@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society 04/29/16 -- Vol. 34, No. 43, Whole Number 1908
Table of Contents
Hugo and Retro Hugo Award Finalists Announced:
The list of Hugo and Retro Hugo Finalists appears at the end of this issue of the MT VOID.
Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups, Films, Lectures, etc. (NJ):
May 12: LOST HORIZON (1937) and novel by James Hilton, Middletown (NJ) Public Library, 5:30PM May 26: "E for Effort" by T. L. Sherred and "Earthman, Come Home" by James Blish (both in SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME 2B), Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library, 7PM Garden State Spec. Fiction Writers Lectures (subject to change): May 7: Hank Quense, Using Parody to Create Humorous and Satiric Fiction, Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library, 12N June 4: Fran Wilde, Worldbuilding in the Air, Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library, 12N July 9: Michael Swanwick, Building Stories, Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library, 12N August: TBD, Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library, 12N September 10: Ellen Datlow, The State of Horror, Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library, 12N Northern New Jersey events are listed at: http://www.sfsnnj.com/news.html
English She Is Funny (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
A cubist is an advocate of cubism.
A socialist is an advocate of socialism.
A fascist is an advocate of fascism.
So is an artist an advocate of artism?
Is a rheumatist an advocate of rheumatism?
[-mrl]
INVISIBLE MAN APPEARS (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
There is a rare Japanese science fiction film on YouTube at the moment. The film is INVISIBLE MAN APPEARS (1949). Made just about halfway between Hiroshima and GOJIRA it combines the familiar plot of the Universal THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933) and a second plot about jewel thieves. I am not saying it is a really good film, but it is unusual as a science fiction film made in Japan before GOJIRA. It was produced by Daiei Studios who later made the Daimajin and the Gamera film. The special effects technology is just about at the same level it was with the 1933 film. See it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtvnYMh3rYo. [-mrl]
FANAC History Project on YouTube (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
"FANAC.org has launched the FANAC Fan History Project YouTube channel with a few choice items. The first videos are from MagiCon, the 50th World SF Convention, in Orlando Florida in 1992. These include Ted White's Interview with Fan Guest of Honor Walt Willis, and the Isaac Asimov Memorial panel."
The channel is available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbp3AN0f2gEcBZJwKTff-Og."
They have since also uploaded the MagiCon Memories of the First Worldcon, the SunCon Hugo Awards Banquet from 1977, and the Conadian Worldcon Opening Ceremonies from 1994.
[-ecl]
My Picks for Turner Classic Movies for May (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
We are coming to a new month and time for me to make suggestions as to what little-known films can I recommend on Turner Classic Movies. There is one film that probably would be forgotten if sources like TCM and New York's Film Forum did not keep it alive by periodically showing it. This is the film CHANG. By itself CHANG is not of any great historic value. But anybody who is a fan of KING KONG will be interested to see the two films' close relationship. Rather than describe the film here let me just repeat an article I originally wrote on the film a few years back. (25? Really?) CHANG will show on TCM, Friday, May 27 at 7:15 AM. At 8:30 AM TCM will show THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, a film made in parallel with KING KONG sharing some of the same scenery including glass paintings to give a nice jungle feel. MOST DANGEROUS GAME and KING KONG share the acting talents of Fay Wray, Noble Johnson, Robert Armstrong and visual effects by Marcel Delgado. (There seems to be a small contradiction in that earlier film says that there is a hunting game more dangerous than hunting giant ape or dinosaur. ) Anyway...
CHANG, Father of Kong
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Do you remember Carl Denham from KING KONG? You remember all the references to the fearless filmmaker? If he wanted a picture of a lion he just set up his camera and told it to look pleasant. He was the guy who made those pictures "with those darling monkeys." He had to crank the camera himself because the wild animals terrified any real cameraman he could get. He had bad memories of running afoul of the monsoons and all the money it cost with nothing to show for it. Then he shot a swell picture and the critics said it would gross twice as much if it had love interest. If all that seems to be a little too much for one man, it was. Carl Denham was based on two men, each crazier than the other in a partnership that always did bring in a picture. The men were Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack who would later make KING KONG, but earlier made three high adventure films together, setting up their cameras in some of the remotest corners of the world under what today seems like incredibly dangerous conditions. The adventure films they made were GRASS, CHANG, and RANGO. CHANG was the one that the critics claimed would have grossed twice as much with love interest. Now CHANG has been resurrected and is playing in a limited set of theaters, and it is all just as described, darling monkeys and all. Watching it casts a great deal of light on how KING KONG came to be made.
