Halloween 2025 – with Bonus Skeleton Warriors

Posted on November 2, 2025 by Cora

As explained in this post, Halloween is still a fairly newish thing in Germany, only becoming popular in the past twenty years or so.

When I was a kid, Halloween was completely unknown in Germany, even though All Hallows’ Day is a public holiday in Catholic parts of Germany. There also were and still are native trick or treating traditions on St. Nicholas Day (December 6), St. Martin’s Day a.k.a. Martinsmas (November 11), Epiphany Day (January 6) or during Carnival, depending on the region. In my part of Germany, we do our trick or treating on St. Nicholas Day.

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Comic Review: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Sword of Flaws No. 1 by Tim Seeley and Freddie Williams II

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Cora

Even though my regular comic collecting days are almost twenty years behind me by now, I still pick up the occasional comic series or trade paperback that interests me, including several Masters of the Universe comics.

Masters of the Universe is mostly considered a toy and cartoon franchise, though it also has a long comic history, starting with the mini-comics packed in with the figures via the DC and later Marvel Star Comics of the 1980s, the various international comics of the 1980s, the She-Ra and New Adventures comics, the 200X comics by MV Creations, which had gorgeous artwork, to the more recent comics published by DC and now Dark Horse. DC had a very good run of Masters of the Universe comics from 2012 to 2016 as well as several crossovers and mini-series, while Dark Horse has published several Masters of the Universe comic mini-series in the Revelation/Revolution continuity since 2021, a few of which I reviewed.

The latest Masters of the Universe comic mini-series from Dark Horse stands outside the Revelation/Revolution continuity and is instead set in the same continuity as the various Masters of the Universe crossovers (Turtles of Grayskull, Masters of the Universe versus Injustice, He-Man/Thundercats, etc…) by the creative team of Tim Seeley and Freddie Williams II – at least according to this interview. Those crossovers were fun enough, though I prefer the “pure” Masters of the Universe comics, if only because you’re not constantly distracted by characters from a completely franchise you may or may not be familiar with. I had enough familiarity with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the Thundercats to understand the respective crossovers, though some minor characters had me wondering, “And who is this supposed to be again?” However, the Injustice crossover, set in an alternate DC Universe where Superman and Wonder Woman are evil and Batman is leading the resistance (apparently based on a videogame), was rather confusing. Besides, we had seen Superman and He-Man clash twice before at this point and we knew by then, surpising as it may seem, that He-Man can beat Superman.

Therefore, when Sword of Flaws was first announced, I was happy to get a non-crossover Masters of the Universe story from the creative team of Tim Seeley and Freddie William II. Of course, I would have preferred another comic series in the Revelation/Revolution continuity, since that universe was too good to just be abandoned, plus Revelation/Revolution finally moved the story forward rather than returning to the same status quo over and over again. However, Mattel seems completely focussed on the upcoming live action Masters of the Universe film by now. And while I’m looking forward to that movie, I would still have preferred to get a third season of Masters of the Universe Revelation/Revolution.

But enough of what we didn’t get. Let’s take a look at what we did get, namely the Sword of Flaws mini-series. The title alludes to some very early Masters of the Universe lore that was quickly abandoned, namely that the Power Sword originally consisted of two halves, a good and an evil half, one of which came with He-Man and the other with Skeletor. These two halves could be combined – literally clipped together – to form a complete Power Sword which also served as the key of Castle Grayskull, as explained in this video as well as in the ridiculously Freudian mini-comic “King of Castle Grayskull” by Donald F. Glut and Alfredo Alcala, which is full of imagery of He-Man and Skeletor thrusting their swords into the keyhole next to the jawbridge of Castle Grayskull to enter the castle and win over the Castle’s guardian Teela. Yup, this is basically a comic about who gets to deflower Teela.

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Researching the Memory Hole Worldcon

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Cora

I have two links to share today. To begin with, I have a story called “Queen of the Communist Cannibals” in Cliffhanger Magazine, a brand-new online magazine for adventure fiction. The story is an homage to the men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and I used an actual men’s adventure magazine headline as a prompt. It’s also a Two-Fisted Todd story, though Todd is not the main protagonist this time around.

I’m also over at Galactic Journey again, reporting about Heicon ’70, the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg, (West) Germany. It’s still the only Worldcon ever in Germany and one of only three in continental Europe.

As Galactic Journey‘s resident West German correspondent, it fell to me to report about the Heidelberg Worldcon. There was only one problem. I obviously didn’t attend the 1970 Worldcon, because I wasn’t born yet. Of course, Galactic Journey has reported about several Worldcons we didn’t attend, based on information found online or in vintage fanzines. However, there is very little information about the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg available online. And no one in German fandom seems to know anybody who attended let alone was involved in the organisation. In fact, no one even seems to know why Heidelberg of all places was chosen as the location of the first and only German Worldcon (since it’s far from a logical choice), though I do have a theory, which I elaborate upon in the article. It’s as if the 1970 Worldcon has fallen into a memory hole.

