Nova Albion and the Future of Fandom

[kevin_standlee]

I didn't hang around after the main convention ended around 5 PM. Too tired, too hungry again. Going to try to get to sleep early.

I had someone ask me yesterday, "How can we inject the energy and spirit at this steampunk convention back into Worldcons?" He's right about the issue. I remember Worldcons, when I started attending in them in 1984, as high-energy, high-excitement events. Now they're much less so.

I gave the person as long-winded answer to his question, but I think it boils down to a single, cold-hearted answer: "Some significant Worldcon SMOFS are going to have to die." Or at least retire from the field of active convention running and participation in Worldcon organization.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not wishing death on anyone, neither literally nor figuratively. But to a great extent our collective conrunning brains at the Worldcon level are suffering from calcification of the neurons as we continue to keep things frozen into the form that we consider ideal, and in some individual cases, effectively working toward mummification, with a stated opinion that amounts to, "I want Worldcon and fandom to die when I do, and it must not change in the slightest until then, either."

It's not that we don't need experience. We do. What we need to do is not be straightjacketed by it. We need people who have the energy and drive to make events like Nova Albion and the other steampunk events and like the anime conventions want to work on general-SF/F events rather than getting discouraged by the entrenched interests who are more concerned with making sure that the Wrong Sort of Fan doesn't actually get involved. We certainly don't need the people making the decisions passing rules that effectively preclude those who actually are willing and able to get things done from even participating. (And that's not an academic, theoretical statement, as the WSFS Mark Protection Committee did exactly that this past year, even in the face of evidence that the members of the WSFS Business Meeting wanted something different.

Comments

[auroraceleste.livejournal.com]

Is there any way to work around the situation currently, or is it literally going to take funerals?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know. Chicon 7's management seems to me to be trying tap into that younger energy. We need future conrunners to be able to be perceived to be welcoming of new energy and drive without also throwing away the lessons learned. Nova Albion made some mechanical conrunning errors that would get Worldcon runners strung up nowadays, and I think it's just inexperience. They do seem at least able to learn from mistakes.

A big question to me includes a factor of convincing people that Worldcon remains relevant. To the newest generation of potential new fans, I get the impression that it doesn't matter, since they can always go to the Big Show (=DragonCon or ComicCon, or whatever).

Worldcons didn't always used to be the province of a bunch of rich semi-geriatric fans the way it's perceived to be by some of those with whom I talk at conventions. The irony is that most of those relatively wealthy older fans are the same people who were young and energetic troublemakers once upon a time.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't go to many Worldcons, but perhaps on that account I'm more sensitive to detect changes, like the uncle who hasn't seen you since you were so high. And I don't see recent Worldcons as mummified or lacking energy and excitement compared to the mid-80s. Perhaps it's because in the mid-80s, you were a neo, ready to see excitement in anything, whereas I was already old and cynical.

So, no, I don't think Worldcons have decayed much in the last couple decades. Now Westercons, on the other hand ...

[bovil.livejournal.com]

While the comparison to your own memories is fine, it's not really what kevin_standlee is talking about here. That's to say, yes, we were all neos and everything was exciting then, but...

...we are talking about other cons that aren't Worldcon or gen SF cons, cons that stir that neo-like feeling of excitement in us still, cons that the 20-somethings are attending and having a blast at.

Furcon, Nova Albion (and other steampunk cons), cons where your creativity and craft (and ideally, but not always, competence) are what gets you recognition and respect (not just longevity).

Gallifrey One, the con that would have only been the children of the 60's and 70's but with the new series transformed into a vital and growing concern (and, at this point, my favorite con of the year bar none).

I'll put anime conventions at the opposite end of the failing continuum, too many being so youth-oriented that they end up driving away older fans of the medium, but that doesn't mean that they're not exciting and energetic, in ways that too many gen SF conventions have stopped being.

[johno.livejournal.com]

You want a very scary comment....

I friend (who in her 30s) attended the LA Worldcon (her first and only worldcon)and her over all assessment...

It was full of OLD people and they were NOT welcoming of younger folks. {emphasis mine}

[buddykat.livejournal.com]

Another issue is that many of the fans from "the list that shall not be named" who do not want Worldcon to ever change from what they remember is that they do not attend, haven't done so in years (for some, decades), and have stated that they have no intention of, or interest in, attending any time soon.

