Category Archives: 90s Fanhistory

15 Costumers You Should Know

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The International Costumers Guild is posting a series of short video tributes to the pioneers and superstars of convention masquerades

The trailer “15 Costumers You Should Know” credits Forry Ackerman as the “Father of Convention Costuming” – he wore a “futuristicostume” made by Myrtle Douglas at the first Worldcon in 1939. The series will revisit the historic work of fans Kathy Sanders, Bruce & Dana MacDermott, Karen Schaubelt Turner Dick, Animal X, Jacqueline Ward, Janet Wilson Anderson, Deborah K. Jones, Pierre & Sandy Pettinger, Barb Schofield, Adrian Butterfield and Ricky Dick.

See more at the IGC Archives.

Stuff That Was Once Cool

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While revisiting fanhistory for my Worldcon panels I began remembering some of the cool fannish things I once wished to own. Some of them I acquired. Some are still cool. One is still cool and available.

The Acoustic Modem

Plenty of fans in the 1970s were engineers, programmers and science grads with legitimate access to the ARPANET, the early computer network and forerunner of the internet. LASFS party hosts with accounts, of course, appreciated that the highest and best use of the system was calling into M.I.T. to let their guests play Zork.

Connecting to the net involved placing a regular phone receiver in the cradle of an acoustic coupler modem linked to the home PC. Those early modems were as big as a combat boot – the one my friends had must have been even bigger than the one in the picture, still, you get the idea. 

It would have been heavenly — for some values of heaven — being able to call in and play Zork for endless hours with no other fans waiting breathlessly beside me for their turns. However, they soon clamped down on access to ARPANET accounts, and I could not have afforded however many hundred dollars that gadget cost. But it was cool!

The Ellison Index

Leslie Kay Swigart had been an active LASFS member of the era right before I joined the club, which is one reason Bruce Pelz had a copy of her magnum opus, Harlan Ellison: A Bibliographical Checklist. The 1973 first edition was printed by Williams Publishing of Dallas and I don’t know if that was a publishing house or just a printer. In any event, he showed off his copy during one of the card games at his place. The intricate cover by Leo & Diane Dillon made it look awesome. (Gosh, did I just write awesome?) And bearing in mind that Harlan Ellison in 1973 was at the pinnacle of his popularity, it’s understandable why Bruce’s offer to sell us copies was irresistible. You can’t read what you don’t even know exists, and in those pre-internet days Swigart’s checklist was the simplest way of discovering everything our hero had written.

Team Banzai headband

In 1984, Twentieth Century Fox hired a crew to travel around the country promoting The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension at conventions. They were the only source for the Team Banzai headband. The over-the-top title and the movie’s implicit coolness struck the right note with fans, which made the headbands popular. A few did wear them as headbands, others as armbands or thighbands, or tied to some piece of fannish paraphernalia.

Glow-in-the-Dark Bid T-Shirt

Fans sure did like the glow-in-the-dark LA-in-90 bid t-shirt (the yellow shirt in this picture). It may have been the most appealing thing about our bid. I’ll bet plenty of fans were wearing these shirts while happily marking their ballots for Holland.

Heinlein Blood Donor Pin

Robert Heinlein suffered two years of extensive illnesses and received many pints of his rare blood type in transfusions. He was determined to pay-it-forward, publicizing the National Rare Blood club and blood donation generally. Fans organized a blood drive at the 1976 Worldcon, MidAmericon, where he was guest of honor and Heinlein said he would only sign autographs for people who donated blood. Part of the package deal was a RAH blood donor pin (commissioned by the LASFS) and copies of his “Are You A Rare Blood” offprint which many of us had him autograph.

Commemorative Heinlein blood drives continue at conventions to this day, an unlike some of the other cool things mentioned in this article you can still get a donor pin.

A LASFSian Remembers Ray Bradbury

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(L to R) Leigh Brackett (Mrs. Hamilton), Ray Bradbury, Marguerite Bradbury, Edmond Hamilton, at 1968 World SF Convention, Hotel Claremont, Oakland, Calif. Photo by © Andrew Porter.

By Mike Glyer: Ray Bradbury had discovered science fiction when he was eight. Now at the age of 17 he was about to discover fandom.

