Smofcon Ripples

Smofcon 27 was held in Austin over the weekend and produced plenty of interesting news.

This year’s Worldcon, Anticipation, distributed checks for pass-along surplus funds, $17,000 each to Aussiecon 4 and Renovation, and is holding another $17,000 for the winning 2012 bid. 

There presently is only one 2012 Worldcon bid, for Chicago. During Smofcon the bid committee revealed it has chosen Dave McCarty to chair the Worldcon if they win. He is beginning to set up the committee structure.

Bidders for future Smofcons made presentations. The two bids for Smofcon 2011 are Maui (James Daugherty and Bobbi Armbruster) and Amsterdam (Vince Docherty, presented by Steve Cooper).  There also is a bid to hold Smofcon in Pennsylvania in 2012, either in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia (Laurie Mann and Joni Dashoff).

Picacio Airs Worldcon Payment Problem

John Picacio outlined for readers of his On the Front blog the problems some U.S. artists have experienced negotiating checks from Anticipation for art show sales:

American artists were in fact mailed checks well after the 60-day period. However, those checks were drafted with questionable routing number information that were subsequently denied by many American financial institutions. A letter accompanied those checks stating that the checks provided a legitimate US routing number, when in fact, they didn’t. They were effectively foreign checks that would necessitate gross collections fees and punitive processing delays of up to eight additional weeks. Not acceptable. When this was communicated to the con, its response was “the checks are fine; it must be your bank.”

Wrong answer, Worldcon.

Anticipation co-chair Rene Walling replied that he did, in fact, believe it was a problem with U.S. banks, because the account had been used to issue checks to other people in the U.S. for the past four years. However, the Worldcon has opened a temporary bank account in the U.S. to work around the problems and keep artists from incurring these fees for handling Canadian checks.

Worldcon Event DVDs

The official Anticipation Masquerade video is available on DVD from CreateSpace for $9.95 plus shipping, reports Video Director Syd Weinstein.

Quite a few videos of North American Worldcons (and the latest Arisia) are for sale via CreateSpace.

Anticipation Masquerade: Edited video of the event complete with the awards.

Denvention 3 Masquerade: Denvention 3 Masquerade hosted by Wil McCarthy — 31 entries including 3 in the young fan category. Includes the presentations, the half time slide show of past masquerade entrants over the years, and the awards ceremony.

Noreascon 4 Opening/Closing/Highlights: Opening and Closing Ceremonies, plus a highlight reel of all of the events.

Noreascon 4 Time Machine (Retro Hugos): Includes the 1954 Retrospective Hugo Awards Ceremony hosted by Bob Eggleton and interviews with the Noreascon 4 Guests of Honor hosted by Peter Weston.

Noreascon 4 Masquerade and Awards (Two Disks): Masquerade hosted by Susan de Guardiola. Disc one includes the masquerade presentations and a montage of the awards. Disc two is the masquerade awards including young fan, special Discworld, and the main awards.

Noreascon 4: Hugos: Hugo Awards Ceremony hosted by Neil Gaiman.

Noreascon 4: Five Disk Set: Official 5 DVD set of the entire week’s programming in the main auditorium. Bonus feature: time lapse video of the entire week, including build, shows, and teardown.

Arisia 2009 Masquerade: Boston-area convention masquerade.

Weinstein adds that the video of Anticipation’s Hugo Awards ceremony is still in production.

[Thanks to John Hertz for the story.]

San Antonio in 2013 Bid

I’m also overdue to report that the Texas in 2013 committee chaired by Bill Parker announced at Anticipation they’re bidding for San Antonio.

Gary Shelton told readers of the September NASFA Shuttle that San Antonio’s bid party at Anticipation served “Texas-sized chicken or steak fajitas. They were outstanding to say the least.” I’m sorry to have missed that party.

San Antonio has added convention facilities since LoneStarCon 2. Now there is a Grand Hyatt Hotel near the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center, in addition to the Marriott Rivercenter and Marriott Riverwalk hotels used in 1997.

The Worldcon, From A to A

The Aussiecon 4 committee is reminding fandom that Melbourne hosts next year’s Worldcon:

After Anticipation, the recent World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Montreal, Canada, in August, the eyes of the global science fiction community now turn to Melbourne. Aussiecon 4, to be held 2-6 September 2010 at the new Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre…

The full press release appears after the jump.

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Brad Templeton’s Modest Proposals

Brad Templeton came home from Anticipation with a hatful of ideas for making Worldcons more of a community experience. The one I liked best was about using more focused facilities:

Because they are always held where deals are to be had on hotels and convention space, it is not uncommon for them to get the entire convention center or a large portion of it. This turns out to be a temptation which most cons succumb to, but should not.

