Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 54

Why the Retro Hugos Have Value

Once again, this is not the post I wanted to write. I had been planning to review The Old Guard, which I finally got around to watching, and maybe write a quick con report about the virtual 2020 NASFIC.

However, the fallout from CoNZealand continues to suck all oxygen out of the room.  The good thing is that the con coms of the upcoming Worldcons DisCon III and Chicon and as well as those bidding for future Worldcons have learned from some of the problems at CoNZealand. The bad thing is that they haven’t necessarily learned the right lessons.

The Memphis Worldcon bid for 2023 has posted a statement about their commitment to diversity and inclusion, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, they also felt the need to let us know in that statement that they don’t intend to hold the 1948 Retro Hugos, if their bid wins. The full statement is here and a detailed discussion may be found at File 770. There also are two proposals by David Wallace and Camestros Felapton, which would basically result in a Retro Hugos light (only one or two categories per year at the discretion of a given Worldcon).

Now I do have some sympathy for the reluctance of Worldcons to hold Retro Hugos, because the Retro Hugos mean a lot of work and extra expenses and the participation could be better. We should maybe also rethink whether the Retro Hugos really need a trophy with an elaborate base and a dedicated ceremony, since the winners are all dead (though one 1945 Retro Hugo winner, the Best Dramatic Presentation co-winner The Canterville Ghost, still has a surviving castmember, Margaret O’Brien, now 82 years old) and descendants often aren’t present to accept the award either.

However, I don’t see the need to make a decision about the Retro Hugos now, since no one expected a statement three years before the con. CoNZealand didn’t announce that they were going to hold the 1945 Retro Hugos until late 2019, a few months before the con. And because the 1946 Retro Hugos were already held in 1996, there won’t be any Retro Hugos until 2022 anyway, so there really was no need to make a statement now. And there was certainly no need to make a statement regarding the 1948 Retro Hugos in the context of a statement on diversity and inclusion, since that implies that the Retro Hugos and an interest in older SFF in general are considered so offensive now that they violate the ideals of diversity and inclusion. And yes, this was maybe not the intention, but that’s how it comes across.

Besides, most of the criticism of CoNZealand focussed on the 2020 Hugo ceremony. I have already written thousands of words about the 2020 Hugo ceremony and linked to other people’s takes on it and the short version is, “Yes, the criticism of the 2020 Hugo ceremony and host George R.R. Martin is absolutely justified, because the ceremony was a disaster.”

A lot of the criticism focussed on Martin’s and Robert Silverberg’s endless reminiscing about “the good old days” and particularly the drinking game worthy frequency with which Martin mentioned John W. Campbell. Again, those criticisms are absolutely justified, because a current year Hugo ceremony is no place to reminisce endlessly about events that happened before many of the finalists were even born.

However, somehow the criticism of the 2020 Hugo ceremony has become conflated with the 1945 Retro Hugos, where the winners included John W. Campbell and the Cthulhu Mythos as well as Leigh Brackett, Margaret Brundage, Clifford D. Simak, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Superman, The Canterville Ghost and Curse of the Cat People (as well as the fanzine Voice of the Imagi-Nation, which some people also have problems with). Of course, there was nothing wrong with the 1945 Retro Hugo ceremony (and it was much shorter than the regular one) except some technical issues and that it had to share a timeslot with the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, leaving the Sir Julius Vogel Award winners feel shafted. However, many complaints about the 1945 Retro Hugo winners focussed solely on the wins for Campbell and Cthulhu (and sometimes Voice of the Imagi-Nation), but completely ignored all other winners. The overwhelming majority of those complaining were also people who had paid zero attention to the Retro Hugos before, who didn’t bother to nominate and probably didn’t bother to vote either, who never discussed the finalists or tried to boost finalists they find less objectionable than Campbell and Cthulhu. Again, I have already discussed all this in great detail here and here.

Now no one is obliged to care about the Retro Hugos. However, if you didn’t nominate and vote, you don’t get complain about the results. I also understand the frustration that Retro Hugo voters keep voting for familiar names like John W. Campbell and weak early stories by future stars of the genre over better works, because I share it. However, unlike many other folks, I didn’t complain, but decided to do something about it, so I started the Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet and Retro Science Fiction Reviews to help potential Retro Hugo nominators and voters make more informed choices. Because I believe that it’s better to try and fix something than destroy or abolish something that some people enjoy.

And while I understand why Worldcons are reluctant to give out Retro Hugos due to the work and expense involved, I really don’t understand the intense hatred they engender in some fans. There are a lot of things going on at Worldcons that I personally don’t care about, but that doesn’t mean I want to take those things away from the people who do enjoy them. I simply focus on the things that give me joy and ignore the rest.

However, the current campaign against the Retro Hugos is part of a larger trend to dismiss the past of our genre as racist, sexist and irrelevant. Also witness the recent debate about the SFF canon, what it is and whether it is relevant with contributions by John Scalzi (here and here), Nina Allan, Camestros Felapton (here and here), the Hugo Book Club, Font Folly, Steve Davidson, Doris V. Sutherland and others. The canon discussion is mostly civil (and the only uncivil are the usual idiots I haven’t linked here) and also makes a lot of good points, such as that there is no one fixed SFF canon, but that individual people have different works which are important to them, that canons can be abused as a form of gatekeeping, that it’s not necessary to read classic SFF works, unless you enjoy them or want to write an academic work about SFF. However, pretty much everybody who is interested in older SFF has experienced hostility about this interest, even if we don’t go around and tell people that they’re not “real fans” (TM), unless they have read the entire output of Heinlein, Asimov, Lovecraft, etc… (and in that case, I wouldn’t be a “real fan” (TM) either). Witness Jason Sanford saying that the Retro Hugo voters are “a small group of people stuck in the past giving today’s genre the middle finger”, never mind that most Retro Hugo voters are Hugo voters as well. Or the person who called me a Nazi on Twitter for tweeting about the Retro Hugo winners, until I blocked them.

As I said before, no one has to care about older SFF and no one has to read it, if they don’t want to. But attacking people for being interested in older SFF and enjoying the Retro Hugos is not okay. Nor is everybody who’s interested in older SFF a reactionary fascist, even if received wisdom claims that the SFF of the golden age was all racist and sexist stories about straight white American men in space, lorded over by the twin spectres of Campbell and Lovecraft.

There is just one problem: The received wisdom is wrong. Because the golden age (intended here as a designation for a specific time period, not a value judgment) was more than just Campbell and Astounding.  It was also a lot more diverse than most people think, as I explained in a three part post last year.

True, John W. Campbell did have an outsized influence on science fiction of the 1940s due to a combination of genuine skill as an editor, an eye for promising writers and knowledge of what the audience he cultivated wanted to read as well as the stroke of luck that Astounding Science Fiction had the considerable financial clout of the Street & Smith publishing empire behind it, allowing Campbell to pay better than his competitors and on acceptance, whereas the father of Robert E. Howard had to pester Weird Tales for missing payments until 1942, six years after Howard committed suicide. And because Astounding was the highest paying SFF mag, he pretty much got the first right of refusal for every science fiction story written between 1937 and 1950, unless the author managed to sell it to the even better paying so-called “slicks” or really didn’t get along with Campbell. Would Campbell’s influence have been as great, if he had wound up as editor of – say – Startling Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories? I doubt it.

Campbell’s influence was further exarcerbated by anthologists who reprinted a lot more stories from Astounding than from other magazines. For example, The Great Science Fiction Stories anthologies edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg often have a significant overlap with the Retro Hugo finalists for the respective year and mainly collect stories from Astounding with a few other magazines thrown in. However, Asimov was part of Campbell’s stable of writers, shared Campbell’s vision of science fiction to a certain degree (though he was known to subvert it on occasion) and supported the myth that Campbell saved science fiction from rayguns and bug-eyed monsters and made it respectable. And having read some of a letters a very young Isaac Asimov wrote to various science fiction magazines during the 1930s, often to complain about the horror of their being women in those stories, it’s clear that making science fiction respectable and getting rid of all of those bug-eyed monsters and women in brass bikinis was important to him. Meanwhile, Asimov is on record for disliking Weird Tales, which he called “a hoary old institution”. The choices he made for the anthologies he edited obviously reflect his biases.

Talking of Weird Tales, there is quite a lot of scholarship about the magazine and its writers – however, most of that scholarship focusses solely on H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and their overlapping circles. However, if you flips through an actual issue of Weird Tales – a lot easier thanks to the magic of the Internet Archive, since physical issues can cost hundreds of dollars – you’ll quickly see that there was a lot more to the “unique magazine” than just Lovecraft and Howard, Cthulhu and Conan. In fact, the Lovecraftian horror stories and early sword and sorcery are in the minority in the actual magazine, outnumbered by gothic horror, ghost stories, occult investigators and proto-urban fantasy. Weird Tales‘ most popular author was not Lovecraft or Howard but Seabury Quinn, whose stories about the occult detective Jules de Grandin and his partner Doctor Trowbridge repeatedly saved Weird Tales from the brink of bankruptcy. Personally, I don’t quite get the popularity of the Jules de Grandin stories – Manly Wade Wellman’s John Thunstone and Judge Pursuivant stories are much better examples of the occult detective genre – though the not so subtle hints that Jules de Grandin and Doctor Trowbridge are more than just good friends are certainly interesting. If you look at an actual issue of Weird Tales, you’ll also note how many women writers and readers the magazine had and how little is known about them. Would we know more about Allison V. Harding, one of the ten most prolific contributors to Weird Tales, if Robert Weinberg had not dismissed her stories “as fillers that just take up space”?

But just as Weird Tales was more than just Conan and Cthulhu, Campbellian science fiction with its competent white male protagonists and its focus on “hard” science (which often turns out to be nonsense upon closer examination) was only one strand of SFF in the 1940s. There was a whole galaxy beyond Campbellian science fiction and even Campbell published a lot of non-Campbellian stories such as the City cycle by Clifford D. Simak, “No Woman Born” and “Judgment Night” by C.L. Moore or “The Children’s Hour” by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, all of which are excellent. However, the stories found in Weird Tales, Planet Stories, Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, Super Science Stories, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, etc… are often more interesting than those published in Astounding. Not to mention the stories and novels published beyond the confines of the American pulp magazine market. But stories not published in Astounding are more likely to be forgotten because of the prevalent narrative that Astounding was the best magazine of the era. And indeed, I came across a lot of great stories in the course of the Retro Reviews project that have never been reprinted at all, while a stinker like “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill (a story even its author disliked) did rack up several reprints and translations over the years, even though the only thing of interest about that story is the handy primer on how to build an atom bomb that is hidden inside a page of bad technobabble.

Another issue – and one that should surprise absolutely no one – is that women authors are more likely to be forgotten than men. Not that there aren’t plenty of men who are forgotten as well – who is still familiar with Emil Petaja, Carl Jacobi, Nelson S. Bond or Albert de Pina (very likely one of the few Latinx SFF authors of the era) these days? However, the only women SFF writers of the golden age who are still remembered nowadays are C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett and even their works are not always easy to find. For example, Leigh Brackett’s Shadow Over Mars, this year’s Retro Hugo winner for Best Novel, is out of print. And a lot of C.L. Moore’s collaborations with Henry Kuttner have been reprinted under his name alone. Meanwhile, other women SFF writers active during the golden age like Margaret St. Clair, Allison V. Harding, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Dorothy Quick, Alice-Mary Schnirring, Greye La Spina, Leslie F. Stone, Mona Farnsworth, Clare Winger Harris, Jane Rice, Lilith Lorraine (one of the few indigenous writers of early SFF), Ruth Washburn, etc… are barely remembered at all, even if some of them were popular authors during their lifetime. Some of these women are so obscure that we don’t know anything about them at all – all we have are the stories they wrote in the scanned pages of yellowing pulp magazines.

Every twenty years or so, we seem to be experiencing a surge of women and writers of colour entering the genre, making a splash, winning awards and generating headlines like “Women and people of colour are writing SFF now”. But then, those women and writers of colour are pushed out, ignored and forgotten, until the next batch comes along. Witness how the golden age became the realm of Campbellian white dude science fiction and how Weird Tales, the most woman-friendly magazine of the era, was reduced to Conan and Cthulhu, Howard and Lovecraft with everybody else forgotten. Witness how the women writers of the silver age were dismissed as “little housewives writing domestic stories set in galactic suburbia” by those who came after them. Witness how the Cyberpunks consigned the feminist SFF of the 1970s to the memory hole as boring and irrelevant. Witness how women writers of epic fantasy of the 1970s and 1980s are forgotten and ignored, while Robert Jordan, Raymond Feist and Terry Brooks are still considered important voices. Witness how the SFF community managed to completely ignore the many women writing urban fantasy, romantic space opera, paranormal romance, time travel romance and YA SFF to great success in the 1990s and 2000s, while celebrating men writing singularity fiction and New British Space Opera? Do today’s champions of “The past is irrelevant, the golden age is now” honestly believe that it will be different this time around? Because I’m pretty sure it won’t be.

And that’s why reading older SFF is important. Because if you actually read the stuff, you’ll quickly see that pretty much every bit of received wisdom – the golden age was all Campbell and competent white dudes in space and everything before was crap, the SFF of the late 1950s/early 1960s was just boring domestic galactic suburbia stuff until the New Wave came along, the science fiction of the 1970s was boring and irrelevant and only the cyberpunks made the genre relevant again, women and writers of colour did not write SFF before 1965/1990/2010/insert date here – is wrong. And that the genre was a lot more complex, a lot more diverse and a lot more interesting than than the one-note received wisdom narratives imply.

If you dive into old SFF, you’ll find great stories that have been forgotten and classics who have experienced a visit from the suck fairy. You’ll find trends and whole subgenres cropping up decades before they had a name (and not just obvious suspects like sword and sorcery either, but also a lot of urban fantasy and military SF years before they became subgenres), you’ll find stories that are decades ahead of or behind their time. You’ll also find that writers and fans seventy-five or fifty years ago were already discussing a lot of the issues we are still discussing today, albeit in different terms than we would use today.

There are discussions about sexism, racism and diversity – often phrased with cringeworthy clumsiness, but nonetheless present. You had people like a fan writer named Harold Wakefield unearthing “forgotten fantasists” in the pages of the fanzine The Acolyte (and how frustrated would Harold Wakefield be, if he knew that we still have to do the same thing today?). There are strong female characters to be found in the stories of the golden age and some of them even pass the Bechdel test. There are characters of colour, quite a few in fact. There are interracial relationships, which either pass unremarked or where the story makes an explicit point that banning interracial relationships is wrong (Robert E. Howard of all people addressed the issue repeatedly in his Kull stories and at one point literally had Kull smash miscegenation laws with his battle axe). There are sex scenes, some of them quite frank. There are references to drug use. There are subtle and not so subtle hints that some people are gay and that there’s nothing wrong with that. There are even transgender characters, either coded in magical sex change stories such as “Adept’s Gambit” by Fritz Leiber, which will be denied its chance at Retro Hugo glory by the decision of the Memphis Worldcon bid, or addressed outright like in the 1962 story “Roberta” by Margaret St. Clair, which I reviewed for Galactic Journey last year.  There also are a lot of explicitly anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist stories, many of them published in that bastion of Socialism and anti-colonialism Planet Stories. To reduce the golden age to just Campbellian science fiction and Lovecraftian horror is to deny the existence of all of those other stories.

Steve J. Wright, comrade-in-arms on the Retro Reviews project, makes some very similar points to mine in this great post on his blog. He also wonders whether our efforts to make the Retro Hugos better and unearth all of the interesting stuff that was going on beyond Campbellian science fiction are futile, since the Retro Hugo voters keep voting for familiar names like Campbell and Heinlein or those truly dreadful Buck Rogers comics anyway. However, as Steve also notes, we have been making some headway. There was a radio drama on the Best Dramatic Presentation ballot and several more on the longlist. The Best Related Work category likely wouldn’t have existed without the Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet and the work done by Steve, N. and others to track down potential nominees. I also doubt that nigh forgotten writers like Allison V. Harding and Dorothy Quick would have made the longlist, if not for our efforts. Ditto for Babette Rosmond, editor of The Shadow and Doc Savage, who just missed the Best Editor ballot. And talking of editors, should we make a push to put John W. Campbell’s long suffering editorial assistant Kay Tarrant on the ballot for future Retro Hugos, in case they still exist. And I hope they will, because frankly, it’s frustrating to have the whole project cut short, just as we were making headway, because some people who never paid any attention don’t like the results.

Besides, as Steve also says, just giving up would mean abandoning the history of our genre to the reactionary fans and to the received wisdom that Campbell was the greatest editor of the 1940s and that Campbellian science fiction ruled. Because the reactionaries are not giving up. Retro Hugos or not, they’re still here and they’re still pushing their version of what the gilded past of our genre was like. And if no one counters them, that narrative will be the only one there is.

