It's been nearly a week since news of the Hugo nominees dropped, and there have been approximately seventy billion reaction posts and tweets from everyone even tangentially related to the whole mess--so at this point, I figure, my neck is aching and everyone else has said something about it, so why not me? I'm not going to go into deep details; if you're unfamiliar with the situation, suffice it to say that this year's Hugo Award nominations were dominated by a particular voting slate that has, among other things, marked itself as a reaction to the tides in which science fiction's most storied award has been following recently. It's divided between the Sad Puppies, headed by writers Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, and the Rabid Puppies, led by racist, sexist, friend to gators, and all-around loathsome person Theodore Beale, who (surprise, surprise) snaffled multiple nominations for himself under his pseudonym Vox Day.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't wade into this morass at all--I have enough stressors in my life as it is, and my social privilege is such that "just ignore it" is a valid option for me. But I will anyway, because as I discovered for the first time last Saturday, I have a personal connection to the Sad Puppies' slate. Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is up for Best Semiprozine, and this affects me because I have been a slush reader for ASIM for the last seven years--which means that if you sent a story to ASIM at any time since 2008 and got rejected, I may well have been one of the people that said "no" to it.
Working with ASIM was my first entry into the world of science fiction, before I'd placed a single story anywhere, well before I'd ever been paid for my words. As I write this there's a new piece of slush in my inbox waiting for my review. I'm happy to be able to be a part of something that people can enjoy, to help make it be as good as it can be.
Which is why, when I saw that ASIM had made its first-ever Hugo ballot thanks to the Sad Puppies' efforts, the thing that echoed in my mind was this: your approval fills me with shame.
Why?
Because, as far as I can see it, the Sad Puppies appear to spring out of the same suspicious, conspiratarian view that characterizes so much of modern American culture, and as such is yet another example of Americans ruining everything the rest of us. (When it comes to science fiction fandom, see also the DC in 2017 Worldcon bid Kool-Aid-Manning into a field that was until then divided between Japan, Montreal, and Helsinki, because god forbid the Americans let the rest of us have one fucking year to ourselves.)
Do a search for "Sad Puppies slate" and the first thing you'll find at the top of Google News is a National Review article headlined "Social-Justice Warriors Aren't So Tough When Even Sad Puppies Can Beat Them."
Go exploring for comments from the people involved and you'll see things like Larry Correia's belief that the Hugos have been "politically biased," or that there's "an ongoing culture war between artistic free expression and puritanical bullies," and his statements from last year that "a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work."
Search for "Sad Puppies" in general and you'll find a lot of stuff framing this not as a gesture to get overlooked works on the ballot, but as a way to stick it to social justice warriors.
It doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence as regards the purity of their motives.
Not that I think that they're bad people, necessarily; I can't speak for everyone, but going by what I've seen and heard, I believe that at least Torgersen really is interested in highlighting works that he sees as not falling into the "Hugo Standard"--but I also believe that he's gone about it in an exceptionally ham-fisted manner.
I believe that he's a modern-day Sorcerer's Apprentice, and he's unleashed something that he was never able to control.
But.
I don't care if the SPs think they're striking a blow for overlooked works. What I care about is that for me, their actions have tainted the entire process. That any award resulting from this would always ask the niggling question "is it really that good, or was it just politically acceptable to a bunch of people gaming the system?" It's true that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are, this year, distinct--but this is the first year this is true, after the Sad Puppies got one of VD's works onto last year's ballot, and which finished sixth behind No Award--but I will also point out that the SP state still includes three nominees from Castalia House, a brand-new publisher established by, and heavily printing, Beale.
But I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I get my voters' ballot. I will take that Best Semiprozine category, and I will not rank ASIM--but I will rank "No Award."
Why?
Because being tied, even tangentially, to those who think that people like Theodore Beale and John C. Wright represent the best of science fiction makes me feel dirty.
Because I don't want your goddamn charity.
Showing posts with label worldcon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worldcon. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Thursday, March 6, 2014
My View on the Ross Thing
You may have heard of the latest controversy to engulf the science fiction community--after all, not only is it less than a week old, this one has been picking up some mainstream media coverage, to the extent that six of the first ten hits for his name deal with it. That's because it pivots around how, for eight hours or so last Saturday, former British TV presenter Jonathan Ross was tapped to host the Hugo Awards at this year's Worldcon, Loncon 3. It was only eight hours because that's how long it took for him to back out of it after the news of his being tapped set off a Twitter storm.
If you've never heard of Jonathan Ross, you may be wondering why he was reacted to in such a manner. He has, in fact, run into no shortage of controversies himself, one of them getting him suspended from the BBC for six months. But that is, in itself, a huge factor in what went down. I get the distinct impression that the Loncon 3 chairs didn't fully appreciate that this isn't just another British con, but a Worldcon drawing thousands of people from all over the world--though mostly North America and Western Europe--many of whom would have never heard of this guy who used to be on the telly. Many of whom had only the stories of his controversies to inform them, and given what the sf community has been through in the last few months, a lot of people out there are understandably on hair triggers.
As an experienced presenter, and knowing that he would be representing Loncon 3 in his interactions with the sf community, Ross should have known how to approach the situation professionally and how to introduce himself to people with no prior experience of him. Instead, this is what we got:
My first introduction to and impression of Jonathan Ross, ladeez and germs.
When you're caught in an incipient controversy, there's one simple rule--don't feed it. Resnick and Malzberg turned the SFWA controversy from eye-rolling and grumbles to flame wars by saying that people rolling their eyes and grumbling at them were liberal fascists trying to censor them. Rob Ford made a mockery out of his status as a crack aficionado by constantly denying that he smoked crack until finally telling reporters that they hadn't "asked the right question." Ross didn't appreciate this, and so he got burned.
But it's more than that, I think. In this, it seems like there's also a measure of fame's blinders. I see plenty of people like Neil Gaiman bemoaning the reaction that Ross received, but how much of this came from an unexamined opinion that everyone would know Ross for Ross? I didn't. I only know Ross from his tweets, and I don't care if Neil Gaiman calls him a friend--I think he's a jerk.
When people voice their concerns about you, the proper response is not to insult them or accuse them of slander. It only makes you look out-of-touch and, frankly, a bit sad.
If you've never heard of Jonathan Ross, you may be wondering why he was reacted to in such a manner. He has, in fact, run into no shortage of controversies himself, one of them getting him suspended from the BBC for six months. But that is, in itself, a huge factor in what went down. I get the distinct impression that the Loncon 3 chairs didn't fully appreciate that this isn't just another British con, but a Worldcon drawing thousands of people from all over the world--though mostly North America and Western Europe--many of whom would have never heard of this guy who used to be on the telly. Many of whom had only the stories of his controversies to inform them, and given what the sf community has been through in the last few months, a lot of people out there are understandably on hair triggers.
