james_davis_nicoll | Book oriented SF conventions in Canada

Amazing to see those two conventions linked so in your post. Oh, the history! The history! LJ users jeffreyab, avt_tor, marahsk, or tammylc could give you much a better answer than I.

Minicon and Boskone remind me a lot of each other. I think there's a considerable overlap in attendees and of course some details in their histories are similar. Both experienced a small drop off in numbers after a clarification of their core mission, for example.

Now, Boston and Minneapolis don't seem much alike. For one thing, the MPLS airport doesn't resemble a converted bus station, nor have I ever feared for my life landing there, whereas Logan scares the hell out of me.

"small drop off in numbers"? Surely, sir, you jest. Boskone, I've heard, has recovered. Here the battle still rages.

MSP is trying its best to become a bus station. One of these days, it will succeed.

What's wrong with Minneapolis' airport? Assuming you avoid That Company, of course and since I make it a point to avoid any airline whose news coverage involves sewage running down the isles, I always have (Well, that and listening to Piglet on the subject the time we met in Wales).

In order to reach the really "bad" areas, you have to fly on the regional airlines. I'll guess you've never had that enjoyment. I guess it's just that they should allow taxis at some of the terminals, although it's hard to do if they're in the middle of runways.

The Toronto-MPL direct route uses the cutest scale model airplanes. The first time I flew to MPL, I was directed onto a bus at Terminal One or Two (I forget which) at Pearson, which took us past a series of increasingly tiny aircraft before arriving at the one we were to use. Luckily, nobody stepped on it.

After a few times flying direct, I realized that small aircraft maximize the things I hate most about flying so I took to going via Chicago, Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. Once they wanted to send me there via Seattle, which seemed like an odd route to use.

For some reason, every flight I took to MPL hit bad weather over Kitchener.

MSP is an okay airport. BOS...well, it's not the worst I've ever seen. (Scary landings? At least it has fairly long runways. LGA and DCA always make me uncomfortable.)

I have, I will admit, never flown into MSP and left the airport by ground transportation. This lack will be rectified later this month.

My first con was Boskone in 1987. Er.

Ad Astra and Keycon (in Toronto and Winnipeg, respectively) are the only Canadian conventions I know anything about. I have very, very much enjoyed Ad Astra, though it's been years since I went.

P.

This sounds as if I didn't enjoy Keycon, which isn't the case. But Keycon always seemed to be a rather skin-of-the-teeth business, and you never knew quite what would be happening. Also I always wanted to copy-edit their flyers, although I am sure no scientific study has ever proven that ill-spelled and ill-written publicity material means a convention is no fun.

P.

I must admit Ad Astra's current website is something of a turn-off for me.

I would agree with that - even I could do better, and I'm a mainframe programmer by trade.

However, the con itself is a lot of fun.

twiddler is one of the chairs, and he's working hard to run a good con this year.

Besides, how can you pass up a con that has a chocolate tasting, scotch tasting, wine tasting and a beefcake/cheescake charity event?

Presentation matters. I know, it makes me sound like an evil marketing person but someone who had no idea what Ad Astra was would look at that website and keep going.

I don't drink alcohol and as part of my "Let's at least try to keep my weight measured in three digits" I no longer eat any sweet I did not make from scratch myself.

Presentation matters. I know, it makes me sound like an evil marketing person but someone who had no idea what Ad Astra was would look at that website and keep going.

I'm not disagreeing with you in the least. :)

I don't drink alcohol and as part of my "Let's at least try to keep my weight measured in three digits" I no longer eat any sweet I did not make from scratch myself.

Hmm... can't think of anything else offhand that distinguishes Ad Astra from any other literary con, then. It's still a good time, though.

(Though you don't actually have to eat the cheesecake at the beefcake/cheesecake event; you could just pay $5 to have some cute young thing sit on your lap for five minutes, and the money would go to Casey House. I don't think they care so long as it stays within the bounds of legality, decency, and comfort of the servers. And at Ad Astra, sometimes I think "decency" is a relative term. ;) )

"Decency" is a relative term ;)

I was planning to take my fourteen year old son to Ad Astra, would you say it was inappropriate for him?

I've never seen anything like what you describe at British or US cons.

I wouldn't say it was inappropriate at all. And perhaps you haven't seen it before because it goes on behind closed doors. If you don't want your son to see certain things, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

I was just looking at the SF-Lovers convention list as part of my own search for conventions. Based on their stated themes I probably wouldn't usually go to C-ACE but this year it has Jo Walton as GoH.

Not exactly a Minicon or Boskone, but mighty oaks from little walnuts grow, or whatever.

I'm going to run one next June in Montreal probably called Papercon, would you like to help?

June 2005 or June 2006?

2006.

FYI, Gaylaxicon is set to be in Toronto June 16-18, 2006. You might want to pick a different weekend. ;)

I'm not opposed to helping out but I don't have any idea what I could do that would be helpful.

Something cons sometimes seem to need more help with than they get: Checking when people say they can appear on programs against when they're scheduled. So that the person who says "I can't be there till Saturday at 2 pm; and I'm never awake before 11 am" doesn't get scheduled on a panel at 10 am on Friday.

When I stage-managed, I planned rehearsals by finding every conflict between people's schedules. Doesn't everyone do it that way? There must be software for this but a sheet of paper will do as well.

For Toronto Trek,

dx4 developed software that does this for us, and we use that in combination with a manual check. Works pretty well. We can also make sure that A/V equipment isn't scheduled to be in opposite ends of the hotel from one timeslot to the next, and the same with panelists; we set things up last year so that all of Derwin Mak's panels were in one part of the hotel because he'd recently had heart surgery, for example.

It's not difficult. Someone just has to make the time to do it.

Book oriented SF conventions in Canada

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