In his post on the Retro Hugo debate, Camestros Felapton points out that the Far Right of our genre – various offshots of the Sad and Rabid Puppy campaigns as well as some established Lovecraft and Campbell fanatics – are actively trying to claim the pulp era for their movement. They can’t quite agree which parts of the pulp era to claim for their own – some of them favour Campbellian science fiction and some of them hate Campbell with the same passion as their political opposites – however, their idea of what pulp SFF was like is highly reductionist and sometimes downright wrong. Hence, you get such howlers that sword and sorcery was a quintessentially masculine genre and that women can’t write it (they grudgingly admit the existence of C.L. Moore and Jirel of Joiry, but declare her “not really sword and sorcery”) and that hardly any women were reading Weird Tales, even though the letter columns indicate a high percentage of female readers. You get claims that SFF of the pulp era was steeped in Christian values, which again is very wrong. You do find stories wherein Christianity plays a role and is explicitly addressed such as Leigh Brackett’s “The Veil of Astellar”, C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy and Ross Rocklynne’s “Intruders from the Stars” (which was a lot more entertaining than it has any right to be), but such stories are in the minority. Finally, you also get people claiming that golden age science fiction was all apolitical fun with no political or social messages at all, which is complete nonsense, whether it’s the “genocide is good” messaging of “Arena” by Fredric Brown or the fact that many of Leigh Brackett’s protagonists are literal social justice warriors.

Now other people may disagree, but I for one am not willing to abandon the past of our genre to the dominant narrative that it was just straight white American men being competent in space and straight white men being incompetent in the face of Lovecraftian horrors nor am I willing to let the reactionary forces continue to dominate the discussion about vintage SFF.

Do we need Retro Hugos to discuss, reappraise and honour vintage SFF? Not necessarily, but they are a useful vehicle to raise the profile of worthy older works which may have been overlooked. Plus, the intense focus on a single year is a good thing, because ideally it makes you look beyond the usual suspects and the stories and authors you have loved for ages.

However, Retro Hugos or not, I am going to continue discussing vintage SFF. Because I enjoy it and I’d rather talk about a story that no one has talked about in seventy or eighty years than offer the umpteenth hot take on Network Effect or Harrow the Ninth or The City We Became to the world, even though I liked all of those books, too.

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Retro Review: “Gambler’s Asteroid” by Manly Wade Wellman

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There are no space walrusses in “Gambler’s Asteroid” either

“Gambler’s Asteroid” is a space opera short story by Manly Wade Wellman, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

The titular gambler’s asteroid is 624 Hektor (spelled “Hector” in this story), which in this story’s version of the pulp science fiction shared solar system has been encased in a bubble of glassite and had its spin sped up by atomic engines to create artificial gravity (Hector is too small to have much in the way of natural gravity) on the inside of the glassite bubble. So all of the characters in this story are walking around on a glass floor with the stars below them. An enterprising Venusian than turned Hector into a sort of interplanetary Las Vegas or rather Atlantic City, considering that the Las Vegas we know today is largely a postwar phenomenon.

Our protagonist is Patch Merrick, a not very successful gambler, who has just bet his last value-units on a card game named Indemnity. The game is fictional, but Wellman explains how it works in a quick paragraph. Not that it matters much, because Merrick loses in the second round anyway.

Wellman now gives us some backstory about Merrick and his tentacled and telepathic Martian pal Zaarrgon. Turns out that Merrick and Zaarrgon are fugitives on the run. Zaarrgon is another of those social justice warriors that certain quarters still claim did not exist in golden age science fiction. He stole water to help his fellow Martians who were dying of thirst and thus attracted the attention of the Martio-Terrestrial League. I can’t help but wonder whether this organisation is a rebrand of Leigh Brackett’s Terran Exploitation Company. “Hey, we’re still an evil bloodsucking company, but at least out new name is a little less blatant about it.”

Zaarrgon ended up in prison, facing execution, and Merrick, who refers to himself as “guilty of sentimentality”, broke him out. As a result, Merrick lost his promising career and his fiancée Morgana Conti, daughter of the wealthy Coburn Conti, and was forced to flee with Zaarrgon to the lawless asteroid belt. They stopped on Hector, hoping to win enough money – pardon, value-units – to buy supplies for their space cruiser and continue their escape. However, Martians are banned from gambling on Hector due to being telepathic and Merrick turns out to be really crap at gambling, so they’re soon out of money and supplies.

The game that Merrick was playing normally ends with all players, including those who dropped out, comparing their totals. The highest total wins. Merrick had good cards. However, he and Zaarrgon are broke and the stakes are too high for them, so Merrick wagers their space cruiser instead. There is obviously no way this can go wrong.

However this time, Merrick gets lucky and beats not just a fellow human player named Mr. Alabaster, but also the house. Now he and Zaarrgon have more than enough to resupply their ship.

Mr. Alabaster, on the other hand, is not happy at all, because he was on Hector to do a job and the money he just gambled away was expense money. Turns out he is a bounter hunter, albeit a very inept one, who is supposed to hunt down Merrick and Zaarrgon on behalf of Morgana Conti and her father. Zaarrgon is still scheduled for execution. As for Merrick, his fate will be worse, at least according to Alabaster, because Morgana Conti still wants to marry him. As for Alabaster, he wound up with the bounty hunting job, because he’s a friend of the Conti family and Morgana hired him. However, she did not consider supplying Alabaster with photos of Merrick and Zaarrgon, which seems like an odd oversight.

Zaarrgon gives the luckless Alabaster his money back and tells him that the fugitives are headed for the moons of Jupiter to throw him off their scent. Not that it helps much, because Zaarrgon and Merrick are arrested anyway by casino security guards who overheard their conversation with Alabaster.

And so Zaarrgon and Merrick end up in prison, while the casino security chief, a froglike Venusian named Lirog, immediately calls Morgana Conti and asks if the prisoners are the fugitives she seeks. Morgana confirms this, doubles the reward and declares that she will pick up the prisoners herself. Alabaster shows up again as well to gloat, because Morgana will pay him a handsome reward as well.

While Merrick and Alabaster are arguing, Zaarrgon uses one of his tentacles to steal a guard’s handy rust raygun and uses it to reduce the lock of their cell to rust. Merrick knocks out a guard and the two fugitives are on the run once more.

On their way back to their space cruiser, they steal some of the atomic fuel for the engines which keep Hector spinning. There is some brief technobabble that Hector was once the centre of a planet that broke apart to form the asteroid belt, which is why powerful atomic fuel can be found there. Fuel powerful enough to take Zaarrgon’s and Merrick’s space cruiser beyond the solar system, though what they plan to do there is anybody’s guess.

They reach the docking bay of their cruiser, Merrick knocks out two more guards and Zaarrgon, who’s clearly the brains of this outfit, uses the rust ray he borrowed to weaken the frames of the glassite sheets and blow a hole into the bubble that envelops Hector, which will both allow the space cruiser to escape and keep everybody on the asteroid so busy with repairing the breach that they won’t have time to follow the fugitives.

The plan works, too. Merrick and Zaarrgon escape and head for another asteroid to purchase supplies, since luckily no one thought to relieve them of their winnings before throwing them into prison.

However, as Merrick and Zaarrgon make their escape aboard their space cruiser, they receive a call from none other than Morgana, who informs them that her plan worked.

When Merrick points out that her plan didn’t work, because he and Zaarrgon escaped, Morgana reveals that she wanted them to escape and made sure they would. She sent Alabaster after them, because he is the stupidest man she knows and a compulsive gambler besides. Then she bribed the card dealer to make sure that Alabaster lost all his expense money to Merrick, allowing Morgana to secretly finance Merrick’s escape.

However, the card dealer informed Ligon, the casino security chief, who then decided to arrest Merrick and Zaargon to get the reward himself. Merrick once more tries to reassert his independence by telling Morgana that he and Zaargon broke out on their own.

“That’s what you think”, Morgana says and reveals that she paid Alabaster to smuggle the rust gun into the prison, allowing Merrick and Zaargon to escape. Merrick is dumbfounded and Morgana tells him that he can’t come home now anyway, because he’s still a wanted man and because there are still many things that Morgana has to fix. And besides, she knows that Merrick isn’t ready to settle down just yet, but once he’s had enough of adventure, he’ll come back to her.

The story ends with Merrick moping and Zaarrgon babbling about asteroids and the creation of the asteroid belt and wondering why Merrick is moping. I take it back. Zaarrgon is not the brains of the outfit, he and Merrick are both idiots in their own way. Morgana, on the other hand, is awesome.

I have to admit, I only read this story, because I flipped forward through the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories after reading “Unsung Hero” by Ruth Washburn and came across this story – after two pages of “incredible but true Scientifacts”. The interior art – showing an anthropomorphic frog and a man in a cage ogling an attractive woman – looked intriguing enough and besides, I like Manly Wade Wellman‘s writing, so I decided to read it. I’m glad that I did, because this is a fun space opera adventure that manages to pack a lot of plot into only six pages.

If I have one complaint about “Gambler’s Asteroid” it’s that it’s too short. With the amount of plot and backstory there is, this could easily have been a novella, if not a novel. The glassite encased asteroid Hector is a fascinating setting, which I would have loved to explore more. I also would have loved to see Merrick break Zaarrgon out of prison and learn more about Merrick’s relationship with Morgana and her father and just what his life and promising career were like, before he decided to free Zaarrgon. And of course, I would have loved to see more of Morgana than two brief videocalls, because Morgana is awesome.

Intergalactic gambling dens are a space opera staple these days, whether it’s Canto Bight and Bespin of Star Wars fame (okay, we never actually see any gambling on Bespin, but you know it’s going on somewhere, considering who runs the place), Stardust City in a recent Star Trek: Picard episode as well as a lots of other intergalactic gambling dens in pretty much every Star Trek series to date, the casino planet Carillon in the original Battlestar Galactica or The Scuttling Cockroach, where Mikhail and Anjali rescue Pietro Garibaldi and get themselves into trouble in my own Freedom’s Horizon. However, Hector is the granddaddy of all of those intergalactic gambling dens. I’m not sure if this is the first intergalactic gambling den to ever feature in science fiction – most likely it’s not. But it’s definitely a very early example.

These days, Manly Wade Wellman is mainly remembered for his (very good) occult detective and folk horror stories – indeed, I reviewed one of them. But like most authors of the pulp era, Wellman was a man(ly) of any talents, who also wrote science fiction, mystery and crime fiction, comic books (a Spirit comic he wrote was nominated for the Retro Hugo this year) and historical non-fiction and who was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award over William Faulkner. However, Wellman’s science fiction stories, particularly his space opera tales from the 1930s and 1940s, are less well known than his fantasy and horror stories. At least based on “Gambler’s Asteroid”, I think that’s a pity.

Wellman’s skills as a writer are clearly evident in this very short story. In a few lines and paragraphs, he manages to sketch a fascinating setting by sprinkling in details like “Venusian chirp-water music”, a “Martian joy-lamp shedding stimulus rays overhead” or the popular Martian genre of “formalised comi-tragedy”, all of which are attractions on offer on the glassite floors of Hector. Wellman also had a dry humour that sets his work apart from other pulpy space opera tales of the era.

Like too many of the stories I have reviewed here at Retro Reviews, “Gambler’s Asteroid” has never been reprinted. I sincerely wonder why, because there is a lot to like about this fun space opera caper.

 

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Cora’s Adventures at CoNZealand, the Virtual 2020 Worldcon, and Some Thoughts on Virtual Conventions in General

[image error]So far, I’ve talked a lot about the Hugo ceremony at CoNZealand, the virtual 2020 Worldcon, but little about the con itself, which is a pity, because CoNZealand was actually pretty good, all things considered.

Normally, this would be a post with lots of photos of panels, exhibits, parties, the convention centre, the Hugo ceremony, the Hugo reception and after-party, etc…. However, due to CoNZealand going virtual like most other cons this year (the ones that weren’t cancelled outright), the convention centre was my office. Which had the advantage that I didn’t have to dash from panel to panel and that I could make myself tea or empty the dishwasher in between panels. Food was always in easy reach and cheaper as well as more nutritious than the usual convention centre grub.

However, there were also new challenges such as “No, Mom, I don’t mind if you want to watch Hawaii Five-O or NCIS or whatever on my TV, but you have to be out of here by half past ten, because I have a panel at eleven.” Another issue is that if the con takes place at home, there is some pressure to keep working anyway, which wouldn’t be there if I had been on the other side of the world in New Zealand. And so I slept in the morning, taught virtual German classes in the afternoon, was at Worldcon by night and also translated someone’s citizenship renunciation certificate in between. Oh yes, and I was still doing the July Short Story Challenge, too, for the first few days of the con, though I only managed a couple fo flash pieces (the post-mortem is coming soon, I promise). I also made sure to take a short daily walk throughout the con.

As you can see from the program schedule I posted shortly before the con, I had a lot of programming this time around. I was on five panels and moderated three of them. I also had a virtual table in the dealer’s hall, something I haven’t done before, either virtually or in person. And then there was the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell, a dealers’ hall reception, etc… In short, I had a busy Worldcon.

My first panel was the “Evolution of Fanzines” panel on Wednesday at 6 AM my time. This was the one of my panels that was probably most affected by the behind the scenes programming changes and fixes that were still going on a few days before the con.

There were two potential problems with the panel: One was the panel description, which asked, “Are fanzines becoming blogs?” That would have been an interesting question to ask, in 2005 or so, but not in 2020. Personally, I didn’t so much mind the panel description – after all, I was moderating and could direct the panel into the direction where I wanted it to go. However, Adri Joy of the Best Fanzine Hugo finalist nerds of a feather was so annoyed by the description which erases most of the 2020 Best Fanzine finalists that she contacted CoNZealand programming and was able to get it changed.

The other potential problem with the fanzine panel was that it seemed to be heavily weighted towards traditional print fanzines, not to mention very white. It also had only three panelists in addition to the moderator. So I asked around in the group that was busily working to make programming more diverse and ended up with not one but two additional panelists who made the panel so much better. And so we had a really great panel with Greg Hills and Jeanne Mealy representing the traditional print fanzine end of the spectrum, Wendy Browne of Women Write About Comics and Sarah Gulde of Star Trek Quarterly and Journey Planet (and myself, I guess) representing the electronic end of the spectrum and Chris Garcia of Journey Planet and The Drink Tank bridging both sides.

Since it was the first day of the con, there were still a number of technical issues. For starters, the panel took place in a so-called meeting room, not a webinar room, so several of the things we’d been told in the Zoom training that CoNZealand organised for all programme participants didn’t apply. And so there were no individual Zoom links for the panelists, but we had to enter with the regular attendants and the Q&A function didn’t exist either, so we took questions via the chat function. One panelist also had technical issues and couldn’t join us until about twenty minutes into the panel. We also had a zoombombing cat, but then zoombombing pets and kids are always welcome.

But all in all, the panel went well, I think, and I also learned some lessons for future panels such as, “Don’t trust that the Q&A function will work and prepare to take questions via the chat?”, “Appoint someone as question wrangler”, “Make sure to remind the audience on which Discord channel (there was one for each programme room) the conversation will continue afterwards” and “Have any links you want to drop into the chat handy before the panel or have a helpful audience member do it for you, because you won’t have the time to chase down links, while you’re actually on the panel.”

I had my next panel the same evening at 11 PM my time. This was “Come Time Travel With Me”, the Galactic Journey live event, featuring Gideon Marcus, Janice Marcus, Lorelei Marcus, Erica Frank and myself. This panel required less preparation, a) because I wasn’t moderating, and b) because I’ve been on the Journey Show, Galactic Journey‘s series of regular online events, a couple of times now (the last time the Saturday before the con, actually), so I knew what to expect. Though I did look up what happened in late July 1965.

Since we’re all time travellers from 1965 for the purpose of the Galactic Journey live events, I also ditched my usual con uniform of geeky t-shirt and Hugo finalist pin (last year’s, since this year’s hasn’t arrived yet) in favour of some retro looking clothes, in this case an original Italian headband from the 1960s and a hippie-ish looking peasant blouse. The audience clearly enjoyed the retro outfits, judging by the chat, and we had another fun panel, which hopefully also brought in some new fans to Galactic Journey and the Journey Show. And talking about Galactic Journey, my latest article there is up. This time, I take a look at two 1965 movies, Again, the Ringer and The Face of Fu Manchu.

The first two days of the con were fairly light with regard to panel load, even though due to the time difference both panels took place on the same day in my timezone. Day three a.k.a. the night from Thursday to Friday, however, was a dozy with three panels, two of which I was moderating, and an event where the dealers’ hall vendors introduce themselves.

My first panel for the day was the “Cover Art” panel at 11 PM my time. I was moderating and the panelists were John Picacio and Alyssa Winans representing the artist side, Pablo Defendini, art director of Fireside Magazine, and Gideon Marcus of Galactic Journey and Journey Press (and myself, I guess) representing the publisher side. That was an amazing panel, which also shows how important good panelists are. I didn’t even have to do much moderating, because John, Pablo and Alyssa basically just threw the ball at each other. I also learned a lot.

