Retro Review: “Gambler’s Asteroid” by Manly Wade Wellman

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Cora
Thrilling Wonder Stories, spring 1944

There are no space walrusses in “Gambler’s Asteroid” either

“Gambler’s Asteroid” is a space opera short story by Manly Wade Wellman, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

The titular gambler’s asteroid is 624 Hektor (spelled “Hector” in this story), which in this story’s version of the pulp science fiction shared solar system has been encased in a bubble of glassite and had its spin sped up by atomic engines to create artificial gravity (Hector is too small to have much in the way of natural gravity) on the inside of the glassite bubble. So all of the characters in this story are walking around on a glass floor with the stars below them. An enterprising Venusian than turned Hector into a sort of interplanetary Las Vegas or rather Atlantic City, considering that the Las Vegas we know today is largely a postwar phenomenon.

Our protagonist is Patch Merrick, a not very successful gambler, who has just bet his last value-units on a card game named Indemnity. The game is fictional, but Wellman explains how it works in a quick paragraph. Not that it matters much, because Merrick loses in the second round anyway.

Wellman now gives us some backstory about Merrick and his tentacled and telepathic Martian pal Zaarrgon. Turns out that Merrick and Zaarrgon are fugitives on the run. Zaarrgon is another of those social justice warriors that certain quarters still claim did not exist in golden age science fiction. He stole water to help his fellow Martians who were dying of thirst and thus attracted the attention of the Martio-Terrestrial League. I can’t help but wonder whether this organisation is a rebrand of Leigh Brackett’s Terran Exploitation Company. “Hey, we’re still an evil bloodsucking company, but at least out new name is a little less blatant about it.”

Zaarrgon ended up in prison, facing execution, and Merrick, who refers to himself as “guilty of sentimentality”, broke him out. As a result, Merrick lost his promising career and his fiancée Morgana Conti, daughter of the wealthy Coburn Conti, and was forced to flee with Zaarrgon to the lawless asteroid belt. They stopped on Hector, hoping to win enough money – pardon, value-units – to buy supplies for their space cruiser and continue their escape. However, Martians are banned from gambling on Hector due to being telepathic and Merrick turns out to be really crap at gambling, so they’re soon out of money and supplies.

The game that Merrick was playing normally ends with all players, including those who dropped out, comparing their totals. The highest total wins. Merrick had good cards. However, he and Zaarrgon are broke and the stakes are too high for them, so Merrick wagers their space cruiser instead. There is obviously no way this can go wrong.

However this time, Merrick gets lucky and beats not just a fellow human player named Mr. Alabaster, but also the house. Now he and Zaarrgon have more than enough to resupply their ship.

Mr. Alabaster, on the other hand, is not happy at all, because he was on Hector to do a job and the money he just gambled away was expense money. Turns out he is a bounter hunter, albeit a very inept one, who is supposed to hunt down Merrick and Zaarrgon on behalf of Morgana Conti and her father. Zaarrgon is still scheduled for execution. As for Merrick, his fate will be worse, at least according to Alabaster, because Morgana Conti still wants to marry him. As for Alabaster, he wound up with the bounty hunting job, because he’s a friend of the Conti family and Morgana hired him. However, she did not consider supplying Alabaster with photos of Merrick and Zaarrgon, which seems like an odd oversight.

Zaarrgon gives the luckless Alabaster his money back and tells him that the fugitives are headed for the moons of Jupiter to throw him off their scent. Not that it helps much, because Zaarrgon and Merrick are arrested anyway by casino security guards who overheard their conversation with Alabaster.

And so Zaarrgon and Merrick end up in prison, while the casino security chief, a froglike Venusian named Lirog, immediately calls Morgana Conti and asks if the prisoners are the fugitives she seeks. Morgana confirms this, doubles the reward and declares that she will pick up the prisoners herself. Alabaster shows up again as well to gloat, because Morgana will pay him a handsome reward as well.

While Merrick and Alabaster are arguing, Zaarrgon uses one of his tentacles to steal a guard’s handy rust raygun and uses it to reduce the lock of their cell to rust. Merrick knocks out a guard and the two fugitives are on the run once more.

On their way back to their space cruiser, they steal some of the atomic fuel for the engines which keep Hector spinning. There is some brief technobabble that Hector was once the centre of a planet that broke apart to form the asteroid belt, which is why powerful atomic fuel can be found there. Fuel powerful enough to take Zaarrgon’s and Merrick’s space cruiser beyond the solar system, though what they plan to do there is anybody’s guess.

They reach the docking bay of their cruiser, Merrick knocks out two more guards and Zaarrgon, who’s clearly the brains of this outfit, uses the rust ray he borrowed to weaken the frames of the glassite sheets and blow a hole into the bubble that envelops Hector, which will both allow the space cruiser to escape and keep everybody on the asteroid so busy with repairing the breach that they won’t have time to follow the fugitives.

The plan works, too. Merrick and Zaarrgon escape and head for another asteroid to purchase supplies, since luckily no one thought to relieve them of their winnings before throwing them into prison.

However, as Merrick and Zaarrgon make their escape aboard their space cruiser, they receive a call from none other than Morgana, who informs them that her plan worked.

When Merrick points out that her plan didn’t work, because he and Zaarrgon escaped, Morgana reveals that she wanted them to escape and made sure they would. She sent Alabaster after them, because he is the stupidest man she knows and a compulsive gambler besides. Then she bribed the card dealer to make sure that Alabaster lost all his expense money to Merrick, allowing Morgana to secretly finance Merrick’s escape.

However, the card dealer informed Ligon, the casino security chief, who then decided to arrest Merrick and Zaargon to get the reward himself. Merrick once more tries to reassert his independence by telling Morgana that he and Zaargon broke out on their own.

“That’s what you think”, Morgana says and reveals that she paid Alabaster to smuggle the rust gun into the prison, allowing Merrick and Zaargon to escape. Merrick is dumbfounded and Morgana tells him that he can’t come home now anyway, because he’s still a wanted man and because there are still many things that Morgana has to fix. And besides, she knows that Merrick isn’t ready to settle down just yet, but once he’s had enough of adventure, he’ll come back to her.

The story ends with Merrick moping and Zaarrgon babbling about asteroids and the creation of the asteroid belt and wondering why Merrick is moping. I take it back. Zaarrgon is not the brains of the outfit, he and Merrick are both idiots in their own way. Morgana, on the other hand, is awesome.

I have to admit, I only read this story, because I flipped forward through the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories after reading “Unsung Hero” by Ruth Washburn and came across this story – after two pages of “incredible but true Scientifacts”. The interior art – showing an anthropomorphic frog and a man in a cage ogling an attractive woman – looked intriguing enough and besides, I like Manly Wade Wellman‘s writing, so I decided to read it. I’m glad that I did, because this is a fun space opera adventure that manages to pack a lot of plot into only six pages.

If I have one complaint about “Gambler’s Asteroid” it’s that it’s too short. With the amount of plot and backstory there is, this could easily have been a novella, if not a novel. The glassite encased asteroid Hector is a fascinating setting, which I would have loved to explore more. I also would have loved to see Merrick break Zaarrgon out of prison and learn more about Merrick’s relationship with Morgana and her father and just what his life and promising career were like, before he decided to free Zaarrgon. And of course, I would have loved to see more of Morgana than two brief videocalls, because Morgana is awesome.

Intergalactic gambling dens are a space opera staple these days, whether it’s Canto Bight and Bespin of Star Wars fame (okay, we never actually see any gambling on Bespin, but you know it’s going on somewhere, considering who runs the place), Stardust City in a recent Star Trek: Picard episode as well as a lots of other intergalactic gambling dens in pretty much every Star Trek series to date, the casino planet Carillon in the original Battlestar Galactica or The Scuttling Cockroach, where Mikhail and Anjali rescue Pietro Garibaldi and get themselves into trouble in my own Freedom’s Horizon. However, Hector is the granddaddy of all of those intergalactic gambling dens. I’m not sure if this is the first intergalactic gambling den to ever feature in science fiction – most likely it’s not. But it’s definitely a very early example.

These days, Manly Wade Wellman is mainly remembered for his (very good) occult detective and folk horror stories – indeed, I reviewed one of them. But like most authors of the pulp era, Wellman was a man(ly) of any talents, who also wrote science fiction, mystery and crime fiction, comic books (a Spirit comic he wrote was nominated for the Retro Hugo this year) and historical non-fiction and who was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award over William Faulkner. However, Wellman’s science fiction stories, particularly his space opera tales from the 1930s and 1940s, are less well known than his fantasy and horror stories. At least based on “Gambler’s Asteroid”, I think that’s a pity.

Wellman’s skills as a writer are clearly evident in this very short story. In a few lines and paragraphs, he manages to sketch a fascinating setting by sprinkling in details like “Venusian chirp-water music”, a “Martian joy-lamp shedding stimulus rays overhead” or the popular Martian genre of “formalised comi-tragedy”, all of which are attractions on offer on the glassite floors of Hector. Wellman also had a dry humour that sets his work apart from other pulpy space opera tales of the era.

Like too many of the stories I have reviewed here at Retro Reviews, “Gambler’s Asteroid” has never been reprinted. I sincerely wonder why, because there is a lot to like about this fun space opera caper.

 

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Cora’s Adventures at CoNZealand, the Virtual 2020 Worldcon, and Some Thoughts on Virtual Conventions in General

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Cora

CoNZealand LogoSo far, I’ve talked a lot about the Hugo ceremony at CoNZealand, the virtual 2020 Worldcon, but little about the con itself, which is a pity, because CoNZealand was actually pretty good, all things considered.

Normally, this would be a post with lots of photos of panels, exhibits, parties, the convention centre, the Hugo ceremony, the Hugo reception and after-party, etc…. However, due to CoNZealand going virtual like most other cons this year (the ones that weren’t cancelled outright), the convention centre was my office. Which had the advantage that I didn’t have to dash from panel to panel and that I could make myself tea or empty the dishwasher in between panels. Food was always in easy reach and cheaper as well as more nutritious than the usual convention centre grub.

However, there were also new challenges such as “No, Mom, I don’t mind if you want to watch Hawaii Five-O or NCIS or whatever on my TV, but you have to be out of here by half past ten, because I have a panel at eleven.” Another issue is that if the con takes place at home, there is some pressure to keep working anyway, which wouldn’t be there if I had been on the other side of the world in New Zealand. And so I slept in the morning, taught virtual German classes in the afternoon, was at Worldcon by night and also translated someone’s citizenship renunciation certificate in between. Oh yes, and I was still doing the July Short Story Challenge, too, for the first few days of the con, though I only managed a couple fo flash pieces (the post-mortem is coming soon, I promise). I also made sure to take a short daily walk throughout the con.

As you can see from the program schedule I posted shortly before the con, I had a lot of programming this time around. I was on five panels and moderated three of them. I also had a virtual table in the dealer’s hall, something I haven’t done before, either virtually or in person. And then there was the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell, a dealers’ hall reception, etc… In short, I had a busy Worldcon.

My first panel was the “Evolution of Fanzines” panel on Wednesday at 6 AM my time. This was the one of my panels that was probably most affected by the behind the scenes programming changes and fixes that were still going on a few days before the con.

There were two potential problems with the panel: One was the panel description, which asked, “Are fanzines becoming blogs?” That would have been an interesting question to ask, in 2005 or so, but not in 2020. Personally, I didn’t so much mind the panel description – after all, I was moderating and could direct the panel into the direction where I wanted it to go. However, Adri Joy of the Best Fanzine Hugo finalist nerds of a feather was so annoyed by the description which erases most of the 2020 Best Fanzine finalists that she contacted CoNZealand programming and was able to get it changed.

The other potential problem with the fanzine panel was that it seemed to be heavily weighted towards traditional print fanzines, not to mention very white. It also had only three panelists in addition to the moderator. So I asked around in the group that was busily working to make programming more diverse and ended up with not one but two additional panelists who made the panel so much better. And so we had a really great panel with Greg Hills and Jeanne Mealy representing the traditional print fanzine end of the spectrum, Wendy Browne of Women Write About Comics and Sarah Gulde of Star Trek Quarterly and Journey Planet (and myself, I guess) representing the electronic end of the spectrum and Chris Garcia of Journey Planet and The Drink Tank bridging both sides.

Since it was the first day of the con, there were still a number of technical issues. For starters, the panel took place in a so-called meeting room, not a webinar room, so several of the things we’d been told in the Zoom training that CoNZealand organised for all programme participants didn’t apply. And so there were no individual Zoom links for the panelists, but we had to enter with the regular attendants and the Q&A function didn’t exist either, so we took questions via the chat function. One panelist also had technical issues and couldn’t join us until about twenty minutes into the panel. We also had a zoombombing cat, but then zoombombing pets and kids are always welcome.

But all in all, the panel went well, I think, and I also learned some lessons for future panels such as, “Don’t trust that the Q&A function will work and prepare to take questions via the chat?”, “Appoint someone as question wrangler”, “Make sure to remind the audience on which Discord channel (there was one for each programme room) the conversation will continue afterwards” and “Have any links you want to drop into the chat handy before the panel or have a helpful audience member do it for you, because you won’t have the time to chase down links, while you’re actually on the panel.”

I had my next panel the same evening at 11 PM my time. This was “Come Time Travel With Me”, the Galactic Journey live event, featuring Gideon Marcus, Janice Marcus, Lorelei Marcus, Erica Frank and myself. This panel required less preparation, a) because I wasn’t moderating, and b) because I’ve been on the Journey Show, Galactic Journey‘s series of regular online events, a couple of times now (the last time the Saturday before the con, actually), so I knew what to expect. Though I did look up what happened in late July 1965.

Since we’re all time travellers from 1965 for the purpose of the Galactic Journey live events, I also ditched my usual con uniform of geeky t-shirt and Hugo finalist pin (last year’s, since this year’s hasn’t arrived yet) in favour of some retro looking clothes, in this case an original Italian headband from the 1960s and a hippie-ish looking peasant blouse. The audience clearly enjoyed the retro outfits, judging by the chat, and we had another fun panel, which hopefully also brought in some new fans to Galactic Journey and the Journey Show. And talking about Galactic Journey, my latest article there is up. This time, I take a look at two 1965 movies, Again, the Ringer and The Face of Fu Manchu.

The first two days of the con were fairly light with regard to panel load, even though due to the time difference both panels took place on the same day in my timezone. Day three a.k.a. the night from Thursday to Friday, however, was a dozy with three panels, two of which I was moderating, and an event where the dealers’ hall vendors introduce themselves.

My first panel for the day was the “Cover Art” panel at 11 PM my time. I was moderating and the panelists were John Picacio and Alyssa Winans representing the artist side, Pablo Defendini, art director of Fireside Magazine, and Gideon Marcus of Galactic Journey and Journey Press (and myself, I guess) representing the publisher side. That was an amazing panel, which also shows how important good panelists are. I didn’t even have to do much moderating, because John, Pablo and Alyssa basically just threw the ball at each other. I also learned a lot.

Coincidentally, the “Cover Art” panel was also an all Hugo finalist panel, since every single one of us on that panel was a Hugo finalist. And one of us, John Picacio, would go on to win a highly deserved Hugo for Best Professional Artist.

After the cover art panel, I theoretically had a full hour until my next panel at 1 AM. However in practice, I had much less time, because I was chatting in Discord with the audience and panelists. So at twenty to one, I suddenly realised, “Oops, I have to go to y next panel” and excused myself.

