Genre Grapevine's 2024 Worldcon report
Thanks to everyone for their patience with the gap in my reporting. I caught Covid at the end of June and that knocked out my column for a bit. But I’m now back on track. In addition to this column about Worldcon, I will have a special report coming out in a few days – tentatively titled “What the hell is going on with SFWA?” – along with a column late next week catching up on all the other news and info that’s been going on in the genre.
Overall Worldcon Reaction
I really enjoyed this year’s Worldcon, which took place at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) and the connected Crowne Plaza Hotel in Glasgow. The hotel I stayed in was a thirty minute walk from the SEC. However, I was able to purchase a convention train pass for only five pounds that allowed me to take ScotRail back and forth with ease.
In-person attendance at this year’s Worldcon was 7,200. All of the panels I took part in or attended featured large audiences, with other attendees telling me the same thing happened with their panels. A number of panels and presentations even turned away people because room capacity was met before the panels started.
One of the panels I proposed and moderated for Glasgow, “Neurodivergent Approaches to Stories,” ended up being the best panel I’ve ever experienced at any convention. During the panel Courtney Floyd, Mikko Rauhala, Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li, Z. K. Abraham and myself discussed how neurodivergent authors and readers approach fiction in different ways from neurotypical people and how we frequently use stories to understand and process our world. We also touched on how frequently given writing advice can be damaging to neurodiverse authors.
Over 120 people attended our panel and evidently there were hundreds of others who tried to attend but couldn’t get in the room. Fortunately, the panel was recorded and is available to Glasgow Worldcon members by logging into their website.
Another thing I loved about this year’s Worldcon was the number of universities who set up displays. The University of Glasgow's Wellcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology gave out copies of their fascinating comics explaining various parasitic diseases such as malaria and toxoplasmosis. The same university also put together an interactive display with partners such as the National Museums Scotland to show how new virtual and augmented reality technologies can enhance interactions with museum exhibits (I’ll have a deeper report on this in the near future).
I also loved Hélène Cruciani’s exhibit “Pulp's Puppets, Scene of the House of Beyond,” which featured paper mache puppets of famous SF/F authors along with tiny reproductions of genre magazines. Here are a few photos I took of the exhibit. You can learn more about Cruciani’s puppets on this Glasgow Worldcon page.
Finally, the dealer’s room was possibly one of the best I’ve seen at recent Worldcons. In particular, a large number of publishers and booksellers from the United Kingdom were represented including Solaris, Angry Robot, Gollancz, TTA Press, and many others.
Combine all that with seeing old friends and meeting new people and you have the best Worldcon I’ve attended in the last decade.
Covid Isn’t Just Another Con Crud
By my count, as of today 204 people who attended Worldcon have announced that they tested positive for Covid-19 after the convention. My count is based on announcements made through the convention’s “disease-self-reporting” Discord channel, on public social media posts by various individuals, or verified with me in personal communications.
I suspect the number of actual Covid cases is much higher. And it’s worth noting that while many of these people said they caught Covid at Worldcon, they may have actually caught it during their travels to and from the convention.
This is a pattern many genre conventions have experienced in recent months since the start of the world’s current Covid surge. I caught Covid at the Origins Game Convention in Columbus, Ohio, in late June, as did several other authors.
A similar thing happened recently at Readercon. Scott H. Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies attended the convention and caught COVID despite masking on the “plane, airport, subway, rides, con, elevator, except when eating and drinking.” Scott Edelman wrote on July 19 that the “current count of positive COVID-19 cases reported out of Readercon seems to be 39, which works out to around 5.5% of attendees.”
Genre conventions have long been places where viruses freely spread, hence the term “con crud.” However, now instead of a common cold we have a disease that can cause severe health problems or even death, especially for those with pre-existing conditions or who are immunocompromised.
Genre conventions need to explore how to mitigate these risks and make the conventions accessible to all. This is especially true during this new Covid outbreak and the expected outbreak that usually emerges in the winter. As John Wiswell said earlier this week, “Any other cons this year should seriously reconsider their COVID policies.”
