Cora Buhlert's Blog

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.

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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.

Happy Birthday Heikedine Körting, Queen of the German Audio Drama

Heikedine Körting, audio drama director, producer, voice actress and lawyer, celebrates her eightieth birthday today.

If you’re not German, you’re likely thinking “Heikedine Who?” But if you grew up in Germany in the past fifty years, Heikedine Körting probably influenced a big part of your childhood, whether you know her name or not. Because Heikedine Körting is the producer and director of the popular Europa audio dramas.

If you grew up in (West) Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, audio dramas on cassette tape were an integral part of your childhood. They were ubiquitous, sold in supermarkets, drugstores, toy stores, department stores, book stores, magazine and tobacco stores all over West Germany, often in bright yellow displays directly by the cash register. They were also cheap, costing 5 or 6 Deutschmarks per tape. In short, these audio dramas on cassette were the ideal quick gift, to reward a kid after being dragged through the shops by their Mom or Grandma all day or for birthday parties of schoolmates.

They were an excellent values, too, for those 5 or 6 Deutschmarks per tape gave you roughly 45 minutes of entertainment. The production values were amazing – a full cast of excellent voice actors, often veteran stage actors, sound effects, music, often full orchestral scores – all for audio dramas aimed at children. The stories were usually well written by authors who specialised such this sort of thing such as horror and science fiction author H.G. Francis. There were dozens of audio drama series available for every age range and gender and in every genre, including lots of licensed properties.

A selection of audio dramas on tape for sale at the Marché Noir retro fair in Dorsten. The series include Gruselserie (The Spooky Series), Jan Tenner (a Flash Gordon science fiction series), Masters of the Universe, Princess of Power, both Filmation and the Real Ghostbusters, Asterix, James Bond, Knight Rider, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The -Team and The Simpsons.

Audio dramas aimed at children were not without controversy, particularly in the early years. There were disparaging comments about “electronic grandmothers”, since the first audio dramas were usually fairy tale based and the usual pedagogogic busybodies complained that listening to audio dramas would harm children’s reading abilities. However, those busybodies also said the same thing about comics, television, movies and dime novels to the point that it’s a miracle that we can read at all. Though there were parents who listened to that nonsense (like mine) and when confronted about it, would say that “But we only wanted the best for you and the experts said…” or “But your cousins read Donald Duck comics and listened to audio dramas and look at their school performance.” The cousins in question BTW happened to be undiagnosed dyslexics growing up in a toxic home.

Nonetheless, every West German kid had at least a few of those audio dramas on cassette (including me) and they also found their way to East Germany in parcels or as gifts. We would pop the tape into the player before falling asleep or as entertainment during long road trips o as background noise while doing homework. When you were on a school trip, the bus driver would usually pop an audio drama into the player (or sometimes a mixtape) to keep his passengers quiet and happy. The tapes were also swapped around and shared and they were so ubiquitous to the point that it never even occurred to me that audio dramas on cassette were mainly a West German thing and not nearly as prevalent elsewhere. I know the US had Kid Stuff records and I even owned a few – since my parents’ worries about comics and audio dramas harming my reading abilities miraculously vanished when the media in question was in English or another foreign language – but with regard to production quality there’s really no comparison.

There were four companies producing these audio dramas, Karussell, Kiosk, Maritim and Europa, but as a kid you didn’t pay attention to the label, only to the series and story. And you certainly had no idea who the people behind those cassettes were. Of these companies, Europa very much pioneered the form. Europa was founded in 1966 as the audio drama focussed imprint of the record company Miller International by record producer and music scholar Andreas E. Beurmann. The initial offerings was on fairy tales on vinyl records, still narrated rather than full cast dramas.

In 1971, Andreas Beurmann met a young law student named Heikedine Körting at a party. The two became friends and eventually fell in love, though Beurmann was 17 years older than Heikedine Körting. They married in 1979 and stayed together until Beurmann’s death in 2016.

As for Heikedine Körting, she had a difficult childhood like many Germans born during or immediately after WWII. She was born on June 18, 1945, in the village of Thalbürgel in Thuringia, barely a month after the end of WWII. According to this profile, Heikedine Körting was literally born in a blueberry field, while her mother was picking blueberries to support the family. The newborn was then put into a manger and licked by curious cows. The family soon relocated to Lübeck in West Germany, where Heikedine Körting grew up as a dreamy kid and natural entertainer who put on puppet shows for her friends. At the age of nine, she contracted polio and had to spend months in bed with only her imagination to entertain her, though she eventually made a full recovery. Public service announcement: Polio is a terrible disease that has thankfully been almost completely eradicated by vaccination, so please vaccinate your children and yourself, because this is one scourge we don’t want to come back.

