Tag Archives: SFF

The Days When You Could Read Everything

Image captured from Amazon

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Periodically, I get emails from Reactor Magazine. I must have signed up for them once upon a time. I usually scan the article titles and then delete the email unless something especially captures my attention. After all, so much of science fiction and fantasy targets an audience other than me.

But today, I saw the article When Did SFF Get Too Big?. The subtitle is, “Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when readers stopped being able to keep up with their favorite genres?”

I didn’t know this had ever been an expectation. That is, I hadn’t realized that lovers of science fiction and fantasy were supposed to read each and every title produced in the genre in a given year. Especially if you’re talking about reading all these books just as they’re published (brand new), that’s a lot of money to shell out (maybe some will end up in the “New Titles” section of the public library, but still…). How do you know you’re going to like each and every book? What if you know that some authors generally produce dreck but keep getting published anyway?

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Retro Hugos, Dragons, and Why I Don’t Care (for the most part) About the Private Lives of Authors

family

© James Pyles – My brother, my parents, and me. I’m the one on the far left. Yes, I used to be thin. The photo was taken about 35 years ago.

Just when I thought I was done with the Hugo Awards and with all this year’s drama and trauma, I ended up reading Looking Forward on Looking Backwards at the Hugo Book Club Blog co-authored by Amanda Wakaruk and Olav Rokne. I don’t know which one of them I talk to on twitter, but they seem like pretty good people.

Anyway, the blog post focused on the Retro Hugos, which are sort of “lifetime achievement awards” for science fiction and fantasy authors who were active before the Hugo awards existed. Being an “older fellow,” I’ve read more than a few in my day, plus a lot of old school Hugo Award Winners. That is, science fiction Hugo winners before the Hugos (in my personal opinion) became less about the quality of a story and more about the “wokeness” of the tale and the writer (both being a necessity these days it seems).

To quote their blog in part:

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