Ravings of a Textual Deviant

So, here I am at this year’s WorldCon in Toronto. First, I have to say that Toronto is a wonderful place to be, whether or not there’s a convention.

Which is a Good Thing.

For reasons which have yet to become clear to me, TorCon III is not quite up to what I am used to from a WorldCon. There are a lot of things missing, which seems to be precisely the problem.

The dealer’s room is miniscule. It’s about 20% of the size I’m used to seeing at a WorldCon. There’s also a noticeable lack of variety–normally, I would say the more books, the better. However, it’s about 75% booksellers, with similar stock, and 90% of which I could easily order online for less money and no currency conversion hassles, GST, or PST. There are only two costume sellers–one with no more than a dozen items, none of which are impressive; the other only impressive in comparison. There is only one DVD/video table, and I’m not impressed with the selection. There’s one anime table. There’s one table for bumper stickers and message buttons–normally, they are legion. There are no games dealers at all; just one spinner rack of 3rd Edition D & D books at a bookseller.

Likewise, the art show has a lot of holes. I would expect that on the first day of the convention, especially in the morning, but about 1/3 of the panels are empty. I’m also sorry to say that there’s less high-quality work as well, which is the real disappointment. There’s a decent amount of good work, but not nearly so much great work as I’d hoped. And, I am sad to say, there’s more bad work–if you’re going to enter your kids’ pencil sketches, at least press out the creases! There’s also a preponderance of drawings and paintings–not very much 3-D work at all, which is something I like. There is a healthy amount of stained glass, but there’s very little sculpture, mixed-media, soft-sculpture, etc. One thing that I did enjoy considerably were a series of parking stickers done on cling-film, so that you could actually stick them in your car. There were six different options: Wolfram and Hart, Miskatonic University, Unseen University, Muppet Labs, Lex Luthor’s company (whose name escapes me), and one other one which escapes me entirely. The print shop was doing good business, and I did pick up a lovely Celtic knotwork/tree picture by Svetlana Chmakova.

Also missing, or possibly misplaced, were some of the participants on the panel discussions. There has been at least one major problem affecting the scheduling, by which I mean panels are not always where or when they are listed in either the program book, the quick-reference guide, or the allegedly-corrected daily schedule. Panel participants who do manage to show up in the right place at the right time are often lacking information, such as who the moderator is, a description of the topic, and the length of time they’re scheduled. This disappoints me more than anything else, as the programming is always a big feature of any convention for me. Moreover, it bodes ill for events like the Hugo Awards and the Masquerade, which are complex enough when everything’s going smoothly.

Most of all, there seems to be a shortage of attendees. The last attendance figure I saw was approaching 3700, and I’ve been to larger regional conventions.

If I had to take a guess, I would start off by saying that Toronto has had a rough time of it the past several months–SARS, mad cow, the blackout, and so on. I’m sure this has put a serious dent in attendance–dealers and artists as well as your basic model of fan. However, I suspect that the crucial problem is that convention ops is understaffed in a variety of areas, which would explain a lot of the behind-the-scenes problems whose effects I’m seeing. Nothing seems to be running smoothly; there’s a feeling that things are barely under control and that only through great effort. I am certain that the convention committee and crew are doing their best–probably with a shortage of volunteers along with everything else–but it’s just not quite coming together, sort of like jam or Jell-O that’s too liquid to eat, but too gelled pour. I sincerely hope that it’ll set overnight.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2003 at 12:51 am and is filed under Been There, Done That, This Modern World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.