I have a lot of friends in California. Some of them are crazy; crazy enough to want to run a Worldcon again. Actually they have been talking about it in SMOFish circles for some time, but with Westercon coming up it is necessary to do things a bit more publicly. Last night invitations started going out on Facebook to like the page there, and I added a bunch of invites this morning. I’m rather pleased to see I have brought in 60 people already. I did try hard not to send invitations to people who were likely to be annoyed by it, or have nothing to do with science fiction, and I have probably left off a few people who would be interested, so apologies for any screw-ups. More info will trickle out in due course, and of course there will be parties at DetCon 1, Loncon 3, Shamrokon and so on.

Of course I won’t be able to go, so to some extent it doesn’t matter much to me. However, it will make (my) Kevin happy if we win. Also the bid is being chaired by Andy Trembley. He and his husband, Kevin Roche, have run some awesome conventions in the past, including Westercon 66 which had Nicola Griffith & Kelley Eskridge as the headline Guests of Honor.

I should note that Worldcons are huge undertakings that involve very many people over several years. Having lived through the previous San José Worldcon, I know how hard it can be to make your vision for the event come to fruition. However, I have a huge amount of faith in Andy & (his) Kevin. Also I am still a director of SFSFC, the parent corporation of the bid, as is (my) Kevin. While we are there, we will be doing our best to make sure that the event (should we win) is welcoming, diverse and international.

The year we are bidding for is 2018. There is opposition. It is New Orleans. It makes me very sad to be bidding against one of my favorite cities in the world, but there was no way we wanted to go up against Helsinki or Dublin. Also, as we are somewhat responsible for their bid, we owe it to our Kiwi pals not only to steer clear of 2020, but also to try to provide them with the best possible venue for their vote. Those of you with long memories may remember that when we were bidding for 2002 we were so friendly with the opposition from Seattle that we even staffed each other’s bid tables, much to the horror of certain older SMOFs. We hope that we can be just as friendly with the New Orleans folks.

Any questions should be directed to the bid team rather than me, though I will probably be able to take pre-supports at Finncon if anyone wants one. There will doubtless be more info available then. If you want to know more about the location or facilities, ask anyone who went to the 2002 Worldcon, the 2009 World Fantasy, or this year’s Nebulas Weekend. Or there’s a website, and a Twitter account, and a Google + page.

I have finally (finally!) got a con report of sorts written for this year’s Ã…con. You can read it here.

I’ll be following that up with a number of podcasts of panels, including my interview with Karen Lord.

In the report I talk a bit more about Archipelacon, the big new convention happening in the Ã…land islands next year. I’m very much looking forward to that one.

I’m back from Liverpool, so I guess it must be time to prepare for the next trip…

Finncon 2014 has their full program online now (almost a month before the event – well done!). You can find it here. My personal events are as follows.

On Thursday and Friday I shall be attending FINFAR, the academic conference that runs alongside Finncon.

Friday 11th: 15:30 — I am moderating On Writing, featuring Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch & Hannu Rajaniemi.

Saturday 12th: 11:00 — The LGBT Superheroes talk gets another outing.

Saturday 12th: 13:00 — Likeable Characters in SF, featuring Rjurik Davidson, Jukka Halme, Hannu Rajaniemi and myself.

Saturday 12th: 17:00 — I am MCing the Masquerade.

Sunday 13th: 13:00 — Women & Publishing, featuring Elizabeth Bear, Johanna Sinisalo, Salla Simukka & me.

Sunday 13th: 14:00 — LGBT in SciFi and Fantasy, featuring Dirk Weger, Suzanne van Rooyen and me.

Update: I’ve added a Sunday panel, which had a provisional working title of “Grimpink”.

Hey, look what is happening in Finland next summer. You want to be there, trust me.

Nine Worlds, the new British SF&F convention, has been collecting feedback on its first year and has produced a report. You can read it here. I’m very impressed. Obviously it is much easier for them to do this sort of thing than it is for a traveling event such as Woldcon or Eastercon, but I think all conventions can learn from what they have done.

I haven’t been spending a lot of time at SMOFcon, partly because I’m mainly in Toronto on business, and partly because I have better things to do with my life. This evening, however, saw the traditional highlight of the convention, the Fannish Inquisition, at which seated conventions and bids get to make presentations and answer questions. That I could not pass up. Here are the highlights.

