Pixel Scroll 6/21/20 It Was Pixellation, I Know, Scrolling You All Alone

(1) YOU ARE NUMBER SIX — ACROSS. Robert Sawyer discovered his book is the first clue in today’s Sunday Mirror (UK) “Quizword and Crossword” puzzle.

(2) GENE WOLFE. Thomas Mirus’The Catholic Culture Podcast devoted a recent episode to “Gene Wolfe, Catholic Sci-Fi Legend”. Sandra Miesel (a three-time Hugo nominated fanwriter in the Seventies) and Fr, Brendon Laroche weigh in.

After much popular demand, Thomas pays tribute to legendary Catholic sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe, who passed away last year. Though not known to the general public, Wolfe is a sci-fi author’s sci-fi author—a number of his contemporaries considered him not only the best in the genre, but in American fiction at the time (Ursula Le Guin said “Wolfe is our Melville”). Among today’s writers, one of his biggest fans is Neil Gaiman.

One critic described Wolfe’s magnum opus, The Book of the New Sun, as “a Star Wars–style space opera penned by G. K. Chesterton in the throes of a religious conversion.”

Wolfe also held the patent on the machine that makes Pringles. That’s his face on the can.

In this episode, Fr. Brendon Laroche comments on Wolfe’s works, while Wolfe’s friend, Catholic historian and sci-fi expert Sandra Miesel, shares personal reminiscences.

(3) THE HALL NINE YARDS. Paul Fraser deconstructs the story choices of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volume 1, 1970, edited by Robert Silverberg, part one” It’s a long post filled with fascinatingly salty opinions.

… Already we can see the wheels beginning to come off. Are these stories by Sturgeon, Heinlein, Leiber, and Clarke really the best these writers wrote in the pre-1965 period? Do A Martian Odyssey and Twilight really belong in the same list as Flowers for Algernon or Nightfall?

The selection procedure becomes even more muddled as editor Silverberg bodges his way through the rest of the list: Arthur Clarke’s The Star is in the top fifteen but is bumped by The Nine Billion Names of God; one writer (Bradbury, I assume) has four stories on the original ballot but none in the top twenty, so Silverberg includes Mars is Heaven, “the story that the writer himself wished to see included in the book” (this, rather than the more obvious There Will Come Soft Rains or The Sound of Thunder)3; another writer’s stories “made the second fifteen, one vote apart; but the story with the higher number of votes was not the story that the writer himself wished to see included in the book” (presumably that is why the middling Huddling Place is here rather than the slam-dunk Desertion).

Definitive? I think not, and this will become even more apparent when we look at the stories themselves….

This footnote is a masterpiece of subversion:   

2. The SFWA has, at various times in its history, been as dodgy an electorate as any other—as one can see from the high correlation of peculiar winners to individuals holding office in the organisation (who conveniently had access to the mailing list of members)—and that’s before you factor in the tendency for a group of professionals to engage in “Buggins’ Turn” (see the Wikipedia article).

Let us also not forget that roughly the same set of voters made sure that the 1971 Nebula Award short story result was “No Award” so that none of the “New Wave” nominees would win, a partisan act that led to the mortifying scene where Isaac Asimov announced Gene Wolfe’s The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories as the winner at the Nebula Awards before having to correct himself.

(4) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • June 21, 1985  — Cocoon premiered. Directed by Ron Howard, it was produced by David Brown, Richard D. Zanuck and Lili Fini Zanuck. The screenplay was written by Tom Benedek off a story by David Saperstein. It starred Don Ameche, Wilford Brimle, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Brian Dennehy, Jack Gilford, Steve Guttenberg, Maureen Stapleton, Gwen Verdon, Herta Ware and Tahnee Welch. Music was by James Horner who did the same for The Wrath of Khan and Avatar. The film was overwhelmingly positively received, did very well at the box office and currently holds a rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes of 67%. 

