Stepping into the chilled air of the Hyatt Regency Chicago was like a scene from a speculative fiction epic. It was as if I’d walked through a portal, woke up in the House of Wisdom. Scotty had beamed me up and revealed a galaxy of literary appreciation beyond anything I’d imagined.
The World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention (Worldcon), the 80th in history, had come to the Windy City and taken over one of its finest hotels.
Authors and cosplayers could be engaged with ease. Editors of some of the finest magazines in the country milled around literary professors from as far off as Japan. The writers of award-winning books rubbed elbows with the aspiring best-sellers of tomorrow. It was a cavalcade of some of the best and brightest the world of Speculative Fiction has to offer. And smack dab in the middle of it all was me.
To call my experience a bit of a whirlwind would be a massive understatement. The decision to head to Worldcon was made during my Writing To Publish class last spring. It started out as a bit of a far-fetched whim, like a dream that slowly crystalizes with time. The idea was to meet writers, editors, and learn as much as I could from them about our craft. As I soon learned before the convention formally began, before my flight to Chicago O’Hare even landed on the tarmac, there was simply no better place to do that.
Within a few hours of checking in, I’d managed to get advice from best-selling author and fellow Washingtonian J.L. Doty, chat with Italian award-winning artist Maurizio Manzieri, and illustrator Eric Wilkerson. I gained insight from publishers and editors. There was so much to absorb, so much to contemplate and write down I was thankful for the downtime I had to let it all mesh. But like a rider at the Battle of Brena, those moments of respite were followed by forays into the Table Talks and panel discussions where the treasures of Sci-Fi and Fantasy shared their decades of knowledge in the industry. A whirlwind of learning unfolded in the foyers, conference rooms, and hallways of the convention. I was able to gain insight from people as acclaimed as Gene Ha, Micaiah Johnson, and Arkady Martine, among many other luminaries.
But what surprised me most of all was the great effort to make everyone feel as comfortable as possible. The event, you could tell, was a celebration of the diversity of Science Fiction and Fantasy. There were people from the Middle East, Africa, and Iceland; followers of different faiths; people of different political persuasions all united by one cause. The world of sci-fi and fantasy is a big tent where many have found shelter from the storms of the modern world.
Science Fiction and Fantasy is often seen as escapist but that could not be further from the truth. As I and many others saw at Worldcon, the two genres offer us different ways of seeing the past and imagining a better future. Entire realms brought into being as cautionary tales, tomes written to inspire hope, even poems recited to battle oppression are at the heart of what speculative fiction is all about. It is about bringing down the walls of misunderstanding and through worlds real and imagined, write a better tomorrow for us all.
They say that sci-fi and fantasy is the realm of utopian ideals, flights of fancy that cannot be real. But my experience at Worldcon showed me that a slice of harmony, where people of different backgrounds can come together for positive common causes, is not so far-fetched after all, nor is it reserved for a distant future. I know because that is exactly what I saw in Chicago, a coming together of minds in all their expressive glory.
Ismael Mujahid
Reporter