Saturday at Worldcon
Started: 2024-08-24 16:30:29
Submitted: 2024-08-24 17:59:23
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Saturday at Worldcon in Glasgow: autographs and breakfast and women in military sf and birthing pods
On Saturday, the 10th of August, I woke with my alarm at 08:00 local time, mostly adjusted to my new time zone two days after arriving in Scotland. I ate breakfast at my hotel, then caught the suburban Argyle Line service to Exhibition Centre with a train full of other people attending Worldcon.
I arrived at the SEC before the halls opened at 10:00, so I joined the queue for hall 4 down the middle of the main concourse. When the hall opened I headed to the autograph zone in the corner of the hall. I arrived just as the queue for Arkady Martine had overflowed the rope barriers onto the far wall, so I waited there until she started signing and the line began to move. I have not had the opportunity to see her in person before so I brought from home my copy of her Hugo Award-winning novel A Memory Called Empire and had her sign it to Kiesa and me.
After I still had two-thirds of the first panel session left, so I headed to the talk "Gin Making in the Highlands: Creating the Glasgow 2024 Gin", which still had plenty of seats available in the room when I arrived. The convention commissioned highlands distillery Pixel Spirits to create a custom gin, which involved picking a mixture of botanicals to add to the still to go with the juniper berries. The whole thing was a fascinating look into the process of distilling, and how to survive as a tiny operation in an industry dominated by giant companies and covered with taxes and regulation.
The next talk I attended was titled "Serious Scientific Talk: The Science of Breakfast", which sounded as if it would be interesting, but it turned out I was not the target audience for the talk. Instead of actually discussing breakfast in terms of "mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, history, geography, religion, modern languages, computer science, ethnography and politics" (as the program indicated that it would) the speaker obliquely joked about the topics and checked them off a Bingo-like list on his presentation. I realized that I had misunderstood the hour-long talk early but I didn't think I could make an easy exit from the front row of the small crowded room so I sat and watched while the rest of the audience laughed at the bad jokes at the expense of science (and breakfast).
The next panel, "Women and Military SF", made up for the talk about breakfast. The panel featured five women who had written about women and military SF (including Emily Tesh, who wrote this year's Hugo Award nominee* Some Desperate Glory) and featured a fascinating diversity of opinion about the very premise of the panel, the role of military in society, the role of women in military service, and how to write fiction engaging with these topics. The panel sat self-described pacifist Anna Smith Spark next to Air Force brat Kelly Sue DeConnick, and they had a polite but impassioned argument about whether the very purpose of a standing military is to kill people or deterrence ("peace through strength").
[* At the time of the panel, Some Desperate Glory had not yet won the Hugo Award for best novel; the award was announced the following evening.]
By the end of the panel it was 14:00 and I had thus far neglected to eat lunch, so I got a Brie-tomato-basil baguette from a coffee-and-lunch shop on the main concourse, then took my food into hall 4 to eat at one of the tables set up around the food trucks. I wandered into the dealer's hall and stumbled upon Anna Smith Spark recording a podcast interview and reading for her small-press publisher. It was a little awkward to crowd around the table in the noisy dealer's hall without distracting the people involved, but the interview and reading were interesting.
The next panel I attended was "Weirding the Future". (This panel was in the Crown Plaza adjacent to the SEC, which was set up with chairs that were not quite wide enough for me; every panel I attended in the Crown Plaza was full, and every time I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with the people next to me.) Despite including Arkady Martine on the panel (likely because of her very weird Hugo Award-nominated novella Rose/House), this panel failed to make much of an impression on me.
The last panel I attended was titled "Clones and Birthing Pods: Reproduction in SFF", which included a local OB doctor and a PhD student working on ethics in sci-fi literature, in addition to the normal assortment of sci-fi authors. The panel spent most of its time talking about the ethics and politics of reproductive technology, influenced by the current regressive policies in ascendency in the US. Everything here is fraught with trade-offs: Who gets access to reproductive technology, and who pays for it? Who gets to decide when to use technology? To what extent is a technology empower people, and to what extent can that same technology be used for repression? (At no point in the panel did anyone mention Gattaca, which I consider to be the best depiction in film of the ethical consequences of widespread genetic engineering.)
The panel wrapped up at 18:30, which I decided was a good time to go find supper, even though there were still panels scheduled into the evening. I walked past the Exhibition Centre train station to the shops lined up on Argyle Street, on the south side of Kelvingrove Park, and ate supper at the vegan restaurant Soul Food Kitchen. They ran out of several appetizers I tried to order, but the appetizer and main they did serve were good. I overheard a group at a nearby table talking about their Worldcon panel schedule for the next day, including a couple of panels I was interested in.
By the time I finished eating the timing of the suburban trains on the Argyle Line meant that it was faster to walk back to my hotel in Glasgow Central station. I spent the evening in my hotel room reading my guidebooks trying to come up with a plan for what to do with my time designated for playing tourist after Worldcon ended on Monday.
