First Fandom Awards
2021 Nominees

First Fandom members have until May 15 to vote on the candidates for the organization’s annual awards.

The names of the winners will be announced at DisCon III, this year’s Worldcon, in Washington, D.C.

Here are the fans up for the three awards along with brief excerpts from their candidate bios.

FIRST FANDOM HALL OF FAME

The First Fandom Hall of Fame, created in 1963, is a prestigious achievement award given to a living recipient who has made significant contributions to Science Fiction throughout their lifetime.

Candidate: William F. Nolan

…Among his many accolades, Nolan has twice won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He was voted a Living Legend in Dark Fantasy by the International Horror Guild in 2002, and in 2006 was bestowed the honorary title of Author Emeritus by the SFWA. In 2010, he received the Lifetime Achievement Bram Stoker Award from the HWA. In 2013 he was a recipient, along with Brian W. Aldiss, of the World Fantasy Convention Award. In 2014, Nolan was presented with another ram Stoker Award, for Superior Achieve[1]ment in Nonfiction. In 2015, he was named a World Horror Society Grand Master.

POSTHUMOUS HALL OF FAME AWARD

The Posthumous Hall of Fame was created in 1994 to acknowledge people in Science Fiction who should have, but did not, receive that type of recognition during their lifetimes.

Candidates:

Richard & Pat Lupoff

…With Pat, he edited the SF fanzine Xero which they unveiled at the 1960 Worldcon in Pittsburgh. A regular feature of Xero was a nostalgic look at Golden Age comic books called “All in Color for a Dime” that later resulted in two books of essays: All in Color for a Dime (1970) and The Comic Book Book (1973), both of which Lupoff co-edited with fellow fan Don Thompson. Dick and Pat appeared at Pittcon, the 1960 Worldcon, dressed as the popular comic book characters Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel for the con’s masquerade event. Their picture as the two superheroes has been widely circulated in SF and comic book fandoms. Xero won the 1963 Best Fanzine Hugo Award. A collection, The Best of Xero, published in 2004, edited by the Lupoffs — and with an introduction by film critic Roger Ebert – was nominated for the 2005 Best Related Book Hugo. In addition, Dick edited other popular genre anthologies, including the What If? SF series (1980 – 1984)….

Mike Resnick

,,,Resnick won five Hugo Awards (nominated for 30+), a Nebula Award (nominated for 10+), and was GoH at Chicon 7 in 2012. He was one of the founders of ISFiC, the organization that runs Windycons. He was also a long-time member of the Cincinnati Fantasy Group (CFG)…

Walter Tevis

…Among his works were several SF books, including The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963), Mockingbird (1980), Far from Home (1981), and The Steps of the Sun (1983). Far from Home was a collection of his short SF, most of which had originally been published in popular genre magazines of the time such as Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, If, and Omni.

…Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (1977) for The Man Who Fell to Earth; Nebula Award Nomination (1981) for Mockingbird; Locus Award Nomination for Best Short Story (1980) for “Rent Control” (originally published in the October, 1979, issue of Omni Magazine)…

SAM MOSKOWITZ ARCHIVE AWARD

Sam Moskowitz Archive Award was created in 1998 to recognize not only someone who has assembled a world-class collection but also what has actually been done with it.

Candidate: Kevin L. Cook

…As a teenager in the 1970’s Kevin kept reading in many places that no one knew more about SF than Sam Moskowitz. He had some questions. Why ask a lesser authority? Therefore, Kevin wrote to Mr. Moskowitz with his questions. Sam answered of course. That act impressed Kevin. If Sam Moskowitz was willing to share a bit of his vast knowledge with someone, should he not pass along the torch if he ever obtained knowledge of his own? With that thought in mind Kevin has provided many publishers in the field with photocopies, scans and even the actual loan of books and magazines…

For more than 25 years has continued to dispense information through his quarterly apazine for The Pulp Era Amateur Press Society (PEAPS). When he obtains a letter from a famous author such as A. Merritt or an interesting inscription in a book, he provides photocopies for the PEAPS members, which also includes people beyond since a copy of all PEAPS mailings are housed in the Popular Culture Library of Bowling Green University. That effort of sharing his knowledge through the collection he has gathered is why Kevin L. Cook is a candidate for the Sam Moskowitz Archive Award for 2021.

