#worldcon 2024

[transformativeworks]

WE ARE AT WORLDCON!

If you are in Glasgow this weekend (8-12 Aug) and are coming to the conference, come see us!

[canmom]

dànachd canmom aig worldcon - pàirt 3: disathairne

My worldcon adventure had to end early because I got covid, so time I wrote up the weekend!

(The titles of these posts have been in Scottish Gaelic, an indigenous language currently spoken by about 1-2% of the Scottish population (not to be confused with Scots). A percentage which at this point does not include me, so I've been relying on machine translation - apologies for any errors. Curiously, if you don't capitalise the names of the days in the input, google translates the first word as dàn-thuras instead... I don't quite know the grammatical difference there, or if it's just neural network quirkiness.)

On Saturday, I got into the con around midday - as seemed to end up the rule - only to spring a flat tire just as I got in. So that wasn't ideal. Nevertheless, I scooted over to the panel on immersive experiences - which had a pretty varied lineup from a Nordic LARPer to a Baldur's Gate 3 voice actor. It was an interesting overview of the space, definitely reminds me I should give immersive theatre a shot some time. But...

I ducked out early since a friend of a friend had a talk on Scottish herring-gutting women and the songs they used to sing. This was a fantastic talk, rich with historical detail and nuance. The speaker was an academic who had been researching and interviewing surviving herring girls - a major occupation in Scotland prior to the introduction of machines that did their job in the early 20th C. - and she discussed both the harsh conditions they worked under, the various complications of religion and culture that affected them, and the sense of camaraderie that informed the songs, as well as various other things that herring women used to get up to like holding dance parties.

Unfortunately she tried to pack so much into the half-hour slot that she ended up having to rush through the last few slides to get to the actual example of a song, sung a capella in Gaelic, which was fascinating to hear, and I could absolutely feel her enthusiasm for the subject when I talked to her after the presentation.

Definitely I think the general convention-going lesson is to go to talks/panels about things I don't already know about lol.

I don't have any pictures of this panel but Gary Lloyd, composer of the opera, gave me these fliers for previous productions by him and Bettina Carpi.

Next up I went to a panel by the creators of the opera Morrow's Island which I saw on Thursday - consisting of composer Gary Lloyd, writer Ken MacLeod, and choreographer Bettina Carpi. I am pretty certain I was the youngest person in the audience, which is a shame, because it was a great panel, full of fascinating anecdotes about the (it turns out) incredibly chaotic production of the opera.

I did not realise because the performance went off pretty much without a hitch, but because it is so expensive to rehearse with pro musicians, the performance on Thursday was actually the first full run-through of the show, and the earlier partial rehearsals of the dances were interrupted by the riots outside.

Moreover, because of the nuances of contemporary dance, the dance was initially choreographed without the music, just from the libretto and general vibes, and refined to the pre-recorded piano versions rather than the full orchestration, which is nuts to me - but apparently contemporary dance is not driven by the beat in the same way that other types of dance are, and is more adaptable to the music. The more you know! What they did def looked good on the stage, but I can't pretend to know the theory of it.

Ken MacLeod, invited to write the libretto (opera-speak for 'script'), came into the project quite unfamiliar with modern opera (same lol), and made a very familiar mistake of a prose fiction writer trying to write a song - in that he apparently made it way too long at first and had to be steered right by Gary. Working flat out (at the same time as two other productions), Gary figured out the musical ideas he'd use, and ended up encouraging Ken to add more elements relating to the history of sciene and occultism in Scotland - something that imo added hugely to the texture of the opera.

Even though he wrote the libretto, Ken didn't know entirely how it was going to go on stage - so he was as surprised as me to see the story start with the sopranos walking out and declaring "there is no incompatibility between dialectical materialism and extrasensory perception". (Which was the precise moment I knew that this musical was going to be absolute fire, for my part). The performance on the night was absolute chaos behind the scenes, with complications over cueing and communication all over - for example the flautist had to be instructed to improvise over a certain scene (iirc the rabbit scene) at the absolute last minute. Despite everything, the opera mostly went as intended. Certainly the seams weren't obvious to me.

All in all, it's kind of impressive and a little alarming. Pro musicians really are something else.

After the panel I ended up sitting down to chat with Gary a lot more, and we hit it off really well! Gary was absolutely full of fascinating anecdotes, first about various minimalist composers he has known or drawn inspiration from (notably the time he met Steve Reich)i , and then later he got into stories his long friendship Alan Moore and the late Iain M Banks. The opening line of the opera, it turns out, is a recording by Banks of a line from the radical psychiatrist RD Laing's book Knots, consisting of the anonymised thoughts of patients. Indeed, Banks phoned Gary Lloyd up near his death, offering to record something before he died.