As an experienced presenter, and knowing that he would be representing Loncon 3 in his interactions with the sf community, Ross should have known how to approach the situation professionally and how to introduce himself to people with no prior experience of him. Instead, this is what we got:
@WendyMetcalfe1 that's slander and untrue. Feel free to voice any opinion but please do not create false 'facts'
— Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014
@wasteofpaint absurd. I'll happily buy the ticket off you and give it someone less stupid.
— Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014
My first introduction to and impression of Jonathan Ross, ladeez and germs.
When you're caught in an incipient controversy, there's one simple rule--don't feed it. Resnick and Malzberg turned the SFWA controversy from eye-rolling and grumbles to flame wars by saying that people rolling their eyes and grumbling at them were liberal fascists trying to censor them. Rob Ford made a mockery out of his status as a crack aficionado by constantly denying that he smoked crack until finally telling reporters that they hadn't "asked the right question." Ross didn't appreciate this, and so he got burned.
But it's more than that, I think. In this, it seems like there's also a measure of fame's blinders. I see plenty of people like Neil Gaiman bemoaning the reaction that Ross received, but how much of this came from an unexamined opinion that everyone would know Ross for Ross? I didn't. I only know Ross from his tweets, and I don't care if Neil Gaiman calls him a friend--I think he's a jerk.
When people voice their concerns about you, the proper response is not to insult them or accuse them of slander. It only makes you look out-of-touch and, frankly, a bit sad.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
You Got 科学幻想 In My Science Fiction
No matter what form the future takes, there's one country that will take a major role in guiding it from those things that it does, or does not, do--China. I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I suggest that the 21st century will be a Chinese century, if for no other reason that it accounts for a significant fraction of humanity and shows no signs of letting its influence fade. As it stands, China's looking toward the future--witness the Chang'e 3 landing and Yutu lunar probe, for example, or its plans to have its own space station in operation by the 2020s. Appropriately enough, science fiction is big business there; its Science Fiction World, with estimates of more than one million readers per issue, is the most popular SF magazine on Earth.
Still, something of a gap remains between Chinese and Western SF--at least, from the Western perspective. It's not unusual for Western science fiction to be translated for the Chinese audience, going back to translations of Jules Verne in the early 20th century, but there's far less of it happening in the other direction. Ken Liu is active in translating Chinese science fiction and fantasy for publication in English, I can't think of anyone else who's doing it. The English translation of Cheng Jingbo's "Grave of the Fireflies," which appeared in this month's Clarkesworld, is the first I've come across.
It's the sort of thing that should change. I mean, this is the 21st century after all. Science fiction is a conversation, and when people are excluded everyone else misses out. If I had the opportunity, I'd start a magazine half in English, half in Chinese, translating stories to carry them across the language barrier... maybe someone will start something like that, one day. Maybe someone already has and I just don't know about it. But connections are important.
So I wasn't entirely surprised to find, the other day, about a group that's bidding for the 2016 World Science Fiction Convention--in Beijing.
It's a bit of a quixotic bid, really. The voting for 2016 is going to be held in London this August, and it's been Kansas City running unopposed for years. The KC bid has built up enough steam at this point that I doubt Beijing would be able to finagle an upset. It's my suspicion, and the suspicion of others, that the bid organizers are rather new to the whole thing--for one, none of the standard questionnaires detailing the dates being bidded for, bid officials, and so on seem to be present on their website. A website, for that matter, which I can only read after passing it through Google Translate, as it's entirely in Mandarin. The organizers seem to be some kind of scientific society where people can go for answers to science-related questions, talk about science and technology, and that sort of thing.
I think there's a definite opportunity for a Beijing bid: not in 2016, but down the road. 2018, for example, only has two candidates so far, New Orleans and San José. Targeting a more distant year would give a Beijing bid group more opportunity to level out a foundation and build bridges to bring the Chinese and Western science fiction communities closer together--which, really, should be the entire point of it.
That's not to say I don't have misgivings about how well Beijing would fare in competition--just after I heard about this bid, I saw those photos of the sunrise being broadcast on big TV screens in Beijing because the smog was thick enough to turn the sky grey.* Still, I am reminded that Loncon 1, held in 1957, came only five years after a particularly vicious smog descended over London. The more things change, the more they really don't.
I have to say, though, I do like the logo they've chosen.
* Postscript 01/24/2014 - As I have subsequently seen, that is not what those pictures accurately represented, but the fact remains that the air in China's urban centers is hideously polluted.
Still, something of a gap remains between Chinese and Western SF--at least, from the Western perspective. It's not unusual for Western science fiction to be translated for the Chinese audience, going back to translations of Jules Verne in the early 20th century, but there's far less of it happening in the other direction. Ken Liu is active in translating Chinese science fiction and fantasy for publication in English, I can't think of anyone else who's doing it. The English translation of Cheng Jingbo's "Grave of the Fireflies," which appeared in this month's Clarkesworld, is the first I've come across.
It's the sort of thing that should change. I mean, this is the 21st century after all. Science fiction is a conversation, and when people are excluded everyone else misses out. If I had the opportunity, I'd start a magazine half in English, half in Chinese, translating stories to carry them across the language barrier... maybe someone will start something like that, one day. Maybe someone already has and I just don't know about it. But connections are important.
So I wasn't entirely surprised to find, the other day, about a group that's bidding for the 2016 World Science Fiction Convention--in Beijing.
It's a bit of a quixotic bid, really. The voting for 2016 is going to be held in London this August, and it's been Kansas City running unopposed for years. The KC bid has built up enough steam at this point that I doubt Beijing would be able to finagle an upset. It's my suspicion, and the suspicion of others, that the bid organizers are rather new to the whole thing--for one, none of the standard questionnaires detailing the dates being bidded for, bid officials, and so on seem to be present on their website. A website, for that matter, which I can only read after passing it through Google Translate, as it's entirely in Mandarin. The organizers seem to be some kind of scientific society where people can go for answers to science-related questions, talk about science and technology, and that sort of thing.
I think there's a definite opportunity for a Beijing bid: not in 2016, but down the road. 2018, for example, only has two candidates so far, New Orleans and San José. Targeting a more distant year would give a Beijing bid group more opportunity to level out a foundation and build bridges to bring the Chinese and Western science fiction communities closer together--which, really, should be the entire point of it.
That's not to say I don't have misgivings about how well Beijing would fare in competition--just after I heard about this bid, I saw those photos of the sunrise being broadcast on big TV screens in Beijing because the smog was thick enough to turn the sky grey.* Still, I am reminded that Loncon 1, held in 1957, came only five years after a particularly vicious smog descended over London. The more things change, the more they really don't.
I have to say, though, I do like the logo they've chosen.
* Postscript 01/24/2014 - As I have subsequently seen, that is not what those pictures accurately represented, but the fact remains that the air in China's urban centers is hideously polluted.