T. Bruce Yerke, secretary of the Los Angeles chapter of the Science Fiction League — an office I held 50 years later in the renamed LASFS – was given Bradbury’s name as a membership prospect. Yerke sent a letter on the club’s hectographed stationery inviting him to attend their meetings at Clifton’s Cafeteria. Ray Bradbury appeared on October 7, 1937 asking, “Is Mr. Yerke here?”

Bradbury was then in high school, graduating in 1938, and already turning out stories. Within a week, Forry Ackerman had him writing and drawing for the clubzine Imagination!, beginning a lifelong friendship. With Ackerman’s encouragement and occasional financial assistance he weathered a stream of constant rejections from sf prozines. Ackerman also underwrote Bradbury’s fanzine Futuria Fantasia, with material by Kuttner and Heinlein, and loaned Bradbury the money to attend the first Worldcon in New York in 1939.

The young fan’s full name was Ray Douglas Bradbury. His father had named him for the silent movie star Douglas Fairbanks. And in the pages of The Damned Thing editor T. Bruce Yerke teased the lofty, Hollywood aspirations of “Rayoul Douglasse Bradbury” who sold papers on a Normandie Ave. street corner.

This sounds snarky, taken out of context. In fact, Bradbury probably enjoyed the teasing — he was one of Yerke’s regular contributors and even drew the cover of The Damned Thing #2.

Bradbury himself told stories about those days in the 1930s when he would roller-skate up to the gate at Paramount and hang around trying to get stars’ autographs. After W. C. Fields complied he dismissed Ray, saying, “Here you go, you little son-of-a-bitch.” And Ray liked to loaf at the famous Brown Derby restaurant — but bought his meals at Hugo’s Hot Dog Stand across the street.

Ray cultivated his many talents to entertain and win friends. He played the violin (badly), impersonated FDR, W.C. Fields and radio star Fred Allen, cracked jokes at club meetings, sang loudly enough while riding a boat in Central Park that the authorities complained, and wrote plays and acted in a little theater group led by actress Laraine Day.

All the while he was faithfully writing 1,000 words a day and selling nothing, until at last he broke through with his first sale in 1941, “Pendulum,” written in collaboration with Henry Hasse and published in Super Science Stories. Soon he was selling regularly, with Julius Schwartz as his agent. He eventually shed the pulps and began selling to major magazines – once hitting the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Coronet and Esquire within a three-week period.

Bradbury married Marguerite McClure in 1948 and they had four daughters. Maurgerite passed away in 2003.

Quite a bit of his most famous fiction was written before 1955. By then television was booming and Bradbury began writing scripts for Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and many other shows.

In 1956, John Huston hired him to write the screenplay for the movie Moby Dick. This took him to Ireland and inspired a series of Irish stories – my favorite when I was much younger was “The Anthem Sprinters,” about Irishmen who tried to get out of the theater between the end of the film and the start of “God Save the Queen.”

In the Sixties filmmakers began making movies from Bradbury’s own work, Fahrenheit 451 directed by Francois Truffaut (1966) and The Illustrated Man (1969).

An amazing thing is that even with his ever-increasing fame, speaking schedule and strenuous writing workload Ray remained cordial towards his fans. I think he actually reveled in his fame, one of the fruits of his success as a writer, but he was an incredibly generous spirit by nature, who gave his time and attention to any cause he felt indebted to – such as the libraries where he’d educated himself – and paid forward the encouragement and mentoring he’d received as a young, unpublished dreamer.

When I got into fandom in the late Sixties I was part of a local library discussion group. I persuaded them to put out a fanzine and as the editor assigned myself the job of trying to get contributions from pro writers. Nearly all of them sent friendly replies saying “no.” Ray Bradbury actually sent us something to use – a tearsheet of “These Unsparked Flints, These Uncut Gravestone Brides,” a poem that essentially compares spinster librarians to unused tombstones, a metaphor less appreciated by the library staff than the rest of us who fixated on the “Wow! Ray Bradbury is in our zine!” part.

He clearly relished an audience, speaking often at libraries, universities and civic events. He spoke at USC during my freshman year, the first time I got his autograph. That was 1970, and Ray had already shaped the basic autobiographical speech that he continued to present til he was 90, about his childhood memories, the art he loved and his successes as a writer. That day he said, “I wanted to become the greatest writer in the world. Aren’t you glad I finally made it?” The audience cheered like mad.

