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The full results of the 1943 Retro Hugos have been released. As usual, below I am reporting the margin of victory for the winner, and the other placings, giving margins of victory where they were less than 20 votes. For the nominations stage, I am reporting the top vote-getters and the nearest misses.

Highlights: the closest result of the Retro Hugos was Best Fanzine, where Le Zombie won by only ten votes, and The Phantagraph won second place by only nine votes. The only closer races were Arthur Wilson “Bob” Tucker winning second place in Best Fan Writer by three votes, and ~~Donovan’s Brain~~ Darkness and the Light winning third place in Best Novel by a single vote.

At nominations, Best Editor Short Form, Best Professional Artist and Best Fanzine all had several candidates in contention for the final places, and a single vote more or a single vote less would have made the difference between being on or off the final ballot

The Screwtape Letters was disqualified for Best Novel due to the original publication date. “The Twonky” got enough votes to qualify in Best Novelette as well as Best Short Story (it won the latter category).

Detail below.

( Read more... )

Beyond This Horizon, by Robert A. Heinlein

Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the nucleus of every cell of every zygote, whether man or fruit fly, sweet pea or race horse, is a group of threadlike bodies—chromosomes. Along the threads are incredibly tiny somethings, on the order of ten times the size of the largest protein molecules. They are the genes, each one of which controls some aspect of the entire structure, man, animal, or plant, in which the cell is lodged. Every living cell contains within it the plan for the entire organism.

This is early Heinlein, his second novel for adults (after Sixth Column/The Day After Tomorrow, the one with the racist ray). Here we have a future society whose population has been and is being shaped by genetic engineering, which raises interesting questions about accountability, which are not really answered. The plot starts promisingly but diverts often into info-dumping and runs out of steam entirely about half-way through. A side-theme is the universal use of fire-arms, at least by men; this is the source of the infamous quote “An armed society is a polite society.” Heinlein's writing style is already lucid and effective, but he hadn't yet found the knack of pulling story elements together to a coherent whole at novel length. But if you want to, you can get it here.

Second-Stage Lensmen, by E.E. "Doc" Smith

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Reasoning from analogy, Kinnison quite justifiably concluded that the back of the drug syndicate had been broken in similar fashion when he had worked upward through Bominger and Strongheart and Crowninshield and Jalte to the dread council of Boskone itself. He was, however, wrong.

I tried the first three Lensman books a decade ago, and bounced off them so heavily that I wimped out of reading Gray Lensman when it was up for the Retro Hugo two years ago. (It came within 28 votes of beating Slan.) Having started this year's reading early, I thought I should give Smith another go, and did in fact get two thirds of the way through Second-Stage Lensmen before I realised that I was appalled by the prose, didn't care about the characters and was not even slightly excited by the plot. So, that's an easy decision then. If you want to test for yourself, you can get it here.

Which means my overall votes for the 1943 Retro Hugo for Best Novel are as follows:

7) Second-Stage Lensmen, by E.E. "Doc" Smith (see above)

6) Beyond This Horizon, by Robert A. Heinlein (see above)

5) Darkness and the Light, by Olaf Stapledon

4) No Award

3) Donovan's Brain, by Curt Siodmak

2) The Uninvited, by Dorothy Macardle

1) Islandia, by Austen Tappan Wright

2018 Hugos: Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Related Work | Graphic Story | Dramatic Long | Dramatic Short | Professional Artist & Fan Artist | Young Adult
1943 Retro Hugos: Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Dramatic Short | Fan Artist

I managed to use various plane flights and Eurostar journeys profitably to work through this category, all between 67 and 108 minutes in length so quite digestible. I generally enjoyed them, but some more than others.

7) Invisible Agent

A frankly silly film about the grandson of the original Invisible Man, who is persuaded to use the invisibility forum for the USA's war effort, and infiltrates Berlin, getting mixed up with Allied spies and German and Japanese goons. (The chief Japanese baddie is played by Peter Lorre, a few months before his role in Casablanca.) The special effects are good, but the plot lacks credibility, and in particular I felt that Jon Hall, the lead actor, wasn't all that great. (His uncle co-wrote the Bounty trilogy, on which the Oscar-winning film was based.) Ilona Massey is much better in the lead female role. You can, if you wish, watch the whole thing here and here.

6) No Award. The others all met my minimal criteria of being serious work.

5) Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book

Very different from the Disney adaptation, this is a presentation of the Raj to American audiences, adapting Kipling’s stories to a narrative where Mowgli (played by young superstar Sabu) is adapting to human society. I thought Patricia O’Rourke as his love interest was good too; she was a former Olympic swimmer whose acting career consists of this film only. (Her sister Peggy Stewart and her husband Wayne Morris were better known.) It loses points for too many actors blacking up to look Indian, but the sets are spectacular and the special effects are very good (apart from the rubber crocodile).

You can watch the whole thing here.

4) Cat People

Much better here - this is the story of a young Serbian woman (who mysteriously has a French accent) who falls in love with a young American chap, but refuses to have sex with him even after they are married because she believes that she will turn into a cat creature and start killing people. He sends her to a psychiatrist to cure her of this delusion, but, of course, she is right. She stalks one of his work colleagues out of jealousy, and again of course she is right. There is some great cinematography, and the cast are giving it their all (especially Simone Simon and Jane Randolph as the two female leads), but I must admit I found the sexual politics somewhat creepy and off-putting.

3) I Married a Witch

More sexual politics here: the heroine, played by Veronica Lake, has cursed the Wooley family to always marry the wrong woman for generations, and this resonates from the Salem witch trials to the present day - when our heroine is reincarnated and herself falls in love with the latest scion of the Wooley family, played by Fredric March, who is running in next week’s election for governor. It’s intended to be funny, and it generally is; though in these less innocent days, the means by which she helps him to win the election would definitely not help his credibility once in office.

The full thing is supposedly on YouTube here, but I find that it simply stops working for me after a few minutes.