Richard Lupoff (1935-2020)

Dick Lupoff in 2013.

Richard Lupoff, known to friends as Dick, died October 22 at the age of 85. His sons Tom and Ken announced on Facebook:  

My dad passed away early this morning in the hospital after a brief final illness. It was peaceful. And despite severe pandemic visitation restrictions my brother and/or I were allowed to be with him at all times so that he was not alone and we got to say proper goodbyes.

A longtime fan who worked as a technical writer, or when feasible a full-time sf pro, Lupoff with his wife Pat (and Bhob Stewart) edited the Hugo-winning fanzine Xero. They were among the founders of the Fanoclasts, and of New York’s Eastercon. Dick participated in APA-F and the New York Futurian Society. As a pro, he produced 20 novels and enough short fiction to fill several collections. He edited hardcover editions of Burroughs books, wrote a biography of Burroughs, and other nonfiction books drawing on his expertise in pulp, comics and sf history.    

Lupoff already was an avid sf reader when he encountered fandom in 1952 via Amazing Stories. “And suddenly I discovered a subculture of people who valued the intellectual over the physical, ideas over objects, imagination over conformity, cooperation over competition.” He decided the fastest way to become part of that world was to publish a fanzine, even though the only means of production available to him was to type each page on a sandwich of original and carbon paper. Once he had made eight copies of a zine he called SF52 he sent them to the leading faneditors of the day. A single recipient – Lee Hoffman – wrote back, which encouraged him to stick around.

In contrast to most fans, Lupoff was already a selling writer by the time he got involved. As a 14-year-old he was earning pocket money as a stringer for metropolitan newspapers, filing stories on prep school sports with the New York Times and Herald-Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Bulletin. Later, while an undergraduate at the University of Miami, he wrote news items for the Coral Gables, Florida, Times, and for WIOD, Miami’s 6:00 o’clock news five days a week. “It was like living in a movie,” he remembered.

After college and a two-year hitch as a conscript in the U.S. Army, he was hired as a technical writer for what was then Sperry Univac at a salary of $350 a month. This enabled Dick and Pat Lupoff to marry in 1958. They lived in Westchester County just north of New York City, where “it was possible for a young couple to lead a very pleasant upper-middle-class life on that salary.”

Pat and Dick Lupoff in 1958

He was impressed by his first sight of a computer:

Univac I. It had 1000 *words* of memory, roughly the equivalent of 12K bytes. The storage medium was a mercury delay line, and if you wanted to look at the memory you had to open a door in the side of a garage-sized metal structure and walk inside. It held half a dozen people comfortably.

He worked for Sperry for five years, then IBM for seven. The last several years at IBM were spent writing and directing movies. In the evenings and other free time he wrote. His first book, Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, came out in 1965, and his first novel, One Million Centuries, in 1967.

Lupoff said that first novel and his fiction-writing career generally was helped with a push in the right direction from Andrew Porter:

Pat and Dick Lupoff in Poughkeepsie in 1965. Photo taken by and (c) Andrew Porter.

FWIW, I want to offer a tip of the tam to Andy Porter. In 1965 I brought out my first book. It was nonfiction. I kept saying that I was going to write a novel but I kept stalling. Finally Andy took the train from New York City up to Poughkeepsie, where Pat and I were living at the time.

He kept pressuring me to stop talking about writing a novel and for heaven’s sake sit down and write. I finally did, and the result was One Million Centuries, certainly not an “Eighty-Yard Run” quality effort, but a respectable novel which went through a couple of editions (Lancer, later Timescape/Pocket) and got my career as a fiction writer rolling.

If it hadn’t been for Andy, I might have spent the next thirty years writing computer manuals and regretting what-might-have-been.

Andy, did I ever thank you for what you did? Probably not. So even at this very late date, and in front of the large and distinguished audience that we call Fictionmags — Thank you!

