Year: 2010

2011 Hugo Base Design Competition Open

~ Kevin

Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention, has announced an open competition for the design of the 2011 Hugo Award base. The convention is soliciting artists and designers from around the world to come up with a base that is worthy of the Hugo Award and which reflects the convention’s theme of the New Frontiers and/or the region of Reno, Nevada and the North-Western United States.

The Hugo Award trophy consists of the iconic Hugo Award rocket, the design of which remains essentially constant from year to year, and a base designed by each Worldcon. Many recent Worldcons have held open competitions to design their bases.

The winning designer will have the opportunity to introduce their base design as part of the Hugo Ceremony itself and the base will also enter the archive of Hugo base designs, including the Hugo History exhibit which travels to each Worldcon. In addition, the winner will receive a full 5-day attending membership of Renovation along with $250 towards the cost of attending the convention.

Entrants are asked to submit initial drawings/renderings of their design to Renovation by January 1, 2011. Entrants also need to be able to arrange for up to 30 bases to be manufactured if their design is successful, with a target price of no more than $150 per individual base. The winning design will be selected no later than February 28, 2011.

Full terms and conditions for the competition can be found on Renovation’s web site.

Note: This competition is being run by Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon. Questions should be directed to them, not to the Hugo Awards web site.

2010 Hugo Award Winners

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2010 Hugo Award Trophy Presented at: Aussiecon 4, Melbourne, Australia, September 2-6, 2010

Toastmaster: Garth Nix

Base design: Nick Stathopoulos with laser etching by Lewis Morley and incorporating the Aussiecon 4 logo by Grant Gittus

Awards Administration: Vincent Docherty, Kate Kligman


  • Best Novel: TIE: The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK); The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
  • Best Novella: “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit)
  • Best Novelette: “The Island”, Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2; Eos)
  • Best Short Story: “Bridesicle”, Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09)
  • Best Related Work: This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance (Subterranean)
  • Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; Art by Phil Foglio; Colours by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
  • Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Moon Screenplay by Nathan Parker; Story by Duncan Jones; Directed by Duncan Jones (Liberty Films)
  • Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars” Written by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; Directed by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales)
  • Best Editor Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow
  • Best Professional Artist: Shaun Tan
  • Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, & Cheryl Morgan
  • Best Fan Writer: Frederik Pohl
  • Best Fanzine: StarShipSofa edited by Tony C. Smith
  • Best Fan Artist: Brad W. Foster

And the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (presented by Dell Magazines): Seanan McGuire

The full breakdown of voting will appear here as soon as we get the data from Aussiecon 4.

Hugo Award Ceremony Live Coverage

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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.

Live Coverage Plans

~ admin

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.

Follow the Hugo Award Ceremony at Dragon*Con

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Because this year’s Worldcon is in Australia, many of the nominees can’t attend. Some of them, however, can make it as far as Atlanta, and Dragon*Con has kindly laid on an event at which those nominees, and anyone else interested, can follow the action from Melbourne.

The event will take place over breakfast in Kafe Köbenhavn. For further details and a list of which nominees will be in attendance, see The Daily Dragon.

We are still sorting out details of our online coverage, which is dependent on exactly what level of connectivity we can get inside the auditorium. At the very least, the folks at Dragon*Con, and you at home, will be able to follow the announcements in the Twitter feeds from ourselves and Aussiecon 4.

Phil Foglio on Winning a Hugo

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Comic creator Phil Foglio will shortly be issuing a compendium edition of volumes -#3 of Girl Genius (volume #8 of which won the first ever Best Graphic Novel Hugo Award last year). It is part of a new graphic novel line from specialist SF&F publisher, Tor. Interviewed at Robot 6, Foglio was asked whether winning a Hugo Award helped him get that deal (and various others also mentioned in the article). Here’s what he said:

It did. Being able to slap “Hugo award wining” [sic] on something before you even publish it, that will rate an automatic “well I have to try this” in the science fiction community. A lot of people in the active science fiction community already read our stuff—there’s what we call science fiction fans and science fiction readers, and for every fan there are a hundred readers who never show up at a convention or publicly identify themselves because of the shame, but they are still aware of what the awards mean.

We certainly picked up more readers, we got more people interested in the book who had never heard of it before, but just being nominated did that. Howard Tayler, who does Schlock Mercenary [which was also nominated for a Hugo] got a lot of positive blowback on that as well. He’s up again this year.

Thanks Phil, we are delighted to know that your Hugo is so helpful.

Our thanks to Tom Galloway for pointing us at this interview.

Hugo Short Fiction Showcased

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Last year we reported that, after many years of absence, there would once again be an anthology of Hugo Award nominated fiction in the shops. We are delighted to announce that the Hugo Award Showcase 2010 is now available. The table of contents is as follows:

  • Cover, Donato Giancola
  • Introduction, Mary Robinette Kowal
  • “Pride and Prometheus”, John Kessel
  • “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, Kij Johnson
  • “The Erdman Nexus”, Nancy Kress
  • “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled”, Michael Swanwick
  • “Shoggoths in Bloom”, Elizabeth Bear
  • “Truth”, Robert Reed
  • “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story”, James Alan Gardner
  • “Evil Robot Monkey”, Mary Robinette Kowal
  • “The Tear’, Ian McDonald

The book concludes with a list of all of the nominees and winners from the 2009 Hugo Awards.

Our thanks to Prime Books and Mary Robinette Kowal for making this anthology available.