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born June 21, 1839 – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.  Called the greatest writer of Latin America; the greatest black literary figure.  Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas – i.e. written after the grave – has been translated into Catalan, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, French.  Two dozen shorter stories; recent English collections in 2018, 2019.  (Died 1908) [JH]
  • Born June 21, 1882 – Rockwell Kent. “I don’t want petty self-expression,” he said; “I want to paint the rhythm of eternity.”  Illustrated Moby-Dick.  Here is Peace Oath.  Here is a bookplate.  His jazz-age-humorist side was signed “Hogarth, Jr.” in the original Vanity Fair and Life magazines.  Memoirs, This Is My Own and It’s Me, O Lord.  (Died 1971) [JH]
  • Born June 21, 1938 Mary Wickizer Burgess, 81. I noticed sometime back when searching iBooks for genre fiction that there was something called Megapacks showing up more and more such as The 25th Golden Age of Science Fiction MegapackThe Randall Garrett Megapack and The Occult Detective Megapack. They were big, generally around five hundred pages in length, and cheap, mostly around five dollars, but occasionally as little as ninety cents, in digital form! Starting in 1976, Mary and her husband, the now late Robert Reginald founded Borgo Press which has published hundreds in the past forty years. By the turn of the century, they’d already published three hundred Megapacks. I bought them for the purpose of getting as little as one story I wanted to read. (CE)
  • Born June 21, 1938 Ron Ely, 82. Doc Savage in Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, a film I saw a long time ago and remember little about. He was also, fittingly enough, Tarzan in that NBC late Sixties series. Somewhere Philip Jose Farmer is linking the two characters…  other notable genre roles included being a retired Superman from an alternate reality in a two-part episode “The Road to Hell” of the Superboy series, and playing five different characters on the original Fantasy Island which may or may not be a record. (CE)
  • Born June 21, 1944 – Hori Akira.  His Solar Wind Node won the 1980 Nihon SF Taisho Award; Babylonian Wave won the 1989 Seiun.  A dozen shorter stories, translated into English, German, Hungarian; “Open Up” is in Speculative Japan 2 (i.e. in English).  Non-fiction, Two People’s Trip on the SF Road (with Musashi Kanbe).  [JH]
  • Born June 21, 1947 Michael Gross, 73. Ok, I’ll admit that I’ve a fondness for the Tremors franchise in which he plays the extremely well-armed graboid hunter Burt Gummer. Other than the Tremors franchise, he hasn’t done a lot of genre work as I see just an episode of The Outer Limits where he was Professor Stan Hurst in “Inconstant Moon” (wasn’t that a Niven story?) and voicing a few Batman Beyond and Batman: The Animated Series characters. (CE)
  • Born June 21, 1948 – Sally Syrjala.  Active particularly in the Nat’l Fantasy Fan Fed’n; edited Tightbeam, Kaymar Award, President 2008-2009.  Elsewhere in fanzines e.g. Lan’s Lantern, LASFAPA (L.A. Scientifiction Fans’ Amateur Press Ass’n), indeed a regular correspondent of Vanamonde.  High school valedictorian.  Chaired the Friends of Cape Cod Museum of Art, trustee of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society.  Her File 770 appreciation is here.  (Died 2010) [JH]
  • Born June 21, 1955 – Sue Burke.  Translator (four books so far of Amadís de Gaula), fan, pro.  Recent novels SemiosisInterference; two dozen shorter stories, poems, in Abyss & ApexAsimov’sBeneath Ceaseless SkiesBroad SpectrumClarkesworldInterzoneSlate.  Alicia Gordon Award.  Milwaukee, Austin, Madrid, Chicago.  Her Website is here.
  • Born June 21, 1957 Berkeley Breathed, 63. ISFDB on the basis of a chapbook called Mars Needs Moms is willing to include him as genre but I’d argue that Bloom County which includes a talking penguin is genre as they are fantastic creatures. And he contributed three cartoons to the ConFederation Program Book. (CE)
  • Born June 21, 1964 David Morrissey, 56. His most well known role is playing The Governor on The Walking Dead (which is a series that I’ve not seen and have no interest of seeing as I don’t do zombies) but I saw his brilliant performance as Jackson Lake, the man who who believed he was The Doctor in “The Next Doctor”, a Tenth Doctor adventure which was an amazing story. He was also Theseus in The Storyteller: Greek Myths, and played Tyador Borlú in the BBC adaption of China Mieville’s The City & The City. I’ll admit that I’m very ambivalent about seeing it as I’ve listened the novel at least a half dozen times and have my own mental image of what it should be. He has also shows up in Good Omens as Captain Vincent. (CE)
  • Born June 21, 1965 Steve Niles, 55. Writer best-known for works such as 30 Days of NightCriminal Macabre, Simon Dark and Batman: Gotham County Line. I’ve read his Criminal Macabre: The Complete Cal McDonald Stories and the the graphic novel — great bit of horror! Sam Raimi adapted 30 Days of Night into a film. (CE)
  • Born June 21, 1984 – Theresa Hannig.  Steffan Lübbe Prize.  Seraph Prize for The Optimizers; next novel The Imperfect.  Just now a panelist at First Virtual Book Fair of the Saar (19-21 June).  Has been a project manager for solar-power plants.  [JH]

