The finalists for this year’s Hugo Awards and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer will be announced Easter Sunday, April 24, starting at 2 pm PDT. The announcement will be made jointly from Norwescon 34, the Pacific Northwest’s premier science fiction and fantasy convention, and Illustrious, the British National Science Fiction Convention (Eastercon).
Renovation will host a live chat session here on thehugoawards.org covering the announcement. More details will be available this weekend.
This is from the same camera position as our live UStream feed, which was unfortunately a bit hit-and-miss, as UStream’s server apparently didn’t like having more than about fifty people watching the feed at once.
You will be able to follow the 2010 Hugo Award Ceremony live from Melbourne using the window below.
Cheryl Morgan and Mur Lafferty will be on hand in the auditorium in Melbourne to introduce the show. Technology willing, Mary Robinette Kowal will join us from Dragon*Con. Kevin Standlee will be moderating your questions. We will also incorporate the official @Aussiecon4 Twitter feed.
The ceremony is due to start at 8:00pm Melbourne time. We may begin coverage slightly earlier, but both Cheryl and Mur have to be at the pre-ceremony reception where important details about the event are announced and nominees have to appear for photo shoots.
Please note that this coverage is text only. We are experimenting with audio and video, but this is the fastest way for us to get the results out to you. It is also more interactive.
Our thanks to Aussiecon 4, and to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, for helping make this possible.
Worldcon is now underway in Australia. The room in which the Hugo Award ceremony is very splendid, and what’s more has excellent wi-fi coverage at a reasonable price. There is also a good 3G signal for mobile phones. It therefore looks likely that we will be able to bring you the results very promptly. We are not yet quite sure when live coverage will begin, but we’ll post when we have more information.
For those of you who will be at Dragon*Con it appears that there is no wi-fi connection in the restaurant where the Hugo Breakfast in being held, but we will be getting the information through to people there via Twitter.
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.
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.
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.
