The Potterization of Science Fiction

One of the more annoying trends in mass-media science fiction and fantasy is the move away from

The absurdity of the notion that
some people are born special
cannot be overstated, whether
we're talking about a monarch
or the Half-Blood Prince.
(Image via Wall Street Journal)

achievement-based protagonists, and towards those whose ‘specialness’ derives from something they were born with.

It’s clear that the entertainment-consuming public is often interested in people who get defined as special, regardless of what arbitrary circumstances have bestowed that specialness on them. We feel that when engagement with a protagonist is predicated on birthright rather than achievement, readers and viewers are essentially being treated as Royal Watchers.

Being expected to care about the narrative because it depicts an unattainable and presumably better position in life is classist and demeaning.

Whether the privilege is acquired through right of birth, through being born ‘special,’ or through being the subject of a prophecy, this trope is fundamentally tied to a classist and undemocratic worldview. The prevalence of such narratives, and why they persist, needs to be examined and challenged.

Certainly, under the right circumstances, this technique can produce characters that are central to memorable and enduring cultural myths, such as Paul Muad'dib or Prince Corwin. Those circumstances, however, are contingent on the overall narrative working coherently with the premise.

Say what you will about Dune,
it doesn't pretend to be anything
less than classist and cryptofascist.
(Image via Screenrant) 

Between the superhero craze and the shoe-horning of high-born people into existing franchises, this choice seems to have become the default for too much mainstream (corporate) science fiction and fantasy — whether or not it strengthens the larger story.

One of the fundamentally troubling assumptions behind the born-great protagonist is the anti-democratic idea that the lives of some people simply matter more than the lives of other people. If we accept that Harry Potter is destined to be the only one who can do the thing that’s important, then why should we care about the life of Ritchie Coote? Likewise, if Aragorn is destined for the throne then we have to accept that all other Men of Gondor would be incapable of managing the kingdom (let alone Women of Gonder). There is a direct link between the idea that one person can be born great, with the ideas that underpin racism, classism, and sexism. See also: the equally flawed “great man” theory.

Just as troubling an assumption is the idea that greatness is unearned; those who are great have not thought about it, have not put in effort to attain greatness, have not practiced whatever inherent part of their nature makes for greatness. It wouldn’t matter if Húrin the Tall graduated at the top of his class in urban planning at the University of Dúnedain, he’d still be incapable of managing Minas Tirith, and

Yes, even your favourite kids'
cartoon Visionaries features
a prince who was born special.
(Image via YouTube)

would be doomed to repeat Denethor’s mistakes. This is an idea that breeds complacency as we are taught by the stories we consume that greatness is achievable only through parentage. That is, one’s efforts to improve their lot in life are largely irrelevant, as is the society that supports the achievement of greatness at all.

We are not suggesting that readers should avoid these books, movies, and short dramatic works. Rather, we are suggesting that readers should cast a critical eye to what they read; particularly concerning issues of race, class and gender. The fact that problematic authors such as (kinda classist) J.R.R. Tolkien and (transphobic) J.K. Rowling would produce problematic works is unsurprising. What is more surprising is that this “born great” trope continues to appear in a plethora of modern, popular, award-shortlisted novels by authors who harbor otherwise progressive and thoughtful worldviews. Our intent is not to cast aspersions on authors who use this trope, but rather to encourage readers to interrogate the ideas at the heart of it. Why is it so appealing to you?

This narrative crutch has long been a central part of epic fantasies (Everything from Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time, to Dragonlance and Masters Of The Universe), but the trend of prophesied protagonists who were born to lead has seeped into wider genre stories.

Salvor Hardin, who in the novel Foundation had been nothing more than a competent mayor who

Although some have tried
to cast the great math
prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan
as someone who was
simply born with abilities,
an examination of his
biography reveals that they
were the result of significant
study and hard work.

happened to get caught up in historical forces, is recast in the television adaptation as someone who was born special; someone with a psychic ability to understand history. In the very same adaptation, Gaal Dornick has been recast from a young professor from a mid-tier university, to a child prodigy whose great mathematical abilities are simply in her blood. To our eyes, the way the series relies on the ‘specialness’ of these characters is condescending to the audience. 