Monday, September 30, 2013
To Your Scattered Panels Go: LoneStarCon 3
It's been nearly a month since Worldcon flared to brief and blazing life down in Texas over this past Labour Day weekend, but it feels like it took weeks for the echoes to start settling down. You may have heard about it in blogs or Twitter in connection with renewed concerns over the greying of the membership and the ongoing problems with diversity in the science fiction and fantasy field. if not, well, you might as well start off here!
What's Worldcon? It's the World Science Fiction Convention, held yearly since 1939 except for 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 due to some unfortunate unpleasantness, and was historically the big get-together of the science fiction and fantasy community--though history tends to give way to the future, which is the source of so many of its present issues. Unlike other major conventions like Dragon Con or San Diego Comic Con or so on, Worldcon doesn't put down roots; it's a roving convention that hops from city to city every year. In 2012 it was in Chicago, in 2014 it will be in London, and so on. Despite the name, which was coined out of analogy with the 1939 World's Fair in New York, most have been held in the United States. This one was held in San Antonio, Texas, at the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center and the Marriott Rivercenter and Riverwalk hotels.
What'll you find at Worldcon? A goodly number of people, for one--while it isn't the tens of thousands that you'll find at Dragon Con or the major comic conventions, over the past couple of decades Worldcons have settled into a steady attendance of three to four thousand. It's enough for the convention to be busy, with multiple program items running concurrently from morning to evening, but not so crowded that it's impossible to do anything but stake out a spot in a line and hope for the best. What you won't find at Worldcon is a strong media presence. Sure, there are panels here and there, but the overwhelming focus is on the written world. There isn't much cosplay either. I never went to the masquerade, but through all the rest of the con, I encountered one person cosplaying as Vanellope from Wreck-It Ralph and that was it.
Unless you count the guy with the remote-controlled K-9 and Dalek. But then they're not costumes, are they?
There was one major, inescapable presence at LoneStarCon 3, though--Texas itself. I knew what I was getting into from the first time I checked the San Antonio temperature charts, but there's a difference between knowing something and living it. I will say that the weather conditions in late August were tolerable, but only because every square inch of the convention space was air conditioned. On my longest trip outside of the conditioned air--a morning journey to the Alamo and back--I felt like the air had sucked every joule of energy out of me. The conditions were generally comparable to standing next to the heat exhaust of a transit bus. When I stepped out of the convention center it felt as if the hairs were being singed off my arms. One of the most important lessons I took away from LoneStarCon 3 is that I am not built for life in Texas.
Nevertheless, LoneStarCon3 was a very Texas convention. To put it into perspective, there more than twice as many attendees from the Lone Star State as from the entire world outside of the United States. Granted, this is nothing new; generally speaking, wherever Worldcon lands, a substantial proportion of the membership is going to consist of people who live within a few hours' drive, and in San Antonio's case, "a few hours' drive" is Texas with a slice of northeastern Mexico. It was strongly evident in the program; aside from the launch of the new Rayguns Over Texas anthology, there were nearly twenty program items dealing with Texas in general, and a dozen dealing with Robert E. Howard specifically--that latter focus, incidentally, drew some heat on Twitter later, and seems to have come about because of a near-total lack of Howard-related programming at LoneStarCon 2 back in 1997.
Though this does cut close to one of the issues Worldcon is wrestling with: the nature of the attendees. There are those who follow Worldcon from city to city, but due to the expenses inherent in airline tickets and hotel rooms, many of them tend to be either closely involved in the scene themselves--writers, editors, what have you--or people who've been going to Worldcons for decades, and have the free time and money necessary to do so. The expense issue alone excludes a lot of potential attendees; hell, if I'd have been aware of the existence of Worldcon back in university, when I was first starting out toward science fiction, the 2003 Worldcon in Toronto was the only one I could have even begun to consider attending, and that only because I was living in Toronto then. Going to San Jose or Boston or Glasgow or Yokohama as a broke-ass student? Forget about it, mangs.
Now then, on with the meat of it.
In retrospect, the first panel I dropped into foreshadowed the whole "aging" question. Dangerous Visions: Are They Still Dangerous?, held on Thursday afternoon when attendees were still trickling into San Antonio International Airport, wore its subject in its title--Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions, published in 1967 to widespread acclaim, and followed by Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972 and The Last Dangerous Visions in1973 1975 1976 1977 1978 1980 1982 1984 1990 2007 bwahahahahahaha I'm just kidding, that thing is never coming out. If you've never heard of it, Dangerous Visions was an anthology intended to collect the sort of stories that couldn't be published anywhere else--or, at least, couldn't be published anywhere else in 1967. One of the included stories, Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels," arrived after having been rejected by Playboy--at the time, the highest-paying fiction market in the United States--and is entirely innocuous today. As I understand, it was dangerous because... it acknowledged the existence of cancer?
In all, no surprise that this was focused in history. I suppose some might say that Worldcon's whole problem is that there's too much focus on history. Things were different in my first Friday panel, Schmoozing 101 with Mary Robinette Kowal, which unfolded in front of a full room. You'd think some of the things she went over--being able to find common ground in a conversation, not trapping people in a conversation, being physically pleasant through such innovations as bathing--would go without saying, but the sad truth is that they don't. One bit that stuck with me was her demonstration of the three types of movement, aggressive, passive, and regressive; a simple statement like "What did you say?" can have *vastly* different meanings if the speaker is leaning toward the subject, standing still, or recoiling.
At the What-If Moments in History panel, presided over by panelists Vylar Kaftan, David Liss, Harry Turtledove, and Jo Walton, the audience filled the chairs and spilled out into standing room only. While a lot of the panel went over the same sort of things I've seen in alternate history panels before, I did find one of Jo Walton's statements intriguing: that is, the notion that AH is an "anti-providential" literature, and so inherently subversive because it undermines the notion that there is some kind of historical plan. Thinking about it now, that makes AH seem like the next great genre to be officially condemned in some authoritarian thought-control state. Perhaps I could get a plot out of that.
I was also a bit flummoxed by the audience member who claimed that a major issue with AH is that we don't know how people in the past talked, acted, or looked like. It sure is a good thing writing and photography were finally invented in 2011, eh?
I was also heartened by Harry Turtledove's assertion that using historical figures born after an alternate history's point of divergence--say, a story about Napoleon Bonaparte in a world where the Carthaginians crushed Rome to powder--is "cheating." I've been saying this all along! Honestly, though, it would be stronger if Turtledove was not guilty of that cheating himself.
