Finally — and this has come up a few times — there’s a generation of amazing Hugo finalists who represent a set of voices that is exciting to nominators, but completely unfamiliar to many folks who will be attending. I can give you a concrete example of this: we have no panel explaining what #ownvoices is, and I’ve had to field multiple questions essentially asking me, “What is that?” I suspect *everyone* at WisCon is familiar with the hashtag and its significance. I would guess maybe 20% of Worldcon 76 members know what it means.
IF PEOPLE DON’T KNOW ABOUT #ownvoices AND YOU’RE NOT RUNNING A PANEL ON IT, RUN A PANEL ON IT.
Preferably on day one. How hard is this shit that you have to write a patronising email with a completely unnecessary dogwhistle about WisCon to explain to people you haven’t been doing your job because you couldn’t be arsed?
Note that all this is in the context of the convention blatantly ignoring and snubbing the Hugo finalists, especially the newer and upcoming writers, “because they’re not well known enough”, so they can’t be on panels.
THAT’S WHY YOU HAVE PANELS.
Worldcon 76: science fiction fans are a notoriously incurious breed, wary of anything new, so let’s keep programming the same people we have had on panels since 1976. It’s not as if the people coming to our con are the same as the people who nominated these writers in the first place, right? It’s not as if you want to value these fans as a con, the most dedicated ones that could actually be bothered to nominate, to give them a chance to meet and get to know the people they’ve been nominating, to get to know those writers they got curious about because other people nominated them.
All of this is bad enough, but the official Worlcon biographies pages Foz Meadows put i:
I will say, though, that it frustrates me how discrimination of this sort always ends up having a double impact on marginalised writers, as they are both the most frequently targeted and the first to resign in solidarity with the mistreatment of others. The Worldcon program is changing, but the people who stepped down from programming to force that change were overwhelmingly POC, women, queer folk, disabled folk, immigrant voices and marginalised writers from around the world – exactly the same people whose mistreatment by the programmers was the problem in the first place. Those with the fewest seats at the table shouldn’t have to step aside to effect better treatment for those who take their place while the majority, unaffected, stays where they are. That doesn’t increase the number of marginalised speakers; it just treats them as a resource to churn through, burning them out and replacing them while claiming to give them a platform.
I have good hope that Worldcon 77, in Dublin, will not take the path this year’s Worldcon has taken, but all this does highlight the need for Worldcon to stay out of the US, especially with Trump as president. America is the heartland of the fascist adjecent Sad Puppies movement, and the fascist right in general has been using nerd culture as its recruiting base there as well as a battlefield. I don’t feel safe going over there and I’m a boring old cishet white bloke with only a few intemperate tweets to worry about.