Even Star Trek — once mocked for depicting an occasionally dull and technocratic meritocracy — has come to embrace the protagonist born great. Starting with the 2009 reboot of the classic series, J.J. Abrams reimagined James T. Kirk as a maverick who was born with a destiny, instead of the Original Series depiction of a studious “stack of books with legs” who had earned a captaincy through hard work in postings on the USS Republic and the USS Faragut. The distinction is not insignificant; in one version of the story greatness is something that is earned through hard work, in the other version greatness is something bestowed upon a person seemingly arbitrarily.

This is almost a direct rebuttal to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tapestry," which tries to give viewers a perspective into why Picard is who he is. It is revealed in that episode, that Picard could easily have ended up as a junior lieutenant, but that circumstances had motivated him to do better. In essence, he earned his command through hard work and diligence.

One could also note that when a protagonist is “born great,” it tends to undermine the role in societal supports leading to greatness. Harry Potter isn’t great because he lives in a society whose social services, schools, and hospitals enable him to achieve, he’s great because he was just born that way. One might parallel this to the view held by those arch-Randians who would proclaim that Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth is entirely self-generated, owing nothing to the school system that educated him or the public investment in developing internet technology.

Works that directly grapple with the implications of “born great” protagonists are worth examining. One of the best, Sarah Gailey’s Magic For Liars, engaged with the classism and elitism that is baked into the very notion of a person born with a great destiny. By taking the point-of-view of someone left behind by the destined greatness of another, the book serves as a sharp rebuttal to the elitism of

This will be the only time ever
that this blog says anything good
about Buffy Season 7.
(Image via Pintrest)

“chosen one” narratives. The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman takes a completely different tack in criticizing this trope by showing how infantilizing it might be for a character to be born into power; his protagonist Quentin Coldwater grows into a listless, emotionally stunted young man precisely because of his privileged magical destiny.

And despite a ham-handed delivery, smug self-congratulatory tone, and a toxic showrunner, we’d probably also have to give credit to the final season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer for at least suggesting that the specialness of the show’s “chosen one” should be democratized.

At its core, the philosophy that some people are just inherently great (and therefore most others just aren’t) is nihilistic. This is a narrative framework in which few people have free will, or whose decisions can have an impact on the world.

If all of our enduring cultural myths are about people whose greatness and purpose are thrust upon them by right of birth, it implies that everyone else is saddled with a purposeless life. That’s a proposition that we urge readers to reject.

American Cleon

There has long been a lapsarian strain in the American imagination, and that’s why Foundation is so

Hari Seldon never suggests making something
better than an Empire. He wants to make Trantor
Great Again. (Image via CNET) 

appealing — and so dangerous — right now. But unlike the fate of the Galactic Empire, the outcomes of the issues facing us today are not certain.

Books and articles about the decline of the United States and of what is called “Western Civilization” have populated bookstore shelves and magazine pages for more than a century, with such notables as Niall Ferguson, Chris Hedges, Emmanuel Todd, and David D. Schein contributing tomes to the pastime of prognosticating American eschatology.

But in the past decade, these types of predictions have reached a fever pitch. And it’s not difficult to see why. Factors such as political polarization, global warming, the decline of democracy, increasing resource scarcity and disparities between rich and poor, all seem to have clear and exacerbating trend lines. If there were one of Hari Seldon’s prime radiants, one could imagine these trends being plotted through the equations of psychohistory and seeing a definitive predictive answer that an unpleasant end awaits us all.

These are historical trends that seem inexorable; they seem as inescapable as “the known probability of imperial assassination, viceregal revolt, the contemporary recurrence of periods of economic depression, the declining rate of planetary explorations…” all of which afflicted the Galactic Empire during the reign of Cleon II.

It must be understood that Foundation reflects the argument made by Edward Gibbons in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; that decline was only in part caused by forces external to the empire itself, that a determinant of collapse was a gradual loss of civic virtue among its Roman citizens (Though by ‘civic virtue,’ some have suggested Gibbons meant ‘members of lower classes knowing their place’). Asimov had just finished reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he began writing Foundation, but he was also writing in the immediate wake of the Great Depression, and a period of upheaval and uncertainty about his country’s future.

Some pundits have gone further back,
and compared present-day politics to
Asimov’s source material.

