The first ever World Con, AKA the World Science Fiction
Convention, was in 1939. It understandably took a few
years off from the years 1942 to 1945 because of some World War
or something. Yeah, there was, like, Nazis and
other issues. Yeah.
In the world of fiction written, spoken on screen storytelling,
Nazis are perhaps the most recognizable human villains of
all time. I use the word human pretty
lightly there. But apart from rude
interruptions by the Nazis, World Con has continued to
unabated. It's fitting that it has lasted
so long and dates back so far. After all, fantasy is the oldest
literary genre, Something I love to point out.
It was original. That concept was originally
introduced to me by Mateo Barbagallo, who will be
mentioned a couple times in this episode.
Hey, Mateo. And George RR Martin himself
pointed that out during one of the panels, so I'd love to hear
that from him. He obviously agrees.
Seattle World Con 2025 was the 83rd World Con.
So many, there's probably no one living that attended that first
one because that's 86 years ago. So if you were 14 years old and
went to World Con in 1939 and you're still alive, you're 100.
So, well, if you are alive, Congrats, that's amazing.
You're a great person and we Revere you.
Less likely to be still going to con.
Yeah, and less likely to be listening to our podcast,
perhaps. But still, if you're out there,
the world has changed in the meantime, right?
Technology has changed. More things that I could name
have changed you, you know that I don't have to list them.
But people still love stories. As much as the world has
changed, that has not. The format maybe has changed,
the way people intake stories maybe has changed a bit, but not
that much. Fundamentally, we all still love
stories. And that's the bottom line.
That's what World Con is all about.
Not just the stories, but the community around them, the
authors, the fans, everything in between, the artists.
Yeah, all that. They loved stories back in the
time of Gilgamesh. They love them now.
We love them now. You love them now.
So yeah, World Con, it's a celebration of that long running
tradition. So in this episode, we've got
lots of love for World Con and the things we did there,
including hanging out with George.
We had some, we have some reports on Brandon Sanderson,
Rebecca Roanhorse, Robin Hobb, those are other authors that
were there, the Hugo Awards and just more of our adventures out
West, pictures included. So all that and more on this
episode of History of Westeros Podcast.
Hello and welcome everybody. It's another episode for you, a
bit different one this time. We do a couple of these a year,
I suppose, reporting on conventions or things that
aren't directly related to a Song of Ice and Fire content in
terms of what's in the books. But this is this is meta textual
here every Sunday, just about every Sunday, that is we are
live at 3:00 PM Eastern. You can catch us on YouTube
there, or you can catch us on YouTube afterwards after the
fact, or on Spotify. You can find the video there as
well or on any podcast platform. You can listen to us and we're
ad free if you listen to us on Patreon.
If you have questions for us, I know this is an episode that
might inspire particular questions, feel free to hit us
up. And if you're catching this
later after the fact, you can e-mail us at
westeroshistory@gmail.com or any of our socials.
We're pretty much on all the big sites.
Let's start with a trivia Question 3 parter.
These are three different years all about George.
What year was George RR Martin the guest of honor at World Con?
What year was George RR Martin's first World Con?
And what year was George RR Martin's first panel at World
Con? If you listen carefully, I will
reveal all the answers during this episode.
If you already know them, go ahead and drop your guesses and
I'll reveal the answers at the end.
Super chat from Corn Emperor. I love that nickname, Corn
Emperor. You know, it's like Corn King,
but this is Corn, like the band. So that's funny.
Super Chat says love. You all have an amazing show.
Thank you very much. We fully intend on doing that
and thank you again for that. I will read our section headers
today. They're pretty basic.
It's just world.com 2025 Seattle by day.
We'll talk about our first day arriving, which is traveling on
Tuesday, then our first day there in full, which was
Wednesday and we do Thursday, then we'll talk about Friday,
then Saturday, then cap it off with the Hugo Awards, which was
also Saturday. And then we're going to describe
a little bit about next year's World Con, which will be in LA.
So that's that's exciting in terms of people's ability to go
there, at least for most Americans anyway.
And then we'll cap off with a little preview for Dragon Con in
a couple weeks or not a couple weeks a week from us.
So pictures included in that as well.
We'll talk about what we're going to do.
So stay tuned. We've got a lot to come.
Let's get to it. It's our 4th world con.
Michelle and I have tried to go to other world cons and we
started in 2018-2019. We went to Dublin. 2018, I'm
sorry, was San Jose. We weren't able to go in 2019 or
2020. That was the COVID year.
It wasn't. There was no live event then.
20/21 was Washington, DC. We did go to that. 1/20/22 was
what was 2022, Chicago, Chicago. We weren't able to attend that
one, which was a bummer. 2023 was in Chengdu, China, no one.
So understandably we didn't go to China.
That's outside of our budget. And yeah, yeah, other issues was
going to China, but people have been going that we have met,
that we know that have been going since the 70s, possibly
earlier. Some of our closer friends have
been going since the early 2000s.
And I'm curious if there's any BWB members out there who have
been going since before the year 2000.
That would be fun to know. I bet there's a few.
Dave Axler and Mark Holloway have been going since before
2000. That's a safe guess.
Yeah, some BWB are people that knew George before A Song of Ice
and Fire. That's true.
That's very true. Yeah.
There's a couple of of people in the BWB, which of course BWB is
the Brotherhood Without Banners. It is the long running fan group
dedicated to the Song of Ice and Fire.
And it started with George in person.
Would he would give quests to prospective members like go find
me this particular food item in whatever?
City they're in. Burnt Ends in Kansas City was a
good example and people would get knighted.
He would knight them with a sword and everything.
Now the group got too big for that.
Song of Ice and Fire got too popular over the long term.
So the dubbings don't happen anymore individually now they
happen in in groups. Shaya and I were inducted in
2018 into the company of the Green Leaf because that was the
first world con in a city with legal marijuana.
So that was the, hence the name. People are inducted into the
free companies. There's been a Free Company of
the Fireworm and a Free company of the Greenleaf when George
attends the BWB party and is there to witness their
induction. So not every world con or every
George Con has a free company. Just if you're wondering, you
know what, what was Glasgow or what was Seattle?
They didn't have them so. Now George was at the BWB party,
but they just didn't have the ceremony.
Just no, he was not at the BWB. Party.
Oh, he went to dinner. You're right, He was.
At the BWB dinner, Paris, his wife attended the party, but he
didn't. Yeah, my bad.
Yeah. So shout out to all those long
standing members. You guys are really special.
We you keeping the community lore together very well, passing
down what we want to know and and the the community values and
all that. You know, one of my favorite
things to do at ABWB. Party or dinner.
What's that? Ask members what their quest
was. Oh yeah, they always have a
funny story. Great stories.
Yeah. Those veterans have some great
stories from back in the day. And, you know, they're loving it
because they're still coming now even, you know, some.
Doesn't matter how how old we get, as long as we can still
move and get there. You're going to We're going to
keep doing that. So throughout this episode, I'll
have the occasional world con factoids.
It's fun to to learn the history of it, but I don't want to drop
all that at once. It gets a little, it's a little
much to handle all at once. So we'll we'll space that out a
bit. We flew out on Tuesday.
We got lucky. We got our flights really far in
advance and they were only 250 bucks each, which we live in
Atlanta. So that was that's crazy.
So we got very lucky there. We try to, we travel a decent
amount, but it's expensive. And when, you know, this show
doesn't exactly make us a killing, you know, we're very
grateful to be to do this. But it is a sometimes we we do
have to do our best to save money.
And luckily, as podcasters that have been around in this
community for a while, we generally are able to get press
access, which means we get our badges for free.
So that also helps save us some money.
So that's good. That was very handy.
We got this is our was this our second time having press badges
at World Con or this is our first time?
OK, cool. Yeah.
I was muted. This was our first time with
press for World Con and they didn't approve us until couple
weeks out. So I mean, we just had to just
trust and I mean, we would have bought a pass at the last
minute, but yeah, it took a while.
Yeah, it was really, it was like, huh, we weren't sure we
would get it, but we did. So yay, hopefully that sticks.
We've gotten press at other cons before and that's obviously,
well, part of what we're doing here is reporting on it and that
is falls right under the umbrella of press coverage.
So here you guys are hearing our coverage.
So Wednesday was our first full day there.
Not much to report on Tuesday other than we flew out there,
you know, Huh, I had not much to say about that.
We went to our Airbnb, which is a little outside of town.
I think it was Tukwila, and it had really nice scenery.
Seattle was just so beautiful. A lot of you know that already
or have heard that, but it's really something to experience
it. I hadn't been there since I was
in college, which was, you know, that's a long time ago, so I
don't remember it super well. And boy, Mount Rainier is just
really spectacular. It's so beautiful.
It's also an active volcano, by the way, y'all, It's one of the
most likely to explode in the entire world.
So, you know, that's a problem, but not a problem for us and not
a problem today. So something to think about,
though. We had a nice set up with a
bunch of our friends. We had an Airbnb with, what was
it like, eight of our friends or seven of our friends?
It was nine of us total, right? Yeah, it was like 9 of us.
Yeah. So a nice big house with great
view, you know, out kind of out there, which would also help
save us a little money. We had a view of Lake Washington
which I've shown on screen here. Super, super nice.
Yeah. So immediately we were taking
pictures immediately. Also almost immediately, we went
into town and went to a dispensary.
It was Sean Kemp's dispensary. If you don't know who Sean Kemp
is, he was an NBA player who made the NBA when he was like 18
years old because he was already like 6 foot eight or nine,
really big and talented. And yeah, so.
And now he owns dispensaries. So there's a big picture of him
painting mural on the side of the wall, which we got a photo
of, and it was pretty fun going in there.
Yeah. Anytime we go somewhere where
it's legal, we like to hit a dispensary, but this was like a
celebrity dispensary, so it was just kind of a fun sightseeing
thing, honestly. The celebrity dispensaries are
just becoming more and more of a thing.
And we were in Vegas. It's like all the everything was
Mike Tyson branded there. Even even Mike Tyson's bites,
they had edibles there that the logo was up an ear with a bite
taken out of it. If you don't know, Mike Tyson
bit Evander Holyfield's ear off during a match way back in the
day. Now twist, apparently Evander
Holyfield is a Co investor. So they're cool now, especially
with all this money rolling in that that can make you forget a
lot of bitten ears, I suppose. But it's all.
Anyway, that's a bit of a digression.
It's still funny though. So the Seattle Convention
Center, this was a really spectacular place.
Normally convention centers are, you know, they're big and huge.
They have a lot of different events and there's not much to
say other than wow, that's big. But the Seattle Convention
Center is interesting because it's new there.
Well, there's two parts of it. It's half and half.
There's an old part which is 19 built in 1988, so that's not
that old. And the new part, which is
called the Summit, which is only built less than two years ago or
around two years ago. So that's pretty crazy.
And it this extension, this add on is more than an add on.
It doubled the whole thing in size.
Here's some fun facts because I can't resist fun facts about big
buildings or just anything. I can't resist fun facts,
period. The ballroom carpet in this
place is 24 by 90 without repeating.
There's 32 colors. It's crazy to have like a like
an ornate pattern on a rug that doesn't repeat.
So that's really cool. The excavation, total excavation
of dirt and and just digging down there is equivalent to the
distance to Portland, 180 miles of excavation all around.
The total amount of steel used in the Convention Center could
account for three Eiffel Towers. OK, that's an interesting unit
of measure. Eiffel Towers, yes, feet, yards,
miles. Eiffel Towers, yes.
Standard measurements. In this building, there is
enough dishes to serve 13,000 people at once.
Are you starting to think of Harrenhal?
Cause yeah, that's where that's where this is going, isn't it?
One thing Harrenhal did not have was elevators.
This building has 19 of them and 42 escalators.
It also has some cool modern green features.
It has advanced waste disposal. It super dehydrates all the
waste to 90% or it reduces its weight by 90% and then it uses
the rest as fertilizer. It uses that product as
fertilizer. It's pretty cool. 71% of the
tiles, mostly roof and floor I suppose, were made from recycled
material. Also it has storm water catches
which cleans the storm water and then uses it in the toilets, so
that's really efficient and for irrigation also, so that's cool.
My favorite thing about it was that it was just very
accommodating to humans. As you see in the picture here,
they had this whole side steps area with with blankets, pillows
for people to just lay and the natural light everywhere had
natural light. It just had all of these
features that I found more accommodating and homey than the
average Convention Center or average anywhere, frankly.
It's warm, like I don't mean temperature wise, but it feels
like, you know, it's giant building with huge ceilings.
It's somehow it doesn't feel like open and empty and cold and
and heartless. You know, like a lot of
convention centers do feel that way because they're just
generic. They're for so many different
kinds of events. But as a Shaya said, that's a
really big deal to have it more human, you know, like for
comforts and to the benches are comfortable and the seats are
comfortable and there's lots of them and there's lots of things
for accessibility. So, yeah, it's it's a nice
example of a modern building that is doing a lot of things
right, in my opinion. So our first little anecdote
from hanging out with fun people.
I got my badge quickly because of press, and I was waiting for
Naomi Makes Art, who was getting her badge.
