We fans are sensitive about Worldcon news coverage. Too sensitive, I guess, if Andrew Porter can fake me into the popcorn machine with an e-mail titled “Sci Fi Geeks Gather in Montreal.” But as his message explained, “Actually not the headline. Thank Ghod.”
On August 1 The Gazette of Montreal published a long Worldcon preview article built around a thoughtful interview of GoH Neil Gaiman:
“It’s a big thing for me,” says Gaiman of his selection as Worldcon Guest of Honour, “and it’s made a little bit stranger, and a little bit more exciting, and feels somehow slightly more of a responsibility, since it has been pointed out to me that I’m essentially the first member of my generation to be a Guest of Honour at Worldcon. … It definitely has significance for some people that I’m doing this. And it has significance for me, I think. It’s a wonderful and remarkable thing. I think it’s always good to give back, and the Worldcons that I’ve been to over the years have all been incredibly memorable. And they’ve all been big, and important. And they’ve mattered.”
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For what it’s worth, I believe I’m the one who pointed out to Neil that he was the first member of our (given that he’s a whopping 27 days older than me) generation to be a Worldcon Writer GOH, particularly since I happened to mention it to him again just a couple of weeks ago. If you look at the birth dates of the last 10 or so Worldcon Writer GOHs, they’re almost completely in the 1940s and very early 1950s, ending up in 1951. Neil’s birthdate is November 1960.
Basically, he’s the first post-Baby Boomer Writer GOH. Yes, technically the Boomer generation goes to 1964 births, but there’s a significant social difference between being a child during the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s and being a late teenager to adult during those years.