Loncon3 announced that they are on track to have around 8,000 members. They are actually concerned about capacity and will be putting day memberships on sale in February as they may have to cap the number that they sell. The current record for Worldcon attendance is 8,365 at Los Angeles in 1984.

The 2014 NASFiC, Detcon 1, has also been busy. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about their plan to offer free memberships to local fans who could not otherwise afford to attend. The fund-raising drive for that is going well. Money to cover 10 free memberships has already been received, which triggers the matching donation promised by the convention. At least 20 local fans will therefore be getting free memberships.

Detcon 1’s chair, Tammy Coxon, also announced that the convention will be giving out awards for YA and Middle School fiction. These will be voted on by the membership. I don’t want to get the details wrong so I’m not going to rely on my memory of what Tammy said — I’m sure there will be a press release soon. What I should note is that Detcon 1 is a NASFiC, not a Worldcon, so these awards will not be Hugos, but they will be voted on in a way very similar to the Hugos, albeit by far fewer people. This will be an interesting trial.

The 2014 SMOFcon will be in Los Angeles. I voted for the rival Baffin Island bid as it was outside the USA, but I have to admit that I didn’t fancy their proposed Friday evening ice-breaker event of “build your own convention facilities, out of ice.”

Kansas City is still the only bid for the 2016 Worldcon, and judging from their presentation they have some excellent facilities. I’m sad that I can’t go.

The race for 2017 has now become even more complex with the announcement of a bid for Washington DC to add to the existing bids for Japan, Montréal and Helsinki. The Canadian bid looked fairly weak, but the Japanese and Finnish bids both appear to have considerable support. Judging from the questions asked, there was considerably annoyance that a US bid had jumped in to challenge a selection of interesting non-US bids. However, the Washington bid team has a huge amount of experience and, judging from the promotional materials they put out, a lot of money.

Looking further afield, San José (in the form of my colleagues and I at SFSFC) have announced we are looking at challenging New Orleans for 2018. If we do, and it is by no means certain, I hope it will be a very friendly contest like the one we ran against Seattle for 2002. I, of course, won’t be able to attend whoever wins, but I think both would be great conventions.

Dublin is the only announced bid for 2019.

New Zealand reported that they are starting to negotiate with facilities for 2020. They are looking at sites in both Auckland and Wellington.

Finally the forward calendar is starting to fill up with bids for Forth Worth in 2021 and Chicago in 2022. The Chicago bid will apparently be for new facilities, not the Hyatt Regency where previous Chicons have been held.

There has already been some discussion about what will happen with regards to the losing bids in 2017. The Finnish and Irish bids have a good relationship, and if the Finns were to lose again I can’t see them targeting anything before 2021. The Japanese committee stated that they would not want to run too close to New Zealand and would therefore not consider a new bid before 2023. I’ve no idea what Montréal will do. If Washington were to lose, I suspect that large number of older American SMOFs would faint with shock, and possibly even retire from the game. So I guess we’ll just have to make that happen.

One of the things that people who rant about lack of diversity at conventions often miss is that attendance at conventions is not cheap. It is necessarily not cheap, because you have to hire the venue. But the fact that it is not cheap means that those sections of society with less money will be less well represented amongst the membership. To get a more diverse membership, therefore, you have to find a way to help those in financial hardship to attend.

That is exactly what this year’s NASFiC, Detcon 1, is doing. The convention is being held in Detroit, a place famously down on its luck right now. As they note:

The city of Detroit has some of the highest unemployment and poverty rates in the entire country. It is also over 80% African-American.

So the convention committee has launched an appeal for funds to help local fans attend the event. Each $55 donated means one free membership for a local fan. And the committee has pledged to match donations up to a total of $550.

Further details, including instructions on how to donate, and how to apply for one of the free memberships, are available here.

There has been a lot of confusion regarding who exactly ought to be held responsible for the various goings on at World Fantasy in Brighton. It isn’t easy to sort out, but I’ll try to shine a bit of light on it.

