I was talking with my greengrocer about where I was disappearing off to over the Easter weekend, and he listened to the sort of stuff that goes on, raising a skeptical eyebrow. Then he said: “A few years ago, I would have said you were mad, but I caught myself looking at this advert in my tropical fish magazine for a Fish Fair in Germany and thinking whether I could afford to go.” Neon tetras or science fiction: a gathering of disparate people with a shared but niche interest, meeting together for a short but intense period of time to celebrate everything fishy/skiffy, and then go back home where no one understands you and you indulge in your passion either ignored or mocked.

Okay. Let’s talk about the paradigm-shifting elephant in the room from the outset. The internet. I’m pretty certain it’s been as revolutionary for the tropical fish community as it has been for fandom. I remember the first time as a baby scientist that I emailed someone whose paper I’d been reading, back in the early days of JANET, UNIX line commands and glowing green-screen terminals. I wanted some more technical information – before, it’d have been a letter, a formal barrier to communication, slow and time-consuming – now the answer came flashing back from half a world away. Anyone in my tiny specialisation was no further than a short walk down the corridor to the computer room. I was abruptly, immediately, not alone.

It was only natural that geeks made the internet their home early on. We were the trail-blazing colonists followed by the pornographers, the knitters, Esperanto-speakers and petrol-heads. Usenet was king until the WWW. It wasn’t just that we talked about science fiction, we were using a science fiction medium to talk about it.

So did any of this negate the need for Cons like Eastercon? Or did it make them more important – a place to cement nebulous online friendships and have unmediated ‘face time’ with people you’d heard about but never met?

Yes. And no. Some of the conversations I had over Easter – technically as an industry professional, actually as someone who just loves SF – were enlightening and disturbing. Without breaking confidences, this was the oddest: “Fandom is very conservative.” That had never really occurred to me before, but here we all were, in the middle of pretty much nowhere (sorry, Birmingham), in a Hilton hotel (way outside my price-range if not for Con rates, and even then…), spending four days inside over a gloriously sunny weekend, paying a lot – really, a lot – for drinks and food. We were doing it that way mostly, partly because we’ve always done it that way. The model is still viable because people still come.

This is not meant to be a broadside against the single-venue hotel-based Con. I thoroughly enjoyed my Eastercon: I did the whole spectrum of events, I was at panels both as panellist and punter. I did a reading and signings, I talked to other writers, publishers, and fans, and did a decent amount of drinking in the real ale Fan bar. Personally, it was worth it.

But was it worth it for enough people? SF, as one of the panels discussed, has won the culture war. Sfnal ideas are mainstream. They’re everywhere. Eastercon, as the UK’s flagship fan-run SF event should be packed out… There are worries about the greying of fandom, almost in the same way that churches worry about an ageing congregation. Where’s the younger generation, and why don’t they want to do the things we do?

For many years now, evangelical Christians have been hiring out-of-season holiday camps. Just google Spring Harvest if you don’t believe me. They get hundreds of families with kids, students, young professionals – the only demographic which is under-represented is pensioners – and lock them in for a five-day extravaganza.

And it turns out that someone’s trying something similar-but-different: I got to talk to people who’d been on the first SFX weekender, held in the depths of winter in a holiday camp. Which was packed with younger – twenties and thirties – fans. Three days of intense multimedia SFF bolstered by the feeling that you were on the set of the Great Escape. And importantly, the financial bar for entry to the event was significantly lower than for Eastercon. Doing the maths with next year’s figures, even a VIP entry ticket with all the knobs and whistles is lower than Illustrious membership and three nights at the Hilton.

I like the hotel-based Con. I like the idea of staying up till stupid o’clock having beery conversations with people I’ve never met, then staggering no further than the lift in order to be transported to my bed. I like the idea of having everything and everyone under one roof.

But I also like the idea of kids being able to afford to just pitch up to a Con and while they’re there, not have to watch every penny, and be surrounded by a mass of people their own age, people my age, people who are older and younger and whatever, and being part of a gloriously diverse, temporary and transient community.