I have a new story out today in Black Cat Weekly #230 – huzzah!
“To Rue, To Revel, To Revert” is… dark. Not going to sugarcoat it. In a world of holograms and brain chips, true justice means rewriting the soul. Any tyrant’s talents can be repurposed to serve our society, but not the way you’d imagine…
This story is about who you think it is, yes, but also every other tyrant like him. I hope you enjoy it.
2026 has been good to me thus far. I’m very very proud to announce a new published sci-fi short story. “To Dream of Better Worlds” poses a simple question: what if prophetic dreams are more than just dreams?
This story was a great way for me to combine some of my passions: sci-fi, strange history, and things that are undeniable but (thus far) unexplainable. For the record, every quote in that story was genuine – there was no misleading editing, eh.
I hope you enjoy the story! And afterwards, please feel free to check out the rest of the stories at Horrific Scribblings.
Here you go: https://horrificscribblings.com/to-dream-of-better-worlds/
My newest published story (the first of many this year!) is in the winter 2026 issue of The Colored Lens.
It’s part of my growing opus of time travel-related works (all of which are interlinked), and I had lots of fun adding my own spin to some of those old tropes.
This story is about the ethics of changing – or not changing – the timeline on a grand scale. It’s about the secret origin of Valkyries. It’s about cold calculations compiled into a cruel-seeming codex. It’s about the third and final chances…
The opening line: “When you’re a time traveler, every hour is a happy hour.”
Enjoy, eh.
Typing this up from a capsule hotel in Tokyo’s salaryman district, Shimbashi. Not something I possibly could have anticipated a year ago, but life can be wild like that, eh.
This was one strange, eventful year – more so than usual. The biggest disappointment was having had to cut short my Continental Divide Trail thru-hike which I’d started in April. Partly because my legs weren’t entirely up to it, partly because it was so soul-crushingly lonely (walking four days without meeting anybody else was considered normal), partly because it involved long stretches of walking on the highway… It did not meet my definition of a nature trail.
An odd experience, that: anticipation, a long journey, a glorious and multifaceted failure… An unusual set of sensations. Might use that in my fiction someday.
The other big thing was the end of the relationship that lasted almost three years – my personal best. I tried. The stress of her daily life only kept rising. The first year was wonderful. It was for the best.
That was also my last tie to Quebec City, which is how, after about four years, I finally packed up and moved to Montreal. In a matter of speaking, that is. All my things are in a storage unit, my address is a PO box, and I’m technically homeless as I roam the world, trying to catch up on all the adventures I’d put on the back burner. (See my “Feral Artist Nomad” posts for more on that.)
Perhaps because of my failure to hike the CDT, my creativity went wild to overcompensate, to make this year meaningful in any way whatsoever. Wrote dozens of new stories. Sold quite a few of them. Of the ones that got published, my absolute favourite was “Hard as a Mirror of Cast Bronze.” It was inspired by someone I once knew and loved, written during the stretch of 40 days and 40 nights when I cared for her: a difficult though rewarding experience, and I believe the story shows that.
This was also the year I got agented! Finding a literary agent was by far the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life – and it involved writing a whole new novel, as one does. Brandy Vallance of BBLA is excellent, and my dystopian YA sci-fi novel, “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes,” is currently on sub, pending with a few editors. It may have been inspired by my Siberian childhood…
My filmmaking side keeps competing with the writing side: my second-ever film festival was Dam Short Film Festival in February, near Vegas, and it was the single greatest week of my adult life. The entire Boulder City came together to organize an event where every visiting filmmaker was treated like royalty, and it was cool beyond all words. I’m currently awaiting their decision for the upcoming festival in seven weeks: I should know within 48 hours. I hope they liked my new sci-fi offerings.
I made four more short films in 2025 and sent them off far and wide… That got me into three consecutive film festivals in the US in October (yay free hotels!) and might result in some more adventures in the coming months… Unless I repeat my Pacific Crest Trail thruhike, which is a very real possibility, seeing as I already don’t pay rent and have all my stuff packed up. (Strategy, eh?) We’ll see.
One definite success was getting my first-ever creative award: my film “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” got the second place in the comedy sci-fi category at the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival, and that little prize alone can open up a lot of new doors for me… Incidentally, funny sci-fi is a remarkably underutilized subgenre. Hmm.
One of this year’s odder adventures began with too much beer. I was browsing FilmFreeway and applying to all the $5 festivals I could find (always an odd mix, those cheapest festivals) when I stumbled on the first-ever Worldcon sci-fi film festival. That annual convention is typically all about books, not movies, so of course I applied. And got accepted! And decided that if I attend, I may as well go for the entire week, not just one day. Seattle is always a fun town to visit, and that week was beautiful… But during the closing ceremony, the two hosts were so woefully unprepared that they didn’t merely mangle all the foreign names – they giggled while doing so.
Five days had passed with zero condemnation from any VIPs from the SFF community, and so I took it upon myself… As they say in Russia, “If not me, then who?” (“Yesli ne ya, to kto?”) And thus was born “When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident” – the single most impactful thing I’ve ever written. It went viral. The organizers of the 2026 Worldcon in Los Angeles – a different crew – have vowed to do better. (Hard to do worse.) Some interesting conversations and debates took place…
And all of that was because once upon a time, I had too much beer, too much time (but that’s nothing new), and applied for an odd little film festival. A five-dollar bill, a click, and then a long and improbable series of events. Life can be funny like that.
