The 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow: Some Thoughts

I wrote this on a train on my way to London, and am posting it from home. My Worldcon adventure has decisively concluded. This was my sixth time attending a Worldcon (the first was Montreal in 2009), and as ever I find that they are dizzying, overwhelming experiences, incredibly intense and yet seemingly over in a minute. I thought I'd round up some thoughts on the con, my events, and of course, the Hugos.

First up, Glasgow 2024 hosted the launch of my book, Track Changes: Selected Reviews. This was my first opportunity to see the book as a completed object (Briardene Books publisher Niall Harrison trucked boxes and boxes of it from his home in Newcastle) and I can confirm that, even beyond the satisfaction of seeing a work you've labored over for more than a year take physical form, it is a beautiful object. We held a launch event for the book on Friday, and despite the fact that nearly everyone I spoke to about it seemed to have another event to go to (more on that in a moment), ended up with a respectable crowd, who listened to Niall and I talk about the book's genesis, and reviewing in general, and then lined up to buy their own copies. The book—as well as Niall's own collection, All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays—was also available for purchase in the dealers' room, at the Speculative Insight (a brand new venue for SFF-focused criticism) and Waterstones tables, and did quite respectable business. It was exciting to see the enthusiasm that so many people at the con had for this project, and I hope that as they carry their own copies home, they will find much in the book to enjoy. (If you'd like to buy your own copies of Track Changes or All These Worlds, in paperback or ebook, both are available at the Briardene Books shop.)

But other than that, Abigail, how was the con? In a word, excellent. Glasgow 2024 was a busy, teeming Worldcon, and although some aspects of that experience can't be avoided—there are so many people who I know were at the con, and would have loved to meet up with, but couldn't because we were both so busy—through the efforts of the con committee and its army of volunteers, it never felt imposing or unapproachable. The SEC, though initially confusing, proved to be an excellent convention space with a variety of different room sizes accommodating an absolutely packed programme, and a responsive staff who handled both tech and crowd control with good cheer. Though some rooms were overfull, there was very little of the queueing that marred the Helsinki and Dublin Worldcons, and none of the breathless running back and forth that characterized London in 2014 and Chicago in 2012 (the decision to space each programme item by half an hour from the next one is an eminently sensible one and should be the norm in all Worldcons going forward). There was also a lot of space to sit around, grab a bit to eat—the multiple food trucks meant there was a variety of lunch options—and have your own conversations. When I ran into critics Marina Berlin and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, we spontaneously decided to hold an Interview With the Vampire fan meet-up, and were easily able to commandeer a suitable table.

Glasgow 2024 should also be praised for fully adopting the capabilities of a hybrid con. A vibrant (honestly, perhaps too vibrant) discord community allowed members to trade information and make changes on the fly (we were able to advertise the Interview With the Vampire meet-up on the discord, for example), and offer running commentary on programme items. Like all post-pandemic Worldcons, Glasgow offered virtual memberships that permitted remote attendance at programme items. But a relatively new development is the ability to catch up on recorded programme items even after the convention's end—the Glasgow catch-up site will remain live until the end of the year. Which also leads to my one complaint against the con, the fact that this capability exists for only about a third of programme items—of my own very full schedule, for example, only two panels are available to stream. There are, obviously, technical and logistical challenges to recording and streaming every item on the programme—aside from everything else, every participant has to consent to both—but I think that future Worldcons should have the goal of streaming and recording as much of their programme as possible, and take that goal into consideration when staffing panels and planning for tech support.

(Another point worth making—though I won't class this as a criticism of the Worldcon since it is, unfortunately, the prevailing norm—is COVID mitigation measures, or rather the lack of same. Though Glasgow officially encouraged mask use, in practice there was no requirement to do so, and by my rough estimate at best 5% of convention attendees were masked at any time. As a result, unsurprisingly, every day of the con saw people dropping out after a positive test, and reports of further infections have continued in a steady stream following the con. I was relatively serious about masking, and that—possibly combined with an anti-COVID nasal spray delivered from Thailand—seems to offered sufficient protection from infection. It seems that we have lost the battle for cons enforcing serious anti-COVID measures, but I would suggest that this should make congoers more, rather than less, serious about their own protection.) 

So what about that programme? Here, my only complaint—one that I heard echoed by many others—is that there was too much good stuff (again, this is a problem that might have been solved by a more aggressive attitude towards recording items). In my own programme, I particularly enjoyed a discussion of the Hugo nominees for best novel, best series, and best graphic story (moderated by Duncan Lawie, with fellow panelists Adri Joy, Ed Fortune, and Ruth O'Reilly), in which we debated not only the quality of the three categories, but the utility of the last two; and a conversation on the spectrum of climate fiction (moderated by Su J Sokol, with fellow panelists Jasmin Kirkbride, Niall Harrison, and Tara Campbell) that ranged over both the literary techniques that climate fiction employs, and the utility of the form as a whole. On a more fannish note, it was a lot of fun to discuss the legacy of Discworld with moderator Samuel Poots (who was parachuted in at the last minute and did an excellent job) and panelists Adrian Emery, Anna Stephens, and Rick Danforth, not to mention an extremely fannish and enthusiastic audience, and to get very fannish myself over the phenomenon that is Myst, with moderator Sarah Gulde and panelist Sam Wilson.