On Sunday, The Future Two Hundred Years Out likewise played to a full room, this one considerably bigger--it may be because Kim Stanley Robinson, one of 2013's Hugo nominees, was one of the panelists. He didn't mince his words on the panel, saying that "the Singularity is bullshit," with humans continuing to be the primary agents of history, and I can't help but lean toward his thinking. There wasn't much real disagreement from the other panelists on that; Joe Haldeman argued the Singularity to be a slow-motion convergence of technological and social trends that began around 1960 and will continue evolving for decades, for one. Other topics tackled here included the common failing of not taking social changes into account (N.B.: according to Sheila Williams, Asimov's does not see nearly enough examinations of the technological and social implications of technological advance, so get on that, writorbs), what will replace capitalism (nobody could really figure that out, though Robinson described present-day capitalism as "liquefied feudalism"), and that dystopias at their core all tell the same story: we can fuck up.
It was the last panel I attended, though--Have We Lost the Future?--that I think put an endcap on the whole experience. In a way, it served as a bookend complementing the Dangerous Visions panel in its historical focus. About midway through, panelist Willie Siros made a statement that bowled me over, that the space age "came and went" in his lifetime. I suppose this is true if you define "space age" to mean "humans landing on Luna." In every other dimension, though, I think things have been accelerating, and the speed of change isn't letting up. As I write this, it's only been a few hours since I watched, live, the launch of a rocket from a webcam attached to its side as it left the atmosphere, built by a company whose CEO has made it clear that he intends to die on Mars. One of the Voyager probes has left the solar system. We've seen 4 Vesta up close and there discovered an equal to Olympus Mons. We have detected nearly one thousand exoplanets!
The Space Age hasn't gone--it's barely even begun!
Here, though, is another potential expression of Worldcon's age issue. The fresh new writers of today are young and of a world in which the lunar missions were all history. We didn't live through them. We didn't expect that they would just be the start and that there would be, say, boots on Mars by 2000. Although we share the science fiction field, our formative experiences are staggeringly different from those who entered the community in, say, the 50s through to the 70s. Likewise, it could be argued that science fiction is still figuring out its place in the cultural sphere--but that place may not necessarily be comfortable to those who were with it in the old days.
What do I think the future holds? I'm not sure. Sooner or later, the cold equations of the actuarial tables demand that younger fans get involved in making Worldcon happen from year to year; the question is how many of those younger fans will be willing to? It's a different world now than it was thirty years ago. Things can change from Worldcon to Worldcon--in my personal experience, I had a good time in the gaming room at Chicon 7 last year, but when I went to the Night Gaming Room at LoneStarCon 3, I found a room with a few tables covered in sheets and absolutely nothing else.
The question of what Worldcon would be in future years hung heavily over the Site Selection battle. For the first time in years, there was more than one site with an active bid: in fact Orlando, Spokane, and Helsinki all vied to host the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in 2015. Parties rich in Finnish flavors rocked the Marriott Rivercenter to its foundations two nights in a row, and the Orlando team struggled valiantly for a convention that promised openness and low cost, for the price of holding it at Disney World during the height of hurricane season, but once the votes were counted it went to the one few had expected--Spokane, Washington.
Personally, I'd expected the real fight to be between Helsinki and Orlando. However, since Worldcon Site Selection runs on Australian rules balloting--that is, you mark your choices 1, 2, and 3, the candidate with the least 1 votes gets knocked out and their voters' 2 votes redistributed, and so on--it became clear that there were two camps: the people who wanted a Worldcon in Helsinki, and the people who wanted Worldcon to stay in the United States. Helsinki got more #1 votes than anyone at first, but when Orlando was knocked out of the running, their voters broke for Spokane over Helsinki by nearly a 4 to 1 margin. What made it so heartbreaking was that Helsinki lost by thirty-five votes. THIRTY-FIVE!
It doesn't surprise me, in retrospect--because Spokane always struck me as the "safe" bid. Helsinki offered the chance to bring Worldcon to an area of the world that had never had it before, and with the 2014 Worldcon being held in London, affored the opportunity for a European Worldcon fandom to arise. Orlando offered a revolutionary take on Worldcon, with low price and openness to new things, even if their latest bid artwork gave the impression they were looking to turn Worldcon into a mini-Dragon Con. Spokane... Spokane offered something unchallenging.
I'm sure that Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, will still be a cool thing, and I've already paid for my membership. Nevertheless, I can't help but think that it says something about the Worldcon community that, when presented with options for the new and for revitalization, it went for the safe and the familiar.
Previous Convention Reports
What's Worldcon? It's the World Science Fiction Convention, held yearly since 1939 except for 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 due to some unfortunate unpleasantness, and was historically the big get-together of the science fiction and fantasy community--though history tends to give way to the future, which is the source of so many of its present issues. Unlike other major conventions like Dragon Con or San Diego Comic Con or so on, Worldcon doesn't put down roots; it's a roving convention that hops from city to city every year. In 2012 it was in Chicago, in 2014 it will be in London, and so on. Despite the name, which was coined out of analogy with the 1939 World's Fair in New York, most have been held in the United States. This one was held in San Antonio, Texas, at the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center and the Marriott Rivercenter and Riverwalk hotels.
What'll you find at Worldcon? A goodly number of people, for one--while it isn't the tens of thousands that you'll find at Dragon Con or the major comic conventions, over the past couple of decades Worldcons have settled into a steady attendance of three to four thousand. It's enough for the convention to be busy, with multiple program items running concurrently from morning to evening, but not so crowded that it's impossible to do anything but stake out a spot in a line and hope for the best. What you won't find at Worldcon is a strong media presence. Sure, there are panels here and there, but the overwhelming focus is on the written world. There isn't much cosplay either. I never went to the masquerade, but through all the rest of the con, I encountered one person cosplaying as Vanellope from Wreck-It Ralph and that was it.
Unless you count the guy with the remote-controlled K-9 and Dalek. But then they're not costumes, are they?
There was one major, inescapable presence at LoneStarCon 3, though--Texas itself. I knew what I was getting into from the first time I checked the San Antonio temperature charts, but there's a difference between knowing something and living it. I will say that the weather conditions in late August were tolerable, but only because every square inch of the convention space was air conditioned. On my longest trip outside of the conditioned air--a morning journey to the Alamo and back--I felt like the air had sucked every joule of energy out of me. The conditions were generally comparable to standing next to the heat exhaust of a transit bus. When I stepped out of the convention center it felt as if the hairs were being singed off my arms. One of the most important lessons I took away from LoneStarCon 3 is that I am not built for life in Texas.
Nevertheless, LoneStarCon3 was a very Texas convention. To put it into perspective, there more than twice as many attendees from the Lone Star State as from the entire world outside of the United States. Granted, this is nothing new; generally speaking, wherever Worldcon lands, a substantial proportion of the membership is going to consist of people who live within a few hours' drive, and in San Antonio's case, "a few hours' drive" is Texas with a slice of northeastern Mexico. It was strongly evident in the program; aside from the launch of the new Rayguns Over Texas anthology, there were nearly twenty program items dealing with Texas in general, and a dozen dealing with Robert E. Howard specifically--that latter focus, incidentally, drew some heat on Twitter later, and seems to have come about because of a near-total lack of Howard-related programming at LoneStarCon 2 back in 1997.