I may be missing some other big 2025 developments, but I believe I’ve covered most of them. As the year ends, I’m sitting on nine sold but not-yet-published short stories and an almost-finished new novel and a few pending grant/residency proposals, and more than a few dreams. Once I finish typing this and crawl out of my oh-so-comfy capsule (it is currently 11:36am), I’ll slither over to the nearby cyber-cafe and use their computers to open a government PDF and submit a cyberpunk-ish short story for a writing contest organized by the Canadian military. My life is very strange: I have tried the traditional path; I have found it lacking.
I may go back to school and get my second Bachelor’s degree – in Physics this time. (The only anglophone universities in Quebec are in Montreal.) I may try some other fun stuff and see where that takes me. The horizon is open and vast.
And just for archival and historical purposes… Briefly: this was the year Donald Trump got inaugurated for the second time. Elon Musk gave not one but two Nazi salutes at the inauguration. It all went downhill from there, with ICE rounding up random people and sending them off to foreign concentration camps, with masked vigilantes harassing Americans without any fear of consequences, with massive protests that are nonetheless ignored by 97% of population. The AI bubble looks like it’s about to pop at long last. The US military has just destroyed its 30th fishing boat near Venezuela, as per the alcoholic Defense Secretary’s illegal orders.
…you can see how one would bury one’s head in fiction, eh?
So here is to a new year. Perhaps not a better one, but a new one nevertheless. Stay safe, my friends.
Such a small world.
The bus that took me from New York to West Reading, PA had two other filmmakers: Vanessa and Kathleen, the co-creators of the wonderful “Five Flights.” We chatted a bit before boarding the bus and then shared an Uber to Marriott’s. (Reading Film Festival provided two free nights to every filmmaker, woot!)
Our names were on the VIP guest list, so the check-in took literally seconds. The organizers gave me a bag of festival swag, two filmmaker badges (alas, I had no companion… but that meant double the drink tickets!), and an XXL-sized T-shirt due to the L-size mix-up. If I ever get a gf who likes wearing oversized shirts as pajamas, this will work great, eh.
After stashing my loot in my posh suite, I joined the first of the three separate filmmaker happy hours that night. In between, there was a 2-hour film block, but I can’t recall what was in it for the life of me.
And so it went the entire weekend: fun films all day long, all the beer and wine we could possibly ask for, and delicious food. By my guesstimate, there were about 40 visiting filmmakers (the local ones didn’t get the free hotel suites), and many new friendships were forged.
I showed off my very first film, “Please Don’t Send Help,” to quite a lot of applause and a fun Q&A with the audience and the event’s host. Along the way, I talked about my technique (making films solely with public domain footage) and trash-talked AI (which was really too easy).
The film block just before mine was “Animation and AI.” Three real animated films, three that were AI garbage. The sole filmmaker from that block who attended the event gave a brave, passionate speech: he’d spent months of his life creating and perfecting his short film, and it was slotted with that slop… The audience gave him one helluva ovation. One audience member actually asked the host to clarify which of the six films were AI slop.
That was a recurring theme throughout the weekend. Lately, AI cultists have been either bribing film festivals to accept their slop or downright spamming their submissions with infinite pieces of AI-generated videos. Each film festival that surrenders and accepts AI adds a bit more legitimacy to those dishonourable thieves. We’ve recently lost Telluride…
As far as I can tell, the Reading fest has added that section for the very first time. (This was their 11th annual festival.) I don’t think they’d anticipated the amount of backlash and anti-AI sentiment they would get. I told the festival’s runner that it would’ve been great if all AI-made (or AI-assisted) films had had a little mark next to them in the program. (It doesn’t have to be a scarlet letter, but that’d be nice.) I’m curious to see if that will happen…
Along the way, during my 55-hour stay in that town, I took very quick trips to see an old firewatch tower, the pagoda built by an eccentric German, and a small but sturdy castle where we had our very last (and small) afterparty on Sunday.
I also took an early-morning walk through downtown: they have so many beautiful murals, so much random street art… There must be something in the water!
I didn’t win any awards (and honestly, wasn’t even expecting to), but on that Sunday morning, I found out that I won the second place in the “Best Comedy SciFi Short Film” category at Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival. My first-ever film festival win – I’m honoured beyond words, and will ride that high for a very long time. (Also, now I get to add “award-winning” to my artist bio – huzzah!)
That Sunday night, after all the goodbyes, and promises to visit one another, and cake, and beer, I stood at the same bus station I’d arrived at, awaiting the bus to Philadelphia for my red-eye flight to Colorado. While waiting there, I realized two things: the “made in Reading” part of the festival was rather enticing, and the area right around the dark bus stop was quite picturesque… That resulted in me jogging around the block (backpacks and all) and filming just about everything on my Android phone. Got about 3-4 minutes of footage out of it: I’ll see if I can transform that into a short urban fantasy film. (For added difficulty, it’d have to be edited entirely on my phone: my computers are in storage in Quebec.)
The bus ride to Philly went well, but I can’t say the same about my bizarre experience with the city’s transit system at 11pm… After the second train suffered an identity crisis mid-ride and dropped me off in a weird-looking neighbourhood, I finally called a taxi. The driver was over-the-top apologetic for the way his city welcomed me. Good guy. Tipped him well.
