Fandom, conventions & etc.
07. Aug, 2009 
6 Comments
Not actually being at Worldcon has given me a fair amount of time to think about being at Worldcon, especially as it regards old fen and the recruitment of new fen.
I attended my first real science fiction convention at the tender age of 13.? It certainly was a different era, as we rarely see children of that age unaccompanied by supervisory adults, let alone taking multiple forms of public transit and checking into a hotel room under their own name.? All of which I did in order to get to that first con.
I distinctly remember lookigng forward to it as being something far more special than the Star Trek cons I’d practiced on – though in retrospect my experiences at both were fairly similar.
I do remember planning out my attendance schedule (it was a Philcon) based on the fact that I’d easily met plenty of nice, interesting people at the Trek cons and that spending time with them and being willing to accept the experience as it came more than filled up the hours.
I distinctly remember checking into the hotel and being bowled over by the activity already going on in the lobby; there were knots of people here and there involved in animated discussion, people walking to and fro clutching armloads of books and magazines, others sitting on the couches, benches and chairs pouring over schedules, reading the program book.
(Of course no one was texting, tweeting or talking on cell phones as such didn’t exist.)
A fair number of folks were clustered around registration getting their badges and packets, and another group clustered around the billboard where all of the ‘looking fors’ and ‘room party in xxx’? notices were posted, the table displaying the information for all of the other cons (a service even then provided by one ‘Filthy Pierre’).
I remember meeting some new fan friends on line at registration – folks who’s names I don’t remember now – people who I’d hang with at or just say hello to in passing throughout the weekend.
I know I made a beeline for the dealers room shortly after finishing at registration and there, among other folks, I met the legendary Bob Madle (a long-time MD/DC area fan and uber-collector).
Bob took an immediate interest in me once I explained that I was very interested in collecting the pulp magazines – but was obviously on a limited budget.? Bob took the time to go over esoterica like grading, different ways to collect things (specializing if you’re on a budget).? He even offered his booth as a place to come back to later on.
Now I’m sure that some of Bob’s interest was enlightened self-interest (create a collector young and they’ll be buying from you for a lifetime – which I have been, lol), but that was certainly the least of his considerations.? Like many of his generation (the fannish gen immediately preceeding mine), he was an activist in the sense that openness, acceptance and growing the brand (to put it in today’s parlance) was the default condition.
Over the next couple of years I ran into the exact same response wherever I went:? Balticons, Disclaves, Lunacons, several one-offs, local club meetings & etc.? Forrest Ackerman spent hours with me on a couch.? Isaac Asimov invited me along to lunch simply because I happened to be in the crowd of folks talking to him when he got hungry; Hal Clement talked to me about writing and encouraged my ambitions.? The staff of various cons allowed me to volunteer and, once they’d ascertained my reliability, gave me an increasing amount of responsibility.
Not Once during those years did I ever run into anyone who discounted me because of age or inexperience (though I did catch some ribbing for having come over by way of Trekkie-dom – which I was ok with, because I very quickly understood the difference(s) between fandom and trekkiedom.? Fandom was a family where anyone might be found sitting at the head of the table on any given day. Trekkies had a very strict hierarchy, with the head of the table reserved for Bill Shatner or (in his absence) Leonard Nimoy.
Not once did I ever hear ‘you’re not old enough’ or ‘let the adults do that’.? In fact, one of the things I heard MOST frequently was “If you think you can handle it, go for it”.
This was, when you think about it, the living embodiment of all of those Heinlein juvenovels I’d been reading.? Thrust into unfamiliar surroundings and reliant only unto myself (along with the stereotypical elder mentors I could call upon) I called upon the powers of every-manism, shouldered my responsibilities and learned to stand on my own two feet.
All around me was positive energy to draw upon; a room full of filkers who didn’t (really) care that I couldn’t carry a tune; another room where the qualities of ‘SMOOTH’ were being discussed and – was I familiar with Murphy’s Irish Whiskey?? Some guys cutting mimeo stencils on a table in the lobby who were more than willing to satisfy my curiosity, folks who would accept me into their discussion circle and not discount my statements because of the mouth they were coming out of.
Conventions quickly became a very favorite part of my life.? There were no age barriers, no assumptions about what I was or was not capable of. Unlike the real world which can be very frustrating to a young (and as I’ve been told) precocious pre-teen.? There were no such things as gifted and talented educational programs back then. (In fact, the stigmas I labored under back then were so onerous that I REFUSED to pay the children’s rate for movies once I no longer qualified, even tho it was frequently offered to me.)