2) The Ghost of Frankenstein

Totally to my surprise, I was really impressed by this. It may have made a difference that I was watching it on its own, and not as the third film in a sequence of Frankenstein films with similar plots. I thought it stood up on its own merits very well, with excellent tension between Cedric Hardwicke as Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi as Ygor, with Lon Chaney Jr dominating as the monster, for the first time after taking over the role from Boris Karloff. (Bela Lugosi’s Ygor is the spitting image of an Eastern European political commentator who I used to know.) No wobbly sets (the German village is recycled from All Quiet on the Western Front) and some excellent cinematography and special effects. I may watch the earlier films too to see if this is a case of taking an existing formula and doing it a bit better. (Incidentally, Cedric Hardwicke is also in Invisible Agent, as the lead Nazi.)

1. Bambi

Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter what I write about any of the others, because Bambi is going to win this category by a country mile. And for good reason. The two particular joys of the film are the character of Thumper, as voiced by four-year-old Peter Behn (who never acted again) for the first half of the film, and the climactic forest fire sequence. But the scene that lingers in everyone’s mind is the death of Bambi’s mother offscreen at the hands of the unseen villain, Man. It’s a drastic emotional punch for a film aimed at such a young audience; unlike Snow White, Bambi’s mother does not return to life. (She is the first in a long line of Disney mothers who get killed.) I do think the film misfires by cutting straight from the death to skip forward a few months to the “gay little spring song” which I have always hated. But maybe Disney had planned a more graceful transition in the 12 minutes that he apparently had to cut before release.

I don’t think I had actually seen the full Bambi before, though I certainly read the original novel by Felix Salten and also the Disneyfied novelisation by Idella Purnell when I was very much younger. This was a real delight.

And now I can go back to watching Oscar-winning films, where coincidentally I had just reached this year in my sequence; so next will be Casablanca.

2018 Hugos: Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Related Work | Graphic Story | Dramatic Long | Dramatic Short | Professional Artist & Fan Artist
1943 Retro Hugos: Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Dramatic Short | Fan Artist

Second paragraph of third diary entry:

Schratt has lived in Konapah for more than thirty years. The heat has dried up his energies. He has become as superstitious as the Indians of his district. If his medical ethics permitted, he would prescribe snake charms and powdered toads for his patients.

This is another finalist for the Best Novel Retro Hugo for 1943, a short novel which was the basis of several memorable films. Our protagonist, a mildly corrupt doctor in a desert town in the Western USA, rescues the brain of evil millionaire Donovan, who is fatally injured in a plane crash, and finds a way of keeping it alive; but the brain is stronger than its human minders, and manipulates them to continue its original owner's evil plans of various kinds (notably perverting the course of justice). It's a basic horror plot of possession, but there's a tremendously convincing air of despairing degeneracy about the entire story (the narrator is disgusted with himself) and nods to the latest technology as of 1942.

It's striking that of the six finalists for the Best Novel category in this year's Retro Hugos, three are from firmly outside genre publishing as it then was (Islandia, The Uninvited and Darkness and the Light). I think both Donovan's Brain and The Uninvited would fit more comfortably into today's horror shelves.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

This Euro-American war was certainly not the war which is being waged while I write this book, in spite of obvious similarities. At this time the Germans had recovered from that extravagant hooliganism which had turned the world against them in an earlier period. They had in a manner reverted from Nazism to the more respectable Prussianism. Other facts also show that this was not our present war. Both India and South Africa had left the British Empire and were already well-established independent states. Moreover, weapons were now of a much more lethal kind, and the American coast was frequently and extensively bombarded by fleets of European planes. In this war Scotland had evidently become the economic centre of gravity of Britain. The Lowlands were completely industrialized, and huge tidal electric generators crowded the western sounds. Tidal electricity had become the basis of Britain’s power. But the British, under their effete financial oligarchy, had not developed this new asset efficiently before the German attack began.

This is another of the Retro Hugo finalists for Best Novel. I'd read Star Maker and Last and First Men by the same author; Darkness and the Light is on the same lines, but not as good. It's a story of two parallel future histories of humanity, which bifurcate at a decision point where a movement of spiritual and political awakening in Tibet either is crushed, in the timeline that leads to the human race being defeated by rats, or leads the world to new levels of civilisation, in the timeline that ends with humanity's transcendence. You can't accuse Stapledon of having small ideas; however, this is not really a novel, in that I don't think there is a single named character or a line of actual dialogue. There are six better-known Stapledon books (the two above-named, also Odd John, Sirius, Last Men in London and Nebula Maker) and there are good reasons why this is not in the top half dozen. It won't get a high vote from me, but you can get it and decide for yourself.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Breakfast was not a meal to linger over. There was too much to be seen, and in two hours the anchor would be dropped. Because I needed advice and also liked and trusted him, when M. Perier appeared on deck, I confided my feelings about Dorn to him; and he, like Islata Soma, advised me to write at once and not to worry about our different views. There was something very friendly in his manner, and my cup of gratitude was full when he offered to take me in hand when we went ashore, suggesting that I present my credentials in his company that afternoon and then come home with him for dinner.

This is one of the Retro Hugo finalists for 1943 this year, having been published in 1942; it is as long as the other five combined, and was published years after the author's death from his assembled notes by his daughter (who probably should get cover creds, but of course doesn't).

It's set in the first decade of the last century. Our protagonist has a bromance at Harvard with a scion of the ruling elite of Islandia, a mysterious country on a mysterious continent in the southern hemisphere (more likely the Atlantic than the Pacific, from the hints we are given). After graduation, he pulls some family political strings and gets sent there as the American Consul. And he falls in love, with several of the young women of Islandia, but most of all with the country itself, whose relaxed social and sexual attitudes are a stark contrast with the rather repressed American culture of the Gilded Age. It's a great work of world-building, with a series of romantic plots overlaid (and some politics, but really not all that much). The pace is fairly gentle, but I did find myself caught up in the story, especially the awkwardness of the narrator's relationships with the women of both Islandia and the USA. It's a long read, but worth it. You can get it here (paper only, not electronic).

