{"id":792,"date":"2003-09-02T23:09:46","date_gmt":"2003-09-02T23:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-792.html"},"modified":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","modified_gmt":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","slug":"hugo-awards-2003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2003\/09\/02\/hugo-awards-2003\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugo Awards 2003"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around this time each year, the World Science Fiction Convention (“Worldcon”) takes place. It touches down in a different city each year. The last one we attended was Bucconneer<\/a>, in Baltimore in 1998. Before then, we went to Intersection<\/a> in Glasgow in 1995, and I attended ConFiction<\/a> in Den Haag in 1990. This year, the event was called Torcon 3, and it took place in Toronto. (We didn’t go. We were visting friends and food in the South of The Netherlands instead.)<\/p>\n

Worldcon is also where the Hugo Awards are announced. The Hugos are the “audience awards” of the science fiction world. Publishers like to tout their Hugo-winning authors. People who have not heard of an author might pick up a book that has “winner of the Hugo award” splattered over its cover. For people who didn’t attend the conference itself, the awards are one of the biggest pieces of news to emerge from it. You’d think that they’d maybe put the results<\/a> up on the front page of their web site, wouldn’t you?<\/p>\n

Okay, say they didn’t put up the results on the front page. Say the results are stuck on a page somewhere deeper in the site. Surely they’d have a link to it right on the home page! Surely?<\/p>\n

Hello–2003 calling Torcon! Anyone home?<\/em> Anyone heard of content management systems<\/a>? Blogs<\/a>? Personal publishing tools<\/a>?<\/p>\n

The SF community has embraced fanzines<\/a> and mini-publishing totally. SF fans love getting together for cons. We love hanging out on the Internet in chat rooms, on Usenet<\/a>, IRC and bulletin boards. Given the sheer volume of geeks and netheads involved in SF fandom, how is it possible for Worldcon web sites to be so uniformly rubbish?<\/p>\n

I complained about this last year<\/a> as well, and nothing has changed in the intervening period:<\/p>\n