The Comet Hitchhiker’s Guide to Worldcon

Turns out, I might be a space law girlie 😏

(Subscribers! Don’t miss bonus content & an additional image at the end of the article, just for you!)

Seattle Convention Center — Summit Extension (August 2025)

Attending the World Science Fiction Convention was not on my lifetime bingo card. Which might have had something to do with the fact that I didn’t know it existed.

That is, until Brandon Sanderson posted on Instagram that he’d be in Seattle in ten days — at something called Worldcon.

Gentle readers, if there is one cardinal rule in modern nerddom, it is this: if the man, the myth, the legend that is Brandon Sanderson indicates that he is going to be anywhere within a hundred mile radius of you — you go.

Hence my rocket-ship-speed scramble: figuring out a ticket and a bus route to what would be my first-ever convention, an event two years in the planning.

Turns out, Worldcon is a watering hole for sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction enthusiasts of all stripes. Writers, editors, publishers, readers, gamers… you name it. Roughly 6,000 people — mostly American, with a strong international contingent spanning Sweden to Saudi Arabia — hoisted the proverbial nerd flag over the Seattle Convention Center from August 13th to 17th.

And in the end, I was one of them.

Since its inception in 1939 — with a 200-person debut in NYC featuring both Isaac Asimov and a teenaged Ray Bradbury — Worldcon has risen to become the lodestar of the nerd-flavored convention circuit. 2025 was only its second iteration in Seattle; the first was in 1961.

I got to sleep in my own bed every night. Brought snacks from home for the marathon eight-to-twelve hour days. No packing, no hotel, no travel logistics. It felt absurdly lucky — and a little surreal — that something so sprawling, so steeped in creative history, was somehow happening just across town.

I expected nostalgia-driven contemplations of keystone 20th century SFF works, plenty of writing workshops, and to be sharing the SCC halls with copious cosplayers.

All true.

(Plus the Brandon Sanderson session, of course — which, yes, absolutely delivered.)

Brandon Sanderson discusses his canon and creative process. (Seattle, USA, August 2025)

What I didn’t expect — and found delightfully stimulating — were panels parsing the ethical intricacies of AI-assisted and AI-created art; others on the ascendance of the romantasy subgenre; and still more on flash fiction, alternative future economies, and death in post-singularity virtuality.

But my favorite throughline of the convention was space-related futurism. Nothing so standard as Star Trek-coded vision-casting or aspirational Martian colonies. Instead, the con hosted a robust subset of researchers, academics, engineers, and futurists discussing orbital debris policy, asteroid mining, satellite law, and speculative galactic settlement models.

Sometimes I forget that I technically have a bachelor’s degree in political science — and not for no reason. My brain thrives on systems-based thinking with strong real-world tethers, especially where patterns, power, and story converge. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself riveted by sessions like “Law and Order in Near-Earth Space” and “Challenges in Sustaining Space as a Resource” — a panel and academic talk, respectively, that approached the cosmos not as a backdrop for heroism, but as an unfolding legal, ecological, and infrastructural reality.

And a third favorite? Bet you’ve always wondered “How to Settle the Galaxy in Three Easy Steps.”

Short version: hitchhiking on comets.

Sounds unhinged — until Dr. Brian Tillotson (a former senior technical fellow at Boeing and Blue Origin, with over 30 years of experience) lays out how it’s actually… not.

Rigorous, visionary, and structurally elegant — this was the kind of speculative thinking that stretched my imagination and my political science acumen in ten directions at once.

I loved it.

Regular readers will know that this dispatch comes on the heels of a tough couple of weeks in this author’s little world, including an inadvertent writing hiatus whilst I was mired in mental troughs and mermaid tears. And so, as I wrap up this reflection just hours after the last session concluded, my overarching feeling is gratitude. Because I leave Worldcon richer than I came: abuzz with ideas, reoriented towards the future, and reinvigorated in (what was for me) the most unlikely and unplanned of ways.

And while the con was packed with future-focused panels, it remains — at heart — a space for stories.

Little wonder, then, that tonight my thoughts are also turning toward the stories that have shaped me so far; the books that didn’t just entertain, but accompanied me through key moments of becoming.

I’ll share that list soon. (There may be dragons.)

🚀Subscriber Bonus: Tips & Tricks from the Comet Hitchhiker for a Successful Conference or Convention