Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Like I've written in the past, I think part of the problem is the population of the places we've held Worldcon since 2000 have been severely skewed.

2000-2006: All in major metro areas, including twice in the BosWash corridor (Chicago, Philly, Bay Area, Toronto, Boston, Glasgow (which really equates to "Britain" and had a track record of good attendance), LA).

2007-2011: All abroad, in two cases *way* abroad, or in smallish relative to the above/isolated metro areas (Japan, Denver, Montreal. Australia, Reno), none on the Pacific Coast, BosWash corridor (Montreal's close, but the border problems cancel that out), or core Midwest.

Put Worldcon in "secondary-level attendance" sites based on known location/population issues for five years straight, and yeah, I think you're asking for a membership dropoff. And note that it'll be at least an 11 year gap between BosWash Worldcons, and depending on how Reno draws from the driving audience, possibly a 9-10 year or more gap between Pacific Coast Worldcons.

Btw, one factual error with Cheryl's piece; Reno is by no means "quite a large city"; its metro area population comes in at about 420K, #115 in the US. It's by far the smallest location for a US-based Worldcon in decades, both in terms of absolute and relative size (for the latter, it may well be the smallest ever).