Loncon3 and Hugo Awards: A Brief Recap

Hello everybody, Ana here. You might know that we just attended our first Worldcon as well as the Hugo Awards last night as Best Fanzine nominees. I just said goodbye to Thea and am at my desk at work trying to get through this sleepless haze and remember everything that happened as I attempt to “recap” our long Loncon3 weekend. Mostly, I will just post pictures. Because words? I do not have them.

Briefly:

Thea and I did a lot of work on Friday – from 8am to 8pm, we sat down and talked about everything relating to The Book Smugglers and its publishing branch, our upcoming short stories (announcement to come soon-ish) and other stuff. It was an extremely productive day and we got a lot done. A lot. We did have time to chillax a bit in the evening and had awesome cocktails at the restaurant at the top floor of the hotel we were staying at. Beautiful views of London and strawberry martinis FTW.

Thea does not approve of strawberry martinis

Saturday morning we made it from central London to the Excel, where the con took place. It is a gigantic convention centre and it accommodated the record-breaking number of attendees really well. We never felt it was over-crowded.

The Excel

Our first step was to register and get our Hugo Award stuff. This was deemed The Coolest Thing Ever for about 24 hours until the actual awards happened and blew our minds away.

Hugo stuff

The programme at Loncon was amazing. There were several tracks, panels that ranged from the fun and silly to the academy and thought-provoking. A lot of diversity and inclusivity and great topics and panellists all around. I can’t even imagine the work that went into programming that many panels but kudos to everybody. Thea herself was in two panels (YA and the Big Screen + My Opinions, Let me Show You Them) and they seemed to have gone well, both rooms were packed.

With that said, we ended up not attending as many panels as we had hoped. We spent a lot of time just meeting and greeting the many, many friends we made over the years online – meeting everybody in person was just…wow. I can’t begin to describe it. Foz Meadows, Liz Bourke, Niall Harrison, Martin Lewis, Paul Weimer, Abigail Nussbaum, Aidan Moher, Aisha, Amal El-Mohtar, Sunil Patel, Estara, Lou and Has, D Franklin, Shaun Duke, Li, Justin Landon, Mahvesh Murad, Nic Clarke as well as all the lovely authors we met and oh gods, so-many-more-I-am-sure-I-am-forgetting someone: it was so freaking great meeting you all.

The epic get together of Team Awesome: Jared, Anne and Justin

And finally, the Hugo Awards. Surreal doesn’t begin to describe it. There was a pre-ceremony rehearsal in which all nominees got to hold the trophy and walked through the stage in case of victory. Then, a Hugo reception in which we got to mingle with other nominees and get an official photo taken per category. David Tennant was at this party. THIS IS NOT A DRILL, DAVID TENNANT WAS AT THIS PARTY. The best part though, was to see all the nerds losing their shit over this (including us, obvs).

The Doctor!

The Awards: the auditorium was massive and we were a pile of nerves walking into it – thankfully we were sitting with other bloggers and friends and we made the most out of it. There might have been a bottle of whisky being passed around. We were sitting right in front and made sure to be loud and cheerful. This was a vibrant awards ceremony (at least from our perspective – we felt like were just hanging out with friends) and as the winners were announced and the whole sad puppies ballot was CRUSHED and that bigoted asshole Vox Day lost, we celebrated like there was no tomorrow and we specially made sure to give standing ovations to John Chu and Ann Leckie.

Special kudos to Kameron Hurley’s Best Fan Writer speech (delivered by Kate Elliott) for being strongly worded and political and subversive and amazeballs. You can read it here if you missed it.

And OK, so we lost the Best Fanzine award to Aidan Moher of A Dribble of Ink. We are a bit gutted of course, but Aidan is such a cool guy and we have known him for ages and ages and we love A Dribble of Ink so we are cool with it. Mostly. Maybe.

Four losers and a winner

Then we had the party-after-the-Hugos aka the Losers Party where we got to drink our sorrow away mingle with other awesome folks. George RR Martin was handing over Hugo Loser ribbons (!!!) and we might have danced-whilst-answering-questions for Shaun Duke’s new video project and then proceeded to take pictures with all the awesome folk there.

Thea and George RR Martin

Hugo Losers!

For a full list of winners and the Guardian’s write-up go here.

Aaaaand that’s a wrap. Our first Worldcon and our first Hugo Awards and it was brilliant. Here is to many more to come. Here, have some Deadpools in a Tardis: