The guests listed here are all confirmed to be at BasedCon 2024. More guests are being added all the time, so check back often and make sure you sign up for email updates!
Bill Willingham
Bill Willingham is probably best known as the creator and writer of the long running Fables comic series. His Twitter address is @billwillingham. His Substack newsletter (These Foolish Games) can be found at: billwillingham.Substack.com. Finally, you can buy his stuff at: Billsartandstories.onlineweb.shop
Blaine Pardoe
Blaine Pardoe is a New York Times Bestselling and award winning author of numerous books in the true crime, science fiction, military non-fiction, political thriller, paranormal, and business management genres. He has appeared on a number of national television and radio shows to speak about his books. Mr. Pardoe has been a featured speaker at the US National Archives, the United States Navy Museum, the US Naval Academy, and the New York Military Affairs Symposium. He was awarded the State History Award in 2011 by the Historical Society of Michigan and is a silver medal winner from the Military Writers Society of America in 2010. In 2013 Mr. Pardoe won the Harriet Quimby Award from the Michigan Aviation Hall of Fame for his contributions to aviation history. Mr. Pardoe has been a speaker at CrimeCon 2018 speaking about the Colonial Parkway Murders. He and his daughter run the true crime podcast, Tantamount. He has been an author and designer in the gaming industry since 1985. He has written countless sourcebooks for games including the Star Trek RPG, Space 1889, the Robotech RPG, BattleTech/MechWarrior, Twilight 2000, Renegade Legion Centurion, Interceptor, and Leviathans. He has authored numerous science fiction novels in the BattleTech/MechWarrior universe. In the last few years, he has been a regular contributor to American Thinker, PJ Media, American Greatness, Bizpac Review, and other conservative sites. In 2022 the current license holder for BattleTech, Catalyst Game Labs, cancelled him after complaints led by an online stalker whom he has a protective order against. His conservative political thriller series, Blue Dawn and his new military sci-fi series, Land&Sea, have been Amazon bestsellers. His books have been mentioned on the floor of the U.S. Congress. His works have been printed in six languages and he is recognized world-wide for his historical and fiction works. He can be followed via Twitter (@bpardoe870), on Facebook, and his blog.
Travis J. I. Corcoran
Forged in darkest Massachusetts, Travis (“TJIC” to friends and enemies alike), escaped from the People’s Republik and managed to bribe his way across the border. He now resides with his wife and dogs on a 56 acre farm in New Hampshire where he writes code, forges knives, raises / slaughters / butchers goats and pigs, and tinkers with his 50 year old Bridgeport milling machine. His debut novel, The Powers of the Earth, won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2018 – the first self-published novel to ever do so. His second novel, Causes of Separation, won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2019 – the first time an author has won two years running, and the first time both a book and its sequel won.
Robert Kroese
Robert Kroese’s sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan – home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In second grade, he wrote his first novel, the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California, where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it. In 2009, he called upon his extensive knowledge of useless information and love of explosions to write his first novel, Mercury Falls. Since then, he has written 32 more novels. His current project is writing three new books in his Rex Nihilo series. Rob is the organizer of BasedCon.
Hans Schantz
Hans G. Schantz is a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and science fiction writer. Principal Scientist at Geeks and Nerds Corporation, he was formerly a co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of the Q-Track Corporation, and co-inventor of the company’s near-field precision indoor location systems. A theoretical physicist by training, he wrote the book The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas. More recently, he branched out into science fiction, authoring the Amazon top-ten alternate history science fiction techno-thriller, The Hidden Truth. The sequel, A Rambling Wreck, was a finalist for the Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance 2018 Book of the Year. Hans lives in Huntsville, Alabama. His wife Barbara, inventor of the Baby Dipper Bowl, looks after the couple’s two sets of twins.
Dan Gainor
Dan Gainor, vice president of Free Speech America for the Media Research Center, is a veteran editor with more than two decades of experience in print and online media. He manages a team that fights online censorship against the right. The MRC heads up an alliance of nearly 80 conservative organizations on four continents fighting against Big Tech censorship. Gainor has made thousands of radio and TV appearances on everything from Fox News to ABC. He has served as an editor at several newspapers including The Washington Times and The Baltimore News-American. Gainor also has extensive experience in online publishing, working online since before the world wide web. He held the position of managing editor for CQ.com and executive editor for ChangeWave. He has worked in financial publishing, launching new services for ChangeWave and Agora Inc. Gainor holds an MBA from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and a master’s in publications design from the University of Baltimore. As an undergraduate, he majored in political science and history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.Gainor is a budding sci-fi/fantasy author with short stories published in several anthologies and one anthology on his own, “Our Heroes Through Tomorrow.”