It took a little while and we were going to have some have
some food. And I went ahead and sat down in
the cafeteria or the cafe right there, open cafe that can see
the line, can see the entrance right there in the entrance to
the Convention Center. So I'm sitting there, I order a
pizza and I, I'm sitting there thinking like, what am I going
to do? Like, what thing am I going to
do first? What fun things are going to do?
This is all kind of overwhelmed by the possibilities.
It's the first day there. And I'm just like, yeah, what
are all the cool things that are going to happen this weekend?
And I think to myself, you know, I should text Sid, George's
assistant and see what's going on with them.
So I do. And two minutes later, seriously
not 2 minutes later, I see Sid and George walking past the
restaurant, like towards where the entrance is.
And I flagged them down. I say hey guys.
And they and they come into the restaurant and sit with me.
Well, that's cool, right? George and Sid come sit with me.
And so we're chatting, just saying what's up and, and
catching up or whatever. And within 10 minutes, our
friends Mateo and Tafni, who know George and Sid very well.
Mateo I mentioned earlier, he's he's the one that ran the City
of Dragons event in Casseras that we went to in November.
So we've talked about him a few times before.
He a great guy, speaks 11 languages, just a very
impressive man, very charismatic.
Just every minute with him is fun.
His partner Taffney has a great time as well.
They're a great couple and we just have a lot of fun with
them. Also, Naomi got her badge and
came over. So we had a nice group there and
another gentleman was sitting to my left there.
There's two photos of this that a Shay I think has put up.
And if you could barely see the guy on my left, I didn't know
who this guy was at first, but he clearly George knew him and
they were talking. They were, you know, jabbing
back and forth, jabbing, jawing back and forth, telling some
stories. And we were all just kind of
listening because they're talking about the old days.
And turns out this guy is Walter John Williams, AKA John
Williams, who is a very celebrated author.
He has been. He was the world con guest of
honor in 2017. He's gotten at least five Hugo
nominations and even more Nebula nominations, including a win for
the novel novella. I think it was a novella,
Daddy's World in 2000. So that's really cool.
I'm just sitting by this famous author, didn't even know who he
was. They're talking about, like,
doing panels together. George asked us, like, do you,
are you getting bored with panels?
Because it's like, yeah, but we always talk about the same
things. Like, I, I want to talk about
new stuff. So he, George likes doing
panels. But, you know, he, he was
talking like, speaking about how sometimes they get a little
repetitive because he's done so many of these.
And to be fair, George has probably been to 50 world cons.
His first was in 71. He wasn't panelling back then,
but 50 world cons goodness. So that was really neat, just
hearing them talking, talking, talking shop talking, writing.
And Walter John Williams lives not far from George in New
Mexico. George lives in New Mexico, he
lives Walter. John lives South of Albuquerque,
so they'd probably live less than an hour from each other.
His first story was published in 1986.
It's called Hardwired. And he's also done RPGs.
He did a cyberpunk playbook, he did some Star Wars stuff.
He wrote a short story called Diamonds from Tequila which I
bet a lot of you have read because it was in Rogues 2014.
Remember Rogues was a anthology by Gardner Dozois and contained
the first publication of the Rogue Prince as in the prequel
to Sons of the Dragon. So it was Damon or Sorry,
Princess and the Queen, which so it was Damon's first real story
and it won the 2015 Locust for best anthology.
The whole book, of course, not just the Rogue Prince of
interest in that book of that anthology is there's also a
story by Phyllis Eisenstein, one by Lisa Tuttle.
Lisa Tuttle, you might remember her.
She is George's ex. They're still good friends.
She is referred to in some of his books and they've written
books together. Scott Lynch.
Joe Abercrombie. Also had stories in there.
And if you're a fan of Patrick Rothfuss, well, it has the
lightning tree in it, which is Bast's short story.
And this is really interesting. It's quite, quite a story.
It's very different. But also, you know, it has
Rothfuss's style and I believe it's the last thing he wrote for
that world. It's been a while.
I think the Slow Regard of of Silent Things came out before
that, but maybe that was the most recent.
Either way, it's been a while and that's a good one.
If you haven't caught that or weren't aware of its existence,
you definitely should be. There's also one by by Daniel
Abraham who is 1/2 of the Expanse writing team.
James SA Corey is their pseudonym.
Daniel Abraham has written a lot of books and he his short story
in Rogues is called The Meaning of Love Can.
I say a fun fact about World Con Daniel Abraham and George RR
Martin. In. 20 I don't even know what
year the the last LA World Con there was a human chess match
between Daniel Abraham and George RR Martin where I think
BWB and other people played the chess pieces and I believe Elio
Garcia ran of Westworth. Org said they're trying to plan
to to do a rematch for LA World Con next year.
Nice. That's cool.
Very cool. So we had our first BWB
gathering that night. There's several.
It's a big part of the weekend, having lots of events at night.
After all the panels and all the stuff that happens, it's usually
a gathering of friends to go to dinner, have parties or what
have you. This first one was just a
surprise party for one of the guys and it was just a small
gathering because not everybody was there yet, but it was a
really good way to get, you know, get going, you know, get
our feet wet at the con. Wednesday is kind of like that.
It's not a whole lot of official stuff happening, but there's a
lot of people there to hang out with and chat and, you know, get
situated. And Ashea went on a road trip on
that day. It was a good time to do that
while, as I said before, the con.
So why don't you tell us about that a little bit?
All right. Yeah.
As you could tell, I wasn't in the picture from Wednesday with
Aziz. That's because I had something
far more important. My best friend from when I was a
teenager lives in Spokane, which is not drivable from Seattle
easily, so we met halfway in between.
We were supposed to meet in a little German Bavarian town
called Leavenworth, but her car broke down an hour before she
got there. So Dom and I had to drive out
further into central Washington, which turned out to be a bonus
because we got to see, as you can see, these like beautiful
desert like plateaus, in addition to like the stunning
Columbia. Oops.
In addition to the stunning Columbia River.
And we did still get to their car, get them a new battery and
go to Leavenworth, which I mean, look at these pictures.
It's this like picturesque town underneath the the mountains.
We got good food. I saw a dog with shoes on, you
know, all the important things here.
But I mean, Columbia River was was just beautiful.
And we wouldn't have seen that if her car hadn't broken down.
You know, look here, I got to take my DSLR out even in the
car. And I took a bunch of pictures
here. So I, I was having the time of
my life taking pictures. It really reminded me of, I grew
up in Northern California. So I felt like I was, I was home
in a lot of ways. Here's me and my best friend
Danielle. Here's us.
We went down by a river. I can't wait to go back to
Washington, frankly. We saw Mount Baker.
We drove all through the Cascades National Forest.
We saw Mount Rainier. Then the next day we went
sightseeing somewhere as these went, too.
We went to Pike Market, as you can see here.
I also took lots of beautiful pictures, beautiful weather.
And I love Seattle. Yeah, Seattle's.
Really beautiful. A lot of you knew that already,
but hopefully you can get there to see it in person.
It really is special in terms of its collection of geographical
features and the just the views pretty much wherever you are.
It looks amazing. I did one other fun thing
Wednesday night, and that was with Naomi Mix.
Art went to the show, Ethel Kane, the performer, and she's a
singer from Tallahassee, which was fun for me because I'm sort
of from Tallahassee. I was born in North Carolina,
but Tallahassee is the place I lived in the longest before
Atlanta, and that's where I went to high school and college.
And my mother still lives there. She's the Viola professor at
Florida State. So I have a big connection to
Tallahassee. And Ethel Cain was really cool.
It was this place called the Paramount Theatre, which is
unbelievably close to the this Convention Center.
It's like literally when I was describing that lunch with
George, you could see the Paramount Theatre through the
glass, through the windows there.
So it's this incredibly close and she's like a Southern Gothic
musician and her singing is very haunting and and really melodic
and it's really good. I had a great time.
That's a really beautiful venue. Used to be in Opera hall, so
very ornate. I didn't get great pictures of
it, but I was mostly taking pictures of the performer.
But I wish I got more pictures of the theater.
But it's beautiful. And every day we were there,
there was a massive line for whatever show was happening that
day. There was a Buddy Guy show
there, and I didn't know. I didn't know Buddy Guy was
still alive. Yeah.
Our friend called him Buddy Gee because that's French, you could
say Gee. So yeah, that was just kind of
fun to learn that that guy's still alive and touring still,
like he must be really up there. But impressive, very impressive.
Most impressive. That was Wednesday.
Let's talk about Thursday. This is when the con really gets
rolling, when more of the official events are started and
there's a lot more to do and it's kind of almost hard to
choose what you want to do because there's so many options.
There's always a bit of an issue at a convention is there's FOMO
can creep in where there's two or three things you want to do,
but they're all happening at the same time.
And you may have, you may also just want to hang out with
friends and that's, that's like a fourth thing and you know, you
can't do it all. So, and while you're in Seattle,
like I say, I said, there's, there's so many fun things to
see. The Pike Market was great.
I, I went there too. One thing I did in a group there
was go to the aquarium. And I love aquariums.
I'm a fish guy. I have aquariums here.
Atlanta has one of the best aquariums in the world.
I've been a member there. I was, I'm always posting
pictures every few months of fish stuff on my Instagram or
whatever. And it's on a great location.
It's right there on the coast. So it's like an aquarium on the
water, which is kind of fun. It's, you know, overlooking
Puget Sound, which is the like the little harborish area around
Seattle. There's a lot of just fun
features. It's so beautiful just to walk
around. The scenery is great.
Some of the highlights of the aquarium were the seals, which I
believe Ashea has a photo of, and the orca skull.
There's a skull of an orca, which is just kind of cool for
general trivia or knowledge. I've never seen a skull of an
orca before. And there were some cool rays
and this really weird fun, like see through, like doughnut
almost. And it just kept rolling.
It kept spinning in place. And it was full of jellyfish.
So it was, it was a Jelly roll or a Jelly doughnut if you
prefer. And it was really neat.
I've never seen anything quite like that.
And the light kind of had lights changing constantly.
Blue, purple. Yeah.
They're just the LED standard color spectrum maneuvering.
And. Ashe also encountered this thing
called the gum wall. I didn't see this gum wall, but
this is crazy. Yeah.
First of all, I went, we went with Dom and I, with Eric
Blackfyre down to Pike Market. We split ways and we met Dom's
old roommate who showed us some Seattle sightseeing things that
kind of go under the radar maybe.
And this is this gum wall. It's this whole alley full of
gum on at Post Alley, just kind of near Pike Market.
And I, I find it quite gross, but it was fascinating and good
photos. And then on our walk from from
there to the Convention Center, we're just walking along and we
see a Fluvog store. Now some of you might go, what?
What is Fluvog? Well, Fluvog is a very famous
and very expensive and high quality boot company.
Shoe company. Not just boots as you see on the
screen, like the most stunning, like beautiful boots and shoes
you'll ever see in your life. Anyway, So of course I went in
and I took pictures and I marvelled and I discovered that
Fluvog did the boots for Strange New World.
That's for Star Trek, which is cool.
I bring this up because, well, later that day I see Sid
George's assistant and I spy her boots and I'm like, those are
Fluvox. And I, I strike up a
conversation with her and she says, yeah, it's the only Fluvox
store in in the United States, apparently.
She tells me and she said she went there the day before or
whatever or that week and bought 3 pairs and I saw her in these
this orange pear one day at the con and I was like, Oh my God,
glorious to see them in person. So incredible shoes.
I know that's what you're tuning into here, but really, really
it's if you're in Seattle, you should go look at the Fluvog
store. It's a funny.
Name too Fluvog. Yes.
My afternoon The rest of my afternoon was spent going to
some cafes, having a couple drinks.
It was three of us, me Naomi makes art and our friend's son
and we hung out and she's from the area, son's from the area.
So she knew some good places to have drinks and snacks and this
is really nice to have, you know, experiencing the the Pike
Market area and eating Seattle food while enjoying the view.
That's really nice. The other.
Feature that this convention space had was a music space just
like open for adults and kids alike to to just jam out and as
you can see it was these beautiful different different
styles of instruments. Here is Tom and our friends
Michael and Adrian. Michael's a very talented
musician and you can see him playing on all kinds of little
things. They they also had in the music
space, like just like you have low blood sugar, have these
these little snacks and just like a place to lay down and
just, again, it was just a very accommodating space.
I really very homey. I really liked it.
Yeah, it's the most. Homey, huge building, you can
imagine, like, it doesn't normally seem like it could be
homey when the ceilings are, you know, 50 feet above you.
But they did it. They pulled it off.
It's really quite impressive, and I hope more modern
convention centers follow this blueprint of sorts.
Oh, can I say 1? More thing that the Convention
Center has that I don't see at mini cons.
Of course they have presentation, a presentation
space with posters and such. I have one on the screen with
like 4 that that accompany their panels.
So like academic poster presentations, like what happens
to death after uploading death autonomy and consent in post
singularity virtuality. And it's just like questions
methodology. They have that all all
throughout this whole section. And I just, I found that
fascinating. We really dug in and read a
whole bunch of them, all of them, but they add new ones
every day. Very cool that.
Evening was the BWB annual dinner, World con dinner.
It was held at an Irish pub. The upstairs was all ours.
That was nice. We had the whole space rented
out and there were I guess about 30 or 40 of us and we got to sit
by George again, that was nice. He came in and sat by and funny
story at one point since it's Seattle, can do this anywhere
except indoors. Went outside to have a have a
smoke, came back in and was passing by George and he said
did you just go have unauthorized fun?
