Karen Burnham

I asked our venerable Roundtable panel about conventions and the con-going experience. I got a huge number of responses that cover a wide range of practical and subjective aspects of this part of the sf/f culture. I decided to break up the responses to cover separate themes, and spread them out over two or three weeks. It seems appropriate to surround WorldCon (which I must sadly miss this year), with discussions about conventions.

This first installment looks at the experience of going to conventions as a pro. Read on for perspectives from Marie Brennan, Cecelia Holland, Terry Bisson, John Clute, Gary K. Wolfe, Paul Witcover, Rich Horton, James Patrick Kelly, and Rachel Swirsky.

As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease of reading. If you’d like to read it all on a single page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. If you don’t see the drop down menu, please click here.

Marie Brennan

Early con-going stories? First panel I was ever on was at World Fantasy… first panel of the con… with the Guest of Honor as one of the panelists… while I had a whopping one short story to my name… and I was moderating.

Yeah, no pressure.

Funny thing was, ten minutes into the panel, I realized my nervousness had completely vanished. In fact, the whole thing felt kinda familiar. And that’s when I realized that moderating a panel is a good deal like leading discussion in a grad school seminar, only with less name-dropping of Derrida and Foucault.

I quite like doing panels. (I even like moderating them — I’ve been lucky and have never had a real problem panelist to deal with.) At World Fantasy, I always opt for a panel over a reading; I figure the latter is mostly likely to draw in fans of my work (by which I mean whatever friends of mine in attendance at the con I can drag into the room), whereas the former will introduce me to people who don’t already know who I am. My approach to panels is that I do my best to be interesting on whatever the topic is, and then afterward, hopefully a few people will remember my name, with positive associations.

Beyond that, they’re good for networking in the “make friends with people” sense of the word, and sometimes for more organized business, like having dinner with my editor. But mostly they’re a chance to make this job social instead of solitary. Do I learn things? Yes, albeit generally during conversations in the bar or the hallway or at dinner, rather than from the panels themselves. But that’s at least half because panel topics get very, very repetitive after a while. We could use some more innovation on that front.

Cecelia Holland

The first con I ever went to was the World Fantasy Con at Calloway Gardens, sometime back in the 80′s.

My career was tanking (again) and I felt like something the business was trying to scrape off its shoe. I thought I was over. Charles Brown, pbuh, recognizing my despair, took me down to Georgia, and I found a new life there. I felt at home there. I had never been around so many writers, and the word-carnival atmosphere was thrilling. A lot of people whose work I admired knew mine, and I made invaluable new connections. I came back from the dead there.

Ever since I’ve loved going to WFC, almost the only con I go to. I love the sense of belonging, first, but also there’s a level of conversation and critical thinking you don’t get anywhere else. It’s a major garden of ideas, of contacts and leads, a living world of writers. (I’ve been to ReaderCon and ICFA too and find the same yeasty intellectual vigor). When I’m tucked in back here in the wilderness I am still somehow connected to a bigger place. So bless Charles Brown, and bless WFC.

Terry Bisson

My first con was a tiny thing at Columbia University in NY. There were only two writers and two editors, so I met and spent the day hanging out with Tom Disch, Ellen Datlow and Alice Turner. My life has been downhill ever since.

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Cecelia Holland

Oh, thanks. And here that night at Antioch motor speedway was the highlight of my life.

John Clute
Good comments on panels and panel etiquette, certainly as it applies to avoiding the impression we’re on panels to sell our wares. Unless the quality of our wares can be defined as the fitness to the panel topic of what we say. Which almost certainly excludes referencing one’s own books (and absolutely excludes referencing one’s own books solely).

I remember one WorldCon in particular, almost certain it was Boston 2004. I had a panel to do, but was slated to be absent for the first five minutes in order to help present an award (no memory what award it was, maybe the Cordwainer Smith when WorldCons still housed it). My absence was announced and apologized for in advance. When I got to the panel, a self-publishing author had spread her wares not only in front of her own patch but over mine as well. As politely as I wished to be, I moved enough of them so I could see the audience. The look she gave me was sour. She said very little during the course of the panel, except to mention her latest publication a few times.