I particularly like how the people behind the Brisbane, Australia, 2028 Worldcon bid are already saying they’ll have Covid policies in place well ahead of time, including “ Mandatory masking in all con spaces Free masks for those who need them * Individual exemptions to those who require it.”
Glasgow’s “disease-self-reporting” Discord channel was useful but conventions should do much more than merely letting people say “Yep, I caught covid” as if we’re talking about another case of con crud. As Yilin Wang said, “seeing an extreme amount of ableism in the worldcon discord when it comes to covid prevention... no wonder it's been such a mess.”
Total agreement.
Hugo Awards News and Comments
This year’s Hugo Awards ceremony ran for just under two hours, a good length that a number of attendees appeared to appreciate. The ceremony opened with a welcome statement by this year's Worldcon chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart, who said Glasgow Worldcon had “committed to administrating (the awards) with transparency and integrity.”
To this end, in addition to Glasgow releasing the complete voting and nomination statistics for this year’s Hugos, a detailed award report was also released covering the administrators’ decisions and work.
Two people who were excluded from last year’s Hugos, Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Wiemer, took home awards (Zhao with the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and Weimer with Best Fan Writer). In addition, Naomi Kritzer won in both the Best Novelette and Best Short Story categories with two excellent tales while Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch won Best Series.
The complete list of Hugo winners can be found here.
I’m thrilled that Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh won the Hugo for Best Novel. While the novel was a somewhat divisive book in fandom, with people either loving or hating it, I personally thought it was the best novel I read last year. I loved how Tesh created a gripping, fast-paced and mind-altering portrayal of a young woman freeing herself – both physically and mentally – from the fascist society she was raised in. I also liked how the story successfully contested not only many of the underlying beliefs of the military space opera genre but also touched on political issues that are, sadly, extremely relevant to our current world.
After the Hugo ceremony I was able to briefly speak with Tesh. She also signed my copy of Some Desperate Glory with the words “I won a Hugo tonight!” This absolutely filled me with tons of fan excitement!!!
On July 22, the Glasgow 2024 Hugo Administration Subcommittee and Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte disqualified 377 Hugo votes that were cast fraudulently out of 3,813 total final ballot votes. These disqualified votes featured “obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics” and favored one unnamed finalist. The votes were also reportedly related to a confidential report the committee received stating someone was sponsoring “the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.” The committee and Whyte said the finalist these votes favored did not appear to know about or be involved in this vote-stuffing scheme.
George R.R. Martin presented his Alfie Awards during Worldcon to honor those who were removed from the 2023 Hugo Awards ballot. According to Locus, the presentation “took place at a private banquet held at the Kimpton Blythswood Square Hotel in Glasgow, to an audience of authors, colleagues, and previous Alfie holders. The awards recipients were Babel by R.F. Kuang for Novel; Xiran Jay Zhao for New Writer; Sandman for Dramatic Presentation; and Paul Weimer for Fan Writer.”
The 2025 Seattle Worldcon announced that they will present a special Best Poem Hugo Award next year. This special Hugo is being created “to honor the rich, vibrant poetry culture of Seattle.” The award will be open to nominations of any “poem within the speculative, science fiction, and fantasy genres, published in 2024, that is at least three lines.”
The very first Hugo Award ever presented was shown in Glasgow and now belongs to the Worldcon historical society. The award will appear at future Worldcons. Here’s a photo shared by Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte of this first Hugo next to the Hugo received by Emily Tesh for her novel Some Desperate Glory.
Finally, Hugo Book Club Blog offers a must-read post, “How can I lose at the Hugos?” Lots of good advice here.
Business Meeting News and Comments
This year’s Worldcon Business Meeting ran for approximately 20 hours over four days, which is a Worldcon record no one involved had any desire to set. The meeting ran so long because of all the issues and proposed resolutions that needed to be dealt with in the aftermath of last year’s Hugo Awards censorship.
