Glasgow 2024 Report
Glasgow 2024, the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention, was held August 8-12, 2024 at the Scottish Events Campus (SEC) in Glasgow, Scotland. Guests of honor were artist Chris Baker; authors Ken MacLeod, Nnedi Okorafor, and Terri Windling; fan guests of honor Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer; special guests were Samantha Béart, Meganne Christian, Tanya DePass, Catherine Heymans, Tendai Huchu, and Three Black Halflings. Registration provided provisional figures of 7,300 in-person warm bodies and over 10,000 total members from at least 33 countries, including 600 online attendees (some of which also attended in-person), reporting, “Glasgow is therefore the fourth largest Worldcon ever in terms of total members.” In the last few years, Worldcon Chengdu saw a record in-person attendance of 18,895 with a combined total attendance of over 20,000; Chicon 8 had 3,574 warm bodies and a total membership of 6,500; and DisCon III reported 2,359 in-person warm bodies and total registered memberships of 9,293.
Located on the north bank of the river Clyde in a redeveloped area once famous for shipbuilding, the SEC includes two warehouse-like buildings: the OVO Hydro arena and the SEC Armadillo, whose exterior is meant to evoke lined up prows of ships in honor of the area’s history. The Crowne Plaza, once the Moathouse, is attached to the Armadillo by enclosed walkway and served as additional con space. Several other hotels were a short walk away. Convention rooms sold out quickly so many con-goers stayed further out. The weather was mostly warm with occasional bouts of rain. Wonderful dining choices lined Argyle Street, a 12-minute walk away. The Crowne Plaza lounge became the gathering spot for many, with other eating and hangout spaces scattered throughout the campus; the Radisson’s Red Sky bar was quieter and further out, but also well suited for mingling. Convention organizers said, “As is normal for a UK Worldcon, there was no US-style Con Suite. A large food court was provided in Hall 4 of the SEC alongside the Exhibits and Gaming areas, with multiple food trucks.”
Programming offered a Wednesday afternoon “Chalking Session” but really kicked off Thursday morning with multiple program streams, including critique groups, scientific presentations, a “Frankenstuffies” workshop, and more. Sara Felix designed an officially registered Tartan for the event, called “Landing Zone Glasgow,” with kilts, waistcoats, and tammies available for sale.
The Opening Ceremony included the Hugo Base reveal, the Special Committee Award to D&D@50, which was accepted by Wizards of the Coast creative director Chris Perkins, and the First Fandom Awards. The Big Heart Award went to Michelle Drayton-Harrold; Hall of Fame to Mary & Bill Burns and David Langford; Hall of Fame, Posthumous to Alfred Bester, Mike Glicksohn, Mike Resnick, and Peter Weston; and the Sam Moskowitz Archive Award to Edie Stern and Joe Siclari. The In Memoriam was also held at the Opening Ceremony.
PROGRAMMING
Programming reported “957 items of all types… with 976 programme participants.” The schedule was available via the website interface, with areas of interest including academic, anime, comics, filk, gaming, literature, science & technology, writing & business of writing, and much more. There were 789 sessions in person, 79 online only, and 89 hybrid; 152 of the in-person items were streamed, and 71 of the hybrid items were streamed. “The online membership [was] able to view 300 sessions… Most of these online sessions were recorded and available on playback.” Leadership noted, “395 panels, 74 talks and presentations, 56 readings, 152 table talks, 51 workshops, tours, and similar sessions… 39 sessions in the academic programme and 8 in the History of Scotland stream. There were 13 book launches. 8 interviews and dialogues.” Plus 12 concerts, 19 performances, and six dances. “Our History of Scotland stream gave attendees a chance to hear from local historians, on topics ranging from Scottish Suffragettes, witch hunting in 17th century Scotland, and the history of Scottish graveyards.” There were 30 autographing sessions with six to eight authors/editors/artists signing per session, as well as “group book launches,” each with eight small/indie/and self-published authors. Some con-goers expressed surprise at the paucity of programming around short fiction and a lack of panel opportunities for notable editors. For comparison, Chengdu offered 235 in-person items with a reported 1,200 panelists and guests; Chicon reported over 700 in-person program items; DisCon III featured roughly 500 program items.
