Immediately after Jim Baen died in 2006, his friends’ wide-ranging discussions about their great respect and affection for him as a person, and regard for his accomplishments as an editor, woke Francis Turner to the realization fandom would have only one more chance to vote him the Best Editor Hugo
Baen had revitalized Galaxy in the 1970s with works from many top writers (most of John Varley’s great early stories were published in Baen’s Galaxy). He ran Ace’s sf book line under publisher Tom Doherty, and later did the same at TOR Books, before starting his own company, Baen Books. Prior to his death he’d received seven Hugo nominations, but the last had been in 1981 and he had never won the award.
Francis Turner wrote a blog post on L’Ombre de l’Olivier in August 2006 encouraging people not only to vote Baen the Best Editor (Long Form) Hugo the following year — but to visualize “A Baen Sweep of the Hugos”.
Turner listed three goals:
- Get Jim Baen nominated and voted for Editor (books) for 2006 [i.e., the eligibility year for the 2007 Hugos]
- Increase the participation in the Hugo process
- Get some Baen works on the ballots
Turner’s first stop in the get-out-the-vote campaign was going to be Baen’s Bar.
As noted at Toni’s Table, the electorate for Hugo awards (and the Campbell award) is almost as small and fluid as that of a “Rotten Burough”. Also noted there is that Baen hasn’t won many such awards recently despite Baen being the #2 or #3 (depending on how you count/who is counting) speculative fiction (SF) publisher. This totally unaffiliated page is therefore set up so that loyal Baen Barflies can do a little consensus building and nominate appropriately with the goal of seeing Jim Baen nominated as editor and ideally also seeing a Baen author/artist win some other category of the 2007 Hugo awards.
Some of Turner’s other arguments have proven equally evergreen:
The participation of the wider SF community in the Hugo awards is declining….
To be honest I find it sad that even 5 years ago less than 1000 people could be bothered to vote for the awards that are supposed to represent all of SF-fandom. The fact that these numbers have now dwindled to two thirds of that in 2006 is even more tragic. What I think is also sad is that I, personally, had only read one 2006 Novel nominee – Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” – and that a number of books that I thought were great did not appear. Most of the books I liked were published by Baen (but not all were) and it was notable that none of the 5 most nominated works were published by Baen…
This is an attempt to mobilise the large number of loyal Baen readers to nominate and vote so that their point of view is recognised within the SF world. I believe both the awards and SF as a whole would benefit from the Hugos not being seen as a high-brow cliquey award…. I hope to do this by convincing a number of loyal Baen readers (aka Barflies) to register as attendees for Worldcon 2007 or as voting associates and, having done so, to nominate Jim Baen for the editor award and to nominate some Baen works/authors/artists for the other awards.
Well aware of the objections that would be raised in other quarters, Turner preemptively insisted —
There is NO intention to produce a Baen “slate” and to insist (as if it were possible) that Barflies nominate and vote for the “slate”.
And another entire section tried to deflect “Potential Controversy.” There, Turner offered such reassurances as —
Secondly despite the title, I neither want nor expect a sweep of all the awards – not in 2007 at least 🙂 .
Surprisingly, considering how well Correia and Torgersen did with the same arguments later on, Turner’s appeal failed to generate the faintest support.
Yes, Jim Baen was nominated for Best Editor. However, that was accomplished with just 30 votes and there’s no sign they were the product of any concerted effort. Because if you look at the Best Novel category in the 2007 Hugo Award nominating statistics you’ll find zero Baen novels among the top 27 books receiving votes — and it took only four votes to be listed in the report.
Two other Baen Editors, Toni Weisskopf and Jim Minz, each received seven votes.
Although Mike Resnick’s novelette “All the Things You Are” (Jim Baen’s Universe October 2006) was a Hugo finalist, nobody has had more fiction nominated for the Hugo than Resnick. He achieved that result without any dependence on Turner’s efforts.
But reading Turner’s 10-year-old post certainly produces a stunning sense of déjà-vu.
[Thanks to Mark-kitteh for the story.]
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I am not saying it is all Toni Weisskopf’s fault but:
1. the standard Puppy complaint that Tor is somehow controlling or dominating the Hugos does not make much sense factually *except* when considering the Best Editor Long Form.
2. Similarly the deep antipathy to PNH may be more VD related but there is a clear reason why fans of Jim Baen may feel aggrieved by PNH’s victory for Best Editor Long Form.