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

Srsly? Sounds like the CFG to me, ghods love 'em, but at least they've all said for decades they don't want to run another Worldcon. (It was in 1949, so you don't have to check.)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Hmmm; that sounds like me, except for the part about not wanting Worldcon to change. (Though I've been having slight urges to get to a Worldcon off and on for a bit now.)

However -- if Worldcon were mostly about TV and movie SF and comics, then I'd completely lose any interest I had; it would be dead to me. *Including* the good work being done in those areas is necessary and appropriate; but they're peripheral, they're not where the field advances (there's little theoretical reason they couldn't be, it's just my observation that so far they aren't; well, the cost of visual media does mean they have to serve a bigger market, and the collaborative nature of the production tends to interfere with consistency and clear visions). They're visually rich, but mostly do not have the real core of SF -- ideas, and thinking.

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

I see plenty of enthusiasm for future Worldcons in England, Japan, New Zealand among other places... I'm not overly worried about the aging of the PFWC.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but enthusiasm in Japan and New Zealand is not going to save/change Worldcons. I'd see very few attendees from either going to other Worldcons not there (or perhaps for NZ, in Australia). In particular, should NZ get the Worldcon in 2020, I'd expect it to have the lowest attendance in quite a while; the NZ natcon last year, which was even promoted as a stopover for non-antipodial fen on the way to Worldcon, only drew a few hundred. Since NZ is a few hours plane flight from Melbourne, I'd expect fewer Aussies at such than at an Aussie Worldcon.

I still think a contributing factor in Worldcon falling off was bad scheduling of such in the 2000s (yes, I know it's "scheduled" by who bids and wins). 2000-2006 all Worldcons were in large metro areas with significant fannish communities (I count "Britain" as a metro area/community for this purpose, based on 2005 and previous British Worldcons). But 2007-2011 have had 2 Worldcons in very isolated from NA/Europe locations, an isolated and relatively small US location (Denver; no really significant other metro areas in driving distance), the smallest US metro area in decades, if not ever (Reno; we'll see how it draws from Portland and the Bay Area), and a Canadian site (which has problems with respect to non-Canadian artists and dealers).

That all means you still get Worldcon regulars, but aren't likely to get many repeating newbies. It also gets former semi-regulars out of the habit of attending when it's in the same time zone or so. Note that, given the current bids, Worldcon will only be in the Eastern Time Zone once in the ten years of 2005-2014 and not at all in the BosWash corridor.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962.

The new guard always has to wait for the old guard to die, often literally, because the old guard hates change.

[travelswithkuma.livejournal.com]

Ifs yous don'ts guards thes fishs Bears wills takes thems.

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

I heart Kuhn, and you're right. Change doesn't happen at the top. And that means, quite honestly, that it won't happen because of kevin_standlee.

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

This weekend I was at Anime Conji in San Diego having similar thoughts.

(While there was the brief thought that I'd be ecstatic if half the people at Conji showed up for ConJecture, until I heard that they'd past 1,500 members, and remembered that ConJecture ended up at a different hotel and has a much tighter space)

I do agree that there does seem to be a lot of the same people running Worldcon as there were around 1999-2000 when I started going, and have observed that the "young guard" there are already in our forties, or late thirties - except for a few in the n+1-th generation, and that includes a lot of the current Chicago crew.

From other discussions, I suspect that one thing that might help is to lower the costs of membership. I know of efforts to remove the tie between the supporting membership rate and the attending rate, but even that was fought fiercely. So I fear that (Worldcon) fandom may be beginning like the school district in Arizona I heard about years ago where residents of a seniors only development packed the school board with their only agenda being to keep their taxes as low as they could.

why bother?

[totient]

That's not a rhetorical question. What does any group of big city US convention runners get out of running a Worldcon that they wouldn't get by putting that energy into their local convention? And is it worth the enormous expense and logistical complexity that comes from having to use a convention center, and the loss of organizational (and especially budgeting) continuity they currently enjoy?

I see what the overseas conrunners get: access to attendees, participants, and organizers who would otherwise be unavailable. Maybe Denver and Reno and Texas get this too. And I see how even though there are far more interesting sercon conventions within an easy drive of Chicago, someone there might want to do it anyway, because they have a hotel that's big enough without a convention center so the cost is small. But the real loci of younger convention runners, places like Minneapolis and Boston and St Louis, lack such hotels, and stand to gain nothing by hanging a Worldcon tag on their efforts. As anyone who went to Tuckercon will be quite aware.

