Seattle Worldcon 2025 Chair Kathy Bond has apologized for several widely-criticized problems and gaffes during this year’s Hugo Awards ceremony. Hosts Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford have also published a statement explaining and apologizing for what went wrong.
The Seattle Worldcon 2025 extends our deepest apologies for multiple failure points which occurred during this year’s Hugo Awards ceremony. We provided insufficient organizational plans at the podium, including an inadequately designed pronunciation guide and other poorly designed materials, which at one point caused our hosts to not realize there was an additional finalist, Kamilah Cole, on another page. We further did not provide our hosts with all of the support and guidance we should have for their role on stage, particularly as Nisi and Tempest note, in directing the rehearsal. We apologize for that lack. Finally, we apologize to the khōréō editorial team for our miscommunication around reading out their entire team on stage. We have carefully documented all of these issues and shared them with LAcon V and Montréal Worldcon 2027 teams.
It is a privilege to celebrate the talented members of our community and we deeply regret causing any individual to experience anything less than the respect and recognition they earned and so fully deserve as Hugo finalists. We thank you for being patient as we took time to respond; our response time was partially impacted by illness. However, we recognize that the delay in communication has compounded the hurt, and we are truly sorry. We should have spoken to you sooner.
In addition to this public apology, we have already undertaken the following steps:
Offered private apologies to Ms. Cole from the Hugo Administrator and K. Tempest;
Made concrete suggestions to LAcon V and Montréal Worldcon 2027 during a debrief meeting highlighting needed improvements in script management and related missteps that have been documented for continuity;
Recommended creation of a new sub-area role in the Worldcon organizational structure responsible solely for the accurate handling of names. While not as visible as the errors at the podium, we also encountered technical issues with our badge printing software that were not identified until too late that failed to print diacritical marks on names correctly. We believe that centralizing this responsibility will help future Worldcons be more inclusive and respectful to individuals in all areas of the convention including the Hugo Awards.
We will continue to remain available to future Worldcons to discuss the back-of-house issues that occurred. We remain committed to learning from this experience, offering our knowledge to future conventions, and to honoring the trust placed in us by this community.
We’re truly sorry that our work hosting the 2025 Hugo Awards Ceremony has caused anyone distress. We never wanted to harm folks with our words. Judging by remarks and posts made to the internet since then, we’ve done that. This ceremony is supposed to be a moment of glory for all nominees, but it seems to have been a source of chagrin and anger for some of us. Our contributions to that scenario are deeply regrettable, and we truly do apologize.
If you’re interested in knowing how or why the major mistakes happened, read on for a post mortem analysis that addresses the following:
Incorrect pronunciation of book titles and names.
Not announcing all nominated books in the Lodestar category.
Not reading the names of the khōréō editorial team.
On Pronunciations
From the beginning of our work with the Hugo Awards team, we wanted to make sure we pronounced all names correctly. To facilitate that, we asked the team to gather pronunciation guides from the nominees, which we understood to be standard operating procedure. Since the awards event team had the contact info for all the nominees, it was their job to collect this information for us. And they did! We had pronunciations for almost all nominees and all of the award presenters used those guides on stage.
There were some names without guides and we did our best to pronounce them correctly. There was one point during the ceremony where Tempest did apologize if they’d said a name wrong. The reason was that there was no guide. In instances where we didn’t have a guide, we assumed that the nominee hadn’t gotten back to the Hugo team.
If we mispronounced anyone’s name, whether we had a guide or not, it was by mistake. Not because we didn’t care or didn’t bother to find out the correct pronunciation. If we mispronounced anyone’s name, we deeply apologize and, if you reach out to one of us directly, we will apologize to you directly.
We’re also aware that there’s a perception that Tempest giggled after or at a name she’d read aloud. Tempest doesn’t remember this moment, but knows for certain that she did not giggle at or because of any name. However unfamiliar the name, neither she nor Nisi would laugh at it. If the person whose name she read felt their name was being mocked, we apologize. And if you reach out to Tempest directly, she will apologize directly.
We are aware that we didn’t pronounce the name of Darcie Little Badger’s book correctly. This is because the pronunciation guide for the title didn’t end up in the script nor on the paper with the name pronunciations we were given just before going back on stage. The script was supposed to have all the pronunciations in it come showtime–it didn’t. There had been several last minute changes to the event just that day and a few miscommunications that led to the script not being as finalized as it should have been. This is not to say that the behind the scenes team didn’t do a great job, because they did. Once again, this was a mistake and something we’d never want to happen. This was not an act of maliciousness or due to a lack of care.
Tempest apologized directly to Darcie Little Badger that night. Together, we apologize again. We’re really sorry to have dimmed the brilliance of your win.
The final mispronunciation we want to address is from the Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form category. When Tempest went out to present the category, she thought that there would be a video announcing all the nominees with clips as that had been the plan earlier. This plan had changed and she didn’t know, so she didn’t have a pronunciation guide for any name in that category.
This and the few other issues and hiccups we had that night could probably have been avoided if we’d had a full run-through rehearsal. Due to some technical issues and scheduling, we didn’t get that. And neither of us knew to insist on it as hosting an awards show was a new thing for us both. We now have a list of strong suggestions for future ceremonies we hope future Worldcons will take on to avoid these mistakes.
Lodestar Mishap
When reading the list of nominees for the Lodestar Award, we did not read one title – So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole – before asking for the winning envelope. This was 100% our mistake. We had two sets of papers in front of us, the script and the pronunciation guide. The final book wasn’t on the guide, which we had been reading, and was on the next page of the script, which we had not flipped to. We would never want to make any nominee feel forgotten or like an afterthought, but that was the result of our actions, which we deeply regret.
Tempest reached out and personally apologized to Kamilah Cole the next day (once someone gave her contact info). Nisi needs to do that as well!
khōréō Editorial Team
After we turned in our part of the script for the Hugo Awards, we asked the event coordinators to check with certain nominated groups about whether they wanted us to read all the names associated with the entity or if they would be fine with something shorter, such as “X editorial team”. We were told that khōréō was fine with not having all the names read. On the pronunciation guide for the category there weren’t any names listed next to the zine name, just “editorial team.” We’ve been told that all the names were on the video screens. While we did see those screens from the stage, neither of us paid attention to them or read from them; we only read from the script or other papers given to us.
We had no idea until after Worldcon that khōréō wanted all of their names read. Had we known, that’s what we would have done. We are very sorry that we got the wrong information and thus didn’t announce all the names on stage. Once Nisi found out about this situation, they apologized to the khōréō team directly.
In Conclusion
We were both truly honored to be Worldcon Toastmasters/Hosts, and we wanted to do a great job in order to honor all the nominees and their amazing work. We tried to mitigate problems that have come up in the past, such as rampant mispronunciation of non-Western names, and keep the focus on the awards. As Hosts, our job was to let the events team know what we needed to do our job on stage. For the most part, they did. The mishaps and mistakes were due to factors that we’re sure they’ll articulate if they need to. We can say for certain that none of it was due to malice, lack of caring, or ignorance.