Russell Newquist
Russell Newquist is the editor of the #1 Amazon bestselling horror anthology Secret Stairs and author of the supernatural thriller War Demons. He moonlights by day as a software engineer and a martial arts instructor.
Morgon Newquist
Morgon Newquist started life by causing an international incident in Central America, and has been marching to the beat of her own drummer ever since. She grew up in the Rocket City – Huntsville, Alabama. After a stint at the University of Georgia to study Latin, she has returned to the place of her upbringing where she wrangles two dogs, a cat, and four children daily.
She is an avid fan of fantasy, science fiction, gaming of all types and other nerdy pursuits.
Her current focus is an ongoing saga of sword and sorcery short stories called The School of Spells and War. The first novella, Down The Dragon Hole, is highly rated and continues to introduce many new fans to the series.
Morgon has worked as a freelance writer off and on since 2007, and written for video game mythologies, table top RpGs, online game guides, and blogs as well as her own short works. She has several published short stories and is currently working on several novels.
Daniel Humphreys
Daniel Humphreys is the author of the Z-Day series of post-apocalyptic sci-fi thrillers and the Paxton Locke urban fantasy series. His first novel, “A Place Outside the Wild”, was a 2017 Dragon Award finalist for Best Apocalyptic novel.
Dan enjoys sci-fi movies, target shooting, and tinkering with computers. He has spent his entire career in corporate IT and suffers from elevated blood pressure due to a lifelong love of the Arizona Cardinals. Daniel lives in Indiana with his wife and family.
His Twitter account is @NerdKing52 and he blogs at www.daniel-humphreys.net.
Rachel Fulton Brown
Rachel Fulton Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses on the history of Christianity, medieval European religious, cultural, and intellectual history, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. She blogs as Fencing Bear at Prayer, and she lectures on Logos, Tolkien, and medieval history at Unauthorized.tv. The Dragon Common Room is her online classroom for training poets in the arts of the Christian imagination. Visit DCR Books for details on their past and ongoing adventures!
Ryan Williamson
Ryan Williamson is a former US Army Cavalry Scout living in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of numerous short stories and the Top 10 Western Horror bestselling novel “The Widow’s Son.” His short story “Little Mouse” received an Honorable Mention from the Writers of the Future contest. Ryan enjoys coffee, motorcycles, cowboy guns, and long walks with coffee
Declan Finn
Declan Finn is the NYC based author of books ranging from thrillers to urban fantasy to SciFi, including the 2016 Dragon Award Nominated Novel for Best horror, Honor at Stake, 2017 for Live and Let Bite, and 2018 for Codename: Unsub in best Apocalypse. He is known for “his strong fight scenes and is romance novels are sexy without being dirty, providing enough sexual tension to curl toes.”
Frederick Heimbach
Look for Frederick Gero Heimbach’s fiction in Analog Science Fiction and Fact and at Mysterion Online. He was editor of the podcast Protecting Project Pulp throughout its run. He can be found on the internet as Fredösphere and in the real world as a resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan, along with his family. He is the author of two novels: The Devil’s Dictum and Ronald Reagan’s Brilliant Bullet.
Herman Hunter
Inspired by pulp fiction, epic fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons, the Bible, and even the occasional scary movie, Herman P. Hunter seeks to blend these influences into everything he writes.
His motto is: “Creating a world of Fantasy, one story at a time.”
Herman can be found on most major social media sites. Book trailers and sample chapters can be found on his YouTube (Herman P. Hunter’s THE LORE FORGE) and Rumble channels.
Patrick Abbot
Patrick Abbott enjoys the easy life after multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently he is spending his free time writing stories that deal with the experiences of war, homecoming, and religion. His first novel, Fallen, has been praised for realistic portrayals of PTSD and military liaisoning. When not writing, he can be found volunteering, hiking, or at his local parish. He blogs at www.patrickabbott.net and posts at www.x.com/patrickkabbott
Jamie Wilson
Jamie Wilson lives in Massachusetts with her husband and son. They enjoy swimming and playing at local parks during the summer, apple picking in the fall, smelling the new flowers and splashing in puddles in the spring, and sledding and making snowmen in the winter. During naptime, Jamie loves reading and writing fantasy novels.
Want to keep up-to-date with Jamie’s books?
Check our her website: www.jamiewilsonbooks.com
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