Live video streaming of the event is scheduled to be available on the UStream Worldcon Events channel, courtesy of Renovation’s Events Team.

Text-based live-blogging coverage of the Hugo Award Ceremony on CoverItLive will be hosted by TheHugoAwards.org.

The Hugo Awards Ceremony is scheduled for 8 PM Pacific Daylight Time on Saturday, August 20.

A record total of 2100 valid final ballots were cast, a 46.1% turnout, from voters in 33 countries. (The previous record set in 1980 was 1788 ballots cast.) Renovation also broke a record earlier this year when it received 1006 valid nominating ballots.

The 2011 Hugo Award winners will be announced on Saturday evening, August 20, at the Peppermill Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nevada. Jay Lake and Ken Scholes will preside as masters of ceremony, with additional presenters to include Renovation Guests of Honor Tim Powers, Boris Vallejo, and Ellen Asher, along with leading genre writers George R. R. Martin and Robert Silverberg.

The unique 2011 Hugo trophy base design will also be revealed at the ceremony by designer and Hugo base contest winner Marina Gelineau.

For more information about Renovation or attending the 2011 Hugo Awards ceremony, please visit http://www.renovationsf.org/.

Bookmark our 2011 Hugo Award Live Coverage page for the gateway to the event coverage on CoverItLive.

Kevin Standlee and Mur Lafferty will cover the event from the Tuscany Ballroom at the Peppermill Hotel in Reno and we’ll incorporate the official @Renovationsf and @TheHugoAwards Twitter feeds, as well as Twitter posts using the #hugos, #hugoaward, and #hugoawards hashtags.

Our coverage is text-only. Renovation intends to provide live streaming coverage of the ceremony on UStream. We’ll include a link to the live-stream from within our coverage.

We’ll be “on the air” shortly before the scheduled 8 PM PDT start. Join us to watch, read, and discuss the results as the Worldcon presents our field’s top honors.

Our thanks to Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, for their cooperation in providing live coverage of the 2011 Hugo Awards ceremony.

Renovation will host a live chat session here on thehugoawards.org covering the announcement. More details will be available this weekend.

2010 Hugo Awards Ceremony from Kevin Standlee on Vimeo.

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.

First of all, let me acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this convention centre is built, the Kulin Nations – and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

Thank you for the introduction, Kathryn. Perhaps those people at the pre-Hugo reception who thought I was their drinks waiter will now believe that I am the Master of Ceremonies. Yes, my name really is Garth Nix and I will be your MC for tonight’s august ceremony. By august I mean time-honoured and highly important, because it is of course September. I just wanted to make that clear for those of you still suffering from jet-lag. Which is probably everyone who has flown in from outside Australia.

Some of you, particularly those people who thought I was their waiter, may be wondering how I came to be Master of Ceremonies tonight. Let me tell you. It all began with a dream. A dream that I had when I was about twelve years old, which as they say, is the Golden Age of Science Fiction. In my dream, I was in a beautiful pastoral scene. I was minding sheep and there were several hobbits nearby, so I guess it was New Zealand.

I was sitting under a tree thinking rustic thoughts when all of a sudden this shining figure came down from the heavens . . . and now that I think about it, it did have a striking resemblance to Perry Middlemiss, the convention’s co-chair, only well, more shiny . . . anyway, this shining figure landed nearby and started to shuffle through a whole lot of huge gold tablets. Eventually, he found the right one and looked at it a couple of times, almost as if he couldn’t believe what was written there, and then he said:

Garth Nix, one day you will be standing on the stage of the Hugo Awards!

Shocked by this pronouncement, I stumbled forward, fell over a sheep, and abased myself. Which is not what some of you are thinking, it means to lower or bring down . . . OK, let’s say I bowed before this shining figure, and I said, “You mean I’m going to be a science fiction and fantasy writer?”

The shining figure said, “Well, I don’t know about that. Maybe you’ll do something . . . more useful. But sometime, who knows where and who knows when, you’re going to be the MC of the Hugo Awards!” and he handed me this huge, heavy gold tablet and there was the running order for the Hugo Awards, with about a dozen names for potential MCs scratched out and mine right there at the very bottom.