I found the top spot very easy to place here. I'm not so certain of my other rankings, but here’s where I am right now.

6) “Asylum,” by A.E. van Vogt

Second paragraph of third section:

He dismissed that particular problem as temporarily insoluble, and because actually—it struck him abruptly—this girl's size was unimportant. She had long, black lashes and dark eyes that glowed at him from a proud, almost haughty face. And that was it; quite definitely that was the essence of her blazing, powerful personality.

Wasn’t really convinced by this (and turns out it is the first part of what ultimately became a novel, Supermind). Space vampires and superhuman intelligences are overseeing New York, and the Great Galactic’s agent in our midst is revealed.

5) “Hell is Forever,” by Alfred Bester

Second paragraph of third section:

She went through the veil sharp on Finchley's heels, that short, slender, dark woman; and she found herself in the dungeon passage of Sutton Castle. For a moment she was startled out of her prayer, half disappointed at not finding a land of mists and dreams. Then, with a bitter smile, she recalled the reality she wanted.

Five protagonists accidentally summon a god who condemns each to an individual hell. They are not very nice people in the first place, and there are some unfortunate stereotypes.

4) “Waldo,” by Robert A. Heinlein

Second paragraph of third section:

Harkness said, “Really, Dr Stevens—”

I liked this much less than I remember doing when I first read it. Waldo’s not a terribly attractive protagonist, and his arc is rather improbable.

3) “The Compleat Werewolf,” by Anthony Boucher

Second paragraph of third section:

The two men next to them began singing "My Wild Irish Rose," but trailed off disconsolately. “What we need,” said the one with the derby, “is a tenor.”

Much more entertaining, though the gender attitudes have not aged well; chap discovers that he can get the girl and foil Nazi spies by turning into a wolf.

2) “Nerves,” by Lester del Rey

Second paragraph of third section:

“Verry ssorry, Dr Ferrel, to bother you. Verry ssorry. No ether pleasse!”

I found this really fascinating - it's the story of a nuclear accident in a near future America, where the Japanese are allies again, and political interference in the accident has potentially catastrophic consequences. We now know that nuclear engineering has worked out very differently, but I really liked this attempt to read the future into what little was known in 1942.

1) “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” by Robert A. Heinlein

Second paragraph of third section:

He continued to hold the Tribune in front of his face as if reading it. “I see him,” he said quietly. “Control yourself. Yuh'd think you had never tailed a man before. Easy does it.”

I really liked this when I first read it 30 years ago, and it hadn't lost much in the intervening decades - Heinlein in fantasy mode, approaching Philip K. Dick in some ways, with the young couple at the centre of the narrative discovering that our world is very different from what they thought. Gets my top vote, and I am sure it will win.

2018 Hugos: Novelette | Short Story | Graphic Story
1943 Retro Hugos: Novella | Novelette | Short Story

Several classics here, three of which I had read before. NB that both “The Weapon Shop” and “There Shall Be Darkness” have female human or human-ish characters. (“The Star Mouse” has a non-human and non-speaking female character.) NB also that the protagonist of “The Weapon Shop” shares the name “Fara” with a secondary character in “Bridle and Saddle” and “Foundation”.

6) “The Weapon Shop,” by A.E. van Vogt

Second paragraph of third section:

Fara sniffed once more at the meaning of the slogan, then forgot the simple thing. There was another sign in the window, which read:
THE FINEST ENERGY WEAPONS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE

I know this is a classic, but I really don't understand what the point is. Particularly in today's atmosphere of Second Amendment debates, it reads very weirdly.

5) “The Star Mouse,” by Fredric Brown

Second paragraph of third section:

"Eggscape velocity, Mitkey! Chust barely, it adds up to eggscape velocity. Maybe. There are yet unknown facgtors, Mitkey, in der ubper atmosphere, der troposphere, der stratosphere. Ve think ve know eggsactly how mudch air there iss to calculate resistance against, but are ve absolutely sure? No, Mitkey, ve are not. Ve haff not been there. Und der marchin iss so narrow that so mudch as an air current might affect idt."

If it weren't for the comic accent of the scientist, this slightly reverse version of Flowers for Algernon would be rather cute and original. However, the scientist has a comic accent, so I'm putting it second last.

4) “Bridle and Saddle,” by Isaac Asimov

Second paragraph of third section:

The fame of Anacreon had withered to nothing with the decay of the times. The Viceregal Palace was a drafty mass of ruins except for the wing that Foundation workmen had restored. And no Emperor had been seen or heard of in Anacreon for two hundred years.

This is the third element of the collection we know as Foundation, where our smart, elderly hero Salvor Hardin outwits both domestic opposition and the local warlord, partly by retaining control of scientific knowledge among his own loyalists. It’s not as good as the other part of the story.

3) “Foundation,” by Isaac Asimov

Second paragraph of third section:

"On us? Are you forgetting that we are under the direct control of the Emperor himself? We are not part of the Prefect of Anacreon or of any other prefect. Memorize that! We are part of the Emperor's personal domain, and no one touches us. The Empire can protect its own."

This is the story where Salvor Hardin manages to wrest control of his world from the Encyclopedists, by the operation of clever politics and inevitable history. It is a nice study of a bloodless coup, planned decades in advance.

2) “Goldfish Bowl,” by Anson MacDonald (Robert A. Heinlein)

Second paragraph of third section:

Already in the boat were the coxswain, the engineman, the boat officer, Graves and Eisenberg. With them, forward in the boat, was a breaker of water rations, two fifty-gallon drums of gasoline &emdash; and a hogshead. It contained not only a carefully packed crate of eggs but also a jury-rigged smoke-signal device, armed three ways &emdash; delayed action net for eight, nine and ten hours; radio relay triggered from the ship; and simple saltwater penetration to complete an electrical circuit. The torpedo gunner in charge of diving hoped that one of them might work and thereby aid in locating the hogshead. He was busy trying to devise more nearly foolproof gear for the bathysphere.