(6) DOUBLE HEADER. Galactic Journey reviews a pair of (1965) Ace Doubles. “[June 20, 1965] Ace Quadruple (June Galactoscope #1)”

[Kris Vyas-Myall and Cora Buhlert team up to cover two of the better Ace Doubles to have come out in a while. Enjoy!]

The Ballad of Beta-2, by Samuel R. Delany, and Alpha, Yes! Terra, no!, by Emil Petaja (Ace Double M-121)

I have generally been disappointed by the Ace Doubles so far this year. Those I have read have seemed to me to be quite old fashioned and I had been wondering if they were going to be heading into a more conservative route with them this year. Thankfully, this new Double I have found has been one of their best…

(7) THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY. The Library of America’s “Story of the Week” is Ambrose Bierce’s “Working for an Empress”. The explanation of how this story came to be is rather involved. Part of it is —

…Captured during the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III was deposed in September 1870 and lived in exile with the Empress and their entourage at Camden Place, a palatial country house in Kent, until his death in January 1873. James Mortimer, an American who served in France as an imperial private secretary, followed Louis-Napoleon and Eugénie to England and, with their financial support, established the London Figaro, the weekly that hired Bierce to write a column. In the spring of 1874, when Bierce had been in England for two years, Mortimer wrote him with a strange proposal: to edit and write a new publication called The Lantern, which was to be modeled after the seditious French journal published years earlier by Rochefort. Because Mortimer’s patron and friend, the Empress Eugénie, regarded the just-escaped Rochefort as “a menace and a terror,” Bierce was puzzled and discomfited by the offer. But his qualms were mostly overcome when was also told that the new magazine, like its predecessor, should be “irritatingly disrespectful of existing institutions and exalted personages”—a prospect that “delighted” Bierce. Still, the purpose of the new enterprise mystified him.

(8) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. In The Guardian: “Yeast of our worries: Marmite supplies hit by Covid-19 beer brewing slowdown”.

…When asked by a customer why larger 400g squeezy jars were hard to get hold of at the moment, the firm replied: “Due to brewers yeast being in short supply (one of the main ingredients in Marmite) Supplies of Marmite have been affected. As a temporary measure we have stopped production of all sizes apart from our 250g size jar which is available in most major retailers.” 

Brewers slowed and stalled production when pubs were forced to shut in an attempt to slow the Covid-19 pandemic.

[Thanks to John Hertz, Thomas Mirus, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Michael Toman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]

73 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/21/20 It Was Pixellation, I Know, Scrolling You All Alone

  1. A second reason to consider “Bloom County” as genre: all the Trek references!

  2. He’s a Puppy, so of course he’s trotting out another conspiracy theory, along with the Puppy fiction that the Hugo Awards at some point were much better than they are now.

  3. Can you help me out here — what would you point to that aligns him with the Puppies? I’ve linked to Paul Fraser a lot of times in the past few years — never saw that myself. Far as I can tell, he’s another acerbic Brit with KTF tendencies who does deep dives into sff topics.

  4. (5) Yes, “Inconstant Moon” is a Niven tale (I’ve never seen the Outer Limits adaptation, but have heard good things about it).

    P.S. Thanks for the title credit.

  5. (8) Good job my jar’s still half full – it should last me the rest of the year!

  6. Andrew says Yes, “Inconstant Moon” is a Niven tale (I’ve never seen the Outer Limits adaptation, but have heard good things about it).

    Huh. I’ll have to see if I can find a copy of it to watch. Right now, I reading his Flatlander collection which is most of the Gil the ARM stories. They’re holding up reasonably well.

  7. JJ on June 21, 2020 at 4:02 pm said:
    Anybody who unironically refers to “SJWs vs. Puppies” is a Puppy. Everyone else knows that’s not actually a thing that ever existed.

    If that’s the worst thing you can point to, I think maybe you should cut him some slack.

    Has he engaged in a campaign of slander against anyone? Has he used racially charged language to demean anyone? Has he tried to silence people who disagree with him about SFF? If not, then maybe he’s not a villain.

