Category Archives: Events

Join us at our auction at Worldcon — virtually!

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This year, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) will be LAcon V, August 27-31, in Anaheim, California, USA, and online. As part of the virtual convention, the Otherwise Award will hold an online fundraising auction on Sunday, August 30th, 6-7pm PDT (check your timezone).

The annual Otherwise Award celebrates genre fiction that expands our understanding of gender. To raise money, comedian Sumana Harihareswara auctions off rare books, vintage collectibles, discounts at retailers, wacky experiences, and more! Watch the livestream, bid in the chat, pay online – or just come to laugh! We’ll also offer a special virtual gift bag to anyone who donates any amount during the auction. A WisCon tradition comes to Worldcon.

This will be our first time auctioning items at a Worldcon since Sumana emceed a fundraising auction at MidAmericon II in Kansas City ten years ago. This time, you can participate from anywhere in the world, as long as you’re registered to attend convention programming! The auction will happen in realtime: Sumana will be auctioneering on a livestream, and you’ll be bidding in the Discord chat.

Where to find us at Worldcon: Otherwise Award Virtual Charity Auction Sunday, August 30th, 6-7pm PDT (or: Monday, August 31st at 01:00 UTC) Online (look for "webinars" in the schedule) [LACon V logo, Otherwise Award logo, Space Babe illustration, QR Code for lacon.org ]
Where to find us at Worldcon: Otherwise Award Virtual Charity Auction
Sunday, August 30th, 6-7pm PDT (or, in UTC: Monday, August 31st, 01:00)
Online (look for “Virtual 2” in the schedule)
Sumana will auction off a variety of items (material and im-) and provide entertainment along the way. Some examples:

  • Delightful décor, such as a one-of-a-kind handmade ceramic inspired by the Award!
  • Funny fannishness, such as an illustrated zine that honors both the author’s crush on Star Trek‘s Data and the aesthetic language of Geocities fan pages!
  • Beautiful books, such as a compilation of over 130 artworks by Hugo Award-winning artist Geneva Bowers!
  • Wacky experiences! (Sumana has promised us that there will be at least one wacky experience.)

The auction is one of the Otherwise Award’s main fundraising activities, but it’s also a fun time even if you don’t bid on anything.

Physical items: shipping within the continental US included in the bid. Shipping outside the US: one of our volunteers will message with the winning bidder to figure out a surcharge based on an estimated shipping cost for that item, probably USD $5-20.

We’ll also have a virtual gift bag for anyone who donates any amount of money during the auction, with some fun items in it, including a digital item made specially for this event! And if the total donations get high enough, there might be a quick game speedrun to watch….

Register now for the convention! There are a bunch of registration options with different prices, but any of them that let you attend convention programming (in person or online) will let you attend the auction.

Otherwise Award will run a fundraising auction at @laworldcon.bsky.social next month!

Register now www.lacon.org/register/ so you can watch and laugh on Sat., August 30th, 6-7pm PDT (in UTC: Mon. 31 August, 01:00-0:200).

Details: otherwiseaward.org/2026/07/join…

#Worldcon #WorldCon2026 #LAConV

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— Otherwise Award (@otherwiseaward.org) July 30, 2026 at 7:42 PM

Otherwise plans at WisCon 2026

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This weekend, May 21-25, we’re participating in the annual feminist sf convention WisCon. This year, the convention is online—you can attend panels in Zoom and chat with other attendees in Discord. It’s not too late to register! Membership prices are sliding scale, USD$5-$25-$65.

Come join us—you’ll get the chance to enjoy fascinating panels, readings of new work, a curated fanvid show, and other sessions, many of which will include CART (real time captioning by a human).

Here are the program items that the Otherwise Award is involved in:

Panel: The Last Year in Gender-Exploring SpecFic

Saturday, May 23rd, 10:30 AM–11:45 AM CDT

Time converter at worldtimebuddy.com

Members of the 2025 Otherwise jury and others familiar with the award will discuss the 2025 Otherwise Winner, Luminous by Silvia Park, as well as the Honor List titles and other works of gender-exploring speculative fiction from the last year. The panel will also discuss trends that they have seen in speculative fiction in in relation to the exploration and expansion of gender and how that exploration intersects, as it must, with other identity categories.

