Episode 5: Let's Chengdu This!

Jeff DJ Switch Sorensen: To the Incomplete WorldCon podcast. I'm Isabel. I'm Switch. And I'm Sarah. And we're jumping right into this episode's WorldCon News. The next WorldCon is Montreal 2027, September 2nd to 6th in Montreal, Quebec. Guests of honor include authors Joe Walton and Yves Minard, as well as Toastmaster Corey Doctorow. Attending memberships are now available. Adult memberships are 270 Canadian dollars, which is about 190 US dollars. Young adult memberships for those age 18 to 30, as well as first WorldCon memberships, are 210 Canadian or 150 US. Virtual memberships will be available closer to the convention, prices to be announced. Hotel booking will not be available until early 2027. But according to the website, the average room rate is around 300 per night in Canadian dollars or about 215 in US dollars. For more information, please visit the website Montreal2027.ca, which is available in both English and French. Yes, French is the official language of Montreal. Some of us in the United States are closer than others, but Canada is a foreign country. So let's talk about international travel in this episode's Dear Cerebelle. Today's question for US folks, how does going to a Canadian WorldCon differ from going to a US world con travel wise? This may be obvious to a lot of folks, but I want to mention it for our international friends, but also our US friends who may not have traveled to Canada before. US dollars and Canadian dollars are two completely different currencies that just both happen to be called dollars, unlike English pounds and Scottish pounds, which my UK friends had the hardest time explaining to me. Now, in my limited experience in Vancouver and Victoria, some Canadian businesses will accept American dollars, but at Canadian face value, which is about a forty percent surcharge, so I recommend getting your Canadian dollars early, especially because they have one dollar coins called Loonies and two dollar coins called Toonies. Or your credit card will work in Canada. Most cards charge a foreign transaction fee. Mine does, and you can check whether yours does. But for me, it's a small charge and I think it's worth the convenience. You'll also need to figure out your travel documentation early. Americans, if you're flying in or out, you need a passport book and you'll want to check the expiration date now because it has to be valid through the end of your stay in Canada. New passports cost $165 and processing currently takes four to six weeks. But that could change. So don't wait. Passport renewals cost one hundred and thirty, and that takes the same amount of time. Now the good news is they're good for ten years, so you'll be ready for the next decade of world cons. If you're traveling by car or boat, you can use a couple of different documents. The gold standard is the passport book, but you can also use a passport card, which isn't good for flying, but it only costs sixty-five dollars. It'll also be good for land and sea crossings to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Bermuda. If you live in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, or Washington State, you can use an enhanced driver's license. This is not the same as a real ID, which is not sufficient. You can also use a trusted traveler card like Nexus Century or FAST. Finally, you can use a driver's license and proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or naturalization certificate. But they are gonna detain you and ask you a lot of questions. So we do not recommend it. If you're going to a WorldCon abroad, take a few minutes to look up the local co the local the local stuff to do. The big thing when going to Montreal is that French is the official language of the city and the entire province. It is a bilingual city, but it's best to learn a few French basics before you go. And before I give a few examples, I'm just going to apologize to every French speaking person in the world for my pronunciation. First, it's polite to greet someone with bonjour and parlez-vous anglais, rather than starting in English. Please as si vous play, thank you as merci and excuse me as pardon. And if you're going to drive up, learn road sign French. You do not want to miss something important and get a ticket. Another important thing you do not want to miss is Montreal's food. Quebec's best known dish is poutine, which is awesome. It's traditionally fried potatoes and cheese curds with gravy, although there are vegetarian options, and I've had them and they are awesome. You can also try Montreal-style smoked meat, which is not vegetarian, ⁓ and Montreal-style bagels. Which are N also awesome. All of these can be found in certified kosher restaurants due to Montreal's large Jewish community. Okay, Isabel, since we're gonna be there together. Which Jewish Montreal food are we gonna try first? ⁓ man, I don't know. ⁓ all of them? I don't know. I'm really looking forward to having a Kanish. I've never had a Kanish. ⁓ my god, you are in for a treat. ⁓ my God. It is, it is