I was expecting a firm announcement about a UK Worldcon bit to come out of Eastercon, but Steve Green reports that the situation is still unclear. The choices have been narrowed down but the bid is still undecided on site (either Glasgow again or London Docklands) and undecided on date (either 2014 or 2015).
Steve made his wishes fairly clear. To which I can only reply with the following:
I strongly wished we could hold a Worldcon in Brazil, but I think it´ll be very hard before 2020. Not a possibility to be discarded, though…
The flying Armadillo is on the wall above our bed, so I have fond associations. On the other hand, having fallen in love with the woman who is now my wife at Confabulation, I also have a quite unexpected regard for the Docklands, despite the way it was pretty much a wasteland then.
By the way – Steve Green’s post appears to be (and I expect quite reasonably so) friends-locked, so that link is not open to some of us.
Glasgow has the advantage of being cheaper than London for travel, accommodation and drink, but as UK Worldcons are likely to be the only ones I’m going to get to easily, variety would be nice.
I can’t see the Livejournal Post. It seems like it is friends locked.
Whoops, sorry about the friend-locked post. Things have been a bit hectic here due to the little storm that Neil unleashed. I’ve removed the link. I don’t think what Steve said about the dates is at all secret, and the photo is public.
Fabio,
We have a few problems that have to be solved before we can even start to think in host a WorldCon. Despite all the structural problems that are governamental responsability, we have a very small literary fandom, who could not support alone a convention this big. Also, we don’t have a well structured institution – the CLFC don’t have any condition at this moment. And I don’t see any improvement in the far future.
Yeah, I’m in a very bad pessimistic mood.
(And hi, Cheryl. I didn’t comment anything until now but I’m always reading your blog)
2014 is much more likely than 2015, which is a fallback date in case of unforseen problems during negotiations. There were concerns about the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, but it appears that there is one viable weekend between the Games and the end of the school holidays.
We’re at the stage of putting together a more formal structure for a bid committee and then entering into more detailed negotiations with the two leading candidates for the venue. We hope to have made that decision by Novacon this year, and then launch the bid formally at next year’s Eastercon.
Thanks Mike, much appreciated. Good luck with the negotiations.
I VERY much want to know what the story is with the Zagreb bid….
A little variety would be nice, but would not mind a trip back to Glasgow as I could not attend Interaction.
The inexperienced American thinks that London would be VERY expensive, but could be wrong about that.
If I had a vote, I would like to see a European continent con before another Glasgow con (even though I LOVED Glasgow!!)
The group that was looking into this did try to find a venue in The Netherlands, of the three sites put forward by dutch fans, the AYOY in Rotterdam was far too small, the RAI in Amsterdam has no onsite hotels and was not that keen for our business and the World Forum in the Hague has shrunk since 1990 and is now only just large enough for around 3,000 warm bodies.
At Eastercon we were given a link to Google groups – EU1415 – but I can’t seem to find it! Is anyone else having problems, or is it just me?!
The correct link is
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/EU1415
Great, thanks Steve! 😀