Plan Your VCON Day
What will your VCON adventure look like? Whether you’re drawn to speculative worlds, creative possibilities, or a lively conversation with fellow fans, explore the program and make the day your own.
VCON 44’s theme, Pick Your Punk: Living Through the 21st Century, invites you to consider the futures we fear, the futures we hope for, and the worlds we might build together. Follow a favourite topic, discover a new perspective, or try something that sparks your curiosity.
Use the schedule grid below to see what’s happening when and where, then scroll down for panel descriptions to help you choose. Leave yourself a little room for unexpected discoveries — sometimes the best conversation is the one you hadn’t planned on.
The schedule is subject to change. Please check back before the convention for updates.
VCON 44 Program Schedule (click here to view grid)
Panel Descriptions
Click a panel title to read its description.
Dead Dog Panel: Have Your Say
This is the final session of the convention, where we take your feedback. What did we do right? Where would you like to see improvement? What would you like to see in future VCONs? And we get the opportunity to thank you for making VCON what it is.
From Wizard to Priestess: Positive Elderly Role Models in Speculative Fiction
An exploration of positive portrayals of elderly figures in speculative fiction.
Ghosts of Honour: Remembering the Speculative Fiction Greats We Have Lost
Remembering Walter Koenig, Patrick Stewart, and others we have lost in 2026.
How to make a future setting unreal.
We all love strange new settings and fictional worlds. This panel seeks advice from writers on how to make a story setting feel strange and unearthly, yet still believable.
Indie Publishing: The Punk of the Publishing World
The indie publishing movement was a rebellion against traditional publishing. This panel promises to give you insights towards successful self-publishing.
Low Tech Solutions: The Future is Not Necessarily High Tech
Sometimes the greatest punk is reverting to tried-and-true technologies from the past. These could be anything from heritage seed lines to using soda bottles for light pipes.
Meet the Guests of Honour
This panel features VCON Guests of Honour, Author Holly Schofield and Artist Eric Chu, who will discuss their inspiration and creative processes and interact with the audience.
Meet William Gibson
Listen to a lecture by the man who coined cyberpunk and created a whole new genre of speculative fiction.
Opening Ceremonies
Jenni Merrifield, President of WCSFA, VCON’s parent non-profit society, welcomes you to VCON 44: Pick Your Punk!
Pick Your Punk: Living In the 21st Century
Steampunk, solarpunk, biopunk, dieselpunk, hopepunk, atompunk, welcoming sampler panel for newcomers and why it still matters.
Robo-horses in the Wild (presentation)
Mechanical mounts crop up in spec fic from steampunk westerns to space operas. In this session we’ll look at the potential benefits and pitfalls of riding robots: when they make sense.
Solarpunk: The Future of Farming
Beyond monoculture, this panel explores new environmentally sensitive technologies that facilitate the agriculture and provisioning for the future.
Space Nomads: Hitchhikers, Vagabonds, and Rogues, and Why We Love Those Scamps
They are the quirky anti-villains that spice up our stories about tomorrow. They add colourful narration and often get the best lines… and we’re here to celebrate their contribution… “laugh it up, fuzzball.”
The Art of Punk
A panel that delves into the evolution of book cover art, especially speculative fiction cover art, and how genre book covers have changed compared with styles from decades past. It will be a chance to celebrate old-school fantasy and sci-fi illustrators while also highlighting some modern gems.
The DIY Future
Zines, indie games, small presses, makerspaces, fan communities, and self-publishing: a practical and celebratory panel on creating outside the gatekeepers’ velvet rope.
The Future We Built: Cyberpunk Then and Now
From Neuromancer to algorithmic feeds, gig work, surveillance tech, and generative AI: which cyberpunk predictions landed, which missed wildly, and what should fiction imagine next?
The Killbot Problem: When Robots Go Punk
Sooner or later, almost any speculative fiction scenario involving robots and AIs must address the “killbot problem,” whether through Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad or Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. This panel explores the killbot problem and how various authors arrived at a solution.
Turkey Readings
We are bringing back a VCON classic: Someone reads a turkey of a book, and people bid to stop reading and counterbid to continue reading, all while some audience members try to act out what is being read. In the “before times”, the Turkey Readings were a fundraiser for CUFF, the Canadian Unity Fan Fund, which supported sending one fan from one side of Canada to a Canvention when it was held on the other side of Canada. Sadly, CUFF is no more, but this year’s organizer has declared the fundraiser to be to “keep VCON alive”.
Turning a Story into a Script (workshop)
A workshop on turning a story into a script, for prose writers specifically.
VCON: A Retrospective
A unique perspective from a long-time VCON attendee and volunteer, sharing his view of VCON’s decades-long history.
Viva Le Resistance… Or Maybe Just Have a Sandwich with Mayo? Have We Lost the Punk?
How much has the resistance inspired by punk genres become integrated into the status quo? Everyone sees themselves as rebels, but we all use the same cell phones, the same internet services, and shop from the same corporations. How can anyone be said to be a rebel when we all behave the same?
What Future Do You Want?
The future is in our hands. We get to choose our fate. But will our choices be for good or ill? You (and our panel) get to decide.