Gosh, an early Heinlein I didn’t know, about a Big Dumb Object which is a bridge to another world. Rare for Heinlein to write a story which leaned quite so heavily on his naval experiences. A pleasing find.

1) “There Shall Be Darkness,” by C.L. Moore

Second paragraph of third section:

The lifting crags that rushed straight up a thousand feet into the clouds were shocking to Earth eyes even after a lifetime on Venus, but Quanna scarcely noticed the familiar sheer cliffs of purple rock hanging like doom itself above her as she climbed. She had been born among these cliffs, but she did not mean to die here. If she had her way, she would die on another planet and be buried under the smooth green soil of Earth, where sunlight and starlight and moonlight changed in a clear sky, she could not quite imagine, for all the tales she had heard.

Much the best prose of any of the stories, as the above extract illustrates. It’s an interesting treatment of colonial and gender issues; Quanna is a Venusian princess (or equivalent) in love with a dashing Earthman, who however is leaving as part of a post-imperial retreat. (Interesting to see this as a theme already in 1942; I guess that the Indian independence movement was well known, and C.L. Moore would have remembered Irish independence too.) The story maybe doesn’t go where a writer of today would take it, but before things can become cliches they have to be told in the first place. A clear first preference from me.

2018 Hugos: Short Story
1943 Retro Hugos: Novelette | Short Story

I found the ranking pretty easy, though hesitated between the top two. See also my guide to getting hold of them - unfortunately the direct link for “Mimic,” by Donald A. Wollheim is no longer working. NB that there is precisely one speaking female human character in these six stories (not surprisingly, in the one story which has a female co-author).

Normally I give the second paragraph of the third section as a taster; none of these stories is subdivided, so I'm just giving the third paragraph in each case.

6) “Etaoin Shrdlu,” by Fredric Brown

Third paragraph:

I admitted my identity. and he said, "Glad to know you, Mr. Merold. I'm—" and he gave me his name, but I can't remember now what it was. I'm usually good at remembering names.

This is a Tall Tale about a printing machine that becomes animated by a mysterious intelligence. That's about it.

5) “Runaround,” by Isaac Asimov

Third paragraph:

"Yaaaah," snarled Donovan, feverishly. "What have you been doing in the sublevels all day?" He took a deep breath and blurted out, "Speedy never returned."

I hope that by now it's well recorded that I hate cute robot stories. The Asimov Laws of Robotics stories are a particularly pointless exercise, with the author setting up rather silly laws purely to hang rather silly plots on them. In the case in point, a robot is torn between loyalty to its human master's orders and self-preservation, and ends up running around a pool of molten metal on Mercury singing Gilbert and Sullivan.

4) “The Sunken Land,” by Fritz Leiber

Third paragraph:

To begin with, he did not like the huge, salty ocean, and only Fafhrd's bold enthusiasm and his own longing for the land of Lankhmar had impelled him to embark on this long, admittedly risky voyage homeward across uncharted deeps. He did not like the fact that a school of fish was making the water boil at such a great distance from any land. It seemed unnatural. Even the uniformly stormless weather and favorable winds disturbed him, seeming to indicate correspondingly great misfortunes held in store, like a growing thundercloud in quiet air. Too much good luck was always dangerous. And now this ring, acquired without effort by an astonishingly lucky chance—

Now we're getting better. This is a nice bit of writing in which poor Fafhrd gets kidnapped by a sinister boatsman who is raiding an even more sinister island. Lots of atmospherics but doesn't quite get anywhere.

3) “The Twonky,” by Lewis Padgett (C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner)

Third paragraph:

Drunk? Lloyd, in his capacity as foreman, couldn't permit that. He flipped away his cigarette, walked forward, and sniffed. No, it wasn't liquor. He peered at the badge on the man's overalls.

This is basically the same story as “Etaoin Shrdlu,” but better written and (as noted above) with an actual speaking female character. In this case the machine is a phonograph/radio rather than a printer, so it has the added frisson of the latest communications technology.

2) “Mimic,” by Martin Pearson (Donald A. Wollheim)

Third paragraph:

We know little or nothing. Some of the most startling things are unknown to us. When they are discovered they may shock us to the bone.

Very close between the first two stories for me; both are about Hidden Secrets, and in this case it's non-human creatures masquerading as humans in contemporary New York. Several chilling images. A bit closer to horror than my usual tastes, but well done.

1) “Proof,” by Hal Clement

Third paragraph:

Kron could "see" all this as easily as a human being in an airplane can see New York; but no human eyes could have perceived this city, even if a man could have existed anywhere near it. The city, buildings and all, glowed a savage, white heat: and about and beyond it—a part of it, to human eyes—raged the equally dazzling, incandescent gazes of the solar photosphere.

In the end my vote goes to this story of inhabitants of the Sun, and other stars, exploring the universe in their own terms, in complete ignorance of planets, let alone Earth, never mind humanity - making for utter mutual incomprehension when they do encounter one of us. The writing is a little clunkier than some of the others, but I'm giving it top marks for ideas.

That's got me off to a reasonably good start.

2018 Hugos: Short Story
1943 Retro Hugos: Novelette | Short Story

Due to new info coming in from Carla (thanks Carla!), I've had to split the Short Stories onto their own page! Hooray! See Novellas here, and Novelettes here.

( the Short Stories )

I haven't counted, but that's well over 100 links. I hope that they are useful!

See Novellas here and Short Stories here - thanks to Carla for supplying details of the original publications.