We do know who the Hugo winners and finalists that year were, but even the photo of the 1970 Hugo trophy on the official Hugo Awards page does not depict the actual trophy, but one with a replacement base fashioned by Pro Artist winner Frank Kelly Freas. The Hugo section of the article was incredibly exhausting BTW, since I was not familiar with many of the winners and finalists – yes, I have read The Left Hand of Darkness and Slaughterhouse Five and know Bug Jack Barron by reputation, but I don’t know the other Best Novel finalists and very few of the novella and short story finalists. Which meant digging up the links to all the reviews of the respective works at Galactic Journey and comparing the Hugos to our person Galactic Stars. That said, I’m mostly in agreement with the 1970 Hugo winners, which is more than you can say for many other Hugo years.

I have only ever met two people (as far as I know) who attended the Heidelberg Worldcon, Robert Silverberg and Betsy Wollheim. My meeting with Betsy Wollheim was very brief and the topic never came up. As for Robert Silverberg, we were on a (virtual) panel together at CoNZealand and he actually told me an anecdote about the Heidelberg Worldcon and the idiot who accosted him about the Vietnam War, which made it into the article. And yes, I did apologise to Robert Silverberg for some guy being a jerk to him fifty years before.

Once I dug deeper into the subject, I did find more information about the 1970 Worldcon, though it was still a lot scarcer than with many other Worldcons. Fanac.org had some photos taken by a Swedish fan named Lars-Olov Strandberg, but they were not labelled and identifying the people took some effort.

More helpful was this con report with photos, dutifully labelled, by German fan Klaus D. Kunze. Kunze seems to have taken a turn towards the far right in later years based on his publication list, but in 1970 he was just a young fan and his con report is solid and was a helpful source, though I strongly suspect I would politically disagree on pretty much anything with him today.

Fancylopedia had a bit more information and also decscribes the “Battle of the Balcony” where con members drove off Anti-Vietnam protesters. They also led me to this brief con report by a fan named Tony Lewis, a detailed con report in the fanzine Munich Round-Up by “Fux” and “WK” (most likely Walter Reinecke and Waldemar Kumming) as well as to 1970 TAFF winner and Heicon fan guest of honour Elliot K. Shorter.

Elliot K. Shorter’s Heicon report and the beginning of his 1970 TAFF report (apparently, he never finished it) were another teasure trove of information. Elliot K. Shorter coincidentally was the first person of colour ever to be a Worldcon guest of honour. Heicon further boasted the first ever woman to win the Hugo for Best Novel with Ursula K. Le Guin and the first ever person of colour to win a Hugo with Samuel R. Delany. That’s a lot of firsts for a Worldcon few people remember and a big step forward for more diversity in our genre.

My article is based mainly on the con reports by Elliot K. Shorter, Klaus Kunze and the pseudonymous Fux and WK. The all focussed on different aspects, but it was possible to piece together what happened, particular concerning a group of trolls, as we would refer to them today, doing their best to disrupt the con in the name of protesting the War in Vietnam. And though I suspect that Shorter, Kunze and Fux and WK would have agreed on very little otherwise, they all agree that those folks were idiots.

Which brings me to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Spekulative Thematik a.k.a. AST a splinter group of the Science Fiction Club Deutschland and the group that did their utmost to disrupt Heicon ’70. Now I’d never heard of AST before, though their chosen name sounds so very earnestly post-1968 left-wing. Their leader Albrecht Stuby who is mentioned in several Heicon reports actually went on to found a well regarded film festival Saarbrücken. I suspect we would get along very well today and I feel a bit bad to call him a troll, but that’s what he was in 1970. In fact, I should probably have tried to contact Stuby, except that I didn’t google him in time.

As I dug a bit deeper into AST, I realised that though I had never heard of them, I had encountered the group and their legacy before. One of their founding members was Hans Joachim Alpers from Bremerhaven (where AST was founded), co-creator of the RPG Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye), which was my and pretty much every other West German’s introduction to tabletop roleplaying. Hans Joachim Alpers also wrote that terrible article about Conan the Cimmerian for the AST zine Science Fiction Times, which I utterly eviscerate here. And regarding AST affiiliated zines, one of them, SF Notizen, which is still around and published by a local guy actually reported about my first Hugo nomination in 2020. I have a copy.

In general, the AST folks are also prime examples of the kind of 1970s West German pop culture criticism, which was the bane of my teen years. These people were the pioneers of pop culture criticism, the first generation of critics to actually seriously look at pop culture and their works were often the only critical works about SFF and other pop culture that existed at all, yet they were suffused by a very specific post-1968 leftwing fervour which condemned anything and everything as fascistoid, war-glorifying, violent American trash and worse.

I first encountered these early works of pop culture criticism in watered down form via teachers at school and the media which insisted that everything I enjoyed – Star Wars, Conan, US superhero comics, Perry Rhodan, Geisterjäger John Sinclair, Masters of the Universe, US cartoons in general, Stephen King, etc… – was trivial, worthless, bad, evil, wrong, fascistoid and would probably turn me into a Nazi war criminal and/or mass murderer.  It was of course all very, very stupid, but nonetheless it caused me to hide the things I enjoyed and feel ashamed about liking what I did, because there clearly was something wrong with me. At the same time, it also ignited the fervent wish to prove all of those teachers and media pundits and pop culture critics wrong, to show that yes, this stuff is good and yes, this stuff has value and no, it’s not just violent American trash (TM). In a way, I’m still doing that today, arguing back against a German teacher who is dead and one who’s still alive (or at least was the last time I checked), but probably doesn’t remember who I am and whom I’ve avoided for more than thirty years, because I know that if I ever saw him again, I would chew the guy’s head off about what a terrible person and teacher he was and how I would never forgive him for what he did to my friend Raphael (who turned out just fine BTW, better than any of us ever expected).