Ray became pretty receptive to invitations to speak at LASFS’ annual convention, Loscon, after his friend Julius Schwartz got active in fandom again in the Eighties. I always hoped to pull off an appearance by Ray for one of the cons I programmed. When at long last his schedule and health seemed likely to permit it, he unfortunately got sick the weekend of the con and had to cancel. Forry Ackerman saved my bacon by agreeing to take that hour and tell stories about Ray, by then his friend for over 60 years.

Writing this blog drew me back into Ray’s orbit once more by connecting me with John King Tarpinian, Bradbury’s batman on outings and one of my colleagues at the IRS. John lives in Glendale near Mystery & Imagination Bookshop, scene of a plethora of Bradbury appearances like his annual birthday parties. (See Ray Bradbury’s 89th Birthday Party, article and photos by John King Tarpinian.)

John helped make File 770 “all Bradbury all-the-time,” our incessant drumbeat of reports about signings and sales amplified by the occasional news blast, like when John snapped a photo of Ray’s gobsmacked expression as he watched Rachel Bloom’s “F*** Me, Ray Bradbury” music video for the very first time (V*** For Me, Ray Bradbury).

I’ll continue to celebrate Ray’s work and life because I’ve never had more fun as a fan of any science fiction writer than I’ve had following the exploits of that unpublished teenager who wandered into LASFS in 1937 and went on to be one of our greatest fantasists, opening the genre to millions of readers.

Update 06/07/2012: Corrected full first name to Ray, which Tarpinian says is on his birth certificate. “Raymond” I got from Warner’s All Our Yesterdays. Bill Warren also sent me the correction. Thanks!

John Hertz: Klein is Big, Door is Dear

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By John Hertz: Jay Kay Klein, the photographer of science fiction, has donated his photographs to the Eaton Collection. Shipments are arriving. It is best to arrange such things while one is alive.

Klein shot all of us – sounds tempting, doesn’t it? – fans and pros. He was there, usually with several cameras. In monochrome, color, stereo, he took a hundred thousand photos.

The Eaton Collection, on the Riverside campus of the University of California, is the world’s largest publicly accessible holding of s-f, with books, prozines, fanzines, ephemera. Terry Carr’s, Rick Sneary’s, and Bruce Pelz’ collections made Eaton the largest in fanzines. The Klein photos are a perfect match, and in their own right an element – I use the word deliberately.

Since seven years were needed for a preliminary index of the Pelz collection, Eaton librarians delighted in finding Klein’s photos carefully identified. Perhaps I may be allowed to say that when I talked with him by phone about it recently he chortled. It had not been by the power of his mind alone that he laid hands on pictures as needed.

How good are they?

Look at the Photo Yearbook in the 75th Anniversary issue of Analog (January-February 2005). The photos are Klein’s. See in particular his portraits of Campbell, Heinlein, Moore.

He’s been as valuable a reporting photographer as a portraitist. Look at the Asimov Appreciation in the June 1992 Locus. He can write, too. He recounted the memorial gathering, then gave the closing reminiscence, after Hartwell, Gunn, de Camp. Asimov “loved to have someone top him if possible. Seldom possible.”

Photography is an extraordinary combination of an artist’s vision and of fact. Of this Jay Kay Klein has been illustrative.

No one can top an act like that, but I promised to say something about Selina Phanara’s door. It arrived safely, was placed duly, and is enjoyed muchly.

Eaton is eager to make its resources available. It has a Website and a copying service. Visits in person are welcome.

Two Eaton archivists studying a Klein shipment.

Selina Phanara's door in place.

Dick Spelman (1931-2012)

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Line for Robert Heinlein's autograph at the LASFS clubhouse in 1973. Dick Spelman is in the center holding a copy of "I Will Fear No Evil". Photo by Bill Warren.

Dick Spelman passed away March 6. After radiation treatments failed to eradicate his cancer, declining health led to his hospitalization with pneumonia and finally placement in hospice care.

Dick was a renowned book dealer at Midwestern conventions in the 1980s, selling new books from a huge island of tables in the huckster’s room. He retired in 1991, sold the business to Larry Smith and Sally Kobee, and moved to Orlando.