Though this does cut close to one of the issues Worldcon is wrestling with: the nature of the attendees. There are those who follow Worldcon from city to city, but due to the expenses inherent in airline tickets and hotel rooms, many of them tend to be either closely involved in the scene themselves--writers, editors, what have you--or people who've been going to Worldcons for decades, and have the free time and money necessary to do so. The expense issue alone excludes a lot of potential attendees; hell, if I'd have been aware of the existence of Worldcon back in university, when I was first starting out toward science fiction, the 2003 Worldcon in Toronto was the only one I could have even begun to consider attending, and that only because I was living in Toronto then. Going to San Jose or Boston or Glasgow or Yokohama as a broke-ass student? Forget about it, mangs.
Now then, on with the meat of it.
In retrospect, the first panel I dropped into foreshadowed the whole "aging" question. Dangerous Visions: Are They Still Dangerous?, held on Thursday afternoon when attendees were still trickling into San Antonio International Airport, wore its subject in its title--Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions, published in 1967 to widespread acclaim, and followed by Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972 and The Last Dangerous Visions in
In all, no surprise that this was focused in history. I suppose some might say that Worldcon's whole problem is that there's too much focus on history. Things were different in my first Friday panel, Schmoozing 101 with Mary Robinette Kowal, which unfolded in front of a full room. You'd think some of the things she went over--being able to find common ground in a conversation, not trapping people in a conversation, being physically pleasant through such innovations as bathing--would go without saying, but the sad truth is that they don't. One bit that stuck with me was her demonstration of the three types of movement, aggressive, passive, and regressive; a simple statement like "What did you say?" can have *vastly* different meanings if the speaker is leaning toward the subject, standing still, or recoiling.
At the What-If Moments in History panel, presided over by panelists Vylar Kaftan, David Liss, Harry Turtledove, and Jo Walton, the audience filled the chairs and spilled out into standing room only. While a lot of the panel went over the same sort of things I've seen in alternate history panels before, I did find one of Jo Walton's statements intriguing: that is, the notion that AH is an "anti-providential" literature, and so inherently subversive because it undermines the notion that there is some kind of historical plan. Thinking about it now, that makes AH seem like the next great genre to be officially condemned in some authoritarian thought-control state. Perhaps I could get a plot out of that.
I was also a bit flummoxed by the audience member who claimed that a major issue with AH is that we don't know how people in the past talked, acted, or looked like. It sure is a good thing writing and photography were finally invented in 2011, eh?
I was also heartened by Harry Turtledove's assertion that using historical figures born after an alternate history's point of divergence--say, a story about Napoleon Bonaparte in a world where the Carthaginians crushed Rome to powder--is "cheating." I've been saying this all along! Honestly, though, it would be stronger if Turtledove was not guilty of that cheating himself.
On Sunday, The Future Two Hundred Years Out likewise played to a full room, this one considerably bigger--it may be because Kim Stanley Robinson, one of 2013's Hugo nominees, was one of the panelists. He didn't mince his words on the panel, saying that "the Singularity is bullshit," with humans continuing to be the primary agents of history, and I can't help but lean toward his thinking. There wasn't much real disagreement from the other panelists on that; Joe Haldeman argued the Singularity to be a slow-motion convergence of technological and social trends that began around 1960 and will continue evolving for decades, for one. Other topics tackled here included the common failing of not taking social changes into account (N.B.: according to Sheila Williams, Asimov's does not see nearly enough examinations of the technological and social implications of technological advance, so get on that, writorbs), what will replace capitalism (nobody could really figure that out, though Robinson described present-day capitalism as "liquefied feudalism"), and that dystopias at their core all tell the same story: we can fuck up.
It was the last panel I attended, though--Have We Lost the Future?--that I think put an endcap on the whole experience. In a way, it served as a bookend complementing the Dangerous Visions panel in its historical focus. About midway through, panelist Willie Siros made a statement that bowled me over, that the space age "came and went" in his lifetime. I suppose this is true if you define "space age" to mean "humans landing on Luna." In every other dimension, though, I think things have been accelerating, and the speed of change isn't letting up. As I write this, it's only been a few hours since I watched, live, the launch of a rocket from a webcam attached to its side as it left the atmosphere, built by a company whose CEO has made it clear that he intends to die on Mars. One of the Voyager probes has left the solar system. We've seen 4 Vesta up close and there discovered an equal to Olympus Mons. We have detected nearly one thousand exoplanets!
The Space Age hasn't gone--it's barely even begun!
Here, though, is another potential expression of Worldcon's age issue. The fresh new writers of today are young and of a world in which the lunar missions were all history. We didn't live through them. We didn't expect that they would just be the start and that there would be, say, boots on Mars by 2000. Although we share the science fiction field, our formative experiences are staggeringly different from those who entered the community in, say, the 50s through to the 70s. Likewise, it could be argued that science fiction is still figuring out its place in the cultural sphere--but that place may not necessarily be comfortable to those who were with it in the old days.
What do I think the future holds? I'm not sure. Sooner or later, the cold equations of the actuarial tables demand that younger fans get involved in making Worldcon happen from year to year; the question is how many of those younger fans will be willing to? It's a different world now than it was thirty years ago. Things can change from Worldcon to Worldcon--in my personal experience, I had a good time in the gaming room at Chicon 7 last year, but when I went to the Night Gaming Room at LoneStarCon 3, I found a room with a few tables covered in sheets and absolutely nothing else.
The question of what Worldcon would be in future years hung heavily over the Site Selection battle. For the first time in years, there was more than one site with an active bid: in fact Orlando, Spokane, and Helsinki all vied to host the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in 2015. Parties rich in Finnish flavors rocked the Marriott Rivercenter to its foundations two nights in a row, and the Orlando team struggled valiantly for a convention that promised openness and low cost, for the price of holding it at Disney World during the height of hurricane season, but once the votes were counted it went to the one few had expected--Spokane, Washington.
Personally, I'd expected the real fight to be between Helsinki and Orlando. However, since Worldcon Site Selection runs on Australian rules balloting--that is, you mark your choices 1, 2, and 3, the candidate with the least 1 votes gets knocked out and their voters' 2 votes redistributed, and so on--it became clear that there were two camps: the people who wanted a Worldcon in Helsinki, and the people who wanted Worldcon to stay in the United States. Helsinki got more #1 votes than anyone at first, but when Orlando was knocked out of the running, their voters broke for Spokane over Helsinki by nearly a 4 to 1 margin. What made it so heartbreaking was that Helsinki lost by thirty-five votes. THIRTY-FIVE!
