Quick post at nearly 8 in the evening, just home from the Locus Awards. Like last year, they were held live at Preservation Park in downtown Oakland; last year’s report is here, and I’m going to borrow a photo from that post for tonight’s report.
Neither the Silverbergs nor Connie Willis attended this year. In Connie’s place, sorta, was Cory Doctorow, masked throughout the afternoon, who gave a keynote speech of sorts mid-way through presentation of the awards. He talked about Luddites, the talk drawn from one of his Locus columns (posted here) about how SF is not about prediction, but about contestation, in particular to challenge the narratives of Silicon Valley elites who seem to be trying to live out the visions of science fiction novels they read as teenagers… Didn’t have a chance to chat with Cory, or to say hi. (Not sure he’d remember me.)
The awards ceremony was led by Henry Lien, dressed up as mythical science fiction character, Emperor Stardust [ added 25jun24 per Facebook comments ] playing a long Chinese banjo, singing about Princess Locus and providing clever two-line intros to each of the award categories. The presenters ranged from Locus folks like Liza Groen Trombi and Tim Pratt, to some young writers I had never heard of before, to Cory Doctorow himself. None of the winners was there; all appeared via pre-recorded videos for their acceptance speeches.
Like last year I had seen the winners in a pre-publication PDF of the July issue that I got a couple days ago. As I write Locus hasn’t posted the winners yet, but I expect them to do so any minute…
We did have nice chats with Bob Blough, Tim Pratt, and Jacob Weisman, and said hi in passing to the other Locus VIPs.
