Future Worldcons

Petrea Mitchell has written an article at Con-News.com about future Worldcon bids that I found interesting. Note that with the newly-announced Spokane in 2015 bid (a rather unexpected turn from the Seattle organization), there are identified bids for every year through 2018. Petrea remarks upon the lack of contested bids, which I believe is a not-necessarily-bad side effect of WSFS having repealed the North American zone-rotation system that forced bids in the same region to compete or else have to wait three years for their next entry window. I say not-necessarily-bad because bidding is ruinously expensive and was one of the factors driving up the costs of Worldcons. While memberships are still probably perceived as too expensive, some of the changes of the past few years have slowed the rate of membership cost increase.