update from Richad Lupoff: FFB: WHAT IF? Volumes 1 & 2, edited by Richard Lupoff--anthologies of stories that should've won the Hugo Award...

The Hugo Awards, of course, are (mostly) literary awards voted on by (shrinking fractions of the) membership of the WorldCons, the World SF Conventions held annually, most often but not always in the US. The first Science Fiction Achievement Awards, which early on were informally then formally renamed in honor of Hugo Gernsback, the founding editor and publisher of the first all-sf magazine Amazing Stories, beginning in 1926 (at least, the first such periodical that wasn't a "dime novel" series or mixed-intent "boy's paper" or the like), were awarded at the 1953 WorldCon, PhilCon II; the next were given in 1955 and in every year since, and soon were being awarded to no-bones-about-it fantasy stories such as Robert Bloch's "That Hell-Bound Train" (published 1958, awarded in 1959, the victor on one of the most crowded ballots in Hugo history, also featuring stories more fantasy than sf by Fritz Leiber and Manly Wade Wellman) (courtesy the Hugo Awards pages) :

Best Short Story

• “That Hell-Bound Train” by Robert Bloch [F&SF Sep 1958]
• “They’ve Been Working On …” by Anton Lee Baker [Astounding Aug 1958]
• “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester [F&SF Oct 1958]
• “Triggerman” by J. F. Bone [Astounding Dec 1958]
• “The Edge of the Sea” by Algis Budrys [Venture Mar 1958]
• “The Advent on Channel Twelve” by C. M. Kornbluth [Star Science Fiction Stories #4 (Ballantine), 1958]
• “Theory of Rocketry” by C. M. Kornbluth [F&SF Jul 1958]
• “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee” by Fritz Leiber [F&SF May 1958]
• “Space to Swing a Cat” by Stanley Mullen [Astounding Jun 1958]
• “Nine Yards of Other Cloth” by Manly Wade Wellman [F&SF Nov 1958]

So, given all the worthy shorter stories that languished (or even unworthy ones, as I suspect the entry above by the remarkably untalented Stanley Mullen to be), even by 1980, in relative obscurity, despite almost winning the most prominent award in fantastic fiction over the previous decades, Richard Lupoff's gathering stories that, he argued, should have won in their years was an utterly natural idea for an anthology, or even a short series, as Pocket Books put out the second volume a year after the first.  (Guest essayist Barry Malzberg, in his review for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, could only note as well how natural an idea for an anthology this was and to self-remonstrate for not making an effort to pitch the idea to a publisher before Lupoff did.) And, of course, an attempt to "right" historic "wrongs" and help preserve the literary legacy of fantastic fiction has since become an annual tradition at the conventions as well, the "Retro Hugos"...not yet a gleam in the Con Committees' eyes or agendae in 1980.

courtesy the Contento Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections:

What If? Volume 1 ed. Richard A. Lupoff (Pocket, Sep ’80, pb); subtitle: Stories That Should Have Won the Hugo

• · Earned Glory · Richard A. Lupoff · introduction
• · Firewater · William Tenn · na Astounding Feb ’52
• · Four in One · Damon Knight · nv Galaxy Feb ’53
• · The Golden Helix · Theodore Sturgeon · na Thrilling Wonder Stories Sum ’54
• · One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts · Shirley Jackson · ss F&SF Jan ’55
• · The Man Who Came Early · Poul Anderson · nv F&SF Jun ’56
• · The Mile-Long Spaceship · Kate Wilhelm · ss Astounding Apr ’57
• · Two Dooms · C. M. Kornbluth · na Venture Jul ’58

---

What If? Volume 2 ed. Richard A. Lupoff (Pocket, Feb ’81, pb)

• · My Aunt Cora · Richard A. Lupoff · introduction
• · The Pi Man · Alfred Bester · ss F&SF Oct ’59
• · The Lost Kafoozalum [Lizzie Lee] · Pauline Ashwell · na Analog Oct ’60
• · The Sources of the Nile · Avram Davidson · nv F&SF Jan ’61
• · Where Is the Bird of Fire? [Mellonia] · Thomas Burnett Swann · na Science-Fantasy #52 ’62
• · Stand-By [Jim Briskin] · Philip K. Dick · ss Amazing Oct ’63
• · Now Is Forever · Thomas M. Disch · ss Amazing Mar ’64
• · All the King’s Men · Barrington J. Bayley · nv New Worlds Mar ’65

There's not too much to quibble with in these slim volumes, aside from casting your own eyes back over the shortlists at the Hugo pages linked to above, and deciding which other nominees, as far as one is familiar with them, were robbed even more blatantly instead, if any were...there's not a story above that I don't agree is impressive or interesting at very least, though the Shirley Jackson story is only fantasy by fiat, being one of her most cheerful stories and utterly within the realm of "realistic" or contemporary-mimetic fiction...but, for some reason, Jackson's other, better-paying markets (women's magazines [which almost all still published fiction, including ambitious fiction, regularly], The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker) bounced it and Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas (the latter on his way out the door as co-editor) were more than happy to take it at F&SF, where it was neither the first nor certainly the last inclusion to be neither fantasy nor sf.  Kate Wilhelm, still productive, along with editor Lupoff (also still publishing interesting work) and the never terribly prolific Pauline Ashwell are the only contributors still with us, and all the contributors are perhaps less potent commercial "properties" now than they were in 1980 except for Philip Dick and Jackson and probably Wilhelm, whose crime-fiction career probably reached its peak in popularity so fat over the last decade or so...this true even given how Wilhelm's late husband Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" has passed into almost folkloric status (and is rarely credited properly), and his brilliant "Four-in-One" collected in Volume 1 was the demonstration subject in his reasonably popular Creating Short Fiction instructional volume. That Theodore Sturgeon's fine story managed to employ a helical metaphor before The Double Helix does as little to preserve his legacy as does for his Cyril Kornbluth's fine "The Marching Morons" being dumbed down without credit for the film Idiocracy, itself a commercial failure fading from the public memory; work as fine as "Two Dooms" will probably live on, with a coterie audience. 

