Well, LonCon3, the 72nd WorldCon is well and truly over, the last dregs of it drunk Tuesday morning, when I spent a couple of hours before I had to get my train helping out with the cleanup. It had been a long weekend of drinking of the firehose of fandom, so much stuff and especially people to see that whatever you were doing, there were always two to five more interesting things to do. I had an absolute blast.
What remains now is the inevitable summing up and recounting. If you’re not all that interested in science fiction and fandom, you may want to skip the rest of the week here or so…
This was my first Worldcon as well as my first convention in a decade, the last having been the 2004 Discworld con. I can’t say it wasn’t a bit scary getting back after so long, at what promised to be a huge con (the largest Worldcon ever!). Cons can be cliquey and lonely if you’re going to them on your own, when everbody else seems to have come with friends and is having fun with them.
What I also found coming back to my friends from alt.fan.pratchett for example is that it’s harder to talk to people you haven’t seen in some years than it is when you’ve met regularly. Our lifes have moved out of synch, people have gotten older, established relationships, had kids and such. It can all be a bit awkward.
But I worried for nothing. What I should’ve realised is that because of its size, most people would be strangers to each other and that there always would be people willing to talk to you if you were open to it. I had a lovely long conversation with a woman in the fan village on Sunday, for whom it was also her first Worldcon and she’d gotten a membership as a birthday gift. There were similar conversations with other fans, especially during the parties at night, when alcohol and general cheer made it easier to talk.
Apart from meeting new and interesting people what I was also looking for was meeting old friends and online acquintances; I’d made a list of people I was on the lookout for, but with on average some 6,000 attendees present each day, it was hard to find them. And then when I did, there wasn’t always time to chat long, either because I was going to a panel or doing some voluntering or because they were. So e.g. on Thursday I was playing hall monitor for the fan village when Deidre Saoirse Moen walked past (not to mention Robert Silverberg) and a little bit later I ran into Nicholas Whyte at the press stand when I was running an errand. At least I got to say hi to him…
I learned a lesson through this: when you run into people, say hi, because you never know when you’ll see them again at the con. I managed to have several quick conversations with various sf bloggers that way, as well as got several people coming up to me who knew me from various online haunts, including several who knew me from back in the day in the rec.arts.sf.* groups. I also got to talk to some of my favourite authors after panels, or like Paul McAuley, browsing in the dealers’ room. Also met Kev Mcveigh that way browsing through the same stack of DAW paperbacks and who kindly gave up a Doris Piserchia novel I had my eye on. Many others though I never met; never got a chance to talk to Elise Mathesen frex, though we tweeted at each other from the same panel…
One meeting happened entirely by chance late at night on the very last day of the con, as some Polish bloke asked me to take a picture of him and his two friends and then the friends turned out to be Gay and Joe Haldeman, who were some of the nicest people you could hope to meet.
So yeah, seize the day, talk to people whose badge names you recognise.