And then… A night – and not even that – spent at the airport. People – and I use the term loosely – who thought it was fine to play loud videos on their phones at 1:20am as we all waited for the ticket counters to open. A 5am Frontier flight to Denver by way of Orlando, as well as a reminder why I rarely fly Frontier. My backpack cost me $70 since it was a carry-on item. The woman next to me in line was moving, so she had five gigantic (and bright-pink) pieces of luggage. They charged her $900 to check all of that in. She almost started crying… But ultimately accepted their terms.
Such a strange little world.
And meanwhile, a plane was waiting to fly me far away, to the Colorado mountains…
It’s 9am on a chilly Friday morning, and I’m about to bid New York adieu. The last 96 hours were eventful: an overnight bus from Montreal, followed by four days of mingling and touristing, as well as three nights of sci-fi films from around the world.
I love this city… In some other timeline, one where Amazon didn’t roll back its expansion, I would’ve moved here instead of Canada. So it goes. The subway, the busy streets, the grandiose and gorgeous monuments the locals take for granted – I’m not sure I could ever grow bored here.
I’ve done all the usual touristy things: the Grand Central Terminal, an overpriced lox bagel, several laps around Times Square, and hours upon hours of walking and gawking and taking pictures. (Hey, it’s a photogenic city.)
Elsewhere, one potential renter after another lies about their intention of renting my Quebec City apartment, and time passes. It sits empty, waiting. By now, I’ve figured out the landlord’s strange chain of communicaton, sending a message in triplicate each time another desperado messages me, aiming to rent an apartment they can’t visit, guided solely by the video tour I’d recorded and annotated in my pidgin French. With any luck, this latest candidate will comr through, or I’ll be on the hook for yet another month of rent on an apartment I have no intention to return to.
This film festival has remarkably more AI fanboys than last year. (And even one fangirl!) For the time being, they’re not in the majority, or even the plurality. When my film, “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace,” screened and when the viewers saw my note that I hadn’t used AI, there was some passionate applause – so I’ve got that going for me.
Last night was my film’s worldwide premiere. Not my first screening or Q&A, and not even the third. And yet the jitters never fully go away. Will they hate the film? Will they boo? Will they form a remarkably well organized mob and proceed to tar and feather me? (The odds of that are low, but never zero.) And then the film begins, and the audience laughs in all the right places, and seven minutes later, they cheer and clap. (And then they laugh some more once they see the Easter egg at the very end.)
Afterwards, a few of them walk by to tell me they liked it, to ask – with reverence in their voice – where they can find the story the film was based on, or whether they can follow me on Instagram. (But of course.) In turn, I encourage them to read Robert Rodriguez’s “Rebel without a crew” and try to make their own low-budget films. I hope to meet at least one of them at the next year’s festival – as a fellow filmmaker, not as an audience member. (The odds of that are low, but, yet again, never quite zero.)
The dozens of short story submissions I’d sent out last month are coming home to roost. Only rejections so far, but that’s okay: I redirect them to other publications using my personal system. I’ve got time.
A small film festival from Stockholm emails me: they like my debut film, “Please Don’t Send Help,” and it’ll be part of their program. Neat.
An experimental musician who dabbles in 3D imagery performed at last night’s film festival as the opening act. Another short film idea – or maybe even more than that – popped up in my brain.
At film festivals, names and faces and tenses eventually blend together, mixing, combining, forming something better and stranger and new. Even more so when free beer is involved. (The free beer was great. The free gelato had been a lie. So it goes.)
During my final subway ride, in the tunnel by the exit, Wonder Woman plays the violin – one pop-culture tune after another. The violin has formed a blister on her neck. I help her apply two bandaids during a lull in foot traffic. I record a video I’m unsure I’ll ever watch. I leave a tip.
By the escalator, at the boundary between the artificial dungeon and the dull October sunlight, a street preacher practices his craft. “What part do I play in my own destruction?!” he shouts.
I board my bus to the next city, the next film festival, the next improbable adventure.
Onward.
Ever onward.
I’ve recently found myself burdened with an inordinate amount of free time and utter lack of responsibilities of any kind. I’m choosing to use this opportunity to tap into my creative side, to a point. Last week, I wrote two new short stories for upcoming anthologies. (There were quite a few anthology calls with September deadlines!) I’ve also submitted my earlier short stories to 14 different submission calls. (Huzzah for simultaneous submissions, eh?) And just now, mere minutes ago, I sent an application for my first-ever fellowship. It feels existentially terrifying, though I suspect everyone secretly feels the same way: fake it till you make it, put on your big-artist face, push on, and persevere. Or push on, in any case.
…two and a half years is a pretty good run for a relationship. She had promised to change. That was a lie. It was for the best…
As I wrote in my shiny new author thread on the Codex message board (you should join if you’re in the biz! It’s mighty active, and their archives are amazing), my filmmaking side and my writing side are in a constant competition. Funny, that, considering my foray into filmmaking had started out as a way to stay sane while querying literary agents. As it stands right now, my filmmaking forays outweigh my writing ones, even if you include the recent viral essay. It took very little time to procure a list of the five most recent screenings and honours. (No prizes yet, but quite a few “finalist” laurels.) And thus the fellowship application was for my filmmaker self, not the writer self. I have this interesting idea for a crowdsourced sci-fi-esque mockumentary, and all I really need is a big ol’ external hard drive and a few weeks of uninterrupted time with no cellphone reception. (An anathema to most Millennials, I know.)