Ah, well, FFB readers, you should seek out the work of everyone listed above, except Mullen (who was on this ballot, I'm sure, because he was a personally popular fan as well as improbably successful at selling terrible stories to fiction magazines) and perhaps (or perhaps not) Anton Lee Baker, whose work I don't know at all. And these books are excellent starting points, if you need such, and if you've missed these stories, you can do much worse and only a little better.

Patti Abbott has the links to other reviews this week here; Barry Malzberg's essay on New American Review (later American Review) is here; Richard Lupoff's contribution to FFB from a year or so back is here.

Update from Richard Lupoff:

Actually my contract with Timescape called for four volumes of What If? and the series was going so well that my editor (David Hartwell) asked me to extend the project to five volumes. However, the bean counters disagreed and the project was cancelled while Volume 3 was literally in press. My recollection is this: I received two letters from Pocket Books in the same day's mail. One was from the promotion department and contained an advance copy of the PW review, along with a congratulatory note on the glowing notice. The other was from David Hartwell, saying approximately:

    "I can sell more copies of a run-of-the-mill first novel by a totally unknown author than a collection of short stories by Theodore Sturgeon. Consequently, the What If series is dead."

    But I think that was just an advance temblor. Shortly after that the entire Timescape project was killed.

    Recently a set of galleys of Volume 3 turned up, as did a cover proof, an the book is now in production at Surinam Turtle Press, an imprint of Ramble House. www.ramblehouse.com  I'll attach a copy of the cover as it would have looked in 1982, Not sure what it will look like in 2013.

  

    Also attached, a preliminary draft cover to WRITER. a two-volume compendium of my nonfiction writings ("essays, memoirs, reviews") also coming from STP/Ramble House.

    Both What If and WRITER are tentatively scheduled for publication this September.

I'm also hoping to publish Carol Carr: The Collected Writings. Preliminary cover attached. Tentative publication schedule for Writer is September and for Carol Carr's book is October. Grania Davis's collection is in print now (officially) but I'm still waiting to receive my own first copy.

Tuesday's Overlooked A/V: JOURNEYMAN, KIDNAPPED and a Hugo Nominee...

Journeyman was one of the best science-fantasy series we've had so far, and NBC gave up on it after 13 episodes, because it was getting worse ratings than CSI Miami, an established series and part of a clangorous franchise, without trying it in any other timeslots or promoting it much. It starts well, with reporter Dan Vasser (played by Kevin McKidd) suddenly finding himself unstuck in time (to borrow Kurt Vonnegut's phrase), unsure at first if he's having delusional blackouts (his wife, Katie [Gretchen Egolf], is even more unsure). Turns out that he's not, and that he's become an involuntary time-traveler, apparently dumped at the space/time site of various snags in fairly recent history...one of the first of which takes him, apparently randomly, to an early waitressing gig of his late previous fiancee, Livia Beale (Moon Bloodgood, already a veteran in 2007 of another initially impressive timeslip series, Day Break). Vasser's brother, cop Jack (Reed Diamond), is as concerned as Katie, with matters complicated by Jack having been previously involved with Katie, before driving her away (and eventually to wed his brother). What made this series so impressive was not so much the originality of the materials, but the sophistication with which they were used; there's a deftness and solidity to both the human interaction and the fantasticated elements in the series that's rare in any fantastic drama, and they even managed to bring elements of the series to a satisfactory conclusion, if open-ended, at the end of the thirteen episodes they were able to do...all thirteen of which are accessible for free on Hulu and via IMDb's Hulu links.

From Crackle: Pilot

Kidnapped was an NBC orphan in the previous, 2006 season, a serialized drama using a modified Rashomon approach to the kidnapping of the adolescent son (Will Denton) of a wealthy couple (Dana Delany and Timothy Hutton), and the efforts of the parents, their daughter, the FBI, a private investigator also working the case, the kidnappers, various political figures behind the crime, and the young man himself to get by, get over, or get away. The first episode was unsurprisingly exposition-heavy, and rather more pedestrian and fraught than it needed to be, but as the series continues (and all the episodes are available, on DVD and on Crackle, as with the pilot above), the complexities and depth of the drama proliferate very satisfyingly, which unfortunately is not the best way to set up a heavily serialized drama (it helps if you're agressively good from jump, because it's going to be difficult for many viewers to jump in as the series goes along). This was certainly Delany's best series after China Beach, Hutton's best tv work along with Nero Wolfe, and eminently worth seeing through the early scene-setting, as it digs in and reaches a fine conclusion (again, a series that took into account that it might not ever get that "back nine" full-season order of episodes from the network).

And a rather remarkable parody of the Britneys and such, in the service of Very Cheekily celebrating Ray Bradbury, has been rather improbably nominated for the Hugo Award for Short Form Drama...so here's "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" for your delectation and possibly World SF Convention voting consideration...