The video of the Chengdu presentation at Smofcon 2022 is up on YouTube. It provides some insight into how the 2023 Worldcon is going. Mostly, it’s going badly. The presentation was about a month ago, but I haven’t seen any significant change since then. Correct me if I’ve missed anything. My focus here isn’t on the logistical issues as such, but on the underlying problems.
PR #1 wasn’t out then and still isn’t out. Ben Yalow said that members won’t receive it “until everything is locked in to the satisfaction of people who get very nervous. … We’re holding off on releasing PR 1 until everything in PR 1 we know is absolutely, completely certain.”
Which people does he mean? Not fans, or at least not just fans. “Membership income is a trivial part of this Worldcon, unlike every other Worldcon in the past, in the past several decades. We are totally dependent on sponsorships and we are working with various corporate and governmental entities to get sponsorships locked down. Until we get the amount of those dollars and a lot of amounts locked down plans are still very very very much up in the air.”
Considering the earlier talk about this convention leaving all previous Worldcon attendance records far behind, it surprised me that memberships are covering such a small part of the costs. In the Q&A, it was explained that the con has about 4,000 attending members acquired from the voting process and they paid $50 each, yielding “a tiny amount compared to what a normal Worldcon would get from their first 4,000 attending memberships.” I think that means that the large number of pre-registrations through voting actually worked against the con’s income, since they got the cheapest rates. In the Q&A, Ben said the con currently has roughly 4,000 full members, which means they’ve picked up few members since then. There have also been “several hundred” five-day attendance packages bought, which get attendance but not voting rights.
A Worldcon is supposed to be a fan-run convention, paid for largely by its members. Sponsorships have been a matter of contention recently; Raytheon’s sponsorship of the 2021 Hugo Awards got many people upset. The involvement of Chinese governmental entities is even more disturbing.
Ben noted that the Covid quarantine situation is still grim. “We again recognize that people will be very reluctant to come to China in a situation where they could be locked down for several months.” In a nice bit of understatement he added, “We also recognize that the politics of China and the politics of the West are not necessarily totally compatible.” Later on he answered a question about the human rights situation by admitting it’s “challenging.” I can’t blame him for not going into detail, considering how much danger he could put the Chinese concom members in — but that’s exactly what the problem is.
In his concluding remarks, he jokingly said that “the purpose of silver linings is to bring dark clouds with them.” There are plenty of dark clouds over the con.