I guess you've heard all about the 2020 Hugos and the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell by now. And believe me, that ceremony was just as bad as everybody says. You can find my own experiences at the 2020 Hugo ceremony as well as a mega round-up of reactions from around the web and my thoughts on the 2020 Hugo winners over at my personal blog.
And yes, I didn't win the 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo, but I finished second, which is a great result the first time out of the gate. And besides, Bogi Takács is a most worthy winner, so check out their work.
Most of the criticism so far has focussed on the many problems with the 2020 Hugo ceremony, including toastmaster George R.R. Martin indulging in excessive nostalgia, but there have also been several complaints about the Retro Hugos, largely because many people were unhappy with the Retro Hugo wins for John W. Campbell, the Cthulhu mythos and Forrest J. Ackerman's and Morojo's fanzine Voice of the Imagi-Nation.
Unfortunately, most of the folks complaining now paid little to no attention to the Retro Hugos during the nomination and voting stage. They also completely seem to miss the wins for Leigh Brackett, Margaret Brundage, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Superman, The Curse of the Cat People and The Canterville Ghost, which they'd probably agree with or at least not disagree.
Below, you'll find links some of the reactions to the 1945 Retro Hugos from around the web, copies from the monster Hugo reaction round-up on my personal blog:
Jason Sanford discusses the 2020 Hugo ceremony and the many problems with it. He makes a lot of good points as well as some with which I disagree.
One of those is that Jason Sanford declares that the Retro Hugos must die, because John W. Campbell and Cthulhu won Retro Hugos this year. Like so many others who complain about Campbell and Cthulhu and maybe Forrest J. Ackerman, he fails to mention that Leigh Brackett and Margaret Brundage, two awesome women who went unrecognised in their lifetimes, also won Retro Hugos this year.
I've already pointed out how strongly I disagree with the people who cry for the Retro Hugos to be abolished, because they don't agree with some of the winners (and I'm not thrilled about the Retro Hugos for Campbell, Cthulhu and Voice of the Imagi-Nation either). I also strongly disagree with Jason Sanford when he calls Retro Hugo voters "a small group of people stuck in the past giving today’s genre the middle finger".
I have nominated and voted for the Hugos and Retro Hugos, when they were offered, since 2014. Like so many others, I was frequently underwhelmed by the finalists and winners, so I decided to do something about it. I started the Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet and Retro Science Fiction Reviews to point potential nominators to worthy works and to show what else was out there beyond the big name writers and editors. I also didn't vote for or nominated Campbell, Cthulhu and Voice of the Imagi-Nation.
It's perfectly fine if someone doesn't want to engage with the Retro Hugos and doesn't care for older SFF in general. However, if you didn't bother to nominate and vote, don't complain about the results. And don't call those of us who are interested in the history of our genre reactionaries - unless maybe they are presenters hijacking the current day Hugo ceremony to reminisce about the past.
I care about the history of SFF because I think it is important to know where we've been to understand where we are now and how we got here. It also infuriates me how much of the history of our genre has been forgotten and erased, how the only ancestors that are remembered are a narrow group of straight white men and tht there's another round of "Wow, women, writers of colour, LGBTQ writers and other marginalised groups are writing science fiction and fantasy now" every twenty years, even though women, POC, LGBTQ people have always been here, only that their contributions to the genre have been ignored and forgotten.
I like having a way to honour those writers and artists who went unrecognised during their lifetimes. The Retro Hugos are one of the few ways we have to do this. They may not be perfect and I certainly don't think that John W. Campbell needs yet another Hugo, considering he won plenty during his lifetime. But rather than abolish the Retro Hugos, I'm trying to make them better and also to challenge received wisdom about what the genre was like in days of old, a received wisdom that's usually much straighter, whiter and male than reality.
Jason Sanford is not the only Retro Hugo hater out there. Aaron Pound thinks they're a joke, because the voters often go for famous names over story quality (which is precisely why I started the spreadsheet and Retro Reviews).
In the latest edition of The Full Lid (which you should subscribe to, if you haven't already), my fellow best fanwriter finalist Alasdair Stuart also weighs in on CoNZealand, the sidelining of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, the disastrous 2020 Hugo Award ceremony, where Alasdair was much in the same boat as me, except that he was also up for Best Semiprozine with Escape Pod and had to wait even longer, only to have semiprozines dismissed as "not paying enough", the unofficial CoNZealand Fringe side programming and the 1945 Retro Hugos. Alasdair isn't happy with the Retro Hugo results, but at least he did notice the work we've been doing here.