It doesn't surprise me, in retrospect--because Spokane always struck me as the "safe" bid. Helsinki offered the chance to bring Worldcon to an area of the world that had never had it before, and with the 2014 Worldcon being held in London, affored the opportunity for a European Worldcon fandom to arise. Orlando offered a revolutionary take on Worldcon, with low price and openness to new things, even if their latest bid artwork gave the impression they were looking to turn Worldcon into a mini-Dragon Con. Spokane... Spokane offered something unchallenging.
I'm sure that Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, will still be a cool thing, and I've already paid for my membership. Nevertheless, I can't help but think that it says something about the Worldcon community that, when presented with options for the new and for revitalization, it went for the safe and the familiar.
Previous Convention Reports
- VCON 36 (Vancouver)
- Fan Expo Canada 2010 (Toronto)
- Ad Astra 2010 (Toronto)
- Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention (Montréal)
- Ad Astra 2009 (Toronto)
Friday, September 6, 2013
Photo: Cutting Edge in the Year 5000
Despite the issues that are rightly being hammered on around the internet, there was plenty to see at Worldcon last week. One fresh appearance to the convention, in association with the TARDIS control panel from the 1996 Doctor Who movie, was K-9. He rolled around the display area of the convention, greeting passers-by and making comments where comments were to be made.
Only a cad would point out that K-9 was actually being remotely operated by the same guy providing the voice.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
Only a cad would point out that K-9 was actually being remotely operated by the same guy providing the voice.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Let's Put the World in Worldcon
Much like the World Series of baseball, the World Science Fiction Convention is a profoundly American affair. This goes all the way to the beginning, back in New York City in 1939, where the original convention was held and named in recognition of the New York World's Fair. Worldcon first bounced out of the United States in 1948, when it lit into Toronto, but on the whole most of the conventions have been held within the United States--hell, ten percent of them have been held in Chicago, including the now-running Chicon 7.
It comes through clearly in the attendance. Well over eighty percent of Chicon 7's membership is from the United States. Canada represents the largest national contingent after that, at 273, but some of those are supporting, non-attending members. To put it another way, there are nearly as many Chicon 7 members from Illinois as there are from the entire world outside the United States--825 to 844. Outside of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, the largest national contingent is Japan's, with 41 members. This is reflected in the convention numbers; of the seventy Worldcons, only eighteen have been held outside the United States, and five of those were in Canada.
Here at Chicon 7, the members are already looking toward the future. For a while, we've known of two competing bids to hold the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in 2015, between Spokane and Orlando. With two cities going at it, the vote next year was already shaping up to be more interesting than this year's, which closes in less than six hours and has London running unopposed. Yesterday, a new challenger entered the mix--a group of fans from Helsinki, Finland announced their bid for the 2015 Worldcon.
I'll admit right off the top--I'm biased. I'm a presupporter of Spokane's bid for three reasons. The first is the simple proximity; it's not likely there'll be a Worldcon any nearer to Vancouver in the near future. The second also deals with location--in 2015, it will have been fifty-four years since there was a Worldcon in Cascadia, going all the way back to SeaCon in 1961, and even within the United States it's a region that hasn't been touched by this travelling convention very often. The third is weather; while I understand Spokane to have a relatively salubrious August climate, the Labor Day weekend that the Orlando bid is aiming for happens to fall squarely within the high point of Florida's hurricane season.
Helsinki, though--Helsinki makes an interesting case, in and of itself. It would be the first time since 1990 that Worldcon visited continental Europe, when it stopped in The Hague. It would be the first in Finland and in Scandinavia. Most importantly, though, it would mark two Worldcons in a row outside of North America--something that's never happened before. Hell, it's rare for there to be two Worldcons in a row that happen outside of the United States; so far it's only happened twice, with the 1994 and 1995 Worldcons in Winnipeg and Glasgow, and the 2009 and 2010 Worldcons in Montreal and Melbourne.
I first heard about Helsinki's bid during the Spokane bid party. One issue that is, admittedly, important is the expense; the simple fact is that many Worldcon attendees are American, and to hold two Worldcons outside North America two years in a row would narrow down the attendance list simply because of the expense. Certainly, that is a factor--but personally, I think it would be healthy for Worldcon to take its name more seriously and move out into the greater world. There are undoubtedly plenty of potential Finnish fans who don't have the resources to attend Worldcons; there are only eleven of them on the Chicon 7 rolls. Taking Worldcon to Finland wouldn't only be a reflection of it being the World Science Fiction Convention--it would be an opportunity to bring in the diversity of opinions that don't always make it to North America.
So if I have a chance, I think I'll presupport Helsinki as well. There's nothing wrong with hedging one's bets, after all.
It comes through clearly in the attendance. Well over eighty percent of Chicon 7's membership is from the United States. Canada represents the largest national contingent after that, at 273, but some of those are supporting, non-attending members. To put it another way, there are nearly as many Chicon 7 members from Illinois as there are from the entire world outside the United States--825 to 844. Outside of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, the largest national contingent is Japan's, with 41 members. This is reflected in the convention numbers; of the seventy Worldcons, only eighteen have been held outside the United States, and five of those were in Canada.
Here at Chicon 7, the members are already looking toward the future. For a while, we've known of two competing bids to hold the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in 2015, between Spokane and Orlando. With two cities going at it, the vote next year was already shaping up to be more interesting than this year's, which closes in less than six hours and has London running unopposed. Yesterday, a new challenger entered the mix--a group of fans from Helsinki, Finland announced their bid for the 2015 Worldcon.
I'll admit right off the top--I'm biased. I'm a presupporter of Spokane's bid for three reasons. The first is the simple proximity; it's not likely there'll be a Worldcon any nearer to Vancouver in the near future. The second also deals with location--in 2015, it will have been fifty-four years since there was a Worldcon in Cascadia, going all the way back to SeaCon in 1961, and even within the United States it's a region that hasn't been touched by this travelling convention very often. The third is weather; while I understand Spokane to have a relatively salubrious August climate, the Labor Day weekend that the Orlando bid is aiming for happens to fall squarely within the high point of Florida's hurricane season.
Helsinki, though--Helsinki makes an interesting case, in and of itself. It would be the first time since 1990 that Worldcon visited continental Europe, when it stopped in The Hague. It would be the first in Finland and in Scandinavia. Most importantly, though, it would mark two Worldcons in a row outside of North America--something that's never happened before. Hell, it's rare for there to be two Worldcons in a row that happen outside of the United States; so far it's only happened twice, with the 1994 and 1995 Worldcons in Winnipeg and Glasgow, and the 2009 and 2010 Worldcons in Montreal and Melbourne.
I first heard about Helsinki's bid during the Spokane bid party. One issue that is, admittedly, important is the expense; the simple fact is that many Worldcon attendees are American, and to hold two Worldcons outside North America two years in a row would narrow down the attendance list simply because of the expense. Certainly, that is a factor--but personally, I think it would be healthy for Worldcon to take its name more seriously and move out into the greater world. There are undoubtedly plenty of potential Finnish fans who don't have the resources to attend Worldcons; there are only eleven of them on the Chicon 7 rolls. Taking Worldcon to Finland wouldn't only be a reflection of it being the World Science Fiction Convention--it would be an opportunity to bring in the diversity of opinions that don't always make it to North America.