And I. Said it's authorized here.
So. But yes, was the answer.
Yeah, so, and that was that was a really good time.
You can see the photos here. There's a nice gang gathering
there. And it was just people hanging
out, you know, telling stories and and meeting each other again
for after a year because that's a lot of us only see each other
once a year, if that, at these world cons.
Occasionally you get to see someone maybe twice a year in
one of these groups, but it's really quite a lot when you
haven't seen someone in a year, a bunch of people in a year, you
have so much to say, so much to, to, you know, catch up on in a
relatively short span of time, can I say?
You can see the pictures where George is sitting and he's like
right by. So we all got there a little
early. We were eager to see everyone.
So we get there and sit down and it's pretty empty.
And George comes in and he's like, oh, is this where it's
happening? And he sat down right next to me
and I was like, I was very startled by that.
Like there's a very big room so you can see there.
But pretty quickly 1, he had a couple of his old friends come,
so he had them to chat with and it got really, really loud.
And so he escaped to outside. Smart choice.
Yes, it did get pretty loud in there too.
The the actual restaurant wasn't separate.
The upstairs wasn't separate. It's like open so the entire
restaurant was it also meant? Every time I wanted to go down
and and hit my vape pen, I got to yap with George.
I talked to him about Superman. I talked to him about hot dogs,
talked to him about upcoming travel trips.
He has things visits to Italy. We talked about a lot.
It was great. Whatever else.
They're doing in Seattle because of course he wanted to do some
sightseeing too. And you know, he's been there
before, but you know, he likes to he likes to check things out
and it's been a while. So that was really fun since
it's all around great evening there.
Ashea mentioned hot dogs, which we'll come back to.
That's another another miniature topic for later.
Ashea has also mentioned Dom several times when a shout out
the the. The channel folk.
Wise on Twitch, that's Dom's channel along with his partner
Daisy there the funny. Thing is, we were out there
talking about hot dogs and Dom's funny, like I should mention,
his PhD is on hot dogs, on hot dog eating contests.
So he brings it up and Mateo's like, oh, we got Doctor hot dog
over here. So that's what Dom got to talk
to George about, was hot dogs, hot dog eating contests, PhDs.
There's Doctor. Frankenstein and Dr.
Frankenfurter. That's right.
Also, so after the dinner there was some Hangouts.
We went up, there was a BWB party room.
Shout out to Tab for that one. That's a good, that's a good.
Funny story. By the way, anyone who knows
Baldur'sgate 3BG3, there's the concept of Tab Tab is just the
generic name for your character. And if you're playing the the
standard playthrough, if you're playing the evil playthrough,
it's called Dirge. There is a BWB member named
Dirge also. So.
And both of these nicknames predate Baldur's Gate by quite a
bit. So there's a Tab and a Dirge in
the BWB, and that's just a great coincidence.
So yeah, shout out again to Tab for hooking us all up with that
room to party in all weekend. It was really great, really
generous and really helps make the socialization pop more
positive. You know, how could we hang out
so much without a a room to gather in at night?
And of course, whenever people of this sort, my sort, our sort
gather in a hotel room and there's a little bit of alcohol
or a lot of alcohol depending, it's not unlikely that karaoke
happens. And of course, karaoke did
happen. Karaoke is always a good time
with with with friends and when people are really cutting loose.
One of the best performances of the evening was the pre
mentioned the aforementioned Eric Blackfyre.
I believe we've mentioned Black Fire before, but a lot of you
maybe haven't heard the story. He has the name Black Fire
because he was the first person ever to learn that George had
created the black fires. George told Eric personally that
he'd created the black fires and then Eric's like, that's a cool
name. I'm taking it.
So before even anyone else really had the chance, he got
that and well, he he deserves it.
He's also has been featured in, I think, Vanity Fair because he
has the largest private collection of A Song of Ice and
Fire art in the world. No, that's known of.
I mean, maybe there's some hidden guy out there that has
more guy or gal, but of people who have made their collections
somewhat public, Eric is number 1.
And that is quite a feather in his cap.
Hell yeah if you. Come to Anaheim slash LA World
Con next year. You will meet him.
He's one of the main PWB hosts because he lives in the area, so
he has some mighty big plans. He's been telling me yes.
Great guy, big member of the community, upstanding member.
There's a lot of things to to facilitate events and you know,
we're really looking forward to see what he does in his
hometown. We got to hang out with him back
in 2022 at the Game of Thrones convention in LA out there and
that was really fun. There's a big group of us out
there. We we talked about it at the
time. Great times soundscapes by
Jordan Reynolds into super chat that says can't TuneIn live, but
looking forward to catching up. Hope your debut's doing well and
had a blast. We certainly did.
Thank you, Jordan. Jordan does a lot of wonderful
soundscapes for Lord of the Rings and The Song of Ice and
Fire, and we'll try to post some links for you to check him out
sometime next year in 2026. It's and you're listening to
this. It's 2025, at least when we
recorded it. We are trying to arrange a field
trip of sorts with the company Geek Nation Tours.
And well, the way that works is we hopefully get about a dozen
of you, maybe a little more. And we go someplace, probably in
Europe where there's filming locations.
And we go for maybe 5-6 days, maybe as long as a week.
And you hang out with us and we go to see the sights and have
meals together and just hang out for a week.
And obviously it wouldn't be cheap, but it's not crazy
expensive either. So we're putting that out there.
Now if you are interested, even just tentatively interested, let
us know because that's going to help us decide how many people
we can include and how to figure out the budgeting and all that.
Because it's, it's not exactly straightforward, but it's really
exciting. We've done these things
obviously privately before and travelled and do these things,
but now it's a, the opportunity to have a few of you along is
something we just couldn't turn down.
It's a really fun idea. I know some other podcasters who
have done this with great success.
Not, not A Song of Ice and Fire, but yeah, Daniele Boli, who has
been a guest we've, I've been a guest on his show a few times.
That's the show History on Fire. He's the one who introduced us
to this. He did a Geek Nation tour to
Japan, I believe it was, and I think they're doing and it went
really well. I think he had about 20 people.
They got to see a bunch of different sites relevant to some
of the things he's podcasted about.
And I think they're going to do another one, but I forget where
it is. Might be Italy, which is where
he's from. And of course there's a ton to
see there. Either way, it's something we
hope you all, at least a few all are interested in.
And looks like it'll be April to May or May, April or May rather
of 2026. We're aiming to be a little bit
after the Dunkin Egg Show comes out, not like right after it,
but we got some news on that, a little bit of news.
It looks like the Duncan Egg Show will be out end of January.
That's not a firm date. Obviously, if it was a firm
date, it would be public news. But that's what we heard from
the insiders that we talked to at the convention.
And we also heard directly from from George that he really,
really likes it. He's, he considers it faithful.
He considers it to have the heart of the show, to capture
the heart of the stories and. We all know George is pretty
unforgiving about adaptations. Now you all know he's complained
a bit about House of the Dragon, but that's nothing compared to
how much he's complained about adaptations since the 80s.
George has been complaining about adaptation since the 80s.
He complained. About adaptations in the panels
we saw one about Starship Troopers and I, Robot.
And I robot. Both that, yeah.
So, yeah, so it's not just. So when you, when we think about
how he complaints about House of Dragon, keep that in mind that
he complaints about almost every adaptation, which on the
positive side, the fact that he is very big on the Knight of the
Seven Kingdoms is a huge, huge plus.
Now, let's not set our expectations too high.
But you can't help but feel good about that reaction.
And they're already filming season 2.
That's nice. So hell yeah, Let's talk a
little bit about what is typical at a world con.
Things that are at pretty much every world con, at least in
recent years, given it's so long running.
As I said earlier, the 86th instance, this hasn't been the
way it has been since the beginning, but it's been pretty
similar the whole way. A lot of these traditions are
very old. There's always, been, almost
always been an artist hall where you show off.
Lots. Of art from different artists
who have contributed to the Phantom, usually professionals.
It's usually that they do for a living.
So it's really, really high quality.
It's really beautiful, original, not just paintings but also
sculptures, just a really huge variety.
I have a picture. Of this one Lee Moyer art
because I'm dying for this person to sell them online.
I I needed a record to find it and message them, and I will
because I really, really, really want this James Tiptree Junior
Alice Sheldon piece. Like, desperately.
They also have related to the artist hall as a dealer hall.
That's where you people sell merch, fun stuff for costumes,
just fantasy attire, jewelry stuff for like a bunch of
different fandoms or just regular artistic stuff.
It doesn't have to apply to specific fandom, but anything
all across the the spectrum of sci-fi, fantasy, everything in
between, whatever falls under that category.
It's a pretty broad umbrella when you're talking about
worldcon. sci-fi is can includes fantasy right?
World science fiction convention that includes fantasy.
The fantasy is considered a sub genre of sci-fi by a lot of
people. I don't care, that's fine, it's
semantics. It's all semantics to me.
Whatever the categories, what matters is what's in the
categories, not so much how they're categorized.
There's a big part of worldcon is autograph sessions.
There's always a lot of famous to semi famous people there who
set up to take to do autographs. That's a lot of fun.
We'll talk about that specifically our experience with
that in a little bit because it was a little later in the
weekend. There's also fan auctions where
a lot of it, not only are the artist things auctioned, there's
like a silent auction. You just write your bids down
and at the end of the weekend, the highest bids win of course.
And there's also auctions for other things, and not just the
art pieces, but there's art, there's auctions for services.
You know, like. Anything that you can imagine
that's fantasy sci-fi related. Some of it's for charity.
Speaking of, there's a blood drive.
There's been a blood drive part of World Con for a super long
time. Gotta love that.
That's a way to give back. Very needed thing.
You got a lot of people gathered there.
You got 6000 people or so showing up to World Con.
Hey, get some of that blood. It's a good time to get them
while everybody's together, right?
There's a bit of a little bit of a fantasy element to that too.
Getting all that blood. What are you doing with all that
blood really? Is it really going to the needy?
I don't know. There might be some blood magic
going on in the background. We'll have to look into that a
little more. If we vanish in a few weeks,
you'll know why we learn too much.
Also for a very long time, the Hugo Awards have been part of
world connably since the 50s. I, I have that in the notes
somewhere else. I'll, I'll get back to that.
Also the Chelsea Awards, the Lodestar Award for the best
young adult book and the Astounding award, which is for
the best new writer. So lots of awards, which is part
of why there are so many famous authors that come regularly
because there's just so much going on.
So many awards are being given out, so much opportunity for
these authors to showcase their work, to schmooze with other
authors, maybe even find agents and things like that.
Some of these are authors are not super established.
Some of them are very established.
You really have the full gamut of George RR Martins to the
people you haven't heard of yet, right?
This is everybody. There's also for a long time
been a costume slash masquerade ball.
I wouldn't say World Con is huge on cosplay, but there's
definitely some. And then the masquerade ball is
when that really comes out more and it's fun to have a
masquerade ball even though neither of us went to it.
Definitely. Some cosplay.
I was in cosplay with Dom. That's right.
I wouldn't say I was in cosplay, but I did do the Alyssa
Targaryen look, which is if you recall Alyssa Targaryen had one
purple eye and 1 green eye. You know, I have two green eyes,
but I wore a purple contact a in my right eye.
So I had the mismatched Targaryen Alyssa eyes there and
that was fun. Actually, it's kind of funny
story. One of them is these are
prescription purple contacts and I just wearing one of them was
it was actually worked really well.
Like when I have both of them on, I can't see my phone because
they're not bifocals. I got to update them so they
are, but with one in and one not in.
I just my eyes would just work properly.
Like my one eye would focus on my phone.
If I look away, I could see far away.
It was actually kind of a, quite a discovery.
I just did it for fun and actually worked really well.
So I might, I might do that more often.
One purple contact, one regular eye.
I'll be a little slightly Uranish, I guess, or more like
a, besides Alyssa, more like a, a little bit like a Tyrion
maybe. There's also a very long
tradition of filks and music there just regular performances,
but also filks, which of course are are are fun versions of
existing songs rewritten with new lyrics.
That's a long standing tradition and great time.
Lots of laughs. Gaming, of course you wouldn't.
No one's surprised that there's lots of gaming at an event like
this, board gaming, role-playing, things like that.
Discussions of They're fighting. Sword fighting, yeah.
All that, all the stuff, all the things you would expect to be
associated with that pinball. Pinball.
Yeah, there's, you know, arcade stuff, you know, good, good
times. They set that up as part of the
event. So it's kind of a like a thing
you can go do if you want to, you know, blow off some steam or
just relax for a minute. You know, you've had enough
socializing for a bit. You need a break, Go play some
video games at night. They often have DJ Ed parties.
Now, this is obviously isn't something that dates back to,
say, the 50s, but it is been a tradition for a little while.
And one of the DJ, the recurring DJs is none other than author
John Scalzi. Yeah, right.
Like some of you knew that already.
But yeah, John Scalzi's a DJ. Yeah, right.
That's cool, huh. I went to.
That I went to it before too, but I went this year briefly.
That's very nice, yeah. He really gets into it.
Yeah, he's I've seen, I've never been, but I've seen footage and
he's just like, yeah, it's it's great.
Yeah, he's a I've never seen an author DJ before, but yeah, he
was just right there doing his thing.