Mod: Sumana Harihareswara. Panelists: Cheryl S. Ntumy and Rebecca Fraimow

Otherwise Fundraising Auction

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

Saturday, May 23rd, 7:00 PM–8:00 PM CDT

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The return of the Otherwise Auction! Sumana Harihareswara is your live auctioneer. Bid on a variety of material and immaterial items to support the Otherwise Award.

I’ll make nerdy jokes. You can come and have fun even if you don’t bid on anything.

If you place a winning bid, you can pay via PayPal, credit card, or Venmo.

Guest of Honor Speeches & Otherwise Presentation

Sunday, May 24th, 7:00 PM–9:00 PM CDT

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WisCon’s traditional Sunday night event. Speeches by the convention’s Guests of Honor, followed by presentation of the Otherwise Award (and a filk to celebrate it!) and a speech from the winner of this year’s Award.

Various people associated with the Otherwise Award are also reading, speaking on other panels, and more. Check out the full convention schedule!

For more info about this year’s convention, see their blog post How to WisCon.

Join us at our auction at WisCon online!

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The annual feminist sf convention WisCon will be online this year. It runs from May 21 through May 25—that’s soon!

And we’ll be there. In particular, this WisCon will feature the triumphant return of the Otherwise Auction, auctioneered by our very own Sumana Harihareswara! The auction will be on the evening of Saturday, May 23.

Sumana will auction off a variety of items (material and im-) and provide entertainment along the way. Some examples:

  • A signed, numbered, hardcover limited edition of N.K. Jemisin’s book How Long ’til Black Future Month! Donated by Subterranean Press.
  • Vintage collectibles, such as a WisCon 42 tote bag! (From 2018, donated by SamHain Press.)
  • Discounts at online booksellers, such as 50% discounts on ebooks from Small Beer Press and Reckoning!
  • Wacky experiences! (Sumana has promised us that there will be at least one wacky experience.)

We’ll also have a virtual gift bag for anyone who donates any amount of money during the auction, with some fun items in it, including the brand-new Otherwise ringtone, made specially for this event!

The auction will happen in realtime (none of that fake time for us): Sumana will be auctioneering on a livestream, and you’ll be bidding in the chat.

The auction is one of the Otherwise Award’s main fundraising activities, but it’s also a fun experience even if you don’t bid on anything.

So we hope you’ll register for WisCon, attend panels and readings, have fun interactions with others there—and come to the auction!

P.S.: We’ll also have other Otherwise-related activities at WisCon—more to come about those in a future post.

Two Otherwise Auctions on Saturday at WisCon, and our Gathering plans

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This year’s WisCon is both in-person and online, so this Saturday, we’re hosting both an in-person benefit auction and a virtual auction! Register now to get a chance to win one-of-a-kind items, and enjoy the entertainment.

Liz Henry, in shiny metallic purple and yellow, CC BY-ND
Your in-person host Liz Henry, shiny and ready to rock

Liz Henry will be your auctioneer in Madison! The in-person auction will raise money to benefit the Otherwise Award and entertain you with comedy, stunts, mystery guests, and bizarre and special auction items. It’s an opportunity to donate and support fantasy and science fiction that explores and expands gender — and to laugh for a while. Liz chaired the 2020 and 2005 Otherwise juries, has participated in WisCon for decades going back to WisCon 20, and will bring a wealth of stories and an incisive sense of humor to the stage! In-person attendees will be able to bid (with money) on memorabilia, books (including a signed copy of Charlie Jane Anders’s City in the Middle of the Night), and weird stuff. As usual, Otherwise will be able to accept payments and donations via cash, check, and credit card.

Sumana Harihareswara, gesturing as if holding something, photo courtesy Jeff Fortin
Sumana Harihareswara will host the online auction through WisCon’s virtual offerings

The in-person auction will start at 19:30 CDT and will run for probably 60-90 minutes, ending by 21:30 CDT. It will be captioned with CART and it will be livestreamed for the benefit of WisCon’s virtual attendees as well.

Sumana Harihareswara will be your host for the virtual auction, which will start 21:00 CDT on Saturday night [CORRECTION: 21:15] and run for 45-60 minutes, ending by 22:00 CDT. Online participants will be able to view the auction via Zoom or YouTube, and participate via Zoom and Discord. Sumana has hosted the Otherwise auctions at WisCon (online and in person) for the last several years, and this year will again entertain the audience with comedy, special guests, and obscure, fun, or even desirable objects to bid on. As we did in 2020, this year our virtual auction will be moneyless! Instead of bidding in dollars, you’ll try to one-up each other with recommendations, poems, and more in the Discord chat. Enjoy using the gestures of “bidding” while prefiguring how auctions might work in postscarcity societies! A guest from the Carl Brandon Society will share an update on CBS’s work increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction, and Sumana will solicit donations for the Otherwise Award and for the WisCon Member Assistance Fund.

