Readercon Impressions Part 1 Monday, July 12, 2010

After a lot of bus riding and walking around the Pioneer Valley cities of Northampton and Amherst--like the rest of the Northeast, they were experiencing record heat-- we finally found a place to live, in a townhouse not far from the UMass campus. We celebrated by canceling all of other showings and having drinks with the local poets. The next day, we took an early bus and went to the Marriott in Burlington, Massachusetts, site of the 21st Annual Readercon.

Burlington itself is a weird simulacra of a city about 7 miles to the north west of Boston, whose buildings encrust, in regular formations common both to bivalvic sea life and retail architecture, the intersection of Interstate 95 and State Road 3. It is a city built to encourage sales without the heady distractions of public life. The only thing distinguishing the Marriott from the nearby Burlington Mall was its bearding of flowering bushes and the swimming pool in back.

Inside was a different matter. By the time we walked into the front lobby at three in the afternoon on Friday, hot and tired from our apartment search, the convention had already been going for a good 24 hours. It was our first big science fiction convention. The front lobby was clogged with men and women, sporting physiques somewhat outlying those held by our Renaissance-era painter friends as falling within the ideal, wrapped to the last lumpen torso in black T-Shirts, either tight-fitting or loose-fitting but never in-between, proclaiming allegiance to "Clarion 2009" or sporting some cloud-borne cryptozoological monstrosity.* The Burlington Marriott is foremost a business hotel, and the hotel's ordinary clientèle, distinguishable by their minority presence as well as by their attractively-fitted clothing and ruddy skin tone, slipped among the Readercon bodies like declawed lions among a thousand confident gazelles.

Another first impression: outsider opinion holds that these conventions are attended exclusively by men, and while that may once have been true, the situation has changed. Unlike your typical corporate boardroom or university creative writing poetry department, the world of science fiction and fantasy has in the last twenty years seen an influx of feminine talent, both lucrative and inspiring. These are not necessarily the spiritual daughters of Russ and Atwood and LeGuin, who were first-rate writers because they had to be, but hard-headed dealers in the business of genre, ready to give a verbal power-point presentation on why her vampire-loves-mermaid steampunk novel is more thrilling than the other three on the market. These earners outnumbered this generation's first-raters like Nalo Hopkinson and Kelly Link, but they were in the right place, in the marketplace, having fun as both fans and untortured practitioners, among their peers. Readercon felt like a solidly co-ed affair.