World Fantasy 2025

Well, here we are again, the good old Brighton Metropole. I was at the last World Fantasy held there, at which Steve Jones contrived to upset as many people as he possibly could and the convention was rescued by the then nascent Redcloaks corps. Given that Jones is now persona non grata at World Fantasy, and FantasyCon has gone from strength to strength, I think we probably have a net win from that event.

I should note that no one in their right minds would choose to hold a convention in the Brighton Metropole. It is an accessibility nightmare, albeit slightly improved on last time. The space is really badly organized. And the hotel itself is big and poorly managed so getting the staff to do anything sensible is really hard.

I’m not casting aspersions on the convention committee here. Their original plan was to use the Birmingham Metropole, which ran a successful Eastercon a couple of years ago, and will be the Eastercon venue again next year. But their booking was gazumped and they had to find a new venue. At that point they ran into the perennial rightsizing problem. There are very few hotels of a suitable size for a World Fantasy in the UK, and so we ended up in Brighton again.

Ah well, at least I got a pile of Hilton points out of it.

I can’t say much about the programming because I had to be in the Dealers’ Room most of the time. I did have one panel, where I moderated a discussion on fantasy in translation with two Romanians and a Russian. It went the way these conversations normally do: we all agreed that translation was important and valuable, but we despaired of encouraging people to buy it, and had no idea how to finance it. With the prospect of the major publishers using AI to do their translations from now on, things are likely to get much worse.

One thing I noticed during the panel was that the soundproofing between rooms was very poor. There was a bigger programme room backing on to ours, and they were Very Loud. But, as it turned out, we got off lightly. Here’s Andrew Knighton from the BFS blog talking about his reading:

But then the problems started. First, the room was locked. Then, when we got in, we found out that there was a wedding disco next door. I ended up reading serious passages about landscape and grief while Michael Jackson and the Village People sounded through the wall, raising my voice every time the DJ turned up the volume.

I had at least two people come to the table the next day asking for Wiz Duo 3 because they were so impressed with Andrew’s heroic efforts in terrible circumstances the night before.

Anyway, there was programming, and people seemed to enjoy it. Some of it is available to members on replay, but I haven’t had the time to look at any of it.

The other program item I was involved in was a book launch for Wizard’s Tower. We had three new books: a new Green Man book from Juliet McKenna; a new novel from Chaz Brenchley; and a new Wiz Duo featuring Ruthanna Emrys and Andrew Knighton. All of the authors except Chaz were at the con, and it was lovely to get to meet Ruthanna at last.

The organization of the event involved a substantial amount of frantic paddling below the surface. The first problem was wine. The hotel was charging over £30 a bottle, which is probably something like a 200% markup. Thankfully corkage was only £12 a bottle, and I am able to source good quality wine for much less than £20. But there was still the problem of getting it to the con. Thankfully, Ben Baldwin lives near Brighton and I was able to ship it to him and collect it the day before the con started. Ben also kindly took delivery of some books, because there wasn’t room in my car for books for BristolCon, books for World Fantasy, Kayla and myself.

We also promised people cake. The convention said that the hotel wanted details of the ingredients beforehand for food safety purposes, which was fine by me. Jo and I were going to make the cakes. But when I got to Brighton I discovered that the hotel wanted other things too, such as copies of my food safety training certificates, and details of when my premises were last inspected by the Council’s food safety officers.

The only way around this was to buy a cake from a local cake shop. Fortunately Brighton is not short of such things, but it did result in substantial extra expense and the need to go and collect the cake first thing on the Saturday morning. Huge thanks are due to Cielo Cakery for coming up with a great cake at very short notice.

Collecting the wine and books from Ben, and the cake from the shop, both required that we take the car out of the hotel car park. This, is turned out, was another major source of problems. The hotel’s underground parking fortress is designed on the assumption that you will put your car in at the start of the stay, and pay on exit when you leave. Taking the car out part way through is major exception that causes all sorts of problems for the hotel.

It didn’t help that most of the staff we spoke to didn’t know how the system worked. Everyone we spoke to gave us a different answer. The person who let us out to go to Ben’s house said that we should have paid in advance, but as we were at the exit she’d let us out on the condition that that we paid for the parking as soon as we got back.

When we got back we tried to pay for the parking, but the staff on reception could not make it work.

Thankfully the car park let us out to collect the cake without needing to call for help.

When I went to check out there was an additional charge on the bill which I figured was probably for the parking, but the receptionist insisted that it must be a mistake and took it off.

When we left we were only charged for one day’s parking. But when I got home I found another charge from the hotel on my credit card. They did not let me know they had done that, nor did they send me a new bill.

Yes, the hotel staff really were that bad. And that’s without going into the whole saga of getting the cake put in a fridge on Saturday morning until we needed it, which was a whole new adventure.

Thankfully the launch went off very well. We had around 50 people there. No one complained about the wine or cake. We did not run out of either. And we sold lots of books. Which is just as well because if we hadn’t the takings from the event would have been very poor indeed.

Everyone in the Dealers’ Room was complaining about the lack of sales, and indeed the lack of footfall. We initially put it down to us having been hidden away in an upstairs room that wasn’t easy to find. Programming was on the ground and first floors (UK numbering). We were on the second floor, and finding the way up to us was challenge enough. Most people seemed not to want to leave the main programme floor, which was the first. There was much jealousy of the Art Show, which was right next to the main programme room, the convention bar and the convention food service.

However, conversations late in the convention suggested that the Art Show had also sold very little, with some big names having no sales whatsoever.

The poor sales appear to have had multiple causes. Firstly the wealthy Americans who normally splash lots of money around at WFC had spent most of what they had available on air fares. The local attendees, who were mostly British Fantasy Society members, are not big spenders in the same way. And, of course, everyone is worried about the state of the world, so free cash was in short supply for everyone.

Nevertheless, I did more business per day in BristolCon than I did at World Fantasy, and had I not had the book launch the total revenue from the two conventions would have been about equal. That was very disappointing, given the cost of attending WFC, and the fact that WFC had around three times the attendance of BristolCon.

The other key aspect of World Fantasy is the socializing. Last time we were in Brighton I went out to dinner with Scott Edelman, which is always an amazing experience given his skill and searching out top quality restaurants. Sadly my hearing is now so poor (even with hearing aids) that I now avoid bars and big restaurant groups because I have to spend all of my time apologizing for not being able to hear what people are saying.

Anyway, we survived the experience. Also Kayla and I got in quite a bit of tourism on the way to and from Brighton, so the weekend was not a complete bust.

I’m looking forward to next year’s FantasyCon being a much more predictable experience in a much better suited hotel, even if I will have to drive to Glasgow for it.