I've seen an. Actor, DJ, because we've seen
Christian Nairn. That's.
True we have seen the Hodor set at that was the LA got con in
2022. Yeah, he is he's good.
So the typical, another typical feature of a world con is a
speeches. There is usually by the guest of
honor gives a speech and some others, big people in the
industry sometimes are offered a chance to do a speech or give a
talk or whatever. The guest of honor this year was
Martha Wells. If you don't recognize that
name, you I bet you recognize the name of what she's most
famous for, which is Murderbot, the Murderbot Diaries.
That is huge right now and I'm watching.
It it's really, really funny and really good and I've I've
decided Aziz is going to watch it with me and I'm just going to
stop and double back and he's going to catch up.
Yeah. She.
Did say that it's true. Also, artist Donato Giancola was
there. He has been doing fantasy art
for a long time. If you've ever played Magic the
Gathering, he was one of the first Magic the Gathering
artists and his art is. A lot.
Featured in older Magic cards. I don't know that he still does
magic cards. I haven't kept up with Magic the
Gathering in quite a long time, but I remember his it was like
one out of every 10 cards in the early days were Dinata Giancola
Art. So that's just, yeah, he's
iconic robotics expert Bridget Landry was there.
So the big part of Worldcon, especially with the sci-fi
element, is getting into future technology and how that, you
know, that affects our world and that affects stories.
And so there's a lot of interest in in technology at Worldcon.
So there's a definitely a, a slot for that.
As you can see with a major guest like this.
I have, of course. Well, not of course I've never
heard of Bridget Landry, but if she's a robotics expert, she's
must be highly intelligent and probably a good presenter too,
because you got It's a lot to explain.
It's tough to explain these difficult technological things
to people who are new to them. There was a Really.
Cool section in the dealer hall for building robotics and
soldering and stuff. And then they had like the
robots fight. They were like robot battles
happening. Did you see that?
I did not see. That happening, it was cool.
Robot fights, that's. Like what's that's that TV show
they have that battle battle bots or robots?
They have robot fights at MAG. Fest too every year.
You should check that out. I always like seeing it Robot.
Fights does same kind of fun. Kind of fitting a kind of
resonant with the second of the short films that we're going to
talk about Mary Margaret Rd. grader yeah we've.
Got some films to talk about in a minute.
That's true. Celtic musician Alexander James
Adams was also a featured guest there.
I'm also not familiar with him but wanted to give him a shout
out 'cause if he's invited to World Con as a major guest then
I want to point that out. Back to Martha Wells, the Murder
Bot author. She's won so many Hugos and
Nebulas that she has started just turning down nominations.
She's like, Nah, take me off the list, let someone else have a
chance. That's a boss right there is a
very confident and well settled individual.
So props to Martha Wells for that.
George was guest of honor in 2003, by the way.
So he, he was, he was the toastmaster, the, the speaker in
2019. But that's not the same thing as
guest of honor. A big part of Worldcon is
deciding where the next World cons will be.
Generally by the year of a world con, the next 2 or so years have
already been decided and then the next three after that
generally are being bid on. So people, there's already
bidding and arrangements being made for as far ahead as I think
2030 or 2031 even. And which is impressive and just
goes to show how ahead of everything they are there.
There's this this con is very healthy and it's it's still
getting bids from cities all around the world.
What usually happens is a number of cities put their bid forth
and then year by year some fall off.
They realize that all you know, everyone wants Montreal and they
don't want to put their effort in.
And by the right now, Montreal is running unopposed.
For example, for 2027, technically enough people could
vote right in and something else could win.
And also apparently the committee, the site selection
committee can also just be like, Nah, we don't want you Montreal.
And they can just choose their own place, which is kind of
crazy to me, but that's how it works.
So right now, Montreal is unopposed, but technically not
guaranteed not. Yeah, yeah, 2028 looks like it's
going to be Brisbane and 2029 looks like it'll be Dublin,
which we're super excited about because we did the Dublin World
Con, as we said in 2019, so this will be exactly 10 years later.
We had so much fun there, made friends and saw a lot of filming
locations. Ireland's just amazing all
around. So if it, we really hope that
one happens, it would be just so perfect to have the 10 year
anniversary of that and hit that again.
So yeah, that's a big part of it.
Parties are a big part of this too.
In other words, what you'll see is each of these locations will
have a party in a hotel room, you know, to drum up interest in
that location. We met some folks who were
trying to drum up interest in the Czech Republic location,
which I believe is being bid on for 2030.
So that was neat. We just some woman started
speaking to us on the elevator and she had an accent.
I was like, is that Eastern European?
And certainly she's part of the Czech bid team, Like, oh, OK,
that makes sense. And so that's pretty cool.
Well in advance there. So we're pretty excited about
those locations. We'll talk a little more about
Laa little bit later, but we hope to see you all at some of
these other ones. We'll probably go to most of
them. I don't think we'll go to
Brisbane, maybe, Who knows, it's a long time away.
Montreal's very likely. Dublin, if it happens, is almost
a guarantee in LA. Next year is also 99% I'd say,
so hopefully you all can join us at one or more of those.
Of course, a big feature of all world cons is panels, artist
discussions, author discussions, reader discussions, certain
fandoms, broad genre of things, like lots of different combined
fans, just you name it. There are panels on everything,
whether it's super, super niche to broad categories like just
how to be a writer or how to succeed as a writer, things like
that. Lots of literary oriented
subjects, but occasionally other things like robotics or like
art. You know, that's a big thing.
There's a lot. Of of more academic leaning
presentations and panels to two hour podcast recordings like the
the science fiction addicts podcast right which we.
Will discuss in detail in just a minute here.
That was a really a really excellent podcast event there.
So panels are more exclusive at World Con compared to any other
con we've ever attended. And what that means is it's the
hardest to be a panelist. Like you have to really be well
known, well established. Every convention ache and I have
ever been to, for the most part, we could have or have been a
panelist. World Con.
I don't think we could get that anytime soon.
It's just you got to be really, really well known, really
established. Like George himself.
His first panel was 761976, so it was fifth.
At his 5th or 6th World Con, he had been turned down.
Prior to that, even though he had already been nominated for
like Hugo and Nebulas like he had, he was pretty well known.
Not obviously not nearly as well known as he is now, but just by
comparison, like we've gotten panels at at conventions just
for having done a podcast, we've been at San.
Diego Comic Con on the panel. Yeah, I.
Mean that's a huge convention and we've been on panels there,
yeah, but George, yeah, they wouldn't even let him on panels
in the early 70s and it took to the mid 70s.
So that's just just goes to show it's World Con's about.
Quality, not quantity. That's right.
We're just quantity, you know. No, we're not writers.
That's a big thing. Podcasts don't have a big
presence at World Con, but it's they're starting to have more of
a presence there. As we, as we saw, as we're about
to discuss, let's all all. Of those, podcasters are also
authors. They all had a book under their
belt. That's true.
So. That's a big deal that we
technically have some books we've contributed to, but we
haven't written our own books all the way.
So let's get to that. Let's get to Friday.
The first thing we did on Friday was attend a panel with George,
and it also had Isabel Kim, who wrote sublimation.
The panel was called A Genre in conversation with itself.
Isabel Kim wrote Sublimation, John Scalzi who wrote When the
Moon Hits Your Eye and a lot of other things, Becky Chambers who
wrote the Monk and Robot series, George, and then Neil Clark who
is the editor of Clark's World magazine.
They. Won best editor at the Hugos.
Oh, you're right on. Clark did.
That's right. Heck yeah.
Way to go, Neil. So that this was a good panel.
It was amusing because George was like 5 minutes late and when
he wandered in, I think it was John Scalzi who said hi, Are you
lost? That was really funny.
I wasn't sure it was Scalzi or not because there wasn't enough
seats. I was sitting on the floor so I
couldn't actually see who was talking just to hear.
I can recognize George's voice, but the rest of them I'm like, I
think that's Scalzi. I don't know, Becky Chambers,
Neil Clark or Isabel Kim hadn't ever heard them speak before.
So anyway, that was cool. That was really fun.
It was a good chat. It was like an hour long and
there's a lot of authorial stuff they were talking about.
It really just stuff from their side of things like how artist
experience rather writer experience and different things
you have to do as an author and what I found.
Interesting in it because it's a genre in conversation with
itself. So it was really about like,
when is something a response, a repudiation?
When is it in conflict? When is it in, you know, adding
on, you know, like, how can we tell what current modern fiction
will be responded to? What fiction coming out now is
what will set the tone for another generation to respond
to? So that was really interesting.
And to clarify what we mean by to respond to a response is
like, for example, George told the story about, I can't
remember the guy's name, the first writer, it was a Czech
writer who invented the concept of a robot.
In other words, the first sci-fi author to mention a robot, and
in that story the robots turned on humanity and, you know, robot
revolution. So for 30 years or so, that was
all. Pretty much every story
involving robots involved it. Was Carol Kopeck?
Carol Kopeck. Thank you.
Every story involving robots for something like 30 years, George
said, was about the robots revolting against humanity.
As a Moff's story. I, Robot was a response to that,
He said. Hey, why not have the first law
of robotics where you have the first law is the human robots
are programmed. The most important thing that
they're programmed is never harm humans.
And then these are a couple other laws that go in there as
well to support that. You get the point.
So, so this is basically you have 30 years of people writing
it a certain way and then someone says, hey, why don't we
do it this way? And it's if someone that does it
really well. And then all of a sudden a lot
of people are writing that style.
They're all lots of people writing the first law of
robotics starts to appear in dozens if not more sci-fi.
You all all know that concept, right?
So what you didn't probably know is that it was a response to 30
years of robot revolution stories.
That's lost in the midst of time to most people who haven't paid
attention or researched or had someone like George tell you
this because it's kind of obscure.
Unless you're like his age or something, you wouldn't know
this. So this is actually before his
time even. So then you.
Kick off this cycle where people are now responding, I'm like, I
want to do it different. You're like, well, actually
you're different is what the standard was that he was
repudiating. Yeah.
Anyways, because we're back to the.
AI taking over now that's starting to come back where
robots are dangerous again. You know, robot revolution.
That's that's a big part of like the resurgence of Dune as an
idea, which was like no robots can do anything.
We banned all robots. Or what are some other examples?
I'm spacing out. But there's, you all know,
there's lots of the, yeah, boom, the Super clear example.
So people think, oh, this is a response to Isaac, Isaac Asimov.
Well, kinda, yeah. But it's, it's just back and
forth. It's like how trends repeat.
You know, it's like fashion is cyclical.
So are so is response fiction, which is fine.
It's not a problem. It's not a bad thing.
I mean, you get 30 years of great stories, and then you get
30 years of great stories that are approaching it differently,
and then they come back again and do it again, but from a
different modern perspective. Because it's been 50 years or so
and the technology has changed and thus people's imaginations
have changed and other things have changed too.
So it's really just kind of neat to watch these patterns evolve.
And that's where this panel is really valuable because you have
people like George who have the really Longview experience,
someone who's been in the industry for a long time who is
maybe a little out of touch with how it is for new authors.
Because George hasn't been a new author and so long, he doesn't
know what it's like to be a new author in 2025.
He knows what it was like back in the day.
He still understands a lot about the business, but he's just been
successful for so long that he's doesn't know what it's like to
be getting started in these days.
I agree. With you, I think give we should
give George some credit for the amount of work he puts into
fostering new voices. And I'm sure he does ask what's
it like and he hears a lot of that.
You can hear that in his panels that he definitely is a little
tapped in more than you might think because of that like
mentoring and fostering work he does.
That's a great. Point yeah, you're totally right
he is definitely someone who gives back to the community he
encourages people to write he helps teach people to write he's
our very. Own McCall Schick is part of the
George RR Martin Writer's fellowship in Chicago.
She just did that that's right. Quotes and who?
Who has done podcasting with Aziz and Yeah?
So. That's really cool.
So that was really neat to hear. And these these these trends are
really interesting to hear about and these these stories about
how the publishing industry works.
And we heard some more of them in this next panel, this podcast
episode, the sci-fi Addicts podcast, which was along with
Dragon Steel Productions, which is Brandon Sanderson's company.
The podcasters were Adrian M Gibson, MJ Kuhn and Greta Kelly.
And as a Shaya mentioned earlier, all three of them are
published authors. So they're podcasters and
authors. The rest of the panel included
Brandon Sanderson, Robin Hobb, Ryan Cahill, Rebecca Rowanhorse
and George. So it is a big panel of heavy
hitters and it was diverse in terms of age.
You got. George is the older, oldest one
there. Ryan Cahill's the youngest I
would like. To say, as he said, it's Cahill,
it's oh, I'm sorry. Cahill, I'm sorry, he.
Said he has patience for it because Americans say it one
way, but he did make a point. Good correction there.
Thank you. So this was also a lot about
industry insights, less about how genre responses and more
about the. Business.
Of being an author and how some of these trends have changed.
For example, what authors have to deal with a lot, all these
authors talked about, even George has talked about this, is
that something does well, a certain thing does well and then
all the publishers tell the authors to do that.
And a good example of that is Game of Thrones.
A lot of like, for example, Brandon Sanderson in this
podcast, he said he wrote his story or his for one of his
first stories. I don't know which one it was,
but he presented it to I think Del Rey.