( the Novelettes )

The eighteen finalists in the three short fiction categories are:

Best Novella
* “Asylum,” by A.E. van Vogt
* “The Compleat Werewolf,” by Anthony Boucher
* “Hell is Forever,” by Alfred Bester
* “Nerves,” by Lester del Rey
* “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” by Robert A. Heinlein
* “Waldo,” by Robert A. Heinlein

Best Novelette
* “Bridle and Saddle,” by Isaac Asimov
* “Foundation,” by Isaac Asimov
* “Goldfish Bowl,” by Robert A. Heinlein
* “The Star Mouse,” by Fredric Brown
* “There Shall Be Darkness,” by C.L. Moore
* “The Weapon Shop,” by A.E. van Vogt

Best Short Story
* “Etaoin Shrdlu,” by Fredric Brown
* “Mimic,” by Donald A. Wollheim
* “Proof,” by Hal Clement
* “Runaround,” by Isaac Asimov
* “The Sunken Land,” by Fritz Leiber
* “The Twonky,” by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

Information from Carla has supplemented Cat's earlier list of those that are easy to find online. We now have free access to every single one of the short fiction finalist, but I also list below the books in which each finalist has been published, mostly out of print but accessible by the usual means - the Novellas in this post, and Novelettes here and Short Stories here.

NB also that five of the six finalists for Best Novel are available online:
Beyond This Horizon, by Anson MacDonald (Robert A. Heinlein): original Astounding publication, Part One, Part Two.
Darkness and the Light, by Olaf Stapledon, online for free at University of Adelaide.
Donovan's Brain by Curt Siodmak, Available for free on Scribd, if you can bear the annoying interface and if it's available in your country (it isn't in mine)
Second Stage Lensmen, by E. E. “Doc” Smith: original Astounding publication, Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.
The Uninvited by Dorothy Macardle, Available for free on Scribd, if you can bear the annoying interface.

( long list, with cover pictures )

Listed by length, title links for Amazon (UK) DVDs, other links where I have found them online.

164 min: Blade Runner 2049 (BDP LF 2018)

152 min: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (BDP LF 2018)

141 min: Wonder Woman (BDP LF 2018)

130 min: Thor: Ragnarok (BDP LF 2018)

123 min: The Shape of Water (BDP LF 2018)

108 min: Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (BDP SF 1943) Whole thing on Youtube Whole thing on Internet Archive

104 min: Get Out (BDP LF 2018)

81 min: Invisible Agent (BDP SF 1943) Whole thing on Internet Archive

77 min: I Married a Witch (BDP SF 1943) Whole thing on Internet Archive

76 min: Black Mirror: “USS Callister,” (BDP SF 2018)

73 min: Cat People (BDP SF 1943)

70 min: Bambi (BDP SF 1943) Whole thing on Internet Archive

67 min: The Ghost of Frankenstein (BDP SF 1943)

60 min: Doctor Who: “Twice Upon a Time,” (BDP SF 2018)

47 min: Star Trek: Discovery: “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” (BDP SF 2018)

25 min: The Good Place: “Michael’s Gambit,” (BDP SF 2018)

21 min: The Good Place: “The Trolley Problem,” (BDP SF 2018)

5 min: “The Deep” [song], by Clipping (BDP SF 2018) Whole thing on Youtube, lyrics here.

Happy to add more sources as people let me know about them.

There’s a real surfeit of statistics for me this year, with not only the 2018 Hugo for Best Novel, but also the 1943 Retro Hugo for Best Novel, the 2018 Hugo for Best Related Work, and the 2018 World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Award for Best Young Adult Book all providing grist to my mill.

What mill is this? I take the ballot and compare the various finalists on Goodreads and LibraryThing, both to see how many users on each system claim to have copies of each book, and to see how much they like them. This analysis has been of rather limited success in identifying winners, but I think it does indicate something about front-runners.

2018 Hugo for Best Novel

	Goodreads		LibraryThing
	owners	av rating	owners	av rating
The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi	45295	4.09	525	3.93
The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin	42668	4.4	510	4.34
New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson	20592	3.6	359	3.72
Provenance, Ann Leckie	21310	3.87	304	3.91
Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty	20058	3.86	269	3.95
Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee	6824	4.22	141	4.26

In terms of ownership, it’s tight at the top between The Collapsing Empire and The Stone Sky; the latter however has higher reader ratings. The best ratings of all are enjoyed by Raven Stratagem.

1943 Retro Hugo for Best Novel

	Goodreads		LibraryThing
	owners	av rating	owners	av rating
Beyond This Horizon, Robert A. Heinlein	5967	3.75	1529	3.36
Second Stage Lensmen, E.E. “Doc” Smith	3705	3.93	954	3.55
Islandia, Austen Tappan Wright	2310	4.33	403	4.21
The Uninvited, Dorothy Macardle	3020	4.08	115	4.06
Donovan’s Brain, Curt Siodmak	955	3.71	194	3.71
Darkness and the Light, Olaf Stapledon	74	3.7	23	3

The outlier here is Darkness and the Light, which has a far smaller base than the other five; perhaps Stapledon fans just got organised this year? Be that as it may, Beyond This Horizon is far ahead on ownership, and Islandia far ahead on reader ratings, so I imagine that the winner will be one of them. The Heinlein is much easier to get hold of.

2018 Hugo for Best Related Work

	Goodreads		LibraryThing
	owners	av rating	owners	av rating
No Time To Spare, Ursula Le Guin	7578	4.07	171	4.1
Crash Override, Zoe Quinn	3579	4.05	73	4.14
Luminscent Threads, Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal	129	4.82	15	4
A Lit Fuse, Nat Segaloff	61	4.8	21	4
Iain M. Banks, Paul Kincaid	67	4.14	15	3.5
Sleeping With Monsters, Liz Bourke	69	4.08	2	-

A pretty clear front-runner here, though the data is so sparse that it may not be meaningful. Note also the exceptionally high Goodreads ratings (from an admittedly small base) for Luminscent Threads and A Lit Fuse.