Glasgow listed 26 items as “Children’s Programme”. Our report did not have information on children’s programming for Chengdu (though far more children than usual were seen around the convention, and even involved in programming items); Chicon 8 listed 34 in-person items tagged with “children’s program.” DisCon III listed only seven items total with the “children” or “teens” tags.
The Masquerade was Saturday night, with MC Kevin Roche and half-time entertainment by Sassafrass. The Award for Best in Show went to “Lipwig for your Life” by Holly Swinyard.
Glasgow also hosted the presentations of the Nommo Awards and the Sidewise Awards.
EXHIBITS & DEALERS’ ROOM
There were over 30 exhibits “concentrating on larger things that had a ‘can’t see this at home’ feel. Space Probes, Batmobiles, VR Labs, Escape Rooms, Research Labs and live games and music….” The dealers’ room, located in a massive hall which also hosted the Art Show, was easy to find and among the first spaces con-goers would encounter. Organizers said, “We had over a hundred individual vendors ranging from one person sole traders to large corporates including Gollancz and Waterstones.” Vendors included booksellers, publishers, jewelers, costumers, and more. Sizeable walking lanes could not diminish the buzz of con-goers wowed by the space and the steady crowds visiting the various hucksters.
Nicky Crowther of PS Publishing said, “The dealer’s room was huge! There was just the right amount of space between the tables so the people could look at the books without being jostled. We were very happy with our position and footfall and sales were very good.” Cheryl Morgan of Wizard’s Tower Press said, “From a COVID point of view, the Dealers’ Room was a good deal. The hall had a high ceiling, lots of ventilation, and some doors open to the outside. I sold around 170 books, and sold out of a number of titles. We were told… that we were not permitted to hold events at our dealer tables… Nevertheless, some larger publishers did arrange such events, advertised them widely, and were allowed to get away with it.” Alexandra Pierce, trading as Speculative Insight, appreciated the organization and accessibility of the room, as well as the groats system, “whereby volunteers were rewarded with con ‘money’ which could be spent with dealers who agreed to do so. I thought foot traffic was pretty good. It certainly died off on Sunday and Monday.” The Locus table helmed by Maya St. Clair and helpers did strong trade in selling subscriptions, back issues, T-shirts, collectible books, and enamel pins, with an almost constant streams of visitors.
ART SHOW
There were 73 artists participating in the Art Show, which was housed in the center of the large hall containing the dealers’ room and seemed a clever strategic choice to literally center the art for con-goers. Organizers reported sales “exceeding £91,000.” An exhibition featuring guest of honour Chris Baker’s work formed the centerpiece. For the Art Show Awards, Best in Show went to Jim Burns for “In the Belly of the Ship”; Best Original to Fred Gambino for “Breel and the Dismantler”; Best Digital to Maurizio Manzieri for “Mulberry and Owl”; Best Textile to Sarah Haddock for “Aquatic Intellect”; Best 3D to Didier Cottier for “Le Sereurier”; Best Junior to Erin Sibson for “Octopus in Space”; Best Fantasy to Margaret Walty for “Dragonwood”; Director’s Choice to Tom Nanson for “Sword of the Angel”; and “Best Fangorn” to Fangorn (aka Chris Baker) for “Waiting”.
PARTIES
For the first time in many years, Worldcon felt like “Worldcon” again in terms of publisher parties. Tor, Orbit, Titan, Gollancz, Angry Robot, and Head of Zeus were among publishers throwing parties, some of them “invite only” and most jam-packed with more people than their venues should probably hold. Many were held off-site at local bars. Seventeen open parties happened in the exhibit hall, including Worldcon bid parties, parties by other conventions, an LGBTQIA+“welcome” party, and more.
