Interaction Reactions

What no one expects from overseas Worldcons is efficiency. A different mix of fans, scattered hotels, strange accents, funny-looking money (plus pockets weighted down by those annoying foreign coins), unusual restaurants, atypical Hugo results: Those we anticipate. Less eagerly anticipated are an inconvenient venue, a highly approximate program schedule, slapdash events management and a general feeling that one is roughing it for the sake of proving that this really is the World Science Fiction Convention.

The last U.K. Worldcon (Intersection, Glasgow, 1995) fell more or less in line with expectations. Interaction (Glasgow, 2005) didn’t. Watching the con set up, run for five days and close down as smoothly as if the committee were following a long-familiar template, one realized whence the Scots derived their reputation as Europe’s foremost engineers. I was just close enough to the inner workings to see an occasional gear fail to mesh, but such problems as existed were trivial indeed. To look just at areas in which I had direct responsibilities, the hangings for the Pro Photo Gallery were set up on Tuesday afternoon, half a day earlier than my realistic best hope. The Masquerade and the Hugo Award Ceremony, for which I was front-of-house manager, kept strictly on schedule, and the Volunteers Department furnished as many gophers as were needed without any desperate pleading on my part. In the future, we may well have to endure British sneers at the bumpy operation of North American Worldcons!

One of the convention’s small delights – less transitory than most – was the CD-rom handed out to members, containing PDF’s of con publications, a huge assortment of fanzines, lots of old Worldcon photographs and almost five hours of audio recordings from Loncon II (1965). Henceforward, I suppose, every Worldcon will feel impelled to produce something similar, an instance of the steady accretion that has made these gatherings progressively more demanding of fannish resources.

[Aha! A glitch! I knew there was one somewhere. Browsing through the program (alias “souvenir”) book on the CD-rom, I see that the 2000 Worldcon is listed in the footnotes as “Chicon 20”.]

Leaving to others an account of what actually went on, let me furnish commentary on the fan-political side of the con. First, the Worldcon races:

There was no site selection vote at Interaction, owing to last year’s WSFS constitutional amendment shifting back to a two-year lead time. The 2008 Worldcon site will be selected next year at L.A. Con IV. Nonetheless, bid parties were numerous and enthusiastic, with one conspicuous exception. The Columbus in 2008 bid, despite having reserved and paid for party space at the Hilton, did not throw a party, nor even man its assigned bid table. According to rather murky reports, a passport snafu kept the bid chairman from traveling to Glasgow, but inability to put anyone at all on site is about as black a mark as a bid can acquire, short of talking loosely about punching out hotel managers. Barring a weird counter-turn of events, I think that 2008 must now be viewed as a two-city race.

Both of the those cities, Chicago and Denver, were out in force with two nights of partying (Friday and Saturday for the former, Thursday and Sunday for the latter). Each also introduced a costume gimmick. Chicago chairman Dave McCarty appeared Saturday night as the alien from the Twilight Zone episode based on Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man”. (The bid’s motto is “To Serve Fan”). On the Denver side, chairman Kent Bloom and his wife Mary entered the Masquerade as dancing gnomes, reflecting the bid’s “Gnome on the Range” theme, and won a prize for their effort.

Contrary to some expectations, underdog Montreal (under the hopeful name “Anticipation”) continues to plug away against heavily favored Kansas City for 2009. Both bids had tables and parties. Nothing happened at either that could reasonably be called “news”.

Melbourne’s bid to host the traditional once-a-decade Australian Worldcon in 2010 remains unopposed. Its big development was the announcement of the engagement of bid chairman Stephen Boucher and super-fan Janice Gelb. It is, of course, a love match, not simply a way to recruit expertise for the con. Aussiecon Three attendees will recall how Janice, present as the DUFF delegate, leaped in to bring what little order there was to program operations.

D.C. in 2011 is looking more and more like a genuine bid, though the local government’s predictable muddle is steadily diminishing the prospects for the construction of an adequate hotel near the new convention center. My anonymous sources (where else would one get information about a Washington bid?) predict that the convention will wind up in Baltimore.

No post-2011 bids have yet come to my notice. I assume that pots are bubbling here and there.

The WSFS business meeting entertained one motion that proved less controversial than it deserved. Chris Barkley and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden’s proposal to replace the “Best Professional Editor” Hugo category with two awards, one for magazine and anthology editing, the other for book editing, passed its first reading by 51 to 6. I’ll confess to having skipped the meeting, because I took it for granted that there would be almost no support for the idea. It’s true that book editors generally have to die in order to win Hugos. Giving them their own Hugo will fill certain bookshelves but, owing to the nature of their work, is a phony remedy.

Authors not infrequently thank their editors. We don’t know, however, whether the thanks is for buying a wonderful manuscript that nobody else would touch, for transmuting leaden prose into gold, for making an occasional helpful suggestion, or for picking up the tab at really good restaurants. What the editor contributes to a book isn’t discernible by readers, and the parties with inside information are unlikely to share it. In the absence of any evidence on which to base rational judgements, “Best Book Editor” might as well be labeled “Book Editor With the Most Fannish Friends”. Nothing’s wrong with popularity, but is it a proper basis for a Hugo?

For the first time in my life, I paid attention to Eurocon this year. In fact, I was one of two non-Europeans to show up for the European Science Fiction Society business meeting, whose highlights were a quickie constitutional amendment (to rectify last year’s forgetfulness about electing officers) and 2007 bid presentations. Copenhagen had a PowerPoint presentation sans projector and a translated science fiction story by Hans Christian Anderson, while its rival Dublin was lambasted for the failure of the last Irish Eurocon (in 1997) to include program items in languages other than English. The upshot was that the Danes prevailed overwhelmingly (51 to 16, plus abstentions and jokes), and Eurocon 2007 will be held somewhere in Copenhagen sometime in August with somebody as Guests of Honor. Memberships will cost something and will be available by writing to some address or logging on to some Web site. In other words, a few details are TBA. This is what fandom used to be like, before the Scottish engineers arrived.

Comments

[Olav M.J. Christiansen]

About the TBA's: Well, we have now established a few more details:

GoH's:

Anne McCaffrey (Ireland)
Stephen Baxter (UK)
Zoran Zivkovic (Serbia)
David A. Hardy (UK)

Site: Valby Medborgerhus (Copenhagen)

Membership: From now and until 1st January 2007 the price is: DKK 100 / £ 10 / € 15 / US$ 18 / NOK 100 / SEK 130.

See http://www.eurocon2007.dk for details. Don't forget to sign up to the newsletter or forum.

Olav

[Olav M.J. Christiansen]

About the Danish Eurocon bid. Don't worry too much about the TBA's. We'll try as fast as possible to establish the facts and make things happen ;-) Cheers/Olav

[Michael Walsh]

Re the Best Editor Hugo...

I dare say most of your concerns about what a book editor does could be said of a magazine editor.