Cora Buhlert's Blog

Comic Review: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Sword of Flaws No. 1 by Tim Seeley and Freddie Williams II

Even though my regular comic collecting days are almost twenty years behind me by now, I still pick up the occasional comic series or trade paperback that interests me, including several Masters of the Universe comics.

Masters of the Universe is mostly considered a toy and cartoon franchise, though it also has a long comic history, starting with the mini-comics packed in with the figures via the DC and later Marvel Star Comics of the 1980s, the various international comics of the 1980s, the She-Ra and New Adventures comics, the 200X comics by MV Creations, which had gorgeous artwork, to the more recent comics published by DC and now Dark Horse. DC had a very good run of Masters of the Universe comics from 2012 to 2016 as well as several crossovers and mini-series, while Dark Horse has published several Masters of the Universe comic mini-series in the Revelation/Revolution continuity since 2021, a few of which I reviewed.

The latest Masters of the Universe comic mini-series from Dark Horse stands outside the Revelation/Revolution continuity and is instead set in the same continuity as the various Masters of the Universe crossovers (Turtles of Grayskull, Masters of the Universe versus Injustice, He-Man/Thundercats, etc…) by the creative team of Tim Seeley and Freddie Williams II – at least according to this interview. Those crossovers were fun enough, though I prefer the “pure” Masters of the Universe comics, if only because you’re not constantly distracted by characters from a completely franchise you may or may not be familiar with. I had enough familiarity with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the Thundercats to understand the respective crossovers, though some minor characters had me wondering, “And who is this supposed to be again?” However, the Injustice crossover, set in an alternate DC Universe where Superman and Wonder Woman are evil and Batman is leading the resistance (apparently based on a videogame), was rather confusing. Besides, we had seen Superman and He-Man clash twice before at this point and we knew by then, surpising as it may seem, that He-Man can beat Superman.

Therefore, when Sword of Flaws was first announced, I was happy to get a non-crossover Masters of the Universe story from the creative team of Tim Seeley and Freddie William II. Of course, I would have preferred another comic series in the Revelation/Revolution continuity, since that universe was too good to just be abandoned, plus Revelation/Revolution finally moved the story forward rather than returning to the same status quo over and over again. However, Mattel seems completely focussed on the upcoming live action Masters of the Universe film by now. And while I’m looking forward to that movie, I would still have preferred to get a third season of Masters of the Universe Revelation/Revolution.

But enough of what we didn’t get. Let’s take a look at what we did get, namely the Sword of Flaws mini-series. The title alludes to some very early Masters of the Universe lore that was quickly abandoned, namely that the Power Sword originally consisted of two halves, a good and an evil half, one of which came with He-Man and the other with Skeletor. These two halves could be combined – literally clipped together – to form a complete Power Sword which also served as the key of Castle Grayskull, as explained in this video as well as in the ridiculously Freudian mini-comic “King of Castle Grayskull” by Donald F. Glut and Alfredo Alcala, which is full of imagery of He-Man and Skeletor thrusting their swords into the keyhole next to the jawbridge of Castle Grayskull to enter the castle and win over the Castle’s guardian Teela. Yup, this is basically a comic about who gets to deflower Teela.

The lore of the two halves of the Power Sword never made it beyond the first few mini-comics and as a kid I was completely unaware of this feature and never even realised that He-Man’s and Skeletor’s swords could be clipped together. That said, the half swords which could be clipped together did continue to appear in the Masters of the Universe Classics and Origins toylines and the Castle Grayskull playsets of the respective toylines both have the keyhole next to the jawbridge into which you can thrust the combined sword. Personally, I find the half Power Swords somewhat irritating as an adult, because they just look weird, particularly if you’re dealing with a collector line like Classics. Though thankfully, you quickly acquire surplus Power Swords, so you don’t have to deal with the half swords.

Skeletor shows off his Havoc Staff and the purple Power Sword. The location is an observation platform high above the river Weser in Minden.

He-Man and Skeletor fight in the Evergreen Forest, portrayed here by the Visbek Bride neolithic tomb. Note that they both have the same sword, only in different colours.

He-Man and Skeletor fight it out again, this time over a piece of plum cake on my dining room table.

The idea of a dual sword also continues to appear throughout Masters of the Universe. The 200X cartoon and toyline features Skeletor wielding a dual sword – however, this is not the Power Sword, but just Keldor’s battle sword, since the 200X Keldor/Skeletor is a master swordsman in addition to being a sorcerer. Apparently, the original idea was that Skeletor’s dual sword was indeed both halves of the Power Sword combined and that the more technological sword He-Man wields in the cartoon was a replacement built for him by Man-at-Arms and the Sorceress (who surely spent a lot of quality time in the process), but that never made it into the actual cartoon and comics.

Keldor wielding his iconic dual swords

More recently, in Masters of the Universe Revelation, the power unleashed by the exploding orb not just disintegrates He-Man and Skeletor (don’t worry, they both get better) but also splits the Power Sword into two halves as a nod to the original toyline. Several episodes than follow the unusual fellowship of Teela, Andra, Evil-Lyn, Orko, Roboto and Beast-Man as they try to track down the two halves (which have ended up in Subternia and Preternia, i.e. Eternia’s equivalents of Heaven and Hell) and reforge the Power Sword.

The Revelation/Revolution version of King Grayskull shows off the two halves of the Power Sword

If you’re a German Masters of the Universe fan, the title The Sword of Flaws will also remind you of the audio drama Das Zauberschwert des Bösen (The Power Sword of Evil) where the Evil Horde member Dragstor aquires a purple evil power sword imbued with hyperspace powers and hands it to – no, not Hordak, but Skeletor (Hordak and Skeletor work together in the German audio dramas). The Power Sword of Evil is probably Dragstor’s most notable appearance in any Masters of the Universe media – Dragstor came along very late in the toyline, never made it into any of the cartoons and only had very limited comic appearances. Dragstor even appears on the cover – riding the evil robot hrose Night Stalker and wielding the puple sword, which is rather strange, because Dragstor can turn into the vehicle, so why does he need to ride a horse? The answer is that audio drama writer H.G. Francis had no idea what Dragstor’s action feature was and probably also didn’t know what the character even looked like – many of the people working on Masters of the Universe tie-in media were given very incomplete information by Mattel, leading to odd interpretations – so he assumed Dragstor was a dragon character based on the name, since very few Germans would have known what a drag racer was in 1987. Coincidentally, I did learn about drag races only a few years later, when I first watched Rebel Without a Cause and American Graffiti (which were kind of mindblowing to me, because at the time it seemed completely inconceivable that people would have illegal car races on German streets – yeah, I was naive), though I never made the connection to the Masters of the Universe character Dragstor until much later.

So in spite of the original idea of the two halves of the Power Sword being quickly abandoned, dual swords and evil purple versions of the Power Sword did have a habit of creeping into different iterations of Masters of the Universe. So let’s see what Tim Seeley and Freddie Williams II do with the idea.

Issue 1 of The Sword of Flaws starts off with a brief introduction to Eternia, the world at the center of the universe, as well as to Eternos City and Eternos Palace, King Randor and Queen Marlena and Castle Grayskull, where all the secrets of the Elders are kept. It is clear that someone is narrating is narrating all this, but we only see who it is on the next page, a striking splash page of a caravan of Royal Guards accompanying a carriage transporting Prince Adam, Cringer and a new character through the Eternian mountains.

This new character is Prince Stahl, son of King Faust of Eisenhold. Of course, Masters of the Universe characters have always had highly descriptive names, but those descriptive names are not normally in German, not even in the German audio dramas. Prince Stahl is also the one who is narrating the brief introduction to Eternia, even though Adam, the person he is addressing, obviously knows all this already. But then Prince Stahl is the sort of person who just loves the sound of his own voice.

Prince Stahl concludes his brief introduction to Eternia by noting that even though Eternos has nigh unbreachable walls (the city and palace are located on top of a mesa), a highly respected king and queen and Castle Grayskull with all its mysteries at their disposal, they are weak. “How so?” Adam who would obviously love to be somewhere, anywhere else, replies.

And because Prince Stahl really loves the sound of his own voice, he continues to elaborate that Eternos has yet one more advantage, namely He-Man, the barbarian from the Stone Tribe (a reference to the very first mini-comic “He-Man and the Power Sword”, where He-Man was a wandering barbarian rather than Prince Adam) turned defender of Eternia and most powerful man in the universe. Prince Stahl continues to explain that even though He-Man is the most powerful man in the universe, there are those who resist him, namely “the alien warlords Skeletor and Hordak”, since Skeletor is apparently back to being a demon from another dimension in this story (either that or he just chooses not to mention that he is Keldor), and “King Hiss, an ancient evil reawakened”, accompanied by a lovely piece of artwork of He-Man locked in a three-way battle again Skeletor, Hordak and King Hiss.

Prince Stahl, however, has to undermine this beautiful drawing of He-Man fighting his three greatest foes by pointing that his family is also resisting He-Man. Dude, you’re no Skeletor or Hordak or King Hiss. You’re not even a second-string villain like Evil Seed or Shokoti or Count Marzo or Geldor or Lodar or Nephtu or any number of one-shot villains from the Filmation cartoon. You’re just a loser and He-Man could squash you like a fly, if he wanted to.

As for why He-Man doesn’t squash Prince Stahl, his father and his kingdom like flies, Prince Stahl has an explanation for that as well. You see, it’s because both He-Man and King Randor have way too much compassion. They don’t want to inspire fear and don’t use the Power of Grayskull to subdue and control others. And if He-Man doesn’t use his power to maximum effect, it’s not power at all.

If Adam had transformed into He-Man right there and then and squashed Prince Stahl like the fly that he is, no one would have blamed him. And indeed it’s obvious that Adam is trying very hard not to punch out Prince Stahl and even make some snappy retort – this is supposed to be a diplomatic mission, after all – so he is just stuffing his face with sandwiches, so he won’t be tempted to say something he shouldn’t say.

Thankfully for everybody involved, Prince Stahl’s rant is interupted by an earthquake or rather an Eterniaquake that overturns the carriage. The Royal Guard, under the command of Duncan and Teela, immediately springs into action. Duncan grabs the indignant Prince Stahl and notes that he’s “got the little blowhard”, while Prince Stahl utters dire threats of punishment, if Duncan does not protect his royal person. Once again, Prince Stahl is lucky that both Duncan and Adam are better people than I would be in that situation.

Teela, meanwhile, insists on protecting Adam and Cringer, while Adam is in telepathic contact with the Sorceress who had been watching over the royal caravan in her falcon form. The Sorceress tells Adam that this quake is no natural tremor, but an attack from below and that his tour is at an end, because He-Man is needed. Adam is not at all sad about this, because – as he tells the Sorceress – he was getting tired of playing the doofus anyway. There is still one problem, though. Teela is Adam’s bodyguard and she will not let him out of her sight, so Adam can’t transform.

Shortly thereafter, the source of the quake and the attack from below emerges. To no one’s surprise, it’s Skeletor. He’s accompanied by several of his Evil Warriors – we see Evil-Lyn, Trap Jaw, Tri-Klops, Whiplash, Jitsu, Spikor and Kobra Khan – and he’s piloting a gigantic war machine. The Sorceress identifies the earthquake machine as a Corebreaker, a relic from the Great Wars and one of the most devastating weapons ever devised.

The Great Wars have been a part of Masters of the Universe lore from the very beginning and were mentioned in the very first mini-comic, “He-Man and the Power Sword” by Donald F. Glut and Afredo Alcala, as a conflict in the distant past of Eternia, which left the planet litttered with technological relics only half understood by its current inhabitants. Initially, this was just a handy explanation cooked up by Donald F. Glut for why sword-wielding barbarians in furry loincloths had Windraiders, Battle Rams and Jet Sleds. But while much from the very early mini-comics was superceded by later lore, the idea of the ancient war machines littering the surface Eternia stuck around and crept into various incarnations of the franchise.

We actually see some of those ancient war machines in the form of matte paintings littering the area around Vasquez Rocks in the 1987 live action Masters of the Universe movie. The 200X cartoons also gave us plenty of ancient magical and technological artefacts is lying around for the taking and also for the first time showed us an ancient conflict between King Grayskull and his forces against the Snake People and Hordak, a conflict which likely are the mythical Great Wars. The Classics canon fleshed this out further and even included a Great Wars Weapons Pak, which did not contain any ancient war machines, alas, but repaints of existing Masters of the Universe Classics weapons. The Classics canon also introduced the Gar, the blue-skinned people of Eternia, as a major faction in these ancient wars as well as the creators of Eternian technology. The 2012 DC Comics run picked this up and gave us a flashback to a civil war between the humans and the Gar erupting after King Grayskull and his forces vanquished the Horde, egged by the dastardly Snake People.

Finally, Masters of the Universe Revolution gave us yet another glimpse of some ancient conflict on Eternia that involved giant war machines once again built by the Gar. Skeletor raises these machine from the ground twice – once to distract our heroes and ingratiate himself with them as the newly returned Prince Keldor and then during the final battle. So in short, there is a lot of precedent for ancient and very dangerous war machines to be found on Eternia.

Freddy Williams II’s drawing of the Corebreaker war machine certainly looks inspired by the ancient war machines seen in Masters of the Universe Revolution. Though the Corebreaker could also be an unrealised toy design from the 1980s. “It shakes, it vibrates, it’s fun!”

What’s also interesting is how Skeletor came by the Corebreaker. He obviously found it somewhere, but the Evil Warrior who repaired and reactivated the Corebreaker was Spikor. Now when we think of Skeletor’s tech guy, we usually think of either Trap-Jaw, who had that role in the Filmation cartoon, the German audio dramas and the 2021 CGI cartoon, or Tri-Klops, who was Skeletor’s main tech guy in the 200X cartoon as well as in Revelation/Revolution. However, there is precedent for Spikor as Skeletor’s tech guy, because in the vintage mini-comics Spikor was introduced as a blacksmith who lives in a cave and creates terrible weapons. Among other things, he forges Skeletor’s Terror Claws (basically oversized gauntlets with sharp claws) for the Lord of Destruction. According to the Classics bio, Spikor’s spikes and the trident that replaces his right hand were also created by himself and fused to his body by magic.

Spikor has been sorely underused in most Masters of the Universe media. He only had a handful of appearances in the Filmation cartoon where he was mostly a random henchman with little personality and didn’t appear at all in the 200X cartoon. Spikor does appear in Masters of the Universe: Revelation, but again it’s only a cameo appearance. He has no lines and doesn’t do very much except shoot spikes at Andra and Teela in one scene. I have no idea why Spikor is so underused, since he does look cool and menacing, but it’s easy to forget that he is also one of Skeletor’s tech guys, when he hardly ever gets to do anything. So kudos to Sword of Flaws for remembering that Spikor is also a tech guy.

That said, no sooner has Spikor bragged about that the Corebreaker was “just a bunch of rusty pieces stuck together by string and prayers” that he gets knocked out by Duncan hurling his mace right into his face. “Surely you saw that coming?” Evil-Lyn asks Tri-Klops, who replies that of course he saw Duncan’s attack coming. He just wanted to give him a small victory before taking him out. Or maybe Tri-Klops is just jealous that Spikor got to be Skeletor’s main tech guy for once.

While Duncan, Teela and the Royal Guards are fighting the Evil Warriors, Skeletor continues his assault on Castle Grayskull with the Corebreaker. However, instead of directly attacking the castle from below, as Evil-Lyn advised him, Skeletor instead emerged with the Corebreaker outside the castle for a frontal assault, because he wants to “see it burst like a blister”. However, this also loses him the element of surprise and gives the Sorceress the chance to protect the castle with a forcefield. This is a callback to the 200X cartoon where the Sorceress hung out inside Castle Grayskull most of the time and projected forcefields whenever the castle was under attack.

Evil-Lyn is grumbly that Skeletor let his ego get in the way of winning again and gave the Sorceress the chance to protect the castle. So she decides to salvage at least something from the mess Skeletor made. She notes that there is not one but two royal princes on the battlefield who will make excellent hostages, “worth nearly as much ransom as the wisdom of the elders”, though personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the people of Eisenhold would rather pay Evil-Lyn to keep Prince Stahl. However, Evil-Lyn has no idea what a pain in the backside Prince Stahl is and so she joins forces with Kobra Khan and tells him to use his venomous mist to knock the two princes out. Evil-Lyn of course has a long history of being willing to double-cross Skeletor and go behind his back, if it suits her. And in the 200X cartoon, she actually does team up with Kobra Khan to release the Snake People from the void underneath Snake Mountain where they have been imprisoned for centuries.

However, before Khan can knock out the princes with his venomous mist, Teela first knocks out Khan with her snake staff and quite graphically smashes his face in, complete with lots of blood. Then she kicks Lyn in the face and orders Adam and Prince Stahl to run. Prince Stahl, however, declares that he is the scion of steel and does not run. “Well, I sure as hell do”, Adam says and takes off with Cringer, since this is just the opportunity he needs to get away and transform into He-Man. Though he’s clearly not happy about having to pretend to be a coward and an idiot once again.

