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

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

It occurred to me that I need to clarify this statement. I appreciate the work being done to change Worldcon, and I've tried to participate in that. However, in Kuhn's model, the tenured don't make change; grad students and the untenured do. As much as I like and respect kevin_standlee, his position as a former Worldcon chair and veteran con-runner (at this point) puts him in the tenured camp in Kuhn's model. So when I say that change won't happen because of him, I don't mean that he or Cheryl or others will block change, but that within Kuhn's model, the source of change lies with folks other than SMOFs, so to speak.

In my case, what I'm trying to do is encourage more people to nominate and vote on the Hugos, which will, I hope, create a more diverse voting body. I've also tried to propose different panel topics and other kinds of programming -- though I get a lot of resistance about that. I think that Reno appears to be creating a great model for new programming, by making the interests of panelists visible to each other, so that we can add interests we hadn't thought of previously.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Oh! That makes sense. You're right. I used to be an outsider. I worked very hard for many years to get myself into positions of influence and authority in a field which I love dearly and which has been the focus of my life, but yes, I'm entrenched now. I only hope that I can recognize good change and work to facilitate it.

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

Yup. And in his model, once the outsiders get into power, they get just as invested in their entrenched paradigm as the previous generation was about theirs. *grin* In your defense, Kuhn himself had issues with people applying his model -- which was about *scientific paradigms* -- to other fields, especially humanities. He said that in the humanities, people are used to a multiplicity of paradigms and schools of thought, which is simply not true in the sciences. (Once the humours were discredited as a source of illness, you can't go back to humours, and such ideas can't coexist with the new paradigm.) Therefore, it could be argued that Kuhn would say "This model doesn't apply to conrunning, duh."