3. Toni W’s long call to arms at According to Hoyt in 2014 doesn’t overtly mention Sad Puppies but does cast awards in terms of a culture war http://accordingtohoyt.com/2014/03/10/the-problem-of-engagement-a-guest-post-by-toni-weisskopf/
4. While ‘Baen author’ very much does not equal ‘Puppy supporter’, it is a common point between Hoyt, Correia, Torgersen and Freer – and also Correia and Torgersen’s main source of perspective on Hugos and Worldcon etc will have been from Baen Books/Weisskopf
5. Brad was most aggrieved by Toni W losing to No Award – far more than any other category and it is the one vote that seems to outrage him the most, way past even Brad’s odd-boundaries of outrage.
Historical note: When Judy-Lynn del Rey was finally voted a Hugo just after she died, Lester told Worldcon to stick their rocket ship where the sun, moon, and stars don’t shine.
Good gods. Is Correia actually mocking Stephen King being hit by a car? That’s appalling.
@Camestros
The “Baen good, TOR bad” part of the kerfluffle always seemed to me to be the most confusing motivation, although both parts of that weren’t necessarily trotted out at the same time. From my personal point of view it was baffling because why would I hate a publisher? I’ve only ever paid the barest attention to whose logo was on the spine.
It’s not clear whether this blog really relates to the later campaigns, as the next Baen-related push we know about were the unsuccessful 2011 and 2012 slates put together on Baens Bar, which is a bit of a time gap. There does seem to have been some mounting resentment over that period, as the organisers of those campaigns seem to have felt nominations had been ignored (leading to Larry saying he was going to audit his SP1 results), and you have people like John Ringo claiming he was sure he’d had enough votes to get nominated in the past but wasn’t (which I think is what TW was alluding to in the quote you give).
@Mark:
But how would Ringo know that?
The only ways are 1.) if there is a list of nominations and how many — in which case lots of people would be pointing out that he had enough nominations to be on the ballot, or 2.) A certain number of people told Ringo that they had nominated him who were fibbing and he added them up and got more than the official tally.
Since polishing up the ol’ resumé in retrospect is a common human behavior, then — assuming Ringo isn’t Making Stuff Up — it’s possible more people told him they had voted for him than actually voted for him.
@Peace
I can probably find the exact comment if you want, but basically it was along the lines of (2) – he’d had sufficient people tell him they’d nominated him to be convinced he should have made the ballot. You’ve pointed out the obvious flaw with that theory.
John Ringo has been pretty childish regarding the Hugos:
https://www.facebook.com/john.ringo.90857/posts/10151560891450887
The “Baen good, TOR bad” part of the kerfluffle always seemed to me to be the most confusing motivation, although both parts of that weren’t necessarily trotted out at the same time.
Especially given that, if I remember correctly, Tom Doherty owns a substantial stake in Baen.
Correia’s comment on King not knowing anything about good heroes is…not surprising, maybe, but illuminating. I have here in my hand my Kindle, which has, oh, well, for starters, The Stand. Heroes we got: Frannie Goldsmith, Larry Underwood, Stu Redman, Nick Andros, Glen Bateman, Judge Farris, Ralph Brentner, and on and on. I’ve also got the collection Everything’s Eventual, which I re-read part of last night while having insomnia. The narrator of “The Man in the Black Suit” suits me as a hero, and the narrator of “Everything’s Eventual” becomes one. And yeesh, the list goes on and on.
I do think that a broad-spectrum inability to recognize the many admirable people King portrays as rising to the challenges facing them says something bad about that reader. (Nobody has to like King’s subjects or styles – not liking horror is fine, not liking King’s work in particular is fine. But refusing to acknowledge his heroes is a defect in reading.)
When Goodreads listed Monster Hunter Nemesis for the 2014 Goodreads choice awards, it was shelved as Horror.
I get the sense that a lot of things that don’t really fit the traditional Horror template are often shelved as Horror nowadays, because there wouldn’t be enough to fill out the category otherwise. (One of my local bookshops shelves Jim Butcher as Horror.)
I should say that there is almost always a gun nut in horror movies and books. They are those that die first, because they haven’t got the wits to run.
@Andrew – I meant Goodreads put Monster Hunter Nemesis in the horror category – not the fantasy catagory. That seems like an error now but I understand it. Not surprised that your local bookstore does something similar.
