Having had a bowl of chili in the hotel restaurant I am now starting to feel a little better. I have also remembered that, thanks to Kevin, I have an invitation to what is known as the Old Pharts Party (or more formerly the Former Worldcon Chairs Party). This is an ideal case to gauge SMOFish reaction to the convention, so I’m off to talk to people.
Denvention3
Neat Gift
It is traditional for the forthcoming Worldcon to not only host a party for the Hugo nominees after the ceremony, but also to give each of them a gift. The party is generally a bust, being massively overcrowded. This year was no exception. But this year’s gift was very good indeed. It is a combination pen and USB stick. The drive capacity is a useful 970 Mb. And of course the pen has “2008 Hugo Award Nominee” written on it (or if you prefer “Candidat – Prix Hugo 2008”). This is one nominee gist that I am going to carry everywhere with me and get a lot of use from. Thank you, Anticipation!
Another One Done
Well, that’s Worldcon over for another year. The mimeo demo appeared to go very well. It didn’t draw a huge audience, but there were several people there who had not used mimeo duplicators before and they all seemed very interested. The most significant point that came out of the demo is that mimeo really is a technology. You can’t buy the machines any more, but even if you could you can’t buy stencils, the right sort of paper, the ink or even corflu. In ten years time doing such a demonstration may be impossible because the supplies being saved by fans of mimeo will have run out.
Hopefully I was fairly entertaining during the demo, but once the program slot had ended and we were just into running pages I’m afraid I opted out. I went back to my hotel room and slept for a couple of hours. I still have a headache. Right now I need food. After that I will decide whether I can make it to parties, or whether I should do something with the huge amount of audio and video footage that I have collected during the past week.
Bleagh
I woke up with a screaming headache today. I don’t think it can have been the booze – I stayed dry last night until after all the Hugo stuff was finished, and then only had one glass of wine and a margarita. I’m pretty sure it is a reaction to 2 hours squinting at a computer screen in a dark auditorium. Still, can’t complain, don’t have time, Golden Ducks to cover. And the mimeo demo to do.
The Numbers
Denvention3 has posted the full breakdowns of nominations and the final ballot here. I’m going to sleep now. The Golden Ducks ceremony starts at 10:00am. Whose daft idea was that?
A Quick Post on Positions
The con newsletter lists the nominees in the order in which they finished. A few highlights:
- John Scalzi was second in Best Novel
- The Arrival finished last – I’m very disappointed by that
- Paul Cornell’s Doctor Who episode was second
- John Picacio was second
- And I finished third behind Scalzi and Dave Langford
2008 Hugo Award Ceremony Live Blogging
Assuming all goes well, we will go live around 7:30pm Denver time, via the embedded screen below.
An Essential Book
I’ve just finished the panel on “20 Essential Books of the Last Twenty Years”, with Charles Brown, Gary K Wolfe, Graham Sleight and Karen Burnham. The panel went very well and I will be posting everyone’s lists on this site soon (probably next week). However, I did want to note the fact that only one book appeared on the lists of all five panelists. That book was River of Gods by Ian McDonald. It is a fabulous book, and I heartily recommend it.
Access Update
It’s patchy. I’m OK now. The room where the Business Meeting was didn’t work too well so I had to go outside to post. In the Fanzine Lounge the connection dropped completely, but that my have been due to the baleful presence of Chris Garcia, who I am sure broadcasts his own radio signals. I need to check ut the main auditorium.
Update: I am sat in the front row of the main auditorium. This looks very good indeed. Check back around 7:30pm Denver time. I think we may be live.
Zagreb Returns
A group of fans from Zagreb has turned up in Denver and announced a Worldcon bid for 2013. I will try to track them down for a podcast later. The Texans, who were planning a 2013 bid, look worried.
Update: I’ve just been checking distances, and Zagreb appears to be about 1400 km from Amsterdam, so if they do win it should not rule out a UK or Netherlands bid for 2015.