2018 World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Award for Best Young Adult Book

	Goodreads		LibraryThing
	owners	av rating	owners	av rating
La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman	88787	4.22	971	4.2
In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan	15897	4.4	129	4.28
A Skinful of Shadows, Frances Hardinge	8512	4.13	110	4.31
Akata Warrior, Nnedi Okorafor	6828	4.3	121	4.27
The Art of Starving, Sam J. Miller	6194	3.74	57	3.9
Summer in Orcus, T. Kingfisher	1242	4.56	41	4.41

I have no insight into any of these books. I note only that La Belle Sauvage is way ahead on owners, and Summer in Orcus has much the highest ratings.

Anyway, that suppies a little numerical context for the vote.

These were the two books that particularly jumped out at me from my list of sfnal 1942 novels by women, so in the name of informing my nominations I got hold of them and read them. I expect that the eventual finalists will probably be from the ranks of those originally published in the genre, but I hope I won't be the only voter to look beyond Heinlein, Siodmak and E.E. 'Doc' Smith. Spoiler: I will be nominating both of them.

(Incidentally, it has been pointed out to me that The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, is only 31,000 words long, so technically falls into the Novella bracket.)

The Uninvited, second paragraph of third chapter:

On the nineteenth of April Cliff End became ours, equally and jointly, free of rent forever –‘from the centre to the sky,’ Pamela added. About the sky, in these days of aeroplanes, I was not so sure.

As a former student of the period, I knew Macardle's fiercely partisan The Irish Republic, a strongly pro-de Valera account of the Irish War of Independence, Civil War, and subsequent political developments. A committed feminist, she was deeply disillusioned with Dev's treatment of women in the 1937 Comstitution, and her experience covering the League of Nations for the Irish Press gave her a sympathy for other small nations that Ireland's wartime neutrality failed to deliver. Her first novel, Uneasy Freehold, was published in 1941 but renamed The Uninvited for its American release the following year, and is therefore eligible for the 1943 Retro Hugos under that name. It was filmed in 1944 - here's a trailer:

The narrator is a young but upper-class Irishman living in London, who decides to move to Cornwall with his sister after a relationship break-up; they buy an empty house from the nearby retired military chap and his cute if troubled grand-daughter. The house turns out not to be quite as empty as they had been led to believe...

It's a ghost story, but a ghost story with a couple of interesting wrinkles. The book casually treats ghosts as a scientifically proven phenomenon operating according to implicitly well-understood laws, with the Irish protagonists (and a Dublin lawyer who is dragged in to help near the end) naturally better equipped to deal with the problem of the haunted house than their English neighbours on the coast of Cornwall. This makes it all a bit less scary - though the moments of terror are still well conveyed - but also more comprehensible. There is a jolly good twist at the end, which I should have seen coming but didn't, linking to interesting issues of sex and gender. I'm not surprised that it made a decent film, and am a bit surprised that I hadn't heard of it before. You can get it here.

Grand Canyon by Vita Sackville-West, second paragraph of third section (there are two parts to the book, each broken into quite short sections):

She wished she were back in Mrs. Temple's room. The grace of the older woman gave her comfort. Mrs. Temple's possessions seemed to share her gracefulness. The silver looked so serene, and some of the highlights had been pink and amethyst where the sunset reflected in them. Loraine wished she could stay and bathe for an hour in that assurance; she would not have asked to be allowed to talk, only to sit and heal.

This is a rare sfnal venture from the Bloomsbury group (the author herself was the basis for Orlando by her lover Virginia Woolf). It is the near future (as seen in 1942). Sackville-West tells us in her foreword:

In Grand Canyon I have intended a cautionary tale. In it I have contemplated the dangers of a world in which Germany, by the use of an unspecified method of attack, is assumed to have defeated Great Britain in the present war. Peace terms have been offered on the basis of the status quo of 1939 and the Germans have made a plausible appeal to the United States Government (who have meanwhile satisfactorily concluded their own war with Japan) to mediate in the name of humanity to prevent a prolongation of human suffering. For the purposes of my story I have allowed the United States Government to fall into the Nazi trap and to be deluded into making this intervention as "the nation which, in its hour of victory, brought peace to the world." The terrible consequences of an incomplete conclusion or indeed of any peace signed by the Allies with an undefeated Germany are shown.

Such a supposition is by no means intended as a prophecy and indeed bears no relation at all to my own views as to the outcome of the present war.

The setting is, surprise surprise, the Grand Canyon, where a tourist hotel hosts a number of European exiles have ended up fleeing the devastation of the other side of the Atlantic. The first half of the book sets the scene of a sedate romance between Helen Temple and Lester Dale; but the inevitable German attack happens, and in the second half of the book, the hotel guests flee to the bottom of the canyon, on a journey that is not at all what it seems to be at first. The metaphors are obvious but not laboured, and the situation of Helen, Lester and the other characters is rather well conveyed. A new paperback is coming out next week; Canadians can read it here.

This year is the sixth time that Retro Hugos have been awarded, following 1996 (for 1946), 2001 (for 1951), 2004 (for 1954), 2014 (for 1939) and 2016 (for 1941). However, only once has the category of Best Related Work attracted enough interest to justify a Retro Hugo, in 2004, when Conquest of the Moon by Wernher von Braun, Fred L. Whipple and Willy Ley saw off two other contenders. So there have been three finalists in five rounds of awards.

This year we are considering work of 1942, and skimming through Goodreads I spotted two books that fall outside the genre as it would have been seen by the hypothetical voters of the non-existent 1943 Worldcon, but arguably could be considered as included by the current rubric, which is:

Any work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom appearing for the first time during 1942 or which has been substantially modified during 1942, and which is either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and which is not eligible in any other category.

The two books in question are Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, by Edith Hamilton, and A Preface to Paradise Lost, by C.S. Lewis. So I have had a good look at them both (read the Lewis completely and the first 100 pages of the Hamilton) and reflected on whether they are good candidates for the second ever Retro Hugo for Best Related Work.

