The Concussion Committee would like to congratulate our Chair, Farah Mendlesohn who, together with her husband, Edward James, has won a Hugo Award at the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention. The award, for Best Related Book, went to the collection of essays, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Farah and Edward, and published by Cambridge University Press.

If you are going to Worldcon in Glasgow, please note that Concussion will have a fan table at the event. If you have any questions about our convention, please come and see us.

Don't forget that Concussion will take place in the Glasgow Moat House, which also happens to be one of the main Worldcon hotels. This is your chance to check the facilities out, and perhaps send us a few suggestions about how we might best use the building.

And while you are in Glasgow, do take the opportunity to check out the local pubs, restaurants and other places of interest. We'd be delighted to see your opinions on our LiveJournal (concussion_chat), or you can send them to us for use on our web site. Not all of our members can get to Glasgow for Worldcon, and we'd like to take this opportunity to get our local area as well scouted as Hinckley.

As of now, Concussion's physical address for all snail-mailing purposes will be:

23 Ranelagh Road, Bruce Grove, London N17 6XY

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. Mail will still be forwarded from the old address.

Further information about hotel booking, including the code needed to book rooms in the Moat House, is now available on our web site.

Well, it is 3:40pm on the final day of Paragon 2. Closing ceremonies start in 20 minutes, and in an hour or so we will be the current Eastercon. In view of this, please check out our Contacts page for details of how to join our email bounce or LiveJournal Community.

A very warm thank you to everyone who joined Concussion at Paragon 2. But if you forgot, or you did not make it to the convention, you can now join online.

The Concussion Committee would like to extend our congratulations to our guest, Johanna Sinisalo, on being joint winner of this year Tiptree Award. Her novel, Not Before Sundown (Troll in the US) has been honoured alongside Joe Haldeman's Camouflage in this prestigious award for the exploration of gender roles through science fiction.

This year the Tiptree Award will be presented in a ceremony at Gaylaxicon, to take place in Cambridge, MA in July. More details about the Tiptree Award are available here.

The Scottish Executive have published their proposals for new restrictions on smoking in Scotland. If they are giving parliamentary approval, the proposals will come into force just before Concussion. The bad news is that smoking is likely to be banned in pubs, restaurants and other public places. However, if you book a smoking room in your hotel you will be able to smoke there, you won't have to go outside at the con to smoke.

Of course all this could be moot because the Scottish Parliament may throw the bill out, or amend it. We'll keep you informed. In the meantime, more information is available via BBC Scotland.

This is a quick reminder that our membership rates go up at the end of this month. The new rates are given on our web site. Buy now (or see us at this year's Eastercon) to lock in the lowest rates.

I've added a bunch of tourism information, some of it links to the Interaction site and the rest stuff about Glasgow I have found on the Web.