ReaderCon: Initial Reactions

ReaderCon: Initial Reactions

After a Feng Wah bus, a subway trip on the "T", and a long ride on a municipal bus, I came to the hotel where they are holding this year's ReaderCon, the Science Fiction (or Speculative Fiction, if you prefer) convention dedicated specifically to books, and thus the only SF convention not overrun with "B" list TV and movie celebrities. One thing was immediately apparent as I stepped through the door of the hotel: everyone at this thing seems to know each other.

At the first panel, on writers who are also reviewers, this became abundantly clear not only by the panelists and moderator Paul Di Fillippo specifically referring to the community as "small", "insular" and a "family", but by the fact that when Fillippo took questions he could call on each person with a raised hand by name. Though this is my first SF convention, I have been to a lot of other convention-type events in my time, mostly comic book ones, but also simply book related events like the Small Press Expo or the BEA. I have never before seen a moderator who knew so much of the audience by name.

I'm trying to figure out exactly why this bothers me so much. My first reaction when Di Fillippo referred to SF as a family was "Great, like I don't have enough issues with my own family". But that's glib and unfair, a reaction that comes out of one too many office jobs where a superior disingenuously referred to us all as a family, as if saying such a thing made it so. But SF really is a family, in the sense that people know each other and try to support each other, even going so far as to raise money for each other when a catastrophe strikes, such as a house burning down or suffering an accident without having health insurance. But it also is something that makes SF so insular, and so prone to becoming defensive to outsiders, or to allow fame within the community to give one an inflated sense of ego. It's part of what makes the community so off-putting to those outside of it.

Another problem with SF was raised in a passing joke about SF's "decrepitude." And indeed, the stories I've heard about the aging of the SF community seems to hold true; there are a disproportionate number of silver-haired folks here. This family is old and dying. In the comic book community, everyone's worried because kids aren't reading them anymore and the average age of the comic book reader is in their twenties and thirties. This is the problem amplified; the average person here seems to be in their forties or fifties.

And yet, I understand all to well the appeal of having a community of people who share your interests. And I don't think people aren't reading fantastic literature; I would like to point the success of writers like Chabon and Lethem and Marquez and Murakami, but might more accurately point the much more massive success of JK Rawling and Stephanie Meyer and the continued popularity of JRR Tolkein. But the mass of Meyer and Rawling fans aren't here. As fantasy-oriented as those books are, their readers don't see themselves as part of this community. Which makes me wonder if there will be such conventions as this one in twenty or thirty years, and if some kind of rival social phenomena will come to replace them.