Readercon: The Reprieve

[yendi]

There's a statement on the Readercon front page addressing next year's con. Aside from the false claim that the flier with misinformation was only distributed on Sunday (it was distributed as early as Friday), it's generally a good statement, especially this chunk:

Readercon 21 will have at least one guest of honor, two tracks of panels, readings, discussions, kaffeeklatches, the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, the Rhysling Award Poetry Slan, the Shirley Jackson Award, Meet the Pro(se), and as always the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition.

In other words, next year's Readercon will be a Readercon.

(Note that does not address the fact that they're actively hostile to minors, nor many of the other issues they need to address, but it does put them in a position to begin to attempt to rectify these issues.)

Comments

[emilytheslayer.livejournal.com]

It's also really interesting that EV's name isn't anywhere on there. He's not Programming Chair anymore, and someone else took over? IDK, I'm interested, at least.

[yendi]

I noticed that, too. I'm actually less concerned about him as Programming Chair than as Guy What Represents the Con in Public, but the implication is that he won't be doing that, either.

[emilytheslayer.livejournal.com]

Well, that was what I was looking at too, yeah. I kinda need to hear that from someone, but seeing someone else's name, and having someone else starting to talk for the con, is at least getting my interest.

[ckd]

I think it was going out on Thursday, actually, since I had it stacked in my bag along with my souvenir book. That said, I'm not going to quibble on that one especially since the flyers were still going out on Sunday...and while the wording's a bit odd, it doesn't say (and only somewhat implies) that Sunday was the only day involved.

The key thing here for me is that the flyer and associated statements have been officially disavowed and that somebody is showing serious signs of listening.

[yendi]

I'm not inclined to quibble (and I certainly don't think it was deliberate -- I'm assuming it's false claim, not a dishonest one), but it was worth noting, as a flier handed out on the last day gives the impression of a hasty mistake much more than a flier that was readily available throughout the con (and which led to poorly-answered questions as early as Friday).

But yes, the bigger issue is that they've disavowed the flier, and are promising a real con, with possible serious progress.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I don't know readercon in particular, but I think a lot of SF conventions have lost the young people. Not just minors but young adults. Fandom is greying, and anime and furry fandoms are a lot more attractive to the people younger than you and I. That last two or three SF conventions I attended were grey enough that I didn't care for them, and am unmotivated to go back. I kinda hate that I feel that way, but I do.

[yendi]

I haven't noticed a huge problem at Arisia, Vericon, or Boskone (the only SF cons I attend other than Readercon), but those all have overlap with other areas of media fandom, and are also explicitly family-friendly.

[ex-gnomicut.livejournal.com]

Seriously? When I went to Boskone I was about a generation younger than anyone else there, except for children of attendees. There were no young adults, and no older teenagers.

Admittedly, it turned me off so much I haven't been back for years.

Also, maybe the rumor mill has churned inaccurately, but I was under the impression that the messy divorce between Arisia and Boskone actually had a fair amount to do with the age-related culture wars. Is that not true?

[yendi]

Both of my Boskone experiences are very recent ('07 and '08), and it's certainly more gray than Arisia, but there were a solid chunk of folks in my age range there, and a large number of younger pros, as well. Of course, it's a huge con, and I would not be surprised if I self-selected myself into areas that hid the overall con makeup.

And yes, the Boskone/Arisia split was founded on an explicit desire to get rid of children (http://www.nightsong.com/phr/boskone-25.txt), which is the only policy I've ever seen that's worse than Readercon's. I suspect that they're still recovering from this decision.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I've observed the same gap. People my age tail off fandom, and then there's small kids who are in-tow, not attending on their own. But I also got turned off and stopped attending. My last attempt was a balticon, where the event pretty much rolled up and went to bed before 11pm.

I do still attend gencon, and it hasn't greyed substantially. Plenty of young people there, even if I am too tired out to go find parties.

[ex-gnomicut.livejournal.com]

ericmvan's attempts to make the convention's decisions look good on the Internet, however, only continue to dig his foot deeper and deeper down his throat.

I love the dismissiveness towards people's complaints about airport and MBTA accessibility.lack of MBTA accessibility is 100% the reason I have never gone. (This year's con reports are the reasons I will never go in the future, but they are also the reasons it seems pretty clear that people like me going is not something they are interested in. I have never enjoyed the worshipful cons, which ericmvan makes pretty clear is the entire point of readercon.)

[yendi]

See, this is why what Van (and Readercon, by extension) is doing is awful. You're young, smart, articulate, and familiar and comfortable with academia and its trappings; you should be exactly the kind of attendee a con like Readercon should be going after (plus, they surely need some Kirkus folks to balance all us PW reviewers in attendance). But by shifting the focus from the focus on reading to a focus on worship (or, perhaps, a focus on talking/networking for the pros, and worship for those lacking the proper con-determined credentials), they perpetuate a model that can only serve to alienate and eventually collapse on itself.

(Mind you, as emilytheslayer notes above, EMV is not con chair or program chair, which at least offers some hope of making progress.)

[ex-gnomicut.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And what I have found in my life is that if I am looking for other young, smart, articulate people who are comfortable both with source texts and academic discussion of the source texts, but who try to be welcoming and who don't defer to the authors/publishers/powers that be as holy figures on pedestals, the place I need to be in media fandom cons/fanfic cons, not traditional f & amp; sf cons. Immediately, media fandom is not much better than f & amp; sf fandom when it comes to issues of race diversity, but it's a hell of a lot less elitist. In my experience, anyway.

At the last media con I attended, I ran an impromptu discussion about children's literature, announced on the con twitter, which was easily accommodated in the con suite and well attended by a lot of interested, articulate attendees. It was fabulous.

[yendi]

*nod* One of the best events at this past Readercon, in fact, was the "Beyond Sparkly Vampires" Koffeeklatch, which was just twenty folks discussing things like Hunger Games, Jenna Fox, etc for an hour while eating cookies and drinking coffee. Only one person in the room (one of the four people behind Erin Hunter) was a pro writer, two were editors (there just as much as fans as anything else), and everyone felt like they were on equal footing.