Worldcon 2025
Worldcon, last week, was so much fun. It wasn't so much just seeing so many other science fiction and fantasy fans together; I've heard stories about fans from the 50's and 60's feeling awe at that, but the world has changed and nowadays most of my friends enjoy the genre in some form. But still, the "trufen" subculture (as they traditionally call themselves) was fun to visit, learning about science and writing and the genre from the panels was great, and meeting several authors in person - especially Larry Niven and David Brin and Ada Palmer - was exhilarating.
The panels especially gave me material for several blog posts; expect them over the next few months as I chew through the ideas. Also, I now really want to write a new piece of fiction... at least two of them, in fact.
I spent most of Worldcon at the panels. Panels are talks by multiple authors (or other notable people), or something midway between talks and conversations we audience members get to overhear. More significantly for why I was there, they were the main organized events showing up on the schedule in advance... and the topics sounded so interesting. (Exploring Mars! History of marriage! Fanfiction! Flying cars!)
I did like them a lot. Some of them were very informative about the topic areas; some were enlightening about the panelists; almost all I went to were fun. Ada Palmer is an excellent panelist; I love how she keeps bringing in historical parallels to every point being discussed. Becky Chambers had some interesting thoughts about ecology and building fantasy worlds; I'll probably want to check out her books. David Brin explained his position on surveillance much better than I'd ever gotten from his blog when talking with other people about it. And, Bridget Landry explained her career working with Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Mars rovers very engagingly.
I'll be blogging later about several ideas from these panels - Chambers' and Niven's ideas about worldbuilding alien worlds are rolling around my mind, as are Francis's thoughts on scenes and what makes a story good. And, I've got a definite response in mind to Palmer's and others' ideas on technological progression.
Book signings were also great; I've now got signatures from both Ada Palmer and David Brin (Larry Niven, unfortunately, wasn't signing books). But besides that, I wish I'd spent more time singing ("filking", as they call both concerts and sing-alongs) and just talking with fellow fans. When I did, it was really fun - but now I see what my sister "Rina" was saying about not filling up my schedule too full at conventions. I want to go back next year!
My Hugo ballot did all right in the results - and the statistics show the second-place best novel was even my second choice. My first choice, The Tainted Cup, won Best Novel; "Tusks of Extinction" and "Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea" (the winners in their categories) weren't my first picks but still in the top half of my ballot; "Stitched to Skin" was bottom choice for me but I do see that people might pick it if they liked the sort of growing horror that it was trying to do. I didn't vote in many of the other categories, but I did enjoy "Dune Part Two" which won Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form.
(I'm sorry Beneath Ceaseless Skies declined nomination for Best Semiprozine; I would've voted for it. It's been a while since I read it faithfully, but it's what introduced me to the author Rosamund Hodge, Yeats' epic poem "The Stolen Child" from which she picked the title of her short story, and some other good stories too.)
This reinforces what I saw at Worldcon itself: The trufen don't have the same tastes as me, but we overlap in a lot of areas. The sort of exciting plot and engaging worldbuilding I like, they like too - even if I like some things they don't care for, and they like some things I don't either.
I am planning to go back to Worldcon next year. Maybe I'll even do a cosplay... and if I can convince my sister, maybe a group cosplay?
But still, Worldcon isn't the "world convention" it originally billed itself as.
It used to be, if not a sizeable fraction of the science fiction and fantasy fan community, a sizeable fraction of those who could practicably travel to a United States convention. But then, the fandom blossomed and multiplied beyond what Worldcon could keep up with.
Back then, Heinlein in books like Have Space Suit, Will Travel could write about his protagonist starting out in a small town where nobody else even cared about space travel - and his readers would relate viscerally. Now, most of my friends enjoy Tolkien or Marvel or some fantasy stories. This isn't even a recent thing; it started with Star Trek which brought well-written science fiction into the mainstream... and one panelist last week mentioned that the trufen of Worldcon had some cultural differences with the new Star Trek fans.
Those cultural differences have only become more acute now. I don't remember seeing any Marvel references except the Captain America T-shirt I wore one day, and there was one Romantasy panel (which I didn't go to) but very little else on that topic. Tolkien and Rowling were discussed briefly, but the focus was not on the most popular works. As Eric Flint pointed out during the Sad Puppies scandal, if we truly want to represent fantasy as the popular reader sees it, we need to give our awards and panel time to Stephanie Meyer. From a glance at the popular tags on ArchiveOfOurOwn, to Romance, I'd add Hurt/Comfort and Angst. Arguably Angst was well-represented at Worldcon, but not the other two.
