Conventions

Masquerade Good and Bad

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As I have noted over on ConReporter.com my live masquerade coverage was torpedoed by decisions made elsewhere. I am slowly calming down from wanting to drop the person responsible from the highest building in Montreal, into a deep pit that leads directly to a pool of molten lava.

Thankfully the show itself was very good. We had 26 entries totaling around 40 people. Most of them appeared to be very competent. My den required almost no looking after. Amongst my den, particular congratulations are due to Midna the Imp, who walked off with the Best in Class Workmanship prize for novices. The half time show was a bit of a flop, but I enjoyed myself anyway showing Irene Gallo and Don Dos Santos around backstage.

I’ll write a lot more in my con report, but right now I am falling asleep at the keyboard so I should go to bed.

Anticipation: Day 3 #worldcon09

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The Business Meeting this morning was a resounding success for the forces of progress. We saved the Semiprozine category (despite some last-minute skullduggery); we ratified the “Making the Web Eligible” motion, which will hopefully put an end to all of the claims that online writing is not eligible for the Hugos; and we ratified with Graphic Story category, which will now be with us until at least 2012. Yay all round.

We finished a little early, and I was able to get out and have lunch, get my photo taken by Kyle Cassidy, vote in site selection and support the Texas in 2013 bid. The it was time for the Greatest Fanwriter Besides Me panel, which I will report on at length in ConReporter.com when I get the time. I have also taken a quick look around the art show and dealers’ room, both of which are sadly small and disappointing.

Now, however, I am back at the hotel getting changed and about to head off for a 5-6 hour stint working backstage at the Masquerade. If all goes well there will be live reporting from the event here.

Anticipation: Day 2 #worldcon09

~ Cheryl

This is going to have to be brief because it is past midnight and I have to be up early. Also my room mate got in from Brussels today and needs sleep.

The two gender panels (one I attended, one I chaired) went well, though in both cases the panelists thought the panel descriptions were silly. I now want to find books by Fiona Patton.

The International Awards “panel” didn’t work very well because it was essentially a whole lot of small award ceremonies crammed into one. A lot of the groups seemed to turn up, say their bit, and go away again.

I’m getting rather irritated by the lack of time control by Program Ops. No one is coming around with “5 minute” cards, and as a result panels are tending to run for the full length of the slot they are scheduled for, so no one has any time to get from one panel to the next. I’m guessing that the con is very short of gophers.

My Future of Sport panel went as well as could be expected for such a huge subject that was scheduled late at night against the parties and the Chesley Awards.

Speaking of awards, much bouncing up and down was done because Chris Roberson won a Sidewise Award; and John Picacio and Lou Anders won Chesleys. All of my pals are winning things this Worldcon. Yay!

I did a couple of parties this evening and am enormously grateful to Bragelonne for having good food — I hadn’t had a proper meal since breakfast — but for various reasons the hotel was elevator hell and I was very glad to get out of there.

Business Meeting – Day 1

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

That was an interesting morning. Mostly it went fairly well, in that SMOFdom managed to restrain itself from doing too much that was hideously embarrassing, though some of them did try very hard.

Most of the committee reports went through on the nod, which was something of a relief for Kevin and myself. The only real fuss was over an internal dispute about the committee charged with maintaining the historical records of WSFS. Earlier this year someone had got it into his head that Forrest Ackerman’s famous first ever Hugo Award was not a proper Hugo. Kevin and I got told to change the official Hugo Awards web site, which we had to do. There followed a huge fuss and eventually Forry’s Hugo got restored. Various motions were proposed to try to prevent this sort of thing happening again without proper oversight, but in the end the BM voted not to do anything official. Hopefully a shot across the committee’s bows will be all that is needed to prevent this sort of thing happening again.

SMOFdom was clearly riled up about James Bacon’s motions on promoting Worldcon and youth memberships. It has to be said that some of James’s ideas were not very well thought out, and Worldcons hate being bound to do specific things by the BM, but equally the ideas deserved to be discussed. We ended up with a couple of fairly innocuous resolutions that expressed intent without requiring anyone to do anything, and that should have been good except that it was pretty obvious from what was being said that a lot of the old guard had no intention of taking any notice of the resolutions.

The women in the Hugos motion got kicked out by a fairly massive majority. I gather from other people that the reaction on the SMOFs list was exceptionally childish, and of course none of those people are prepared to say anything in public. As I said before, I really didn’t expect the motion to pass, but the adamant refusal to even discuss the issues sends a really bad message to the rest of the fannish world.