Same goes for us. The mistakes were true mistakes and not a lack of fucks given. Still, we know full well that Intent is Not Magical and that even though we didn’t intend to hurt anyone, we have done so. For that, we can only apologize and say that we will do what’s in our power to ensure that these same mistakes don’t happen again at the Hugo Awards or at any event we may host or MC (should we be asked). As we said, we have a list of suggested remedies to pass along to the events team based on our experience.
We hope that this offers some clarity or perspective on this situation and that the community can accept our sincere apology.
Seattle Worldcon 2025 chair Kathy Bond’s June 18 message reports the steps taken in the past month to recover from the committee’s controversial use of ChatGPT to vet program participants. The complete statement appears at the end of this post.
Bond said in a previous statement that ChatGPT was not used in deciding who to invite as a panelist, it was used “in the discovery of material to review after panelist selection had occurred” and as part of their remediation the Seattle committee would redo that part of the process for which ChatGPT had been used. That work will be performed by new volunteers from outside their current program team. However, Bond’s update says limited progress has been made.
Regarding re-vetting, we have only been able to get a few people to definitively join the team, and they joined in the last two weeks. Because of the pressing need to finish this step and to find willing volunteers, we decided to expand our pool of volunteers to include people who have performed some work for Seattle Worldcon 2025, but who were not involved in volunteering with our program team. This step should allow us to get enough people to finish re-vetting.
Bond had also announced her intention to get “outside members of the community with prior experience in Worldcon programming” to perform an audit of Seattle’s program process, with access to all their systems and people. No progress has been made on this item.
Regarding our program audit process, we are still seeking someone to perform this task and prepare a report for the community.
Bond says the next update come “when we have completed our re-vetting process, which will hopefully occur by the end of June.”
Seattle Worldcon 2025 chair Kathy Bond posted a new “Message From the Chair” on May 13 following up last week’s statement about the way ChatGPT was used in the panelist selection process.
Last week, I promised an update about the progress Seattle Worldcon 2025 has made regarding our next steps related to remedying our mistakes related to the use of ChatGPT in panelist vetting. Much of this update can be summed up as “we’re waiting to hear back from the people we have invited to help.”
Regarding re-vetting, we have invited two people, new to our team, to join, and we are waiting to hear back from them. We are still searching for at least three to four more people to join that team. If you would like to volunteer, please email [email protected]. This new team will be working with our existing program team but be reporting to the chair.
We have reached out to a team of two people with prior Worldcon programming experience to audit our program process and the remedial steps. We are still waiting to hear back from them.
We have processed all refund requests that we have received; former members will be receiving them this week.
Our next update will be once we have identified who is helping with re-vetting and performing our program audit or in three weeks, whichever comes sooner.
Bond says ChatGPT was not used in deciding who to invite as a panelist, it was used “in the discovery of material to review after panelist selection had occurred.”
Morgan adds, “This process has only been used for panelists appearing on site in Seattle; panelists for our Virtual program have not yet been selected.”
Bond stresses that “ChatGPT was used only for one tailored task that was then followed by a human review and evaluation of the information,” and that “no selected panelist was excluded based on information obtained through AI without human review and no selected panelist was chosen by AI.”
As part of their remediation, the Seattle committee is redoing the part of the program process that used ChatGPT, with that work being performed by new volunteers from outside their current team.
Morgan also makes her own apology (the chair published her own several days ago).
I want to apologize specifically for our use of ChatGPT in the final vetting of selected panelists as explained below. OpenAI, as a company, has produced its tool by stealing from artists and writers in a way that is certainly immoral, and maybe outright illegal. When it was called to my attention that the vetting team was using this tool, it seemed they had found a solution to a large problem. I should have re-directed them to a different process. Using that tool was a mistake. I approved it, and I am sorry. As will be explained later, we are embarking on the process of re-doing the vetting stage for every invited panelist, completely without the use of generative AI tools.
And Morgan has provided the text of the ChatGPT query that was used in the vetting process.
The committee will be making their next update about the subject on May 13.
(1) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 CHAIR APOLOGIZES. Kathy Bond today posted an “Apology and Response From Chair” at the Seattle Worldcon 2025 website to address the brewing controversy about the committee using ChatGPT as part of its process for screening program participants.
(2) 2025 LOCUS AWARDS SHORTLISTS. The 2025 Locus Awards finalists have been posted at Locus Online. See the full list at the link. The Locus Awards winners will be announced June 21 during the in-person Locus Awards Ceremony, held in Oakland, California.
(3) PUPPIES AIN’T WHAT THEY USTA BE. In “Locus Slate Shenanigan Update” Camestros Felapton scores Jon Del Arroz’ efforts to push his picks onto the Locus Awards shortlist.
Early in April I posted about an attempt by Jon Del Arroz/Fandom Pulse (and others) to game the Locus voting with a last minute slate. So how did the JDA slate perform?
OK, I have to do some complex data crunching here. Well, my provisional results come out at a whopping 0% of JDA slated works made it….
(4) 2025 EDGAR AWARDS. Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the 2025 Edgar Awards on May 1.
Publishers Weekly reports the ceremony was marred by the use of AI images, and this is being compared with the Worldcon’s own LLM kerfuffle.
An opening video, surveying treatments of the genre on the big and small screen, was narrated by a creepy AI version of Humphrey Bogart, complete with imperfect lip-syncing, later followed by one featuring an even creepier, black cat-holding, artificially-generated Edgar Allan Poe.
(5) ELRIC’S EARS: THE DEFINITIVE ANSWER. Cora Buhlert has written an article about Elric of Melniboné for the Seattle Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blog, which got responses from both Michael Whelan and Michael Moorcock, settling the question whether Elric has pointed ears or not. “Fantastic Fiction: Elric of Melniboné: Tortured Elf Emperor with a Cursed Sword”. See their comments at the link.
…Elric was born out of a conversation between John Carnell, editor of the British magazine Science Fantasy, and the young writer Michael Moorcock, wherein both proclaimed their love for the sort of fantasy adventure stories—soon to be called “sword and sorcery”—that had been published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales some thirty years earlier but were considered hopelessly passé by the early 1960s. Carnell remarked that he would be open to publishing “that Conan stuff,” so Moorcock wrote The Dreaming City, the first Elric story, which appeared in the June 1961 issue of Science Fantasy…
…“I think everything that’s in the book is in the show basically,” explained Paul Weitz. “We early on got in touch with Martha Wells kind of as fans and, so there are things that are added to the story, sort of like filling in the cracks, but anytime that we had an idea like that, we would call up Martha and say, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re thinking of, what do you think?’ And she’d either say, ‘Oh, that’s a cool idea’ or ‘Well, maybe think about this instead. That was a huge, huge relief.
“I think that part of the thing for us was never feeling like we were like we were padding stuff,” he continued as he explained why they made the changes they did….
…This year our judges received 112 eligible submissions from 49 UK publishing imprints and independent authors.
If you’re interested in how this compares to previous years, you can see past lists and analysis here: clarkeaward.medium.com
The TLDR though is this is pretty much a Goldilocks Zone year. Not the highest ever numbers received, but not worryingly low, and more on par with where we’ve landed in terms of recent submissions history for both books received and publishers entering.
