tiredAt 3 PM it was time for what was for me The Big Event: the official announcement of the 2022 Worldcon Site Selection, about which there has been much internet drama over the past week, with Open Letters complaining about the WSFS Board of Directors, me getting quoted in the Guardian, and being accused of all sorts of things of which I'm pretty sure that I'm the exact opposite, but it would take too long to go into it all here, so I won't.
To the surprise of virtually nobody, Chicago won the bid to host the 2022 Worldcon, with 90% of the vote. The bid from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia got about 6% of the vote, while the remainder went to None of the Above and an assortment of write-in bids. You can see the longer form announcement, including a link to the details, at the Worldcon web site. The newly-seated 80th Worldcon will be called Chicon 8.
An advantage of a virtual Worldcon is that I'm at my home office, with my full-size keyboard on my desk, not pecking away on my laptop perched precariously actually on my lap as I try to update the Worldcon website. While the newly-seated Worldcon made its presentation, I was updating Worldcon.org with the new Worldcon information. Thanks to Alan Stewart, the site selection administrator, who sent me a copy of the detailed results, I was able to get almost everything updated before the announcement panel ended.
While I was working on making the changes, I got an e-mail from the Chair of the JeddiCon bid informing me that Jeddah was rebidding for 2026. I was already in the process of removing 2022 bidders, so it was easy enough to create a new entry for them by moving their old one while pulling the Chicago in 2022 bid off the site. As I noted elsewhere, people who are unhappy with the Saudi bid now have several years to organize other bids or support other bids, and have no excuse for claiming that they were unaware that this bid existed. Frankly, I don't think they had any excuse anyway. None of this information is secret if you pay any reasonable amount of attention to Worldcon. It's only people (including many people who attend Worldcons) who never pay attention to future Worldcon sites until just a few days before the vote (if that) who are taken by surprise and who get angry that They Were Not Told.
Anyway, I did get everything updated, the results Tweeted and posted to Facebook, and even had time to get some dinner and go out for a walk with Lisa before the party block (starting at 8 PM PDT) started. Lisa and I hung out in the Chicon 8 party until nearly 10 PM, which is very late for me, because I still have to be up at 4:30 AM for work.
It's funny, but there's one part of this virtual convention that's just like an in-person Worldcon for me. Thanks to my commitments to keep the WSFS web sites maintained, I've attended little programming and I still haven't seen the exhibits.
Tomorrow is Hugo Day, and also (if it's set up so that we can see it) the WSFS Business Meeting. The Business Meeting is set for 3 PM PDT (10 AM Saturday in New Zealand) and is supposed to be pro forma, but I'm enough of a WSFS geek to want to see it anyway. Besides, I haven't missed a single Business Meeting since 1989 and I'm going through withdrawal.
The Hugo Awards are scheduled for 4 PM PDT (11 AM Saturday in New Zealand) and will be broadcast live (no CoNZealand membership required) over The Fantasy Network. TheHugoAwards.org will not be doing our customary live coverage, but we'll be tweeting the results as each category is announced, and we'll have the full results including the detailed breakdowns of nominations and placements as soon as we can after the ceremony ends. I will be very busy.
I think I'm going to be glad that due to the time difference, there's no Worldcon on Sunday my time, as I'm going to need a lot of sleep, even without being there in person.