Hugo.

I'm going to the Hugos!

Well, technically speaking I'm attending Worldcon, the annual World Science Fiction Convention, which is taking place in Seattle from August 13th to 17th of 2025 - but in my mind, I'm going to the Hugo Awards.  

In the process of researching a previous posting on the trials and tribulations being suffered by the Hugo Awards, I happened to notice that the 2025 Worldcon host city was Seattle, which is just a hop, step and a jump away from Vancouver.  As such, I decided to do a bit of a feasibility study on attending - given that plane tickets wouldn't be a factor in expenses.  

As it turned out, there's a reduced membership price for new attendees, which brought the price down to something somewhat reasonable, and I decided to go for it.  In addition, Seattle last hosted Worldcon in 1961, the year I was born, so there's a certain symmetry in attending its return to the Emerald City. 

I'm actually a bit giddy about it - it's like being a lifelong fan of the cinema who is not only going to the Oscars, but gets to vote on the winners as well. 

I've talked about the Hugo Awards - and the eponymous Hugo himself, Hugo Gernsback - in previous postings, but I haven't gone into a lot of detail about the process.

Worldcon is the original science fiction convention - the mother of all conventions, if you will.*  The first Worldcon took place in July of 1939, but the Hugos weren't part of the event until 1953, becoming an annual awards event in 1955.  I was surprised to learn that the official title of the awards is the Science Fiction Achievement Awards, I never knew them as anything other than the Hugos** - presumably I wasn't alone in this, as the awards were officially renamed as the Hugos in 1993. 

The Hugo voting process is a little odd. In order to vote, you need to be a member of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). But the WSFS doesn't really exist, it's just a mechanism for hosting Worldcons, and you become a member of the WSFS by buying a ticket to a Worldcon.

However, you don't have to attend to vote, and you can buy a cheaper non-attending membership which just lets you vote for the Hugo winners and choice of the hosting city two years hence. There's also a reduced price attending membership for new attendees, staff, and "individuals who would otherwise feel cost-constrained to attend the convention." In addition, if you buy your membership before January 31st, you also have the ability to make nominations for the awards. For anyone desiring to see a detailed breakdown of the process, I direct you to the Seattle Worldcon membership page for more information.

Suffice it to say that as a first time attendee who is very aware of the current exchange rate between USD and CAD, I opted for the reduced rate adult membership, which didn't seem to raise any red flags.

As a sign that the gods were smiling upon my trip, I also managed to find a downtown Seattle rental on VRBO that came in under a thousand dollars CAD for my six night stay - provided it's not a scam (it has ZERO reviews, never a good sign, but it's also a new listing) it's a great deal, not right in the back yard of the Seattle Convention Center but close enough to the Space Needle (and monorail) to make for a reasonable commute.

Note to self - pencil in a visit to the Infinite Worlds of Science Fiction at the MOPOP!

But wait - how does the Hugo awards ceremony work?  Is there a dinner?  If so, is it extra?  Do I need to wear a tux? Make a reservation?  Is it a cash bar? Fingers crossed for a robust FAQ...

But, for now, none of that matters - I'm going to the Hugos!

- Sid

* At this point, the shade of Sir Arthur C. Clarke appears to defend the first UK fan meeting, held in Leeds in 1937, in response to which American fans point to the 1936 Philadelphia fan meet-up with members of a New York group.  Regardless, Worldcon undeniably has the title of longest ongoing event, although there was a hiatus during World War II.  (And the 2020 event was done solely online due to COVID.)

**  Hey, trivia fans - apparently a fan named Bob Madle was the genius who suggested calling the new awards the Hugos.  Madle was also a founding member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, which hosted the 1939 Worldcon after the dissolution of the International Scientific Association by Donald A. Wollheim in 1937 following the collapse of the Science Fiction League, Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories-based group.  (When you start digging around on the Internet, you can end up doing some very deep dives...)

Flashback Friday.

It's been 15 years since I posted about the Voyage In Time website, which offered subscribers the opportunity to travel in time for a mere $18 investment (which, over time, would presumably grow to incalculable value and pay for the trip in a time machine).  