Dick had early contacts with fandom, writing letters to the prozines, and his brother Henry belonged to Boston’s Strangers Club. Dick attended the 1952 Worldcon in Chicago but he didn’t go to another until 1972 (L.A.con). By then he was living in Los Angeles and that’s when he transformed into a real actifan.

I got to know him when he joined LASFS in 1973. Dick joined the short-lived sf discussion group we started once LASFS bought its first clubhouse. Milt Stevens, Elst Weinstein and I were among the others in the sparsely-attended group.

During the Seventies Dick was an active collector and researcher. In 1978 he issued four well-respected chapbooks which listed the production of several book publishers: Science Fiction and Fantasy Published by Ace Books (1953-1968), Science Fiction and Fantasy Published by Arkham House (1939-1976), Science Fiction and Fantasy Published by Ballantine Books (1953-1977), and Science Fiction and Fantasy Published by Avalon Books.

Along the way Dick developed his book business and moved back to the Midwest. Dealers who make the rounds of conventions have a golden opportunity to become influential figures in fan politics and Dick made a rapid ascent. A chapter is devoted to him — “Dick Spelman: From SMIF to SMOF” — in Mike Resnick’s Once a Fan. He became a director of the Chicon IV (1982) Worldcon committee, served as president of ISFiC, belonged for awhile to MCFI, and chaired the 1982 Windycon. He worked many more conventions as staff.

Resnick published two of Dick’s stories in the most fannish of his anthologies, “The Forgotten Worldcon of ’45” in Alternate Worldcons (1994) and “The Worldcon of 2001” in Again, Alternate Worldcons (1996). (If you’re curious, the NESFA Recursive Science Fiction site gives the plots of these stories.)

Dick was honored as Fan GoH at the1987 Windycon and the 1991 Marcon.

How much we’ll miss him!

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Kathryn Daugherty (1950-2012)

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Kathryn Daugherty

Kathryn Daugherty passed away on February 24 after a two-year battle with cancer. Her husband, James, plans to hold a memorial service this spring in Maui. They were married nearly 40 years.

Kathryn’s life ended in the home in Henderson, Nevada that the couple had called their Dream House. When they started work on it in 2009 she set out to track every step on her blog Adventures in Surreal Estate: Building our Dream House in the Desert. Then illness took its toll and she stopped posting in September 2010. The house did get finished — she told Facebook friends on January 6 they had moved in. Unfortunately she did not have long to enjoy it.

She was among the most respected sf convention runners, having done indispensible work as a department head and division manager at many Worldcons, as well as working Baycons, serving as the “beach chair” of the 2000 Westercon in Hawaii, and as San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions Secretary. Chris Garcia credits her invitation to participate in BayCon for his return to fandom in 2000.

She was gracious and charming. She could also be really funny, too, in the penetratingly acerbic way fans love best. I remember her scoffing about the MagiCon “pocket program” –

Did you actually carry around that mammoth publication in your pocket? Even my purse wasn’t big enough and somewhere in there is the map to the Lost Dutchman Mine and Judge Crater’s phone number.

And it was Kathryn who furnished the pineapple jellybeans Gardner Dozois shot out of his nose at the Millennium Philcon in 2001…

Kathryn and James were Loscon 31 Fan Guests of Honor. Her brief autobiography wistfully chronicles the many ways fandom called out her gifts:

One day the woman said to her husband, “Look, there is going to be a convention in the city Right Next Door for people who love fantastic literature. Let’s go.” They went and discovered a new world to explore. The woman saw people singing. She had a good voice and thought, “Maybe I could do that too.” The woman saw people with beautiful costumes. She had a sewing machine and an impressive collection of cloth. She thought, “I could make a costume some day.” She saw artists and writers and scientists. “Maybe there is a place for me there,” she thought. But when she was asked to be a door guard for the masquerade, she knew she had found her calling. She got a ribbon to wear and got to hang out with the people who were actually running the convention. She began to travel to other conventions to volunteer. She began to plan other conventions. One day she was even the Chair of her very own convention.

She was an engineer by profession. Her favorite job at the university had been feeding punchcards into the giant CDC 6400.

Kathryn and her husband were genuine globetrotters. Over the years she and James visited a very long list of countries. For a time Kathryn even lived in New Zealand. She once told the SMOFs list that among the places she most liked to explore were Cambodia, Bali and Vietnam. Her blogs were filled with photos of international travel and accounts of cruises and tours.

