On Saturday, August 19th, 2016, the redhead and I were at MidAmeriCon II and heading towards a panel titled The Shipping Forecast set to be moderated by Keith Yatsuhashi and featuring Jaylee James and Alyssa Wong. The topic of the panel was the appeal of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings for shippers. We had decided to attend this panel specifically because Wong was on it, and we wanted to see the Campbell finalist speak in person. We figured that this was the perfect panel to highlight the skills of someone with her talent for creepy and unsettling fiction.
Alyssa Wong wasn't at the panel.
At the start of the scheduled hour, Yatsuhashi announced that Wong would not be able to attend for personal reasons, and that the trio of scheduled panelists was reduced to a duo. They tried to do their best, but without the third voice the panel got off to an unsteady start, and the redhead and I ended up leaving early, disappointed.
It was only later that we learned what had happened. It seems that two writers of a column called Exploding Spaceship for the online magazine Bull Spec had harassed Wong at WisCon leading to a "no contact" order being issued to them. They turned up at MidAmeriCon and started up more or less where they had left off, continuing to harass Wong and targeting Brooke Bolander as well after she tried to intervene on Alyssa's behalf. Wong, with Fran Wilde's assistance, filed an incident report Saturday morning. To their credit, the MidAmeriCon staff worked quickly and the two people who had harassed Wong were ejected from the convention in relatively short order. In her account of the event, Wong praised the MidAmeriCon staff on this score, but to a certain extent, the damage had already been done because the only thing that they could do at that point amounted to efforts at remediation and amelioration.
Responding to incidents of harassment is important, and it seems that conventions overall are getting better at doing so, but this only deals with one side of the problem. Conventions need to get better at preventing harassment - by identifying repeat harassers and dealing with them accordingly. In their statement announcing the suspension of the two columnists who harassed Wong at WisCon and MidAmeriCon, Bull Spec revealed that their inquiries had uncovered yet another harassment incident that the pair had been involved in at ConCarolinas. That makes three incidents that we know of. Who knows how many more took place that we don't know about. Someone might say that that is three incidents too many, but that's a standard that would be impossible to meet. However, three incidents is probably at least one, and possibly two, too many to be acceptable in terms of conventions acting responsibly to prevent harassment.
In the aftermath of this incident, I have seen numerous posts on blogs and social media discussing it, and the comments have been full of people, mostly women, saying some variant of "this is why I don't go to conventions". Allowing serial harassers to attend conventions is driving a not inconsequential number of people away. The question people running conventions have to ask themselves is simply this: Are we going to provide an environment that is welcoming to people with a track record of harassing others at other conventions, or are we going to provide an environment that is welcoming to the people who are currently staying away from their event because they fear that they will be the target of harassment. Right now, most conventions seem to have taken a somewhat confused stance, becoming better at responding to harassment, but appearing to do almost nothing to prevent it.
Conventions need to be better at stopping harassment before it starts. To be blunt, conventions need to deny entry to potential attendees with a track record of misbehavior. I expect that there will be significant push back on this point, in large part due to the fact that it runs counter to Geek Social Fallacy #1 of "Ostracizers Are Evil" as outlined by Michael Suileabhain-Wilson in 2003. On a certain level, I understand the reaction: No one wants to be the person who tells someone else that they are barred from coming to the party. On another level, however, I am convinced that this sort of preemptive banning is probably necessary: Ignoring these sorts of issues is one of the things that is driving people away from conventions. As Suileabhain-Wilson wrote, "nearly every geek social group of significant size has at least one member that 80% of the members hate, and the remaining 20% merely tolerate". Apply those figures to convention attendees, and then consider how many of the "80%" are simply staying away and it becomes clear that the cost of doing nothing is something that conventions really can't afford to ignore. When one considers that the individuals who would be excluded are those who have demonstrated a propensity to violate the rules of the convention in the past, the need for preemptive action becomes even more readily apparent.
Setting aside the reluctance of people to actually pull the trigger and exclude known bad actors from conventions, the primary practical impediment to doing so is the lack of public information about such bad behavior. When it came to light that the people who harassed Wong at MidAmeriCon II were the same people who had harassed her at WisCon, some excused the MidAmeriCon II staff's lack of proactive action upon the fact that they probably didn't know about the incident at WisCon. The sad truth is that this is very plausible. After all, as far as I can tell, until Bull Spec revealed that their investigations had uncovered an additional instance of harassment traced to the same perpetrators at ConCarolinas, it appears that most people didn't know about that either. The problem is that conventions seem to be very bad at communicating with one another. There is some communication between conventions, but it is informal, winding through back-channels and passed by word of mouth. If someone running one convention doesn't know someone at another, they may never find out about issues that have cropped up, and even if they do, it will probably be related as an anecdote that is likely to be garbled in some way in the telling.
As things stand now, it is entirely possible for someone to go to a convention, harass someone, get kicked out, and the next month go to a second convention, harass someone again, and get kicked out again. That same person could probably go to a third convention the next month, harass someone yet again, and then get kicked out yet again. And on and on, repeating the pattern every month or two, and no one at any of the conventions would know what had happened before the serial harasser caused a problem at their event. And then they could possibly do it all over the next year, starting with the original convention, because not only do conventions not talk to one another about problem attendees, some seem to not even talk internally.
Right now, there is no real way to document patterns of bad behavior on the part of convention attendees. Conventions simply must get better at documenting and sharing information about instances of harassment. There needs to be some way to keep track of who has been ejected from a convention, and for what reason. Other conventions have to be able to look at these records and decide whether to issue a badge to individuals with a propensity to cause trouble. Conventions must be willing to preemptively ban serial harassers and bad actors. Had ConCarolinas documented the harassment that took place at their event and made it available to other conventions, and WisCon documented the harassment that took place at their event and made that available to other conventions, then this pair would not have been able to fly under the radar the way they did and turn up at MidAmeriCon II without anyone there being aware of their history. Had such a system already been in place, the people who harassed Alyssa Wong at MidAmeriCon II might not have even been there to harass her in the first place.
I don't know what the perfect solution is here, but I do know that conventions can do better. Scratch that - I know that conventions have to do better, because when it comes right down to it, not taking action to head off harassment means siding with the harassers and throwing their victims over the side. If conventions are serious about making themselves a welcoming place, then they need to start working together to identify harassers and stop them before they get through the door.
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Showing posts with label Worldcon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Worldcon. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Event - MidAmeriCon II, August 17th -21st, 2016: Saturday and Sunday
There are some people who say that Worldcon is too small, and that the convention should work to increase its attendance to five figures worth of attendees. My experience with Worldcon is that it is plenty big already. For every event that the redhead and I attended, there were usually a dozen others that we did not, and this doesn't even consider the other options we had, such as wandering through the dealer hall, playing games in the gaming area, or admiring the many "parks" that had been set up. There was so much to see and do that we didn't even notice there was an Iron Throne or a display of examples of past Hugo statues in the main convention hall until Sunday.
Not only was there a wide variety of events to choose from, all of the events the redhead and I went to were well attended, in some cases, they were filled to capacity or beyond. The lines at the signing sessions were quite long for all the authors one would expect long lines for, and even for lesser known authors there was often a fair amount of traffic. The Hugo Award ceremony was held in a large theater that was filled with attendees. When someone says that Worldcon "should" be larger, I have to wonder what they mean by that. Does Worldcon need to replicate Dragon*Con, or San Diego Comic Con, or some other large media convention in terms of attendance? There doesn't seem to be a need for that to happen, especially given that giant conventions like Dragon*Con and Gen Con already exist. What does Worldcon have to gain from trying to emulate them (and probably being a poor substitute) instead of being what it already is and delivering what it is already good at delivering?
