DragonCon Review

                                                        By Doug Tillyer

 

       DragonCon is annually held across Labor Day weekend in Atlanta Ga. and is one of the largest if not the largest SF convention held in the US.  They admit to 35,000+ attendees, that they spread across the multilevel convention space of three adjacent hotels.  It tends to be a bit of a walk-a-con, if you’re interested in multiple themes, you get to hike between hotels quite a bit.  While we did not loose any fans to the local traffic, the three hotels were separated by major, three lane, roads, carrying a fair bit of traffic.  The Con actually went to the trouble of hiring a traffic officer to control the traffic on the road separating the Hyatt and Marriot.  The hotels are not particularly well equipped for handicapped access and as you would expect the hotel elevators are completely overwhelmed most of the convention.  The Pocket program was very irritating, to find what panels a guest was attending required referencing 4 pages within the program, and half of the Marriot's convention space was omitted from the hotel maps. 

      Their websites are: http://www.dragoncon.org   and their daily broadsheet is available at  http://dailydragon.dragoncon.net/

      The convention organization is a bit different from most other SF conventions.  Most program tracks have exclusive use of one particular panel room with occasional relocations to a "Main" (read ballroom type) programming room for program items expected to attract larger then normal attendance.  This is required as some of the panel items for a track include the media guests that are also present at the convention.  It appears that many attendees come just for one particular track... eg Star Trek, Buffy, Stargate etc. 

      There is a HUGE Gaming area for boardgames, miniatures and RPG's, most of the Hiltons convention space was dedicated to Gaming. Dragoncon appears to have its roots in a gaming convention, with media guests.  There were 3-4 rooms dedicated to Media (i.e. anime, video, films etc), three large dealers rooms, an art show, an Artist Alley for various comic artists to display their skills and wares, and an area called the "Walk of Fame" where media guests were set up to meet their fans, and sell photos, autographs and other jeejaws.

      Costuming appears to be a major staple of Dragoncon, there were hundreds of hall costumes, Pat and I missed the Saturday Parade through the streets of Atlanta, and the masquerade was well attended.  There was a spill over room with a closed video feed of the masquerade and it was also piped into guest rooms of the three main convention hotels.  The Star Trek Track held a Miss Klingon Contest, and the Star Wars track held a Princess Leia look-a-like contest.  I caught the end of this (just by chance) moving between panels, there was a foam Jabba the Hutt with 12-15 women draped around him in their Leia slave girl costumes....  and a Security guard bellowing "Take your photo and Move along.  These are not the Leia's you're looking for...."

 

      Pat and I went mostly to get autographs of various authors, at which we were very successful.  In fact, if you’re interested in author autographs, or just chatting with an author Dragoncon would seen to be an excellent convention to do this.  I get the feeling that Literary SF is almost an afterthought with the convention and not on the radar of many attendees. 

      Todd McCaffrey was in attendence, there was a dedicated PERN track, outside of the general SF Literature track.

      There was a fair amount of science and space science related programming, updates on various nasa projects, private space launch etc.

     Michael Laine, president of Liftport was there and had a panel each day of the convention.  I managed to get to all of the panels (at least in part) and their plans have evolved and matured.  They have produced a trade paperback LIFTPORT, from Meisha Merlin, with a mix of fiction and hard science articles.  Their confidence level is high that the Carbon Nanotube and Laser advancements they need will succeed, they appear to be less sanguine that the legal/political problems will be surmounted.  Liftport is running a contest, 5 prizes of 1000 shares of liftport stock for $10.00.... 

The url is:
WWW.liftport.com/contest_Form.html  When your there you can also register for their newsletter from the mail site.