A caveat as always about our terminology: this is a simple list of submissions of eligible books received, not a ‘long-list’ or other form of juried selection, but simply those books sent to our judges for them to consider as potential future Arthur C. Clarke science fiction book of the year winners….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Iron Man film (2008)
By Paul Weimer: “I am Iron Man”
Although the Hulk movie preceded it, Iron Man started the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and for good or ill, the modern age of superhero movies. I can’t claim to know that was going to happen at the time–but I was excited. My movie-watching friend Mike, although well versed in horror and some comics, had no idea who Iron Man was. He had never read any of his comics and didn’t know his deal. So sitting in the movie theater with him, previews rolling, I explained Iron Man’s story (as I had gotten it fifteen years earlier, first). He was fascinated, I sold him on the idea that although Iron Man was maybe C-Tier (compared to Spidey, and Hulk and other high well known Marvel Superheroes), this could be fun.
And then we settled in to watch.
Shorn of the need to set up any mythology (although it effortlessly does), future movies, or refer to previous continuity (except for the credit cookie scene with Fury), Iron Man I is still in my top tier of Marvel movies. The story is straightforward enough, and Robert Downey Jr. (who was still somewhat damaged goods, remember) redeemed his entire career playing Tony Stark. Having read the comics, when I saw Obadiah Stane show up, I realized, but didn’t tell my movie going partner, just what was in store.
“Icing problem?”
“You might want to look into it.”
Favreau’s direction, Matthew Libatique’s cinematography are excellent in use of color, lighting and imagery.
I think that the real best relationship in this movie is not between Downey and Paltrow (although her Pepper Potts is every inch what is needed for the role) but between Downey and Bettany (who does the voice of JARVIS). Bettany once again (like in Master and Commander and A Knight’s Tale) plays the second part of a double act to more well known actor with charm, humor and a lot of fun. Forget Vision and Scarlet Witch (sorry Elisabeth Olsen), the Iron Man/JARVIS is where it’s at. Their sometimes acidic and always funny relationship is what makes the beats of the movie really sing.
Just writing this piece has the Black Sabbath song running through my head.
And hey, this is the movie that launched a movie franchise…and at the same time, in the world of comics, catapulted Iron Man to A-Tier.
When, movies later, Downey says “I am Iron Man” and does his snap and defeats Thanos at the cost of his own life, that was all originally set up and grounded from the original Iron Man movie.
(10) ARCHIPELACON 2 IS DRAWING NEAR. Finland’s national convention and this year’s Eurocon, Archipelacon 2, The Nordic SF and Fantasy Convention, announced today over 700 memberships have been sold, out of a total maximum of 1 000.
The convention will take place in Mariehamn, Åland on 26-29 June, at the Alandica Culture & Congress Centre. The second Archipelacon is a follow-up to the now legendary first edition, which was held in the same venue in 2015.
We have a stellar lineup of Guests of Honour: Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer, Mats Strandberg, and Emmi Itäranta. For full presentations please visit our website https://archipelacon.org/guests-of-honour/
Preparations for the event are in full swing. Last minute programme proposals can be submitted via the programme form, but please hurry if you have suggestions. The form can be found here.
The final programme will be published in early June.
We are also looking for volunteers. If you are interested in making Archipelacon 2 happen, please sign up on our website at https://archipelacon.org/volunteer/
Archipelacon 2 is financed by sales of memberships and T-shirts, vendor table rentals, as well as grants. This year’s event has received grants from PAF, Suomen Kulttuurirahasto, and Svenska Kulturfonden. We thank our sponsors for their generous support!
The Psyche spacecraft launched nearly two years ago and is currently on its way to rendezvous with a unique asteroid in an effort to understand the origins of Earth. Although it’s still a few years away from orbiting the asteroid, which bears the same name, the Psyche mission has run into an issue with its propulsion system that forced it to power off its thrusters.
NASA engineers with the Psyche mission are investigating the root cause of a recent decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system, an issue that needs to be resolved before mid-June so that it doesn’t affect the mission’s trajectory. “The mission team has chosen to defer thrusting while engineers work to understand the pressure decrease,” NASA wrote in an update.
Psyche launched in October 2023, beginning a 2.2 billion-mile journey to a metal-rich asteroid located in the main belt. The spacecraft began firing its thrusters in May 2024, using a solar electric propulsion system that relies on solar energy to generate power for four electric thrusters. On April 1, the spacecraft detected a pressure drop in the line that delivers xenon gas to the thrusters, which went from 36 pounds per square inch (psi) to about 26 psi, according to NASA. In response to the sudden decrease, the spacecraft automatically powered off its thrusters…
“Let’s do the time warp again!” This year marks the 50th anniversary of the musical film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” To celebrate the occasion, a newly restored and remastered version of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” will be let loose in 4K Ultra HD, along with the debut of a new anniversary logo.
Audiences were first introduced to the movie in 1975 and it quickly became a cult classic. It’s based on the musical play by Richard O’Brien, and has continued to grow with late-night screenings, fan costumes, and has created a unique moviegoing experience with dance parties. To this day, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” still makes history as the longest-running theatrical release of all time.
The Walt Disney Studios Restoration team oversaw the 10-month project to digitally scan and preserve the film.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Nina Törnudd,Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark.]
Kathy Bond today posted an “Apology and Response From Chair” at the Seattle Worldcon 2025 website to address the brewing controversy about the committee using ChatGPT as part of its process for screening program participants.
First and foremost, as chair of the Seattle Worldcon, I sincerely apologize for the use of ChatGPT in our program vetting process. Additionally, I regret releasing a statement that did not address the concerns of our community. My initial statement on the use of AI tools in program vetting was incomplete, flawed, and missed the most crucial points. I acknowledge my mistake and am truly sorry for the harm it caused.
There is much more that needs to be done to address this harm, but it will take some time to develop a comprehensive response and fuller apology over the weekend. We will release a response by Tuesday of next week that provides a transparent explanation of the process that was used, answers more of the questions and concerns we have received, and openly outlines our next steps.
Seattle Worldcon 2025 Chair Kathy Bond today issued a public statement attempting to defend the use of ChatGPT as part of the screening process for program participants. The comments have been highly negative.
…We received more than 1,300 panelist applicants for Seattle Worldcon 2025. Building on the work of previous Worldcons, we chose to vet program participants before inviting them to be on our program. We communicated this intention to applicants in the instructions of our panelist interest form.
In order to enhance our process for vetting, volunteer staff also chose to test a process utilizing a script that used ChatGPT. The sole purpose of using this LLM was to automate and aggregate the usual online searches for participant vetting, which can take up to 10–30 minutes per applicant as you enter a person’s name, plus the search terms one by one. Using this script drastically shortened the search process by finding and aggregating sources to review.
Specifically, we created a query, including a requirement to provide sources, and entered no information about the applicant into the script except for their name. As generative AI can be unreliable, we built in an additional step for human review of all results with additional searches done by a human as necessary. An expert in LLMs who has been working in the field since the 1990s reviewed our process and found that privacy was protected and respected, but cautioned that, as we knew, the process might return false results.
The results were then passed back to the Program division head and track leads. Track leads who were interested in participants provided additional review of the results. Absolutely no participants were denied a place on the program based solely on the LLM search. Once again, let us reiterate that no participants were denied a place on the program based solely on the LLM search.