The next panel was “The Second Golden Age: SF of the 1960s”. Bradford Lyau was moderating, the panelists were Robert Silverberg, Jack Dann, Kathryn Sullivan and myself. This time, I wore my regular con outfit – geeky t-shirt with Hugo pin – because unlike the Galactic Journey panel, this was a retrospective panel, so I was not actually a time traveller from the 1960s this time around.

There also was some debate about the subject of the panel beforehand, because one panelist (you can maybe guess who) heartily disagreed that the 1960s were the second golden age of science fiction or even the silver age and felt that the early 1950s were the true second golden age.

Talking about the term “golden age” for a moment, I’ve seen complaints from mostly younger SFF writers and readers that they don’t think the period from 1937 to the early 1950s, that is traditionally called “the golden age of science fiction” should be called that, because they believe that the true golden age is now, because there is so much good SFF being published today.

I disagree with this, because I see “golden age” more as a descriptive term used for a certain period than as a value judgment. Of course, it was initially intended to be a value judgment, but even then it should have been clear that the initial golden age would eventually be matched or eclipsed. But by now, the term “golden age” has simply become so engrained that we use it for a specific period, whether we actually think it was golden or not. For example, I also use the term “golden age of comics” for the period of approx. 1938 to 1954 (almost concurrently to the golden age of science fiction), even though I vastly prefer the bronze age and even the much derided 1990s to the so-called golden age. Ditto for the golden age of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s – I use the term, even though I don’t like the actual books all that much.

That said, the actual panel was pleasant and civil. Yes, Robert Silverberg told stories about the good old days, but unlike the Hugo ceremony, this was the right context for it, because people who come to a panel about science fiction of the 1960s (or insert decade here) actually want to hear stories about the good old days. Though apparently, there is still bad blood regarding Stanislaw Lem supposedly saying mean things about some American SFF authors more than forty years after Lem was kicked out of the SFWA (one of only two members to ever get kicked out – the other was Theodore Beale a.k.a. Vox Day). But whether you like Lem or not, when someone asks a question about the best and most memorable worlds in 1960s science fiction, you can’t not mention Solaris or Dune for that matter.

After the 1960s SF panel, I had only ten minutes to get to my next panel “Translation: The Key to Open Doors to Cultural Diversity in SFF”. I was moderating again and the panelists were Libia Benda from Mexico, Luis F. Silva from Portugal, Wataru Ishigame, speaking from the POV of a publisher publishing translated SFF in Japan, and Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine as the token American. Though that would be mean, because Neil Clarke has done more than pretty much any other magazine editor to bring translated SFF to English speaking readers.

Again, we had a lively e-mail debate before the panel and just as lively a debate during the panel, complete with an audio zoombombing by a Mexican street vendor. I had also asked all panelists to recommend some SFF books or stories from their country that had been translated into English (and Neil Clarke generally recommended SFF in translation), so there were book recommendations as well.

The translation panel also overran by almost half an hour, because once the Zoom recording  was stopped, the Zoom meeting just remained open. After ascertaining that the audience could still hear us, we just continued talking about SFF in translation for another twenty five minutes or so, until the Zoom host shut down the room.  Now that’s something that could never have happened at a physical con, unless you were the last panel of the day and the room wasn’t needed again. And even then, convention center staff is usually eager to get you out of the program rooms, so the rooms can be cleaned and the staff can go home. Because a Worldcon is a huge challenge not just for the committee, but also for the venue and its staff, because Worldcons are quite different from the professional conferences that convention centers usually host, as this post on the official site of the Convention Centre Dublin, using the 2019 Worldcon as a case study, shows.

After the translation panel, I theoretically has an hour of time – except that practically, it was more like thirty minutes – before I had to head to my next engagement, a “Meet the Dealers” event for the vendors in the virtual dealers hall.

Renting a table in the virtual dealers hall was an experiment for me and one that wasn’t entirely successful. I did sell some e-books, including several copies of the Pegasus Pulp Sampler,  a collection of twelve novellas, novelettes and short stories, which includes samples – usually the first story – of all my series. But I didn’t earn the fee for the table back, which is okay, because it’s tax deductible for me. And besides, I also view the sales table as a form of marketing, to get my name and that of Pegasus Pulp out there.

In general, I feel that while Zoom and Discord do a decent job of replicating the convention experience in virtual form, the dealers hall is probably the most difficult part of a traditional convention to replicate, because the sense of browsing and discovery that you get in a physical dealers hall is simply missing when clicking from page to page.

Friday night was Hugo night. I didn’t have any panels, so after my virtual German class finished, all I had to worry about was the Hugo ceremony. And I’ve already talked exhaustively about what happened there and also shared the POVs of many other people.

Around the time, Best Related Work was announced I noped out of the ceremony and headed to the virtual after-party – not hosted by George R.R. Martin this time around, if only because Martin was still reminiscing about Worldcons of the 1970s – where I had a lot more fun and interestingly found myself talking to some of the same people I’d chatted with in person at the physical Hugo Losers Party and Hugo reception in Dublin the year before. I also met several great new people.

Indeed, I found that the party aspect of Worldcons was recreated remarkably well in Zoom, even though I would have expected that would be the most difficult aspect to recreate. I didn’t attend any of the parties at the Helsinki Worldcon, if only because I had my Mom in tow and her idea of a nice evening in a foreign city is a sit-down dinner at a nice restaurant and not nibbles and drinks, while chatting with people in a random convention centre room.

In Dublin, I tagged along when some folks from the File 770 meet-up wanted to go to one of the bid parties and found that I quite enjoyed the experience of drifting from party to party and chatting with all sorts of people, whether it was representatives of the sadly now defunct Nice Worldcon bid for 2023 or the assembled German SMOFdom. The Zoom parties recreated that aspect rearkably well, even if you had to provide your own drinks and nibbles (red wine and regular chocolate – the champagne and the good Belgian chocolate went back in the cellar, when I did not win the Hugo).

The last Worldcon day was relatively quiet for me. I watched some panels and checked out the parties and had fun. I was also really exhausted by that point, because virtual conventions can be as exhausting as physical ones, especially if you still have to teach virtual classes, translate certificates, make lunch or show up at your parents’ for Sunday barbecue, too.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the Dublin Worldcon was the Raksura Colony Tree community art project, where a group of crafters came together to create a section of a colony tree from the Books of Raksura by Martha Wells in yarn and fabric. I found heading to the crafting table and just sitting there and chatting with other crafters an immensely relaxing oasis in the bustle of the con.

CoNZealand also had a community art project called Yarnbombing CoNZealand, which was initially supposed to yarnbomb the area around the Wellington convention centre. But with the convention going virtual, we simply yarnbombed our own gardens and neighbourhoods instead.

Sadly, the yarnbombing page in the CoNZealand exhibit are is gone, but you can see my contribution, Occulus, the friendly eyeball monster below. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on his brother Ophthalmos. There will be more photos, once Ophthalmos is finished as well:

Occulus the Eyeball Monster in his new habitat

Occulus the Friendly Eyeball Monster decorates the fence.

Close-up of Occulus the Eyeball Monster

A close-up look at Occulus, the friendly eyeball monster.

And that was my CoNZealand report. This is not the report I hoped to write – instead I hoped that I could give you a trip report with lots of photos from New Zealand, but the corona pandemic messed this up like it messed up so many other things.

That said, I find that I do enjoy virtual conventions. Besides, virtual cons make it possible for me and many other fans to attend, even if the con is happening on another continent, which is a definite plus. Though I do hope that I will get to attend another physical Worldcon someday in the not too far future.

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Retro Review: “Unsung Hero” by Ruth Washburn

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Cora
Thrilling Wonder Stories, spring 1944

Lester Brant encounters neither murder walrusses nor women in brass bikinis in this story.

“Unsung Hero” is a humorous science fiction short story by Ruth Washburn, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

When I embarked on the Retro Review project, one of my goals was to spotlight the works of the forgotten women SFF authors of the golden age. And so I reviewed not just stories by the big name female authors of the era such as Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore, but also by lesser known and largely forgotten women such as Allison V. Harding, Dorothy Quick, Alice-Mary Schnirring and E. Mayne Hull. However, there was one woman publishing science fiction in 1944 who is so obscure that even I, who was explicitly looking for women authors of the time, overlooked her, namely Ruth Washburn.

During the early forties, Thrilling Wonder Stories ran an amateur story contest and published the winning story in their magazine. Ruth Washburn was the winner of the story contest for the Spring 1944 issue. Almost nothing is known about Ruth Washburn except what she herself wrote in the short biographical blurb that ran alongside her story (and the child psychologist Ruth Wendell Washburn who comes up on Google is definitely not the same person as the author of “Unsung Hero”).

According to the brief biography she provided, Ruth Washburn was born between 1901 and 1909, i.e. during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, in Vermilion, South Dakota. She seems to have been a rebellious youngster who repeatedly ran away from home and amassed a remarkable resume of odd jobs ranging from farmworker, factory worker and cook to cosmetics saleswoman and carnival worker. By the time she wrote “Unsung Hero”, Ruth Washburn was living in Chicago with her husband and working as a dressmaker, even though she always dreamed of being a writer.

I really wish we knew more about Ruth Washburn, since she seems to have had a fascinating life. “Unsung Hero” is her only published science fiction story, at least under that name. I did come across a 1932 cookbook for Old-fashioned Molasses Goodies by one Ruth Washburn Jordan who may have been the same person. At any rate, our Ruth Washburn worked in the food industry and molasses are briefly mentioned in the story.

“Unsung Hero” opens in a newspaper office Washburn’s hometown Chicago during WWII. In addition to “war on a dozen fronts”, as a journalist character puts it, Chicago is experiencing a homegrown crisis, for an invisible barrier is blocking the Chicago River and impeding the war effort.

The news also reaches a would-be inventor named Lester Brant in his private basement laboratory. Lester is trapped in an unhappy marriage with Matilda who places no trust in his abilities as an inventor and would rather that Lester keep earning money as a lensmaker. I wonder whether this is a gender reversed commentary on Washburn’s own position as a woman who wanted to write, but had to work as a dressmaker to support the family. Was Ruth Washburn’s husband as unsupportive of her writerly ambitions as Matilda is of Lester’s inventor spirit?

Lester theorises that the unseen barrier is due to a parallel world colliding with ours. And so he grabs one of his apparatuses, which allows him to look into other dimensions – at least in theory. But before he can take off for the Chicago River to test his theory, Lester is interrupted by Matilda banging on the door of his lab. Determined not to let Matilda stop him now, Lester switches on his device and promptly sinks through the floor in front of the eyes of a stunned Matilda.

Lester finds himself in an alien world, where he meets beings with large saucer-like eyes, which look like cartoon ghosts and can project random tentacles from their bodies. The beings, called Tnn and Mmmm, are telepathic and Lester begins to communicate with them. However, he has problems making Tnn and Mmmm understand his plight, while the two aliens are incredibly fascinated by Lester’s clothes and proceed to strip him to his underwear.

Eventually, Tnn and Mmmm teleport Lester to see their leader, one Ool. Ool, it turns out, is having problems, for he is trying to create a force dome by combining the mental powers of a large group of aliens. However, the alien minds generate too much power and so the force dome won’t close, but the power just projects outwards, eventually piercing the dimensional barrier and blocking off the Chicago River.

Lester decides to test his theory by turning his device off and promptly materialises – in striped boxers – on a bridge across the Chicago River near the barrier. Lester’s suddenly appearance startles the onlookers and attracts the attention of a young female news photographer in a scene which is also charmingly illustrated in the interior artwork by M. Marchioni.

Lester quickly turns his device on again and returns to Tnn and Mmmm, who are in the process of dissecting (quite literally) Lester’s clothes. Lester gets angry, accidentally telepathically blasts Tnn and Mmmm’s house and then returns to Ool to explain that he must switch off the force wall, because it is causing problems and impeding the war effort in Lester’s home dimension. Ool certainly has sympathy for Lester’s problem, but points out that his people need the wall to shield themselves from stray thoughts in order to solve complicated problems.

The situation is unknowingly resolved by Tnn, who is trying on Lester’s hat and finds that it blocks out all stray telepathic thoughts. This gives Lester an idea. If felt and leather, unknown to Tnn’s people, can block out stray thoughts, then there is a solution to Ool’s problem that doesn’t involve invisible force walls blocking off the Chicago River.

Lester asks Ool how many people there are in his colony and then returns to his own dimension, only to promptly be arrested, because men in underwear suddenly appearing out of thin air is frowned upon in Chicago. And as if getting arrested for disturbing the peace wasn’t bad enough, Matilda also appears waving a newspaper with Lester’s portrait – in striped boxers – on the front page.

Lester and Matilda are taken to the police station, where Lester tries to make everybody understand that he alone knows how to solve the problem of the invisible barrier blocking the Chicago River. But of course no one believes him. And so Lester is about to be thrown into jail with bail set at fifty dollars, which must have been a significant sum indeed in 1944.

Matilda has no intention to bail him out, but Lester, who has finally found his courage, threatens her with divorce and tells her to hand over the money, since he knows that she has quietly embezzled money from him. Grudgingly, Matilda does so.

Lester once more tries to explain that his device allows him to travel to other dimensions and once more no one believes him. The police sergeant wants to try out the device. Lester lets him and the police sergeant promptly vanishes, only to reappear a few seconds later, now convinced that Lester is telling the truth.

All of a sudden, the police are a lot more helpful. They escort Lester to a sporting goods store, where he buys football helmets for all the beings in Ool’s colony. Lester returns to Ool’s dimension to drop off the football helmets, whereupon Ool switches off the force field and the Chicago River is free again

Lester is now the hero of the hour and even Matilda grudgingly promises to make him pork chops, when Lester threatens that next time he’ll disappear for good. So Lester gets his happy ending. Not only is Matilda a lot nicer to him, he also has a limitless number of strange worlds to explore.

Old-fashioned Molasses Goodies by Ruth Washburn Jordan

Okay, so it’s not SFF and it may not even be the same author, but it’s a cute cover and apparently the recipes are good as well.

This is a charming little story reminiscent of Henry Kuttner’s humour pieces such as “A God Named Kroo” and the Gallegher stories. In many way, “Unsung Hero” is a science fiction screwball comedy.

The henpecked husband and overbearing wife dynamic between Lester and Matilda grates a little, because it’s very much a cliché by now. Not to mention that I wonder why the threat of leaving or divorcing her works on Matilda. She clearly has no respect for Lester, so why would it bother her, if he left her? It’s briefly mentioned that Matilda primarily views Lester as a meal ticket, but I don’t think a woman would have had problems finding a job in Chicago in 1944. For that matter, why doesn’t Lester leave Matilda? Surely, he could find someone to make him pork chops who doesn’t steal from him and is a lot easier to get along with.

Honestly, the gender dynamics in this story are not great, especially for a story written by a woman. Though it is notable that the random news photographer who gets a snapshot of Lester in his underwear is a woman.

Even though this was Ruth Washburn’s first and only published story, she clearly had talent. It doesn’t feel like a debut story and I have certainly read far worse SFF stories published in 1944.

Stylistically, “Unsung Hero” is closer to what was published in Astounding Science Fiction than the grab bag of adventure focussed pulp science fiction that was found in the likes of Thrilling Wonder Stories and its sister magazine Startling Stories. Did Washburn originally submit this story to John W. Campbell at Astounding, only to have it rejected? Or was she a reader of Astounding and unconsciously mimicked the style of the stories therein, but it never occurred to her to try to submit to Campbell?

At any rate, I wonder how Ruth Washburn’s writing career would have gone, if she had sold “Unsung Hero” to Campbell at Astounding rather than to Oscar J. Friend at Thrilling Wonder Stories. After all, we know that Campbell for all his flaws did nurture the careers of new writers, including some women.

