This weekend is Farpoint, my annual Star Trek and science fiction convention, which is why the blog is two days late. The last-minute planning for a three-day event tends to eat up all the days in the week before. Especially when you just closed a show the weekend going into that week. If you missed it, I just performed The Seagull with the Rude Mechanicals. So I’m the emcee for Farpoint’s opening ceremonies. I don’t always give an actual speech, but, given the tenor of the times, I wanted to say a few things to my local S.F. community. I had actually planned to use them as the basis of this week’s blog, and that decision was reinforced when more than one audience member asked me to do just that. So here is my opening address to Farpoint 2025.
I started this con when I was 27.
I didn’t start it alone, but I was the one that year who jumped up and said, “Hey kids, let’s put on a con!
People thought I was too young and reckless and feral to run a con, but, here it is and here we are, and This year I turn 60.
It’s been a long and eventful journey for me, for Farpoint, and for Baltimore fandom. We’ve gained new friends and we’ve lost dear old ones. We’ve seen new incarnations of the thing that brought us together originally, which was the three-season 1966 series Star Trek.
We’ve since experienced the Next Generation and DS9, Voyager and Enterprise, Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy. We’ve had the original cast films, the Next Gen Films, the JJ verse and Section 31, and let’s not forget Galaxy Quest and the Orville. The thing that brought us together has become so diversified that a lot of our newer siblings have not seen the original Star Trek and have no interest in it.
Sacrilege? Not really. With each new iteration, someone cries out, “That’s it! They’ve forgotten what Star Trek is all about!” And someone cries back, “No, they’ve made it better!”
Listen, that argument goes back to 1987, when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered. I had that argument with my co-founding chairman of Farpoint, my mother-in-law, Beverly Volker. And if Bev and I had an argument, it’s been had. Absolutely nothing more ever needs to be said again.
Once we had had that argument, Bev and I came together and built this con. And here it still is. Because, the simple truth is that what Star Trek is all about is us. It’s all about us and the things we have in common.
In fact, for all the kicking and screaming, back around 1990 when we made room for Next Gen fans. We had to make a LOTTA room, because they tripled the attendance at our cons.
We’ve shrunk back down since then, but, even if we hadn’t, there would still be room for all at Farpoint.
Whatever your background, your gender identity, your religion or lack thereof, your place on the spectrum, your physical abilities and… some people might not agree but this is my stance and thus it is the Farpoint Family’s stance… whoever you voted for last November or any other time… There is room for you.
There is one exception to that welcome—you are not welcome to make anyone else un-welcome. So please just let’s not, okay?
Differences and the anger they cause were very well addressed for me a long time ago in a brilliant script by the late Gene Roddenberry and the late Gene Coon called the Questor Tapes. Questor the android has one human friend, and his friend turns him into the authorities who think an android is a dangerous thing. In addressing this development, Questor looks at his one friend and says, “You did what you thought was right. Does that make you any less my friend?”
To each of you I say, whatever we disagree on, whatever ways there are that I am not like you, it does not make you less my friend. You are welcome here. You are safe with us.
Welcome… home to Farpoint.