my first Worldcon

At the LACon panel on "Memories of Worldcons Past," I asked each panelist to begin by identifying their first Worldcon, and by telling an anecdote about it, preferably something funny and that reveals something about how worldcons past were different than they are now. Here, somewhat expanded, is mine:

It turns out I've been around longer than any of the other panelists. My first Worldcon was 1976 in Kansas City, MidAmeriCon - "Big MAC" it was called, mostly out of fears that it would be uncontrollably large.

For most of their existence, Worldcons had been under a thousand people. But lately they'd been getting larger, and in the last few years increasing rapidly: 1972 had 2000 people, 1973 had 3000, 1974 had 3500. The 1975 Worldcon was the first one in Australia, so nobody expected that to be very large, but what would happen in 1976? Would it be 4000, 6000, or what?

In the end it turned out to be not much more than 3000, but the convention went into a frenzy of planning for a really large turnout. Instead of the traditional banquet to present the Hugos, they rented a local theater. That was the first time that was done. Another innovation of MidAmeriCon's was the invention of escalating membership fees: if you bought early, your fee was less expensive than if you bought later. This is now so normal that many may not be aware it was once an innovation, but at the time many people were furious at this.

But the biggest innovation of all had to do with security. MidAmeriCon decided that using name badges as authorization to enter convention areas wouldn't work: they were too easily lost, and people would wear them in various spots, some hard to see or hard for security to spot quickly when trying to clear large numbers of people.

So they came up with something new and never done before, and oh how they chortled in the progress reports when they told the members about it. But they wouldn't say what the security device was, and you didn't find out until you checked in for the convention and found that it was:

A hospital I.D. bracelet. Plastic, with the MAC logo printed on it.

You were supposed to wear these for the entire five days of the convention. In theory, at least, they were unremovable without being cut off. But wearing an I.D. bracelet in the hospital is one thing, during a convention was another. They became a nuisance, sliding around your wrist, as you tried to use your hands; and they got clammy and grotty if you tried to shower with the bracelet on.

So, unlike the escalating membership fees, as far as I know no other fannish convention has tried something like that, though other types of conventions have.

hu-gone

In my post on the Hugo winners I commented that few of the finalists in any category had I even heard of. Tis is quite a change from years past when I was familiar with the work of all of them and knew many personally.

When did I drop out? I decided to trace the history of one category, Best Fan Writer, as the one where my acquaintance was the closest. And I found that from 1980 to 2012, I rarely knew personally fewer than three of the finalists (and when it was less, it was two). Some I knew very well, others I'd just met or briefly corresponded with, but I knew them. One year, 1989, I knew all of the finalists.

But then it abruptly changed, and from 2014 on I've known only an occasional finalist. All the others are completely unknown to me. That was just about the time I ceased considering myself an active fan, and that may have had an effect, but I don't think it's the whole story.

Worldcon day 4: Hugos!

Sunday I was feeling poorly most of the day, so I skipped out on logging in to any program items. Had I been scheduled for a panel I could have made it, but anything I didn't have to do seemed a bit much.

But by evening I was a little better, so I watched the Hugo Awards ceremony - almost the whole thing - even though I had no horses in this race. I'm really out of it as contemporary SF and fandom go, and few of the finalists in any category had I even heard of. (Official statistics)

When I signed up for programming, I had to join the convention, and this made me eligible to vote for the Hugos. So I downloaded the finalist packet, but I didn't have time before the deadline to do very much with it, and I didn't vote. I read a few of the short fiction nominees, but, as it happens, none of the ones I read were among the award-winners.

The only Dramatic Presentation finalist I saw, in either category, was KPop Demon Hunters. I rather doubt I've had put it in first place, but on the other hand the other movies in that category were on my not-see list, so maybe I would have.

Only three or four people buried down amid the credits in the fan categories had I heard of at all. Once upon a time I'd have known everybody in those categories personally.

But I enjoyed the ceremony, even if it was a parade of people I hadn't heard of except for some of the presenters (and a few winners: Picacio, Clarke, Scalzi). I appreciated the acknowledgements that many of the sf community weren't there because of difficulties in travel to the US, I enjoyed the unusual animal facts from emcee T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon).

Now I want to read the Related Work winner (Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer) and the Graphic Story winner (Fred Fordham's adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea).

Worldcon day 3 part two: two more panels

These, in the late afternoon, both went well. My camera worked properly and I was awake.