The idea of the United States as a “new Rome” has existed since shortly after the American revolution. It is communicated through the myth of manifest destiny and is encapsulated in the architecture of Washington, D.C. At various points through its history, American preachers have attempted to create historical narratives that cast the rise and fall of the country as divine prophecy (Just as one high-profile example, Latter-Day Saints founder Joseph Smith told his followers that the U.S. Constitution was a divine document, and that Jesus’ second coming would occur in Missouri).

Foundation as a narrative has to be understood in this context; Isaac Asimov’s understanding of history was informed by American exceptionalism, the influence of America’s third ‘Great Awakening’ of apocalyptic religiosity, the wake of the Great Depression, and of a period of upheaval and uncertainty about the country’s future. It might be asked why, after 80 years, the books are finally being adapted to the screen; is it perhaps because we are again in a period of upheaval and uncertainty?

While we should be aware that the original novel is a product of the ideas and concerns of the time it was written, the television show is a product of today and makes arguments about the world of 2021. We would suggest that the television series version of Foundation contains hints of Gibbons’ classism, echoes of Asimov’s concerns about America on the eve of the Second World War, but also reflects our own 21st Century concerns about decline.

Margaret Atwood has said that “Prophecies are really about now. In science fiction it's always about now.” And it’s really more about how people perceive the present, as today’s perceptions determine the actions of tomorrow. Apple TV’s Foundation series resonates because people perceive these trends to be inescapable, and determinative. This is underscored by science fiction’s ideas shaping powerful political forces.

If we accept that this new iteration of Foundation is indeed about the United States, those who take its core messages seriously may help ensure that decline is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The problems facing the world are not insurmountable. There are policies and technologies that will mitigate climate change. Pressure on politicians can force them to behave in our best interest. These things are not easy but they are necessary if we want to avoid Seldon’s predicted outcome.

Inescapable doom can sometimes be more comfortable than faint hope; if the Empire’s going to collapse one way or another, then enjoy it while you can and let Raven Seldon worry about what comes next. If we, as citizens of the world, accept the metaphor presented by Foundation, it can inculcate fatalism about the very real problems we’re facing. As Florida International University professor of English Charles Elkins argued in his Marxist reading of Foundation, “Reading these novels, the reader experiences this fatalism which, in a Marxist analysis, flows from his own alienation in society and his sense of impotence in facing problems he can no longer understand, the solutions of which he puts in the hands of a techno-bureaucratic elite.”

Decline is a powerful idea, and one that rightly should worry us. Foundation suggests that individuals have little agency to affect real change. In doing so, it absolves us for doing nothing.

Sleeping Next To An Elephant

It’s often said in Canada that living next to the United States is like sleeping with an elephant: you are

A Memory Called Empire
does not seem like a
first novel.
(Image via Amazon)

affected by every twitch and grunt. It’s a phrase that came to mind when reading Arkady Martine’s debut A Memory Called Empire, a sprawling and richly imagined novel about hegemony and loss of culture.

Set in the capital city of the vast Teixcalaanli interstellar empire, A Memory Called Empire follows Mahit Dzmare the new ambassador from the much smaller Lsel Stationer Republic as she investigates the murder of her predecessor and navigates a political crisis that could spell disaster for both nations.

Martine has delivered one of the most Asimovian science fiction novels we’ve read in recent memory, while making the narrative uniquely her own. There are clear parallels to Asimov’s Caves of Steel, as an outsider partners with a local to investigate a killing in a sprawling steel megacity. Much like in that classic robot novel, this provides the reader a powerful cultural vantage point. But the ways in which American exceptionalism is subverted in each novel is different, and reflects the time periods in which they were written; Asimov was concerned with what he saw as a growing rift within American society between the educated and the uneducated, while Martine seems to concern herself with the nature of how a culture exerts its dominance on another. While Martine’s staging of a dominant culture grappling with self-preservation in a wider social network pushes our use of the American metaphor, the use of a wider lense makes Memory more interesting.

Adding to the intellectual richness of this novel is the way in which the Teixcalaanli cultural and governance practices are emblematic of an empire in decline. Their obsession with rote memorization and a pedigreed form of high literature aligns with the obsessive conservative culture of, for example, the British Empire’s heyday. Their preoccupation with the preservation of their own culture at the expense of creative and technological innovation perhaps mirrors the Bakumatsu period in Japan (I.E. pre-Commodore Perry). The portrait of a civilization in which bureaucracy has bloomed past the point of usefulness is painfully relevant today. It’s a portrait that again evokes comparisons to Asimov, as one can find parallels to the crumbling Galactic Empire of Foundation.