But unlike Lester Brant, we cannot peer into the alternate universe where Ruth Washburn became a popular science fiction author of the golden and silver age with a lengthy career. And in our universe, this is the only story of hers that we have. I for one find that a pity, because based on “Unsung Hero”, I wouldn’t have minded reading more of Ruth Washburn’s work.

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Reactions to the 2020 Dragon Awards Finalists or the Sound of Puppies Crying

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Cora

Considering that this year’s Dragon Awards ballot looks pretty good, I guess reactions from certain quarters of the genre community, who used to consider the Dragons their territory, were inevitable. And indeed, Mike Glyer has put up a round-up of Dragon Award reactions at File 770.

But if you want my take, here it is:

Catholic fantasy/horror indie author Declan Finn and former Dragon Award finalist, who to be fair has done a lot to promote books he likes for the Dragon Awards, is not at all pleased by this year’s ballots, for not only did very few of his favourites make the ballot, he also isn’t familiar with most of the finalists at all, though he somehow knows they’re crap.

I have to raise my eyebrows at Declan Finn somehow missing Martha Wells’ Murderbot books or Gideon the Ninth, one of the most heavily promoted SFF books in recent memory, let alone that he knows no one who watches Star Trek Discovery or Picard.

Nonethelesss, his post illustrates an issue I see a lot in the whole indie author ecosystem, of which Finn and the whole superversive fiction movement form a small subsection, namely that a lot of indie authors only read other indie authors, especially other indie authors in their specific niche, and don’t know what is going on in the wider genre world at all, because they don’t read anything except indie books in their specific niche (and the occasional traditionally published author they like) and don’t pay attention to anything outside their niche. Indeed, I’ve seen advice for indie authors telling them to read and study the Kindle top 100 bestsellers in their subgenre, but not to bother with traditionally published books at all, because there is nothing to be learned from traditionally published books about writing books that appeal to the Kindle Unlimited crowd.

Whatever you think about that advice, the results is that when a popular, widely read and discussed book wins an award or hits a shortlist, particularly a book which does not fit narrow conceptions of what the genre should be (I’ve had people argue with me that Becky Chambers’ books can’t possibly be space opera, because there is no spaceship on the cover, and that Jo Walton’s Among Others must be literary fiction, because the cover doesn’t look like a typical fantasy novel), the reaction is, “Who is this person? I’ve never heard of them, so they can’t be any good.”

This insularity works both ways, because a lot of people in the world of traditional publishing are not necessarily familiar with popular indie authors either, because they just tend to scroll past those books and all those carefully split-tested ads to get to the book they want to buy. And since indie books are rarely discussed or reviewed in the places where general SFF readers gather, a lot of SFF readers are simply not familiar even with very popular indie SFF books. There are a few cracks in the wall – projects like the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off or my own Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month round-ups – but they are still limited and affected by selection bias. As a result, you have situations where the biggest fish in the subgenre Kindle pond walks into Worldcon or the SFWA suite, expecting to be celebrated, because they are a six figure author and number one in their subcategory, only to be met with “And who are you again?” reactions.

I don’t even exclude myself here. Due to having a foot in both worlds, I am familiar with a lot of indie authors, but far from all. And I have to admit that I had to google several Dragon Award finalists, though less than in previous years, because those authors are either writing in subgenres I’m not that familiar with or exist in a different ecosystem. However, there is a difference between, “I don’t know who these people are, let’s google them and find out,” and “I don’t know who these people are, so they must be crap.”

That said, I do sympathise with Declan Finn’s frustration that his attempts to discuss and review books he likes that are eligible for the Dragon Awards met with so little resonance. Because I sometimes feel the same with regard to my own efforts with the Retro Hugos, when people complain about the winners they don’t like, but paid zero attention to the efforts by me and others to unearth, list and review eligible works.

Though I have to quibble with Finn’s claim that he compiled every Dragon eligible book, because frankly, that’s impossible, given the volume of books published every year. Declan Finn even missed several very popular and well reviewed novels with a lot of buzz, as his “Who are these people?” reaction shows, let alone the many, many lesser known books. What Finn seems to have done is compile and review eligible books from his little superversive corner of the SFF world and you know what? That’s great.

Because for an award with an eligibility period as weird as that of the Dragon Award, eligibility lists, preferably crowdsourced, are important. The Red Panda Fraction organised an eligibility spreadsheet for the Dragons last year and Finn seems to have done something similar for his little corner of the genre world.

Doris V. Sutherland has also found an interesting Twitter thread started by Declan Finn, in which Finn and several other names we may remember from the puppy years wonder what happened. Here are some highlights – you can read the whole thing by clicking through to the first tweet:

Here is another Twitter thread along the same lines, started by someone whose name I don’t recognise. Again, here are the highlights. Click on the first tweet to get the whole thread, including the original poster’s thoughts on the finalists for Best Science Fiction novel. They seem to think The Ten Thousand Doors of January is romance, BTW, since it’s apparently “misclassify this book” week.

These conversations are interesting, both since they hint at internal chasms inside the Superversive and Pulp Revolution movements and also because you see the growing realisation that the former puppies and their various offshoot movements are not the majority of SFF readers they thought they were, but instead a small group whose tastes are largely out of step with the majority. The resounding failure of the sad and rabid puppies in 2015 and 2016 should have brought this home, only that they chalked it up to conspiracy theories and declared that what happened was their plan all along. And now that the Dragons, the true award of the people that was going to replace the Hugos, is moving in the same direction, it’s a lot more difficult to ignore the fact that they are not the majority and never were.

ETA: At a blog called The Dark Herald, Cataline Sergius declares that the Dragons have fallen and that the ballot is a social justice warrior shitfest.

But while Declan Finn and friends are mostly still wondering what happened, Catholic SFF writer and Dragon Award winner Brian Niemeier knows exactly what happened and who is to blame, namely the corona pandemic. How? Well, you see, due to the corona pandemic all conventions including Dragon Con have gone virtual and so “normal people” (who Niemeier hopes would have nominated his Catholic mecha stoies) are no longer attending, because virtual conventions are no fun. As a result, the “Death Cult” – which to Niemeier means everybody who is not an ultra-conservative Catholic – took over and swamped the Dragon Awards with nominations for books Brian Niemeier does not like. For you see, it’s not Niemeier and friends who are in the minority, it’s all a conspiracy. I guess he believes it, too.

There is also some bonus ranting against John Scalzi, for of course there is. Though I wonder which book Niemeier is referring to, when he mentions lesbian vampire stories. I suspect it might be Gideon the Ninth, except that they’re necromancers, not vampires. They are lesbians, though.

Talking of John Scalzi, how does he react to his Dragon Awards nomination, considering he tried and failed to withdraw in 2017? Well, it turns out he is delighted to be in such excellent company. He’s not the only happy Dragon finalist either, as these joyful reactions from Chuck Wendig and Fonda Lee show. It’s also interesting that Scalzi says that the Dragon Awards had a rough few years as they started up, but that they seem to be figuring themselves out as they go along, cause this is also my impression. Also note that Tor.com reports about the Dragon Awards finalists and asks people to vote, whereas they have ignored the awards before. Another clear sign that the Dragons are becoing respectable.

In yesterday’s Dragon Awards post, I mentioned a post by a “friend” of this blog who shall remain unnamed, because me linking to his posts bothers him and causes him to claim I’m trying to silence him (No, I don’t get it either). In that post, he contrasts the Dragon Awards and his own private awards as proper awards, which only judge works on their own merit without taking the author into account, with the Hugos and Nebulas, which he believes judge works mainly based upon the race, gender and sexual orientation of the author, for how else to explain that so any women and writers of colour are winning Hugos and Nebulas?

So I was of course very interested to see what he would make of a Dragon Award ballot that looks a lot like the Hugo and Nebula ballots of recent years. Thankfully, he has obliged us and let’s us know his thoughts about the 2020 Dragon Award finalists. In short, he thinks that the ballot is a dumpster fire, found nothing to vote for in several categories (hey, at least during the bad early years of the Dragon Award, I usually found at least one semi-decent book per category to vote for), but otherwise is fairly sanguine (well, more sanguine than Niemeier and Finn) about it, because off years happen.

Like Brian Niemeier, he also blames the corona pandemic, which somehow kept the right sort of people from casting an online ballot and therefore allowed the wrongfans reading wrongbooks to – gasp – nominate for their favourites.  There are also dark hints that “a publisher” might be influencing the nominations. Three guesses which publisher that would be. He also shares his own nomination ballot, which is heavy on several familiar names from the superversive movement and from Dragon Awards past.

One thing I noticed is that Finn, Niemeier and the unnamed “friend” of this blog are all upset that Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars tie-in Thrawn: Treason was not nominated. Now I have to admit that this is surprising. Okay, so Grand Admiral Thrawn never did much for me, even though I read the original Thrawn trilogy like pretty much every other Star Wars deprived fan back in 1991. But I know that Thrawn is a beloved character and the blurb for Thrawn: Treason actually sounds pretty interesting, so the novel’s absence from the Dragon Award ballot is unexpected. Maybe Timothy Zahn declined the nomination or maybe Star Wars fandom has simply moved on – after all, the original Thrawn trilogy came out almost thirty years ago. A whole generation of fans has grown up since them, for whom Thrawn simply won’t have the same meaning he had for someone who read the trilogy back in 1991, when it was the first new Star Wars in several years.

In his analysis of the 2020 Dragon Award ballot, Camestros Felapton also points out with lots of diagrams and data that the 2020 ballot did not happen in a vacuum, but that the Dragon Awards have been steadily moving into a more mainstream direction , as they became better known and people other than the initial supporters started nominating and voting.

In fact, the corona pandemic might even have exarcerbated this trend, because with Dragon Con going virtual, people may be paying attention, who would never have gone to the physical con due to it happening in Atlanta, Georgia. Dragon Con partnering with the Fulton County library system to promote the awards might also have helped.

So in short, there is no conspiracy. Just the award becoming better known, which is a good thing, for the Dragon Awards, Dragon Con and also for the early winners and finalists, because having won/been shortlisted for a respected award is certainly better than having won/been shortlisted for a failed experiment.

Would we still be talking about They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, if it hadn’t won the second ever Hugo for Best Novel? Even if no one has anything good to say about that book and it’s generally regarded as the worst Hugo winner of all time, at least we’re still talking about it.

Which is probably why two other previous Dragon Award winners from the sad puppy camp, Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, actually seem to be pretty satisfied with this year’s Dragon Award ballot (which apparently they’ve been telling the world on Facebook, where I can’t see it), even though I suspect that many of the finalists are no more to their tastes than they are to Niemeier’s or Finn’s. However, they know that as the Dragon Award becomes better known and gains more respect, it also positively reflects on their careers.

I’m keeping comments open for now, but if there’s trolling, I will shut them down.

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The 2020 Dragon Award Finalists Go Full Tilt Towards Mainstream Respectability

Posted on August 12, 2020 by Cora

I’ve been following the saga of the Dragon Awards, an SFF award handed out at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia, since their inception in 2016. During these five years, the Dragon Awards went from puppy award that was conceived as an alternative to the Hugos that puppies could actually win to award for Kindle Unlimited content mills to the mainstream popular award the Dragons were supposed to be and back again.

So what would the 2020 Dragon Award ballot look like, considering that the official website couldn’t even be bothered to update the nomination ballot for ages?

Well, the finalists for the 2020 Dragon Awards have been announced today and the ballot looks…. actually pretty good. You can find the whole ballot here on the official site and in a less eye-searing format at File 770.

So let’s take a look at the individual categories:

Best Science Fiction Novel:

This finalists in this category are probably the biggest surprise, because they are all popular mainstream science fiction novels. Not a single “Who is this?” nominee to be found among them. There is also a lot of overlap with other genre awards ballots, which isn’t normally a thing with the Dragons.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow and The Rosewater Redemption by  Tade Thompson were all Hugo and Locus Award finalists, Gideon the Ninth and The Ten Thousand Doors of January were also Nebula finalists and one of Tade Thompson’s Rosewater novels won the Clarke Award.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is this year’s Ian McEwan, a literary SFF novel that winds up on the Dragon ballot. And of course, The Testaments is last year’s Booker Prize winner (together with Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo) and was a Locus Award finalist. Unfortunately, Dragon Con and the award ceremony will be virtual this year, so we will be deprived of Margaret Atwood’s reactions to Dragon Con.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig was a Locus and Stoker Award finalist, The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz was on the Hugo longlist and I’m pretty sure that Network Effect by Martha Wells and The Last Emperox by John Scalzi will show up on several awards ballots next year.

It is also notable that John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig are two writers whom puppy types flat out hate and Margaret Atwood writes to sort of books that make puppies cry. So for them to make the Dragon ballot in the Best Science Fiction Novel category, while none of the puppy favourites is anywhere in sight is remarkable.

Of course, The Ten Thousand Doors of January is actually fantasy and Gideon the Ninth is science fantasy, but then the Dragons have played it fast and loose with genre classifications since their inception, including a fantasy novel winning Best Science Fiction Novel and a space opera with religion winning Best Horror Novel in 2016.

Diversity count: Five women, two men, one writer of colour, three international writers

Best Fantasy Novel

The finalists in the Best Fantasy Novel category are another bunch of broadly popular mainstream novels with not an outlier among them.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia was a Nebula and Locus finalist. Jade War by Fonda Lee, Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern and Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer were all Locus Award finalists. The Burning White by Brent Weeks is the only Dragon finalist in this category that didn’t show up on other awards ballots, but then Weeks is a hugely popular fantasy author, so his presence here is no surprise.

Notable by his absence is Larry Correia, who has been a fixture in this category since the inception of the Dragon Awards and won several times. However, I seem to recall that Correia recused himself.

In odd genre classifications, I could have sworn that Dead Astronauts was science fiction, insofar that any Jeff VanderMeer novel is only one genre. And Leigh Bardugo is normal a YA author.

Diversity count: Four women, two men, two writers of colour, two international writers

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel:

This category has always been the most mainstream literary Dragon Award category since its inception and this year upholds the trend.

CatFishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer not only won the Lodestar Award and  the Edgar Award, it was also nominated for pretty much every other SFF and crime fiction award in existence and now Naomi Kritzer gets to add a Dragon Award nomination to the list.

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett is a well regarded and bestselling feminist teen dystopia (Is that the sound of puppies crying I hear). Cog by Greg van Eekhout was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award this year. The Poison Jungle by Tui T. Sutherland is a novel in a bestselling middle grade fantasy series that I have to admit I never heard of.  Force Collector by Kevin Shinick is a young adult Star Wars tie-in novel and author Kevin Shinick is a TV and comics writer and Emmy winner. Bella Forrest is a hugely popular SFF indie author and Finch Merlin and the Fount of Youth is the latest in a popular series.

So in short, these are all very popular books. With regard to odd genre classifications, I’m surprise that Force Collector was not nominated in the Media Tie-In category, but I guess in this case target audience trumps the fact that it is a tie-in.

Diversity count: Four women, two men, two writers of colour, one international writer, one indie author

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel

The Military SFF category has always been the most typical Dragon Awards category (and the Dragon Awards are the only genre award that has a separate category for military SFF) and indeed, it looks more like the Dragon Awards of old this year than any other category.

Aftershocks by Marko Kloos, System Failure by Joe Zieja and Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio are all popular mainstream military science fiction novels. Aftershocks is also the only Dragon Award nomination for an Amazon imprint (47 North). And though Howling Dark was published by DAW, Christopher Ruocchio works for Baen Books, which has traditionally done well in the Dragons. And Joe Zieja is not just a writer, but also a popular anime voice actor, which I for one didn’t know.