It was in 1926 and 1927 that CHANG was made in the jungles of Northern Thailand. It was there that Cooper and Schoedsack ran afoul of the Thai monsoon and found themselves with "months gone and money lost and nothing to show for it" before getting started on CHANG. When the film was made it was a fairly simple story. Lao tribespeople Kru and Chantui, their children Nah and Ladah, and an unnamed infant live in the jungle where all there is are, as one of the titles tell us, "men have never seen a film, animals have never known the fear of a modern rifle, and the jungle." Along with the family and providing the comic relief is Bimbo, the pet gibbon. Bimbo has arms longer than his body from head to foot. While the narrative titles tell us in the third person about the other members of the family, Bimbo is given lines of dialog (or is it monolog?). Bimbo's commentaries tell us what is going on. But, even apart from the odd pet, this is not quite a typical Lao family. Most of the Lao live together in a sort of rough village. Kru has built his family home deeper in the jungle. This takes courage since it means Kru must always live in fear of and fight the animals of the jungle.
The first real enemy we see is the leopard who preys on Kru's goats. In one night a whole family of goats is reduced to one surviving kid. Kru makes the walls of the goat pen high enough to stop a leopard. Not to keep a leopard out, but to keep one in. Kru makes a trap with the last kid as bait, hopefully safe in a wooden cage inside the pen. The leopard comes at night for the goat and finds the door open. He enters looking for the goat and releases a catch. Suddenly the feline hunter finds himself the prey.
Next Kru faces a tiger and needs to call on the men of the village to help him. This filming of this sequence is particularly exciting and making the film must have been more exciting still. The tiger can be seen charging directly at the camera at least once. This is not tame tiger either. This is a man-killer running directly at the man turning the crank on the camera. Even today the scenes of the tigers filmed at close range are startling. In the story Kru's answer to the tiger is traps--more clever traps this time, however. There are snares, pitfalls, and a deadfall. This time the threat is much more of a challenge and evades several of the traps before being caught.
When the tigers are finally killed, even then there is no peace. The precious rice crop is destroyed and huge footprints are left indicating that the damage was done by the most dangerous animal of the jungle. Have you ever heard of "Chang"? It is a chang that has destroyed the rice crop. A pitfall is dug and sure enough it catches the terror of the jungle, or at least a small version. After some struggle, out of the pitfall is pulled a baby elephant. The chang is taken and tied to one of the legs of Kru's stilted house. (This in spite of Bimbo's presentiment that it is a bad move. Bimbo does not like the chang's nose.) In a sequence perhaps reminiscent of GORGO, Mama Elephant comes and frees the baby. And for good measure she knocks over Kru's house. As Cooper later said "I knew she would get the baby loose, but I didn't know she was going to tear down the house." So then that was how the plot of the film was amended. Kru's house is destroyed by the mother elephant in the story because Kru's house was destroyed by the mother elephant in real life. In Carl Denham fashion Cooper and Schoedsack got the camera running whenever they could and then decided how the footage would be used, rewriting the plot to fit the footage.
Kru returns to the village to tell them that after 50 years the Great Herd of elephants has returned to this part of the forest. It is difficult to face hard reality and the villagers prefer to laugh at Kru. The laugh is short-lived, however. Out of the jungle come literally hundreds of elephants--a wall of crushing meat. ("Hundreds" is no hyperbole, by the way. CHANG cost $60,000 and fully half of that went to lease a 300-elephant herd from Prince Yugula, brother to Rama VII, the King of Siam.) Not surprisingly all the villagers run. But wait. Right in the path of the elephants is a crying baby sitting on the ground. With the child not more than a few feet from being crushed, the child is swept up by a running parent. But as we watch the entire village is flattened. Can anything stop the herd? That would be telling. And it really would be telling because the nature dramas of this time were not constrained to have happy "Hollywood" endings.
