Author: Cheryl Morgan

While I have been to many Worldcons, this was the first one at which I have been a dealer. The experience is very different. It is also my first post-COVID Worldcon, which also changed things a lot.

Usually Worldcon for me has meant attending a few panels during the day, browsing the Dealers’ Room, Fan Tables and Art Show in the gaps, then going out for dinner and attending parties in the evening. This year, with one small exception, I was in the Dealers’ Room from when it opened until it closed. After that I was so tired that on most days I grabbed a quick meal from the food trucks and fell into bed. Not that I actually wanted to spend time in bars or at parties, as I was pretty sure that they would be prime sites of infection.

From a COVID point of view, the Dealers’ Room was a good deal. The hall had a high ceiling, lots of ventilation, and some doors open to the outside. This was a relief because I needed to spend a lot of time talking to people and I’m not easily understood when wearing a mask as my voice is quite quiet.

Not having attended a Worldcon as a dealer before, I didn’t have much idea of what to expect. I just stuffed my car with as much as I could carry and hoped for the best. As it turned out, I sold around 170 books, and sold out of a number of titles. I was very pleased. That was despite being given a pitch way at the back of the hall where some people never ventured. I noticed that I was placed close to Bona Books, AK Faulkner and Sandra Bond, which made our part of the hall something of a queer ghetto. But The Portal Bookshop was much nearer the front so I don’t think this was anything deliberate on the part of the convention.

The one thing that was slightly annoying about the arrangements was the issue of at-table events. We were told very firmly before the convention that we were not permitted to hold events at our dealer tables. This was to avoid queues for author signings clogging up the alleyways between the tables. Nevertheless, some larger publishers did arrange such events, advertised them widely, and were allowed to get away with it. I totally understand the concern about space, and have been at Worldcons where queues at tables would have been a massive problem. But in Glasgow we had a huge amount of space. There wasn’t any need for that rule, and enforcing it selectively just penalized smaller dealers.

I had one panel. Roz & Jo kindly looked after the table for a couple of hours while I was away. The panel was on Gods and Faith in Fantasy. Besides me it featured Dr. Meg MacDonald (who has a PhD in the very subject of the panel) and Wole Tabali, with Ehud Maimon as moderator. It was great fun, and we good some really good feedback. I hope to catch up with some of the other panels on replay, but this far the only one I have seen is the History of LGBT+ SF&F one, which is hilarious, at least in part as Trip and Chris were asleep on their feet when they did it.

I did also briefly attend one fan party. That was because Pride Space is a project backed by San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions Inc., and Wizard’s Tower was sponsoring the party. I didn’t stay long. I was too tired.

Kevin spent almost the entire convention in the Business Meeting. How he managed to do so and yet remain sane and free of COVID is a mystery to me. Apparently it went about as well as could be expected, given that executing people for engaging in Recreational Parliamentary Practice while people are trying to get important stuff done is not allowed. Most importantly it appears that none of the miscreants from Chengdu have been given an excuse to sue the Worldcon. Hopefully they will eventually be dealt with in a manner that doesn’t put any conventions at risk.

Aside from move-in and move-out, the one thing we got to do together was attend the Hugos. Of course the last time that Worldcon was in Glasgow (2005), the ceremony took place in the starship WSFS Armadillo, and Kevin and I were running Events. The time before that (1995) we went to the Hugos for our first date.

Attending the ceremony when you have been in charge of it means that you see it in a very different way to the average punter. Things were done differently; sometimes for the better, and sometimes not so.

One big change is that Glasgow did away with the role of Toastmaster. There was no overall host for the ceremony. Various presenters rotated through the evening, each controlling the stage in turn. The slot at the beginning in which the Toastmaster normally tells some jokes was replaced by John Scalzi doing a 5 minute history of the Hugos. John is very amusing, so it went pretty well, though because it had to be very quick he inadvertently added to the suggestion that Kevin and I were somehow partly responsible for the Hugos in Chengdu. He also seemed to mangle Cheryl’s Second Law of Fandom. For those who have forgotten, here are the Three Laws again. I think you’ll agree that they are even more true now than they were in 2008 when I first devised them.

1. Never accept accident or incompetence as an explanation when a bizarre and complex conspiracy can also be advanced to explain the known facts.
2. One data point indicates a dangerous trend that must be resisted; two data points indicate a sacred and holy tradition that must be preserved.
3. If a tree falls in Central Park, New York, is seen to fall by 100 New Yorkers, is captured on film by CNN and the video of the fall is broadcast around the world, but I wasn’t there to see it, then it didn’t fall.

I’m not sure that doing away with the Toastmaster adds anything to the ceremony, but it does free up money to have a more varied set of GoHs so it might be worth doing.