potato, which is like the best, you know, the best food ever. ⁓ it's potato in like a a pastry dough, for lack of a better word. It's not actually pastry dough. But basically imagine, I don't know, potatoes. Sometimes they have other things. They've got cheese, they've got chives, but they're just awesome. And the the real ones should be huge. They should look like you should look at that and be like, ⁓ my god, what did I do? What did I get myself into? Carbloading check. Yes. ⁓ yeah. ⁓ and I just need to mention the Montreal style hot dog, which is called a steamy and is sold in shops called Wieneries. Yep. That's what they're called. Wieneries. Yeah. ⁓ no, I'm just no, I'm sticking to the canish, okay? But There is also a ton of nightlife to be found in Montreal, where the drinking age is 18 and last call is 3 a.m. If you're a French speaker, you may enjoy the bars and clubs on Saint Denis Street. English speakers might feel more comfortable on Crescent Street. And if you are LGBTQ, you may want to check out Gay Village on St. Catharine Street. This is not an exhaustive list, but if you need more ideas or have other world con questions for dear cerebell, you can connect directly with us on Instagram at Incomplete worldcon pod or email us at incompleteworldcon pod at gmail.com. And your question might be featured on a future episode. So the last time we tried to travel back in time, we had some technical difficulties. ⁓ switch, can we get an update on the WorldCon Wayback Machine? Sure, yeah. Well, it looks like a thermal fracture caused a ground plane to short out in the tertiary board for the biomimetic impulse field generator. And it took out a couple of the magnoscopic particle lines along with it. I would have had it fixed sooner, but the parts I ordered two day shipping took a week to show up. Anyway, we should be back up and running, but ⁓ maybe stand over behind that lead wall just in case. It's always something. And three, two, one. Better. Yeah, that sounds like it's working. It's October 18th to 22nd, 2023. The number one movie is Taylor Swift, The Eras Tour. The number one song is First Person Shooter by Drake. The most popular SFF book on Goodreads is Starling House by Alex E. Harrow. And the 81st World Science Fiction Convention was held in Shengdu, China, with over 20,000 attendees, about 19,000 of which were in person. That's just crazy. I I I can't even like, ⁓ my God, nineteen thousand people? That's huge. That's so huge. That is three times the size of a normal world con. ⁓ yeah. More than that even. Yeah. Yeah. I I how many is nineteen thousand? Like, how do you even picture that? Taylor's concert? No. A lot of a lot of NBA teams like the Chicago Bulls or the Portland Trailblazers, their attendance is around nineteen to twenty thousand. okay. Yeah. if you if you can imagine like a like a basketball stadium full of people, all just nerding out on sci-fi. ⁓ my God. Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Good on them. Yes. Yes, absolutely. The Shangdu WorldCon did have its issues, which we'll get to, but we saw the pictures and the venue was gorgeous. The convention was held at the brand new Shangdu Science Fiction Museum, which is a work. of art. It sits next to a lake and it was designed to look like a giant silver nebula. They actually even delayed the convention two months so that the building could be finished and WorldCon was its inaugural event. There were banners in the streets and drone shows over the lake and they had an adorable mascot named Cormo, which was a giant panda in a high-tech spacesuit. ⁓ and they also had a panda on the Hugo Award base where it was coming out of what appeared to be a Stargate. ⁓ I love Stargate. I love Stargate. ⁓ my God. I saw I saw like all the shows. Yes. I mean, so far I have zero Hugo Awards, but out of all the ones I've seen, that's the one I'd most like to own. I actually have a really funny Stargate story. Tell us your really funny starty story. Very quickly, like super fast. So in 2012, I was working for Xbox and I'm pretty sure my NDA is over at this point. So ⁓ I was working for Xbox ⁓ on their ⁓ call center production floor, and I was actually a networking specialist for them. So I like I would field special ⁓ calls from Xbox users who were having trouble getting on Xbox Live. And I would like I would like get on a call with their ISPs to like figure out like what's going on with your internet, like that kind of thing. Right. ⁓ and so because I was a specialist, I didn't take every call all day long. Sometimes I would sit for periods where I the phone wouldn't ring and I would just be waiting for the phone to ring for a special call. And so one day I decided to throw on ⁓ Stargate. And ⁓ just turn on captions on the Xbox that I had in my cube. And the and the cube I I shared an Xbox with a monitor with a couple of other people next to me. ⁓ and so I just threw on Stargate while I was waiting for somebody to call in, thinking that I could just watch a little sci-fi, not remembering that the first two seasons of Stargate