Worldcon shows it’s increasingly more concerned about real world politics than about science fiction as members complain about lack of mentions of politics in the Seattle 2025 World Science Fiction Convention Newsletter and Washington DC drops its bid to host a future convention.
The World Science Fiction Convention used to be a place for the best of science fiction writers to gather and celebrate the genre. The first one was held In New York City in 1939 and it’s maintained a tradition ever since.
In the last couple of decades, however, the convention has become increasingly political in nature.
In 2001, Gor author John Norman was excluded despite selling millions of copies of his books. In 2017, Jon Del Arroz was banned under false pretenses, which eventually led to the convention having to pay for libel and apologize after a long court proceeding.
But the political nature doesn’t stop at simply who’s allowed at the convention. The Hugo Awards have become a nightmare of politics, as outlined in the years of the Sad Puppies, where when political outsiders were nominated for awards, the hateful bigots inside Worldcon decided to vote No Award rather than allow it to go to people they don’t like. They eventually changed their voting rules to make sure only political insiders would get awards in the future.
The politics didn’t stop there, during the last Washington DC Worldcon, the convention actually had weapons manufacturer Raytheon sponsor the event. Two years later, they hosted the event in Chengdu China, a country where slavery is rampant and the host country actually applied political pressure to manipulate the Hugo Awards.
Hyperventilating over Donald Trump seems more important than these very real political issues to the virtue signaling left that runs these conventions, however. Fandom Pulse covered a call for WorldCons not to be held in the United States by an author earlier this year.
This is now starting to become a reality as the Washington DC organization who organizes WorldCon bids dropped out over politics. They posted:
At its meeting on March 9, the Baltimore Washington Area Worldcon Association (BWAWA) decided to end its bid to host the 2026 SMOFcon.
Since we announced the bid at SMOFcon last year, it has become clear that the current political situation in the United States would significantly reduce the willingness of fans from outside the United States to participate, even in the fully hybrid convention that we were proposing. In light of this, it seemed the best course of action was to end our bid. Unfortunately, we expect that similar problems are likely to confront any US bid for SMOFcon for the time being.
It's not enough, according to some, however, seeing as Seattle Worldcon is still happening this year. One BlueSky user complained about Seattle’s recent update focusing on the event and not ranting about politics, saying, “@seattlein2025.org We just got a new newsletter, and what's glaringly missing is some mention of the current climate, especially impacting transgender people (and folks from other marginalized groups), and related to people travelling from outside of the US.”
The person continued, “I really wish you'd say something publicly, seeing how many sff fans and creaters are trans and/or queer, and/or are BIPOC, and/or how travel from outside of the US. I know you don't know everything and how it might impact folks, but the silence is deafening.”
And then voiced concern to next year’s Los Angeles Worldcon, “And I'd urge @laworldcon.bsky.social to take a good look at how they want to run their con, taking all of this into account.”
BlueSky is littered with more virtue-signaling content about feeling unsafe to go to Seattle, one of the most left-wing cities in America, as if these people are afraid Donald Trump will be personally waiting for each and every one of them at the airport to bring them to concentration camps.
Meanwhile, SFWA posted their annual Nebula Awards nominations video with their president Kate Ristau ranting about indigenous people rather than science fiction. It’s no wonder readers and writers are turning away from associating with any of their nonsense
As they get more ridiculous and self-segregate from society as they’ve done on social media, these institutions are sentencing themselves to irrelevancy, but don’t expect them to change any time soon. The more insular it becomes, the more they’ll feel safe, after all.
What do you think of Washington DC dropping out of wanting to host a Worldcon because of Donald Trump? Leave a comment and let us know.
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"At its meeting on March 9, the Baltimore Washington Area Worldcon Association (BWAWA) decided to end its bid to host the 2026 SMOFcon."
To which one can only respond: BWAWA-HAHAHHAHAHAAAHH! BWAWA-HAH-HAHAHAHA!
I really don't care about any of this shit anymore. I'll stick to the old things that I've always loved.