Otherwise Auction at WisCONline May 23rd

This year’s WisCon will be online, and you can register now. Register for WisCon by tomorrow — Wednesday, May 20th — to make sure you can attend!

And no WisCon is complete without our annual benefit auction! Here’s the WisCon schedule. The annual Otherwise Award auction will be Saturday night, May 23rd, 7:30pm-8:30pm Central Time.

Time converter at worldtimebuddy.com

Sumana Harihareswara as auctioneer
Sumana Harihareswara in two pairs of trousers onstage, as auctioneer, at a past auction at WisCon.

WisCon will stream the auction — including comedy, stunts, and special guest stars — via YouTube, and you’ll be able to bid and converse using a live Discord chat. And the entire auction will be hosted by auctioneer Sumana Harihareswara and live-captioned by a CART (“Communication Access Realtime Transcription”) transcriptionist.

Since this year’s auction is transcending the material plane, and because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re taking this opportunity to play with the auction format in a few ways.

First: the Otherwise Motherboard has decided to use pass-the-hat challenges this year to raise money for the Carl Brandon Society and WisCon’s general fund, instead of raising money for Otherwise. (We’re fortunate enough to be able to keep the award going this year without the auction’s income. And celebration, community, and fun have always been key to the auction, besides the fundraising, and those things are more important than ever this year.)

Second: to reduce the risk and difficulty of mailing things, and receiving mail, most of the auction items are electronic.

And third: for the items below, instead of bidding in money, you’ll try to one-up each other with recommendations, colors, and poems in the Discord chat. Enjoy using the gestures of “bidding” while prefiguring how auctions might work in postscarcity societies!

Cover of China Mountain Zhang
New Tor Essentials edition of China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh, with new introduction by Jo Walton

The auction items will be:

Want to win one of those? Want to see the surprise guest who’ll sing if we reach a donation challenge? Want to support science fiction that explores and expands gender (with the Otherwise Award)? Want to help increase racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction (with the Carl Brandon Society)? Want to roar with laughter?

There are dozens of possible reasons to visit this year’s auction. Hope to meet you there! Please register by May 20th.

Here’s a trailer!

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