Worldcon – Day 1

I am so glad that I got registered last night. The queues this morning were horrendous. Worldcon registration is supposed to be a solved problem, but there always seems to be someone keen to re-invent the wheel.

There is, by the way, a practical issue with programme participants. If you give them a separate check-in line a lot of them won’t join it and will then get mad when they find they have been waiting in the wrong queue. If you don’t and queues are long then people may miss panels. You need to be flexible. Hopefully they were, because I was seeing tweets from panelists stuck in the queue.

Today I have been to panels talking about international comparisons of children’s SF&F literature; Nordic SF&F; and John Clute’s term “Fantastika”. I also heard some academic papers, one of which was about trans characters in SF, which I’ll talk more about in a separate post.

I have also seen a lot of people that I know, many of them from California, Australia, Finland, Sweden, Ireland and Croatia. I am sorry that mostly I haven’t had time to stop and talk. This is Worldcon. Everyone is crazy busy.

I have been to the Finnish bid party and drunk terva, as one does.

There are copies of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion on sale at the Tachyon Publications table. I know we have sold at least one. Many thanks to Jacob & Rina for facilitating this.

And finally for today, someone asked me to sign a copy of Women Destroy Science Fiction, which made me very happy.