Australia Wins By A Cricket Score
It should be no surprise that Australia has won the site selection for 2010. They were unopposed, more or less, although the friendly aliens from XERPS did put up a great fight. The Australian Guests of Honor are as follows:
- Kim Stanley Robinson
- Robin Johnson
- Shaun Tan
Slightly More Awake
So yes, the masquerade was great fun, even though I didn’t see much of it. I was backstage looking after a grizzy bear, a woman with huge wings, and the Great Beast of Aaargh. I think I am starting to specialize in mad costumes. Remember the llama from LA? The only totally crazy thing I missed out on this time was the velociraptors.
I have taken a bunch of pictures, and several videos of people talking about how their costumes were put together. I need time to process them, but I think they’ll be worth waiting for, especially the one about the bear.
The show appeared to go very well, aside from the usual problem of the management forgetting to think about getting competitors on stage quickly at the end to get their prizes. And everyone was happy except the very small number of competitors that the judges elected not to give prizes to. (I have ranted about this before.) I was exhausted, and fell into the Hyatt where I devoured a plate of nachos and met a man who destroys planets (or at least was part of the process that led to Pluto no longer being a planet).
Today we get to learn who Australia has chosen as their Guests of Honor, I moderate a panel, and we do the Hugos. After that, sleep.
Late Night Report
Masquerade awesome. Got eaten by a bear. Photos and video to follow.
Much Award Business
This morning at Worldcon was filled with much business to do with Awards. The results of the Business Meeting deliberations, and the new about the new Campbell pin, have been posted to SF Awards Watch. Here’s a small amount of personal opinion.
Mostly I’m very pleased with what the Business Meeting has done. However, the debate over the removal of the Semiprozine category appeared to involve a lot of odd discussion. Those in favor of the motion continue to assert that they are not trying to remove the category just to stop Locus from winning any more awards. However, when challenged to provide examples of their rationales they were peculiarly unable to do so. Ben Yalow said it was because there are not enough magazines eligible for the category, so was not an honor to be nominated, but in fact there are very many small press fiction magazines that pay contributors and carry advertising that appear eligible. That argument simply doesn’t hold water.
Seth Briedbart went on to complain that some of the magazines that do get nominated for Semiprozine are not worth reading. This is a very old and tired argument, and basically it boils down to “I don’t like the things that get nominated so I will define them as not Hugo-worthy.” Seth specifically mentioned 5th-place finishers, so let us take a quick look at the sort of publications that the proposers of this motion think are so bad they are not worth reading (let alone worthy of a nomination). Last year that was Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. In 2006 it was Interzone. In 2005 and 2004 it was Interzone’s (now deceased) Fantasy/Horror sister publication, The Third Alternative. These are not inconsequential magazines. And of course in 2006 Emerald City came fourth in the category. Was it also not worth reading? And if so how come it won a Hugo as a fanzine two years before?
There were no other arguments presented for the proposal. So what does this tell us about people’s motivations? If we are generous it says that people who attend the Business Meeting do not read small press fiction magazines and don’t think that there should be a Hugo for such things. Alternatively the truth of the matter, despite all of the protestations to the contrary, is that the category is being killed to stop Locus from winning it.
A Note On Geography
All of the convention parties are in the Sheraton. It is several blocks walk from the convention center. There is a Hyatt across the road from the convention center with a decent bar in it. Of an evening, most of the fans are in the Sheraton grazing the parties, and most of the pros are in the bar at the Hyatt. I have been in the bar with Chris Roberson, so it is now a proper convention.
Actually the geographic issues are worse than that, because the filk, gaming and anime are in the Sheraton, and the readings are in another hotel (one of the Hyatts, I’m not sure which). And yet we look lost in the vastness of the convention center. I guess there must be a reason for it – such as having to buy function space in the hotels in order to get decent room rates.
Hugo Press Coverage
Chris Barkley in the Denvention 3 press office tells me that National Public Radio is looking to do interviews with Hugo winners after the ceremony on Saturday. This is excellent news.
Meanwhile I am slightly disappointed at the lack of reaction I am seeing to Sam Jordison’s article on the Guardian book blog. Fandom has been complaining for ever that the mainstream media doesn’t care about us, and now we get a preview of the Hugos in a national newspaper and no one says anything. Get on over there and say “thank you”, people, and let The Guardian know that covering science fiction gets them readers.