Those Feminists Are Plotting Again

~ Cheryl ~ 15 Comments

Checking through my blogs this morning I noticed a post on Feminist SF that suggested introducing a motion to the Business Meeting that would require all Hugo Award nominees to be women for one year. That, I am sure, would have been kicked out very quickly, but it got me thinking about how we might actually get the Hugos to take more notice of women. In the shower I had a bright idea, and that has since been refined (thank you Tim Illingworth) as follows:

Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution by inserting the following into the end of Section 3.8:

3.8.n If in the written fiction categories, no selected nominee has a female author or co-author, the highest nominee with a female author or co-author shall also be listed, provided that the nominee would appear on the list required by Section 3.11.4.

Section 3.11.4 is the one which specifies that the top 15 nominees plus whoever gets at least 5% of the vote, must be published within 90 days of the Worldcon.

There are two important things about this idea. Firstly no one loses their nomination as a result. If a ballot contained five men, they would all still get their nominations; they would just be joined by a woman. Secondly we don’t pick just anyone – the female nominee has to be someone who would have been honored anyway by being put on the “runner up” list.

There are, of course, many open questions, the most obvious of which is whether it is the job of the Hugos to provide positive discrimination in this way. I don’t expect it to pass. However, I do think that raising the issue for debate will be useful, and I will be fascinated to see what sort of response the motion gets.

Many thanks to Yonmei for having the idea of doing something in the first place.

Anticipation: Day 1 #worldcon09

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Today was relatively lightly loaded. It started off with a Masquerade team meeting over breakfast at Eggspectation. We were then supposed to set up the Masquerade desk in the registration area, but this took a while and in the meantime I managed to get registered and pick up a bit of gossip.

The con seems to be going fairly well. I was a bit worried when I saw that they were printing badges at Registration, but the system worked smoothly and the lines were fairly small. The program schedule is rather confusing, with overlapping time slots, and Program Ops doesn’t appear to have any runners to keep panels to time, but so far nothing appears to have gone badly wrong.

My first panel was at 2:00pm, and I ended up moderating it as two of the panelists were late. It was on handling the mainstream media, and it went fairly well. The panelists all had good expertise, and people had sensible, constructive points to make from the audience. You may be able to hear the whole thing online as it was recorded by the Thru The Wormhole guys, of whom I will have more to say over on ConReporter.com.

One of the highlights of the show so far is the giant steampunk robot that can be found near the art show. I have a picture here. I haven’t been into the Art Show or Dealers’ Room yet, but they look fairly small.

Kevin and I have survived out first day of WSFS duties. Today was the meeting of the Mark Protection Committee which formally accepted and approved the report of the Hugo Marketing Committee. This is a good thing, and it means that Hugo marketing in moving forward.

And finally, I have indulged in a little Feminist activism. More of that in the next post.

Here At Last #Worldcon09

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well, I’m in Montreal, and I should really have got straight online, but instead I got myself invited out to dinner and as a result I’m here writing blogs at gone midnight. Still, it was a very fine dinner in the excellent company of Jenny Rae Rappaport, Lou Anders and Paul Cornell. We ended up in a Catalan restaurant called Les Pryrenees, and we were very well fed.

I also had a very pleasant flight and, as expected, had some excellent company. Many thanks for the conversation, folks, and for the champagne sneaked out of Business Class.

More tomorrow. Now I need sleep.

Hitting the Big Time

~ Cheryl

Today ConReporter.com got featured on Whatever and Tor.com. Hopefully that’s going to do some good for our viewing figures. And they could be yours too, because basically all we are doing is enabling people around the world to find reports about Worldcon. If you are going to be blogging or tweeting from the convention, our readers could be reading you too. All you need to do is sign up.

We haven’t got anyone from Australia or New Zealand yet. Or the Nordic countries. Get with it, guys.

El Worldcon Habla Español

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Worldcon is starting to get extended coverage in various media. The convention’s press team is keeping track of it all here. I was particularly pleased by the extended coverage that we got from Sitio de Ciencia-Ficción, a Spanish-language web site. It has been obvious for some time from the links we get to the Hugo web site that there is a lot of interest in SF in Spanish-speaking countries, but it is always nice to see it in action again.

All of which reminds me that I need to nudge you folks about ConReporter.com again. We are now up to 35 reporters, but we can always take more. After Miguel Esquirol Ríos’s excellent coverage I would really like to get more Spanish-speakers on board. And I want more countries. We don’t have anyone from Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Scandinavia or Japan. I know people from those countries are going to the convention. Surely some of them must be blogging.

DWJ09 Report Online

~ Cheryl

I have finally got around to finishing my report on the Diana Wynne Jones conference that I attended just before jetting off to Finncon. Profuse apologies to Farah Mendlesohn, Charlie Butler, Sharyn November, and of course Diana, for taking so long. You can read the report here.

