Worldcon Memories

The first science fiction convention I attended (apart from a small Doctor Who convention in Connecticut) was also among the largest, and it is fair to say it left an impression on me.  The 1989 World Science Fiction Convention met in Boston over Labor Day weekend, and I went for all four days, staying in a crowded suite with 20 college students, sleeping on the floor, eating sporadically, and goggling at everything.  It was the first time I had seen cosplayers, quite an experience for a callow and immature 19-year-old; I decided to keep a respectful distance and not to look them directly in the eye, and consequently none of them ate me.  It was the first time I had watched anime - “Japanimation,” as we called it then – with more than one or two other people, though the fifty or so people with whom I watched Megazone 23 late one night represented less than one percent of the con-goers, and they were about all of the anime fans there.  It was the first time I had been in a convention dealers' room, a great flea market of nerdly swag, and while I was a poor student I still was able to buy a dozen or so home-made buttons with geeky slogans (e.g. “He's dim, Jed!”) two paperbacks I'd been hunting for some time, Cory Panshin's Rite of Passage and Philip Dick's A Scanner Darkly (the latter out of print, believe it or not), and a graphic novel or two.  It was also the first time I'd seen science fiction writers in the flesh, and it was not entirely a deflating experience.  I remember seeing Isaac Asimov bustling through the convention center halls while I ate breakfast one morning, attending a panel on world-building where Larry Niven sat like a bump on a log, and attending another panel on Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, where David Brin denounced Bloom and his boyfriend Hegel while Hal Clement crankily defended traditional education.  Rounding out my fanboy inauguration, I participated in a playtest of a new diceless role-playing game called Amber, and an impromptu round of the old card game Illuminati (I played to lose, and played weird); had a rambling conversation with my roommates about Immanuel Kant and asteroid mining; talked with an earnest old nerd about “Lojban,” the Logical Language of The Future; paid a wandering poet five bucks for a poem he imposed on me around 2 o'clock one morning; and slipped out to see the movie Batman (the Tim Burton one), which was still playing in local theaters.

Worldcon wasn't the happiest or most pleasant episode in my life, but it was certainly exciting, and I've been chasing that particular high ever since, through one Star Trek convention, four general SF cons, and about 15 gaming conventions.  This year I thought about attending the World Science Fiction convention in San Antonio to see how it compared to my memories of Noreascon.  I didn't go, but I've read several accounts by fans who did attend, and preliminary reports suggest that I would have blended right in, insofar as the convention's prime demographic was white, male, and aging.  It also sounds like it was a pretty conservative crowd, full of climate-change deniers, homophobes, and mil-SF types who want Heinlein taught in the schools (presumably not the books with incest and rape-oriented plotlines, but who knows?).  I suspect this was the case at the '89 convention too, but that was a quarter-century ago.  It is depressing to realize that the same people who went to Noreascon 3, or very nearly, are the principal attendees of the modern Worldcon, and that their interests and politics haven't changed at all – indeed, they may be narrower and more regressive than they were in the Reagan era.

Not that Worldcon is in any institutional danger.  Tobias Buckell notes that the convention has been at the same size (4,000-6,000 people) since the early 1980s, and Cheryl Morgan observes that Worldcon is a fan-run, print-centered convention, and therefore can't expect to compete with corporate media conventions like DragonCon or SDCC.  Fair enough.  But the reports I've read suggest that even within these limits, Worldcon's attendees don't want to reach out to young people, and don't have a problem identifying themselves (in some cases, at least) as sexist oinkers.  It would be easy enough for the organizers to add a Hugo Award for young adult SF, which has exploded in the last ten years; to place more programmatic emphasis on graphic novels and manga; to adopt anti-harassment policies like those adopted by Chi Fi*, and to offer student discounts.  But the old grumblers who've been going for twenty years might not like it, and they're the ones who currently have the money and inclination to attend.  So be it. In fifty years some of them will still be going to Worldcon, perusing glass-cased displays of Gor novels, quarreling about whether Bradbury was a better writer than Bester, and making snide remarks about female novelists.  Perhaps one or two of them will wonder, while waiting for their nursing aides to show up, why no-one at the con was under the age of eighty.  Then it will be time to go back to the Home, or off to the Soylent Green factory.

* In fairness to the 2013 Worldcon, it did, in fact, have an anti-harassment policy, but this is still not universal at SF cons.