    He was using that phrase to describe the “cultural zeitgeist”. How else would you describe that moment in time?

  8. 5) It seems more likely that Breathed provided cartoons than cartons, but I wasn’t at ConFederation, so who knows?

  9. Things I want to comment on.

    But things dropping from my hands, and I’m jumping at everything, and the amateur fireworks started in the afternoon, and have continued intermittently.

    I am not functional.

  10. @JJ
    Paul Fraser is certainly ascerbic and has conservative tastes and a preference for older SFF, but I wouldn’t call him a puppy, even though he’s not a huge fan of current Hugo finalists.

  11. BREAKING NEWS: The current edition of Battlefield Earth is subtitled “A Classic Dystopian Book.” Um, yeah….

  12. @Lis
    Lots of sympathy. And possibly good earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones.
    (My area has had pyrotechnics or super-subwoofer concerts every night for most of the last month. Much swearing has ensued.)

  13. OlavRokne: If that’s the worst thing you can point to, I think maybe you should cut him some slack.

    Claiming that SFWA Board Members were rigging the Nebulas? Claiming that the Hugos used to recognize greatness, but have totally gone downhill (“Already we can see the wheels beginning to come off”)? “SJWs vs. Puppies”?

    If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I’m calling it a duck.

     
    OlavRokne: He was using that phrase to describe the “cultural zeitgeist”. How else would you describe that moment in time?

    Far-right ideologues attacking the Hugo Awards.

    It was never “SJWs vs. Puppies”, there was no such thing. It was always “Puppies vs. Worldcon members”.

  14. As it happens I did see the adaptation of “Inconstant Moon” with Michael Gross in it. My main recollection was that the adaptation got very sentimental, where the really interesting thing about the original (at least to me) was its lack of sentiment.

  15. @JJ

    Ehh. The Puppies are a fairly specific group (i.e. people who attacked the Hugo Awards as part of the groups Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies) which so far as I can tell Fraser wasn’t a part of. He can be someone you strongly disagree with and think is spreading unfair accusations against organisations you like without being a Puppy. I don’t think we should turn it into a catch-all term.

    (I’m not sure he was accusing SFWA board members of rigging the Nebulas; I think he was suggesting that they had an advantage when campaigning for votes. Which maps closely enough to what I’m sure I’ve seen people I respect and trust suggest about the Nebulas of past years that he might not actually be that far off the mark.)

  16. Meredith, fine, I will amend to “Puppy-adjacent” which is the term I use for people who make it clear that they agreed with what the Puppies were saying, even if they don’t come out publicly specifically in support of the Puppies.

    That whole “the Hugo Awards used to recognize good works, and now they no longer do” canard is something for which I have very little patience. There’s an ongoing discussion over at Cam’s about the way that some people try to retcon the Hugos to be something different from what they actually were, along with the “SFF since 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 years ago has absolutely gone to hell, but before that, it was so much more fantastic” idiocy.

  17. JJ: I’m a lot more interested in seeing a discussion of Paul Fraser’s critique of a classic short story collection.

  18. Fraser’s criticism of the SFWA membership that voted on stories was that they were opposed to the New Wave. That’s a valid critique. His story about how Gene Wolfe was treated at the Nebula Awards is painful.

    Now, as to Silverberg’s SF Hall of Fame Anthology, look at the original publication dates on the stories in Volume 1:

    “A Martian Odyssey” 1934
    “Twilight” 1934
    “Helen O’Loy” 1938
    “The Roads Must Roll” 1940
    “Microcosmic God” 1941
    “Nightfall” 1941
    “The Weapon Shop” 1942
    “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” 1943
    “Huddling Place” 1944
    “Arena” 1944
    “First Contact” 1945

    The most recent story was published 15 years before the New Wave was considered to have started. Is this an intentional snub, or what?

    I agree with Fraser that the collection contains some great stories and some clunkers, but I disagree on which is which. “A Martian Odyssey” is a charming story with a memorable alien character. “Twilight” is thoughtful and moving. Both stories changed the field, for the better. And both stories have not aged badly. On the other hand, I don’t want to reread “Helen O’Loy” or “The Roads Must Roll.” I find it strange that Fraser is so worked up about the importance of the New Wave, but then with older stories he is unappreciative of the stories that were stylistically and thematically new for their time.