And they were like, yeah, this is pretty good.
Have you read Game of Thrones? Go write that instead.
He's like, I, I can't do that. I'm not George.
I like, I write my stories. You know, these are my this is
how I write. I don't write like him.
Nothing wrong with how he writes.
Nothing wrong with how I write. But we are different.
You know it. Which is highly relevant to
people out there who think Sanderson should finish George's
books. Even Sanderson doesn't think
he's fit for that. So that conversation needs to
die. Other examples, really.
Like, Cahill gave an example of how, oh, maybe it wasn't him,
but one of them gave an example of no, I think it was Sanderson
again. It gave an example of how he was
told, do bring me anything, just not vampire stuff.
Like, that's dead. Like, he made a joke.
Yeah, Like, dead. Like the vampires themselves,
like, don't do vampire stuff. Anything but that.
The next year, The Vampire Diaries came, no, no, Twilight,
Twilight, sorry, Twilight came out the next year.
So Sanderson's like, don't listen to the publishers.
They may tell you what to do, but you, you got to ignore that
the, all the authors, every single one of them on the panel
was adamant that you should write what you love to write,
because if you don't, you'll get stuck in doing things you don't
like. You'll lose enthusiasm for it,
Ryan said. If you do well with one and
they're going to make you do another one, and you won't want
to do that 'cause you already struggled to do the first one,
'cause you didn't like it. You were writing something that
was outside of your enjoyment. So it's really important.
One of the bottom line points here is that you have to be
enthusiastic about your own work 'cause that shines through in
your work and that is a big draw in the 1st place.
It's really hard to bring people in via a work of art that the
artist isn't excited about or that they they themselves don't
love, right? That's it's really hard to
succeed with those conditions. You just got to be like the most
ultra talented type person to overcome art in a place that you
aren't enjoying it. One of the.
Points I thought was really interesting was they talked
about how their inspiration, what was what was like their
model when like what how they their introduction, their
inflection point into fantasy and science fiction.
The scope of the the panel was epic fantasy, so they were
really focusing on the epic fantasy.
But of course, you can't help but bring up epic science
fiction, space opera and stuff like that.
So anyways, obviously George had had Tolkien and, you know, had
his own influences. It's talked about a lot.
I found it really fascinating that Brandon Sanderson brought
up Dune as his big model and dragon Lance.
So did Rebecca. Yeah.
And that's what I'm about to say is that Rebecca Rowanhorse
brought up Dune and A Song of Ice and Fire, and I think that
rings through in her series. And like I read in Black Sun,
there really is a lot of political intrigue and you can
tell the influences that A Song of Ice and Fire had on her and
how you know. So that's my pitch to read
Rebecca Rowanhorse because her, she's a very good author.
She's on my. Short list.
I really have been meaning to read her series for a while and
now it's just one best that you go for best series.
So it's like, Oh yeah, that's even more incentive.
So yeah, that to add on to what Shay was saying, all of them
except Rebecca Rowanhorse said like Tolkien was the first one
they read, but she hasn't read. Tolkien she hasn't read.
And Sanderson said that he read Tolkien, but he was more like
chip on his shoulder about it. Like, I don't want to write like
this. Like everyone writes like this
because of the when he was coming along, Tolkien had been
the the thing for so long. He wanted to do something
different. And so he also said that Dune,
like Shea said, was the the one that really affected him more, a
lot more than Tokyo and and then Game of Thrones.
So even though he doesn't write at all like Frank Herbert or
George R Martin, the ideas, the genesis for so much of his world
building and characters and just everything started a lot with
with these influences. Some other interesting takes.
They discussed magic systems. This was interesting because you
also have and it's funny that George R Martin and Brandon
Sanderson were sitting the farthest apart.
Now, of course, they're very respectful to each other.
They're they're colleagues and all that.
So there wasn't any like there's never any, nothing negative
here, but they definitely had different approaches.
It was it was your debate. Yeah, it was more of a debate
like people like like Robin Hobb and and George are more on the
magic should be mysterious. It should have consequences, it
shouldn't work the same always. And Sanderson often prefers this
strict magic systems which are very outlined and very detailed.
And Robin Hobb had the most insightful, succinct comment
about this dichotomy. I think most of you out there
have heard the phrase any advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic. Probably all heard that before.
It's just something common like tropish statement made about
usually applied to sci-fi settings.
She turned that around and said any repeatable magic, if you can
do it over and over get the same results is indistinguishable
from science. If it has repeatable results,
then it's it's, it's not like you can still call it magic.
But if it just works the same, if the same exact process
creates the same exact results every time, then it's, it's very
straightforward. You can analyze it and study it.
And that mystery element doesn't exist because other than what
hasn't been discovered yet, I love.
This especially because in Brandon Sanderson's works, it is
all working towards a future series where magic is being
harnessed in a real scientific way for planetary travel.
Like we haven't reached that point yet, but that's what he's
working towards. And so like that is what's going
to hit that they are going to be using their magics and
harnessing them in a reliable way.
And they, I mean, you see that in Stormlight Archive, they do
have magic used as science regularly that is like used to
make machinery, used to make, you know, ways to travel, things
like that. And, and I love that.
I love that. But it is definitely scientific
magic. Yeah, which so that's a really,
I thought there's a really clever way of of describing the
difference there. And so it's just very insightful
all around. But I thought Robin Hobb's
comment was particularly insightful on that one, if you.
Listen to this podcast. I don't know how they're going
to release it. I don't know how they're going
to edit it. There's something that people
live when people who watch live streams of it were harsh on
George about. But I need to point this out.
There were multiple times where they said to answer this Robin
and they asked Robin a question or they asked Rebecca or Brandon
a question and George answered. You might be like, oh, how rude.
No, you guys, he can't hear them.
He he uses a hearing aid these days.
It's very hard when you're on stage.
I know from first hand, having been on panels and from seeing
George on panels, having heard him have to have questions
repeated every one of those times.
He did not hear them adding the name on to the end.
He was not just bulldozing someone.
He wasn't just, yeah, he wasn't just being a jerk.
I, I, I just, I really need you to realize that.
I hope you listen to this podcast and I hopefully they
edit it so that it doesn't sound so so rude.
Like 2 like. Two or three times he did that,
yeah. But yeah, as I say, I said
that's. Yeah, it was.
It was certainly no, nothing more than just, it's hard to
hear up there. And so, yeah, again, every
single one of them was just overwhelmingly adamant about
writing what you love. And if you want to be an author,
you have to write. You have to have stuff out
there. You can't just, you have to have
something to show to people because if the opportunity comes
along, you need to be prepared for that.
And they all had some really funny stories about how this
worked for them. Like Robin Hobb talked about,
like, she was asked by somebody if she had this story.
She's like, yeah, I'm working on a novel, which wasn't true.
She just said that. And they were like, then the
person was like, will you show it to me?
And then she's like, so she had to take two of her existing
short stories. She just, she just hammered them
together into one. And it worked and it was good
and it was successful. So do what you got to do.
Cahill said that he was the youngest on the panel.
He's like in his and he does indie.
Publishing. He was an indie author on the
panel. That's important to know.
Yeah. So that was.
Yes, the publishing was a big part of the discussion.
This is one of the things that that George didn't was is a
little beyond his scope because indie publishing, Internet
publishing, that's he doesn't do that so much.
And if he what bits of that he does is done by other people
handling it for him. So these modern trends and
George said that he's like he he was complimenting Brandon
Sanderson was like, you are clearly the master of this
Internet thing because Brandon is absolutely astonishing almost
in his ability, his business management.
Like as far as all these authors, Sanderson is the most
impressive in terms of his his own personal brand, I would say.
And the fact that he basically talked for a minute about this,
about how nowadays, in the in the old days, literary agents
were their own thing. Nowadays, every agent basically
works for Amazon or Barnes and Noble, not literally, but
basically because those are the platforms that matter.
He said specifically, there's been lots of authors with great
books that Barnes and Nobles is like, Nah, it doesn't fit our
our what we want on the shelves right now.
And that kills the book. They can't.
There's nothing you can't with with Barnes and Nobles isn't
going to put it on the shelf. It's really hard to sell it.
And so that's what Sanderson decided he was like.
He realized that he's beholden to Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
He didn't want to be. He's like, I want to be 2003.
Right. I think there's a long time ago
where they turned off the spigots.
Maybe it was like 2013. Yeah, I think it was 20. 13
Yeah, Where they. Turned off like they they just
his publisher could not sell on Amazon.
He just was not. There was a dispute.
Yeah, there was a dispute and then Amazon just turned him off
and so his books couldn't sell for a while.
And he's like, well, I just don't ever want that to happen
again. I'm never going to put myself in
a position for that to happen again.
So he worked super hard to start his own company and mailing.
List mailing list. So he.
Has a direct connection to his fans.
He can sell directly to his fans.
He publishes to his fans. He doesn't have need obviously
the he uses these other distribution networks, but
doesn't need them. If they if they kick him out or
he has a problem with them, a dispute, he has leverage.
He's like, well, fine, I'll just do it on my own.
They can't force him into it by leveraging.
We're the only game in town. So and Cahill is doing a similar
thing. He's not as established.
He's not as nearly as big as Sanderson, but he's younger too
and is on maybe on a track kind of like that.
So that that was really interesting.
It was really fascinating. Like I said, I encourage you to
to listen to this podcast when it comes out.
It was over 2 hours and we've probably only covered maybe 1/3
of it at most. Maybe maybe a little, whatever,
not, not a whole lot. There's a lot of other
interesting things said by these highly intelligent, experienced
authors. There was some reporting on an
incident during this podcast. Reporting was a little off on
this as things tend to be, but we were there.
We know what happened. There is an audience Q&A and
there was going to be 8. They allowed eight people to ask
a question. Our friend Mateo was 9th.
So it's too bad that this happened because he would have
gotten to ask a question and Ashea would have been like 11th
so. And I got a good look at this
person in person too. They're very crazy.
We don't really want to give them the attention that they
want. They definitely want this
attention. They posted this stuff
themselves, you guys. They've also been booted from
the Tolkien fandom from Lord of the Rings for harassing Royd
Tolkien. So you just it's not worth
giving them the attention. It's, it's what they want it.
I will say Worldcon did not do a background check.
They did not vet them because this person was on a panel and
in their description, like they had a reading and it said they
would do a reading as Visenya Targaryen.
And let me say that their question had them tell George
they're the person who's been harassing him to be cast as
Visenya Targaryen. This is someone who goes by he
they pronouns and does not look like Visenya Targaryen.
So the the reason this became like national?
Solitary. News is because the question
they asked or tried to ask. Was.
Started off with the bit about the Senya and some other just
rambling, and then it went to George.
We all know you're not going to be with us much longer.
And then, of course, with that intro, half the audience was
stunned to silence. The other half went oh, whoa.
And then the podcast host or one of the podcast hosts just went
no and just shut them down. It was like, show some respect.
That's it. That's the end.
Now, some people. So, so a lot of the reporting
says the event was cut short by this.
No, not really. This was the last question
anyway. It was already gonna be the last
question too, is it was saved by cut short.
It was cut short by like 2 minutes or one minute, you know?
So technically it was, but not really.
I liked what the host. Adrian said.
He said that was not nice. That was not a nice question.
I really liked how mild he was. Yeah.
And. And the person was still trying
to like standing there, like still trying to get like some
response and and they were just still like, no, no.
People were already. Leaving, you know, and of
course, basically hold. Mateo back from like confronting
this person anyways. Yeah, yeah.
Daphne held him back. Like, just don't.
Just don't. Yeah, He's like, all right,
fine. Because he just wanted to know,
like, why would you do that? Why would you say something?
He wasn't going to like, you know, attack her or something,
but he just really wanted to know why you would say such a
thing. Attack them.
We want to use their pronouns even when they're crazy.
Oh yeah, attack. Them My bad.
Yes, my bad. So that was just quite an
incident and yeah, you probably, many of you have probably
already seen that because it was it's been all over the news
anyway. So that's the real story,
because we were there for it, yeah.
To be clear, the the crazy part wasn't even the question.
The the second part, the crazy part is the fact they like
George. I think it's a restraining order
to keep this person from Jean Cocteau.
And like, there was a lot of other crazy stuff beyond how
callous and heartless the question became, right?
Just so you know, 1000%. Yeah.
And one last tidbit on that too. They said that or or Shaya
mentioned Roy Tokian. It's also a restraining order
against her or them for that because it's they sexually
harassed Roy Token, apparently. So it's like, whoa, this is
quite a person. Yeah.
Anyway, enough of that. Then we went to the signings.
The signings were Next up, and we got some good photos of that.
And there's this particularly great photo of me and George
that I believe Shay will put on screen here in a SEC, if it's
not already there. We both have this kind of goofy
grin that we're doing together. Compare the.
Face of George with with the Z's where he's laughing because
George Z's made a joke. 2 Oops, wrong way.
His face here where I just think this is like a memeable face and
he looks really disturbed. It's just a silly giant.
Someone messed me like, is George OK?
And I'm like, yeah, it's just a funny photo.
It makes me laugh. So I got my copy or a copy of
Knight of the Seven Kingdoms signed my copy.
No, it's our copy. I got Michael Clarfeld's reach
map signed right next to George's Garth Green hand.