"Foundational Fantasy You Should Read": pre-con conversations with the other panelists had convinced me that introductory remarks on Dunsany and Peake would be useful, and also some guide into Tolkien's obscurer gems, for which I resurrected The Forgotten Women of Middle-earth. Others recommended some authors I could really do without, but I kept silent about that. We talked a little about the forging of "fantasy" as a publishing genre in the 1960s, and my definition of "foundational" was "from before then," but some of the audience members defined it as anything from before their personal time, so we also got in UKL and DWJ.

"Writing Fantasy in Real Worlds": I'd originally signed up for this because I had things to say on this subject, but finding myself moderator of a panel with five pretty high-powered pro authors on it, including Andrea Hairston and Sarah Pinsker, whose work B. knew even if I didn't, I figured I'd better just pose the questions and let them talk. They gave good value, talking with detail but not from a self-promotional angle about what they've done with these settings, how, and why (notably Wole Talabi's story about rescuing stolen African treasures from the British Museum); and they all also responded with enthusiasm when I asked them to name such work by other authors they'd recommend. Both that and their own work were both more recent and more multicultural than my own knowledge of the subject, so leaving it to them was for the best.

After dinner, about an hour into the Masquerade I turned that on, to find some unskilled belly dancers flouncing around to some really irritating music. This going on for several minutes and showing no signs of ceasing, I turned the feed off.

Worldcon day 3 part one: two panels

I had two online panels in the early wee hours this morning, at just about the time when I normally would finally fall into actual sleep. I didn't do that; instead, it looks as if I'm going to be tired, but without actual sleep, all day. At least I stayed awake and alert for both panels. But my camera wouldn't turn on for either panel, and nothing the tech staff did would fix it.

"Fandom as a Found Family": We all agreed that fandom is, or has been, a refuge for friendless children on the autism spectrum, and that the biggest obstacle is the lack of introductory social skills by many fans. Formal introductory material - panels explaining cons to new attendees, guidebooks to lingo and customs - are filling in the gap.

"Memories of the Worldcons Past": Mostly wound up as a comparison between Worldcons of the 1980s and today. Fewer opportunities to run into big names casually, but more caffeeklatches to meet them in small groups. (Again, formal introductory material filling in the gaps.) More dazzle. A feeling that Worldcons, although they haven't shrunk in size, are now the smaller siblings of the likes of DragonCon and Comic-Con.

Worldcon day 2: one concert

The great part of not actually being at the worldcon is that you don't feel guilty for missing anything. I didn't watch any panels today (though I'd have liked to see the recording of one from Thursday that I missed if they'd put up the recordings yet), but around evening-time I wondered what they were doing for evening entertainment tonight, as the costumes are tomorrow and the awards on Sunday.

It turned out to be a concert of anime music. A group which both looked and sounded like a high-school jazz orchestra played some occasionally modestly interesting jazz-type compositions while the emcee stood in front, embodying the "wave arms around until music stops" school of non-conducting when he bothered to do anything at all.

Worldcon day 1: one panel

So it's the first day of the Worldcon, and I watched an all-Zoom virtual panel, on the topic of "Can We Enjoy the Art of Unethical People?" The Zoom worked very well, everybody was clearly visible as well as audible. The Discord comment channel sucked, though. I couldn't figure out how to submit a post; no instructions I found online worked, and the con's e-mail help line was worse than useless.

In another universe, I'd haven taken notes and submitted a summary, but I think it's been recorded and you can watch it later. What I have instead is some of my own thoughts in response.

First I should say, that we in classical music have faced this dilemma for centuries. Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven are unquestionably two of the greatest composers there ever were; we could not do without their music; yet they were both thoroughly unsatisfactory human beings.

Our answer has been yes, we listen to their music, while acknowledging their personal failings. The only exception is in Israel, which maintains an unofficial boycott against Wagner.

Of course, the fact that they're both long dead makes it easier; they're not making any money off our purchases, and this distinction was made at the panel; one panelist mentioned that the estate of Roald Dahl is trying to make amends or at least apologies for his failings.

Yet I'm a little uncomfortable with the dead v. alive distinction. If they're not in prison, a person needs to be able to make a living; is it right to withhold money you would otherwise spend on their work because of their past misdeeds? On the other hand, continuing unapologetic offenders like Rowling - the idea of giving them money is repulsive, and there's probably enough cretins who agree with them that they won't starve.

The panel also talked a lot about the difference between misdeeds in life and as depicted in fiction. Stories being as they are, you have to expect repulsive things to happen often enough. How does the author convey that they don't approve? General opinion was, don't worry about it; you can't control what people think. Nobody mentioned Resnick's Kirinyaga, but that would have been a good example. Koriba gets his comeuppance, but not until the last story; the first one seemed to a lot of readers as if he had authorial approval.