All that is this Saturday, May 28th. We’ll also host a table at the Gathering on Friday afternoon, 12:30 pm to 4 pm, in-person in Madison. Our table will include posters celebrating the history of past Otherwise award winners and recent Honor List honorees — plus, local bookstore A Room of One’s Own will be on hand to sell you books from those lists, with a portion of those proceeds going to the Otherwise Award.

Register now if you’d like to experience either or both! Registration for the virtual convention is only USD$25, with no cap on attendance and no deadline to register.

WisCon and Otherwise events in 2022

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Otherwise’s home convention, WisCon, is holding both an in-person and a virtual event this year (May 27th-30th) to maximize accessibility. Otherwise will be there as well and we’re planning multiple events within this year’s WisCon, including our traditional benefit auction! Auctioneer Sumana Harihareswara will raise money to benefit the Otherwise Award and entertain you with comedy, stunts, special guest stars, and bizarre and special auction items. It’s an opportunity to donate and support fantasy and science fiction that explores and expands gender — and to laugh for a while.

Currently our plan is to run the auction in person and to host a table as part of the Friday afternoon Gathering, adhering to all of WisCon’s COVID-19 health precautions. As of yesterday, the WisCon COVID-19 vaccination policy includes required booster shots for many participants, so do make plans to get boosted if that includes you.

We’re still figuring out whether there will also be a virtual auction, or whether/how virtual WisCon participants will be able to participate in the in-person auction. We’ll post here on our blog when we know more.

If you are planning to visit WisCon in person, register and book your lodging soon. (And please subscribe to the WisCon email newsletter so you can stay up to date..) If you’ll join us online, please register soon. And WisCon needs both in-person and online volunteers so please consider volunteering if you can!

Otherwise Auction open for bidding – plus a free crossword puzzle!

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Stack of fiction books
A stack of five fiction books bundled together as one auction item for the Otherwise Auction 2021: “Black Water Sister”, “Love in Penang”, “The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water”, “Fugitive Telemetry”, and “Chaos on CatNet”.

This year’s Otherwise Auction is now open for bidding at https://otherwise.betterworld.org/auctions/otherwise-award-auction. You can bid from anywhere in the world for art, books, and more!

You’ll need to create a BetterWorld.org account and use a credit card to bid. If you run into trouble bidding, please let us know AND contact Better World.

Bidding is in US dollars, but it’s free to attend the live auction performance. Here are WisCon’s instructions on how to visit!

And, for your free enjoyment, please check out our new custom crossword puzzle sprinkled with Otherwise-specific clues, constructed by volunteer Parker Higgins — thank you, Parker — and published as CC BY-SA! You can download it as a PDF to print out and solve, or solve it in your browser using amuselabs.com.

If you get stuck, it might help to look at our past awards and honorees! And you can choose “Reveal: Reveal grid” at amuselabs.com for the answers.

This year’s Otherwise Auction is tomorrow!

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A low-key virtual WisCon is happening this weekend, May 29-30, and you can register now (free or pay-what-you-wish)! And WisCon has confirmed that we’ll have an auction Saturday night to benefit the Otherwise Award, at 7pm Madison time:

Time converter at worldtimebuddy.com

Ms Marvel figure
One of our auction items this year: an action figure of superhero Ms. Marvel — with embiggened hands! — signed by writer G. Willow Wilson at WisCon 43 in 2019.

Here’s what Pat Murphy says:

We didn’t think it would happen — but it’s happening!

The 2021 Otherwise Auction — an event that combines fund-raising, humor, political commentary, and zany hijinks — will be held online on May 29th at 7PM Central Time!

To attend, just register here — it’s free!

This Auction will be part of what the folks who put on Wiscon are calling “a very low key virtual event.” But I’m baffled by how anything involving Otherwise Award auctioneer Sumana Harihareswara could possibly be considered low-key.