…she was incredibly particular about her water. I always made sure to carry a bottle of her favourite brand in my backpack. Most times, she didn’t even touch it. Now I have 20 of the damn things left in my fridge. Forcing myself to drink them because when I break my lease and move out, it would be beyond foolish to pack them…
I’d sent out my very first agent query in March 2024. Completed my first short film in June 2024. My first screening: October 2024. My first red carpet with adoring fans shouting my name in the darkness: February 2025. My first viral essay (which opens up a lot of possibilities…): August 2025. Things are accelerating, and I don’t think there’s a way to get off this ride, much like a rollercoaster which takes your initial consent and terrifies you the entire way down, up, and down again, over and over, until you finally reach the end. There is no way to leave before the ride is done. No good way, anyhow. I hadn’t realized these aspects of myself had even existed. And now, as any self-respecting gamer, I want to follow that progression tree all the way to the end. How far can I proceed? Is there an end at all? A whole new universe – two of them, actually – both with a nearly infinite amount of shiny and delicious knowledge to consume, absorb, enact.
…she was the last reason for me to stay in this beautiful tiny town. The big city to the west has far more parties, and more cultural events, and a gigantic airport that would not require me to carpool twice and dedicate an entire day just to get there and back. I’ll break my lease any day now. I’m curious about spending November-January doing light Workaway labour in some tropical country, or more than one. I’m curious about many things…
I believe that certain actions permanently alter your personality. There is a version of you before and after losing your virginity. Before and after having your first drink, first drug, first communion. (If ever, that is.) This morning, I’d been the sort of artist who had never applied for a grant or a fellowship of any sort. Here and now, just a few hours later, I can no longer say that.
The future is terrifying.
But also fun.
Bring it.
It’s January 22, 2017, and Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway coins the phrase “alternative facts” during a TV interview while defending Sean Spicer’s blatantly false claims about the size of the inauguration crowd. The phrase goes viral. Within a week, the sales of Orwell’s 1984 go up by 9,400%. Conway gets mocked, becomes a meme, shrugs it off, and lives happily ever after.
It’s August 16, 2025. The two hosts of the annual Hugo Awards ceremony mangle many non-anglophone names, and giggle at least once while doing so.
It’s August 20. Host #1 makes a Bluesky comment, saying “For context I was high as a kite on pain meds.”
It’s August 21. My essay on the Hugo incident unexpectedly goes viral: 13,000 views and counting.
It’s September 2: 17 days after the awards ceremony, 12 days after the essay. The Seattle Worldcon Chair and the two hosts issue simultaneous non-apology apologies. They are… odd.
The easiest way to kill a lot of weeds or unwanted plants is to cover them with a tarp to cut off their sunlight. For best results, wait a week. Or two weeks. Or 17 days.
When you take 17 days to craft an apology, one would expect a masterpiece to rival Abraham Lincon’s Gettysburg Address, especially when those apologizing are professional writers. We did not get a masterpiece.
The Gettysburg Address was 271 words long. The hosts’ non-apology was 1,283 words long. The Chair’s non-apology was 401 words long. We are to believe that, on average, only 23.6 words of that statement were written every day.
Here is the shortest possible apology: “I’m sorry. I screwed up. How can I possibly make this better?” This took me 13 seconds to write. At this pace, working eight hours a day, for 17 days straight, my resulting apology would have been 451,938 words long, or only 6% shorter than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A few hours ago, Jess Nevins posted an excellent Bluesky thread about the lost art of apologizing. Just like me, he chose not to name the hosts.
I rather enjoyed his point #4:
“#4) I’m truly surprised I have to type this one, but….
DO NOT EVER SAY ANYTHING THAT CAN BE REMOTELY CONSTRUED AS ‘WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, ME OR YOUR LYING EYES/EARS?’
It happens all the time that the offender and the offended remember events differently.”
This bit was also quite good:
“Because if you make your living crafting sentences and paragraphs and pages and chapters and entire books, you don’t need time to gather your thoughts or to articulate your apology correctly. You write for a living: putting together an apology shouldn’t be difficult for you or take much time.”
The non-apology from the hosts begins with, “We’re truly sorry that our work hosting the 2025 Hugo Awards Ceremony has caused anyone distress.” That is an unusual way to start, and is synonymous with “we’re sorry you got upset.”
The letter goes on to claim there’d been confusion with the pronunciation guides, all caused by the Worldcon staff, and that there’d been no time to rehearse the names. (But I suspect they’d found the time to rehearse the Hugo song. Priorities…)
Perhaps most interestingly, the apology states that host #2 (the younger of the two hosts) did not giggle while reading any names. Well, of course she didn’t. That was host #1. (For what it’s worth, I too hate watching videos of myself and have a hard time recognizing my own voice.) For posterity’s sake, here is that giggle once again. There were thousands of us in the audience. We all heard it. We all reacted instantaneously, turning to our neighbours, asking, “Did that just happen?”
But no, dear reader. No. Do not believe your lying eyes and ears. What good have they ever done to you? Don’t worry your pretty little head. Do as you’re told instead.
The non-apology apology goes on to say that neither of the hosts had felt comfortable insisting on a full run-through rehearsal, because they’d never hosted an awards show before. That said, they’ve both offered their advice and guidance to the future Worldcon organizers. Generous.
