The Aurora looks like they were designing a patriotic churchkey and didn't make the hook pronounced enough to lift a cap.

Either that, or they lifted a Canadian version of this from army surplus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field....._Eating_Device

You know, a SciFi churchkey could be a fun series. Engraved with the brands of alien beers and ales?

What doesn't come across in this flat-bed scan is that the Aurora pin is a curved surface, roughly a very flat S in cross section. It is also quite shiny and smooth looking in the hand. The scan makes it look like a piece of pot metal that has been handled with a wrench.

I don't know. I have a strong appreciation for line art when done properly. The SF community, especially those in Canada, have been going one of two ways from what I can tell. Either they've been moving towards the literature solidly, or they have been moving towards the movie/tv stuff.

And it really is a shame.

*shrugs*
I still happily wear the shirt you did for Anticipation.

SciFi in GENERAL has a problem. No young blood is coming in; they go off to anime or comics or MLP. Young folks aren't impressed by stories revolving around being able to talk to someone on the other side of the world when they can do that already.

It seems to me that SciFi fandom doesn't appeal to anyone younger than 40. We grew up with wild dreams and our heads in the stars. We had the saturday B movies on TV. We had space 1999, battlestar galactica, star trek, star wars... what did the teens have to watch in 2000, other than the Matrix?

I feel bad for the fandom of today. It's full of old farts like me, enjoying shows of the past and getting older and older, while no young folks are coming in to replace us. We have already lost many conventions. And more are disappearing every year, replaced by furry, anime, and comic cons. We have a generation gap in fandom where our youth have many more opportunities than we had at their age, and they are less interested in the scifi dreams than we were. I guess nobody believes that we are really going to go into outer space again, so the wild stories set there are as unbelievable as tales of dragons nowdays. Not to mention the tech levels available today are more far out than even our wildest stories back when.

Well, look at the kind of science fiction being produced today, there's not a lot to like. Unless you LIKE hating yourself, your species and your planet and feel good about being blamed for everything wrong in the universe. If you like morally ambiguous heroes who aren't necessarily better or worse than their opponents (can't call them Villains, really anymore.) this is your era.

The old Rocketship Sci Fi was about the unlimited potential of humanity. We could conquer the universe if we wanted to. Today it's all "Stop trying to conquer the universe, you'll only spoil it." and "Humanity is a plague, it would be better if it were all wiped out." "Yeah, especially if you wipe out all the men first."

The Hugo this year was won by a novel whose main selling point was that it somehow managed to avoid using gendered pronouns. Last year it was a "tribute" to Star Trek that really didn't seem to love it at all.

The Hugos have seen declining participation as the sorts of people who like that kind of thing are the only ones who are still voting for it, while everyone else drifts away. There was a Surge this year when there was a push to get something different nominated (some actually fun to read adventure), and the sorts of people who prefer stunt-writing without pronouns surged to the defense of the bulwarks against anything different getting through and threatening their "diversity", ironically exactly proving the point of those making the push for something different.

Which is to say the "fandom" is changing ... in fact, changing in many ways. It is less technologically oriented perhaps, and attracted to stories about superpowers and magic of one sort or another. Even if you look at a straightforward SF adventure like Star Wars, you can see that it's not technology based -- abilities are essentially magical, starships travel at FTL speeds with no explanation of how they might work and without any sort of consequences (like limitations of warp speed, black-out of communications in hyperdrive or creating turbulence in space-time like you might expect in a realistic universe). Star Wars was a movie about movies, really, pastiching dozens of different Saturday Afternoon matinee genres like gangster films, westerns, war movies, Tarzan movies, samurai movies, etc. The modern non-science based SF has crowded out the old Gernsbachian type, and the fandom has gone along with the change.

Thats not true entirely , I'm living proof to that, as I'm younger.:P

Though I may supect on reason.On that side of big pond it became unfashionable to read. First it about "serious literature" - I know about four dozen people, from USA and canada, who are educated, thing they are "cultured".. and never had read a book or two. On this side, they try give that to schilds, try to give them taste of it.
Adventure books? Same thing, because now there are movies.
Now scifi.. pushed out from child mind by gaming industry. Most likely now it is game fandom.. Which is stillborn becase game developers usually do not allow evn fanart, quarding their franchise from infringement.

Now even technical courses exclude readin.. instead students use interactive learning programs. ANd I often heard "I don't want read!" when poiting on some manual.
That irks me, because books teach people to think, saving them from expensive - by time and nerves -expierence. I see many broken ones, who don't know how to react properly in _simpliest_ social situations.

You still have a ways to go before matching Susan Lucci's number of nominations without a win. I still look forward to your new art.

I never tried to compare myself to the professional categories ... for one thing, it would take too much work looking up all the stats. In the fan categories, I tied with Steve Stiles for nominations without a win. However, Steve hung on another couple of years after I dropped off the ballot, and he has something like 13 nominations without a win, which is the current record without a win in the fan categories.

it's not over, it just.. niche, I think. COlor printing , color typography is still a big issue (and actually became bigger issue lately compared to 90s - because of stupid software and hardware designers)