I have spent the last couple of days at the Paris Peace Forum, which takes place around 11 November every year in, er, Paris, in the old Bourse building, now the Palais Brongniard. There have been loads of interesting discussions about the state of the world, with guests including a dozen or so presidents and prime ministers (including Emmanuel Macron of course), but I found myself looking at it to an extent with a convention-runner’s eye, especially so soon after Chengdu WorldCon, which again was a bit different from the usual North American / European fan-run convention experience. Like Chengdu, the Paris Peace Forum had more resources poured into it than your average Worldcon; but even so, those resources are not infinite.
The most familiar aspect of the Paris Peace Forum was the fact that there were up to nine parallel programme items running most of the time.
The usual happened – it took me several goes to get used to the conference layout, two sessions which both looked interesting were scheduled against each other, also I was too late to get into the one panel that a work colleague was on. A couple of the panel venues were in more or less open spaces, with panelists miked up and the audience equipped with headsets for translation or just augmented hearing where needed, which struck me as an innovative use of space.
Almost everything was in-person, though one of the panels I went to featured a video message from President Zelenskyy, which again you’re less likely to get at a science fiction convention.
From the SF point of view, there was a particularly interesting panel on Safe and Sustainable Lunar Development, featuring the Lunar Policy Platform, which has been set up by the San Francisco-based Open Lunar Foundation. The good news is that there is lots of international law already applicable to the Moon, including a legal obligation on lunar bases to accept visitors from other lunar bases. The bad news is that there is no real way of enforcing this; and the prime real estate around the moon’s South Pole has a smaller area than the greater Paris region, so there’s less room than you might have thought.
Also of sfnal interest, Chen Qiufan, who now generally goes by Stanley Chen, author of the recent Chinese sf bestseller Waste Tide, was on a panel about the social impact of AI along with Brad Smith of Microsoft and Gabriela Ramos of UNESCO. We had a wee chat afterwards – he missed Chengdu Worldcon but was understandably keen to get my perspective on it.
Most of the panels were on broad thematic issues and how they affect world peace, rather than specific conflicts or potential conflicts (I attended a private conference about many of those last weekend in Oslo). Perhaps as a result the discussions were fairly optimistic about the long term – with sufficient food will and energy, solutions can be reached, and many of them have already been identified. There were a couple of exceptions – Ivan Krastev was typically acerbic and thought-provoking about EU enlargement. He was one of many friends and former colleagues who I bumped into over the weekend.
After another panel, someone came up and asked me if I was the guy with glasses and a beard who had asked the last question. Unusually, I was not; it was the political scientist and former US government and UN official, Barnett Rubin, who is shorter, older and more American than me. I got a photo with him later to prove that we are different people.
There was a nice display area of projects seeking or already receiving support from the Paris Peace Forum and its partners. There were groups of stalls on topics such as gene editing and artificial intelligence which would not have been out of place at an sf convention; however others, such as “Fishing for Empowerment in Sierra Leone”, might be a bit further from fannish interests.
Rather than the fan-run parties of an sf convention, the Mayor of Paris invited us to the gloriously decorated City Hall for a reception on Friday night. It’s a fantastic venue, though I am sorry to say that the mayor herself spoke for a bit too long. However, the Prime Minister of Barbados then responded on behalf of the participants, a lovely emotional well-pitched speech. Her name is Mia Mottley and we will hear more of her, I expect.
I don’t often write about work stuff here, but this was a bit out of my usual professional orbit and remarkable enough to be worth noting. And the closing ceremony had a lovely dance performance too.
Many thanks to Fabienne for the invitation.
