Another in my series of posts on SFF conventions’ codes of conduct. This time I’m writing about the one for Arisia 2026. Arisia is held in Boston or Cambridge in January each year. I haven’t attended Arisia in years, but I found the code of conduct surprisingly reasonable. However, there’s another requirement which potential attendees could find burdensome.
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Leslie Fish, one of the best-known members of the filk music community, has died. She was talented, opinionated, outgoing, and just weird (in the best sense of the word). I didn’t know her well, but I’d seen, heard, and talked with her on many occasions. Other people who knew her better will write about her, but I should give my perspective here.
She appeared on the fannish scene around 1975. With a group called the DeHorn Crew, she produced a vinyl LP called Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain’t Even Been Yet. Another, Solar Sailors, came out the next year. The songs focused on Star Trek and space travel. In addition to being a fan, she was an anarcho-syndicalist, associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), aka the “Wobblies.” She was no fan of central economic planning, and her politics often ran in a libertarian direction.
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Social media can be hugely deceptive in judging how popular ideas are. One side can be noisy while the people who disagree feel too intimidated to dissent. An example is the self-declared “Nazi punchers.” They’re self-righteous in their advocacy of violence, and they like to distort a footnote of Karl Popper’s into a “paradox of tolerance” that says they must be intolerant to be tolerant. But we don’t routinely see news reports of assaults of this kind, which is a clue that they’re more noise than action or few in numbers. Probably both.
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I’ve registered as an attending member for the 2027 Worldcon in Montreal. Even though it’s in another country, it’s an easy day’s drive from my home. I hope that crossing the border won’t be too dangerous to consider by then, but today I’m here to talk about its code of conduct. There have been better ones and worse ones. I have concerns, but they weren’t enough to scare me out of registering. Let’s take a look, as I have with other conventions.
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In 2024, there were some disturbing actions in science fiction/fantasy fandom against people who are from Israel or support its existence. I’ve blogged about some of them before. Vancouver Comics Arts Festival banned an artist for being Israeli. A statement by the convention berated the earlier organizers for their “ignorance” in inviting someone who had served in Israel’s armed forces in the early 2000s. The CRIT awards put a blanket exclusion on nominating anyone who supports Zionism (i.e., supports the existence of a Jewish state). Both sets of bigots got slapped down and are now being less public, but they’ve shown that the problem exists in fandom.
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In my post on tech buzzword panic, I briefly mentioned a situation where Dragon Con bizarrely called the police to expel an exhibitor. Bleeding Cool mentions this situation and a somewhat similar one at Fan Expo Canada:
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Dean Cain, who had once played Superman on the TV show Lois & Clark, has taken a job as an ICE officer. He is listed as a guest at Cincinnati Comic Expo. He may be a guest at other upcoming conventions I don’t know about. Now that he is working for ICE, he is a dangerous person to have at any gathering of fans. By taking the job, he has shown that he has no regard for human rights. He may well pick attendees for ICE to grab.
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One more post on convention codes of conduct. The information here is based on an entry in File 770 (scroll down to item 7). The writers’ organization Codex has permanently revoked Savil Lavingia’s membership. Codex’s notice, according to the entry, consisted of the following:
The Codex Board has reviewed your case and permanently revoked your membership due to concerns raised by members about your activities at DOGE that violate our Code of Conduct and make our members feel unsafe. We strive to maintain a space where diversity is celebrated and all members feel safe and included around each other.
With Balticon coming around again, I took another look at their code of conduct. It still has some disturbing features, and I’m not going, although it’s within a day’s driving distance and will likely have a good filk program.
There is a blanket prohibition on “Slurs and derogatory comments about a person, group, or category of people.” That presumably includes, just to come up with some examples, the Chengdu con chair, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Russian army, billionaires, Neil Gaiman, and the new Pope. It will be one dull convention if no one can say anything bad about any of those people! When attendees can be accused without eyewitness testimony, it’s even worse. This isn’t just hypothetical; in 2022 Balticon used this provision to make life miserable for one of its program participants.
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The bid for a 2028 Worldcon in Uganda, which I had criticized here and here, has changed its proposed venue to Kigali, Rwanda. The name is now ConKigali. It may be an improvement in some ways, but is it enough of one to get serious consideration?
Freedom House gives Rwanda a rating of 23, categorized as “not free.” This is lower than Uganda’s rating of 34. From the standpoint of fans’ personal safety, though, Rwanda may be the less dangerous of the two. Homosexuality isn’t outlawed, but people traveling there still need to be careful what opinions they express. The US State Department has issued a long list of “significant human rights issues” in Rwanda.
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