Another aspect of the filming of CHANG may have affected the plotting of KING KONG. In the classic fantasy film the natives of the island lived in fear of the great jungle animal. Then the American adventurers/filmmakers came along and rid them of the terrible animal just as a by-product of a film they were making. That actually happened in the making of CHANG. The Lao villagers lived in terror of the great tiger they called "Mr. Crooked." As Goldner and Turner report in The Making of King Kong, the tiger's tracks "had been found at many a scene of tragedy." Well, the two filmmakers needed tigers to film. They rounded up and trapped the tigers they needed. Among the ones that were trapped was the fearful Mr. Crooked. Before the making of CHANG, the tigers took a serious toll of the population of Nan province. After rounding up the tigers for no other reason than to film, the death toll from tigers was cut to one-third of the previous total. The terror of the jungle (or say, two-thirds of it) was taken in chains to provide entertainment for American audiences.
It is not difficult to find touches in CHANG that were reused in KING KONG. Some should be obvious from the above description. There are more scenes that appeared almost the same in KING KONG. When some of the animals are caught behind a trap we see a gate close on them and a massive tree trunk used as a sliding wooden bolt to lock it. And there are scenes of battles with lizards and snakes much as similar scenes would be used in KING KONG. It is not hard to visualize the early concepts of KING KONG as being a film almost too similar to CHANG. The original plan, it should be remembered, was to use a live gorilla and only when that became obviously infeasible did Cooper and Schoedsack start looking at other ways to show a gorilla on the screen. It is easy to see them planning an almost-remake with the lizards and snakes of the jungles ruled over by the king gorilla, KONG. (Note that like "Chang" really is the Lao's word for elephant, "Kong" really is the word for "gorilla" in some language that Cooper and Schoedsack found.) When using a live gorilla became impossible and the filmmakers saw what Willis O'Brien's stop motion photography could do, they immediately started thinking of bigger snakes, bigger lizards, and a much, much bigger gorilla.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
CHANG has been unavailable for years prior to the recent restoration. Its current release to art houses casts new light not only on the making of KING KONG, but also on a nearly forgotten chapter of film history.
(Facts in this article were taken from multiple sources, in particular the above-mentioned THE MAKING OF KING KONG. Additional information came from the article "Wild Thing" by Georgia Brown from the "Village Voice," April 9, 1991 and "Trouble in Paradise" by J. Hoberman, "Premiere," May 1991.)
[-mrl]
SACRIFICE (film review by Mark R. Leeper):
CAPSULE: SACRIFICE has a few tense moments and a few ideas borrowed from better-made films, notably THE WICKER MAN. But there is not a lot for an experienced horror fan. An obstetrician and her husband move to the Shetland Islands and begin to find clues that something sinister is happening on the islands. Radha Mitchell, veteran of several horror films, stars as doctor acting as detective to get to the bottom of the deaths of women and babies on the island. The middle section of the film is a bit protracted, but overall the film is at least polished. Instead of some real horror, which we are told about rather than shown, the film has the tone of "Masterpiece Mystery". Peter A. Dowling adapted the novel by Sharon Bolton and has now directed it on the screen. Special notice should be given to David Grennan's photography of the islands. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
SACRIFICE is a medical thriller that frequently appears inspired by THE WICKER MAN and perhaps THE STEPFORD WIVES. Borrowing from a film as strong and as vital as THE WICKER MAN sets the bar almost impossibly high for making a film at all similar a good experience. SACRIFICE cannot possibly pay back enough for what it borrows. Peter A. Dowling directs the film from his screen adaptation of a novel by Sharon Bolton.