It was very, very clear how much admiration Gary had for Iain Banks, and it was fascinating hearing about how much him and Alan Moore looked up to each other. One of Gary's stories involved Banks bringing Moore to tears by telling him that Voice of the Fire was straight up the best book in the English language; another was how Lloyd turned down involvement in The Highbury Working in order to give its composer (I can't remember whether he said David J or Tim Perkins there) a chance to really hit his stride. He also talked a bit about music, such as some of the theory of polyrhythms. All in all one of the most utterly enthralling conversations I've had at worldcon and I'm very happy that he seemed to like me too ^^

I also went to a talk on homelessness in SFF. It was a good discussion by people who had lived it, diving into some nuances of the subject like the indignity of many of the kind of desultory forms of support for homeless people. As with many matters of 'how do you represent x', the message for SFF writers is along the lines of like give a shit about what you're writing and write characters as people with all the complexity that entails, rather than defining them entirely by a single trait like homelessness - e.g. give them their own desires and preferences rather than just drilling into the one thing - but I picked up some recs along the way. Definitely a big step up from the panels I went to on Thursday.

Next up: the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre!

I met up with the CUSFS gang for this, and it ended up being an absolutely charming performance involving one actor (Kev F Sutherland) staging a rapidfire, pun-dense dialogue between two sock puppets. For something so deliberately silly, the amount of skill involved would be easy to underestimate - Sutherland's back-and-forth flow is incredible, and he could make the technical jank of a one-man show, like switching costumes, fit very smoothly into the overal comedy. The show took a subject that could easily have been a bit naff (superheroes) and turning into something both sweet and funny that perfectly walked the line of self-referential/fourth-wall breaking, complete with a bunch of pop song parodies and a whole sock puppet emotional arc. I never knew how hard you can act with sock puppets.

Next up was the monsterfuckers panel, titled 'We Do The Monster Smash', the only 18+ panel I ended up making it to.

Despite the dire warnings, nobody checked my ID. It was a decent enough discussion but could definitely have gone much deeper (;p), though def it must be tricky to figure out the right level to pitch a panel like this. Despite the panellists' stated loathing for 'transforms back into human at the end' type stories, I can't help but feel an idea of 'cosy monsters' is sorta doing the same thing, sanding off the sharp edge of transgression. I cooked up a big question to ask about the contradiction between the monster as symbolic of what is Other and transgressive vs. the contemporary sexual culture of taxonomising everything into precisely defined kinks, but nobody asked me lmao. Shoutout to the one panellist who brought a thorough knowledge of hentai and ero-guro stuff, which she didn't really get to address that much.

I spoke briefly with the panellists after the con. There's gonna be a one-day monsterfucker convention in Bristol. I have no idea what the vibes of that kind of event would be like!

Afterwards I wandered into the Masquerade room. The Masquerade, for those (like me) unfamiliar, is essentially a costume competition. Each contestant comes out and does a little show in cosplay, then the judges go off to deliberate while a music act played. Unfortunately, I completely missed all the actual performances, but I did get to see Sassafrass (not to be confused with another unrelated band called Sassafras), the a capella band who sing mainly about Norse mythology, led by SFF author Ada Palmer...

You could hardly have picked a more perfectly 'worldcon' act, this is truly the musical embodiment of the fan culture and a long fixture of the scene, and I feel like I actually get that having experienced it in person. I had heard of Sassafrass before, and listened to some of their songs online, but I didn't quite vibe with them - it was another story hearing them live, with explanations of the mythology they were singing about.

Sassafrass's main technique is complex, multi-part vocal harmony, with different overlapping parts coming in and out of 'focus' as the song evolves, sorta like that one song The Confrontation in Les Mis but way more so. Here's an example of their thing, a song about the conflict between Odin and Loki, as a duet...

but the most complex has to be the one about the Norse creation myth sung as a three-part song between Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda, and the mythological giant Seeress from the Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, with the disagreements between the sources rendered as conversational disagreements in the song. Palmer herself takes on the role of the environment, providing underlying harmony to the two parts. It is frankly the most ASNAC* song I've ever heard.

*editor's note: Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, a degree you can take at Cambridge, perhaps unsurprisingly well-represented among the ranks of the Science Fiction Society

And honestly, while I still regard the filk song Somebody Will (my intro to Sassafrass) as a bit of a cope, I kinda love all this viking stuff. And knowing a little more about singing now, I am very impressed by how much harmonic texture they are able to get from just three singers and no other instruments. Definitely Sassafrass deserved a spot on that article on narrative in music, because they're doing some crazy complex shit here.

Although I didn't get to see the actual stage shows, I did at least get to see the costumes afterwards. Here's a little photo gallery - though there will surely be much nicer photos and a recording of the show on the Worldcon website...

Sadly I did not get to shoot the overall winner who did an elaborate routine as Moist von Lipwig in which they transformed from prisoner to postmaster. It sounded very impressive. I also missed photographing 'cookpunk', which involved an elaborate hob backpack.

All in all, next time I Worldcon (hopefully sooner than ten years this time), I will at the very least watch the Masquerade and maybe just maybe even show up in costume.