Coincidentally, the “Cover Art” panel was also an all Hugo finalist panel, since every single one of us on that panel was a Hugo finalist. And one of us, John Picacio, would go on to win a highly deserved Hugo for Best Professional Artist.

After the cover art panel, I theoretically had a full hour until my next panel at 1 AM. However in practice, I had much less time, because I was chatting in Discord with the audience and panelists. So at twenty to one, I suddenly realised, “Oops, I have to go to y next panel” and excused myself.

The next panel was “The Second Golden Age: SF of the 1960s”. Bradford Lyau was moderating, the panelists were Robert Silverberg, Jack Dann, Kathryn Sullivan and myself. This time, I wore my regular con outfit – geeky t-shirt with Hugo pin – because unlike the Galactic Journey panel, this was a retrospective panel, so I was not actually a time traveller from the 1960s this time around.

There also was some debate about the subject of the panel beforehand, because one panelist (you can maybe guess who) heartily disagreed that the 1960s were the second golden age of science fiction or even the silver age and felt that the early 1950s were the true second golden age.

Talking about the term “golden age” for a moment, I’ve seen complaints from mostly younger SFF writers and readers that they don’t think the period from 1937 to the early 1950s, that is traditionally called “the golden age of science fiction” should be called that, because they believe that the true golden age is now, because there is so much good SFF being published today.

I disagree with this, because I see “golden age” more as a descriptive term used for a certain period than as a value judgment. Of course, it was initially intended to be a value judgment, but even then it should have been clear that the initial golden age would eventually be matched or eclipsed. But by now, the term “golden age” has simply become so engrained that we use it for a specific period, whether we actually think it was golden or not. For example, I also use the term “golden age of comics” for the period of approx. 1938 to 1954 (almost concurrently to the golden age of science fiction), even though I vastly prefer the bronze age and even the much derided 1990s to the so-called golden age. Ditto for the golden age of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s – I use the term, even though I don’t like the actual books all that much.

That said, the actual panel was pleasant and civil. Yes, Robert Silverberg told stories about the good old days, but unlike the Hugo ceremony, this was the right context for it, because people who come to a panel about science fiction of the 1960s (or insert decade here) actually want to hear stories about the good old days. Though apparently, there is still bad blood regarding Stanislaw Lem supposedly saying mean things about some American SFF authors more than forty years after Lem was kicked out of the SFWA (one of only two members to ever get kicked out – the other was Theodore Beale a.k.a. Vox Day). But whether you like Lem or not, when someone asks a question about the best and most memorable worlds in 1960s science fiction, you can’t not mention Solaris or Dune for that matter.

After the 1960s SF panel, I had only ten minutes to get to my next panel “Translation: The Key to Open Doors to Cultural Diversity in SFF”. I was moderating again and the panelists were Libia Benda from Mexico, Luis F. Silva from Portugal, Wataru Ishigame, speaking from the POV of a publisher publishing translated SFF in Japan, and Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine as the token American. Though that would be mean, because Neil Clarke has done more than pretty much any other magazine editor to bring translated SFF to English speaking readers.

Again, we had a lively e-mail debate before the panel and just as lively a debate during the panel, complete with an audio zoombombing by a Mexican street vendor. I had also asked all panelists to recommend some SFF books or stories from their country that had been translated into English (and Neil Clarke generally recommended SFF in translation), so there were book recommendations as well.

The translation panel also overran by almost half an hour, because once the Zoom recording  was stopped, the Zoom meeting just remained open. After ascertaining that the audience could still hear us, we just continued talking about SFF in translation for another twenty five minutes or so, until the Zoom host shut down the room.  Now that’s something that could never have happened at a physical con, unless you were the last panel of the day and the room wasn’t needed again. And even then, convention center staff is usually eager to get you out of the program rooms, so the rooms can be cleaned and the staff can go home. Because a Worldcon is a huge challenge not just for the committee, but also for the venue and its staff, because Worldcons are quite different from the professional conferences that convention centers usually host, as this post on the official site of the Convention Centre Dublin, using the 2019 Worldcon as a case study, shows.

After the translation panel, I theoretically has an hour of time – except that practically, it was more like thirty minutes – before I had to head to my next engagement, a “Meet the Dealers” event for the vendors in the virtual dealers hall.

Renting a table in the virtual dealers hall was an experiment for me and one that wasn’t entirely successful. I did sell some e-books, including several copies of the Pegasus Pulp Sampler,  a collection of twelve novellas, novelettes and short stories, which includes samples – usually the first story – of all my series. But I didn’t earn the fee for the table back, which is okay, because it’s tax deductible for me. And besides, I also view the sales table as a form of marketing, to get my name and that of Pegasus Pulp out there.

In general, I feel that while Zoom and Discord do a decent job of replicating the convention experience in virtual form, the dealers hall is probably the most difficult part of a traditional convention to replicate, because the sense of browsing and discovery that you get in a physical dealers hall is simply missing when clicking from page to page.

Friday night was Hugo night. I didn’t have any panels, so after my virtual German class finished, all I had to worry about was the Hugo ceremony. And I’ve already talked exhaustively about what happened there and also shared the POVs of many other people.

Around the time, Best Related Work was announced I noped out of the ceremony and headed to the virtual after-party – not hosted by George R.R. Martin this time around, if only because Martin was still reminiscing about Worldcons of the 1970s – where I had a lot more fun and interestingly found myself talking to some of the same people I’d chatted with in person at the physical Hugo Losers Party and Hugo reception in Dublin the year before. I also met several great new people.

Indeed, I found that the party aspect of Worldcons was recreated remarkably well in Zoom, even though I would have expected that would be the most difficult aspect to recreate. I didn’t attend any of the parties at the Helsinki Worldcon, if only because I had my Mom in tow and her idea of a nice evening in a foreign city is a sit-down dinner at a nice restaurant and not nibbles and drinks, while chatting with people in a random convention centre room.

In Dublin, I tagged along when some folks from the File 770 meet-up wanted to go to one of the bid parties and found that I quite enjoyed the experience of drifting from party to party and chatting with all sorts of people, whether it was representatives of the sadly now defunct Nice Worldcon bid for 2023 or the assembled German SMOFdom. The Zoom parties recreated that aspect rearkably well, even if you had to provide your own drinks and nibbles (red wine and regular chocolate – the champagne and the good Belgian chocolate went back in the cellar, when I did not win the Hugo).

The last Worldcon day was relatively quiet for me. I watched some panels and checked out the parties and had fun. I was also really exhausted by that point, because virtual conventions can be as exhausting as physical ones, especially if you still have to teach virtual classes, translate certificates, make lunch or show up at your parents’ for Sunday barbecue, too.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the Dublin Worldcon was the Raksura Colony Tree community art project, where a group of crafters came together to create a section of a colony tree from the Books of Raksura by Martha Wells in yarn and fabric. I found heading to the crafting table and just sitting there and chatting with other crafters an immensely relaxing oasis in the bustle of the con.

CoNZealand also had a community art project called Yarnbombing CoNZealand, which was initially supposed to yarnbomb the area around the Wellington convention centre. But with the convention going virtual, we simply yarnbombed our own gardens and neighbourhoods instead.

Sadly, the yarnbombing page in the CoNZealand exhibit are is gone, but you can see my contribution, Occulus, the friendly eyeball monster below. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on his brother Ophthalmos. There will be more photos, once Ophthalmos is finished as well:

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Occulus the Friendly Eyeball Monster decorates the fence.

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A close-up look at Occulus, the friendly eyeball monster.

And that was my CoNZealand report. This is not the report I hoped to write – instead I hoped that I could give you a trip report with lots of photos from New Zealand, but the corona pandemic messed this up like it messed up so many other things.

That said, I find that I do enjoy virtual conventions. Besides, virtual cons make it possible for me and many other fans to attend, even if the con is happening on another continent, which is a definite plus. Though I do hope that I will get to attend another physical Worldcon someday in the not too far future.

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Retro Review: “Unsung Hero” by Ruth Washburn

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Lester Brant encounters neither murder walrusses nor women in brass bikinis in this story.

“Unsung Hero” is a humorous science fiction short story by Ruth Washburn, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

When I embarked on the Retro Review project, one of my goals was to spotlight the works of the forgotten women SFF authors of the golden age. And so I reviewed not just stories by the big name female authors of the era such as Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore, but also by lesser known and largely forgotten women such as Allison V. Harding, Dorothy Quick, Alice-Mary Schnirring and E. Mayne Hull. However, there was one woman publishing science fiction in 1944 who is so obscure that even I, who was explicitly looking for women authors of the time, overlooked her, namely Ruth Washburn.

During the early forties, Thrilling Wonder Stories ran an amateur story contest and published the winning story in their magazine. Ruth Washburn was the winner of the story contest for the Spring 1944 issue. Almost nothing is known about Ruth Washburn except what she herself wrote in the short biographical blurb that ran alongside her story (and the child psychologist Ruth Wendell Washburn who comes up on Google is definitely not the same person as the author of “Unsung Hero”).

According to the brief biography she provided, Ruth Washburn was born between 1901 and 1909, i.e. during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, in Vermilion, South Dakota. She seems to have been a rebellious youngster who repeatedly ran away from home and amassed a remarkable resume of odd jobs ranging from farmworker, factory worker and cook to cosmetics saleswoman and carnival worker. By the time she wrote “Unsung Hero”, Ruth Washburn was living in Chicago with her husband and working as a dressmaker, even though she always dreamed of being a writer.

I really wish we knew more about Ruth Washburn, since she seems to have had a fascinating life. “Unsung Hero” is her only published science fiction story, at least under that name. I did come across a 1932 cookbook for Old-fashioned Molasses Goodies by one Ruth Washburn Jordan who may have been the same person. At any rate, our Ruth Washburn worked in the food industry and molasses are briefly mentioned in the story.

“Unsung Hero” opens in a newspaper office Washburn’s hometown Chicago during WWII. In addition to “war on a dozen fronts”, as a journalist character puts it, Chicago is experiencing a homegrown crisis, for an invisible barrier is blocking the Chicago River and impeding the war effort.

The news also reaches a would-be inventor named Lester Brant in his private basement laboratory. Lester is trapped in an unhappy marriage with Matilda who places no trust in his abilities as an inventor and would rather that Lester keep earning money as a lensmaker. I wonder whether this is a gender reversed commentary on Washburn’s own position as a woman who wanted to write, but had to work as a dressmaker to support the family. Was Ruth Washburn’s husband as unsupportive of her writerly ambitions as Matilda is of Lester’s inventor spirit?

Lester theorises that the unseen barrier is due to a parallel world colliding with ours. And so he grabs one of his apparatuses, which allows him to look into other dimensions – at least in theory. But before he can take off for the Chicago River to test his theory, Lester is interrupted by Matilda banging on the door of his lab. Determined not to let Matilda stop him now, Lester switches on his device and promptly sinks through the floor in front of the eyes of a stunned Matilda.

Lester finds himself in an alien world, where he meets beings with large saucer-like eyes, which look like cartoon ghosts and can project random tentacles from their bodies. The beings, called Tnn and Mmmm, are telepathic and Lester begins to communicate with them. However, he has problems making Tnn and Mmmm understand his plight, while the two aliens are incredibly fascinated by Lester’s clothes and proceed to strip him to his underwear.

Eventually, Tnn and Mmmm teleport Lester to see their leader, one Ool. Ool, it turns out, is having problems, for he is trying to create a force dome by combining the mental powers of a large group of aliens. However, the alien minds generate too much power and so the force dome won’t close, but the power just projects outwards, eventually piercing the dimensional barrier and blocking off the Chicago River.

Lester decides to test his theory by turning his device off and promptly materialises – in striped boxers – on a bridge across the Chicago River near the barrier. Lester’s suddenly appearance startles the onlookers and attracts the attention of a young female news photographer in a scene which is also charmingly illustrated in the interior artwork by M. Marchioni.

Lester quickly turns his device on again and returns to Tnn and Mmmm, who are in the process of dissecting (quite literally) Lester’s clothes. Lester gets angry, accidentally telepathically blasts Tnn and Mmmm’s house and then returns to Ool to explain that he must switch off the force wall, because it is causing problems and impeding the war effort in Lester’s home dimension. Ool certainly has sympathy for Lester’s problem, but points out that his people need the wall to shield themselves from stray thoughts in order to solve complicated problems.

The situation is unknowingly resolved by Tnn, who is trying on Lester’s hat and finds that it blocks out all stray telepathic thoughts. This gives Lester an idea. If felt and leather, unknown to Tnn’s people, can block out stray thoughts, then there is a solution to Ool’s problem that doesn’t involve invisible force walls blocking off the Chicago River.

Lester asks Ool how many people there are in his colony and then returns to his own dimension, only to promptly be arrested, because men in underwear suddenly appearing out of thin air is frowned upon in Chicago. And as if getting arrested for disturbing the peace wasn’t bad enough, Matilda also appears waving a newspaper with Lester’s portrait – in striped boxers – on the front page.

Lester and Matilda are taken to the police station, where Lester tries to make everybody understand that he alone knows how to solve the problem of the invisible barrier blocking the Chicago River. But of course no one believes him. And so Lester is about to be thrown into jail with bail set at fifty dollars, which must have been a significant sum indeed in 1944.

Matilda has no intention to bail him out, but Lester, who has finally found his courage, threatens her with divorce and tells her to hand over the money, since he knows that she has quietly embezzled money from him. Grudgingly, Matilda does so.

Lester once more tries to explain that his device allows him to travel to other dimensions and once more no one believes him. The police sergeant wants to try out the device. Lester lets him and the police sergeant promptly vanishes, only to reappear a few seconds later, now convinced that Lester is telling the truth.

All of a sudden, the police are a lot more helpful. They escort Lester to a sporting goods store, where he buys football helmets for all the beings in Ool’s colony. Lester returns to Ool’s dimension to drop off the football helmets, whereupon Ool switches off the force field and the Chicago River is free again

Lester is now the hero of the hour and even Matilda grudgingly promises to make him pork chops, when Lester threatens that next time he’ll disappear for good. So Lester gets his happy ending. Not only is Matilda a lot nicer to him, he also has a limitless number of strange worlds to explore.

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Okay, so it’s not SFF and it may not even be the same author, but it’s a cute cover and apparently the recipes are good as well.

This is a charming little story reminiscent of Henry Kuttner’s humour pieces such as “A God Named Kroo” and the Gallegher stories. In many way, “Unsung Hero” is a science fiction screwball comedy.

The henpecked husband and overbearing wife dynamic between Lester and Matilda grates a little, because it’s very much a cliché by now. Not to mention that I wonder why the threat of leaving or divorcing her works on Matilda. She clearly has no respect for Lester, so why would it bother her, if he left her? It’s briefly mentioned that Matilda primarily views Lester as a meal ticket, but I don’t think a woman would have had problems finding a job in Chicago in 1944. For that matter, why doesn’t Lester leave Matilda? Surely, he could find someone to make him pork chops who doesn’t steal from him and is a lot easier to get along with.

Honestly, the gender dynamics in this story are not great, especially for a story written by a woman. Though it is notable that the random news photographer who gets a snapshot of Lester in his underwear is a woman.

Even though this was Ruth Washburn’s first and only published story, she clearly had talent. It doesn’t feel like a debut story and I have certainly read far worse SFF stories published in 1944.

Stylistically, “Unsung Hero” is closer to what was published in Astounding Science Fiction than the grab bag of adventure focussed pulp science fiction that was found in the likes of Thrilling Wonder Stories and its sister magazine Startling Stories. Did Washburn originally submit this story to John W. Campbell at Astounding, only to have it rejected? Or was she a reader of Astounding and unconsciously mimicked the style of the stories therein, but it never occurred to her to try to submit to Campbell?

At any rate, I wonder how Ruth Washburn’s writing career would have gone, if she had sold “Unsung Hero” to Campbell at Astounding rather than to Oscar J. Friend at Thrilling Wonder Stories. After all, we know that Campbell for all his flaws did nurture the careers of new writers, including some women.

But unlike Lester Brant, we cannot peer into the alternate universe where Ruth Washburn became a popular science fiction author of the golden and silver age with a lengthy career. And in our universe, this is the only story of hers that we have. I for one find that a pity, because based on “Unsung Hero”, I wouldn’t have minded reading more of Ruth Washburn’s work.

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Reactions to the 2020 Dragon Awards Finalists or the Sound of Puppies Crying

Considering that this year’s Dragon Awards ballot looks pretty good, I guess reactions from certain quarters of the genre community, who used to consider the Dragons their territory, were inevitable. And indeed, Mike Glyer has put up a round-up of Dragon Award reactions at File 770.