Using this process saved literally hundreds of hours of volunteer staff time, and we believe it resulted in more accurate vetting after the step of checking any purported negative results….
LibGen contains millions of pirated books and research papers, built over nearly two decades. Court documents show Meta torrented a version of it to build its AI.
Here’s an example of what is being discovered.
But writers refuse to despair.
Search the LibGen database here, and peer inside a pirated library of millions of books and research papers used by Meta and others:
(2) BORDER AROUND THE WORLDCON. Seattle Worldcon 2025 chair Kathy Bond today responded to concerns about Trump administration policies and the hazards they create for international visitors to the U.S. Here are some excerpts:
I am writing this statement in order to share the status of Seattle Worldcon’s current journey through living up to our theme of Building Yesterday’s Future—For Everyone. We have received a number of concerns asking how the convention will respond to orders and actions of the U.S. government, which we condemn, that create hostile conditions and travel barriers for LGBTQ+ members and international members….
… We do not have a list of all the steps we are going to take in light of the political landscape right now, as it continues to shift rapidly. We know this is not a particularly satisfying answer in light of the many concerns that we have heard from you about our members who need to enter the United States and what they might encounter trying to cross the border. We are not minimizing those concerns. The situation is frightening, and we encourage our members to make the best decisions for themselves even if that means that we will miss you at our convention. At the same time we are committed to not cancelling the in-person Worldcon as some have suggested because it is even more important than ever to gather with those who are able to do so to discuss our theme and celebrate the power of SFF to imagine different societies.
We are investigating what concrete actions we can take and offer to our members. Our Code of Conduct, Diversity Commitment, and Anti-Racism Statement provide the guidelines we are using in making these determinations. We would also like to remind people about what we are already doing.
First, we have in place a Virtual Membership for people who determine that they are no longer safe traveling to the U.S or cannot attend for other reasons…
Second, building on the work of other Worldcons and conventions, we will be having Safer Spaces Lounges available for members of marginalized communities who attend the convention in person. These spaces will be marked on convention maps.
Third, we will be drafting a resource guide to collate many of the wonderful resources that local organizations have already put together. In the interim, the ACLU of Washington has several Know Your Rights publications available, as does Northwest Immigrants Rights Project for individuals concerned about their rights while traveling.
Fourth, we will be fundraising for the following nonprofit organizations at the convention: Books to Prisoners, The Bureau of Fearless Ideas, and Hugo House. All of these organizations do important work to promote literacy education in the Seattle area and help build community resilience.
Finally, the political landscape is changing daily and impacting all of us in differing, but profound ways. Our staff is not immune. Many of our staff are deeply, personally impacted by the actions of the U.S. president, as his bigoted and hateful orders target our shared humanity. Many of us are federal employees who are now navigating what is happening to the civil service, terminations from our careers, and extreme uncertainty about our livelihoods. Many of us are also still dealing with the impact of the Los Angeles fires, Hurricane Helene, tornadoes, and other recent severe weather events on our families, loved ones, and friends. As citizens in the U.S. and around the world, we have many concerns, which are probably similar to yours. We all care deeply about our community and about Worldcon and are working diligently to navigate all of the waters that surround us, but we are also human with all the fallibility, blind spots, and competing demands on our time that entails.
This is a time to support each other. If you have questions about how we can support you in deciding about your Worldcon attendance, please reach out to [email protected].
(3) ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY. Frank Catalano, journalist, past SFWA Secretary, and File 770 contributor, amplified the expressed concerns in a Facebook post.
…The climate, and practices, at the border have changed a lot since Seattle committee won its bid.
…I think it now requires even more caution if you’re a writer or artist from outside the U.S. who considers conventions like this to be part of your work.
Asked at border crossings your purpose for entering the U.S.? In the past, saying you were attending a science-fiction convention might have gotten a weird look and a wave. Now, if you also say you work in the field, it may get you denied entry without an appropriate visa. Or even detained.
This isn’t alarmism. It’s happened to Canadian and U.K. citizens trying to enter the U.S. recently whose visa paperwork, in the eyes of those at the border, was not in order.
I’m attending Worldcon. I’d love to see all of you there, especially my international colleagues.
But take care. Prepare. Based on recent events, casual answers that led to a wave of flexibility in the past may keep you from entering, or returning home, in a timely manner.
After 11 years as Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher of Uncanny Magazine, Lynne M. Thomas is stepping down from her editorial duties starting with Issue 64, and will also be stepping down as Co-Publisher starting withIssue 67. Going forward, Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher Michael Damian Thomas will continue solo in both of these roles.
As many of you know, Lynne worked at Uncanny Magazine while also working as a rare books librarian, most recently as the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For over 15 years, Lynne has balanced rare book librarianship with an editorial and publishing career in science fiction and fantasy, but she is now shifting her focus to her day job as she works towards her rare book librarianship goals. The entire Uncanny Magazine staff warmly wishes Lynne the best of luck going forward!
Over the years, Michael gradually took over most of the editorial and publishing responsibilities at the magazine, and he is prepared for the work ahead and excited to continue sharing his vision as the sole Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Uncanny Magazine.
Today, Wheaton announced a brand new weekly audiobook podcast called It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, in which he narrates speculative fiction stories he loves from places like Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Clark’s World Magazine, and On Spec. The podcast launches on March 26, 2025, anywhere you get your podcasts.
We got a chance to chat with Wheaton about the inspiration behind it, what we’re going to experience, and getting the blessing of fellow Star Trek actor LeVar Burton.
Vital Thrills: Tell us all about “It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton”!
Wil Wheaton: …Our first season is mostly established authors. We have a couple of multiple Hugo and Nebula finalists who have written incredible works because I just wanted to have something to show people in a few months, or however long it takes, so I could say to them, look, this is what I’m doing. This is what I want to do. Do you want to pitch us?
And that’s the ultimate goal. The thing that pushed that all from an idea into a thing that I worked on and the thing that is coming out was my love of LeVar Burton’s podcast, “LeVar Burton Reads.” When he was finishing his podcast, I was at a point where I had to decide: am I going to do this, or am I just going to record a thing for my friend?
I asked LeVar what he thought, and I said, “This is what I’m thinking about doing, and this is how I’m thinking about doing it, and I just really want to make sure that I don’t step on your toes. You absolutely inspire it.”
And it was so awesome. We were at the Burbank airport waiting to get on an airplane to go to a convention together, and LeVar just lit up and he hugged me, and he was like, “I’m so excited for you. I love it. It’s such a great idea. I give you my blessing. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please ask.”…
VT: I love that! The book market is so different now with everything online and self-publishing and all that, so a lot of stuff gets buried. This is such a cool way to get stuff out there. Did you have specific criteria in terms of what you were picking? Were there things that you’ve seen before?
Wil Wheaton: There were a couple of things that I’d seen before. I knew, for instance, that I loved Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Clarkesworld. I’ve been reading them for years, and when I was in the beginning, I went and looked for things… I was like, I’m going to do this entirely on my own.
And I went looking for new things. I went to all the writers’ markets. I went to all the very, very, very small publications. Most of ’em are online only in the double digits only. And I’m like, I’m going to find gems here. I know there are. And it turns out that I’m not good at that. It turns out that I don’t have that editorial skill.