Overall the meeting appeared to go smoothly, with kudos given to Glasgow Worldcon for having a dedicated Discord channel for sharing info and summaries of each day’s votes and decisions. On the less positive side, the meeting was held in an off-site hotel that was a ten minute walk across the river from the SEC. This made it difficult for most Worldcon members to simply drop in. The distance also gave the appearance that the meeting was not open to everyone.
Here are the big items to emerge from the business meeting:
A private executive session considered censuring the 2023 Hugo Awards committee, including Dave McCarty, for the censorship that took place in last year’s awards. In the end the possible censure resolution was passed on to a committee and might be considered at next year's Worldcon. However, the censure resolution was not published because of a fear that, according to reporting by File770, “publication of these items, as well as public debate about them in Glasgow 2024 spaces, will bring us out of compliance with Scottish libel and defamation law and expose Glasgow 2024, the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS), and/or its members to significant legal liability.” There is no word on if the complete censure resolution under consideration will ever be released to the public. (Note: My report originally said the executive committee approved this censure resolution instead of passing it on to a committee. My apology for this mistake.)
An executive session also empaneled a committee to investigate what happened with the 2023 Hugo Awards. Members of the committee are Warren Buff (chair), Chris Barkley, Todd Dashoff, Chris Garcia, Farah Mendelsohn, Randall Shepherd, and Nicholas Whyte.
A Hugo process study committee was created to examine ways to improve the administration of the award.
Among the proposals that were voted down were ones to create a Hugo Award for Best Independent Film and change the Best Fancast category so only fancasts that didn't provide compensation were eligible. Also voted down was a proposal to create an ASFiC convention, which would have been an Asian counterpart to the North American Science Fiction Convention (NASFiC) held in Asia any year when Worldcon is not held in that part of the world.
The following constitutional amendments were passed to change different aspects related to the Hugo Awards. All of these proposed amendments would have to be ratified at next year’s Worldcon: F.11 Hugo Administration and Site Selection Monitoring (would change administration and monitoring of the Hugos); F.18 Cleaning up the Art Categories (would change the eligibility requirements for the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories, essentially saying a Professional Artist is anyone who did work for hire, had a commission, or had a sale; and F.19 No More Retros (which would kill the Retro Hugo Awards going forward).
The complete business agenda, which includes language on the above amendments up for ratification at next year’s Worldcon, can be downloaded here.
Finally, I agree with what Hugo Book Club Blog said: “The team behind the WSFS business meeting deserve a commendation. The busiest such meeting ever held was run well, got through the agenda, and the attendees were treated with respect. This was a difficult year, and they handled it well.”
Other Worldcon News
Glasgow Worldcon has a Flickr account filled with tons of photos from the convention.
The 2025 Seattle Worldcon is accepting panelist applications.
The Seattle Worldcon is using $30,000 from DisCon III to start a Community Fund for attending next year’s convention. The fund will have four focus areas: “Pacific Northwest community members attending for the first time, LGBTQIA+ community members, BIPOC/AANHPI community members, and Global South community members.” Applications for funds will open shortly.
George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg both attended Worldcon but were not on programming. There was a good bit of news coverage of Martin not being on programming, which as The Guardian reported resulted from “the organisers’ rigid – though admirably egalitarian – insistence that any and all potential participants, regardless of status or renown, fill in the same online application form.” No official reason for Silverberg not being on programming was given.
People who won Hugo Awards last year are now receiving their trophies. However, some of these winners like the Hugo Girl podcast are reporting the trophies to be severely damaged. According to Juli Marr, "There are a few Hugos where repairs were attempted, but the repair was insufficient and the award still displayed signs of damage. Those awards have been re-created. The re-created awards will not ship out until after Glasgow.”
Finally, Dave McCarty was seen in various Glasgow hotels during Worldcon but not allowed into official convention spaces. I considered using various similes to describe this behavior — that he circled the convention like sewage in a toilet, or he haunted the convention like an undead zombie. But in the end, none of that matters and Worldcon went on quite happily without him.