Westercon to Bow Out at 80

This past weekend at Westercon 78 (combined with BayCon 42) in Santa Clara, its Business Meeting ratified the motion from last year which dissolves the convention. This means this year’s was the last Westercon to host a Business Meeting, but the convention itself will persist for two more years.

Westercon 79 will be combined with BayCon 43. No bids had been filed for Westercon 80 as of two weeks ago, but two were presented at the meeting: one to combine it with BayCon one more time, and one to combine it with Loscon, the Los Angeles science fiction convention run by LASFS, the organization that created Westercon.

The Loscon bid was accepted, meaning that Westercon 80 will be held Thanksgiving weekend in 2028.

As the official announcment says:

The first three Westercons were held in Los Angeles in 1948-50, with Westercon 4 being held in San Francisco in 1951. These final two Westercons symbolically retrace the convention’s steps from the Bay Area to the Los Angeles area, and are a sort of “Retirement Tour” for the convention. Both BayCon and Loscon are expected to include programming about the history of Westercon.

Westercon has been held every year since except for 2020.

Only a few conventions can claim to be as old as Westercon or older. The UK’s national science fiction convention was also first held in 1948. Boskone in Boston, Philcon in the Philadelphia area, and the World Science Fiction Convention are the only other survivors from that era.