Savage Wars by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole is a novel in Anspach and Cole’s highly popular Galaxy’s Edge series. Josh Hayes is an indie author who has collaborated with Jason Anspach, Nick Cole and Richard Fox, all of whom we’ve seen on the Dragon ballot before. His nominated novel Edge of Valor was published by Aethon Books, an indie press run by Rhett C. Bruno, who was a 2018 Nebula finalist, and  Steve Beaulieu. Aethon Books also published Defiance by Bear Ross, a novel I for one had never heard of before.

So we have three traditionally published finalists (lumping in Amazon under traditional publishing here) and three indie/small press finalists, which looks about right, considering that military SF is very indie dominated.

Diversity count: Six men, one international author, three indie authors.

Best Alternate History Novel

This has always been an odd category that mixes mainstream and indie works, probably because alternate history is a tiny subgenre. This year is no exception. In addition to the military SFF category, this is probably the category that looks most like the Dragon Awards of old.

Witchy Kingdom by D.J. Butler is the third in a series that Dragon Awards nominators clearly like, because both previous volumes have been nominated as well. It’s also the only Dragon Award nomination for Baen this year.

Revolution by W.L. Goodwater is the second in a series of Cold War with magic novels that have found more attention in the crime/thriller world than in the SFF world, though they’re published by Ace.

Up-time Pride and Down-time Prejudice by Mark H. Huston is a tie-in to Eric Flint’s popular 1632 series that was published by Flint’s own imprint. Of course, Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, 180 years after the time during which the novel is supposedly set, but then quibbling about the historical accuracy of the 1632 books would be a lengthy endeavour.

The Girl with No Face by M. H. Boroson is a small press novel that sounds pretty interesting actually. As Our World Ends by Jack Hunt is a self-published post-apocalyptic novel that probably ended up in alternate history, because the Dragon Award category for post-apocalyptic fiction was discontinued a few years ago. A Nation Interrupted by Kevin McDonald was published by Braveship Books, an indie author small press in the vein of Michael Anderle’s LMBPN Publishing and Chris Kennedy’s indie press, both of whom are notable by their absence on the Dragon ballot this year.

Also notable by his absence is S.M. Stirling who was a fixture in this category every single year.

Diversity count: Six men, between two and three indie authors, depending on how you classify Eric Flint’s imprint.

Best Media Tie-In Novel

No real surprises in this category. We have Rebecca Roanhorse’s Star Wars novel Resistance Reborn, two Star Trek novels, a Firefly novel and an Alien novel.

Diversity count: Two women, three men, one author of colour, two international authors

Best Horror Novel

This is another Dragon Award category that has always been dominated by popular mainstream novels, even if the first ever winner was an indie novel which wasn’t even horror.

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky (author of the hugely popular novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower), The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon, The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North a.k.a. Catherine Webb a.k.a. Kate Griffin and The Toll by Cherie Priest were all Locus Award finalists in the horror category this year, though there is no overlap with the Bram Stoker Awards at all. Michaelbrent Collings is a popular indie horror author and multiple Stoker Award finalist, though his Dragon nominated novel Scavenger Hunt was not nominated for the Stoker Award.

So in short, we have a lot of popular horror authors and novels here.

Diversity count: Three women, two men, one international author, one indie author.

Best Comic Book

Dragon Con is a big media con and so the Dragon Award categories for comics, graphic novels, film, TV and games have always been dominated by popular mainstream works. This year is no exception.

And so we have three time Hugo winner Monstress, three mainstream Marvel superhero comics (Avengers, Immortal Hulk and Spider-Woman) and two Image Comics (Bitter Root and Undiscovered Country). No DC, though they show up in the Graphic Novel category.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make comics.

Best Graphic Novel

Again, there are few surprises here. Mainstream superhero comics are represented by Batman Universe, Mister Miracle (DC) and Black Bolt (Marvel). The other finalists are a Battlestar Galactica tie-in, Something is Killing the Children, a horror comic published by Boom! Studio, who also publish the Hugo winning La Guardia, and Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang, a bestselling graphic novel author. Though I wonder what Dragon Hoops is doing on the Dragon Award ballots, since it seems to be an autobiographical story about basketball with zero SFF content. Maybe it was the name.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make comics.

Best TV Series

The Mandalorian, The Witcher, Watchmen, Star Trek Picard, The Expanse, Lost in Space and Altered Carbon are all highly popular SFF TV series and none of them is even remotely surprising as a finalist.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make TV shows.

Best Movie

There are a few more surprises here, if only because the 2020 movie season, which normally would have generated several Dragon Award finalists, has been cut short by the pandemic.

That said, the Dragon Award nominations for The Rise of Skywalker, Terminator: Dark Fate and Joker will surprise no one. I am a bit surprised by the nominations for Ad Astra and the live action Lion King, since both had middling to bad reviews, when they came out. That said, Disney’s live action remakes of their animated movies always make a lot of money, even though you never meet anybody who admits to actually watching them.

One finalist that is a real surprise is Fast Color, an indie dystopian superhero movie with a largely black cast. Fast Color completely flew beneath my radar, though it sounds like the sort of movie I should love.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make movies.

The Game Categories

I’m not a gamer, so I can’t say much about these categories, except that they are full of games even I have heard of, so they must be popular.

I’m a bit surprised The Last of Us 2 wasn’t nominated, but then it came out very close to the nomination deadline.

***

This is the most mainstream Dragon Award ballot we’ve seen so far. Lots of broadly popular works, lots of overlap with other genre awards, very few “Who the hell is this?” finalists and half of those turn out to be well known to someone, just not to me.

There are also a lot more women and writers of colour nominated this year. The only fiction categories, which are all male (and all white and mostly all American) are Military SFF and Alternate History. These are also the only categories which have several indie author finalists.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at what we don’t find on the 2020 Dragon Award ballot: For starters, there are no puppies and puppy adjacent authors. The only exception are Nick Cole and Jason Anspach, since Cole used to be affiliated with the puppies (never heard anything about Anspach). But then, Cole and Anspach’s Galaxy’s Edge series has found an audience beyond the limited puppy realm.

Baen, who have traditionally done well at the Dragons (probably because Baen always sends several of its authors to Dragon Con), only have one finalist this year plus two (Christopher Ruocchio and Mark H. Huston) who are affiliated with Baen, but not published by them.

Michael Anderle and Craig Martelle’s LMBPN Publishing and Chris Kennedy Publishing are also notable by their absence. And Chris Kennedy always had multiple Dragon Award finalists in previous years. Aethon Books and Braveship Books seem to be following the LMBPN/Chris Kennedy model of an indie author press, but both are new to the Dragons.

This ballot has surprised pretty much everybody who pays attention to the Dragon Awards (basically Camestros Felapton, the Red Panda Fraction and myself). There are a few suspicions what may have happened.

For starters, it seems as if there was less Dragon Award campaigning by the usual suspects. The fact that the nominations opened very late and that the ballot wasn’t easy to find probably didn’t help either. There also are suspicions that there was a change in the administration of the award or that Dragon Con applied pressure on the awards administrators to cater less to special interest groups.

This press release about the awards, which Doris V. Sutherland found, also mentions that Dragon Con cooperated with various public libraries in the Atlanta area to get the word out about the awards, which may also have tilted the ballot towards broadly popular works.

However, it seems as if the Dragons are finally becoming what they were supposed to be, a people’s choice award for broadly popular works. Campaigning still has some effect in smaller, specialised categories like Military SFF and Alternate History, which is why those categories look most like the Dragons of old. But in the bigger categories, regular nominators drown out special interest and bullet nominators, which results in a ballot that looks very much like other genre awards.

So far, there are no reactions from the puppy camp. Though I did come across this post from a “friend” of this blog who shall remain unnamed, because he dislikes unapproved people linking to him (which is why this is an archive.is link), in which he declares that award winning works should be judged on their own terms rather than based on the race, gender, ethnicity, etc… of the author. The Dragons and the author’s own private awards do this in his opinion, the Hugos and Nebulas don’t. He then does on to rant about N.K. Jemisin, John Scalzi and Jeannette Ng*, who apparently vy for the title of worst ever SFF author in his opinion, and the Retro Hugos, because people have been saying mean things about John W. Campbell.

In short, there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen a hundred times before, but what makes this post interesting is that it was posted August 10, i.e. one day before the Dragon Award ballot was announced. I shall be very interested to see what he makes of this year’s Dragon Award ballot, if only because it very much disproves his point.

 

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Some Comments on the 2020 Hugo Award Winners

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Cora

Now that I’ve finally got the discussion about the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell out of the way (see here and here), let’s talk about a much more pleasant topic. For while the 2020 Hugo ceremony may have been an unmitigated disaster, the actual Hugo winners are a very fine selection of works indeed.

The full list of winners is here, commentary by deputy Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte may be found here and the full voting and nomination statistics are here.

Best Novel

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel is A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. This is not exactly unexpected, since A Memory Called Empire is a very popular novel and also a highly deserving winner, even though my personal favourite in this category was The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley with A Memory Called Empire in second place. Looking at the voting breakdown, I’m a little surprised that Middlegame finished in second place – not because it’s a bad novel, for it’s not, but because it seemed to get less buzz than the other finalists. But then the 2020 Best Novel ballot was the strongest we’ve had in years and indeed any of the six finalists would have been a most deserving winner.

The Hugo win for A Memory Called Empire is also a win for the space opera resurgence. For while a new type of more diverse space opera has been one of the big trends in SFF in recent years, this hasn’t been reflected very much by the Hugos, where the last space opera to win was Ancillary Justice in 2014, even though we’ve had several space opera finalists since then.

Looking at the nominations, the most notable thing is that The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie got more than enough votes to qualify for the ballot, but was withdrawn by the author. Ann Leckie explains why she declined the Hugo nomination for The Raven Tower here – basically, she felt that as someone who already had four Hugo nominations and one win, she wanted to make room for one of the many great SFF novels, including debut novels, that came out in 2019. And this is why Ann Leckie is a true class act.

Those who worry that too many women are getting nominated for and winning Hugos these days will be pleased to note that there are three novels by male authors on the longlist.

Best Novella 

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella goes to This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and May Gladstone, which was also my top pick in this category. Again, this is not exactly surprising, because This Is How You Lose the Time War truly was a cut above the other novellas last year and also got a lot of buzz.

Those usual suspects will be pleased that men can still win Hugos in 2020. And if you look at the nominations, you’ll also note that there are five male authors on the longlist.

Best Novelette 

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novelette is Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin. This win surprised me a little, because I found the story a bit too predictable and on the nose. It’s not a bad story, if only because N.K. Jemisin is an excellent writer, but Emergency Skin is a minor Jemisin. But then, even a minor Jemisin is better than the major works of many other writers.

I’m also surprised to see “Omphalos” by Ted Chiang in second place, because I flat out hated that story. I don’t quite get the intense love that Ted Chiang’s work inspires in parts of the Hugo electorate anyway – my reaction to his stories is usually, “Well, I guess it was okay.” Though I did like the other Ted Chiang story on the ballot a lot better than this one.

My personal number one choice in this category was the delightful “For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll, by the way.

Best Short Story

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Short Story goes to “As the Last I May Know” by S.L. Huang. It’s a strong and harrowing story that was not only one of my nominees, but also my top pick for this category.

That said, the short fiction categories at the 2020 Hugos are full of extremely grim stories with very little lighter fare. Reading too many of them in a row could be downright depressing and I do hope we’ll get a mix of light and dark next year.

Best Series

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Series is The Expanse by James S.A. Corey a.k.e Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, which was also my top pick for this category.

The Expanse is also exactly the kind of series that the Best Series was made for, a beloved series where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and where individual volumes often don’t stand alone well enough, even though Leviathan Wakes was a Best Novel finalist in 2012 and the most recent volume Tiamat’s Wrath hit the Best Novel longlist this year.

And those who worry about men not winning any Hugos anymore will be very pleased that the 2020 Hugo winners for Best Series are two men.

Best Related Work

The 2020 Hugo for Best Related Work goes to Jeannette Ng’s acceptance speech for what was then the Campbell Award.

This is one of two 2020 Hugo winnners I really disagree with. Not because I disagree with the points that Jeannette Ng made in her 2019 speech. I very much agree with her, both with regard to the situation in Hongkong (which has gotten much worse since last year) and with regard to Campbell. And of course, people in the SFF community have been discussing that Campbell was a problematic figure for more than seventy years now, which Jeannette Ng acknowledged in this year’s acceptance speech. Leigh Brackett’s Retro Hugo winning essay “The Science Fiction Field” contains some jabs against Campbell – in 1944. Michael Moorcock called Campbell a fascist in the 1960s and he was far from the only one. Over the years, many winners of the Campbell Award, as it was then, have pointed out that Campbell would likely never have published them – one example I remember is Rebecca Roanhorse in 2018. Alec Nevala-Lee wrote a weighty and well researched tome about the intertwined histories of Campbell, his favoured writers and Astounding Science Fiction, which was nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo last year and came in dead last – most likely because the vast majority of voters didn’t even bother to read it.

I would say that John W. Campbell was a more complex figure than the “fucking fascist” Jeannette Ng called him, but then a ninety-second speech doesn’t offer much space for nuance. And this is precisely the problem I have with this Hugo win. Due to the (very wise in retrospect) time restrictions imposed on acceptance speeches in Dublin, Jeannette Ng’s speech is very short. The two acceptance speeches I never got to hold are both under 300 words long and run for about one A4 page in large print (so I wouldn’t have to squint). I think that Jeannette Ng overran her allotted time slightly, because I recall her saying that she’s not finished at one point. But even so, I doubt that her speech is longer than 500 words.  She packed a lot of punch in those few words and her speech clearly had an impact that the many other people who criticised Campbell over the years did not have, because it got the name of the Not-a-Hugo for Best New Writer changed to Astounding Award, which I support, if only because it makes no sense to name the award for the best new writer after an editor who died before most of today’s finalists were even born.

But no matter how impactful, a speech of roughly one A4 page is in no way equivalent to in-depth non-fiction books that are 100s of pages long and a 68 minute documentary. That’s not even comparing apples to oranges, that’s comparing apples to peas.

Now I care about genre-related non-fiction, because works like the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction or Jeff Rovin‘s various books on pop culture were hugely important to my development as a science fiction fan.  Teenaged me saved up her birthday, Christmas, Freimarkt and good grade money to purchase those non-fiction books, which due to import fees cost me fifty to eighty Deutschmarks a piece, an exorbitant sum for a teenager (and a lot of birthday, Christmases, Freimärkte and good grades). There were also books I read in the store and took notes, but did not purchase, usually because I didn’t have the money. I still have those non-fiction books, too, and the battered dustjackets and spines show how much they were appreciated. I used those books to guide me to SFF authors, books and movies – they were basically a way for me to find more stuff to love (or not love, as it was). These books were also how I absorbed SFF theory and knew terms like New Wave or Cyberpunk ere I had ever read any examples.

This is not the usual way into SFF, but it was mine and that’s why I will always have a soft spot for genre-related non-fiction. And that’s why I’m not happy that the non-fiction works, which for me are the core of the Best Related Work category, are increasingly being crowded out by leftfield finalists. Also, in-depth non-fiction books like The Lady From the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara, The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn, Joanna Russ by Gwyneth Jones, Astounding by Alex Nevala-Lee or Arwen Curry’s documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin are very research intensive and can take years to compile and write. I think that we should honour the work that critics and historians do to excavate and remember the history of our genre. And let’s not forget essay collections such as the Octavia Butler and Tiptree collections of recent years or Chicks Dig Time Lords, which so infuriated the puppies, and autobiographies, which offer an insight into the life of a genre personality, whether it’s the diaries of the late Carrie Fisher, Zoe Quinn’s Crash Override or this year’s finalist Becoming Superman, an autobiography so harrowing that it needs a trigger warning. Such works are valuable and I hate to see them crowded out by edgecase finalists.