But if you want my take, here it is:

Catholic fantasy/horror indie author Declan Finn and former Dragon Award finalist, who to be fair has done a lot to promote books he likes for the Dragon Awards, is not at all pleased by this year’s ballots, for not only did very few of his favourites make the ballot, he also isn’t familiar with most of the finalists at all, though he somehow knows they’re crap.

I have to raise my eyebrows at Declan Finn somehow missing Martha Wells’ Murderbot books or Gideon the Ninth, one of the most heavily promoted books in recent memory, let alone that he knows no one who watches Star Trek Discovery or Picard.

Nonethelesss, his post illustrates an issue I see a lot in the whole indie author ecosystem, of which Finn and the whole superversive fiction movement form a small subsection, namely that a lot of indie authors only read other indie authors, especially other indie authors in their specific niche, and don’t know what is going on in the wider genre world at all, because they don’t read anything except indie books in their specific niche (and the occasional traditionally published author they like) and don’t pay attention to anything outside their niche. Indeed, I’ve seen advice for indie authors telling them to read and study the Kindle top 100 bestsellers in their subgenre, but not to bother with traditionally published books at all, because there is nothing to be learned from traditionally published books about writing books that appeal to the Kindle Unlimited crowd.

Whatever you think about that advice, the results is that when a popular, widely read and discussed book wins an award or hits a shortlist, particularly a book which does not fit narrow conceptions of what the genre should be (I’ve had people argue with me that Becky Chambers’ books can’t possibly be space opera, because there is no spaceship on the cover, and that Jo Walton’s Among Others must be literary fiction, because the cover doesn’t look like a typical fantasy novel), the reaction is, “Who is this person? I’ve never heard of them, so they can’t be any good.”

This insularity works both ways, because a lot of people in the world of traditional publishing are not necessarily familiar with popular indie authors either, because they just tend to scroll past those books and all those carefully split-tested ads to get to the book they want to buy. And since indie books are rarely discussed or reviewed in the places where general SFF readers gather, a lot of SFF readers are simply not familiar even with very popular indie SFF books. There are a few cracks in the wall – projects like the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off or my own Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month round-ups – but they are still limited and affected by selection bias. As a result, you have situations where the biggest fish in the subgenre Kindle pond walks into Worldcon or the SFWA suite, expecting to be celebrated, because they are a six figure author and number one in their subcategory, only to be met with “And who are you again?” reactions.

I don’t even exclude myself here. Due to having a foot in both worlds, I am familiar with a lot of indie authors, but far from all. And I have to admit that I had to google several Dragon Award finalists, though less than in previous years, because those authors are either writing in subgenres I’m not that familiar with or exist in a different ecosystem. However, there is a difference between, “I don’t know who these people are, let’s google them and find out,” and “I don’t know who these people are, so they must be crap.”

That said, I do sympathise with Declan Finn’s frustration that his attempts to discuss and review books he likes that are eligible for the Dragon Awards met with so little resonance. Because I sometimes feel the same with regard to my own efforts with the Retro Hugos, when people complain about the winners they don’t like, but paid zero attention to the efforts by me and others to unearth, list and review eligible works.

Though I have to quibble with Finn’s claim that he compiled every Dragon eligible book, because frankly, that’s impossible, given the volume of books published every year. Declan Finn even missed several very popular and well reviewed novels with a lot of buzz, as his “Who are these people?” reaction shows, let alone the many, many lesser known books. What Finn seems to have done is compile and review eligible books from his little superversive corner of the SFF world and you know what? That’s great.

Because for an award with an eligibility period as weird as that of the Dragon Award, eligibility lists, preferably crowdsourced, are important. The Red Panda Fraction organised an eligibility spreadsheet for the Dragons last year and Finn seems to have done something similar for his little corner of the genre world.

Doris V. Sutherland has also found an interesting Twitter thread started by Declan Finn, in which Finn and several other names we may remember from the puppy years wonder what happened. Here are some highlights – you can read the whole thing by clicking through to the first tweet:

That which is not explicitly right-wing will be infiltrated and subverted by the left.

The only way to keep the Dragons neutral (never mind favourable towards us) is to consistently participate.

— Kit Sun Cheah (@thebencheah) August 12, 2020

That is a load of cancer. Looks like this won’t be the Baens this year.

— PulpArchivist (@ArchivistPulp) August 11, 2020

It’s Tor SOP to have the company vote in Hugos.

I guess it’s easier to get them to vote in the Dragons, since it’s free

— Finn, Declan Finn. Author (@DeclanFinnBooks) August 11, 2020

Thanks.

The 2020 Dragon Award Finalists Go Full Tilt Towards Mainstream Respectability

I’ve been following the saga of the Dragon Awards, an SFF award handed out at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia, since their inception in 2016. During these five years, the Dragon Awards went from puppy award that was conceived as an alternative to the Hugos that puppies could actually win to award for Kindle Unlimited content mills to the mainstream popular award the Dragons were supposed to be and back again.

So what would the 2020 Dragon Award ballot look like, considering that the official website couldn’t even be bothered to update nomination ballot for ages?

Well, the finalists for the 2020 Dragon Awards have been announced today and the ballot looks…. actually pretty good. You can find the whole ballot here on the official site and in a less eye-searing format at File 770.

So let’s take a look at the individual categories:

Best Science Fiction Novel:

This finalists in this category are probably the biggest surprise, because they are all popular mainstream science fiction novels. Not a single “Who is this?” nominee to be found among them. There is also a lot of overlap with other genre awards ballots, which isn’t normally a thing with the Dragons.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow and The Rosewater Redemption by  Tade Thompson were all Hugo and Locus Award finalists, Gideon the Ninth and The Ten Thousand Doors of January were also Nebula finalists and one of Tade Thompson’s Rosewater novels won the Clarke Award.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is this year’s Ian McEwan, a literary SFF novel that winds up on the Dragon ballot. And of course, The Testaments is last year’s Booker Prize winner (together with Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo) and was a Locus Award finalist. Unfortunately, Dragon Con and the award ceremony will be virtual this year, so we will be deprived of Margaret Atwood’s reactions to Dragon Con.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig was a Locus and Stoker Award finalist, The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz was on the Hugo longlist and I’m pretty sure that Network Effect by Martha Wells and The Last Emperox by John Scalzi will show up on several awards ballots next year.

It is also notable that John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig are two writers whom puppy types flat out hate and Margaret Atwood writes to sort of books that make puppies cry. So for them to make the Dragon ballot in the Best Science Fiction Novel category, while none of the puppy favourites is anywhere in sight is remarkable.

Of course, The Ten Thousand Doors of January is actually fantasy and Gideon the Ninth is science fantasy, but then the Dragons have played it fast and loose with genre classifications since their inception, including a fantasy novel winning Best Science Fiction Novel and a space opera with religion winning Best Horror Novel in 2016.

Diversity count: Five women, two men, one writer of colour, three international writers

Best Fantasy Novel

The finalists in the Best Fantasy Novel category are another bunch of broadly popular mainstream novels with not an outlier among them.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia was a Nebula and Locus finalist. Jade War by Fonda Lee, Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern and Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer were all Locus Award finalists. The Burning White by Brent Weeks is the only Dragon finalist in this category that didn’t show up on other awards ballots, but then Weeks is a hugely popular fantasy author, so his presence here is no surprise.

Notable by his absence is Larry Correia, who has been a fixture in this category since the inception of the Dragon Awards and won several times. However, I seem to recall that Correia recused himself.

In odd genre classifications, I could have sworn that Dead Astronauts was science fiction, insofar that any Jeff VanderMeer novel is only one genre. And Leigh Bardugo is normal a YA author.

Diversity count: Four women, two men, two writers of colour, two international writers

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel:

This category has always been the most mainstream literary Dragon Award category since its inception and this year upholds the trend.

CatFishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer not only won the Astounding Award and  the Edgar Award, it was also nominated for pretty much every other SFF and crime fiction award in existence and now Naomi Kritzer gets to add a Dragon Award nomination to the list.

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett is a well regarded and bestselling feminist teen dystopia (Is that the sound of puppies crying I hear). Cog by Greg van Eekhout was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award this year. The Poison Jungle by Tui T. Sutherland is a novel in a bestselling middle grade fantasy series that I have to admit I never heard of.  Force Collector by Kevin Shinick is a young adult Star Wars tie-in novel and author Kevin Shinick is a TV and comics writer and Emmy winner. Bella Forrest is a hugely popular SFF indie author and Finch Merlin and the Fount of Youth is the latest in a popular series.

So in short, these are all very popular books. With regard to odd genre classifications, I’m surprise that Force Collector was not nominated in the Media Tie-In category, but I guess in this case target audience trumps the fact that it is a tie-in.

Diversity count: Four women, two men, two writers of colour, one international writer, one indie author

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel

The Military SFF category has always been the most typical Dragon Awards category (and the Dragon Awards are the only genre award that has a separate category for military SFF) and indeed, it looks more like the Dragon Awards of old this year than any other category.

Aftershocks by Marko Kloos, System Failure by Joe Zieja and Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio are all popular mainstream military science fiction novels. Aftershocks is also the only Dragon Award nomination for an Amazon imprint (47 North). And though Howling Dark was published by DAW, Christopher Ruocchio works for Baen Books, which has traditionally done well in the Dragons. And Joe Zieja is not just a writer, but also a popular anime voice actor, which I for one didn’t know.

Savage Wars by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole is a novel in Anspach and Cole’s highly popular Galaxy’s Edge series. Josh Hayes is an indie author who has collaborated with Jason Anspach, Nick Cole and Richard Fox, all of whom we’ve seen on the Dragon ballot before. His nominated novel Edge of Valor was published by Aethon Books, an indie press run by Rhett C. Bruno, who was a 2018 Nebula finalist, and  Steve Beaulieu. Aethon Books also published Defiance by Bear Ross, a novel I for one had never heard of before.

So we have three traditionally published finalists (lumping in Amazon under traditional publishing here) and three indie/small press finalists, which looks about right, considering that military SF is very indie dominated.

Diversity count: Six men, one international author, three indie authors.

Best Alternate History Novel

This has always been an odd category that mixes mainstream and indie works, probably because alternate history is a tiny subgenre. This year is no exception. In addition to the military SFF category, this is probably the category that looks most like the Dragon Awards of old.

Witchy Kingdom by D.J. Butler is the third in a series that Dragon Awards nominators clearly like, because both previous volumes have been nominated as well. It’s also the only Dragon Award nomination for Baen this year.

Revolution by W.L. Goodwater is the second in a series of Cold War with magic novels that have found more attention in the crime/thriller world than in the SFF world, though they’re published by Ace.

Up-time Pride and Down-time Prejudice by Mark H. Huston is a tie-in to Eric Flint’s popular 1632 series that was published by Flint’s own imprint. Of course, Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, 180 years after the time during which the novel is supposedly set, but then quibbling about the historical accuracy of the 1632 books would be a lengthy endeavour.

The Girl with No Face by M. H. Boroson is a small press novel that sounds pretty interesting actually. As Our World Ends by Jack Hunt is a self-published post-apocalyptic novel that probably ended up in alternate history, because the Dragon Award category for post-apocalyptic fiction was discontinued a few years ago. A Nation Interrupted by Kevin McDonald was published by Braveship Books, an indie author small press in the vein of Michael Anderle’s LMBPN Publishing and Chris Kennedy’s indie press, both of whom are notable by their absence on the Dragon ballot this year.

Also notable by his absence is S.M. Stirling who was a fixture in this category every single year.

Diversity count: Six men, between two and three indie authors, depending on how you classify Eric Flint’s imprint.

Best Media Tie-In Novel

No real surprises in this category. We have Rebecca Roanhorse’s Star Wars novel Resistance Reborn, two Star Trek novels, a Firefly novel and an Alien novel.

Diversity count: Two women, three men, one author of colour, two international authors

Best Horror Novel

This is another Dragon Award category that has always been dominated by popular mainstream novels, even if the first ever winner was an indie novel which wasn’t even horror.

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky (author of the hugely popular novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower), The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon, The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North a.k.a. Catherine Webb a.k.a. Kate Griffin and The Toll by Cherie Priest were all Locus Award finalists in the horror category this year, though there is no overlap with the Bram Stoker Awards at all. Michaelbrent Collings is a popular indie horror author and multiple Stoker Award finalist, though his Dragon nominated novel Scavenger Hunt was not nominated for the Stoker Award.

So in short, we have a lot of popular horror authors and novels here.

Diversity count: Three women, two men, one international author, one indie author.

Best Comic Book

Dragon Con is a big media con and so the Dragon Award categories for comics, graphic novels, film, TV and games have always been dominated by popular mainstream works. This year is no exception.

And so we have three time Hugo winner Monstress, three mainstream Marvel superhero comics (Avengers, Immortal Hulk and Spider-Woman) and two Image Comics (Bitter Root and Undiscovered Country). No DC, though they show up in the Graphic Novel category.

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

Best Graphic Novel

Again, there are few surprises here. Mainstream superhero comics are represented by Batman Universe, Mister Miracle (DC) and Black Bolt (Marvel). The other finalists are a Battlestar Galactica tie-in, Something is Killing the Children, a horror comic published by Boom! Studio, who also publish the Hugo winning La Guardia, and Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang, a bestselling graphic novel author. Though I wonder what Dragon Hoops is doing on the Dragon Award ballots, since it seems to be an autobiographical story about basketball with zero SFF content. Maybe it was the name.

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

Best TV Series

The Mandalorian, The Witcher, Watchmen, Star Trek Picard, The Expanse, Lost in Space and Altered Carbon are all highly popular SFF TV series and none of them is even remotely surprising as a finalist.

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

Best Movie

There are a few more surprises here, if only because the 2020 movie season, which normally would have generated several Dragon Award finalists, has been cut short by the pandemic.

That said, the Dragon Award nominations for The Rise of Skywalker, Terminator: Dark Fate and Joker will surprise no one. I am a bit surprised by the nominations for Ad Astra and the live action Lion King, since both had middling to bad reviews, when they came out. That said, Disney’s live action remakes of their animated movies always make a lot of money, even though you never meet anybody who admits to actually watching them.

One finalist that is a real surprise is Fast Color, an indie dystopian superhero movie with a largely black cast. Fast Color completely flew beneath my radar, though it sounds like the sort of movie I should love.

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

The Game Categories

I’m not a gamer, so I can’t say much about these categories, except that they are full of games even I have heard of, so they must be popular.

I’m a bit surprised The Last of Us 2 wasn’t nominated, but then it came out very close to the nomination deadline.

***

This is the most mainstream Dragon Award ballot we’ve seen so far. Lots of broadly popular works, lots of overlap with other genre awards, very few “Who the hell is this?” finalists and half of those turn out to be well known to someone, just not to me.

There are also a lot more women and writers of colour nominated this year. The only fiction categories, which are all male (and all white and mostly all American) are Military SFF and Alternate History. These are also the only categories which have several indie author finalists.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at what we don’t find on the 2020 Dragon Award ballot: For starters, there are no puppies and puppy adjacent authors. The only exception are Nick Cole and Jason Anspach, since Cole used to be affiliated with the puppies (never heard anything about Anspach). But then, Cole and Anspach’s Galaxy’s Edge series has found an audience beyond the limited puppy realm.

Baen, who have traditionally done well at the Dragons (probably because Baen always sends several of its authors to Dragon Con), only have one finalist this year plus two (Christopher Ruocchio and Mark H. Huston) who are affiliated with Baen, but not published by them.

Michael Anderle and Craig Martelle’s LMBPN Publishing and Chris Kennedy Publishing are also notable by their absence. And Chris Kennedy always had multiple Dragon Award finalists in previous years. Aethon Books and Braveship Books seem to be following the LMBPN/Chris Kennedy model of an indie author press, but both are new to the Dragons.

This ballot has surprised pretty much everybody who pays attention to the Dragon Awards (basically Camestros Felapton, the Red Panda Fraction and myself). There are a few suspicions what may have happened.

For starters, it seems as if there was less Dragon Award campaigning by the usual suspects. The fact that the nominations opened very late and that the ballot wasn’t easy to find probably didn’t help either. There also are suspicions that there was a change in the administration of the award or that Dragon Con applied pressure on the awards administrators to cater less to special interest groups.

This press release about the awards, which Doris V. Sutherland found, also mentions that Dragon Con cooperated with various public libraries in the Atlanta area to get the word out about the awards, which may also have tilted the ballot towards broadly popular works.

However, it seems as if the Dragons are finally becoming what they were supposed to be, a people’s choice award for broadly popular works. Campaigning still has some effect in smaller, specialised categories like Military SFF and Alternate History, which is why those categories look most like the Dragons of old. But in the bigger categories, regular nominators drown out special interest and bullet nominators, which results in a ballot that looks very much like other genre awards.

