Just got back from BayCon

[mithriltabby]

I grew up in a very urban environment. In the media, I’ve seen portrayals of the “small town” where there’s a sense of community, where people understand the expected standard of behavior and a degree of neighborly feeling where they’re fairly comfortable around each other. I have never experienced this for myself in any place I’ve lived. Where I do get this feeling is when I’m in a science fiction convention— a place where everyone has agreed that eclecticism is the norm and the new and unusual is to be savored.

It’s rather like having Brigadoon for your home town.

I have no idea if a community composed of fans all in the same area for the long term could work out as well as a convention can. (Fandom includes some extreme personalities that can have interesting discussions in a convention setting but might wind up seriously getting on each other’s nerves if they lived on the same city block.) But I sometimes wonder what might happen if a large group of science fiction fans, gamers, anachronists, neo-pagans, and so on were to converge on a particular place and become a substantial portion of the population. The problem is having jobs for all these folks— you’d need to have a lot of folks that run catalog or online businesses, telecommute to work, etc., or take over a number of floors in an arcology. (If anyone ever gets around to building arcologies in a place where they’re needed to relieve the housing pressure, like in Silicon Valley.)

I am now reminded of something I heard at the convention: a fan with a technology job emerges from watching The Matrix for the first time and declares, “So that’s what it’s like to be in the target demographic!” (Someone else opined that that was also a good basis for answering the question “What’s it like being a white male?” when trying to understand the difference between the “minority” and “mainstream” experience.)