Meanwhile, the Sorceress is having problems of her own. For though her forcefield protects Castle Grayskull, the seismic vibrations generated by the Corebreaker are instead being redirected into the bedrock underneath the castle, causing quakes, fissures, volcanic eruptions and other problems all over Eternia. The Sorceress telepathically tells Adma that Eternia is on the verge of cracking apart and that she may doom the planet if she continues to protect Castke Grayskull. Furthermore, she specifically notes that she can feel the terror of the insectoid Kex people who live in caverns underneath the Mystic Mountains. The Kex people’s first and only appearance was in the mini-comic “He-Man and the Insect People”, though the Filmation cartoon featured a similar insect race in a few episodes. The reference to this largely forgotten Eternian race is a nice Easter egg.

Adam finally transforms into He-Man and he and Battle Cat throw the assorted Evil Warriors around like rag dolls. Then he lifts up the Corebreaker to stop its vibrations from destroying other Castle Grayskull or Eternia. Skeletor is about to blast He-Man with his Havoc Staff, but thankfully Teela is there to knock out Skeletor. Note that Teela has single-handedly knocked out Kobra Khan, Evil-Lyn and Skeletor in this battle, which is very impressive, considering that at this point, Teela is a highly skilled warrior, but doesn’t have any magical powers or other special abilities. Meanwhile, He-Man and Battle Cat together knock out Whiplash, Trap Jaw and Jitsu and Spikor, i.e. four Evil Warriors, between them, while Teela deals with three Evil Warriors on her own without any special powers. And note that Skeletor and Evil-Lyn are probably the most dangerous of the Evil Warriors.

Though Teela is polite and thanks Prince Stahl for his help in dispatching the Evil Warriors (though we don’t see Prince Stahl dealing with any of them) and comments that she wishes Adam were half the fighter Prince Stahl is. But while Prince Stahl may be a skilled fighter, he’s also a treacherous piece of shit and so he commandeers the Corebreaker determined to reduce Eternos’ advantage over Eisenhold by taking out two of Eternos’ greatest sources of power, He-Man and Castle Grayskull. Worse, He-Man is steadily weakening and not sure how much longer he can hold the Corebreaker.

When I first saw Prince Stahl in some preview pages for the comics – I think still unlettered and not coloured at that point – I viewed him as a similar character to Goras, Adam’s annoying and boastful cousin from the German audio dramas (pretty much all of Adam’s cousins are annoying). But once I actually read the whole comic, Prince Stahl turns out to be a much darker and nastier character than Goras. Goras is a braggard and a coward and endangers people, but he’s otherwise harmless. Prince Stahl, however, would have happily killed He-Man and destroyed Castle Grayskull and possibly all of Eternia as  well out of his lust for power.

While He-Man and Teela are dealing with the Corebreaker, Skeletor and his Evil Warriors and the treacherous Prince Stahl, Duncan is duelling with Tri-Klops. Duncan versus Tri-Klops is a popular pairing we’ve seen lots of times, from the German audio dramas via the 200X cartoon and the 2012 DC Comics all the way to Revelation/Revolution. It does make sense, too, because from the 200X cartoon onwards, Duncan and Tri-Klops are the prime tech guys of their respective factions. They’re also both regular, if technologically augmented humans with neither superstrength nor magical abilities, so they’re fairly evenly matched.

And so Duncan and Tri-Klops go blade to blade, Tri-Klops wielding his classic toy blade (ironically the same sword that Fisto also uses) and Duncan wielding the short sword that came with the Classics figure.  Indeed, the appearance of most characters in Sword of Flaws seems to be based mainly on the toys (and here mainly on the Classics versions), down to details such as Whiplash wielding an orange spear. Of course, Tri-Klops has been portrayed a skilled swordsman since his very first appearance in the vintage mini-comics (he is also blind – one of many disabled Masters of the Universe characters), but Duncan’s weapon of choice is usually either some kind of blaster or his mace, though we have seen him wield a sword on multiple occasions all the way back to the Filmation cartoon (in one episode, he even has a lightsaber) and he does know how to use it.

The duel of the weapons masters: Duncan versus Tri-Klops

Tri-Klops even compliments Duncan on his skills. However, he’s still a villain and so he cheats. “You’re an old soldier”, Tri-Klops says, “Your body is a map of scars and broken bones.” Then he uses his X-ray vision to locate just such an old injury and kick Duncan in that vulnerable spot. But while Duncan may be down, he’s far from out. He fires a cable from his arm cannon to connect to and hack into Tri-Klops’ visor. For Duncan’s modern scanners cannot penetrate the hull of the ancient Corebreaker weapon. However, Tri-Klops like to brag that he sees everything, so Duncan hijacks his visor to locate the Corebreaker’s battery and shoot it with his pistol – once again the very pistol that came with the Classics figure – disabling the Corebreaker and not a moment too soon. He then sends a power surge through the cable to fry Tri-Klops’ visor and disconnects.

There’s a sweet moment when the Sorceress telepathically tells He-Man that Duncan did it and saved them all and He-Man replies, “He always does”, showing how important Duncan is for both of them, though in very different ways.

Then He-Man and Battle Cat reduce the Corebreaker to scrap metal to prevent a repeat of the events and turn to the treacherous Prince Stahl, who notes that they all feared him and that he was the Master of the Universe, if only for a moment. “You were selfish”, He-Man informs him and declares that true power lies in friendship, sharing and cooperation, because it just wouldn’t be a Masters of the Universe story without a moral.

As for Skeletor and the Evil Warriors, they run away like they usually do after losing a fight. In this case, Evil-Lyn teleports everybody away, snarkily noting that they return to Snake Mountain with their tail between their legs… again. Skeletor of course doesn’t get it and wonders what kind of wisdom he needs to steal to figure out why he always loses. Listening to Lyn would be a good start, but of course Skeletor will never understand that.

Case in point: Later, back at Snake Mountain, we see that the battle has affected Tri-Klops badly. He is writhing on the floor, clearly sick and mumbling nonsense, likely due to having his visor fried. Lyn tries to comfort him, while Skeletor is just annoyed at a sick and moaning henchman and wants to put him out of his misery, which is extreme even by Skeletor’s standards. For while Skeletor has no problems abusing and even maiming his underlings (Trap-Jaw received his disfiguring injuries at the hands of Skeletor in two different origin stories), he normally doesn’t outright murder them. Not to mention that Lyn stops Skeletor from killing Tri-Klops and points out that if there is a way to destroy He-Man and steal the secrets of Castle Grayskull, Tri-Klops will find it – for Skeletor. Tri-Klops meanwhile mumbles that “our doom is violet.”

Now Evil-Lyn has always been the smartest of Skeletor’s henchpeople and the one most likely to betray him. However, Lyn normally has little use or love for her fellow Evil Warriors, but seems to view them mostly as idiots. Which, to be fair, most of them are. Of course, Lyn will absolutely ally with some of the other Evil Warriors against Skeletor, if it suits her. And indeed, we have seen her allying with both Kobra Khan and Tri-Klops before.  However, Lyn usually no more cares for the other Evil Warriors than Skeletor does, but strictly views them as tools. Therefore, it’s unusual to see her being protective of Tri-Klops. It also makes you wonder how different Snake Mountain would be if Lyn were in charge rather than Skeletor.

Meanwhile, back at Eternos Palace, we learn that King Faust of Eisenhold was so embarassed by Prince Stahl’s behaviour that he agreed to bilateral peace talks with King Randor. “I’m pretty good at this ambassador thing”, Adam notes. But of course, Teela, who has always been Adam’s harshest critic, will not let him have even a little moment of triumph and points out that He-Man was the one who stopped Prince Stahl, while Adam was hiding the whole time. Teela does admit that Adam has his charms, but that he shouldn’t confuse luck with competence. Then she takes off, not without reminding Adam that they have a combat training session in the morning.

As I’ve said here, while Randor has frequently been disappointed by Adam and views him as a failure, Teela absolutely know what Adam is capable of and how brave and heroic he can be. Her occasional harshness towards Adam is born out of love and the reason she pushes him so hard – and much as I love Teela, she must absolutely exhausting to be around – is because she wants Adam to be the best he can be. And Teela’s teachings do have an impact, though they manifest in He-Man rather than in Adam.

And since Adam loves Teela, he hates disappointing her and is clearly hurt by her harsh words. Orko and Duncan try to comfort him. Duncan tells Adam that one day Teela will see him for who he really is and that the burdens of being He-Man will make him a great king someday. Adam, however, isn’t so sure that he even wants to be king. After all, being He-Man has its advantages. He can save the world, lift continents and punch out monster drills. Being king is a step down from that. This is consistent with Adam’s portrayal elsewhere, whether it’s Masters of the Universe: Revolution, the Filmation cartoon or the 2012 DC Comics.  Adam doesn’t particularly want to be king, especially since becoming would mean not only losing his father, but also having to give up being He-Man.

Adam finally leaves and notes that he has to go and be irresponsible, stay out late, get drunk and disappoint Teela some more in the morning, as maintaining his secret identity requires. Duncan notes that all soldiers have one thing in common. None of them ever liked the weight of their weapon.

Now I’ve said before that Adam keeping the fact that he is He-Man secret from Teela never made any real sense and I applaud Masters of the Universe Revelation/Revolution for finally moving beyond that. However, Adam’s secret identity does make for some juicy character dynamics, not to mention a lot of angst for Adam. It’s also good to see Duncan being the supportive mentor/father figure/friend again.

The setting of this conversation is also neat. It’s a landing of a staircase inside Eternos Palace, which is lined with the portraits of Eternian kings and other artefacts. The focal point is a giant portrait of King Randor, looking once again exactly like the Classics figure. Honestly, this could be a Classics tie-in comic. There’s also a smaller portrait of Queen Marlena, a large statue of King Grayskull, a bust of King Miro, a bust of someone who might be an older He-Ro (He-Ro is the son of King Grayskull in the Revelation/Revolution continuity) and even a half-glimpsed portrait of a woman who might be Queen Amelia as well as other unidentified kings and queens of Eternia. There’s also an as of yet empty frame labelled Adam, which is reserved for the king he will one day become. No hint of Keldor anywhere, but then King Miro liked to pretend he never existed.

Randor’s portrait is also flanked by two flags. One looks like one of the flag on top of the Central Tower of the Eternia playset (yes, I had to look that up) and is presumably the flag of the Kingdom of Eternos, though Eternos has a different flag and coat of arms in the Revelation/Revolution continuity. The second flag is an American flag and represents Queen Marlena, though it’s not clear whether the flag was aboard Marlena’s spaceship, the Rainbow Explorer (American astronauts do like sticking their flag onto any celestial body they visit), or whether Randor had it made for her later on. At any rate, it is a nice touch and also a callback to a scene from the screenplay for the 1987 live action movie, where Earth teenager Kevin and Julie as well as Detective Lubic find a tattered American flag as well as a NASA mission badge in the catacombs beneath Castle Grayskull and He-Man tells them that his mother came from Earth and brought these things with her. The scene unfortunately never made it into the final film, though it would have been nice if the movie had acknowledged He-Man’s earthly legacy. In fact, the movie would have been better if Julie had been Adam’s cousin from Earth rather than just some random teenager and if He-Man and friends had specifically sought her out to ask her for help.

There is one final scene where the Heroic Warriors survey the damage caused by the quakes created by the Corebreaker. The team includes reconnaissance specialists Stratos and Mekaneck, whereby Statos is flesh-coloured like he was in the first few mini-comics. Also present and playing cards are two much more surprising characters, namely Strobo and the Fearless Photog. Both are characters who were supposed to appear in the vintage Masters of the Universe toyline, but were never released.  Strobo actually made it into a comic and cardback art for the character has also resurfaced as part of the so-called “lost wave” of figures assembled from existing parts that was supposed to come out in 1988.  All of these characters were eventually released in the Classics line and all but Strobo and Plasmar have been released in the Origins line. Strobo has the repainted body of Sy-Klone with a shiny mirror in his chest instead of Sy-Klone’s radar as well as the helmeted head of Zodac. Because of this helmet, he is usually assumed to be a member of the Cosmic Enforcers these days and has been portrayed as such in cameo appearances in the Masters of the Multiverse comic mini-series as well as in Masters of the Universe Revolution. Though in his only vintage comic appearance, he is just a Heroic Warrior with light powers.

Strobo and fellow Cosmic Enforcer Zodac and a fragment of the dark star, which appeared in the comic which was Strobo’s only vintage appearance. I have assembled a couple of more Cosmic Enforcers by now and really need to take another Cosmic Enforcer group shot.

Fearless Photog is an even more obscure character with an even stranger history. He was the winner of a Create-a-character contest for kids held in 1986 and the creation of Nathan Bittner, then eleven years old. The prize for winning the contest was a college scholarship, an all-expenses paid trip to California to visit the Mattel headquarters as well as Disneyland and the winning character should be made as an action figure. Nathan Bittner did get his scholarship money and the trip to California, but his creation Fearless Photog was never made in the vintage toyline, most likely because sales were faltering.  Also, Fearless Photog is one of the weirdest looking characters in a toyline full of weirdos. Instead of a head, he has a camera and the images he captures are displayed on his chest as a lenticular sticker. He allso has a shield which looks like a vintage camera flash and a blaster which looks like a camera. Fearless Photog was eventually made in the Masters of the Universe Classics line (and no, I don’t have him, though he is quite cheap and I should probably pick him up eventually), though he never had any appearances in any Masters of the Universe media beyond a “Where is Waldo?” type appearance in a giant battle scene in one of the Classics mini-comics (the Classics mini-comics had a thing for giant battle scenes cramming in as many characters as possible). Therefore, it’s amazing to see this weirdo pop up in a regular Masters of the Universe comic. Due to his photographic abilities, it also makes sense to include him as part of the reconnaissance team, even if all he does is play cards with Strobo.

Stratos is engaged in some aerial reconnaissance for earthquake damage and wants to get close to a mountain with the delightful name Heavenpiercer when downdrafts and a sudden bout of nausea force him to land. Mekaneck extends his neck and discovers something astonishing. For the peak of Heavenpiercer has split open and reveals a sword, which looks just like He-Man’s Power Sword, only that it’s purple.

All in all, the first issue of the Masters of the Universe comic mini-series The Sword of Flaws is off to a good start, even though the titular sword only appears on the final page. Most of the issue is taken up by a massive battle, but there are also plenty of nice character moments for both the good and the bad guys.

Freddy Williams II’s artwork is beautifully detailed and full of little Easter eggs and callbacks to the various toylines. Cringer has rarely looked cuter and more cuddly, though sadly he doesn’t speak.

I’m defnitely interested in seeing where this story goes in the upcoming installments.

Researching the Memory Hole Worldcon

I have two links to share today. To begin with, I have a story called “Queen of the Communist Cannibals” in Cliffhanger Magazine, a brand-new online magazine for adventure fiction. The story is an homage to the men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and I used an actual men’s adventure magazine headline as a prompt. It’s also a Two-Fisted Todd story, though Todd is not the main protagonist this time around.

I’m also over at Galactic Journey again, reporting about Heicon ’70, the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg, (West) Germany. It’s still the only Worldcon ever in Germany and one of only three in continental Europe.

As Galactic Journey‘s resident West German correspondent, it fell to me to report about the Heidelberg Worldcon. There was only one problem. I obviously didn’t attend the 1970 Worldcon, because I wasn’t born yet. Of course, Galactic Journey has reported about several Worldcons we didn’t attend, based on information found online or in vintage fanzines. However, there is very little information about the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg available online. And no one in German fandom seems to know anybody who attended let alone was involved in the organisation. In fact, no one even seems to know why Heidelberg of all places was chosen as the location of the first and only German Worldcon (since it’s far from a logical choice), though I do have a theory, which I elaborate upon in the article. It’s as if the 1970 Worldcon has fallen into a memory hole.

We do know who the Hugo winners and finalists that year were, but even the photo of the 1970 Hugo trophy on the official Hugo Awards page does not depict the actual trophy, but one with a replacement base fashioned by Pro Artist winner Frank Kelly Freas. The Hugo section of the article was incredibly exhausting BTW, since I was not familiar with many of the winners and finalists – yes, I have read The Left Hand of Darkness and Slaughterhouse Five and know Bug Jack Barron by reputation, but I don’t know the other Best Novel finalists and very few of the novella and short story finalists. Which meant digging up the links to all the reviews of the respective works at Galactic Journey and comparing the Hugos to our person Galactic Stars. That said, I’m mostly in agreement with the 1970 Hugo winners, which is more than you can say for many other Hugo years.

I have only ever met two people (as far as I know) who attended the Heidelberg Worldcon, Robert Silverberg and Betsy Wollheim. My meeting with Betsy Wollheim was very brief and the topic never came up. As for Robert Silverberg, we were on a (virtual) panel together at CoNZealand and he actually told me an anecdote about the Heidelberg Worldcon and the idiot who accosted him about the Vietnam War, which made it into the article. And yes, I did apologise to Robert Silverberg for some guy being a jerk to him fifty years before.

Once I dug deeper into the subject, I did find more information about the 1970 Worldcon, though it was still a lot scarcer than with many other Worldcons. Fanac.org had some photos taken by a Swedish fan named Lars-Olov Strandberg, but they were not labelled and identifying the people took some effort.