While the distinctions between this genre and that are cool to discuss and understand, the early MHI books were about vampires and werewolves; the attack on loved ones; and the resulting conflict. That’s why I made the comparison. The definition above about protagonist is helpful in discussing why one would fit in an award category and the other would not. But I see how this gets muddled by various venues.
This wasn’t the only distinction. There are other works Goodreads views as fantasy that I am not sure Hugo fans consider within the lines for their award perhaps because the work is too romantic.
I followed that link and read the article. That’s a goofy article. At one point she says:
“And yet, to quote Heinlein, “Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you. If you don’t bet, you can’t win.” ”
That’s just stupid.
She starts out saying that no politics in SFF history has led to a proper state of fandom. Then she ends with this:
Good lord. What is she talking about? The larger culture war is precisely why you don’t want to stir it into fandom. The fight isn’t worth anything. It defines SFF in all the wrong ways. Talk about a fixed game that can’t be won.
@Zenu:
That’s probably a matter of perspective against the surroundings. Looking at a fantasy/romance book, a person who reads a lot of romance will see the fantasy as salient (and may be able to judge that the romantic elements aren’t as prominent as in core genre books); whereas a person who hardly reads romance (and avoids the core of that genre) will be inclined to shelve all romance books together whether fantastic or not.
That’s a goofy article.
It certainly is. There’s a whole lot of pronouncements in that article that aren’t backed by any facts at all. It is very Puppy-ish in that regard.
She says people have criticized others on the basis that they read Heinlein. Who has done so? She doesn’t say. It is just out there as a royal pronouncement, unsupported by anything.
She says that efforts to rally reader were thwarted by apparently underhanded means. Once again, there’s no evidence offered for this extraordinary claim. She just states it and then blithely sweeps forward to her conclusion.
Of course, the entire tenor of the essay is that Worldcon voters have been doing it wrong because they are bad people, and it isn’t even worth bothering to engage them, because they are too evil to be reasoned with.
I suspect that, in part, it is making nonsense pronouncements like she made in that essay is what cost Weisskopf the Hugo last year. You just can’t write something as stupid and offensive as that essay and expect people not to remember.
Aaron on January 7, 2016 at 6:55 am said:
[glowing electrons dimmed]
She says people have criticized others on the basis that they read Heinlein.
Wait … read the Heinlein who wrote this?
“The rules permitted a contestant to submit any number of entries as long as each was written on a Skyway Soap wrapper or reasonable facsimile.
I considered photographing one and turning out facsimiles by the gross, but Dad advised me not to. “It is within the rules, Kip, but I’ve never yet known a skunk to be welcome at a picnic.”
So I sold soap. ”
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/9781416505495/9781416505495___2.htm
Wait … read the Heinlein who wrote this?
Yep. The specific line is this:
As you point out, it seems that they may have read Heinlein, but perhaps didn’t really understand what he wrote. By the way, here is one of her dismissals of basically the entire Worldcon voting body:
One has to wonder how anyone thought that Worldcon voters would ever vote for Weisskopf after she wrote things like this.
Particularly if it’s an example of her editing skills. I read that four times when it came out and still didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was ultimately getting at. The post is inflammatory word salad.
RP on January 6, 2016 at 10:43 pm said:
Citation, please. When? Which year? I maintain the Hugo Awards web site, but I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the minimum number of nominations required to make the ballot per category per year. Four seems low to me, even going back to the relative nadir of interest a decade ago.
supergee on January 7, 2016 at 3:30 am said:
True, and in addressing that specific issue, WSFS created a different one. Prior to then, you found out you were a finalist when the final ballot was announced. A couple of years after that event, WSFS changed the rules to require that potential finalists be given a reasonable opportunity to decline nomination. (Note that this is not the same thing as requiring them to positively accept nomination, which could indefinitely delay issuing the final ballot.) But this now means that there is every year a gray-zone period during which people know that they are Hugo Award finalists but are not supposed to tell anyone. Except that human nature is what it is and it’s impossible to make such things leak-proof. And for that matter, certain Puppies have used the fact that such leakage is inevitable as indirect evidence for their conspiracy theories about how the results have been systemically “fixed” by The Evil Tor Books, when in fact everything was easily explainable as “people who actually know what the rules are and how people have historically behaved made reasonable observations.”