In panels I attended, I particularly enjoyed the complementary panel to my Hugo discussion, on the short fiction categories (moderated by Emily January, with panelists Jonathan Strahan, Niall Harrison, Roseanna Pendlebury, and Ruth O'Reilly), which condensed a wide topic—only sixty minutes to cover eighteen stories—in a way that gave ample space to individual nominees while also addressing the fact that this year's short fiction ballots were decidedly meh. The Hay lecture (organized by the SF Foundation and introduced by Graham Sleight) on life extension in science fiction and reality, by William Bains, was informative and energetically presented. There always has to be at least one reviewing panel in any con, and I confess that I always worry that it will end up asking exactly the same questions and giving exactly the same answers. But the one at Glasgow—moderated by Graham Sleight, with panelists John-Henri Holmberg, Liz Bourke, Paul Kincaid, and Roseanna Pendlebury—managed to make both the questions and answers seem new (and might even kick off a new round of conversation, as seen on Niall Harrison's blog). But once again, in reviewing the programme to get information for this post, I was reminded of all the fascinating-looking panels that I wanted to attend but couldn't, and find myself wishing, again, that more of the convention had been recorded and was available for streaming.

Oh, and the Hugos happened, too, right? Yes, in a well-done (if somewhat gaffe-prone) ceremony that both acknowledged the irregularities of last year's awards and decisively set out to prove that the current awards did not share them. I was disappointed that neither Niall Harrison's All These Worlds nor Maureen Kincaid Speller's A Traveller in Time took home the best related work Hugo—review collections, it seems, have a ceiling among voters in this category. But this disappointment was more than made up for by the long overdue win for Strange Horizons in the best semiprozine category, and the extremely timely win for the podcast Octothorpe—which had done such excellent work reporting on Chengdu as it was being planned for and happening—in best fancast. Though, as noted above, I found the short fiction categories underwhelming, I was particularly invested in the best novel race, and am thrilled that Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory took home the award. This is an excellent novel that plays with readers' expectations, taking what initially seems like a conventional, even YAish premise in increasingly mind-blowing directions (see my full review). I'm particularly pleased that Some Desperate Glory and Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors have, between them, split the Hugo and Nebula awards. These are two fantastic debut novels that between them represent the breadth of what the field is capable of. If you add the best series award for Ann Leckie Imperial Raadch series, which is fast becoming one of the most interesting works of accumulative worldbuidling in the genre, it feels like there were a lot of intelligent choices being made by the Hugo voters this year.

We also got the Hugo stats—which provided attendees at the post-Hugo party (which I attended as the gust of Octothorpe co-host Liz Batty) with the comical site of a bunch of us standing in a circle, furiously scrolling our phones. More skilled analysts than myself have already looked at these numbers and confirmed that they lack the odd clustering and "cliffs" that we saw last year. But in addition there are also the surprising revelations that these stats always deliver: Strange Horizons and Octothorpe, for example, won their categories by a half-dozen votes each, a reminder that every vote counts. Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers—which I fully expected to see on the best novel ballot—missed its shot by only a handful on nominations. Patrick Stewart's autobiography needed only one more vote to make it onto best related work—giving rise to the tantalizing alternate universe in which Captain Picard attends the Hugo awards. Most intriguingly, some forty people nominated Ann Napolitano's Hello Beautiful, a mainstream multigenerational saga with, as far as I can tell, no genre content, for best novel. If someone knows what the story there is, I'd love to hear it.

But what about the business meeting? This year's business meeting was, unsurprisingly, an extremely busy affair, stretching on for five hours on every day of the convention. Nevertheless, of the simply dizzying number of proposals laid before it, few were given a full discussion. The most decisive action the business meeting took was to roll back most of the decisions that had slipped in at the under-attended business meeting in Chengdu, things like a prohibition against virtual participation in the meeting, or the parachuting in of two additional Hugo categories for independent film. Many other proposals to address the irregularities of Chengdu were referred to a committee which has been established to study the Hugos and come up with procedures for standardizing their running and promoting accountability and transparency. Another committee has been formed to study the business meeting itself and propose better and more efficient ways to run it. Which is obviously badly needed, because as this year's example has shown, the business meeting's cumbersome rules have effectively made it available only to people who are willing to sacrifice their entire Worldcon to it—whose fandom is, essentially, attending the business meeting. And yet at the same time, as we saw in Chengdu, these rules have also left the Worldcon constitution vulnerable to any low-attendance con. We badly need a new system, and I hope (and trust) the newly-formed committee will deliver it.

Hey, did you get a look at Glasgow at all? Um, a little? It's probably a testament to how good this year's con was that I ended up doing hardly any touring once it was up and running. I did end up going to a few museums, and admiring the city's Victorian architecture, green parks, and (to me) wintery weather. There's no doubt more to see, which means I am fully in support of a future Glasgow Worldcon.

Speaking of the future, the 2026 site selection returned the expected result of LA (which ran unopposed). Upon being announced, the con revealed an intriguing slate of guest of honor nominees, including taking advantage of its Hollywood-adjacency to bring in Ronald D. Moore and former imagineer Tim Kirk. Next year's Worldcon in Seattle has announced a special Hugo for SFF poetry, which is one of those cases where I'm looking forward to seeing the final ballot while knowing that I will have no idea what to nominate in that category myself. Still, that's next year's problem. For now, let's hope that future Worldcons take the many good examples that Glasgow 2024 offered, and do even better.