The Worldcon historical exhibits were first done for Noreascon 3 in 1989 and subsets of them have appeared at most Worldcons since then. Some new exhibits have been created (the Hugo Award exhibit at Magicon is an excellent example) and most of them have grown in size, but they have been broadly similar for fifteen years now, and they're getting a bit stale. What we're going to do for 2005 is to reinvent the historical exhibits to freshen them and make them interesting to someone who is new to fandom while at the same time worth a visit by a long-time fan who has seen the historical exhibits of the past fifteen years. This year's work is a start, not a finish. If we do our work well this year, future Worldcons will continue the process.
Because we have relatively little time left, we will focus on creating a series of exhibits which each tell a story illustration some facet of SF or fandom. There'd be a narrative combined with artifacts from the Worldcon history exhibit collection. Let me give a couple of examples:
or
The key points are:
This is an idea to liven things up, it is not the only thing we'll do! For example, there'll be a Hugo exhibit, Fanac scanning station and doubtless some of the traditional exhibits will be used, also.
There are three things we want each exhibit to do:
I'd also like to post each of these exhibits permanently on the Web after the convention.
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