were produced by Showtime. ⁓ oops. And so and so we get like 20, 25 minutes into that very first pilot episode. ⁓ man. And there's this topless woman, like topless alien woman who's like, you know, like commanding her armies from her throne or whatever. And ⁓ and immediately I was like, oops, and I just I hit I've never backed out of a Netflix show so fast in my life. They actually made a a joke about that. In the in one of the later episodes, I don't remember what it was, but but Dean Anderson at one point actually says, What is this? Do they think that the that that it's on Showtime or something? Or I I don't remember the line, but he was talking about somebody else who had a show or whatever. But like they said all sorts of things like that. Like in the opening episode, they had ⁓ Sam Carter. ⁓ I guess people like she was explaining what the Stargate was and what the Stargate program was. And there were all these military guys treating her like shit and talking about, you know, what what is the stupid Stargate or whatever. Right. And she said, Look, it took us months to MacGyver this thing together. ⁓ And I just thought that was awesome. Cause I never I never watched MacGyver. But I love Richard Dean Anderson. And so when he was in Stargate, I was very happy. I'm still friends. Sorry, go ahead. So I was gonna say, I'm still friends with my old ⁓ manager from Xbox, and I told him that story here like like a year or two ago. And we laughed for a solid 15 minutes about the dumb crap that we got away with in that office. Yeah, see, some people play solitaire or sudoku. You watch showtime television. Right. Sophomore sci-fi. ⁓ my. ⁓ my. All right, shall we shall we move on? Shengdu So we like to joke that it wouldn't be a world con without a major controversy. But I think what happened with Shengdu really set a new bar. Even before the con started, there were a number of issues with site selection, but the big thing everyone remembers is the Hugo Awards. The TLDR is that the 2023 Hugo Awards Committee tampered with the nomination process in several ways, which resulted in controversially disqualified nominations and some winners who were left wondering whether their win was affected. We found a lot of great coverage and analysis on the 2023 Hugo's, including a report on censorship and exclusion by Chris ⁓ Barkley and Jason Sanford, and Charting the Cliff, an investigation into the 2023 Hugo nomination statistics. By Camestros Philapton and Heather Rose Jones, both of which were finalists for the 2025 Hugo Award for best related work. You can check those out on file 770 for more details, but here are a few of the bullet points. The awards committee did not give a reason for several disqualifications, but it turned out that they self-censored to appease the Chinese government, who did not even ask them to do anything like that. One nominee had been disqualified simply for having visited Tibet, which was news to the nominee who actually visited Nepal. An unknown number of Chinese nomination ballots were deemed a slate or organized vote and rejected entirely despite there being no rule against slates. This resulted in very few Chinese language finalists on a Hugo Awards ballot in China. One winner eventually had to file a lawsuit against the Chengdu Hugo Awards administrator and small claims court to get their award trophy. In total, sixteen trophies had not been shipped, and three years after the ceremony, there are still some trophies which have not reached their winners. The fallout was huge and was picked up by just about every major news outlet. The next year, Glasgow 2024 had to deal with a lot of it. And this year, the World Science Fiction Society voted to censure andor ban. Two of the Shendu WorldCon co-chairs and two of the Shengdu Hugo Award Committee members. In particular, Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty was permanently banned from Wisfus membership, from joining any future WorldCon, and from volunteering at any future WorldCon in any capacity. With all that being said, the convention in Shengdu does deserve to be remembered for more than just the Huguen Awards. They worked really hard to welcome the attendees and share Chinese culture with visitors. The opening ceremony was a fusion of ancient Chinese civilization and sci-fi future, and the con featured a mini museum of Chinese cultural heritage, such as music and crafts, and the traditional tea ceremony. The con also distributed devices that simultaneously translated Chinese panels to English, Korean, and Japanese. And despite what happened in Chengdu, we want there to be more world cons in places there haven't been world cons before. Right now there's not a single active bid for a future world con outside of Europe and North America. And we'd love to see some other options. If either of you could put a world con anywhere in the world outside of the US or Canada or Europe, where would you put it? ⁓ you know where I'd put it? I would put it in Patagonia. And that way we could go ⁓ we could go see where the dread pirate Roberts