Retro Hugo Awards

[Dave]

SCIFI WIRE -- Retro Hugos To Be Given [for 1953]

Retrospective Hugo Awards, honoring works from 1953, will be presented as part of the 62nd World Science Fiction Convention in 2004, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors of America Web site reported. The Noreascon Four Committee made the announcement over the weekend.

Retrospective Hugo Awards may be awarded by a Worldcon held 50, 75 or 100 years after a Worldcon at which no Hugo Awards were presented. Retro Hugos will be awarded at Noreascon Four because none were awarded at the 1954 Worldcon, SFCon, in San Francisco, which would have recognized works from the year before, the site reported.

Noreascon Four will take place in Boston Sept. 2-6, 2004.

A major change of the Hugo Awards (or to give them their proper title, The Science Fiction Achievement Awards) in the 1990's was the institution of the Retro Hugos. These Hugos were first awarded at LAConIII in 1996.

Do you think Retro-Hugos are a good thing? Is it fair to judge books 50, 75 or 100 years after they were written? Or is it more even-handed to judge them now; more unbiased and dispassionately in the cold light of technological advances, than in the heat of the moment?

 

[Tabitha]

Interesting... Is it more legitimate to award these books on their acheivements in describing what might have happened in technological advances compared to what DID happen than to rate Shakespeare on his historical accuracy?

SF books aren't textbooks (well, they shouldn't be, even though Kim Stanley Robinson, Carl Sagan and others border on it), so their vision of the future shouldn't really be any less valid now that it was then. As irrelevant as futures shaped by a continued Cold War or a catastrophic Third World War arising from the Cold War now seem, I still find them hugely enjoyable. They are still a "what if..?", just with an earlier jumping-off point than the present day.
Some new books have used the basic situation of the world in the 1980s as their starting point for future civilisations (see Ken McLeod's books).

I believe that older SF writing has no lesser significance than new, in fact it is frequently illuminating how many stories I believed to be new and original can be found in old anthologies from the 50s and 60s - and goodness knows if they were even original then.

I think it would be hard to decide whether it is better to judge these books at a distance than at the time they were published. Every work of art or literature should be a product of its time to some degree, so unless you are an historian with an eidetic memory some level of an older book may be lost on you, and need some explaining.

 

[Dave]

Discussing the pros and cons of Retro Awards

There is an interesting article here:

http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Reviews/02Horton_1953Best.html

He makes some good arguments that people cannot, or at least they do not, vote fairly.

BTW 1953 was the year that 'Fahrenheit 451' and 'The Fellowship of the Ring' were published.