I have been to Dragon*Con. I like Dragon*Con. I will probably go to Dragon*Con again at some point in the future. But I also like Worldcon, and I don't want or need the two conventions to supply the same experience. There is room in the world for different kinds of conventions, especially since some people want the giant media experience that Dragon*Con and the various Comic Cons provide, and others want the more relaxed experience of smaller, local literary conventions, and still others prefer the conventions that fit in between those two extremes. And for every person who loves a particular type of convention, there is probably another person who has no interest in it, but loves a different type. When people who are agitated about the way Worldcon is run say that it needs to change, to expand, to cater to a different audience, they never really seem to have a reason why. They always seem to put forward the notion that Worldcon should be different as if it were self-evident that it should, and that is a proposition that I think is dubious at best.
Saturday: This was another late start for the redhead and I, mostly because of how late we had stayed at the Tor.com party the night before. At least in our experience, we have to decide if we want to attend convention events in the morning or parties in the evening, because doing both is a schedule that is simply too exhausting for us to keep up with.
The day also got off to a somewhat disappointing start. The first panel of the day that we intended to go to (actually the only real panel that we intended to attend) was The Shipping Forecast moderated by Keith Yatsuhashi, with Jaylee James and Alyssa Wong scheduled to be panelists. When we arrived, we were informed that Alyssa would not be joining the panel. As I figured out later, the reason for her absence appears to have been the result of the harassment she had been subjected to the evening before, and she was still in her hotel room filing her report with the MidAmeriCon response team. But we didn't know that on Saturday morning, all we knew is that the author we had most wanted to see at the panel wasn't there. I suspect we were not the only people who had decided to go to this panel to see Alyssa speak, and came away sad that she was not there. On the list of reasons why harassment is something conventions should be concerned about, this is well down the list, but it is not inconsequential: The ripple effects that follow-on after a harassment incident affect more than just those directly involved - they can, and often do, affect the entire convention. The problems of harassment and disruption are issues that I want to talk about, but I'm going to leave them for a blog post of their own, as I believe that they deserve a comprehensive treatment.
Friday had been a day dominated by magazine reading panels. In contrast, Saturday was a day of attending signing sessions. The first one the redhead and I went to featured David Brin and Greg Bear, who both signed books for us. While we were standing in line, David Gerrold ran over from a nearby booth where he was signing material to say "I guess this is where you come to Brin and Bear it". He then quickly ran away followed by a chorus of groans. I suspect that if people in the group had had popcorn on hand, we would have thrown it at him as he retreated. Both Walter H. Hunt and Fran Wilde were also part of this signing session, but as both of the authors have signed literally every work of theirs we own, all we could do is tell Hunt how much we liked Elements of Mind, and tell Fran how much we were looking forward to the release of her new novel Cloudbound.
The next signing session we attended featured Mary Robinette Kowal and Jo Walton. The redhead and I now have a complete set of the Glamourist Histories series, all signed by Ms. Kowal, and a copy of What Makes This Book So Great signed by Walton. Also at the signing session were astronauts Stan Love and Jeanette Epps, a fact that pretty much turned everyone present into star-struck twelve year old children. Some of the authors expressed an interest in abandoning their own signing sessions so they could go and have a fangasm over the two astronauts. Sarah Pinsker, who was signing at the table right next to Love and Epps, took a hilarious selfie with the astronaut table in the background. We ended up with signed pictures from both of them, and the redhead got to take a picture with each astronaut. All good things must come to an end, and before long the astronauts had retired to be replaced by the next collection of authors. We got books signed by John Scalzi and Ferrett Steinmetz, both of whom were exceptionally funny to talk to. We also got to speak with Sarah Beth Durst, who is scheduled to be the Guest of Honor at our "home" convention of CapClave in October.
The big event of the day was the Hugo Award ceremony, which started at eight in the evening, but for which we got in line shortly after six. At Worldcon, even waiting in line is frequently enjoyable, as you are always surrounded by people who have just as much of a passion for science fiction as you do. As part of a conversation, I brought up the line "[t]he sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel", and everyone knew exactly what I was referencing. Our conversation wandered across a variety of topics, but mostly centered on time travel scenarios and how we would (or would not) successfully cope with technological limitations if we were sent back to relive our teen years knowing what we know now. There are very few places that you can have that sort of conversation with a random group of strangers in a line, but Worldcon is one of them.
Once we got into the Pat Cadigan Theatre, things settled down as everyone took their seats. Many of the attendees had dressed up, and the redhead and I were no exception - she had made herself a very attractive dress decorated with text from The Hobbit, and had made me a matching kilt, also adorned with Tolkien's prose. Among the men, I believe that Scott Edelman stole the show with a fantastic suit covered in stars (although John Hertz in a tux and tails complete with a top hat gave him a good run for his money on that front), while Lynn Thomas and Alyssa Wong appeared to be competing for the Hugo Award for Best Dress. Pat Cadigan served as Toastmaster, assisted by Jan Siegel, and they hosted a magnificent ceremony. Through the night, Cadigan and Siegel were funny, especially when joined on stage by Ellen Datlow and Robert Silverberg, but most importantly, they kept the ceremony moving at an energetic pace. The Hugo Awards have a lot of categories, and it would be easy for them to bog down (and I have watched previous ceremonies in which they dragged at times), but Cadigan, Siegel, and the other presenters kept things moving and the entire show just flew by in what seemed to be no time at all.
As anyone who follows this blog probably knows already, I have thoughts on the Hugo Awards themselves, and how the voting turned out this year. I intend to talk about those topics more fully in a later blog post, but for now I will say that I am mostly pleased with the results. Worthy works won, and, with a few exceptions, things that deserved to finish behind "No Award" did so. The speeches by the winners were all excellent, but the true highlight of the night was when Andy Weir won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer - not his winning (he wasn't my first choice, but he was my second), but rather who accepted the award for him. Weir didn't come to the ceremony due to his reluctance to use air travel, so instead he had the astronauts in attendance accept the awards on his behalf, and Stan Love accepted the Campbell for him. For those who do not know, the Campbell Award comes with a tiara, and Love happily knelt to receive the shiny headgear from presented Elizabeth Bear and proudly wore it as he delivered Weir's acceptance speech. To Stan Love - you are the best of sports, and the most securely manly of men.
Every other speech was fantastic, from Hao Jingfang accepting the award for Best Novelette with a halting but delightful speech about how she was uncertain she wanted to win because she had been really looking forward to going to George R.R. Martin's annual Hugo Loser's Party, to Best Semiprozine editor Lynne Thomas opening her speech with "Well, shit" followed by fellow editor Michael Damien Thomas opening his with "Love is real!" Neil Gaiman provided the most direct speech of the night, thanking the voters for his win, but rebuking both the Sad and Rabid Puppies in no uncertain terms. Both Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin supplied acceptance speeches that emphasized the need for, and the enriching nature of, diverse voices in the genre fiction field. The best, and most powerful speech of the night goes to another editor from Uncanny Magazine, Michi Trota, who pointed out that creating diversity is not merely opening the doors and expecting people to walk in, but also requires seeking out and encouraging new voices from the community of those who have previously been marginalized.
