Westercon 18

Westercon 18 was held 3-5 July, 1965 at the Edgewater Inn, Long Beach, CA. GoH: Frank Herbert; FGoH: Anthony Boucher. Chaired by Steve Tolliver and John Trimble.

Unusually for Westercons in this period, there were very few complaints about the hotel, mostly about the slow service in coffee shop and an atrocious musical group in the dining room.

GoH Herbert spoke on writing novels from haiku and the possibility of reducing all novels to haiku. There were speeches by Bradbury and Leiber, a panel on "1964: Science Fiction in Retrospect" and a panel of pro authors titled "There I Stood in My Sense of Wonder". (This latter panel turned into Harlan Ellison vs. Ace Books.)

Art Show judging featured two innovations: The panel of judges included two local art instructors and each of five judges selected his own Judges Choice award, instead of trying to all agree on one choice.

The auctions were very successful. There was $400 in sales achieved by second day of convention and all auction material had been disposed of, so on Monday some material from the Art Show was auctioned. There was a special auction featuring Harlan Ellison which netted $35 in which he agreed to write a short story using the name of the winner (Larry Niven) as protagonist, and used three words supplied by the Niven in the text Niven was to get 10% of proceedings of any sale of the story. {what was the story?}

Other well-known people in attending included Hal Clement, Lester del Rey, Sam Moskowitz and a group from the Fanoclasts promoting their New York in 1967 Worldcon bid, which included Ted White, rich brown, Mike McInerney, Dave Van Arnam, and Arnie Katz.

At Westercon site selection, San Diego beat Burlingame by 4 votes for the right to host Westercon 19. Other bidders, real and hoax, included Lake Tahoe and New York.

Len Moffatt and June Konigsberg (later June Moffatt) wrote a report published as "The Patter of Fannish Feats or the Feats of Fannish Patter", distributed with the August 1965 FAPA mailing, which mentions several other attendees and has excellent anecdotes.

See the September 1965 issue of Science Fiction Times for a con report by Ed Meskys and Ratatosk 16 for a con-report by Bruce Pelz.

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Westercon 17	Westercon - Bidding	Westercon 19
	1965

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