So! Worldcon 2025 is at an end! And what a wild blast it was. I enjoyed the previous Worldcon I attended in San Jose, but I wasn't really prepared to take advantage of it. This year, I couldn't swing a sonic screwdriver without bapping a friend or colleague, or without making a new business or academic contact. I credit at least some of that to the prepwork that I and the Thinking Ink Press team did, and at least some of it to having the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table as a "home base" to go back to.
After the Hugos, the Fountain bar at the Sheraton was so packed they couldn't even take my order before close, but I wanted to get more writing done, and I was just up the street last year for CVPR 2024, so I remembered the Elephant and Castle bar, right up the street, open until 2. I got a goodly chunk of THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY done right here in the table in the center, until roughly 1am.
BUT! Even as a night owl, I understand the value of early to bed, early to rise, and to convince myself to do that, I try to get up for a hearty breakfast. I don't always make it, but I made it today. The TIP gang has been keeping tabs of each other on Signal, and so my colleague Liza Olmsted and I realized we were at the same restaurant, got together (as I was starting my breakfast and she was finishing hers) and during our discussions came up with the idea for a brand new anthology! Woohoo.
The simple expedient of bringing Clockwork Edgar (Sandra's messenger raven) attracted a lot of people to the Clockwork Alchemy table, and the backstory Sandra had built around Edgar's messenger bag (complete with spare gear, compass, message and a few other items) was very entertaining.
After a neurodivergence talk at noon, which was very productive for me and Liza, I returned to the show floor to close up and found that we had two more hours before close due to a typo in an email. So, I had one last chance to attend a talk by my new friend Dr. Paul Price, who lectured on "exponential plots" (think Goku getting more and more powerful in Dragon Ball Z) with a strongly evidence-based lecture built on a close read of old space opera.
Paul showed that cyclical (episodic) plots work well with no-growth (think Sherlock Holmes versus case of the week) or slow-growth plots (think a slowly learning protagonist) but can get out of hand if a ridiculous enemy attacks every week with a similarly ridiculous growth in the protagonist's power - nevertheless, if you build in humanizing elements from the start, it can still work.
The coolest thing in his lecture was his critique of gender roles in the old space operas - I don't remember the precise numbers, but the gist was, in an entire space opera series by John Campbell, there were 25 instances of the pronoun "she" - but 18 of those referred to a ship, 6 to love interests, and the remaining was a stenographer who was alien, but was nevertheless depicted in a stereotypical gender role.
After that, we did close, and even as we did so, I kept on making contacts, meeting people, and so on. Even trying to buy a last-minute gift from a friend ended up with a vendor taking my card and inquiring about my writing as they were a voracious reader and were interested in my series.
Paul and I, who just met, nevertheless found many similarities in our research styles, and got together tonight to discuss next steps on using his data in our corpus or our code to analyze his data. A laser-guided question from an audience member at my talk got me thinking about DEI issues with our corpus, and Paul's "usages of the pronoun she" analysis sounds like a perfect candidate for implementation by an LLM.
On the way back, we had an interesting conversation about religion, mortality, transhumanism, the weird giant statue we saw in front of an art museum, and the crowd of filkers still filking away in the hotel when we finally got back.
I ended up retiring to the hotel bar - which I interpreted as the right thing to do because on my way down there I ran into someone I had wanted to run into at the con but had only passed and waved. We had a great conversation, and I got a lot of work done at the hotel bar before closing it up.
On that note, that's a wrap for Worldcon 2025. I may have more to say about it ... but it's gonna have to be tomorrow.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me at the photo booth, the courtyard of Elephant and Castle, fresh fruit for breakfast, Edgar the clockwork raven, Paul giving his talk at the academic track, packing up our booth at the con, a giant statue on the street, a giant crowd of filkers, and me and a giant tray of oysters - all rendered with my "make it look like an illustration" series of Photoshop filters.