    Two years after editing The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Silverberg published Dying Inside. Nowadays many people think of Silverberg as a New Wave author. He certainly wrote stories that were stylistically out there.

    I’m not sure what to make of all this. If I were to do an anthology, I wouldn’t choose the same stories that Silverberg did. That was 50 years ago. Certainly any new SF Hall of Fame would have to include Ballard and Moorcock and Russ and Le Guin and Tiptree and, well, Silverberg too. But I also don’t agree with Fraser’s critique. Maybe it is a definitional thing. Does “Hall of Fame” mean the most important and influential stories of their time, or the most enduring stories, or the stories that are truly great? I think everyone can agree “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” should be included either way. The SFWA membership for the Silverberg anthology seems to have taken the first, historical perspective. Also 1945 was not that long ago in 1970, and at that time everyone who was a fan or pro was very familiar with the older stories.

  19. 1945 was not that long ago in 1970, and at that time everyone who was a fan or pro was very familiar with the older stories.

    Tom Becker is right here. One of the remarkable things about sf publishing in roughly the mid-sixties to mid-seventies was that almost everything of any interest from the forties and fifties was reprinted — and some of the thirties material, too. We could keep up with the new stuff and read whatever we wanted of the old stuff. We knew the history of the field.

    Nowadays it’s pretty much impossible to keep up with the new stuff. And I have even heard contemporary writers complain whenever a standard publisher reprints something old, because they want publishers to encourage readers to buy current authors. (But, of course, not to let their own work go out of print.)

  20. My math was off by 10 years. Oops. 1945 in 1970 was 25 years in the past. Like 1995 is today.

  21. The most recent story was published 15 years before the New Wave was considered to have started. Is this an intentional snub, or what?

    That’s only the first half of the full anthology, though — it was split for UK publication, and the contents of all editions were arranged in chronological order. Here’s what was in the second part: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?403912

    Only A Rose for Ecclesiastes is closely associated with the New Wave (though Fondly Fahrenheit and Flowers for Algernon could be seen as forerunners). But then in 1970 the New Wave was still fairly new and the Hall of Fame title suggests that it’s for works that had already got a sustained reputation.

  22. And I have even heard contemporary writers complain whenever a standard publisher reprints something old, because they want publishers to encourage readers to buy current authors.

    I have been known to complain “Oh FFS, not the Nine Billion Names of God again

    And that’s before such weight was given to Clarke’s dodginess.

  23. I must admit, I’ve never really thought of Dying Inside or Flowers For Algernon as connected with The New Wave. Maybe because although they’re both a little experimental (by SF standards of the day), they’re extremely successful experiments and great stories, whereas much of, say, Dangerous Visions or Jerry Cornelius, feels more experimental and less successful (with the caveat that it’s many years since I’ve read any of these).

  24. Cliff: whereas much of, say, Dangerous Visions or Jerry Cornelius, feels more experimental and less successful (with the caveat that it’s many years since I’ve read any of these).

    I tried to read the first Cornelius book a year or so ago, and it was so awful, I had to stop. It’s hard for me to believe that it was ever considered meritorious.

  25. I have to say, if I saw an anthology marketed as a “Hall of Fame”, I’d expect it to be full of older and more familiar stories – “Hall of Fame” implies enduring reputation, so it’d have to be made up of stories that had had, well, time to endure.

    (Will admit to being with JJ on Jerry Cornelius… I worked through the four main novels, and, umm, it was work. Not pleasure.)

  26. I agree with both of you. I did read all four, as well as a couple of short story compilations, but came away feeling stupid. I thought it was my fault, and so desperately wanted to ‘get it’. I seem to recall enjoying parts of the third.

    One of them was given some book-of-the-year award by The Guardian, I seem to remember.

  27. Do I recall correctly that the SF Hall of Fame volumes were intended to honor works from before the institution of the Nebula Awards (in 1966)? Which leaves very little room for the New Wave.
    But Fraser was complaining about lack of New Wave in the 1971 Nebulas, not in the SFHoF anyway.

  28. I got through the first four Cornelius books in my teen years, probably because I was such a Moorcock fan. However, I never did get to the second Cornelius anthology and it stares at me accusingly from my bookshelf. I can’t bring myself to read it or to sell it, go figure.

  29. A member at The Avocado, a pop-culture discussion site, posted a look back at a 1946 Superman radio play in which Jimmy Olsen and Superman investigate an anti-immigrant group. I found it a really interesting discussion. A different story from the radio series was recently adapted into the graphic novel Superman Smashes the Klan.