At File 770, Chris M. Barkley also weighs in on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, the 2020 Hugo winners and the 1945 Retro Hugos. He's also not happy about the Retro Hugo wins for Campbell and Cthulhu, though he notes that Margaret Brundage and Leigh Brackett won as well.
At the blog of the excellent small press Foxspirit Books, Russell A. Smith shares his thoughts about the 2020 Hugo ceremony (which he compares to Lord of the Rings in length) and the 1945 Retro Hugos. It's a good post, though I have one minor quibble. John W. Campbell "only" won the Retro Hugo for Best Editor, not Best Series because the only potentially eligible series Campbell ever wrote, the Arcot, Morey and Wade series finished in 1931 (which is a good thing, because while these stories influenced a lot of writers from Campbell's stable, the Arcot, Morey and Wade stories are pretty dreadful) . Instead, the Retro Hugo for Best Series went to the Cthulhu Mythos by that renown racist H.P. Lovecraft and a whole lot of others.
Richard Gadsden has some suggestions to improve the Retro Hugos, which he e-mailed to Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon. Once again, he's completely unaware that there was a crowdsourced eligibility and recommendation spreadsheet or that Paul Fraser assembled links to every single eligible story published in the SFF pulps.
2020 Best Novelette finalist Siobhan Carroll has some thoughts about how to imrpove the Retro Hugos, which also invvolve making it a juried award.
Font Folly also points out that a lot of the problems with the Retro Hugos stem from people trusting received wisdom such as that Astounding was the best SFF magazine of the 1940s and that John W. Campbell was the best editor, even though this isn't the case when you actually read the magazine, because Astounding actually published a higher ratio of crap than many other magazines, even though they also published a lot of classics.
Comrade-in-arms Steve J. Wright, who heroically reviewed a whole bunch of Retro Hugo eligible stories and discovered both a lot of dross and some overlooked gems, shares his thoughts on the 1945 Retro Hugo winners here. Steve J. Wright also shares his thoughts on John W. Campbell and points out that even though he did not vote for Campbell, Campbell was a more nuanced figure than the simple "saviour of science fiction" or "fucking fascist" dichotomy makes him out to be.
The Hugo Book Club also weighs in on the Retro Hugos and declares that contemporary voters and nominators often have to rely on received wisdom and hindsight, because they don't have the same overview of the field that fans of the time did. They also point out that Best Series doesn't work well with the Retro Hugos.
Remco van Straten busts another bit of received wisdom regarding the 1945 Retro Hugos and points out that the 1945 Retro Hugo winner for Best Graphic Story Superman: “The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk” is credited to the wrong person, for the art was not by Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, but by Ira Yarbrough, an uncredited artist who worked in Shuster's studio. But even though Yarbrough and other studio artists were uncredited, golden age Superman fans have long since figured out who drew which stories. So the misattribution is embarrassing and shouldn't have happened, especially since Alex Raymond's co-artist Don Moore is credited correctly for Flash Gordon, as are the creators of the nominated Spirit comic, none of whom is Will Eisner. I guess the lesson is to reach out more to golden age comic fandom in correctly sourcing who actually drew those comics.
And yes, Hugo voting already is a lot of work and Retro Hugo voting adds to that workload with the added complication that there is no helpful Hugo voter packet - you have to track down all of that stuff yourself. But I'd rather help voters and nominators to make more informed decisions than to abolish the Retro Hugos altogether, because I don't like how they turn out.
So with the 1945 Retro Hugos over, what happens next?
Well, there won't be any Retro Hugos next year, because the Retro Hugos for 1946 were already covered back in 1996. The winners look pretty good, though the finalists look very male indeed with only one woman (C.L. Moore, writing like she so often did with her husband), in there.
So I won't do a new recommendation spreadsheet, until 2022 and the 1947 Retro Hugos, should they take place. However, I will keep this site running and continue to review vintage science fiction and fantasy. From now on, the reviews will be a mix of works eligible for the 1947 Retro Hugos as well as other vintage stories, which I want to revisit or read for the first time or which just caught my eye. And yes, I'll probably continue to focus on women authors, but not exclusively.
In fact, the next review will be for a 1944 story by a little known woman author named Rith Washburn that I overlooked the first time around.
