The Gordian Knot of Fan Vs. Pro

Wilson Tucker was a superb author whose prose almost earned him the very first Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1953. His Long Loud Silence — one of the most unflinching and depressing looks at the future of war — came in second to Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man.

Should Tucker have recused
himself from consideration
when he was shortlisted
for the Hugo for best Fan Writer
in 1970? We would suggest not.
(Image via File 770)

But his accomplishments as a professional writer were often overshadowed by his contributions to fandom. He coined the term “Space Opera,” and helped develop the fanzine culture that continues to enrich the genre. He was Fan Guest of Honour at two Worldcons: 1948 in Toronto and 1967 in New York.

In a very real way, Tucker is the case example of a dilemma that has bedeviled those arguing about Hugo Awards rules: the question of fan versus pro, and, specifically, what works should qualify for fan Hugos. Given his output as an author, Wilson Tucker was a pro. Given his contributions to fandom, Wilson Tucker was a fan. But should these roles be viewed as complementary or binary for the purpose of community recognition? And should there be clear guidelines about who counts as a “fan”?

These questions have reared their head in the wake of Worldcon 2022 at which three out of the four fan Hugos were presented to industry professionals. We want to stress that, in our opinion, all of these finalists and Hugo winners are worthy of recognition — in particular we were glad to see Lee Moyer win a long-overdue first Hugo Award. Questions of what a “fan” work is shouldn’t distract from the quality of these projects.

But it is still worth talking about why questions about “Fan Vs. Pro” arise, and hopefully forestall any hasty and ill-considered changes to the WSFS constitution.

This debate has a long history. While it’s clear that “Fan” and “Pro” are not antonyms, there’s reason to suggest that “fan” might be interpreted as being synonymous with “amateur” or “non-professional.”

The category now called “Fanzine” is the second-longest running Hugo category, having been awarded on no fewer than 75 occasions (only Novel has been recognized more often). But for the first quarter century the award existed, it was called the Hugo for best Amateur Magazine, and the distinction was explicit that this was a non-professional award.

From the very beginning, there were questions about what counted as amateur (or “fan” work), and what counted as professional. The first recorded constitution of the World Science Fiction Society from 1963 sets out the fanzine category as a “generally available non-professional magazine devoted to science fiction, fantasy or related subject.” That constitution’s primary author George Scithers noted in a 1964 edition of Yandro that non-professional was not defined, but added “I think the terms are well-enough understood to be clear.”

All the existing fan categories were hived off from Amateur Publication / Fanzine. First with fan writer and fan artist recognizing those who contributed to fanzines, then with fancast as a new medium of fanzine. They all derive from the same tradition of amateur publications.

Just three years after the Scithers constitution was introduced, Jack Gaughan showed just how unclear the existing language could be, winning both the fan artist and professional artist Hugo Awards in a single evening. There was an outcry over this — why have two separate categories if the same body of work could win both? A clause was quickly added to the constitution to prevent this from happening again, but the language did not seek to clarify what was Fan and what was Pro, rather stating that “Anyone whose name appears on the final ballot for a given year under the professional artist category will not be eligible for the fan artist award for that year.”

In the unlikely event that this blog ever generated more
than $500 a month in revenue via crowdfunding, we would
recuse ourselves from the fan categories. To be clear,
we do not plan to profit from our fan writing, and instead
of ever having a Patreon we would encourage you
to support Trans Lifeline, Planned Parenthood,
the EFF, Wikipedia, or the ACLU.
(Image licensed via Shutterstock.)

Over the years, this question has resurfaced fairly regularly. Questions were raised over John Scalzi winning best fan writer in the same year that his novel The Last Colony was on the ballot. Two years later there was some slight grumbling about Fred Pohl — at that time one of only 25 authors to have won three professional prose Hugos — winning for best fan writer.

So in this context, a well-intentioned but problematic proposal (“An Aristotelian Solution to Fan vs Pro”) brought forward to this year’s business meeting provided an attempt to parse out this question. The Hugo Awards Study Committee suggested that language be added to the constitution laying out strict guidelines about the commercial purposes or uses of artistic works and fan writing. Though this proposal was soundly defeated at the 2022 WSFS business meeting, the subsequent Hugo Awards ceremony featured three of the four “fan” categories going to creators who are full-time professionals within the field. In some cases, the fanworks in question were also commercially successful.

The Hugo Study Committee suggested commercial activity as a means to determine what constitutes professional works, and thus which creators are non-professional. For example, it would be difficult to call an online publication “amateur” if it has a Patreon page that collects upwards of $1,000 per month. But there are more problematic scenarios. What about fan artists who sell a handful of print-on-demand T-Shirts based on their works? They might make enough from these sales to buy a Starbucks coffee every other week… should that prevent them from being recognized in a fan Hugo category?

Attempts to set a bright-line test to determine category correctness are doomed. Should there be a rule to parse out which creators can call themselves “Fans,” it would inevitably fail. No creator who works for both payment and fandom does so in isolation of the other.

To further complicate this question, authorship is a profession which operates in a reputation economy in which an individual author’s future earnings are contingent on the public awareness and appreciation of that person’s works. As such, any publishing activity or communication to the public by an author whose living depends on sales can be seen as promotional activity, and therefore could be interpreted as “professional,” even if they never earn a dime directly from that output. When examining the question under this lens, the work may be fannish, or it may be professional, and the only difference is motivation. Let us say very clearly here that it should never be the job of anyone in fandom to police or attempt to interpret the motivation of creators. 

Alexei Panshin recused himself from the fan
categories after winning best fan writer. Lady
Business recused themselves after winning best
fanzine. It's a courageous decision to make.
(Photo by Jay Klein via Calisphere)

There is no easy solution to this dilemma, no set of rules that will ever be able to parse out what should be considered as fannish activity from that which is not. When it comes to what should count as fan works, we should avoid the temptation to take the same approach that United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart took on obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”

As America has seen with the selective enforcement of obscenity tests, any determination based on a gut feeling will be overly influenced by the unconscious prejudices of those in power. For example if the Hugo Admins or a motivated block of voters took it upon themselves to selectively determine what was appropriate to be a “fan” work in any given year, it’s likely that such decisions would disprivilege the already marginalized — not through ill intent, but due to subconscious factors.

So where does this leave us?

Perhaps the best solution is not to change the rules at all, but rather to foster existing cultural norms that encourage us all to ask ourselves whether or not we are appropriate for the categories we are shortlisted in.

These categories have sometimes recognized pros for their fannish endeavours, but have continued to mostly recognize non-professional amateurs who have contributed to fandom. As long as nobody Langfords a category, the fan Hugos will be just fine.

Zoning Out - The Hugo cinema of 1962

This blog post is the fifth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

At the 1962 Hugo Award ceremony, held at the Pick-Congress Hotel in Chicago, Illinois on Sunday,

The audience at the 1962 Hugo Award banquet
photo by Ben Jason, via Fanac.org.

September 2, the announcement that Twilight Zone had won Best Dramatic Presentation for a third time was greeted with mixed reactions. While many in the audience were fans of the series overall, there were suggestions that the show had declined in quality.

For the third year in a row, Rod Serling was not present to receive his Hugo Award, even though on the night of the ceremony, he was a relatively short drive (about five hours) away in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he was guest lecturing at Antioch College. Lacking even a delegation of Los Angeles-based fans to accept the trophy, Toastmaster Bob Tucker instead handed a chrome rocketship to WSFS business meeting chair Martin Moore, Jr.

This snub of the Hugo Awards was symbolic to some fans, who had often complained that Hollywood didn’t take science fiction seriously. The dissatisfaction with the situation was compounded by questions raised about the eligibility of a series to win the award three years in a row; as the 1960 WSFS business meeting had discussed such a restriction.

The Twilight Zone was still capable of extraordinary highs; The Invaders, which features a solitary

When Twilight Zone is great,
it's great. But there's a reason
people remember The Invaders,
but forget Quality Of Mercy.
(Image via IMDB.com)

woman terrorized by tiny aliens, remains a favourite. It's A Good Life, in which a child with god-like powers terrorizes a town, may be the high point of the entire series. But more and more, the writers seemed to have fallen into a rut. Viewers had come to expect a surprise ending, and the writers only aim seemed to be delivering that twist and little else.

Serling's writerly preoccupations had begun to wear thin: nostalgia, aging, the civil war, and the misuse of magic powers. The series got repetitive. In March of 1961, Twilight Zone aired two different episodes that revolved around communicating across time using radio. By the time the dreadful civil war episode The Passerby aired in November, the series had already done at least two previous episodes where the main character was a ghost who didn’t know she was dead.

In retrospect, this is a perplexing shortlist for the Best Dramatic Presentation, with inclusions both interesting and questionable. Despite the fact that it’s a top-tier movie — one that several of us thought should have won the award in 1961 — Village Of The Damned should not have made a repeat appearance on the ballot.