A Preface to Paradise Lost, second paragraph of third chapter:

The Primary Epic will be illustrated from the Homeric poems and from the English Beowulf, and our effort here, as throughout the present discussion, will be to discover what sort of thing the Primary Epics were, how they were meant to be used, what expectations they hoped to satisfy. But at the very outset a distinction must be made. Both Beowulf and the Homeric poems, besides being poetry themselves, describe poetical performances, at feasts and the like, proceeding in the world which they show us. From these descriptions we can gather what the epic was in a heroic age; but it does not follow that Beowulf and the Homeric poems are themselves the same kind of thing. They may or may not be what they describe. We must therefore distinguish the literary conditions attributed to the heroic age within the surviving poems, which, since they are described, can be studied, from the literary conditions in which the surviving poems were themselves produced, which can only be conjectured. I proceed, then, to some account of the literary conditions which Homer describes.

C.S. Lewis had a good year in 1942; he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC, he was working on Perelandra, and he also published The Screwtape Letters (which are certainly on my ~~Best Novel~~ Best Novella ballot). A Preface to Paradise Lost is 150 pages of detailed analysis of the epic poem, the first half looking at the epic style in itself, and the second half looking at Milton’s ideas of Christianity. I’m more familiar with the other epics, and found the first half tremendously rewarding reading, though Lewis’s feud with T.S. Eliot is a little wearying. A very interesting examination of what epic poets are trying to do.

However, I think Lewis himself clearly does not regard the book as related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom. He comments that Dante (who he otherwise doesn’t discuss much) can be seen as in the same tradition as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but clearly separates them from Homer, Virgil, the author of Beowulf and Milton as doing very different things. I doubt that the hypothetical voters of the non-existent 1943 Worldcon would have put this on their final ballot, and more important, I doubt that Lewis would have accepted nomination if offered the choice. (Unlike The Screwtape Letters, which clearly has some sfnal roots.)

Oddly enough, the second paragraph of the third chapter of Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes starts with a quote from Book VII of Paradise Lost:

First there was Chaos,
the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild.
These words are Milton's, but they express with precision what the Greeks thought lay back of the very first beginning of things. Long before the gods appeared, in the dim past,uncounted ages ago, there was only the formless confusion of Chaos brooded over by unbroken darkness. At last, but how no one ever tried to explain, two children were born to this shapeless nothingness. Night was the child of Chaos and so was Erebus, which is the unfathomable depth where death dwells. In the whole universe there was nothing else; all was black, empty, silent, endless.

This re-telling of Greek (and some Roman and Norse) legends was apparently the classic school textbook of classical mythology for decades of American schoolchildren. I read only the first hundred pages (of 329), but I think it is enough to get a feel for it. In the introduction, she makes very large claims for the unique quality and modernity of Greek myth, where a similar collection today would stress the links with other neighbouring cultures and might also look at how this particular set of stories became elevated above others. The retelling of the actual stories is breezy enough, and jumps lightly over the amorous activities of Zeus. It’s pretty comprehensive, but I think my heart is still with Roger Lancelyn Green’s versions which have a little more bite to them, not having been written as a school text book.

I also don’t think that Mythology qualifies as a Best Related Work. It is not non-fiction, nor is it “noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text”. The most noteworthy part of the book, its very core, is Hamilton’s retelling of the fictional myths. It might perhaps be a potential finalist for Best Novel, but there are a lot of better candidates (see my previous post on 1942 sff novels by women and writers of colour). So I suspect that there will be no award for Best Related Work in this year’s Retro Hugos; and that’s not such a terrible thing.

For my own notes, in Retro Hugo nominations season; and maybe yours too: fifteen sff novels by women, and two by writers of color, first published (or first published in English, or first published in the USA) in 1942. First ten listed in descending Goodreads popularity, with links to Goodreads pages; next five are not on Goodreads so listed in random order. NB I have not checked length eligibility.

The Uninvited, by Dorothy Macardle (Goodreads)

Gobbolino The Witch's Cat, by Ursula Moray Williams (Goodreads)

Twig, by Elizabeth Orton Jones (Goodreads)

Henrietta's House / The Blue Hills, by Elizabeth Goudge (Goodreads)

Eyes of Horus, by Joan Grant (Goodreads)

Follow The Drum, by Andre Norton (Goodreads)

Grand Canyon, by Vita Sackville-West (Goodreads)

Iron and Gold / The Fair Woman, by Hilda Vaughan (Goodreads)

Dreadful Hollow, by Irina Karlova (Helen Mary Clamp) (Goodreads)

Then We Shall Hear Singing: A Fantasy in C Major, by Storm Jameson (Goodreads)

Moloch, by Marjorie Livingston (Encyclopedia of Fantasy)

City of a Hundred Gates, by Isobel Stone (Heritage Auctions)

The Fetch / The Spectral Bride, by "Joseph Shearing" [Marjorie Bowen] (online)

The Pink Egg, by Polly Boyden (Lorne Bair)

Village of Glass, by Frances Frost (Kirkus Reviews)

Also two sff novels first published / first published in English in 1942 by non-white authors:

Monkey: The Journey to the West (abridged from 西遊記) by Wu Cheng'en, translated by Arthur Waley (Goodreads)

My Lives and How I Lost Them, by Countee Cullen (Goodreads)

This year's Worldcon, Worldcon 76, has decided to award Retro Hugos for 1943 (celebrating work of 1942) as well as the regular Hugos for 2018. For the first time, this means that we voters will be nominating Retro Hugos in the Best Series category, since it was added to the permanent list by last year's Business meeting.

The Best Series category is defined as follows:

3.3.5: Best Series. A multi-installment science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, appearing in at least three (3) installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the previous calendar year, at least one (1) installment of which was published in the previous calendar year, and which has not previously won under 3.3.5.

3.3.5.1: Previous losing finalists in the Best Series category shall be eligible only upon the publication of at least two (2) additional installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words after they qualified for their last appearance on the final ballot and by the close of the previous calendar year.