Obstetrician Tora Hamilton (played by Radha Mitchell) desperately wants a baby of her own, but cannot bring a baby of her own to term. After a miscarriage she decides to simplify her lifestyle. She retreats with her husband Duncan (Rupert Graves) to the Shetland Islands where her husband is from one of the first families. Tora's father-in-law believes he can arrange for Tora to adopt a baby right on the islands.
Tora is not on the island long when a dead body is found in a bog that may have preserved it for just a short time or for decades or even longer. Tora's background in medicine tells her much about the body that the police did not see. For one thing, the body had given birth a week or so just before the killing. And in a bizarre touch the police did not catch, the body was carved with runic symbols. Tora is intrigued and begins her own investigation. This constitutes a good first act of the thriller. Sadly, the second act is slow and mostly constitutes a surprisingly prosaic investigation with long sequences of Tora sneaking down stairways and around hallways.
The viewer gets little more information than is necessary to tantalize the viewer. The killing of the dead woman fits in surprisingly close to legends from the area. Could this be a revival of very old and barbaric customs on the Shetland Islands or could there be a more recent origin of the crimes? Tora is determined to find out. Along the way she learns of the misogynistic attitudes and practices that once were once common on the island and still hang on by tradition. There are also hints of demonic fairies, the Trows, that were believed in on the Shetlands.
The film builds to some medium-surprising reversals toward the end, but not strongly enough to pay off for the viewer. This is a film that has potential to be an effective piece of horror, but it is kept rather prosaic in spite of what could have been intriguing ideas. There are times the viewer might not be sure where the story is going, but none of the places are all that interesting. If you are going to borrow from a film as good as THE WICKER MAN, at least make the borrowing worthwhile, fresh, and new. I rate SACRIFICE a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10. SACRIFICE will be shown at the IFC Center in New York on April 29. It will be released to DVD and VOD that same day.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2078718/combined
What others are saying: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/771440507/
[-mrl]
Passover (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
In response to various comments on Passover in the 04/22/16 issue of the MT VOID, Evelyn writes:
People might find this interesting:
http://tinyurl.com/void-rabbis-bless-marijuana
Project Breakthrough Starshot (letters of comment by Peter Trei and Philip Chee):
In response to Mark's comments on Project Breakthrough Starshot in the 04/22/16 issue of the MT VOID, Peter Trei writes:
This sounds insanely ambitious, but there's some smart people behind it.
The thing I find most astounding is the claim that we'll be able to detect a 1-Watt laser signal at interstellar distances.
The politics of building a 100-GW launch laser system could be interesting. It's planned to be put it in the Atacama desert, not in orbit. That at least means it can't be pointed at a ground target without a mirror. However, at 60kW/m^2 brightness, it could take out anything in orbit--in fact, it could double as an Anti- Asteroid Defense Laser (maybe the far side of the Moon is a better location).
Another problem is power--100 GW is about 10 large power stations, but its actually worse, since lasers aren't 100% efficient--even the best IR diodes are only 64%. This means your laser array is going to need a *lot* of cooling.
This is worth keeping an eye on. [-pt]
And Philip Chee writes:
After you launch your starshot, you still have a working 100 Giga- watt laser array on your hands. This sort of makes certain governments paranoid. There was a story arc in Justice League Unlimited which dealt with the aftermath following the JLA using their multi-giga-watt thingy to defeat an alien invasion. [-pc]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
The lists of Hugo Award finalists and Retro Hugo Award finalists follows this column, and I have a few comments.
First, the Retro Hugos:
I was (pleasantly) surprised to see Jorge Luis Borges get nominated for "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". This is the first non-English work to be nominated for its first appearance in its original language (1940) rather than for its first English translation (1961). Its uniqueness lasted only about five minutes, though, because KALLOCAIN by Karin Boye is a Swedish novel whose first English translation did not appear until 1966. A. E. Van Vogt's nomination for SLAN came on his birthday--how appropriate!
I'm not sure if Heinlein's six nominations in one year is a record.