retired to. ⁓ Okay, no, no. But ⁓ if I'm being serious, I would love to see ⁓ the pyramids in Mexico. that's like maze long, right? Yeah, well there's there's a ton of them. There's a ton of them. ⁓ like Chichenitza is, you know, the first one that most people think of, but but there's all sorts of other ones. but yeah, I I'd I'll see any of them. Absolutely and switch? Switch, what do you think? I think My I th my first thought was something Caribbean, right? Like ⁓ like a trade out in Tobago, like a Jamaica, ⁓ like a Puerto Rico. ⁓ we had an ASVIC there already in Puerto Rico. Fair fair enough. ⁓ but my thing my thinking was, ⁓ I'm sorry, what did you say? I couldn't hear you over the sound of the waves and the drink in my hand. Like There you go. Convention? What convention? Panels? What panels? But ⁓ but ⁓ but my again, my real answer, ⁓ I think actually would have to be Brazil. And ⁓ specifically because A, ⁓ as I understand it, there hasn't been one in Brazil before. And B, I've got a couple of friends in the retro gaming scene that have been traveling to Brazil for a retro gaming convention down there for the last couple of years. And apparently it's amazing. Like the nerd community in Brazil is incredible and they very similar to what we were talking about in China, like they show up in numbers. I have to say, I would love to have a world con on a cruise. ⁓ no. That would be so awesome. Charter an entire boat. ⁓ I know there's a million logistics things, but it also solves a million logistics problems. Let's put it that way, all your hotel is included, all your food is included. ⁓ your entertainment, your your what's usually pre con or post con travel can be during the con. It's anyways, I'm just putting that out there for future bids. I'm concerned about the boat. I'm a little worried. I'm a little worried it wouldn't come back. Are you concerned to your poor boat? Like, ⁓ that poor boat is suffering by having all those crazy nerds on it. Like, I don't I don't I'm not wishing any harm on anybody. I'm just saying that like everybody comes back, but somehow the boat doesn't. And whenever anyone is asked what happened to the boat, absolutely no one talks about it. That's how I see this going. I want us to commandeer the cruise ship and start a new society in international waters. ⁓ my God. And just never come home. So your real answer isn't a cruise, it's piracy. Yes. There you go. And we're back. And we're back to Patagonia. Yes, we can take a cruise to Patagonia. How's that? We'll take a cruise to Patagonia. ⁓ my goodness. I I feel like this is a villain origin story. Panel guest carriells. ⁓ my God. ⁓ my God. Yes. Yeah. Can we have, like, for one of the nights entertainment, can we have a ⁓ a princess bride, not a sing-along, but like, you know, how you used to do with ⁓ the Rocky Horror Picture Show where you would go and you would say the lines Inconceivable. Yeah, exactly. Shouting at the screen and you've got actors on a stage that are acting the whole thing out. Exactly, yeah. No, the best part would be the poison part, right? Like, yes, but are you the kind of man that would pick his own drink? ⁓ my god, yeah. And we just need an entire section of people who just quote every single Andre the Giant line. Yes. ⁓ my God, yes. Okay, maybe I'll change my answer. No, no, I'm kidding. I I still want to go to Mexico. We just we got a little bit sidetracked. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Which have fun editing this. Just remember folks, don't let Sarah on a boat. You might you you might not get it back. ⁓ my goodness. Okay, so because it's a while before the next world con, the news flash is going on hiatus. But we will continue to bring you a new full episode every month. Next month we'll be traveling back in time to 2022 for Shy Con 8. Woohoo! My hometown. My hometown. My hometown. Okay, all right. ⁓ so yes, twenty twenty two for Shycon Eight. So be sure to tune in. New episodes are available on the first of the month. Sign up for reminders at our website, incompleteworldconpod dot riverside.com or email us at incompleteworldconpod at gmail.com. If you enjoyed today's discussion, please follow us on Instagram at IncompleteWorldCon Pod or on Facebook at the Incomplete WorldCon Podcast. Please review the show on the podcast platform of your choice and share the show with your friends. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you again next time. Bye, everybody. If you'd like your question to be featured on a future episode of the Incomplete WorldCon podcast, please send your questions or thoughts to incompleteworldconpod at gmail.com or leave a comment on our socials. This episode was produced in 2026 by DJ Switch PDX. So the last time we tried to travel back in time, we had some technical difficulties. ⁓ Switch, can we get an update on the WorldCon Wayback Machine? Well, it looks like a thermal fracture caused a ground plane to short out and the tertiary board for biomimetic impulse fuel, I can't even read my own techno crap. Don't cut, don't cut, keep going.