Writers Circulate Letter of Concern About Saudi Worldcon Bid

Anna Smith Spark, a grimdark author from London, has organized an open “letter of concern” with several dozen co-signers, including Charles Stross, about the bid to bring the Worldcon to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2022, which will be voted on this week. The competition is a bid for Chicago in 2022.  

Anna Smith Spark sent File 770 the letter, and “Also (and I will be dead in the eyes of the WSFS for this) the email they sent me washing their hands of this and having a quick pop at those involved in the anti-Puppies work as well for good measure,” which is a reply received from WSFS webmaster Kevin Standlee.   


An open letter to the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) and to Norman Cates as the Chair of the 2020 WorldCon

Dear WSFS, and dear Norman,

As writers, publishers and readers of science fiction and fantasy, we are writing to express our concern that Saudi Arabia has been accepted as a potential host site for the 2022 World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon).

SFF is the great genre of possibilities and pluralities. As readers, writers and publishers of SFF our task is to inspire wonder: we look up at the stars to seek out other ways of being, we look down at the earth around us to find enchantment, beauty, romance, horror, hope. We create new worlds because we believe that in doing so we can make this world a better and intellectually richer place. A Jeddah WorldCon would allow fandom a chance to visit a breathtakingly beautiful city, Jeddah. It would break new ground for SFF Fandom, open up a new world to fans who may otherwise never have an opportunity to travel there, and show solidarity with creative communities within Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. It’s therefore with great sadness that we must face reality for what it is, that the Saudi regime is antithetical to everything SFF stands for.

The most recent Amnesty International report on Saudi Arabia states that in 2019 the Saudi government ‘escalated repression of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. They harassed, arbitrarily detained and prosecuted dozens of government critics, human rights defenders, including women’s rights activists, members of the Shi’a minority and family members of activists.  […] Some people, most of them members of the country’s Shi’a minority, were executed following grossly unfair trials.’[1] Saudi women face systematic legal discrimination, while identifying as LGBQT+  is illegal and can be punishable with corporal punishment and even execution. Saudi Arabia is a key player in the war in Yemen that has left 80% of the Yemeni population in need of humanitarian aid, and has been accused of war crimes in the region[2]. The UN concluded last year that it was ‘credible’ that the Saudi Crown Prince personally ordered the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi for the crime of writing words[3]. It cannot and must not be acceptable to stage an international event against this backdrop. Indeed, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi alone should be enough to render the concept of a literary convention in the country an absurdity.

On a personal level, we note that many of us would ourselves not be able to write or to live freely under Saudi law. We refuse to attend an event if those staffing it cannot have the same basic freedoms. We express deep concern that many members of the SFF community would be excluded from attending an event because of their sexuality, nationality or religious beliefs.

We stand in solidarity with those who seek change in the country. And we write in protest but also in hope – that by raising awareness of the political situation in Saudi Arabia a WorldCon SA will one day be possible.

Yours sincerely,

Anna Smith Spark (organiser), Justin Lee Anderson, Andrew Angel, Helen Armfield, Allen Ashley, Graham Austin-King, Ali Baker Brooks, Andrew Bannister, RJ Barker, Alan Baxter, Donna Bond, James Brogden, Mike Brooks, Angela Cleland, Tom Clews, Adrian Collins, Lee Conley, Emily Cornell, Sarah Doyle, Margaret Eve, Mike Everest Evans, The Fantasy Hive, Fantasy Faction, Nick Ferguson, Karen Fishwick, Carol Goodwin, T. L. Greylock, Joanne Hall, Patricia Hawkes-Reed, Bethan May Hindmarsh, Stewart Hotson, Shellie Horst, Steve D. Howarth, Humber SFF, Barbara James, Cameron Johnston, Daniel Kelly, Simon Kewin, Alex Khlopenko, Shona Kinsella, Alex Knight, David Lascelles, Ulff Lehmann, Dale Lucas, Eloise Mac, Steve McHugh, Juliette McKenna, Peter McLean, Kevin McVeigh, Kareem Mahfouz, Masimba Musodza, Andy Marsden, GR Matthews, Simon Morden, Alistair Morley, T. O. Munro, Stan Nicholls, Chris Nuttall, Scott Oden, Graeme Penman, Peter Philpott, Steven Poore, Gareth L Powell, Robert V.S Redick, Ian Richardson, Courtney Schaffer, S. Naomi Scott, Ian Segal, Mike Shackle, Steve J Shaw, Sheffield Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, , Rita Sloan, Sammy HK Smith, Vaughan Stanger, Mark Stay, Charlie Stross, Allen Stroud, Amanda M Suver Justice, Clayton Synder, Sue Tingey, Three Crows Magazine, Tej Turner, Catriona Ward, Matthew Ward, David Watkins, RB Watkinson, Adam Weller, Graeme Williams, Phil Williams,  Deborah A Wolf.