Gary K. Wolfe
As a young academic, I started off by going to Science Fiction Research Association conferences in odd places like Staten Island or Cedar Falls, Iowa. But some of those early SFRAs were pretty spectacular–at Cedar Falls in 1978, for example, I first met Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Joe & Gay Haldeman, Gordon Dickson, Darko Suvin, Robert Scholes, Eric Rabkin, and Brian Aldiss (who was the Pilgrim Award recipient that year). They even published a “Proceedings” volume, which is probably one of the rarer items in my SF criticism collection.

That led me to test the waters on fan cons, but the first couple of local ones I attended near Chicago weren’t that impressive. A few years later the World Fantasy Convention landed in a Chicago suburb. By then I’d gotten to know Philip Jose Farmer, and when he invited me to lunch along with Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber, I got a taste of what it felt like to be an insider, and WFC became one of my favorite cons, though I didn’t start making them regularly until sometime after 2000. That and the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (a sort of half-con, half academic conference, which at least makes it somewhat comprehensible to my academic colleagues), are, along with Readercon, about the only ones I try to make on a regular basis.

I did, along the way, attend a couple of Worldcons here in Chicago, but even then they seemed almost unmanageable. My most bizarre convention experience was undoubtedly a Star Trek convention in the mid-1970s. One of my students was heavily involved in organizing it–purely as a business venture, since she had almost no interest in SF–and she asked me to come up with names of writers to invite. I don’t remember the full list, but Dickson, Farmer, Bloch, and Ellison were on it, and I’m pretty sure that was the first time I’d met Harlan. Because of my involvement, I got some sort of special “crew” badge, so I spent much of the con hanging out in the executive suite at the Conrad Hilton with the show’s cast members and the various writers I’d invited. I had no real interest in attending the giant events scheduled in the hotel ballrooms, but later learned the convention drew something like 14,000. The oddest thing was my student’s habit of paying the per diems for all the guests in gold dollar coins. I still have no idea where she got them.

Paul Witcover
I don’t recall all the particulars of my first con, but it was held in Baltimore at some point in the early 80s, I believe, and coincided with Poe’s birthday. I attended with a friend of mine. One high point was watching Fritz Lieber read The Raven at Poe’s grave. One expected him, when finished, to open up a casket and crawl inside. Another was attending a panel that featured Stephen King, among others. He sat down with a brown paper bag, opened it, and pulled out a six pack of beer, which he proceeded to drink from as the panel progressed. I’ve often thought in the years since, when I’ve been trapped on hijacked or just plain boring panels, that I should have followed his example. But on the whole I prefer to do my con drinking in bars and at room parties. I used to spend quite a bit of time in the dealers’ room, but since I can’t afford anything I see there, my enjoyment has petered out: now I take a turn or two at most, and even that seems to involve more chatting than browsing. One thing I absolutely love about cons is the opportunity to hear writers read from their work. It’s fun and can be surprisingly illuminating. If I could only choose to hear panels or readings, I should choose the latter without hesitation. Hearing John Crowley read was an eye-opening experience; it gave me an insight into his prose that I never would have experienced from the page alone. Ditto with Jeff Ford, Liz Hand, or any number of other excellent writers who are also amazing readers.
Rich Horton

My first con was ConQuesT, in Kansas City, in about 1998. I was fortunate in having been urged to come by Dave Truesdale, who knew plenty of people and introduced me widely. Perhaps for that reason ConQuesT remains my favorite con — I know more people there and feel more comfortable.

I quickly started attending my more local con, Archon, as well. The first couple of times there I had the same experience some others have reported at other cons — I was too shy to introduce myself to anyone and felt a bit lonely and disconnected. This has certainly gotten better over time.

The only other con I’ve attended is Windycon, on Steve Silver’s invitation. (It’s also convenient as it is reasonably close to my parents’ place, and I can stay with them.)

I’ve always really enjoyed panels, both as an audience member and as a panelist. And the dealer’s room is a constant treasure, for the old books and magazines, and the less readily available new books.

I have a few cons on my “really want to get to” list — Readercon, for sure. And Wiscon someday (except it conflicts with ConQuesT.) And of course a Worldcon (next year in Chicago, for sure!) and a World Fantasy. It’s a bit hard to travel far, though, because my wife has no interest in SF and would simply feel left out.

