Dublin 2019 - the great magical melting pot

I've been home from the Dublin Worldcon for a week now.  Coming come from a big con always triggers a reflective period.  Every Worldcon I've been to has always had a diverse membership, and Dublin was no different. People from 62 countries attended the con, sharing the same space, queueing in the same queues, sitting next to each other at events.  There are no barriers at a Worldcon.

My hotel was a fifteen minute walk from the convention centre, but the lazy way to get there was to take the LUAS, the tram, one stop, then walk five minutes to the con.  I spent a lot of time waiting for trams,  getting into conversations with fellow con-goers.  It's not unusual to find yourself talking to an American on your left and a German on your right, all of us discussing science fiction and fantasy.  We have a common currency which stretches across cultures.

Diversity was very evident this year.  Jeanette Ng, born in Hong Kong but who now lives in England, used her Hugo acceptance speech to support the Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests.  She  received the John W Campbell Award for best new writer, and denounced Campbell as a fascist.  "Through his editorial control of Amazing Stories," she said "he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre today.  Sterile.  Male.  White."  Strong stuff, and not surprisingly, there was pushback against her words, but they reflect the zeitgeist of Dublin 2019.

The Hugo Best Novel Award was won by Mary Robinette Kowal for her book The Calculating  Stars. It is a story of an alternate NASA of the 1950s, where women were allowed to become astronauts.  It also references the unthinking racism of white people, and the #MeToo movement,

The panels which I appeared on dealt with asexuality in fiction, and older characters and older authors.  A con-goer got into conversation with me on the tram later about how my panels were helping to make asexuals visible.  And after the older writers panel one of the audience spoke to another panellist.  She said "my husband treated me horribly, and this panel brought me so much peace."  Wow!  What a result.  And someone after the asexuality panel gifted me a badge with the slogan "queer SF - write the rainbow."

It was really amazing to see my panel ideas and my words reaching other people, validating them, adding to the great debate on diversity.  I'm proud to have been part of the great magical melting pot that was Dublin 2019, the first-ever Irish Worldcon.