CON PUBLICATIONS
The souvenir book was 160 full-color slick pages with gorgeous cover art by Chris Baker AKA Fangorn. A welcome from the chair was followed by interview with and essays about the guests of honor and special guest; art by Fangorn and Terri Windling; articles about the various fan funds; a section on the Hugo Awards and others with finalists and other nominees; previous Hugo, Retro Hugo, and Astounding Awards winners and the Special Committee Awards; the historical list of Worldcons and the Constitution; and acknowledgments including the membership list, the In Memoriam, and a farewell by the vice chair.
Unicorn, the convention newsletter, had nine digital issues delivered to the website, the members portal, and display screens around the convention, in keeping with their sustainability policy and strategy. The newsletter featured programming updates, useful information, announcements, awards results, and more.
HUGO AWARDS
The 71st Hugo Awards Ceremony took place at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 11, 2024 in the Armadillo. The event was livestreamed through the member portal on the Glasgow Worldcon site as well as on YouTube. There was a signer for British Sign Language as well as a captioner. Organizers estimate the audience to have been over 2,000 viewers, with more in an overflow room; as of August 31, the YouTube channel had over 5,800 views. There was no toastmaster or master of ceremonies this year. Despite occasional technical glitches, mostly with recordings and video presentations, the atmosphere was jovial.
Convention chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart opened by welcoming everyone, noting that some items traditionally presented at the Hugo Ceremony had been shifted to other events “in order to put more focus on the Hugo Ceremony and the finalists themselves.” MacCallum-Stewart emphasized a sense of community and that the awards were chosen by the community. John Scalzi gave a brief overview of the history of the Hugo Awards, as well as Hugo controversies. “It is you who make the Hugos matter,” Scalzi said, “Your love of them, your care for them, and your desire to celebrate the best of speculative fiction every year.” Awards administrator Nicholas Whyte held up the very first Hugo Award trophy ever presented (which Forrest J Ackerman had left on stage in 1953) and discussed voting statistics.
Nnedi Okorafor presented the first award of the night, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, to Xiran Jay Zhao. Zhao, overwhelmed, thanked Dell Magazines for extending their eligibility, lightheartedly commenting that people had voted for them “only because you all felt bad for me” and that they are one of the storms the Hugos “has weathered.” They added that “the outpouring of support is just touching.” They spoke about conditions in the Gaza strip, calling for donations, and saying they are in communication with “about eight families” in the area. Travis Baldree presented them with “the newly reforged” Astounding Award diadem.
The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book went to To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose.
Reserve astronaut Dr. Meganne Christian presented the award for Best Fan Artist to Laya Rose.
The Award for Best Fan Writer went to Paul Weimer. Breathless, Weimer spoke about the similarities between fan writing and photography. He credited the award to his being part of ongoing community conversations, then thanked “everybody who has helped and supported my fan writing” including John DeNardo, Patrick Hester, Christina Orlando, the Nerds of a Feather, Skiffy & Fanty, and Reactor teams, and more.
Guff delegate Kat Clay presented the Best Fancast Award to Octothorpe. John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty accepted, thanking everyone who voted. They quickly thanked many people, including the plot collective “for modeling collaborative fanac,” fandom, their families and friends, as well as their listeners.
Best Fanzine was presented to Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together. Adri Joy, Roseanna Pendlebury, Joe Sherry, and Weimer accepted. Pendlebury thanked partner Ed, as well as “every member of the reviewing community that our work exists in conversation with, because reviews cannot exist in a vacuum.” Joy thanked her parents, Sparkle Rocket, the Cannibal Cult and the Subjective Chaos gang, the NoaF team, and more. Joy decried the “national shame for the UK” of “decades of xenophobic, racist, anti-Muslim rhetoric… violence and pogroms against refugees and migrants… misinformation and hate speech from political elites.” Joy said, “I take this award as a challenge to recommit to my own actions, to push back against racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and marginalisation in all its forms, in whatever small ways I can make a difference. And I invite you all to do the same.”
