During the closing ceremony of this year’s Eastercon on Monday, the Doc Weir Award was handed out to the bloke on the right, Martin Hoare. Martin is one of those people who has been active in fandom, mostly behind the scenes, for years and decades, quietly helping British fandom ticking over. There are a lot of these nutters spending their free time doing things like setting up artshows at cons, or organising real ale bars, printing newsletters, etc, all with no expectation of reward and little public recognition. The Doc Weir Award is British Fandom’s way of drawing some attention to these unsung heroes, named after somebody the majority of fans never met since he died long before they were born. Arthur “Doc” Weir was somebody who had found fandom late in life and had flung himself headlong into it. It was in his memory that the award was set up in 1963, making it more than fifty years old: hard to think of a better example of fannish timebinding and tradition. There’s no monetary part to the price, just a trophy you get to keep for a year to drink your choice of alcohol out off. For all the ongoing controversies, the day to day aggrevation fandom can stand for, it’s sometimes good to remember that this is fandom too, full of some of the nicest and hardest working people you’ll ever meet.
In sad contrast to this stood the news we got the day before, of the way in which the socalled Sad & Rabid Puppies slates had managed to pack the Hugo nominations, in response to which an emergency panel was convened. Niall Harrison, Charlie Stross, Vince Doherty, Gaie Sebold and Kari Sperring all were eloquent about the damaged done to the Hugo and the room as a whole was outraged and hurt by it. If you come late to this whole thing, basically two groups of rabid rightwingers with massive entitlement issues set out to game the Hugos by running slates of ideologically acceptable candidates (and the occassional useful idiot) then got their followers to vote for them, with the socalled Sad Puppies run by Brad Torgenson and Larry Correira being the most visible of the two, seemingly providing cover for the more reactionary Rabid Puppies slate run by Vox Day and John C. Wright. Correira had the cunning to withdraw himself from consideration while Torgenson didn’t manage to get nominated in the first place even with the slate, but that still left Vox Day & John C. Wright stinking up the Hugos, as well as a host of supporting assholes and the occassional useful idiot.
The response at Eastercon was one of disbelief, horror and despair about what happened. That something bad was coming was well known, with various rumours doing the rounds in fan Twitter and such, but the sheer scale of it depressed people. It seemed that the organised temper tantrum had gotten what it wanted in terms of attention, that all the good work done in the last few years of making fandom and science fiction more diversive, more welcoming, was done in vain. It was not a happy mood that the con was in that Sunday. All the good cheer of the rest of the con, seeing all those people coming together to celebrate a mutual love for science fiction and fandom, for a moment was hidden behind this cloud of grief. While it’s not yet clear what we should do, we should keep in mind the last words of Joe Hill:
Don’t mourn, Organize!
Some indeed, like Hawkeye in the first pic there, were at both cons. What I liked about the cosplayers was their enthusiasm, skill and generousity. People were more than happy to pose and some groups and people were very popular. There was some real creativity there as well: not just your Deadpools, Storm Troopers, Black Widows, Lokis and Thors (this time both in male and female versions), but I also saw a captain Haddock, a trio of Giffen era-JLA cosplayers doing Guy Gardner, Fire & Ice and 
The layout of the con didn’t help. There was a huge, largely empty hall for the Q&A/music sessions, there was the main hall where you came through which was badly lit and confusingly laid out with the main sponsors and retailers, as well as the space for the autograph sessions, which took up a huge chunk on the side of the hall with crowd barriers and such but where you could only see which person was signing once you skipped the barriers and walked to their table. The secondary hall, where all the smaller retailers and standholders were located, also had a lot of wasted space at the edges and at least one lane that was too narrow, leading to huge traffic jams. It didn’t help one of the ways to reach it was through one of the con center’s food outlets. What happened to the artist alley was even worse, a few picnic tables put together in a corner inbetween the main and secondary halls, easily overlooked. Not helping matters was the lack of sign posting everywhere.