(I'm also planning a blog post on this - digging into both the cultural differences in the 60's, and those now.)
Also, speaking of the Sad Puppies scandal where the Culture Wars invaded the Hugos circa 2014, I can completely bear out the "Puppies'" claim that Worldcon is overwhelmingly politically progressive. The opening ceremonies spent substantial time castigating Trump; the panelists several times mentioned him and conservatives with opprobrium; when one panelist said we need to see fewer white characters they were greeted with applause; I just heard next year's Worldcon planning committee apologize for iconography evoking the American frontier. You can say these are good things - I'm sure the trufen would argue that - and I don't mean here to argue otherwise. My point is this's a pronounced difference from genre readers as a whole.
Comiccon and Dragoncon, which do have different focuses, are much larger. Even the anime convention Sakuracon is larger (over 25,000 for Sakuracon, versus 5600 for Worldcon not counting day memberships) - my sister Rina, who's gone there, described how the halls were so much more packed at Sakuracon. Worldcon appears content to be smaller. That's a very valid choice; it is what it is, and it doesn't want to change its culture. (We saw that in the Sad Puppies scandal!) But that does mean that it shouldn't anymore be claiming to represent the whole fandom.
Still, this trufendom is great to visit.
I came home with so many books, even more book recommendations, a badge with so many banners flying off it, signatures of two of my favorite authors, a new piece of art, and more. Some of the book recommendations were even nonfiction - Ada Palmer's love for history shines through, and I love the on-point historical parallels and arguments from history she brought up throughout her panels. (I hope to blog more about this soon.) That's the sort of history I love seeing in the background of my novels; I finished Palmer's Terra Ignota series just before Worldcon and will gladly read every other novel she writes.
(There were also some science book recommendations; Larry Niven and Becky Chambers, especially, had some very interesting things to say about Earth ecology as a model for designing alien worlds.)
The vendors' hall was festooned with tables from small presses, most of which I walked by, but some seemed interesting. For all I know I passed up another Mistress of the Waves... but without a good recommendation system, how could I tell? Now that I think about it, perhaps Worldcon would be a good place to pilot that recommendation system if someone develops it? But I don't expect to be a panelist at Los Angeles Worldcon next year.
Though if I do design that recommendation system, it's not impossible I'll have a panel the year after that? Judging from one panel I went to where two game designers were just talking about ideas for virtual worlds as tie-ins to novels, it's not that hard to get a panel on the schedule. But I hold myself to a higher standard; I'd want to have developed something solid before I talk about it.
The slogan for this year's Worldcon was "Building Yesterday’s Future – For Everyone."
In the opening ceremonies, they talked about "yesterday's future" as characterized by the optimism of Golden Age sci-fi. This was fitting, because that's the era Worldcon comes from. It's a sort of science fiction I really enjoy reading, both because of its optimism and elements such as frequent spaceflight which more modern science fiction de-emphasizes.
This optimism, the MC's pointed out, is especially something we need today. They said this because they were assuming we were all politically progressive (and I'm sure most of us in the audience were), but I'll second it on a broader scale. As we think about science, we should be alive to the possibilities of the future. As we think about science fiction and fantasy as a genre, we should be optimistic.
There are so many more things that could be done, and Worldcon has opened my eyes to some of them.
My wife and I went to ConFrancisco decades ago (it was the year when Vernor Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep and Connie Willis's Doomsday Book tied for Best Novel). Earlier that year we had been at the San Diego Comic-Con, which was around 30,000 that year (of course it has grown since then). We walked into the ConFrancisco convention center to pick up our badges, and I looked around and said, "What a nice little relaxacon!" (Total attendance was a bit over 3000, I believe.) But I haven't been back, originally because the cost was prohibitive (still an issue now), but more recently because science fiction seems to have turned into a political monoculture. As a Board member of the Libertarian Futurist Society I'm continuing the effort to keep a different strain alive in fandom, but it's something of an uphill effort. . . .
Nice, I will definitely check out Ada Palmer.
https://www.adapalmer.com/fiction-sf-fantasy/
I'm a little put off by the phrase, "uses gender in challenging ways", but gender seems to be part of the SF ocean we now swim in. (And yeah too bad there aren't as many rocket ships and space battles, these days. :^)