It’s probably time to overhaul the Best Related Work category, which has become something of a grab bag in recent years, and either split it into Best Related Work Long Form and Short Form, which would give a space not just to works like Jeannette Ng’s acceptance speech but also the essays and articles, which regularly make the longlist and sometimes the shortlist. Another solution would be to keep Best Related Work for non-fiction of whatever medium and create a Hugo category, Special Hugo or Not-a-Hugo for Best Fannish Thing, which would cover acceptance speeches as well as worthy projects like AO3 or the Mexicanx Initiative. If anybody is planning any proposals of that sort to submit at the Discon III Business Meeting, let me know.

Jeannette Ng is a talented writer. Her debut novel was good enough to gather two nominations and one win for what was then the Campbell Award. And I’m sure that we will see more great novels and stories from her in the future, which may well hit the Hugo ballot. But I’d still prefer Best Related Work to be kept for the non-fiction works it was originally intended for.

Best Graphic Story

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story is LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor with art by Tana Ford and colours by James Devlin.

This is another most worthy winner and was not only my top pick in this category, but also one of my nominees. And gorgeous as Monstress is, it’s nonetheless nice to see something else winning for once.

Best Dramatic Presentation Long:

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form is Good Omens, written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Douglas MacKinnon. This is another excellent choice, even though I put Captain Marvel in first place in the end. It’s also the long overdue Hugo win for Sir Terry Pratchett, which eluded him during his lifetime. And indeed Neil Gaiman remembered his co-writer Sir Terry in his touching acceptance speech.

I’m a bit surprised that Us ended up fairly low on the ballot, since it seemed to me as if Us was very popular and that I was one of the few people who didn’t care for it. But Us is a very American movie and I suspect that it just didn’t work for many non-American Hugo voters just as it didn’t work for me. The Rise of Skywalker comes unsurprisingly last, because frankly it’s a mess.

Looking at the longlist, I see a lot of unsurprising candidates like The Witcher, The Mandalorian, The Expanse or Spider-Man: Far From Home, but also a number of surprises such as Russell T. Davies dystopian series Years and Years, which is highly worthy but maybe a little too British and too obscure for a Hugo, as well as Alita: Battle Angel, which I remember no one liking, and the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, which I suspect made the longlist as a result of Chinese fandom making their voices heard.

Best Dramatic Presentation long will be a difficult category to nominate for next year, because there are almost no new movies coming out anymore due to the pandemic. Currently, I have three on my list: The Old Guard, The Invisible Man and The Vast of Night. I suspect we will see more seasons of TV series nominated and also smaller indie films like The Vast of Night making the ballot.

Best Dramatic Presentation Short:

This is the other 2020 Hugo winner I sincerely disagree with, because the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Short once again goes to the bloody Good Place.

Now I’m on record for intensely disliking The Good Place – I basically find it unwatchable. But even if you actually like The Good Place, does it really need to win three years in a row? Especially since there are so many other fine SFF TV and streaming series. Though the silver lining is that The Good Place ended earlier this year, so we have at most one more year of The Good Place on the Hugo ballot.

My own top pick was The Mandalorian, which was also the only one of my nominees that made it (I also nominated the Good Omens episode, which was disqualified), but then my hit rate for Best Dramatic Presentation Short is abominable. I’m a bit surprised to see the Watchmen episode “This Extraordinary Being” in last place, since that was the one Watchmen episode which not only stood alone, but also was pretty good, whereas I did not care for “A God Walks into Abar” at all.

Best Editor Long and Short:

This is always a difficult category to judge, but Navah Wolfe for Long Form and Ellen Datlow for Short Form are both highly deserving winners. I’m particularly happy for Navah Wolfe, since Saga Press fired her while pregnant and shortly after winning a Hugo.

Best Professional Artist:

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist is John Picacio.

Pro Artist is anoter category that’s not easy to judge, because my reaction is to the finalists is usually; “They’re all great. Can’t I put all of them in the number one spot?” But John Picacio is not just a great artist, but also a really cool person (and a Hugo host who does not keep the finalists hanging unnecessarily) and I’m honoured that we were on a panel together.

Best Semiprozine:

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine is Uncanny Magazine, making this the fifth win for Uncanny in a row.

Now Uncanny is an excellent magazine, but Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside, FIYAH, Escape Pod and Strange Horizons as well as those semiprozines which did not make the ballot like The Dark, Luna Station Quarterly, Daily Science Fiction, GigaNotoSaurus, Interzone, Cast of Wonders, PseudoPod, PodCastle, etc… all do great work, too, and it would be nice if one of them would get a look in once in a while.

Best Fanzine:

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine goes to The Book Smugglers. My own top vote in this category was for Galactic Journey obviously, though I’m very happy for Thea and Ana, who’ve been doing great work for years now.

That said, this is the second year in a row that the Fanzine category only narrowly escaped being no awarded due to too few votes. This is a shame, because fanzine writers and editors do a lot of great work and foster the SFF discourse, all for the love of the genre and with no financial reward. So vote in the Fanzine category, for no awarding a whole category, not because the finalists are unworthy, but because not enough people could be bothered to vote, would be a shame.

I think it’s also time to promote fanzines and sites in the run-up to next year’s Hugos to increase interest in this category.

Best Fancast:

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fancast is Our Opinions Are Correct by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders – or Emily Nutts and Chocolate Jackhammer, as the automatic close captioning thinks they’re called (Looks like hilarious close captioning errors are a recurrent phenomenon with the Hugos). Our Opinions Are Correct is another highly deserving winner, even though my own number one pic was The Skiffy and Fanty Show. Finally, my Mom thinks that Annalee and Charlie Jane are an adorable couple.

Best Fan Writer:

As you all know by now, I didn’t win and so the beautiful trophy will be shipped to Bogi Takács, who is a most worthy winner indeed and has done great work to promote QILTBAG SFF and excavate forgotten works, so three cheers for Bogi.

But as I would have said in the acceptance speech I didn’t get to hold (maybe next year), “As far as I’m concerned, we’re all winners in this category.” And indeed I would have been fine with anyone of us winning, even though you can probably guess who my top pick in this category was. Besides, I finished in second place right out of the gate, which is pretty damn awesome.

If you look at the statistics, I just scraped onto the ballot past Charles Payseur. Adam Whitehead actually had fewer nominations than Charles or me, but Adam had a very focussed group of nominators (ditto for Elsa Sjunneson and Stitch, the one name on the longlist I’m unfamiliar with), whereas people who nominated me were more likely to also nominate Camestros Felapton, Paul Weimer, James Davis Nicoll, Adri Joy or O. Westin (which makes sense, since we all know each other) and therefore EPH weighted those nominations differently.

Camestros Felapton takes a look at the Best Fan Writer longlist and how points were redistributed as nominees dropped off. Camestros has also done a neat graphic representation of how the people on the fan writer longlist are connected to each other. He also looks at how focussed the nominators were in this interesting graph. Once again, Adam Whitehead’s nominators were the most focussed (next to Elsa Sjunneson’s), while mine and Bogi’s were the most distributed of those who made the ballot.

And talking of graphics, this is as good a place as any to point you to the Sankey diagrams of how votes were redistributed among the Hugo finalists that Martin Pyne a.k.a. Goobergunch made.

Best Fan Artist

The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist goes to Elise Matthesen, who was also my first pick in this category.

I really like the art categories, because they let me look at beautiful works and take little time. However, I also find them hard to judge, because most of the time I like every finalist’s work.

That said, I have a weakness for jewellery, so whenever there’s a jewellery designer on the ballot, it makes me go, “Shiny! Me want”, so I usually rank them at the top of my ballot. Though once again, this is a category where every finalist would have been a most deserving winner.

Lodestar

The winner of the 2020 Lodestar Award a.k.a. the YA Not-a-Hugo is Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer, which was also my top choice in this category.

Catfishing on CatNet is also a true genre-crossing book, because it not only won the Hugo and was nominated for the Andre Norton Award, but it also won the Edgar Award and was nominated for the Anthony and ITW Awards, so mystery and thriller readers clearly loved it as much as SFF readers did.

In general, I found this year’s Lodestar ballot much stronger than last year’s, which for me was marred by several books having very similar plots, even if the settings were different, and annoying and whiny main characters, which triggered the eight deadly words.

Astounding

The 2020 Astounding Award for Best New Writer (formerly known as the Campbell Award) goes to R.F. Kuang. Unfortunately, The Poppy War didn’t work for me and indeed my own top pick in this category was Jenn Lyons. However, I’m not surprised that R.F. Kuang won, because she is the only repeat finalist in this category, and I’m sure we’ll see fine work from her in the future.

Though it’s sadly ironic that R.F. Kuang explicitly mentioned in her acceptance that writers of colour will have their names mispronounced, only for George R.R. Martin to mispronounce her name.

And that’s it. The 2020 Hugo commentary post is done, though I still want to link to some reactions to the actual winners:

Unfortunately, the disaster of a Hugo ceremony has sucked all oxygen out of the room, so there are a lot more posts and articles about the ceremony than about the actual winners.

At the Guardian, Alison Flood reports about the Hugo winners and adds some snippets from various acceptance speeches. She also mentions that George R.R. Martin hosted the awards and quotes one of the sensible things he said (considering how much he talked, some of it must have been sensible), but completely fails to comment on the many issues with the ceremony, which takes some doing.

Camestros Felapton takes a look at the Hugo winners and stats (because we all know that the stats are the most fascinating and were eagerly waiting for them to be put up) here.

At Women Write About Comics, Doris V. Sutherland discusses both the 2020 Hugo Award winners as well as the issues with the ceremony.

ETA: Adri Joy and Joe Sherry discuss the 2020 Hugo winners at nerds of a feather.

And that’s it for the 2020 Hugos, which yielded a crop of fine winners and were unfortunately marred by a terrible ceremony that will probably be remembered for its sheer awfulness for a long time.

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First Monday Free Fiction: Picnic at Seashell Beach

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Cora

After the End - Stories of Life After the ApocalypseWelcome to the August 2020 edition of First Monday Free Fiction. To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on every first Monday of the month. It will remain free to read on this blog for one month, then I’ll take it down and post another story.

You may have noticed that there was no First Monday Free Fiction in July, because with the July Short Story Challenge and everything else going on, I just plain forgot.

This month’s free story is called “Picnic at Seashell Beach” and  may be found in the collection After the End – Stories of Life After the Apocalypse.

So join Pete and Marcie for a post-apocalyptic daytrip and a…

Picnic at Seashell Beach

“Okay, so what are we doing here again?”

Marcie jumped out of the solar car. She put on her shades and adjusted her shawl, even though the sun was already dipping towards the horizon, hanging like an overripe Satsuma in the late afternoon sky.

“It’s an outing.” Pete got out of the car and activated the lock. He opened the tiny trunk and picked up a cool box. “We’re going to have a romantic picnic on the beach.”

“A picnic? Outside? Really?” Marcie applied sunscreen stick to her exposed cheeks and nose. “That’s an… interesting idea.”

“It was my Grandma’s idea, really.” Pete gave Marcie a sheepish look and pulled his cap deeper into his face. “She told me when she and Grandpa were dating, Grandpa didn’t have any money to take her for dinner, so they had a picnic at Seashell Beach instead.”

“And when was that?” Marcie wanted to know. Cause Seashell Beach — which had neither seashells nor a beach these days — was about the least romantic place she could imagine.

Pete shrugged. “I dunno. Sixty, maybe sixty-five years ago. Granny’s getting on in years and Grandpa — well, he’s been dead for almost twenty years now.”

Noticing Marcie’s questioning glance, Pete added, “He died when I was seven. Melanoma got him. He refused to wear sunscreen, you know. Said he never needed any when he was young.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry.”

Pete shrugged again. “There’s no need, really. I barely remember him and what I remember is hospital beds and mottled skin. But Granny, she remembers. They’d been married for almost forty years, you know.”

***

This story was available for free on this blog for one month only, but you can still read it in After the End – Stories of Life After the Apocalypse. And if you click on the First Monday Free Fiction tag, you can read this month’s free story.

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More Reactions to the 2020 Hugo Ceremony and a bit about the Retro Hugos

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Cora

I’d hoped to get my comments on the generally excellent winners of the 2020 Hugo Awards up today (ETA: It’s here). However, this was not to be, for two days later we’re still talking about the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell, as it will probably be known one day, when some toastmaster at the 2060 Hugos will bore the audience to death with remembering how they survived the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell back in the olden days of 2020. And if that toastmaster should be me, you officially have my permission to kick me off that stage.

You can read my account of the ceremony as one of the finalists who were waiting on tenterhooks while George R.R. Martin went on and on and on here. In that post, I also linked to the reactions and summaries of the disaster that was the 2020 Hugo ceremony by Natalie Luhrs, Sean Reads Sci-Fi, Miyuki Jane Pinckard and Matt at Runalong the Shelves.

However, in the past days I’ve come across even more reactions to the 2020 Hugo ceremony from around the web.

ETA: I’ll just keep adding to this post, because more and more reaction posts keep showing up.

My fellow best fan writer finalist Adam Whitehead shares his thoughts on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, including the torturous wait imposed on the finalists. And since Adam is in the UK, he was very much in the same boat as me (and Alasdair Stuart, for that matter) that the ceremony took place in the middle of the night for him.

Erin Underwood, the 2020 DUFF winner who presented the Best Fan Writer category, explains what the 2020 Hugo ceremony was like from the POV of a presenter and confirms that she was never given any guidance in how to pronounce the finalists’ name.

ETA: There also is some coverage of the disastrous Hugo ceremony in mainstream news outlets and major geek news sites, probably because George R.R. Martin was involved.

At the Guardian, Alison Flood reports about the 2020 Hugo winners and completely fails to remark on the many issues with the ceremony, which really takes some doing.

ETA: At Esquire, Gabrielle Bruney has a thoughtful article about the Hugo ceremony mess, in which she also points out the many problematic of A Song of Ice and Fire.

At Vulture, Madison Malone Kircher reports about the 2020 Hugo ceremony with plenty of embedded tweets criticising George R.R. Martin.

At The Mary Sue, Kaila Hale-Stern also weighs in one the 2020 Hugo ceremony and shares various links and tweets.

ETA: At KPBS San Diego, Andi Dukleth reports about the 2020 Hugo ceremony and also shares a few comments from Best Related Work winner Jeannette Ng.

ETA: Torsten Adair’s report at the comic site The Beat focuses mainly on the Hugo winners, finalists and longlists in the Best Graphic Story and Best Retro Graphic Story categories, but also touches upon the many problems with the ceremony.

ETA: At the New Zealand news site The Spinoff, Sam Brooks reports about the strange, shambling mess that was George R.R. Martin’s hosting of the Hugo Awards ceremony.

Also at The Spinoff, Casey Lucas reports about the other SFF awards ceremony CoNZealand messed up, namely the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, New Zealand’s national science fiction and fantasy awards. All CoNZealand members, regardless of country of origin, were eligible to vote for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards this year, only that hardly anybody knew about this, because it wasn’t publicised. And those who did find out that they were eligible to vote didn’t receive the voters’ packet. And then, to add insult to injury, the Sir Julius Vogel Award ceremony was stuck onto the back of the Retro Hugo ceremony like an afterthought. Given CoNZealand’s track record with award ceremonies, I now wonder whether there were issues with the Prometheus Awards, which are traditionally handed out at Worldcon, too.