Heikedine Körting attended the gymnasium (academic focussed 13-year grammar school in Germany) when this was still highly unusual for girls, since “they only would get married anyway”. She got in trouble for writing essays that were too imaginative (I can sympathise). After graduation, she attended law school and became Germany’s youngest independent lawyer, though her true calling lay elsewhere.

Shortly after she met Andreas Beurmann, he invited Heikedine Körting to his recording studio. She taught herself how to use the mixing console and started directing and producing audio dramas. In 1973, Heikedine Körting became the head producer and director for Europa‘s extensive line of audio dramas, a position she retains to this day.

Heikedine Körting was largely responsible for Europa‘s shift away from narrated fairy tales to full cast audio dramas and also for the expansion into adventure, mystery, science fiction, fantasy and horror series aimed at older kids. She recruited well-known stage and voice actors for Europa – people like Hans Paetsch, who voice Hui Buh the castle ghost from the eponymous series and narrated many of the fairy tales, Peter Pasetti, who was the German voice of Humphrey Bogart and voices Alfred Hitchcock in The Three Investigators and Skeletor in Masters of the Universe, Norbert Langer, the German voice of Tom Selleck and John Nettles of Midsomer Murders fame as Prince Adam/He-Man in Masters of the Universe, German film and TV star Horst Frank as Inspector Reynolds in The Three Investigators or Jürgen Thormann, the German voice of Michael Caine as Ram-Man and Zodac in Masters of the Universe. Listening to these audio dramas, especially as an adult, can be a weird experience, because of all the famous voices. Part of the reason why Heikedine Körting was able to recruit such high calibre actors for audio dramas aimed at children was that many stage actors, particularly older ones, were frustrated by the direction that German theatre was heading in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where directors were more interested in making political points that may or may not be related to the play in question rather than in putting on reasonably faithful productions (also see this post at Galactic Journey about an early example of that trend). In retrospect, it’s funny that the much criticised “Regietheater” of the 1970s and 1980s is indirectly responsible for my generation being exposed to excellently acted audio dramas as kids.

The range of audio dramas produced by Europa under the auspices of Heikedine Körting is stunning. The most famous are probably the teen mystery series The Three Investigators, in nigh continuous production since 1979 and still with the same voice actors who are now gentlemen in their 50s and 60s rather than teens, and TKKG, which started in 1981. Also still in production to this day are Hui Buh, the Castle Ghost (started in 1973), The Famous Five (started in 1978), based on Enid Blyton’s eponymous kids adventure series, and Hanni and Nanni (started in 1972), based on Enid Blyton’s St. Clare’s boarding school novels. Past series include the SF series Commander Perkins (1976 to 1982) and Perry Rhodan, based on the eponymous dime novel series, the horror series Gruselserie (literally Spooky Series), Castle Schreckenstein, Larry Brent and Macabros, which were controversial due to being bloodier and scarier than the usually terminally bland West German kids’ entertainment, because audio dramas could get away with more than visual media. In the 1980s, Europa also produced a lot of audio dramas based on licensed properties such as The A-Team, Knight Rider, A Nightmare on Elm Street, James Bond 007, Asterix, both the Filmation and the Real Ghostbusters (cause double busting makes you feel twice as good), Bravestarr, Rainbow Brite and of course both Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power.

There are two different versions about how the Masters of the Universe audio dramas came to be. One is that Heikedine Körting was strolling through the Nuremberg Toy Fair when she saw Masters of the Universe figures on display at the Mattel booth and asked the Mattel rep whether there was any media to go with these toys and whether she could licence them to produce audio dramas. The other version is that Heikedine Körting saw her young nephews playing with Masters of the Universe toys and when she asked, if there was a story to go with these toys, she was told, “No, there isn’t” (which was true in the early 1980s). So Heikedine Körting contacted Mattel and licences Masters of the Universe to produce audio dramas. But whichever version of the story is the true one, the Masters of the Universe audio dramas were huge successes and continue to the be the canonical version of Masters of the Universe for many German fans. The German Masters of the Universe audio dramas, penned by the prolific H.G. Francis, also introduced Anti-Eternia He-Man, the evil parallel universe counterpart of He-Man who has since made his way into the wider Masters of the Universe cosmos.

“Happy Anti-Birthday to you, Ms. Körting. Have some anti-cake!”

“Get lost, imposter. I want to wish Ms. Körting a happy birthday.” – “Imposter? It’s you who’s the imposter, you goody two-shoes.”

