The 84th World Science Fiction Convention LAcon V
World’s oldest sci-fi convention LAcon V comes to Anaheim Aug 27-31, and it’s not what you think
The 84th World Science Fiction Convention LAcon V hits Anaheim Aug 27-31. Hugo Awards, Ronald D. Moore, and real creator access — here’s why to go.
LAcon V gets it right: the people who actually made the things you love, sitting in a hotel ballroom in Anaheim, willing to talk. The 84th World Science Fiction Convention, the oldest continuously running genre gathering on earth, arrives August 27-31, 2026 at the Anaheim Convention Center, and if you’ve been sleeping on Worldcon because it doesn’t come with a cosplay parade and a Marvel trailer, this is your intervention.
What Worldcon Actually Is
The World Science Fiction Convention has been running since 1939. The Hugo Awards, the Oscars of speculative fiction, voted on by fans rather than industry committees, have been presented there since 1953. LAcon V is the fifth time the convention has borne the LAcon name, and the seventh time a Worldcon has been hosted in the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, a lineage that stretches back decades through Anaheim, a city that apparently has a thing for hosting the impossible.
Where Comic-Con has evolved into a content delivery mechanism for IP franchises, Worldcon has stayed stubbornly itself: a convention run by fans, for fans, where the distinction between audience and creator is genuinely blurry. The person on the panel in the morning might be sitting next to you at lunch. That’s not an accident. It’s the architecture.
For context: at SDCC, access to a writer requires a badge, a wristband, a lottery win, and arriving at 6 a.m. At Worldcon, you can sometimes just ask them what they’re working on.
The Guests of Honor Are Not Decorative
LAcon V’s Guests of Honor include Ronald D. Moore, Emmy, Peabody, and Hugo Award-winning screenwriter and executive producer of Battlestar Galactica, For All Mankind, Outlander, Carnivale, Roswell, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. If you’ve watched prestige television in the last 30 years and cared about how it was made, Moore is one of the architects.
His presence at LAcon V isn’t a courtesy appearance. Worldcon guests of honor give keynote programming, sit for extended Q&As, and participate in the kind of substantive conversation that a Comic-Con panel slot, measured in minutes and audience questions filtered through a microphone runner, simply cannot accommodate.
Also on the guest roster: Colleen Doran, New York Times bestselling cartoonist whose adaptations include The Sandman, American Gods, and Good Omens; Tim Kirk, Hugo Award-winning illustrator and longtime Walt Disney Imagineer who served as a principal designer on Tokyo DisneySea and the Disney-MGM Studio Tour; and Dr. Anita Sengupta, rocket scientist and aerospace engineer who worked on the supersonic parachute system that landed the Curiosity Rover on Mars in 2012 and led development of the Cold Atom Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The NASA scientist is not a non sequitur. She’s the point. Worldcon has always understood that science fiction and science fact share a feedback loop, that the people who imagined interplanetary travel and the people who engineered it are often fans of each other’s work. Having Dr. Sengupta in the same building as the writers who inspired her career is exactly the kind of collision that makes this convention worth the drive down the 5.
The Hugo Awards Ceremony: The One Night Worth Dressing For
The 2026 Hugo Award ceremony takes place Sunday evening, August 30, hosted by toastmaster Ursula Vernon — herself a six-time Hugo winner — and will be streamed live on YouTube free of charge for anyone who can’t attend in person.
The Best Novel shortlist this year is worth your attention regardless of whether you plan to vote. Finalists include A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett, Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson, and Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a shortlist that reflects the breadth of where speculative fiction is right now: literary, political, cosmological, and not especially interested in being any one thing. Voting is open only to LAcon V members, with winners announced at the August 30 ceremony.
The Hugo ceremony is also, per the official LAcon V website, “the one traditionally dressy event of the convention.” Authors and artists show up in tuxedos and evening wear. The rest of the convention is t-shirts and jeans.
How to Attend
LAcon V takes place August 27-31, 2026 at the Anaheim Convention Center, Hilton Anaheim, and Anaheim Marriott. Single-day attendance registration is open. Hotel room blocks at both the Hilton Anaheim and Anaheim Marriott are available through the LAcon V website.
For Southern California residents, this is a day trip that doesn’t require burning vacation days. The convention runs programming across five full days with enough depth that you can build an entire schedule around a single interest area: film, literature, art, science, gaming.
Mini FAQ
Q: What is LAcon V and when does it take place?
A: LAcon V is the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, taking place August 27-31, 2026 at the Anaheim Convention Center, Hilton Anaheim, and Anaheim Marriott in Anaheim, California. It’s the oldest annual science fiction convention in the world and the event where the Hugo Awards are presented each year.
Q: Who are the guests of honor at LAcon V 2026?
A: Guests of honor include Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: TNG), novelist Barbara Hambly, cartoonist Colleen Doran, Disney Imagineer and illustrator Tim Kirk, and rocket scientist Dr. Anita Sengupta. Toastmaster for the Hugo Awards ceremony is author Ursula Vernon (T. Kingfisher).
Q: How is LAcon V different from San Diego Comic-Con?
A: Scale, access, and focus. SDCC is a massive commercial event built around IP announcements and celebrity appearances. Worldcon is fan-run, smaller, and built around substantive programming and direct creator access. The Hugo Awards — voted on by attendees — carry genuine literary prestige. If you care more about craft than content marketing, Worldcon is your convention.
The Con that Delivers
LAcon V is 70 miles from Downtown LA and has everything SDCC promises and rarely delivers: real access, real conversation, and an awards ceremony that has been predicting the direction of science fiction for over 70 years. Single-day badges are available. The Hugo ceremony streams free. There’s no reason not to at least spend an afternoon in Anaheim in late August finding out what the genre is actually thinking right now.