While I was at Finncon I was seeing regular enthusiastic tweets from people at Readercon. It sounded like a very impressive event (albeit, Graham, very small in comparison). Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover on getting home that Readercon 2010 will be seriously downsized. Some initial unhappy reaction, and response from the convention, can be found here.

Much of the negative reaction can, I suspect, be blamed on the fact that Boston fandom has a very poor track record when it comes to convention downsizing. The infamous Boskone meltdown, which gave rise to Arisia, is something that fandom ought to have learned from, but is also bound to be brought up any time a US con has to downsize. Also Eric Van, although ferociously intelligent in many ways, is not the best communicator in fandom. He needed someone else to handle the downsizing project.

Therein, however, lies the rub. Eric is downsizing Readercon because he doesn’t have the time and energy to run it at the current levels any more, and he says he can’t find anyone to help him. Is that really the case?

There are issues with popular culture events that can lead to a desire to downsize. I’ll talk about them more in the Finncon report. However, Readercon has never been anywhere near the size that Finncon is now, so it shouldn’t suffer from those sorts of problems. Nevertheless, fan-run conventions continue to get themselves into this sort of mess because as a community we tend to be bad at delegating, bad at managing people, and bad at PR. We are also bad at understanding our motivations.

I’ve never been to Readercon – there tends to always be something else happening around that time – so I can’t speak authoritatively on this. However, I understand that it is around the same size as WisCon (under 1000), which also has phenomenally good programming, so running it should not be impossible. WisCon also instituted a membership cap (because it didn’t want to leave its current facility) without causing undue upset. Of course if the Readercon folks don’t want to run their convention any more, that’s down to them, but I don’t believe that it is impossible to carry on the way they were going, if they could get other people involved.

Unfortunately, as a convention gets bigger and more successful, there will always be people who wander around complaining that “things aren’t like they used to be”, there are way too many people around, and they are “not like us”. If you listen to these whiners it is all too easy to get depressed about your convention and want to give up. Ultimately, however, there are only two good reasons for running a con. They are 1) “I want to run a big party for myself and my friends” and 2) “I want to promote an interest in science fiction.” You can do both for a while, but if you are successful you have to believe in 2, otherwise it all becomes too much. It sounds to me like Readercon wants to go back to doing 1, and that means there will be a hole in the market for anyone who wants to start a con doing 2.