So far, there are no reactions from the puppy camp. Though I did come across this post from a “friend” of this blog who shall remain unnamed, because he dislikes unapproved people linking to him (which is why this is an archive.is link), in which he declares that award winning works should be judged on their own terms rather than based on the race, gender, ethnicity, etc… of the author. The Dragons and the author’s own private awards do this in his opinion, the Hugos and Nebulas don’t. He then does on to rant about N.K. Jemisin, John Scalzi and Jeannette Ng*, who apparently vy for the title of worst ever SFF author in his opinion, and the Retro Hugos, because people have been saying mean things about John W. Campbell.

In short, there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen a hundred times before, but what makes this post interesting is that it was posted August 10, i.e. one day before the Dragon Award ballot was announced. I shall be very interested to see what he makes of this year’s Dragon Award ballot, if only because it very much disproves his point.

 

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Some Comments on the 2020 Hugo Award Winners

Now that I’ve finally got the discussion about the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell out of the way (see here and here), let’s talk about a much more pleasant topic. For while the 2020 Hugo ceremony may have been an unmitigated disaster, the actual Hugo winners are a very fine selection of works indeed.

The full list of winners is here, commentary by deputy Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte may be found here and the full voting and nomination statistics are here.

Best Novel

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel is A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. This is not exactly unexpected, since A Memory Called Empire is a very popular novel and also a highly deserving winner, even though my personal favourite in this category was The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley with A Memory Called Empire in second place. Looking at the voting breakdown, I’m a little surprised that Middlegame finished in second place – not because it’s a bad novel, for it’s not, but because it seemed to get less buzz than the other finalists. But then the 2020 Best Novel ballot was the strongest we’ve had in years and indeed any of the six finalists would have been a most deserving winner.

The Hugo win for A Memory Called Empire is also a win for the space opera resurgence. For while a new type of more diverse space opera has been one of the big trends in SFF in recent years, this hasn’t been reflected very much by the Hugos, where the last space opera to win was Ancillary Justice in 2014, even though we’ve had several space opera finalists since then.

Looking at the nominations, the most notable thing is that The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie got more than enough votes to qualify for the ballot, but was withdrawn by the author. Ann Leckie explains why she declined the Hugo nomination for The Raven Tower here – basically, she felt that as someone who already had four Hugo nominations and one win, she wanted to make room for one of the many great SFF novels, including debut novels, that came out in 2019. And this is why Ann Leckie is a true class act.

Those who worry that too many women are getting nominated for and winning Hugos these days will be pleased to note that there are three novels by male authors on the longlist.

Best Novella 

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella goes to This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and May Gladstone, which was also my top pick in this category. Again, this is not exactly surprising, because This Is How You Lose the Time War truly was a cut above the other novellas last year and also got a lot of buzz.

Those usual suspects will be pleased that men can still win Hugos in 2020. And if you look at the nominations, you’ll also note that there are five male authors on the longlist.

Best Novelette 

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novelette is Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin. This win surprised me a little, because I found the story a bit too predictable and on the nose. It’s not a bad story, if only because N.K. Jemisin is an excellent writer, but Emergency Skin is a minor Jemisin. But then, even a minor Jemisin is better than the major works of many other writers.

I’m also surprised to see “Omphalos” by Ted Chiang in second place, because I flat out hated that story. I don’t quite get the intense love that Ted Chiang’s work inspires in parts of the Hugo electorate anyway – my reaction to his stories is usually, “Well, I guess it was okay.” Though I did like the other Ted Chiang story on the ballot a lot better than this one.

My personal number one choice in this category was the delightful “For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll, by the way.

Best Short Story

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Short Story goes to “As the Last I May Know” by S.L. Huang. It’s a strong and harrowing story that was not only one of my nominees, but also my top pick for this category.

That said, the short fiction categories at the 2020 Hugos are full of extremely grim stories with very little lighter fare. Reading too many of them in a row could be downright depressing and I do hope we’ll get a mix of light and dark next year.

Best Series

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Series is The Expanse by James S.A. Corey a.k.e Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, which was also my top pick for this category.

The Expanse is also exactly the kind of series that the Best Series was made for, a beloved series where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and where individual volumes often don’t stand alone well enough, even though Leviathan Wakes was a Best Novel finalist in 2012 and the most recent volume Tiamat’s Wrath hit the Best Novel longlist this year.

And those who worry about men not winning any Hugos anymore will be very pleased that the 2020 Hugo winners for Best Series are two men.

Best Related Work

The 2020 Hugo for Best Related Work goes to Jeannette Ng’s acceptance speech for what was then the Campbell Award.

This is one of two 2020 Hugo winnners I really disagree with. Not because I disagree with the points that Jeannette Ng made in her 2019 speech. I very much agree with her, both with regard to the situation in Hongkong (which has gotten much worse since last year) and with regard to Campbell. And of course, people in the SFF community have been discussing that Campbell was a problematic figure for more than seventy years now, which Jeannette Ng acknowledged in this year’s acceptance speech. Leigh Brackett’s Retro Hugo winning essay “The Science Fiction Field” contains some jabs against Campbell – in 1944. Michael Moorcock called Campbell a fascist in the 1960s and he was far from the only one. Over the years, many winners of the Campbell Award, as it was then, have pointed out that Campbell would likely never have published them – one example I remember is Rebecca Roanhorse in 2018. Alec Nevala-Lee wrote a weighty and well researched tome about the intertwined histories of Campbell, his favoured writers and Astounding Science Fiction, which was nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo last year and came in dead last – most likely because the vast majority of voters didn’t even bother to read it.

I would say that John W. Campbell was a more complex figure than the “fucking fascist” Jeannette Ng called him, but then a ninety-second speech doesn’t offer much space for nuance. And this is precisely the problem I have with this Hugo win. Due to the (very wise in retrospect) time restrictions imposed on acceptance speeches in Dublin, Jeannette Ng’s speech is very short. The two acceptance speeches I never got to hold are both under 300 words long and run for about one A4 page in large print (so I wouldn’t have to squint). I think that Jeannette Ng overran her allotted time slightly, because I recall her saying that she’s not finished at one point. But even so, I doubt that her speech is longer than 500 words.  She packed a lot of punch in those few words and her speech clearly had an impact that the many other people who criticised Campbell over the years did not have, because it got the name of the Not-a-Hugo for Best New Writer changed to Astounding Award, which I support, if only because it makes no sense to name the award for the best new writer after an editor who died before most of today’s finalists were even born.

But no matter how impactful, a speech of roughly one A4 page is in no way equivalent to in-depth non-fiction books that are 100s of pages long and a 68 minute documentary. That’s not even comparing apples to oranges, that’s comparing apples to peas.

Now I care about genre-related non-fiction, because works like the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction or Jeff Rovin‘s various books on pop culture were hugely important to my development as a science fiction fan.  Teenaged me saved up her birthday, Christmas, Freimarkt and good grade money to purchase those non-fiction books, which due to import fees cost me fifty to eighty Deutschmarks a piece, an exorbitant sum for a teenager (and a lot of birthday, Christmases, Freimärkte and good grades). There were also books I read in the store and took notes, but did not purchase, usually because I didn’t have the money. I still have those non-fiction books, too, and the battered dustjackets and spines show how much they were appreciated. I used those books to guide me to SFF authors, books and movies – they were basically a way for me to find more stuff to love (or not love, as it was). These books were also how I absorbed SFF theory and knew terms like New Wave or Cyberpunk ere I had ever read any examples.

This is not the usual way into SFF, but it was mine and that’s why I will always have a soft spot for genre-related non-fiction. And that’s why I’m not happy that the non-fiction works, which for me are the core of the Best Related Work category, are increasingly being crowded out by leftfield finalists. Also, in-depth non-fiction books like The Lady From the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara, The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn, Joanna Russ by Gwyneth Jones, Astounding by Alex Nevala-Lee or Arwen Curry’s documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin are very research intensive and can take years to compile and write. I think that we should honour the work that critics and historians do to excavate and remember the history of our genre. And let’s not forget essay collections such as the Octavia Butler and Tiptree collections of recent years or Chicks Dig Time Lords, which so infuriated the puppies, and autobiographies, which offer an insight into the life of a genre personality, whether it’s the diaries of the late Carrie Fisher, Zoe Quinn’s Crash Override or this year’s finalist Becoming Superman, an autobiography so harrowing that it needs a trigger warning. Such works are valuable and I hate to see them crowded out by edgecase finalists.

It’s probably time to overhaul the Best Related Work category, which has become something of a grab bag in recent years, and either split it into Best Related Work Long Form and Short Form, which would give a space not just to works like Jeannette Ng’s acceptance speech but also the essays and articles, which regularly make the longlist and sometimes the shortlist. Another solution would be to keep Best Related Work for non-fiction of whatever medium and create a Hugo category, Special Hugo or Not-a-Hugo for Best Fannish Thing, which would cover acceptance speeches as well as worthy projects like AO3 or the Mexicanx Initiative. If anybody is planning any proposals of that sort to submit at the Discon III Business Meeting, let me know.

Jeannette Ng is a talented writer. Her debut novel was good enough to gather two nominations and one win for what was then the Campbell Award. And I’m sure that we will see more great novels and stories from her in the future, which may well hit the Hugo ballot. But I’d still prefer Best Related Work to be kept for the non-fiction works it was originally intended for.

Best Graphic Story

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story is LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor with art by Tana Ford and colours by James Devlin.

This is another most worthy winner and was not only my top pick in this category, but also one of my nominees. And gorgeous as Monstress is, it’s nonetheless nice to see something else winning for once.

Best Dramatic Presentation Long:

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form is Good Omens, written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Douglas MacKinnon. This is another excellent choice, even though I put Captain Marvel in first place in the end. It’s also the long overdue Hugo win for Sir Terry Pratchett, which eluded him during his lifetime. And indeed Neil Gaiman remembered his co-writer Sir Terry in his touching acceptance speech.

I’m a bit surprised that Us ended up fairly low on the ballot, since it seemed to me as if Us was very popular and that I was one of the few people who didn’t care for it. But Us is a very American movie and I suspect that it just didn’t work for many non-American Hugo voters just as it didn’t work for me. The Rise of Skywalker comes unsurprisingly last, because frankly it’s a mess.

Looking at the longlist, I see a lot of unsurprising candidates like The Witcher, The Mandalorian, The Expanse or Spider-Man: Far From Home, but also a number of surprises such as Russell T. Davies dystopian series Years and Years, which is highly worthy but maybe a little too British and too obscure for a Hugo, as well as Alita: Battle Angel, which I remember no one liking, and the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, which I suspect made the longlist as a result of Chinese fandom making their voices heard.

Best Dramatic Presentation long will be a difficult category to nominate for next year, because there are almost no new movies coming out anymore due to the pandemic. Currently, I have three on my list: The Old Guard, The Invisible Man and The Vast of Night. I suspect we will see more seasons of TV series nominated and also smaller indie films like The Vast of Night making the ballot.

Best Dramatic Presentation Short:

This is the other 2020 Hugo winner I sincerely disagree with, because the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Short once again goes to the bloody Good Place.

Now I’m on record for intensely disliking The Good Place – I basically find it unwatchable. But even if you actually like The Good Place, does it really need to win three years in a row? Especially since there are so many other fine SFF TV and streaming series. Though the silver lining is that The Good Place ended earlier this year, so we have at most one more year of The Good Place on the Hugo ballot.

My own top pick was The Mandalorian, which was also the only one of my nominees that made it (I also nominated the Good Omens episode, which was disqualified), but then my hit rate for Best Dramatic Presentation Short is abominable. I’m a bit surprised to see the Watchmen episode “This Extraordinary Being” in last place, since that was the one Watchmen episode which not only stood alone, but also was pretty good, whereas I did not care for “A God Walks into Abar” at all.

Best Editor Long and Short:

This is always a difficult category to judge, but Navah Wolfe for Long Form and Ellen Datlow for Short Form are both highly deserving winners. I’m particularly happy for Navah Wolfe, since Saga Press fired her while pregnant and shortly after winning a Hugo.

Best Professional Artist:

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist is John Picacio.

Pro Artist is anoter category that’s not easy to judge, because my reaction is to the finalists is usually; “They’re all great. Can’t I put all of them in the number one spot?” But John Picacio is not just a great artist, but also a really cool person (and a Hugo host who does not keep the finalists hanging unnecessarily) and I’m honoured that we were on a panel together.

Best Semiprozine:

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine is Uncanny Magazine, making this the fifth win for Uncanny in a row.

Now Uncanny is an excellent magazine, but Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside, FIYAH, Escape Pod and Strange Horizons as well as those semiprozines which did not make the ballot like The Dark, Luna Station Quarterly, Daily Science Fiction, GigaNotoSaurus, Interzone, Cast of Wonders, PseudoPod, PodCastle, etc… all do great work, too, and it would be nice if one of them would get a look in once in a while.

Best Fanzine:

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine goes to The Book Smugglers. My own top vote in this category was for Galactic Journey obviously, though I’m very happy for Thea and Ana, who’ve been doing great work for years now.

That said, this is the second year in a row that the Fanzine category only narrowly escaped being no awarded due to too few votes. This is a shame, because fanzine writers and editors do a lot of great work and foster the SFF discourse, all for the love of the genre and with no financial reward. So vote in the Fanzine category, for no awarding a whole category, not because the finalists are unworthy, but because not enough people could be bothered to vote, would be a shame.

I think it’s also time to promote fanzines and sites in the run-up to next year’s Hugos to increase interest in this category.

Best Fancast:

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fancast is Our Opinions Are Correct by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders – or Emily Nutts and Chocolate Jackhammer, as the automatic close captioning thinks they’re called (Looks like hilarious close captioning errors are a recurrent phenomenon with the Hugos). Our Opinions Are Correct is another highly deserving winner, even though my own number one pic was The Skiffy and Fanty Show. Finally, my Mom thinks that Annalee and Charlie Jane are an adorable couple.

Best Fan Writer:

As you all know by now, I didn’t win and so the beautiful trophy will be shipped to Bogi Takács, who is a most worthy winner indeed and has done great work to promote QILTBAG SFF and excavate forgotten works, so three cheers for Bogi.

But as I would have said in the acceptance speech I didn’t get to hold (maybe next year), “As far as I’m concerned, we’re all winners in this category.” And indeed I would have been fine with anyone of us winning, even though you can probably guess who my top pick in this category was. Besides, I finished in second place right out of the gate, which is pretty damn awesome.

If you look at the statistics, I just scraped onto the ballot past Charles Payseur. Adam Whitehead actually had fewer nominations than Charles or me, but Adam had a very focussed group of nominators (ditto for Elsa Sjunneson and Stitch, the one name on the longlist I’m unfamiliar with), whereas people who nominated me were more likely to also nominate Camestros Felapton, Paul Weimer, James Davis Nicoll, Adri Joy or O. Westin (which makes sense, since we all know each other) and therefore EPH weighted those nominations differently.

Camestros Felapton takes a look at the Best Fan Writer longlist and how points were redistributed as nominees dropped off. Camestros has also done a neat graphic representation of how the people on the fan writer longlist are connected to each other. He also looks at how focussed the nominators were in this interesting graph. Once again, Adam Whitehead’s nominators were the most focussed (next to Elsa Sjunneson’s), while mine and Bogi’s were the most distributed of those who made the ballot.

And talking of graphics, this is as good a place as any to point you to the Sankey diagrams of how votes were redistributed among the Hugo finalists that Martin Pyne a.k.a. Goobergunch made.

Best Fan Artist

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist goes to Elise Matthesen, who was also my first pick in this category.

I really like the art categories, because they let me look at beautiful works and take little time. However, I also find them hard to judge, because most of the time I like every finalist’s work.

That said, I have a weakness for jewellery, so whenever there’s a jewellery designer on the ballot, it makes me go, “Shiny! Me want”, so I usually rank them at the top of my ballot. Though once again, this is a category where every finalist would have been a most deserving winner.

Lodestar

The winner of the 2020 Lodestar Award a.k.a. the YA Not-a-Hugo is Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer, which was also my top choice in this category.

Catfishing on CatNet is also a true genre-crossing book, because it not only won the Hugo and was nominated for the Andre Norton Award, but it also won the Edgar Award and was nominated for the Anthony and ITW Awards, so mystery and thriller readers clearly loved it as much as SFF readers did.

In general, I found this year’s Lodestar ballot much stronger than last year’s, which for me was marred by several books having very similar plots, even if the settings were different, and annoying and whiny main characters, which triggered the eight deadly words.

Astounding

The 2020 Astounding Award for Best New Writer (formerly known as the Campbell Award) goes to R.F. Kuang. Unfortunately, The Poppy War didn’t work for me and indeed my own top pick in this category was Jenn Lyons. However, I’m not surprised that R.F. Kuang won, because she is the only repeat finalist in this category, and I’m sure we’ll see fine work from her in the future.

Though it’s sadly ironic that R.F. Kuang explicitly mentioned in her acceptance that writers of colour will have their names mispronounced, only for George R.R. Martin to mispronounce her name.