  30. @JJ @Steve J Wright @Rob Thornton
    Many years ago, I tried to read a Jerry Cornelius book and disliked it so much along with Chthon by Piers Anthony (which isn’t even considered New Wave, I think) that I was reluctant to try anything labelled New Wave a quite a while afterwards, because I had decided based on those two books that the New Wave wasn’t for me.

  31. I also read the first four Cornelius books (in that giant mass-market omnibus) a few times in my teens & twenties, but haven’t been able to bring myself to revisit them. And not only do I have the second omnibus staring accusingly from my bookshelf, I have the third omnibus staring accusingly from my bookshelf.

    (And I have a similar relationship with the Pyatt books, although possibly for different reasons.)

    Also yes, it seems … questionable to ding an anthology specifically designed to showcase older work for not including more recent work.

  32. Today’s meta-modest proposal, or at least a gedanken, suppose we bleshed NIGHTFALL with THE NINE BILL NsOG, making their plot events simutaneous, or contemporaneous, or whatever, such that name #9,000,000,000 was reached just as [** WARNING! PLOT SPOILERS!**] the sky-darkening eclipse allowed the bazillions of stars to be seen, said stars began winking out.

  33. Mike Glyer on June 21, 2020 at 9:52 pm said:
    JJ: I’m a lot more interested in seeing a discussion of Paul Fraser’s critique of a classic short story collection.

    Sorry to dredge this up, but there’s a few things that were said that kind of pick at me.

    It was always “Puppies vs. Worldcon members”.

    It was my impression that anyone who buys a Worldcon membership was a member of that year’s Worldcon. Maybe I just don’t understand the appropriate way to gatekeep Worldcon membership?

    Claiming that the Hugos used to recognize greatness, but have totally gone downhill

    This is not an opinion that I hold, but it’s not an opinion that I think people should be castigated for holding. If someone expresses an opinion I disagree with, I gotta ask: “are they being a jerk about it?”

    If Fraser had said racist, sexist or homophobic things about recent winners, that would be a completely different matter. If he had tried to silence people, or censor people, that would be a completely different matter. Then I could see taking issue with him. But when I asked you directly about that, you were not able to point to any instances of him doing so.

    “Puppy-adjacent” which is the term I use for people who make it clear that they agreed with what the Puppies were saying

    Because we need a derogatory term for people with whom we disagree?

    I’ll note that Fraser doesn’t seem to have endorsed the creation of a slate, or any active campaign to undermine Hugo nominations/voting. He’s expressed his preferences in terms of what he likes to read in SFF, and what he is likely to vote for in the awards. Do you think he should only be allowed to promote books by authors you approve of? Could I get a list of which books we’re allowed to enjoy so that I don’t engage in WrongThink™?

    David Shallcross on June 22, 2020 at 4:43 am said:
    Do I recall correctly that the SF Hall of Fame volumes were intended to honor works from before the institution of the Nebula Awards (in 1966)? Which leaves very little room for the New Wave.

    That was my understanding as well.

    I’d argue that the New Wave was as much a literary movement as a generational shift in the readership of SFF. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baby Boomers became a dominant market for the genre, and also started to be Worldcon voters. They voted for works that represented their concerns, their worldview … and some members of an older generation of fen resisted that shift and resented it.

    A similar event has taken place over the past 20 years, as Millennial fans started buying, reading, and voting for works that address concerns and themes pertinent to their generation. Much like in the 1970s, an older generation resisted and resented it.

    Backing up this analysis, there are two points when which the average age of authors with works on the Hugo shortlist suddenly decreased: the 1970s and the 2010s. You can see it in those decades being littered with the youngest Hugo finalist authors; in the 1970s GRRM, Lisa Tuttle, Spider Robinson, Vonda McIntyre, Joan Vinge. In the 2010s Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Alyssa Wong, Rachel Swirsky, Sarah Gailey, Aliette de Bodard.

    (As a Gen X fan myself, I’m part of a smaller demographic cohort that has never been the dominant voice in SF. A lot of the SF responding to these two demographic bubbles doesn’t really speak to me … but then it doesn’t have to. I don’t have to be the target audience to know that it has value to those it is speaking to.)

  34. Uncle Hugo’s posted a link to a post contailing info about its current situation, links to sweatshirt and t-shirt ordering and details about the fire and surrounding timeline.