But it wasn’t until 1970 that, with Pat’s support and encouragement, he went full-time as a pro sff writer. His work was well-received. His novella “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama” in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions was a Nebula nominee (1973). He earned two Hugo nominations for his short fiction, “After the Dreamtime” (1975), and “Sail the Tide of Mourning” (1976 – a Nebula nominee, too). His books during the decade included Sacred Locomotive Flies (1971), Into the Aether (1974), The Triune Man (1976), and two Buck Rogers novels under his Addison E. Steele pseudonym.  His entertaining collection of parodies on other sf authors, The Ova Hamlet Papers came out in 1979.

During that period he also wrote the short story “12:01 P.M.” (1973), adapted as the Oscar-nominated short film 12:01 pm (1990) and the TV movie 12:01 (1993). (Lupoff appeared in both films as an extra.) The major plot device is a time loop, so similar to that of 1993’s Groundhog Day that Lupoff and Jonathan Heap, director of the 1990 film, were “outraged” by the apparent theft of the idea, but “After half a year of lawyers’ conferences and emotional stress, we agreed to put the matter behind us and get on with our lives.”

An economic downturn at the end of the Seventies affected Lupoff’s markets and pushed him back into the workforce for a few years. But when given the opportunity to write full-time again, he said he found “The lesson that I had to accept was that the field had moved on, leaving me behind. It’s painful to say this, but it was nonetheless true.” However, he was able to rebrand himself as a mystery writer, and in that genre he enjoyed fresh success with The Comic Book Killer, featuring the detective team of insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey and Berkeley police officer Marvia Plum. That was followed by The Classic Car KillerThe Bessie Blue KillerThe Sepia Siren Killer, and (coming in 1995) The Cover Girl Killer.

Pat and Dick Lupoff in 2011

By the start of the 21st century, Dick and Pat Lupoff, who had raised three children, also were looked on as the lineal ancestors of comics fandom, a fact they celebrated by publishing a book of selections from their famous fanzine, The Best of Xero (2004) – which was, in turn, nominated for the Best Related Book Hugo (2005). John Hertz’ review describes the fanzine’s early days and names some of the well-known contributors:

Pat & Dick Lupoff typed stencils in their Manhattan apartment, printed them on a machine in Noreen & Larry Shaw’s basement, collated by hand, and lugged the results to s-f cons or stuffed them in mailboxes. The machine had not been given by Damon Knight, A.J. Budrys explained in a letter after a while, but lent. Eventually drawings could be scanned by electro-stencil, a higher tech. Colored ink joined colored paper, sometimes wildly colored. Xero could be spectacular.

…You’ll also see Anthony Boucher, Harlan Ellison, Ethel Lindsay, Fred Pohl, Rick Sneary, Bob Tucker as “Hoy Ping Pong”, Harry Warner — fans and pros mixing it up. Roger Ebert, later a movie critic, contributed poetry, often free-style, or formal and funny…

Even before starting Xero, the Lupoffs paid tribute to comics in their iconic costumes for the 1960 Worldcon masquerade, as Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel.

Pat Lupoff died in 2018. Dick was in Assisted Living these last few years, but still got around. He was a fixture at the annual Paperback Show in LA (see the photo of him at the 2019 event), one of the many places his absence will be felt.

Richard Lupoff, Sunni Brock, William F. Nolan, Jason Brock in 2019.

Correction: Elinor Busby Was the First Woman To Win A Hugo

Elinor Busby. Photo by Earl Kemp, Corflu, Las Vegas, April 2008.

Elinor Busby made history as the first woman Hugo winner when Cry of the Nameless, which she co-edited, topped the Best Fanzine category in 1960.

  • Cry of the Nameless ed. by F. M. Busby, Elinor Busby, Burnett Toskey and Wally Weber

I’ve corrected my obituary for Pat Lupoff to reflect that she was second, as co-editor of the Best Amateur Magazine winner in 1963. (The category title varied as the rules changed in the early years of the Hugo.)

