The 2023 Worldcon committee announced today its official name in English is Chengdu Worldcon, after the city in China where the convention will be held from August 16-20, 2023.
The official channel to buy memberships will open in May (right now the website is not taking them), and major credit cards will be accepted. At that time they also will announce staff and volunteer opportunities.
The Chengdu Worldcon Facebook page has added a chart with membership rates, accompanied by this statement:
The chart shows a lot of rates for attending and supporting Chengdu Worldcon — what do they all mean?
In reading the columns, note that when we refer to having a DC token, this describes anyone who voted in Site Selection at DisCon III, or who purchased a voting token and did not vote.
The first row represents a Supporting membership. That carries all of the voting rights that the WSFS rules, under which the Worldcon operates, gives to members of the convention. Those rights include the right to nominate and vote on the final ballot for the Hugo Awards which will be given out at Chengdu Worldcon, and the right to nominate (but not to vote on the final ballot) for the 2024 Worldcon’s Hugo Award. We don’t know where that Worldcon will be held, yet. It will be voted on at the 2022 Worldcon, in Chicago. In addition, Supporting members can buy the right to vote in the 2025 Site Selection, by buying a token for $50 which will give them a Supporting membership in the 2025 Worldcon, wherever it is held.
If you voted in DC (for any candidate), or bought a voting token but didn’t vote, you already have a Supporting membership according to the WSFS rules, with the full set of voting and nominating rights. And, for those who have a supporting because of voting/buying a token in DC, we will upgrade you for free to a full attending membership, and you need to take no other action.
For anyone newly purchasing, we are selling the right to attend the convention, either as a full convention admission pass, or as an attending membership with full voting rights. The price difference between the two will always be $50 – the price of a Supporting membership. If you only wish to attend, but not vote, you can buy the admission pass, but, if you want to vote, and don’t already have a Supporting membership, you can buy an attending membership. So if you already have a Supporting membership by buying one between now and the convention, and later decide that you want to attend, the prices will be $50 less than the attending membership price at the time when you convert.
The basic cost for an attending membership is $120. This will give admission to the convention, and a full set of voting rights. Again, remember that if you already bought a Supporting, then the price is only $70 to convert your Supporting membership to an attending membership. And, if you don’t want to get voting rights, then the full convention admission is $70, since you’re not buying the voting rights piece.
We are offering several discounts. The first is that for people who have not attended a Worldcon in person before, we are offering a $20 discount, so a full attending membership costs $100 ($50 if you already have a Supporting), or $50 if you want an admission without voting rights. Note that if you had a supporting membership in DC (or another Worldcon) that doesn’t make you ineligible for the First Worldcon discount; you are only ineligible if you attended another Worldcon.
The second discount is that students, with student ID (we will check when you pick up your badge), get a $40 discount (which can’t be combined with the First Worldcon discount). So a student can get an admission for $30 without voting rights (or with voting rights if they already had bought a Supporting), or $80 if they want voting rights as well as admission.
Finally, Children aged 0-11 at the time of the convention can attend for free. This admission has no voting rights.
These rates will be good until at least Sept 30, 11:59pm, Chengdu time. We may raise the rates after that, but have not decided whether we will do so.
A second post on their Facebook page concludes with this message:
…Being a first time Worldcon runner, our team strives to provide to our members as best as we can a unique and fulfilling con-going experience, following the WSFS Constitution, the SFWA’s mission guidelines, as well as local laws, to ensure a safe, colorful, and culturally diversified Worldcon. Currently we are working diligently to finalize more funding resources, more experienced talents, and most importantly, more enthusiastic fans, to join our endeavor, as we are putting efforts to integrate our own local experiences with the Worldcon tradition.
Sorry folks for this delayed updating! Please keep communicating with us. Our information address is [email protected]
Staff vacancies and volunteer opportunities will be announced in May. We are looking for more volunteers to join us in putting on the Chengdu Worldcon. At [email protected], we will open a volunteer channel soon for people who are interested in volunteering to help. We have already received many inquiries on this matter. Sorry for the slow updating. But we will get there.
