First Message from the Co-Chairs About Can*Con 2022!

Hi friends!

Spring is here! We’re not buried in snow anymore. People are jogging. Well, Evan is jogging, but we’re cheering him on. Run, Evan, run! We wanted to let you know where things are with Can*Con 2022.

First though, we want to say how proud we are of the science fiction, fantasy and horror community. It’s been a tough 2 years, and we know how much people have been doing to care for others, and how much people have been reluctantly learning to care for themselves. The SFFH community has been an inspiration in terms of the kindness and the community we saw.

We didn’t run Can*Con 2020 or Can*Con 2021 for the safety of our community. It was a hard, but responsible choice. The public health situation is now different. Quebec and Ontario have very similar vaccination rates (well above 85% of those eligible for double dose and about half of people have booster). The city of Ottawa has even higher rates of vaccination. We feel we can offer a safe and responsible meeting of the community in October, 2022 in Ottawa. Mark your calendars now—October 14-16, 2022!

There will be a few changes we hope you’ll find reasonable. In 2019, we ran two large and two small program tracks, plus the Science Literacy Track and a publisher/agent/writer pitches/meetings cluster of programming. In 2022, we’re planning to run two tracks of regular Can*Con programming in the largest rooms on the 2nd floor and the Science Literacy track in the big windowed penthouse space. In response to feedback we’re also going to provide a bit more time between program items. This means that we will need fewer program participants, but we’ll offset this by creating more networking spaces. We’ll also run an entirely online programming track, for panelists and viewers who choose not to attend in person.

In 2019, we capped attendance at 450 attendees. For 2022, we’re going to open with an initial cap of 250 in-person attendees, which, if the public health situation allows, we might raise closer to the event, to a maximum of 350 in-person attendees. Of this 250 cap, we will initially reserve 75-100 spots for program participants. There will be no limit for online attendees and online only-memberships will be offered at a discounted price. Some online networking facilities will be developed for virtual attendees.

We’re still working on Can*Con’s Public Health Policies, but we can already say that all in-person attendees will need to show proof of full vaccination at registration. This is a safety feature of the conference. We’re letting people know now so that anyone who wishes to attend Can*Con, but is currently unvaccinated will have time to get fully vaccinated. We’re working on a Mask Policy for 2022. Some of our early preferred options are full masking or full masking with unmasking for panelists while paneling. We will soon be doing a public consultation on public health policies, as we did a few years ago with our harassment policy.

Through Can*Con, we want to bring together the community because it will be fun to see friends and celebrate all the things we couldn’t celebrate together for the last two years! We’ll have more announcements in the coming weeks and months about the conference, so watch this space!

Can*Con 2022 will do what it does best: bring together authors, fans, editors and agents for important and meaningful discussions about the content and business of science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature. This smaller, more cautious Can*Con 2022 will be a test run for a larger and more ambitious Can*Con 2023, so we hope you can join us in person or virtually!

Derek and Marie
Co-Chairs
Can*Con 2022