Sunday evening was the main event—the Hugo Awards presentation. Before that, being human beings of a hungry sort, we decided to seek out food.
This proved to be more problematic that we could have imagined. We first decided to go back to Le Steak Frites, but found them to be booked full until 8:30 or later, which was no good, since the awards started at 8:00, and, well, we didn’t want to wait that long. It seemed to be full of Con people, and perhaps there were officials being dumped there, and such. So we went back to the convention center to try a restaurant there, only to find that was full. We had had trouble finding a place that was open near the convention center the evening before, so we decided to go back to our hotel and try the restaurant there.
Food was only being served at the bar, and was not especially cheap or appetizing. So we set out again, thinking maybe of the nearby Dairy Queen, before ending up at Eggspectation, where I had a satisfactory panini sandwich. After all that questing, we were running a little later than expected, but still arrived at about 7:55 PM, where we had to sit toward the back of the massive Main Tent, as it was quite full.
The Hugo Awards ceremony was generally well-run. There were a few tech mis-cues, and a few times we had to wait slightly long before somebody came out or got to the stage, or whatnot. None of the speeches were unnecessarily long, and so the evening went by quickly and pleasantly.
The results can be found here, at the official Hugo Awards site. It was nice to see Neil Gaiman win for The Graveyard Book at the Worldcon where he was Guest of Honour. David Hartwell also won Best Long-Form Editor, and he was Editor Guest of Honour, and also damned entertaining. I enjoyed all of the winners, and felt a little bad for the “losers”, many of whom were my first choice, but it was a fun and exciting evening overall.
After the awards ceremony, we did one more panel, from 10 to 11 PM, called “Young Turks”. It featured a few writers who were basically emerging as forces to be reckoned with, and because the audience was small enough, it became a sort of cooperative Q&A whereby they talked about why they wrote, how they got to the point they were each at, techniques and tools they had found helpful for their writing, and the like. For a panel so late, and day 4, after the Hugos, it was a pleasant surprise to have such an engaged and active set of panelists, and such a fun and interesting panel. Kudos to them for pulling it off.
At that point, we called it a day.
Also, Leah Bobet signed my Shadow Unit flyer, which was really sweet of her, because she wanted to go hang with her roommate who had just won a Hugo. Note: Admiration of her now joins my massive intimidation.