As quickly as the ceremony had begun, it was over. After the Hugo winners had come back to the stage for the traditional group photo, the redhead and I headed back to the con suite area for a snack and a drink and to get hold of copies of the post-Hugo statistics. We sat down with a couple of friends, and then slowly accumulated what seemed like most of the members of the Washington Science Fiction Association as we went through the rankings and the longlist of nominees, identifying who had been pushed off the ballot by slate voting, and figuring out what the ballot in some of the categories might have looked like absent the unethical actions of the Puppies. As I noted before regarding the experience of standing in line before the Hugo Award ceremony, there are few places where one can have an extended conversation about matters of mostly nerdy interest - in this case, a conversation about the nominating and voting stats for a genre fiction award - and have everyone within earshot as a fully on board participant. Worldcon is one of those places, and that is one of the things that makes it such an almost magical event.
Sunday: Sunday was the last day of the convention, and was also a shortened day, with the last scheduled event starting at four in the afternoon. There is always something melancholic about packing up and checking out of one's hotel room on the final day of a convention, but there is also some relief. Conventions are a lot of fun, but they are also exhausting.
We weren't quite ready to head home yet, so we made our way to the magazine group reading for the Hugo-Award winning Uncanny Magazine moderated by Lynne M. Thomas and featuring Scott Lynch, Alyssa Wong, Max Gladstone, and Elizabeth Bear. Lynch opened up the panel by passing out the name cards, deciding that he would like to be Gladstone for the day. Bear elected to be Alyssa Wong, and Wong decided to be Bear, because, as she said "Elizabeth Bear is awesome". That left Gladstone to be Scott Lynch, leading him to quip how great it was to have Lynch's long flowing hair. This bit of silliness completed, the four authors began their readings, quickly proving why Uncanny had won the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award the night before. I know I sound like a broken record, but I cannot recommend these types of multi-author reading panels enough.
Our next panel was Sense8 moderated by Kate Elliott, with panelists Meg Frank, Sunil Patel, and Mark Oshiro, focused, as one might expect, upon the Netflix television program. This panel was the very first one that the redhead and I had put on our schedule when we were first mapping it out, and it did not disappoint. Elliott led an energetic discussion about the series, what made it so very good, what it got right, and also what it got wrong - although the general consensus was that the show hit just the right tone much more often than it suffered a misstep. Every panelist was excellent, but the commentary provided by Oshiro concerning the storylines revolving around Leto was outstanding, as was Patel's commentary relating to Kala's story set in India. This was one of the best panels I have ever attended, which really should not be surprising given the high quality of both the panel and the subject matter.
The final convention-related event the redhead and I attended was Can Hard Science Fiction Be Too Hard? a panel with Geoffrey Landis and Ann Leckie. Even though it was late in the day on the last day of the convention, both Leckie and Landis were in top form, ranging across a wide variety of science fiction topics and works - commenting on works by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Hal Clement, and also contrasting hard science fiction with other modes of science fiction such as space opera. After the panel, we got a chance to talk to Leckie for a bit, and she was just as warm and personable as one would expect a person who wrote a space opera series in which tea was a major plot element. We also met a woman who had cosplayed as several characters from Leckie's Imperial Radch series over the course of the weekend, having taken on the appearance of Tisarwat, Breq, and Anaander Mianaai. I am always impressed by the dedication and creativity of skilled cosplayers, and this woman was no exception.
After our final panel, the redhead and I met up with a friend of ours from the local area to go out to eat at Jack's Stack, as it is probably a criminal offense to spend any time in Kansas City without having a barbecue meal. And then we drove away from Worldcon, taking with us some books, some autographs, a lot of pictures, and a collection of wonderful memories.
MidAmeriCon II, August 17th - 21st, 2016: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday
Events Home
Not only was there a wide variety of events to choose from, all of the events the redhead and I went to were well attended, in some cases, they were filled to capacity or beyond. The lines at the signing sessions were quite long for all the authors one would expect long lines for, and even for lesser known authors there was often a fair amount of traffic. The Hugo Award ceremony was held in a large theater that was filled with attendees. When someone says that Worldcon "should" be larger, I have to wonder what they mean by that. Does Worldcon need to replicate Dragon*Con, or San Diego Comic Con, or some other large media convention in terms of attendance? There doesn't seem to be a need for that to happen, especially given that giant conventions like Dragon*Con and Gen Con already exist. What does Worldcon have to gain from trying to emulate them (and probably being a poor substitute) instead of being what it already is and delivering what it is already good at delivering?
I have been to Dragon*Con. I like Dragon*Con. I will probably go to Dragon*Con again at some point in the future. But I also like Worldcon, and I don't want or need the two conventions to supply the same experience. There is room in the world for different kinds of conventions, especially since some people want the giant media experience that Dragon*Con and the various Comic Cons provide, and others want the more relaxed experience of smaller, local literary conventions, and still others prefer the conventions that fit in between those two extremes. And for every person who loves a particular type of convention, there is probably another person who has no interest in it, but loves a different type. When people who are agitated about the way Worldcon is run say that it needs to change, to expand, to cater to a different audience, they never really seem to have a reason why. They always seem to put forward the notion that Worldcon should be different as if it were self-evident that it should, and that is a proposition that I think is dubious at best.
Saturday: This was another late start for the redhead and I, mostly because of how late we had stayed at the Tor.com party the night before. At least in our experience, we have to decide if we want to attend convention events in the morning or parties in the evening, because doing both is a schedule that is simply too exhausting for us to keep up with.
The day also got off to a somewhat disappointing start. The first panel of the day that we intended to go to (actually the only real panel that we intended to attend) was The Shipping Forecast moderated by Keith Yatsuhashi, with Jaylee James and Alyssa Wong scheduled to be panelists. When we arrived, we were informed that Alyssa would not be joining the panel. As I figured out later, the reason for her absence appears to have been the result of the harassment she had been subjected to the evening before, and she was still in her hotel room filing her report with the MidAmeriCon response team. But we didn't know that on Saturday morning, all we knew is that the author we had most wanted to see at the panel wasn't there. I suspect we were not the only people who had decided to go to this panel to see Alyssa speak, and came away sad that she was not there. On the list of reasons why harassment is something conventions should be concerned about, this is well down the list, but it is not inconsequential: The ripple effects that follow-on after a harassment incident affect more than just those directly involved - they can, and often do, affect the entire convention. The problems of harassment and disruption are issues that I want to talk about, but I'm going to leave them for a blog post of their own, as I believe that they deserve a comprehensive treatment.
Friday had been a day dominated by magazine reading panels. In contrast, Saturday was a day of attending signing sessions. The first one the redhead and I went to featured David Brin and Greg Bear, who both signed books for us. While we were standing in line, David Gerrold ran over from a nearby booth where he was signing material to say "I guess this is where you come to Brin and Bear it". He then quickly ran away followed by a chorus of groans. I suspect that if people in the group had had popcorn on hand, we would have thrown it at him as he retreated. Both Walter H. Hunt and Fran Wilde were also part of this signing session, but as both of the authors have signed literally every work of theirs we own, all we could do is tell Hunt how much we liked Elements of Mind, and tell Fran how much we were looking forward to the release of her new novel Cloudbound.
