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.
Heidi van der Vloet has been a SF fan for as long as she can remember. She is a huge xenophile and loves to make her brain think in circles with a good book, a beautiful and/or science fiction film or a strange work of art.
She has been visiting conventions at home and abroad since she was 18 and has been organizing conventions since the late 1990s. First the NCSF conventions, later also Imagicon and the (Mid)dag van het Fantastische Boek and now for a while also HSFCon. Whenever possible, she visits the WorldCons and reads for the Hugo awards. She also judges the Harland Prize story competition.
She is also crazy about maps, both in literature and in her work: she advises on geo-information at a large municipality. She likes to make geeky crafts. When she grows up, she wants to move to Mars as an uploaded A.I. and sit behind the geraniums as a grumpy cybergranny dreaming of Mars.
Alice Jouanno
I am proud to be a boardmember of the Dutch SF society NCSF and editor for their HSF magazine. I helped organise the 2019 Benelux On, the first two HSF con and Eurocon 2024 Erasmuscon.
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. She did, however, enjoy helping to organize the Dutch Discworld Convention, Cabbagecon.
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.