Worldcon
By Angela Roberts
Last weekend, I attended Worldcon here in Montreal. I splurged, bought a weekend pass and was there for Friday evening, most of Saturday, and all of Sunday. It was pretty sweet. I got to meet a couple authors I admired, attended some panels, and handed out some flyers for the magazine. Wore a gloaming t-shirt and represented too. And, if anyone reads the magazine or visits this blog because they saw my t-shirt or spoke to me at the con, thank you very much. We welcome you whole-heartedly and we hope you see something you like and tell your friends.
So, Worldcon. I'd only ever attended either big commercial cons like Toronto's Fan Expo or small fan-run ones like MONSFFA's Con-cept before last weekend. Both are cool and both have merit. Certainly, if you want to get cool swag and see famous people from all aspects of genre entertainment, go to Fan Expo. If you really like panels and discussions about writing and reading SF or you enjoy fannish debating about the merits and downsides of SF TV and film today, go to Con-cept. I go to both.
Worldcon struck me as being a lot like a big small-fan-run convention. In a way, it is. It took over a huge part of the Palais de Congres (which is a big convention center, certainly as big as the Metro Convention Centre in Toronto where the Fan Expo is held), but for all of its sprawling size, it still seemed small. And I don't mean this in a negative way. Small can be good. Only at a small convention would you get to spend several minutes talking to your favourite author about whatever. At a big con, sometimes you can't even get near a celebrity or artist. Or you have to pay up for the privilege. Forget talking to someone at a signing. Your time will be taken up by the guy who brought his entire comic collection for the writer or artist to sign. (This is just one of my beefs with con etiquette.) It's not impossible. If you go on Friday evening, you can usually get a few moments. Last year, I spoke pleasantly and briefly with Peter David (comic writer and author) and Georges Jeanty (awesome artist of the new Buffy comic); both really nice. But Worldcon is very much for SF literature, and writers are definitely more accessible. This also makes it smaller, since the pool of attendees for media-related events is inevitably larger than the lit crowd. It could also be the price, which is quite prohibitive. Don't know if I would have paid it for anything else - my weekend pass cost $195. It's true that I would have paid less if I'd pre-registered, but not significantly less enough that I wouldn't have still gone back and forth on whether or not I would go until I had to pay the full price. The price is so high that the con organizers introduced lower day pass and "taster" prices (where you could go and if you didn't like it within three hours, you could get your money back) probably because they were worried about attendance.
And while there were a lot of people who attended, there were still significantly fewer than you would see at a more commercial con. At Fan Expo, you will often find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder on the show floor with other attendees, or standing in a line that loops around the convention centre lobby six times. You wouldn't need to stand in a line at Worldcon. The only lines I witnessed were for Neil Gaiman. There was lots of space to walk around. And this isn't just because Fan Expo is in Toronto and Worldcon was in Montreal. It's part of it, but I think it's also that fan-run conventions tend to attract only certain fans. One notices at small fan-run cons that most of the people seem to know each other. Worldcon, in a way, was just a bigger collection of people who know each other. Which isn't necessarily bad. It can be comforting. But it can also be limiting, and possibly detrimental to the future of the whole sub-culture. For instance, I noticed that a lot of the stuff that attracts twenty-somethings like myself (the age range you will often see at commercial cons) was relegated to the teen programme track (anime, manga, comics, vampires, zombies, etc.). Well, I haven't been a teen for some time, so I wasn't really going to sit in a room with kids just to talk about stuff I like. But it's not a huge surprise that the average age range of the attendees of alot of the panels I went to seemed to be 40-65. Don't get me wrong. Most of the panels I attended were very interesting, and I got plenty out of it. But the question still lingers - where is the place of youth in current SF lit fandom?
Worldcon was fun, and I was rarely disappointed in my experience. I met some nice people, listened to some great panels, and got books signed by two authors whose works I enjoy - Kristen Britain (Green Rider series) and Pat Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind). I would definitely go again given the opportunity.
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