Part of the reason why Masters of the Universe and the other licenced audio dramas were so successful in West Germany is that while we got most of the toylines of the 1980s, we didn’t get the cartoons that went with them, because in the three TV-channel world of early 1980s West Germany, the public channels would not broadcast those terrible violent American cartoons (where no one ever got seriously hurt and He-Man and friends delivered moral messages at the end of every episode). So unless you were lucky enough to have cable TV early or had access to foreign TV, the audio dramas were the only story you got to go with your toys. And they were good and usually a little harder edged, more violent and more grown-up than the cartoons, even if the Filmation cartoon was a stronger influence on me personally than the audio dramas.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Europa audio dramas were huge success. Heikedine Körting was awarded a staggering 180 golden and platinum records for the audio dramas she directed and produced, making her one of the most successful female recording artists of all time, outselling the likes of Madonna or Taylor Swift.

But difficult times were coming for Europa, because the sales of audio dramas on cassette starting dwindling in the late 1980s and fell off a cliff in the early 1990s. The reasons were the increasing shift away from audio tapes towards CDs, the proliferation of private TV, which brought a huge expansion of cartoons and other shows popular with young viewers and also the proliferation of video games. By the early 1990s, all of Europa‘s many series had been cancelled except for the blockbusters The Three Investigators and TKKG.

However, the fortunes of Europa reversed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as more and more of the now grown-up listeners of yesteryear got on the internet, rediscovered the audio dramas of their childhood and also connected with other fans. The prices for vintage audio dramas on cassette tape or vinyl skyrocketed – a cassette that cost 5 or 6 Deutschmark in the 1980s now goes for twenty times that. In response, Europa reissued many of their popular series starting in 1999, though in some cases series could not be reissued because of rights issues involving the music. The licensed series were mostly also not reissued, because the original licence didn’t allow for it and the property would have to be relincensed, after from new owners who were not exactly sympathetic. The Three Investigators even toured as live stage shows with the original voice actors. Europa also began producing new instalments of popular series such as The Three Investigators, TKKG or Gruselserie as well as brand-new series such as Teufelskicker (Devil Players) about a football team. Oddly enough, I remember winning a football themed audio drama on cassette at the Bürgerpark Tombola (a local charity tombola to finance a park) sometime in the 1980s. Since I didn’t care for a football themed story about boys, I swapped it with my cousins (the undiagnosed dyslexics whose school performance caused my parents to believe so much nonsense) for something more to my taste.

Amazingly, Europa only stopped offering audio dramas on cassette tape in 2011, largely because audio tape was nigh impossible to source by then. You can still buy their offerings on CD or as MP3 and you can also stream them. Heikedine Körting still produces and directs Europa‘s audio dramas and the various sound effects are still sourced from analogue tapes and not digital.

The legacy of Heikedine Körting also continues to bear fruit elsewhere, because Germany still has a rich environment of new companies producing audio dramas inspired by the cassette tapes of yore. The vintage horror dramas have inspired productions like Blutige Zeche in Bottrop (Bloody Mine in Bottrop). The science fiction series Jan Tenner (which was not produced by Europa, but by rival Karussell) has just made a comeback with brand-new stories and even Masters of the Universe has a new series of audio dramas.

So a happy 80th birthday to Heikedine Körting and thank you for all the wonderful stories that kept generations of kids entertained.

Frontpage News

We interrupt your regularly scheduled con coverage, because I’ve been in the news again, for Alexandra Penth interviewed me for the Weser-Kurier about my Hugo nomination as part of the Galactic Journey team. You can read the article here. I also really love the photo of me in my Foundation t-shirt, posing with the 2022 Best Fan Writer Hugo.

And here is what the article looks like in the actual paper:

Yes, I made the front page above the fold. Of course, it’s only the front page of the regional supplement for Stuhr, Weyhe and Diepholz county, but it is still the front page.

And while on the subject of Galactic Journey, I forgot to link to my latest article where I review the 1970 science fiction novel (well, it’s more of a fix-up actually) A Circus of Hells by Poul Anderson. It’s a Dominic Flandry novel, entertaining but also rather dated.

In the early years of my science fiction reading journey, I read a lot of Poul Anderson and a lot of Dominic Flandry, because Anderson was very prolific and the spinner rack at my local import bookstore always carried at least one book by him.

But then I discovered Lois McMaster Bujold and read The Warrior’s Apprentice almost directly after a Flandry novel, which might have been A Circus of Hells (I own it and definitely read it) and Bujold told a similar story – spy action and intrigue in space – so much better than Anderson ever did.

What is more, the winners of the 2024 Nebula Awards were announced while I was at the Los Amigos con. I’m not sure if I’ll do my usual commentary post on the winners this year, but I’m overall satisfied with the Nebula winners and think they are great choices.

The next instalment of my epic Los Amigos con report should come out soon, hopefully tomorrow, so stay tuned.