Westercon 74 Event Videos Posted

Westercon 74 has created a Westercon 74 YouTube channel where we post videos from the convention.  On this channel, we have also set up an Events playlist that includes recordings of all of the items that happened in the Main Hall/on the Main Stage of the Tonopah Convention Center, in the order that they happened during the convention.

The Events were, in order:

  • Friday: Opening Ceremony, followed by Question Time for the Utah in 2024 Westercon bid and for Westercon 75 in Anaheim.
  • Saturday: Match Game SF
  • Sunday Morning: Westercon Business Meeting, and separately uploaded, the Committee of the Whole on 2024 Westercon Site Selection.
  • Sunday Afternoon: Kuma’s Korner Stuffed Friends Gathering
  • Sunday: Closing Ceremony

We also have included separately the opening and closing title videos shown during the Opening and Closing Ceremonies.

We are still working on preparing recordings of our online and hybrid programming and will post them our our YouTube channel when they are available.

Westercon 74 Videos

Westercon 74 recorded videos of all events in the Main Hall (Opening Ceremony, Match Game SF, Business Meeting, and Closing Ceremony) and also recorded the online and hybrid programming in the Blue Room. We intend to publish these videos on YouTube as soon as possible. The rush of post-convention business, and unfortunately the effect of COVID-19 on our Programming Operations lead, mean that it will take longer to make these videos available than we had hoped.

When videos are published, we will announce it here on our website as well as on our Twitter feed and Facebook page.

Programming Help Wanted

Update: We have a volunteer who has agreed to run the onsite portion of the Scavenger Hunt and the Trivia Contest. We hope people will join in on one or both activities.


Our Programming Team is looking for volunteer staff members to be the onsite runner of the Scavenger Hunt and to host the Trivia Game. Clues and Questions will be provided to you for both games.

Duties for Scavenger Hunt: Hand out clues to participants, collect and assess clue responses, and award the winner a certificate.

Duties for Trivia Game: Host and run the trivia game.

Westercon 74 Announces Guests of Honor

Westercon 74 today announced that they will honor Kevin Andrew Murphy and Myrna Donato as Guests of Honor. Although the convention initially announced while they were bidding that they would not have guests of honor in an attempt to keep the cost of the convention down, thanks to a generous grant from the Utah Fandom Organization (Westercon 72/SpikeCon), they are able to honor two Nevadans for their contributions to the field of science fiction and fantasy, one of them as an author and another as a bookseller.

Kevin Andrew Murphy writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction and roleplaying games, as well as poetry, plays, and occasional nonfiction. A longstanding member of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards consortium, Kevin won the 2019 Darrell Award for Best Novella for “Find the Lady,” his contribution to Mississippi Roll. His most recent Wild Cards story, “A Flint Lies in the Mud”/“But a Flint Holds Fire,” is the opening tale for Knaves Over Queens, and he has more Wild Cards stories and a graphic novel coming out in the future. Kevin also writes stories outside the Wild Cards universe, including “Portals of the Past” in Weird War IV, edited by Sean Patrick Hazlett.

On the gaming front, Kevin has contributed both game writing and fiction to many worlds over the years, from White Wolf’s Mage, where he created the popular character Penny Dreadful and her novel of the same name, to Paizo’s Pathfinder, with numerous stories chronicling the adventures of the revolutionary alchemist Norret Gantier, to work for Sigil and Savage Worlds, most recently “The Covenant of Six,” the fiction for the S5E: Superheroic Roleplaying Kickstarter.

Kevin also brews mead, cooks, collects books and antiques, and generally enjoys himself. He resides in Reno, Nevada, in a fortified stone fortress with canyons on each side, home to proud hawks, majestic deer, and a somewhat less proud and majestic scurries of ground squirrels and coveys of quail.

Myrna Donato is the owner of Amber Unicorn Books, which she operated along with her late husband Lou Donato at two brick-and-mortar stores in the Las Vegas area and at conventions. She and Lou opened their first store in March 1981, and they were married on the beach in Maui in October of 1982. Over the years, they attended and sold books at many SF/F conventions, including both local conventions and Worldcons, most recently at the 2011 Worldcon in Reno.

In 1997, they sold their store and began selling books online and at conventions, coming out of retirement in 2008 when they opened their second Amber Unicorn Bookstore “due to the demand of our old customers,” as she put it.

Besides specializing in science fiction and fantasy, Amber Unicorn specialized in cookbooks, for which they were written up in Saveur magazine. They were voted as one of the top ten vintage cookbook stores in the USA.

In 2016, the loss of the anchor store in their business complex, followed by the sudden and unexpected death of Lou in 2017, and then the onset of COVID-19 led to Myrna taking the difficult decision to close the physical bookstore in December of 2020, ending a 39-year run as the largest and oldest used bookstore in Las Vegas. Since then, Myrna has been selling books online through AbeBooks.com and enjoying being at home with her black labs. She says, “If you wonder how and why the store was named the Amber Unicorn, ask me and I will tell you the story behind the name.”