Most fans discover fandom through their love of the stories but when they become absorbed in its social aspects the reading tapers off. Not in Kathryn’s case. I found her current and complete familiarity with the latest works in the sf field one of the most impressive things about her. Some years she racked up reading 200 books. She was so knowledgeable and articulate fans loved to attend her one-woman convention programs to hear pointers about developing new writers and take notes on her award recommendations. Or sometimes she’d be the centerpiece of a panel: one of the best times I ever had was appearing with her and Chris Garcia to handicap the Hugo nominees at the 2008 Westercon.

Her legion of friends, myself among them, will miss her strength, humor, and knowledge.

Further Reading: Friends will also want to read Deidre Saoirse Moen’s appreciation of Kathryn.

What a Future DC Worldcon Needs

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Washington DC’s Walter E. Washington Convention Center opened in 2003 but not until November 2011 was ground broken on a 1,167-room Marriott Marquis across the street. Fans have long considered such a hotel the essential missing piece in any plan to return the Worldcon to Washington.

Two Worldcons have been held in Washington DC (1963, 1974). Two more bid committees tried to bring the convention back. An out-of-rotation bid for 1984 depended on a rules change that failed to pass. A bid for 1992 was forced to fold a few months before the vote after losing its first option on the Sheraton Washington.

In 2004 Michael Nelson publicly discussed the possibility of a DC bid for 2011, if the convention center hotel was built in time. Of course, it was not.

But remember – when it rains, it pours. The Washington Post ran an article last September reporting that developers would like to build two more Marriotts beside the one already going up by the convention center. However, the city has balked on giving them $35 million in subsidies they want for the project.

Yes, September. If this is not the freshest news, never forget File 770’s motto – “It’s always news to somebody.”

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]

Richard Thompson Suspends Comic Strip

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Richard Thompson, who draws the Cul-de-Sac daily comic strip, has suspended the strip for four weeks to undergo treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

Thompson came out of fanzine fandom. Many of his cartoons appeared in the 1980s and 1990s in such fanzines as Stephen Brown and Dan Steffan’s Science Fiction Eye, Ted White and Dan Steffan’s Blat! and the Disclave program book.

Thompson was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2009. Since then friends and fans have been encouraging and supporting Thompson through Team Cul De Sac.

Thompson lightened the latest announcement with a touch of humor:

Well, I’m taking some time off. Some more time off, three or four weeks. I’m about to start a program of physical therapy sessions designed for people with Parkinson’s. I’ve only been in for an evaluation, but the therapy largely consists of big, exaggerated movements and sweeping silly walks that will so embarrass your body that it’ll start behaving itself, I hope.

Thompson received the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award, a cartoonist of the year prize, in 2011. The daily “Cul de Sac,” which he launched as a weekly feature in The Washington Post Magazine, is carried by more than 140 papers.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]

Fallen Angels at 20

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On Saturday, Loscon 38 celebrated the 20th anniversary of Fallen Angels, Niven, Pournelle and Flynn’s novel starring over a hundred Tuckerized science fiction fans out to save two downed astronauts from a tech-hostile government.  

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and facilitator John Hertz discussed the novel’s enduring appeal with a standing-room-only audience.

Baen synopsizes the story:

One minute the two space Hab astronauts were scoop-diving the atmosphere, the next they’d been shot down over the North Dakota Glacier and were the object of a massive manhunt by the United States government.

That government, dedicated to saving the environment from the evils of technology, had been voted into power because everybody knew that the Green House Effect had to be controlled, whatever the cost. But who would have thought that the cost of ending pollution would include not only total government control of day-to-day life, but the onset of a new Ice Age

Stranded in the anti-technological heartland of America, paralyzed by Earth’s gravity, the “Angels” had no way back to the Space Habs, the last bastions of high technology and intellectual freedom on or over the Earth. But help was on its way, help from the most unlikely sources ….

Pournelle said the book is still selling about 30 copies a week, which is especially gratifying because a Baen Free Library edition has been available for years. He theorized these sales were driven by referrals from Amazon’s “customer’s who bought this also bought that”robot.

