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This year’s Worldcon provided a lot of programming that was viewable online, and many of those program items were recorded and made available for later playback. Those recordings will continue to be available to Worldcon members until the end of the year.

As a result, I ended up watching part or all of 55 program items over the past two months, which is far more programming than I usually manage at a convention. I watched some of those in realtime, but most of them as recordings.

I’m not going to list everything I watched, but here are the ones I liked best, in alphabetical order by title:

• “Fighting Fungi in Space”: Presentation about the International Space Station’s “microbiome, the challenges it poses to our aspirations to travel through space, and some of the surprising ways that science is fighting back.”
• “The Future of Birth: Obstetrics and Science Fiction”: Presentation about “depictions of birth and pregnancy in science fiction from the perspective of a practising obstetrician and a gaze into the future of human reproduction via the exciting developments in pregnancy care today.” Content warning for various things about pregnancy and birth.
• “Homelessness in Genre Fiction”: This panel turned out to be more about homelessness in the real world than in genre fiction, but that was fine with me.
• “Through an African Lens”: Four African writers talking about sf, especially sf by African writers.
• “Using Nanomedicines to Improve Our Health—Small Yet Mighty”: Presentation about Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which are the delivery vehicles for mRNA in mRNA vaccines. (If I understood right.) Unfortunately, a significant chunk seems to be missing from the middle of the recording—there’s a skip at around 08:40, where as much as 15 minutes might be missing.
• “Writing Diasporas in SFF”: I think there wasn’t a lot here that I hadn’t seen in previous diaspora-related panels at other conventions, but I nonetheless thought it was a good solid interesting panel.

…I’m surprised that three of my favorites were one-person presentations about science topics—I don’t often attend that sort of thing at conventions, but I enjoyed these.

(One advantage of the common approach where recordings stop being available soon after a convention is that I can give up on them quickly—as soon as they’re no longer available, I can put them behind me and move on to other things.

But even so, I did really appreciate all of these recordings being left up for an extended period. It was neat to get to see so much programming, without having to cram it all into one weekend.)

(This entry was originally posted on Facebook on October 8, 2024.)