Chris Baker presented the Best Semiprozine Award to Strange Horizons. Joyce Chng, Michael Ireland, Clark Seanor, Hebe Stanton, and Vanessa Jae were on hand to accept. Stanton read their speech, thanking readers, voters, and fellow nominees. “Strange Horizons is a global collective… we are the largest group of people to be nominated for a Hugo award, and now to have won it, and that’s because we believe that everyone’s work is crucial to making a magazine like this happen…. It took a village of nearly a hundred volunteers to raise this baby.” They expressed support for “the Palestinian people’s right to justice, freedom, equality, and self-determination.”
The Award for Best Professional Artist went to Rovina Cai.
After a brief hiccup when a video presentation did not work properly, the Award for Best Editor, Long Form went to Ruoxi Chen. In high spir its, Chen got the audience laughing, thanking “all my fellow awkward people in the audience for whom seeing your face displayed four times in a row during technical difficulties would have been an absolute personal nightmare.” Chen thanked partner Drake, friends and family, authors, Clarion West students, editorial assistants and interns, and others. “The work can be really fucking hard… But for every professional punch to the face that you get, there is someone who is kind, there is someone who knows your work, there is a book, there is an author, there is someone whose writing you get to work on who makes you reevaluate everything that you doubted, and you get to be part of something that will last longer than you are on this Earth. And that is so special.”
Neil Clarke took the Award for Best Editor, Short Form. He described some of the problems plaguing the magazine industry and talked about the “uplifting” solidarity of the genre community in facing these problems. “You’ve shown sympathy, and outrage, and confusion… each time I was ready to toss my hands in the air and scream ‘Enough!’ and walk away, some unexpected gesture pulled me back from the edge. Thank you to every one of those people.” Clarke thanked wife Lisa and his family, readers, translators, authors, Sean Wallace and Kate Baker, and more.
Baldur’s Gate 3 received the Award for Best Game or Interactive Work. Ten people took the stage to accept the award, with director Swen Vincke of Larian Studios expressing gratitude, saying that the Hugo Awards have “determined my reading lists since forever.” He said, “Video game writing is often underestimated. It is very, very, very hard work. For Baldur’s Gate 3 we had to create over 174 hours of cinematics, just to be able to respect the choices of the players, and to make sure that each and every single one of them would have an emotional story that was reflecting their choices and their agency. So, it takes a very long time, and it takes a very large team… it takes a lot of perseverance and a lot of talent.”
Three Black Halflings (Jasper William Cartwright, Olivia Kennedy, and Jeremy Cobb) presented the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form to The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time”. Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form went to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
Tanya DePass presented the Hugo for Best Related Work to A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith. Zach Weinersmith thanked wife and co-author Kelly, saying, “We were a research team on this for four years, we have a bibliography that is 50 pages long… honestly we worried we had pissed off all the people like you, who grew up reading Heinlein, and [who] thought it was all gonna happen tomorrow… we certainly have our biases but we tried our best to follow the truth, and the truth is that it’s a lot harder than is commonly represented in prominent media and we thought that was a story worth telling, despite a lot of pushback we got. It’s time… to do it safely and in a way that doesn’t cause damage to the planet.”
The Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic went to Saga, Volume 11.
Ken MacLeod presented the Award for Best Series to the Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie. Rachel Swirsky accepted for Leckie, who thanked her editors Tom Bouman, Will Hinton, Priyanka Krishnan, Jenni Hill, and Brit Hvide, as well as agent Seth Fishman, plus the other authors, and her readers. “When you’re first writing and sending things out, and hoping for sales and contracts, it’s impossible to anticipate just how wonderful it is to discover that people resonate with your work. To find that in some cases it becomes part of their lives.”