And that’s it. The 2020 Hugo commentary post is done, though I still want to link to some reactions to the actual winners:

Unfortunately, the disaster of a Hugo ceremony has sucked all oxygen out of the room, so there are a lot more posts and articles about the ceremony than about the actual winners.

At the Guardian, Alison Flood reports about the Hugo winners and adds some snippets from various acceptance speeches. She also mentions that George R.R. Martin hosted the awards and quotes one of the sensible things he said (considering how much he talked, some of it must have been sensible), but completely fails to comment on the many issues with the ceremony, which takes some doing.

Camestros Felapton takes a look at the Hugo winners and stats (because we all know that the stats are the most fascinating and were eagerly waiting for them to be put up) here.

At Women Write About Comics, Doris V. Sutherland discusses both the 2020 Hugo Award winners as well as the issues with the ceremony.

And that’s it for the 2020 Hugos, which yielded a crop of fine winners and were unfortunately marred by a terrible ceremony that will probably be remembered for its sheer awfulness for a long time.

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First Monday Free Fiction: Picnic at Seashell Beach

[image error]Welcome to the August 2020 edition of First Monday Free Fiction. To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on every first Monday of the month. It will remain free to read on this blog for one month, then I’ll take it down and post another story.

You may have noticed that there was no First Monday Free Fiction in July, because with the July Short Story Challenge and everything else going on, I just plain forgot.

This month’s free story is called “Picnic at Seashell Beach” and  may be found in the collection After the End – Stories of Life After the Apocalypse.

So join Pete and Marcie for a post-apocalyptic daytrip and a…

Picnic at Seashell Beach

“Okay, so what are we doing here again?”

Marcie jumped out of the solar car. She put on her shades and adjusted her shawl, even though the sun was already dipping towards the horizon, hanging like an overripe Satsuma in the late afternoon sky.

“It’s an outing.” Pete got out of the car and activated the lock. He opened the tiny trunk and picked up a cool box. “We’re going to have a romantic picnic on the beach.”

“A picnic? Outside? Really?” Marcie applied sunscreen stick to her exposed cheeks and nose. “That’s an… interesting idea.”

“It was my Grandma’s idea, really.” Pete gave Marcie a sheepish look and pulled his cap deeper into his face. “She told me when she and Grandpa were dating, Grandpa didn’t have any money to take her for dinner, so they had a picnic at Seashell Beach instead.”

“And when was that?” Marcie wanted to know. Cause Seashell Beach — which had neither seashells nor a beach these days — was about the least romantic place she could imagine.

Pete shrugged. “I dunno. Sixty, maybe sixty-five years ago. Granny’s getting on in years and Grandpa — well, he’s been dead for almost twenty years now.”

Noticing Marcie’s questioning glance, Pete added, “He died when I was seven. Melanoma got him. He refused to wear sunscreen, you know. Said he never needed any when he was young.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry.”

Pete shrugged again. “There’s no need, really. I barely remember him and what I remember is hospital beds and mottled skin. But Granny, she remembers. They’d been married for almost forty years, you know.”

Marcie nodded, trying and failing to imagine being married for so many years, longer than she and Pete had even been alive. Pete and Marcie had been together for five months now, which made this officially the longest relationship Marcie had ever had, Even the idea that a relationship could last five months and still show no sign of going stale scared her a little, because Marcie had never considered herself the monogamous type. But imagining a relationship lasting for almost forty years — well, that was fucking scary.

“She’s been talking a lot about Grandpa lately and what it was like back when they were dating,” Pete continued, “Her mind’s fading, I think, and the past is a lot clearer to her than the present. Sometimes, she doesn’t even remember that Grandpa’s dead.”

“Dementia?”

“Well, there’s no official diagnosis, but…” Pete turned to Marcie, his eyes meeting hers behind the shades. “…yeah, I think it is. We’ve been pushing for the doctors to do some tests, but you know what they’re like.”

Marcie nodded. She knew.

“So, well, I told Granny about you, since I’ve heard that it’s important to keep talking to them, even if they’ll forget, and suddenly she started telling me all about that picnic that she and Grandpa had at Seashell Beach and what food they had and how romantic it all was. And then she insisted I should take you to Seashell Beach for a picnic. She even helped me with the food and…” Pete shrugged helplessly. “…she seemed so alive, so there, more present than I’d seen her in a long time. And…”

“…you didn’t want to disappoint her?” Marcie supplied.

Pete shook his head. “Planning the picnic made her so happy, so I thought, ‘Why the hell not?’ Though…” He lowered his eyes to study his feet and the heat-cracked concrete underneath. “…we can take the cool box and go somewhere else, if you want.”

“No, it’s okay,” Marcie assured him, “I mean, since we’re here anyway, we might as well have a look at Seashell Beach.”

She set off, along the cracked concrete walkway that led to the beach, rusted and faded signs pointing the way. Pete followed, lugging the cool box.

“Have you ever been here before?” he asked.

Marcie shook her head. “There wasn’t really a point.”

Both sides of the walkway were lined by decaying structures that had once been motels, trailers, diners and ice cream stands, but now were just ruins slowing dissolving into the sand.

“What about you?”

“Once, back when I was a little kid. It was already fading by then and you had to go to the far end of the pier to finally have some water underneath your feet, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it would get…”

Pete smiled, lost in a private memory.

“There were still seagulls and ice cream stands and motels in those days. I remember the ice cream most of all. And I remember toddling through the sand, every exposed bit of skin smeared with that really nasty, oily sunscreen they had in those days…”

Marcie laughed. “Oh God, yes, I remember that stuff. I hated it, hated having it smeared onto my body.”

“Me, too,” Pete said, “I always cried and complained when Mom tried to apply it. And then Grandma and Grandpa — he was still alive back then, though you could already see the melanoma on his skin — said they shouldn’t force me, that kids never needed sunscreen in the old days. Thankfully, Mom was smart enough not to listen to them…”

“Old people really have a hard time grasping how dangerous the sun is. When I was a kid, I remember my Mom smearing sunscreen first on my grandparents and then on me. Our protests were equally loud. Still, I’m glad that she did it, cause if she hadn’t…” Marcie shuddered. “I mean, can you imagine that people used to voluntarily lie in the sun and tan?”

“I’ve seen photos of Grandma as a young woman in a bikini — yes, they really wore those outside in the sun — and she’s… like… crispy sunburnt brown.”

“She’s lucky she didn’t get melanoma like your Grandpa,” Marcie said.

On the other hand, was dementia really better? Marcie had no idea. Especially since treatment for melanoma was getting steadily better. Dementia, on the other hand, was still incurable.

They passed a lopsided sign. The sign was pockmarked with rust spots, the writing long faded, but you could still make out a laundry list of rules and regulations for behaviour on the beach. “No dogs, no alcohol, no surfing, no diving, no fires, no camping.”

Marcie squinted at the sign. “I wonder if picnics are allowed.”

“Well, they must have been allowed at some point,” Pete remarked, “Unless Grandma made up the whole story about that picnic on the beach.”

More signs followed, just as rusty and eroded as the first. “Warning. No lifeguard on duty. Swim at your own risk.” And finally, a foreboding “Beware of sharks.”

Marcie and Pete posed with the fading signs and snapped pics, just to highlight the absurdity of it all.

“Do you think I should show ‘em to Grandma?” Pete asked, “Or would the shock of what has become of Seashell Beach be too much for her?”

“I don’t know.” Marcie squinted at a bird flying past overhead. “Maybe show her some harmless photos first — say, you and me sitting in the sand, having our picnic — and see how she reacts.”

The bird returned, circling overhead, and emitted a shrill shriek.

“Fuck, that’s a seagull.” Marcie pointed up at the sky. “A bona fide seagull.”

“I’ve heard they can come pretty far inland, fifty, seventy, sometimes even a hundred miles.” Pete flashed Marcie a quick grin. “Still, if there’s a seagull, it means the beach can’t be far.”

The path ended abruptly at a massive dune. Somewhere beyond, a plume of smoke was rising up into the early evening sky. Steps led up to the crest of the dune, half buried. The rusty remnants of a handrail poked out of the sand. There was another sign, too, a lopsided arrow of bleached wood that said “Beach” in faded letters.

“Looks like we’re supposed to go that way,” Marcie said, while Pete snapped another pic.

The dune wasn’t really all that high, but nonetheless trudging up the half buried steps in the residual heat of the evening was more laborious than Marcie would have thought. And unlike Pete, she wasn’t even lugging the cool box.

Then finally, they reached the top and looked out across the world beyond.

There was no sea, of course. Here at Seashell Beach, the ocean had dried up twenty years ago and the real shoreline was a good forty miles further out. And so all that could be seen from the top of the dune were the sand and the mud flats that had once formed the ocean floor.

Pete set down the cool box, spread out the picnic blanket he’d brought and snapped another pic, while Marcie just looked around, marvelling at the view.

Like the path there, the actual beach was littered with the rusty remnants of long gone structures. There were the struts that had once held up the pier, now rotted beyond recognition. And just beside the spot where Pete and Marcie had climbed the top of the dune, the rusty end of a giant waste water pipe stuck randomly out of the sand.

There were other structures, too, their once and current purpose less obvious than the pier struts and the waste water pipe. For the former sea floor was dotted with monstrous assemblies of rusty pipes and tanks that belched clouds of dark smoke into the atmosphere. Marcie briefly regarded the belching monstrosities, wondered how on Earth that sort of thing could be legal, before something far more interesting arrested her attention.

The sea might be long gone, but the ships were not. They were still sitting where they’d run aground when the sea had receded, gigantic rusting reminders of a world long gone. There was one sitting not far from the beach, in full view. A freighter named — so the faded letters on its side said — the Caribbean Princess, registered at Kingston, Jamaica.

“Such a romantic name…” Marcie said, “…for what is just a huge chunk of rusty steel now.”

Though to be honest, the wreck did look rather romantic, as the light of the setting sun painted its rusty hull a coppery gold.

The Caribbean Princess might have been abandoned by her crew, but she was far from deserted. For like most of the beached wrecks that dotted what had once been the Jersey shore, the rusty carcass of the Caribbean Princess had been taken over by scavengers. They’d erected a small cluster of tents and lean-tos in the shadow of the hulking vessel. They’d also bored holes into the hull itself and studded the wreck with wind turbines and solar panels assembled from bits of scrap metal.

As Marcie and Pete watched, they spotted two figures emerging from one of the holes drilled into the hull of the Caribbean Princess. The figures seemed to scan the surroundings — though it was difficult to tell, since they were wearing goggles and thick, protective clothes. And so it was only when one of the figures started towards them, while the other vanished inside the wreck again, that Marcie and Pete realised they had been spotted.

“Uhm, maybe we should leave,” Pete whispered, “Cause some of those scavengers can be… well, rather aggressive.”

Marcie had heard all sorts of rumours and stories about scavengers, too. How they committed crimes, slaughtered men, raped and killed women and kidnapped and ate little children and did all sorts of other unsavoury things.

All her life, she’d been told, “Beware of those scavengers. They’re dangerous and probably not even quite human anymore.”

However, Marcie had never been one to listen to scare stories by older folk. Especially since history had shown that most “Beware of group X” scare stories were just that. Stories without any basis in reality.

So she reached out and put a calming hand on Pete’s knee and shook her head. “I don’t think they’re dangerous. They probably just want to say hallo or make sure that we don’t steal their stuff.”

“They live in a rusty shipwreck,” Pete countered, “What the hell should we steal from them?”

Marcie shrugged. “I don’t know. That ship was a freighter once, wasn’t it? Maybe it was carrying something useful.”

“I doubt it,” Pete said, “And besides, why would we try to steal a twenty-year-old ship’s cargo? That not exactly… — Oh shit, is that a gun?”

Shielding her eyes against the glare of the sinking sun, Marcie peered at the approaching figure, who was indeed carrying a rather suspicious looking oblong object in one hand.

“It’s probably just a very big stick,” she said with more confidence than she really felt.

The figure came ever closer. By now, Marcie could make out more details such as that the stick the figure was carrying really was suspiciously shaped like a gun. What was more, the figure was holding it differently now, with one end pressed against the shoulder and the other pointed right at Marcie and Pete.

“Okay, so it is a gun,” she whispered.

“Fuck! What do we do now?”

Marcie had been asking herself the very same question these past five seconds or so. At first, she considered running away. But it was a long way back to the car and besides, she had no way of knowing if a person paranoid enough to carry a gun in the first place had any qualms about shooting people in the back.

Wordlessly, she raised her hands. Pete did the same.

Still the figure came closer. Like everybody who worked outside during the day, the figure was bundled up from head to toe — Wellington boots, jeans, a long coat — but undeniably male. A cotton scarf was wrapped around his head, tinted goggles shielded his eyes and a bushy black beard covered the rest of his face. But the most notable thing about him was his gun, an ugly pump-action shotgun, which was aimed right at Marcie and Pete.

“Are you cops?” the man demanded in a low grumbling voice.

“We’re not cops,” Marcie replied, staring into the barrel of the shotgun like the proverbial deer in the headlights (never mind that deer were as extinct as gasoline powered cars these days), “Uhm, could you put that away, please? We mean you no harm.”

However, the man did not put the gun away.

“What d’you want then?” he demanded, “If you’re looking for a place, we have no room. If you’re looking for work, we have none. And if you want to steal something…” He waved his gun about.

“We don’t want to steal anything,” Marcie said quickly, “Like I said, we mean you no harm.”

“Well, what do you want then?” the man repeated, “Cause no one ever comes here without wanting something.”

“We… we just wanted to have a picnic…” Pete stammered and nodded at the cool box beside him, “…a picnic on the beach.”

“A picnic?” The man emitted a bitter laugh. “You’re twenty years too late then. Cause there’s no more picnics here in Seashell Beach and there sure as hell ain’t no more beach either.”

“I know,” Pete exclaimed, clearly exasperated, “But my grandparents had a picnic here when they were young some sixty or sixty-five years ago and…” He shrugged helplessly. “…well, I just thought it would be romantic.”

“So you take your girl here to Seashell Beach, a place where no one in their right mind wants to be?” the man demanded, “Don’t ye know this place can be dangerous? Scavengers — well, not us, but the other scavengers, the bad ones — they rape and kill and murder people all the time.”

The man continued muttering something about “stupid privileged middle class kids” under his breath.

Marcie flashed him a broad smile. “Well, we’re lucky we found the good scavengers then.” She nodded at the cool box. “Do you want some… well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what Pete has packed in that cool box, but I’m sure it’s tasty.”

“Coke…” Pete stammered, “S…sandwiches, potato salad, cupcakes. I tried to re… recreate the original picnic as much as possible.”

“That’s very sweet,” Marcie said.

“O…okay, we don’t have any tuna sandwiches, cause tuna is… like… extinct. But we have mock duck, which is almost as good.”

The man, however, was not interested in debating the relative merits of tuna versus mock duck sandwiches.

“Coke?” he repeated, “Like… real Coke, not that off-brand dimestore stuff?”

Pete nodded. “Real Coke,” he confirmed, “Even got the really good stuff made with crystal sugar rather than corn syrup.”

“Gimme a Coke!”

With shaking hands, Pete opened the cool box, withdrew a bottle of Coke and handed it to the man.

The man accepted the Coke, though he still managed to keep the gun trained on Pete and Marcie with his free hand.

Pete reached into the cool box again. “Do… do you want a…?”

The man snapped the cap of the bottle with a calloused thumb.

“…a bottle opener?” Pete returned the opener to the box with a sigh.

The man, meanwhile, raised the bottle to his mouth and downed the half the cola in a single fizzy gulp. Silhouetted against the sinking sun, he looked almost like a Coke commercial, if not for the shotgun he still held in his free hand.

“Could… could you put that away?” Marcie tried again, “We mean you no harm…”

“I even gave you a Coke,” Pete added.

“…and besides, it’s really uncomfortable talking to the barrel of a gun.”

The man regarded the gun in his hand, as if he only now remembered it was there. “Oh, sorry,” he grunted and finally lowered the gun, so that the barrel pointed at the sand. “Can’t be too careful these days. Times are hard and lots of people are struggling. Thanks for the Coke, by the way.” He lifted the bottle and took another gulp.

“You’re welcome. I’m Marcie, by the way, and this is Pete. And you are…?”

“Sam,” the man grunted and took yet another gulp.

“And you live here, Sam?” Marcie asked, because it only felt polite to make conversation, “Inside the ship?”

Sam shook his head. “Not inside the ship. Too hot. We live in them tents and huts next to the ship.” He pointed at the jumble of shelters leaning against the ship.

“So you’re from Seashell Beach then?” Marcie asked. She’d heard of people like these, too nostalgic or too stubborn to leave when their communities died.

“Nope,” Sam grunted, “I’m from Pennsylvania originally. Bethlehem.”

Which was just as dead as Seashell Beach now, poisoned and ruined by centuries of mining and smelting. There were a lot of places like that in the US these days, towns and cities where people had once lived, but no longer could. Most of them had long since moved on to better places, but there were always a few who were left behind. Or others like Sam who’d managed to move to a place that was even worse.