Theodore Judson once observed that history is often the secret weapon of science fiction authors, and by that standard Arkady Martine is armed and dangerous.

Arkady Martine's academic background
in Byzantine history helps inform
her excellent debut novel.
(Image via MacMillan.com)

And this examination of hegemony is in fact one of the strongest elements of the novel; how the children on Lsel Station are exposed to so much Teixcalaanli poetry that they ignore their own cultural output, and how Mahit is at once both drawn to the dominant culture and uncomfortable with its allure. To be blunt about it, the Stationers are sleeping with an elephant.

Throughout the book, Martine makes these cultures feel distinct, and delves into their unique social mores. The writing is clear and engaging, and while the science fictional aspects of the book are never overwhelming in their detail, they are interesting and believable. Given the quality of the writing and plotting, it is hard to believe that this is a debut novel.

Despite the hype for A Memory Called Empire, none of us had read it prior to its inclusion on the Hugo Award ballot. We are very glad that it got nominated because it is very likely to end up at the top of some of our ballots.

Hollywood has a mixed history adapting Hugo-shortlisted works

Last week, Apple announced that it has greenlit a high-budget TV series based on Isaac Asimov’s

For us, this series of covers
is one of the best works based
on the Foundation novels.
(Image via michaelwhelan.com) 

Foundation novels.

Should this announcement be greeted with trepidation or enthusiasm? After all, Hollywood has a long and storied history of screwing up adaptations of Hugo-shortlisted works.

By our count, there are 15 movies, eight television series, and two standalone television episodes based on Hugo-Award-winning textual works. There are an additional five television series and 14 movies based on textual works that were shortlisted, but did not win the Hugo Award. (The list we’ve compiled is here. It was woefully incomplete when this article was written, and has been updated significantly over the past two years.)

These dramatic presentations are at best a mixed bag and few have aged well. While a handful of adaptations of Hugo winners have themselves been shortlisted for a Hugo Award, no movie or television show based on a Hugo winner has itself won a Hugo for dramatic presentation.

The earliest of these adaptations is “The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon,” an episode of The United States Steel Hour that aired in February of 1961, based on Daniel Keyes’ 1958 Hugo-winning short story Flowers For Algernon. The episode is actually well-made for the time, hews closely to the original work, and keeps the emotional core of the story (though it adds a happy ending). It was on the shortlist in 1962.

Flowers For Algernon is probably the Hugo-winning work that has been adapted most often. On top

Even Mick Jagger can't make the
costumes in Freejack look cool.
(Image via Yahoo.co.uk) 

of various stage productions, there were four movies including one that won an Academy Award, a Tony-nominated musical, and a video game. Several of these adaptations — such as the 1968 movie Charly — seem to have been produced with an understanding of what made the original resonate with audiences.

But for every decent Flowers For Algernon adaptation, there’s a Bicentennial Man: The Movie.

One of Asimov’s robot stories, Bicentennial Man won best Novella in 1977, and in 1999 was turned into a maudlin Robin Williams vehicle complete with Celine Dion soundtrack. Unfortunately the film ignored Asimov’s meditations on whether or not mortality makes us human, and on what rights a sentient non-human might have. The film is largely a failure.

There’s 1997’s Freejack (based on Robert Sheckley’s 1959 shortlisted novel Immortality, Inc.), and Kevin Costner’s The Postman. There’s the 2013 adaptation of Ender’s Game. There’s Millennium, based on John Varley’s shortlisted novel of the same name. This is not a list that fills one with confidence about Hollywood’s ability to adapt great works of science fiction.

At least Bicentennial Man was a more
faithful adaptation than I, Robot.
(Image via Youtube.com) 

It could be that the Hugo-shortlisted works that have worked best as adaptations (Slaughterhouse Five, American Gods, Arrival as examples) are the ones that are smaller in scope and focus on personal stories of self-discovery. The great works of science fiction that are more epic in scope – Dune, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Three-Body Problem – have often been Hollywoodized into mindless action-adventure works, stripped of what made them great.