The next signing session we attended featured Mary Robinette Kowal and Jo Walton. The redhead and I now have a complete set of the Glamourist Histories series, all signed by Ms. Kowal, and a copy of What Makes This Book So Great signed by Walton. Also at the signing session were astronauts Stan Love and Jeanette Epps, a fact that pretty much turned everyone present into star-struck twelve year old children. Some of the authors expressed an interest in abandoning their own signing sessions so they could go and have a fangasm over the two astronauts. Sarah Pinsker, who was signing at the table right next to Love and Epps, took a hilarious selfie with the astronaut table in the background. We ended up with signed pictures from both of them, and the redhead got to take a picture with each astronaut. All good things must come to an end, and before long the astronauts had retired to be replaced by the next collection of authors. We got books signed by John Scalzi and Ferrett Steinmetz, both of whom were exceptionally funny to talk to. We also got to speak with Sarah Beth Durst, who is scheduled to be the Guest of Honor at our "home" convention of CapClave in October.
The big event of the day was the Hugo Award ceremony, which started at eight in the evening, but for which we got in line shortly after six. At Worldcon, even waiting in line is frequently enjoyable, as you are always surrounded by people who have just as much of a passion for science fiction as you do. As part of a conversation, I brought up the line "[t]he sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel", and everyone knew exactly what I was referencing. Our conversation wandered across a variety of topics, but mostly centered on time travel scenarios and how we would (or would not) successfully cope with technological limitations if we were sent back to relive our teen years knowing what we know now. There are very few places that you can have that sort of conversation with a random group of strangers in a line, but Worldcon is one of them.
Once we got into the Pat Cadigan Theatre, things settled down as everyone took their seats. Many of the attendees had dressed up, and the redhead and I were no exception - she had made herself a very attractive dress decorated with text from The Hobbit, and had made me a matching kilt, also adorned with Tolkien's prose. Among the men, I believe that Scott Edelman stole the show with a fantastic suit covered in stars (although John Hertz in a tux and tails complete with a top hat gave him a good run for his money on that front), while Lynn Thomas and Alyssa Wong appeared to be competing for the Hugo Award for Best Dress. Pat Cadigan served as Toastmaster, assisted by Jan Siegel, and they hosted a magnificent ceremony. Through the night, Cadigan and Siegel were funny, especially when joined on stage by Ellen Datlow and Robert Silverberg, but most importantly, they kept the ceremony moving at an energetic pace. The Hugo Awards have a lot of categories, and it would be easy for them to bog down (and I have watched previous ceremonies in which they dragged at times), but Cadigan, Siegel, and the other presenters kept things moving and the entire show just flew by in what seemed to be no time at all.
As anyone who follows this blog probably knows already, I have thoughts on the Hugo Awards themselves, and how the voting turned out this year. I intend to talk about those topics more fully in a later blog post, but for now I will say that I am mostly pleased with the results. Worthy works won, and, with a few exceptions, things that deserved to finish behind "No Award" did so. The speeches by the winners were all excellent, but the true highlight of the night was when Andy Weir won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer - not his winning (he wasn't my first choice, but he was my second), but rather who accepted the award for him. Weir didn't come to the ceremony due to his reluctance to use air travel, so instead he had the astronauts in attendance accept the awards on his behalf, and Stan Love accepted the Campbell for him. For those who do not know, the Campbell Award comes with a tiara, and Love happily knelt to receive the shiny headgear from presented Elizabeth Bear and proudly wore it as he delivered Weir's acceptance speech. To Stan Love - you are the best of sports, and the most securely manly of men.
Every other speech was fantastic, from Hao Jingfang accepting the award for Best Novelette with a halting but delightful speech about how she was uncertain she wanted to win because she had been really looking forward to going to George R.R. Martin's annual Hugo Loser's Party, to Best Semiprozine editor Lynne Thomas opening her speech with "Well, shit" followed by fellow editor Michael Damien Thomas opening his with "Love is real!" Neil Gaiman provided the most direct speech of the night, thanking the voters for his win, but rebuking both the Sad and Rabid Puppies in no uncertain terms. Both Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin supplied acceptance speeches that emphasized the need for, and the enriching nature of, diverse voices in the genre fiction field. The best, and most powerful speech of the night goes to another editor from Uncanny Magazine, Michi Trota, who pointed out that creating diversity is not merely opening the doors and expecting people to walk in, but also requires seeking out and encouraging new voices from the community of those who have previously been marginalized.
As quickly as the ceremony had begun, it was over. After the Hugo winners had come back to the stage for the traditional group photo, the redhead and I headed back to the con suite area for a snack and a drink and to get hold of copies of the post-Hugo statistics. We sat down with a couple of friends, and then slowly accumulated what seemed like most of the members of the Washington Science Fiction Association as we went through the rankings and the longlist of nominees, identifying who had been pushed off the ballot by slate voting, and figuring out what the ballot in some of the categories might have looked like absent the unethical actions of the Puppies. As I noted before regarding the experience of standing in line before the Hugo Award ceremony, there are few places where one can have an extended conversation about matters of mostly nerdy interest - in this case, a conversation about the nominating and voting stats for a genre fiction award - and have everyone within earshot as a fully on board participant. Worldcon is one of those places, and that is one of the things that makes it such an almost magical event.
Sunday: Sunday was the last day of the convention, and was also a shortened day, with the last scheduled event starting at four in the afternoon. There is always something melancholic about packing up and checking out of one's hotel room on the final day of a convention, but there is also some relief. Conventions are a lot of fun, but they are also exhausting.
We weren't quite ready to head home yet, so we made our way to the magazine group reading for the Hugo-Award winning Uncanny Magazine moderated by Lynne M. Thomas and featuring Scott Lynch, Alyssa Wong, Max Gladstone, and Elizabeth Bear. Lynch opened up the panel by passing out the name cards, deciding that he would like to be Gladstone for the day. Bear elected to be Alyssa Wong, and Wong decided to be Bear, because, as she said "Elizabeth Bear is awesome". That left Gladstone to be Scott Lynch, leading him to quip how great it was to have Lynch's long flowing hair. This bit of silliness completed, the four authors began their readings, quickly proving why Uncanny had won the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award the night before. I know I sound like a broken record, but I cannot recommend these types of multi-author reading panels enough.
Our next panel was Sense8 moderated by Kate Elliott, with panelists Meg Frank, Sunil Patel, and Mark Oshiro, focused, as one might expect, upon the Netflix television program. This panel was the very first one that the redhead and I had put on our schedule when we were first mapping it out, and it did not disappoint. Elliott led an energetic discussion about the series, what made it so very good, what it got right, and also what it got wrong - although the general consensus was that the show hit just the right tone much more often than it suffered a misstep. Every panelist was excellent, but the commentary provided by Oshiro concerning the storylines revolving around Leto was outstanding, as was Patel's commentary relating to Kala's story set in India. This was one of the best panels I have ever attended, which really should not be surprising given the high quality of both the panel and the subject matter.
The final convention-related event the redhead and I attended was Can Hard Science Fiction Be Too Hard? a panel with Geoffrey Landis and Ann Leckie. Even though it was late in the day on the last day of the convention, both Leckie and Landis were in top form, ranging across a wide variety of science fiction topics and works - commenting on works by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Hal Clement, and also contrasting hard science fiction with other modes of science fiction such as space opera. After the panel, we got a chance to talk to Leckie for a bit, and she was just as warm and personable as one would expect a person who wrote a space opera series in which tea was a major plot element. We also met a woman who had cosplayed as several characters from Leckie's Imperial Radch series over the course of the weekend, having taken on the appearance of Tisarwat, Breq, and Anaander Mianaai. I am always impressed by the dedication and creativity of skilled cosplayers, and this woman was no exception.
