The Hugo Award nominees for this year have been announced, and you can find the full list at Tor Dot Com. You can also find links there to read a number of the stories online, including Charles Stross’s Overtime, another tale of the Laundry that so far has only been published online.
KamikazeCon 3 in Houston, Tx, will be the massive anime event of the weekend. This is no great surprise considering it is the town that has created a full third of the English dubs for anime DVDs over the last decade. They have a ton of guests and a events for the gathering; wish I could be there.
SenshiCon, Alaska’s Original Anime Con (their tagline) takes place at the UAA Student Union in Anchorage, Alaska. While their web site seems to be in need of some help, they do have a strong voice actor guest list which seems to be primarily from FUNimation. Another anime convention this weekend is MomoCon, which I would love to tell you about. Unfortunately their web site is a blank black screen when I go to it, but perhaps you will have better luck. As near as I can tell from their source code, the Georgia Tech Anime Con is using a script to gracefully degrade to standard HTML if you don’t have Flash installed, and has a script which hides the standard HTML if you do have Flash; in my browser both scripts seem to be active at the same time, hiding both the Flash and the HTML.
LunaCon 2010 in Rye Brook, NY is a general Sci-Fi Con with author GoH Tanya Huff. They look to have pretty much everything going on, including Dancing in the Gears, the 2nd annual LunaCon Steampunk Ball, and a massive number of Events and Programs scheduled for the festivities, as you can tell by the list of participants. Meanwhile, in Chattanooga, Tn, FantaSciCon is happening, and it gets my vote for the best Con T-Shirt I have seen this decade. It also has a good selection of guests and a lot of fun events.
The most important Doctor Who Con of the season has to be Gallifrey One: Blackjack 21 in Los Angeles. Guests include Sarah Sutton, Katey Manning, Georgia Moffett, Debora Watling, Frazier Hines, John Levene, and many, many more.
There are two good general sci-Fi cons in the US this weekend; on the left coast is Condor XVII in San Diego, with Writer GoH CJ Cherryh. The theme is Tripping the Past Fantastic in all its Steampunk glory, with a Mad Science Faire and nominations open for the Mad Scientists Hall of Fame. Out of those already nominated, I have to vote for Nichola Tesla for the Real and for the Fictional, it’s a toss-up between Dr. Emmett Brown and Professor Albert Wickwire (in both cases because of the skill and sheer joy the actors brought to the parts). There are also writers workshops, dealers rooms, anime rooms, the Hogwarts Educational Retreat, lots of live music including the Steam Powered Giraffe, and ever so much more.
Over on the write coast, SheVaCon in Roanoke, VA, has guests covering the spectrum of authors (including Kevin J. and Rebeca M. Anderson), artists, and actors. All aspects of Fandom seem to be covered in the Events section, with Anime Rooms, TV/Movie Viewing Rooms, Game Rooms, Computer Rooms, Fan Groups (a LOT of them), multiple competitive Cosplay events as well as non-competitive, and everything else you would expect. Whichever coast you are on, quality general Sci-Fi Fun is to be had!
If you are down under, Continuum 6: Future Tense looks to be the venue of choice this weekend. The premise for the event is that 2010 was used in so many books, movies, etc. to mean simply The Future, that now that it is here we should celebrate! Their home page describes it as Killer robots are beating down the door while Mutant Hordes gather… your Emotional Inhibitor is on the fritz and your Computer is calling you “Dave”, and again this event has everything a good general Con should have, plus something special. This is the event where they hand out the Chronos Awards, which I find somewhat disturbing. I am not disturbed by the thought of the award, but by the fact that I know none of the nominees in a contest that is pulling together the best authors and stories from an entire subcontinent. Looks like I have some serious reading to do!
Meanwhile the Japanese Art Festival comes alive at the Richmond Adult Community College in Richmond, UK. This is a Non-traditional anime-related event, if you are interested in the subject matter, I urge you not to miss this one; it is a monster!
According to Famous Monsters, Kage Baker is dead. She created a wonderful world of time travel at The Company, and according to hints at her formerly author maintained home page there may still be some stories to come from that universe. If you are not yet familiar with Dr. Zeus Inc., otherwise known as The Company, you have some excellent reading ahead of you.
This is just too funny for words, only watching the video will give you an idea. Many thanks to John at SF Signal for finding this one.
I missed mentioning a Mediacon that snuck past me… possibly because I am not a pre-pubesent female. It seems there is a Twilight Con going on this weekend in Nashville, Tn. Over at io9, there is a very good interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on his new book, Galileo Dreams.