I have previously proposed a voting system (Three Stage Voting) that eliminates “leakage,” still gives potential finalists a chance to decline a place on the short list, allows “crowdsourcing” of eligibility (reducing the administrator’s burden), allows the membership as a whole to express a yes/no preference on each potential finalist in isolation from the others, and doesn’t require fractions to explain. Its only drawback is that it would require an additional round of voting and consequently would carve out time (I estimate around eight weeks, from early March to late April) from the middle of the approximately 7-8 month Hugo Award Season and impose additional administrative issues on Worldcons. These “additional complexity” reasons were cited as reasons against it; those same people tended to argue even harder against EPH on the “too hard” front. If EPH fails of ratification, or if it turns out to not produce results as expected, I may go ahead and introduce “three stage voting” in the future.
I think our nasty puppy visitors should actually try to read this website, and realize that the lion’s share of its material on Jim Baen has been glowing, for good and excellent reasons.
Jim Baen racked up a reasonably impressive stack of Hugo nominations: 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1981, all for Best Editor. Coincidentally, that pretty much represents the period in which he was editor of Galaxy and then Destinies. Far Futures, New Destinies and his work at Tor and Baen didn’t attract nominations, except as an afterthought once he died.
There are jolly good reasons why the Best Editor award generally went to magazine editors. Even now, when there is an award specifically for book editors, no one knows how to vote on it; so they would clearly be ill-placed when set against people whose achievement was easy to discern.
Soon Lee:
The “let’s get [NAME] a Hugo because they’ve just died and this will be their last chance” campaigns make me uncomfortable. It didn’t feel right when Jim Baen died, it didn’t feel right when Robert Jordan died, it doesn’t feel right with Terry Pratchett either, and I’m a big fan of his.
I agree: but for some reason I don’t feel this so strongly about Best Related Work. (For which both Jordan and Pratchett have eligible works this year. As does Tolkien.)
At least now we know what happens when nobody shows up for the culture war. We start our own regarding date formats.
I felt that of the 2015 Best Editor long form nominees, only Sheila Gilbert and Anne Sowards attempted to inform us of why they were deserving of the award, and Sheila Gilbert did a better job of it. That’s why I voted for Sheila Gilbert above No Award, and Toni Weiskopf below.
I’m not a big fan of posthumous awards, I’ve always thought the point of the award is to show our appreciation of the recipient (or the recipient’s work) to the recipient.
@Peace: Besides being appallingly crass, it’s also pretty ignorant, since King was walking on the side of the road when he was hit by a van that swerved off the road. This was very widely reported– I have trouble believing that anyone who’s devoted more than half a minute’s thought to King’s career would not have known it. So Correia either knew and didn’t care because his joke was so hilarious, or he barely knows who the guy is that he’s comparing himself to.
RP: If the Hugo is so irrelevant, why do you even care about it? Leave it to those who consider it relevant, and move on.
Hampus Eckerman : At least now we know what happens when nobody shows up for the culture war. We start our own regarding date formats.
Imagine how confused the historians are going to be trying to figure out whether the Great Skirmish of The Twentieth of Nivose in the Year of the Fruitbat is the same battle as the Glorious Defense of 247.02 of the 32nd Year of the Consul M?kh??l Glyer.
A Hugo nominee ‘earned’ its place on the list of nominees with 4 votes.
I’m sure you can identify which nominee this was, and when it happened, can’t you?
So Correia either knew and didn’t care because his joke was so hilarious, or he barely knows who the guy is that he’s comparing himself to.
Given Correia’s general level of ignorance on subjects that he opines upon, I’m leaning towards the second.
Bruce Baugh –
It’s surprising to me, but maybe he hasn’t read The Gunslinger.
@Matty Y: The truth is, there’s a tradition of adventure fic writers who think George S. Patton didn’t know what he was talking about when he said, “Every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he’s not, he’s a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days.” They think he only got a later part of the same speech right, when he said, “Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base.”
So characters who have any sort of normal reaction to terrible things just aren’t acceptable as hero fodder.
Cally on January 7, 2016 at 9:30 am said:
Agreed. To paraphrase what I’ve said elsewhere (on Lou Antonelli’s FB): I think there are people who think that you can demand respect and get it simply by shouting a lot, and that there is an Official Sanctioning Body somewhere, and that if the Official Respect and Prestige Board says your award is prestigious, then it is, no matter what. (This was in response to a complaint about how The Hugo Awards web site describes the Award as “science fiction’s most prestigious award.”)
