The Dealers-Room at DortCon 2013
Last month the bi-annual “DortCon” took place in Dortmund. DortCon is one of the major SF-conventions in Germany, alternating with the more fannish “ColoniaCon” in Cologne. This year saw as guests of honor the famous British writer Charlie Stross, the Austrian writer Michael Marcus Thurner and the artist Stas Rosin, who presented his work in a small gallery show. As always, the programme of the two-day-event was packed with public reading, discussions, presentations and lectures, and unlike last year a two-tier-programme, running in parallel, had been installed to satisfy all the applications by authors and publishers. Therefore even the most engaged visitor missed half of the programme inevitably. Most prominent were the discussions and talk-shows with the guests of honor, especially as Charlie Stross had the tendency to be quite outspoken about his work (and about his publication history with German publishers), which both amused as well as impressed the German audience. Among the highlights of the programme were the formal launch of a new SF-series – “The ninth expansion”, Europa SF has already reported about the project – and of course the evening show on Saturday, which mixed comedy and other forms of entertainment and culminated in the famous DortCon-poetry-slam, to which numerous authors contributed. At the end of the event, the organizers showed themselves to be pleased with the outcome of the convention. Attendance has risen slightly to 270 visitors – a good number for German cons – and interest in supporting the bid for EuroCon has risen considerably, filling the “war chest” of the organizers in order to participate in upcoming EuroCons in order to promote the German bid. Aside from the official programme, the dealer’s room was well frequented, and a number especially of genre-related small presses were able to present an impressive amount of new novels and anthologies, representing a very vibrant publication-scene aside from the mass-market-publishers. All in all, DortCon 2013 accomplished to solidify its exceptional role in the German SF-fandom and everyone is hoping that the bid for EuroCon will be successfull, as a professional team with a lot of experience is more than ready to welcome fans from all over Europe.