The characters in the novel were based on fans the authors knew – but Mike Flynn lived on the East Coast and hadn’t met many of the people Niven and Pournelle incorporated in the story. Larry Niven said one thing he was proud of is that Mike Flynn was able to recognize a particular person based on his description of her in the book.

How the Hugos Avoid Conflicts of Interest

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The British Fantasy Awards became mired in controversy when Stephen Jones charged a conflict of interest between the administrator and several winners. That prompted a few fans to suggest fixing the BFA by borrowing rules from the Hugo Awards.

The Hugo Awards do have an excellent reputation for avoiding such conflicts, but don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s because of the superior draftsmanship of the rules. The real reason is that over the years many different people have steered clear of conflicts that the rules do not prevent.

What Is a Conflict of Interest? A conflict of interest exists when anyone exploits his/her official capacity for personal benefit.

The Hugo Awards are run under a set of rules that is extremely wary of conflicts of interest. The WSFS Constitution excludes the entire Worldcon committee from winning a Hugo unless these conditions are met:

Section 3.12: Exclusions. No member of the current Worldcon Committee or any publications closely connected with a member of the Committee shall be eligible for an Award. However, should the Committee delegate all authority under this Article to a Subcommittee whose decisions are irrevocable by the Worldcon Committee, then this exclusion shall apply to members of the Subcommittee only.

To avoid disqualifying the whole Committee – upwards of 200 people, most having nothing to do with the Hugos – the Worldcon chair generally appoints the fans who count the votes and apply the eligibility rules to a Subcommittee. So if some minor member of the concom wins a Hugo, as I did while serving as editor of L.A.con II’s daily newzine in 1984, it’s no problem.

From the beginning the WSFS Constitution (1962-1963) has banned all committee members from eligibility for the Hugos. To my knowledge, the rule was modified in the 1970s by adding the option of an autonomous Subcommittee. People thought it should have been unnecessary for Mike Glicksohn to resign from the TorCon 2 (1973) committee rather than forego the chance for his and Susan Wood Glicksohn’s Energumen to compete for the Hugo, which they indeed won.

The modified rule has worked to everyone’s satisfaction for a number of reasons having little to do with its precision. Worldcons once were commonly led by people also involved with Hugo contending fanzines, which has rarely happened in the past 40 years. On those rare occasions the people involved have taken it upon themselves to avoid any conflicts.

For example, many fans involved with running Noreascon Three (1989) wrote for The Mad 3 Party in the years leading up to the con. Edited by Leslie Turek, TM3P was nominated for Best Fanzine in 1988, withdrawn in 1989, and won a Hugo in 1990. Noreascon Three did appoint a Hugo Subcommittee, of unassailable integrity — in my mind, if TM3P had competed in 1989 and won a Hugo there would have been no reason to doubt the result. The committee, however, felt they needed to go beyond what was required in the rules to preserve an appearance of fairness and TM3P was withdrawn.

When I chaired L.A.con III (1996) friends reminded me that I could remain eligible for a Hugo by delegating responsibility for the awards to a Subcommittee. I felt invested in and responsible for everything that was happening with the con, so for me it was never an option to act as if the Hugos weren’t a part of that. I did appoint a Subcommittee – and put myself on it, announcing that I was withdrawing from the awards for 1996.

So the anti-conflict rule works because people make it work. It is not an infallible rule. In fact, I agree with a comment made by drplokta on Nicholas Whyte’s From the Heart of Europe that it would be hypothetically possible for something similar to this year’s BFA situation to play out in the Hugos without violating the rule.   

[Hugo Subcommittee members’] partners are eligible though, and I guess if a Hugo subcommittee member ran a publishing house then the books that they publish would be eligible, since the nomination would be for the author and not for the publisher.

In short, it’s a good rule to have, but it’s not all-encompassing as some have assumed in recommending it to fix the BFAs. 

The Hugo Awards Conflict of Interest Trivia Quiz: When I made my decision to withdraw in 1996 I doubted that other Worldcon chairs had ever faced the same choice. But they did. I’ll share what I’ve discovered in the answers to this two-question trivia quiz.

Question 1: How many times has the chair of the current year’s Worldcon won a Hugo?

(a) Once
(b) Twice
(c) Never

There’s been such controversy about the chair of the British Fantasy Society’s close association with 5 of this year’s award winners — for example, he is a partner in the publisher that won Best Small Press – that you’d have to assume it would be impossible for a Worldcon chairman to win a Hugo at his own con without raising a historic stink, right? Wrong.

