Resnick on the Loose. Mike Resnick
found its target 450 miles away.
So much for First Law.
Then there’s TANSTAAFL—the war cry of fans in the 1960s and 1970s, which was Robert A. Heinlein’s acronym for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” a battle cry voiced in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
But of course it’s ridiculous. There are free lunch programs all the hell over. Check your local school. Or look at New York, where Mayor Michael Blumberg has just proposed not only free lunches, but cash payments to poor people who don’t break the law, to parents who actually read their kids’ report cards, to kids who obey the law by attending school, and so on.
If there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, it’s only because it’s been surpassed by a couple of hundred more lucrative free things.
Okay, let’s go back to one of the fathers of science fiction, H. G. Wells. Wells explained, time and again, that the proper way to write science fiction was to take one, and only one, scientific breakthrough and write a story around it, that the public couldn’t possibly buy more than one a book.
Sounds logical…but it’s dumb. It presupposes that the 1950s public couldn’t deal with, say, jet planes, television, and the Salk polio vaccine at the same time, or that no 1990s story proposing space flight, cell phones, AIDS medications, and DVDs could be assimilated by the man (or reader) on the street.
And another revealed truth bites the dust.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The only answer is: to whom? Not to the people who create it. Not to the people who apply it. Not to all the people who benefit from it. (I love the late George Alec Effinger’s response to reading about faster-than-light drives and zap guns and all the other tropes of science fiction that some misguided authors feel they must explain, at length, in their stories: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk.”)
Then there’s Damon Knight’s classic definition of science fiction: “Science fiction is what I’m pointing at when I say ‘That’s science fiction.’”
Witty as all get-out. Great line at parties. But I’ve been hearing it quoted as something meaningful for more than four decades now. Let’s try an experiment: substitute the word “Jabberwocky” or any other nonsense word of your choice. Seems just as brilliant (and just an uninformative), doesn’t it?
Then there’s Robert E. Howard’s classic and oft-quoted line (though of course Nietzsche said it first): “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Sure sounds good. But maybe you should ask a quadriplegic car crash survivor, or someone who’s just lost a lung and a kidney to cancer, if they think they’re any stronger because of what didn’t kill them.
Sturgeon’s Law—“90% of everything is crap”—is so famous that even the New York Times has quoted it. I’d have no problem with it if it were limited to television, movies, and Windows Vista, but it’s all-inclusive, and your brain would surely qualify for Sturgeon’s 90% if you believed 90% of all medical and technological breakthroughs (or Baen books, for that matter) were crap.
Back to Isaac Asimov, whose second most famous statement is “Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.” Which may very well be true, but doesn’t acknowledge the far more meaningful corollary, which is that the competent don’t wait that long.
I’m sure you can think of more of science fiction’s Revealed Falsehoods and Half-Truths, but you get the idea. Even in a field as cerebral and forward-looking as ours, we pay lip service to a lot of lines that sound brilliant but hold about as much water as a sieve.
So the next time someone comes up to you and proves how brilliant we are by quoting an unquestioned statement by one of our leading lights, make sure you’re within reach of the saltcellar, because you’re going to have to take what they tell you with a few grains of sodium chloride.
Breeding Like Rabbits—Or Hugos
Walk up to any serious science fiction reader and name the last hundred Hugo winners. Chances are he’ll know less than a quarter of them, no matter how much of the stuff he reads.
There’s a reason for it.
Movies have the Oscars. Theater has the Tonys. Television has the Emmys. Mysteries have the Edgars. And we here in the field of written science fiction have the Hugos.
They’re our most prestigious award. Even overseas, every science fiction writer, reader and fan knows what the Hugo is.
The problem is that it’s not what it used to be. Maybe it never was.
The Hugo was first awarded in 1953. It went to Best Novel, Best Magazine, Best Cover Artist, Best Interior Artist, Excellence in Fact Articles, and Best New Author. Six awards, and only two went to writers (although everything went to professionals, a situation that would change before long.)
Move the calendar ahead to 1957, and only three Hugos were handed out. Right—just three.
1957 was an aberration. By 1963 we were back to giving out six Hugos—Novel, Short Fiction, Artist, Magazine, Drama and Fanzine. No one had a problem with that. We were thrilled that TV and movies were starting to take us seriously, and since fandom was responsible for putting on the Worldcon where the awards were handed out, it made sense that they’d want to award Best Fanzine.
It started innocently enough. But let’s take a quantum leap ahead, to 2007. You know how many Hugos were awarded this year? Fourteen.
And of those fourteen, you know how many were given out for written science fiction, which is the basis for this entire field? Four. That’s right. Less than 30% of the Hugos now go to written works of science fiction.
How did this come about?
Well, 1967 was a very fannish Worldcon. More panels were devoted to fandom, as opposed to written science fiction, than ever before. And since there was nothing in the rules that said you could only give out six Hugos, NyCon III (the 1967 Worldcon, the last to be held in New York), added Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist to the list. So, when you include Best Fanzine, NyCon III handed out as many Hugos to fans as to works of science fiction.
By the time of Noreascon II (the 1980 Worldcon, held in Boston), the academics had discovered us, and we them, and a new category was added: Best Non-Fiction Book—and suddenly we had seven annual Hugos that did not go to works of science fiction.
Now, all during the late 1970s and early 1980s, fanzine editors and publishers were grousing about the fact that Locus kept winning Best Fanzine every year. Which figured. It was professionally printed (almost no other fanzine was), it was supported by dozens of ads from major publishing houses (almost no other fanzines had any ads at all), and it had a circulation that was well over 6,000 and climbing (most fanzines printed and distributed less than 300 copies). Clearly there was no way a “traditional” fanzine would ever win the Best Fanzine Hugo again—but aha! The 1984 Worldcon committee came up with a brand-new category—Best Semiprozine—where Locus could win every year to its heart’s content and traditional fanzines could once more win the Best Fanzine Hugo.
And suddenly there were four Hugos for fans and four for written science fiction. In fact, the overall tally by the time of LACon II (the 1984 Worldcon, held in Anaheim) was four fiction Hugos and eight everything-else Hugos.
And so it remained until Buffy came along on the boob tube, and Buffy fans bemoaned the fact that a short TV show couldn’t compete with a $130 million movie. So Torcon 3 created a second Dramatic category for the 2003 Toronto Worldcon: Best Short Dramatic Presentation. It was informally called the Buffy Award, just as the Semiprozine Hugo was informally known for years as the Locus award, the delicious irony being that although Locus has indeed won something like 20 Best Semiprozine Hugos, Buffy never did win the Buffy Award.
As you can see, it’s become a bit of demonstrable folk wisdom that if you lose enough Hugos, sooner or later you can put together enough disenfranchised (read: Hugo-losing) friends so that you can get a new Hugo category installed and