My favorite moment during last night’s awards presentation (which I had to watch online through Cheryl Morgans Live coverage, not being there) was when they announced Best Fan Writer goes to Cheryl Morgan and her response: #*%! I won a Hugo!!!… LOL. David Anthony Durham won the Campbell Award for best new writer. Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form was won by Wall-E, while Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form went to Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog. Winner for Best Novel was The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, and Neil was the presenter for Our brand new category, Best Graphic Story: won by Girl Genius, Kaja and Phil Foglio. Other winners included Ellen Datlow, David G Hartwell, Weird Tales, John Scalzi, Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, Nancy Kress, and several others. I find this rather amazing, because for the first time ever every one of my picks from the nominations were actually the winners. Congratulations to everyone, and do you know where your towel is?
SciFi Cool has posted the first trailer for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassu, along with a brief synopsis of the story. This is the first new film in a while from Terry Gillium, and it looks really good. There is also an international trailer available, which looks fairly similar. In Worldcon-related news, Suvudu has posted that George R. R. Martin was interviewed and the results podcast. If you missed last weeks Eisner Awards Winners, you will find the list at that link. Tomorrow are the Hugo Awards at Worldcon, which will (technology willing) be covered Live by Cheryl Morgan, in conjunction with SF Awards Watch and the folks that seem to have the best Con coverage I have found so far, Con Reporter. They also are running a Live Celebrity Tweets compilation continuously, with input from people like Lou Anders, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaimon, John Scalzi, and many others (yes, that was in alphabetical order; good of you to notice).
Word is someone is going to take Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon and turn it into a movie. Even better, the person planning on doing this is James McTeigue; his last SF project was a film called V for Vendetta, so Altered Carbon may get the quality treatment it deserves. BTW, if you are having problems logging into Twitter, it suffered a DoS Attack (Denial of Service) earlier today. It seems to be back up now, but is a bit slow to respond.
It’s party time again! Thanks to the World Science Fiction Society, Worldcon 2009 is about to happen, from the 6th to the 10th of August. This time around, it takes place in Montreal, Canada, and goes by the name AnticipationSF. As always, it will include presentation of the Hugo Awards and the Campbell Award, as well as the Chesley Awards (and you might enjoy reading the Crotchety Old Fan’s Hugo Winner Prediction). Since this years Worldcon is also Canvention 29, the Aurora Awards will be handed out there as well. There will be the usual world-class writers workshops, the rather insane Masquerade, and so much more I can’t decide what to mention next. So I will just do the Masquerade historical reminder; Cosplay was invented by Forrest J Ackerman and his friend Myrtle R. Jones at the very first Worldcon in 1939. He came dressed in a space suit, while she wore a gown recreated from the classic 1933 film Things to Come (written by H.G. Wells, the movie was staged for 1936, and only 6 years in the past at the point the convention occurred). Neil Gaiman is the Guest of Honor this year, and Tom Doherty is the Publisher Guest of Honor. You gotta love Worldcon!!!
If you got here by way of Google, this probably isn’t what you were thinking it was, but you might enjoy it anyways. Bookslut put together an in-depth review of Philip K. Dick’s life, with some information I had not previously seen. Likewise Skulls In The Stars just posted a review of the works of Henry Kuttner; it is really good to see classic SF authors still appreciated in modern times. For some of them, this is the future they were writing about. THR reports that the original voice cast has signed up to return for the new season of Futurama. Click the City (don’t ask me which city, I didn’t look) has an interesting article about the GI Joe Costumes, looking at science fiction vs. science fact in the armament.
TOR has put together a celebration of the Lunar landing which includes a lot of top-quality SF/F authors putting forward their own input on the topic. It is a little hard to find all the bits, but that’s all right; the team at SF Signal have compiled the links in one handy location for us! If you are one of those folks who love finding the Easter Eggs on DVDs, feel free to skip the cheet sheet and hunt them down on your own. Sci-Fi Heaven has put together their first podcast, called Continuum. The first episode is in standard several-geeks-babbling mode (pretty much the way I would do it, but with more voices), we will see how it evolves.