Worldcon: Day 2
I finally got away from my computer at around 1:00pm and headed off to the convention. I was able to bag a couple of good interviews about future Worldcons – one with Farah Mendlesohn about programming in Montreal, and one with Stephen Boucher about facilities in Melbourne. I need to clean the audio up before I can podcast them, but hopefully they will go live next week. I’m also hoping to talk to Dave McCarty about the innovative ideas the Chicago in 2012 bid has about supporting memberships.
I did a quick tour through the Art Show and found a couple of things worth mentioning. I think that the Raku Ray Guns have been mentioned online before, but now I have seem them in real life and I can confirm that they are every bit as awesome as they look in photos. Elsewhere in the show I was impressed by Myles Pinkney, particularly this picture, which I may just buy a print of.
I was pleased to see that the exhibits area has filled up a bit. Obviously some folks were late arriving. However, the con still looks lost in such a big building.
The “SF Outside of the English-Speaking World” panel went very well, and we could have easily filled another hour with all the stuff there was to talk about. Many more people are now in awe of Finnish fandom.
I was going to be at the Chesley Awards ceremony this evening, except that ASFA has had a few problems and there will not be any awards given out until later in the year. This leaves me at a loose end for the evening. I’m not quite sure what I shall do, but I suspect that the words “Chris Roberson” and “bar” will feature somewhere along the way.
I’m also thinking that I might be able to do live blogging from the Hugos. Stay tuned for more news.
Worldcon: Day 1
It turns out that I adopted the right tactics about Registration. I went back in the afternoon and there was no queue at all for my line. I still haven’t got to the bottom of what went wrong, but it seems clear that the Reg staff made some daft decisions about splitting lines without taking into account which letters of the alphabet were most popular for beginning names. Also they may have been slowed down by lots of people being surprised and/or offended that they were required to present photo ID to attend a Worldcon. It was a graphic demonstration of how far Security Theater has become embedded in the psyche of anyone running an event.
The convention center is huge, and membership is pretty low (I have heard suggestions of 3,500) so the convention looks lost. I would love to be able to stage Finncon here, but Worldcon looks very thinly spread. This isn’t helped by the fact that the Exhibits people don’t appear to have anything much except the standard traveling Worldcon exhibits. The one exception to this is the Technology of Reading exhibit where Colin Hinz has done a magnificent job of providing examples of mimeo technology and printing. The actual mimeograph appears to be in good condition, so I’m very hopeful for Sunday.
My best laid plans of attending Opening Ceremonies were waylaid by getting invited out to dinner by the Locus folks. More of that in a separate post. They also sidetracked me from my intention to attend the Friendly Scandinavians party, though Gary Wolfe made up for that by offering me a sample from his bottle of Akavit, which turned out to be very nice.
Kathryn Cramer has posted photos of Peter and Elizabeth having fun at Summer Camp. It looks like a very good excuse for not being here.
The program is pretty uninspired so I have been spending the morning blogging. This is just as well as it has proved to be a very busy day on SF Awards Watch. And we have the Chesley Awards to come tonight as well.
Registration = FAIL
There are some things about Worldcon that ought to be solved problems. Registration is one of them. Since ConFrancisco in ’93 ever Worldcon committee has been determined to avoid long lines. Except, apparently, Denver. The waiting time appears to be at least half an hour, probably longer. I have better things to do with my life.
So I have been wandering around talking to people. There are lots of people here that I know. And even more people here who know me. I am mastering the art of glancing quickly at people’s badges when they hail me because (I am pleased to note) the names on the badges are nice and large. So there I was talking Frank Wu into coming to the mimeo demo and trying to draw on a stencil (which he has given a provisional “yes” to) when some guy taps me on the shoulder. I blank for a few seconds. “I’m John Scalzi,” he says, “remember me?” *mega blush* I swear last time I saw him he was wearing a tiara and he looked totally different.
I’ve also taken advantage of the time to pop back to the hotel. I’d forgotten to put on a watch, and also I had forgotten all of my rules about hot weather. So I have blistered a toe, and I had forgotten to use Nalo Hopkinson’s secret remedy for sticky thighs. I will now head back out fortified against the heat.
Heading for Breakfast
And after that a look around the convention. While I am away, you folks can read my Finncon Report.