More helpful was this con report with photos, dutifully labelled, by German fan Klaus D. Kunze. Kunze seems to have taken a turn towards the far right in later years based on his publication list, but in 1970 he was just a young fan and his con report is solid and was a helpful source, though I strongly suspect I would politically disagree on pretty much anything with him today.

Fancylopedia had a bit more information and also decscribes the “Battle of the Balcony” where con members drove off Anti-Vietnam protesters. They also led me to this brief con report by a fan named Tony Lewis, a detailed con report in the fanzine Munich Round-Up by “Fux” and “WK” (most likely Walter Reinecke and Waldemar Kumming) as well as to 1970 TAFF winner and Heicon fan guest of honour Elliot K. Shorter.

Elliot K. Shorter’s Heicon report and the beginning of his 1970 TAFF report (apparently, he never finished it) were another teasure trove of information. Elliot K. Shorter coincidentally was the first person of colour ever to be a Worldcon guest of honour. Heicon further boasted the first ever woman to win the Hugo for Best Novel with Ursula K. Le Guin and the first ever person of colour to win a Hugo with Samuel R. Delany. That’s a lot of firsts for a Worldcon few people remember and a big step forward for more diversity in our genre.

My article is based mainly on the con reports by Elliot K. Shorter, Klaus Kunze and the pseudonymous Fux and WK. The all focussed on different aspects, but it was possible to piece together what happened, particular concerning a group of trolls, as we would refer to them today, doing their best to disrupt the con in the name of protesting the War in Vietnam. And though I suspect that Shorter, Kunze and Fux and WK would have agreed on very little otherwise, they all agree that those folks were idiots.

Which brings me to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Spekulative Thematik a.k.a. AST a splinter group of the Science Fiction Club Deutschland and the group that did their utmost to disrupt Heicon ’70. Now I’d never heard of AST before, though their chosen name sounds so very earnestly post-1968 left-wing. Their leader Albrecht Stuby who is mentioned in several Heicon reports actually went on to found a well regarded film festival Saarbrücken. I suspect we would get along very well today and I feel a bit bad to call him a troll, but that’s what he was in 1970. In fact, I should probably have tried to contact Stuby, except that I didn’t google him in time.

As I dug a bit deeper into AST, I realised that though I had never heard of them, I had encountered the group and their legacy before. One of their founding members was Hans Joachim Alpers from Bremerhaven (where AST was founded), co-creator of the RPG Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye), which was my and pretty much every other West German’s introduction to tabletop roleplaying. Hans Joachim Alpers also wrote that terrible article about Conan the Cimmerian for the AST zine Science Fiction Times, which I utterly eviscerate here. And regarding AST affiiliated zines, one of them, SF Notizen, which is still around and published by a local guy actually reported about my first Hugo nomination in 2020. I have a copy.

In general, the AST folks are also prime examples of the kind of 1970s West German pop culture criticism, which was the bane of my teen years. These people were the pioneers of pop culture criticism, the first generation of critics to actually seriously look at pop culture and their works were often the only critical works about SFF and other pop culture that existed at all, yet they were suffused by a very specific post-1968 leftwing fervour which condemned anything and everything as fascistoid, war-glorifying, violent American trash and worse.

I first encountered these early works of pop culture criticism in watered down form via teachers at school and the media which insisted that everything I enjoyed – Star Wars, Conan, US superhero comics, Perry Rhodan, Geisterjäger John Sinclair, Masters of the Universe, US cartoons in general, Stephen King, etc… – was trivial, worthless, bad, evil, wrong, fascistoid and would probably turn me into a Nazi war criminal and/or mass murderer.  It was of course all very, very stupid, but nonetheless it caused me to hide the things I enjoyed and feel ashamed about liking what I did, because there clearly was something wrong with me. At the same time, it also ignited the fervent wish to prove all of those teachers and media pundits and pop culture critics wrong, to show that yes, this stuff is good and yes, this stuff has value and no, it’s not just violent American trash (TM). In a way, I’m still doing that today, arguing back against a German teacher who is dead and one who’s still alive (or at least was the last time I checked), but probably doesn’t remember who I am and whom I’ve avoided for more than thirty years, because I know that if I ever saw him again, I would chew the guy’s head off about what a terrible person and teacher he was and how I would never forgive him for what he did to my friend Raphael (who turned out just fine BTW, better than any of us ever expected).

At university, I then found the primary sources in the library, these early works of pop culture criticism, which were so very much of their time such as the 1977 two volume Entertainment – Lexicon of Popular Culture, which is actually in my personal collection and which dedicates entire entries to various New Wave SFF authors who were no longer particularly relevant by the time I found the genre, while dismissing much better known golden age authors as – you guessed it – fascistoid.

Thankfully, science fiction and pop culture criticism has moved on since the 1970s and the teachers who used second hand versions of that same criticism to shame students for their reading and viewing choices are either retired or dead by now. And the AST people mostly moved on as well. Albrecht Stuby who gave a speech in 1970 accusing Worldcon, the Hugos, the masquerade, etc… of being frivolous, because there were people dying in Vietnam (and elsewhere) went on to found the Max Ophüls Film Festival and Award in Saarbrücken ten years later (which includes frivolous things like galas, awards ceremony and a trophy, even though people are still dying). Hans Joachim Alpers went on to co-create Das Schwarze Auge and introduce generations of (West) Germans to the joy of RPGs, though he is still wrong about Conan. An Austrian fan – not an AST member, but a former president of the Science Fiction Club Deutschland – named Axel Mehlhardt who gave a talk about sword and sorcery at the Heidelberg Worldcon (mentioned in several con reports, though I couldn’t find out what he actually said and since he died in 2024, it’s no longer possible to ask him) went on to found a highly regarded jazz club in Vienna. In short, the angry young men (and it seems they were mostly men) of 1970 grew up and mellowed. Not all of them remained active in SFF fandom, though several of them ended up in other creative fields such as running jazz clubs and film festivals.

I have even run across the theory that the disruptive behaviour of the AST people is the reason why there never was another Worldcon in Germany. This is nonsense. For starters, we know the reason why there never was another Worldcon in Germany. It’s because German fandom is balkanised – the Star Trek fans, Star Wars fans, Perry Rhodan fans, anime fans, gamers, even the Masters of the Universe fans, etc… all have their own cons, but there are very few pan-fandom cons. And the people who would be the logical choices to run a German Worldcon bid, namely longterm runners of literary focussed SFF cons, don’t want to do it. That said, things are changing in German fandom and I expect to see a German Worldcon bid for sometime in the 2030s, though it won’t be for Heidelberg again.

Not to mention that Heicon ’70 was far from the only Worldcons beset by controversy and disruptive trolls. Worldcon has a history of controversies from the very first one in 1939, where the Futurians were kicked out for allegedly planning to distribute a pro-Communist leaflet, on. A known pedophile was kicked out in 1964, which led to people (who I hope had no idea about the extent of his crimes) protesting the exclusion of this pedophile. We’ve had more than one case of people being kicked out or preemptively banned for disruptive behaviour. In fact, I’m surprised that the AST people were not unceremoniously kicked out. We had the Sad and Rabid Puppy drama in 2015/2016 and in 2018, we had a far right protest outside the San José Worldcon. So in short, drama and controversy have always been a part of Worldcon. If anything, the AST folks trying to disrupt Heicon ’70 to strike a blow against the war in Vietnam is one of the less remembered Worldcon controversies.

As for the rest of my Heicon ’70, I tried to write it like I would write a contemporary con report and that includes the trip to get there. I suspect 1970 Cora would have been no more likely to take the train than 2025 Cora, though the specific incident which turned me against trains (a teacher shaming me for politely asking where the baggage check-in at the train station was, even though I had only ridden on a train once by the point, from Bremen to Osterholz-Scharmbeck, which takes 15 minutes and required no luggage) most likely wouldn’t have happened to 1970 Cora. However, my Dad’s family were always car people – my paternal grandpa managed a gas station and had a car since the late 1920s.

As for which car to take for my fictional 1970 Worldcon trip, my Dad really did have a Mercedes in the early 1970s, though I don’t know if it was this particular model, though it’s likely based on production years. I have very vague memories of that car and my parents sold it, when my Dad got a company car from his employer. As a replacement, they bought a Volkswagen Beetle – with the small window, but not the pretzel window – to maintain the low car insurance premiums (in Germany, car insurance premiums go down the longer the insurance has been active without accidents), which was mostly driven by my Mom once she got her licence. For longer roadtrips, we always used the bigger car, because it’s more comfortable. Because cramming three people plus luggage into a Volkswagen Beetle is not particularly comfortable.

For the route taken, I first plotted a contemporary route and then checked which Autobahnen already existed in 1970. Figuring out which service stations already existed wasn’t all that easy either – the history of individual Autobahn service stations in Germany is not well documented – but thankfully I found some vintage postcards of service stations on route as well as vintage postcards of Heidelberg and Neckarsteinach, where the boat trip went. I honestly think that more Worldcons should have roadtrips.

Aunt Irmtraut, the relative who’s mentioned in the con report, is a real person. She’s my Mom’s cousin and lives in Heidelberg and really keeps asking me when I’ll come to visit her.

Meanwhile, while I was working on my Heicon ’70 report, it was announced that next year’s Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention is relocating to – guess where? – Heidelberg, since their regular venue in Neuss is undergoing renovations. So I will really attend a con in Heidelberg next year, though a very different con and 56 years later.

 

Better Late Than Never: The 2025 Hugo Ceremony Apology

It’s been more than two weeks since the pretty disastrous 2025 Hugo ceremony (for all the gory details, see this post) and not only do we finally have the Hugo nomination statistics, we also finally have an apology or rather two.

First of all, there is this apology from Kathy Bond, chair of the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle, Washington. Kathy Bond and her team admit that the organisation of the ceremony was sorely lacking, that pronunciation guides and a script were inadequate and that they left hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl inadequately prepared. It’s kind for Kathy Bond to fall on her sword and take the blame for the mess, but I wouldn’t let the hosts off the hook entirely, because if pronunciation guides, proper scripts, etc… were missing and the general rundown of ceremony was unclear, they should have asked for clarification.

There is also an apology to Kamilah Cole, the Lodestar finalist whom the hosts forgot, when reading out the finalists, as well as to the kh?ré? editorial team (sorry for WordPress refusing to recognise diacritics) for not reading out the names of the whole team without informing them beforehand. The same thing happened to the r/fantasy bingo team in Best Related, who also didn’t have their individual names read out without being informed beforehand, but they are not explicitly mentioned in the apology.

Kathy Bond also notes that they have “carefully documented all of these issues and shared them with LAcon V and Montréal Worldcon 2027 teams”. Which is certainly a good thing, except that none of the issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were in any way new. All of these things, mispronounced names, jokes and giggles about names and big teams, captioning failures and forgetting to read out a finalist, have all happened before, sometimes multiple times. In short, Worldcons should know about these pitfalls and issues, yet the same mistakes keep happening again and again.

In the comments at File 770, Erin Underwood also points out that none of the issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were in any way new and that we’re dealing with a recurrent infrastructure problem here. The main issue here is that due to the structure of Worldcon, every Worldcon starts from scratch and tries to reinvent the wheel rather than fall back on institutional knowledge and solutions which have already been successfully implemented. One such solution is prerecording the list of the finalists to take pressure off the presenters and only let the presenters announce the winner.

By the way, during the neverending Hugo ceremony from Hell of 2020, Erin Underwood presented the Best Fan Writer category and mispronounced my name. As soon as I pointed this out, Erin Underwood promptly apologised to me and also asked how to properly pronounce it. As I’ve said before, I could spell my full name in two language by the time I was five, I’m used to having my name mispronounced and respond to anything that even vaguely resembles my name. However, I still appreciate when people take the care to get it right or apologise when they get it wrong.

Finally, there is this suggestion:

Recommended creation of a new sub-area role in the Worldcon organizational structure responsible solely for the accurate handling of names. While not as visible as the errors at the podium, we also encountered technical issues with our badge printing software that were not identified until too late that failed to print diacritical marks on names correctly. We believe that centralizing this responsibility will help future Worldcons be more inclusive and respectful to individuals in all areas of the convention including the Hugo Awards.

Now this is a good suggestion that future Worldcons will hopefully implement. As for the badge printing software, I’m sadly not surprised that this happened. Because particularly US based software often has issues with diacritics and special characters. Note that I apologised above for WordPress not recognising diacritics and thus mangling kh?ré?. Because this is a known issue with WordPress and one they refuse to address. See this post from 2019 remembering Czech director Václav Vorlí?ek. That post – a tribute to a beloved director of genre films and TV, who is little known in the English speaking world – near killed me, because WordPress kept stripping out the handcoded diacritics.

But it’s not just WordPress. I’ve heard from people who had problems going through security at the airport, because the name on the ticket did not match the name on the passport. However, airline reservation software often doesn’t recognise special characters, so the people were forced to use workarounds, which then didn’t match their passports. I know one person who actually changed their legal name to get rid of the special character ß in their name, because they had a job which required a lot of travelling and kept running into problems with airport security.

So in short, I’m surprised that there were problems with the badge printing software. Nonetheless, these problems shouldn’t happen in the year 2025. Software developers should finally realise that English is not the default and that diacritics and special characters exist and that names don’t always fit neatly into a first name, middle name (Germans don’t have middle names – we can have multiple first names and multipart surnames, but no middle names) and surname pattern, that sometimes titles are part of a name, that patronymics exist, that transliteration can result in different spellings, that sometimes a rude word can be part of a name, etc… Also see , which someone linked in the comments about the apology.

Also, with regard to diacritics, it’s not okay to just leave them out, because diacritics affect the pronunciation and can also change the meaning. A German person named Käthe Müller would not be happy to find herself spelled Kathe Muller, because that’s not her name. The way her name would be spelled in systems that cannot handle Unlaute is Kaethe Mueller BTW.

Finally, regarding the pitfalls of names, I’d like to share a funny true story. Some forty years ago, there was a prominent German politician named Otto Graf Lambsdorff. That wasn’t even his full name, just the shortened version. His full name was Otto Friedrich Wilhelm von der Wenge Graf Lambsdorff. Hereby, Otto is the first name, Graf is his title, since he was from an aristocratic family, and Lambsdorff is his surname. In English, his name would be Otto Count Lambsdorff.

Otto Graf Lambsdorff was West Germany’s secretary of the economy from 1977 to 1984 and in this capacity he visited Singapore sometime in 1982/83. The Singapore Straits Times reported about this visit – with the headline “Otto visits Singapore”, which was an absolute howler for German speakers, because Otto was the stage name used by popular comedian Otto Waalkes. Indeed, I remember seeing that headline as a kid and saying to my parents, “Wow, I had no idea that Otto was famous even here. Though I wonder how his humour will translate.”

It’s easy to see how that mistake happened. Someone at the Straits Times saw a foreign name with three parts and assumed it followed the Chinese naming pattern where the surname is listed first. Or maybe some software programmed for Chinese names messed up. The correct headline would have been “Graf Lambsdorff visits Singapore” or – if you’re opposed to aristocratic titles – “Lambsdorff visits Singapore”. Note that the nephew of Otto Graf Lambsdorff, who’s also a politician as well as the German ambassador in Moscow, simply uses Alexander Lambsdorff as his screenname on Twitter, ditching the title.

As for why it took more than two weeks for an apology to be posted, Kathy Bond notes that several members of her team fell ill. I have no reason to disbelieve this, since I’ve heard from several people that they caught covid or other varieties of con crud at Worldcon. However, a brief note along the lines of “Yes, we’re aware of the issues with the Hugo ceremony and we will address them, but many of us are currently ill, so please give us time” should have been posted before.

That brings me to the second apology by hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, which may be found here as well as at File 770, if you don’t want to deal with Google Docs.

The apology by the hosts once again points at institutional issues behind the scenes that pronunciation guides weren’t provided for all names and none of the titles, that the script they were given wasn’t adequate, that there was no full rehearsal due to scheduling and technical issues and that there were last minute changes made to the ceremony (which was also confirmed by Seanan McGuire who presented a different category than initially planned with very short notice).

ETA: I checked with our editor Gideon whether he gave Seattle the pronunciations of every Galactic Journey team member listed as a Hugo finalist, since my name and Kris Vyas-Myall’s were mispronounced and I’m not sure if they got Natalie Devitt’s right, and according to Gideon, he was never asked for the pronunciations of the names of team members. So the con definitely didn’t have the pronunciations of our names (unless someone had the pronunciation of my name from a previous nomination).

However, even if the con failed to provide pronunciation guides for names and titles, the hosts could still have requested this information from the con or even contacted the people in question directly. When John Picacio hosted the Hugo ceremony a few years ago, he personally asked all the finalists how to pronounce their names to get it right. K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl could have done the same. And a full rehearsal of the Hugo ceremony should be a scheduling priority. The hosts should also have insisted on a full rehearsal.

There are specific apologies to Kamilah Cole for forgetting her, when reading out the Lodestar finalists, to Darcie Little Badger for mispronouncing the title of her Lodestar winning novel Sheine Lende and to the kh?ré? editorial team for not reading out the full list of names. Once again, there is no mention of the r/Fantasy bingo team, even though they were also neither informed nor happy about not having their names read out.

