Raining on Finndom's Parade

Posted by Sari

I have about six pages of notes on programming, and might at some point try to construct some sort of post about that, but now I just feel like being the grumpy granny of the fandom and disagreeing with everyone for a bit:

Everybody seems to have had a great time at the Worldcon. I didn’t, for various reasons. Don't get me wrong, there were bits I enjoyed a lot: meeting people I see all too rarely, shopping for Lemsip, seeing what some of my favourite authors look like and discovering some new ones. But all in all, I was less than impressed.

Some of it was my own attitude. I was not really interested in going in the first place. I was busy, stressed out and short of money and would much rather just stayed home and worked. Thus I was not in the most receptive state of mind to begin with, and I probably was a tougher customer than Jukka who was all bubbling with excitement ready to enjoy every minute.

Some of it is, that I have come to the conclusion that panel discussions are fundamentally unsatisfying program items – at least for me. Even the best of panels just scratch surface of interesting subjects, most of them are just painfully bad waffling which have very little to do with the title. Sixteen programe numbers and maybe two or three which were worth listening for longer than five minutes. The situation was not helped by the fact that the dealers room was a) devoid of any media dealers b) did not have dealers stocking the work of the authors taking part of the programme, so every time I found an interesting new voice I failed to find his or her work.

Then there is the duality of the con. It was clearly two different events, one for the fans, one for the pros. The feel of the event was more like a book fair than a convention: fandom as an audience, the pro scene promoting, wheeling and dealing amongst themselves. Some of this is probably because as a foreign neophyte I don’t know the ins and outs of anglo-american fandom, but I really think that the times when fans and pros really intreacted in conventions the size of the worldcon are basically really over if they ever existed.

Which leads to the next point. If one can see the con as fandom doing it for fandom, as a community event with where one can enjoy the quaint communal hierarchies and jargon, then worldcon can still be a satisfying experience. But if you feel the disconnect the way I felt it through the con, then the participant becomes a consumer. And this consumer paid a shitload of money for ticket to a bookfair where programming was mediocre and not enough of products available to buy.

Edited to add: I think on reflection this tells more of me than of cons. Jukka who is much more extrovert, more fannish and more ready to put himself on the line had a great con.

Comments

[Néa]

It was very very good to see you, though :-)

[Sari]

And You too!!!! The meeting people part was fun. And now that I getting better orientated to the non-Finnish con scene I think I might actually get the hang of why the rest of it can be fun too.