What would

[james_davis_nicoll]

A Readercon done right look like?

Comments

[tanac.livejournal.com]

I'd have to third that, as someone who's gone to Wiscon every year for over ten years, and tried Readercon once and was put off by its atmosphere so thoroughly as to never go back.

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

What exactly put you off? (I've been to several Wiscons, but never a Readercon.)

[tanac.livejournal.com]

First and foremost, the cliquish-ness. We went without knowing anyone there beforehand, or not knowing them well, and it was extraordinarily difficult to make any connections. The only mass social activity was held on Saturday evening, after dinner. We are not new congoers, or especially shy, but we ended up eating dinner alone on Friday and Saturday because we couldn't find anyone to go with*. Everyone seemed to have their pre-existing groups and people and not be much interested in adding anyone new.

*We also volunteered for con suite/green room in hopes of meeting people - and even volunteered to run green room the following year (we've done that before), but the attitude of the concom and the former green room person (turns out she wanted an on-site minion, not someone actually involved in the decision-making or setup process) made us regretfully withdraw.

Second... I found the attitude of many of the panelists during panels to be simply off-putting. The short way of putting it is that Readercon is interested in the internal nature of a writing, where Wiscon is interested in the cultural/societal context of a writing. When issues like sexism or cultural context were brought up, they were summarily dismissed so the panelists could get back to talking about 'important' things.

Readercon encourages/celebrates authors like R. Scott Bakker (a notorious misogynist); Wiscon encourages/celebrates Nnedi Okorafor.

Also, there were just people behaving... badly. Moderators who were rude to panelists, authors who were openly snippy about not getting their way (there was a group of authors who'd gotten together to play some LARP thing who got upset when the space they wanted to use actually had some programming going on in it, and were extremely not interested in having anyone else join their (listed in the con schedule) game, for example.)

Either alone would probably not have been enough to condemn the convention for me, but both together left such a bad taste in my mouth (and impression of readercon as hopelessly insular) that we just didn't want to return. Even if the dealer's room was impressively stocked with wonderful treasures.

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

Last question: was this a recent con?

[tanac.livejournal.com]

Depends on your definition of recent; 3-4 years ago?