So if I have a chance, I think I'll presupport Helsinki as well. There's nothing wrong with hedging one's bets, after all.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
To Your Scattered Panels Go: Anticipation
For an event oriented toward the world as a whole, it was surprisingly cozy. Anticipation SF - the 67th World Science Fiction Convention - was fairly lightly attended, with only a few thousand people navigating this way and that through the wide and very long halls of the Palais des congrès de Montréal in downtown Montreal, Quebec from August 6th to 10th. It was a place where one could easily find oneself sharing an elevator with Larry Niven or shaking hands with Cory Doctorow, and I should know, because that's what I found - among other things, to be sure.
This was the first time I've attended a Worldcon, and considering that the next two are in Melbourne and Reno, it may be the last for a while yet. It was the closest I've ever been to science fiction fandom as a unified force. Though its attendance was a drop in the bucket next to the Fan Expos and Comic-Cons of the world, that's all right with me. While I was at Worldcon I felt like I was rubbing shoulders with the genre as a whole, from its elite grandmasters down to everyday fen.
Everyone gets something different out of a convention. For some it's the costuming and masquerade, and others find themselves amid the crowded tables of the dealer's room. Personally, I was most interested in the panel discussion. There were panels held every day of the convention, from 9 AM to 10 PM - some even went head-to-head with the Hugo Awards presentation on Sunday night - and even if I had slept five hours a night and spent every waking moment in the Palais, I wouldn't have been able to attend all the ones I was interested in.
It wouldn't have been as fun of a convention either, at that rate. I'd have never been able to tour the Montreal Metro - but that's for another day.
The panelists for Saturday's Is Climate Change Storyable? panel
Friday
The first panel I attended set the tone for much of what was to follow. Intellectual Property and Creative Commons, held on Friday the 7th at 10 AM, included Cory Doctorow among its panelists and he had a great deal to say, as well as a great many questions from the audience to answer. I'd not considered the idea of a Laffer curve in copyright, but from what the panel said meshes with my own experience, not to mention common sense - beyond a certain point, additional rights reserved to creators or rightsholders do not translate into a greater incentive to create.
Later that evening I attended the presentation for the 2008 Sidewise Awards for Alternate History, and compared to the Hugo Awards presentation ceremony two days later, it was brief and informal and, to me, reminiscent of what science fiction itself might have been like a few decades ago, before it hit the mainstream in a big way. It was nice. Only twenty-five people, approximately, were in attendance, and not even the two winning authors - Mary Rosenblum for "Sacrifice" and Chris Roberson for The Dragon's Nine Sons - were among them. Both were accepted by sf author and editor Lou Anders. The program had budgeted it an hour slot, but it wrapped up after fifteen minutes.
I came to the conclusion, while in that room, that I'd like to win a Sidewise one day. All I need to do is write something that's worthy of one.
Saturday
My first priority on Saturday was to tour the Montreal Metro, and that ate the whole morning. Once that was settled, I returned to the Palais for the Alternate Canadas panel, looking at alternate history in a specifically Canadian vein. This was the first of two panels I attended that included S.M. Stirling - who, when questioned on the Draka series, answered "I wrote that in law school. I was full of anger and hate." Which, if you've read or even heard of the Draka, explains a great deal.
What I took out of this panel is that there are a great deal of potential points of divergence, but only a handful of well-known ones. AHs that include, say, a successful Quebec referendum in 1980 or 1995, or the success of the Avro Arrow, tap into issues that are relatively familiar to the public at large. The way I see it, there is great potential in Canada's more obscure history. Possibilities like a Huguenot exodus to New France - which would have completely upended the manner in which Quebec and Canada developed - no expulsion of the Acadians, the settlement of Prince Edward Island by Norse seafarers in the 11th century, a Canada bilingual in English and Swedish, or the survival of Sir Isaac Brock and Tecumseh all have great potential, but are only rarely used because of the general lack of familiarity with Canadian history.
One thing that's always galled me is a tendency in science fiction to look gleefully into a future where cities are obsolete, and the people scatter like seeds into a new rural lifestyle made possible by new communication or transportation technologies - Sir Arthur C. Clarke had his personal helicopters, and Transhuman Space has the ubiquitous Web. The City of the Future panel took a long, hard look at this issue. The panelists traced possible roots of this idea to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when cultural nostalgia for vanished village life led to the increasingly common portrayal of cities as dystopias. I don't have any truck with that kind of belief, and it was refreshing to find that the panelists didn't seem to, either - cities are far more efficient in energy use per capita, and there's nothing more isolating than rural life. I learned that while travelling through Amaranth Township.
Sunday
The first panel I attended on the last full day of Worldcon flowed smoothly from the day before. Which Histories Get Alternates? was even better-attended than Alternate Canadas, and explored the same subject matter on a grander scale. One of the ideas presented was that the frequency of alternate histories that focus on the American Civil War or Second World War, and the lack of ones that explore differences in, say, the Napoleonic Wars or the First World War, stem from a lack of "blazing moral questions" in the latter two conflicts. It's easy to cast the Civil War as a war against slavery, and the Second World War as a war against Evil, and they're both intensely familiar to a story's potential audience. That doesn't mean writers and readers shouldn't try things they're not as familiar with, though.
Later that evening I shuffled to the Is Climate Change Storyable? panel, which is of particular interest to me. It's the sort of thing writers are going to have to acknowledge in their visions of the future, or those visions will soon look as anachronistic as stories set in 1999 which include a prominent Soviet Union and vacuum-tube computers. Geoffrey Landis was there, and his comment on potential mitigating solutions for climate change was instructive: "There are quick solutions, and they're usually stupid and wrong."
What issues are there to be explored with something like climate change? The panel discussion came up with a few - what happens when environmental Quick Fixes go awry, what happens if developing states "leapfrog" the 20th century, political and cultural issues that stem from the decentralization of power generation, or the consequences of the Midwest drying up due to water depletion - Landis advised Great Lakes cities like Chicago and Toronto and Montreal to start building walls now. I think he was only half-kidding.
Saturday night was dominated by the presentation of the Hugo Awards, held in the single largest room in the Palais and filled to the brim by most of Worldcon's attendees. I was there for a short while, but ducked out; I'd been on my feet most of the day, and I'm not really an awards-show kind of dude. It really was science fiction's Academy Awards, though, and the scope and scale was impressive.
