notpulpcovers
This is the Hugo Award. You may have heard of it.
Hugo Award nominees and winners are chosen by supporting or attending members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon. You have heard something about that recently.
The Hugo Award is named after Hugo Gernsback.
This is Hugo Gernsback:
In addition to inventing those awesome television glasses, he spent years trying to make the word “Scientifiction” happen.
“When I coined the word “Scientifiction” in 1915, I knew that sometime or other it was bound to become popular, and I even cherished a secret hope that someday it might appear in a standard dictionary. In any event, “scientifiction” is a word that will grow with the added years. As science advances, scientifiction will advance and flourish. No one of to-day can even dimly foresee what it may produce. There was a time when science made scientifiction. The time has already come when scientifiction makes science. The author who works out a brand new idea in a scientifiction plot may be hailed as an original inventor years later, when his brain-child will have taken wings and when cold-blooded scientists will have realized the author’s ambitions.”
He also wrote a great deal of scientifiction himself.
However, he is probably most famous for starting the first magazine
in America devoted to science fiction scientifiction, Amazing Stories.
Then as now, sci-fi engendered very strong feelings in the people who enjoyed it. Earlier magazines devoted to weird and speculative fiction were known for their active letter columns discussing and arguing about the stories, and authors frequently corresponded directly with fans who wrote them through the magazine. Robert E Howard and H.P. Lovecraft first began corresponding after Howard wrote a letter to the editor of Weird Tales arguing that Lovecraft’s anthropology in The Rats In The Walls was unsupported by the latest science. Howard then went on to write about the Picts being the natural enemies of the Atlanteans, proving that hypocritical fedora-wearing fanboy complaints are not a recent development.
Gernsback, however, made a fateful decision that would change the fate of fandom forever; he began publishing the letters sent to his magazine with the author’s full address.
This changed everything. Now you, living as you do in an age of SWATing and doxxing, might think that publishing the physical locations of hundreds of fanatical sci-fi fans (fan – short for fanatic) might be a bad idea. But since your great-grandparents were generally better people than you (other than that one thing) they instead used this information to write letters to each other. No longer did angry fans need to hope that an editor would publish their indignant response to an angry defense of a vicious attack on their favorite story; now they could write their target directly! Friendships were made, clubs were formed and the earliest popular culture fandom movement began to become a community. A community bound together by nothing but their love of the genre and the post office, ready to argue about which spaceship would win in a fight. Arguing about the plausibility of fictional inventions.
It was the dawn of the era of organized fandom, growing out of the letter columns of pulp magazines. Every obsessive genre fan you know exists because of these letters. By
1939, this community was holding a convention at the World Fair in New York, and doing what fans always do when gathered together; arguing about which authors and stories were the best. To settle the matter they held a vote, allowing everyone who was there to choose their favorites and giving awards to the winners.
This Science Fiction Convention at the World’s Fair was called the World Science Fiction Convention, or WorldCon.
Where they give out the Hugo Award. You may have heard of it.
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