After our final panel, the redhead and I met up with a friend of ours from the local area to go out to eat at Jack's Stack, as it is probably a criminal offense to spend any time in Kansas City without having a barbecue meal. And then we drove away from Worldcon, taking with us some books, some autographs, a lot of pictures, and a collection of wonderful memories.
MidAmeriCon II, August 17th - 21st, 2016: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday
Events Home
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Event - MidAmeriCon II, August 17th - 21st, 2016: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday
Last week the seventy-fourth Worldcon, titled MidAmeriCon II, was held in Kansas City, Missouri. The redhead and I were among the many thousands of attendees this year, and at least as far as we are concerned, it was a terrific convention.
Wednesday: We arrived late in the day on the first day of the convention after driving eight hours to get to Kansas City. After checking in to our hotel, we took the Main Street streetcar to the convention center for the first time. I will take this opportunity to heap praise onto Kansas City for their excellent streetcar service, which was easy to use and got us where we needed to go in a most efficient manner.
After a short walk from the streetcar, we reached the convention center and found the registration desk shortly before it closed, claiming our badges. The redhead also got her first badge ribbon as the volunteer working the desk had a "Team Mystic" ribbon to give her. From there it was a escalator ride to the enormous main hall of the convention where the "consuite", dealer hall, and artists' alley could be found as well as the various "parks" that had been set up, and the "party rooms" were located. Con ops and the area for author signings were also located in this room, as were the gaming area and the cosplay repair station. Everything was separated by temporary dividers, which worked well, but did block some of the food vendors along the walls - a fact that we did not discover until Saturday, and then only by accident.
We took this opportunity to tour the dealer hall, as we didn't know if our schedule would permit us to do so later. We found the Studio Foglio booth where we acquired volumes twelve and thirteen of the Girl Genius series, and had them both signed by Phil and Kaja Foglio. From there we headed to Larry Smith's book store and acquired a number of books we had been looking forward to, including Time Siege by Wes Chu, League of Dragons by Naomi Novik, The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin, and The Royal Succession by Maurice Druon. We would have also picked up Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal, but Larry didn't have the book, just as he had not had it at either Balticon or InConJunction. He had all of the other books in Kowal's Glamourist Histories series, but not that one for some reason, at least not at the start of the convention. All turned out well eventually, by Thursday Larry had received a mailed shipment of books that included Glamour in Glass, and in a stroke of luck, Mary was there when the redhead went to buy a copy and got it signed on the spot.
After leaving the main hall, we ran across Fran Wilde, Sarah Pinsker, Scott Edelman, and a few others, giving us an opportunity to catch up with them. After a short conversation, we headed over to the local supermarket Cosentino's to stock up on supplies for the rest of the week. We usually do this at most conventions, stocking up on snacks, drinks, and food for the convention and carrying the supplies in an insulated backpack we bring just for this purpose. We were able to get most of what we needed, but we discovered something we didn't previously know about Cosentino's: Their pre-prepared food is very attractive, but for the most part is mediocre at best.
Thursday: Our convention really got going on Thursday, with a panel on the Best (Mega)Bits of Gaming featuring Randy Henderson, Symantha Reagor, Andrea Stewart, Brianna Wu, and Carrie Patel moderated by Vivian Trask. We had mostly gone to the panel to see Brianna and Carrie, but the entire discussion was excellent, touching on a wide variety of issues related to video game development and design. On a side note, this panel was scheduled in the earliest time slot of the day, which was a quite reasonable 10 A.M. Whoever made the decision to have programming for this Worldcon start at 10 A.M. (as opposed to many conventions where 8 A.M. is the norm), I send my thanks to you. As a bonus, Brianna's husband Frank Wu was in attendance at the panel, and we were able to meet him as well. He thought my Five Year Mission t-shirt was interesting, so I pointed him to the band's website where I hope he enjoys the music they produce.
After our panel we ran across Mary Robinette Kowal, who was in costume for her roving book launch party for Ghost Talkers. We gave her the pass phrase from the blog post in which she had announced the roving book launch party, and she gave us a coded telegram. And thus our participation in the game of cracking Mary's various coded messages began, although it turned out that this was an inauspicious beginning, as there was no real way to crack the code in the telegram. It turned out that the code in the telegram was a book code keyed, naturally enough, to Ghost Talkers. Unfortunately, Ghost Talkers was pretty much impossible to acquire at the convention, as none of the book dealers had a copy available, which made the code impossible to crack. After we had beaten our heads against the code for the better part of a day, we ran into Mary again, and she gave us a postcard as a replacement code to puzzle out, and the rest of the challenges went quite smoothly. There were common Caesar codes, a keyed Caesar code, a pigpen cipher, and a columnar transposition cipher. We spent the better part of two days working them out and then tracking Mary down to give her the coded pass phrase to get the prizes of tea, chocolate, rum, and a pencil, and finally the final code. The final prize was to be delivered at the Tor.com party on Friday evening, but I'll talk about that when I write about Friday's events.
Going back to the subject of musical acts, at noon, we attended Paul & Storm's concert. As usual, the duo were excellent, providing geeky comedy and music that included numbers such as Opening Band, Irish Drinking Song, Write Like the Wind (George R.R. Martin), Nun Fight, and Westerosi Pie. They closed their concert with a rousing (and lengthy) rendition of The Captain's Wife's Lament. If you have not attended a Paul & Storm concert, it is worth it to go just for that song alone, although one should be warned that they take a song that runs for about two minutes and twenty seconds in the studio recording and make it last for eight, ten, twelve, twenty, or even more minutes. As a consolation, the live version of the song incorporates substantial audience participation, which is what makes the song so long and so much fun.
Our next event was the Grand Master Chat featuring Larry Niven, Connie Willis, Joe Haldeman, James Gunn, and Robert Silverberg. This is the sort of panel that it is almost impossible to find anywhere but Worldcon, because this assemblage of talent doesn't show up anywhere else very often. The panel was mostly an undirected conversation, in part because one would be hard-pressed to find someone who could moderate this group, and in part because there wasn't any real need to direct it. For the most part, this panel was a little bit like sitting in a room where some very old friends were having a conversation about whatever they thought was interesting. Everyone on the panel was excellent, but Willis and Silverberg stood out even in this group.
Our next panel was titled SF as Protest Literature with Bradford Lyau, Mark Oshiro, Jo Walton, Ann Leckie, and moderated by Alex Jablokow. Once again, this was a brilliant panel with intelligent and knowledgeable panelists providing insightful and interesting commentary. From there we went to Your Character Ate What? a game show style panel hosted by Fran Wilde and featuring Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, Maz Gladstone, Esther Friesner, and John Chu. The format for the game show was fairly simple: Two audience members were selected as contestants; they then picked a member of the panel as their spokesperson for each question. Fran would ask a question and ask the selected panelists to answer it, at which point the contestants would have to decide if their chosen panelist's answer was right or wrong. The twist is that the questions almost always involve food, and are almost always incredibly weird. The real fun is watching authors who clearly have not read the book that the question is based upon try to bluff their way through their answer, or, as seemed to frequently be the case for Scott Lynch, when they simply make no pretense at getting the correct answer. This panel was great fun, and was one of the highlights of the convention. If you are ever at a convention where Fran is hosting this game show, I highly recommend attending.
