History
Ad Astra first ran in 1980, and has run every year since, excepting 1981 and 1999. The convention occasionally serves as host for other conventions; for example, Canvention 7 was held as part of Ad Astra 7, in 1987, and the convention hosted the Toronto games convention Orion for its last two years, 2003 and 2004.
In previous years, guests have included prominent Canadian writers including Robert J. Sawyer, Nalo Hopkinson, Tanya Huff, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Charles Wilson, Phyllis Gotlieb, etc., as well as internationally renowned authors including C. J. Cherryh, David Brin, Connie Willis, Larry Niven, Lois McMaster Bujold, Frederik Pohl, Katherine Kurtz, Orson Scott Card, James P. Hogan and others. Ad Astra has continued to evolve past its focus on literature to include programming dedicated to costuming, art, filking, and media. In some years, Jason Taniguchi has performed popular one-man parody shows at the convention. More recently, TV personalities Ed the Sock and Liana K have hosted various events during the convention.
Read more about this topic: Ad Astra (convention)
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“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)