James Patrick Kelly
I should probably stop telling this story and with this iteration, maybe I will. It is a tale of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. This occurred at one of the bigger cons, possibly a WorldCon but I can’t remember which. I was still a relative newbie, possibly just turned thirty, although I had published some and was starting to get on panels when I showed up at conventions. When I saw my schedule for this one I was at once horrified and elated to see that I would be on a panel with Robert Silverberg. This was the first time I would be meeting the great Silverberg, who had been one of my writer heroes from the moment I graduated from Tom Swift and Tom Corbett to real SF. Sure, I revered the big three — Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov — but as a young writer with a literary bent, it was Silverberg’s career I most aspired to emulate.

I have no memory of the panel’s topic, but I do remember arriving early and taking my place at the far end of the table, where I could hunker down and escape notice. Bob (did I just call him Bob? I still can’t believe this!) arrived shortly thereafter. He chose the place beside me. It was all I could do to keep from melting off the chair. But I gathered my courage and introduced myself and he did likewise, as if he needed to. Pause. Still five minutes to the start of the panel. Awkward silence. I decided let my inner fanboy loose. I leaned toward him and murmured something like: “I have to tell you that I’m a huge fan. You may not believe this, but your novel The Man in the Maze was the first sf book I bought with my own allowance.” Bob glanced at me and said with his characteristic sang froid, “Jim, I will thank you never to speak of this again.”

I was pretty sure he was speaking ironically. Or was he? Gulp.

Now as a writer who has now attained a certain age, I can appreciate where this remark came from. For example, I still get an odd twinge when my friend Matt Cheney, a man of mature years, tells the story of how we met when I visited his middle school when he was in seventh grade. Nevertheless, I was momentarily croggled. What if I had really given offense? But here is where my misspent college career as an English major paid off. I opined to Bob as how it seemed unlikely that most readers would get the fact that The Man in the Maze was a riff on the myth of Philoctetes, the archer who owned the bow of Heracles. Philoctetes was marooned by the Greeks on the island of Lemnos on the way to Troy because a wound on his foot was festering and gave off a terrible smell. For this he blamed Odysseus. Later it was prophesied that the Greeks would never conquer Troy without Heracles bow, and Odysseus was dispatched to convince Philoctetes to rejoin the countrymen who had betrayed him. Change the island of Lemnos to planet Lemnos and the foul smell to continuous and uncontrollable telepathic broadcast, add a huge helping of genius and you’ve got a wonderful sf novel (the original copy of which I still own). Now I have no idea why I knew the story of Philoctetes or when I had mapped it onto Bob’s novel, but suddenly this wasn’t mere fanboy gush, it was one writer noticing the intricacy of another’s work. I believe that my friendship with Bob Silverberg began with that awkward moment.

And I’m afraid I’ve dined off this anecdote (at conventions) many, many times before this. I’ve done so in the hope that Bob doesn’t really mind when I remind people what an influence he has been on this field — and on me.

Terry Bisson

OK I stand corrected, and apologize. My first post was a joke (though it was true: I was dazzled by such company) because I thought this topic would lead to a lot of dull grumbling. Not so. A lot of good stories instead. Mine differ only in the details. I didn’t set out to be a SF writer but discovered I was one; and discovered through the cons that I was part of a community of writers (something I had always wanted) with a consistent (somewhat) community of thoughtful readers. I had stumbled into the city I had always sought and been given a home. With all our grumbling I think we all realize what a rare privilege that is for writers in America. I like what Jim Kelly said. I won’t be running them down.
Paul Witcover
On Terry’s point, when my partner Cynthia was coming to join me at Readercon this year, she told a mutual friend, who is a fine writer and a teacher in an MFA program, where she was going–and he expressed commiseration, telling her how much he hated writer’s conferences–his experience being solely of the literary, academic sort. That did make me realize how different the SF con scene really is from any other writerly experience. Perhaps the romance cons are similar; I don’t have first-hand experience of them. But I tend to doubt it.

Rachel Swirsky
Rather than wait until I get home to give an actual respond, I’ll just say this: “Can’t answer. At a con.”*

*Or con equivalent.