Other Minn-STEF cons, mostly fallcons

Minn-STEF generally throws a small relaxing convention in the fall, a fallcon. Our tradition has been to casually discard names and to give chairs a great deal of leeway as to what sort of con they run. This, along with the very informal nature of some of the cons, makes it challenging to present a complete history. Nevertheless, we will try. In accordance with fannish tradition, a "1" is appended to any convention which was followed by another of the same name, even if the original con with that name didn't advertise itself as such.

As with Minicon there is no connection, strictly speaking, between any two fallcons, except that they are all minn-STEF-sanctioned conventions. None are regularly scheduled, except that Minicon has managed, despite this, to be on Easter weekend once a year for a very long time now. (At least this is how it works under current minn-STEF bylaws. In ancient times, the bylaws did specifically talk about Minicon.)

What I'm trying to say (besides being pedantic, which I do enjoy) is that there's no guarantee that every year comes with exactly one fallcon. Some years, we just at Minicon, and twice we had three cons in a year. Plus, in some cases, you have to squint to say "fall" (one was in August). To muddy the waters further, or to clear them further, depending on what sort of a person you are, two Minicons in the 70's were the fallcons.

→ The next non-Minicon con is Diversicon 32 ←

Further notes: For GoH-like people, I have tried to note what they were called by the con at the time. Trouble is, sometimes the distinction between "GoH" and "honored guest", or whatever, is fraught with deep meaning, and sometimes they are just synonyms. It's often hard to tell from a flyer decades later, so I hope I have not horribly misrepresented anyone.

This list does not count the picnic back when it people called it Picnicon, or any other not-really-con that got the suffix -con tacked on for fun. The line is fuzzy, but is basically drawn by requiring the event to be a 3-day shindig in a hotel requiring a paid membership (or one that the board has clearly designated a con). An exception is made for Not-A-Reinconation, which was a 3-day roving house party, but clearly part of a series of cons.

List curator as of 2024: minn-STEF archivist Matt Strait.

We Need Your Help!

We are working on building as complete a digital archive of Minn-STEF's history as we can!

For all these items, please contact: [arDONOTTYPETHISchivist at% mnstf dot org]

Physical materials wanted: If you have badges, program books, pocket programs, photos, progress reports, convention reports, or other stuff from or relating to past conventions we're interested in putting that sort of thing online. Photos and audio or video recordings too. If it's something we don't have in our own archives, we might be interested in borrowing items from you or making other arrangements to scan stuff for use on the website.

Digital materials wanted: If you have items in digital format or are willing to put things in digital format, you can send that stuff to us. Please check with us before sending any large files (over 50MB) as email attachments. If you know where we can find stuff about Minn-STEF online that we haven't yet linked to, please pass those links along to us.

Transcriptions wanted: We would like our archives to be searchable and accessible. This means that we'd like to make plain text versions of everything that's just an image now. Would you like to help? Find something that needs transcription and let us know you're going to work on it.

Requests wanted: If you're looking for something that isn't here, please let us know. We may already have it on paper and can prioritize it for scanning.