“So why here of all places?” Marcie wanted to know.

Sam shrugged. “Ain’t nowhere else I can go.”

“But if you’ve lost your home, there are resettlement camps…”

Marcie seen a documentary about that on TV a few weeks ago and those camps weren’t nearly as bad as they were often made out to be. Everything was clean and really quite civilised and besides, it was certainly better than living in a lean-to in the shadow of a rusty wreck.

But Sam’s eyes narrowed and his grip tightened on his shotgun once more. “Ain’t nowhere else I can go,” he repeated and Marcie thought it wiser not to argue.

“So what do you do here all day?” Pete asked instead, “You just hang out or…?”

Sam shook his head. “Oh no, we work,” he said, something akin to pride in his voice.

“Work?” Pete repeated, “But I thought there was no work left here on the Jersey Shore, now the tourists have all gone.”

“There’s always work,” Sam countered, “You just have to know how to look for it.”

Pete and Marcie exchanged a glance, since they could see nothing that looked even remotely like a place to work anywhere around.

“So what do you work?” Marcie finally asked.

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “You sure ask a lot of questions. You sure you ain’t cops?”

Pete shook his head. “Oh no, we’re just students enjoying our spring break.”

“College, eh? Must be nice to have the money and time to go, especially these days. Me, I never got to go, not even back in the day. Went to work at the mill soon as I finished high school.”

“I’m sorry,” Marcie said, if only because she didn’t know what else to say. Curse Pete for flaunting their privilege quite so openly.

At least, Pete seemed to have recognised his misstep. “Do you want a sandwich?” he asked, “We’ve got egg salad mayo, cheese and soy ham and fake mock duck tuna.”

San cast a longing look at the cool box. “A sandwich would be nice,” he finally said, “Ain’t always easy getting food round here.”

“I can imagine,” Marcie said, slathering her voice with sympathy, “Just help yourself to a sandwich…”

Sam reached into the box and grabbed two sandwiches — egg salad mayo and mock duck pretending to be tuna.

“…or two.”

Marcie and Pete exchanged a glance, while Sam dug in, swallowing half a sandwich in a single bite. Crumbles of egg salad got stuck in his beard.

“That’s a good sandwich,” he said. Or at least, Marcie thought that was what he said, cause the words were rather hard to make out among all the chewing.

They waited for Sam to devour the second sandwich, privately wondering whether there’d be anything left of their picnic at all by the time Sam was finally done.

Maybe, Marcie thought, they’d finally hit upon the kernel of truth inside all of those stories about the murdering and plundering and raping scavengers. They won’t murder or rape you, but they’ll eat all your food. Because apparently, they have none of their own.

“That was good,” Sam said, once he had demolished the mock duck tuna sandwich. He turned to Marcie. “You made them?”

“I made them,” Pete said, “Me and my Grandma.”

“Your Grandma’s a good cook,” Sam said.

He eyed the cool box longingly, so Marcie quickly handed him another sandwich, soy ham and cheese this time.

“Here. You haven’t tried one of those.”

Sam accepted the sandwich and gobbled it up, while Pete looked first at their dwindling food supply inside the cool box and then at Marcie.

“I guess we can always make more,” he whispered.

“These are good”, Sam repeated, still chewing, “Your Grandma’s a really good cook.”

“I’ll tell her, thanks,” Pete said.

“My Grandma, she was a good cook, too,” Sam said, “Always made dinner for me and my sisters, while Dad was out working at the mill and Mom was out working at the diner. Course, she had nothing else to do with my Grandpa gone…” He paused, his eyes taking on a haunted look. “She got widowed young, my Grandma. Vietnam.”

Marcie briefly wondered what one of South East Asia’s boom countries could possibly have done to kill Sam’s grandfather, until she remembered that the US had been at war with Vietnam once, seventy or eighty years ago. Marcie didn’t quite remember the reason — freshman history seemed very distant by now.

“My Grandma is also a widow,” Pete said, “Melanoma.”

Sam nodded knowingly. “Nasty stuff, that. Took one of our people last year, even though we’re always careful to bundle up.”

“How many of you are there anyway?” Pete wanted to know.

“Twenty-seven right now,” Sam said, “Normally, we’re thirty-two, but a few of us are off trading.”

“So what is it you people do here?” Marcie asked, her curiosity getting the better of her once again.

“Work,” Sam grunted. He furtively looked around, but there was no one on the beach except the three of them. “We take rusty steel from the ship and the pipes and the other trash here and smelt it into steel in the furnace back there.” He pointed at one of the smoke belching structures.

“And that’s legal?” Pete asked, while Marcie groaned internally, because the answer was — like — totally bleeding obvious.

“Well…” Sam suddenly became very interested in the sand underneath his Wellington boots. “…not really. But the economy needs steel and it ain’t easy to get anymore, so the authorities turn a blind eye, as long as we’re not too obvious about it.”

“What do you use for fuel?” Marcie asked, morbid curiosity getting the better of her once more.

“Coke,” Sam replied, “Not the drinking kind, the burning kind.”

Marcie had seen the word in that context before, in an industrial history textbook. “Where do you get it? I thought that sort of thing was banned.”

“Well, it is, technically. But there’s still people mining coal and making coke here in Jersey and over in Pennsylvania and that’s where we get it from.”

“And the authorities turn a blind eye?” Pete hazarded a guess.

“Mostly. Sometimes we get cops and environmental types here. Sometimes, they close down a furnace or a colliery or a coking plant. But they always move on somewhere else. People got to live, you know?”

Both Marcie and Pete nodded in agreement.

“So that’s why I was wary of you two at first,” Sam continued, “Cause you’re strangers and college types and I wasn’t sure if you were cops come to close us down…”

“We’re not,” Pete and Marcie said as one.

“But you brought Coke and sandwiches, so I guess you’re okay.” Sam cast another longing look at the cool box. “Talking of which, you got some more of those? Food ain’t always easy to get here and the little ones haven’t had anything good in days.”

“Little ones?” Marcie and Pete exchanged an alarmed look. “You’ve got kids here?”

Sam nodded. “We’re thirty-two altogether, twenty adults and twelve kids. Two of ‘em are mine, Sarah and Sam Junior. Sarah’s nine and Little Sammy is six.”

“And they haven’t eaten yet?” Marcie asked, even more alarmed.

“Sure, they’ve eaten. It’s just…” Sam pretended to study his boots again. “…we don’t get the good stuff all that often out here. And seagull stew gets boring, if you have it all the time…”

Marcie gagged and fought down the impulse to throw up the meal she hadn’t actually had yet. She took another look at Sam — bundled up, bedraggled Sam trying to stay one step ahead of the law — and imagined him sharing a pot of seagull stew — for fuck’s sake, seagull stew — with two equally bedraggled kids. And all of a sudden, she knew what to do.

She picked up the cool box and all but shoved it at Sam. “Here, take it. For the children.”

Pete opened his mouth to protest, but a glare from Marcie silenced him.

“But… that’s your picnic,” Sam stammered, “What… what will you have now?”

“We’ll just sit here and watch the sun set”, Marcie declared, “We can have dinner at home. And you can have dinner with your kids.”

Sam hesitated, so Marcie added. “There’s cupcakes in the box, too. Cupcakes with chocolate and sprinkles. Your kids like cupcakes, don’t they?”

Sam nodded. “Sure they do. They like all sweet things.”

“Then take it. Dinner and cupcakes for your kids.”

“You mean, I can really have the food?” Sam repeated, “All of it? And the box, too?”

Pete opened his mouth to protest, but Marcie overrode him. “Sure,” she said with a sunny smile that was even mostly real.

Sam’s mouth widened into a gap-toothed grin. “Th…thanks. That’s great of you. I’m sorry I thought you was cops at first. Cause you’re cool people, you are. And thank you so very much.”

Sam waved at them and took off towards the rusty wreck, bearing the box like a treasure brought home from a long and hard quest.

“That was our picnic…” Pete grumbled, once Sam was out of earshot, “…and my cool box.”

Marcie looked after Sam, shielding her eyes against the setting sun. “Oh please. He and his family clearly need the food more than we do.”

“But Granny and I — well, mostly Granny — made the sandwiches and the other stuff for you and me. Not for some scavenger who recklessly endangers what’s left of our environment.”

“He has kids,” Marcie pointed out, “They eat stew made out of seagulls.” She turned to Pete, righteous anger flaring in her eyes. “Seagulls.”

“We don’t know if he really has kids…” Pete said, “…or if he’ll really share the food with them. He might’ve been making up shit to gain our pity.”

“They eat seagulls,” Marcie repeated.

Sam had almost reached the jumble of tents and lean-tos huddling in the shadow of the wreck. Up to now, the camp had seemed deserted, but upon Sam’s return, two small figures tumbled out of one of the tents to greet him.

Marcie pointed at the scene. “Look.”

“Okay, so he really does have kids…” Pete admitted.

They watched as Sam opened the cool box and handed something to each kid, probably a sandwich or maybe a cupcake. But whatever it was, it made the kids bounce up and down with excitement.

“…and he really does share the food with them. But it was still our picnic.”

“Oh, come on.” Marcie pointed at Sam and his bouncing kids. “Doesn’t that make you at least a little misty-eyed?”

“Well, I guess it does,” Pete admitted. He pressed a hand to his stomach. “But it also makes me hungry.”

“We can stop for a soy burger on the way home,” Marcie suggested, “I’ll even pay, if it makes you stop grumbling.”

“This was supposed to be a date,” Pete said, “I’ll pay.”

“Let’s say we split, okay?” Marcie settled down on the blanket they had spread out — all that was left of their picnic now — and beckoned to Pete. “But now sit down. The sun is about to set.”

So they sat next to each other on the blanket and watched the sun — bloated and orange now like a gigantic grapefruit — sink beneath the horizon, turning the wreck and the broken pipes and the smoke belching furnace into silhouettes outlined sharply against the raspberry sky.

It was still warm, but nonetheless Pete put his arm around Marcie, who snuggled against him in turn.

She held out her phone and snapped a pic. The two of them sitting on the beach, the setting sun on their faces, as if it was still twenty years ago and Seashell Beach was still a thriving resort and not a ghost town.

“So what do we do about this?” Pete nodded at the plumes of smoke spiralling upwards from the furnace until they met the encroaching night high above. “Shouldn’t we report them?”

“And what will that accomplish?”

“Make someone do something about this,” Pete replied, “I mean, it’s not okay that people live like this, especially not children. And besides, burning coal is forbidden. I think the authorities should know about this.”

“The authorities already know about this and turn a blind eye,” Marcie pointed out, “But if we report these people and someone feels compelled to do something about them, now the public has taken notice, all that will happen is that Sam and his family are driven away from the only home they have. And the rogue wreckers will start over somewhere else.”

“So we do nothing? We just pretend we never saw all this?”

Marcie shook her head. “No, I think we should do something. We should come back here. And bring more food.”

“Another picnic? This time with enough food that there’s something left for us as well?”

“Actually, I was thinking about something a bit bigger,” Marcie said, “We could ask for food donations, maybe rope in a few other people from college and come back here to drop off food.”

Marcie turned to Pete, the idea beginning to take form even as she spoke. “Maybe we could even involve your Grandma. You said she likes to cook and being around people will do her good.”

“And what do I tell her is happening here? After all, she thinks it’s still sixty years ago”

“Tell her these people are refugees who need help,” Marcie said, “It’s not even a lie, is it?”

“And what if she asks what happened to Seashell Beach or where the ocean has gone?”

“Uhm, it’s low tide?” Marcie sighed. “Look, if you don’t like my idea and don’t want to help, that’s okay. But I want to do something for these people.”

Pete shook his head. “No, actually I think your idea is great. And Granny will probably love it. When she was younger, she used to volunteer at a homeless shelter. And she likes kids a lot, so…”

Marcie flashed him a big smile. “So you’re in?”

“Yes, I guess I’m in.”

“Then we should start brainstorming ideas as soon as we get home. Or maybe even over those soy burgers we’ll be having on the way there?”

“When we stop for soy burgers, I won’t brainstorm,” Pete said, “I’ll be wolfing them down, because my stomach is grumbling like crazy.”

“Then afterwards, okay? And Pete…” Marcie leant forward to plant a quick kiss on his lips. “…this picnic was a great idea.”

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new story will be posted.

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More Reactions to the 2020 Hugo Ceremony and a bit about the Retro Hugos

I’d hoped to get my comments on the generally excellent winners of the 2020 Hugo Awards up today. However, this was not to be, for two days later we’re still talking about the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell, as it will probably be known one day, when some toastmaster at the 2060 Hugos will bore the audience to death with remembering how they survived the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell back in the olden days of 2020. And if that toastmaster should be me, you officially have my permission to kick me off that stage.

You can read my account of the ceremony as one of the finalists who were waiting on tenterhooks while George R.R. Martin went on and on and on here. In that post, I also linked to the reactions and summaries of the disaster that was the 2020 Hugo ceremony by Natalie Luhrs, Sean Reads Sci-Fi, Miyuki Jane Pinckard and Matt at Runalong the Shelves.

However, in the past day I’ve come across even more reactions to the 2020 Hugo ceremony from around the web.

My fellow best fan writer finalist Adam Whitehead shares his thoughts on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, including the torturous wait imposed on the finalists. And since Adam is in the UK, he was very much in the same boat as me (and Alasdair Stuart, for that matter) that the ceremony took place in the middle of the night for him.

Erin Underwood, the 2020 DUFF winner who presented the Best Fan Writer category, explains what the 2020 Hugo ceremony was like from the POV of a presenter and confirms that she was never given any guidance in how to pronounce the finalists’ name

At Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers weighs in on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, mostly quoting from Natalie Luhrs’ excellent post.

At The Daily Dot, Rachel Kiley also discusses the 2020 Hugo ceremony and the many, many problems with it.

Another of the many problems with the 2020 Hugo ceremony is that the acceptance speech of Best Editor Long Form winner Navah Wolfe was cut off by a technical glitch. Navah Wolfe has now shared the full text of her speech online, which you can read here, here and here. I think this is my favourite acceptance speech of the night, though most people seem to prefer R.F. Kuang’s. I’m also horrified that it’s even legal in the US for a company to fire an employee who’s pregnant.

Norwegian fan Dag-Erling Smørgrav shares his thoughts on the 2020 Hugo ceremony and particularly focusses on George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg repeatedly praising John W. Campbell, which was clearly a jab against the renaming of the former Campbell Award as the Astounding Award and Hugo finalist (and eventual winner) Jeanette Ng. And as I said in my previous post, I have some sympathy that Martin as one of the first finalists ever for the Campbell may not be happy about the renaming (even though the fact that the Campbell Award is now the Astounding Award doesn’t take away Martin’s accomplishment in getting nominated for it in 1973), but the repeated jabs at the Astounding Award and Jeanette Ng were petty and uncalled for.

Sword and sorcery writers Remco van Straten and Angeline B. Adams also weigh in on the 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony in a post fittingly entitled “When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth”. And indeed it’s interesting that both Dag-Erling Smørgrav and Remco van Straten/Angeline B. Adams evoked dinosaurs in their posts about the 2020 Hugo ceremony. I guess Camestros Felapton, who wrote the brilliant Hugosauriad to discuss how dinosaurs are a recurring theme on the Hugo ballot, has found the dinosaurs at the 2020 Hugos, only that this year they weren’t on the ballot, but up on the stage.

As sword and sorcery writers, Remco van Straten and Angeline B. Adams are well aware that it’s possible to appreciate the SFF of yesteryear while remaining aware of the flaws of these works and their creators and so point out how problematic many of the writers and editors of yesteryear who were explicitly mentioned at the Hugo ceremony truly were.

Van Straten and Adams also have a great post about the controversy surrounding the sword and sorcery anthology Flashing Swords #6, from which several authors pulled their stories, after they became aware that editor Robert M. Price’s foreword was a sexist and transphobic screed. In their post, Van Straten and Adams point out that sword and sorcery was always a diverse genre and that women like C.L. Moore and newly minted Retro Hugo winner Margaret Brundage were an important part of the genre from the beginning and that writers of colour like Samuel R. Delany and Charles R. Saunders and transpeople like artist Jeffrey Catherine Jones were part of the genre at least from the 1960s on. The 2020 Hugo ceremony is only mentioned in passing, but the post very clearly illustrates that the past of our genre was a lot more diverse and a lot less straight, white and male than it is often remembered.

British writer Ed Fortune calls the 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony the worst awards ceremony he ever had the misfortune to sit through and also goes into the debacle about the 2019 Hugo Losers Party, where the venue George R.R. Martin booked was too small and several Hugo finalists and their plus ones were left standing outside.