Then there is the issue of giggling at some of the names, which K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl claim they can’t remember doing, but that they would never giggle at someone’s name. Now I don’t doubt that they can’t remember the giggling, but it definitely happened and can be clearly heard on the recording of the ceremony. Grigory Lukin links to one instance in the comments at File 770.  The affected person is Egbiameje Omole, poetry editor at FIYAH. Now the giggle may well have been due to nerves or something the audience wasn’t aware of (like the infamous laugh during a memorial ceremony for flood victims that cost Armin Laschet the chancellorship) and not necessarily directed at Egbiameje Omole, since I don’t believe that K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl of all people would giggle at a Nigerian name. But it definitely happened, whether K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl remember it or not, and Egbiameje Omole deserves an apology, too.

Finally, K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl point out that they didn’t have any experience hosting an awards ceremony and therefore didn’t know what to ask of the organisation team.

This last bit is part of the problem, namely that Hugo toastmasters are usually popular and well regarded writers or other members of the SFF community. However, just because someone is a well known writer doesn’t mean they’re necessarily a good Hugo ceremony host. This was part of the problem with George R.R. Martin in 2020, for while George R.R. Martin may be one of the best known writers on the planet and does come across as likeable in TV interviews and the like, he’s not actually a very good Hugo ceremony presenter and also has known issues with pronouncing unfamiliar names and words.

What you want for a Hugo ceremony or indeed any awards ceremony is someone with stage experience who is spontaneous, can respond to unexpected issues and who can also handle unfamiliar words and names. And we do have people who fit this description in our community, even if they may not be the biggest names. But I’d rather have someone on stage who does a good job and knows what they’re doing rather than a big name writer who stumbles through the ceremony.

On the weekend after Worldcon I was at another con, Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel. Now Toyplosion is a very different con than Worldcon. It’s a vintage toy convention where the dealers room is not an afterthought but the main attraction. They don’t have an awards show or a masquerade or anything like that. However, Toyplosion also had stage programming such as interviews and a live podcast recording. There was also a tombola where the winners were announced live on stage and handed their prizes. And for the tombola winner announcement, the Toyplosion organisers drafted a YouTuber with local TV experience and an actress/singer/TV presenter who also happens to be a fan. Because these two people both have stage experience, are charming and managed to make even something fairly dull such as reading out winning tombola numbers entertaining. I wouldn’t necessarily choose these two people to host a Hugo ceremony, especially since the YouTuber has notable pronunciation issues with English language words and names (because not everybody is good at everything). Nonetheless, Toyplosion, a newish con which doesn’t have big ceremonies, handled the one they have better than Worldcon did.

I don’t think that the many issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were due to malice and I never did. The main issue here is carelessness on the part of both the hosts and the organising team. And the fact that everybody involved should have known better, since we’ve dealt these very same issues before, makes this carelessness even more aggravating, since none of this needed to happen.

 

Some Comments on the 2025 Dragon Award Winners

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Toyplosion coverage, because the winners of the 2024 Dragons Awards were announced today at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. The full list of winners may be found here. For my thoughts on the 2025 Dragon Award finalists, see here.

I’ve been following the Dragon Awards since their inception in 2016, so I guess  I’m committed/cursed to cover the Dragon Awards at this point.

Not a Dragon Award, but a gorgeous golden Schleich dragon and the Masters of the Universe Classics Jitsu who has claimed the dragon as his personal steed.

However, I had a busy weekend, so let’s delve right into the categories:

Best Science Fiction Novel

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel goes to This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman is the latest book in Dinniman’s popular Dungeon Crawler Carl LitRPG series.

I have to admit this win surprised me a little, because at least for me, this was the most obscure book in this category, but then LitRPG really isn’t my subgenre. That said, it’s interesting to see that indie books, who dominated the early years of the Dragons, can still win a Dragon Award in 2025.

Best Fantasy Novel

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Fantasy Novel is The Devils by Joe Abercrombie.

Personally, I was rooting for Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by the late Howard Andrew Jones, especially since this is the last chance to honour Howard Andrew Jones.

However, Joe Abercrombie is very popular and exactly the sort of author – very popular, but overlooked by other awards like the Hugos or Nebulas – the Dragon Awards were made for.

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Young Adult and Middle Grade Novel goes to Sunrise of the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. This win isn’t remotely surprising, since Sunrise of the Reaping is a prequel to Suzanne Collins’ extremely popular Hunger Games series and also a book that people who are not regular YA/middle grade readers will have heard of.

Best Alternate History Novel

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel is The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal. This was also my vote and I’m happy that it won.

But the Dragon isn’t the only award Mary Robinette Kowal won this weekend, for she also won the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction for her story “Marginalia”, which was also a Hugo finalist this year. It’s a very good story, too, about a young woman, a former chambermaid, who uses her knowledge to save a knight as well as her little brother from a giant snail.

Best Horror Novel

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel goes to Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle.

For those of us who’ve been following the Dragon Awards since the beginning, this is a beautiful case of poetic justice. Because the Dragon Awards grew out of the Sad and Rabid Puppy mess and while they were billed as an award for broadly popular SFF overlooked by other awards, the Dragons were also very much positioned as a sort anti-Hugo for conservative and right-wing SFF. And indeed the first Dragon Award winner for Best Horror Novel wasn’t even a horror novel, but a religious space opera by a very Catholic and very rightwing indie writer.

However, once the Dragons escaped containment, the ballot began to more closely resemble what the award set out to do, namely honour popular works frequently overlooked by other awards. The Dragon ballot is still more white and more male than many other genre awards and there still are right-leaning works on the ballot, but they’re by highly popular authors rather than obscure puppy hangers-on.

As for Chuck Tingle, he first came to many people’s attention when Vox Day slated him onto the Hugo ballot for his satirical erotica story “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” and Chuck Tingle proceded to royally troll the Puppies, which won him a non-slated Hugo nomination the following year. Chuck Tingle is also a horror writer, so for him to win an award initially pushed by the Puppies with a gay horror novel is not only poetic justice, but also proof that love is real.

Best Illustrative Book Cover

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Illustrative Cover is Michael Whelan for Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson. Michael Whelan is of course an SFF art legend and this was by far my favourite covers of all the finalists in this category.

Best Comic Book/Graphic Novel

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel goes to Daredevil: Cold Day In Hell by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven. I haven’t read this comic or indeed any Daredevil in thirty years, so I can’t say any about it.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series is Andor. This is an utterly unsurprising win, because Andor is the one Star Wars series that almost everybody likes. In fact, I’m something of an outlier, because while I like Andor, I don’t love it as much as many others seem to. And in fact, I voted for Murderbot.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie goes to Deadpool and Wolverine. Again, this is far from surprising, because Deadpool and Wolverine was extremely popular and probably the highest grossing movie on the ballot aside from Wicked. And the fact that Wicked is a) a musical and b) focussed on two women may have given Deadpool and Wolverine the edge here.

Best Digital Game

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Digital Game is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. As I always say whenever this category comes up, I’m not a gamer, but even I have heard of Assassin’s Creed.

Best Tabletop Game

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Tabletop Game goes to Magic the Gathering: Final Fantasy. This is another win that’s not even remotely surprising, because both Magic the Gathering and Final Fantasy are extremely popular. Magic the Gathering has also won the Dragon Award in this category before and was represented with two sets on this year’s ballot.

Other Awards

There were a number of other awards given out at Dragon Con as well.

As mentioned above, the 2025 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction goes to “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal.

The winner of the 2025 Mike Resnick Memorial Award for the best unpublished science fiction short story by a new author is “Elsewhere” by Anaïs Godard.

The 2025 Julie Award, named after Julius Schwartz, goes to Dave Goelz and the 2025 Hank Reinhardt Fandom Award goes to Mike Hannigan.

***

The Dragon Awards are now in their tenth year, well established and they pretty much do what they were intended to do, namely award broadly popular SFF works with big fanbases. It’s notable that this year’s Dragon Award winners are a lot more male dominated than last year’s, but then the Dragons tend to skew more male than most other genre awards.

I haven’t seen any reactions beyond some social media posts by happy winners so far, but I will link any reactions I find here.

Back to the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the 2025 Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel Part 1: It’s Roadtrip Time

I still haven’t gotten around to posting the final part of my report about my trip to the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention in Neuss earlier this summer and it’s already time for the next convention.

But first of all, I’m at Galactic Journey again today, for the third time this month. This time around, I review another Ballantine Adult Fantasy book, Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith. If Ursula K. Le Guin derisively referred to Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz as Poughkeepsie because of its fairly plain language and low magic world, Zothique is definitely Elfland. Though I think there is room for both in fantasy.

But now  let’s get to the topic at hand. For last weekend, I headed to Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel in the Ruhrgebiet. Though only in its third year, Toyplosion already is one of Europe’s biggest vintage toy conventions. Unfortunately, I had to miss the first Toyplosion due to both my parents being sick, but I attended last year’s Toyplosion and enjoyed it a lot, so much that I bought a ticket for this year’s edition as soon as they went on sale.

He-Man goes Ruhrpott – again.

As with this year’s Los Amigos convention, I also booked a hotel for the night. That way, I could spare myself the stress of driving both ways in a single day and also explore the many fascinating sights the Ruhrgebiet has to offer.

Though I suspect a lot of people still have the old image of the grimy Ruhrgebiet in their minds. Cause when I told neighbours and friends that I was going to Castrop-Rauxel for the weekend, the inevitable reaction was, “Why on Earth would you go there?”, whereby “there” was often pronounced with utter disdain. I guess a lot of people still haven’t realised that the old grimy Ruhrgebiet is long gone and that the region actually is a viable tourist destination with lots of interesting sights now. Though I recall seeing a travel broshure announcing that “The Ruhrgebiet is green”, complete with photos of castles, mansions and parks, sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s, at a time when many of mines, steelworks and other heavy industry in the Ruhrgebiet were still active. So the Ruhrgebiet has been rebranding itself as a tourist destination for more than thirty years now.

Autobahn A1

On Saturday morning, I got up at five AM. The con was set to open at nine, one hour earlier than last year. The trip would take roughly two and a half hours and I wanted to stop for breakfast along the way.

I left home at half past five, driving onto my old friend Autobahn A1. It was still dark outside – sunrise was at six twenty AM – though the sky was gradually turning from black to gray. More remarkably, the Jet gas station just before exit Groß-Mackenstedt was not just closed, but entirely dark. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it dark before.

In spite of the early hour, there was quite a bit of traffic – both trucks as well as cars and campervans. But then, the summer holidays are still ongoing in some parts of Germany. Indeed, the summer holidays in Northrhine-Westfalia, which is not only the German state with the biggest population, but also the state where Castrop-Rauxel is located, ended this very weekend, which meant additional traffic.

But even though there was more traffic than you’d expected at this early hour, I still made good time. By the time the sun came up at twenty past six, I was just passing service station Dammer Berge with its iconic bridge restaurant, which was already lit up in spite of the early hour. Though I didn’t stop this time around, because I wasn’t in the mood for overpriced soapy coffee.

A bit further down the Autobahn, I got a surprise, because I passed an exit named Rieste that I had never noticed before. Now I’m very familiar with the Autobahn A1 leg between Bremen and Osnabrück, because I’ve driven it lots of time. I know every exit, every parking lot, every service station. So how could there suddenly be an Autobahn exit I had never noticed before?

The answer is that Autobahn exit Rieste is brand-new and only opened for traffic on August 7. And come to think of it, there had been a construction zone in this area until recently, clustered around an Autobahn bridge in the process of being replaced. Driving past this spot on my way to the Los Amigos in Neuss, I did notice a paved exit ramp, but assumed it led to a newly built or expanded parking lot.

As for why Rieste, a village of 3600 people, gets its own Autobahn exit, the reason is the massive Niedersachsenpark business park next to the A1, which among other things is home to the European distribution center for Adidas and Reebok. Until now, the Niedersachsenpark could only be accessed via the neighbouring exit Neuenkirchen-Vörden, but as the business park grew, traffic increased as well until a second Autobahn exit became necessary. Coincidentally, this is also the reason that the A1 exit Groß Ippener further north exists, because there is a business park next to the Autobahn. Meanwhile, the exit Posthausen even further north on the Bremen to Hamburg leg of the A1 only exists because of the Dodenhof shopping center, one of Germany’s largest malls.

I drove onwards, past Osnabrück, across the Teutoburg Forest and through the void of nothing that is the Münsterland. The sun was already up by now, but it was still gloomy with low-hanging clouds, which did not bode well for the day. Now the Teutoburg Forest has a tendency to be gloomy – something which already plagued and doomed Publius Quinctilius Varus and his legions – but the Münsterland normally isn’t overly gloomy.

Breakfast at Kamener Kreuz

It was around half past seven, when I reached the cloverleaf junction Kamener Kreuz, where Autobahn A1 intersects with Autobahn A2. Normally, I should have changed onto Autobahn A2 here, but instead I drove on to the next exit Kamen-Zentrum. Because in the business and retail park next to the Kamener Kreuz, there is a really nice bakery café, a branch of the Dortmund based chain Bakery Grobe. I discovered it last year on the way home from the Los Amigos convention and have been stopping here whenever I’m at Kamener Kreuz ever since, because due to its proximity to the Autobahn, it makes for the perfect pitstop.

Though it was half past seven on a Saturday morning, the bakery café was already quite busy. While waiting in line, I chatted with a trucker lady who had driven all through the night and was making one last breakfast stop on her trip to Solingen. At one point, we talked about Bremerhaven (a common destination for truckers due to the harbour) and I mentioned that I got there sometimes to interpret at the courthouse. Trucker lady: “Bremerhaven has a courthouse?” – Me: “Of course. It’s an independent city.” – Trucker lady: “But that’s not near the harbour, is it?” – Me: “Not at all. The Bremerhaven courthouse isn’t close to anything of interest. You can’t even get anything to eat around there. If I want to have lunch, I have to go to the fishing port.” Note that Bremerhaven is a rather weird city, which consists of separate districts – the touristy parts along the old and new harbour, the city center with shops and the like, the fishing port, the actual modern harbours, residential neighbourhoods and a big box retail district on the edge of the city – with little connection between them. If you only ever go to one part like the modern harbours, you don’t necessarily know that the other parts exist.

Then it was my turn to order breakfast, I had a Dortmund market omelette, a latte macchiato and a glass of orange juice. He-Man approves:

Breakfast of Champions of Grayskull: He-Man and I are enjoying a Dortmund market omelette.

And here is just the Dortmund market omelette. It’s filled with cheese and tomatoes and served with a bread roll as well as some tomato and cucumber slices.

When I left Bakery Grobe, I also chanced to take a closer look at two houses on the other side of the road. They are both old, dating from the nineteenth or early twentieth century and clearly predate both the Autobahn and the retail park. I had noticed these houses before and mostly wondered why they were still standing, because it’s not a pleasant place to live, awkwardly wedged between a busy retail park and one of Germany’s busiest Autobahnen. Mostly houses that find themselves in such locations are sold and torn down sooner or later.

But this time, as I walked back to my car, I noticed one of the houses, painted a striking burgundy red, actually had a sign that read Club A1 and a large poster of a scantily clad lady. And suddenly I realised, “Crap, that’s a brothel.”

The A1 roadside brothel on Kamener Kreuz and its neighbour.

Now prostitution is legal and mostly uncontroversial in Germany and it flourishes along the Autobahnen, whether it’s in the form of campervans with red neon hearts in the windows parked on commuter parking lots or the ladies of the night cruising trucker parking lots. Sometimes, you get actual brick and mortar brothels like this one as well, though those tend to be more common in rural areas. But then, a brothel probably is the best use for a building in such an awkward location.

Autobahn A2, two A-Fortysomethings and a Spooky Parking Garage

I drove back the few kilometers to Kamener Kreuz and changed onto Autobahn A2, passing Lünen (one of the lesser known Ruhrgebiet cities) and Dortmund. At the junction Dortmund Northwest, I changed onto Autobahn A45 and then again at intersection Castrop-Rauxel East onto Autobahn A42 for the last few kilometers.

The nine o’clock news were just starting, when I left the Autobahn at the exit Castrop-Rauxel, i.e. I had arrived just in time for the con to start.

The con venue, the Europa Hall at Forum Castrop-Rauxel, is very close to the Autobahn. I followed the signs that led towards the parking area. Last year, I parked on an elevated park deck a few hundred meters away from the Europa Hall. This year, however, the signs led me to an underground parking garage underneath Forum Castrop-Rauxel, which I’d either missed last year or it had been already full.

The parking garage was certainly convenient, but it was also terrible, because the place was incredibly dimly lit. If I was given to being afraid of parking garages (which I’m not, at least not when attending a con with thousands of people), this one would have been terrifying.

I found a place to park and went in search of a ticket machine, since the signs said I needed a ticket. However, I couldn’t find the ticket machine in the dimly lit garage. I finally spotted a young woman getting out of her car and asked, if she knew where the ticket machine was. Turns out she did know, because she was an employee at Castrop-Rauxel city hall, which just happens to be located at Forum Castrop-Rauxel as well. She offered to show me to the ticket machine.