I happened to randomly revisit that posting today (mostly because I was looking for the Robert E. Howard post that came after it, and I wondered why I was asking people to pull on my leg in the preceding post) and I'm sorry to say that the Voyage In Time website is no longer active, and I was not able to find anything that seemed to be related after a search in Google™.

However, let's hope for the best.  I see by the screen grab that I did at the time that one Eugen Weingarten had purchased 10 time travel certificates 18 days earlier, suggesting someone who was willing to share his time travel experience with a reasonably wide circle of friends, relatives or both.  Eugen, if you somehow find this posting, please, PLEASE let us know if the site closed down after the successful development of time travel and a trip to the birth of the universe with you and nine other people!

We eagerly await your reply.

- Sid

Shrödinger's Bookstore.

The legacy of the pandemic shutdown has been surprisingly long-lived. More than a few stores that planned to temporarily shut down never re-opened, and more than a few also discovered that online sales and remote shopping were more lucrative options than they expected. 

And then there was Lawrence Books, a local used book store which closed their doors in March of 2020. When the veil began to lift in 2021, Lawrence failed to reopen, but there were no signs that the business had come to an end - signage remained in place, their sunfaded book display continued to decorate their windows, they just weren't open.  Like the cat in Shrödinger's famous mind experiment, the fate of the store was unknown.

As always, patience is its own reward.  Last week my wife Karli informed me that Lawrence Books had finally collapsed the quantum superposition by reopening*, albeit with a short three-day-a-week schedule, and I was finally able to pay them a visit this weekend.

Located at the corner of Dunbar and 41st,  Lawrence Books is very much an old school used book store: a maze of narrow aisles, unexpected nooks and dead ends, front stacked pine shelving**, and the unique smell of old paper in bulk.  It was obvious that the inventory had gone untouched for a while - when I found the Science Fiction section and started browsing, a few of the books were lightly stuck together.

I found a few things that were of interest - a few Ace Doubles in acceptable condition, a couple of replacement texts for my collection - but nothing extraordinary, nothing unique, which is really what every used book shopper hopes to stumble across. 

However, on my way to the till, I took a quick look at the minimal Fantasy selection and spotted a somewhat worn copy of the 1979 fantasy novel Urshurak, which I instantly added to my handful of purchases. It may not qualify as extraordinary, but it's a book that I've been aware of for a long time without ever having a chance to read it. 

Urshurak is one of those books that is famous more because of its back story than the novel itself. The concept was the brainchild of legendary genre artists Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, better known as the Brothers Hildebrandt.

As visual artists, the Brothers Hildebrandt came to Urshurak with a unique perspective.  Heavily influenced by Tolkien, they wanted to create their own version of Middle Earth, but based their story in art rather than text, creating a diverse and detailed portfolio showcasing the characters and key plot moments from their narrative.

When the project failed to attract any attention (or funding) as a live action film property, it was briefly promoted as an animated option, but ultimately ended up as an illustrated novel written in collaboration with author Jerry Nichols, with both coloured plates and black-and-white sketches of the original concept art integrated into the text.  I'm curious to finally take a look at the result - I don't think of Jerry Nichols as a well-known name in the science fiction and fantasy world, but there are a lot of authors out there, it's not hard to imagine that I could have just missed Mr. Nichols over time.

A final note to potential shoppers: the store's payment terminal was down when I went to pay for my books, which led to a quick game of find the banking machine (my personal pandemic holdover is that I no longer carry cash).  In spite of the sales person's information, there is not actually a cash machine at the nearby Save-On-Foods, and the machine at the Shell station across the street from Lawrence's took two attempts to accept my card - plan accordingly.

- Sid

* Well, actually she just told me that they were open again, I don't think Karli viewed it as a quantum physics situation.

** Why is it that so many used bookstores feature unfinished pine bookshelves? Is it purely a case of economy, or is there something about not having lacquer fumes near pulpwood paper that I don't know about?