At university, I then found the primary sources in the library, these early works of pop culture criticism, which were so very much of their time such as the 1977 two volume Entertainment – Lexicon of Popular Culture, which is actually in my personal collection and which dedicates entire entries to various New Wave SFF authors who were no longer particularly relevant by the time I found the genre, while dismissing much better known golden age authors as – you guessed it – fascistoid.

Thankfully, science fiction and pop culture criticism has moved on since the 1970s and the teachers who used second hand versions of that same criticism to shame students for their reading and viewing choices are either retired or dead by now. And the AST people mostly moved on as well. Albrecht Stuby who gave a speech in 1970 accusing Worldcon, the Hugos, the masquerade, etc… of being frivolous, because there were people dying in Vietnam (and elsewhere) went on to found the Max Ophüls Film Festival and Award in Saarbrücken ten years later (which includes frivolous things like galas, awards ceremony and a trophy, even though people are still dying). Hans Joachim Alpers went on to co-create Das Schwarze Auge and introduce generations of (West) Germans to the joy of RPGs, though he is still wrong about Conan. An Austrian fan – not an AST member, but a former president of the Science Fiction Club Deutschland – named Axel Mehlhardt who gave a talk about sword and sorcery at the Heidelberg Worldcon (mentioned in several con reports, though I couldn’t find out what he actually said and since he died in 2024, it’s no longer possible to ask him) went on to found a highly regarded jazz club in Vienna. In short, the angry young men (and it seems they were mostly men) of 1970 grew up and mellowed. Not all of them remained active in SFF fandom, though several of them ended up in other creative fields such as running jazz clubs and film festivals.

I have even run across the theory that the disruptive behaviour of the AST people is the reason why there never was another Worldcon in Germany. This is nonsense. For starters, we know the reason why there never was another Worldcon in Germany. It’s because German fandom is balkanised – the Star Trek fans, Star Wars fans, Perry Rhodan fans, anime fans, gamers, even the Masters of the Universe fans, etc… all have their own cons, but there are very few pan-fandom cons. And the people who would be the logical choices to run a German Worldcon bid, namely longterm runners of literary focussed SFF cons, don’t want to do it. That said, things are changing in German fandom and I expect to see a German Worldcon bid for sometime in the 2030s, though it won’t be for Heidelberg again.

Not to mention that Heicon ’70 was far from the only Worldcons beset by controversy and disruptive trolls. Worldcon has a history of controversies from the very first one in 1939, where the Futurians were kicked out for allegedly planning to distribute a pro-Communist leaflet, on. A known pedophile was kicked out in 1964, which led to people (who I hope had no idea about the extent of his crimes) protesting the exclusion of this pedophile. We’ve had more than one case of people being kicked out or preemptively banned for disruptive behaviour. In fact, I’m surprised that the AST people were not unceremoniously kicked out. We had the Sad and Rabid Puppy drama in 2015/2016 and in 2018, we had a far right protest outside the San José Worldcon. So in short, drama and controversy have always been a part of Worldcon. If anything, the AST folks trying to disrupt Heicon ’70 to strike a blow against the war in Vietnam is one of the less remembered Worldcon controversies.

As for the rest of my Heicon ’70, I tried to write it like I would write a contemporary con report and that includes the trip to get there. I suspect 1970 Cora would have been no more likely to take the train than 2025 Cora, though the specific incident which turned me against trains (a teacher shaming me for politely asking where the baggage check-in at the train station was, even though I had only ridden on a train once by the point, from Bremen to Osterholz-Scharmbeck, which takes 15 minutes and required no luggage) most likely wouldn’t have happened to 1970 Cora. However, my Dad’s family were always car people – my paternal grandpa managed a gas station and had a car since the late 1920s.

As for which car to take for my fictional 1970 Worldcon trip, my Dad really did have a Mercedes in the early 1970s, though I don’t know if it was this particular model, though it’s likely based on production years. I have very vague memories of that car and my parents sold it, when my Dad got a company car from his employer. As a replacement, they bought a Volkswagen Beetle – with the small window, but not the pretzel window – to maintain the low car insurance premiums (in Germany, car insurance premiums go down the longer the insurance has been active without accidents), which was mostly driven by my Mom once she got her licence. For longer roadtrips, we always used the bigger car, because it’s more comfortable. Because cramming three people plus luggage into a Volkswagen Beetle is not particularly comfortable.

For the route taken, I first plotted a contemporary route and then checked which Autobahnen already existed in 1970. Figuring out which service stations already existed wasn’t all that easy either – the history of individual Autobahn service stations in Germany is not well documented – but thankfully I found some vintage postcards of service stations on route as well as vintage postcards of Heidelberg and Neckarsteinach, where the boat trip went. I honestly think that more Worldcons should have roadtrips.

Aunt Irmtraut, the relative who’s mentioned in the con report, is a real person. She’s my Mom’s cousin and lives in Heidelberg and really keeps asking me when I’ll come to visit her.