This is the big final cloth version we have.
Like the one behind us. Yeah.
So there's a nice group of us getting stuff signed.
That was fun. We had just got to hang out in
line together. That's fun.
Good way to pass the time. And George is his signings are
always very efficient. They, they're really nice too,
the way they take your picture while you're getting it signed.
So you have some keepsake that's usually Sid taking those
pictures. She's got a lot of experience at
that because George's done a lot of signings.
George is so automatic with his signings that they told us to
mark what page you want signed. But George is he just
automatically goes to the title page and signs it.
Like if you he just it, it's just so ingrained.
He's talked about like you put a book in front of me, he's
probably just going to sign it. And he's like, oh, wait, I
wasn't. I wasn't asking you to sign that
George in front of him. That's the best thing to do is
just put restaurant bills in front of him.
He'll just sign that. No, I'm just kidding.
Actually, he did pay for my pizza.
That was nice. It was from that, from that
Wednesday. So yeah, that signing was fun.
Really. Randomly, my friend Joe, who
I've known since I was 19, I didn't know he was going to be
there. And again, I live in Atlanta.
We live in Atlanta. Joe lives like 10 minutes from
us here in Atlanta, Roswell, GA, technically the suburb.
And he was there with his, with his father and mother and they
were in line before us. They like they scoped it out.
They were the fourth people in line for the George signing.
And then after the George signing, they went to the
Brandon Sanderson signing. So that was pretty cool.
So they, they got their some good signatures done there and
it was really cool to see my friend randomly.
I was the best man in his wedding long ago.
Good times. So that was fun.
A little bonus that evening was the BWB party.
The previous night was the BWB dinner.
This was the BWB party, same room where the karaoke and the
other partying was happening, the same room rented out by Tab,
and there were a lot of fun people there.
Shay already mentioned that Paris was there, George's wife,
she was there. John Pacaccio, the great artist,
was there, and we got to hang out with John off and on all
throughout the weekend. He's such a nice guy,
charismatic dude. He and Lee Bardugo, the artist
of Shadow and Bone, have finished a book together, a
children's book about death, which is a very unusual thing.
It's beautiful. The illustrations are amazing,
the story is really good that Lee wrote the story and John
wrote the did the art comes out August. 26th and the title.
Is the invisible. Parade.
Invisible parade. Yeah, really.
I highly suggest you at least take a look at it.
The centerfold piece on is by itself is unbelievable, John
said. He took him, it was two months
of his life to make that and it shows.
It's just, it's stunning, I think a beautiful.
Book for adults and kids alike. If you have kids that are
grappling with loss and death or or anything like that, I think
it's a a great gift to give to kids of a certain age.
And John said that this was a real risk they were taking
because publishers are, like, death books for children.
Yeah, we don't do that. That's not a big seller, John,
But they're like. But they really wanted to do it.
You know They're famous and that will help it get promoted.
They're doing A8 city book tour. Unfortunately, Atlanta is not
one of the stops, so we would totally go to that.
But anyway, you might want to check your city.
If you live near a big city like New York or Chicago, they will
probably be in your area very soon.
Lee Bardugo. If you don't realize is the
author of the Shadow and Bone series.
That's right, Netflix series and very popular among.
We have a bunch of friends who cosplay from that series.
A lot of crossover with some A Song of Ice and Fire fandom I
got to. Chat with Lee for quite a bit.
She was super nice, very friendly.
We got to chat for a while and she was very down to earth.
She had like a whole squad of her friends there, a bunch of
girls. They were all cool, Leonard.
Dugo wasn't a Song of Ice and Fire fan and a member of the
Westeros org boards like a She's a BWB member and so she met John
at a World Con BWB party. I don't know how long ago.
Yeah, quite a. While back and they have been
friends ever since and that's why they're collabing now
because they've had that relationship and they work well
together and this idea came along.
I'm not sure exactly the genesis of the idea, but they both have
been running with it for a while.
John had a. Post just the other day about
it. If you look at his Instagram, he
did post about the genesis of it.
OK, cool. Yeah, it.
Just occurred to me just now that I was like, oh you know,
how did that even get started? So funny anecdote, I might have
told this story before from an ice and fire con years ago and
this was my ice breaker to approach Lee in the 1st place.
I was walking down the hall at Ice and Fire Con with David J
Peterson, the language guy. And we walk by the front room of
the hotel, and there's four of our friends dressed as Shadow
and Bone characters. Even though it was Ice and Fire
Con, they decided one evening they do Shadow and Bone.
That's cool. And David notices them.
And he, of course, having done languages for every show that
needs languages, he has done work on Shadow and Bone the TV
show. And so he saw them.
He's like, hey, you guys doing Shadow and Bone cosplay?
And they're like, yeah. And he goes, I'm going to take
your picture and send it to Lee. And they're like, what?
They just like died. So I told Lee that story.
I was like, I was standing right next to David when he sent you
that photo. He's she's like, oh, that's so
cool. And I said, those girls, they
just loved it so much. And so at the end, when we were
done talking, she was going to leave.
I was like, Hey, let me get your a selfie.
And then I was able to send it to those girls so they could,
you know, full circle everything there.
And I got to tell them that that I approached her using that
story as my icebreaker. So that was.
Great. I had a great time with her.
She's super nice and I hope this book is a big success for them
you're getting. Compliments on your Blackwood
shirt, which I will say is a compliment to me because I made
it. That was my design.
And you can see in this picture, Dom has a a Baratheon shirt.
I made him as well as he's also has some others like a Lannister
and a Targaryen. Targaryen, a Golden Company,
Golden Company. I have a Golden Company too.
And our friend Mateo humbly requested I make him a a Stark
shirt. So I I have something I think I
did. I make Joe Magician one too.
Yeah, I did. I did.
Wait. Which one was it?
Was it also Blackwood or it was also?
Blackwood. He'll have to.
He was in the chat. He'll have to tell me.
I can't quite remember but I made him one on request too.
So we managed to not get, you know, hungover or anything.
Neither of us are big drinkers. I didn't.
Drink at all? Yeah, I think I had.
One he doesn't normally. Drink, but I swear he was more
tipsy than I've seen him in a long time.
I think I had. Yeah, well, which is weird
because I only had, I think I only had three drinks.
But anyway, you told me the. Same story like 3 times, yeah.
That's a sign. That's a sign.
I was like you told me, like, I'm not drunk at all.
And I'm like, Aziz, I've heard the same story.
This is the third time you're drunk, OK?
You're drunk. No, I'm not.
So first bit on Saturday, Ashaya
has a story. Take it away.
Sure. Do This was a big day for me and
Dom because we were cosplaying and like because he said it's
not like the biggest cosplay con in the world.
It's really few and far between people do I did a cosplay of
Poison Ivy from her current comics run, which is by G Willow
Wilson and starts and heavily features Seattle.
So I got a bunch of really great pictures of that.
This Is Us with Willow. The G is silent as she she said
she did a panel with Rebecca Rowanhorse on writing commercial
IP for fun and profit 'cause she does a lot of comic stuff.
She did Miss Marvel. She's done a lot.
She she's currently doing Black Cat in addition to Poison Ivy, I
think. Yeah.
And Rebecca Rowanhorse has done a lot of commercial IP stuff
because she did Star Wars, she did Resistance Reborn, She's
doing a Andor book that's coming out, which was pretty exciting
to hear. And she's also done stuff in the
Predator world. And so that was really just
interesting to hear about how one gets into to working on
commercial IP, what you get out of it, what the trade-offs are.
But really we went because we wanted to meet Willow and show
her our cosplay. The other person you see in
this, the faceless person is Dom, who is cosplaying another
Poison Ivy character called Peter Undine.
He's this flower faced man and Willow freaked out when she saw
us and she posted to her Blue sky at All Caps Undine cosplay.
She said it was the first Peter Undine cosplay she's ever seen.
She sent it to her editor and the artist.
And then later that day, Dom ran into her on the escalator and
started talking to her and he told her he's my new favorite
weird little guy. And she, she shared that she
tweeted or not tweeted, she skeeted whatever.
She posted a direct quote from him.
So she really appreciated us and I really appreciated her.
And I highly recommend the Poison Ivy comics run if you
like comics or you like Poison Ivy.
It's really cool, beautiful art, meaningful, moving, made me cry
at points. Really, really good.
So yeah, that was why I had Moss and mushrooms glued on my face.
I. Had to stay away from Michelle a
lot that day because I'm very allergic to Poison Ivy so I
couldn't couldn't take any risks there.
No seriously, I am very allergic to Poison Ivy.
Next up was the Song of Ice and Fire fan meet up run run by
Laura Antonio who we met at Ice Fire Conch.
He's great and is in the chat. Right now, the chat.
Hey, Laura, how are you doing? Yeah, so that was fun.
We got to gather in there. I'm in the 5th floor, 4th floor,
up in the pretty high up in the Summit building.
It was good, nice open space. I just seen a lot of people we
are mostly familiar with and met a few new people and had a good
time. Yeah, it's a great thing to do,
having the keeping the community vibrant by having meetups like
this. I always appreciate people who
take it upon themselves to arrange events like that, meet
up to conventions, you know, like unofficial slash, semi
official, things like that. They are such an important part
of the convention experience and what makes them good.
Next up, we attended movies. That's was great because these
are George's movies. Well, George's movies.
He produced them that he didn't write them.
These are Howard Waldrop short stories that were adapted to
film. And this is this is a little
sad. He introduced these films by
talking about Howard Waldrop. And Howard Waldrop was one of
his best friends. And Howard Waldrop died only
about a year and a half ago. And he told lot he spent quite a
few minutes, several minutes talking about Howard, talking
about their friendship. They known each other since they
were teenagers, really like when they were both trying to become
authors. They know they've known each
other that long ago. So he was a bit melancholy.
He was very obviously loved Howard and talking about him,
you know, it was a little bit sad, but very meaningful, very
positive, even though it was sad because it's this is a friend.
This is a man who loved his friend and has extra money and
is willing to make these movies even if he takes a loss on it,
even if he takes a substantial loss, He's just like, you know,
I want my friends movies to be out there.
I want I want him to be remembered.
So it was really touching and the movies are good.
Like this is like this is these are good stories like this.
Howard Waldrop wrote like 100 short stories.
He never wrote long form short stories was his thing.
And George picked out a few of these to make into films.
One of these we've discussed before.
Ashay and I attended the premiere of Night of the
Cooters, which is the first short story, Night of the
Cooters. Yeah, that's the name of it.
And we, I think we mentioned this in the prior previous
podcast, we tend to the premiere.
It sounds so fancy. The premiere was here in
Atlanta. So it was we just drove
downtown, you know, and it was easy.
But it was cool because Vincent d'onofrio was there with George
and Vincent was the lead actor and Co producer.
Oh, no director. He was the director, right?
Yeah, he was the director. Yeah, he was the director.
And Star. Yeah.
So that's really. Good we so Shay and I had seen
it already, but it was really fun seeing it again It's.
War. Of the Worlds fan fiction.
Essentially it takes place 10 years after the Civil War.
Hysterical. Giving George's opinion on fan
fiction, I just got to say I'm like, it's it's war.
It literally is War of the Worlds fan fiction.
Come on. Yeah.
And it's really good. So the idea is this, the setup
is simple. This is not a spoiler.
It's a very simple setup. In War of the Worlds, there's
five pods that come down from the aliens, 5 alien pods that
land on Earth. Three of them land in London.
The other two are just never mentioned.
The war of those just ignores the other two.
You can just assume they like went into the ocean or they just
blew up. Nothing happened.
It wasn't important to the story.
Howard Waldrop didn't notice that.
He's like, what if we write a story about those other two
pods? There's a great line with
Vincent D'onofrio in in the movie where he says, you're
telling me that the aliens landed in London, England and
Pachuco, Texas. Yeah.
So it's like an old South southern town.
There's like a little some Civil War vibes because it's only been
10 years after the Civil War. So there's another great line
where they're they're all joining together to fight the
cooters, the aliens. And they're one of the guys is a
Union soldier. And he's like, let me man this
weapon, you know, let me take, let me take over this gun for
you guys. He's like, you're a Yankee.
And he's like, yeah, but we won. He's.
And he's like, good point. Like, all right, go ahead.
Really funny. Short film and really
aesthetically striking because it's filmed in a rotoscope
method called trioscope. Trioscope.
Yeah, Which is the. Name of the company Trioscope is
A and they were they're an Atlanta based company and that's
part of why the premier originally was in Atlanta and
one of the other stars of the movie, Vincent Dionofrio's
deputy was Hopper Pen. If you think that's the son of
Sean Penn, you'd be right 'cause he is the son of Sean Penn and
Robin Wright. They almost named him Steak.
Steak pen. Steak Pen.
He's named for Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson.
I don't know how Jack Nicholson gets in there 'cause Hopper is
just Maybe he's Hopper, Jack. Hopper.
Jack Nicholson, Hopper. Jack Penn?
Yeah, Maybe so, yeah. He looks like Sean Penn a bit.
Yeah, he did. Yeah, and that name was like, I,
you see that name, I'm like, that's got to be Sean Penn's
kid, and he's probably named after Dennis Hopper.
And I looked it up and that's exactly what it was.
So there you go. So the next film was called Mary
Margaret Rd. Grader.