So I went back to, okay, I love these magazines, and I love these editors. And as it turns out, a good friend of mine has a great relationship with Lynne and Michael Thomas, who are the editors of Uncanny, and she offered to make an introduction for me. I talked to them, and I told them what I wanted to do, and they were so excited.
They were on board before I even finished, before I got to the part of the pitch where I was like, “So, do you want to work together?” They were like, “So what do you need from us?” I was like, “Holy crap. This is amazing.” Every step of the way….
VT: The podcast launches on March 26 — where can everybody find it?
Wil Wheaton: You can get it wherever you get podcasts. I’ve asked the team to make sure that it’s in all the usual places. So Apple Podcasts is probably the biggest, most centralized place for people to find it, but it’s also on Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Pandora, iHeart, and Spotify. I have a homepage for the podcast at WilWheaton.net/Podcast. And there’s a list there with links to all the different places that it’s online at the moment….
(6) C.L. MOORE’S SHAMBLEAU. [Item by Rich Horton.] I thought this essay very interesting. There’s a paywall but you get two free per month. “The Soul Should Not Be Handled” by B.D. McClay in The Point Magazine.
… I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake. If somebody asked me whether I preferred literary fiction to genre fiction (or vice versa) I would say, I hope, that I prefer good fiction to bad fiction. I think that this is a good response to a silly question, but there’s another one we could ask that’s a little more interesting: Is what makes a genre story good the same thing that makes realistic fiction good? Part of what makes genre genre is its place in a certain tradition with certain conventions and stock elements. If we are reading a detective story, we have certain figures and moments we come to expect: the amateur detective, the hapless sidekick, the suspicious woman, a second crime, a red herring, a solution. Part of what makes a detective story good or bad is its use of these expectations—a use that can (and often does) include subverting them. When it comes to speculative fiction, another dimension is that the boundaries between a fan, a professional and an amateur are never very clear. The landscape is more horizontal. You could, if you wanted, start a fanzine and get important writers to contribute; you could publish your first story ever in a magazine and get a letter from one of your most famous peers. Within genre, work can be wildly experimental, but this experiment takes place in a context of shared touchstones and trust in the audience. Writers of speculative fiction want to be read, and they have a good idea of who is out there reading their work….
…So let’s go back to that old issue of Weird Tales—it’s from November 1933—and to the first entry in the table of contents: “Shambleau,” “an utterly strange story” (the table of contents says) “about an alluring female creature that was neither beast nor human, neither ghost nor vampire.”…
The Big Bang Theory spinoff on Max is untitled no more — and it’s good news and bad news for Kevin Sussman’s Stuart Bloom character.
The series, which remains in development, will be titled Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Deadline has learned. That puts Stuart at the center of the offshoot but also hints that the beloved sidekick, who could never quite catch a break on Big Bang, might not have better luck on his own….
…On Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Sussman is joined by fellow Big Bang alums Lauren Lapkus, who plays Stuart’s girlfriend Denise, Brian Posehn (Bert Kibbler) and John Ross Bowie (Barry Kripke). Because the series is still awaiting a green light, the quartet are not formally cast in it but have talent holding deals with WBTV with the purpose of starring in the spinoff once it’s picked up.
For the first time, legendary visual futurist Syd Mead will have a major exhibition of his paintings. “Future Pastime” will run March 28-May 21 at the former Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery space in Chelsea.
Long before the metaverse, Mead was crafting immersive future worlds that have shaped our collective imagination and became a defining force in science fiction cinema, designing iconic worlds. From the neon-drenched streets of Blade Runner (1982) to the sleek, geometric landscapes of TRON (1982), his influence on sci-fi films is undeniable. His designs also impacted Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 2010 (1984), Aliens (1986), and many more. They even inspired Elon Musk’s Cybertruck.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1933, Mead was a visionary artist who redefined how we imagine the future. After serving in the U.S. Army, he studied at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, blending inspiration from classical masters like Caravaggio with the Space Age musings of Chesley Bonestell to create a singular and unprecedented art style: visions of the future rendered wholly with classical technique. His philosophy of science fiction as “reality ahead of schedule” defined a career that bridged imagination and reality. He died in 2019….
(9) TRIBUTE TO GINJER BUCHANAN. [Written by Cat Eldridge.] I have come to honor one of our most excellent Editors ever, Ginjer Buchanan. She was the Editor-in-Chief at Ace Books and Roc Books, two sff imprints of Penguin Books, where she stayed for an extraordinary thirty years before retiring. Prior to that, she was consulting editor for the Star Trek tie-ins at Pocket Books and an outside reader for the Science Fiction Book Club which just ended its long run.
And yes, she was active in fandom from an early age which included being a founding member of the Western Pennsylvania Science Fiction Association (WPSFA, or “Woops-fa” as it was affectionately known as she noted in a Locus interview.)
Berkley president and publisher Leslie Gelbman upon her retirement said of her: “During her thirty years with Ace and Roc, Ginjer was essential in growing our science fiction and fantasy list and launching the careers of several bestselling authors. Her love for the genre and books in general and dedication to her authors is unparalleled, and she’s a key reason Ace/Roc is one of the preeminent science fiction-fantasy publishers.”
She won a Hugo at Loncon 3 for Best Editor, Long Form and was nominated for the same at Nippon 2007, Denvention 3, Anticipation, Aussiecon 4 and Renovation.
She won the Nebula Solstice Award in 2013, and the same year saw her garner the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (aka the Skylark). She was nominated in 2006 for a World Fantasy Award in the Special Award, Professional category for her work Ace Books but alas did not win.
She was the Toastmaster at the World Fantasy Convention in 1989, and a Guest of Honor at ArmadilloCon in 1988, Foolscap in 2000 and at OryCon in 2008. Ginjer was also a Guest of Honor at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon, and a GOH at World Fantasy Con in New Orleans in 2022.
And yes, she’s written fiction. Her sole novel is a Highlander series tie-in, White Silence. It’s a most excellent novel, well worth reading, especially if you are a fan of that series. Yes I am. She’s got a deft feel for the characters and the milieu they’re a part of. Yes, it’s available from the usual suspects.
She’s also penned three short pieces of fiction, “The End of Summer by The Great Sea” in the Alternate Kennedys anthology, “Cathachresis” in the More Whatdunits anthology, and “If Horses Were Wishes …” in the By Any Other Fame anthology. The first two are edited by Mike Resnick alone, the last by Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. All three are available are to be had from the usual suspects.
So being a serious Firefly fan, she has an essay, “Who Killed Firefly?” in the Jane Espenson edited Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly collection. It’s available from the usual suspects. And yes, it’s a lot of fun to read if you’re a Firefly fan. Really it is.
And being a fan of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, she penned “The Journey of Jonathan Levenson: From Scenery to Sacrifice” which was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide, Volume 3 edited by Paul Ruditis. This is not to be had from the usual suspects.
Oh, and she has one published poem, “Four Views of Necon” published in Cemetery Dance’s The Big Book of Necon anthology edited by Bob Booth. No luck on this one either.
All in all, a truly amazing individual who has contributed in oh so many ways to our community, so let’s toast her now as she so richly deserves to be.
Ginjer Buchanan
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Carpe Diem finds small businesses have it hard in Middle-Earth, too.