  • Xero ed. by Richard A. Lupoff and Pat Lupoff

Evidently this wasn’t the first time I’ve made this mistake either – see the note at the end of “Dark Carnival, a Science Fiction Landmark” from 2013.

Four women won fan Hugos – all in the Best Fanzine / Amateur Magazine category – before a woman won in any other category.

The third woman to win was Juanita Coulson, in 1965, co-editor of the fanzine Yandro.

  • Yandro ed. by Robert Coulson and Juanita Coulson

The fourth woman was Felice Rolfe, in 1967, co-editor of the fanzine Niekas.

  • Niekas ed. by Edmund R. Meskys and Felice Rolfe

The first woman to win a Hugo in a fiction category was Anne McCaffrey, whose Weyr Search tied with Philip Jose Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage for Best Novella in 1968.

Pat Lupoff (1937-2018)

Pat and Dick Lupoff in 1958

Pat Lupoff, the second woman to win a Hugo award, died October 17. She and Richard (Dick) Lupoff, whom she married in 1958, and Bhob Stewart co-edited the 1963 Best Fanzine Hugo winner Xero.

Xero’s discussion of comics sparked other fans to create their own specialty comics fanzines and organize the spinoff comics fandom of the Sixties that has grown so huge today. And when a collection of articles from their historic zine, The Best of Xero, was published in 2004, John Hertz’ review described the fanzine’s early days and named some of now-famous contributors:

Pat & Dick Lupoff typed stencils in their Manhattan apartment, printed them on a machine in Noreen & Larry Shaw’s basement, collated by hand, and lugged the results to s-f cons or stuffed them in mailboxes. The machine had not been given by Damon Knight, A.J. Budrys explained in a letter after a while, but lent. Eventually drawings could be scanned by electro-stencil, a higher tech. Colored ink joined colored paper, sometimes wildly colored. Xero could be spectacular.

…You’ll also see Anthony Boucher, Harlan Ellison, Ethel Lindsay, Fred Pohl, Rick Sneary, Bob Tucker as “Hoy Ping Pong”, Harry Warner — fans and pros mixing it up. Roger Ebert, later a movie critic, contributed poetry, often free-style, or formal and funny…

The Best of Xero won the Best Related Book Hugo in 2005.

Even before starting Xero, the Lupoffs paid tribute to comics in their iconic costumes for the 1960 Worldcon masquerade, as Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel.

The Lupoffs also hosted meetings of the (Second) Futurian Society of New York in their Manhattan apartment in the early Sixties — til the guests’ manners became intolerable, and the couple helped found a schismatic new group, the Fanoclasts.

Pat and Dick had their first child, Kenneth, in 1961.

Pat and Dick Lupoff in 2011

Update 10/21/2018: Corrected to show that Pat Lupoff was the second woman to win a Hugo, the first having been Elinor Busby, co-editor of Cry of the Nameless, the Hugo-winning fanzine in 1960.

Dark Carnival, a Science Fiction Landmark

Michael Chabon and child, Jack Rems, Ayelet Waldman, Pat and Dick Lupoff.

Michael Chabon and child, Jack Rems, Ayelet Waldman, Pat and Dick Lupoff.

These days the second woman ever to win a Hugo Award, Pat Lupoff, works in Berkeley’s Dark Carnival bookstore. She and the bookstore’s owner were interviewed by KALW radio on August 13.

JACK REMS: My name is Jack Rems. I’m the owner of Dark Carnival Bookstore and Escapist Comics in Berkeley. It’s the oldest science fiction store in this part of the world. We opened in 1976.

PAT LUPOFF: My name is Pat Lupoff. Hey Jack, how long have I worked here? Do you know?

REMS: I don’t really know.

LUPOFF: I think I’ve worked here about six years.

Rems says the best book in the store is The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies.

Cry of the Nameless with F. M. Busby, Burnett Toskey, and Wally Weber. Pat and Dick Lupoff started the fanzine Xero in 1960, which won a Hugo in 1963, resulting in Pat becoming the second female Hugo winner.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Update 08/18/2013: Somebody would have noticed eventually that Elinor was really first….