Seattle Worldcon: Post-Con Report!

 

I've been home from Seattle Worlcon for a couple weeks now, but school starting immediately upon my return has kept me too busy to make a post about it. Until now! I'm happy to report that I had a great time!

Due to weather on Tuesday, my flight from Chattanooga to Chicago was canceled, and I had to rebook for the next day. I barely made it to my first panel in Seattle on Wednesday evening. I walked into the panel a few minutes late straight from the airport. Oh, and they lost my luggage in Chicago (I was reunited with it in Seattle several hours later).

My panels

But that panel went well! It was called "Heartbeeps: Can Robots Have Emotions?" It's always nice to go to Worldcon, where audiences tend to be enthusastic and have lots of great questions.

My academic track talk, "Could Robots Have Rights?: An Intersection of Science Fiction and Philosophy," went extremely well. It was standing room only. It warmed my heart to see so many science fiction fans interested in philosophy!

Both the panel and my talk were organized with Manju Menon through the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society. You can find more specific information about both in a previous post. 

Me giving my talk. I love that someone is casting a shadow that looks like Godzilla!

The room during my talk!

Other activities

I also went to a bunch of other panels, events, and parties at Worldcon. I also did some Seattle tourism and visited friends in the area. One of the panels I attended, "The Promise and Perils of Utopian Fiction" gave me some ideas for the Utopias and Dystopias class I'm teaching this semester.

Probably my most relevant tourist activity was the amazing Museum of Popular Culture! Here are a few photos. I visited with friends from various parts of my life over the last 30 years.

The Hugos: My ballot versus reality

One of the highlights of Worldcon for me is always the Hugo Awards Ceremony. And this was a fun one! MC's Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford were great, and they kept it moving along. I deeply appreciated that my friend and co-founder of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society, Anand Vaidya, made the In Memoriam list.

You can see how I voted for the Hugos in my Hugo ballot post. At the ceremony, I was doing really well picking the winners, at least until we got to the four main fiction categories. There I only picked one winner: Ray Naylor's The Tusks of Extinction for Best Novella. But I'm not upset, since I genuinely thought all the nominees were pretty good this year. 

While I greatly enjoyed the winner for Best Novel, Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup, I didn't personally find it as interesting as most of the other novels, especially the two Tchaikovsky novels. I feel like other Hugo voters may go more on vibes or fun and less on my own nebulous criterion of "interestingness," but who knows? There are probably as many criteria for Hugo voting as their are Hugo voters. That's the fun of how Hugo voting works (or peril as we saw with a certain group of depressed canines last decade). In any case, you can see the full list of winners here.

Worldcons past and future

Sadly I don't think I'll make it to the Los Angeles Worldcon next year (although I was saying that about Seattle at this time last year, so you never know). I always enjoy Worldcon, even if they keep doing it at an inconvenient time for me given my university's obnoxious penchant for starting school in the middle of August. Maybe I'll make it to Montréal in 2027 or wherever Worldcon may be after that! And maybe, dear reader, I will see you at Worldcon.

Thanks, Seattle! It was great!