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Worldcon 2002 and Vernor Vinge
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On Sunday - September 29th, 2002 - we brought you a special show featuring excerpts from the Hugo award ceremonies at this year's WorldCon along with an interview with the convention's Guest of Honor Vernor Vinge. Over this last Labor Day weekend the Hour 25 crew spent their time in San Jose busily interviewing authors and other folks who were attending the 60th World Science Fiction Convention. It was a hectic time for us. We managed to get 14 interviews done in just three days - and two of those interviews were two hours long. At the end of each day I was exhausted, but it was well worth it. |
 Suzanne Gibson |
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Of course, I spent so much time of my time at the con doing interviews that I hardly saw anything else that was going on there. Though I did manage to slip away a couple of times for an hour to visit the dealers' room. {You wouldn't believe how fast you can spend money on books if you really set your mind to it!} And on those 'book buying expeditions' I even managed to line up some more guests for later interviews. Like I said, we were busy but it was lots of fun. On tonight's show we will be bringing you excerpts from this year's Hugo award ceremonies. For those of you who couldn't make it to the con, here's your chance to hear some of what you missed. I've got to say that Neil Gaiman's acceptance speech was one of those special moments that you will never forget. I mean, he's an immensely talented writer. Famous. Someone who draws huge crowds whenever he does a signing and his books and comics have set high standards within our genre. And here he was, tongue tied, surprised and honored to have won a Hugo. His words, and the expression on his face, made this Hugo ceremony one to remember. And speaking of really great writers.... Tonight's interview is with Vernor Vinge, one of the smartest and most imaginative persons I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. He has the ability to find all the logical consequences associated with ideas that few people could even imagine and the writing skills to turn them into fascinating fiction. He is, to say the least, one of my very favorite authors. |
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TOR Books  TOR Books |
Vernor Vinge started his professional writing career while still in college and since that time has delighted the science fiction world with a series of memorable short stories and novels. His recent anthology from TOR books, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge gives us a chance to have all of his short fiction - with two exceptions - in one place. And what a place it is. Upon reading this book I was struck by how many of Vernor's stories had stayed firmly in my memory, even though I had read many of them in magazines twenty or thirty years ago. Now that's good writing. And the icing on the cake is that the last story of this book, Fast Times at Fairmont High won this year's Hugo for best novella. You can't go wrong with this book. Highly recommended. True Names is one of the truely seminal books of the SF genre. It explored the nature of human-computer interaction, computer based crime, computer networks, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. In other words, all of the things that were to be a major part of the cyberpunk movement of the 1980's could be found in True Names several years before the publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, the book that is often taken as the starting point for cyberpunk. Questions of dating aside, True Names remains one of the best science fiction stories I've ever read. It sparks your imagination, makes you think and entertains you at the same time with a cracking good yarn. If you haven't read this story, then by all means do so now. You won't be disappointed. |
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Certainly the best place to find a copy of True Names is in the new book True Names and The Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. This book uses that story as a focal point for essays by researchers in various computer science fields and continues the exploration of ideas that Vernor first put forth over twenty years ago. It makes fascinating reading. Highly recommended. A Note from the Interview : During this interview I mentioned that an engineer who was a contemporary of the Wright brothers had written a couple of books about aerodynamics that explained the effects of supersonic flow on airfoils and other things that were far beyond the technology of his day. Of course I couldn't remember the name of the engineer who had done this. <sigh> So I checked with my friend and aeronautical engineer extrordinaire Barnaby Wainfan to get the straight skinny. The author was F.W. Lanchester and the books were Aerodynamics {1907} and Aerodonetics {1908}. Please note these were originally written in 1897 but their ideas were so advanced that it took 10 years to get them published. For more information about this fascinating engineer check out this summary of his accomplishments, or view the comments that were made about him when he won the Daniel Guggenheim Medal in 1931, or this web page which discusses various develoments in aeronautics, including the work of F.W. Lanchester. |
 BAEN Books |
 TOR Books |
 TOR Books |
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 Copyright © 2002, Suzanne Gibson |
 Copyright © 2002, Suzanne Gibson |
And the Winners Are...
