Listing to the Other Side

The Long List of Hugo Awards site has restored to full Hugo status the 1953 awards given to Forry Ackerman and Willy Ley, the 1956 awards to Ley and Damon Knight, and the 1958 award to Walt Willis. The corrections have been made without public explanation.

It was only this year that the reclassification of the Hugos as “Special Awards” by the FOLLE committee in 2003-2004 came to light and became a source of controversy.  I happened to notice the changes today while researching a post, and I know they are recent because I checked the site before I wrote about the matter in the current File 770.

3 thoughts on “Listing to the Other Side

  1. This is good news, but reinstatements have not yet been made for the Ley and Knight Hugos for 1956 and the Willis Hugo for 1958 on Kevin Standlee’s “Official Hugo Awards” website (http://www.thehugoawards.org/) which I understand is a WSFS sanctioned website.

    By the way, I am a member of the FOLLE committee and your blog posting is the first I’ve heard of this correction to the FOLLE Hugo Awards Long List. There is a listserve for FOLLE members, but there was no notification of the change. You are correct that there has been an appalling lack of transparency in the way the FOLLE committee has addressed this issue.

  2. Just in case anyone was still in doubt about the Ackerman and Ley awards for 1953, the Progress Reports for the 1953 Worldcon can be found at http://www.fanac.org/worldcon/Philcon/w53-pubs.html

    In PR #3, the Science Fiction Achievement Awards are announced, and “Fan Personality” and “Fact Article(s)” are both shown as proper categories on the ballot, just like the other categories. They are treated similarly in PR #4.

    It’s apparent that Ackerman’s and Ley’s awards were voted on by the same method as the other awards that year.

  3. Rich:

    I’m uncomfortable with you calling http://www.TheHugoAwards.org/ “Kevin Standlee’s site.” Although I’m one of the maintainers, I don’t own it. If you want to get very technical, Deb Geisler owns the domain names because she’s the ones who registered them, but the site is “owned” (in the sense of who pays the bills) by the WSFS Hugo Awards Marketing Committee and paid for by Mark Protection Committee funds, which means it’s jointly owned by all Worldcons since that’s’ the MPC’s primary funding source.

    I did go back and make the changes a few days ago when I saw (from this article!) that they’d been made on the FOLLE committee’s list. I had been leery of making the corrections until I knew that the FOLLE list — which is theoretically the canonical one — had been corrected, and, as you note, nothing was said on the FOLLE’s committee’s own e-mail list about this.

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