Sometimes you have to depict misbehavior to convey the point. Someone brought up the n-word in Huck Finn. It would have been false to the setting of the story to leave that out; that's the way people talked then, and we need to know it. That the word didn't have the encoding then that it does now was one important point.

On the difference between life and fiction in general, I remember an old comment: "Murder is illegal. Writing about murder is not. Sex is not illegal. Writing about sex is." Of course restrictions on writing about sex have loosened over the years, but it's still a good distinction.

The question was asked, should we write about authors we disfavor? Yes, we should; people need to know. One panelist recounted having been, in her youth, a big David Eddings fan, only much later learning of his unethical behavior and being taken aback. I was taken aback by that, as I hadn't heard anything about Eddings. So I looked him up and found he'd been imprisoned for child abuse before he became an author. This was on the public record but was not generally known until after he died - or by me until just now.

Tim Curry, who just died, got a mention. His original fame was for Rocky Horror, which surprises some people today, though it's where I first heard of him. He recently wrote: Is Rocky Horror problematic today? Yes it is. But remember it was written just a few years after being actively gay ceased being illegal in England, and it was daring and necessarily transgressive at the time.

There was much more to the panel, but that's enough for a post.

ghost at Worldcon

The Worldcon is coming up, but though it's only a few hundred miles from here, I'm not going. Remembering from past LA Worldcons the sheer expanse of the Anaheim Convention Center, I don't think I'm any longer up to the expenditure of space and of time that goes with attending a Worldcon.

But I will be there virtually, for at least part of the con. I was contacted by programming and decided to volunteer. So I'll be on four all-online panels, all of them on Saturday. I'm moderating two of these, "Memories of the Worldcons Past" and "Writing Fantasy in Real Worlds," and will be a panelist on two others, "Fandom as a Found Family" and "Foundational Fantasy You Should Read." I'll try to report on these after they happen.

Because they're online and panelists can be anywhere, these programming tracks run 24 hours. My first panel is at 4.30 am. At the` time I signed up for programming, this would have been fine, being about the time I'd get up anyway. But in the last few weeks, it's been just after I finally fall asleep. I don't know what's going to happen, but the last time I tried to get up in the early morning, I was groggy and exhausted all day.

stupid stupid software creatures

There is one additional thing I'm using AI for, besides asking it to find words that I know but have slipped my mind. And that is, finding commands or fixing glitches in programs and apps. This occurs constantly.

For instance, the upcoming Worldcon is using Discord for its chat function, and while I've used Discord before when Mythcon employed it for the same purpose, I didn't much like it and it's been a long tiem since then. But as a panel moderator, I'd best use it, so I followed the con's advice to try it out and get used to it.

And then I had to ask Google AI, "How do you log off Discord?", a question I remember having to ask some help function on a previous occasion. The answer is that the log off command is hidden at the bottom of a non-obvious menu.

Sometimes the answer doesn't work, or it refers you to a command that I can't find where it's supposed to be, so I resubmit the question with "I've done X" or "There is no Y" added in. The following is an actual example from today of my adding no fewer than five "I've done X" to my original question because none of the previous answers worked.

in Excel, I've highlighted the cells I want to print, and I've cleared the print area, and I've re-selected the data range, and I've selected Set Print Area, and I've changed the print setting to Print Active Sheets, and the cells are not empty or hidden, but when I go to print them, I get an error message that says "we didn't find anything to print"

The actual solution turned out to be "close the program and start over," which hadn't occurred to me because I'd already tried that and it didn't work the first time.

If software makers had access to AI question logs concerning their products, they could learn a lot about what users can't figure out. In the meantime, these glitchy programs and their stupid user interfaces are as bad as AI.

lost Gilbert and Sullivan

I attended an online Zoom presentation by the Lamplighters, the San Francisco Gilbert & Sullivan society, of three songs recently discovered (like, three months ago) that were cut from G&S's opera Iolanthe before the work was finalized for regular performance in 1882. They were found by a G&S scholar named Marc Shepherd, who was browsing through a rehearsal score in the British Library that apparently nobody else had examined closely before. Sullivan's practice was to destroy any material he didn't use in the final opera, but this rehearsal score must have been missed. Probably they were deleted for the reasons that songs are often deleted from stage musicals at a late stage: unnecessary for plot development, slowing down the action, difficult to sing.

I hadn't heard of this discovery before - except for the text of the third song, which Gilbert published among his poetry - nor did I know until the program that the songs had already been released. Here is Shepherd's account of the songs, and here they are being sung by, as the Lamplighters also did them, professional-quality G&S performers.



I don't find them hidden gems, but they're enjoyable enough, especially in these performances, and I'm glad we have acquired these nuggets.