Copied to the Board of the SFWA, Locus Magazine, Tor.com, Starburst, the UK Guardian newspaper


WSFS Web Site Team Reply

Anna:

There is no such entity as the “Board of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS).” WSFS is an unincorporated literary society that has no Board of Directors, no ongoing chief executive, and no “Head Office.” I am copying the co-chairs of ConZealand on this reply.

The rules of WSFS, which are made by the members of WSFS (the attendees of the Worldcon), set very minimal technical requirements for any group to bid for a Worldcon. The selection is not made by a Board of Directors or Executive Committee, but by the entire membership of WSFS, who vote on the choice, just as they vote on the Hugo Awards. Indeed, the process is very similar in both cases, in that Worldcons are not supposed to make subjective value judgments about nominees for the Hugo Awards. This decision is reserved to the entire membership, exercising their right to vote.

If you are interested in more information about how WSFS works and how you can propose changes in its rules, I can explain things in further detail.

This is not intended as being dismissive, but to try and explain that Worldcons and WSFS as a whole does not give anyone the right to make subjective judgements about either Hugo Award nominees/finalists or prospective Worldcon sites other than the entire membership.

Kevin Standlee, WSFS Web Site Team


[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/saudi-arabia/report-saudi-arabia/

[2] https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/yemen-crisis

[3] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24713

129 thoughts on “Writers Circulate Letter of Concern About Saudi Worldcon Bid

  1. SIGH

    Others, including, Mr. Standlee, are far more knowledgeable on this and can give better and more informative replies than I can.

    I’m sufficiently versed in the rules governing site selection and what can (and, more importantly, cannot) be done regarding bids and I’m barely involved in fandom. I look forward to the replies.

  2. As the matter stands, no matter what bid wins all the Worldcons from 2021 to 2023 will take place in countries with human rights records ranging from appalling to atrocious. This letter might not be the bureaucratically correct way to show opposition but it’s a start

  3. I don’t have a problem with Kevin Standlee’s response, but there’s nothing wrong with people challenging a policy of the WSFS even when the WSFS lacks a central authority that could address the concerns.

    We’re making a choice to be decentralized and leave the current convention unable to reject a country’s Worldcon bid. That choice is fair game for criticism and potential reconsideration at WSFS Business Meetings.

  4. I understand the concerns raised about Saudi Arabia, but I’m not sure what solution they are hoping for or from whom (since WSFS is everyone with a Worldcon membership.) And I don’t understand the interpretation of Standlee’s reply as “having a quick pop at those involved in the anti-Puppies work.”

  5. Laura: Their solution is implicit rather than explicit — apply social media pressure to the people who can avert the possibility of a Saudi Arabian Worldcon. Even if they’re wrong that the chairs of CoNZealand (and there are two, even if they failed to address one of them) control the outcome, the people who do control it, the voters, will feel the pressure anyway.

    The reference to “a quick pop at those involved in the anti-Puppies work” seems to be Sparks’ interpretation of Standlee’s attempt to explain the neutral stance of people administering WSFS rules.

  6. I’m am as concerned about this bid as I would be if Kim Jong Un bid to have a Worldcon in Pyongyang. It will not happen. And I have no idea why Smith Spark thinks this will make her “dead in the eyes of WSFS”, i.e the whole membership of the current Worldcon, when I don’t know anyone who is in favour of the bid.

  7. At this point it’s too late to be implicit. Tell members how to vote on site selection. Tell people how to become members. CoNZealand is going to let its members decide.

  8. I am curious as to who exactly are the undecided members that this letter is aimed at, if its purpose is to apply pressure to voters.

    I have increasing sympathy for the organisers of the Jeddah bid, given some of the discourse around them even being allowed to request hosting. They’re in a difficult position as creatives and intellectuals in an authoritarian country.

    Meanwhile, I had to shake my head at this wooliness in the Guardian article.

    It’s the Saudi regime that is the antithesis of everything SFF should stand for, absolutely not Islam or Arabic culture to which both science and literature are hugely indebted

    While I agree that the Saudi regime are terrible, the sharia law that would make the country unsafe for many attendees is a fairly significant component of Islam and even without the strict application of the law Arabic culture is very socially conservative. There is also little commitment to freedom of speech.

  9. I’ve been following this, and it’s kind of fascinating watching the cross-purposes of the people who are coming at it from a– very valid– moral perspective of There Ought To Have Been Stopped, and Kevin, who has the bureaucratic perspective What Do You Think The Mechanism of Stopping It Should Be? Plus there’s the side dish of, “We are going to stop it by, you know, voting, because that’s the mechanism.”

    And I guess what I find most frustrating is most of the people coming at Kevin aren’t interested in thinking about how to implement a good mechanism, but are mad at him that it doesn’t exist already.