Before I do that, however, I recommend this post by Laura Lam which follows up on yesterday’s disgraceful attempt by WFC2013 to deflect blame for the lack of action on harassment onto the victims. Laura also confirms my understanding that WFC2013’s statement that the person reported for harassment on the Saturday night was a “fan” is a lie.

I note, for the benefit of the curious, that while at least two of the reported creepers have professional interests in SF&F, none of them is well known. No one is protecting a “big name”. Indeed I had not even heard of two of them before this all blew up.

Meanwhile, back with organizational structures. At the bottom of the tree are the volunteers. These are mostly people described as “Redcoats”. All reports I have seen suggest that these people worked hard and did a good job within the limits of their powers.

The convention’s website lists a “committee”, but I expect that some of these people will have had little or no influence on what went on. The only people who had direct influence on policy will have been the co-chairs and anyone else with a direct interest in whatever organization staged the event.

Finally we have the World Fantasy Board. As Jonathan Strahan noted on the latest Coode Street Podcast, these are people with the power to make policy. There are certain things that they require conventions to do. I also know from experience that they can be very intrusive with regard to the day-to-day running of the convention.

Of course, as Kevin often says, you can get away with anything when running a convention if you never intend to run another one. It is entirely possible that some members of the WF Board were unhappy with that went on in Brighton, and that Steve Jones thumbed his nose at them as much as he did at the membership. But the Board chose to grant him the right to stage the convention, and they did so after having summarily rejected a UK bid from a group with much more convention-running experience.

I note also that Jones may be a member of the Board (he has been in the past, and presumably is now as a past chair of a WFC) and that other members of the convention committee may also be Board members.

So my view on this complex mess is as follows. Steve Jones and his co-chairs are directly responsible for how the convention was run. The World Fantasy Board is responsible for having granted the convention to Jones in the first place (and they have enough experience of his behavior to have known what to expect). The Board is also responsible in that it has the power to set policy regarding how the convention should be run, and to select groups to run future conventions wisely.

Whether they will do so or not is another matter. They are not responsible to anyone except themselves. My suspicion is that as long as people continue to attend WFC in significant numbers the Board will not see any need for change.

I’ve been checking out the comments on the other blog posts made about WFC2013 today. One of them highlighted something in the WFC email that I had missed. The email says:

Regrettably, we learned of one small harassment incident that occurred on the Saturday night when an extremely drunken fan made a nuisance of himself in the hotel Lobby.

I highlighted the word “fan” there. I happen to know who the person accused of harassment on Saturday night is. So does the WFC2013 management, because the incident was reported to them. That person works for a large, international company involved in the industry. So either we are talking about a fourth incident of harassment here, or someone at WFC2013 is telling porkies about it being a fan who was responsible.

The Brighton World Fantasy Convention has sent out a final newsletter and is merrily continuing to thumb it’s nose at the membership. Sophia McDougall summed up their attitude very neatly.

WFC2013: "Ha! Don't you feel stupid now, thinking we would do bad and unreasonable stuff just because we said we were planning to do it."

— Sophia McDougall, MSt (@McDougallSophia) November 17, 2013

It is, of course, good that they didn’t rip people off as badly as they threatened to, but their apparent insistence that this proves that they did nothing wrong is just pathetic. Sadly their attempts to brush off any criticism also extends to the incidents of sexual harassment. One of the victims is furious at the way what happened to her is being dismissed. She comments here.

Update: Alex Dally MacFarlane rants so that I don’t have to. Thanks Alex!

As promised, I have finally got around to posting some comments on the less savory aspects of this year’s World Fantasy. It isn’t all bad by any means. Lots of things went well at the event. But if we want conventions to be better run then we need to take note of what went wrong as well, and this year’s WFC was spectacularly poor in some respects.

The post is very long, so I have given it a page of its own in the con report section of the website.

One of the things I noticed when I went to the event with Manda Scott and Ben Kane in Bristol last month was that they were both headed off to Harrogate the following weekend for a convention. Indeed, Manda was chairing it. I gather that it was a huge success. They got over 2000 people, which I believe is more than double the number who attended this year’s Eastercon in Bradford. There is a con report from Emma Darwin here. It all sounds very familiar. Provided that it doesn’t clash with BristolCon, I might have to go next year to see how they do things.