While we were walking to the ticket machine, I asked her, if it was normal for city hall employees to work on Saturdays in Castrop-Rauxel, because our city hall is closed on Saturdays. The young woman explained that the Castrop-Rauxel city hall was closed on weekends as well, but this weekend some employees had to come in to deal with a problem with election notifications and mail-in ballots (more about that here). “Oh yes, you’re having a local election in September,” I replied, “I noticed the campaign posters.” In fact, I noticed election posters a few weeks ago on a day trip to Porta Westfalica, but initially assumed it was a special election just in Porta Westfalica and Minden, not in all of Northrhine-Westfalia. I also asked her if she at least got an overtime bonus for having to come into office on a weekend. Yes, she is getting an overtime bonus as well as a weekend bonus.

When we reached the ticket machine, I saw that the price for a day ticket was a very reasonable 3 Euros. However, when I threw my coins into the slot, I got the message. “No parking fee today”, which is even better. Honestly, considering the horrendous parking costs in Bremen and also Oldenburg, parking costs in the Ruhrgebiet have always been very reasonable in my opinion.

Having saved the parking fee, I then went in search for a way out of the parking garage, which turned out to be a staircase which led up to Forum Castrop-Rauxel and the con. But that’s a story for another post.

Some Comments on the 2025 Hugo Winners – with Bonus Tall Ship Photos

The winners of the 2025 Hugo Awards were announced last night or rather very early in the morning at Worldcon in Seattle, Washington. My thoughts on the finalists may be found here and the full voting statistics and some comments by the administrator may be found here.

I didn’t attend Worldcon this year, because the US government has unfortunately gone quite mad and the risk of being refused entry to the US or – worse – getting thrown into some ICE jail is too big, especially since Worldcon already falls into the gray area between business and leisure travel for me.

However, Worldcon wasn’t the only big event happening this weekend. Cause the SAIL tall ship festival in Bremerhaven, one of the biggest in the world, was also happening at almost the same time as Worldcon. And unlike Seattle, Bremerhaven is only about eighty kilometers away. And when the water was sunny but cool on Saturday morning, I hopped into the car and drove to Bremerhaven to the visit the SAIL. I will probably do a separate blogpost with more photos, but for now enjoy this little taste:

A look across the new harbour in Bremerhaven. Moored on the right, you can see the “Shabab Oman II” from Oman and next to it the “Sagres II” from Portugal

A SAIL panorama: The bow of the “Le Francais” from France, local hero “Alexander von Humboldt II” with her distinctive green hull and sails, the “Capitan Miranda” from Uruguay, the historic Simon Loschen lighthouse and the stern of the “Gorch Fock”, training vessel of the German Navy

Scandal prone, but iconic: The “Gorch Fock”, training vessel of the German Navy. She was also the lead vessel in the SAIL tall ship parade together with the “Alexander von Humboldt II” and also transported German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to open the festival.

The Spanish Galeon “Andalucia” was one of three Spanish galeons at the 2025 Sail in Bremerhaven.

Running around Bremerhaven all day – plus having to take the longer way home with a pit stop in the Fright Zone Brake, all because of a traffic jam on the Autobahn – did make me tired to the point that I just wanted to take a nap when I got home. But then I realised during the drive home, “Crap, the Hugos are tonight, aren’t they?”

I did take the nap after all – since the Hugo ceremony wasn’t due to start until the unchristly hour of 5:30 AM my time. I also put a bottle of premixed Hugo cocktail in the fridge, just in case.

A bottle of premixed Hugo cocktail, just in case. I even bought the fancier name brand rather than the cheaper store brand.

But enough about my day. Let’s get to the 2025 Hugo Awards:

The Ceremony

First a few words about the ceremony. Now I’m something of a Hugo ceremony veteran by now and I have never experienced one which did not have its share of problems from fire alarms to messed up auto-captioning to lengthy delays to mispronounced names and rambling speeches by presenters and winners. Some years stand out for being particularly issue laden – shout out to the neverending Hugo ceremony from Hell of 2020 – but they all have some issues.

So how does the 2025 Hugo ceremony measure up? Well, it wasn’t as bad as the neverending Hugo ceremony from Hell – thank heavens – since it was a lot shorter for starters. However, it definitely wasn’t good.

The issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were many and – what was really annoying – they mirrored issues we’ve seen in previous years, so lessons apparently weren’t learned. To begin with, the ceremony started with some delay, which is annoying, when it’s already a late start – the ceremony was supposed to start at 8:30 PM Seattle time, which was very late in the evening for people on the US East coast and the early hours of Saturday morning for those of us in Europe.

When the ceremony finally did start, it started with several people walking on stage, singing a rewritten version of the “Ballad of the Witches’ Road” from Agatha All Along, entitled “Down the Hugo Road”.  The people singing were the two hosts, K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, as well as several Hugo finalists, which I only knew because having the request to sing on stage sprung upon them upset several finalists. If you didn’t have any behind the scenes knowledge and were just watching the ceremoney livestream, you had no idea who any of these people were, because they were never introduced.

The “Down the Hugo Road” song was a cute idea, though I don’t think they really needed to sing every single verse – the song is over three minutes long in Agatha All Along version – nor did the hosts have to reprise the chorus every time someone came on stage or a category was announced. Cause the Hugo road song wore out its welcome very quickly. I think it was around the Best Fan Writer was announced that I said “If I have to hear that bloody song one more time, I’m going to scream.” By the time Best Related Work was announced, I actually did scream. And when I took my trash out very early on a misty Sunday morning, I probably woke the neighbours by singing very loudly “Fuck, fuck, fuck you off, fuck you all off” to the tune of the Ballad of the Witches/Hugo Road”. Because the Witches/Hugo Road song had replaced the earworm (this rewritten version of Adele’s “Rolling on the Deep” as performed by Michelle Brückner to promote the SAIL tall ship festival) I’d had in my head for days, because Radio Bremen 1 insisted on playing it multiple times per day. It’s not an improvement.

Agatha All Along was a Hugo finalist in the Best Dramatic Presentation Short category, so it was probably reasonable to assume that many/most people in the audience would be familiar with it. That said, not everybody watched Agatha All Along. For example, Lodestar finalist Jordan Ifueko reported in the Hugo finalist Discord that her grandmother had asked her what hymn they were singing between the category announcements. Also, if you have seen Agatha All Along, you know what the “Ballad of the Witches Road” is actually for, which makes it just a baffling all around choice.

But that annoying song was just one of the many issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony. Early on, the hosts made a joke about not having a script, while messing about with a pile of papers. Unfortunately, as the evening wore on, it became clear that it wasn’t a joke, but that there apparently really was no script nor any kind of plan at all.

The two hosts often seemed lost. At one point, one of them joked that they shouldn’t have taken a gummy (of the marihuana kind) beforehand and unfortunately, I’m not sure if that was a joke either.

Names were mispronounced all the time, including mine, since no one had apparently bothered to give the hosts a phonetic pronunciation guide, even though the Seattle Worldcon had the information. With some of the big team categories, some names were not read out, while others were, and this was not previously agreed with the respective teams who were often sitting in the audience to hear themselves referred to as “Team X”. A page from the speech submitted by the designer of the Lodestar Award was missing, which the hosts only realised on stage. Apparently, no one had informed the hosts either that the Best Dramatic Presentation finalists would be introduced by clips from the respective works (including one which literally spoiled a series finale). And finally, the hosts forgot to read out the name of the Lodestar finalist So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole, who was sitting in the audience and deeply and understandably upset. Hearing your name read out at the Hugo ceremony is a special moment and finalists being randomly denied that special moment is just wrong. What made these lapses even worse is that all of this has happened before, including a finalist being skipped (this happened with one of the Best Graphic Story finalists in Dublin).

The autocaptioning course struck again as well, with the autocaptioning system not only seriously lagging, but also messing up names, titles and anything that was not English. I didn’t notice any howlers like in Dublin, where the audience was pretty much rolling on the floor laughing at the autocaptioning system utterly butchering Ada Palmer’s heartfelt Campbell/Astounding Award laudatio, but it was still terrible. And again it has happened before. Note that the WSFS Business Meeting uses a human transcriber for the captions and no autocaption system. What made the whole thing even worse was that a deaf finalist who was in the audience that he couldn’t properly read the autocaptions or make out the sign language interpreter.

There were plenty of other issues with the organisation of the ceremony as well. When Joy Alyssa Day, designer of the beautiful Hugo base, asked for the lights to be dimmed, so she could demonstrate its light-up action feature (this must be the first ever Hugo base with an action feature), the lights did not dim. The sound was often terrible as well to the point that I couldn’t make out one of the winners – Best Dramatic Presentation Long – at all and neither could the autocaptioning robot. I have worked live events and I have a lot of respect for light and sound technicians who are truly the unsung heroes who keep such events going.  However, while I respect light and sound technicians, I also expect them to do their jobs.

Another issue were the seating and stage arrangements. Cause some of the finalists/winners were seated quite far away from the stage and the stage was accessed via a ramp, so it took a long time for the winners to make their way on stage.

Now don’t get me wrong, the ramp is a huge step forward (pun fully intended) for accessibility, especially since there was at least one wheelchair user among the finalists this year. And even for non-wheelchair users the often steps leading onto a stage can be a problem to navigate. The steps leading onto the stage in Dublin were so steep that I thought, “My Mom [who already had mobility issues at the time] would have a hard time getting up here.” And while my Mom wouldn’t have to get on stage, there are many people with mobility issues, including Hugo finalists. What is more, Hugo winners are almost always nervous, they’re frequently wearing outfits with long skirts, full skirts, hoop skirts, bustles, trains, high-heeled shoes and other potential hazards for tripping or getting stuck. So in short, the ramp itself was a great idea and I hope to see ramps on other Hugo stages.

But because the ramp was long, it took winners quite a bit of time to make their way on stage. Now the Oscars, which have a similar arrangement, cover the time it takes to get on stage with music and an announcer reading out some facts about the winner. “X has been nominated five times, this is their first win”, etc… The 2025 Hugo ceremony had music on occasion, which you often couldn’t really hear on the livestream, because the sound was so bad. And while there apparently was some kind of “voice of God” announcer, they only did their job sporadically.

So in short, the 2025 Hugo ceremony was a mess and it didn’t really have to be, since most of the problems were issues other cons had encountered before. A lot of people are disappointed with the hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, especially since both of them have done so much for more diversity in our community, so people expected better from them. But while K. Tempest Bradford, Nisi Shawl and the other presenters bear part of the blame, the main issue lies with the organisation team behind the scenes. Seanan McGuire has said that she was supposed to announce the Best Novella winner, but then was asked to announced Best Novelette instead during the ceremony with barely any preparation time. Seanan managed to handle this, because she is good at improvisation. Not everybody is.

But enough of the mess that was the 2025 Hugo ceremony. Let’s get to the winners:

Best Novel 

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novel is The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett.

I have to admit that this win surprised me a little, if only because The Tainted Cup seemed to get less buzz than many of the other finalists and also because Robert Jackson Bennett really stepped in it during the voting period by defending the use of AI to vet program participants by the Seattle Worldcon. And while I did enjoy The Tainted Cup, there were other finalists in this category I enjoyed more. But if you look at the voting statistics, The Tainted Cup had a comfortable lead from the start, so other voters seem to have liked it a lot more than I did.

Robert Jackson Bennett submitted a funny pre-recorded acceptance speech, since he wasn’t on site. And in fact, none of the Best Novel finalists were on site this year, which is a first as far as I know.

Best Novella

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novella goes to The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. Once again, this wasn’t my first or even second choice for this category, but then the category was very strong and it’s a fine winner.

Also that fact that both Best Novel and Best Novella went to male writers will hopefully pacify the “But what about the poor widdle menz?” brigade?

Best Novelette

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novelette is “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer. This is a great story and was also on the top of my ballot.

Best Short Story

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Short Story goes to “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo.

This wasn’t my top choice in this category, but it was one of the most pleasant surprises on this ballot. I never loved Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle as much as many others evidently do, so I didn’t expect much from this story, but I wound up enjoying it a lot and I think it’s a most worthy winner.

Best Series

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Series is Between Earth and Sky by Rebecca Roanhorse.

This win surprised a little, but it was a very pleasant surprise, since I have been enjoying the series. A look at the voting data reveals that Between Earth and Sky was in fourth place in the first round, behind InCryptid, Southern Reach and Stormlight Archive, but a lot of people placed fairly high after their first choice, whereas not all that many people like Southern Reach, Stormlight Archive and InCryptid equally.

Best Poem

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Poem is “A War of Words” by Marie Brennan.

Best Poem was a special category run by the Seattle Worldcon, though there is a proposal to make it a permanent category which I would welcome, because poetry has been part of our genre since the very beginning and deserves recognition.

The category was presented by Brandon O’Brien, who was the Seattle Worldcon’s poet laureate and who did a great job presenting this special Hugo – in verse form.

Best Graphic Story

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Short Story goes to Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way written by Ryan North with art by Chris Fenoglio.

This story, which is basically a Choose Your Own Adventure comic in the world of Star Trek: Lower Decks, was another very pleasant surprise, since it wasn’t really on my radar at all before.

Writer Ryan North also accepted the award in person, but then the comic people usually do care about the Hugos.

Best Related Work

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Related Work is Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll.

This was also on the top of my ballot and it’s one win which makes me very happy, because I have a strong preference for well-researched non-fiction books in the Best Related Work category, which unfortunately has become something of a catch-all category for anything that’s cool but doesn’t fit anywhere else in recent years.

That said, the one edge case finalist this year, the r/Fantasy bingo team, did win me over by simply being really great and enthusiastic people. I wouldn’t have minded at all, if they had won.

A look at the voting data shows that the documentary about the failure of the Disney World Galactic Star Cruiser Hotel was actually in the lead, though it eventually finished in third place. I have to admit that the popularity of Jenny Nicholson’s documentaries in general and this one in particular surprises me, because they never really worked for me.

This one also irked me, because when I was in primary school I was told I shouldn’t talk about Disney World (which had visited with my parents long before there was a Disneyland Paris and this was extremely uncommon for Germans) so much, because this was apparently bragging. Not that I was bragging, I simply had experienced something awesome (and I will forever be grateful to my parents for giving me that experience, even though Disney World was expensive even back then and also probably not something my parents enjoyed all that much, since they didn’t like amusement parks) and wanted to tell everybody about it. My teachers were probably also not happy that I completely failed to be impressed by our local amusement parks Magic Park Verden and Heide-Park Soltau, neither of which even remotely compares to Disney World, especially not in the 1980s. However, I stopped talking about Disney World and then about my experiences abroad – I had lived in the US and Singapore by that time – altogether, because it was very clear to me that talking about my experiences was not welcome*. This lasted well into adulthood to the point that when I started applying for jobs and sending out resumes, someone asked me why I didn’t put my experiences living abroad in my CV (international experience was something employers were looking for at the time) and I said, “Well, it’s not really important and who cares about that anyway?”

So considering I was told I shouldn’t talk about Disney World so much as a kid, of course I was a little irked about a three hour documentary about a single attraction in Disney World. Though part of me would love to sit my primary school teachers (who are very likely dead by now) down in front of the computer, “So you think I was talking too much about Disney World, huh? Well, how about this video where a woman spends three whole hours talking about a single attraction in Disney World, while wearing funny hats, then?”

Best Dramatic Presentation Long 

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Long goes to Dune Part II. Honestly, Dune must be the most awarded SFF work of all time now, since it was nominated as a serialised novel, regular novel, 1984 film adaptation, 2000 TV-series, 2003 sequel TV-series, 2021 movie, 2024 movie as well as for a tie-in comic and it won several of those Hugos.

Not that Dune isn’t an important work, but it’s not that good that it deserves so many wins and nominations in different categories. But then I’ve been over Dune, since I tried to watch the 2000 TV-series and didn’t like it and then pulled the novel of the shelf and realised that I no longer liked it either.

There was no accepter present for Dune Part II nor was there a pre-recorded speech or even an acknowledgement from anybody involved with the movie – and Denis Villeneuve’s name was really badly butchered, too. The person who accepted the award, a Worldcon volunteer, held an impromptu speech blasting studios for not sending anybody to accept their Hugos in the Best Dramatic Presentation categories.

Best Dramatic Presentation Short

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Short goes to the Star Trek: Lower Decks series finale “The New Next Generation”, which is the first time a Star Trek episode has won a Hugo since the Next Generation series finale back in 1995, i.e. thirty years ago.

In stark contrast to the Best Dramatic Presentation Long winner, writer Mike McMahan did accept his award virtually and held a lovely speech. On BlueSky, Mike McMahan also explains what being nominated for and winning a Hugo means to him, since he’s a longtime SFF fan and has been following the Hugos for years.

Best Game or Interactive Work

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work is Caves of Qud. Now I’m not a gamer and I can’t really say much about this game except that it looks nice enough visually.

What is more, at least one of the developers was present to accept the Hugo. In general, the finalists in the game category have always been happy about their nomination, showed up to accept their awards and interacted with fellow finalists, which makes me happy, even though I particularly care for this category.

Best Editor Long 

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Editor Long goes to Diana M. Pho, who held a great acceptance speech about the importance of art and resistance.