ETA: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand, the organisation behing the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, has announced that the voters’ packet for the award will be made available again to CoNZealand members.

Andrew Liptak declares that the 2020 Hugo ceremony was a mess, which it absolutely was.

At Digital Spy, Louise McCreesh reports about the 2020 Hugo ceremony.

At io9, Charles Pulliam-Moore also weighs in on the 2020 Hugo Awards.

At Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers weighs in on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, mostly quoting from Natalie Luhrs’ excellent post.

At The Daily Dot, Rachel Kiley also discusses the 2020 Hugo ceremony and the many, many problems with it.

ETA: Omigy.co.uk, a pop culture site I’d never heard of, reports about the problems with the 2020 Hugo ceremony.

ETA: At Rokzfast, Jacob Tyler weighs in on the issues with the 2020 Hugo ceremony and links to several tweets.

ETA: At Women Write About Comics (which would be a great choice for Best Fanzine next year – hint, hint), Doris V. Sutherland shares her thoughts on the 2020 Hugo Awards, the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards and the 2020 Hugo ceremony.

ETA: New Zealand fan Soon Lee also weighs in on the 2020 Hugo ceremony and particularly focusses on the almost complete lack of any New Zealand content. Soon Lee also points out that it’s offensive that George R.R. Martin seems to assume that New Zealanders have no idea what the Hugos and Worldcon are.

ETA: Discon III, the 2021 Worldcon in Washington DC, has announced that the hosts of their Hugo ceremony will be Malka Older and Sheree Renée Thomas, so the 2021 Hugo ceremony will be a lot younger, a lot less white and a lot less male. After this year’s disaster, I can only see this as a good thing. The toastmasters at Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon in Chicago, Illinois, will be Annelee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, two time Hugo winners for Best Fancast and another excellent choice. So I’ll think we have two good Hugo ceremonies ahead of us.

Another of the many problems with the 2020 Hugo ceremony is that the acceptance speech of Best Editor Long Form winner Navah Wolfe was cut off by a technical glitch. Navah Wolfe has now shared the full text of her speech online, which you can read here, here and here. I think this is my favourite acceptance speech of the night, though most people seem to prefer R.F. Kuang’s. I’m also horrified that it’s even legal in the US for a company to fire an employee who’s pregnant.

Norwegian fan Dag-Erling Smørgrav shares his thoughts on the 2020 Hugo ceremony and particularly focusses on George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg repeatedly praising John W. Campbell, which was clearly a jab against the renaming of the former Campbell Award as the Astounding Award and Hugo finalist (and eventual winner) Jeanette Ng. And as I said in my previous post, I have some sympathy that Martin as one of the first finalists ever for the Campbell may not be happy about the renaming (even though the fact that the Campbell Award is now the Astounding Award doesn’t take away Martin’s accomplishment in getting nominated for it in 1973), but the repeated jabs at the Astounding Award and Jeanette Ng were petty and uncalled for.

Sword and sorcery writers Remco van Straten and Angeline B. Adams also weigh in on the 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony in a post fittingly entitled “When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth”. And indeed it’s interesting that both Dag-Erling Smørgrav and Remco van Straten/Angeline B. Adams evoked dinosaurs in their posts about the 2020 Hugo ceremony. I guess Camestros Felapton, who wrote the brilliant Hugosauriad to discuss how dinosaurs are a recurring theme on the Hugo ballot, has found the dinosaurs at the 2020 Hugos, only that this year they weren’t on the ballot, but up on the stage.

As sword and sorcery writers, Remco van Straten and Angeline B. Adams are well aware that it’s possible to appreciate the SFF of yesteryear while remaining aware of the flaws of these works and their creators and so point out how problematic many of the writers and editors of yesteryear who were explicitly mentioned at the Hugo ceremony truly were.

Van Straten and Adams also have a great post about the controversy surrounding the sword and sorcery anthology Flashing Swords #6, from which several authors pulled their stories, after they became aware that editor Robert M. Price’s foreword was a sexist and transphobic screed. In their post, Van Straten and Adams point out that sword and sorcery was always a diverse genre and that women like C.L. Moore and newly minted Retro Hugo winner Margaret Brundage were an important part of the genre from the beginning and that writers of colour like Samuel R. Delany and Charles R. Saunders and transpeople like artist Jeffrey Catherine Jones were part of the genre at least from the 1960s on. The 2020 Hugo ceremony is only mentioned in passing, but the post very clearly illustrates that the past of our genre was a lot more diverse and a lot less straight, white and male than it is often remembered.

ETA: Robert J. Sawyer weighs in on the problems with the 2020 Hugo ceremony and points out that George R.R. Martin repeatedly referring to various writers and editors by their nicknames alienated the audience even further. Now it’s not too big of a stretch that “Silverbob” refers to Robert Silverberg, who introduced himself as Bob when I was on a panel with him. But the “Piglet” thing threw me, too, since I’ve never heard George Alec Effinger referred to by that name and it’s not easily deducible either.

ETA: At Future Less Travelled, Vivienne Raper, a fan and critic whose taste in books leans more conservative, declares that the 2020 Hugo ceremony was a dumpster fire, which it absolutely was.

ETA: Lela E. Buis also weighs in on the issues with the 2020 Hugo ceremony.

ETA: James Pyles sent me a link to his thoughts about the 2020 Hugo ceremony, so here it is.

ETA: At a site called The American Thinker, which seems to be the usual US conservative website obsessed with “the Left”, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Andrea Widberg reports about the problems with the 2020 Hugo ceremony (which she doesn’t seem to have watched) and declares that “cancel culture” is going after George R.R. Martin and that it’s somehow the fault of the Maoists. Never mind that Maoists are exceedingly rare in the twenty-first century, several of those who criticised George R.R. Martin are the children of people from China and Hongkong who left those countries for political reasons, so they’re extremely unlikely to be Maoists.

ETA: The usual canine suspects are mostly silent about the 2020 Hugos, which means that they’ve moved on, so good for them. Vox Day is mainly starting fights with Patreon these days, but he still can’t resist a quick post about the Hugos, which mainly quotes from the Daily Dot article. Vox also gloats that George R.R. Martin is cancelled now and that he hopes John Scalzi will be next (not that anybody ever brought up Scalzi, except for Vox Day who’s obsessed with him). There’s also a jab against his other obsession N.K. Jemisin, though he seems to have missed that she has won four Hugos by now,  and a lot of use of the word “rape” for a very short post. So in short, business as usual.

ETA: Puppy come lately Jon Del Arroz sees to have moved on to comics these days, but he also feels compelled to weigh in on the Hugo ceremony in this video. Of course, he didn’t even watch the ceremony (well, he saved himself almost four hours by that), because Worldcon and the Hugos are dead and the Hugo winners don’t sell, blah, blah, blah. Never mind that one look at Amazon presents a very different picture. He also thinks it’s ridiculous that people are upset that George R.R. Martin and the other presenters mispronounced several names, which is interesting coming from someone whose name is not pronounced the way you would assume either. As a result, Del Arroz probably gets his share of mispronounciations, too (and he makes a point of saying his name at the beginning of every video, likely to counter that), so you’d think he’d have some sympathy for people being fed up with having their names mispronounced all the time.

YouTube being what it is, I also came across a bunch of other videos from aggrieved white gamer dudes weighing in on the Hugo ceremony, usually without having watched the ceremony or following the Hugos at all, because the Hugos and Worldcon are supposedly irrelevant. What drew their attention was the involvement of George R.R. Martin and the fact that he supposedly was cancelled. Never mind that all of these folks were screaming about the ending of Game of Thrones or the fact that Winds of Winter is still not out not so long ago. There’s a bunch of these videos – apparently, there are a lot of disaffected white gamer dudes with too much time on their hands out there. You can find examples here, here, here and here. I wouldn’t recommend watching them, unless you have a lot of time to kill, since it’s mostly the same blather about SJWs, cancel culture, blue checkmarks on Twitter, Sad Puppies, etc… that we’ve heard umpteen times from that corner before.

ETA: At a blog called The Dark Herald, Cataline Sergius weighs on in the 2020 Hugo ceremony (one day after it happened, even though the Hugos are supposedly not even on their radar anymore) and claims that winning a Hugo damages an author’s reputation. I guess N.K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, Arkady Martine and other recent Hugo winners are crying all the way to the bank.

British writer Ed Fortune calls the 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony the worst awards ceremony he ever had the misfortune to sit through and also goes into the debacle about the 2019 Hugo Losers Party, where the venue George R.R. Martin booked was too small and several Hugo finalists and their plus ones were left standing outside.

Two time Hugo winner Cheryl Morgan shares her thoughts on the disastrous 2020 Hugo ceremony and also remembers the incident in 2006, where Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis on stage at the Hugo ceremony, just in case you were wondering if Hugo ceremonies can get worse than what happened this year. Cheryl Morgan also points out that Harlan Ellison at least seemed mortified that his behaviour had damaged the ceremony and the Hugos, even if he didn’t quite understand what the problem was. She is not so sure that George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg understand what they did.

Cheryl Morgan also has a follow-up post about how and why Worldcons go wrong, which is well worth reading. Cheryl also points out that pointing fingers at the World Science Fiction Society doesn’t help, because the WSFS is us, i.e. every supporting and attending member of Worldcon.

Jason Sanford also discusses the 2020 Hugo ceremony and the many problems with it. He makes a lot of good points, but then he goes into something I’ve also seen on Twitter, namely that Worldcon is old, irrelevant and in danger of dying and that the big media cons like San Diego Comic Con and Dragon Con in Atlanta are the future.

Leaving aside the irony that the Puppies said the very same thing back in 2015/16, for better or for worse, Worldcon is a different beast than commercial cons like San Diego Comic Con and Dragon Con (and let’s not forget that Dragon Con’s literature trek leans strongly conservative/rightwing, even if the overall membership doesn’t). Worldcon is less polished than the media cons, because it’s entirely run by volunteers. At Worldcon, the barriers between fans and pros are much lower, because everybody is a fan first and a writer, artist, editor, publisher, filmmaker, etc… second. This doesn’t always work out as intended, as this weekend’s events have shown, but I still love the inclusive idea behind it and it makes me sad when I hear of people – often writers and fans of colour – who were made to feel unwelcome at Worldcon. But while Worldcon isn’t perfect, as Cheryl Morgan said, Worldcon is us. We can make it better and many of us try in a myriad of ways, whether it’s people braving the Business Meeting to submit proposals or this year’s Hugo finalists and others who worked behind the scenes to make programming more diverse and inclusive or the many volunteers who keep the convention running.

But the best thing about Worldcon is that it’s not stationary, like San Diego Comic Con, Dragon Con and so many other cons, but that it moves around. Of course, the “World” in Worldcon is still too often ignored, the locations are still too often in the US, though we’ve been seeing more non-US locations in recent years, and whole continents barely get a look in. But while there’s at least a chance that Worldcon will eventually come to your country or continent (plus, if you find enough likeminded fans, you can bid to bring a Worldcon to your country), you’ll always have to go to San Diego to attend Comic Con and to Atlanta with its hellish airport to attend Dragon Con. Entering the US was always an unpleasant experience (ask me why I hate Atlanta airport so much sometime) and it has only gotten worse in the past twenty years and even worse in the past four. Even if they get a visa, which is by no means assured particularly for people from non-western countries, a lot of people from outside the US are reluctant to travel to the US. Some people like Cheryl Morgan are unable to enter the US at all through no fault of their own. So those who are saying, “Worldcon is old and irrelevant, so let it die and go to Dragon Con or San Diego Comic Con instead” are saying to everybody who can’t or won’t travel to the US and everybody inside the US who cannot afford to travel to Atlanta or San Diego, “You don’t matter. We don’t care if you can’t come.” I’m sure that’s not what they mean to say, but that’s how it comes across.

Jason Sanford goes on to declare 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.

ETA: 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.

ETA: At File 770, Chris M. Barkley also weighs in on the 2020 Hugo ceremony, the 2020 Hugo winners and the 1945 Retro Hugos.

ETA: 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.

ETA: 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).

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.

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.

ETA: 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.

ETA: 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.

ETA: 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.

ETA 2: And the official listing for the Retro Hugo for Best Graphic Story has been corrected.

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.

Posted in General, Links | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Some Reflections on the 2020 Hugo Ceremony a.k.a. Reminiscing with George

Posted on August 2, 2020 by Cora

This was not the post I wanted to write today. The post that I hoped to write was, “Hey, I won a Hugo. Go me!” However, Bogi Takács won and a most deserving winner they are, too. And in fact, the speech I never got to hold would have specifically said that as far as I am concerned, everybody in the fan writer category was a winner. And besides, I came in second at first try, which is pretty amazing.

So yes, let’s talk about the 2020 Hugo Ceremony. By now, you may have seen some tweets or read some posts about the fact that the 2020 Hugo Ceremony was a) very, very, very long, and b) pretty damn awful. If you have about three hours and forty-eight minutes of time to spare, you can watch the whole thing. Or you can read the summaries by Natalie Luhrs, Sean Reads Sci-Fi, Miyuki Jane Pinckard and Matt at Runalong the Shelves. You can also watch the 2020 Hugo ceremony without all the extraneous blather at the YouTube channel of The Reading Outlaw.

As you know, I was a Hugo finalist this year, so I was in a different position than those watching the regular livestream. I was in the Hugo finalist Zoom, waiting for my categories (I was accepting again for Galactic Journey this year as well as for myself) to be called. And since the fan categories are up first, I was basically sitting there in full ceremony get-up – evening gown, tiara, jewellery – from 1 AM my time on. My elderly parents were there as well. I’d told them that my category would probably come up by 1:30 AM at the latest.

Cora Buhlert in Hugo outfit

Me in my Hugo dress, posing with a bookshelf and Occulus, the friendly eyeball monster.

So the ceremony started, George R.R. Martin appeared on the screen and starting talking. And talking. And talking. He reminisced about his first Worldcon and his first Hugo ceremony in 1971. He reminisced about the first time he was a finalist for what was then the Campbell Award in 1973. Those stories about the olden days were actually interesting, but they also went on for much, much too long. Besides, those stories are better suited to a panel or the bar than to the Hugo ceremony.

When they finally announced the Lodestar and Astounding winners after more than half an hour, I thought, “Okay, now my categories will be up in a few minutes.” And then I saw a message in the Zoom chat from Allan, the tech person in charge of the Hugos who did a great job (and who unlike the finalists, actually had to sit through all three hours and forty-eight minutes of it), that the next video would be 17 minutes long. “That’s a typo”, I thought, “He means 1.7 minutes or 7 minutes.” But it wasn’t a typo. Because George R.R. Martin went on to talk for another 17 minutes.

Meanwhile, the fan category finalists who were up first (and all the other finalists for that matter) were on tenterhooks. My parents were nodding off. My tiara and my bra were hurting and I really needed to go to the bathroom, but didn’t dare to go, before my categories were called.

And because I could see the other finalists in Zoom, I saw that they were in a similar situation. There was one fan category finalist, also in Europe where it was in the middle of the night, who kept fanning themselves and dabbing at their face, because they were obviously hot and sweating. At one point, I said to the screen, “George, please get to the point already, because finalist X is melting.”

Then fanzine and fan writer were called, neither Galactic Journey nor I won, and my parents left, clearly grateful to be finally able to go to bed. I got rid of my bra and my tiara, dressed more comfortably, made myself a tea, got my crochet and settled down again. Fan artist and semiprozine were called, while I was undressing, but I missed nothing during my tea break, because George R.R. Martin was talking again. And then Robert Silverberg talked as well and also for a long time, introducing the editor categories.

