dànachd canmom aig worldcon - pàirt 1: diardaoin
I'm at the World Science Fiction Convention! Better known as Worldcon.
Unlike previous adventures, this one didn't take me to any picturesque French towns. In fact it's like 15 minutes bike ride from my house! I managed to move to Glasgow right before Worldcon dropped in my lap.
Due to Events, the last few weeks before the con ha been some of the most hectic of my goddamn life, but I've been able to secure some time off. Things actually started on Wednesday night, when my friend and I wandered into the hotel at the convention centre on our way home and ended up fast friends with a group of people including a few big authors and editors in the scene, which was kind of wild. That's the con experience though! But things kicked off for real today on Thursday.
Due to a combo of minor medical emergency and then staying up late to finish off work after I finally got home, I got very little sleep that night, and sadly did not arrive at the con in time to catch Dune: The Musical. So most of the day ended up panels, though with an opera and a ceilidh at the end to spice things up, not to mention meeting like 90% of my old friends from uni, which is kinda sick. (Hello to the ones who follow me on here :p)
Here are some artstation-ass cars they had in the uh... the hall where all the little societies have stands.
Nearly every timeslot had multiple things I might want to attend, so I kind of played it by ear... and ended up weebing it up a little bit, attending two panels on anime and a presentation by the Japanese Scifi Writers Association.
The anime panels (on the subjects of food and music in anime respectively) were sadly quite disappointing. The panellists seem to have been chosen kind of arbitrarily - my friend dakkar knows his shit but there were a lot of banal 'what's your favourite x' type questions and a couple of panelists who either just wanted to bang on about basic shōnen shit as if it's all anime is, or were constantly mispronouncing Japanese words in a kinda painful way ("ai-sekai" being the worst). I was really hoping the food in anime panel might go into, for example, the historical context for why anime has such lavish depictions of food, or the technicalities of how food is portrayed. The discussion ended up going on to subjects like cooking recipes from anime and manga but honestly didn't really have a lot to say about it!
The way the panels seem to have been organised is, so far as I can infer... someone would pitch a description, and then the organisers would assign some people to be on that panel from a big pool? Which... idk, doesn't seem like it necessarily leads to selecting people with a lot to say on that subject!
I think I would have been wiser, in retrospect, to have gone to talks about sff lit, since in the end it's just not an anime con - something I'll bear in mind tomorrow. On that front, I did go to the presentation on Japanese scifi, which included the presentation of the Seiun ('nebula') awards to a couple of people whose works in translation were popular in Japan. In a bizarre quirk of programming, this one was run right next door to a panel on Chinese scifi, which is a real move lol.
Sadly this panel was marred by some pretty severe tech issues. Two of the panelists couldn't come to the UK due to visa bullshit, but the video call wasn't working, so Takayuki Tatsumi had to deliver a talk without being able to see his slides, and the slides were slightly in a different order than his talk. Still, I collected a nice list of JP SF authors whose works are available in translation, so looking forward to getting into that. Worse, there were other tech issues, like audio bleeding from another panel; a couple of the panelists struggled with English and the moderator ended up interpreting, which really isn't his job. Compared to the anime talks at Annecy, which had some very talented and fast interpreters, it was a bit of a disaster.
Due to all these issues, I didn't really get to figure out much of what Mari Kotani had to say about the links between shōjo manga and science fiction, a topic which sounds really interesting. Perhaps I can find her books.
The Seiun awards were given to John Scalzi, who showed up and got his prize for The Kaiju Preservation Society and was very polite about it...
...and Alastair Reynolds, who didn't show up to receive his giant fan.
I haven't read any of Scalzi's books, tbh they probably aren't my thing, but he seems like a really sweet guy from my encounters with him and his daughter yesterday and today. And I respect that he insisted on sharing credit with his JP translator.
The other panel I went to was a talk on magnets. This one was properly prepared - I learned a little about the geopolitics of rare earth production, and some of the cool new uses of magnets, though sadly at a fairly surface level. The presenter - who turned out to be a former aerospace industry guy who worked on the fucking Eurofighter Typhoon, now at some society that uhh promotes magnetism or something - mentioned that this is a talk he often gives at schools, and it did kinda feel like being back at uni. There wasn't a lot of good picks for this slot, but maybe the rocketry anecdotes panel would have been better. It was fun to play with the neodynium magnets and similar demos after the talk at least! I probably should have realised that having a physics degree meant I wouldn't learn very much from this talk.
I do hear there were some real good panels in other rooms, so I kind of have only myself to blame here. Tomorrow I'll try and learn from it!
Much better than all the panels was the debut performance of the new opera Morrow's Island, about a scientist conducting Cold War experiments to create psychic links with animals. I knew I was in for something great when one of the first lines was a scientist declaring 'There is no contradiction between dialectical materialism and extra-sensory perception' and it did indeed deliver.
I don't listen to a lot of opera, so I don't have a lot of context to analyse it musically, but it sounded great, full of cool polyphony and interesting melodic lines and the texture of repeating phrases, supported by the flowing motions of a group of contemporary dancers. The ending left me a little cold, but honestly it hit so many of the right notes for shit I'm a real nerd about - Soviet stuff, occult stuff, etc. - that I couldn't not love it. My favourite sequence saw the psychics make contact with the overwhelming complexity of ecosystems, summed up by the repeating phrase "there's so much life, there's so much death". The repeating phrases and gradual transitions called to mind Philip Glass to my admittedly very uncultured ear. Absolutely cool shit, definitely my favourite thing I saw today. I think they're putting a recording online.
The ceilidh, run by Science Ceilidh, was pretty intensely crowded at first so I ducked out. Later in the evening it got a bit more manageable so I returned to dance a bit more, and got to witness an astonishingly nerdy and complicated dance based on the life cycle of Dune sandworms. Surprisingly it went pretty smoothly - credit to the caller for making that work somehow.
I also wandered around the stalls a bit. I got some cool booklets about spaceflight, met a guy from the SCA, saw a 3D scanner scanning a vase, and didn't buy any books because I need to come back with a bag lol.
The best part about Worldcon is just meeting people from all over really. The con ribbons tradition is a great trick for encouraging nerds to talk to each other (though i need to get more...), and people have been very approachable for a crowd whose autism quotient must be near saturation lol. I met people from Finland, Australia, South Korea... mostly anglophone or european countries but still it's good shit. I'm starting to recognise more and more people in the crowd as the con goes on.
It really is so goddamn nerdy, like you look at this crowd and you're like damn, but in the best way, honestly. I am definitely no exception. Hopefully I make some better calls on panels tomorrow loll.
If you're in town, give me a shout, would love to meet more internetfriends!