Obviously, since this category has not been awarded before, the strictures on previous winners and finalists are not relevant. But even so, the pickings are very slim. There are a number of series which started in 1942 but had not published 3 installments by the end of the year (eg Asimov's Foundation). There are other series with many installments which however do not amount to 240,000 words (eg the Via and Adam Link sequences by Otto Binder, and I think also the Professor Jameson stories by Neil R. Jones). What I am left with is the following rather brief list:

Oz, by L. Frank Baum, Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neil, qualifying installment is Lucky Bucky in Oz by John R. Neil. This series was long past its glory days by 1942.

Pellucidar, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, qualifying installments "Return to Pellucidar", "Men of the Bronze Age" and "Tiger Girl", all published in Amazing Stories and collected much later in Savage Pellucidar. Again, a series that had been going for decades.

Amtor / Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, qualifying installment "War on Venus", published in Fantastic Adventures, which later became the last part of the fourth book of the series, Escape on Venus.

The Ki-Gor series, by John Peter Drummond, qualifying installments "Blood Priestess of Vig N'Ga" / "Slaves for the Renegade Sultan" / "The Cannibal Horde" / "The Devil's Death Trap", which were the twelfth too fifteenth stories in the series. The first three collected Ki-Gor volumes, the thrid of which includes three of the above stories (but not "The Devil's Death Trap") total almost 1100 pages, so it surely qualifies on length.

Captain Future, by Edmond Hamilton, qualifying installments Quest Beyond the Stars / 10 Outlaws of the Moon / The Comet Kings / Planets in Peril. These are the ninth to twelfth installments of the series, each of them about 80 magazine pages; so they may fall short of the required word count

The James Armitage trilogy, by Franklyn Kelsey, qualifying volume The Prowlers of the Deep. Total pagecount well over 800, which probably means it qualifies on length.

Edited to add: oops, forgot The Lensman series, by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, qualifying installments parts 3 and 4 of Second Stage Lensmen as first published in Astounding. Again, pagecount for Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman and Second Stage Lensman is over 800 so it’s probably OK.

Edited again to add: someone else points out the eligibility of Doc Savage, whose 107th-118th installments were published in 1942; it certainly satisfies the length criteria.

Edited once more to add: An anonymous commenter below suggests the following additions, which all have sfnal elements, though I feel some only barely scrape into being sf:
- The Shadow by ~~William~~ Walter B. Gibson: Qualifying installments: The Room of Doom\The Book of Death\Vengeance Bay. I believe this was around the 16th novel length Shadow story
- The Avenger by Paul Ernst: Qualifying installments: The Green Killer\The Happy Killers\The Black Death\The Wilder Curse. I believe this is the 24th novel length Avenger story
- The Spider by Grant Stockbrige: Qualifying installment: Death and the Spider. This had around 30 novel length installments by this point as well as various pieces of short fiction so should be eligible.
- Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn: Qualifying installment: Stoneman's Memorial. This had around 50 installments (mostly novelette length) by this point so I think this is fine.
- Jorkens by Lord Dunsany: Qualifying installments: The Khamseen\ The Welcome\ On the Other Side of the Sun. There were around 67 pieces of short fiction by this point, probably reaching around 1000 pages by the size of the collections.

Edited yet again to add: Cora, below, alerts me to G-8 and His Battle Aces, a WWI aviation pulp with plenty of SFF and horror elements such as zombies, sentient gorillas, ray guns, masked masterminds, etc... The 100th issue was published in 1942, featuring a Japanese scientist who had found a way of making planes invisible.

The Heirs and Assigns series by [James] Branch Cabell includes the 1942 novel The First Gentleman of America: A Comedy of Conquest and appears to meet the length criteria, but apparently the stories are not really fantasy but straightforward historical novels. The ISFB listing of the Green Ghost stories by G.T. Fleming-Roberts seems incomplete, but I suspect that even if it were complete, there would be insufficient word-count for 1942.

My anonymous commenter below proposes another two that I think do not qualify - Torminster by Elizabeth Goudge: 1942 Installment: The Blue Hills/Henrietta’s House, which I don’t think has sufficient word count (and the series as a whole appears to be insufficiently sfnal), and the Cthulhu Mythos, where the only potential 1942 instalment is “The Black Bargain” by Robert Bloch, a story that refers to the book De Vermis Mysteriis but not to any of the Elder Gods, which I think makes it only marginally part of the Cthulhu series.

That's not a lot - if my count is right, only ~~six~~ ~~seven~~ eight eligible series for six available ballot places, with two of them (Ki-Gor and James Armitage) distinctly obscure, and the best-known of them (Oz) well past its best-before date.

I don't envy the decision of this year's Hugo administrators on whether or not to go ahead with the ballot in this category.

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Entries tagged with retro hugos 1943

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1943 Retro Hugos: the detail

Beyond This Horizon; Second-Stage Lensmen; and the 1943 Retro Hugo finalists for Best Novel

The 1943 Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Donovan's Brain, by Curt Siodmak

Darkness and the Light, by Olaf Stapledon

Islandia, by Austen Tappan Wright

The 1943 Retro Hugo finalists for Best Novella

The 1943 Retro Hugo finalists for Best Novelette

The 1943 Retro Hugo finalists for Best Short Story

How to get the 1943 Retro Hugo finalists, Part 3: Short Stories

How to get the 1943 Retro Hugo finalists, Part 2: Novelettes

How to get the 1943 Retro Hugo finalists, Part 1: Intro, Novels and Novellas

This year's Hugos and Retro Hugos - dramatic presentation categories

This year’s Hugo ballot: Goodreads/LibraryThing stats

Two #RetroHugo 1943 novels: The Uninvited, by Dorothy Macardle; Grand Canyon, by Vita Sackville-West

1943 Retro Hugo for Best Related Work: C.S. Lewis on Paradise Lost, Hamilton’s Mythology

SFF novels of 1942 by women and writers of colour

Best Series Retro Hugo 1943

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