Thousands of science fiction and fantasy fans will be going back to the future this week when Seattle plays host to Worldcon, the world’s premier sci-fi convention, for the first time since the Space Needle opened its doors.
“The Pacific Northwest is a great community of makers and doers and learners, and people really deeply engaged in speculative fiction and all that genre has to offer,” Kathy Bond, the chair of Seattle Worldcon 2025, told GeekWire. “We want to share that with the rest of our world community.”
Registered Worldcon members selected the site of the annual convention under the auspices of the World Science Fiction Society — a tradition that started with the first convention in New York City in 1939. Seattle’s organizers have been preparing for this week since 2017, when they sent in their initial bid to host Worldcon.
Bond, a volunteer who works as an attorney at her day job, became involved after attending her first Worldcon in 2015 in Spokane. “From there, I got it into my head that we could totally do this in Seattle,” Bond said.
The path hasn’t always been smooth: This spring, a controversy arose over the revelation that generative AI was used to glean information about prospective speakers. Bond issued an apology, and the organizers reworked the process for vetting Worldcon’s panelists — but the episode led some writers and fans to create a one-day alternative convention called ConCurrent Seattle, set for Thursday.
“The goal is to provide quality programming that rejects the use of genAI at all levels,” ConCurrent’s organizers said. “We firmly believe there is no place for genAI when it has been used to steal from artists and has a devastating impact upon the environment.”
Headliners and the Hugos
Worldcon’s five-day program kicks off on Wednesday. This year’s best-known featured guest is Martha Wells, the author of the Murderbot Diaries, a series of tales about a conflicted killer robot. “With the Apple TV+ adaptation, the timing has worked out really well for her appearance here,” Bond said.
Other guests of honor include sci-fi / fantasy artist Donato Giancola, rocket scientist Bridget Landry and folk minstrel Alexander James Adams. The convention’s hosts are sci-fi authors K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl. George R.R. Martin, the writer whose novels inspired the “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” TV series, is among more than 800 panelists who have signed up to talk about topics ranging from generative AI and surveillance tech to the joys of Star Trek fanfic and tips for creating the perfect costume.
You can expect a heady swirl of cosplay, particularly when the Worldcon masquerade takes place on Friday night. The convention reaches a climax on Saturday night when the annual Hugo Awards are handed out. But if you take a wider perspective, the Pacific Northwest and its science-fiction legacy could well be considered the stars of the show.
Worldcon’s organizers are leaning into the fact that the last time the convention came to the Emerald City, in 1961, the Seattle World’s Fair (a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition) was just seven months away from its opening in 1962.
Promotional materials for this year’s Worldcon reflect an appropriately ’60s-style retro-futuristic look. The theme for the convention is “Building Yesterday’s Future — For Everyone.” Qne of this week’s panel sessions will take a long look back at Century 21 and assess how close the fair’s techno-optimistic vision of the future came to 21st-century reality.
During the past six decades, the timelines for Seattle’s tech history and science fiction’s progress have become closely entangled, said Frank Catalano, a journalist, former tech executive and self-described “minor science-fiction author” who is participating in three Worldcon panels this week.
Catalano’s résumé includes a stint as a GeekWire contributor — and he’s also been the secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association as well as a member of the administrative team for SFWA’s Nebula Awards. He has vivid memories of Seattle’s science-fiction scene during its heyday.
“It was amazing to me, even back in the 1980s, what a rich group of speculative-fiction writers lived here,” Catalano said. “You had Frank Herbert, you had Vonda McIntyre and Greg Bear. Octavia Butler moved here in the 1990s. Terry Brooks, the fantasy writer, is in this area. So, you have some of what are considered now the greats of science fiction and fantasy living in this area and stimulating other writers.”
One of Vonda McIntyre’s contributions, beyond her sci-fi novels and short stories, was her role as the founder of Seattle’s Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1971. Hundreds of writers have gone through Clarion West’s summer workshop, under the tutelage of some of the best-known names in speculative fiction.
The future of science fiction and tech
Catalano argues that science fiction had a hand in making Seattle into the tech powerhouse it is today, with the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen serving as a prime example.
“I’m sure that Paul Allen, were he still alive, would admit that he was inspired by many of the same people whose artifacts he later wound up exhibiting in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame,” he said. “The science-fiction presence in the greater Seattle area is not because of the tech industry and economy. It stimulated and was a precursor to that.”
Catalano isn’t so sure that Seattle’s current cultural environment is as conducive to fostering the science-fiction community. “Amazon and Microsoft and the other tech gorillas tend to suck all the speculative air out of the room,” he said. “People are more interested in talking about the latest hype about AI and intelligent assistants than they are in speculating about the future and what these things might do.”
That’s where Worldcon could provide a boost. “My hope is that with Worldcon here, and with the attention that gets, it will help raise the profile of science fiction, fantasy, horror writing and related speculative writing in the area, and maybe help writers find each other and re-create a stronger community here,” Catalano said.
Convention chair Kathy Bond is on the same page. “I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘why this.’ Why am I asking people to spend their money on coming to Worldcon when they could be donating their money to bail funds, or donating their money to Gaza, or all of these other things?” she said.
“The answer I’ve come to is that art is still really important,” Bond said. “We need our fiction, particularly our speculative fiction, because it helps us build better futures and aspire to be better than we are currently. These spaces that we create for the community to come together and celebrate what’s already there, and challenge each other to come up with new ideas and new ways to try to build better futures … I think that’s really important.”
Seattle Worldcon 2025 runs from Wednesday to Sunday, with most events taking place at the Seattle Convention Center’s Summit building. Membership rates for attendees range from $75 to $500 for the full convention, and $20 to $70 for single-day attendance. Check the Worldcon website for details.
ConCurrent Seattle offers a full day of panels on Thursday at the ACT Theatre / Union Arts Center. Admission is free, but registration is required.
To hear more about Worldcon and the state of the science-fiction community, check out this week’s Fiction Science podcast. Alan Boyle and science-fiction author Dominica Phetteplace chat with Tim Chawaga about his newly published climate-fiction novel, “Salvagia,” and also discuss what’s happening at Worldcon. Chawaga will do a book reading and participate in two panels at Worldcon this week, while Phetteplace will talk about the outer solar system with astronomer Pedro Bernardinelli of the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute.