Best Editor Short

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Editor Short is Neil Clarke. It’s a highly deserved win and Neil also held a great acceptance speech, speaking out against generative AI.

Best Professional Artist 

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist goes to Alyssa Winans. All artists nominated in this category are great, but this is one win I was really happy about, since Alyssa were both first time finalists in the same year and met when we were both on a panel together.

Best Semiprozine

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine is Uncanny Magazine. Uncanny has won almost every year save for two since 2016, but then they do excellent work.

The acceptance speech was given by co-editor Lynne M. Thomas, who is also having a very difficult time right now.

On BlueSky, Lynne M. Thomas notes that this is her twelfth Hugo win, making her the woman with the highest number of Hugo wins and the person with the fifth highest number of Hugo wins overall, tied with Mike Glyer.

Best Fan Writer

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer goes to Abigail Nussbaum. It’s a well deserved win and coincidentally also the first repeat win in this category since David Langford’s nineteen year winning streak ended in 2007.

Best Fan Artist

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist is Sara Felix, who gave a very heartfelt speech about community and the extremely difficult year she had. For more about that, see here and here.

This is a category full of great artists – all of the categories are full of great people – but I’m very happy for Sara, especially considered all that she and her family went through this year.

Best Fancast

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Fancast goes to Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, another first time finalist, on what would have been Diana Wynne Jones 91st birthday.

I have to admit that this win surprised me a little, because of all the podcasts nominated in this category, this was the one that I was least familiar with. That said, it’s a very deserving winner.

If you look at the voting statistics, this was also the narrowest win of the night, since Eighty Days of Diana Wynne Jones beat Worldbuilding for Masochists by one vote.

Best Fanzine

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine is Black Nerd Problems. They’re a first time finalist and most deserving winner. Unfortunately, they neither sent an accepter nor an acceptance speech, which is extremely uncommon in the fan categories.

This also meant that the bottle of premixed Hugo cocktail could stay in the fridge for now, since Galactic Journey, for which I was nominated as part of the team, did not win. My surname also acquired an additional J, when it was read out, but that’s okay. I used to teach German as Foreign Language and respond to pretty much anything that even vaguely sounds like my name. Also considering how badly some names were butchered, I got off lightly.

Lodestar Award for Best YA or Middle Grade Novel

The 2025 Lodestar Award for Best YA or Middle Grade Novel goes to Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger. This is a highly deserved win and Darcie Little Badger also delivered a great speech about how the inspiration for Sheine Lende was her own family history and how her ancestors survived in the face of persecution.

This year’s Lodestar trophy, a little robot, is also very cute.

Astounding Award for Best New Writer

The winner of the 2025 Astounding Award is Moniquill Blackgoose.

This is one win I’m not one hundred percent happy with. Not because Moniquill Blackgoose isn’t a talented writer, she is, but because according to my definition (which is not the Astounding Award definition) she’s not a new writer, since she’s been writing erotic fiction under another name for several years before To Shape a Dragon’s Breath came out.

While I know that it’s common to thank your agent in your acceptance speech, if your agent was banned from Worldcon, most likely due to an ongoing feud with an SFF author and Worldcon member, it does leave an odd aftertaste.

That said, together with Rebecca Roanhorse’s win in Best Series and the Lodestar win for Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger, this has been a great year for indigenous SFF and that’s something worth celebrating.

Finally, was that jab against John W. Campbell by the presenters really necessary, considering that name of the former Campbell Award was changed five years ago? Just let it go.

Though I also noticed that David D. Levine, who presented one of the categories was introduced by the “voice of God” announcer as a Campbell Award finalist among other things. Of course, the not-a-Hugo for the Best New Writer was named the Campbell Award back when David D. Levine was a finalist in 2003 and 2004, but lots of people refer to the award either by the current name even for winners and finalists from before 2020 or as the former Campbell Award

***

So that’s it for the 2025 Hugo Awards. All in all, we have a very good set of winners, which is why it’s a pity that the conversation about the pretty terrible ceremony has drowned out celebrating the actual winners.

As for reactions and commentary on the Hugo winners, there’s not a whole lot yet. The leading nuissance voice feels the need to tell the world in his Fandom Pulse Substack newsletter how irrelevant Worldcon and the Hugos are and how the Hugos reward “extreme identity politics” – in a year where both Best Novel and Best Novella went to white men. The Fandom Pulse article is behind a paywall, but he makes the same points on YouTube. Basically, he objects to The Tainted Cup winning Best Novel, because it’s fantasy (the first time a fantasy story won a Hugo was in 1959) and because the protagonist is a bisexual woman. He also objects to Black Nerd Problems and Speculative Whiteness winning Hugos, because one is a fanzine by black fans and the other is a non-fiction book about the far right trying to claim the genre for themselves. Or maybe he’s just jealous that he isn’t mentioned in the book.

Finally, he also has a problem with the Best Graphic Story winner, because he dislikes one of publisher IDW‘s editors Heather Antos, who supposedly campaigns for awards. Of course the fact that Star Trek: Lower Decks is a popular series, which also won in Best Dramatic Presentation, clearly has nothing to do with a Lower Decks comic winning Best Graphic Story. No, it has to be the doing of an editor who for all I know might not even have worked on the book. Also, there were panels on neurodiversity, panels that were criticial of generative AI, people said critical things about Donald Trump and a fabulous looking drag queen read stories to kids. In short, it’s the usual nonsense.

More Hugo reactions and commentary will be linked here, as they surface.

ETA 08-18-2025: Alan Boyle, who has been reporting about the Seattle Worldcon for GeekWire, talks about the 2025 Hugo winners at Cosmic Log.

 

Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz or How to Suppress Women’a Writing – The Fantasy Edition

I’m over at Galactic Journey again – for the second time this month and a third article is coming later this month, which must be a new record for me – to talk about Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz, a novel which was incredibly influential and yet isn’t remembered nearly as well as it should be.

For the actual review, head over to Galactic Journey. If you want to know why this novel was so influential – which I obviously couldn’t discuss from the 1970 POV of Galactic Journey – read on.

In order to discuss why this novel was so influential, we must take a look at the history of fantasy and the state of the fantasy genre in 1970.

Now a lot of common knowledge about the history of fantasy is actually wrong. There are still people who believe that J.R.R. Tolkien created fantasy out of whole cloth in 1955, completely ignoring that there was a there was plenty of fantasy fiction – though they did not yet use that term – published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Unknown, Strange Stories, Fantastic, etc… from the 1920s onwards. There was of course , penned by Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner and a few others. There was also a lot of what we would now calls urban fantasy, though again the term did not yet exist. There was quite a bit of humorous fantasy – Greek or Norse Gods in the modern world and the like. There was a lot of horror – genre boundaries were a lot more fluid at the time – both of the cosmic and more traditional gothic variety and even some early folk horror. There was a thriving subgenre of stories about haunted machinery – I review a great example here.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, there was a thriving tradition of ghost stories. There were also authors writing secondary world fantasy, often drawing on British and Irish mythology such as Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake, E.R. Eddison, Hope Mirless and a certain J.R.R. Tolkien who wrote a novel, initially aimed at young readers, called The Hobbit. Though there wasn’t really such a thing as a fantasy genre, not yet, there were just writers doing their own thing.

During and particularly after WWII, science fiction ruled supreme and the various fantasy subgenres mostly faded, especially once Unknown ceased publication in 1943 and Weird Tales in 1954. There still was fantasy, mostly of the heroic sort, published during this time – The Tritonian Ring by L. Sprague De Camp, The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, The Dying Earth by Jack Vance, but these works were few and far between.

Then in 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien wasn’t creating a genre and I would consider him in the tradition of writers like Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake or Hope Mirless who were just doing their own thing. The Lord of the Rings was well regarded and those who were open to fantastic fiction generally loved the trilogy, but it’s influence was slow to spread, simply because it was a hardcover trilogy published in the UK, so particularly many American readers never even knew it existed. Neither did German readers, because Lord of the Rings was not translated into German until 1969.

Meanwhile, from the late 1950s onward, there was a slowly simmering revival of the still namely sword and sorcery genre. There was a resurgence of interest in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which were never intended to be fantasy, but increasingly feelt like fantasy by 1960. Fritz Leiber returned to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Michael Moorcock created Elric of Melniboné and editors Cele Goldsmith Lalli in the US and John Carnell in the UK were open to publishing such works.

Then in 1965/66 the double impact of the unauthorised US paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings and the Lancer reprints of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with additional material by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter sent the simmering fantasy revival into overdrive. Both were enormously successful, proved that fantasy was a viable genre and paved the way for more fantasy on the bookshelves.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series brought a lot of fantasy from the first half of the twentieth century back into print – in colourful and affordable paperback edition. But the fantasy revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s also brought us a lot of sword and sorcery. The works from the first sword and sorcery boom of the 1930s came back into print and new authors entered the genre. Some of these new authors were doing new things with the old tropes – writers like Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Tanith Lee, Joanna Russ, Karl Edward Wagner, Charles Saunders. Others were penning Conan pastiches – the infamous Clonans – by the truckload. Some of these Conan pastiches were pretty good like Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes, others were a lot of fun such as Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman by Gardner F. Fox, others were quite bad and some of them like Gor novels by John Norman (which are technically sword and planet, not that it matters much) quickly wandered into BDSM erotica territory.

There also were some fantasy novels coming out during this period that were not sword and sorcery, for example The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (both 1968), The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs and The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland (both 1969). You also had Thomas Burnett Swann’s mytholical fantasy in the 1960s. What we did not have, however, was a flood of Tolkien imitators. Both The Face in the Forst and The Unicorn Girl show some Tolkien influence, but they’re very much their own thing.

In fact, the glut of Tolkien inspired big fat fantasy did not start until 1977, when The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks was published to great success and opened the floodgates for epic fantasy boom that smothered everything else in its path. Tolkien cannot really be blamed for any of this. He never set out to create a genre and besides, he was dead by 1977. Terry Brooks also can’t be blamed, because The Sword of Shannara initially was just one blatantly Tolkien inspired book. Maybe you could blame Judy-Lyn and Lester Del Rey who – inspired by the massive success of The Sword of Shannara – flooded the market with epic fantasy.  Or you could blame rising paper costs and advances in paperback printing technology which made 400 or 500 page paperbacks possible and also appear like a great value for your money.

But whoever is at fault, the fantasy genre got a lot less interesting and varied in the 1980s, which also coincides with me becoming a serious SFF reader. When I started reading SFF and English books, the sword and sorcery boom was on its last legs, though you could still find sword and sorcery at the bookstore. However, big epic fantasy books in lengthy series by authors like Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings or Mercedes Lackey were dominating the genre. I did read some of them – I do have quite a bit of Feist in my personal library for some reason – but overall I preferred sword and sorcery to epic fantasy – and I definitely knew the difference, though I have no idea where I picked this up – and science fiction to both.

Which brings me to the actual topic of this post, Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series. The Deryni books were on the shelves or rather in the spinner rack at Buchhandlung Storm (the “trusty import bookstore” mentioned in my Galactic Journey articles. They closed for good last year, though they have been a shadow of their former glorious self for a long time), when I started reading SFF in earnest. I did read some of them, including Deryni Rising, and remember liking them – more than I enjoyed some of the male written epic fantasy novels of the same era – but I mentally classified Katherine Kurtz as one of the many authors who came in with the epic fantasy boom kicked off by The Sword of Shannara.

When I spotted Deryni Rising in the list of upcoming books for Galactic Journey, I thought, “Wait a minute, this was published in 1970, i.e. it predated Sword of Shannara by seven years? I though it was from the 1980s. And it was originally a Ballantine Adult Fantasy novel?” Note that my personal copy had a typical Darrell K. Sweet 1980s epic fantasy cover, not the much cooler psychedelic Ballantine Adult Fantasy cover.

Since I remembered enjoying Deryni Rising, I agreed to review for Galactic Journey, even though I hadn’t read it since I was a little older than the boy king Kelson Haldane. Of course, revisiting books you read as a teenager always carries its share of risks – the suck fairy is a thing, after all. However, it turns that Deryni Rising not only held up, but it also was a lot more pioneering and influential than I realised when I first read it.

So did Katherine Kurtz kick off the Tolkienesque fantasy boom seven years before Terry Brooks? Not really. In her introduction, Katherine Kurtz does list The Lord of the Rings as one of her inspirations – as would pretty much everybody writing fantasy in 1970 – but Deryni Rising isn’t particularly Tolkienesque.

However, Katherine Kurtz did something even more remarkable. She pretty much invented the modern historical fantasy genre, fourteen years before Guy Gavriel Kay came onto the scene.  Not that there wasn’t historical fantasy before 1970 – Robert E. Howard explicitly wrote the Kull and Conan stories as history with the serial numbers filed off, while the Bran Mak Morn and Solomon Kane explicitly have historical settings. Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions are historical fantasy, as are Thomas Burnett Swann’s works from the 1960s. And Mary Stewart’s Arthurian novel The Crystal Cave came out earlier in 1970. However, Deryni Rising is a lot closer to later historical fantasy works like the A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, The World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold or the works of Guy Gavriel Kay.

Particularly the similarities between A Song of Ice and Fire and the Deryni books are notable. Both are set in an alternate Britain, though Martin has seven kingdoms and Kurtz eleven. Both deal with court intrigue and royal succession struggles – Deryni Rising is basically about making sure that the fourteen-year-old heir to a murdered king will actually survive his own coronation. Two later books in the Deryni series also have weddings which end in blood and tears with the bride and respectively the bride and groom murdered at the altar.

A Song of Ice and Fire is a lot more graphic with regards to violence and sex than Deryni Rising, where the various assassinations happen either off page or are very bloodless – the bloodiest scene in the novel is probably when young Kelson has to pierce his own hand with a needle – which is duly disinfected beforehand – to unlock the magic potential resting inside him. As for sex, Deryni Rising has a single sex scene between the villainess sorceress Charissa and a traitor at court who sabotages the heroes at every turn. The door is firmly closed after the treacherous nobleman sits down on Charissa’s bed – though Charissa dryly notes that he had his uses, once she murders him after he failed to win a duel. I saw a modern review which called Deryni Rising YA. It’s not, but I can see how it might feel like YA to a modern reader due to the relative lack of sex and graphic violence and because the central character Kelson (though I wouldn’t really say he’s the main protagonist, because we spend more time in the head of his protector Alaric Morgan) is only fourteen.

Deryni Rising is very much a book about love, but it’s not romantic or sexual love, but the mutual affection between Kelson and his general and protector Alaric Morgan, the half Deryni Duke of Corwyn, which for me at least was what made rereading the novel so enjoyable. What can I say, I am a sucker for supportive and loving families, whether biological or found. Morgan’s relationship to Kelson is also influenced Morgan’s love – and yes, that word is explicitly used in the text – for his king Brion Haldane, father of Kelson. Morgan himself notes that Brion was father and brother to him, though rereading the book as an adult, I couldn’t help but notice that there was at least a hint of romantic attraction there as well. Morgan does get married in one of the later books, to the widow of a nobleman executed for treason, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

Both A Song of Ice and Fire are also set in low magic worlds. There are no dwaves, elves, fae, etc… nor dragons and White Walkers in the Deryni books. There are only humans and humans with magical abilities, the titular Deryni. And the Deryni abilities are closer to the psionic abilities that science fiction was full of from the 1940s well into the 1970s and beyond. In many ways, the Deryni are closer to Marvel’s X-Men of the Claremont era, down to being feared and hated for abilities, than the likes of Gandalf, Elric or the sorcerers that Conan tangles with. Though I couldn’t draw the X-Men comparison in the Galactic Journey article, because Giant Size X-Men N0. 1 won’t come out until 1975. Was Chris Claremont familiar with the Deryni books? I have no idea, though it’s certainly possible. Is George R.R. Martin familiar with the Deryni books? It’s likely, sind Martin and Katherine Kurtz came up at around the same time.

The depiction of magic in the Deryni books is also interesting, because this isn’t the dark and dangerous magic of Robert E. Howard nor the powerful but vaguely defined magic of Tolkien. Deryni magic is very ritualised and systematised – long before magic systems were common. However, Deryni magic isn’t a Brandon Sanderson style hard magic system, probably because a lot of the modern fantasy magic systems have their root in Dungeons & Dragons, which didn’t yet exist in 1970.

Instead, Deryni magic is based on the ritual magic practiced by real world occult groups like the Rosicrucians or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, except that it really works (no offence to any Rosicrucians or members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn reading this, but at least I have never been able to make any of this work). This does make sense, because occultism is the closest thing to “real” magic you can find in our distinctly unmagical world. I certainly have a nice selection of books on occultism and ritual magic in my collection for reference – in spite of anything new age or occult being deeply frowned upon in (West) Germany’s own version of the Satanic Panic. As a result, I hid away my occultism books until well into adulthood. And when I went into a New Age shop in Seven Dials in London (now long gone) with my Mom in tow, I told my Mom when she asked what sort of shop it was, “It’s a book shop.” Well, it wasn’t wrong – they did have a lot of books. And Mom was quite entranced by the crstals and incense burners and Tarot cards, while having no idea what they were.