Monday, the final day of Worldcon, was more of a whirlwind for me. As we had to check out of our hotel room by noon at the latest, my roommate and I spent the last couple hours just hanging out in the Palais, like I'd seen so many people do beforehand. The last event I attended was a reading by Robert J. Sawyer, where he read a "prose poem" he did for the Harbourfront Centre and his short story "Mikeys." Once the applause came up, that was it for me, and I was hustling towards Place-d'Armes metro station to get to Berri-UQAM and the Central Bus Station on time.
It'll be difficult to forget, Montreal will. I just can't figure out, though, what the convention guide cover illustration - an anthropomorphic skunk playing hockey - has to do with Montreal.
Previous Convention Reports
This was the first time I've attended a Worldcon, and considering that the next two are in Melbourne and Reno, it may be the last for a while yet. It was the closest I've ever been to science fiction fandom as a unified force. Though its attendance was a drop in the bucket next to the Fan Expos and Comic-Cons of the world, that's all right with me. While I was at Worldcon I felt like I was rubbing shoulders with the genre as a whole, from its elite grandmasters down to everyday fen.
Everyone gets something different out of a convention. For some it's the costuming and masquerade, and others find themselves amid the crowded tables of the dealer's room. Personally, I was most interested in the panel discussion. There were panels held every day of the convention, from 9 AM to 10 PM - some even went head-to-head with the Hugo Awards presentation on Sunday night - and even if I had slept five hours a night and spent every waking moment in the Palais, I wouldn't have been able to attend all the ones I was interested in.
It wouldn't have been as fun of a convention either, at that rate. I'd have never been able to tour the Montreal Metro - but that's for another day.
The panelists for Saturday's Is Climate Change Storyable? panelFriday
The first panel I attended set the tone for much of what was to follow. Intellectual Property and Creative Commons, held on Friday the 7th at 10 AM, included Cory Doctorow among its panelists and he had a great deal to say, as well as a great many questions from the audience to answer. I'd not considered the idea of a Laffer curve in copyright, but from what the panel said meshes with my own experience, not to mention common sense - beyond a certain point, additional rights reserved to creators or rightsholders do not translate into a greater incentive to create.
Later that evening I attended the presentation for the 2008 Sidewise Awards for Alternate History, and compared to the Hugo Awards presentation ceremony two days later, it was brief and informal and, to me, reminiscent of what science fiction itself might have been like a few decades ago, before it hit the mainstream in a big way. It was nice. Only twenty-five people, approximately, were in attendance, and not even the two winning authors - Mary Rosenblum for "Sacrifice" and Chris Roberson for The Dragon's Nine Sons - were among them. Both were accepted by sf author and editor Lou Anders. The program had budgeted it an hour slot, but it wrapped up after fifteen minutes.
I came to the conclusion, while in that room, that I'd like to win a Sidewise one day. All I need to do is write something that's worthy of one.
Saturday
My first priority on Saturday was to tour the Montreal Metro, and that ate the whole morning. Once that was settled, I returned to the Palais for the Alternate Canadas panel, looking at alternate history in a specifically Canadian vein. This was the first of two panels I attended that included S.M. Stirling - who, when questioned on the Draka series, answered "I wrote that in law school. I was full of anger and hate." Which, if you've read or even heard of the Draka, explains a great deal.
What I took out of this panel is that there are a great deal of potential points of divergence, but only a handful of well-known ones. AHs that include, say, a successful Quebec referendum in 1980 or 1995, or the success of the Avro Arrow, tap into issues that are relatively familiar to the public at large. The way I see it, there is great potential in Canada's more obscure history. Possibilities like a Huguenot exodus to New France - which would have completely upended the manner in which Quebec and Canada developed - no expulsion of the Acadians, the settlement of Prince Edward Island by Norse seafarers in the 11th century, a Canada bilingual in English and Swedish, or the survival of Sir Isaac Brock and Tecumseh all have great potential, but are only rarely used because of the general lack of familiarity with Canadian history.
One thing that's always galled me is a tendency in science fiction to look gleefully into a future where cities are obsolete, and the people scatter like seeds into a new rural lifestyle made possible by new communication or transportation technologies - Sir Arthur C. Clarke had his personal helicopters, and Transhuman Space has the ubiquitous Web. The City of the Future panel took a long, hard look at this issue. The panelists traced possible roots of this idea to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when cultural nostalgia for vanished village life led to the increasingly common portrayal of cities as dystopias. I don't have any truck with that kind of belief, and it was refreshing to find that the panelists didn't seem to, either - cities are far more efficient in energy use per capita, and there's nothing more isolating than rural life. I learned that while travelling through Amaranth Township.
Sunday
The first panel I attended on the last full day of Worldcon flowed smoothly from the day before. Which Histories Get Alternates? was even better-attended than Alternate Canadas, and explored the same subject matter on a grander scale. One of the ideas presented was that the frequency of alternate histories that focus on the American Civil War or Second World War, and the lack of ones that explore differences in, say, the Napoleonic Wars or the First World War, stem from a lack of "blazing moral questions" in the latter two conflicts. It's easy to cast the Civil War as a war against slavery, and the Second World War as a war against Evil, and they're both intensely familiar to a story's potential audience. That doesn't mean writers and readers shouldn't try things they're not as familiar with, though.
Later that evening I shuffled to the Is Climate Change Storyable? panel, which is of particular interest to me. It's the sort of thing writers are going to have to acknowledge in their visions of the future, or those visions will soon look as anachronistic as stories set in 1999 which include a prominent Soviet Union and vacuum-tube computers. Geoffrey Landis was there, and his comment on potential mitigating solutions for climate change was instructive: "There are quick solutions, and they're usually stupid and wrong."
What issues are there to be explored with something like climate change? The panel discussion came up with a few - what happens when environmental Quick Fixes go awry, what happens if developing states "leapfrog" the 20th century, political and cultural issues that stem from the decentralization of power generation, or the consequences of the Midwest drying up due to water depletion - Landis advised Great Lakes cities like Chicago and Toronto and Montreal to start building walls now. I think he was only half-kidding.
Saturday night was dominated by the presentation of the Hugo Awards, held in the single largest room in the Palais and filled to the brim by most of Worldcon's attendees. I was there for a short while, but ducked out; I'd been on my feet most of the day, and I'm not really an awards-show kind of dude. It really was science fiction's Academy Awards, though, and the scope and scale was impressive.
Monday, the final day of Worldcon, was more of a whirlwind for me. As we had to check out of our hotel room by noon at the latest, my roommate and I spent the last couple hours just hanging out in the Palais, like I'd seen so many people do beforehand. The last event I attended was a reading by Robert J. Sawyer, where he read a "prose poem" he did for the Harbourfront Centre and his short story "Mikeys." Once the applause came up, that was it for me, and I was hustling towards Place-d'Armes metro station to get to Berri-UQAM and the Central Bus Station on time.It'll be difficult to forget, Montreal will. I just can't figure out, though, what the convention guide cover illustration - an anthropomorphic skunk playing hockey - has to do with Montreal.
Previous Convention Reports
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