Respect cannot be obtained by demand; it has to be earned. The converse is true: something once respected can lose it by consensus. These people who insist that the Hugo Awards are and always have been irrelevant (or that it was only relevant in respected in Ye Goode Olde Dayes) aren’t doing their own case very well by the demanding way in which they behave.
Well as SP3 proved it shouldn’t require many people to get something nominated and in previous years the numbers were even smaller. 2011 would have required somebody to get 30 nomination votes for a nomination in short story. That is within the bounds of plausibility for somebody to know personally everybody who cast a nomination vote for them.
Did you mean FOURTEEN because that is the lowest I’m aware of (2006 Short Story) http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2006HugoStatistics-Nominating.txt
I’m seeing a bit of an uptick in this style of argument: i.e. the Hugo awards suck and who’d want one anyway style. Makes me optimistic.
I poked around trying to find a nominee that got on with 4 votes and I couldn’t but I was surprised to see a short story made it with on 16 votes in 2007. I also found that one of the Best Novel nominees got in with only 35 people recommending it. I think a lot of the puppy stuff was crap but it is shocking as to how few people it takes to get a nomination.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2007%20Nominations.pdf
Camestros Felapton: Courtesy of Google, Francis Turner can be found commenting on other sf writers’ blogs in later years. I don’t see much to be gained by spending the time, but it’s possible one could go through Correia’s blog and see if Turner (or anybody else) introduced these same arguments before Correia began to write about them in the early Sad Puppies posts. They seem fairly obvious complaints that could have occurred to anyone independently — Hugo participation is small (Turner’s 2006 post, in fact, quoted Cheryl Morgan on that point), Baen Books is rarely represented (unless the work is by Bujold or Resnick), Baen’s Bar ought to be a fertile recruiting ground — however, Turner packaged these ideas so well he may have played Homer to this Iliad. But not necessarily.
@Jesse H
I think the only real response to that is that the days of participation at that low level have gone, and participation appears to be rising independent of the puppy-injections (h/t Kevin Standlee). Also, the level of diffusion of opinion that contributed to those figures is a strength, in my opinion.
Fair point – what struck me more was that her argument was much, much stronger (e.g. that participation had declined) but followed the same structure as later arguments that made people go ‘huh?’. I suspect if Correia (or other puppies) were directly aware of the post they’d have quoted or referenced it, so I’m assuming more of a set-of-notions-that-were-in-the-air, truisms that get passed around.
Not something we’ll ever know as it is lost into the far, far depths of time, back before even iPads existed and presumably fire hadn’t been invented yet. 🙂
Sorry – I said “her” argument when Francis Turner is a he. My only excuse is that the spaceship containing my mind recently blew up.
Bruce Baugh –
Doesn’t seem very heroic if they aren’t overcoming the natural reaction to terrible things and trying to right them anyway.
@lurkertype–Must admit I didn’t get to “China Mountain Zhang” (we didn’t have packets back then, we had to buy own our dead-tree volumes!), but I vividly remember thinking I’d just read a little bit of “Steel Beach” when I went to bed… and the next thing I know, I was all teary-eyed at the end and the sun was up
I wouldn’t have been able to actually choose between the two. Both author’s world-building was dazzling,IMHO.
I think Ms W’s Heinlein point would have been better served by saying people have been criticized for believing that Heinlein’s work stands the test of time. I’ve read a number of online discussions and there’s always someone in the comments who has a melt-down and just can’t believe that people enjoy Mr. Heinlein in spite of his “sexism”. ‘Friday’ springs to mind as one that always get heated.
I think RP’s ‘four votes’ may come from the line in the post ‘it only took four votes to be listed in the report’, missing the distinction between being listed in the report and being nominated.
I don’t actually think fourteen votes is too distressing (though more would of course be better, and is now being achieved), if you consider that (a) the purpose of nominations can quite reasonably be seen a bringing things to the attention of a wider audience, and (b) a quite large number of votes, spread out over a wide field, can still produce a small number of votes for each work.
@Harold: “I’ve read a number of online discussions and there’s always someone in the comments who has a melt-down and just can’t believe that people enjoy Mr. Heinlein in spite of his “sexism”. ‘Friday’ springs to mind as one that always get heated.”