The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, a television movie faithfully based on Daniel Keyes’ short story Flowers For Algernon, is an interesting choice. By the time the television adaptation aired, the story had achieved rare crossover success, earning the author a Hugo Award, as well as critical acclaim from the New York Times and Time Magazine.

This would be just the first of several dozen dramatic adaptations of the story; the 1969 movie was

Boris Karloff is just delightful as a host
of the NBC series Thriller. 
(Image via Wikipedia) 

Hugo-nominated, and earned Cliff Robertson (who reprised his role) an Academy Award. Two big-budget stage musicals were later produced, as well as two Japanese film adaptations, and eleven different radio damas. In 1980, Stirling Silliphant was hired to write a sequel called Charlie 2. But The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon was the first of many.

For those unfamiliar with the story, it depicts experiments to increase the intelligence of a person with an intellectual disability. Although the experiments are initially successful, the protagonist Charlie Gordon then has to deal with a slow reversion to his pre-experiment abilities.

Performed live to air, this television production has a remarkable vitality to it. Several of the performances are terrific, including Cliff Robertson, who earned an Emmy nod for his sensitive and nuanced portrayal of the title character.

What is interesting to note is how many differences there are between this early version of the story and later retellings. Of these changes, Keyes would later write in his autobiography that his focus had always been on ensuring that the protagonist was not an object of ridicule, and that the reader perhaps walked away with more respect for persons with intellectual disabilities.

Another interesting shortlisted work is the second season of the television series Thriller. The show had been originally intended to be an NBC crime anthology series that would compete with CBS’ hit show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. For the first several episodes of the first season, the show was largely considered a failure. A slow retooling of the series over several months, which included the addition of supernatural elements, helped it find its niche, with stories by authors like Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, and Henry Kuttner drawing in audiences.

The introductory monologues to these stories are provided by Boris Karloff — making him arguably the first person of Indian descent to be a Hugo finalist. Modern audiences may not recall just how terrific Karloff’s sonorous baritone voice can be, but he delivers these macabre introductions with a perfect mix of glee and charm.

Stephen King has called the resulting show “probably the best horror series ever put on TV,” and we would not disagree. There are several stand-out episodes: The Hungry Glass (featuring a young and shockingly charismatic William Shater) is a perfectly paced ghost story. Pre-Bewitched Elizabeth Montgomery is note-perfect in the Henry-Kuttner penned Masquerade. Pigeons From Hell is the first Robert E. Howard work ever adapted to the screen. The high quality of this season of television is more consistent than the third season of Twilight Zone.

With Aniara honoured at the
1962 Hugo Awards, Harry 
Martinson became the first
person to earn a Nobel Prize
and a Hugo.
(Image via Youtube)

For us, the two works that were clearly head-and-shoulders above all the other Hugo finalists were the first two foreign-language works to be honoured by the World Science Fiction Society: Swedish musical Aniara, and Czech art film Invention For Destruction. Both are extraordinarily inventive, visually dazzling works unlike anything we’ve seen before or since.

Aniara, an opera adapted from an epic poem written by Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson, was performed in 1960 by the Royal Opera of Stockholm and filmed for Swedish television. Due to the overwhelming response to the story of a spaceship filled with refugees from Earth encountering adversity in their voyage, the BBC broadcast a subtitled version in 1962.

The Worldcon committee determined — largely at the urging of British author Brian Aldiss — to name Aniara a “Hugo Award honourable mention.” As far as we are aware, this is a distinction that has not been repeated for any work since. The haunting music, powerful vocal performances, and surreal set design make this one of the most avant-garde and compelling works ever to be recognized by the Hugo Awards.

But in our opinion, the Hugo should have gone to Invention For Destruction, the artfully odd adaptation of several works of Jules Verne. Released in Czechoslovakia in 1958, and translated into English for a 1961 release, it was an international hit. To this day, it remains the most successful Czech-language movie ever made.

Invention For Destruction sometimes feels like a
Virgil Finlay illustration has come to life.
(Image via Criterion.com)

Director Karel Zeman was a passionate fan of the history of cinema and of Jules Verne’s novels, using a combination of live action and animation to bring pulp-magazine-style illustrations to life. The acting is less naturalistic than most modern audiences would be used to, but in combination with the unreal visuals, that acting feels right.

The story — which follows a scientist and his aide who are kidnapped by pirates who want to use the scientist’s work for evil — moves along at a sprightly pace. It’s an enjoyable story that’s relatively well told. But we were often so taken with the imagery that the story became secondary. There were visual effects that we are still astounded by — how could something like this have been made more than 70 years ago? The only modern movie we might compare this to visually is the Hugo winner Spider-Man: Through The Spider-Verse.