If there’s one man who could reliably be considered to have the history of the DC Universe at his fingertips, it’d be Barry Allen — the former Flash who was the first hero to travel the multiverse and uncover the secrets behind DC’s reality. If there were two, then the other would be real-life comic book writer Mark Waid, long-time DC expert and writer of everything from The Flash and Kingdom Come to Action Comics and Justice League Unlimited. Starting this June, the two will be collaborating (well, kind of) to make fans’ dreams come true with the four-issue comic book series New History of the DC Universe.
Written by Waid and starring the erstwhile Mr. Allen, the series is intended to reveal the truth behind the DCU — including some secrets even longtime fans might be surprised by.
“This is my dream project,” Waid said in a statement about the series. “It’s a chance to realign all of DC’s sprawling continuity into one master timeline, and to be joined by some of comics’ greatest artists to make it shine. With new information for even longtime fans, plus Easter eggs galore, this series will be an essential read for DC fans.”
The first issue will feature art from Jerry Ordway and Todd Nauck, and will cover everything from the beginnings of the DCU through the origins of the Justice Society of America. Future issues will see an “all-star line-up of interior artists” contribute, according to DC, with an equally impressive group of cover artists working on the title throughout….
… This isn’t the first time DC has released an official version of its comic book canon: in 1986, the company published History of the DC Universe by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, the two creators who had just rebooted everything in the previous year’s Crisis on Infinite Earths series. It’s also not the first time that Mark Waid has worked on a project of this scope; in 2019, he wrote the six-issue History of the Marvel Universe, illustrated by Javier Rodriguez….
Disney investors on Thursday voted down a proposal that the entertainment giant cease its participation in a prominent LGBTQ rights organization’s equality ratings program.
The proposal — requesting that Disney “cease” its participation in the Human Rights Campaign‘s annual Corporate Equality Index — was submitted by right-wing think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, through its Free Enterprise Project initiative. (The FEP calls itself “the original and premier opponent of the woke takeover of American corporate life.”)
“When corporations take extreme positions, they destroy shareholder value by alienating large portions of their customers and investors. This proposal provides Disney with an opportunity to move back to neutral,” the FEP’s proposal stated. It noted that since 2007, Disney has received a “perfect score” on the CEI, “which can only be attained by abiding by its partisan, divisive and increasingly radical criteria.”…
… Disney’s board recommended voting against the proposal to end its participation in the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index. Shareholders concurred, with only 1% of shares voted in favor the proposal, according to the preliminary tally….
A foreign language sci-fi movie is headed to U.S. movie theaters this spring, but audiences won’t have to groan about subtitles. For the first time, an international feature film will look and sound as if it was made in English thanks to artificial intelligence.
Though the supernatural Swedish adventure “Watch the Skies” was made in its native tongue, AI company Flawless has digitally altered the film’s images and sound so character mouth movements and speech will be perfectly synced for English speaking viewers. The tech uses voices of the original cast to create dubs, and is compliant with SAG-AFTRA.
AMC Theatres, the nation’s top movie chain, has committed 100 screens to the project in the top 20 markets across America. Flawless has partnered with distributor XYZ films to roll the film out to cineplexes on May 9.
SpaceX’s Crew-9 astronauts had some company in the water after they splashed down on Tuesday afternoon (March 18).
The Crew-9 mission returned to Earth at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) on Tuesday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida. A fleet of recovery vessels soon converged on Crew-9‘s Dragon capsule, named Freedom — and so did some curious marine mammals, who wanted to check out this strange object that fell from the sky into their domain.
Freedom carried four people — NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos — home from the International Space Station (ISS)…
…Crew-9’s splashdown was memorable and dramatic even before the dolphins showed up. It brought an end to the long space saga of Wilmore and Williams, which was a big story from the outset but became turbo-charged recently….
While in space, astronauts must exercise two hours per day, every day,according to a NASA pamphlet, as zero-gravity conditions can cause “bone and muscle deterioration” over time. Williams worked out first thing as part of her morning routine — waking up at 5:30 a.m. GMT and “running, cycling, and weightlifting” until 7:30 a.m., according to ESPN.(NASA did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It’s request for comment on the amount of control Williams had over her schedule.)
Wilmore and Williams will now have to spend 45 days re-acclimatizing to Earth’s gravity, NPR reports. Their new routines will include a “personalized recovery program” of two hours per day that they spend exercising with personal trainers….
Dark energy, the mysterious force powering the expansion of the universe, appears to be weakening, according to a survey that could “overthrow” scientists’ current understanding of the fate of the cosmos.
If confirmed, the results from the dark energy spectroscopic instrument (Desi) team at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona would have profound implications for theories about the evolution of the universe, opening up the possibility that its current expansion could eventually go into reverse in a “big crunch”.
A suggestion that dark energy reached a peak billions of years ago would also herald the first substantial change in decades to the widely accepted theoretical model of the universe….
… Dark energy has been assumed to be a constant, which would imply the universe will meet its end in a desolate scenario called the “big freeze”, when everything is eventually so far apart that even light cannot bridge the gap between galaxies. The latest findings, announced on Thursday at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, challenge that prevailing view.
Desi uses its 5,000 fibreoptic “eyes” to map the cosmos with unprecedented precision. Its latest data release captures 15m galaxies, spanning 11bn years of history, which astronomers have used to create the most detailed three-dimensional map of the universe to date.
The results suggest that dark energy reached a peak in strength when the universe was about 70% of its current age and it is now about 10% weaker. This would mean the rate of expansion is still accelerating, but that dark energy is gently lifting its foot off the pedal.…
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, N., Frank Catalano, Matthew Kressel, Rich Horton, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
By Vincent Docherty: The traditional Q&A was held at SMOFcon 41 on Saturday in the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, site of a number of previous conventions, including Westercon.
The Q&A was hosted by Vincent Docherty and Theresa (TR) Renner, and featured presentations by and questions for future SMOFcon bids, the upcoming seated Worldcons and future Worldcon bids, now including an exploratory bid for Maastricht in the Netherlands for 2032. Several of these had completed questionnaires in advance.
FUTURE SMOFCONS. SMOFcon 42 will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, 5-7 Dec 2025. It will be chaired by Carolina Gómez Lagerlöf, who presented the bid, which was unopposed and voted in by acclamation. The convention website is live including the membership registration page. Hotel booking will open in January.
Expressions of interest for future SMOFcons were presented, including:
DC/MD/VA (run by BWAWA and chaired by Cathy Green) in 2026
A 2027 LA, CA to Mexico cruise ship based SMOFcon bid led by Ron Oakes
A 2027 European SMOFcon bid, site tbc, (likely in a ‘warmer country’), presented by Tammy Coxen on behalf of various interested groups
GLASGOW 2024 PASS-ALONG FUNDS REPORT. The Q&A then heard a brief message from Glasgow 2024, confirming that Pass-along-funds of £20,000 each has been given to the 2025 and 2026 Worldcons and similar will be given to the selected 2027 Worldcon.
SEATED WORLDCONS. The seated 2025 and 2026 Worldcons then gave presentations.