Last year, Sumana’s online auction was amazing, compelling, and impossible to describe. I’m a science fiction writer; I should be able to describe just about anything. But somehow Sumana managed to auction off things that didn’t actually exist but were (despite that) real. It was one of those “you had to be there” events — even though none of us were actually there.

This year Sumana promises that there will actually be some physical things that people can buy and possess — along with a custom crossword puzzle with Otherwise-related clues. Just a few tangible objects and a lot of intangible fun — which seems appropriate as we slowly ease back into the physical world.

For the past 26 years, the Otherwise Award has raised money each year at an auction like no other. Apparently even a pandemic can’t stop us.

I hope to see you there!

This year, you’ll be bidding on gorgeous and captivating books (including a hard-to-get book with a story by Zen Cho, one of next year’s WisCon Guests of Honor), a Ms. Marvel figurine signed by WisCon 43 GoH G. Willow Wilson, and more. You’ll bid via our new online auction platform — we’ll post here and on social media when it opens for bidding Saturday night.

And you’ll get a few special guests, a couple off-kilter “commercial breaks”, and a pass-the-hat stunt. Oh, and yes, a free custom crossword puzzle with Otherwise Award clues and answers!

Register now; WisCon will send you a link to the virtual event platform in time for you to join us on Saturday.

Otherwise Auction at WisCONline May 23rd

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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!

More Information on Le Guin Symposium

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Interested in coming to the “Tiptree symposium” celebrating the work of Ursula K. Le Guin? (Ms. Le Guin’s birthday was October 21. Happiest of birthdays, Ursula!)

We wrote about the symposium here, and now we know more.

uklbyjs-600dpi-color
Copyright (c) 2003 by Joyce Scrivner

The University Libraries haven’t published a final schedule yet; they have been moving some items around since we last posted. Both the Le Guin and Feminist Science Fiction panel, featuring several Tiptree Award winners and motherboard members, and Tiptree Award founding mother Karen Joy Fowler’s keynote will be on Friday, December 2. We recommend coming a day early for motherboard member Alexis Lothian’s presentation “Queer Longings in Straight Futures” and, of course, staying through Saturday for the second day of the symposium.

The University has reserved a block of rooms at the Phoenix Inn, very easy walking distance from the symposium events. The Tiptree Award will host an open party at the Phoenix Inn on Friday night, December 2, exact time to be determined. To reserve your room, email reservations704@phoenixinn.com or call 800) 344-0131. Be sure to tell them you’re coming for the Tiptree Symposium.

We hope to see you there!

2016 “Tiptree Symposium” Celebrates Ursula K. Le Guin

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symposium-collage

Clockwise from left: Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Brian Attebery

This year’s 2016 James Tiptree Jr. symposium is a celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin. Last year’s inaugural symposium featured James Tiptree, Jr., and was such a success that the University of Oregon (at Eugene) has made it an annual event.  It will be held December 2 and 3 on the Eugene campus. The Tiptree Award will almost certainly host a party; watch this space for details.

Tentative keynote speakers are Brian Attebery, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Karen Joy Fowler.

Along with the tentative keynoters, here’s a peek at the tentative schedule.

At 3:00 on Thursday afternoon, December 1 (before the symposium starts), Dr. Alexis Lothian will give the Sally Miller Gearhart Lesbian Lecture, “Queer Longings in Straight Futures: Notes Toward a Prehistory for Lesbian Speculation.”

On December 2, festivities start at 10:00 a.m. and end at 7:00 p.m. Joan Haran will moderate a panel on The Dispossessed, and another panel will feature Dr. Carol Stabile’s feminist SF students discussing The Lathe of Heaven. That day’s keynote (and question and answer session) will be by Karen Joy Fowler.

On December 3, the schedule runs from 9:30 a.m. to 5;00 p.m. Alexis Lothian will chair the panel on The Left Hand of Darkness, and Karen Ford will moderate a panel on  Ursula Le Guin and the Field of Feminist Science Fiction. The two keynotes that day will be: Kelly Sue DeConnick and Ben Saunders having a conversation about Le Guin’s influence; and Brian Attebery.

We couldn’t resist counting: the speakers include: one Tiptree Award founding mother, three award winners , two Motherboard members, at least six previous jurors, and our inaugural Tiptree Award Fellow. Ursula Le Guin, who has won twice and been on the jury twice, may also attend. We’ll be well represented. And for the fun of it, also several past WisCon guests of honor and one upcoming one.

Will you be there?