Yesterday spelled the end of Aussiecon, the 68th annual world science fiction convention, held in Melbourne this year. Sunday night was the Hugo award ceremony, which actually had a tie for the main event - Miéville's The City & The City and Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tied for Best Novel. The rest of the Hugo award winners are listed here. It was my first worldcon, and an excellect writers convention, with some panels that were rich with inspiration and ideas (and some others that were admittedly less so, but mileage always varies). Personal highlights were:

• David Levine's presentation about his two weeks in a Mars simulated habitat with five other "astronauts" out in Utah, living in an eight-meter-by-two-story six-man habitat, walking around in space suits performing experiments and performing ingenious repairs to necessary equipment with whatever was to hand.
• A lively discussion on interactivity and narrative in the creation of video game stories and video games
• Panels discussing creating believable space flight, first contact and the Fermi paradox, and geoengineering against climate change.

I don't know what the attendance was like comparative to other worldcon conventions, but every panel and presentation I attended was at least two thirds full. Oddly enough, it seemed to run mostly on the honesty policy - while we had named tickets on lanyards, these were never checked or presented, and I saw several people walking around without them, presumably because they'd either decided against sporting a large red necklace that screamed BORDERS, or they'd snuck in via the devious method of just walking through the doors.

But yes - if you're in Reno next year, I'd highly recommend WorldCon, or Renovation, as it's being called. Not the most appropriate name in the world, in my opinion, but hey. Whatever you think's a fair thing.

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