Two time Hugo winner Cheryl Morgan shares her thoughts on the disastrous 2020 Hugo ceremony and also remembers the incident in 2006, where Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis on stage at the Hugo ceremony, just in case you were wondering if Hugo ceremonies can get worse than what happened this year. Cheryl Morgan also points out that Harlan Ellison at least seemed mortified that his behaviour had damaged the ceremony and the Hugos, even if he didn’t quite understand what the problem was. She is not so sure that George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg understand what they did.

Cheryl Morgan also has a follow-up post about how and why Worldcons go wrong, which is well worth reading. Cheryl also points out that pointing fingers at the World Science Fiction Society doesn’t help, because the WSFS is us, i.e. every supporting and attending member of Worldcon.

Jason Sanford also discusses the 2020 Hugo ceremony and the many problems with it. He makes a lot of good points, but then he goes into something I’ve also seen on Twitter, namely that Worldcon is old, irrelevant and in danger of dying and that the big media cons like San Diego Comic Con and Dragon Con in Atlanta are the future.

Leaving aside the irony that the Puppies said the very same thing back in 2015/16, for better or for worse, Worldcon is a different beast than commercial cons like San Diego Comic Con and Dragon Con (and let’s not forget that Dragon Con’s literature trek leans strongly conservative/rightwing, even if the overall membership doesn’t). Worldcon is less polished than the media cons, because it’s entirely run by volunteers. At Worldcon, the barriers between fans and pros are much lower, because everybody is a fan first and a writer, artist, editor, publisher, filmmaker, etc… second. This doesn’t always work out as intended, as this weekend’s events have shown, but I still love the inclusive idea behind it and it makes me sad when I hear of people – often writers and fans of colour – who were made to feel unwelcome at Worldcon. But while Worldcon isn’t perfect, as Cheryl Morgan said, Worldcon is us. We can make it better and many of us try in a myriad of ways, whether it’s people braving the Business Meeting to submit proposals or this year’s Hugo finalists and others who worked behind the scenes to make programming more diverse and inclusive or the many volunteers who keep the convention running.

But the best thing about Worldcon is that it’s not stationary, like San Diego Comic Con, Dragon Con and so many other cons, but that it moves around. Of course, the “World” in Worldcon is still too often ignored, the locations are still too often in the US, though we’ve been seeing more non-US locations in recent years, and whole continents barely get a look in. But while there’s at least a chance that Worldcon will eventually come to your country or continent (plus, if you find enough likeminded fans, you can bid to bring a Worldcon to your country), you’ll always have to go to San Diego to attend Comic Con and to Atlanta with its hellish airport to attend Dragon Con. Entering the US was always an unpleasant experience (ask me why I hate Atlanta airport so much sometime) and it has only gotten worse in the past twenty years and even worse in the past four. Even if they get a visa, which is by no means assured particularly for people from non-western countries, a lot of people from outside the US are reluctant to travel to the US. Some people like Cheryl Morgan are unable to enter the US at all through no fault of their own. So those who are saying, “Worldcon is old and irrelevant, so let it die and go to Dragon Con or San Diego Comic Con instead” are saying to everybody who can’t or won’t travel to the US and everybody inside the US who cannot afford to travel to Atlanta or San Diego, “You don’t matter. We don’t care if you can’t come.” I’m sure that’s not what they mean to say, but that’s how it comes across.

Jason Sanford goes on to declare that the Retro Hugos must die, because John W. Campbell and Cthulhu won Retro Hugos this year. Like so many others who complain about Campbell and Cthulhu and maybe Forrest J. Ackerman, he fails to mention that Leigh Brackett and Margaret Brundage, two awesome women who went unrecognised in their lifetimes, also won Retro Hugos this year.

I’ve already pointed out how strongly I disagree with the people who cry for the Retro Hugos to be abolished, because they don’t agree with some of the winners (and I’m not thrilled about the Retro Hugos for Campbell, Cthulhu and Voice of the Imagi-Nation either). I also strongly disagree with Jason Sanford when he calls Retro Hugo voters “a small group of people stuck in the past giving today’s genre the middle finger”.

I have nominated and voted for the Hugos and Retro Hugos, when they were offered, since 2014. Like so many others, I was frequently underwhelmed by the finalists and winners, so I decided to do something about it. I started the Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet and Retro Science Fiction Reviews to point potential nominators to worthy works and to show what else was out there beyond the big name writers and editors. I also didn’t vote for or nominated Campbell, Cthulhu and Voice of the Imagi-Nation.

It’s perfectly fine if someone doesn’t want to engage with the Retro Hugos and doesn’t care for older SFF in general. However, if you didn’t bother to nominate and vote, don’t complain about the results. And don’t call those of us who are interested in the history of our genre reactionaries – unless maybe they are presenters hijacking the current day Hugo ceremony to reminisce about the past.

I care about the history of SFF because I think it is important to know where we’ve been to understand where we are now and how we got here. It also infuriates me how much of the history of our genre has been forgotten and erased, how the only ancestors that are remembered are a narrow group of straight white men and tht there’s another round of “Wow, women, writers of colour, LGBTQ writers and other marginalised groups are writing science fiction and fantasy now” every twenty years, even though women, POC, LGBTQ people have always been here, only that their contributions to the genre have been ignored and forgotten.

I like having a way to honour those writers and artists who went unrecognised during their lifetimes. The Retro Hugos are one of the few ways we have to do this. They may not be perfect and I certainly don’t think that John W. Campbell needs yet another Hugo, considering he won plenty during his lifetime. But rather than abolish the Retro Hugos, I’m trying to make them better and also to challenge received wisdom about what the genre was like in days of old, a received wisdom that’s usually much straighter, whiter and male than reality.

Font Folly also points out that a lot of the problems with the Retro Hugos stem from people trusting received wisdom such as that Astounding was the best SFF magazine of the 1940s and that John W. Campbell was the best editor, even though this isn’t the case when you actually read the magazine.

And yes, Hugo voting already is a lot of work and Retro Hugo voting adds to that workload with the added complication that there is no helpful Hugo voter packet – you have to track down all of that stuff yourself. But I’d rather help voters and nominators to make more informed decisions than to abolish the Retro Hugos altogether, because I don’t like how they turn out.

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Some Reflections on the 2020 Hugo Ceremony a.k.a. Reminiscing with George

This was not the post I wanted to write today. The post that I hoped to write was, “Hey, I won a Hugo. Go me!” However, Bogi Takács won and a most deserving winner they are, too. And in fact, the speech I never got to hold would have specifically said that as far as I am concerned, everybody in the fan writer category was a winner. And besides, I came in second at first try, which is pretty amazing.

So yes, let’s talk about the 2020 Hugo Ceremony. By now, you may have seen some tweets or read some posts about the fact that the 2020 Hugo Ceremony was a) very, very, very long , and b) pretty damn awful. If you have about three hours and forty-eight minutes of time to spare, you can watch the whole thing. Or you can read the summaries by Natalie Luhrs, Sean Reads Sci-Fi, Miyuki Jane Pinckard and Matt at Runalong the Shelves. You can also watch the 2020 Hugo ceremony without all the extraneous blather at the YouTube channel of The Reading Outlaw.

As you know, I was a Hugo finalist this year, so I was in a different position than those watching the regular livestream. I was in the Hugo finalist Zoom, waiting for my categories (I was accepting again for Galactic Journey this year as well as for myself) to be called. And since the fan categories are up first, I was basically sitting there in full ceremony get-up – evening gown, tiara, jewellery – from 1 AM my time on. My elderly parents were there as well. I’d told them that my category would probably come up by 1:30 AM at the latest.

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Me in my Hugo dress, posing with a bookshelf and Occulus, the friendly eyeball monster.

So the ceremony started, George R.R. Martin appeared on the screen and starting talking. And talking. And talking. He reminisced about his first Worldcon and his first Hugo ceremony in 1971. He reminisced about the first time he was a finalist for what was then the Campbell Award in 1973. Those stories about the olden days were actually interesting, but they also went on for much, much too long. Besides, those stories are better suited to a panel or the bar than to the Hugo ceremony.

When they finally announced the Lodestar and Astounding winners after more than half an hour, I thought, “Okay, now my categories will be up in a few minutes.” And then I saw a message in the Zoom chat from Allan, the tech person in charge of the Hugos who did a great job (and who unlike the finalists, actually had to sit through all three hours and forty-eight minutes of it), that the next video would be 17 minutes long. “That’s a typo”, I thought, “He means 1.7 minutes or 7 minutes.” But it wasn’t a typo. Because George R.R. Martin went on to talk for another 17 minutes.

Meanwhile, the fan category finalists who were up first (and all the other finalists for that matter) were on tenterhooks. My parents were nodding off. My tiara and my bra were hurting and I really needed to go to the bathroom, but didn’t dare to go, before my categories were called.

And because I could see the other finalists in Zoom, I saw that they were in a similar situation. There was one fan category finalist, also in Europe where it was in the middle of the night, who kept fanning themselves and dabbing at their face, because they were obviously hot and sweating. At one point, I said to the screen, “George, please get to the point already, because finalist X is melting.”

Then fanzine and fan writer were called, neither Galactic Journey nor I won, and my parents left, clearly grateful to be finally able to go to bed. I got rid of my bra and my tiara, dressed more comfortably, made myself a tea, got my crochet and settled down again. Fan artist and semiprozine were called, while I was undressing, but I missed nothing during my tea break, because George R.R. Martin was talking again. And then Robert Silverberg talked as well and also for a long time, introducing the editor categories.

By the time best related work was called, I’d had enough and decided to decamp to the after-party and follow the finalist announcements on Twitter. Which I promptly did and I had a great time, too. A lot better time, I bet, than the poor finalists in the fiction categories, who had been waiting for three hours at that point.

Around the same time that I gave up, I saw tweets, Discord messages, etc… from plenty pf people saying the same thing. “Sorry, I’m going to bed, just let me know who won.” And today on Discord, someone said, “Wait a minute, the Hugo ceremony is over?”

“No”, I replied, “George is still sitting in his theatre in Santa Fe reminiscing about the olden days and he’s up to the 1989 Worldcon by now. However, the technician fell asleep and accidentally ripped out the cable.”

Now some of George R.R. Martin’s and Robert Silverberg’s annecdotes might actually have been interesting, if presented on a panel about “Writers remember the olden days” or “Rememberances of Worldcons and Hugos past”. And indeed, there was such a panel. But the Hugo Award Ceremony is not the time to go on endlessly about things that happened decades ago. Instead, the point of the Hugo Ceremony is to honour today’s finalists and winners. Which seemed almost like an afterthought at this year’s ceremony.

I understand that George R.R. Martin is not happy about the name change of the former Campbell, now Astounding Award, considering he was one of the first Campbell finalists. And once again, his remarks would have been appropriate for a hypothetical panel called “Saviour of science fiction or freaking fascist? The complex legacy of John W. Campbell”. However, the 2020 Hugo Ceremony is not the place to go on about what an important figure he was to the genre – and I already shared my thoughts on Campbell in the Retro Hugo post – considering Campbell died before most of this year’s finalists in any category were even born.

What makes this lengthy and rambling Hugo Ceremony even more annoying is that George R.R. Martin (and Robert Silverberg for that matter) both know what it’s like to be a finalist, waiting for your category to be called. After all, they’ve been there several times. So they should have asked themselves, “How would I have felt if this had happened at my first (or second or third) Hugo ceremony as a finalist and the toastmaster had gone on and on and on with anecdotes about Hugo Gernsback?”

And for some Hugo finalists, the lengthy wait was more than an annoyance, but made it impossible for them to accept the Award without violating their religious beliefs. Best Editor winner Navah Wolfe is orthodox Jewish and let the Hugo Ceremony organisers know that she would not be able to accept in person after sunset in her part of the world because of Shabbat. Best Fan Writer winner Bogi Takács was in the same boat, only that fan writer was announced earlier in the evening. Nor is this the first time this has happened, Alix E. Harrow’s designated accepter last year had to drop out, because the Hugo Ceremony coincided with Shabbat. There are a lot of Jewish people in our community and while not all are observant, we nonetheless should be able to find a date and time for the Hugo ceremony that doesn’t force anybody to choose between violating their personal beliefs and accepting a Hugo.

ETA: Several Hugo finalists also report that the overlong Hugo ceremony conflicted with panels or readings they had at what they expected to be after the ceremony. One of my panels was actually scheduled for after the Hugo ceremony, but since every single person on that panel was a Hugo finalist (and one of us – John Picacio – went on to win in his category), we contacted programming and asked them to shift the panel, which they did.

But if the lengthy ramblings of George R.R. Martin were bad, what was even worse was George and other presenters repeatedly mispronouncing the names of Hugo finalists and in one case misgendering finalists (George talked about the young men and women nominated for the Astounding Award, even though this year’s finalists were only women, two of them with ambiguous names). And yes, finalists of colour were the worst affected, but white and western finalists had their names mispronounced as well. In my category alone, Paul Weimer and myself had our names mispronounced (not by George R.R. Martin, who didn’t present our category). Now I’m used to English speaking people mispronouncing my surname as “Bjuhlert”, even though there is no J in my name anywhere, so it’s no big deal for me, though I can understand why particularly people from a non-western background who have their names mispronounced all the time are angry.

But I still have no idea how a native English speaker can mispronounce “Jemisin”. And don’t even get me started on FIYAH Magazine, who had to put up a tweet explaining their name, because Martin mispronounced them, even though the title of the magazine is a phonetic spelling of “fire”. And yes, mistakes happen, but they shouldn’t happen with such frequency and they certainly shouldn’t happen in segments that have been prerecorded, because the good thing about prerecording is that you can do it again, if you mess up the first time around. Not to mention that all Hugo finalists were explicitly asked to provide their pronouns and the phonetic spelling of their names to prevent debacles like this.

As a teacher of German as a foreign language, I know how difficult even seemingly easy names/words can be to pronounce, if one’s native language does not have that particular phoneme. But if George R.R. Martin really couldn’t handle the pronounciation of certain names, they should have let someone else do it. And in fact this was probably the idea behind the “voice of God” that read out the names of the finalists again, because Martin did such a bad job of it.

It’s also not that I haven’t accidentally mispronounced someone’s name either. However, if you’re not sure how to pronounce someone’s name, ask them, cause they’re usually happy to tell you. For example, for the Galactic Journey acceptance speech I never got to hold, I asked how to pronounce the names of those members of the Galactic Journey team where I wasn’t sure. Because getting someone’s name and gender right is basic courtesy.

Also, several people noted that Martin had no problems pronouncing names like Fritz Leiber (and I actually praised him for getting Fritz Leiber’s name correct, before he started mispronouncing everybody else), Robert A. Heinlein and Roger Zelazny, probably because he knew those author personally. But even if he isn’t as familiar with today’s authors, that’s still no excuse to get their names wrong.

That said, while George R.R. Martin may have been the host of the ceremony, organising it was CoNZealand’s job and frankly, they didn’t do it very well. And yes, I understand the technical challenges they were faced with. But would it have been that difficult to ask George R.R. Martin and the other presenters to keep their remarks to 5 minutes per category and edit them down, if necessary? Especially since George R.R. Martin is known for many things, but brevity is not one of them. And would it have been that difficult to make sure that the names of the finalists were pronounced correctly and that the right pronouns are used, especially since they explicitly asked us for that information.

There have also been other criticisms, such as the fact that even though Worldcon was supposed to be held in New Zealand, the Hugo presenters were mostly white Americans as well as a white Brit and a white Australian. The closest the Hugo Ceremony came to New Zealand representation were the congratulations in the M?ori language following every announcement, which the finalists were told to use as a cue. Another finalist and I even asked what the appropriate response to those congratulations would be. They phrase we were given is scribbled – phonetically spelled – on the top of my acceptance speech.

The CoNZealand chairs Norman Cates and Kelly Buehler have now apologised for the Hugo mess, which is a start. And George R.R. Martin himself points out in the comments at File 770 that he was never provided with phonetic spellings of the finalists’ names (which is CoNZealand’s oversight then) and that people generally enjoy his anecdotes. Which I’m sure they do, but maybe not at the Hugo Ceremony.

But in general, this has not been a good experience, especially for the first-time Hugo finalists, of which I am one. First, the pandemic ruined everybody’s chances to enjoy their first time as a Hugo finalist in person at the con (though Discon III, the 2021 Worldcon in Washington DC, has announced that they want to hold a reception for the 2020 Hugo finalists, because they didn’t get one due to the pandemic). Then there was the inconsistent messaging that Hugo finalists received regarding what membership level was required for them to participate in the con and the Hugos and the fact that some Hugo finalists initially didn’t receive any programming at all. Nor is it the Hugo finalists’ job to fix issues with the programming, though we got comped memberships for 47 awesome people of colour, indigenous and otherwise marginalised people out of it, who made Worldcon programming so much better and more diverse. And in general, I enjoyed the first virtual Worldcon a whole lot, but that’s its own post. Nonetheless, I suspect the neverending Hugo Ceremony of 2020 will be talked about for a long time.

The analysis of the Hugo winners will be in a separate post.

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