But as difficult as it is to win a Hugo Award, it sometimes seems more difficult to stop winning them. By 1962, the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation had been in existence for five years, had been presented four times, and The Twilight Zone had won thrice.

It would be three more years before the Hugo Awards recognized anything else for Dramatic Presentation.

The runners up for the 1953 Hugo Award

It is interesting to note that on purely technical grounds, there’s a case to be made that The

Galaxy Magazine had a
very good year in 1953.
(Image via Wikipedia)

Demolished Man should not have received the 1953 Science Fiction Achievement Award.

Bester’s classic novel was first published in the 1952 January, February and March editions of Galaxy Science Fiction. Unlike the modern Hugo Awards, the eligibility of works was not based on the calendar year, but was instead (according to the ballot) works first published between August 1, 1952 and August 1, 1953.

That being said, it’s hard not to see that the high quality of Alfred Bester’s proto-cyberpunk novel helped legitimize the awards that would soon become known as the Hugos.

The Demolished Man is often held up as an example of Worldcon members choosing the most worthy novel of the year — and few would question the quality of this classic.

Well-known fan, Wilson
Tucker is remembered
for The Lincoln Hunters
and his Hugo-shortlisted
Year Of The Quiet Sun.
(Image via Wikipedia)

What is rarely considered, however, is what else might have been on the ballot.

As many fans will know, there was no Hugo shortlist for the first two years the award was offered (1953 and 1955), as there was no nomination process. Instead, for each of those two Worldcons, the third progress report included a ballot with blank spaces in which members could write in the names of their favourites. In each category, the person or work that was written in the most times was given the award. Unlike some subsequent Hugos, there was no qualifying or disqualifying by any committee of judges.

If there had been a nominating process, there’s no way to know for sure what might have been on it, but it’s possible to make a few informed guesses.

At the time of the fourth convention progress report, Wilson “Bob” Tucker’s Long Loud Silence was second in the vote count. The story — a character-driven conflict in a post-apocalyptic U.S. — is notable for its bleakness. It’s hard to root for a protagonist whose goal of getting out of the ruined Eastern U.S. would mean spreading a plague. It is an excellent novel by one of the central figures of early fandom.

For today’s SF fan, it’s surprising to think that both Long Loud Silence and The Demolished Man were ahead of the second volume of Asimov’s original Foundation Trilogy, Foundation and Empire. This is the high point in a series of novels that was named “Best All-Time Series” at the 1966 Hugos, and whose inferior sequel won the 1983 Hugo Award.

Clifford D. Simak’s popular stories about genetically engineered intelligent dogs in a post-humanity

The French translation of City
is called "Tomorrow, the Dogs."
(Image via Goodreads)

world were stitched together into a novel in 1952. Unlike many stitch-ups, City is greater than the sum of its parts, as the doggish introductions and explanations of how these stories fit into their oral history are delightful. The sixth and seventh parts, Hobbies and Aesop, become more than just poetic fables, but an exploration of this new culture, and these new beings who understand the world so much differently than humanity. Simak’s work has clearly influenced generations of writers, and foreshadows such diverse works as David Brin’s Uplift novels and Ian M. Bank’s post-scarcity Culture novels.

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, was serialized in Galaxy Magazine the three months immediately after The Demolished Man, with the final part appearing in the August edition. More successfully than most science fiction of the era, The Space Merchants explores the importance of marketing and corporate influence on societal trends.

It is one of the earliest works to depict a world in which nation states have become secondary to corporate influences — which some might consider a prescient warning. The novel is in some senses a parody, but it’s a parody with a lot of bite. The protagonist, a star copyrighter with an ad agency is at first on one side of an ad campaign, selling the idea of emigration to Venus — and then is forced to live the reality of what he was trying to sell. The language is breezy, but engaging. While the characters are occasionally a bit flat, the book comes alive through well-imagined details like the “United Slime-Mold Protein Workers of Panamerica, Unaffiliated, Chlorella Costa Roca Local.” There’s a good chance that this would have been at the top of our ballots, had we been able to travel to Philadelphia in 1953.

Looking back on the quality of science fiction that was published in 1952 and 1953, one can understand why the organizers of the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia chose to introduce an award recognizing excellence.

In any given year, there are probably more Hugo-worthy novels published than can ever earn the award, and 1953 is no exception. Had the administrators of the first award decided that The Demolished Man was ineligible, fans would have had no shortage of excellent options to hand the trophy to.