Now I need to read more of Diana’s books…

Damned Foreigners

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

Adam Roberts not unreasonable, though probably hopeless, request to fandom to be more imaginative about its Hugo nominees has flushed out all sorts of bizarre comments about how the Hugos are awful because they don’t reflect the writer’s taste. My favorite to date (and I’m not going to link to it because the writer really doesn’t deserve any further publicity) is someone whose rant included this:

every third or fourth year the World Convention is held outside of the U.S., which means that in those years, the awards typically go to books you can’t buy by writers you’ve never heard of.

Why those damned foreigners! How dare they? Still, in the spirit of scientific inquiry I decided to take a look at Best novel winners at past non-US Worldcons, in particular Australians ones as that’s where next year’s Worldcon will take place. This is what I found:

  • Aussiecon One (1975): The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Aussiecon Two (1985): Neuromancer, William Gibson
  • Aussiecon Three (1999): To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis

So, “books you can’t buy by writers you’ve never heard of,” eh?

Irony Indeed

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Various people on Twitter have been pointing at this piece by Lev Grossman in Time, in particular the following:

Most painful irony: By winning, nerd culture has lost. When I was a kid the fact that comics and games and fantasy and whatever were awesome was a secret, and people gave me a hard time about it. Now suddenly everyone’s all, hey, no, this stuff is great, Iron Man, woo! Which means instead of being our little secret, now it’s all about big corporations selling nerd culture to as many Joe Douchebags as it can pack into the multiplex. And where am I in that transaction? I don’t want to be anywhere near it.

That, of course, is a sentiment we are all familiar with. It is the “not part of our community” argument that we hear so much of from the old guard at Worldcon. So why was Mr. Grossman at Comic-Con instead of sobbing into his beer in Montreal? Could it be that he has a novel out and he thinks he has more chance of selling copies at Comic-Con because there are so many more people there?

(To be fair, those I know who have read it say that it is a very good book.)

Worldcon Photo Shoot

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

One of the many cool things that will be happening at Worldcon is that Neil Gaiman’s photographer friend, Kyle Cassidy, will be running an open studio from 10:00am to 4:00pm pm on Saturday. Anyone can come along and ask to be photographed. Obviously this will appeal particularly to people in hall costumes, but Kyle tells me he is looking to photograph all sorts of attendees. If you were to hire someone like Kyle to photograph you it would probably cost a fortune, so this looks like a neat opportunity.

To see some examples of Kyle’s work, take a browse through his LiveJournal (unless you are allergic to cats) and his Where I Write project.

Update: times corrected as per discussion with Anne and Kyle below.

Showing Weakness

~ Cheryl

I don’t know, 11:00pm and I’m thinking of packing it in for the day. And I’m only just producing this sorry excuse for a blog entry. Whatever is the world coming to?

Still, today has been productive in that I’ve done lots of work on the paying job, and on the current sekrit projekt. Also ConReporter now has 25 people offering their reports from Worldcon, with another 3 promised. I think we’ll be providing some pretty comprehensive coverage between us. I now need to try to do a bit of software work to make it easier to use.

But right now I am going to read Kari’s Living with Ghosts, which I am starting to find addictive. G’night.

Working on a Schedule – #worldcon09

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Now that we have a provisional program available I have been working on where I need to be when at Worldcon. The trusty iPhone is coming into its own here, because I can put all of my appointments in its calendar. I have also been totting up how busy I will be. My total commitments currently look like this:

  • Thursday : 5.5 hours
  • Friday: 9.0 hours
  • Saturday: 10.5 hours
  • Sunday: 9.0 hours
  • Monday: 3.0 hours

The breakdown of activities is like this:

  • Program participant: 11.5 hours
  • Staff jobs: 6.5 hours
  • WSFS Business: 8 hours
  • Working for SFAW: 5 hours
  • Attending panels: 6 hours

The SFAW work would have been a lot more had Anticipation not scheduled several award ceremonies opposite each other on Saturday, and scheduled me on a panel in the middle of that.

As you can see, I won’t get to see much of the program myself. I’m particularly disappointed that I am scheduled on a panel of my own opposite the International Fandom panel, but so it goes. No program schedule is perfect.

Of course this is by no means all I will be doing. It doesn’t include any mealtime meetings except the Masquerade Team breakfast on Thursday. I expect I’ll end up with a few lunch or breakfast meetings. It also doesn’t include parties. I’ll be expected to turn up at the Hugo Losers Party on Sunday; and there’s the Dead Dog on Monday, which is normally invaluable for getting material for the con report. And of course I will want to make time to take a look around the Dealers’ Room and Art Show. It also doesn’t include time for blogging, interviewing people and so on.

So if I end up exhausted by Monday night you’ll know why.

And Talking of Program… – #Worldcon09

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Just look at this one:

2-175 Fri/Ven 14:00 1hr 30min
P-511CF Human Culture – From SF Reader to Economist
Economist and current Nobel recipient Paul Krugman talks about why science fiction lead him to entering the field of economics. Q&A follows.

Sadly I am scheduled against it.