To Be CONtinued is a Non-Profit Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat, "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Convention

A convention, in the sense of a meeting, is a gathering of individuals who meet at a pre-arranged place and time in order to discuss or engage in some common interest. The most common conventions are based upon fandom, industry, and profession. Fan conventions usually feature sales, people dressed up as their favorite characters, and guest celebrities. Trade conventions typically focus on a particular industry or industry segment, and feature keynote speakers, vendor displays, and other information and activities of interest to the event organizers and attendees. Professional conventions focus on issues of concern to the profession and advancements in the profession. Such conventions are generally organized by societies dedicated to promotion of the topic of interest. Conventions also exist for various hobbies, such as gaming or model railroads.

In the technical sense, a convention is a meeting of delegates or representatives. Often times organizations which are made up of smaller units, chapters, or lodges, such as labor unions, honorary societies, and fraternities and sororities, meet as a whole in convention by sending delegates of the units to deliberate on the organization's common issues. This also applies to a political convention, though in modern times the common issues are limited to selecting a party candidate or party chairman. In this technical sense, a congress, when it consists of representatives, is a convention. The British House of Commons is a convention, as are most other houses of a modern representative legislature. The National Convention or Convention, in France, comprised the constitutional and legislative assembly which sat from September 20, 1792 to October 26, 1795.

A convention can also be religious, such as Christian meetings in Paterson, NJ, Newark, NJ, Bronx, NY, Middletown, NY, Staten Island, NY, Elizabeth, NJ.

Many sovereign states have provisions for conventions besides their permanent legislature. The Constitution of the United States of America has a provision for the calling of a constitutional convention, whereby delegates of the states are summoned to a special meeting to amend or draft the constitution. This process has never occurred, save for the original drafting of the constitution, although it almost happened in several cases. The US Constitution also has provisions for constitutional amendments to be approved by state conventions of the people. This occurred to ratify the original constitution and to adopt the twenty-first amendment, which ended prohibition.

Con is a common slang for convention, as seen in the case of "DEF CON", a hacker gathering similar to Hackers on Planet earth.

Science Fiction and Fantasty

A science-fiction story may be firmly rooted in real scientific possibilities (see Hard science fiction) as they are understood at the time of writing, as in Arthur C. Clarke's novel A Fall of Moondust, or highly imaginative, set in an extraterrestrial civilization or a parallel universe, as in Isaac Asimov's novel The Gods Themselves.

Some science fiction portrays events that fall outside of science as currently understood, as in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. But one alternate viewpoint on such tales is to view them not from the current era's understanding of science, but to view the tale in the context of the known science during the time the tale was written. Another example of that would be Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon", which postulated a private enterprise exploration of the earth's moon decades in advance of the real events in 1969 - thus a contemporary reader might instead take the work as a member of the subgenre Alternate history, rather than the Hard science fiction work it was at the time of its publication.

Also, different readers have different ideas about what counts as scientifically "realistic"; an uneducated person will have different expectations about what science can do than a professional physicist. As Clarke himself stated, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (third in Clarke's three laws). Thus, even fiction that depicts innovations ruled out by current scientific theory, such as stories about faster-than-light travel, may still be classified as science fiction, as they are in the popular Honorverse novels and stories by David Weber.

The Dying Earth subgenre of science fiction gives particularly strong examples of the genre-boundaries being blurred; Jack Vance's Dying Earth works, first published in 1950, depict an Earth so old and desolate that it has receded into a sort of dark age, where the line between magic and technology is blurred. This technique is later used in M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence and particularly Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, which depicts objects like aliens, androids, and ancient crashed spacships while retaining a very medieval setting, described by a narrator who does himself not comprehend any of these technological relics.

Accordingly, the borderline between fantasy and science fiction is blurred, and many bookstores shelve science fiction and fantasy together. There is a substantial overlap between the audiences of science fiction and fantasy literature, and many science-fiction authors have also written works of fantasy. Fans often nominate works of fantasy for science fiction awards such as the Hugo and Nebula, clearly indicating a substantial overlap among readers.

Indeed, it can be argued that science fiction is simply a modern form of fantasy. According to this view, the elements that would previously have been presented as fantasy (e.g., magic, shapeshifting, divination, mind-reading, fabulous beasts, and so on) are rationalized or supported through scientific or quasiscientific explanations such as marvelous devices, mutation, psychic abilities, aliens, etc. An example is The Force and the conflict between the Sith and Jedi in Star Wars. Star Wars could be considered both science fantasy and standard science fiction due to the massive technological warfare in its story.

This definition is resisted by some scholars and writers who attempt to define the genre's aspects more sharply, and advocate an aspiration to present a world without mystical or supernatural forces. For example, in such works as Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin emphasises a cognitive element in science fiction. According to Suvin, the purpose of science fiction is to introduce scientific or technological novelties in order to create narratives that enable us to perceive everyday reality at a reflective distance. He uses the term cognitive estrangement to label this effect.

Some science fiction clearly exhibits this aspiration, but not all. As a result, some theorists are able to emphasise the difference between science fiction and fantasy, while others emphasise continuity. It is also common to see narratives described as being essentially science fiction but "with fantasy elements." [citation needed] More recently, the term "science fantasy" has been increasingly used to describe such material.