André de Boer’s first contact with the genre was through computer games, TV shows and films. From there he started exploring the books on which many of these stories were based. In the past few years he also developed a deep love for board games and RPGs. André has visited several conventions over the past couple of years and has now joined the organising committee for HSFCon.
With his background in business finance and administration it is no wonder that Paul van Oven has been and still is active as a treasurer for multiple organisations. He has been a science fiction fan for as long as he can remember and was part of the club committee of the Dutch Contact Centre for Science Fiction (NCSF) for ten years when that society was first established. In 2008 he returned to the same society. The past few years he has been involved mostly in collaborating on a variety of conventions, among which several Worldcons. He is the driving force behind the Dutch Discworld convention Cabbagecon, and is involved in the preparations for the first Dutch Eurocon in Ahoy, Rotterdam in 2024, in association with the Glasgow Worldcon in the same year.
Heidi van der Vloet has been a fan of SF for as long as she can remember. She is a huge xenophile and loves to have her brain twisted by a good book, a beautiful film or a weird piece of art. She has been frequenting conventions in the Netherlands and abroad since she was 18, and has been involved in organising conventions since the 1990s. The first of these were conventions of NCSF, then Imagicon and the Dag van het Fantastische Boek (‘fantastic book day’) and now HSFCon. Beside all this, Heidi loves maps, both in literature and in daily life, working as a geo-information co-ordinator for a large Dutch municipality. She also enjoys working in her allotment garden and making geeky pieces of needlework. When she grows up she wants to be uploaded as an AI and move to Mars, and sit at home as a cantankerous old cyber-granny dreaming of Mars.
Alice Jouanno
I am originally from France and spent my teenage years there reading, watching and visiting anything that could be described as Fantastique (for a Dutch-language piece on the subject, see Hoe de Franse SF geen SF is). In 2008, when I was 18, I moved to the Netherlands and soon I was drawn into the ‘community’. I am proud to be a boardmember of the Dutch SF society NCSF and part of the editing team for their newly resurrected HSF magazine. Having frequented a lot of conventions, I felt it was time to start organising them myself. After the 2018 Beneluxcon it’s now time for the first HSFCon and in 2024 hopefully the first Dutch Eurocon. Besides all this I love board games, RPGs, literature and bingeing good SF movies and shows on Netflix and Amazon. I work as a translator, content manager and customer experience specialist at
Catawiki.
Tanja van Oven was raised in a house full of scifi and fantasy books. All those outlandish and fascinating titles drew her into the genre with an irresistible force and somehow that fascination never really went away. SF taught her to look at the world slightly differently and to keep being amazed at how strange reality sometimes is. Some real-world stuff really is a lot stranger than fiction.
She would like to claim to be a regular at scifi conventions, but the truth is different. In actual fact she just doesn’t seem to get around to it much. On the other hand, she has been involved in the organisation of the one and only Dutch Discworld Convention, Cabbagecon, from the very beginning.
Apart from scifi and fantasy she is very interested in nature and landscape, being involved in a volunteer group for landscape and nature conservation (think gardening but on a slightly larger scale) and she loves cycling and hiking in the Netherlands and abroad.
She spends her working days as a project manager at a translation and subtitling agency in Hilversum.
Jan Scholte considers himself a daily visitor of the amazing universe that can be described as the fantastic genre. From reading Science Fiction books to watching cheesy horror films and from playing fantasy games (board games and card games) to listening to narrative music. He used to visit a lot of conventions in the past, a bit less so in the present. This did result in an ever growing collection of autographs. Every now and then he tries his hand at creating his own worlds through writing, but he has a lot of writing miles still to travel to reach this goal. Jan occasionally has a go at writes articles or interviewing people for NCSF’s society mag HSF.
In terms of HSFCon Jan occupies himself with various jobs, including managing the website and using (or misusing) the hastags #HSFCon and #WeLoveItLiterally.
In real life Jan lives in the far north with his wife and cat. On weekdays he can put all his energy into his work as a court appointed financial guardian.