Which brings us back to Isaac Asimov’s most epic work: Foundation. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Series in 1966. Winner of a Best Novel Hugo in 1984. Winner of a Retro Hugo for best short story at the most recent Worldcon. This is a work that has enduring value to the science fiction community. It continues to draw in new readers from outside the community and is credited by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman with inspiring his career. If ever there was a work that deserved a faithful and respectful adaptation, this is it.

But Foundation presents at least one major challenge for screenwriters: selecting a focal point. Producers can choose to focus on the classic trilogy or on the novels that were published later. The main stories (the original trilogy) tell a cohesive story but use an ever-changing cast of characters. More recent Foundation novels offer a cohesive cast of characters, but tell a story that is unlikely to engage the typical Hollywood consumer. Both options seem to have their quandaries.

The quality of an adaptation matters because a mediocre – or wildly divergent – film adaptation

A surprising number of people know our genre primarily
through Hollywood's adaptations of the classic works.
Mediocre adaptations make it easier  for non-fans
to dismiss the great works of science fiction.
(Image via Facebook)

can undermine the cultural value of a great work. For example, some fans of the movie Starship Troopers are unaware that it is based on a novel, while others believe it’s loosely adapted from Ender’s Game. When speaking to everyday non-fans about the work Bicentennial Man, how many of them are likely to believe that it’s actually an excellent novella, given that they’re probably familiar with the Robin Williams movie?

Those concerns aside, there is some room for hope with the adaptation of Foundation. Of the Hugo-winning or shortlisted works that were adapted into a TV series in the past decade, several have arguably lived up to the original works — American Gods, Game of Thrones, and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell come to mind as examples of this. It is possible that television is a better medium for science fiction adaptations than cinematic releases.

We are cautiously hopeful for Foundation: The TV Series and will attempt to judge it as it comes. We are also hopeful that irrational exuberance about the prospect doesn’t get in the way of seeing the series for what it is.

Retro Hugos 1943 — Short Stories

In terms of short fiction,
1942 was a great year.
And Astounding SF
led the way in publishing
issue after issue of brilliant
short stories. 

Science fiction has changed since 1942-43.

This is not only true of the content, but the format, the fandom, and the way it connects to the culture as a whole.

Nowhere is this more true than in short fiction.

Many of us will have read the stories of 1942 collected in anthologies, stitched together into novels, and bearing the weight of their publication history. Most of the works are now primarily available in author-centred best-of anthologies.

And this leads to a historicity-bias in the Retro Hugo awards where authors with long and storied careers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein have a leg up over lesser-known authors like Colin Keith, Eric Frank Russell or Robert S. Richardson. To some degree the award can end up as a ‘lifetime achievement award,’ rather than being based on the individual work.

As with all structural biases in voting systems, it is incumbent upon those of us participating to be aware of those biases and to challenge ourselves to question how these structures are influencing the nominations.

The context in which we appreciate older works of science fiction is inevitably a different one than those in which the works were first published. In some ways, this gives present day readers a deeper perspective on the enduring value of works published 75 years in the past.

But it also presents a barrier to understanding how these works were in dialogue with other narratives

A.E. Van Vogt's classic story
The Weapons Shop was
illustrated by William
Kollikar.
(Image via WordsEnvisioned)

including the political context of the day. One notable work that should be considered in context with its time is A.E. Van Vogt’s The Weapons Shop.

This was the only short story published in 1942 that was selected to be included in Silverberg’s well-known anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 1 (1929-1964). That tome – which honoured short stories published prior to the foundation of the Nebula Awards – included the “best” works as voted on by the members of the SFWA. We surmise then that the Retro Nebula for 1942 might have gone to The Weapons Shop.

The story – which sees a small-town merchant named Fara butting heads with an illegal weapons shop – is beloved by second-amendment advocates. Van Vogt (ironically from Canada, where weapons rights are far more restricted than in America) offers an idealized implacable force in the weapons shops, which exist in opposition to the tyranny of the state. Eventually, Fara comes around to the weapons’ seller’s point of view and takes up arms against the state.

The Weapons Shop is also as much about propaganda as it is weapons – Fara is a devoted defender of the Empire until he is shown the true face of the Empress. While those of us who do not believe in the unfettered right to bear arms should remember is when reading The Weapons Shop is that it was written and published in an era when there were despicable regimes marching in Europe that relied on this type of propaganda, and on the silencing of dissent.