Answer to Question 1: Once. Loncon I (1957) was chaired by Ted Carnell. The winner of the Hugo for Best British Professional Magazine was New Worlds edited by John Edward Carnell. The same person.

Ted Carnell is the only chair to win a Hugo at his own Worldcon. And it appears everyone was content. Harry Warner’s history of Fifties fandom, A Wealth of Fable, doesn’t contain the least hint of controversy. Neither do any of the conreports from Loncon I collected on Rob Hansen’s website.

Sometimes in the award’s early days the chair of the Worldcon administered the Hugos and counted the votes. That may not have been the case in 1957. The progress reports directed members to send their Achievement Award ballots to the convention secretary Roberta Wild. The chair winning a major award might still have been questioned but I’ve found no record of any complaint. In all my time in fandom I’ve never heard anybody say a bad word about that having happened.

Ted White, the 1967 Worldcon chair who responded to some questions for this article, agrees: “I have never heard anyone say anything disparaging about it either.  It was a bit too obviously deserved. Fandom was a lot smaller then, and even smaller in the UK.  Carnell wore several hats.  I met him in 1965. A quiet, unassuming, gentle and generous man.”

Question 2: How many times has a Worldcon chair won a Hugo the year before or after their con?

(a) 2
(b) 4
(c) 8

Answer to Question 2: 4 times.

Many Worldcon chairs and their committees were connected with award-winning fanzines over the years. Before the Internet that was the best medium for building fannish communities and wooing voters.  

(1) Wally Weber was a co-editor of Cry of the Nameless, the Best Fanzine Hugo winner in 1960, the year before he chaired Seacon (1961). Cry was not a nominee in 1961 but was back as a finalist in 1962. So was the zine kept out of contention the year they hosted the Worldcon? Wally Weber isn’t certain but he thinks they might have:

As for the 1961 Hugos, I remember a discussion and decision that Cry be disqualified due to the unusually large percentage of the eligible voters being from the Seattle area and who had never read a fanzine other than Cry. Unfortunately my memory is often more creative than accurate and I have no documentation to back that up. I do not even remember who participated in making the decision. I don’t even remember how the voting was done or who counted the ballots. Did we have official ballots? I would think such a decision would have been mentioned in one of the progress reports if, indeed, there actually had been such a decision. Maybe votes for Cry were just discarded during the counting processes.

(2) The 1961 fanzine Hugo winner was Earl Kemp’s Who Killed Science Fiction. The next year Kemp chaired Chicon III (1962). However, as I’m sure you already know, Who Killed Science Fiction was the most famous one-shot in the history of sf. It obviously wasn’t a factor in the Hugos when he chaired the Worldcon.

(3) George Scithers chaired Discon I (1963) in Washington, D.C. He edited Amra from 1959 to 1982. It won the Hugo in 1964. Since it had never been nominated for the Hugo in any prior year it’s difficult to guess whether he took any special steps to keep it off the ballot when he chaired the Worldcon in 1963. None of the committee members who might know are still with us – Scithers, Bob Pavlat and Dick Eney. One thing we do know is that he wouldn’t have permitted his zine to be placed on the ballot because he’s one of the people who helped write the anti-conflict rule into the original WSFS Constitution of 1962-1963.

(4) Ted White co-chaired NyCon 3 (1967), the Worldcon which originated the Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist Hugos. He also worked for F&SF at the time. Ted says: “F&SF withdrew itself; this was not a NyCon3 committee decision. Ed Ferman [the editor] had a nice sense of propriety.”

Ted says he didn’t take any steps to stay off the ballot in the fan categories the year he chaired the Worldcon. “I did not withdraw myself from the Fanwriter category (nor make any announcements to that effect) because I did not regard it as necessary. I wasn’t nominated that year, obviating the question.  My win the following year surprised me.” However, he probably did not need to make any announcement: people would have been aware of the anti-conflict rule in the Constitution.

White and F&SF both won Hugos the following year, 1968.

[Special thanks to Robert Lichtman and Ted White, as well as Darrell Schweitzer, Peggy Rae Sapienza, Michael J. Walsh, Elinor Busby and Wally Weber for their assistance in researching this article.]