The redhead and I then headed back to the main hall to cast our votes for site selection, which was an extremely well-organized process. Our return to the main hall also allowed us to stop by the various fan tables, including those organized by the various bids to host Worldcon and NASFiC. This allowed us to obtain a number of badge ribbons, both for the bids themselves - I got ribbons for New Orleans in 2018, Dublin in 2019, New Zealand in 2020, and San Jose in 2018 - and silly ones such as a ribbon stating "Adult Supervision Is Recommended", and a pair of Chuck Tingle influenced ribbons: One said "I Am Chuck Tingle", and the other "No Devilman Plots". The redhead got one that said "Ladys Get Hard". On that note, I should point out that anyone who thinks that Tingle's placement as a Hugo finalist embarrassed the Worldcon community is simply deluded. There were so many Chuck Tingle themed badge ribbons that if one didn't know better, they might have thought he was one of the guests of honor. There was even a matching set of ribbons that said "I am secretly Chuck Tingle" and "I am not secretly Chuck Tingle", which many people wore together, making them a kind of Schrödinger's Tingle. Far from being upset by the nomination, most people seemed to embrace the silly nature of it, and had great fun at the convention as a result.
Friday: Friday was supposed to start off with the panel It's Not Torture If It's the Good Guys, but the combination of Wednesday's drive and Thursday's packed schedule meant that the redhead and I didn't get ourselves together early enough to attend. One thing that almost always happens at a convention is that your planned schedule will be disrupted and you won't be able to do one of the things you had hoped to be able to do. Whether it is because you overslept, or because getting lunch took longer than you thought, or simply because the event you wanted to attend was so overcrowded that you couldn't get in, something is almost certain to go wrong somewhere, and it is unlikely to be a unique event. You just have to be prepared for this sort of thing to happen, and roll with it.
The first panel we actually made it to wasn't really a panel at all, it was the Magazine Group Reading for Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, moderated by C.C. Finlay and featuring readings by David Gerrold, Cat Rambo, Sarah Pinsker, William Ledbetter, and Esther Friesner. This was the first of several magazine reading panels that the redhead and I had scheduled at the convention, and I cannot recommend this type of panel enough. There is no better way to get exposure to the work of a lot of writers than to go to a group reading panel, especially one that is themed in some way. The authors on this panel had all been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction at some point, and most read a section from one of their stories that had appeared in the magazine. Each of the authors gave a terrific reading, but both Gerrold and Friesner were notable for the humor that infused their readings.
Next we attended the Magazine Group Reading panel for Analog: Science Fiction and Fact moderated by Trevor Quachri and featuring Alec Nevala-Lee, Stanley Schmidt, Rosemary Claire Smith, and James van Pelt. Of all the group readings the redhead and I attended at Worldcon, this one was the least interesting overall. I'm not sure if it was because the readers delivered their material in a dull manner, or if the stories themselves were weak. I have found the stories in Analog, when taken as a group, to be the blandest and most pedestrian of the stories found in the major speculative fiction magazines, although I usually attribute this to the fact that the magazine emphasizes technical details more than the others, sometimes at the expense of storytelling, and that may have been what happened on this panel. On the plus side, there were two stories featuring dinosaurs. I will also say that while I have often been critical of Quachri's time at the helm of the magazine, the answers he gave to the audience questions were informative and insightful.
From the Analog reading, we moved directly to the Magazine Group Reading for Asimov's Science Fiction moderated by Sheila Williams and featuring readings by James Patrick Kelly, Mary Robinette Kowal, Steve Rasnic Tem, Connie Willis, and Robert Reed. As with the other readings, all of the authors were in top form, and all gave excellent readings, especially Willis and Kowal. One of the interesting things to see at these panels is the interaction between the editors and the authors, and one particularly funny exchange ended up with James Patrick Kelly crawling away into the audience in shame.
Friday was the day that David Truesdale hijacked a panel on The State of Short Fiction, an incident that led to his expulsion from the convention. I may write about that in some other post, but to satisfy my curiosity I went back and figured out where the redhead and I were when this happened: We were in line to get books signed by Robert Silverberg. Over the course of the convention, the redhead and I asked several authors to sign books for us, and every single one of them was gracious and generous, whether we were asking after a panel, or while in the dealer hall, or at an official signing session. Silverberg was no exception. One of the wonderful things about the science fiction community is that an author with as long and accomplished a career as Silverberg will still sit and talk with fans almost at the drop of a hat. In many cases, I have the impression that were it not for the requirements of scheduling, many authors would spend all of their time at Worldcon simply sitting around and talking with attendees.
Our final Magazine Group Reading of the day was for Clarkesworld, moderated by Neil Clarke and featuring Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kelly Robson, Seth Dickinson, Martin Shoemaker, and Naomi Kritzer. As with the other reading panels, this one was entertaining fro start to finish, with highlights provided when Kritzer read from her Hugo-nominated (and later Hugo-winning) story Cat Pictures Please and Shoemaker read from his WSFA Small Press Award-nominated story Today I Am Paul. Aside from the readings, the best moment in the panel came when Mohanraj pointed out to Clarke that he has turned down the sequel to the story she read and he went and stood in the corner in shame.
After four magazine group readings and two signing sessions, the redhead and I made it to our first actual panel of the day titled 'It Takes a Pack to Raise a Child' Families and Friends in Steampunk, with panelists Gail Carriger, Beth Cato, Sandee Rodriguez, and Belinda McBride moderated by Heather Rose Jones. This panel was quite good on the whole, delving into what makes a character a side character as opposed to a member of an ensemble, and how to use such characters to drive a story forward. All of the panelists contributed, but the star of the hour was definitely Beth Cato, whose commentary was consistently stellar.
The final event we attended on Friday was the Girl Genius Radio Play hosted by Phil and Kaja Foglio. As they explained at the outset, this event was neither radio nor a play, but rather a collection of people standing in front of microphones reading a story in character in a manner similar to that done in the past for radio broadcast. Except there was no broadcasting done on this night. After Phil selected members of the audience to fill out parts, Kaja took to the microphone as Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius, while her son took on the role of Krosp, Emperor of All Cats, and Phil assumed the role of narrator. With the cast in place, presentations of Revenge of the Weasel Queen and Agatha's Big Date commenced, with much fanfare and cheering and audience participation. Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer, tried to be heroic, Krosp was sarcastic, Zeetha knocked heads, and Agatha saved the day. Kind of. By mistake. The Girl Genius Radio Plays, despite being neither radio nor plays, are a rollicking good time, and if you are at a convention where they are held, I highly recommend going.
After the Radio Play, we went to dinner and eventually went to the Tor.com party, and finally completed Mary Robinette Kowal's final code challenge. The prize for completing the challenge was supposed to be a story, written by Mary on the spot at the party using her portable manual typewriter. Unfortunately, she had accidentally dropped the typewriter earlier in the day, and it was not working. Mary spent nearly two hours trying to fix the machine, adjusting the tension of various screws and wires, trying to find just the magical combination that would get it working again. For much of this time, I sat next to her, having offered my Swiss Army Knife for her to use as a screwdriver and holding the miniature flashlight for her while she tinkered away. Eventually she gave up, and gave us an I.O.U. for the story, but even if she had not, this is the sort of experience that makes conventions what they are. As tense and out of sorts as Mary was for most of the time, I will never forget sitting there and doing my best to help. It wasn't how I imagined I would spend the bulk of the Tor.com party, but I wouldn't trade the time spent being Mary's assistant for anything. On a more party-like note, I did get to spend some time making the acquaintance of Naomi Kritzer, who is just as delightful in person as her stories are on the page.
