Doctor Who’s Day Of The Doctor got an official Guinness World Record for being simulcast in the most number of countries of any TV show ever, a total of 94 of them. You can almost see me and my friend in the shot where they are facing the audience, but then Steven Moffat raises his hand and blocks your view of us and the 50 or so people immediately around us.
Goodreads is doing a number of categories, so you can vote for the Best Science Fiction books of 2013, or the best fantasy, ect. They have completed round one, and the winners have moved on to the next round. They have a number of authors and titles I am not familiar with, so I will be using this set of lists to help me chose which new works to explore.
The Hugo Awards were handed out this weekend at Worldcon as always, which this year was LoneStarCon 3 in San Antonio, Texas. For the full list of who won and how the presentations went down, be sure to stop by the Hugo Awards site, but I figured I should mention a few on the ones I found of interest.
Best Novel was grabbed by Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, written by John Scalzi, while Best Novelette was awarded to The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi, by Pat Cadigan. Joss Whedon got Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form for The Avengers, an honor he well deserved. Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form went to George R.R. Martin and collaborators this time around for Game of Thrones: Blackwater, beating out 3 Doctor Who episode nominations and breaking the Doctor Who string of wins in that category over the last several years.
Stanley Schmidt pulled in 2 awards, and Clarkesworld, SF Signal, and SF Squeecast all won in the various Zine categories. I recommend checking out the source article for the full list with all the details and the links, but for the first time in a couple of decades I completely agreed with the winners for those works I was familiar with. Usually I am at around 40%, this one was a nice change.
The Saturn Awards are handed out by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, and try to honor the best TV and Movies each year. There are some amazing programs up for consideration this year; I will be cheering on The Avengers and Joss Whedon for their multiple nominations and hope they each take home something, but there is some stiff competition. For the full list, see the Saturn Awards Nominations Page.
If you saw Wreck-It Ralph in a movie theater, this was the short feature that prefaced that film. If you haven’t seen it, this one is up for an Academy Award in the Short Film, Animated category. It is a wonderful bit of storytelling, made even more amazing by the fact they didn’t even need many words to make you fully understand it.
Yes, it is Worldcon time again, this time with Chicon 7, the 70th annual World Science Fiction Convention. It started on Thursday, august 30th, and runs through the holiday weekend, with an incredible line up of guests and events. One of the most important events each year is the presentation of the Hugo Awards, which has John Scalzi as Host and Toastmaster, and will be held at 8PM CDT tomorrow, September 7th. If like me you can’t be there physically, you can actually watch it Live on the Worldcon UStream channel as well as on the Hugo Awards CoveritLive page. You can go to the Worldcon UStream page now and watch last years Chelsea Awards, Hugo Awards, and a quite amusing presentation of Just A Minute that had me laughing up a storm. If I had a vote of what program out of this years offerings should also be sent out live or included as a recorded online video it would have to be the Filk Opera version of Tanya Huff’s Choice of Ending.