Conventions and fandom was the other part of my family, my ‘distant relatives’ as it were, that I actually looked forward to visiting with.
These days, as I try to engage young fans in discussions concerning fandom and conventions, I’m often surprised at the upfront vehemence with which rejection of both the subject and their potential participation is delivered.
This makes me wonder if anyone is really doing the kinds of things that Ackerman, Asimov, Madle, Clement and others (including Vincent DiFate, Jack Chalker, and a long list of others) did for me.? These were all folks who had compressed time schedules and who were the objects of much attention from everyone else at the con, yet they took time and gave it to me.
It was one on one – slow, wasteful of time, inefficient and yet – look where I am today.? Despite a long GAFIATION, I’m back, FIAWOL, and many, if not all of my old friends have welcomed me back with open arms.
We talk about ‘programs’ and marketing concepts that we can use to engage with younger fans (and cudos to everyone working on such), but, among other things, I suspect that one of the issues we face and are not addressing is one of age.
Parent’s no longer allow their pre-teens to visit far away cities on their own. Hotels will not let a room to someone who is in their minority.? And, as we know, the golden age of science fiction is 12 (or in my case 10).
It is far more difficult to get a kid and his or her parents to spring for a con – and yet these days, that is what would really be required in order to get fans who are of that age where they are ready, willing and able to become fans, to attend.? My wife suggested a program similar to a sleep-away camp, but right now I suspect that those things that would make a program like that work are inaccessible to ‘fandom’.
And I think that age – at least in terms of openness? and desire – is going to prove to have been a key component in recruitment.? It isn’t the 16 to 24 year olds we’re after – they’ve already made their decisions (and many of them in an anti-fan direction). It’s those precocious kids who glommed on to Harry Potter or Twilight or Zoe’s Tale or Little Brother while still in grade school that become fans. (Remember the videos of the last Potter release?? Moms standing in line with their ten year olds, at midnight.)
Society’s rules have certainly changed over the decades (any parent who let their 13 year old wander off to a convention and spend an unsupervised weekend with adults not of their family where partying, skimpy costumes and who-all knows what else was going on could certainly be brought up on neglect charges. Think about that when pondering exactly how much really has changed.)? When cons started, it was the younger set who made them happen.? In fact, I think the age range for the first Worldcon was something like 15 to 31.
Not anymore. This is a roadblock and something for which a solution needs to be found. Perhaps a localized program that brings adults who are travelling to a con together with younger fans who want to.? Perhaps a special, once a year type convention specifically set up to accomodate parents and children (including such things as, no membership fee for parents and guardians).
Teens and young adults have already settled in on where they are going to spend their time and their dollars.? If they don’t have the earlier experiences of conventions (presuming that such interested them) they’ll simply not have spending time at cons in their playbook when they get to be old enough to go out on their own.
So I think that it is important that we all take the time to mentor those young ones who do manage to make their way to conventions, but we all need to do some serious thinking about the ways in which the greater society’s mores have changed and affected things.
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A funny thing: my first reaction to seeing this was to think “Waitaminnit — neither of us had been to cons before we met at 16 or 17 or so.” But then, refocusing my memory, I recalled that yes, of course, we had.
I flashed a few days ago on our seeing the listing of the 1977 Worldcon planning in the back of a magazine, realizing that it was in our town, and calling the number to aske what a Worldcon was. Don (or was it Grace?) Lundry saying “Come on over and find out!”
And there went our summer…
“a long-time MD/DC area fan and uber-collector”
Bob Madle was a founder of the Philadelphia SF Society, in December, 1934, for the record, and a longtime Philly fan before a Balti-DC fan. http://www.psfs.org/about/founders.php
And, of course, he won TAFF in 1957, in what was the most controversial race up to then, because he was almost entirely unknown to British fandom, and the race became seen as something of a contest, for the first time, between “fanzine fans” and “convention fans.”
This is a theme that would, of course, never again show up in fandom. [/sarcasm]
Thus the title of Bob’s TAFF Report, “A Fakefan In London,” which you can read all of here, if you can stand the rather fuzzy scanning.
“Not once did I ever hear ‘you’re not old enough’ or ‘let the adults do that’. In fact, one of the things I heard MOST frequently was ‘If you think you can handle it, go for it’.”