Read his blog for the factual breakdown and analysis. I would only add that committees yield to this temptation while they are still in the Worldcon bidding process. Advertising plans to use a fine convention center makes bidders more competitive. Then after winning, in the tradition of Parkinson’s Laws, the con expands to fill the space available. The best chance of concentrating activity into something with a sense of neighborhood is if lots of fans tell bidders they don’t prefer expansive use of a big city convention center with endless corridors.

Templeton also thinks Worldcons are more enjoyable when the attendees have more experiences in common. For example:

Anticipation offered an interesting mostly plenary session with Charlie Stross and Paul Krugman, and it did indeed become a shared experience and talking point for the whole crowd. Strangely, Anticipation actually scheduled several sessions opposite the Hugo Awards which is almost always a plenary.

He also believes that programs ought to be in the right size rooms to accommodate their audiences, though as a former program organizer I admit my reflexive response to his solution was “Hanging’s too good for him!”:

At Anticipation, I attended a session on the last day (usually sparse) on the Fermi paradox. It was in a small room and standing room only. Across the hall was an author reading in a large room with 2 audience members. So I pulled a “panel switch” and asked the author if she would mind moving to a small empty room with her reading, and she was nice and did.

When I approached the idea a bit more flexibly, my main concern was information-sharing after the swap. What’s supposed to happen to the people who come by during the hour looking for the item in the original room? Says Templeton:

Of course you also need to be able to quickly put up signs about the room switch.

Right. Informing the world about unilateral room changes arranged by panelists shouldn’t be too tough. How about a gofer on a Segway with a printer in her backpack roving the halls outside program rooms checking to see if the original panel is still inside? No, no, I’m still not being flexible enough. Really, if panelists work this out between themselves, then they can take a pen and a couple pieces of paper and put up their own signs too. Most people will end up where they want to go. Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good!

I liked Templeton’s challenge for committees to allow absent winners to participate remotely in the Hugo Ceremonies:

Surprisingly, at least at the Hugo awards, I’ve never seen them get the absent nominees or winner on the phone to let them accept in person.

This sounds like a genuinely modest request even to me, a jaded conrunner who tends to believe “Tech always fails.” The question is what technology to gamble on.

This is a little tricky as sending video requires a fair bit of CPU. You can’t readily be sending Skype to multiple nominees without multiple PCs. You can however send a video feed using other live streaming video tools which send one video to a master server from which people can stream. Indeed, for the Hugo awards, it would be possible for all sorts of absent people to watch the awards live via video.

Beginning any advice about tech with the phrase “this is a little tricky” is fatal so far as my interest is concerned. But as Templeton points out, there are various ways this can be done, whether there’s full-on video, a voice-only connection, or simply Tweets from the absent winner.

[Via Tom Galloway.]

Hugo Win Makes Weird Tales Editor a Local Celeb

Weird Tales’ winning the Best Semiprozine Hugo made a splash in editor Ann VanderMeer’s hometown paper, the Tallahassee (FL) Democrat:

She was all glammed-up for this year’s tony World Science Fiction Convention, attended by roughly 5,000 fans and industry people and known as a Really Big Deal in the sci-fi world. Decked out in a new ankle-length, pink-and-white flowered dress and pink shoes, VanderMeer was there as the fiction editor for Weird Tales, a dark-fantasy and sci-fi magazine first published in 1923. The magazine had been nominated for a Hugo Award.

But neither she nor the magazine’s editorial and creative director, 34-year-old Stephen Segal of Rockville, Md., thought they had much of a chance to win the “Best Semiprozine” award. Weird Tales (which has a circulation of 5,000 to 8,000, VanderMeer said) had never won – or even been nominated – for the award, which is given to the best small-press magazine with part-time staff.

***

Many people in Tallahassee link science fiction and the name VanderMeer with Ann’s husband, Jeff, a sci-fi writer. They’ve been married for seven years. Ann was married before, and has two grown children and a grandson. Ann and Jeff were long-time friends who shared a love of sci-fi and fantasy.

Since marrying, they’ve edited several anthologies together, including two “Best American Fantasy” collections from Prime Books.

For Ann, finding small fantasy-story gems has long been a passion. She started her own magazine, Silver Web, in 1988 in order to publish good sci-fi and fantasy. (Her last edition – she generally printed from 500 to 2,000 issues – came out in 2002.) And though she earns a small paycheck now for her work as a fiction editor at Weird Tales, it continues to be primarily a labor of love.

[Thanks to Michael Walsh for the link.]

Poor Trufan’s Almanack:
Anticipation Membership Figures

The Anticipation membership breakdown was distributed to the staff. It shows 3,921 people present, 4,497 total memberships.

The FOLLE committee will be distilling these numbers into an official Worldcon attendance figure for the Long List. For example, the memberships for comps and stuffed animals will probably be dropped from the warm body total.

Anticipation had 159 fans take advantage of the Taster Membership policy, leaving within three hours of paying for a daily membership and getting a refund of all but $20.

See membership breakdown after the jump.

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