One thing that is vaguely Tolkienesque about Deryni Rising are the various rhyming spells. In fact, I had forgotten how many rhyming verses there were in the novel. What is more, the whole middle chunk is taken up by the characters trying to decypher the poem which explains how to unlock Kelson Haldane’s inborn magical abilities, which he will need to defeat the villainess Charissa and survive his own coronation.

Ironically, Deryni Rising is the book that Ursula K. Le Guin skewers in her famous 1973 essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”. Now I always had my issues with that essay, starting with the title, because from a German point of view “Poughkeepsie” sounds very much like some kind of fantasy realm as do many other American placenames derived from indigenous languages. I’m also pretty sure that when I first read that essay, I had no idea where Poughkeepsie was and that it was a town in the US.

However, until someone mentioned it in the New Edge Sword and Sorcery Discord server, I had completely forgotten that Deryni Rising was the negative example cited by Le Guin in “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”. In fact, Le Guin considers Deryni Rising not fantasy, because the language is too modern for her taste, especially compared to the rest of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Now I respect Ursula K. Le Guin as writer and critic, but I rarely agree with her opinions and I definitely don’t agree with her in the case of Deryni Rising. Yes, occasionally some overly modern terms creep in what was after all a debut novel, but it does not detract from the whole. I also find that I enjoyed Deryni Rising more than I ever enjoyed Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which never did much for me, probably because I was too old when I first read it.

The influence of Deryni Rising and the rest of the Deryni series can be felt reverberating through speculative fiction until this day. Katherine Kurtz proved that there was a market for a more epic type of fantasy not written by J.R.R. Tolkien seven years before The Sword of Shannara came out, she pretty much created the historical fantasy genre and echoes of her work can be found in anything from A Song of Ice and Fire via Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of the Five Gods, Guy Gavriel Kay’s work, The Witcher stories and novels by Andrzej Sapkowski (which draw a lot on 1960s and 1970s fantasy mixed with East European myth and folkore) to Masters of the Universe, which was influenced a lot by the 1960s and 1970s SFF that the original creators read. I should probably do a post about that eventually.

As for why the Deryni novels by Katherine Kurtz, though influential and pioneering, are not nearly as well remembered as they should be, Kari Sperring offered an explanation in an article at Strange Horizons, which is the only critical appraisal of the Deryni novels I found aside from the Le Guin essay.  It’s the same old story. Women writers are forgotten more quickly than male writers, their contributions to the genre ignored, downplayed or attributed to me. Here’s a quote from Kari Sperring’s article:

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, [Katherine Kurtz] was popular and widely read. But at some point in the later 1990s, she began to slip from view within the genre. Modern accounts of historical fantasy focus on the men who followed her, notably Kay and Martin. A lot of current readers seem not to have heard of her at all.

It’s notable that a lot of the women fantasy of the 1970s and 1980s were fading and ignored by the 1990s (though the last Deryni novel to date came out in 2014 – completing a trilogy after an eight year gap). Also note what happened to Tanith Lee around the same time. However, Tanith Lee was just a little too strange and offbeat for an increasingly codified fantasy genre. Katherine Kurtz really isn’t. I find the Deryni books a lot more enjoyable than stuff like the Shannara series or The Wheel of Time, both of which are still very much around and discussed.

As it tends to happen to me, once I’d reread Deryni Rising for the Galactic Journey review, I continued to read onwards. I do have the second book in the first Deryni trilogy, Deryni Checkmate, but I don’t have the third, High Deryni. So I hopped over to Amazon only to realise that there is no print edition avaible, only an e-book edition. Which again illustrates the above point.

So do check out Deryni Rising and the rest of the series, if you haven’t read them already, because this is a pioneering that deserves more attention than it gets.

 

A Charcuterie Board of Mixed Links

I’ve been working on a post about the Masters of the Universe reveals at the 2025 San Diego Comic Con, which started off with links to all the other places where I’ve been lately.  But that post got too long, so the links are getting their own separate post.

So here is where else you could find my work of late:

At Galactic Journey, I wrote about the breaking out of Andreas Baader from prison, an event which will eventually be considered the birth of the far left terrorist group Red Army Fraction.  This article wasn’t easy to write, even though the history of the Red Army Fraction is pretty well documented. However, it’s still a touchy subject in Germany, especially if you have a mildly more sympathetic view than “These people are evil, evil, evil.” I tried to be fair to all parties involved, because fairness is the one thing that the members of the future Red Army Fraction were rarely granted.

And even though I thought I knew a lot about the 1968 movement and how some of its members drifted off into terrorism and murder, it turns out that there is so much I didn’t know. There are also many things that no one knows, e.g. there’s one key member of the prison break plot about whom we know next to nothing except her name. For another member of the plot, we don’t even have that – all we know is that it was a man. We also know very little about the first victim of the future Red Army Fraction – a janitor who got caught in the crossfire – beyond his name and age.

The whole thing is also so much weirder and more pathetic than I thought. I mean, parts of this story – due to a typo, security was increased for the wrong prisoner, some of the fugitives forgot their passports when trying to flee to a different country, Horst Mahler accidentally gave away the location of the fugitives, because he rang the wrong embassy – are straight up comedic.

For those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, the Red Army Fraction were the ultimate bogeyman. Their faces were on every post office wall, yet no one had seen them in years. Occasionally, they would murder a banker, a CEO, a judge or a prosecutor – never a politician – and send rambling letters to the media, which never explained anything. The truth is that these bogeymen were actually quite pathetic, though no less deadly for it. As for a plan, they obviously never had one in the beginning beyond “break Baader out of prison” – indeed, quite a few people said that the Red Army Fraction was formed by accident – and most likely there never was any plan at all.

BTW, two weeks ago we got word that Horst Mahler, one of only two protagonists of the Red Army Fraction article who was still alive, died aged 89, very much unlamented, because he was scum, going from leftwing lawyer to far left terrorist to Neo-Nazi and raging Anti-Semite. At the time of his death, he was on trial for Holocaust denial – not for the first time.

***

Also at Galactic Journey, I write about the merger of the two West German shipping companies Norddeutscher Lloyd and Hapag to form Hapag-Lloyd in 1970 as well as about the occult detective Larry Brent and what is considered to be the birth of the horror “Heftroman” a.k.a. dime novel in West Germany.

Both topics had a personal impact on me. Because my Dad worked at Hapag-Lloyd in Bremen from 1973 to 1982 and I remember going to visit him in his office as a little kid, remember the doorman who knew me and my Mom (because he actually was a distant relative, as I later learned), remember the carpeted floors and the model ships all over the place.

When Hapag-Lloyd closed its Bremen office and relocated most departments to the Hamburg office, my Dad left and instead went to work in Singapore. I was an adult until I realised that taking a job on the other side of the world, because you don’t want to relocate to an office 125 kilometers away makes no sense at all. I suspect there was something else to it – a promotion Dad expected, but didn’t get – but I never got around to asking him about this. Though, “My Dad hated Hamburg so much that he’s rather work in Singapore” is kind of funny. That said, he did eventually wind up working in Hamburg, though at a different company, from 1992 until 2008 or so.

Though Dad really did hate Hamburg or rather the terrible traffic. He even once paid for a more expensive plane ticket, so I could fly from Bremen rather than Hamburg. I don’t hate Hamburg and never have. But after Dad died and I decided to take the car and visit Hamburg, I quickly realised why Dad disliked driving to Hamburg so much, cause the traffic really is terrible. And public transport is an alternative, though it still takes forever, because Hamburg’s main problem is that there aren’t enough Elbe crossings and that almost all inner city traffic has to squeeze across a couple of bridges dating from the 19th century.

As for the horror “Heftromane”, when I was a kid, these horror dime novels were considered very, very bad stuff, which would inevitably turn you into an axe murderer or something. So of course they were also irresistable. When I finally got my courage up to buy one, I was actually disappointed that the contents were not nearly as bloody as I expected based on the moral panic these dime novels engendered.

***

At the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blog of the Seattle Worldcon, I wrote about the remarkable 100 year history of the body-hopping supervillain Dr. Mabuse, who experienced his second flourishing in the early 1960s.  There have been many issues with the Seattle Worldcon, but the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blog was a consistently bright spot and I’m glad to have contributed several articles about the science fiction and fantasy of the early 1960s.

***

I also was at the Hugo-nominated podcast Hugos There twice to discuss the 2025 Hugo finalists for Best Short Story and Best Novella with a panel of fans and reviewers.

Stay tuned for my thoughts on the Masters of the Universe reveals from San Diego Comic Con. The final two parts of my epic “He-Man goes Ruhrpott” a.k.a. “the industrial history tour featuring He-Man” adventure are coming as well.

The Obligatory 2025 Dragon Awards Ballot Post

I was planning to blog about something else, but as they usually do, when you’re busy with other things, the 2025 Dragon Awards decided to drop their 2025 ballot – after posting an empty ballot page for several days.  The full list of finalists may be found here or – in a less eye-straining format – at File 770.

To recap, the Dragon Awards are a fan award given out by Dragon Con, a massive SFF media con in Atlanta, Georgia. They are in their tenth year now and have gone through quite a bit of history in those ten years, as recounted here by Camestros Felapton. I have covered the Dragon Awards since the beginning and you can also find my previous posts about the Dragon Awards and their tangled history here.

Camestros Felapton’s commentary about the 2025 Dragon Awards finalists may be found here – with some discussion in the comments.

Since it seems that I – along with Camestros Felapton and Doris V. Sutherland – am cursed to be the chronicler of the Dragon Awards, here is my analysis of the 2025 ballot:

Best Science Fiction Novel

We have a mix of the expected and unexpected here. The duo writing as James S.A Corey have had several Dragon Awards nominations and even wins. This year, they are nominated for their latest novel The Mercy of the Gods.

C.J. Cherryh is a veteran science fiction author who has been publishing since the 1970s and has multiple Hugo and Nebula nominations and wins under her belt as well as an SFWA Grandmaster Award. She is nominated along with her wife Jane S. Fancher for Alliance Unbound.

Absolution is the latest novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, which was a Hugo finalist for Best Series this year. A previous Southern Reach novel also won the Nebula Award, plus the first Southern Reach novel Annihiliation was adapted as a movie in 2018.

Elizabeth Bear has had multiple Hugo and Nebula nominations and I wouldn’t be surprised to see The Folded Sky on next year’s Hugo ballot.

Kevin J. Anderson’s original fiction has never done much for me, but he is extremely popular. I haven’t read his nominated novel Nether Station.

Extremophile by Ian Green was a finalist for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. It’s a kind of cyberpunk, climate change eco-thriller, which is not exactly what you’d expect to find on the Dragon Awards ballot. Coincidentally, this means that two works of ecological science fiction, Extremophile and Absolution, have made the Dragon Award ballot this year, which is sure to make puppies cry.

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman is the latest book in Dinniman’s popular Dungeon Crawler Carl LitRPG series. It’s a self-published book, which means that Dinniman holds up the indie flag at the Dragon Awards.

Diversity Count: 3 women, 6 men (James S.A. Corey is two people, 1 author of colour, 1 international author, 1 indie author and a married lesbian couple.

Best Fantasy Novel

I’m really happy to see Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by the late Howard Andrew Jones, the third and sadly final book of the Chronicles of Hanuvar, on the Dragon Award ballot. The Chronicles of Hanuvar is an excellent series and I urge everybody who likes sword and sorcery and historical fantasy to read it.

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan is a novel I enjoyed a lot and I’m happy to see it nominated. It’s also a portal fantasy in a category dominated mostly by epic fantasy with a military bend.

Joe Abercrombie is a very popular writer of grimdark fantasy and is nominated for his latest novel The Devils.

The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness is the latest book in her All Souls’ series, which is very popular.  It’s a kind of dark academia/urban fantasy type novel and the second outlier in this epic fantasy dominated category along with Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan. Interesting that the two outliers are also the only two novel written by women.

Larry Correia is a very popular with the Dragon Awards electorate and has several wins and nominations under his belt. This year’s finalist Heart of the Mountain is part of his Saga of the Forgotten Warrior epic fantasy series.

Cameron Johnston is a Scottish writer of grimdark fantasy who is quite popular. His Dragon nominated novel The Last Shield is billed as a “gender-flipped Die Hard set in a mysterious castle”, which actually sounds a lot of fun.

Diversity count: 2 women, 4 men, 1 author of colour, 2 international authors, 1 deceased author

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel 

Sunrise of the Reaping is the latest instalment in Suzanne Collins’ extremely popular Hunger Games series and not even remotely a surprising finalist.

Shami Stovall has been nominated in this category several times before, so she’s clearly popular with the Dragon Awards crowd. Her 2025 finalist is Labyrinth Arcanist.

David Webber is another perennial Dragon Award favourite with multiple nominations and wins, though I didn’t know he also write YA until today. He is nominated in this category for Friends Indeed co-written with Jane Lindskold, who is a well regarded fantasy writer. Apparently, Friends Indeed is part of a whole series and ties into David Webber’s popular Honor Harrington series.

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White would have made the Lodestar ballot this year, but the author chose to withdraw. Withdrawing from the Lodestar, but accepting a Dragon nomination is certainly unusual and now I wonder whether the Dragon Awards bothered to inform the finalists beforehand. Coincidentally, Compound Fracture with a queer and autistic protagonist is exactly the sort of book that makes puppies cry.

I have never heard of Among Serpents by Marc J. Gregson before, though it apparently was a New York Times bestseller.  The synopsis sounds more like military fantasy than YA, though it was published by a YA imprint.

I haven’t heard of Rest in Peaches by Alex Brown before either, though the novel sounds like a lot of fun and very much like YA with a murder investigation at a high school. Alex Brown has been a Locus Award finalist. Coincidentally, this is not Alex Brown, the Reactor and Locus reviewer, but a different person with the same name.

Diversity count: 4 women, 3 men, 1 author of colour, 1 indie author

Best Alternate History Novel

The most amazing thing about the Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel is that it’s still around and survived the gradual purge of the various subgenre categories that characterised the early years of the Dragon Awards. I guess someone among the faceless administrators of the Dragon Awards really likes alternate history fiction.

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal is the latest instalment in her popular Lady Astronaut series and not at all a surprising finalist.

Eric Flint has been steadily nominated in this category since its inception. This year, he is nominated for 1635: The Weaver’s Code, co-written with Jody Lynn Nye, which is part of the Ring of Fire series. What makes this nomination a little surprising is that Eric Flint died in 2022. I guess The Weaver’s Code was either an unfinished manuscript or based on notes Flint left behind.

S.M. Stirling is perennially popular – at least in the US, since I hardly ever see his books in Europe – and has been a Dragon Award finalist before. His nominated novel To Turn the Tide appears to be a kind of Lest Darkness Fall for the twenty-first century.

Both Tom Kratman and Kacey Ezell have been nominated for the Dragon Awards before. This year, they are jointly nominated for 1919: The Romanov Rising, co-written with Justin Watson.

Gangster by Dan Willis appears to be a supernatural crime novel and part of a series. I’m not familiar with this one and am also not sure whether it’s actually alternate history, since it sounds more like historical fantasy to me.

Gold, Gangs, and Glory by Laurence Dahners is another book I’ve never heard of. It seems to be a kind of multiverse hopping tale featuring a female doctor in 1918. Dahmers is an orthopaedic surgeon and indie writer.

It’s notable that most of the finalists in this category actually seem to be alternate history – only the status of Gangster by Dan Willis and Gold, Gangs, and Glory by Laurence Dahners is a little unclear. This hasn’t always been the case in the past.

Diversity count: 3 women, 6 men, 2 indie authors, 1 deceased author

Best Horror Novel

Stephen Graham Jones is one of the best and most popular horror authors writing these days. He is nominated for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

Chuck Tingle is a two-time Hugo finalist, writer a satirical gay erotica, master puppy-troller and now horror author. He can now add a Dragon nomination for Bury Your Gays to his impressive resume.

Delilah S. Dawson has been nominated for the Dragon Award and the Stoker Award before. This year, she is nominated for It Will Only Hurt for a Moment, which appears to be a modern gothic.

Ian McDonald has been nominated for the Hugo Award multiple times, though this is his first Dragon Award nomination as far as I can recall. He is normally a science fiction author, but The Wilding is very clearly horror.

S.A. Barnes writes science fiction horror and has won the Goodreads Choice Award in the science fiction category. She is nominated for Cold Eternity.

Darrcy Coates is a popular Australian horror author. Her nominated novel The Vengeful Dead is part of her Gravekeeper series.

Diversity count: 3 women, 3 men, 1 author of colour, 2 international authors

Best Illustrative Book Cover

Doris V. Sutherland has kindly posted the nominated covers in the comments at Camestros Felapton’s post, so check them out.

What’s notable is that these covers tend to have the busier style of the 1980s and early 1990s rather than the more stylized style that is popular today. I don’t find most of the finalists particularly interesting and while looking up the artists, I liked many of the other works on their portfolio much better than what they are nominated for. My favourite is Michael Whelan’s cover for Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth.