MidAmeriCon II, August 17th - 21st, 2016: Saturday and Sunday
Events Home
Wednesday: We arrived late in the day on the first day of the convention after driving eight hours to get to Kansas City. After checking in to our hotel, we took the Main Street streetcar to the convention center for the first time. I will take this opportunity to heap praise onto Kansas City for their excellent streetcar service, which was easy to use and got us where we needed to go in a most efficient manner.
After a short walk from the streetcar, we reached the convention center and found the registration desk shortly before it closed, claiming our badges. The redhead also got her first badge ribbon as the volunteer working the desk had a "Team Mystic" ribbon to give her. From there it was a escalator ride to the enormous main hall of the convention where the "consuite", dealer hall, and artists' alley could be found as well as the various "parks" that had been set up, and the "party rooms" were located. Con ops and the area for author signings were also located in this room, as were the gaming area and the cosplay repair station. Everything was separated by temporary dividers, which worked well, but did block some of the food vendors along the walls - a fact that we did not discover until Saturday, and then only by accident.
We took this opportunity to tour the dealer hall, as we didn't know if our schedule would permit us to do so later. We found the Studio Foglio booth where we acquired volumes twelve and thirteen of the Girl Genius series, and had them both signed by Phil and Kaja Foglio. From there we headed to Larry Smith's book store and acquired a number of books we had been looking forward to, including Time Siege by Wes Chu, League of Dragons by Naomi Novik, The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin, and The Royal Succession by Maurice Druon. We would have also picked up Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal, but Larry didn't have the book, just as he had not had it at either Balticon or InConJunction. He had all of the other books in Kowal's Glamourist Histories series, but not that one for some reason, at least not at the start of the convention. All turned out well eventually, by Thursday Larry had received a mailed shipment of books that included Glamour in Glass, and in a stroke of luck, Mary was there when the redhead went to buy a copy and got it signed on the spot.
After leaving the main hall, we ran across Fran Wilde, Sarah Pinsker, Scott Edelman, and a few others, giving us an opportunity to catch up with them. After a short conversation, we headed over to the local supermarket Cosentino's to stock up on supplies for the rest of the week. We usually do this at most conventions, stocking up on snacks, drinks, and food for the convention and carrying the supplies in an insulated backpack we bring just for this purpose. We were able to get most of what we needed, but we discovered something we didn't previously know about Cosentino's: Their pre-prepared food is very attractive, but for the most part is mediocre at best.
Thursday: Our convention really got going on Thursday, with a panel on the Best (Mega)Bits of Gaming featuring Randy Henderson, Symantha Reagor, Andrea Stewart, Brianna Wu, and Carrie Patel moderated by Vivian Trask. We had mostly gone to the panel to see Brianna and Carrie, but the entire discussion was excellent, touching on a wide variety of issues related to video game development and design. On a side note, this panel was scheduled in the earliest time slot of the day, which was a quite reasonable 10 A.M. Whoever made the decision to have programming for this Worldcon start at 10 A.M. (as opposed to many conventions where 8 A.M. is the norm), I send my thanks to you. As a bonus, Brianna's husband Frank Wu was in attendance at the panel, and we were able to meet him as well. He thought my Five Year Mission t-shirt was interesting, so I pointed him to the band's website where I hope he enjoys the music they produce.
After our panel we ran across Mary Robinette Kowal, who was in costume for her roving book launch party for Ghost Talkers. We gave her the pass phrase from the blog post in which she had announced the roving book launch party, and she gave us a coded telegram. And thus our participation in the game of cracking Mary's various coded messages began, although it turned out that this was an inauspicious beginning, as there was no real way to crack the code in the telegram. It turned out that the code in the telegram was a book code keyed, naturally enough, to Ghost Talkers. Unfortunately, Ghost Talkers was pretty much impossible to acquire at the convention, as none of the book dealers had a copy available, which made the code impossible to crack. After we had beaten our heads against the code for the better part of a day, we ran into Mary again, and she gave us a postcard as a replacement code to puzzle out, and the rest of the challenges went quite smoothly. There were common Caesar codes, a keyed Caesar code, a pigpen cipher, and a columnar transposition cipher. We spent the better part of two days working them out and then tracking Mary down to give her the coded pass phrase to get the prizes of tea, chocolate, rum, and a pencil, and finally the final code. The final prize was to be delivered at the Tor.com party on Friday evening, but I'll talk about that when I write about Friday's events.
Going back to the subject of musical acts, at noon, we attended Paul & Storm's concert. As usual, the duo were excellent, providing geeky comedy and music that included numbers such as Opening Band, Irish Drinking Song, Write Like the Wind (George R.R. Martin), Nun Fight, and Westerosi Pie. They closed their concert with a rousing (and lengthy) rendition of The Captain's Wife's Lament. If you have not attended a Paul & Storm concert, it is worth it to go just for that song alone, although one should be warned that they take a song that runs for about two minutes and twenty seconds in the studio recording and make it last for eight, ten, twelve, twenty, or even more minutes. As a consolation, the live version of the song incorporates substantial audience participation, which is what makes the song so long and so much fun.
Our next event was the Grand Master Chat featuring Larry Niven, Connie Willis, Joe Haldeman, James Gunn, and Robert Silverberg. This is the sort of panel that it is almost impossible to find anywhere but Worldcon, because this assemblage of talent doesn't show up anywhere else very often. The panel was mostly an undirected conversation, in part because one would be hard-pressed to find someone who could moderate this group, and in part because there wasn't any real need to direct it. For the most part, this panel was a little bit like sitting in a room where some very old friends were having a conversation about whatever they thought was interesting. Everyone on the panel was excellent, but Willis and Silverberg stood out even in this group.
Our next panel was titled SF as Protest Literature with Bradford Lyau, Mark Oshiro, Jo Walton, Ann Leckie, and moderated by Alex Jablokow. Once again, this was a brilliant panel with intelligent and knowledgeable panelists providing insightful and interesting commentary. From there we went to Your Character Ate What? a game show style panel hosted by Fran Wilde and featuring Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, Maz Gladstone, Esther Friesner, and John Chu. The format for the game show was fairly simple: Two audience members were selected as contestants; they then picked a member of the panel as their spokesperson for each question. Fran would ask a question and ask the selected panelists to answer it, at which point the contestants would have to decide if their chosen panelist's answer was right or wrong. The twist is that the questions almost always involve food, and are almost always incredibly weird. The real fun is watching authors who clearly have not read the book that the question is based upon try to bluff their way through their answer, or, as seemed to frequently be the case for Scott Lynch, when they simply make no pretense at getting the correct answer. This panel was great fun, and was one of the highlights of the convention. If you are ever at a convention where Fran is hosting this game show, I highly recommend attending.