Their statement does not mention host #1 being “high as a kite on pain meds.”
Their statement does mention omitting Kamilah Cole’s name, but that section ends rather oddly: it says that host #2 has apologized to Cole, and that host #1 “needs to do that as well!” (I have not altered their punctuation.) That reads like an odd first draft. That does not read like a professional statement that had taken two writers 17 days to prepare.
I often wonder about the ratio of “time spent rehearsing the Hugo song” to “time spent rehearsing the names,” but it’s bad luck to divide by zero.
In their non-apology, the hosts repeatedly say that the pronunciation guide was either missing or incomplete. That is objectively false.
On April 6, 2025, the Seattle Worldcon released this video where professional announcers read out almost every name. They read those names without giggling. If you’re curious what the giggle-inducing name is supposed to sound like, here you go. (Egbiameje Omole, I do not know you, but I am so sorry.)
The list of the finalists was not secret. It had been released more than four months before the Seattle Worldcon took place. The full video is 22.5 minutes long. You could play it almost three times in one hour at normal speed. You could practice the names multiple times per day.
If you cared, that is.
That pronunciation video is cleverly concealed. To access it, one must go on YouTube and type in such secret, esoteric words as “2025 Hugo Awards.”
Verily, I say upon thee: there was no way for anyone to find it.
In their non-apology, the hosts complain that the title of Darcie Little Badger’s YA novel, Sheine Lende, also wasn’t in their pronunciation guide. It might not surprise you to learn that the title was also in that pronunciation video, just 78 seconds in.
The hosts chose to release their non-apology in a rather unusual format: not as a blog post, or a press release, or even a PDF. No, it’s a shared Google Doc file. Fun thing about those files: they cannot be archived by the Wayback Machine, and the people who own the document can go in and alter it at any time.
The internet is a complicated and chaotic place. It’s possible that something unexpected might happen to that file within, let’s say, a year. It’d be a shame if it disappeared. A real shame.
As someone who cares about the preservation of historical documents, I’ve gone ahead and saved a PDF copy. It’s timestamped and tamperproof. If some tragedy ever befalls that Google Doc, I’ll attach my copy of the PDF to this essay. Please, no need to thank me.
How to issue a slightly longer apology:
Perhaps the most subtle aspect of this incident is the silence of the A-listers. Of all the bestselling authors I follow, to the extent of my knowledge, only Elizabeth Bear spoke about this entire incident. There were bloggers, of course: Cora Buhlert has made an excellent (as always) post on the nature of the two non-apologies. File 770 wrote about it here and here, though at one point the anti-name-manglers got referred to as “woke folk.”
There were many bestselling authors who sat in the same audience, and in better seats than the rest of us, probably, and who heard the mangling and the giggling, and then chose to say nothing. My best guess is that they didn’t want to make waves, didn’t want to upset their friends. Smile and clap and move on.
I suspect that by writing the previous essay, as well as this one, I might be sabotaging the odds of publishing my YA sci-fi novel, as well as any follow-ups.
Perhaps. But even if so…
Worth it.
When properly pronouncing people’s names becomes woke, only the woke will properly pronounce people’s names.
The non-apology from the Seattle Worldcon’s Chair, Kathy Bond, is much shorter – a mere 401 words. It’s quite good, and it almost passes for a true apology if you don’t look closely enough. It sure seems to follow the traditional format.
And yet… It has no mention of host #1’s odd admission of being high during the ceremony. It does not mention that host’s giggling while reading a non-anglophone name. It suggests creating a centralized “organizational structure responsible solely for the accurate handling of names” (or, in simpler terms, “name team”) without explaining why their own pronunciation guide video got ignored by all.
Perhaps the strangest part is that neither of the two non-apology letters even mentions the r/fantasy nominee for the Best Related Work. When the two hosts got to that slide, they saw the list of 20 or so names (as well as Reddit nicknames), and they both laughed in unison as they skipped it. That was not an ambiguous giggle. That was laughter. Was it nerves? Was it the same kind of classism that the AO3 folks experienced not long ago when the very nature of their platform wasn’t deemed serious enough? We’ll never know.
What to do if you didn’t rehearse any of the names and are faced with an unexpectedly long list of them:
What not to do:
In my first essay, I asked the Seattle Worldcon these seven questions:
I suspect the Worldcon people saw them while drafting their short non-apology. Only one of those questions got addressed, and even then, very briefly: “We provided insufficient organizational plans at the podium, including an inadequately designed pronunciation guide and other poorly designed materials.”
Translation: “We didn’t prepare.”
That admission is as much as you and I deserve, my friends.
If anyone ever decides to make a Fyre Festival-style documentary about this mess, it’d be pretty entertaining. I bet there’s at least one insider who doesn’t agree with the party line. I bet there have been some interesting Discord chats or text messages or even emails during those 17 days.
I bet I’m not the only one who likes to save things for safekeeping.
My blog will not fall prey to digital decay. I’ll keep it accessible for as long as I live – and then some.
You may be reading this in the future, in a year far beyond 2025. No, not you with the cat – you with the cyber-glasses. I hope you’ll find this essay useful, whoever you are. Maybe you’re bored. Maybe you’re insatiably curious. Maybe you’re working on a book (do you still have books in the future?) about the history of Hugo awards.
Perhaps, in whatever future you’re reading this, be it a week, or a month, or a decade from now, you’ll have more answers and more context and more clarity.