Sadly, when I woke up the gold tablet had disappeared. They do that, apparently. But the very next thirty-five years three months and six days later, I got an email inviting me to be the MC for the 2010 Hugo Awards. So my dream came true . . . and here I am.

Naturally, as soon as I accepted the invitation and had to confront the reality rather than the dream, fear and panic set in. Previous MCs or toastmasters of the Hugo Awards have included such giants of the field as Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Lester del Rey, John Brunner, Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis . . . how could I stand in their shoes and do justice to the role?

Obviously I needed something to boost my confidence, and it was thinking of “standing in the shoes of previous MCs” that helped me work out what I needed. I mean it was obvious once I thought of it.

I needed to get a pair of Isaac Asimov’s shoes.

This proved to be a little bit difficult, but not impossible. So with thanks to the Shoe, Slipper and Exotic Footwear of Dead Authors department of the Museum of Science Fiction in Seattle, I am in fact wearing the cowboy boots that Isaac Asimov wore when he wrote Lucky Starr Space Ranger, and let me tell you that having these on has helped me immensely.

But soon after I got the boots, I started to wonder if that was enough and I soon realized that while it helped, I still didn’t feel confident to tackle the demanding job ahead.

I realised I needed something else, something suitably confidence-building from another great science fiction writer. This time I turned to possibly the largest private collection of Robert Heinlein memorabilia on the planet, and the custodians of the deep vaults in the Oakland hills below Locus headquarters were kind enough to lend me this bow tie. The very one Heinlein wore when he accepted the Hugo for The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, one of my favourite novels.

But even the boots of Isaac Asimov and the bow tie of Robert Heinlein were not enough, not when I became aware there was something that would complete my ensemble for sale on Ebay. Sadly, I couldn’t afford the item in question, and nor would the convention committee give me the $50,000 I needed. So unfortunately tonight I am not wearing one of Neil Gaiman’s hand-knitted woolen singlets.

Without this final confidence-building item of apparel I was almost unable to come out here on stage, but fortunately at the last minute I was able to steal these Facebook-enabled wifi glasses from Cory Doctorow, and so with something old, something new, something borrowed and something … damn it … blue … I became fully equipped to be your Master of Ceremonies tonight.

It is a great honour to be the MC for the Hugo Awards, because the Hugos are the most prestigious awards in science fiction. They were first awarded in 1953, and have been awarded every year since 1955.

As most of you know, the awards are named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories, the first major American SF magazine, in 1926. Sometimes called the “Father of Magazine SF” Hugo Gernsback not only has these eponymous awards, he also has a crater on the Moon named after him. Which is almost as good as having a mountain on Mars named after your family and its sporting prowess — which is what I thought Nix Olympica was for many years.

Every year, the Hugo nominees represent a select list of the best in science fiction and fantasy, as voted on by the members of the World Science Fiction society, that floating population of Worldcons that once a year alights on a city somewhere on this earth, and like the travelling court of a medieval ruler, celebrates all that is good and great in this usually dispersed kingdom of like-minded souls.

But as in all such awards, and in as in so many stories and films, though the nominees represent the best in science fiction and fantasy, only one can win. Tonight, we will put our nominees in each category into caged death matches from which only one will emerge alive … oh, actually that’s been crossed out, apparently we already know who’s won from the voting … anyway, tonight we award the winners of the 2010 Hugo Awards and we celebrate all the nominees.

So once again welcome to the 2010 Hugo Awards, and without further ado, let us begin.

To ease me gently into my introducing role, I have been allowed to start not with a difficult author, artist or fan, but with a video, in the hope that it will not bite me, act up or be offended when I mispronounce their name.

This video, by Mark Slater, gives us a look at the Highlights of Science Fiction and Fantasy from 2009.

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.

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.

You can find the Aussiecon 4 Twitter feed here.

For further details about the announcement event, see the Eastercon web site.