Ditto. I don’t recall volunteering at the 1973 Lunacon, my first, although I might have gophered; it’s too long ago for my memory to be clear. The same goes for the 1974 Lunacon. But by 1975 (I was born in November, 1958, and Lunacons were in April, so I was 16) I was attending Lunarians, along with Fanoclasts and FIStFA and other fannish NYC parties and other cons, and was handed loads of responsibility, including doing that first Lunacon fanhistory Exhibit.
By 1976, when I was 17, I was running Facilities, and was Hotel Liason for those purposes, again doing a more elaborate fanhistory exhibit, and was generally trouble-shooting. Stuff I ended up dealing with included the pepper-gassing of the performance of Bob Asprin and Phil Foglio’s “The Capture,” thefts from the Art Show, and, well, the next deserves its own paragraph: the hiring of Pie-Kill International’s Rex Weiner by Charles Platt to pie Ted White (one of the GOHs as the GOH was technically all the editors ever of “Amazing Stories”) I ended up personally tackling Rex Weiner after Elliott Shorter chased him down the stairs, after Rex ran out of the programming room, having tossed his pie, and I took the elevator to the lobby and nabbed Weiner as I went up, with Elliott securing him with me.
It wasn’t hard to figure out the culprit, even though Rex wouldn’t talk, because he had gotten in with a nametag that had been altered from “Charles Platt” to “Charles Blatty.”
Charles and I became good friends years later, and had a good laugh about it. I’m not sure Ted was amused, though I seem to recall him saying something funny about the flavor.
Anyway, as you know, Don Lundry handed me even more responsibility in 1977 for Lunacon and SunCon, when I was still only 18, and I ended up, in July of 1978, being made Director of Operations and subsequently made retroactive Vice-Chair, of Iguanacon, the 1978 Worldcon (the yet largest Worldcon ever then).
So, yeah, fandom didn’t shy away from giving responsibility to young people, although I did learn to quit admitting my age unless forced to, for a few years, because I did have a few bad experiences with a few fans in my late teens who suddenly treated me and my opinions much less seriously once they learned I wasn’t in my twenties, as they’d previously assumed.
“…another room where the qualities of ‘SMOOTH’ were being discussed and – was I familiar with Murphy’s Irish Whiskey?”
Not Beam’s Choice?
“And, as we know, the golden age of science fiction is 12″
Credit: Peter Graham.
“Society’s rules have certainly changed over the decades (any parent who let their 13 year old wander off to a convention and spend an unsupervised weekend with adults not of their family where partying, skimpy costumes and who-all knows what else was going on could certainly be brought up on neglect charges. Think about that when pondering exactly how much really has changed.)”
Well, that was relevant to the vast feuding over the Exclusion of Walter Breen at the 1964 Worldcon, but perhaps best I not get into that, even though many of the participants, including Walter, are now dead. My old instincts still fear an argument erupting over it, though….
“…but we all need to do some serious thinking about the ways in which the greater society’s mores have changed and affected things.”
Have you considered the possibility that the role of sf in society has changed enough that sf cons simply aren’t relevant to young people any more, and never will be?
I wrote my first long piece in 1981, for Telos, about the changes in fandom in then recent years, in how sf themes had been becoming mainstream, etc. That was nearly thirty years ago that I was saying sf was becoming a no longer isolated thing, that it was becoming no longer a “proud and lonely thing to be a fan.”
Then came LARPs, Furry fandom, large-scale gaming fandom, sf themes in every commercial, popular sf movies all the time, the mainstreaming of sf ideas in mainstream novels, the rise of personal computers, bulletin board systems, FidoNet, mailing lists, the internet, the WWW, LiveJournal, blogs: why would anyone young need a convention to talk about manga, fantasy, vampires, computer gaming, reading science fiction, seeing sf movies, or whatever it is you think they might want them for, exactly?
I wish I currently had a copy of my 1981 piece in which I foresaw this, but it all came true, and I’m not clear how it’s supposed to change now, or why we should try, any more than the fans of the forties should have insisted we were doing fandom wrong in the Seventies by not reproducing the Thirties.
Things have their time and place. Fandom has always evolved, and maybe its fate is to simply die out, or at least to simply evolve into the forms it’s already in: LiveJournals, twittering, YouTubing, texting, blogging, occasional raves and parties, flash mobs, and whatever the future brings.
I’m certainly sure trying to turn back the clock, or the mimeo crank, won’t work.
All good things must come to an end. Or, at least, transform.
(Even email is considered an ancient dead form by kids today.) And I didn’t even mention Facebook. Let alone whatever will be exciting in five years.
By the way, the folks who care about SDCC continue to have just as many arguments about changes, new people, etc., as Worldcon folks do.