But meanwhile, here and now, in this slice of the time-space amber, this is the best bad truth that we mere mortals are allowed by our betters.
We deserve more.
Aaaand I’m back. Just 10 days ago, I typed up the hopeful, giddy post, Onward to Worldcon. In it, I wondered just what kind of cool adventures and experiences I would have had over the following week.
Much has changed.
Short version: many adventures were had. My overall impression of my first-ever Worldcon was positive, and I’ll definitely attend the next one in California. Many fun new friends.
Long version: wild week, eh. I tried to fill every waking moment with new experiences and friends and panels and parties, and I had very very many waking moments, since I slept only about 4-5 hours per night.
Worldcon felt to me like an intricate clock with ten thousand moving pieces. Some of the pieces had redundancies, so if something failed (and I’m sure many things did), we the attendees never found out. It was a monumental event of staggering complexity, and the fact that it went as well as it did is a testament to the combined efforts of all the volunteers. Sincere and heartfelt kudos to you all, my friends.
There’s a lot to process here, and I’m sure random bits and pieces will fall into place weeks and months later. For now, though, here’s a list of the good, the bad, and the fugly.
To start with, the fugly. The essay I posted yesterday, When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident, has been improbably successful. Over 8,000 blog views within 24 hours, over 1,400 likes and 800 reskeets (yes, we call them “reskeets” – no, we will not change), and so many excellent conversations. That’s more than I could ever hope for. Anyhow, not much else for me to say on that front.
The second fugly aspect was the registration line… My initial plan had been to fly in the night before (Quebec City -> Chicago -> Seattle), crash at my brother’s place, get a 7am bus to the convention center, get my pass, and make it to one of the 9am-ish panels.
Reality interfered. The flight to Chicago got delayed to the point where I had to spend the night at the airport, and didn’t get to Seattle till 9:30am. I raced from there directly to the convention center, big backpack in tow. (Experienced traveler tip: always carry deodorant, toothpaste, and a toothbrush! That cost me five minutes, but it made me much more pleasant to be around, eh.)
I arrived at the convention center at 10:30am. And then… Then I spent almost two hours waiting in the registration line. One of my many, many privileges (of which I’m constantly cognizant) is that I’m physically fit and in good health. Even so, that line almost defeated me. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have felt like to those who had mobility issues or couldn’t spend two hours surrounded by the loud crowd on all sides.
The convention staff claimed there were some connectivity issues. (They apparently lasted the entire first day, judging by the Discord chatter from those who tried to watch panels remotely.) If there was a backup in place, it must have failed. I was sleep-deprived and borderline delirious, but I swear I heard them ask the folks in line if anyone could join them and help with processing the registration passes.
As we got closer to noon, they made another announcement, telling the panelists with the upcoming panels to step aside for the express line so they wouldn’t actually miss their panels. It was not good… The wait was made worse because my neighbour in line was a) an old-timey Worldcon visitor, with 20+ years of convention memories, and b) incredibly cynical: they kept saying how none of the opening/closing events mattered, etc, etc. Later, during the second hour, my neighbour moved on to describe their daily routine, their preferred type of digital tablet, and more. Unbidden. I nodded and tried to filter it all out and kept promising myself that the day could yet be salvaged.
Finally, at 12:15pm, I finally got my pass with the neat little “my first Worldcon” ribbon and raced upstairs, to find the third panel on my daily schedule.
From what I understand, it’s not always like that. What I don’t understand is what specific cascade of issues caused all that. Later in the day, folks who arrived at the convention center in the afternoon claimed it still took them 90 or so minutes to get processed.
This… kerfuffle, let’s call it that, made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, I ought to throw my hat into the panelist pool for the 2026 convention. I know a lot about several topics, and will gladly contribute my knowledge if they’ll have me. I would do just about anything to minimize any further chance of being stuck in the Line From Hell. (Yes, folks, it was that bad.)
So that was the fugly: the registration at the start and the name-mangling giggling mess toward the end. I’ll intersperse the good and the bad.
Good: the variety of panels was mind-blowing! Hundreds of them, with at least 10 to pick from for any one-hour slot. (Some went longer than an hour.) Some panels were so full that folks sat on the floor (the ones with GRRM and Martha Wells, for example), while others were oddly sparse, like the panel on the future of energy. (It had an excellent mix of experts in the field. One of them gave me their personal email address since they don’t have a blog, huzzah!)
Bad: folks, I get that it was all volunteer-run, but some of the moderators… There were two particularly bad examples. At one panel, the moderator never even showed up. The panelists were three women, who were all published authors, and a 95-year-old man who used to be a UW professor. (If I recall correctly, he may have published something at one point.) The panelists decided to self-moderate. The old man turned his introduction into a bona fide speech. Weird, but okay. When the panelists decided to discuss the panel’s topic (I’m being vague here: no topic, no names), the old man interrupted one of the women and launched into an honest-to-God lecture on the topic, as if we were a bunch of college freshmen. He went on and on and on. I finally stood up and walked out. Quite a few people followed me. I felt so incredibly sorry for those panelists…
The other weirdly moderated panel actually had a moderator. The moderator was a woman, as were all the panelists. (One of them is among my favourite podcasters!) Problem was, the moderator wasn’t sure what her job entailed, and an impatient panelist had to explain it to her. Over the hour that followed, the moderator launched into looooong monologues about her personal involvement with the panel’s subject. She talked on and on, longer than any two (out of four) panelists put together. The audience grew restless. The poor panelists couldn’t hide the impatience and frustration from their faces. Finally, the impatient panelist interrupted the moderator when the filibuster showed no sign of slowing down. Some discussion among the panelists took place. The offended moderator buried her hands under the table, texting or browsing or doing who knows what else on her phone.
