Charles Nikki (“Charlie”) Brown, who died in his sleep last night, is the only person for whom a Hugo Award category was created.
In 1968 he co-founded Locus, a tiny zine intended to disseminate news about the science fiction world in general and the Boston in 1971 Worldcon bid in particular. The Worldcon came and went, but Locus didn’t depart with it. Charlie kept it going, with expanding frequency and coverage, the opposite of the normal fanzine trajectory. In 1970, it got a Hugo nomination for Best Fanzine. In 1971 it won, and in 1972 and 1976, and then in 1978, 1979,
The victory streak wasn’t unprecedented. What did have no parallel was the obvious mismatch between the winner and the also-rans. By the late 1970's, Locus was the indispensable news source for fans, writers, artists, publishers, in fact for everybody who wanted to keep up with what was happening in literary SF. Monthly issues, crammed with data, appeared on time and on newsstands. In short, while Charlie was clearly a fan, and his intention was to serve a fannish need, his enterprise was to a fanzine as Napoleon’s Grande Armée to Frederick Jahn’s anti-French gymnastics clubs.
No one (well, almost no one) wished to deprive Charlie of the opportunity to win Hugos. Fandom sensed that this incentive was one of the spurs that kept Locus going. On the other hand, its only likely competition came from other zines with similarly serious and responsible outlooks. “Best Fanzine” would be an odd name for a category in which no guy cutting stencils in his basement had a chance to win.
Thus was born the awkwardly named “Semi-Prozine” category, first presented in 1984. The criteria for semi-pro status were designed to fit Locus. Other publications fell into it, too, a couple in deliberate imitation, so it wasn’t just a “Best Charlie Brown” Hugo. Against reasonably stiff competition (such as Andy Porter’s late, lamented Science Fiction Chronicle and, more recently, Interzone, The New York Review of Science Fiction and Ansible), Locus won 21 times. Naturally, it’s on this year’s ballot, which means that it could win the very last Best Semi-Prozine Hugo; for a WSFS constitutional amendment to abolish the category passed its first reading last year and is up for ratification at the Montreal Worldcon.
Any marketing consultant could have told Charlie that he was doing everything wrong. All that Locus purveys is information, crowded into dense pages of type, whereas the cognoscenti know that the contemporary reader yearns for flashy graphics, stylish layouts, breezy prose, and only those facts and figures that he can easily digest. The marketer would have recommended something on the lines of People, Sci-Fi Edition. That’s a couple of parsecs from what Locus offers.
Over the past several years, as he grew older and less mobile, Charlie, by his own report, delegated more and more of the day-to-day work on the magazine to his staff. He remained active, however, both as a publisher and as a fan. It was fitting that he died while returning home from a science fiction convention.
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