worldcon Archives - max gladstone

Posts Tagged ‘worldcon’

Slightly Better WorldCon Wrapup

Con is awesome, and con is weird, and con is cool.

… I’ve stared at that sentence for a while wondering what to add, but there’s too much. To me, WorldCon was a more intense, vaster version of the experience I have at ReaderCon and World Fantasy: constantly surrounded by people who care about the writing and reading of genre. I met people I’ve wanted to meet for years—whose work I’ve followed for decades, in some cases, and for those of you keeping track at home, I don’t go back that many decades. I broke through some old-school inveterate shyness and actually introduced myself to people whose work I admired; I shared drinks with Hugo nominees and winners, cartoonists and novelists and magazine founders and screenwriters and editors and Redditors and fans. I met new writers from China, and if all goes well I’m actually going to start translating some stories from Chinese—something I should have done a long, long time ago but always held back on for lack of knowing the right people.

Cons are in a lot of ways like the beginning of sophomore year of college—you see people you love after long absences, and you meet a whole bunch of new people too just because of the sheer post-hiatus chaos. The social energy is palpable, and new communities are formed in the heat of compression. And these communities endure—people come back, year after year, con after con. They strain their budgets because they feel a bond with the others they’ve come to know. Some members of the group of fans who came to the first WorldCon, back in 1939, still come to this day! There are fans who predate Pearl Harbor. Think about that for a second. People who remember the year The Left Hand of Darkness was published. For whom Zelazny is a living memory—hell, for whom Fritz Leiber is a living memory. I met authors’ parents, and editors’, who’ve been coming to the con for longer than I’ve been alive. That community is powerful, and durable, and wonderful, and beyond any price. It is itself the living memory of the genre I love, and in which I’ve chosen to tell my stories. I was on a panel with Ben Bova, who told stories about John W. Campbell and a young Jerry Pournelle! There was a bridge of the original Enterprise on display—a copy made for promotional purposes when the show was first on the air! I stand in awe.

Now, community isn’t some magic word that means ‘perfect’—small farm towns can be loci of love and fellow-feeling, but they can also harbor horrors, and often, maybe most often, they do both at once. In a way the WorldCon attendee group seemed less diverse than a major media con like SDCC—there seemed to be fewer people whose skins weren’t white, for one thing. Men also outnumber women, though I don’t think SDCC does better on that score (can’t find statistics for WorldCon; San Diego Comic Con skews 60% male, vs. an average 49% in the US population). Looks like the community could do a better job of reaching out to those it claims to represent—that is, all fans everywhere, regardless of nationality, gender, or ethnic background—and exciting them enough to come to WorldCon and join in.

Age is an interesting topic here. I saw some talk today on the internet about the aging of science fiction fandom, but I don’t remember a lot of gray hair at NYCC or SDCC—in fact, with the world population aging overall I’d be surprised if the big comic/media and gaming conventions didn’t have an attendee age much lower than the national average. (This site indicates that SDCC average attendee age falls in the 16-34 bracket, so let’s be bad statisticians and take a midpoint of 25, while median US age is 36.8; I wonder what the median WorldCon attendee’s age is? It’d have to be 49 or higher to be as divergent as our super-statistically-reliable median age of SDCC attendees…) I wonder—don’t know, mind, just wonder—the extent to which perceived age difference between WorldCon and SDCC isn’t so much that the young people aren’t around as that the older folks are. Which, of course, is part of that wild and awe-inspiring living memory I mentioned before. An interesting topic for further study. Demographers, start your engines!

Anyway, all this is a sidebar to the true point. Attending SDCC and sundry I can struggle to find human beings to connect with in the mess of media; I do, and it’s a great deal of fun, but damn if I don’t feel the marketing crosshairs of a billion brands settle on me soon as I walk through the doors. That’s part of the plan, after all. We go to big media conventions to see crazy stuff and meet people, and also to walk in the presence of small gods—Lord Nintendo and Lady Legendary Pictures and Sir Lucasfilm and Lord Has of Bro. Attending WorldCon I felt more like I sat down at a large fire surrounded by very cool people, ready to chat, make friends, tell stories, share drinks. I made great friends—not least the other Campbell nominees, Mur and Chuck and Stina and their families, and David and Steve and Justin the other folks from r/fantasy, John and Patrick and the rest of the SF Signal crowd, Steve of Elitist Book Reviews, Shaun of Skiffy and Fanty, and a ton of people from Tor, and of course Valya and Nancy, and Editors Without Parallel Marco and David, and I shook hands with Howard Tayler and with Phil Foglio and John Scalzi and Saladin Ahmed and I met Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch in line for drinks and Elizabeth Bear said she really liked my book, like in person and spontaneously, and I hung out with Nick Mamatas and Paolo Bacigalupi and Jason Heller at an airport and I was in the nominees audience for a Campbell Award with my wife and I went to the after party and and oh god I’m going to stop now or else I’ll overload my keyboard with excitement.

Con’s awesome, and con’s weird, and con’s cool. I probably should have left it at that. If I had, I wouldn’t have missed fencing tonight, that’s for sure.