Presented below are the winners of this year's Hugo awards.- Best Novel: American Gods by Neil Gaiman (Morrow)
- Best Novella: Fast Times at Fairmont High" by Vernor Vinge {The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, Tor}
- Best Novelette: "Hell Is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang {Starlight 3, Tor}
- Best Short Story: "The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick {Asimov's 10-11/01}
- Best Related Book: The Art of Chesley Bonestell by Ron Miller & Frederick C. Durant III, with Melvin H. Schuetz {Paper Tiger}
- Best Dramatic Presentation: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring {New Line Cinema/The Saul Zaentz Company/WingNut Films} Directed by Peter Jackson; Screenplay by Fran Walsh & Phillipa Boyens & Peter Jackson; Peter Jackson, Barrie M. Osborne and Tim Sanders, Producers; Michael Lynne, Mark Ordesky, Robert Shaye, Bob Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein, Executive Producers.
- Best Professional Editor: Ellen Datlow {SciFiction}
- Best Pro Artist: Michael Whelan
- Best Semiprozine: Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown
- Best Fanzine: Ansible, edited by Dave Langford
- Best Fan Writer: Dave Langford
- Best Fan Artist: Teddy Harvia
- Best Web Site: Locus Online, Mark R. Kelly editor/webmaster
- John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 2000 or 2001: Jo Walton
A Night at the Hugos
Below are some pictures that Suzanne took at this year's Hugo ceremonies. If they seem a bit dark, just remember that they were taken in available light and that the subjects were about 50 feet away. {All of the following pictures are Copyright © 2002, Suzanne Gibson unless otherwise noted.}
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 Illustrations Copyright © Bonestell Space Art 2001 |
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 HarperCollins Books |
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| It was a pleasure to see the joy writ large across Neil Gaiman's face when he won the Hugo for best novel. His unabashed delight made his winning a moment that everyone could share. And his spontaneous expletive made us all roar with laughter. | |
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For more information about this year's WorldCon check out the ConJose web site or Locus On-line.
Listen to this week's show |
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Also, in this week's news I mentioned that the Shuttle would be launched on Wednesday for a mission to the International Space Station. However, weather problems caused a delay in that flight and it is now scheduled for launch on this coming Monday.
Hour 25 and the Hugo and Nebula Nominees
For a long time now the best way to find out who would be getting nominated for a Hugo or Nebula has been to see who has recently been a guest on Hour 25. Each year a large percentage of the persons who get nominated for either award - generally in the long form categories - will be guests on our show. And in most cases they have appeared before they got their nomination. Far be it for me to postulate a cause and effect relationship, but none the less, if I was a betting man.....Presented below are links to our interviews with the Hugo and Nebula nominees for this year who have appeared on Hour 25 in the last year or so.
- Lois McMaster Bujold {July 2001} and {July 2002} {Hugo, novel, nominee}
- Neil Gaiman {Hugo, novel, winner}
- China Mieville {Hugo, novel, nominee}
- Connie Willis {Hugo, novel, nominee}
- Ursula K. LeGuin {September 2000} and
{October 2001} {Hugo, short story, nominee}
- Bob Eggleton {Hugo, best professional artist, nominee}
- Catherine Asaro {Nebula, novel, winner and novella, nominee}
- Geoffrey Landis {Nebula, novel, nominee}
- George R.R. Martin {Nebula, novel, nominee}
- Tim Powers {Nebula, novel, nominee}
- Connie Willis {Nebula, novel, nominee}
For more information about these authors here's a set of links to their web pages or web pages about them.
- Catherine Asaro
- Lois McMaster Bujold
- Bob Eggleton
- Neil Gaiman
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Geoffrey A. Landis
- George R. R. Martin
- China Mieville
- Pat Murphy
- Tim Powers
- Vernor Vinge
- Tad Williams
- Connie Willis
The Great Hour 25 Disk Crash of 2002 - On-Going News
As a result of our recent hard disk crash the Hour 25 newsletter mailing list has vanished into the digital darkness. It would be very helpful if subscribers to the Hour 25 Newsletter would resend their email addresses to me {wwjames@earthlink.net} so I can reconstitute the Newsletter mailing list. {If you have done this "post-crash" then I have your email address and you don't need to do anything.} New editions of the newsletter will start coming out "real soon now". In the same vein, if you previously sent in an entry for the Karen Willson Five Word Challenge, now would be a good time for you to fish around in your "sent mail" folder and resend your entry. Or come up with a new one and send it in. {And please put "Five Word Challenge" or some approximation thereof in the subject line of your email to make it easy for me to keep track of your entry.}
Links for more information relating to this week's show
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Vernor Vinge Space News For On-Going Updates on Space News ISS News | |||
Copyright © Warren W. James, 2000-2002.
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