Meanwhile, while I was working on my Heicon ’70 report, it was announced that next year’s Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention is relocating to – guess where? – Heidelberg, since their regular venue in Neuss is undergoing renovations. So I will really attend a con in Heidelberg next year, though a very different con and 56 years later.

 

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Better Late Than Never: The 2025 Hugo Ceremony Apology

Posted on September 3, 2025 by Cora

It’s been more than two weeks since the pretty disastrous 2025 Hugo ceremony (for all the gory details, see this post) and not only do we finally have the Hugo nomination statistics, we also finally have an apology or rather two.

First of all, there is this apology from Kathy Bond, chair of the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle, Washington. Kathy Bond and her team admit that the organisation of the ceremony was sorely lacking, that pronunciation guides and a script were inadequate and that they left hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl inadequately prepared. It’s kind for Kathy Bond to fall on her sword and take the blame for the mess, but I wouldn’t let the hosts off the hook entirely, because if pronunciation guides, proper scripts, etc… were missing and the general rundown of ceremony was unclear, they should have asked for clarification.

There is also an apology to Kamilah Cole, the Lodestar finalist whom the hosts forgot, when reading out the finalists, as well as to the kh?ré? editorial team (sorry for WordPress refusing to recognise diacritics) for not reading out the names of the whole team without informing them beforehand. The same thing happened to the r/fantasy bingo team in Best Related, who also didn’t have their individual names read out without being informed beforehand, but they are not explicitly mentioned in the apology.

Kathy Bond also notes that they have “carefully documented all of these issues and shared them with LAcon V and Montréal Worldcon 2027 teams”. Which is certainly a good thing, except that none of the issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were in any way new. All of these things, mispronounced names, jokes and giggles about names and big teams, captioning failures and forgetting to read out a finalist, have all happened before, sometimes multiple times. In short, Worldcons should know about these pitfalls and issues, yet the same mistakes keep happening again and again.

In the comments at File 770, Erin Underwood also points out that none of the issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were in any way new and that we’re dealing with a recurrent infrastructure problem here. The main issue here is that due to the structure of Worldcon, every Worldcon starts from scratch and tries to reinvent the wheel rather than fall back on institutional knowledge and solutions which have already been successfully implemented. One such solution is prerecording the list of the finalists to take pressure off the presenters and only let the presenters announce the winner.

By the way, during the neverending Hugo ceremony from Hell of 2020, Erin Underwood presented the Best Fan Writer category and mispronounced my name. As soon as I pointed this out, Erin Underwood promptly apologised to me and also asked how to properly pronounce it. As I’ve said before, I could spell my full name in two language by the time I was five, I’m used to having my name mispronounced and respond to anything that even vaguely resembles my name. However, I still appreciate when people take the care to get it right or apologise when they get it wrong.

Finally, there is this suggestion:

Recommended creation of a new sub-area role in the Worldcon organizational structure responsible solely for the accurate handling of names. While not as visible as the errors at the podium, we also encountered technical issues with our badge printing software that were not identified until too late that failed to print diacritical marks on names correctly. We believe that centralizing this responsibility will help future Worldcons be more inclusive and respectful to individuals in all areas of the convention including the Hugo Awards.

Now this is a good suggestion that future Worldcons will hopefully implement. As for the badge printing software, I’m sadly not surprised that this happened. Because particularly US based software often has issues with diacritics and special characters. Note that I apologised above for WordPress not recognising diacritics and thus mangling kh?ré?. Because this is a known issue with WordPress and one they refuse to address. See this post from 2019 remembering Czech director Václav Vorlí?ek. That post – a tribute to a beloved director of genre films and TV, who is little known in the English speaking world – near killed me, because WordPress kept stripping out the handcoded diacritics.

But it’s not just WordPress. I’ve heard from people who had problems going through security at the airport, because the name on the ticket did not match the name on the passport. However, airline reservation software often doesn’t recognise special characters, so the people were forced to use workarounds, which then didn’t match their passports. I know one person who actually changed their legal name to get rid of the special character ß in their name, because they had a job which required a lot of travelling and kept running into problems with airport security.

So in short, I’m surprised that there were problems with the badge printing software. Nonetheless, these problems shouldn’t happen in the year 2025. Software developers should finally realise that English is not the default and that diacritics and special characters exist and that names don’t always fit neatly into a first name, middle name (Germans don’t have middle names – we can have multiple first names and multipart surnames, but no middle names) and surname pattern, that sometimes titles are part of a name, that patronymics exist, that transliteration can result in different spellings, that sometimes a rude word can be part of a name, etc… Also see this great post by Patrick McKenzie about falsehoods programmers believe about names, which someone linked in the comments about the apology.

Also, with regard to diacritics, it’s not okay to just leave them out, because diacritics affect the pronunciation and can also change the meaning. A German person named Käthe Müller would not be happy to find herself spelled Kathe Muller, because that’s not her name. The way her name would be spelled in systems that cannot handle Unlaute is Kaethe Mueller BTW.

