The Science Fiction and Fantasy Society is sad to announce what is obvious to everyone, that we are unable to hold SFContario 9 this year.

The main issue is money. Two issues affect us.Hotel rental has increased by more than 40% in Toronto since our first event in 2010. Membership numbers were below expectations last year, and we just don’t have cash in the bank to cover deposits this year. We need to recapitalize to come back to the convention scene. A second issue is just personal; some of our core committee have had to deal with a variety of personal distractions preventing us from contributing to the convention as we have in the past; most of these distractions are temporary, but this year has been difficult for some people. A third issue seems to be marketing; while we’ve always had an excellent program, thanks to the brilliant community of authors, creative people, and active fans in our region, and while practically everyone who attends the convention has a great experience with the program and social activities, this message hasn’t gotten out to the wider community as widely as we’d hoped. We’ve had complaints about the hotel, which again goes back to the financial issue (we’ve been in the most affordable location in the downtown area). We would need to take some time to brainstorm better methods of outreach. Finally, we face the issue every convention faces, that fandom has changed. Fandom overall has grown in society, but it has done so partly through high-profile pop culture gatherings, and partly through online channels, such that our traditional format of in-person social gathering is in less demand; this is an issue many small and medium-sized conventions have been facing in recent years.

We also apologize to our community for the delay in announcing this news. We’ve tried for a while to find a workable solution to financial issues. After that, we faced difficulty getting our core committee together at the same time to have a conversation on how to proceed; this discussion really has only begun and we have a lot to work through. We will, on request, reimburse members who have purchased early memberships, or we will roll over purchased memberships to apply to the next event we host (which will likely be at a higher price).

We are taking a hiatus of at least two years as we reorganize and plan for the future. It takes about eighteen months to plan a convention from scratch and we don’t see ourselves getting this sorted out by next spring.

We are starting to think about ways to move forward. We can build on the things we’ve learned and the contacts that we’ve made, but we want to think about how we might to more than be a generic local science fiction convention. We have some good ideas, but we’re just starting to have this conversation. The world has changed in the past couple of years, and some people have new priorities and new responsibilities as the wider society becomes more complicated. Some of these external issues have become distractions, and we are starting to think about ways we can align our non-fannish agendas with our fannish activities.

From electrocuting pickles to hosting the Aurora Awards, we’ve seen and done a lot of amazing and unexpecting things with a lot of wonderful people. This motivates us to keep doing the work of bringing people together. We won’t have formal meetings until plans become more solid, at least until we’re sure we have resources to hold another event, but our committee is easy to find in person and online, and we’re happy for any good ideas people want to share with us.