A press release from LI-Con:

ICON Science Fiction is proud to announce LI-Con 1. This convention will be very focused on science, science fiction and fantasy literature, and anime. It will be held at the Best Western Mill River Manor in Rockville Centre, New York, March 29-30, 2014.

The two-day event will feature creators and experts in many areas, including scientists and science writers, authors and scholars of literature, and creators and performers in the field of anime. Programming will include lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and viewings of important movies and television shows in these fields.

Special Guests will include John Rennie, host of the Weather Channel’s Hacking the Planet and former editor-in-chief of Scientific American, and author Jody Lynn Nye.

The convention has been organized and backed by ICON Science Fiction, a non-profit educational corporation. ICON also holds an annual convention called I-Con (with a hyphen), which has been a fixture on Long Island for over thirty years.

ICON has begun a crowd-funding campaign for its activities through Indiegogo. This new fund-raising method will enhance transparency of ICON’s budgeting and operations, give the organization flexibility and the potential to do much more in the future, and increase our community’s involvement in everything we do.

Please join our campaign here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/i-con-returns.

“After 31 successful I-Cons, it was time for the corporation to broaden its activities,” said ICON Vice President and LI-Con Chair Carl Fink. “LI-Con is just the first of a series of new events we’ll be announcing to carry out our corporate mission of promoting education, literacy, science, and the arts.”

ICON Science Fiction is a 501(c)(3) charitable corporation chartered in the state of New York to promote education, especially in the areas of literature and science.