VCON 25 ELRONS (2000)
Presented by R. Graeme Cameron
So far I’ve been unable to find the original record of the VCON 25 Elrons in the BCSFA Archive, but it is known that John Travolta won for Battlefield Earth (worst movie), the Raelian Cult won for its absurd claim they had successfully cloned a human being, and John Norman (20) got a retroactive Elron for his sex manual Imaginative Sex published by DAW in the late 1970s.
VCON 26 ELRONS (2001)
Presented by R. Graeme Cameron
1) – The Special ‘Why Don’t We Just Forget it and Hire the Japanese to do it’ Elron Award: The Russian Space Program, for failing to hit the American designated target with their discarded Mir Space Station.
2) – The Special ‘The Real Sci-Fi First Fan Gets the Last Laugh’ Elron Award: Forrest J Ackerman, for winning his lawsuit against Ray Ferry, the ‘fake’ Famous Monsters of Filmland Editor.
3) – The Special ‘Shove it Up your Mundane’ Elron Award: To Fandom.inc for insisting they own the trademark ‘Fandom’ and suing anyone who used ‘Fandom’ as part of their URL.
4) – The Special ‘Hidden Feminist Agenda Mole’ Elron Award: John Norman (21), for becoming the ‘Perry Como’ of bondage (by today’s standards) and thus discouraging young male readers from adopting the now quaint and tame fuddy-duddy philosophy of Goreanism.
VCON 27 ELRONS (2002)
Presented by R. Graeme Cameron
1) – The Special ‘Marlon Brando’ Elron Award: to those film critics who persist in believing the Mighty Tor Johnson couldn’t act despite the clearcut evidence in films like ‘The Beast of Yucca Flats”’that Tor was a subtly, spontaneous Surrealist actor in the tradition of actors in films like ‘L’agedor’ by Louis Brunel and Salvador Dali. IIt was Marlon Brando’s dream to star in a remake of ‘The Beast of Yucca Flats.’)
2) – The Special ‘Norman Bates Mommy and I are One’ Elron Award: To all those mundanes who believe a fan can never amount to anything, in that author Robert Bloch revealed that the character of Norman Bates in Psycho was NOT based on the notorious mass murder Ed Guin, but on Calvin Beck, the SF fan who published ‘Castle of Frankenstein’, and who was dominated by his voraciously obsessive mother more than any other man on Earth.
3) –The Special ‘If You Liked his Zine so Much Why Couldn’t You Mention His Bloody Name?’ Elron Award: to Donald Wollheim, founder of DAW Books, who as a young fan in June of 1936 reviewed Canada’s first SF fanzine ‘The Canadian Science Fiction Fan’ (published out of Vancouver B.C.) without giving the name of the editor, who to this day remains simply “The Unknown Faned.”
4) – The Special ‘Moral Conundrum’ Elron Award: John Norman (22), for his conflicting advocacy of bondage and newfound condemnation of censorship (of his writings) as an immoral form of bondage, as if to imply the concept of ‘bondage’ could be anything other than moral.
5) – The Special ‘Shove it up your Fundament’ Elron Award: to Ray Ferry, the ‘fake’ Editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, for draining Forrest J Ackerman’s savings with continuous litigation appealing the court decision which reverted ownership of Famous Monsters to Ackerman, the ‘legitimate’ editor.
VCON 28 ELRONS (2003)
Presented by R. Graeme Cameron
1) – The Special ‘Just Like Ronald Reagan I am a Political Automaton Threatening Humanity’ Elron Award: Arnold Schwarzenegger, for following in Reagan’s footsteps (a movie actor becoming Governor of California).
2) – The Special ‘Shooting (and I do Mean ‘Shooting’) into the 21st Century Ultimate Survivalist Program Ahead of All Other Nations’ Elron Award: The Chinese Space Program, for announcing that their Shenzou Five manned spacecraft “will carry handguns, knives, and other defensive weapons” so that their Astronauts “on landing would be able to deal with wild beasts, sharks, other dangerous animals or enemies.”
3) – The Special ‘Valley Girl School of Journalism’ Elron Award: Rebecca Eckler, of Canada’s The National Post, for describing fans attending Torcon Three (SF World Convention in Toronto) as obvious geeks because “75% of them wear glasses” and other such trenchant observations in the proud tradition of the “Zap! Zap! Atomic Ray is Passe with Fiends!” George Bain Globe & Mail article covering Torcon One in 1948.
4) – The Special ‘Wilting Dildo’ Elron Award: To John Norman (23), for successfully warping the minds of several generations of young men and women, almost as if he were proselytizing on behalf of a genuine creed.
5) – The Special ‘Wrapping The Master in His Own Chains’ Elron Award: to ‘Elle’, Author of ‘House Plants of Gor’, for wrapping all John Norman’s attributes as a writer into a tight, constrained package of parody which covers all, yet reveals everything.
VCON 29 ELRONS (2004)
Presented by R. Graeme Cameron
1) – The Special ‘Two Tone Ambivalence’ Elron Award: Michael Moore, for naming his recent film ‘Fahrenheit 911’ much to the displeasure of Ray Bradbury who disliked his concept of burning books (in the novel ‘Fahrenheit 451) being associated with burning people, but on the other hand through use of the title reminding us that the fictional dystopias of the past remain very relevant to the present.
2) – The Special ‘Reviving, Revealing and Reveling in that Old SF Sense of Wonder’ Elron Award: film critic Roger Ebert, for refusing to critique Sky Captain, World of Tomorrow and admitting he sat in the theatre grinning from ear to ear watching the film with the same sense of wonder he experienced as a kid reading the old ‘Tom Corbett, Space Cadet’ books.
3) – The Special ‘Turning Evolution Upside Down’Elron Award: to Claude ‘Rael’ Vorilhon (founder of the Quebec-based ‘Raelian’ cult) for claiming the movement would soon be able to clone ‘instant genetically manipulated teenagers’ who would turn into NHL “Hockey players (that) would all be more powerful, stronger, faster…” , thus reversing the revered SF tradition of depicting future humanity with bigger brains and puny bodies.
4) – The Special ‘Blood Rust Reality’ Elron Award: to NASA, for spending millions of dollars to remake the SF film Spacemaster X-7 (which depicted a crashed satellite unleashing the blob-like alien ‘Blood Rust’ on humanity), resulting in the crashed Genesis Satellite presented as science fact, thus combining the best of both classic film and reality TV, a wonderfully futuristic concept.
5) – The Special ‘Reviving the Hallowed SF Tradition of Building a Spaceship in Your Backyard’ Elron Award: to the 25 civilian teams competing to duplicate John Rutan’s X-Prize feat of flying a privately financed spacecraft twice into space within a 14 day period.
6) – The Special ‘Retro, Retro, Retro’ Elron Award: John Norman (24), for becoming increasingly Libertarian as he aged, thus following in the footsteps of Robert Heinlein! In John Norman’s honour all 100 plus Elrons distributed since 1971 will be recalled, bound very, very tightly together in a maypole-like ‘tree of bondage freedom,’ around which Goreans will cavort and dance for generations to come.