In terms of the number of members physically in attendance, Denvention 3 was the smallest World Science Fiction Convention since the 1970’s, excepting only those held in sparsely settled Australia. That is only an observation, of course, not a criticism. Overall, this was one of the better Worldcons that I’ve attended, and fen who missed it unnecessarily have something to regret.
The long walks from hotels to the convention center were an annoyance, it is true, but they were pleasant walks (albeit interspersed with a couple of thunderstorms that reminded a Floridian friend of hurricanes) and were much shorter than at Denvention 2. Hey, the trend is in the right direction.
My small aperçu on the concomm (I was on the staff e-mail list by virtue of maintaining the Pro Photo Gallery) indicated that the cost of smooth operations on-site was frenzied labors beforehand. Almost everything ran perpetually behind schedule. Not by coincidence, this was the first Worldcon in almost two decades that had only two years to put the event together. Whatever the merits of shortening the lead time (a question that I’ve no intention of re-debating), future concomms need to learn from this experience.
Wasn’t it the Duke of Wellington who said that writing the history of a convention is like trying to write the history of a ball – or something of that sort? Anyway, I won’t try. Fanzine accounts will show up soon enough. (Here is an early entry.) In the meanwhile, the con newzines give a notion of what went on.
The Absent Multitude
Why were so few fen in attendance? I’ve heard no final, official numbers, but, as of late Saturday (the con ran Wednesday through Sunday instead of the customary Thursday through Monday), the newszine reported:
Registration:
3,666 Adults (with day members)
150 Children
663 Supporting Members
The “warm body” count can’t be inferred from those figures, because we don’t know how many Attending Members failed actually to attend. Attendance at recent North American Worldcons has typically been in the range of 4,500 to 6,000. The two Canadian cons (1994 in Winnipeg and 2003 in Toronto) were comparable in size to Denvention, though apparently a little bigger. The last U.S. site in the same league was – Denver in 1981; and that Denvention was the third largest Worldcon to date rather than a sudden dropoff.
The boilerplate explanation for the turnout was “the economy”. That may be correct, though only in a roundabout way. A large portion of Worldcon attending fans are, if I may borrow David Mamet’s term, “brain-dead liberals”, to whose minds America has been in recession ever since the evil Bushitler stole the Presidency and is now collapsing into a rerun, or worse, of the 1930’s. People with those perceptions will naturally be cautious about spending their own money (how they vote to spend the money of others is a different question). When Denvention’s hotel rates came in well above predicted levels (a side effect, ironically, of the Democratic Party’s decision to nominate The One in Denver) and gas prices and air fares rose, too, it seems that many of these fretful ferdies dropped their plans to attend. A better glimpse of economic reality may come from the dealers with whom I talked, all of whom said that sales were decent to good, despite the lower than expected number of potential customers.
The Hugos
Every Hugo ceremony has its memorable moment. This year it wasn’t, thank ghu, announcing a wrong winner or one presenter’s groping another. What will stick in my mind from the 2008 presentation is George R. R. Martin, dressed in a black suit, wearing a black hat, his locks flowing profusely, announcing that the Best Novel Award would go to The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. If Brasyl had won, the effect wouldn’t have been the same. (Or would Railroad have foreseen that and shown up in soccer garb?)
At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I have an objection to lodge against the winner. The framework of the novel is a detective story, and a key clue is the chess position that the murder victim was contemplating just before he died. Yet the reader is never shown the position. Invoking the conventions of a genre, then cavalierly disregarding them, is a literary offense that ought to be punished with at least the loss of a Hugo.
The winners in the other literary categories were worthy efforts: Two that I voted for – “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis (both an SF story and a tutorial on Christmas carols) and “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang – won, which shows me more in tune than usual with vox populi. The very worthy Short Story winner, “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear, prompted an interesting digression from Patrick Nielsen Hayden (this year’s Best Editor (Long Form) winner, incidentally), spinning off from the fact that Miss Bear, born in 1971, is the second latest born Hugo winner in history. (Tim Pratt, who took Best Short Story honors last year, was born in 1976.) No one born after 1969 has ever won a Nebula.
This graybeard domination of the two major SF awards is an interesting phenomenon, though I don’t know that it means much. The cause can hardly be prejudice against youth on the part of an aging electorate. How many Hugo voters have any notion of most writers’ ages? I am astounded, for instance, to learn, via the industrious and estimable Nicholas Whyte, that Ted Chiang is past 40, Charlie Stross 44 and Orson Scott Card in his late 50’s. Ah, well, another fannish mystery.
I was disappointed the Diana Glyer’s excellent study of the Inklings, The Company They Keep, lost the Best Related Book Hugo. The winner, Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction may, I’ll grudgingly concede, be of greater general interest.
The Big News, which would have been a surprise if everybody hadn’t expected it, was Dave Langford’s dethronement from the Best Fan Writer spot after a run of 19 consecutive Hugos. Having finished one vote behind last year, John Scalzi loped away with the honors. The first time that Mr. Scalzi was nominated in this category, I had my say. My opinion hasn’t altered since then. In his acceptance speech, Mr. Scalzi expressed the hope that he will not be chosen next year. It’s delightful that he and I have come to a meeting of minds.
(On a less snippy note, Mr. Scalzi deserves great kudos for having arranged for making the Best Novel nominees available to Denvention members free of charge. Maybe whatever letters or e-mails he sent the publishers should count as fan writing, in which case his may indeed have been the best of the year.)
Some may discern a burst of electoral ambivalence in the choice of File 770 (vide pp. 15ff.) as Best Fanzine. At least, the Glyer family got one trophy to take home to Sierra.