But the ideology behind those who are selling the weapons is ill-defined and nebulous at best. These weapons shops, it is implied, sell freedom rather than weapons, but what that means is unclear. To further undermine the work, Fara’s only real choice is between allying himself with either one of two implacable and unyielding forces – and even that isn’t much of a choice.

In 1942, Asimov's story Foundation
was illustrated by M.Isip.
(Image via Gabriel Schenk)

The importance — and influence — of Isaac Asmiov’s short story The Encyclopedists cannot be overstated. When reading it today, most of us experience it as the second part of the novel Foundation, but in 1942 it was the introduction to Hari Seldon, to the Foundation and to psychohistory.

When it was in the May, 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction under the title of Foundation, it was published alongside a bevy of other stories about prognostication including Alfred Bester’s excellent Push Of A Finger.

The May 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction is probably too pricy (and hard-to-find) an item for most fans and collectors to track down just to have the original experience. Thankfully, an Oxfordian science fiction fan named Gabriel Schenk scanned it and put the entire thing online. With a couple of excellent illustrations by M. Isip to liven up the story, it’s worth reading and trying to appreciate the story as a one-off on its own merits.

If there had never been another story published in the Foundation universe, The Encyclopedists would

When reading the original Foundation
stories and thinking about the context
in which Asimov wrote them, Trantor's
gleaming spires become tied to New
York's rapidly changing 1942 skyline.
(image via Wikipedia) 

have stood on its own – it encapsulates essentially all of the big ideas of the series: the mathematics of history, the decline and fall of an empire, and the ennobling positivist view of the ability of humanity to alter its destiny. While later stories built on this foundational story, everything that makes the Foundation series great was right there in this initial blueprint.

In this story, Asimov offers us the series’ most unforgettable – and quotable – protagonist Salvor Hardin, the mayor of Trantor. In the context of when this story was published, just five months after Pearl Harbor, his famous quote “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,” might be seen as an surprising anti-war exhortation.

Re-reading The Encyclopedists on its own, and attempting to strip it of the weight of history, was a surprisingly revelatory exercise that increased our already high esteem for Asimov’s story.

Alfred Bester’s Push Of A Finger covers some similar themes to Foundation; scientists with a new way of seeing the future and working to prevent disaster. But unlike the more famous work, Bester writes with a touch of comedy. Although one suspects that Bester’s long-forgotten work will not receive an award, we would encourage you to consider it for your Retro Hugo nominations.

Eric Frank Russel's
Mechanistra is usually
found in the collection
Men, Martians and
Machines.
(Image via Abe.com)

Another lesser-known work that is likely to be on our Retro Hugo ballots is Eric Frank Russel’s Mechanistra, the second – and possibly best – of his Starship Marathon series of stories. This humourous story, involves the crew of the starship encountering mechanical termite-like aliens that are hostile to all organic life. Russell’s prose is lively with lurid descriptions of alien life and conflicts.

Of Heinlein’s prolific output of short works in 1942, Waldo is probably the most well-known. I would suggest, however that it is Goldfish Bowl from the March edition of Astounding that is a more interesting work to consider nominating. The story, whose human protagonists are trapped as exhibits in a human zoo is melancholic and nuanced in ways that much of Heinlein’s work is not. That being said, none of Heinlein’s stories are likely to make our ballots, and certainly not My Object All Sublime.

Hal Clement’s first published short story Proof is an excellent debut that presaged significant themes

Twenty-year-old Hal Clement
as he appeared in his 1943
Harvard yearbook.
(image via Mariners Museum)  

that he would explore throughout his career. Clement – just 20 when he wrote the story – imagines life that evolved from magnetic fields and gas in the sun exploring the solar system and being befuddled by the existence of the Earth.

When considering works for the Retro Hugos, it was interesting to consider how these works were distributed, their availability to readers, and the limitations of our collective cultural memory.

Because of these differing contexts, we suspect that there are often works that would have garnered more attention had the 1943 Hugos actually been voted on in 1943.

That being said, of the works we have managed to track down and read from 1942, the most well-remembered short story did in fact stand out as the most exemplary work.

The reputation of Asimov’s The Encyclopedists is well-earned as one of the finest works of Golden Age science fiction.

It is likely that it will – and should – win the 1943 Retro Hugo.