Thanks all (for the support as always, and for the patience)!
Stay safe and be well!
Pray for peace.
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Still no info about dropping GoH Lukyanenko?
Note: There’s no Uighur Discount, so they may as well stay in their concentration camps.
How much does it cost to REMOVE my name from the membership rolls?
The slowness of getting this together concerns me. How competent are they? Will China be in lockdown? Of course we don’t know what COVID 19 will be like next year but China is rather draconian about it and this would not be as simple as requiring masks and vaccination cards as some conventions are doing. Will this thing even be held if the Chinese government has a real heavy hand in it?
Interesting to see how they square that with 1.5.9 of the WSFS constitution.
That was interesting. Usually, if you voted at the Worldcon, in this case Discon III, you have full voting rights as a supporting member. That can be easily corrected.
@linda robinett – not sure what you’re referring to as needing to be corrected. Chengdu is giving folks who voted a full Attending membership in the convention, which includes voting rights. Usually there’s a fee to upgrade the supporting membership you get from voting to one that gives you the ability to attend. Chengdu has set that fee at $0 for people who voted.
That’s free. You just need to transfer your membership to somebody else. Maybe the person who organized the Open Letter? I can put you in touch.
I was wondering what was taking the committee so long to announce rates. Normally when a bid wins they announce the initial rates and sell memberships. Now that the rates are announced, they are extremely low, so they must have very different costs and sources of funding than previous Worldcons. I can understand it taking time to work that out.
It is good that the committee is honoring DC voting tokens. The DC site selection process had a lot of members succeed in paying the site selection fee but fail to submit a ballot. I hope that future online site selection votes do not have a two step process.
Still not planning on going, with Lukianenko as a GoH.
That was confusing as I always have had to pay some amount of money to upgrade my supporting membership to attending. Well, that is good then. I wonder if they are keeping it cheap on behalf of the Chinese fans who are probably college students.
On one hand, it’s likely that the Chinese fans won’t have any preferences on the site selection, with no existing east Asian bids for 2025. And perhaps they have doubts that the Hugos are worth voting for, if it appears Chinese works only have a chance to win if they appeared in English in 2022.
On the other hand, as Scott Zubrek pointed out, the WSFS Constitution is fairly explicit that they can’t sell to adults a membership “that allows attendance and full participation for the entire duration of the convention and does not include all WSFS voting rights.”
I was a surprised at my free “attending” membership with my voting token, till I looked at the other rates. Plus who knows (crystal ball: broken years ago) if there’ll be a lockdown or other limit or block on foreign tourists when the time comes.
@Steve D: Don’t you want to vote on Hugos ? (A quick look-up seems to indicate there’s only 1 site bidding on 2024)
@David Shallcross
There is no requirement that works be published in English to be eligible for the Hugo Awards. Works that have been translated get an additional year of eligibility when they are translated, but that does not mean they are ineligible without it. Note the word “also” below.
3.4.1: A work originally appearing in a language other than English shall also be eligible for the year in which it is first issued in English translation.
A few years ago there was a Worldcon in either Glasgow or London and when the Hugo nominations were announced, I tried to read all the novel length works only to find that some were not available at my library or on Amazon. So I used my librarian superpowers to seek a few out and found that at least one was only available from a New York bookstore. At that time it had not been published in the US. So I read what I could and voted amongst that group. If books and other written materials are only in Chinese, which I cannot read, then I will vote for what I can read. If a Chinese work wins, I suspect it will be translated in a short time after that. I would prefer that the Hugo nominated works be in a language that the majority of the fans can read.
Linda Robinett: When you talk about preferring that Hugo nominees be in a language a “majority of fans” can read, while I understand you’d like them to be in English, the language spoken by the majority of eligible Hugo voters in 2023 probably will be the dominant Chinese language.
I was wondering about that, partly because visiting the convention without being a member sounds to me like a good idea.