  10. So would the letter signers be satisfied if we, I dunno, maybe held some kind of question and answer sessions where we could ask the bidders to answer some tough questions? Then we could choose whose bid to vote for (or against) based on their responses (or lack of response).

    It’s a shame that no one ever thought of that. Oh wait.

  11. And I guess what I find most frustrating is most of the people coming at Kevin aren’t interested in thinking about how to implement a good mechanism, but are mad at him that it doesn’t exist already.

    File 770 is full of stories where a group of fans and/or pros challenged a convention to change its practices without having knowledge of the inner workings of that organization. It often worked, too.

    I see this as more of the same. What percentage of Worldcon supporters and admirers have ever taken a glance at the WSFS Constitution? I was a Hugo voter for years before I dove into the inner workings of the con.

  12. I am deeply confused how nobody, in all of these open letters, has seen fit to correct the oversight of ignoring one of the co-chairs of the convention.

  13. DaveH: Did you ever try reading the material already posted so as to avoid adding duplicate information?

  14. @rcade–

    File 770 is full of stories where a group of fans and/or pros challenged a convention to change its practices without having knowledge of the inner workings of that organization. It often worked, too.

    I see this as more of the same. What percentage of Worldcon supporters and admirers have ever taken a glance at the WSFS Constitution? I was a Hugo voter for years before I dove into the inner workings of the con.

    We recently went through several years of struggle with people who believed, and may still believe, that there’s a cabal within WSFS that controls who gets the Hugo Awards. People explained multiple times, at length and in detail, and very publicly, widely published on the web, why that isn’t true, and the complete lack of any mechanism for it to be true, and then publicly demonstrated the mechanism that does exist, for changing the current rules.

    At last some of the people who have signed that litter, including Stross, have no freaking excuse for not knowing better. They certainly know where to look, before they publish nonsense like this. In fact, though, they didn’t even bother to check who the chairs of this convention are (chairs, yes, two, one of them a woman, whom they casually erased in a letter objecting to the existence of the Saudi bid, in part on grounds of sexism).

    The mechanism for rejecting an objectionable bid is to vote. Granted, some people seem to find the idea of being expected to vote to be shockingly hard, in the real world as well as fandom. Too bad. Vote.

    The starting point for making a useful complaint seeking to change a convention’s practices is to find out what their decision-making structure is. This can be hard to find for some small, local cons. Larger, more visible cons tend to have their rules relatively easy to find. And with Worldcon, there’s also quite a bit of explanation online that no, there isn’t any central, controlling body, that major decisions are made by the membership voting, and take two years to complete because a change voted by one Worldcon has to be ratified by the next Worldcon…

    It makes perfect sense that outsiders find this to so incomprehensibly insane that they assume it can’t really be true.

    Fans should know better.

    There is no way to keep objectionable groups/countries mounting a bid.

    How to reject an objectionable bid is absolutely clear, and I’m reasonably sure we’re about to do it.

    There is no objective standard that can be applied to declare bids unacceptable on human rights grounds, that can’t be manipulated by some future analog of the Puppies.

    The way to work against a clearly objectionable bid is to get the message out to Worldcon members who will be voting in site selection. Address the voters, not a non-existent board, or committee of the con where the site selection vote will happen and which doesn’t have the ability to reject a bid.

  15. Out of the 88 personal names listed as signers above, I can find 6 listed as members of ConNewZealand.

  16. rob_matic: I am curious as to who exactly are the undecided members that this letter is aimed at, if its purpose is to apply pressure to voters.

    I’m convinced most of the co-signers don’t even know there are voters.

    But you’re wrong in supposing the voters have to be undecided to feel the pressure. I may think the Jeddicon bid is a nonstarter. The people in my social media bubble may think it’s a nonstarter. And yet it’s on the ballot, and I’m thinking about THAT.

  17. @bookworm1398–

    Out of the 88 personal names listed as signers above, I can find 6 listed as members of ConNewZealand.

    So at least 82 of them will not be doing the one thing that will actually be effective in stopping the Jeddah bid. Why am I not surprised?

  18. Lis Carey: , they didn’t even bother to check who the chairs of this convention are (chairs, yes, two, one of them a woman, whom they casually erased in a letter objecting to the existence of the Saudi bid, in part on grounds of sexism).

    Yes, I thought that was astonishing.

  19. @Mike
    Yup, this is what’s concerning to me because I imagine the people behind the Jeddah bid have been explaining how to vote in site selection. Meanwhile, how many of the above are members and have voted?

  20. I was looking at the CoNZealand membership list too. I gave up a few names in. Granted some may not have their names on the public list or be listed there differently.

  21. @ Laura. There are 15 con members from Saudi Arabia. It doesn’t look like the JeddiCon people have recruited a large number of locals to support their bid, they are hoping to get votes from the regular membership.