Something that may be a really good idea, and I understand was first done in Chengdu, is to have the roll-call of the names of the finalists pre-recorded. This relieves the presenter of the need to learn how to pronounce all those names. They just have to get the name of the winner right. The downside is that, having been relieved of the need to read the names of the finalists, some of the presenters clearly did no prep at all, and one badly mangled the name of the winner despite having just heard it read out.

The thing that everyone at the ceremony will remember is the tech failure on the pre-recorded video. One of the presenters, Catherine Heymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was unable to be at the convention in person. She had pre-recorded some video, and tech was unable to play any of it. Because of this, there was no envelope on stage, and the people doing their best to cover ended up reading the plaque on the trophy to find out who won.

Kudos is due here to Meganne Christian, who had presented some awards earlier and came back on stage to take control of the chaos. You can tell she’s an astronaut, she was utterly calm and decisive in a crisis.

What most people in the audience probably didn’t notice was that there was no other recorded video. That means no clips of the Best Dramatic Presentation finalists. That’s probably a good thing as they eat up a lot of time in the ceremony, and devour an absurd amount of volunteer time trying to get permission to show them. It also meant no acceptance speeches from people who could not attend the convention. It seems highly unlikely that none of the absent winners would have wanted to say anything, so I have to assume that Glasgow did not give them the opportunity. That seems churlish, except that presumably those videos would not have worked either.

The new Best Game or Interactive Work Hugo seems to have gone down well. Unlike the last time this was trialed, there was a lot of interest in the category. Also the winners, from Larian Studios who produced Baldur’s Gate 3, turned up in force to accept the trophy. This was a big shock. Most of us Worldcon veterans had assumed that video game companies, like Hollywood studios, would not care about the Hugos. Larian were clearly delighted to have won.

I’m not going to comment on the results much. They are what they are, and they are voted on by fans. Besides, the novel that I placed first actually won this year, which is a rarity. Of course the best novel of last year, The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson, barely made it onto the “also ran” list in the Lodestar. Your mileage may vary. I am, however, deeply delighted that Juliet McKenna’s Green Man series was on the “also ran” list for Best Series. Thank you, everyone who voted for it.

The Emerald City Best Dressed at the Hugos Award went to Adri Joy for her magnificent jellyfish hat. I’d like to see someone try to top that.

That’s about all I have to say, because I didn’t see most of the convention. I understand from other reports that it was generally very well received. The two major areas of complaint were the usual suspects complaining about Worldcon having “gone woke”, and people upset at having caught COVID. The former were likely to complain no matter what happened, and I suspect that the only way to attend Worldcon and guarantee not to get sick is to attend virtually. UK fandom is probably less rigorous about masking that Americans, but it is in bar spaces where everyone is packed together and is unmasked because they are drinking and talking that you are most likely to catch the virus.

It is great to be back. One of the worst things about the pandemic was that I could not make my regular trips to Finland. I have been suffering sauna-deprivation.

This year Finncon was in Jyväskylä which meant that my good friend Irma Hirsjärvi was involved in the organization. I absolutely could not miss that. Also one of the Guests of Honour was Ursula Vernon, and I’ve been wanting a chance to chat to her about the Sworn Soldier books, and about weird animals.

Talking to Ursula was easy. It turned out that she and her husband, Kevin, were taking the train from Helsinki to Jyväskylä. I needed to do the same, so I volunteered to go along as a “local” guide. As it turned out, we only made it as far as Tampere, but that was because Irma came to collect us and take us to the Moomin Museum. They have done a lot of work on it since I was last there. I warmly recommend it.

First up for me at the convention was the academic conference, which is how I ended up reading Ghost Stories for Darwin (reviewed elsewhere in this issue). That was Friday morning sorted.

In the afternoon I headed off to the Writers’ House for the traditional “On Writing” panel. This part of the con is supposedly aimed at professional writers, but a lot of fans come along too. I got to interview Ursula, which meant that we got to talk about Sworn Soldiers and weird animals in public. As I recall, Ursula knew about the paper nautilus, but the Spanish mole story was new to her. I live in hope of it turning up in a Hugo acceptance speech one day. (If you are not familiar with these animals, you need to buy Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction from Luna Press and read my essay on “Worldbuilding with Sex and Gender”).

Finncon proper was very much as expected. There were lots of young people in costume. There were many interesting panels. The good folks from Rosebud had tables groaning with books. It was all very pleasant. I gave a lecture entitled “Wales in the Time of Arthur”, which had an audience of around 120. I also participated in the LGBTQ+ Fiction panel. And of course I got to help judge the masquerade.

