Hugo Nomination Plug

Hugo nominating ballots arrived last week with InterAction’s Progress Report 3. I feel my wonted annual frustration. Hardly ever do I get around to reading a reasonable cross-section of the year’s science fiction crop during the year in which it is published, which renders my nomination picks rather haphazard. I’m perennially embarrassed by thoughts of how the Hugo Administrator must snicker as he peruses my list and murmurs, “Another fakefan.”

Well, fakefan or not, I may as well take such opportunity as I have to lobby for someone whom I nominate every year and whose name never reaches the ballot, though he often comes close: John Hertz for Best Fan Writer.

The principal outlet for John’s fan writing is Vanamonde, a both-sides-of-one-sheet zine that he has published weekly for over eleven years. It isn’t available on-line, as the author is one of Fandom’s last determined hold-outs against electronic publishing, not out of Luddism but because he believes that the new tools are generally used to do badly what can be done well with paper and ink.

Writing two pages a week may not sound strenuous, not even if one writes them every week, but Vanamonde’s are of the lapidary quality that might lead one to assume that, like Horace’s, they have been set aside for years and presented to the world only incessant polishing.

The zine’s regular venue is APA-L, the long-enduring APAzine of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Association. The format follows a set pattern four issues out of five: one or two very brief, tightly packed observations, reflections or witticisms, followed by responses to points raised by other APA contributors, intermingled with interesting quotations and the occasional third party cartoon. Fifth issues consist chiefly of excerpts from letters of comment.

Samples, picked from the issues that lie closest to my keyboard (bracketed inserts in original):

You touch on a virtuoso point of theater, and of the different strengths of stage and print. A novelist can depict a man who lacks self-confidence but is so heroic he emerges as a leader and hides his diffidence from his crew – as C. S. Forester did with Horatio Hornblower [10 novels, most of an 11th, 1937-1966]. Live portrayal of such a man is hard: one must convey to an audience that there are things one isn’t showing. In film the team of an excellent actor and an excellent director ought to have it easier, but films often duck. The Elizabethan stage had soliloquies, and speeches aside: curiously it was less earnest about realism than we are; in our freedom we take art most seriously; indeed huge effort since the 20th Century has been devoted to smashing rules; why did they need smashing?

In free fall one could, as in your Jack Harness cover, wear puffs or sparkles, like outriggers, floating on two-foot threads straight out from one’s body at the neck, waist, and calves, maybe for a fashion statement. They wouldn’t droop but might tangle in things.

Dinner in Downey for Len Moffatt’s 80th birthday. We were forbidden to bear gifts, which I dodged by drawing from my pocket and blowing up a suitably lettered balloon. It was, if I may say so, a handsome dark green, and according to rule was bigger than his head. “What rule is that?” “I just now made it up.” Len remarked that he and Weird Tales both began in 1923; so also, an elaborate gag observed, had the Milky Way candy bar, an early example of the sweetness of science fiction. I proposed his health in a limerick revealing how hard it was to rhyme Moffatt (I did just manage “quaff it”). He sang about flying saucers. At my end of a long table, the children’s corner, June’s No. 1 son Bob Konigsberg reported on vinifying, Connor Freff Cochran told industrial tales, and Ed Green admitted HEROWism [Torcon III made him chairman of the Hugo Eligibility for the Rest of the World committee – not its real name – on work not first published in English] and described the blasting-cap diet. Forry Ackerman having expressed some hope of attending, we saved him a seat, though by the time I had to leave, when the night was young, he had not yet escaped the celebration of his 87th across town.

When I first read Heinlein’s Between Planets (1951), wire recorders had already gone away, and I ignorant of them supposed its micro-wire recording was some futuristic technology Heinlein had wholly imagined.

Reverse Bowdlerization is as fascinating, or tiresome, as the other direction. A while ago when a rash of Jane Austen films was under way I saw a newspaper piece by a man involved with them who explained that Austen was repressed. He proposed to liberate her by putting into the films all the sexual matter she had omitted. Shakespeare immediately came to my mind. He, a great artist working in a day not hers or ours, put sex in. She, another great artist, left it out. We laugh at people who would cut it from his work. Shouldn’t we laugh just as loud at people who would add it to hers?

In fandom we don’t do much to initiate people. Likewise our policy is not “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.” If someone shows up we tend to take his welcome for granted. If he finds his way perhaps nothing more will ever be done about it. If he waits to be shown the ropes, or tested or passed, he may wait long. I often quote the late great Bill Rotsler, on a “So This is Your First Con” panel with me, “What if all those other people are as shy as you?” We do prize wit. Note that wit can be sharpened, never mind the mundane folly – or worse, oppression – that would make it a Magic Power of Special People Over There, beyond the reach of “the rest of us”; also it isn’t really the highest or greatest good, nor do we really think it is, ask anyone who has put on cons, or club work-parties; nor is it really a business of snide put-down, as people learn who find we tire of them. This taking for granted is paradoxically hard on newcomers, aggravated in recent years by our @#%€! complacency.

Also scattered through Vanamonde are arresting quotes from a remarkably wide range of others, such as “Bigotry does not mean believing that people who differ from you are wrong; it means assuming that they are either knaves or fools” (Frank Sheed, 1954) and this, from Sir Henry Sidney, Queen Elizabeth I’s viceroy in Wales, to his son, the poet Philip Sidney:

Give yourself to be merry, for you degenerate from your father if you find not yourself most able in wit and body and to do anything when you be most merry: but let your mirth be ever void of all scurrility and biting words to any man.

Nor must I omit to quote one of John’s tanka:

Glitter for many
In a season of good will.
Finding gleams to bring,
Though some dishes must stay closed,
Shines abroad what good one can.

More frequently he does the better known haiku:

Why the autumn Moon
Is bigger, silverier,
Maybe the clouds know.

Reaching through the fence
Across my path, or I yours,
Bougainvillea?

And one that I have recited to myself at cons:

Why am I awake?
This work could be done later.
But look! There’s the Sun!

I’m sure that John (no e-address, for the same reason that he doesn’t pub in HTML) will be delighted to send a few exemplar issues to anyone who writes him at 236 South Coronado Street, No. 409, Los Angeles, California 90057.

In repayment for your attention to this unpaid unpolitical advertisement, I will give serious consideration to any potential Hugo nominees conveyed to me via comments or otherwise. Members of Noreascon Four, last year’s World Science Fiction Convention, and all members of InterAction as of January 31, 2005, are eligible to submit nominations, which are due no later than midnight GMT, March 11, 2005.

Comments

[Eric Rasmusen]

Nice post-- even for someone like myself who has no connection to SF fandom.