Finally, regarding the pitfalls of names, I’d like to share a funny true story. Some forty years ago, there was a prominent German politician named Otto Graf Lambsdorff. That wasn’t even his full name, just the shortened version. His full name was Otto Friedrich Wilhelm von der Wenge Graf Lambsdorff. Hereby, Otto is the first name, Graf is his title, since he was from an aristocratic family, and Lambsdorff is his surname. In English, his name would be Otto Count Lambsdorff.

Otto Graf Lambsdorff was West Germany’s secretary of the economy from 1977 to 1984 and in this capacity he visited Singapore sometime in 1982/83. The Singapore Straits Times reported about this visit – with the headline “Otto visits Singapore”, which was an absolute howler for German speakers, because Otto was the stage name used by popular comedian Otto Waalkes. Indeed, I remember seeing that headline as a kid and saying to my parents, “Wow, I had no idea that Otto was famous even here. Though I wonder how his humour will translate.”

It’s easy to see how that mistake happened. Someone at the Straits Times saw a foreign name with three parts and assumed it followed the Chinese naming pattern where the surname is listed first. Or maybe some software programmed for Chinese names messed up. The correct headline would have been “Graf Lambsdorff visits Singapore” or – if you’re opposed to aristocratic titles – “Lambsdorff visits Singapore”. Note that the nephew of Otto Graf Lambsdorff, who’s also a politician as well as the German ambassador in Moscow, simply uses Alexander Lambsdorff as his screenname on Twitter, ditching the title.

As for why it took more than two weeks for an apology to be posted, Kathy Bond notes that several members of her team fell ill. I have no reason to disbelieve this, since I’ve heard from several people that they caught covid or other varieties of con crud at Worldcon. However, a brief note along the lines of “Yes, we’re aware of the issues with the Hugo ceremony and we will address them, but many of us are currently ill, so please give us time” should have been posted before.

That brings me to the second apology by hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, which may be found here as well as at File 770, if you don’t want to deal with Google Docs.

The apology by the hosts once again points at institutional issues behind the scenes that pronunciation guides weren’t provided for all names and none of the titles, that the script they were given wasn’t adequate, that there was no full rehearsal due to scheduling and technical issues and that there were last minute changes made to the ceremony (which was also confirmed by Seanan McGuire who presented a different category than initially planned with very short notice).

ETA: I checked with our editor Gideon whether he gave Seattle the pronunciations of every Galactic Journey team member listed as a Hugo finalist, since my name and Kris Vyas-Myall’s were mispronounced and I’m not sure if they got Natalie Devitt’s right, and according to Gideon, he was never asked for the pronunciations of the names of team members. So the con definitely didn’t have the pronunciations of our names (unless someone had the pronunciation of my name from a previous nomination).

However, even if the con failed to provide pronunciation guides for names and titles, the hosts could still have requested this information from the con or even contacted the people in question directly. When John Picacio hosted the Hugo ceremony a few years ago, he personally asked all the finalists how to pronounce their names to get it right. K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl could have done the same. And a full rehearsal of the Hugo ceremony should be a scheduling priority. The hosts should also have insisted on a full rehearsal.

There are specific apologies to Kamilah Cole for forgetting her, when reading out the Lodestar finalists, to Darcie Little Badger for mispronouncing the title of her Lodestar winning novel Sheine Lende and to the kh?ré? editorial team for not reading out the full list of names. Once again, there is no mention of the r/Fantasy bingo team, even though they were also neither informed nor happy about not having their names read out.

Then there is the issue of giggling at some of the names, which K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl claim they can’t remember doing, but that they would never giggle at someone’s name. Now I don’t doubt that they can’t remember the giggling, but it definitely happened and can be clearly heard on the recording of the ceremony. Grigory Lukin links to one instance in the comments at File 770.  The affected person is Egbiameje Omole, poetry editor at FIYAH. Now the giggle may well have been due to nerves or something the audience wasn’t aware of (like the infamous laugh during a memorial ceremony for flood victims that cost Armin Laschet the chancellorship) and not necessarily directed at Egbiameje Omole, since I don’t believe that K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl of all people would giggle at a Nigerian name. But it definitely happened, whether K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl remember it or not, and Egbiameje Omole deserves an apology, too.

Finally, K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl point out that they didn’t have any experience hosting an awards ceremony and therefore didn’t know what to ask of the organisation team.

This last bit is part of the problem, namely that Hugo toastmasters are usually popular and well regarded writers or other members of the SFF community. However, just because someone is a well known writer doesn’t mean they’re necessarily a good Hugo ceremony host. This was part of the problem with George R.R. Martin in 2020, for while George R.R. Martin may be one of the best known writers on the planet and does come across as likeable in TV interviews and the like, he’s not actually a very good Hugo ceremony presenter and also has known issues with pronouncing unfamiliar names and words.

What you want for a Hugo ceremony or indeed any awards ceremony is someone with stage experience who is spontaneous, can respond to unexpected issues and who can also handle unfamiliar words and names. And we do have people who fit this description in our community, even if they may not be the biggest names. But I’d rather have someone on stage who does a good job and knows what they’re doing rather than a big name writer who stumbles through the ceremony.