Diversity count: 6 men, 2 international artists

Best Comic Book / Graphic Novel

This is a very mainstream ballot dominated by Marvel and DC and A-list superheroes. We have Absolute Batman, Absolute Superman, Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate Wolverine and Daredevil: Cold Day In Hell (no absolute or ultimate here).  The lone outlier is Transformers Volume 3 and that’s not exactly an obcure property

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make comics.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series

This is basically a list of popular and well-regarded SFF series which aired/streamed in the past year. We have Murderbot, Andor, Severance, Silo, The Wheel of Time and The Rings of Power. No Marvel or Star Trek this year, but then I don’t think there was anything eligible except Daredevil Born Again. Doctor Who, which did air its most recent season during the eligibility period, is also notable by its absence.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make TV series.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie

Once again, this is basically a list of popular and well-regarded SFF movies that came out during the eligibility period.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, though in trouble, is represented by Thunderbolts* and Deadpool and Wolverine. I personally don’t care for Wicked at all, but it was hugely popular and also a Hugo finalist in this category. Sinners was probably the surprise horror hit of the year and is also a very good movie. I kind of forgot that Alien: Romulus existed, because it came out at the very start of the eligibility period. The live action How to Train Your Dragon got mixed reviews and was mostly considered an unnecessary remake of a beloved animated film. But then, live action remakes of animated films do tend to do well at the box office, in spite of lukewarm reviews.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make movies. And yes, the ballot lists the directors, but you need a lot more than a director to make a film.

Best Digital Game

I can’t really say anything about this category, except that I’ve heard of Assassin’s Creed, Elden Ring and Death Standing.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make games.

Best Tabletop Game

I can’t really say anything about this category either, except that it seems to be heavy on collectible cardgames with two different Magic the Gathering expansions and Disney’s Lorcana nominated.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make games.

Overall Thoughts

As in previous years, the 2025 Dragon Award ballot consists mainly of broadly popular works with the occasional more niche work with a passionate fanbase thrown in, so the Dragons are doing what they were created to do, namely honour the sort of popular works that are often ignored by other awards.

As is common with the Dragons, they are a lot whiter and more male and more American than most other genre awards, though there is only one category that’s all male. Baen makes a strong showing, but then Baen traditionally has a large presence at Dragon Con and also actively promotes their authors for the Dragon Awards. One thing I noticed that there are a lot of writers from Utah nominated, more than you’d normally assume.

Another thing I noticed is that the Dragon Awards have a higher tendency to nominate deceased writers than other awards. I have no idea why this might be, but it is an interesting phenomenon.

Finally, there is nothing related to Dune on the ballot – no movie, tie-in comic or tie-in novel – for the first time in years.

I haven’t found any reactions beyond happy finalists announcing their nominations about the 2025 Dragon Award finalists. If any show up, I will add them here.

ETA 08-05-2025: Larry Correia is honoured to be nominated for a Dragon Award again, but would prefer people to vote for Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by Howard Andrew Jones, which is a classy thing of him to do.

Cora’s TV Adventure – Take Two

Before we get to the main event, I was at the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow blog of the Seattle Worldcon again, this time talking about the 1960 East German science fiction film Der schweigende Stern a.k.a. The Silent Star.

Back in January, I wrote about how I appeared in a segment on viewers’ opinions on NDR TV.

Well, guess what? This Saturday, I was on TV again. And this time around, it even has something to do with science fiction and the Hugos.

The story started last Friday, when I got a phone call from Désirée Bertram, a journalist working for buten un binnen. For those who don’t know (which is most likely everybody who’s not from Bremen and surroundings) buten un binnen is the regional news program of Radio Bremen TV, it has been broadcast daily on weekdays (and later on Saturdays) since 1980. The title is Low German for “without and within” and is taken from  the motto inscribed above the doorway of the Schütting, seat of the Bremen chamber of commerce, in gilded letters: “Buten un binnen – wagen un winnen” (Without and within – to dare and to win). BTW, I love that it rhymes in both English and Low German.

Back in 1980 – and I’m pretty sure I watched the first episode as a young kid – buten un binnen felt fresh and modern compared to the deadly dull evening news programs featuring serious looking older men (and very rarely women – since women were considered too emotional to read the news) in suits and ties who announced very serious news in very serious tones. buten un binnen was different. The anchors were fairly young, they wore sweaters and no ties and impressive facial hair (it was the early 1980s), they were less reverent than the staid elderly gentlemen of the mainstream news programs, asked hard questions and even made jokes on occasion. Nowadays, this sort of style is common for news programs, but back in 1980, it was something genuinely new and different. As a result, buten un binnen became hugely popular and remains so to this day. When the public TV channel ARD tried to banish all of its regional programming from its nation-wide channel (where the two hours from six to eight PM were once reserved for regional programming) to the less popular regional third programs, buten un binnen managed to avoid this fate for a while, since it was by far the most popular regional news program in Germany and the one that people were actually watching.  Though nowadays, buten un binnen is broadcast on the regional channel Radio Bremen TV.

As for why a journalist from buten un binnen called me, well, she’d read the article about my Hugo nomination in the Weser-Kurier and wanted to interview me. Now I always sent out my press releases about my Hugo nominations to all the local media, including Radio Bremen. However, I never got a response from them. When I won in 2022, I even adressed the e-mail directly to one of their radio journalists, who was a classmate of mine at university, though I still had to send it via their central contact address. No response. And now they suddenly contact me out of the blue in response to a newspaper interview about me.

I had a nice chat with Désirée Bertram and explained what the Hugos are, what Galactic Journey is, what we do and so on. She also asked me if they could interview me at home, how the conditions are, if there’s enough space to fit in a TV team and their equipment and so on. I said, “No problem, you can film me at home, there’s enough space and since I’m self-employed, I’m also flexible with regards to time.”

Initially they planned to shoot the interview on Tuesday, which gave me three and a half days to get the house in order – and luckily, the house was more orderly than it had been in January. Though the garden was not in great shape. The front lawn needed mowing and there were other issues like dead plants as well.

Now I dislike gardening work. I find it deeply unpleasant and so I’ve hired my neighbour Vladimir, who has a gardening and house repair business, to do the garden for me. Which normally isn’t a problem, except that the time frame was a little tight. So I asked Vladimir, “Could you maybe mow my lawn and clean up the garden by Monday, because buten un binnen wants to interview me on Tuesday?”

Indeed, Vladimir and his two helpers did mow my lawn and got rid of the dead plants for me on Monday – only to be promptly interrupted by a gust of rain. I also bought some strawflowers and lavender plants at the DIY store and planted them in a planter that was filled with mostly dead heather and weeds. At any rate, my garden looks much more presentable now, though in the end you can see very little of it in the TV report.

In the end, the buten un binnen TV team shot the interview on Wednesday rather than Tuesday, which gave me one additional day to clean up the house and reorganise my Masters of the Universe collection to show them off a little better.

The TV team showed up on Wednesday at noon in a van emblazoned with “Radio Bremen”, so all the neighbours could see what’s going on. And believe me, they were curious, because everything out of the ordinary gets noticed in this neighbourhood.

Inside the van, there were three people: Désirée Bertram, the journalist who’d contacted me, as well as a camera operator (his name is Lür Wagenheim according to the credits at the end of the TV report) and a sound technician. They lugged a lot of equipment into the house. Home cameras have gotten much smaller since my days with the public access channel Bremer Umland, but professional TV cameras are as big and heavy as they ever were.

This time around, I did not have a microphone clipped to my collar with a wire running under my shirt. I was glad about that, because it’s summer and I’m not wearing a lot under my t-shirt, so the wire would have been on my bare skin.

The house was inspected and the two Hugo trophies and my Masters of the Universe collection were duly admired. “I had no idea there were so many of those figures,” someone – I think the sound guy – said, “I always thought there were only four or five or so.” I replied, “Oh, there were a lot more than that [there were 72 figures in the vintage Masters of the Universe line, not including vehicles, playsets and mounts like Battle Cat or Panthor], only that they weren’t all available at the same time and some were never sold in Germany at all.”

As for filming, I pointed out that the dining room/hall was probably the best place to film, but we could also use the living room (actually a misnomer, since the room is only used on Christmas and sometimes for visitors), except that one of the automatic blinds is broken and permanently down and will likely remain so, since Dad couldn’t locate the problem and if he couldn’t find it, no one else stands a chance. The living room also needs redecorating, because I want to get rid of my parents’ outdated decor. “You can also film me in my office,” I said, “But it’s not very exciting – just an attic room.” – “Can we film you working somewhere else?” – “I can unplug the laptop, no problem,” I said.

So in the end, the dining room/hall it was. I unplugged the laptop, took it downstairs and started it up. “Do you have some research materials we can show?” Désirée Bertram asked. I replied, “You’re lucky, cause my parents’ collection of Das Jahr im Bild [The Year in Pictures, a kind of almanac] is right here on the shelf and I can pull out the 1970 edition. Though I hope it doesn’t cause everything else to come crashing down.”

As a matter of fact, I’m currently in the process of reorganising the bookshelves in the dining room/hall area, cause they are full of my parents’ books – lots of coffee table type books about ships and motorbikes and WWII, chronicles of the companies where my parents worked that no one really cares about as well as a shelf worth of Marie Louise Fischer novels – which aren’t necessarily topics that excite me very much. I’m not going to get rid of them altogether – not even the Marie Louise Fischer novels, because maybe I want to write something about her work – but I don’t want them clogging up prime real estate in the house. Some of the books have already been relocated to the basement, though others are still there. And those Das Jahr im Bild books really are useful for research.

So I pulled Das Jahr im Bild 1970 from the shelf – and no, nothing came crashing down, though I wondered why on Earth we own a book listing all the churches in Bremen? – and put it quite prominently on the table. Then I typed random stream of consciousness stuff, opened Galactic Journey and scrolled through one of my articles and flipped through the pages, while I was being filmed from all angles.

One funny moment was, when the pewter mugs and decorative plates in the shelf behind me were scrutinised, whether there’s anything political or potentially problematic visible. “Welll, unless the city of Hamelin or the propeller manufacturer Voith are considered problematic now, it should be fine.” The decorative pewter mugs, plates, spoons, etc.. also belonged to my parents and will probably be removed eventually – because they’re not to my taste at all – though so far I haven’t been able to bring myself to get rid of them.

I was asked a few questions and occasionally had to repeat an answer for another take. I was also handed some sheets of white cardstock and a marker and asked to write the date 1969 onto the cardstock. The first time I did it, I was asked to do it again and turn the marker, so you can’t make out the very prominent manufacturer’s name. Radio Bremen is a public TV channel and have to be wary of anything that might be considered product placement, cause that would be illegal advertising. And yes, there have been scandals involving product placement and illegal advertising in German public TV going back to the 1980s, though none of them ever involved Radio Bremen. The most infamous case is probably the very prominent appearance of Paroli cough lozenges in the Schimanski Tatort episodes “Zahn um Zahn” (Tooth for a Tooth) and “Freunde” (Friends), which allegedly were only greenlit, because the then head of the public TV station WDR claimed to have no idea that Paroli was a real brand.

I was also asked to take the Hugo from the shelf, put it on the table and admire it. Later, I was also asked if I could hold the trophy, while answering a few questions. “Not for very long,” I said, “It weighs four and a half kilos and is very heavy.”

After those shots had been finished, the TV team because to assemble a green screen in my dining rooms. Basically, it’s is a metal frame covered with green cloth. The thing was huge and pretty much divided the entire dining room. Squeezing past it wasn’t easy, squeezing past it while carrying a Hugo trophy was even more of a challenge. They also had problems with light shining through the green cloth from behind. Internal lights could be switched off, but sunshine streaming in through the garden door was a problem. “I can lower the automatic shutters, if you like,” I said. “Oh, that would be wonderful.” Of course, the switch to operate the automatic shutter was on the other side of the dining room table, so I had to squeeze past the green screen again to reach it.

I also asked if the fact that the print on my t-shirt – which is reproduction of the cover of the 1966 edition of Foundation – is green was a problem.  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” I was told, “We can exclude it from the process.”

I was then asked to stand or sit in front of the green screen, answer more questions and write “1969” onto the white cardstock again. I was also asked to look around and follow an imaginary object with my eyes. The Hugo was also filmed against the green screen.

Of course, I know what a green screen is and how it works. I’ve known that since I was a kid and eagerly watched “making of” documentaries about science fiction movies. However, this was my first experience with an actual green screen. Coincidentally, it was also the first time working with a green screen for journalist Désirée Bertram.

Now Radio Bremen has always had cutting edge TV technology and they have been using early versions of the green screen process since the 1960s, mostly to insert animated backgrounds into the famous Beat-Club/Musikladen music program. And nowadays, they use the tech for news programs, to make me appear in front of footage of the first Moon landing.

After the filming at my home was done, the TV team also wanted to film me outside. Now buten un binnen is a regional TV program for Bremen and surroundings, so of course they wanted a local hook. And the one they chose was the crash of Lufthansa flight 005 while landing at Bremen airport on January 28, 1966.  I wrote about this crash for Galactic Journey and incorporated eyewitness statements, including that of my Dad who chanced to drive past the crash site very shortly after it had happened. The article is here BTW and I’m very proud of it, because it took a lot of research.

Nowadays, there are two memorial steles commemorating the victims in a park near the crash site. The first stele was donated by the Italian National Olympic Committee and is dedicated to the seven members of the Italian national swim team as well as their coach and a TV reporter who died in the crash. That stele was erected in 1967 shortly after the crash, though it has been moved since then, when the runway of Bremen airport was extended in the early 1980s. The second stele, which lists the names of all 46 victims, was only erected in 2019 and no, I have no idea why it took them so long to honour all 46 people who died in what is still the worst plane crash ever at Bremen airport. Though Bremen has a thing for putting memorials decades later. The memorial stele for the three victims of the Gladbeck hostage drama (most of which did not actually take place in Gladbeck, but in Bremen), 15-year-old Emanuele De Giorgi, 19-year-old Silke Bischoff (who went to my school) and 31-year-old police officer Ingo Hagen, was not set up until 2019, thirty-one years after it happened, either.

So the TV team loaded everything back into their van and also filmed me going out and into the house. When I opened the door, I nearly stumbled over a stack of packages that had been delivered. I actually did see the mail person, but he never rang the doorbell. The packages actually contained things ordered weeks apart, because two shipments had been delayed due to holidays, one arrived unexpectedly fast and Mattel Creations packages arrive whenever they please anyway.

They also asked me if I could drive to the memorial for the victims of Lufthansa flight 005 in my own car, because they still had more filming to do in the city center afterwards. “No problem,” I said.

Just before we drove off, my neighbour Franziska chanced to come by with her two young kids whom she’d picked up at the kindergarten. The two kids cheerily greeted the TV team and me. Of course, a TV van is not nearly as exciting as heavy machinery, but still exciting enough for little kids.

We then drove to the park with the two memorial steles for the victims of flight 005. I drove ahead, since I know the way better, and the TV van followed. I drove onto a parking lot by the park, which is used by dog walkers and the like, again followed by the TV van.Of course, it had to start to rain the moment I stepped out of the car.

The two memorial steles are quite close to the parking lot, located amidst a copse of oak trees. Thankfully, the grass had been mowed, so we didn’t have to wade through tall grass to get there. I told the TV team that I had actually taken a photo of the stele with the names of all the victims and googled every single one to see what I could find out about them. “This was the pilot,” I said, pointing at the name, “This was the co-pilot. This was a flight attendant. Here’s the actress Ada Tschechowa.”

I was filmed walking along a small path in the park, planes roaring overhead and traffic rushing by on Kladdinger Straße (which was particularly busy that day due to two traffic jams on Autobahn A1 and Bundesstraße B75). I was also filmed at the memorial, looking at the inscription and writing the year 1966 onto the white cardstock, while insects were buzzing all around me. “I’m not sure if they’re attracted to the scent of the marker or my deodoriser or my shampoo,” I said. The TV team assured me that insects wouldn’t be visible on the screen and they aren’t.

After the shooting at the memorial for the victims of Lufthansa flight 005, the TV team and I parted ways. The TV team returned to the city center for some more filming, while I wondered what to do now. I was hungry, because the TV team arrived at twelve o’clock and I didn’t want to have lunch before to avoid unpleasant smells or bowel movements. However, it was after two PM by now and too late for lunch, at least lunch outside the home. So I decided to have an ice cream instead and stopped by the ice cream parlour Il Sole in Brinkum on my way home. I had a martini sundae and then continued homewards.

I’d been told that the TV report would air in the Saturday edition of buten un binnen, unless something urgent came up. However, there were no urgent news and so the report actually did air on Saturday. You can watch it – and read the related text – here. And here is the full buten un binnen episode. My segment starts at the 19:24 minute mark

I think it’s a lovely piece and it’s always interesting to see how much work (roughly two and a half hours of filming plus post-production) goes into such a very short report.

Of course, I watched buten un binnen live on Saturday evening and then had dinner. When I checked my e-mail afterwards, I already had two acquaintances e-mail me to let me know that they had seen me on buten un binnen. I suspect I’ll get more of this in the next few days, because – as I said – almost everybody watches buten un binnen. I’ve also noticed an uptick in people visiting my blog, though I don’t know if Galactic Journey has a similar uptick.

ETA: Gideon has since confirmed that Galactic Journey receive an influx of visitors from Germany following the buten un binnen report as well.

And that was my second TV appearance in 2025.