Re: why bother?

[edgreen86.livejournal.com]

"What does any group of big city US convention runners get out of running a Worldcon that they wouldn't get by putting that energy into their local convention?" Egoboo

[jeff-morris.livejournal.com]

The first question should be "Why should any of these younger fans want to attend Worldcon?" What does it provide that the other cons don't--and would make these people WANT to attend?

And the second question should be "How in the hell do we make attending a Worldcon affordable?" Because I'm 51 and I sure as hell don't have that kind of coinage.

However, based on the comments here I would be inclined to guess that neither of these questions are ones the SMOFs in question are terribly interested in asking...or getting answers for.

[totient]

the second question should be "How in the hell do we make attending a Worldcon affordable?"

The answer to this has two parts. One: put it in a hotel (not a convention center), within easy driving distance of as many fen as possible. Chicago is doing this, and you could also do it in New York or Las Vegas. Then, and this is the scary part unless you have a lot of cash you're willing to lose, lower the price to the point where all those fen will actually come. A $0 conversion to attending from a $50 or possibly even $40 voting fee, an at door rate in the $80-$100 range, and $20 supporting memberships that come with the right to convert to attending at the price difference in effect at time of purchase, would all be good starts.

One thing that's in the way of a $0 conversion is the way bids operate. But in an age of mostly uncontested bids, they could probably operate some other way, that didn't saddle the winning convention with the bidding costs.

[petrea-mitchell.livejournal.com]

The zeroth question should be "Do any of these younger fans even know about Worldcon?"

If people know about Worldcon, it will always find that new audience. If they don't, any further discussion of what's attracting or repelling them is pointless.

And I find, going to conventions with a younger crowd, that is the biggest thing I run into there. "Worldcon, what's that?" Heck, most of them don't know about their local sf convention. Or even cons that specifically cater to their interests.

The first year I went to Kumoricon, the local anime convention here in Portland, one of the committee members told me about going to Sakura-Con in Seattle and running into other people from Portland who wished they had an anime con to go to closer to home... when Kumoricon had already existed for several years.

This is not to point the finger at Worldcon organizers and say they are doing nothing. SDCC has had the extraordinary good fortune of being selected as a publicity venue by Hollywood, which in turn has generated tons of free media coverage. Dragon*Con has had the extraordinary good fortune of being in the backyard of what was the one and only general-news channel most of the US knew about for years and years. Worldcon's never been thrown a break like that.

also

[totient]

A given con will be much more exciting in a smaller space than a larger one, as Arisia found this year. pV=nRT. If you're not brave enough to shoot for a 10,000 person Worldcon and risk falling short, and you don't want to shrink to fit into a typical hotel, at least pick convention centers in which the con does not rattle around.

Re: also

[cherylmmorgan.livejournal.com]

That's one of the issues we are dealing with. The accepted wisdom amongst SMOFdom is that a packed event is a *bad* event. That's in part because they are old, and don't like busy, noisy events.

[lindadee.livejournal.com]

Money and travel are two issues that keep fans from Worldcons. In my younger days , I would go to Worldcon ony when it was on the East Coast or within reasonable travel distance. I couldn't afford airfares or taking a room by myself. Unlike SDCC or Dragon*Con, worldcon travels, so it's "permanent" crowd will always be smaller.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yes, but not every person attending DragonCon or ComicCon lives within commuting distance of Atlanta or San Diego. Huge numbers of people are coming from far away, including other continents, to attend. So there's something attracting them enough to entice them to spend the money it would take you or me to attend a Worldcon in Europe or Australia or such.

[janusfiles.livejournal.com]

Is there any way to get some of those "significant Worldcon SMOFs" out of active convention/Worldcon running short of having them whacked?

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons I initially had no desire to go to Reno: it will (mostly) be a perfectly good, perfectly competent, perfectly unimaginative con, run by the Usual Suspects.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Reno is a weird experiment (I know, I'm inside it). It's mostly the usual suspects, but it's the usual suspects going in with the attitude of "Some things must be the same for the con to work, but we want to shake everything else up."

[randy-smith2.livejournal.com]

Take a look at FogCon. It was literary convention with a decidedly younger committee and membership. I felt like an old foggy. I'm not sure what they did, but it would be worth a long conversation with Debbie Notkin to find out.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Good point. SFSFC did some minor support for FOGCon, but I wasn't able to go. Sounded like they had enthusiasm.