By the time best related work was called, I’d had enough and decided to decamp to the after-party and follow the finalist announcements on Twitter. Which I promptly did and I had a great time, too. A lot better time, I bet, than the poor finalists in the fiction categories, who had been waiting for three hours at that point.

Around the same time that I gave up, I saw tweets, Discord messages, etc… from plenty pf people saying the same thing. “Sorry, I’m going to bed, just let me know who won.” And today on Discord, someone said, “Wait a minute, the Hugo ceremony is over?”

“No”, I replied, “George is still sitting in his theatre in Santa Fe reminiscing about the olden days and he’s up to the 1989 Worldcon by now. However, the technician fell asleep and accidentally ripped out the cable.”

Now some of George R.R. Martin’s and Robert Silverberg’s annecdotes might actually have been interesting, if presented on a panel about “Writers remember the olden days” or “Rememberances of Worldcons and Hugos past”. And indeed, there was such a panel. But the Hugo Award Ceremony is not the time to go on endlessly about things that happened decades ago. Instead, the point of the Hugo Ceremony is to honour today’s finalists and winners. Which seemed almost like an afterthought at this year’s ceremony.

I understand that George R.R. Martin is not happy about the name change of the former Campbell, now Astounding Award, considering he was one of the first Campbell finalists. And once again, his remarks would have been appropriate for a hypothetical panel called “Saviour of science fiction or freaking fascist? The complex legacy of John W. Campbell”. However, the 2020 Hugo Ceremony is not the place to go on about what an important figure he was to the genre – and I already shared my thoughts on Campbell in the Retro Hugo post – considering Campbell died before most of this year’s finalists in any category were even born.

What makes this lengthy and rambling Hugo Ceremony even more annoying is that George R.R. Martin (and Robert Silverberg for that matter) both know what it’s like to be a finalist, waiting for your category to be called. After all, they’ve been there several times. So they should have asked themselves, “How would I have felt if this had happened at my first (or second or third) Hugo ceremony as a finalist and the toastmaster had gone on and on and on with anecdotes about Hugo Gernsback?”

And for some Hugo finalists, the lengthy wait was more than an annoyance, but made it impossible for them to accept the Award without violating their religious beliefs. Best Editor winner Navah Wolfe is orthodox Jewish and let the Hugo Ceremony organisers know that she would not be able to accept in person after sunset in her part of the world because of Shabbat. Best Fan Writer winner Bogi Takács was in the same boat, only that fan writer was announced earlier in the evening. Nor is this the first time this has happened, Alix E. Harrow’s designated accepter last year had to drop out, because the Hugo Ceremony coincided with Shabbat. There are a lot of Jewish people in our community and while not all are observant, we nonetheless should be able to find a date and time for the Hugo ceremony that doesn’t force anybody to choose between violating their personal beliefs and accepting a Hugo.

ETA: In the comments, Standback, who was supposed to accept the Hugo for Alix E. Harrow in Dublin and dropped said, said that the ceremony did not conflict with Shabbat after all, but that he had to drop out for other reasons. And of course, Navah Wolfe did win Best Editor last year and was able to accept her award in person. Bogi was a finalist as well, though I’m not sure whether they were at the ceremony. But the fact that Dublin got it right doesn’t excuse that CoNZealand did not take the religious beliefs of at least two finalists into account.

ETA: Several Hugo finalists also report that the overlong Hugo ceremony conflicted with panels or readings they had at what they expected to be after the ceremony. One of my panels was actually scheduled for after the Hugo ceremony, but since every single person on that panel was a Hugo finalist (and one of us – John Picacio – went on to win in his category), we contacted programming and asked them to shift the panel, which they did.

But if the lengthy ramblings of George R.R. Martin were bad, what was even worse was George and other presenters repeatedly mispronouncing the names of Hugo finalists and in one case misgendering finalists (George talked about the young men and women nominated for the Astounding Award, even though this year’s finalists were only women, two of them with ambiguous names). And yes, finalists of colour were the worst affected, but white and western finalists had their names mispronounced as well. In my category alone, Paul Weimer and myself had our names mispronounced (not by George R.R. Martin, who didn’t present our category). Now I’m used to English speaking people mispronouncing my surname as “Bjuhlert”, even though there is no J in my name anywhere, so it’s no big deal for me, though I can understand why particularly people from a non-western background who have their names mispronounced all the time are angry.

But I still have no idea how a native English speaker can mispronounce “Jemisin”. And don’t even get me started on FIYAH Magazine, who had to put up a tweet explaining their name, because Martin mispronounced them, even though the title of the magazine is a phonetic spelling of “fire”. And yes, mistakes happen, but they shouldn’t happen with such frequency and they certainly shouldn’t happen in segments that have been prerecorded, because the good thing about prerecording is that you can do it again, if you mess up the first time around. Not to mention that all Hugo finalists were explicitly asked to provide their pronouns and the phonetic spelling of their names to prevent debacles like this.

As a teacher of German as a foreign language, I know how difficult even seemingly easy names/words can be to pronounce, if one’s native language does not have that particular phoneme. But if George R.R. Martin really couldn’t handle the pronounciation of certain names, they should have let someone else do it. And in fact this was probably the idea behind the “voice of God” that read out the names of the finalists again, because Martin did such a bad job of it.

It’s also not that I haven’t accidentally mispronounced someone’s name either. However, if you’re not sure how to pronounce someone’s name, ask them, cause they’re usually happy to tell you. For example, for the Galactic Journey acceptance speech I never got to hold, I asked how to pronounce the names of those members of the Galactic Journey team where I wasn’t sure. Because getting someone’s name and gender right is basic courtesy.

Also, several people noted that Martin had no problems pronouncing names like Fritz Leiber (and I actually praised him for getting Fritz Leiber’s name correct, before he started mispronouncing everybody else), Robert A. Heinlein and Roger Zelazny, probably because he knew those author personally. But even if he isn’t as familiar with today’s authors, that’s still no excuse to get their names wrong.

That said, while George R.R. Martin may have been the host of the ceremony, organising it was CoNZealand’s job and frankly, they didn’t do it very well. And yes, I understand the technical challenges they were faced with. But would it have been that difficult to ask George R.R. Martin and the other presenters to keep their remarks to 5 minutes per category and edit them down, if necessary? Especially since George R.R. Martin is known for many things, but brevity is not one of them. And would it have been that difficult to make sure that the names of the finalists were pronounced correctly and that the right pronouns are used, especially since they explicitly asked us for that information.

There have also been other criticisms, such as the fact that even though Worldcon was supposed to be held in New Zealand, the Hugo presenters were mostly white Americans as well as a white Brit and a white Australian. The closest the Hugo Ceremony came to New Zealand representation were the congratulations in the M?ori language following every announcement, which the finalists were told to use as a cue. Another finalist and I even asked what the appropriate response to those congratulations would be. They phrase we were given is scribbled – phonetically spelled – on the top of my acceptance speech.

The CoNZealand chairs Norman Cates and Kelly Buehler have now apologised for the Hugo mess, which is a start. And George R.R. Martin himself points out in the comments at File 770 that he was never provided with phonetic spellings of the finalists’ names (which is CoNZealand’s oversight then) and that people generally enjoy his anecdotes. Which I’m sure they do, but maybe not at the Hugo Ceremony.

But in general, this has not been a good experience, especially for the first-time Hugo finalists, of which I am one. First, the pandemic ruined everybody’s chances to enjoy their first time as a Hugo finalist in person at the con (though Discon III, the 2021 Worldcon in Washington DC, has announced that they want to hold a reception for the 2020 Hugo finalists, because they didn’t get one due to the pandemic). Then there was the inconsistent messaging that Hugo finalists received regarding what membership level was required for them to participate in the con and the Hugos and the fact that some Hugo finalists initially didn’t receive any programming at all. Nor is it the Hugo finalists’ job to fix issues with the programming, though we got comped memberships for 47 awesome people of colour, indigenous and otherwise marginalised people out of it, who made Worldcon programming so much better and more diverse. And in general, I enjoyed the first virtual Worldcon a whole lot, but that’s its own post. Nonetheless, I suspect the neverending Hugo Ceremony of 2020 will be talked about for a long time.

The analysis of the Hugo winners will be in a separate post.

Posted in Books, General | Tagged , , , , | 29 Comments

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for July 2020

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Cora

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month
It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some June books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have urban fantasy, science fantasy, fantasy mysteries, paranormal mysteries, paranormal romance, science fiction romance, space opera, military science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, horror, non-fiction, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, unicorns, necromancers, bounty hunters, galactic peacekeepers, magical assassins, magical cats, code monkeys, crime-busting witches, post-apocalyptic chickens and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Free Station by Rachel AuckesFree Station by Rachel Auckes:

The Galactic Peacekeepers are being hunted.

The tables have turned. Marshals are going missing.

Marshal Throttle Reyne and her Black Sheep are sent on a mission to investigate the recent surge in pirate attacks. But when the pirates unite and take over Free Station, the headquarters of the Galactic Peacekeepers, the Black Sheep must make a suicide run against the pirates and save the lives of their friends. If they fail, the system will belong to the pirates.

Bounty Hunter: Nothing to Nobody by Rachel AuckesBounty Hunter: Nothing to Nobody by Rachel Auckes:

A dark threat is creeping across the wastelands.

Bounty hunters are the closest thing to law enforcement across the wastelands, but most folks can’t tell the difference between the criminals and their chasers. Havoc Joe Ballast and his team at the Haft Agency are trying to change that by picking their own targets and going after the worst criminals. But that’s not working out so well for them.

They should’ve stuck to the rules.

Their first target, the bloodthirsty Red Dead gang, is terrorizing hapless refugees. Things go bad fast when Havoc and his friends are ambushed and forced to flee to the lawless Wilds. Stranded in deadly territory, the hunters must align with a secret rebel group to survive while turning the tables on their merciless enemies.

Join the bounty hunters as they fight for their lives in the post-apocalyptic wastelands. Their enemies may think they have won, but the hunters are just getting started.

Aloha Thrive by Ginger BoothAloha Thrive by Ginger Booth:

An ex-cop who cannot die. A moon full of settlers who cannot thrive.

Mahina’s terraformers built a high-tech urban paradise. Then Earth flooded the colony with desperate refugees, cop Sass Collier among them.

The settlers who arrived with Sass died decades ago. Outside the citadel, their descendants die weak and young.

Sass fought a rebellion against the city once. She won concessions to give the settlers a chance at health. She paid with 20 years in prison.

Now she’s out, a reformed character. She assembles an oddball crew doing odd jobs. She intends to mind her own business – how to make a profit on the skyship Thrive.

But her fellow settlers are still failing.

While her business model careens toward circus acts, Sass dares to defy the city again, to solve Mahina’s failure to thrive.

Book of Dark Magic by Sara BourgeoisBook of Dark Magic by Sara Bourgeois

When Richard Jordan is found dead in the woods outside of Coventry, the town’s reputation for being paranormal is put into the spotlight.

Richard wasn’t just murdered. The person who found him was shocked by what looked like a Satanic ritual murder.

Suddenly, the town’s regular tourism starts to dry up. In its place is a flood of weirdos and wannabe Satanists who are there to finish the ritual they believe Richard’s murder began.

Is this the apocalyptic scenario that Kinsley was prophesied to stop? Or, did someone want the town drunk dead and used a bunch of dark magical items to make it look paranormal?

What about the mysterious black book that shows up on Kinsley’s doorstep? Does it hold the key to solving the crime, or does it represent something far more sinister?

Come along as Kinsley and friends solve this crime one spell at a time!

The Pegasus Pulp Sampler by Cora BuhlertThe Pegasus Pulp Sampler by Cora Buhlert

Get an overview of the works of Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert and her one-woman small press Pegasus Pulp Publishing.

Space opera, military science fiction, alien invasions, hostile planets, sword and sorcery, pulp thrillers, men’s adventure, murder mysteries, cozy fantasy, historical romance – we have all that and more.

Enjoy twelve novellas, novelettes and short stories in five genres.

Contains the following stories:

•Evacuation Order
•Baptism of Fire
•Mercy Mission
•Acacia Crescent
•Valentine’s Day on Iago Prime
•The Four and a Half Minute Boiled Egg
•The Cork and the Bottle
•The Crawling Death
•Countdown to Death
•The Valley of the Man Vultures
•The Revenant of Wrecker’s Dock
•The Kiss of the Executioner’s Blade

Mist and Magic by Lindsay BurokerMist and Magic by Lindsay Buroker:

As a freelance assassin, Val Thorvald leads a dangerous life.

She’s learned not to stay in the same place for long and not to get too attached to anything. For example, she would never consider adopting a pet.

But when she’s searching for a missing friend, she finds an abandoned silver tiger cub.

The magical feline is clearly from another realm, but Val has no idea which one or how to send it back. All she knows is that it’s the only witness to her friend’s kidnapping.

Val can kick the butts of ogres, trolls, and wizards, but she has no experience taking care of pets—certainly not magical tigers. And as she quickly learns, the cub has teeth like a chainsaw. Soon, everything from her apartment to her seat belts to the hair on her head is in danger.

But if Val can’t forge a bond with the cub, figure out what it knows, and find her missing friend, more than her belongings—and her hair—may be at risk.

Deadland Sentinel by J.N. Chaney and Ell Leigh ClarkeDeadland Sentinel by J.N. Chaney and Ell Leigh Clarke:

With the trafficking ring obliterated, Jack turns his attention to wiping out the dregs of the criminal empire.

But when he arrives to take out a particular scumbag, he only finds the man’s corpse.
And he’s missing a shoe.

As the investigation begins, Jack surmises he has either stumbled into a conspiracy or there’s a serial killer on the loose. The team must mobilize to figure out exactly what is going on.

Corruption, kidnapping, and life as they know it all collide as the group comes up against deadly elements within the very organizations they were sworn to protect.

With their own lives in the balance, and the integrity of the Union government at stake, it’s a race against the clock to figure out who the players are and how to bring them down.

All without being taken out themselves.

Heartless by Dannika DarkHeartless by Dannika Dark:

“For you, I’ll wait an eternity.”

Despite the spoils of a solid relationship and an idyllic life at Keystone, Raven is itching for the thrill of another big case. Things begin to heat up when a dangerous assignment falls in her lap.

Searching for the mastermind behind an illegal fighting ring is no easy feat, but as the weeks roll by, Raven’s undercover job begins to take an unexpected emotional toll. It’s a deadly mission, and if she’s not careful, she could lose everything.

The Ark War by Chris FoxThe Ark War by Chris Fox:

The Ark War Has Begun

War on a scale not seen in this sun-cycle has begun. Nox and his demonic army were thwarted at the Proto-Ark, but not before forging the tool that will hasten the destruction of the world. The Grey Men have a Primary Access Key, and are ready to bring their masters home. The Builders are coming.

Millions of deathless surround Jordan in the broken Ark of the Mother. The only thing standing between Lima and destruction is the last god anyone wants to trust…Irakesh. Jordan follows Sobek to Australia in search of allies, but what lurks there predates humanity.

Blair and Trevor spearhead a desperate gambit to alter time and save the Mother from her death at The First Ark. To do that they need powerful allies. The time has come to wake Jes’ka, so that she can train Liz in the ways of the Ka-Ken. If Blair and Trevor succeed, then ensuring Set doesn’t return to the present falls upon them.

But there is a spy in their midst. The Builders are far, far closer than anyone suspects.

