Tag: Hugo Awards

Worldcon: Day 4 (Part 2)—The Hugo Awards

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.

Worldcon: Day 4

The fourth day of Worldcon was also a big one, and quite full.

We started at 9 AM once again, with a panel on “How Not to be a Jerk Online”.  I went to this because John Scalzi—whose blog and work I am a fan of—was one of the panelists, and I suspected it was a topic he would hold forth entertainingly about.  I was right, although the other panelists (whose names I will call forth in a later update) also had excellent and amusing contributions.

The next panel I wanted to see was “Deities and Demigods”, because I wanted to snag panelist Paddy Forde to sign a book I had, but alas, it was cancelled.  That did leave me free to join my girlfriend at another panel I was interested in, on “English-Canadian Small-Press SF Publishers”, which was an illuminating and honest look at the business and economics of small press publishing in Canada, with the attendant advantages and disadvantages.  Kind of interesting and depressing.

Next was another panel on “The Singularity: O RLY”, which was pretty entertaining, although with my own reading in the area and the panels I’ve been to this weekend, I may be singularitied out.  I did get a signature from Peter Watts after, though, and had an entertaining conversation with him about genetic algorithms as they might be applied to FPGAs that was punctuated him him being mind-boggled when he noticed my {Terror} t-shirt form Dr. McNinja.

Then it was lunchtime, followed by spending too much money in the Dealer’s Room, where my girlfriend bid on a print in the art show, and I bought a Con t-shirt, another book, and ended up subscribing to OnSpec.

The next panel we saw was “Which Histories Get Alternates?”, wherein the panelists discussed why so many alternate histories focussed on the same events (eg. American Civil War, WWII, etc.), and partly concluded that it was needed because the audience had to have strong familiarity with the events in question to understand how it is alternate.  A list of other types of alternates was also volunteered by the audience.

Then it was on to “Economics of Star Traders”, which discussed whether it could ever be worthwhile to have trade between planets, first in a relativistic universe, then opening it up to FTL-capable universes.  Some interesting ideas bandied about.

We were pretty exhausted by panels, so we wandered around a bit, outside, before heading back so I could get some books signed by Robert Charles Wilson.  Then it was in search of dinner, about which I will complain in the next post.

Hugo Voting Season

So, my previously-mentioned plan to read all my 2008-purchased books in time to make Hugo nominations did not come to fruition.  I got through a few, read parts of a few others, and just guessed on the rest.  The final list came out some time ago, and voting closes July 3rd.  My current plan is to read as many of them as I can.  Thankfully, I already have two of the novels completed, and I have read some of the shorter fiction as well.

For the novels, I will do individual posts to talk about them.  For the shorter categories, I may lump them together in summary posts.  For the non-fiction categories, I may also just have one humongous summative post.

The Aurora Awards (the Canada-only Hugo equivalent) are also open to voting now, but the period is open a few weeks longer and so I’ll see to that reading when the Hugo task is over and done with.

So, the coming month of posts may be literature-heavy, but I still have a bunch of posts about movies and concerts in the works, so I’ll try to push those through as fast as I can.  I hope I can make some headway in this.

Ack! Five Weeks Until Hugo Nomination Deadline

So, I woke up this morning to find an e-mail from my wonderful girlfriend, telling me that she had purchased me an attending membership at the Worldcon as my birthday present.  Apart from this being a delightul surprise, it has also introduced a bit of worry into my life.

As an attending member, I get to nominate and vote for the Hugo Awards.  Every year, I’m always interested to see the winners, and often check out the winners or finalists after they’ve been announced.  This year, however, I get to come at things from the other direction.

This is a problem because, if you’ve been following my reading summaries, you’ll note that I’ve been looking at a lot of older works.  I can only nominate stuff from 2008.  And while I have a number of books published in 2008, I haven’t read any of them yet.

This brings me to my plan: to read as many of the 2008 science fiction and fantasy books, novellas, short stories, and whatnot that I can in the next five weeks, so as to make informed Hugo nominations.  Once the finalists are announced, I’ll try to read all of them, as well, before final voting.

Don’t be surprised if you get a flurry of reading summaries in the coming weeks.  And if any of you readers have read standout science fiction or fantasy books (or short stories, novelettes, novellas, etc.) published in 2008, let me know about them in the comments, so that I can check them out, too.