On the weekend after Worldcon I was at another con, Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel. Now Toyplosion is a very different con than Worldcon. It’s a vintage toy convention where the dealers room is not an afterthought but the main attraction. They don’t have an awards show or a masquerade or anything like that. However, Toyplosion also had stage programming such as interviews and a live podcast recording. There was also a tombola where the winners were announced live on stage and handed their prizes. And for the tombola winner announcement, the Toyplosion organisers drafted a YouTuber with local TV experience and an actress/singer/TV presenter who also happens to be a fan. Because these two people both have stage experience, are charming and managed to make even something fairly dull such as reading out winning tombola numbers entertaining. I wouldn’t necessarily choose these two people to host a Hugo ceremony, especially since the YouTuber has notable pronunciation issues with English language words and names (because not everybody is good at everything). Nonetheless, Toyplosion, a newish con which doesn’t have big ceremonies, handled the one they have better than Worldcon did.

ETA 09-06-2025: On BlueSky, Mary Robinette Kowal discusses how the 2025 Dragon Awards handled their ceremony and particularly how host Robert Picardo (you may remember him as the emergency medical hologram from Star Trek Voyager) handled names where he was not sure of the pronuciation.

Given the track record of the Dragons, it’s telling if they manage to do something better than the Hugos.

I don’t think that the many issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were due to malice and I never did. The main issue here is carelessness on the part of both the hosts and the organising team. And the fact that everybody involved should have known better, since we’ve dealt these very same issues before, makes this carelessness even more aggravating, since none of this needed to happen.

 

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Some Comments on the 2025 Dragon Award Winners

Posted on September 1, 2025 by Cora

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Toyplosion coverage, because the winners of the 2024 Dragons Awards were announced today at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. The full list of winners may be found here. For my thoughts on the 2025 Dragon Award finalists, see here.

I’ve been following the Dragon Awards since their inception in 2016, so I guess  I’m committed/cursed to cover the Dragon Awards at this point.

Schleich Eldrador Lunar New Year dragon and Masters of the Universe Classics Jitsu

Not a Dragon Award, but a gorgeous golden Schleich dragon and the Masters of the Universe Classics Jitsu who has claimed the dragon as his personal steed.

However, I had a busy weekend, so let’s delve right into the categories:

Best Science Fiction Novel

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel goes to This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman is the latest book in Dinniman’s popular Dungeon Crawler Carl LitRPG series.

I have to admit this win surprised me a little, because at least for me, this was the most obscure book in this category, but then LitRPG really isn’t my subgenre. That said, it’s interesting to see that indie books, who dominated the early years of the Dragons, can still win a Dragon Award in 2025.

Best Fantasy Novel

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Fantasy Novel is The Devils by Joe Abercrombie.

Personally, I was rooting for Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by the late Howard Andrew Jones, especially since this is the last chance to honour Howard Andrew Jones.

However, Joe Abercrombie is very popular and exactly the sort of author – very popular, but overlooked by other awards like the Hugos or Nebulas – the Dragon Awards were made for.

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Young Adult and Middle Grade Novel goes to Sunrise of the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. This win isn’t remotely surprising, since Sunrise of the Reaping is a prequel to Suzanne Collins’ extremely popular Hunger Games series and also a book that people who are not regular YA/middle grade readers will have heard of.

Best Alternate History Novel

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel is The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal. This was also my vote and I’m happy that it won.

But the Dragon isn’t the only award Mary Robinette Kowal won this weekend, for she also won the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction for her story “Marginalia”, which was also a Hugo finalist this year. It’s a very good story, too, about a young woman, a former chambermaid, who uses her knowledge to save a knight as well as her little brother from a giant snail.

Best Horror Novel

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel goes to Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle.

For those of us who’ve been following the Dragon Awards since the beginning, this is a beautiful case of poetic justice. Because the Dragon Awards grew out of the Sad and Rabid Puppy mess and while they were billed as an award for broadly popular SFF overlooked by other awards, the Dragons were also very much positioned as a sort anti-Hugo for conservative and right-wing SFF. And indeed the first Dragon Award winner for Best Horror Novel wasn’t even a horror novel, but a religious space opera by a very Catholic and very rightwing indie writer.

However, once the Dragons escaped containment, the ballot began to more closely resemble what the award set out to do, namely honour popular works frequently overlooked by other awards. The Dragon ballot is still more white and more male than many other genre awards and there still are right-leaning works on the ballot, but they’re by highly popular authors rather than obscure puppy hangers-on.

As for Chuck Tingle, he first came to many people’s attention when Vox Day slated him onto the Hugo ballot for his satirical erotica story “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” and Chuck Tingle proceded to royally troll the Puppies, which won him a non-slated Hugo nomination the following year. Chuck Tingle is also a horror writer, so for him to win an award initially pushed by the Puppies with a gay horror novel is not only poetic justice, but also proof that love is real.

Best Illustrative Book Cover

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Illustrative Cover is Michael Whelan for Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson. Michael Whelan is of course an SFF art legend and this was by far my favourite covers of all the finalists in this category.

Best Comic Book/Graphic Novel

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel goes to Daredevil: Cold Day In Hell by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven. I haven’t read this comic or indeed any Daredevil in thirty years, so I can’t say any about it.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series is Andor. This is an utterly unsurprising win, because Andor is the one Star Wars series that almost everybody likes. In fact, I’m something of an outlier, because while I like Andor, I don’t love it as much as many others seem to. And in fact, I voted for Murderbot.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie goes to Deadpool and Wolverine. Again, this is far from surprising, because Deadpool and Wolverine was extremely popular and probably the highest grossing movie on the ballot aside from Wicked. And the fact that Wicked is a) a musical and b) focussed on two women may have given Deadpool and Wolverine the edge here.

