Kayla Allen corrects me and supplies additional info on Westercon, which I discussed in this post…
Westercon is not actually just a California convention. It has and can be held anywhere in western North America or Hawaii. (It’s been in Canada three times, Hawaii once, but never Mexico.) Sometimes, it is held in conjunction with another convention: this year and next year, it will be held in conjunction with BayCon in Santa Clara, California. After that, its future is uncertain, as the number of people willing to do the work to organize SF/F conventions appears to be getting smaller. There’s a proposal to retire the convention after the Westercon 80, scheduled for 2028, and the members of this year’s Westercon in Santa Clara will vote on it.
Westercon is somewhat like Worldcon, and was originally founded because people on the west coast thought that Worldcon being held in impossibly-far-away places (like New York City) meant they wanted to have a convention that they could actually attend. Worldcon this coming year is going to be in Anaheim, then Montreal after that, but then the next few are likely to be overseas, as most non-U.S. fans have absolutely no desire to travel to the U.S.A. under the current regime.
“Why, what could be keeping them away?” he asked, knowingly. “I thought every single thing that regime did was an unprecedented success,” he said, sarcastically.
Thanks, Kayla. I hope I made it clear that I mostly enjoyed the two Westercons I attended more than fifty years ago. It wasn’t the con that soured me on science-fiction conventions…just a few people at them. And I guess once we started having Comic Book Conventions in California, that killed my desire to go to s-f cons.
When I first became aware of Comic Book Fandom, there were those who referred to it as a subset of Science-Fiction Fandom. I haven’t heard anyone say that in a lonnnng time. If anything, the rankings became reversed. But even if I don’t attend them, I kinda like the whole concept of science-fiction conventions and I’m kinda sorry to hear that this one might go away. The folks attending them seemed to have such a good time.
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