A child of the Sixties, Mark is a fan of Silver Age DC, monsters, and TV shows with ten minutes or less commercials per hour. He grew up on library-book anthologies of sci-fi and short stories, and remembers that the Dewey Decimal System classification for flying-saucer books was 629.13. Nowadays he maintains blogs about pop culture, music, the Apollo Moon program, and Central OK fandom history. Mark is an author and editor for Jacobs/Brown Press, for whom he wrestles books about Trek, X-Men, the Moody Blues, and more. He’s a founding member of both the original and current Soonercons, and proudly displays his childhood library card.
Soonercon began in 1986 and has grown into Oklahoma’s longest-running pop-culture convention. This panel brings together organizers and longtime staff to share stories from the convention’s earliest days through its modern evolution. Learn how the event developed, the challenges it faced, and the community that helped it thrive. Join us as we look back at the past and ahead to the future of Soonercon.
A look at the dark side of imagining things into existence! After Slenderman was invented, some claim to have seen him IRL. The tulpa theory posits that entities can be created by the mind, willingly or not, and then run amok, like poltergeists. Is the human mind that powerfully twisted?
Some horror movies do more than startle us in the moment. They linger in our minds long after the credits roll. This panel invites fans to share the movies, scenes, and twists that truly stuck with them. What moments still make you uneasy years later?
What elements from the "Golden Age" of science fiction continue to captivate audiences today? Panelists explore timeless classics and why these stories still resonate with modern readers and viewers.