Much fun was had. Much sauna was had. I got to eat at Harald. And I went to a really interesting panel on Hopepunk, which I shall write about separately.

After the con I delivered Ursula and Kevin back to Helsinki Airport, and then spent a week at an Assyriology conference at Helsinki University. That was also fun, but in a very different way.

One of the interesting things about conquests and colonization is how language shifts as a result. England was conquered by the Normans in 1066. The Norman aristocracy continued to speak French for a long time thereafter, but the English people never adopted that language and eventually the nobility started speaking English. It took the Normans a lot longer to extend their conquest into Wales, and it wasn’t really until the time of Henry VIII that Wales became fully subsumed into the British state. People in Wales continued to speak Welsh right up until the 19th Century, when the Victorians decided that the Welsh should be forced to speak English, on pain of strict punishment. Since Devolution, the Welsh language has seen something of a revival, at least in official spheres, but the rise of English as a world language has made it hard to explain to young Welsh people why they should have to learn their native tongue.

What does all this mean for Welsh Literature? There are some who think that to count as such a work has to be written in Welsh. But if you insist on that strict definition you are ruling out, amongst much else, the entire oeuvre of Dylan Thomas, arguably the greatest Welsh poet ever. Not to mention the great Welsh fantasy and horror writer, Arthur Machen. So most people accept that Welsh literature can be written in English. They still argue over whether the author has to have been born in Wales, live in Wales, be eligible to play rugby for Wales, or any other definition of nationality, but Welsh Literature written in English is officially a thing. And that means that academics will study it.

So, an academic conference, at a lovely location in central Wales, and an opportunity to give a paper about Nicola’s Griffith’s brilliant novel, Spear. How could I resist?

Let’s start with the venue. Gregynog Hall is a mock-Tudor stately home situated in large grounds a few miles north of the town of Newtown in Powys. While the area has been occupied since at least the 12th century, the current building is only around 150 years old. The ‘half-timbered’ look is entirely artificial. Of rather more interest is that the whole thing was done using what, for the 19th century, was a new and unusual building material—concrete.

Prior to the reconstruction, there was a Jacobean mansion on the site. The builders left one room of that house standing, and built the new house around it. The so-called Blayney Room dates from 1636 and is entirely wood-paneled, with all sorts of interesting carvings that I would love to investigate more.

The Hall has extensive gardens (including several Redwood trees which just love the damp Welsh climate). I’m told that we got a superb view of the aurora on the Friday night. Sadly I had gone to bed and missed the whole thing.

One downside of the venue is that it is not very accessible. In particular the two conference rooms are on the second floor (third floor if you are American) and there is no lift. However, there is good wifi in the conference areas and the event is mostly hybrid.

This being Wales, much of the content was about poetry. We even had some well-known poets at the event, including the fabulous Taz Rahman. But there were things more in my wheelhouse as well. I was particularly impressed by the opening keynote from Dr. Mary Chadwick. She has just edited a new edition of Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel by Anna Maria Bennett. That’s a book you have probably never heard of, and indeed this is the first new edition since 1794, but it was a massive best-seller in its time, alongside works by Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Along with Bennett’s six other works, it was almost certainly read with enthusiasm by the teenage Jane Austen. There were, after all, not many women novelists for her to read.

Bennett has been forgotten for many reasons, starting with her being a woman. She was also Welsh, hailing from Merthyr Tydfil with a family name of Evans. After an unhappy marriage to a Bristol man called Thomas Bennett, she ran away to London where she caught the eye of Admiral Thomas Pye. She was his mistress for many years, and turned to writing only when the relationship began to sour. All of her books were published after Pye’s death, and the income from them helped Bennett and her daughters survive. One of those daughters, Harriet, became an actress and mistress of the Duke of Hamilton.

I do love a bit of forgotten feminist history, and this was a fine example of the genre.

There were presentations from some current creative writing students. My friend Jo Lambert is working on a story about the legendary Welsh outlaw, Twm Siôn Cati, who seems much more interesting than the modern, sanitized versions of his story make out. Also Mari Elis Dunning has a forthcoming novel called Witsch, about an alleged witch from early modern Wales. The history of witch trials in Britain is fascinating for many reasons, one of which is the geographic distribution. While the Scots condemned thousands of alleged witches to death, and the English hundreds, the Welsh executed precisely 5. Mari argues that a Welsh witch would only be found guilty if she had fallen foul of the local nobility; otherwise she was a valued member of the community.

My own paper went down well enough, though it did suffer from being in the part of the schedule that was double-streamed. I also got to meet and chat to some of the great and good of Welsh publishing, which will hopefully be useful for Wizard’s Tower. I very much enjoyed the weekend, and look forward to going again next year.