That evening I went to the dance party and had a great time actually moving to music, something I don't do nearly often enough. It had the things you'd expect at a nerd event - 80s songs, Rocky Horror stuff, Rammstein, even Taking the Hobbits to Eisengard which really took me back. I was glad to see that the dancers made space for a friend who uses a wheelchair to join in too, and it was a lot of fun as the dancing got more energetic later on. Unfortunately this is probably a great candidate for 'event that gave me covid', because that's a lot of energetic movement and heavy breathing in a confined space...

I also ended up running into @threefolddefencespeech, who actually recognised me off here and remembered my old URL! we had a great rest of the evening chatting away and running into various people, and I ended up pushing my bike home around 4am.

[mslanna]

Bye for now

I'm about to embark on my WorldCon Weekend and I will not be online. I just won't have the energy.

maybe I'll drop some unsolicited Con pics

also, do not fear. while it is dangerous to go alone, am am taking this him with me:

emotional support creachur activate

[githjanken]

hello glasgow

[carmillapixel]

I completely forgot to post these here, I think! It's been a wild month. I illustrated these armadillo knights to submit to the souvenir book for Worldcon which was held in Glasgow this year. I was very fortunate and all three of my artworks were featured! I think it's the first time I've seen my art in print like this and it's very very cool! They did spell my name wrong in the credits page, but I had added my socials tag to the pictures at least.

(One of the convention buildings is locally known as the armadillo, which is why I drew an armadillo knight)

[paranatellonta]

A warm welcome to everyone who's discovering Paranatellonta after Worldcon 2024 in Glasgow, and to everyone who's been here for a long time and may be rediscovering this project now!

For a quick introduction, we are Fie and Minerva. Fie's photos have been inspiring Minerva's 10-sentence stories since August 2013. We were initially inspired to pick up this concept because we were admiring Erin Morgenstern and Carey Farrell's Flax-golden Tales.

The main page will lead you to the newest stories, the chronological page will show you where we started in 2013, and the random button will let the fates decide to which of our 380+ stories you'll be led. We cannot promise that all of them are equally amazing, but we do promise a new edition on every 1st and 15th day of the month. (Up until October 2017, we had one every week!) All of those editions can be accessed here for free.

(Of course we do ask you to mention our names and link to the original if you are telling your friends about this, and none of these materials can be used for generative AI learning or financial gain.)

Minerva was on the Worldcon 2024 panel "Flash Fiction: The Art of Storytelling in Under 1,000 Words", moderated by Stephen Granade, with Aimee Ogden, Istvan Vizvary, and @microsff as fellow panellists. The panel talked a little about experimental forms, so among the most recent Paranatellonta stories Minerva would recommend Edition 372 (Extract from "A Travel Guide to the Fairy Realm"), Edition 366 (story in poem format), and Edition 364 (dialogue) as examples of that. As our photographer has a cat, there are also quite a few cat pov stories to be found!

For those who want to find the flash piece Minerva recommended at the end of the panel, that was @avakellyfiction's claustrophobic love story "Silence, Entwined" from queer horror anthology Neon Horror.

Ava Kelly was also the guest photographer and writer for Paranatellonta's fifth and tenth anniversary. They are the author of the beautiful book Alia Terra: Stories from the Dragon Realm, illustrated by @mspencerdraws.

In case you're curious about reading longer work by Minerva, xyr queer fairy tale novella The Dragon of Ynys came out with Atthis Arts in 2020, and xyr website is the place to keep an eye on for news.

Among the flash fiction pieces recommended by the other panellists were The God of Arepo (Tumblr, 2018), The Night the River Meets the Sky (Fireside Fiction, 2022), and Good (Flash Fiction Online). An additional recommendation from the audience was Litany in the Heart of Exorcism (Flash Fiction Online).

We also recommend Small Wonders magazine, co-edited by Stephen Granade, for more SFF flash fiction and poetry.

Enjoy all these flashes of imagination! We hope you, too, will be inspired. Thank you for being here!

[gollancz]

G2024 ... In Conversation with Peter S. Beagle & Catherynne M. Valente

An interview with award-winning authors Peter S. Beagle and Catherynne M. Valente from Glasgow 2024 Presents (Worldcon).

FREE ONLINE EVENT! Peter S. Beagle in conversation with Catherynne M. Valente, 6pm UK Time, Wednesday 15th November!

This fab online event is in collaboration with Glasgow Worldcon 2024, and we're so excited for it!

And it's COMPLETELY FREE!

[hawkwinglb]

76. Disproportionately queer? Looking back on my experience of Glasgow Worldcon 2024

Title of this post partly taken from Aliette de Bodard’s fantastic business card, advertising “disproportionate queerness.” The very first Worldcon I went to – indeed, the first convention that I went to of any stripe – was a Glasgow Worldcon. This was back in 2005, when I was a wee larva of just-turned-nineteen, social media was in its infancy, and Livejournal was the most happening place on…

View On WordPress