I Only Wish Worldcon Was That Important

[kevin_standlee]

I think he really means it when he says, in support of his paranoid delusion that Worldcons held outside of the US would be High Profile Terrorist Targets requiring High Security:

Worldcon is easily accessible and the Worldcon is a BIG Name event… and if you think that an event that features so many writers and media people with an International profile isn’t a BIG event in the UK then I humbly submit to you that you are wrong.

As I pointed out to him, the Worldcon, while important within our community, isn't even important enough to the UK publishing industry, let alone anywhere else. In 2005, we couldn't get the publishers to pay attention to the Glasgow Worldcon, despite the UK authors being nominated for Hugo Awards, because it was a minor event of little importance to them.

I simply find the idea laughable that a World Science Fiction Convention would be a significantly important target compared to high-profile sporting event or political conference. If the terrorists start targeting as low as us, then long before then the entire world will have shut down because you won't be able to step outside your door without setting off the bomb on your doorstep.

Comments

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

The Baltimore Police and Otakon have a full building evacuation plan (IIRC) and have had to evacuate the building once due to exploding Manhole covers. They evacuated the building (at a third of the size it is now) in about 10 minutes. They are prepared for terroism at Otakon. They deeply doubt that it will ever happen, but since 9/11 (or in case of fire or Exploding Manhole covers) this is important

Worldcon isn't at the size or importance to have to go that far. I would at least think the con should work with the venue to have a plan to do a full evacuation in case of fire at a very least.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, your staff needs to be familiar with the various emergency plans and whatnot. The "This is your Captain speaking," announcements before each of the major events at Interaction were how we packaged up a requirement from the convention center that we include evacuation briefings, for instance. We included the part they required, packaged around the stuff about loss of artificial gravity, etc.

In 2002 in San Jose, we had to seriously consider what to do in case of "rolling blackouts" because of the (at that time) semi-crisis in the electricity-distribution system. And naturally, we can't forget about earthquakes when you hold a convention in California. But we don't let the fact that a disaster could happen make us put our heads between our legs and kiss our a**es goodbye on account of We're All Doomed.

Everything in life has a certain risk involved with it. Humans seem to have a really bad risk-assessment system built in to us. We set way too high a priority on things that are low risk.

In the case before the bar: It is not beyond the realm of possibility that I might have gone to the UK a month early to spend a month touring around the country before going up to Glasgow. (I spent three weeks in Japan in 2007, after all.) And had I been in London, I might well have been in the Russell Square tube station (or on a particular train in that station) at the wrong time on July 7, 2005. (And it's a higher-than-random chance, because when I was in London post-Interaction, that's exactly the area in which I traveled several times.) But the terrorists wouldn't have been trying to kill me personally because I was Chairman of the only permanent body of the World Science Fiction Society, and suggesting that it might be so would be absurd.

[jeanineers.livejournal.com]

Every hotel and convention facility has evacuation plans. It is not usually necessary to make the attendees at any event at a hotel or convention facility fully aware of the evacuation plans. The attendees should always pay attention to marked exits and, in the event of an emergency, should follow the instructions of hotel or convention center staff.

I live in earthquake country. It's much more likely that we'll need to evacuate an event due to capricious mother nature rather than malicious acts.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

Comicon - now THAT's an event. But yeah, any average Man U game is much more important a target than Worldcon.

[cherylmmorgan.livejournal.com]

Minor nit. The editors at the UK publishers were generally very supportive of Worldcon. The problem was that their PR people worked at a corporate level and were not interested in anything to do with science fiction. What we ended up with as a compromise was that some of them did events with their authors in bookstores so that they didn't have to have anything to do with the convention.

[howeird]

So let me throw out a whole new idea: with the enormous rise lately in the number mainstream sci-fi/fantasy movies and, presumably, fans, should WSFS and the local Worldcon organizers be marketing the cons with the object of making them big enough to be a terrorist threat magnet?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I think that it is not worth worrying about. We'd have to grow to the size of Comic-Con to even come close to being newsworthy enough, and that's never going to happen.