My first day at Worldcon, or: How to experience a whole new type of imposter syndrome

So today (Thursday) was my first day ever at a Worldcon, and my second day ever of being in Dublin. For those who don’t know, Worldcon is the world science fiction (and fantasy) convention, which is in its 77th (!) year and takes place in a different location each time. Also for those who don’t know, Dublin is definitely not in the UK (the only boo of the convention so far was for an American author who used the phrase “here in the UK…”).

I won’t go into detail on all the talks I went to, except to say that for anyone interested in South Asian SFF, there’s a handy link here from one presenter with the latest and I presume greatest. I do want to talk about the Opening Ceremony.

Opening Worldcon (after a full day of programming…)

Now, having been to a number of academic conferences, I have certain expectations about opening ceremonies. There’s usually a keynote speaker who talks about their amazing, career-spanning work, and you usually walk away with exciting new knowledge. Plus there’s usually a weird, supposedly native, performance (some are more authentic than others).

While the Worldcon opening ceremony certainly had some interesting performances, there’s not much I learned about it except that it’s very old. As part of the ceremony, they not only held the Retro Hugos (retroactively celebrating the SFF that came out in 1944, a worthy goal except for the fact that most everyone of the recipients is dead and most surrogates had absolutely nothing to do with the winner…), but also gave out fan awards to those who have gone above and beyond as part of the First Fandom, the oldest generation of fans.

It’s only natural that these people are celebrated, as they are the main organisers and proponents of the whole thing, and Worldcon would not have survived this long, being the volunteer-run event that it is, without them. However, I personally couldn’t help but feel like an imposter. This is my first Worldcon, and while I vaguely know a few people who are here, the event is so big that there’s a good chance I will never even run into them. Overall, I feel like I’m too much of a slacker to be here. I have heard Dutch spoken all around the con, and yet I don’t know of a single Dutch SFF community.

There are so many nationalities, that no matter where you are from, dear reader, I can guarantee that at least a few of your countrymen and -women are here. As such, I vow here to endeavour to find out where these SFF Dutchies are hiding so that when Worldcon comes to the Netherlands (hopefully) sometime in the 2030s I will know my own community at least a little better!

My kingdom for a time-turner

Aside from feeling like a complete outsider and a fake fan (an accusation all too often thrown at female fans of any subculture, but I digress), I am mainly feeling overwhelmed. There are so many great talks by so many authors and editors I admire that I can’t possibly see all of them. I really hope I’m making the right choices. It doesn’t help that some of the talks take place in an entirely different venue that is a 15-minute walk away, which means you either have to risk it and miss even more or just give up on those talks altogether. First world problems, I know I know.

So here I am, sitting in my hotel room, thinking about all the things I might be missing out on and the people I could be talking to (I’ve seen Seanan McGuire, one of my favourite authors who really deserves to win the Best Series Hugo for her October Daye books, several times, but we’re always going in opposite directions and I don’t want to disturb her anyway…). Who knows what tomorrow brings.

Valuable resource

It may seem like I’m just complaining and feeling down, but that doesn’t mean I think aspiring (genre) authors should miss out on this amazing opportunity. Every day, there are opportunities to talk in a small group with all sorts of authors and editors (you just have to sign up in advance for these events). If you’re shy like me, you can still sit in panels and take in the wisdom and wicked sense of humour of a lot of talented, hard-working people.

Of course, if you are shy (or simply lacking in funds) then a place like Nine Worlds (which I’m hopeful will come back one day), or your own equivalent smaller fan convention near wherever you are, might be more suitable. It won’t have as many star authors, but it should still have enough. More importantly, it’s a lot smaller, which means less queuing, more chance of actually getting into all the panels you want, plus when I went to Nine Worlds I kept seeing the same people around which makes it a lot easier to get social if you’re not someone who is naturally inclined to go and talk to people.

Anyway, those are my first impressions of the insanity that is 6,000-odd people coming from all over the world to get geeky together. Time for bed.

As an addendum, I met up with an Irish friend yesterday (not at the con) who I hadn’t seen in 10 years, which reminded me that I’m the best at picking friends, so if you are at Worldcon this week and see someone in a NaNoWrimo shirt do say hi and see if you can be one of the best people that are my friends. (I hope that sounded like the compliment to my friends it was meant as rather than as an arrogant statement. Internetting is hard.)

Want to read some intimidatingly good fiction? Go to WorldCon!

For those in the UK: Happy National Writing Day! You should really be writing instead of reading on… For the rest of you:

As you can tell by the dearth of posts over the last few months, my non-work-related writing mojo has been lacking of late. To try and get it back – and because it sounds like fun – I signed on to attend the 77th World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon for short) in Dublin this August. For those of you who don’t know, an important part of WorldCon for established writers and editors is the Hugo ceremony, where awards are handed out to (hopefully) worthy winners in a variety of sci-fi related categories.

Who votes for these awards? Attendees! This means that, in order to sway voters, many publishers/nominees provide electronic versions of the novel/novelette/short story/series to eligible voters for free! It’s like the Oscars voting process but less elitist, classist and morally corrupt, hurrah! Also a lot cheaper for everyone involved probably, double hurrah!

So this happened before the Hugos were announced in Japan and if that’s not enough reason to want to be nominated for one, I don’t know what is

Reading time

I’ve started my ‘judging’, naturally, with the best novel category. Since voting closes near the end of July and there’s a lot of categories to get through – plus the books were just mostly cool to read – I read four out of the six books in the space of a week. One of the other ones, I own, but when it came to the last book in the category, I simply got stuck.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book and worthy of its nomination. It’s not the book, it’s partly the format (PDF and eReader does not mix) but mostly it’s me. Two of the four other books, I instantly want to read the sequel of. That’s a lot of investment in a lot of different characters, and I guess you could say it burnt me out.

However, there’s a silver lining to this. Because the whole mush of wonderful words unlocked a new story idea in my brain! It’s tough going for me, writing words when the rest of my life is extremely uncertain and I’m dealing with a lot of work-based rejection (otherwise known as looming unemployment), but it’s new and I’m trying not to think of how bad it is. So thank you, Hugos! Now I just have to read the works in all your other categories and also finish this one more book and, and, and…

Worthy winners of the past

I’m by no means an expert in science fiction, but here are some past Hugo winners whose work I really dig:

• N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (yes, she won three years in a row!). I’ll be doing a ‘Reading inspiration’ post about this one at some point, but just trust me it’s good. Very, extremely, amazingly, terrifyingly good.
• The Ditch Diggers! I’ve talked about this podcast before, but they definitely deserved to finally win it last year and also how cool is it that there’s a podcast category?!
• Seanan McGuire. Her books are always enjoyable and I really hope she wins this year for the highly addictive October Daye series. Every Heart a Doorway, for which she won in the past, is a YA book/novella that talks about what happens after the magic quest, after Alice has been to wonderland and she’s back home unable to readjust. Except it’s not Alice, but a whole new character with a whole new story among other kids with stories of their own. Also there’s murder.
• Any of the nominated zines, as those precious babies deserve lots of love and attention (plus you might be able to submit your work to them!).

I’ll leave you with these suggestions, even though there are many other worthy winners to mention. Feel free to tell me which past Hugo winner/nominee really rocks your world in the comments. You’ll hopefully hear from me again in less than four months this time as at the very least I’ll write a blog post about my trip to WorldCon. Adios again for now, and maybe I’ll meet some of you in Dublin!