Best Digital Game

The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Digital Game is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. As I always say whenever this category comes up, I’m not a gamer, but even I have heard of Assassin’s Creed.

Best Tabletop Game

The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Tabletop Game goes to Magic the Gathering: Final Fantasy. This is another win that’s not even remotely surprising, because both Magic the Gathering and Final Fantasy are extremely popular. Magic the Gathering has also won the Dragon Award in this category before and was represented with two sets on this year’s ballot.

Other Awards

There were a number of other awards given out at Dragon Con as well.

As mentioned above, the 2025 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction goes to “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal.

The winner of the 2025 Mike Resnick Memorial Award for the best unpublished science fiction short story by a new author is “Elsewhere” by Anaïs Godard.

The 2025 Julie Award, named after Julius Schwartz, goes to Dave Goelz and the 2025 Hank Reinhardt Fandom Award goes to Mike Hannigan. Dave Goelz is a puppeteer with the Jim Henson Company who brought Gonzo the Great to life among others.

***

The Dragon Awards are now in their tenth year, well established and they pretty much do what they were intended to do, namely award broadly popular SFF works with big fanbases. It’s notable that this year’s Dragon Award winners are a lot more male dominated than last year’s, but then the Dragons tend to skew more male than most other genre awards.

I haven’t seen any reactions beyond some social media posts by happy winners so far, but I will link any reactions I find here.

ETA 09-02-2025: DragonCon issued a press release about the various awards handed out at the convention, including the Dragons.

Two bits stand out. The first is this quote:

The Dragon Awards were created in 2016 as part of Dragon Con’s 30th anniversary celebration.

The interesting thing of course is that there is zero mention of the Puppies or the late Eric Flint who apparently was instrumental in the establishment of the Dragon Awards. Instead, the Awards are linked to DragonCon’s thirtieth annviersary.

The other interesting bit is that “Nearly 6,000 fans cast ballots for this year’s Dragon Award winners…” which is as close to nomination and voting data we will ever get for the Dragons.

Though Camestros Felapton points out that the number of voters given in 2023 and 2024 was 7000 and in 2018, it was as high as 11000. The numbers are still higher than the Hugos normally get, largely because the Dragon Awards are free to vote and nominate for and don’t require a convention membership. However, they’re dropping, but then the number of Hugo votes went down this year as well.

ETA 09-01-2025: Camestros Felapton briefly weighs in one the 2025 Dragon Awards and notes that the winners are mostly very popular works with big fanbases. So in short, the Dragons are doing what they were supposed to do.

ETA 09-01-2025: At her blog, Doris V. Sutherland offers an overview of ten years of Dragon Awards and the many controversies the Dragons attracted in their fairly short lifetime.

Regarding the 2025 Dragons, Doris notes that the winners are mostly broadly popular works with big fanbases. She’s also surprised at Matt Dinniman’s win in Best Science Fiction Novel, since she’d never heard of Dinniman before. I had heard of him, but I had no idea he was that popular. So I guess Matt Dinniman is an author who really appeals to a certain niche and is little known outside it, though his fanbase is big and vocal enough to win him a Dragon and push him onto the Hugo longlist for Best Series.

So far, there hasn’t been anything from the far right side of the genre. Though it is very telling that ten years after their inception, the Dragon Awards are doing exactly what they were designed to do, namely honour popular works with big fanbases that are often overlooked by other awards.

However, the former Puppies aren’t winning any Dragons or even get nominated with the exception of authors like Larry Correia who has a big fanbase that extends beyond the puppy sphere.

What is more, the former Puppies also mostly abandoned the Dragons, once it became clear that they couldn’t win them anymore and that maybe, they were not the silent majority of SFF fans they thought they were.

ETA 09-02-2025: Doris V. Sutherland dug up this Twitter conversation, wherein users PulpArchivist and Fiannawolf, subtitle “Questing for the Superversive”, discussed their disenchantment with the Dragon Awards back when the nominations came out.

Also weighing in is self-published, rightwing and very Catholic SFF writer and unlikely story inspiration Declan Finn who notes that he has lost interest in the Dragons. This is significant, because Declan Finn was a Dragon finalist in the first year and spent subsequent years eagerly campaigning for a Dragon nomination. Declan Finn also used to post recommendation lists the Dragons.

Doris V. Sutherland notes that there are six people who dutifully chronicle the Dragon Awards – Doris  herself, me, Camestros Felapton, Mike Glyer, Ray Radlein and Sean C.W. Korsgaard, the last two of whom also live tweeted the winners well before Dragon Con officially announced them. None of us are Puppies or former Puppies and Mike, Cam and I are people the former Puppies actively dislike and I’m pretty sure they don’t like Doris and Ray either. That leaves Sean Korsgaard who is a former Baen employee and current editor of Battleborn Magazine. However, he wasn’t involved in the Puppy wars, because not everybody working at Baen is/was a Puppy.

