Well, I’ve been hoping and planning and working toward going for some time, but yesterday I actually booked my plane tickets so you can’t get more ‘official’ than that.<\/p>\n
I expect most people know—but just in case—Worldcon is the\u00a0 World Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention (or more correctly, the convention of the World Science Fiction Society) and this year the 68th convention is being held in Melbourne, Australia—just a brief 1500 mile (2404 kilometre) hop across the Tasman from New Zealand. (But still, a lot closer than the 10,000 miles to North America, so I am impressed at how many attendees are coming from both the Americas and Europe.)<\/p>\n
The guests of honour are Kim Stanley Robinson, Shaun Tan<\/strong> and Robin Johnson.<\/strong><\/p>\n Worldcon is also where the winners of the Hugo Awards<\/a><\/strong> are announced.\u00a0 The awards ceremony will be of particular interest to me this year, firstly because it’s the first time I have been eligible to vote and secondly because I have actually read and voted on all the fiction finalists: five short stories, and six each novelettes, novellas and novels respectively. I have also blogged twice about the process of “reading for the Hugos” on the Out of this Eos<\/strong><\/a> blog: both on 20 July<\/a> and more recently on 30 July<\/a>—just before voting closed on the 31st.<\/p>\n So, lots of books, lots of writers, lots of people from around the world interested in science, science fiction and fantasy, plus the Hugo Awards—and it’s all happening in Melbourne, which is one of my favourite cities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, I’ve been hoping and planning and working toward going for some time, but yesterday I actually booked my plane tickets so you can’t get more ‘official’ than that. I expect most people know—but just in case—Worldcon is the\u00a0 World Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention (or more correctly, the convention of the World Science Fiction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards","category-worldcon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=868"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":875,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions\/875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}