Y’know, I’m 45. I read Heinlein rather early on, and I’ve told the tale of the Most Influential Flea Market Buy Ever more than once. (Very short version: My mother got a dozen SF books for a dime each. Almost all classics, and most were Heinleins. I credit those books with making me a fan, and quite possibly a better person.) Friday is one of my favorite Heinlein books, the one specific book that I point to if I’m ever asked how I became a fan, because an entry in the “praise” front matter mentioned its ties to earlier Heinlein work. That was probably the first “new” Heinlein I picked up after devouring the flea market books, and that stray mention struck me as something between a contest and a challenge: Find The Reference. By the time I did, I was a fan.
Anyway, I can recognize – now – that there’s some problematic content in the book. The incest themes in his later books are another example. At the same time, he wrote the books that were my first exposure to concepts that are still struggling for mainstream recognition – such as open acceptance of transgender, poly, and bisexual characters. It may sound funny to some, but I give Heinlein a lot of credit as an early SJW in the best sense of the term. He wasn’t a cartoonishly screechy Eebil SJW caricature, but minority characters (racial, sexual, and otherwise) and competent women were a significant part of his work as far back as I can remember. They weren’t strange or unusual – they were just there. No justification required. Friday herself is an excellent example; I’d put her up against Daniel Craig’s 007 any day of the week.
Now, do his books epitomize cutting-edge 2016 understandings of the nuances of those issues? Of course not; the man’s been dead for almost 30 years, and society has not stood still. He was a man of his time, and his books reflect that; how can they not? But he tried, and IMO he succeeded more than he failed in looking ahead to a more equitable society. That ain’t nothin’, not by a long shot.
Ninjaed by Andrew in the time it took me to sit down in front of a computer (had some errands to run and hate typing much of anything on my smartphone). Oh well. We should none of us be surprised a rabid puppy (presumably, based on the handle “RP”) doesn’t understand the difference between being mentioned in the report on Hugo nominations and being on the shortlist and therefore actually nominated.
Jon on January 7, 2016 at 1:51 pm said:
I’m guessing that’s what RP did, which is yet another reason that we no longer refer to being listed as one of the finalists as being “nominated.” The proximate reason for making the change was that people who received a single nomination were billing themselves as “Hugo Award Nominees,” and were reacting badly when we tried to correct them, complaining that the “plain meaning” of the word “nominee” meant (in effect) that anyone can be a Hugo Award nominee simply by nominating him/herself. Fair enough, we said, and we officially dropped the term. The people on the final ballot are officially “finalists” and can be said to be “shortlisted” for the Award. Those who make the report showing nominations down to the top 15 can be said to have made the “long list,” and are legitimately “Hugo Award nominees,” but the latter term now applies to anyone at all who received at least one nomination.
Rev. Bob on January 7, 2016 at 1:44 pm said:
I agree with every word you wrote here, Rev. I’m 20 years older than you, and my first Heinlein was “Rolling Stones” when I was 10. It was the first book I had read that took the actual rocket science seriously.
And if anything makes me angry, it’s that the SP/RP nonsense left the second part of the Heinlein biography out in the cold for a Hugo.
Among many other things about the SP/RP nonsense that makes me angry …
Camestros Felapton: NOS4A2 (or NOS4R2 in non-USland)
You wacky Commonwealthers and your magickal appearing and disappearing “R”s.
I couldn’t figure out for the longest time why the saying “Arthur or Martha” was some sort of big deal. Then I finally realized that it’s because, to you lot, that phrase actually rhymes.
When I made this exclamation upon the realization, the Commonwealther sitting next to me asked — in all sincerity — “Why don’t they rhyme in the U.S.?”
Yes, Henlein was at least one of those who started me on SF. Not sure which one, but my guess is The Door Into Summer which was a favourite in my family.
Well I’m more rhotic* than most but I assume the original title implied that the name of a capital ‘A’ is pronounced ‘ar’ or ‘ah’ (rhyme with ‘bar’) as opposed to ‘ay’ (to rhyme with ‘may’) – which I didn’t know was a thing and I’m sure that isn’t what they say on Sesame Street**. So I’m assuming it is a regional thing in the rebellious former colony? Or is it that the non-USians don’t say the final /r/ in ‘four’? But then I don’t see how the how A fits in if you do say fourrr instead of ‘fuh’.
*[I’m just trying to show off with a word I don’t really understand. I don’t know how the ‘r’ thing works either. I don’t make an ‘r’ sound in “glass” and I do tend to sound ‘r’ sounds at the ends of words. Naturally I am the only English speaker in the universe without an accent unlike everybody else, despite what they all say when they laugh at how I say things]
**[and I regard that as the ultimate authority]