  35. @OlavRokne: It was my impression that anyone who buys a Worldcon membership was a member of that year’s Worldcon. Maybe I just don’t understand the appropriate way to gatekeep Worldcon membership? The Puppies joined one Worldcon in a deliberate attempt at sabotage. I would like to find a more-accurate divider than “Puppies vs Worldcon members”, but Fraser’s categorization of the dispute categorizes the 3000 or more who took late supporting memberships as SJWs, where ISTM they were more interested in fair play and the continued health of the field.

    @David Shallcross: But Fraser was complaining about lack of New Wave in the 1971 Nebulas, not in the SFHoF anyway. No, he complains about the New Wave getting block-voted out of winning (by the selection of No Award) — and he complains much more broadly about the total lack of New Wave in SFHoF, e.g the exclusion of Aldiss and Ballard.

    @Olave Rokne:

    A similar event has taken place over the past 20 years, as Millennial fans started buying, reading, and voting for works that address concerns and themes pertinent to their generation. Much like in the 1970s, an older generation resisted and resented it.

    You present the “older generation” as a monolith; this is debatable at best. Bear in mind that Boomers were also dealing with Issues (civil rights, feminism, use of power, ecology) that are still relevant; some of us have not forgotten that — or even taken up the idea that they were permanently solved in our time.

    @JJ: there’s nothing in this article about the Hugos; your reports about his they-aren’t-like-they-used-to-be complaints are way too vague to mark him as a Puppy, or even Puppy-adjacent (which by that standard would encompass a large chunk of fandom).

  36. David Shallcross on June 22, 2020 at 4:43 am said:
    Do I recall correctly that the SF Hall of Fame volumes were intended to honor works from before the institution of the Nebula Awards (in 1966)? Which leaves very little room for the New Wave.

    Your recollection is correct: in fact, stories were restricted to those published before December 31, 1964 – this is specifically mentioned in Silverberg’s introduction to Volume One. The SFHoF was specifically intended to serve as the retro-Nebulas for stories published before the award was introduced, as voted on by the members of the SFWA. Hence the absence of the New Wave, which had barely begun to appear at that point, and the historical focus of the chosen stories.

    I’m pretty much on the same page as Tom Becker regarding Fraser’s criticisms. Also note that – with the single exception of “The Star”, which came in 15th place in the voting, and was left out because it was decided to only include a single story from each author (Clarke was the only writer to place two stories in the top 15) – Silverberg made no editorial choices over the first 15 places (which included 5 ties), only the remaining eleven places (the total number limited by the allowed length of the volume). And while I might have picked “There Will Come Soft Rains” or “A Sound of Thunder” over “Mars is Heaven!”, this is coming down to personal choice out of a trio of great stories, and I can’t really fault Silverberg for yielding to Bradbury’s preference as to which one he wanted included in the volume.

  37. @ChipHitchcock
    You present the “older generation” as a monolith; this is debatable at best.

    I expressed myself inelegantly here, and you are correct. Thank you for giving me a chance to clarify.

    What I mean to say is that some portion of the older generation (in both cases) responded negatively. In both cases, there were some who just got annoyed, some who said inappropriate things, and some who threw a tantrum. Whether or not this was a significant portion of the older generation, I leave up to debate. But in both cases, the intransigent elements were loud enough to be noticeable.

    Bear in mind that Boomers were also dealing with Issues (civil rights, feminism, use of power, ecology) that are still relevant; some of us have not forgotten that — or even taken up the idea that they were permanently solved in our time.

    Yeah. Those themes certainly are still relevant. But the New Wave was at least as much about psychadelics, and experimental literary forms, as it was about those issues. Just look at the proportion of Moorcock’s New Worlds run is devoted to stories about doing acid.

    A lot of the acid-trip New Wave SFF hasn’t aged nearly as well, at least to my eye. I know they both have their proponents, but when I look at the novel Sylva or try to read The Butterfly Kid … they are really novels just for Boomers.

    There’s also a lot of content in the iconic New Wave anthology Dangerous Visions that hasn’t aged so well either.

  38. I’m too old to be a boomer–in fact, I’m old enough to have taught college-level SF courses to boomers, starting more than 50 years ago. I’d have to dig out my old syllabi to be sure, but I think the SFHoF paperback edition was one of the anthologies I used.