Necrotech by Chris FoxNecrotech by Chris Fox:

The Unseen Fleets Come and Worlds Burn

The Unliving are implacable. Unreasonable. No one knows what they want, beyond souls, and bone for their war machines and ships. Now they’ve set their sights on the Inurans, and hey, I couldn’t wish an army of necromancers on a better target.

There’s just one problem.

I’m trapped on the Inuran Trade Moon, and the necromancers are attacking. Even if I can get the minister back to her ship we’ll still need to find a way to fight their flagship. That’s going to be tough to do without enough magic to power the Word of Xal.

If I pull it off I think I get a bonus though. Also, there’s that living thing.

324 Abercorn by Max Allan Gunnells324 Abercorn by Max Allan Gunnells

Brad Storm doesn’t believe in ghosts, but moving into the house at 324 Abercorn just may change his mind.

Best-selling author Bradley Storm finally has enough money to buy and restore his dream home. Despite 324 Abercorn’s reputation as one of the most haunted houses in America, Bradley isn’t worried. He doesn’t believe in the supernatural. Then strange things begin to happen. Objects no longer where he left them. Phantom noises heard from empty rooms. Shadows glimpsed from the corner of his eye.

Is his house truly haunted, or is there something more sinister happening on the property?

With the help of Bradley’s new boyfriend and a few friends who are just as intrigued with the seemingly inexplicable occurrences surrounding the infamous house, they set out to find the truth of what stalks the halls at 324 Abercorn.

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

Silent Cravings by Jess Haines and E. BlixSilent Cravings by Jess Haines and E. Blix:

What’s a vampire to do when the werewolf she craves is playing hard to bite?

Christoph needs to save a young girl from a vampire’s clutches. It’s his fault she’s there in the first place—and rescuing her is the only way he might get back into his alpha’s good graces.

Unfortunately for them both, he’s just not that good.

He and his packmate soon find themselves caught and magically “neutered” by enchanted collars so they can’t hurt anyone in the vampire’s entourage.

Just when Christoph thought it couldn’t get any worse, a mute vampire named Mouse decides to claim him as her boy-toy.

She has her own set of problems involving some lingering issues from her past. She hungers for Christoph, but can’t stand to see someone victimized or—even worse—afraid of her.

The two must learn how to live together (and deal with his new fashion accessory)—without driving the rest of the vampire’s household crazy in the process.

Wicked Games by Lily Harper HartWicked Games by Lily Harper Hart

Ivy Morgan knew she was in for a world of hurt when she was sentenced to community service. She had no idea just how bad things were going to be, though. On her first day of picking up trash along the roadside, one of her crew members stumbles over a body, and it happens to belong to someone she knows.

Sasha Carmichael was described as a “good girl” and nobody can figure out how she ended up alone in the woods, so close to a road and help, and abandoned. When Jack Harker and his partner start digging down, though, some dark possibilities come to the surface.

It seems Sasha had ties to more than one person on Ivy’s work crew, which means Shadow Lake’s favorite witch is working with a killer. Finding the guilty party is difficult, especially given the way her crew chief is watching her.

If Ivy sticks even one toe out of line, her community service could be extended. That means her wedding is on the brink and her honeymoon might be lost. Jack isn’t about to let either of those scenarios happen.

It’s going to take both of them working together to solve the crime, and even then nothing is guaranteed.

Hang on to your hats, because murder has come to Shadow Lake and this killer might not be done … by a long shot.

Zero by Simon HaynesZero by Simon Haynes:

Hal Spacejock loves to watch cargo ships taking off for distant star systems.

One day, he promises himself. One day I’ll leave this dump of a planet and explore the galaxy!

But Hal’s not supposed to watch the ships.

No, his job is to load cargo into them… and he’s not very good at it.

After a particularly bad mixup, Hal flees from his boss, certain he’ll get the sack.

Instead, he runs smack-bang into an adventure that will alter the course of his life.

This prequel covers events leading up to Hal 1: A Robot Named Clunk. You can read it before or after any of the main Hal Spacejock novels.

Brewing up a Storm by Amanda M. LeeBrewing Up a Storm by Amanda M. Lee:

Storm season has hit Moonstone Bay and with it comes a whole lot of trouble.

Hadley Hunter thinks she’s ready for what’s to come, but she’s not. Before the storms can wreak havoc on her life, though, she has something even more frightening to deal with … lunch with her boyfriend Galen Blackwood’s mother.

Despite her best intentions, things don’t go as smoothly as Hadley envisioned. Before she has a chance to deal with that, though, the storms bring another surprise in the form of an unconscious woman on the beach and a yacht that keeps appearing (and then disappearing) with each subsequent storm.

Hadley can’t wrap her head around what’s happening, especially when news breaks regarding the identity of the individual who was found in front of the lighthouse. It seems she’s the wife of a very rich and powerful man … who disappeared a year before. In addition to that, the couple had two daughters with them at the time their boat fell off the map. What happened to them?

It’s a race against time for Hadley and her motley band of paranormal friends. They must find the yacht and uncover every horrible secret one family has managed to bury beneath a deep blue sea … and they have to do it with a monster on their tails.

At the heart of almost every family is love. At the heart of this one is despair. Somehow, Hadley will have to overcome her worst fears to become the best witch she possibly can.

Here’s hoping she’s up to the challenge.

A Blood Moon Swindle by W.H. LockA Blood Moon Swindle by W.H. Lock:

It’s the end of the world and it’s all Quinn’s fault.

Quinn is a talented conman and sorcerer, but even the best get caught. On his first day out of prison, Quinn was offered a job he should have refused. Quinn’s parole officer wanted him to steal a skull from a necromancer in Los Angeles.

It all went to downhill from there.

Quinn put together a team of the best criminals he knew. Together they stole the skull without getting caught. Only to be betrayed by one of the team and the parole officer. The pair was secretly working for the archangel Uriel in a plot to end the world.

Quinn and his team tried to stop the trio from getting the last artifact they needed to destroy the world, only to fail at the last moment because of Quinn’s antics.

Now Quinn is on the run from the FBI and his former team and he has made a literal deal with a devil.

If Quinn doesn’t save the world he’ll suffer an eternity of torment at the hands of Mamon, the Demon Prince of Greed. If he saves the world, all the debts he piled up will come due.

And those are the sort of debts that take an IOU.
Can Quinn save the world and escape certain death?

Ex Inferis by Nazri NoorEx Inferis by Nazri Noor:

Get ready for a hell of a ride.

Spoiled, sarcastic, and brutally self-obsessed, fledgling sorcerer Quilliam J. Abernathy has never worked a day in his life. And why should he? Being the half human son of a demon prince comes with its perks, among them a palatial lifestyle of luxury and excess.

But Quill’s comfort comes with a price. He is the Chosen of Asmodeus, destined to destroy the world and fated from birth to become the harbinger of hell. One last trial now stands in his way, the final obstacle to his ascent: a deadly game of devils…

Ex Inferis is the prequel to the Infernal Inheritance urban fantasy series, set several years before the events of the Darkling Mage and Sins of the Father books. Experience Quill’s rise to power as the Chosen of Asmodeus in an intense, action-filled supernatural suspense story filled with demons, devilry, and danger.

Of Flesh and Feathers by L.M. PierceOf Flesh and Feathers by L.M. Pierce:

“A modern Watership Down meets The Walking Dead – but with a lot more feathers.”

A foul wind blows through the chicken coop. The flock’s caretaker no longer comes to collect Chickory’s eggs or bring her feed, and the stench of death is everywhere. Her friend Fayne is haunted by visions of danger, and by a prophecy of safety beyond the farthest horizon a chicken has ever known. With the help of their faithful farm dog, Chickory must convince her flock to follow her into a frightening world of disease and predators, both natural… and unnatural.

Their survival may depend on fateful premonitions, but in order to save the world of humans and birds, Chickory must discover the truth behind the prophecy and the sickness that turned their keepers into killers.

From the mind that brought you Trans Liberty Riot Brigade, L.M. Pierce presents:
Of Flesh and Feathers

Winds of Change by Christine PopeWinds of Change by Christine Pope:

One surge of magical power could free her — or short-circuit her future.

Jake Wilcox thought he’d covered their tracks when he hid his love, weather witch Adara Grant, in a remote Wyoming town under the watchful guard of the Northern Arapahoe. He should have listened to his instincts that he was making a horrible mistake.

Now Addie’s gone, taken in the dead of night by the very nemesis they thought they’d eluded. Locked away so deep in a government testing facility, it’ll take more than magical luck to find her, much less get her out alive.

Addie is living her worst nightmare, and feeling every one of the three thousand miles between her and Jake. The temptation to use her wild gift to free herself is strong — but it’s not just her own life at stake. The facility is full of orphaned witches.

And one faint signal that could be glimmer of hope — or a sign that luck has run out for Addie, Jake, and everyone they love.

Road Seven by Keith RossonRoad Seven by Keith Rosson

Mark Sandoval—resolutely arrogant, covered head to foot in precise geometric scarring, and still marginally famous after Hollywood made an Oscar-winner based off his memoir years before—has been strongly advised by his lawyer to leave the country following a drunken and potentially fatal hit and run. When a woman sends Sandoval grainy footage of what appears to be a unicorn, he quickly hires an assistant and the two head off to the woman’s farm in Hvíldarland, a tiny, remote island off the coast of Iceland. When they arrive on the island and discover that both a military base and the surrounding álagablettur, the nearby woods, are teeming with strangeness and secrets, they begin to realize that a supposed unicorn sighting is the least of their worries.

Fraternity by Alasdair ShawFraternity by Alasdair Shaw:

The Indescribable Joy of Destruction has to choose between his human friends and his fellow Artificial Sentiences.

Legate Olivia Johnson struggles to adjust to life without her enhanced brain implants.

Decurion Anastasia Seivers rejoins the Legion to face her biggest challenge – command.

Together they are closing in on the war criminals in the Red Fleet. Will they succeed in bringing its commander to justice or will he evade their clutches once more?

Fraternity is the last in the trilogy of novels: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Cosmic Lock by Aurora SpringerCosmic Lock by Aurora Springer:

Three sets of enemies and a wormhole to shut?
Follow the superpowered Griffins on a rollercoaster adventure where new threats counter each success.

Grand Masters Violet and Athanor Griffin return from beyond the Cosmic Rift with two shiploads of rescued children and escaped slaves, but their enemies have not been idle in their absence. Avalon is in flames and their baby son is missing. Finding him may be the easiest of their problems. They must unite the fractious Grand Masters, stop the bloodsucking Ixioths from enslaving sentients, and seal the cosmic rupture to prevent new incursions of the vindictive Nulls. The clock is ticking. They have twelve days to squash their enemies before their final venture into the alternate universe. Can they overcome the challenges and secure peace for the galaxy?

Deception by Glynn StewartDeception by Glynn Stewart:

A new home on the edge of nowhere
A new hope for a peaceful future
An old enemy that won’t let go

Kira Demirci left her homeworld of Apollo pursued by assassins seeking revenge for her victories in the war against the Brisingr Kaiserreich. Now she has a new home and a new role: as the nova fighter wing commander aboard the mercenary carrier Conviction under Captain John Estanza.

Conviction is on retainer with the royal family of Redward, who encourage Kira and her pilots to make themselves a new home on the frontier planet. But there is a reason they want to tie the mercenary carrier’s crew more tightly to themselves and stormclouds are brewing on the horizon.

Those clouds break when a Redward warship goes missing on a standard patrol. Conviction and her fighters are sent out to find the destroyer—but instead they find a deadly plot by old enemies that will bring down the Syntactic Cluster in fire and war.

Unless Kira Demirci can do the impossible.

Lacey and Alex: The Dagger of Ill Repute by V.R. TapscottLacey and Alex: The Dagger of Ill Repute by V.R. Tapscott

Talking Plants, Explosions, Gunfire, Mayhem,
Magic and a Hint of Romance.

Lacey & Alex, roommates in San Francisco, are a barista and a cook by day. By night though, Lacey is a part time private investigator and Alex talks to plants. And they talk back.

In this book, they get dragged into hunting for a lost dagger. Of course, it winds up being so much more than simply a lost dagger.

The pair spend a couple of action-filled weeks travelling from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Barstow to Vegas and all parts between in their hunt for the elusive artifact.

They meet up with loose cannon Stevie and step it up a notch with exploding cars and tension of a whole nother kind, as she makes it clear what she thinks of Lacey.

Olive from Jane Bond shows up with a little tiny insignificant part (heh) and Jane herself has a cameo.

Join Lacey & Alex and Stevie as they have the adventure of a lifetime! Talking plants, explosions, gunfire, mayhem, magic and a little bit of romance all enter the picture before the end, in this slightly humorous, slightly serious, and always fun mystery.

Child of Wrath by R.K. ThorneChild of Wrath by R.K. Thorne:

Commander Ellen Ryu, Lieutenant Kael Sidassian, and the crew of the starship Audacity barely escaped Capital with their lives. Then betrayal kicked down their door. Now they need to clean up the mess.

The one team member they thought was safe has disappeared—their benefactor Doug Simmons. Doug’s former classmate is also in danger, and he’d planned a mission for them to rescue her. And the crew is zeroing in on just what exactly Ellen’s nemesis Dr. Arakovic is planning as the clues sharpen into focus.

Will the team be able to put together the pieces of many different puzzles before it’s too late? Attacked on multiple fronts, Ellen and her crew will have to divide and conquer if they want to triumph.

Because cyborg super soldiers, awkward aliens, gang members with secrets, and an ex-girlfriend from the past are just a few of the problems on their plate.

The baby they’ve been hiding from the entire galaxy is also about to make herself known.

Loudly.

Code Monkey by A.E. WilliamsCode Monkey by A.E. Williams

THAT IS ONE ANGRY MONKEY!

A.E. Williams opines on more matters of concern to thinking people, philosophers and chicken farmers.

CODE MONKEY follows the trajectory set by ROCKET SURGEON, as A.E. Williams opens up a can of whoop-ass on science, technology, politics and religion. Yeah, all those uncomfortable subjects that polite people eschew during cocktail party banter are just gristle for the mill as far as Williams is concerned.

Rocket Surgeon was just the first stage! Code Monkey ramps it up with a second-stage-to-orbit collection of articles, essays and unpublished works that will leave you shocked, aghast and rolling on the floor laughing.

Follow irascible raconteur, voyeur and mental saboteur A.E. Williams down a whole slew of rabbit holes, conspiracy theories, discussions about the fallacies and truth of the challenges of our times! You’ll discover why Williams is one of the most sought-after essayists on the planet. (Sought after by aliens, Sasquatch, sea serpents and hackers, that is…)

Once more, A.E. takes you by the hand and shoves facts, figures and statistics up your…nose, until you are spitting mad at finding out you have been duped all this time by Big Brother, the Deep State, the Man, the Establishment and even your lying parents! (Oh, for the sake of Santa! How could you!)

Williams regales you with personal tales from the aerospace trenches. He shows why firmly held ‘scientific’ facts are just as suspect as ‘truths’ that have been debunked, time and again. You’ll be cramming your tinfoil hat past your ears as you are exposed to the grim secrets of how the world REALLY works!

And, as always, you’ll chuckle and chortle your way through page after page of outrageous stories, anecdotes and observations by the man Cleopatra* said was “So funny I laughed my asp off!”

Get your copy TODAY and join the ranks of computer-literate primates who have gone bananas over riots, COVID19 and all the troubles in the world that have you praying for the Second Coming, World War 3 or a long-overdue asteroid strike!

*Cleopatra Jones works as a hair stylist in Roanoke, Va.

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