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Back to the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the 2025 Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel Part 1: It’s Roadtrip Time

Posted on August 27, 2025 by Cora

I still haven’t gotten around to posting the final part of my report about my trip to the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention in Neuss earlier this summer and it’s already time for the next convention.

But first of all, I’m at Galactic Journey again today, for the third time this month. This time around, I review another Ballantine Adult Fantasy book, Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith. If Ursula K. Le Guin derisively referred to Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz as Poughkeepsie because of its fairly plain language and low magic world, Zothique is definitely Elfland. Though I think there is room for both in fantasy.

But now  let’s get to the topic at hand. For last weekend, I headed to Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel in the Ruhrgebiet. Though only in its third year, Toyplosion already is one of Europe’s biggest vintage toy conventions. Unfortunately, I had to miss the first Toyplosion due to both my parents being sick, but I attended last year’s Toyplosion and enjoyed it a lot, so much that I bought a ticket for this year’s edition as soon as they went on sale.

Masters of the Universe Classics He-Man posing with a Ruhrpott mug

He-Man goes Ruhrpott – again.

As with this year’s Los Amigos convention, I also booked a hotel for the night. That way, I could spare myself the stress of driving both ways in a single day and also explore the many fascinating sights the Ruhrgebiet has to offer.

Though I suspect a lot of people still have the old image of the grimy Ruhrgebiet in their minds. Cause when I told neighbours and friends that I was going to Castrop-Rauxel for the weekend, the inevitable reaction was, “Why on Earth would you go there?”, whereby “there” was often pronounced with utter disdain. I guess a lot of people still haven’t realised that the old grimy Ruhrgebiet is long gone and that the region actually is a viable tourist destination with lots of interesting sights now. Though I recall seeing a travel broshure announcing that “The Ruhrgebiet is green”, complete with photos of castles, mansions and parks, sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s, at a time when many of mines, steelworks and other heavy industry in the Ruhrgebiet were still active. So the Ruhrgebiet has been rebranding itself as a tourist destination for more than thirty years now.

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He-Man Goes Ruhrpott – Cora’s Adventures at the 2025 Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss, Part 3: Coal, Castles and Grevenbroich

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Cora

I know this post is much delayed, but here is the long awaited part 3 of my trip to the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention in Neuss on the long Pentecost weekend. For the rather eventful trip to get there, see part 1 and for my adventures at the con itself, see part 2.

By the time, I had finished my rounds of the con and finally found a place to have lunch, even if it was only a sandwich, it was approximately a quarter to four in the afternoon, so there was still time to take in some sights before heading to the hotel.

As mentioned above, it was the long Pentecost holiday weekend. Plus, there were several events in addition to the Los Amigos convention going on in Neuss and neighbouring Düsseldorf such as Dokomi, one of Germany’s biggest anime cons in Düsseldorf as well as several fairs and sports events. As a result, all hotels in Neuss and Düsseldorf were very expensive, if they had vacancies at all. So I picked a hotel in the town of Grevenbroich, some twenty-five kilometers to the south west of Neuss. Of course, this would take me further from home, but the price difference was one hundred euros per night, which is significant.

Now I have to admit that I knew nothing whatsoever about Grevenbroich beyond the fact that it exists. Some googling revealed that there were a couple of castles in the area around Grevenbroich. It also revealed something else. Grevenbroich also happens to be located in the middle of the Rhenish lignite coal mining area very close to the Garzweiler and Hambach lignite coal stripmines.

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Some Comments on the 2025 Hugo Winners – with Bonus Tall Ship Photos

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Cora

The winners of the 2025 Hugo Awards were announced last night or rather very early in the morning at Worldcon in Seattle, Washington. My thoughts on the finalists may be found here and the full voting statistics and some comments by the administrator may be found here.

I didn’t attend Worldcon this year, because the US government has unfortunately gone quite mad and the risk of being refused entry to the US or – worse – getting thrown into some ICE jail is too big, especially since Worldcon already falls into the gray area between business and leisure travel for me.

However, Worldcon wasn’t the only big event happening this weekend. Cause the SAIL tall ship festival in Bremerhaven, one of the biggest in the world, was also happening at almost the same time as Worldcon. And unlike Seattle, Bremerhaven is only about eighty kilometers away. And when the water was sunny but cool on Saturday morning, I hopped into the car and drove to Bremerhaven to the visit the SAIL. I will probably do a separate blogpost with more photos, but for now enjoy this little taste:

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Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz or How to Suppress Women’a Writing – The Fantasy Edition

Posted on August 17, 2025 by Cora

I’m over at Galactic Journey again – for the second time this month and a third article is coming later this month, which must be a new record for me – to talk about Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz, a novel which was incredibly influential and yet isn’t remembered nearly as well as it should be.

For the actual review, head over to Galactic Journey. If you want to know why this novel was so influential – which I obviously couldn’t discuss from the 1970 POV of Galactic Journey – read on.

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So what does Cora think of the new Masters of the Universe toys revealed at San Diego Comic Con?

Posted on August 7, 2025 by Cora

So do you want to know what I think of the new Masters of the Universe toys revealed at San Diego Comic Con – illustrated with photos of my toys from my own collection which were not revealed at San Diego Comic Con, at least not this year? If yes, then you’re in luck. And if no – well, then I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to skip this post.

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