The good news is that most of the fiction finalists are readily available. (Buying Heinlein's THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW gets you five finalists right away.) Several are now parts of longer works. The two de Camp & Pratt form THE INCOMPLETE ENCHANTER, the White is the third section of THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, and the Williamson was expanded into a novel. (In fact, it is probably the most difficult to find in the nominated form.)
The one category which got the biggest reaction was Fan Writer. It was not that H. P. Lovecraft is persona non grata these days, it is that in 1940 he was persona non viva, which is to say that he had already been dead for three years. Arkham House published nothing by Lovecraft in 1940, so it is not a collection from them that makes him eligible. It turns out that a search in GoogleBooks shows a citation in H. P. LOVECRAFT CRITICISM: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY by S. T. Joshi for "Defining the 'Ideal' Paper" having appeared in "The National Amateur", 62, No. 3, June 1940, as part of an essay by Babcock, Lovecraft, and Edkins. Wikipedia's bibliography lists this as a 1936 work. I *think* I trust Joshi more, but this is a very iffy qualification for the Retro.
As for Dramatic Presentation, "long" and "short" had different meanings in 1940, so what were considered feature films then end up (quite correctly by the rules) in the "short" category. So the eighty-one-minute-long INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS and the eighty-eight- minute-long PINOCCHIO ends up in the "Short Form". In general, the choices are reasonable, though I wonder if people just did not think of THE GREAT DICTATOR.
And now the regular Hugos:
Apparently the Puppy slates were more effective in some categories (e.g., Novelette, Short Story, and Editor (Long Form)) than others (e.g. Novel, Dramatic Presentations).
There were 4032 valid nominating ballots, a new record by a huge margin. When even the Fan Artist category gets over a thousand ballots, you know that a tipping point has been reached.
Apparently I was wrong when I said that Andy Weir was not eligible for the Campbell Award. THE MARTIAN was published as a Kindle ebook in September 2012, but this is evidently not considered a "professional sale" for JWC purposes. [-ecl]
Hugo Finalists 2016 (for work from 2015):
There were 4032 valid nominating ballots.
BEST NOVEL (3695 ballots)
ANCILLARY MERCY by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
THE CINDER SPIRES: THE AERONAUT'S WINDLASS by Jim Butcher (Roc)
THE FIFTH SEASON by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
SEVENEVES: A NOVEL by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow)
UPROOTED by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
BEST NOVELLA (2416 ballots)
"Binti" by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)
"The Builders" by Daniel Polansky (Tor.com)
"Penric's Demon" by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum)
"Perfect State" by Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel
Entertainment)
"Slow Bullets" by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon)
BEST NOVELETTE (1975 ballots)
"And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead"
by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed, Feb2015)
"Flashpoint: Titan" by CHEAH Kai Wai (There Will Be War
Volume X, Castalia House)
"Folding Beijing" by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu
(Uncanny Magazine, Jan-Feb 2015)
"Obits" by Stephen King (The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Scribner)
"What Price Humanity?" by David VanDyke (There Will Be War
Volume X, Castalia House)
BEST SHORT STORY (2451 ballots)
"Asymmetrical Warfare" by S. R. Algernon (Nature, Mar 2015)
The Commuter by Thomas A. Mays (Stealth)
"If You Were an Award, My Love" by Juan Tabo and S. Harris
(voxday.blogspot.com, Jun 2015)
"Seven Kill Tiger" by Charles Shao (There Will Be War Volume X,