Five minutes before the panel was scheduled to end, the moderator finally looked up, realized she missed something, and announced that it was time for some Q&A. The panel went wayyy past the one-hour mark so, once again, I felt like a jerk by getting up and walking away, to get a good seat at the next panel before it filled up. Ho hum.
Good: the panel on navigating AI for writers and editors was excellent, in large part due to Jason Sanford, who made it very very clear that, as a moderator, he would not suffer fools gladly – or at all. He kept the ideologically polarized crowd in check, especially after one of them jeered something in support of the pro-AI panelist. Sanford sounded downright intimidating from time to time, but he made sure the panel stayed on track, he didn’t monologue, and he gave each of the four panelists time to speak.
Neil Clarke, of the Clarkesworld fame, spent most of the hour literally facepalming as a blatantly pro-AI “author” opposite him used every pro-AI excuse in the book, (The other two panelists were a pro-consent, anti-AI professor, and another professor who kept saying how neat it would be to have an AI cowriter…) Neil has been an anti-AI champion with his magazine for years, and he made his point quite clear during that panel. Later, at the awards ceremony, he gave a brief but passionate anti-AI speech when he accepted his Hugo for the best short-form editor. You rock, Neil! Keep up the good fight, eh.
Bad: food and coffee options inside the convention center. It was very very strange to see that the sole coffee stand (and in Seattle, no less!) packed up and left for the day by 5:40pm. With thousands of caffeine addicts milling around, you’d think that the baristas’ overtime wage would’ve paid for itself within five minutes. (Or hey, maybe their boss could come by and take over…) But nope. The overpriced food vendors on the exhibit floor also folded up by 6pm. I more or less had to beg them for the privilege of buying a small bag of chips and a coke for the low, low price of $8. Oof. Oof, I say. (And no, there were no vending machines.)
Good: the 7am coffee meet-ups were excellent. Part of the Fringe program, they were partly a tour of Pike Place, partly a way to make new friends, which we all did. I’ve made it out to just two of those early meet-ups, I think, and the second one ballooned into an awesome one-on-one conversation of humanity and theology as it pertains to sci-fi and fantasy. (“Those aren’t gods – you just recreated superheroes!” Heh. You rock, C.W.) Granted, there wasn’t much to do at the actual convention center before 10am (aside from a few very early panels) because the exhibit floor stayed closed till 10pm, but nonetheless – those coffee meetups were wholesome and fun and edumacational. (If you ever travel to Seattle, touring Pike Place around 7am is a unique experience: it’s empty and devoid of crowds; quite different from the rush hour.)
Bad: you know, I’m actually out of bad stuff – it was overwhelmingly good! The only borderline weird thing was the nature of the big masquerade event. At first, I assumed it was going to be a masked ball. One of the old-timers assured me that was not the case: all were welcome, mask or no mask. After that reassurance, I assumed it was going to be a masked ball, but with mask-less folks welcome to attend and mingle. Welllll, it was actually more of a fashion show. Folks sat in the huge auditorium, while up on stage, cosplayers of all kinds took turns to display their amazing costumes. (Giant squid person – you were a genius!) That was a very different pace and vibe than I’d expected, so I hung around for just 10 minutes before bouncing out.
Good: authors! It was so, so great to finally meet my favourite authors in person. I’d met Matt Dinniman (he of the Dungeon Crawler Carl fame) a few times before, but I kept running into him at the convention, and the two panels with him that I attended were brilliant. A genuinely nice guy on top of being a great author! Mary Robinette Kowal is now at the very top of the list of authors I’ll read once I get through the books on my short-term list. (Geek problems, am I right?) Her live taping of the “Writing Excuses” podcast (with Erin Roberts and Howard Tayler) taught me more about writing than some of the 200-page writing manuals I’d encountered in my journey. In a building full of brainiacs, she stood out by a long shot.
Meeting John Scalzi and GRR Martin was also fun. I’ve been reading Scalzi’s blog for about 20 years now, and it was great to finally put the voice to the persona. (His pink unicorn “Alpha Male” T-shirt was excellent trolling.) Martin showed up 12 minutes late to his own panel, did quite a bit of monologuing, and had to be gently (but firmly) stopped by Scalzi when his monologues got too long. Interesting guy. I was not at the event (autograph signing?) when one of Martin’s extra-toxic fans asked if he could please hurry up and give his series to Brandon Sanderson (who was also present) before dying of old age. Ye gods… That might have been the ugliest fan interaction Worldcon has experienced in years. It felt as if one of the extra-toxic subreddits breached containment.
Good: the Freebie Lounge! That was such an interesting part of the convention… It was located in the corner of the big exhibit hall on the second floor. There were books, books, and more books. Some titles had been brought by authors seeking to boost their recognition: dozens of books, shrink-wrapped and waiting to be picked up. Some authors set up a little autograph table for their freebie books. (Great strategy!) There were a lot of old-timey sci-fi magazines from the 60s and 70s: I snagged a couple, and will devour them at leisure. (Retro sci-fi is quite different from the stuff today, for better and for worse.) There were also the latest issues of today’s top magazines: Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Analog.