Joyce Lloyd, chair of the recently selected 2026 Worldcon LAcon V, spoke about how the convention is progressing, and introduced the convention mascot ‘Fuzzy’, in honor of the late Marilyn “Fuzzy Pink” Niven.
FUTURE WORLDCON BIDS. The Q&A then focused on bids and expressions of intent for Worldcons in later years, covering 2027-2032.
2027. The two bids for the 2027 Worldcon provided important updates.
The chair of the Montréal in 2027 bid, Terry Fong, and other committee members, responded to a number of questions from Q&A attendees, and announced that they have filed officially with the site selection administrator of Seattle 2025, which will host the 2027 vote.
The Tel Aviv 2027 Worldcon bid sent a message to the Q&A. Bid chair Guy Kovel wrote: “Regrettably, due to the situation in Israel, we would have to push our bid to a later year, we have not yet made an announcement as we are still in internal discussions as to what year we would be able to bid for.”
As a result, Montreal in 2027 is the only currently active bid for the 2027 Worldcon.
2028. The two bids for the 2028 Worldcon, were unable to attend in person, and sent messages and materials for the Q&A session.
Brisbane, Australia in 2028, bid chair Random Jones, sent a message which was read out by the Q&A hosts, including that the date of the proposed convention has been changed to be closer to the solar eclipse of 22nd July 2028 which will be visible from Sydney. The bid provided materials to be shared: ”the shiny brochure that the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre put together with us for Worldcon Glasgow. It’s too big to include in the mailing list, so it can be found here. It’s slightly out of date, so here are the updated answers to the questionnaire.”
The Q&A then heard from later bids and expressions of interest.
2029. Dublin in 2029 bid co-chair Brian Nisbet, provided greetings from co-chair Marguerite Smith and the latest news from the bid, including their intent to use the Convention Centre, Dublin (CCD), used by the 2019 Dublin Worldcon, along with the nearby National College of Ireland (NCI) facility. Further details in their completed questionnaire.
2030. Olav Rokne, representing the Edmonton in 2030 bid, presented initial details of their recently announced bid, supported by a questionnaire.
2031. A representative of the Texas in 2031 bid reiterated their intent, and that work is ongoing to build the team and to select a suitable city and venue.
2032. Q&A host Vincent Docherty announced information about an emerging group of fans and conrunners in the Netherlands, who are investigating the possibility of a Dutch worldcon in 2032. They are looking at the MECC facility in Maastricht as a potential venue. The bid team indicated that if it goes on, they will announce the bid probably in Seattle.
BEYOND. The host then reminded the audience that with bids now extending to 2032, it is germane to consider the upcoming centenary/centennial in 2039 of the very first Worldcon, in 1939, (Wikipedia link), which was held in New York.
In 2025 there will be further opportunities for the bids to provide updates at various conventions, in particular at Seattle 2025 and SMOFcon 42.
(1) URSULA VERNON’S HUGO ACCEPTANCE SPEECH. Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon’s pen name) won the Best Novel Hugo today. Arley Sorg delivered her acceptance remarks and by popular demand she has published them in a free Patreon post titled “The Light At The End Of The Frog”.
… There are a lot of serious and heavy things I could say right now, and probably I should. But other people have said them better and more movingly than I ever will. So instead I want to share something wonderful and disgusting and maybe a little inspiring with you.
There is a species of water beetle that regularly gets swallowed whole by frogs. And while there’s a lot of things you can do to keep from being eaten, once you’re inside a frog, your options are severely limited….
(2) MEDICAL UPDATE. RiverFlow, co-editor of this year’s Hugo-winning fanzine Zero Gravity Newspaper, was hospitalized today reports Zimozi Natsuco in a File 770 comment here. More details at the link.
(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON PHOTO GALLERIES ACCESS. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Adaoli/SF Light Year sent me a clean version of the QR codes for the official photo galleries.
(4) GET SEATTLE 2025 PR 0. Seattle 2025 is now officially seated after yesterday’s site selection vote. Their Guests of Honor will be Martha Wells, Donato Giancola, Bridget Landry, and Alexander James Adams with Hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl. Download Seattle Worldcon 2025 Progress Report 0 at the link. The chair told followers in a message:
My name is Kathy Bond, Chair of this Worldcon, and I am absolutely thrilled to announce that Seattle will have the honor of hosting you all for the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention. I love Seattle, especially when it rains, and I cannot wait to share with you all of the rich, vibrant, creative life in the people and places of this city. I hope that you will be able to join us in person or virtually if a trip to Seattle is not in the cards.
Worldcon cannot take place without every member of this community. All of the plans and dreams that have led us here to this moment would not have been possible without the volunteers who helped sit at tables, who talked to each other and you about Seattle, and without the financial support of buying pre-support memberships. Every tiny act of volunteerism built this bid and helped us win. And, we still need those acts of volunteerism. Come join our community of makers, doers, and shapers for a few hours during the convention or throughout this planning process.
My vision for this Worldcon is to bring our Pacific Northwest community and our Worldcon community together to learn from each other, to create with each other, and to build with each other the type of inclusive community that our best genre fiction inspires us to build. Building Yesterday’s Future For Everyone is an acknowledgement that we have not successfully built the future we have aspired to but that we can still be inspired by the optimism of the past to keep building. We remember our yesterdays; we work for our better futures….
(5) BULGACON 2023. [Item by Valentin D. Ivanov.] Bulgacon is the annual national Bulgarian SFF convention. The 2023 edition took place in Plovdiv from September 22-24 with help from the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. The event gathered some international participation including Alex Schvartsman, Andreas Eschbach, Francesco Verso, Nina Horvath, Peter Watts and Wole Talabi, among others.
A bilingual Bulgarian/English booklet with the program and the list of panelists can be seen in PDF format here at the convention website.
The Clarion Foundation wishes to honor the impact of the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund as it winds down after 43 years of support. Thanks to Paul Wrigley and Debbie Cross, and their tireless fundraising efforts through the Oregon Science Fiction Conventions Inc, the Petrey scholarship stands as the oldest ongoing scholarship supporting Clarion students, and has demonstrated the critical importance of scholarship support in making the Workshop possible. Over the years it has awarded 71 scholarships to Clarion and Clarion West students.
The fund was created in honor of Susan C. Petrey, an American fantasy writer of short fiction who was early in her career when she passed. Her work would later go on to be posthumously nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo Award. Thanks to Paul and Debbie, her legacy and community spirit have endured.
The Petrey Scholarship is particularly appreciated for its demonstration of the ways that communities built around a special person or a targeted cause — in this case, both — can have philanthropic impact beyond what the original donors might have imagined. Along with Paul and Debbie, we sincerely thank all of the fund supporters, and look forward to building more such communities in the coming years and decades.
“On behalf of the Clarion Foundation board and all the many recipients of this important scholarship over the years, we want to express our deepest appreciation to Debbie, Paul, and the OFSCI,” said Clarion Foundation President Karen J. Fowler. “Your generosity over so many years has been simply extraordinary. I don’t know how we can begin to thank you. I feel all the end-of-an-era sadness, but a sadness overwhelmed with gratitude.”
Former recipients of the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund are welcome to share the importance of their scholarship to their Clarion experience and we will pass them along.
Which book are you ashamed not to have read? I’ve never read Proust.