It's also fan fiction in the Mad Max world and it's Native
Americans, the Native American setting, how they adapted to the
specifically. Mad Max, it's just in that tone,
it's not, it's not as explicitly.
This is fan fiction like, you know what I mean?
Yeah. I I.
Don't know if I agree with that. It was very Mad Max.
I mean, it was blatantly mad. Max in town, but I don't think
anything explicitly because it was in a world where basic right
they don't. Mention like it's not like that
character is famous in that world, it's just the other one
was. Explicitly War of the World,
this one. Yeah, it was.
It was more of in the in the conversation with it, yeah.
So it was really good. You see the the Native American
culture is adapted to the setting, the post apocalyptic
setting. They're they're, they have a car
culture. It's a, they do a lot of tractor
pulls. That's one like one of the sport
sporting events that they gather for.
And it's told like a traditional Native American story in a lot
of ways, as a, as a story within a story, like a person is
relating their version of events with the narration style and
from their earlier days or what have you.
And it's just really good. It's just, it was fantastic.
We loved it. And during the movie, Naomi
leans over to me and said, this should be a full length movie.
And then at the end when George is talking about it, he's like,
this one might be adapted for a longer full length.
And we're like, oh, and it's got more, a better chance than you
might think of being made into a full length film because there's
a there's a very positive reaction from the Native
American community, at least as far as we were told.
And there's occasionally more grant money available for films
being made if they have, you know, if they're mostly or
entirely native so that they have a chance for extra funding
for that. So there's a decent chance that
happens. It's really it was really good.
Also Trioscope filming, so also really interesting looking.
The third film was live action. It's called the Ugly Chickens.
The original version won Howard Waldrop and Nebula awards.
It was really good. And when we asked or somebody
asked, which was George's favorite?
Me. I was you.
Was that you? OK.
We were at the. BWB dinner and I was just trying
to strike up conversation with him that it was not like trite
and I don't like things that he would care about.
And so I was like, I I was like, oh, I saw Night of the Cooters
in Atlanta. I'm so excited to see the Which
is your favorite? You know, And he was like the
ugly chickens really quickly. Quickly, yeah.
And by the way, as an aside, it was George Shay talking about
like how to have a conversation with George.
That's not trite. That's a secret that I'm going
to let you all in on right now. I've, I've had a lot of success
approaching famous people and talking to them.
Why? Because I don't treat them like
a famous person. When you're at a party, if
you're a famous person at a party, you don't want people
coming up to you and telling you how great you are.
And they, they, they're there to have a good time.
They don't want to, they're not in work mode.
Handling fans is work mode. They're there to be among
friends, hang out. So you got to treat them like
that and they, they will generally will respond well.
If you act fanish, it puts them in work mode and they don't want
to be in work mode when they're at a party.
If you approach them at their artist table and say things like
that and say, hey, I'm a big fan, you've inspired me, that's
the right time for that. But if you're just trying to
strike up a conversation with an artist, don't be starstruck.
It's off putting to them because they they deal with that all the
time. You know, you might think that
you're giving ping them a great compliment and you are, but it's
the wrong time for that. So that's my secret.
Hopefully it works for you. Hopefully you get a chance
anyway, beginning with The Ugly Chickens.
It the star of The Ugly Chickens was Felicia Day.
That's really cool. So it's a famous person.
And to her credit, it took a long time for the movie to get
made. It was in stasis for quite a
while. And she stick with it.
She's like yeah, even though it took like 5 years from inception
to being made, it was longer. He said she went from being a
single woman at the inception to having a like, I think 9 year
old or 8 year old, Oh my God, way.
Longer OK, a child. A child.
A child, yeah. So it was a very simple
adaptation because the original main character of the ugly
Chickens was a man. So they switched it to Felicia
Day. Didn't really affect the story
that much. A couple of small details had to
be changed. That's it. 1979 is the setting.
And the ugly chickens refers to the dodo bird.
I will say no more. It's a really fun story about
dodo birds. And the character Felicia Day is
is obsessed with the dodos. And yeah, it's it's very
touching and fun and quirky and unique.
Yeah. The thing that's.
Really unique about it is that it shows science fiction in that
it's alternate history, science fiction, one which is is already
a thing. But science that is not, it's
fantastical. It is science fiction that is
like science is, you know, birds, Ornithology.
Yeah, that's that science. Science it is.
It's not. Technology science, which is
what we 99% of the time association sci-fi involves.
It's the technology that's the science there.
That's the science This is. Well, what if it's just
Ornithology? It's like, Oh yeah.
That's science. That's absolutely.
That's science. Of course it is.
Yeah. Geology.
That's science. Like geology, by the way, that's
a big part of NK Jemison's Broken Earth.
That's a, you know, it's fantasy, but there's a little
sci-fi element to it as well. Anyway, it was adapted by a man
named Michael Cassutt who was there and he was with George.
And they spoke a lot about the production and how it was made
and all that. And it was great hearing them
talk about it, you know, the the internal workings of all that.
And, and George is very open about the fact that he wants to
make more. He wants to make more of Howard
Waldrop's stories into movies. And even if he's going to take a
loss, he's willing to do that check about how hard it is.
To market and sell them because they're short films.
I thought someone in the audience had a great answer for
that, which is getting up together and sell them to
somewhere like a Netflix or somewhere is anthology.
Anthology are big. These days, true A.
Whole season of it and you have six of seven of you know,
whatever, that's enough. 3 is a little light.
I mean, we could. Probably name several anthology
style series that are involved and some of them are involved
with like major production like Star Wars does Visions, which is
an anthology yeah and even. There's even short film
anthologies because Love Death and Robots are really short,
because the other anthologies, you know, Star Wars Visions is a
normal length. Yeah.
Black Mirror is a long length, say Black.
Mirror, yeah, but a love. Death and Robots is the closest
one I could think of on Netflix. Is it an American?
Horror Story anthology as well. It is.
It is but. It's a season long anthology.
Oh. OK, that's different.
Yeah. It's kind of like like a, like a
Fargo, like a White Lotus or. A Fargo, Yeah, yeah.
OK, anyway. So there you go.
That's that. Let's move on to the Hugo
Awards. Yeah, basically the last main
event of the convention. The program started off with the
line Many Both and spies died to bring you tonight's list of
finalists. We.
Attended the actual award show. A lot of our friends just went
and watched it on closed circuit TV, which is something you can
do at Worldcon. It's kind of fun.
You can hang out and have drinks with your friends.
But we got dressed up and wanted to see there.
We had newbies. With us we had newbies with.
Us, Yeah, it was me, Ashaya, Dom, Naomi Makes Art and our
friend Michael G And it was really fun.
They won shtick. They repeated.
The two hosts had a song, but they kept repeating with each
each time a new award would be announced, or a new little skit
or whatever they were doing in between awards.
And it went something like down, down, down the road, down the
Hugo. Road.
And it was. Every time.
So it started to like, eventually particularly me and
Dom started singing along loudly, like eventually about
1/3 of the crowd was singing along and that was very
gratifying. They at one point they said,
Michael said. The person next to him was
annoyed. Too bad for him or them.
Because it was. A lot, yeah.
So that's one of. Those things where if you're not
having a good time with it, yeah, you might be annoyed by
it, but because it was constant. But we, I loved it.
We were singing along. It was great.
I went through. A bit of a roller coaster with
it myself where the first one was like, oh, how nice.
And the second time I was like, Oh no, it's happening every
time. And then like third or fourth, I
was like, OK, I just beat you. Down into submission, you're
like, OK, this is fun. You didn't have like a.
Brief moment I was like no every time.
But that was because the Hugos in that experience have been too
long. But I was worried it would make
it longer, and it did. But it wasn't.
It was short. It was great.
Yeah, they did a good job keeping it shorter.
It was 15 minutes. Shorter than the runtime.
I was so proud of them. Great job.
Folks yeah, so that was fun the song and and a pivotal moment
with the song came from our friend Michael.
The best long form on screen winner was Dune too.
So you know this this the Hugo spans like pretty well known to
like massively popular things like Dune to.
Lesser known, you know, short stories and and authors were
kind of up and coming. Michael Sang Dune, Dune Dune
Part 2. Danny Villeneuve.
That was good. So yeah, O'Shea mentioned
earlier that many times during the weekend we heard Rebecca
Rohnhorst say that she was going to lose to Brandon Sanderson for
best series. She did not.
She won Between Earth and Sky won best series.
It's pre Columbian fantasy. I mean Columbus with lots of.
Political intrigue and like supernatural magic, I would say
like it's on the supernatural side on when it comes to magic.
Yeah. So I I.
Haven't, like I said I haven't read it yet but it's on my short
list so this is just more more incentive to read.
I love the idea. That's so pretty queer.
For for what what it's worth, which I liked non.
European based settings like. Nothing wrong with that,
obviously, but that is the fit. Too much of what we have.
You know, it's good to have other styles of world building
than, you know, quasi European or quasi Middle Ages.
Obviously we love that it's game.
That's where Game of Thrones falls for some part.
But yeah, but we do have a lot of it.
So it's good to have a variety. One of the.
Panels, I saw they were talking about cultures that you could
mine and, and represent and stuff and how how to make things
fresh and real and all of that. And they're like yeah, instead
of just doing generic European, maybe be like slot like
specifically Czech, you know, like stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah. That's not yeah, because generic
you're like which you get a little bit like stories like the
Witcher, which are a lot more Eastern European and there's a,
if you're not from that part of the world, a lot of like the
monsters and lore are Polish or Czech or whatever, and you might
not know those. So that's a good example like,
but that it's still European. But that's a good example of
something that's like a little off the beaten path.
Whereas this Black Sun sounds like it's even more off the
beaten path of European stuff. It was a lot more different
because it's pre Columbus so they wouldn't even have contact
with Europe by then. So that's really cool.
The best novel winner was Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted
Cup, which brings us back to that podcast because this was a
topic that they discussed on the current trends in fantasy and
how high fantasy is kind of epic fantasy is kind of ebbing right
now, but it's also being mashed up with other genres.
The big one being romanticy. There's a lot of romance mashed
up with fantasy. 4th Wing, Sarah J.
Moss, all that stuff that's that's huge right now.
And none of these, none of the authors on that panel right in
that genre, none of them really want to.
But they also recognize that it's probably just like all
these other things. It's just a trend.
You know, it'll be, it doesn't mean it, it doesn't mean it's
going to die. But it may not be the most
popular thing in a few years, but it's really big right now.
And that's back to Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted
Cup. Rebecca Rohnhorst thought it was
brilliant in part because of these, this genre combination.
It's a little unusual. Murder mystery, epic fantasy.
I've never heard of such a thing because murder mystery seems
kind of small scale. Epic fantasy is obviously
anything but small scale, so that's an unusual combination,
but it but it it won the Hugo, so it must be really good.
That's what George. Wants to do with his If he were
ever able to do a story set in Bravos, he wanted to do a murder
mystery set in Bravos, which we did.
Set in an epic fantasy world. Yeah, that's a good point.
Another thing from that pocket that was really interesting is
how world building is in demand. Even though epic fantasy is kind
of ebbing right now, it'll almost certainly come back at
some point. Even with that world building is
huge. You can't get away with one of
the points I think Robin Hobb and George RR Martin both made
was you can't get away with just, you know, a long time ago
in a Galaxy far, far away, or you know, did a long time ago,
you know the. The the you know the.
A long time ago kind of start. You can't.
You have to describe the setting.
People want to know what you're dealing with.
That's a change in the audience. They also talked.
About things have to be kind of rooted in some realism for them.
You know you to believe it. Like if you have a horse, the
horse can't just travel for three days without dying, right?
And it made me think of a really funny scene in the show Mythic
Quest for any of you that have seen that, where there's like an
A fantasy author, you know, a science fiction fantasy author
and he's like being critiqued on his work.
And they're like, it just doesn't make sense.
Like, why would this be the case?
And he goes, well, it is a fantasy after it is.
Fantasy after it's like, no. Even if it's.
Fantasy, you gotta, like, you believe the fantasy parts
because of what it's rooted in. Yeah, it still has.
To have a sense of like humans would behave that way.
Yeah. Or they would do that.
Yeah. So that was really cool.
So it's interesting to see these trends and hear them discussed.
And then to see that playing out on the on the award stage there
during the BWB party or that actually, sorry, post Hugo party
that was in the same room that we were partying in all weekend.
I met the director of the Hugo winning Star Trek Lower Decks
episode, The New Next Generation.
Her name was Megan Lloyd, and it was cool.
She was carrying her Hugo around with her.
She was holding it there at the party and I was like, oh, we
could look at that. It was nice.
And so that was cool just meeting her briefly and and she
talked a little bit about it. Star Trek.
Lower Decks won two Hugos, so Star Trek.
Also won for for best graphic novel.
That's right. Yeah, I believe so.
Yeah, so Star Trek cleaned up this year.
It's. Interactive like choose your own
adventure, Star Trek? Oh, I didn't know that.
That's neat. Yeah.
So Star Trek franchise still doing quite well is if this is
any indication. I mean, a lot of people say
Strange World is really, really good too.
And we're not going to go through every award.
That would be a little much. You can just look up the list if
you want to. If you're curious who also won.
Some of you may have already done that.
It's a really good way to find a list of suggestions to read.