The local SFF fans helped out by donating books from their own collections, which was unexpectedly wholesome! That’s how I got my hands on four Terry Pratchett paperbacks. (I’m on a long-term quest to acquire every Terry Pratchett novel, but only from thrift stores and/or freebie locations.)
I had to be very selective (limited luggage space, limited shelf space) but even so, I ended up with 11 books, including lots of amazing fanzines! The most unexpected find was the hardcover copy of Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries by Howard Tayler, creator of the Schlock Mercenary comic. The book is in the format of Art of War (one rule, many commentaries), except that it’s annotated by military grunts and mercenaries from the distant future. It’s beyond funny. Tayler was kind enough to sign it for me when I bumped into him at a panel later that day. (What a guy!)
Good: parties! All in all, I partied for five nights straight – the sixth night was a fun barbecue after a day of hiking near Mt Rainier. (Probably the best yet least attended Fringe event. Only nine sign-ups out of 5,000+ attendees!) I’m an introvert who is very very good at storing social energy, much like a sloth has a hidden reservoir of energy reserves. The convention had a dedicated dry-erase board where different party organizers could promote their events.
A few were somewhere in the city, but most were at the nearby hotel, three or four at a time. The hotel’s elevators couldn’t quite handle all the traffic, and required a key card to use them after 10pm. At one point, our gregarious gaggle of geeks got tired of waiting and just started going up and down the stairs, following the noise on each floor till we found an unlisted (but not unwelcoming!) party. Much fun was had by all, especially at the famous annual Dead Dog Party (disregard the odd name) that was bigger and more attended than all the other parties combined. Huzzah!
Good: friendos! Sooo many new friendos. Many emails were exchanged. Lots of social media connections were forged. At least one epic conversation will continue.
Not bad, but funny: as someone only tangentially aware of Worldcon (this was my first), I’d always heard about the so-called Bar Con, aka the after-panel meetup at the nearest bar, where all the writers would trade lore and tips and gossip, being all cool and writer-y. For some reason, in my mind’s eye I’d always thought it would be a fancy, private-club sort of affair, with posh velvet chairs, relaxed lounge music, and fairly quiet, witty conversations…
Reader, I was wrong. I was so wrong that it’s actually pretty damn funny. (I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t pack a full-on suit in my Osprey backpack!) The bar at the nearby Sheraton hotel had writers, yes, and fans of said writers, and many many other people. Hundreds of them, actually. It was louder than some of the concerts I’ve attended in the past, and that just added to the hilarious mismatch of my expectations and the actual reality.
It was a bit odd when the hotel’s bar stopped serving drinks at the stroke of midnight. That was on Saturday night, no less, right after the awards ceremony, which mercifully ended around 10:40pm. Later on, I heard that that the city ordinance is to stop serving drinks at 2am. Soooo, much like with the coffeeshop, when you make a deliberate choice to stop serving drinks to a giant crowd on a Saturday night… Weird business choice, brah. (I know, I know, Worldcon had no part in it. Just listing my personal subjective experiences.) Nonetheless, I made a couple of new friends in that Bar Con crowd, so all was well.
Good: SFWA events! I wrote recently that I managed to join the SFWA after making juuuust enough money to exceed their associate member threshold. Their members-only breakfast on Friday, followed by a networking reception just before the awards on Saturday, was fun. I did end up accidentally talking to at least one AI apologist (eww. Eww, ewww, ewww.) but the vast majority of them were cool cats. There was an issue with SFWA forums during the convention, so I joined their Discord server (not my favourite platform: bad archival functionality), and made even more friendos that way!
Good: film festival! My short film Please Don’t Send Help screened on Thursday, to the audience of about 80 people. There were approving-sounding face noises. There were no rotten eggs or tomatoes or booing or riots. There was a very small but cozy Q&A at the end (thanks, Shawn!) and at least one person who recognized me and stopped by to chat a few days later. It’s always wild to see something I created on a big screen. What an excellent treat.
Neither good nor bad: my writing streak took quite a hit, and that’s entirely on me. I tried (mostly failed, but tried) to write at least a little bit on my phone’s Notes app every day, and managed to type up exactly 2,183 words. Better than nothing, but not a whole lot, considering I was away for eight whole days. Ah well, it was still progress. Today was the first day when I actually sat down and typed typed typed. The end result: 1,644 new words for my first draft. Not too shabby.
Super-good: sooo much inspiration! I jotted down ideas for at least three new short stories, as well as a sci-fi novel that would actually utilize my degree in political science. (Seriously, it’ll pretty much write itself.) Just gotta finish the current WIP, which has just reached the 55% or so mark… It’s good to have more ideas than you know what to do with! I also took lots of notes on book recommendations (as well as the occasional movie) from all the panelists. My reading list will never ever run dry, and that is beautiful.
And so… Fun event. Not perfect, not terrible. Will come again. Lots of fun free books (the best kind!) for my reading pile. I haven’t checked yet, but I believe the organizers are uploading the panels that got filmed (not all got filmed) and will keep the files available till the end of the year. So much to stream!
A year from now, I’ll be the grizzled second-year Worldcon attendee – to quote a joke, “This isn’t my first rodeo!” I say at my second rodeo.
I’ll see you all there, I hope.
Grigory Lukin.com 