The redhead and I then headed back to the main hall to cast our votes for site selection, which was an extremely well-organized process. Our return to the main hall also allowed us to stop by the various fan tables, including those organized by the various bids to host Worldcon and NASFiC. This allowed us to obtain a number of badge ribbons, both for the bids themselves - I got ribbons for New Orleans in 2018, Dublin in 2019, New Zealand in 2020, and San Jose in 2018 - and silly ones such as a ribbon stating "Adult Supervision Is Recommended", and a pair of Chuck Tingle influenced ribbons: One said "I Am Chuck Tingle", and the other "No Devilman Plots". The redhead got one that said "Ladys Get Hard". On that note, I should point out that anyone who thinks that Tingle's placement as a Hugo finalist embarrassed the Worldcon community is simply deluded. There were so many Chuck Tingle themed badge ribbons that if one didn't know better, they might have thought he was one of the guests of honor. There was even a matching set of ribbons that said "I am secretly Chuck Tingle" and "I am not secretly Chuck Tingle", which many people wore together, making them a kind of Schrödinger's Tingle. Far from being upset by the nomination, most people seemed to embrace the silly nature of it, and had great fun at the convention as a result.
Friday: Friday was supposed to start off with the panel It's Not Torture If It's the Good Guys, but the combination of Wednesday's drive and Thursday's packed schedule meant that the redhead and I didn't get ourselves together early enough to attend. One thing that almost always happens at a convention is that your planned schedule will be disrupted and you won't be able to do one of the things you had hoped to be able to do. Whether it is because you overslept, or because getting lunch took longer than you thought, or simply because the event you wanted to attend was so overcrowded that you couldn't get in, something is almost certain to go wrong somewhere, and it is unlikely to be a unique event. You just have to be prepared for this sort of thing to happen, and roll with it.
The first panel we actually made it to wasn't really a panel at all, it was the Magazine Group Reading for Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, moderated by C.C. Finlay and featuring readings by David Gerrold, Cat Rambo, Sarah Pinsker, William Ledbetter, and Esther Friesner. This was the first of several magazine reading panels that the redhead and I had scheduled at the convention, and I cannot recommend this type of panel enough. There is no better way to get exposure to the work of a lot of writers than to go to a group reading panel, especially one that is themed in some way. The authors on this panel had all been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction at some point, and most read a section from one of their stories that had appeared in the magazine. Each of the authors gave a terrific reading, but both Gerrold and Friesner were notable for the humor that infused their readings.
Next we attended the Magazine Group Reading panel for Analog: Science Fiction and Fact moderated by Trevor Quachri and featuring Alec Nevala-Lee, Stanley Schmidt, Rosemary Claire Smith, and James van Pelt. Of all the group readings the redhead and I attended at Worldcon, this one was the least interesting overall. I'm not sure if it was because the readers delivered their material in a dull manner, or if the stories themselves were weak. I have found the stories in Analog, when taken as a group, to be the blandest and most pedestrian of the stories found in the major speculative fiction magazines, although I usually attribute this to the fact that the magazine emphasizes technical details more than the others, sometimes at the expense of storytelling, and that may have been what happened on this panel. On the plus side, there were two stories featuring dinosaurs. I will also say that while I have often been critical of Quachri's time at the helm of the magazine, the answers he gave to the audience questions were informative and insightful.
From the Analog reading, we moved directly to the Magazine Group Reading for Asimov's Science Fiction moderated by Sheila Williams and featuring readings by James Patrick Kelly, Mary Robinette Kowal, Steve Rasnic Tem, Connie Willis, and Robert Reed. As with the other readings, all of the authors were in top form, and all gave excellent readings, especially Willis and Kowal. One of the interesting things to see at these panels is the interaction between the editors and the authors, and one particularly funny exchange ended up with James Patrick Kelly crawling away into the audience in shame.
Friday was the day that David Truesdale hijacked a panel on The State of Short Fiction, an incident that led to his expulsion from the convention. I may write about that in some other post, but to satisfy my curiosity I went back and figured out where the redhead and I were when this happened: We were in line to get books signed by Robert Silverberg. Over the course of the convention, the redhead and I asked several authors to sign books for us, and every single one of them was gracious and generous, whether we were asking after a panel, or while in the dealer hall, or at an official signing session. Silverberg was no exception. One of the wonderful things about the science fiction community is that an author with as long and accomplished a career as Silverberg will still sit and talk with fans almost at the drop of a hat. In many cases, I have the impression that were it not for the requirements of scheduling, many authors would spend all of their time at Worldcon simply sitting around and talking with attendees.
Our final Magazine Group Reading of the day was for Clarkesworld, moderated by Neil Clarke and featuring Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kelly Robson, Seth Dickinson, Martin Shoemaker, and Naomi Kritzer. As with the other reading panels, this one was entertaining fro start to finish, with highlights provided when Kritzer read from her Hugo-nominated (and later Hugo-winning) story Cat Pictures Please and Shoemaker read from his WSFA Small Press Award-nominated story Today I Am Paul. Aside from the readings, the best moment in the panel came when Mohanraj pointed out to Clarke that he has turned down the sequel to the story she read and he went and stood in the corner in shame.
After four magazine group readings and two signing sessions, the redhead and I made it to our first actual panel of the day titled 'It Takes a Pack to Raise a Child' Families and Friends in Steampunk, with panelists Gail Carriger, Beth Cato, Sandee Rodriguez, and Belinda McBride moderated by Heather Rose Jones. This panel was quite good on the whole, delving into what makes a character a side character as opposed to a member of an ensemble, and how to use such characters to drive a story forward. All of the panelists contributed, but the star of the hour was definitely Beth Cato, whose commentary was consistently stellar.
The final event we attended on Friday was the Girl Genius Radio Play hosted by Phil and Kaja Foglio. As they explained at the outset, this event was neither radio nor a play, but rather a collection of people standing in front of microphones reading a story in character in a manner similar to that done in the past for radio broadcast. Except there was no broadcasting done on this night. After Phil selected members of the audience to fill out parts, Kaja took to the microphone as Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius, while her son took on the role of Krosp, Emperor of All Cats, and Phil assumed the role of narrator. With the cast in place, presentations of Revenge of the Weasel Queen and Agatha's Big Date commenced, with much fanfare and cheering and audience participation. Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer, tried to be heroic, Krosp was sarcastic, Zeetha knocked heads, and Agatha saved the day. Kind of. By mistake. The Girl Genius Radio Plays, despite being neither radio nor plays, are a rollicking good time, and if you are at a convention where they are held, I highly recommend going.
After the Radio Play, we went to dinner and eventually went to the Tor.com party, and finally completed Mary Robinette Kowal's final code challenge. The prize for completing the challenge was supposed to be a story, written by Mary on the spot at the party using her portable manual typewriter. Unfortunately, she had accidentally dropped the typewriter earlier in the day, and it was not working. Mary spent nearly two hours trying to fix the machine, adjusting the tension of various screws and wires, trying to find just the magical combination that would get it working again. For much of this time, I sat next to her, having offered my Swiss Army Knife for her to use as a screwdriver and holding the miniature flashlight for her while she tinkered away. Eventually she gave up, and gave us an I.O.U. for the story, but even if she had not, this is the sort of experience that makes conventions what they are. As tense and out of sorts as Mary was for most of the time, I will never forget sitting there and doing my best to help. It wasn't how I imagined I would spend the bulk of the Tor.com party, but I wouldn't trade the time spent being Mary's assistant for anything. On a more party-like note, I did get to spend some time making the acquaintance of Naomi Kritzer, who is just as delightful in person as her stories are on the page.
MidAmeriCon II, August 17th - 21st, 2016: Saturday and Sunday
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