Where To Find The 1943 Retro Hugo Finalists For Free Online

By JJ, with content provided by Nicholas Whyte, Kat Jones, Carla H., Joe Siclari, Edie Stern, FANAC.org, Bill Burns, eFanzines.com, and The Internet Archive

Since the 1943 Retro Hugo Voter’s packet has not yet arrived, if you’d like to get a head start on your reading, you can use this handy guide to find material which is available for free online.

The Professional Artist images are taking quite a long time to locate and format into galleries, so I have gone ahead with this post so that people will be able to start reading works. When the galleries are finished, I will post an update.

Related articles:

Best Novel

  • Beyond This Horizon, by Anson MacDonald (Robert A. Heinlein) (Astounding Science Fiction, published as a two-part serial: April 1942 and May 1942)
  • Darkness and the Light, by Olaf Stapledon (Methuen / S.J.R. Saunders)
  • Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak (Black Mask, September-November 1942)
  • Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright (Farrar & Rinehart)

(the published book is 1,014 pages; this archive is 2,293 scanned pages of the original unpublished, uncut manuscript and related materials, and if anyone can provide the page range of a 100- to 200-page segment of this archive as a recommended reading sample, it would be appreciated)

Best Novella

Best Novelette

Best Short Story

Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form

  • Bambi, written by Perce Pearce, Larry Morey, et al., directed by David D. Hand et al. (Walt Disney Productions)  trailer
  • Cat People, written by DeWitt Bodeen, directed by Jacques Tourneur (RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.)  trailer
  • The Ghost of Frankenstein, written by W. Scott Darling, directed by Erle C. Kenton (Universal Pictures)  trailer
  • I Married a Witch, written by Robert Pirosh and Marc Connelly, directed by René Clair (Cinema Guild Productions / Paramount Pictures)  trailer
  • Invisible Agent, written by Curtis Siodmak, directed by Edwin L. Marin (Frank Lloyd Productions / Universal Pictures)  trailer
  • Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, written by Laurence Stallings, directed by Zoltan Korda (Alexander Korda Films, Inc. / United Artists)  trailer

Best Editor – Short Form

John W. Campbell

Oscar J. Friend

  • Captain Future 1942 (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter)
  • Startling Stories 1942 (Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep, Nov)
  • Thrilling Wonder Stories 1942 (Feb, Apr, Jun, Aug, Oct, Dec)

Dorothy McIlwraith

Raymond A. Palmer

Malcolm Reiss

  • Planet Stories 1942 (Spring, Summer)
  • Jungle Stories 1942 (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter)

Donald A. Wollheim

Best Professional Artist (galleries still under construction)

  • Hannes Bok
  • Margaret Brundage
  • Edd Cartier
  • Virgil Finlay
  • Harold W. McCauley
  • Hubert Rogers

Best Fanzine

Best Fan Writer

* if you encounter any invalid links, please let me know in the comments *

Source links:

 

16 thoughts on “Where To Find The 1943 Retro Hugo Finalists For Free Online

  1. The Kindle US link for The Uninvited goes to a “Sorry, we cannot find this page” at Amazon.

  2. Thanks, Robert, it looks as though a space sneaked in there. I’ll get Mike to fix it.

    The Uninvited, by Dorothy Macardle (Kindle US)

  3. At first I was somewhat disturbed by how much more familiar I was with these titles than the current year’s nominees, then I realised I’ve had a lot more time to encounter them.

  4. I’ve often used archive.org as a resource, and I think that what they do is a good thing.

    While it is true that many of the pulps they host scans of did not have copyright renewed, and that archive.org represents them as being in the public domain, in many (most?) cases, the individual authors did renew copyrights to the individual stories, and many of them (or their literary estates) would dispute that it is legal/appropriate for the stories to be available like this.

    I don’t think that making these old stories available is at the level of ripping a DVD of the newest Star Wars movie and uploading it to a torrent host; but neither is reading them an action completely devoid of ethical concerns. YMMV.

  5. A lot of the issues linked above do have renewed copyrights of their own (in addition to the individual story renewals that Bill notes). Astounding, for instance, started renewing issue copyrights starting with the October 1933 issue, and I think most of the later issues were copyright-renewed as well, though I haven’t done a systematic check for this magazine past the first renewal.

    I have done a more thorough survey of Amazing Stories, another magazine linked above, and while it didn’t renew any of its 1942 issues, 6 out of its 12 issues that year have copyright-renewed contributions.

    More details can be found in my inventory of copyright-renewed serials in the link for my name in this comment. Basically, don’t assume that any of the post-1922 pulps uploaded to the Internet Archive are necessarily in the public domain. Some are, and some aren’t (in part or in whole), and as far as I can tell the main uploaders don’t do much checking of them before uploading.

  6. There’s also the issue that some magazine copyright renewals are only for editorial content.

  7. Thanks so much, JJ. This will make voting SO MUCH easier–I remember most of these stories, but haven’t re-read them in years.

    Historical questions just from looking at the Tables of Contents:

    Why was Heinlein using pseudonyms in this period? Why did he use different ones for Astounding and Unknown Worlds?

    I never heard of Jane Rice before (I think). Does anyone know why she didn’t use a pseud while C.L. Moore did? Wikipedia says Moore wasn’t trying to hide her gender, but the fact that she was writing, but I don’t know how true that is.

  8. Doctor Science: Why was Heinlein using pseudonyms in this period? Why did he use different ones for Astounding and Unknown Worlds?

    The Patterson bio says Heinlein used pseudonyms for the following reasons, depending on the magazine and story: (1) to keep Heinlein stories a kind of brand; (2) so it wouldn’t look like his early productivity was taking over the pages of Astounding; (3) to avoid associating his name with stories that were good enough to sell but not good enough for his “brand.”

  9. In the magazines I’ve looked at in my copyright surveys, I’ve noticed that many of the pseudonymous magazine stories by well-known authors were in issues that also had another story by the same author under their usual name. It seems to have been fairly common for some magazines to print multiple stories by the same author, but want to make it look like every story was by a different author.

    Sometimes the pseudonymous stories were popular enough to spawn later magazine stories using the same characters or setting. In those cases, the pseudonym was also often reused for those later stories, to avoid confusing people.

  10. Last two pages of Donovan’s Brain were missing but are included in the plain text version
    here (Famous Fantastic Mysteries vol. 11 #6)

  11. @Doctor Science

    I never heard of Jane Rice before (I think). Does anyone know why she didn’t use a pseud while C.L. Moore did? Wikipedia says Moore wasn’t trying to hide her gender, but the fact that she was writing, but I don’t know how true that is.

    The story I’ve seen about C.L. Moore in several places was that she used a pseudonym because she was afraid that she’d lose her well paid job at a bank, if her boss knew she was writing. Some of these sources are academic works I consider trustworthy. Of course, it’s still noteworthy that she decided on a gender-neutral pen name rather than go by e.g. Lucille Moore.

    I’ve never heard of Jane Rice either. Not even books about woman SFF writers of the 1930s and 1940s mention her.

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