I don’t know the history of that clause but it always struck me as circular. If you can’t vote on stuff then you don’t have full participation – which clearly can’t be what it means. However, presumably, if some other element of participation is also limited, then a non-voting membership is permissible?
@Linda that is the normal experience of non-US fans attempting to nominate and vote for the Hugos. And I would not be surprised to learn that China already has more avid SF fans than the rest of the world put together.
Somewhat surprisingly, no one has mentioned the most notable part of the post. So, in case there’s a good reason, I won’t mention it either.
BTW I’ve had to reenter my information and am not sure which version of my name I’ve used.
@Jeff Jones: I had to look carefully before I saw the sentence I think you meant. If so, I share the sentiment if not the practice. But I have no idea what else to think about it.
@John A Arkansawyer: It sounds like you found it.
I can only hope that the winners of the Hugos are then translated into English. A quarter of the University studies and grades in China are based on learning English. This does not mean that Chinese fans would enjoy reading a SF novel in English but it does mean that English translations of the winning works will be out quickly. There are probably a billion English speakers in the world either as a first or second language.
Have any previous Worldcons sent pass-along funds to Chengdu?
@Jeff Jones: “Somewhat surprisingly, no one has mentioned the most notable part of the post. So, in case there’s a good reason, I won’t mention it either.”
No clue what you’re talking about, but I skimmed a lot of the post, focusing on the rates. I may not be the only one. If you have something to say. . . .
So, as Scott mentioned, if section 1.5.9 of the currently in-force WSFS constitution disallows selling a full-duration membership for adults that does not include voting rights, what mechanisms are available to officially inform them of a possible WSFS constitutional contravention? Submitting something to the Chicago business meeting seems applicable, but perhaps inadequate?
1.5.9: No convention committee shall sell a membership that is available to persons of the age of majority at the time of the convention (as defined by the laws of the country and other jurisdictions where the convention is being held), that allows attendance and full participation for the entire duration of the convention and that does not include all WSFS voting rights. Should no law of the country and other jurisdictions where the convention is being held define an age of majority, the convention shall consider all persons 18 years of age or older as being of age of majority.
For that matter, what mechanism does WSFS have to enforce the rule if Chengdu violates it?
Anyone believing they’re violating the constitution should let them know now. Why wait till a business meeting months from now, where they may or may not even have anyone present? Simply contact them and point out the constitution says X, they’re doing Y, and this isn’t allowed because Z.
If I understand the voting rights thing correctly. (I do find the membership rates list from Chengdu a bit confusing) The $50 voting rights for upcoming bids, is the normal $50 or so that we are charged to vote. That is, the voting fee. We usually pay it when voting for the upcoming bid. I haven’t paid it yet for Chicon, as the site bidding has not opened yet for Chicon. I would think I would pay this fee when site bidding opens up next year for the 2025 bids. The way it is written is confusing. We can vote on Hugos for example without paying this fee.
“Following SFWA’s mission guidelines”? Not only is SFWA a writers’ organization unrelated to WSFS, a fan organization, I thought it was only for writers who sell a lot in English language markets, hence of limited relevance even to Chinese professional writers unless they make a lot from translations. Huh?
I didn’t notice that SFWA reference, @Brian Z. How weird, yes.
I took the reference to SFWA’s mission as the Chengdu concom using it as a supplemental guideline to inform the way they developed their programming*.
Mission
SFWA informs, supports, promotes, defends and advocates for its members.
SFWA activities include informing science fiction and fantasy writers on professional matters, protecting their interests, and helping them deal effectively with agents, editors, anthologists, and producers in print and non-print media; encouraging public interest in and appreciation for science fiction and fantasy literature; sponsoring, editing, and disseminating writings, papers, books, pamphlets, and other publications which exemplify science fiction and fantasy literature of high quality; conducting conferences, public discussion groups, forums, lectures, and seminar programs; and furnishing services connected with this stated purpose.
* actual results yet to be determined
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