Xiangxi Kong, Francesco Verso
The Award for Best Short Story went to “Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer. Kritzer thanked her husband, S.B. Divya, the Wyrdsmiths writing group, and Neil Clarke. “What the AI in this story does over and over is to give people permission to do the things that fulfill them and make them happy… if the story spoke to you I hope you take it as permission to do the things that feed your soul.”
T.L. Huchu presented the Award for Best Novelette to “The Year Without Sunshine”, also by Kritzer, who added thanks to Haddayr Copley-Woods, Betsy Lundsten, Kristy Anne Cox, Marissa Lingen, and Sigrid Ellis. “This story was inspired by listening to disabled friends talk about the stories that made them feel like everyone around them saw them as disposable… I wanted to write a story about how coming together for mutual aid can save a whole community, because I absolutely believe that it does. I sent this story first to Uncanny… it had more subject matter expertise that once again made this a stronger story. The Uncanny editors Lynne and Michael Thomas were the parents of a really lovely young woman named Caitlin who died this past April. Caitlin was a light in the world. She was someone who had the gravitational pull to create a community of caring that made fandom a better place. This story was not about Caitlin, but it exists in part because of Caitlin.”
The Hugo for Best Novella went to Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher. With characteristic humor, Vernon mentioned her bout with breast cancer and thanked everyone for the award. She thanked her husband, her editor Lindsey Hall, and her agent Helen Breitwieser. “Since Thornhedge is about a small person doing a very important but overlooked job, I wanted to talk about a small creature that does an important but overlooked job….” From that introduction she began relaying amusing facts about sea cucumbers, “a tube sock made of meat full of water and innards,” including the critical role sea cucumbers play in ecology.
The Award for Best Novel was presented to Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh. Tesh thanked her family, agent Kurestin Armada, editor Ruoxi Chen, the Tor and Orbit UK teams, and others. “I hope this book disappears. I hope it joins the very honorable ranks of past Hugo winners, which spoke to a particular community at a particular time, and not to all of history. And I hope for that disappearance because no one sets out to write a science fiction dystopia wanting to be proved right. And Some Desperate Glory is a book which was inspired by some of the worst of what is happening in the world today….” Tesh said that she believes sometimes books can change hearts, and “what actually changes the world is people.” She exhorted listeners to “act in whatever way you can, in whatever way is right for you, to support the victims of violence and warfare around the world, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, and in many other places; to support the victims of cruelty and intolerance close to home including here in these islands, where that solidarity is dearly needed right now, especially for the victims of the recent racist riots; and for those targeted by the concerted transphobia of some parts of the UK media. I wrote humanity’s bad end and I call upon you all with perfect faith to prove me wrong.”
WORLDCON 2025 AND BEYOND
The 83rd World SF Convention, Seattle Worldcon 2025, is scheduled for the new Summit expansion to the Seattle Convention Center August 13-17, 2025 in Seattle, Washington, featuring guests of honor Alexander James Adams, Donato Giancola, Bridget Landry, and Martha Wells, plus “Our Poet Laureate” Brandon O’Brien and hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl.
The 84th World SF Convention, LAcon V, will be held at the Anaheim Convention Center and the Hilton Anaheim & Anaheim Marriott Hotels in Anaheim, California, August 27-31, 2026, featuring guests of honor Colleen Doran, Barbara Hambly, Tim Kirk, Ronald D. Moore, Stan Sakai, Anita Sengupta, Geri Sullivan, and Ursula Vernon.
–Arley Sorg & Liza Groen Trombi
Jo Walton
Fred Gambino, Didier Cottier
Feòrag NicBhrìde
Photographers: Olav Rokne, Beth Gwinn, Simon Bubb, Paul Weimer, Dan Ofer, Mike Benveniste, Liza Groen Trombi, Karen Haber, Maya St. Clair, Ida Keogh, Thomas Nugent, Lisa Hayes, and Naomi Kritzer.
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