My First WorldCon: Attending the Hugo Awards and the State of Science Fiction
Earlier this month, I flew to Glasgow to attend the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention and see the Hugo Awards. It’s been a dream come true for me in many ways, because not only have I been able to attend a conference that has been on my bucket list since I was 12, but I was a panelist and a speaker on two different program sessions.
Before I get too mushy about everything, I want to be very clear about one thing: the conference was eye-opening at how universal the science fiction genre is yet attending these types of conventions where networking is critical for those in publishing, filmmaking, and gaming is incredibly expensive.
Full transparency: Much of the costs were made available thanks to a grant related to my graduate student status and through cashing in on credit card rewards points for the flights. It’s an extreme privilege to be able to go and all in, it would have cost about $1700 but I will only have spent about $400 of my own money.
I say this because there clearly were people in attendance who have been to decades worth of conferences. The people in the business meeting - where the rules around the Hugo Award Ceremony and the nature of the convention are established - were all well known to each other. It felt like walking in on a dinner party that I invited myself to.
But I’ll digress for now.
Let’s get back to the things that healed my inner child and give me hope to be able to make a name for myself in this industry.
Big Names in Publishing, Film, and Games Attend WorldCon
Someone told me they ran into George R.R. Martin (yes, the man, the myth, and the legend behind Game of Thrones) casually at the conference hotel bar. He invited Xiran Jay Zhao, the New York Times Bestselling author of Iron Widow, to dinner at some point during the convention.
The panels were filled with filmmakers who worked on Marvel projects to various capacities and video game professionals who had worked on popular games like Baldur’s Gate. Smaller indie projects were well represented of course. There was a good mix of both, in the games sessions especially.
All of this shows that WorldCon is a hub for someone to learn more about the industries involved in bringing science fiction stories to life.
It was an honor for me to be on a panel discussing multimedia franchising with Will Frank, an intellectual property lawyer, and Gregory A. Wilson, the author of award winning dark fantasy series, The Gray Assassin Trilogy which has been adapted into a table top role playing game.
A great conversation was had about the legal foundations behind franchising your work and the creative realities that happen when you try to make a business out of your passion project.
To hear the two of them, who are more seasoned than I am, say that I brought a lot to the table was so much validation. Up until this point, I’ve been charging onward with my pursuits without really knowing if any of it will pay off because it hasn’t yet. Making at least a part-time income doing something at the intersection of publishing, film, and games has been a pipe dream that I’ve been encouraged on more than one occasion to drop.
But being involved in this conference has shown me a clear path forward, even if I didn’t meet anyone doing exactly what I’m hoping to do, which is be a creative consultant and publisher for the indie publishing, filmmaking, and games space.
Moreover, I held a workshop (one that I’ve done in different variations in different settings) discussing personal branding for creative professionals. I had someone say that they had tried to attend other webinars and workshops elsewhere but that only after my workshop did he feel Ike he understood and felt empowered to build his personal brand.
That’s my goal: to empower others to build their creative business. The room was filled up with about 30 capacity and there was a waitlist with 30 more people on it. The room was filled with authors, artists, comedians, game developers and so much more. Many of them told me they walked away feeling truly inspired and mentioning that I should take this to businesses.
Which I would love to do! I got started on this path because of too many indie authors I’ve talked to saying their small presses who have published them have’s done enough. I’d love for indie publishing houses to reach out for me to do a workshop or training for their staff and authors. Same for game developers and filmmakers.
So, if you’re reading this and you’re interested, reach out to me at rochele@arxegos.com and we’ll see what we can do for you and your team!
Attending the Hugo Awards
The ceremony for the Hugo Awards itself was surreal. Again, 12-year-old Rochele was gleaming inside. It’s historically been one of the most prestigious awards in the industry across publishing, film, and games. There are about a dozen categories that are nominated and voted on by the convention body.
For a serious award, it also sort of felt unserious because of some technical difficulties and situational humor in between the emotional speeches that touched on political issues around the world: from the political censorship that happened at the 2023 Hugo Awards to calls to free Palestine to the outcry regarding the race riots in the UK.
Now, I won’t get into the drama of the 2023 Hugo Awards because I wasn’t there and from what I can tell, the conference organizers did a good job at recognizing the issues of the past and being as transparent as possible to avoid more breaches in trust.
What I will say is that I did notice a few patterns in the Hugo Awards nominees. If you aren’t published by a larger publisher then it doesn’t seem you have a shot at the Hugo. Likewise if you are in film or games and you aren’t involved in a project that is backed by a large player in the field.
There seems to be little room for independent creatives, which make up the biggest chunk of all these industries. According to a report on statista, 99% of video games released on Steam in 2023 were from indie studios. Indy Film Library estimates the top 10 independent features at the box office in 2023 brought in a combined $1.6 billion with indie films as a whole representing around 21% of total global box office revenue. As for publishing, the ISBN vendor Bowker says that in 2022 11% of ISBNs registered that year went to authors from large publishers.
So, as you can see, it’s difficult to aspire to these types of awards when the independent space is not represented well despite the independent artists being a sizable portion if not the majority of the industry. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to win a Hugo Award as an independent artist, but you have to be at the peak of a really strong career with high international visibility within the year your project is elgible to enter the Hugo awards to have a chance.
It’s not entirely encouraging, is it?
They are making strides to fix this by adding some independent film and game categories for next year I believe. So we’ll see if they stay as a permanent category.
The State of Science Fiction
I think overall, I left WorldCon with cautious optimism for my own career and the careers of others. There was a common thread among many conversations discussing various external factors causing disruptions in every field:
from artificial intelligence infringing on artsists’ works to
common community-building practices (social media marketing, Patreon , Kickstarter) becoming unstable due to greedy changes to the corporate platforms that those communities are on and a real fear of losing the community that has been built from those platforms to
political tensions geographically causing harm to freedom of expression and censorship amidst rising nationalist regimes
Yet, there was also a unified understanding that science fiction is a storytelling format that perseveres. It has the uncanny ability to prophesy the future and as one of the Hugo Award winners put it, we should aspire to envision a more hopeful future with the faith that it can be manifested.
And I have that in mind with my Vicious Circle series. I’m working on a prequel with an ambitious goal to have pre-orders available this fall so stay tuned for more.
Until Next Time,
Rochele