A very nice map
Thank you.
I realized that I don't know enough about these maps to go for anything fancy, so I opted for simple and fun. The vagueness of some of my responses makes sense, I hope. Technology is part of hard science fiction, military SF, and space opera, but it isn't necessarily part of social fiction/dystopia or fantasy.
No doubt some American attendees were able to bike, drive, and take public transit to the convention if it was in their city (and the same for the people in other countries when it was their turn).
The SCA was founded by a group of SF/F authors and history buffs, and it's not uncommon for them to show up at cons and have a table in the dealers' room and do demos of fighting and dancing (the other people around are usually invited to participate in the dancing - leading to the very odd sight of a guy dressed like Hagar the Horrible, including the hairstyle, doing medieval dancing!).
Books are imported and exported from countries, and travel is part of this because both fans and authors like to make the convention part of a larger holiday. When Bjo Trimble and Sonni Cooper were the co-GoHs in Calgary in the early '80s, they decided to take a couple of extra days and go to the Calgary Zoo and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller. They issued an open invitation for people to tag along when they went to the zoo, so there were half a dozen of us who took them up on that. It was an amazing day, as they told us stories about some of the people involved in the making of Star Trek (they lived close to one of the sites where both TOS and Bonanza did some of their location filming for several episodes).
WorldCon is something I've never been to, but always wished I could. From the descriptions, it's similar to the conventions I went to in the '80s and '90s, just really,
really bigger. Getting to meet and chat with the authors is what I like about SF/F conventions, so WorldCon would be an incredible experience.
www.rostercon.com