  22. Like Laura, I was rather baffled by Anna’s reading of Kevin’s reply, which seemed quite balanced and helpful. I was also puzzled as to why it took until this close to the vote for such an objection to be raised.

  23. I thought Kevin’s reply to the AO3 people was pretty balanced as well, but that sure blew up.

  24. They seem to have left this rather late, since, as I write this, the deadline for site selection voting is in four and a half hours…

  25. Is it “next month” in the technical sense that it will be August when the vote is cast?

    (edited to say: oh, no, not even.)

  26. Anyone know how they plan to announce the results? Usually happens on the third day of the Business Meeting, but obviously not this year.

  27. Ah, found the announcement on the schedule 10:00, Friday 31 Jul 2020 NZST, Programme Room 2.

    (@Chris R, I was confusing myself.)

  28. The site selection vote closes today at 8 p.m. Eastern today (12 p.m. Wednesday Wellington time). I just cast my ballot.

    As a longtime supporting-not-attending Worldcon member I haven’t voted in site selection before. To do it, I followed these instructions.

    I had to log in to the ConZealand site (using a link emailed to me), buy a supporting membership in the 2022 Worldcon for $72 NZ (around $48 US), get a confirmation number, download this fillable PDF ballot, fill out my details including ConZealand membership number and 2022 ticket confirmation number, save the form and email it to [email protected].

  29. Here’s where I got the deadline (from the fillable ballot): “PDF ballots must be received by email by Wednesday, 29 July 2020, 12:00 pm Wellington Time.”

  30. Yes, I just voted in site selection for the first time too! About 3 hours left now.

    Announcement of the results 10:00, Friday 31 Jul 2020 NZST (Thurs 6pm EDT)

  31. I’m fairly convinced that Worldcon bids shouldn’t be allowed where In that country a proportion of guests would be deemed criminals because they are LGBT.

    The current Worldcon set-up permits those bids that feels incredibly wrong.

    The Worldcon lack of governance that people like Standlees are vindicating feels hollow in protecting and also more crucially supporting human rights.

  32. OK, so. Arguably this is an issue that’s been simmering for 32 years, ever since the Yugoslavia bid. And honestly, it’s something that really needed to be addressed. But a letter right before the convention opens isn’t going to cut it.

    I mean there’s three days before the business meeting, so good luck coming up with an acceptable proposal. And even then that won’t take effect for two years?

    The best that can happen is to start having a discussing on what changes could be proposed in the future.

  33. And the Business Meeting is only looking at extending Hugo eligibility and passing everything else on to next year anyway.

  34. It should be a non issue. The idea of a worldcon in a country where single women can’t be seen is preposterous. And honestly, the voting body is sufficiently North American than you’d need a quote stunning bid to lose against Chicago.
    How many people normally vote in site selection? Could a revived puppy campaign divert the con to somewhere utterly inappropriate?

  35. And the Business Meeting is only looking at extending Hugo eligibility and passing everything else on to next year anyway.

    I am interested to see if the ability to participate remotely in a Business Meeting becomes more palatable if next year’s WorldCon is also adversely affected by the pandemic.

  36. If we agreed to empower a permanent authority under the WSFS Constitution that could reject bids on the human-rights criteria we set, don’t we run the risk of setting criteria the U.S. wouldn’t pass?

    It seems to me the best course is likely the current one, even if it results in campaigns like this open letter. Let the people motivated enough to vote for site selection decide by their own standards whether a site is acceptable.

  37. @Nickpheas I proposed that hypothetical to Kevin Standlee on Twitter, who said that who was going to spend $50-100k on a odious Worldcon Bid?

  38. @Matt Cavanagh: “I’m fairly convinced that Worldcon bids shouldn’t be allowed where In that country a proportion of guests would be deemed criminals because they are LGBT. The current Worldcon set-up permits those bids that feels incredibly wrong.The Worldcon lack of governance that people like Standlees are vindicating feels hollow in protecting and also more crucially supporting human rights.”

    For “lack of govenance”, I read a simple disinclination by the WSFS to impose draconian rules upon itself. As Kevin points out, the WSFS has no board of directors, but comprises the membership of the current Worldcon. Do you not consider them capable of making the correct decision?

  39. @Kevin Hogan
    I would love to see virtual attending become a ongoing new tier between supporting and physical attending (when we get back to that).

  40. How many people normally vote in site selection? Could a revived puppy campaign divert the con to somewhere utterly inappropriate?

    Here’s what I found in a quick search (errors likely):

    New Zealand won the 2020 vote with 643 votes out of 726 cast and no significant rival.

    Dublin won the 2019 vote with 1,160 votes out of 1,227 cast and no significant rival.

    San Jose won the 2018 vote with 675 votes over New Orleans with 594.

    Helsinki won the 2017 vote with 1,363 votes over D.C. with 828, Montreal with 228 and Nippon with 120.

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