Campbell Nominees and Ben Bova in Tiaras

There is so much to write about WorldCon and I’ve spent all day so far writing emails to the crazy cool people I’ve met in the last few days and if I don’t eat lunch soon my stomach will decide to attack other vital organs. There will be more! But for now, here’s the pull photo of the weekend:

All the Campbell Nominees were just great, great people—it was a pleasant surprise to be sitting in the Hugo audience with Mur and Stina and Chuck, all of us up for the same award, and thinking that I’d be excited for any of us to win. For those of you who don’t know, the Campbell Award is a plaque, and for the last several years the plaque has been accompanied by a tiara; as a show of solidarity, we all got tiaras. And, of course, since we were on a panel with Ben Bova, creator of the Campbell Award and a man who really needs no introduction in the field—well. Tiaras for Ben Bova too!

More later. But that should be a good indicator of how well the weekend went.

Hugo Awards Season is Here, and You Can Vote!

When I was a kid, just discovering science fiction and fantasy, my uncle recommended I start with books that won the Hugo and Nebula awards, and move on from there. I discovered some of my favorite books this way, but I always figured that the awards were voted upon by Secret Masters seated on some distant mountain. Only last year did I learn that anyone can nominate works for the Hugos, and vote on them—well, anyone willing to spend a little money for the privilege.

Here’s how it works: each year, one science fiction convention out of all conventions in the world holds the title of “World Con.” This year’s World Con is Lone Star Con, held in San Antonio. Anyone who, as of January 31 2012, has a membership (basically, a ticket) to this year’s World Con, or last year’s, or next year’s, can nominate and vote. World Cons even have a ticket you can buy if you don’t want to go to the con, and only want to nominate and vote on the Hugo Awards—it’s $60, and gives you voting / nominating rights both this year and next year.

For $60, you get to stand up and say what you think the most important works in science fiction and fantasy were last year. Pretty wild. And the voting pool’s actually quite small. It’s not tiny or anything, but each vote makes a difference, and if you feel certain works or authors aren’t getting enough attention, your voice matters.

On top of that, for your $60, you generally get electronic copies of the works that end up on the final ballot. All these authors deserve your, you know, real financial support—as far as I know being in the Hugo voting packet doesn’t garner anyone royalties or ad impressions—but voting packets are great ways of discovering new authors you can support in the future. One of my favorite genre books of 2011 I discovered in the Nebula voter’s packet. Pretty neat!

Here’s what you do:

1. Register for World Con before Jan 31 2012, by filling out this form. Click “Submit.” This will take you to a page where you can select the kind of membership you want to buy. If you don’t plan to go to World Con this year in person, you want the “Supporting Membership ($60),” which is the last option on the next page. Fill out the form, and click “Buy Now,” which will take you to a PayPal payment processing page.

2. Receive a Hugo Voter PIN. World Con will send this number to you.

3. When you have received your PIN, use this electronic form to nominate works for the Hugo, and there you go! You’ll receive more instructions from the award administrators from that point on.

But Max, what should I vote for?

If you got this far, you probably have some strong ideas of your own, and I bet you can decide for yourself. The Hugos have categories for everything. This website I keep linking you to has a list; some sections about which you may have opinions, depending on what you do for fun, are “Best Novel,” “Best Short Story,” “Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)” (which is to say, movie), “Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)” (probably a single episode of a television show—I don’t know how two-parters work in Hugo voting), Best Professional Artist, Best Fan Writer (very happy this category exists!), Best Fan Artist (ditto!), and so on.

This year was pretty dense with writing, and I didn’t catch up on a lot of the good new releases. Rise of Ransom City, by Felix Gilman, came out in 2012, as did Railsea, by China Mieville, and I liked them both a great deal. A kind of left-field idea: Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles is amazing, and while it’s shelved in the Literature section of the bookstore, it’s that rare gem, a retelling of the Illiad that actually includes, you know, gods, and goddesses, and all that fantastical stuff that’s actually in the text. Plus, it’s beautifully written, and it’d tickle me if there was an edition of the book that had both the Orange Prize and the Hugo listed on the cover. Take that, Artificial Genre Boundaries!

Of course, there’s plenty of television and film to nominate. This was a good year for SF and superhero blockbusters—but please consider my impassioned plea to consider Rian Johnson’s Looper. At least see it, if you haven’t already. It’s a good film.

What are you eligible for, Max?

My first book, Three Parts Dead, is eligible for Best Novel, and is awesome. I’d be pleased if you would consider nominating it. Don’t take my word for it—ask Carrie Vaughn, or the Book Smugglers. Also, I’m eligible for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer award this year The Campbell isn’t a Hugo Award, but Hugo voters vote on the Campbell award at the same time as the Hugo award. A little complicated, I know.

As for related works, my amazing cover artist, Chris McGrath, is eligible for Best Professional Artist, and my editor David Hartwell is almost certainly eligible for Best Editor.

And that’s a long post, so I’ll cut it short here. Any questions? What did you think was the best genre novel of 2012?