Finally, there is the John W. Campbell Not-a-Hugo for Best New Writer, where I am left to wonder, “Who is Mary Robinette Kowal?”, and how did so many voters develop such enthusiasm for a writer whose stories are, in her own words, “hard to find” (no novels, nothing in the Big Three magazines, only one story in a high profile anthology)? I don’t question her literary merits, but I’m genuinely perplexed.
Full Hugo Award Results
Future Hugos
Fiddling with Hugo categories is a major preoccupation of the WSFS Business Meeting. This year two major alterations won preliminary approval. (They must be passed again at Anticipation, next year’s Worldcon in Montreal.) One would abolish the Best Semiprozine category, the other establish a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Work.
As everybody knows, though it may be politically incorrect to admit it, Best Semiprozine was created to keep Locus from winning the Best Fanzine Hugo in perpetuity. It has, in the 25 years of the category’s existence, won 21 times, losing only (i) when the Worldcon was held in Britain (1995 and 2005) and (ii) in the heyday of Andy Porter’s late, lamented Science Fiction Chronicle (1993 and 1994). Locus is very good at what it does, and Charlie Brown and his crew have earned all of their rockets, but it’s not hard to see why some folks regard the award as superfluous, particularly when very few publications are eligible. The vote on this amendment was far from unanimous, so Charlie shouldn’t cancel his order for more Hugo shelving quite yet.
My interest in comic books graphic novels is so near to nil that I’ll make no comment on giving them Hugos. Assuming that the idea wins final approval (as appears to be a virtual certainty), I shall give my nephew Bryan (an aficionado, who was able to explain V for Vendetta to me) my proxy. Or perhaps I’ll take “graphic work” literally and nominate book covers. I leave it to others to be more literal and nominate porn.
Worldcon Political Gossip
When the abolition of the old zone rotation system was being debated, I predicted that one effect would be a decline in contested races. Bids would, I reckoned, claim squatters’ rights to particular years well in advance, and potential opponents would move elsewhere. So far, I am no Nostradamus. The trajectory is, I still believe, in that direction, but it is trajecting rather slowly.
Melbourne, Australia, won the 2010 Worldcon unopposed. It will be called AussieCon Four, naturally. A Raleigh group headed by Warren Buff and Dan Caldwell has announced a bid for the 2010 NASFiC (to be selected at the 2009 Worldcon). Under different leadership, Raleigh lost the 2005 NASFiC to Seattle – by four votes, and more than four bidcomm members neglected to cast ballots. I foresee a more disciplined approach this time around.
Twenty-eleven pits Seattle against a late-starting, but impressively staffed, bid for Reno, Nevada. I need to ponder this one further. When I asked members of the Reno bidcomm whether the blackjack tables at their HQ casino accept surrender, none of them knew. In fact, none of them knew what surrender means. (This may be the only context in which that is a flaw.) Imagine a Chicago bid whose backers knew nothing of Vienna beef, double crust pizza Navy Pier.
Speaking of Chicago, the committee that would have put on this year’s Worldcon, had a mere half dozen voters changed their minds, launched a 2012 bid with a Wednesday night party. (I’m the bidcomm treasurer, so filter what I say accordingly.) This time around, the Official Bid Refreshments are smoothies of various flavors, and the Official Gimmick is Confounding Science Fiction, a bidzine featuring pulp-inspired short stories by Chicago authors. Issue #1, available to presupporters at Denvention, carries “Bialystok Stronghead and the Mermen” by Frederik Pohl.
There have been rumors for some time of a Texas bid for 2013. Speaking to the parties involved, I learned that the proto-bidcomm expects to choose a site (San Antonio, Fort Worth and Houston are in the running) within the next couple of months and unveil the bid at SMOFCon in December.
They may have a rival. At the Business Meeting, a young woman whose name I didn’t catch (Petra Somebodivich) announced that Zagreb is interested in a 2013 bid. Myself, I’m waiting for Tblisi.
Either 2014 or 2015 will see a European candidacy for an as-yet-undisclosed location (not Zagreb). Glasgow would be the easy choice, but it is knocked out for 2014 by the Commonwealth Games and would likely have to run against San Diego in 2015. Other possibilities that I’ve heard mentioned are The Hague, Brighton, the outskirts of London and Liverpool (? – sounds like an auditory hallucination).
Enough, enough. This was supposed to be a light, superficial post, and it’s run to four WordPerfect pages. I’ll end by congratulating Kent Bloom and Co. on a job well done. Ad astra per aspera!
Update (8/20/08): Denvention’s registration division has sorted through the paperwork and produced membership numbers. They are higher than what I inferred from the newszine, though it was still a smallish Worldcon.
First, memberships by category:
Adult Attending Memberships: 3,525 (3,243 present at con)
Child Attending Memberships: 117 (110 present)
Guests of Honor and family members: 10 (9 present)
Members of Denvention One: 3 (3 present)
Supporting Memberships: 630
Adult Day Memberships: 333 (332 present)
Next, the “warm body” count:
Adult Members: 3,587
Child Members: 110
Special passes: 54
Kids-in-Tow: 36
The convention’s official attendance figure is 3,751, which includes special passes (e. g., single-event panelists and helpers for handicapped members) and excludes kids-in-tow. Anyone who purchased one or more Day Memberships is counted as a single “warm body”, regardless of how many days he showed up. (Many other cons have used the convention that one Day Membership equals one-third of a warm body.)
On another matter, Cheryl Morgan points out correctly in Comments that George R. R. Martin didn’t present the Best Novel Hugo; he accepted it on behalf of Michael Chabon. I have no idea why I wrote differently. Should I blame George W. Bush?