    There were always problems finding texts for those courses back then–popular-literature titles went into and out of print. The appeals of the HoF were that it included a decent swath of “classic” magazine short fiction and that it seemed designed to remain available. (I would have actually preferred the SF Book Club’s two-volume, Anthony Boucher-edited Treasury of Great Science Fiction set–four novels, twenty shorter pieces by many (then) big names–but that was a logistical impossibility.

    As for Fraser’s critique of the HoF anthology, much of it seems to me to be personal-preference quibbles–X would be a better choice than Y–embedded in a basic misunderstanding of what that collection was trying to be. There was no thought of pleasing him when it was compiled.

  39. Russell Letson: Just a purely personal response, but when I read my SFBC edition of the Silverberg-edited HoF volume I thought in about 90% of the cases “These are exactly the right stories to pick!” Why did I think that? I’d only been reading sff for maybe five or six years by the time a copy came into my hands, but I’d read a lot of it by then. There would, therefore, have been to some extent a selection bias in that I’d seen these stories before in other collections curated by an editor who valued them highly — maybe the Healy/McComas collection, or the Boucher, and the prozines were doing annual hardcovers of their best short fiction in the Sixties, which I’d have found in the library. And in Sam Lundwall’s book about sff authors he would have talked about what stories of theirs had the highest reputations. So the SFWA members who voted on the Hall of Fame and I probably shared a lot of the perceived wisdom of which stories were the milestones of accomplishment in the field. Not that historic or literary significance was enough. They couldn’t put a hundred or five hundred top stories in one book. What singled out some of these HoF stories was their emotional impact on readers of the time — experiences that were no more than a couple decades in the past when the HoF vote was taken. And what wowed readers then is not what wows them today (or did in 1980, for that matter.)

  40. As I think about it, when I was in high school (during the Reagan administration), I took an SF course as one of my English electives, and at least part of our reading came from one or more of the Hall of Fame volumes; and within the past couple of years, I picked up all five volumes (1, 2A, 2B, 3, 4) at Uncle Hugo’s, but haven’t gotten around to dipping into them yet.

  41. @Mike Glyer wrote:

    What singled out some of these HoF stories was their emotional impact on readers of the time — experiences that were no more than a couple decades in the past when the HoF vote was taken. And what wowed readers then is not what wows them today

    I agree wholeheartedly with you about this approach. It’s one of the things I really like about what James W. Harris is doing on his site:
    classicsofsciencefiction.com/lists-used

    Comparing the “definitive” lists of great works of SFF as compiled in different decades gives a very interesting look at the changing perception of the field.

  42. 3) I think Fraser is too hard on Weinbaum’s Martian Odyssey. His own description of the aim of the anthology includes the acknowledgment that the compilers meant to make selections noting the context of the historic period they first appeared in. In that context, Martian Odyssey AFAIK contains the first alien that is both sympathetic and depicted as mentally ALIEN – with thought processes we can’t easily understand, not just figuratively a human in alien makeup. In that context, it was a giant step forward, and deserves to be recognized as such.

  43. Mike–Yes, by the time the SFHoF was assembled there was already a kind of ad-hoc consensus about a Golden Age canon–certainly which writers, if not every particular story. I’m a few years older than you and started reading SF around 1955, guided not by what was appearing in the magazines at the time but by the contents of the big anthologies on the library shelves. So it was Healy & McComas, Groff Conklin, Bleiler & Dikty, and such who formed my sense of what was representative American SF. A bit later, Tony Boucher reinforced what might be called the Conklin School of retrospective vision and Judith Merril broadened the notion of what current SF might be. But through most of the 1950s, “classic” SF was what was preserved in those anthologies.

    The SFWA members who voted on the SFHoF stories could hardly avoid being affected by that consensus, since few of them would have bothered to root around in the original magazines to look for alternate candidates, though I suppose a number of them would have been old enough to have memories of the original appearances in the pulps. (The Futurians, say, were merely middle-aged back then.)

    There’s a similar process of canon-formation in other areas of the lit biz–we teach what is available, which is governed by availability (or affordability) of editions. Part of the basic work of literary scholarship is to keep digging and sifting, hoping to find an underappreciated or completely unknown artist to put on the shelf next to Shakespeare and Austen and Dickinson–and mostly coming up with perfectly respectable, close-but-no-cigar or one-shot additions.

    (I should add a disclaimer: I am nearly two generations out of the academic end of the lit biz, so one might take that last paragraph accordingly.)

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