The 2010 Hugo Awards were announced at a live ceremony in London today, and also live on the Internet via the Aussiecon4 Twitter feed.
The full list of nominees is available on the Aussiecon 4 web site. We will add the details here shortly.
Author: admin
Nominations Announcement Schedule
From the Aussiecon 4 news feed:
Aussiecon 4 received a record number of nominations for the 2010 Hugo Awards: 864, up from 799 nomination ballots at Anticipation in 2009 and 483 at Denvention 3 in 2008. This year’s Hugo Award nominations will be announced 22:00 BST, Easter Sunday 4 April, at Odyssey 2010, this year’s Eastercon, and covered live on the Aussiecon 4 Twitter feed. Balloting for the Hugo Awards will commence thereafter and will conclude on 31 July at midnight, US PDT. The Hugo Awards Ceremony will be held at Aussiecon 4 in Melbourne on Sunday, 5 September 2010.
You can find the Aussiecon 4 Twitter feed here.
For further details about the announcement event, see the Eastercon web site.
Information for Publishers
Because we get a number of inquiries from publishers about the Hugo awards, we have created a special information page for them. You can find it here.
Nomination Eligibility Deadline Looms
If you want to participate in the nominations stage of this year’s Hugo Awards, and you were not a member of the 2009 Worldcon in Montréal, then you must purchase at least a Supporting Membership in this year’s Worldcon by January 31st.
Note that this is not the deadline for submitting nominations, it is just the deadline for securing eligibility to vote. That’s set much earlier to allow time for your membership to be processed, and for ballot papers to be mailed to anyone who does not wish to vote online.
This year’s Worldcon, Aussiecon 4, takes place in Melbourne, Australia in September. It is not necessary to buy an Attending Membership, or travel to Australia, in order to vote in the Hugo Awards. All you need is a Supporting Membership. Prices for these are: AU$70, US$50, CA$50, £25, €35 or ¥4,900. Further details, including online payment, can be found here.
A Blast from the Past
In 1979 Worldcon was held in Brighton, England, and the BBC sent along a film crew. They were making a series of programs, Time out of Mind, about science fiction writers, and Worldcon was a good place to get footage. The final program in the series ended up dedicated entirely to the convention, and culminated in a brief segment from the Hugo Award ceremony where we see Vonda N. McIntyre receive her trophy for Dreamsnake.
As the series dates back to 1979, little has been seen of it for a long time. However, one enterprising British fan, Arnold Akien, did record it on a very early VHS machine, and that video has found its way to us. Here, then, is a brief moment from the history of the Hugo Awards.
Amongst the other luminaries present at the convention were Christopher Reeve, who accepted the Hugo Award for Superman. A young British fan called Dave Langford received his first two Hugo Award nominations that year, but he did not win in either category. A full list of the 1979 winners can be found on this site.
2009 Award Ceremony Video
The Anticipation folks have made a DVD of the 2009 Hugo Award Ceremony available for sale. It costs $9.95 + postage, and you can buy it from CreateSpace. A DVD of the convention’s masquerade is also available.
Nominations Open for 2010
As per our tweet earlier today, Aussiecon 4 has opened nominations for the 2010 Hugo Awards. And being in Australia, which started 2010 long before most of us, they were very quick off the mark indeed. You can find the ballot at their web site.
As usual, the nominating stage of the process is open to anyone who was a member of last year’s Worldcon, Anticipation in Montréal, and to anyone who buys at least a supporting membership in Aussiecon 4. In order to give the Aussiecon 4 folks time to process memberships before the ballot closes you must buy your membership by January 31st. Supporting membership prices are as follows: US $50; AU $70; € 35; £25; ¥4,900. You can buy them online here.
Fans around the world are already discussing which works and people to nominate. You may wish to check the third party recommendation sites listed in our right-hand sidebar. If you are unsure about the eligibility of online works because of the changes to the WSFS Constitution that were made in Montréal you may find this public statement by Aussiecon 4’s Hugo Award Administrator helpful. And please remember that Best Graphic Story is now an official category so you can keep nominating such works.
The deadline for submitting nominating ballots is 23:59 PST on Saturday, March 13, 2010.
Logo in Book Stores Soon
John Scalzi reports that the Tor edition of his book Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded is going to hit the book stores soon (the official publication date is January 5th). As far as we know, this is the first book to bear the official “Hugo Award Winner” logo. We look forward to seeing many more, but congratulations to John and many thanks to Tor.
Introducing the Hugo Award Showcase
People have been asking us for some time where there is no annual anthology of Hugo Award winners. Our answer has been that no one wanted to publish one (and WSFS does not publish books). However, that answer no longer applies. We are delighted to announce that we have licensed Prime Books to produce a Hugo Award Showcase anthology. It will be edited by Campbell-winning writer, Mary Robinette Kowal. The 2010 edition, as well as featuring winning fiction from 2009, features a magnificent cover by 2009’s Best Artist, Donato Giancola. Here’s a mock-up of the proposed cover.
Oscars Copy Hugos
The instant runoff voting system that the Hugo Awards use for their final ballot (often known as an Australian Ballot) has come in for a fair amount of criticism in its time. People complain that it is too complicated and they can’t understand it. However, we have stuck with it, because we believe that it produces better results. A certain other well known set of awards has always used a first past the post (plurality) system, but it was announced recently that from now, at least for Best Picture, on the Oscars will use an instant runoff system very similar to the one we use. Apparently the folks in charge of the Oscars think the change will produce better results (better here meaning fewer people yelling, “how come that won?”).
Tied in with this decision is the move to expand the nominee list for Best Picture to 10 films. Once you know that, the instant runoff system decision becomes obvious. With first past the post voting it is possible to win with a (1/N) + 1 share of the vote, where N is the number of nominees. With 5 nominees it was theoretically possible to win Best Picture with 21% of the vote; with 10 nominees you could win with 11%, so the chances of an upset win are much greater. The instant runoff system, however, will always produce a compromise winner that is least disliked by all voters.
There is just one problem for the Oscars. The members of the Motion Picture Academy are complaining that the new voting system is too complicated and they can’t understand it. Perhaps we could get some experienced Hugo voters to help them cast their votes.