I mean, these are voted on by sci-fi fans, people and fantasy
fans have been in this industry for as fans slash business
people slash, you know, luminaries within the industry
for a long time. A lot of people with a good
taste, a lot of people who read a lot of different books and
they're good to listen to. So the world Con is a well, the
Hugo Awards rather, is a great place to look for new things to
read. You just just look at all the
finalists and there. Here's my segue to a great pitch
for y'all. When you vote for the Hugo's,
and when you nominate for the Hugo's and you join the World
Science Fiction Society, which costs $50, you get the Hugo
voting packet, which is this digital packet full of of
examples of the artwork of ebooks and audiobooks of all the
things nominated. They provide you with everything
you need to vote with the knowledge that no one is blocked
out by not being able to afford all of the things nominated.
So this is a great value. For $50, you get a lot of books.
You get all this like art in PDF form.
You get some wonderful stuff, OK?
And so that's for $50. You join the World Science
Fiction Society to nominate and then to vote.
And this is my pitch for y'all. Looking at it over the years,
we've noticed the nominees. It's really low numbers.
I have it on the screen right
now for best fan Cast, which is the category we would be in the
lowest range to be nominated, 24 nominations.
If we'd gotten 25 nominations, we would be Hugo nominees.
The highest range was 64. Now we're going to Anaheim.
We know a lot of people going. We've decided that we're going
to just make a point to mention it to y'all periodically mention
it to our friends, nominate history of Westeros and we'll
get nominated. I really believe that we can
get, I believe we can get well over 3050.
I think we can easily get a nomination and I would be
honored to get a nomination. I don't really care about
winning. I just think just just being on
the ballot would be would be such an honor.
And so we'll bring this up again, but I just want to point
that out. It's really a very low bar.
And it really all it would require from y'all is to join
the World Science Fiction Society, nominate us and you
will get a lot, a lot of value from that.
You will get so many books so. Many.
Yeah. And of course, helping us out is
a nice benefit as well. And we it would definitely do be
good for our show to be able to say, you know, Hugo nominated
podcast or something like that. That would be nice for us.
I would love to. I would love.
To mention the the best fan cast category and read off every fan
cast for y'all there's the Coud St. podcast.
There's 8 days of Diana Wynne Jones Hugo Girl which is fun.
Hugo's there. So two different Hugo specific
podcasts. A meal of thorns and world
building for masochists. So those were the nominees.
And so hopefully next year we're saying history of Westeros.
Yeah. Let's go 2026.
Come on y'all, help us out. The Hugo awards not quite as old
as World Con World Con 1939's first year Hugo awards first
year 1953. So quite old.
Been around quite a while, that's what is it 472072 years.
They've also started doing retro Hugos, which are Hugo awards for
works before 1953. They're trying to like, well,
they deserve awards too. Even though some of these are
the authors that aren't around anymore, they still want to
honor those works. They they're no less relevant,
and a lot of them are quite relevant because they were
fundamental to forming the OR influencing authors that came
after. Worldcon has been and the Hugos
have been in Seattle one other time, 1961, long time ago.
So the 8th or 9th year of the Hugos, and that would be the
year the Space Needle was built in 1961 in Seattle.
So that that's happened at the same time it was built in
advance of the 1962 World's Fair, which doesn't exist
anymore, but the Space Needle still does.
It's funny because the time Space Needle was like one of the
tallest buildings not only in Seattle, but of the West Coast.
Now it's like kind of swallowed up.
It's actually kind of hard to see from certain angles because
it's it isn't that stand out anymore in terms of size.
It's a cool building because it's unusual.
But yeah, it doesn't the height isn't as impressive as it might
have been a long ago. So yeah, of course with the with
all this talk of the next year, let's talk about that a little
bit now. World Con 2026 LA get you all
excited for that. Hopefully see some of y'all
there. It's actually not LA as the
chance it is Anaheim. In fact, this is the seventh
time that it has been in LA, but actually five of those seven are
Anaheim. So it's actually going to be the
fifth time in Anaheim. Only twice in LA properly but
they just call that LA. Even the owner of the Anaheim
Angels Major League Baseball team tried to brand his team as
the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, which is weird but I
guess you kind of makes sense to attach yourself to the much
bigger market but I digress. 7th time is not the most that world
con has been and in the city 6 times it's been in San
Francisco, so one last there eight times in Chicago which is
the most. Chicago has had the most world
cons 8 times. Melbourne has had it four times
and Brisbane is probably 2028, so that's another one.
And as we said before, Montreal 27, Dublin 29.
If you want to join the WSFS, you can register through LA Con
for 50 bucks. Ashea is going to post the link
in the chat and the description, I guess at least the
description. Yeah, I'll hold the description.
Too, But it is really simple. It's a it's LA con.org/register
I can also say it. Aloud too.
LA con.org/register Yeah and like.
I said you only need the $50 Society membership to vote and
then you can upgrade to a full World Con membership if you
decide to attend. Right on.
And there's also generally going to be other news from us.
We'll always keep you up to date on our travel plans and what
we're going to be doing at conventions when we're there.
A quick note here, the first world con outside the US was in
1948, Toronto. The first outside North America
was London 1957. The first in a non-english
speaking country, non-english, not the main language, was
Heidelberg, West Germany in 1970.
Yes. They actually had to specify
West Germany because it was 1970.
So there was an East and West Germany then.
The first in Asia was Yokohama, Japan in 2007.
Atlanta had a world con, our own hometown here.
We didn't live here then. It was 1986, but World Con
Atlanta became Dragon Con going forward and it became a
permanent event in Atlanta on the same weekend.
So they kind of stole World Con's weekend, and World Con
actually moved backwards to a previous week because of that
the first time. I heard about this was talking
to George, and this was probably back in like 2015.
It was like a long time ago. We were talking about like
conventions and Abby, I made the mistake or someone made the
mistake of asking about Dragon Con.
And George goes, I will never attend that convention.
They stole World Con's weekend. And we're like, please tell us
more. And he says it started as a
World Con in Atlanta. And they were like, that's fun.
Let's do it again the same weekend next year.
And then they became more successful.
And eventually World Con was like, well, we're not going to
fight you over this. We're just going to not do the
same weekend. So George is not such a fan of
Dragon Con? It's under different.
Management now, but the the sting is still there.
It's been a long time, but yeah, that was, you know, 39 years ago
or 40 years ago anyway. Yeah.
And like I said, Dragon Con is just way, way, way bigger than
World Con now. It it's a very different
convention. But yeah, size wise, it's not
even Dragon Con is literally more than 10 times larger.
So let's talk about Dragon Con briefly as our, as our outro,
basically here we are going, we live in Atlanta.
I've been going to Dragon Con since the 90s and we do have
some A Song of Ice and Fire content as part of it because
it's cosplay. Ishia is going to run back the
Muppet Tullys. Yeah, the squad returns for
Muppet Tullys again thanks to Chuck Lazarow and his great
costume designing abilities. Shout out to Chuck, he is the
Kermit. Ishia is the Oscar and I believe
Michael is going to be the Elmo again.
I'm not sure who the the Grover will be this year, but we'll
tell you later, I think. Tommy.
Pappas is Tommy. Gonna be Tommy.
'S gonna be Grover. Yeah.
Here's a picture I just realized.
But here we are. So Grover would be much taller.
I think he was in in previous years.
But no, I love being a Muppet. I love I love wearing the mascot
suit and and head so much so that I may or may not have made
my own mascot head with Dom for dragon con.
So that's a surprise, but very excited about it.
No, no one heard that. Yeah, but I'm very excited to
wear it. Ashaya and I and several friends
will be dressing up as Ongo Goblogian, from which is Danny
DeVito, one of Danny Devito's character from It's Always Sunny
in Philadelphia. The the the art collector Ongo
Goblogian charmed I'm sure derivative we've got.
Like 10 plus of us doing this. So it's really very derivative.
It's very. Yeah, we're derivative of each
other. We are.
We also have a plan to have another Ongo on the phone
waiting so that we can all like argue about something and just
say, hey, let's call Ongo to get his opinion and then call him,
put him on video call and he'll say derivative and we'll all
have a good time with that. So that's really fun.
We're excited about the Ongo squad rampaging through Dragon
Con. My Friday costume is going to be
a mash up. I will be Damongo Targlobian, so
I will be Ongo Gablogian mixed up with Damon Targaryen.
I have one of Damon's suits. I'll have the hair.
My hair will be blonde and of the purple eyes and yeah, so
I'll be half and half and half. On Saturday.
We have the actual World of Ice and Fire photo shoot, which
happens every year. It tends to be on Saturday.
Shout out to our good friend Britt for running the shoot.
She is dressing as the Realms Mcfuckin Delight, as she says,
which is Rainier, and that's awesome.
I'm going to do something I haven't done before.
I'm doing a new costume. I'm going to be Baylor the
Blessed. Yeah, I'm going to have bite
marks on my bare feet. I'm going to have a robe with a
rope belt. I've got purple eyes and a
flower crown and A7 pointed star necklace.
And our friend Meg is going to be Dana the Defiant alongside
me. So that's going to be awesome.
We'll give you guys some pictures later of that.
We will report back with fun. So if you're going.
To Dragon Con, the place to 1st sure find us and meet us is
Saturday at the World of Ice and Fire.
Shoot, we will always be there, every year, every single year.
This is an Evergreen ad, no? Matter what year you're hearing
this, we will be at the World of Ice and Fire shoot and almost
certainly dressed up as something relevant.
Last year I was the red Kraken. This year Baylor the bus my
great. Disappointment at Dragon Con is
that the World of Ice and Fire shoot is cross scheduled with
the X-Men shoot and I also do Madeleine Pryor cosplay that I
would love to wear to the X-Men shoot, but obviously this takes
precedence. I will simply do it at night, so
we thank you. Very much for listening to this
episode. We enjoy getting to do something
a little different every once in a while.
Talk about our adventures at conventions and with George and
with these other luminaries of the literary world and fantasy
and sci-fi and just talk about our trip.
It's fun. It's a it's a privilege to get
to speak to you all about that and to have you actually listen
and care about it. We appreciate the feedback.
A lot of y'all were excited for this episode.
We'll be back with regular content starting again next
week. Or not next week.
Sorry, not next week, because the Dragon Con is next week.
The week after, yeah. And then the rest of the year is
mostly smooth sailing with episodes, except for perhaps
around the holidays, but that's it.
So we'll have quite a bit more content this year, as you would
expect. But before we go, our trivia
answers. What year was George RR Martin
the guest of honor at Worldcon 2003?
You may have been thinking of 2019, when he was the
Toastmaster, The presenter, which is not the same thing as
the guest of honor. His first World Con was 1971, so
a good 55 years ago. Whoa.
And what was George's first panel at World Con 1976?
Sorry, what year? Not what was, but what year?
1976 I would actually love to. Know what the panel topic was?
I wish we knew that. I think we used to.
Know and forgot, Yeah, and. Well, one, that and two take
about 5 years before he got out of panel.
Yeah, and. That's also around the time he
met Paris. They met at Worldcon, his wife,
they met at Worldcon. So that's cool.
And it's another happy story, which is something that we've
seen a few times, which is for some of us going to a
convention, a Song of Ice and Fire, convention or otherwise,
is sometimes it's a revelation. For some people, it's like, wow,
I've found my people. I am an introvert who doesn't
feel introverted around people like me.
That's not uncommon. And from that, you occasionally
see relationships form because of the shared love of this
fandom in this community, we have witnessed a lot of couples
form from at conventions. Occasionally we even see
marriages happen at the conventions themselves in honor
of the fact that that's where they met and that's where their
most of their best friends will be.
Makes it a good place for that. In fact, one of our friends is
getting married to Dragon Con. Well, two of our friends are
getting married to Dragon Con. Yeah.
Because, yeah, obviously. Her fiance is our friend.
Yeah, we're. Friends with both of them, yeah.
I was like, Nah, screw that guy. That's just kidding.
Some of the biggest? Advice.
I tell people who expressed to me this loneliness to express to
me that they don't have anyone around them that they can share
this with. I say, well, go to a convention,
find your fine people and you will find friendship,
camaraderie, maybe love. I don't know.
I did like I, I, I, you know, like it worked for me.
You mean you find so much deep connection at these conventions?
All of my closest friends and loved ones, essentially, with
few exceptions, I met at a convention or I met online and
then met in person at a convention.
Yep. Classic story of friendship and
community from our community. That's how it works a lot of
times. And no doubt most of my friends
are in the community or met through the community.
So that's. Yeah.
It's our life. It really is.
It's it's everything. It's everything.
I want it. We're all just air conditioners.
Yeah. All right, friends.
Thank you very much. We'll see you next time.
Thanks to everybody that we saw at the convention.
All the names, everybody. The BWB George.
Sid, Mateo, Taffney, everybody. We mentioned all the great
authors who gave us content and things to talk about, all of our
friends that I didn't mention just now.
On behalf of Ashea, I'm Aziz. Thanks to Joey Townsend for our
music. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for
our opening video. And of course, Ashea got a
Klarfeld map, map sign by George.
That's fun. You can get your own by going to
his website, KLARADO x.de. I showed it to George.
And he goes, hey, I know these. And Sid goes, yeah, we own them,
George. That's right.
So until next time, my friends, you know what to do.
Valar Riridis.