not proposed by people who only watched or produced full-length movies.) This year’s Japanese Worldcon marked the first time that Best Editor was divided into Best Magazine Editor and Best Book Editor. Some of the book editors were getting tired of losing to magazine editors every year (only two book editors ever beat the magazine editors in open competition, and both of them did it posthumously), so one of the book editors, through a fannish surrogate, proposed splitting the award—and to make sure the new one went to a true-blue novel editor, anthology editors were lumped in with magazine editors.
What’s next? I don’t know.
But I know this. We now give out fourteen Hugos every year, and only four go to the reason for the existence of the field, the Worldcon, and the Hugo itself—written science fiction.
Think about it.
Television Has a Lot to Answer For
It was close to seven decades ago that Isaac Asimov looked around at the current state of the art, realized that except for Eando Binder’s crude, pulpish hero Adam Link, almost every robot in science fiction was a malicious monstrosity, applied a little rationality, and came up with the Three Laws of Robotics.
It was a brilliant breakthrough, and forever put an end to the kind of robots that dominated the covers and interiors of the science fiction magazines of the 1930s. In fact, it seemed reasonable to assume that from that day forward every science fictional robot would be governed by the Three Laws or some variation of them.
So what happened?
Clifford D. Simak created Jenkins, the robot servant in the classic City, a robot who felt, empathized, and could even lie in a good cause. John Sladek created Roderick, a robot whose middle name might well have been Satire. Robert Sheckley created a robot with (very humorous) sexual accomplishments. I picked up a Hugo nomination for a story about a robot whose greatest desire was to cry.
During the same time period that Asimov developed his laws, Robert A. Heinlein created the ultimate time paradox tale in his classic novella, “By His Bootstraps.” No need for anyone to ever write another.
But Heinlein himself topped it with “All You Zombies.” So did David Gerrold with The Man Who Folded Himself. So did William Tenn with “Me, Myself and I.” And none of them had anything in common with “By His Bootstraps” except that they concerned time paradoxes.
Phillip Wylie actually created the first superman in his novel, Gladiator. Then came Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John, a mental rather than a physical superman. Then came a whole series of supermen created by A. E. van Vogt. And of course there was Asimov’s Mule, and Henry Kuttner’s Baldies, and James H. Schmitz’s delightful Witches of Karres…and need I go on? The only ones who bore more than a passing resemblance to Wylie’s original were the continuing pulp character Doc Savage, and the continuing comic book character Superman.
Olaf Stapledon gave us a thinking dog in Sirius. Which was nothing like the thinking dogs Clifford D. Simak gave us a decade later in City, or Fredric Brown’s thinking dog, or Brown’s thinking mouse, or any number of thinking cats, horses, dragons, you name it. None of which had anything in common with Sirius, except that they were animals and sentient.
Okay, move the clock ahead to the 1990s and 2000s. I can’t tell you how many young people I’ve spoken to at lectures, workshops, and online who only want to write Star Trek books or Star Wars books (and in the 1990s you could add Beauty and the Beast books). The CompuServe network, back in the 1990s, had about 300 embryonic writers who only wanted to write Pern stories, even though the laws of copyright were explained to them and Anne McCaffrey had to land on a couple who ignored those laws.
For the longest time I didn’t understand it. These aren’t detective or Western stories, where you create a Sherlock Holmes or Hopalong Cassidy and tell his adventures for the rest of your career—and even in mysteries or Westerns, you created your own detective or cowboy, you didn’t swipe someone else’s.
We’re not mysteries or Westerns. We’re science fiction, which gives its writers all time and space to play with. Our galaxy has about one hundred billion stars. We’ve got at least a couple of billion Class G stars, just like our sun, and we’re starting to find out that damned near every star we examine has planets. The possibilities, scientific and fictional, are endless. So why do so many people want only to tell second-hand stories about Kirk and Spock and Picard and Skywalker in a handful of third-hand, shopworn, thoroughly-explored and not-very-logical universes?
When they see something that interests them or impresses them, why don’t they do what Simak did when he read about Asimov’s robots, what van Vogt did with he read about Wylie’s and Stapledon’s supermen, what Gerrold did when he encountered Heinlein’s time paradoxes? Why are the book and magazine slushpiles filled almost to overflowing with thinly-disguised Enterprises and Darth Vaders and the like?
And then it occurred to me. There is one major difference between most of the writers I named, and all of the hopeful ones I’ve been encountering for the past decade or so…and that is that most of the writers I named did not grow up watching television. Television didn’t exist during their formative years, so they grew up reading. They did not watch the same unchanging characters in the same trite, interchangeable plots week in and week out. They did not spend hours every night exposed to uncreative, unthreatening mental pablum that convinces each new generation of couch potato that it is Art. And, uninfluenced by the tube, they kept science fiction lively, creative and innovative.
Conclusion: even our here in the boonies where written science fiction lives, television has a lot to answer for.
Attending Worldcon
Jim Baen’s Universe has come of age. We put a story on the Hugo ballot in our first year, we just put one on the Nebula ballot for our second year. We’ve had a lot of stories get picked up for Best of the Year anthologies. More and more top writers are sending us their best material.
The next step is to win an award one of these years. The Hugo is the most prestigious—and along with voting for the best stories we run, don’t forget that Eric Flint is also eligible for Best Short Fiction Editor.
To nominate and to vote, you must be a member of Worldcon—and if you’re going to pay your dues, you might as well attend science fiction’s biggest celebration of the year. One of the things I’ve gleaned from Baen’s Bar and from a number of private e-mails is that a lot of you have not yet bitten the bullet and attended a Worldcon, so I thought it might not be a bad idea to let you know what’s in store for you, and perhaps encourage you to join and attend.
PARTIES
You’ve probably heard endless tales about all the parties at Worldcon, and indeed, most nights there will be over 50 of them—big ones, little ones, public ones, private ones. There are all kinds of parties—the single events, the pro events, the bid parties, the hospitality suites. You’ll get most of your info from various bulletin boards, and also from the twice-daily (and often thrice-daily) convention newsletter, which will be made available in most public places. Hollywood to the contrary, not all parties feature drugs, nudity, drunken behavior and wild sex, and Worldcon parties are among those that feature none of them. These are just friends visiting with old and new friends who share some of the same interests.
Every group that’s bidding for a future Worldcon will have at least one party, most two, a few every night. These are “open” parties and will be posted/advertised all over the hotels and in the newsletters.
A number of regional conventions will also have open parties to interest you in attending their upcoming cons. Almost any new convention with ambitions of becoming a major feature on the convention calendar will also have an open party to announce its existence.
The winners for the next two years usually have open parties. In fact, next year’s winner traditionally hosts the Hugo Losers Party. Frequently the previous year’s host has an open “thank-you” party.
Then there will be open and semi-open Hospitality Suites, including the Con Suite, which will be run by the host committee and open to all.
There will be