We'll also remain open to guest reviews, so if there's a work of vintage SFF that you always wanted to review, feel free to send it to me.
And yes, I didn't win the 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo, but I finished second, which is a great result the first time out of the gate. And besides, Bogi Takács is a most worthy winner, so check out their work.
Most of the criticism so far has focussed on the many problems with the 2020 Hugo ceremony, including toastmaster George R.R. Martin indulging in excessive nostalgia, but there have also been several complaints about the Retro Hugos, largely because many people were unhappy with the Retro Hugo wins for John W. Campbell, the Cthulhu mythos and Forrest J. Ackerman's and Morojo's fanzine Voice of the Imagi-Nation.
Unfortunately, most of the folks complaining now paid little to no attention to the Retro Hugos during the nomination and voting stage. They also completely seem to miss the wins for Leigh Brackett, Margaret Brundage, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Superman, The Curse of the Cat People and The Canterville Ghost, which they'd probably agree with or at least not disagree.
Below, you'll find links some of the reactions to the 1945 Retro Hugos from around the web, copies from the monster Hugo reaction round-up on my personal blog:
Jason Sanford discusses the 2020 Hugo ceremony and the many problems with it. He makes a lot of good points as well as some with which I disagree.
One of those is that Jason Sanford declares that the Retro Hugos must die, because John W. Campbell and Cthulhu won Retro Hugos this year. Like so many others who complain about Campbell and Cthulhu and maybe Forrest J. Ackerman, he fails to mention that Leigh Brackett and Margaret Brundage, two awesome women who went unrecognised in their lifetimes, also won Retro Hugos this year.
I've already pointed out how strongly I disagree with the people who cry for the Retro Hugos to be abolished, because they don't agree with some of the winners (and I'm not thrilled about the Retro Hugos for Campbell, Cthulhu and Voice of the Imagi-Nation either). I also strongly disagree with Jason Sanford when he calls Retro Hugo voters "a small group of people stuck in the past giving today’s genre the middle finger".
I have nominated and voted for the Hugos and Retro Hugos, when they were offered, since 2014. Like so many others, I was frequently underwhelmed by the finalists and winners, so I decided to do something about it. I started the Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet and Retro Science Fiction Reviews to point potential nominators to worthy works and to show what else was out there beyond the big name writers and editors. I also didn't vote for or nominated Campbell, Cthulhu and Voice of the Imagi-Nation.
It's perfectly fine if someone doesn't want to engage with the Retro Hugos and doesn't care for older SFF in general. However, if you didn't bother to nominate and vote, don't complain about the results. And don't call those of us who are interested in the history of our genre reactionaries - unless maybe they are presenters hijacking the current day Hugo ceremony to reminisce about the past.
I care about the history of SFF because I think it is important to know where we've been to understand where we are now and how we got here. It also infuriates me how much of the history of our genre has been forgotten and erased, how the only ancestors that are remembered are a narrow group of straight white men and tht there's another round of "Wow, women, writers of colour, LGBTQ writers and other marginalised groups are writing science fiction and fantasy now" every twenty years, even though women, POC, LGBTQ people have always been here, only that their contributions to the genre have been ignored and forgotten.
I like having a way to honour those writers and artists who went unrecognised during their lifetimes. The Retro Hugos are one of the few ways we have to do this. They may not be perfect and I certainly don't think that John W. Campbell needs yet another Hugo, considering he won plenty during his lifetime. But rather than abolish the Retro Hugos, I'm trying to make them better and also to challenge received wisdom about what the genre was like in days of old, a received wisdom that's usually much straighter, whiter and male than reality.
Jason Sanford is not the only Retro Hugo hater out there. Aaron Pound thinks they're a joke, because the voters often go for famous names over story quality (which is precisely why I started the spreadsheet and Retro Reviews).
In the latest edition of The Full Lid (which you should subscribe to, if you haven't already), my fellow best fanwriter finalist Alasdair Stuart also weighs in on CoNZealand, the sidelining of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, the disastrous 2020 Hugo Award ceremony, where Alasdair was much in the same boat as me, except that he was also up for Best Semiprozine with Escape Pod and had to wait even longer, only to have semiprozines dismissed as "not paying enough", the unofficial CoNZealand Fringe side programming and the 1945 Retro Hugos. Alasdair isn't happy with the Retro Hugo results, but at least he did notice the work we've been doing here.
