Not the best Worldcon wrap up. But it's mine.

So this is supposed to be the big Worldcon wrap-up post. Except it's not something I can really encapsulate as simply as that. This was only the second con I'd ever been to. So. Very. Big.

Highlights? Too many. But if I attempt a list:

The live recording of Galactic Suburbia. GS is a truly excellent podcast and it was great to finally put faces to the voices I've been hearing.

The panels on mysteries and westerns. Unfortunately, I've ended up with an even larger list of books I need to read/ films I need to see.

The Steampunk panel. I started smiling every time Charlie Stross reached for the mic. Great entertainment, but Stross made some very good points. The surface of Steampunk may be all clockwork and parasols, but I'd really like to see more of it that addressed the underlying issues of Empire. Moorcock did it in The Warlord Of The Air, so did (IIRC) Gibson and Sterling. I'm all for fur coats and Zeppelins. But there's so much more to unpack there.

The Hugos. Yeah, the Hugos were freaking awesome. I knew I'd mess up an acceptance speech if I got called up, so I stuck with the plan of just reading it from my iPod. The whole thing's just a blur. Can't wait for someone to upload the video so I can see it all again.

At the after party, after a while I just gave up and watched everything happening around me. I was watching the contents of my bookshelf walking around talking to each other.

There's more. There's so much more. Mostly I just walked around with a big dumb smile on my face.

It really was a privilege to accept the Hugo for StarShipSofa. There were other benefits too. I might talk a good game on Twitter, but my true self is more like a frightened little mouse. So if I didn't talk to you, I wasn't being a snob. That was just my usual petrified self. But when I could introduce myself as being with the Sofa, that all went away. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Not the most complete review of Worldcon, or the most insightful. But there you go.