Tor Books Author John Scalzi Lambasts Worldcon Using AI While Hugo Award Finalist Drops Convention

It gets worse for Worldcon Seattle as it’s become all the rage for mainstream science fiction writers to rag on this year’s convention. Now, Tor Books author John Scalzi has piled on the convention while Hugo Award finalist Jeff Vandermeer virtue signaled he will not be attending.

This month has been a bad one for the committee running the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle 2025. Worldcon, in the last few years, has been mired in multiple controversies, from political blacklisting to Raytheon sponsoring a con and the Chinese Communist Party dictating the Hugo Awards. While all of those sound like dystopian sci-fi nightmares that wouldn’t be tolerated, all of those didn’t bother the mainstay elites in publishing to do anything, but now the use of AI in their panel selection process is getting participants to leave en masse.