Chapter 47
What Homo erectus is to Homo sapiens, Worldcon is to comic and popular culture, the ur-source for nerds, the Nile headwaters for all things geek.
The first of the science-fiction conventions was held in New York’s Caravan Hall in July 1939, to coincide with the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair. The event drew 200 attendees with a roster that read like a Constitutional Convention of modern science-fiction’s Founding Fathers: Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury, John W. Campbell, Harry Harrison, and Forrest J. Ackerman. They were the seeds of an enchanted forest that, respectively, sprouted the Foundation series, “I Robot,” “Lest Darkness Fall,” The Silver John stories, “The Martian Chronicles,” “Who Goes There?” (better known in its film form as “The Thing From Another World” and John Carpenter’s gonzo remake, “The Thing”), “The Stainless Steel Rat,” and Ackerman’s “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine. They were the Argonauts cruising on a sea of dreams.
The convention didn’t go by the name Worldcon at the start. The participants referred to it as the World Science Fiction Convention. The diminutive “con” didn’t come into vogue until Ackerman later referred to the convention as Nycon, and Nycon 1, mingling the abbreviation for New York with the first syllable of “convention.” (Ackerman also holds the honor of abbreviating “science fiction” into “sci-fi.”) The following year, 1940, when the convention moved to Chicago, the event’s program booklet sported the name Chicon. Later, the World Science Fiction Society (which runs the expo) formally invested the annual convention with the name Worldcon. Held each year since 1939 (except for a brief hiatus from 1942 to 1945, when Hitler commanded more attention than Ming the Merciless), the conference has been sited from Miami to Montreal and London to Los Angeles. In the years since the show’s inception, the “con” suffix spread like spam for erectile dysfunction—Comic-Con, Dragon Con, Revel Con, Cardboard*Con, Capricon, DeepSouthCon, BotCon, Costume-Con, WisCon, The Wrath of Con, and a slew of others as prolific and confusing as the Marvel comics universe. In 2013, Eventbrite Inc. estimated that such conventions grossed more than $600 million in ticket sales, with 47 percent of these convention-goers traveling to three or more events each year. The majority of attendees report spending between $100 and $500 at each show.
Worldcon’s effect goes beyond the merely economic, though, into the cultural. It is the Cthulhu of conventions, its tentacles twisting around and shaping the nature of science-fiction and fantasy.
Starting in 1953, Worldcon initiated the Hugo Awards, given “for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy,” whose voting is done by anyone purchasing a membership in that year’s convention. But its greatest effect may have been the sartorial style of whole nations.
Ackerman and his significant other, Myrtle Jones, “stylishly dressed in the fashions of the twenty-fifth century,” had celebrated the inaugural Worldcon by dressing up in a long-sleeved “futuristicostume” modeled after the outfits worn in the 1936 sci-fi feature “Things to Come.” (For the 1941 convention, Jones donned a frog face concocted for her by Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion model animation.) Ackerman, resplendent in a green satin cape, peg pants, and button-down shirt embroidered with his nickname “4SJ,” greeted attendees while only speaking Esperanto, the constructed language from the nineteenth century (which, naturally, has held its own exhibition, the World Esperanto Congress, since 1905). The next year in Chicago, the first Worldcon masquerade ball was held, starting a tradition, lasting for decades, where revelers dressed as spacemen, scientists, and bug-eyed monsters.
Then, after covering the 1984 Worldcon in Los Angeles, Nobuyuki Takahashi coined the word “cosplay,” a portmanteau of “costume” and “play” that reflected not just costumes donned, as briefly as a song, for an event, but costumes studied, crafted, and modeled, as passionately as a sommelier waxing about a Krug Clos d’Ambonnay 1998 for an occasion. (Others date the term’s origin story differently, linking it to Takahashi’s writing it in 1983.)
The phenomenon spread, its vector the world of fantasy and science-fiction conventions, resulting in a cosplay cafe in 1999, the first World Cosplay Summit in 2003, and the reality-TV show “Heroes of Cosplay” in 2013. So significant is the rise of cosplay that its popularity, similar to that of rock and roll and comic books of previous generational scaremongering, has been correlated to a faltering economy, because hordes of young people were opting to dress as Sailor Moon, or Princess Leia in a gold bikini, and Boba Fett or Walter White/Heisenberg rather than scour the want ads for responsible work. In the end, Worldcon, its many offshoots, and cosplay teach us the value of what Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”