At File 770, Chris M. Barkley also weighs in on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, the 2020 Hugo winners and the 1945 Retro Hugos. He's also not happy about the Retro Hugo wins for Campbell and Cthulhu, though he notes that Margaret Brundage and Leigh Brackett won as well.
At the blog of the excellent small press Foxspirit Books, Russell A. Smith shares his thoughts about the 2020 Hugo ceremony (which he compares to Lord of the Rings in length) and the 1945 Retro Hugos. It's a good post, though I have one minor quibble. John W. Campbell "only" won the Retro Hugo for Best Editor, not Best Series because the only potentially eligible series Campbell ever wrote, the Arcot, Morey and Wade series finished in 1931 (which is a good thing, because while these stories influenced a lot of writers from Campbell's stable, the Arcot, Morey and Wade stories are pretty dreadful) . Instead, the Retro Hugo for Best Series went to the Cthulhu Mythos by that renown racist H.P. Lovecraft and a whole lot of others.
Richard Gadsden has some suggestions to improve the Retro Hugos, which he e-mailed to Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon. Once again, he's completely unaware that there was a crowdsourced eligibility and recommendation spreadsheet or that Paul Fraser assembled links to every single eligible story published in the SFF pulps.
2020 Best Novelette finalist Siobhan Carroll has some thoughts about how to imrpove the Retro Hugos, which also invvolve making it a juried award.
Font Folly also points out that a lot of the problems with the Retro Hugos stem from people trusting received wisdom such as that Astounding was the best SFF magazine of the 1940s and that John W. Campbell was the best editor, even though this isn't the case when you actually read the magazine, because Astounding actually published a higher ratio of crap than many other magazines, even though they also published a lot of classics.
Comrade-in-arms Steve J. Wright, who heroically reviewed a whole bunch of Retro Hugo eligible stories and discovered both a lot of dross and some overlooked gems, shares his thoughts on the 1945 Retro Hugo winners here. Steve J. Wright also shares his thoughts on John W. Campbell and points out that even though he did not vote for Campbell, Campbell was a more nuanced figure than the simple "saviour of science fiction" or "fucking fascist" dichotomy makes him out to be.
The Hugo Book Club also weighs in on the Retro Hugos and declares that contemporary voters and nominators often have to rely on received wisdom and hindsight, because they don't have the same overview of the field that fans of the time did. They also point out that Best Series doesn't work well with the Retro Hugos.
Remco van Straten busts another bit of received wisdom regarding the 1945 Retro Hugos and points out that the 1945 Retro Hugo winner for Best Graphic Story Superman: “The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk” is credited to the wrong person, for the art was not by Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, but by Ira Yarbrough, an uncredited artist who worked in Shuster's studio. But even though Yarbrough and other studio artists were uncredited, golden age Superman fans have long since figured out who drew which stories. So the misattribution is embarrassing and shouldn't have happened, especially since Alex Raymond's co-artist Don Moore is credited correctly for Flash Gordon, as are the creators of the nominated Spirit comic, none of whom is Will Eisner. I guess the lesson is to reach out more to golden age comic fandom in correctly sourcing who actually drew those comics.
And yes, Hugo voting already is a lot of work and Retro Hugo voting adds to that workload with the added complication that there is no helpful Hugo voter packet - you have to track down all of that stuff yourself. But I'd rather help voters and nominators to make more informed decisions than to abolish the Retro Hugos altogether, because I don't like how they turn out.
So with the 1945 Retro Hugos over, what happens next?
Well, there won't be any Retro Hugos next year, because the Retro Hugos for 1946 were already covered back in 1996. The winners look pretty good, though the finalists look very male indeed with only one woman (C.L. Moore, writing like she so often did with her husband), in there.
So I won't do a new recommendation spreadsheet, until 2022 and the 1947 Retro Hugos, should they take place. However, I will keep this site running and continue to review vintage science fiction and fantasy. From now on, the reviews will be a mix of works eligible for the 1947 Retro Hugos as well as other vintage stories, which I want to revisit or read for the first time or which just caught my eye. And yes, I'll probably continue to focus on women authors, but not exclusively.
In fact, the next review will be for a 1944 story by a little known woman author named Rith Washburn that I overlooked the first time around.
We'll also remain open to guest reviews, so if there's a work of vintage SFF that you always wanted to review, feel free to send it to me.