What was the last lie you told? I don’t tell lies any more, because my memory is going.
What is your guiltiest pleasure? Really fancy sushi.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 21, 1904 — Edmond Hamilton. One of the prolific writers for Weird Tales from the late 20s to the late 40s, writing nearly eighty stories. (Lovecraft and Howard were the other key writers.) Sources say that through the late 1920s and early 1930s Hamilton wrote for all of the SF pulp magazines then publishing. His story “The Island of Unreason” (Wonder Stories, May 1933) won the first Jules Verne Prize as the best SF story of the year. This was the very first SF prize awarded by a vote of fans, which one source holds to be a precursor of the Hugo Awards. From the early 40s to the late 60s, he worked for DC, in stories about Superman and Batman. He created the Space Ranger character with Gardner Fox and Bob Brown. On December 31, 1946, Hamilton married fellow science fiction author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett. Now there is another story as well. (Died 1977.)
Born October 21, 1914 — Martin Gardner. He was one of leading authorities on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll’s two Alice books, is still a bestseller. He was considered the doyen (your word to learn today) of American puzzlers. And, to make him even more impressive, in 1999 Magic magazine named Gardner one of the “100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century”. Cool! (Died 2010.)
Born October 21, 1929 — Ursula K. Le Guin. Writer, Artist, Editor, Poet, and Translator. She called herself a “Narrative American”. And she most emphatically did not consider herself to be a genre writer – instead preferring to be known as an “American novelist”. Oh, she wrote genre fiction with quite some brilliance, be it the Earthsea sequence, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or Always Coming Home. Her upbringing as the daughter of two academics, one who was an anthropologist and the other who had a graduate degree in psychology, with a home library full of SF, showed in her writing. She wrote reviews and forewards for others’ books, gave academic talks, and did translations as well. Without counting reader’s choice awards, her works received more than 100 nominations for pretty much every genre award in existence, winning most of them at least once; she is one of a very small group of people who have won both Hugo and Nebula Awards in all four fiction length categories. She was Guest of Honor at several conventions, including the 1975 Worldcon; was the second woman to be named SFWA Grand Master; was given a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement; and was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In later years, she took up internet blogging with great delight, writing essays and poems, and posting pictures and stories of her cat Pard; these were compiled into a non-fiction collection, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, which won a posthumous Hugo for Best Related Work. Her last Hugo was at Dublin 2019 for The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition which was illustrated by Charles Vess. (Died 2018.)
Born October 21, 1971 — Hal Duncan, 52. Computer Programmer and Writer from Scotland whose first novel, Vellum: The Book of All Hours, won a Spectrum Award and received nominations for World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Kurd Laßwitz, Prix Imaginaire, and Locus Best First Novel Awards, as well as winning a Tahtivaeltaja Award for best science fiction novel published in Finnish. His collection Scruffians! and his non-fiction work Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions were also both finalists for British Fantasy Awards. An outspoken advocate and blogger for LGBTQ rights, he was a contributor to Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project.
Born October 21, 1974 — Chris Garcia, 49. He’s editor of The Drink Tank and several other fanzines. He won a Hugo Award at Renovation with co-editor James Bacon for The Drink Tank after being nominated from 2010 to 2013. He was nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo three years straight starting in 2010. His acceptance speech for the Hugo at Renovation was itself nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form Hugo at Chicon 7. I can’t begin to list all his feats and honors here.
He might be nearing 90, but one relentlessly athletic adventurer is poised for a pop-culture reappreciation.
Flash Gordon, the intergalactic space warrior who predates Superman and Batman as an iconic American action-comic hero sprung from Depression-era pages — as well as a Hollywood screen star who inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars — is returning to newspapers.
King Features Syndicate, whichintroduced the character in 1934, will relaunch the comic strip “Flash Gordon” beginning Sunday after a two-decade absence — featuring a new look and a new artist. (The Sunday and daily strips will be available online and in print.)…
Schkade won a competitivetryout earlier this year to script and draw the strip, shortly before King announced a licensing deal with Mad Cave Studios, which will begin publishing other original “Flash Gordon” narratives, graphic novels and comic reprints beginning next year.
How will “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s paean to economic growth and artificial intelligence, play to a wider audience? The reviews are in from two award-winning writers who are familiar with the impact of generative AI on creative professions.
“I think it’s mostly nonsense,” science-fiction writer Ted Chiang said Thursday at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle.
Chiang, a longtime Seattle-area resident, is best-known as the author of “Story of Your Life,” the novella that was adapted for the Oscar-nominated 2016 movie “Arrival.” But he’s also won acclaim as a commentator on AI’s effects for The New Yorker and other publications. Last month, Time magazine included Chiang among the 100 most influential people in AI.
The other writer on the SIFF Cinema stage was Eric Heisserer, the screenwriter who turned Chiang’s story into the script for “Arrival.” Heisserer witnessed the debate over generative AI and the future of work up close as a member of the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America during its recent strike against Hollywood studios.
Both Chiang and Heisserer say AI is too often unjustly portrayed as a high-tech panacea. That claim came through loud and clear in Andreessen’s manifesto, which called AI a “universal problem solver.”
“Technology can solve certain problems, but I think the biggest problems that we face are not problems that have technological solutions,” Chiang said in response. “Climate change probably does not have a technological solution. Wealth inequality does not have a technological solution. Most of these are problems of political will. … And so Marc Andreessen’s manifesto is a prime example of ignoring all of these other realities.”
Chiang took issue with Andreessen’s view that growth is always good. “Growth is untenable on a finite planet, so at some point, we are going to have to think about some alternative to a growth economy, some kind of stable state, because the laws of physics are going to put a stop to growth at some point,” he said.
He also called attention to Andreessen’s track record as a tech commentator. “He was all in on crypto,” Chiang said. “He is all in on the metaverse. Anyone who was so enthusiastic about those things … I think we need to keep that in mind when gauging their credibility about anything they recommend now.”…
…The show is a 2023 take on the 1999 film The Matrix, which fits with the current 90s nostalgia (those skintight PVC trousers will take you right back) but is also alarmingly prescient in its story of humans being usurped by intelligent machines as we enable the march of AI, ever more in thrall to the algorithm….
… Are the Matrix’s hero, Neo (Corey Owens), and his journey a bit lost among all this? Well, yes. With 50 dancers on stage, Free Your Mind is built from large-scale set pieces. Choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy is a master at orchestrating tightly drilled ranks of battle-ready glitching bodies and short, sharp shocks of metrical movement. Although when Sandy himself appears as Morpheus, he reminds us one dancer is sometimes enough. A magisterial performer, he is molten and he is rock….
Astronomers have detected a mysterious blast of radio waves that have taken 8 billion years to reach Earth. The fast radio burst is one of the most distant and energetic ever observed.
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves with unknown origins. The first FRB was discovered in 2007, and since then, hundreds of these quick, cosmic flashes have been detected coming from distant points across the universe.
The burst, named FRB 20220610A, lasted less than a millisecond, but in that fraction of a moment, it released the equivalent of our sun’s energetic emissions over the course of 30 years, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science….
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Valentin D. Ivanov, Nathan Hillstrom, Frank Catalano, Steven French, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