Castalia House)
Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle (Amazon Digital
Services)
BEST RELATED WORK (2080 ballots)
BETWEEN LIGHT AND SHADOW: AN EXPLORATION OF THE FICTION OF
GENE WOLFE, 1951 TO 1986 by Marc Aramini (Castalia House)
"The First Draft of My Appendix N Book" by Jeffro Johnson
(jeffro.wordpress.com)
"Safe Space as Rape Room" by Daniel Eness (castaliahouse.com)
SJWS ALWAYS LIE: TAKING DOWN THE THOUGHT POLICE by Vox Day
(Castalia House)
"The Story of Moira Greyland" by Moira Greyland
(askthebigot.com)
BEST GRAPHIC STORY (1838 ballots)
The Divine written by Boaz Lavie, art by Asaf Hanuka and
Tomer Hanuka (First Second)
Erin Dies Alone written by Grey Carter, art by Cory Rydell
(dyingalone.net)
Full Frontal Nerdity by Aaron Williams (ffn.nodwick.com)
Invisible Republic Vol 1 written by Corinna Bechko and
Gabriel Hardman, art by Gabriel Hardman (Image Comics)
The Sandman: Overture written by Neil Gaiman, art by
J.H. Williams III (Vertigo)
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (LONG FORM) (2904 ballots)
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON
EX MACHINA
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
THE MARTIAN
STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (SHORT FORM) (2219 ballots)
DOCTOR WHO: "Heaven Sent"
GRIMM: "Headache"
JESSICA JONES: "AKA Smile"
MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC: "The Cutie Map" Parts
1 and 2
SUPERNATURAL: "Just My Imagination"
BEST EDITOR (SHORT FORM) (1891 ballots)
John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Ellen Datlow
Jerry Pournelle
Sheila Williams
BEST EDITOR (LONG FORM) (1764 ballots)
Liz Gorinsky
Vox Day
Sheila E. Gilbert
Jim Minz
Toni Weisskopf
BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST (1481 ballots)
Lars Braad Andersen
Larry Elmore
Abigail Larson
Michal Karcz
Larry Rostant
BEST SEMIPROZINE (1457 ballots)
BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES edited by Scott H. Andrews,
Nicole Lavigne, and Kate Marshall
DAILY SCIENCE FICTION edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and
Jonathan Laden
SCI PHI JOURNAL edited by Jason Rennie
STRANGE HORIZONS edited by Catherine Krahe, Julia Rios,
A. J. Odasso, Vanessa Rose Phin,Maureen Kincaid Speller,
and the Strange Horizons staff
UNCANNY MAGAZINE edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael
Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, and Erika Ensign
& Steven Schapansky
BEST FANZINE (1455 ballots)
BLACK GATE edited by John O'Neill
CASTALIA HOUSE BLOG edited by Jeffro Johnson
FILE 770 edited by Mike Glyer
SUPERVERSIVE SF edited by Jason Rennie
TANGENT ONLINE edited by Dave Truesdale
BEST FANCAST (1267 ballots)
8-4 Play, Mark MacDonald, John Ricciardi, Hiroko Minamoto, and
Justin Epperson
Cane and Rinse, Cane and Rinse
HelloGreedo, HelloGreedo
The Rageaholic, RazorFist
Tales to Terrify, Stephen Kilpatrick
BEST FAN WRITER (1568 ballots)
Douglas Ernst
Mike Glyer
Morgan Holmes
Jeffro Johnson
Shamus Young
BEST FAN ARTIST (1073 ballots)
Matthew Callahan
Christian Quinot
disse86
Kukuruyo
Steve Stiles
JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER (1922 ballots)
Pierce Brown *
Sebastien de Castell *
Brian Niemeier
Andy Weir *
Alyssa Wong *
* Finalists in their 2nd year of eligibility.
Retro Hugo Finalists 2016 (for work in 1940):
There were 481 valid nominating ballots.
BEST NOVEL (352 ballots)
GRAY LENSMAN by E.E. "Doc" Smith (Astounding Science-Fiction,
Jan 1940)
THE ILL-MADE KNIGHT by T.H. White (Collins)
KALLOCAIN by Karin Boye (Bonnier)
THE REIGN OF WIZARDRY by Jack Williamson (Unknown, Mar 1940)
SLAN by A.E. Van Vogt (Astounding Science-Fiction, Dec 1940)
BEST NOVELLA (318 ballots)
"Coventry" by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science-Fiction,
July 1940)
"If This Goes On..." by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science-
Fiction, Feb 1940)
"Magic, Inc." by Robert A. Heinlein (Unknown, Sept 1940)
"The Mathematics of Magic" by L. Sprague de Camp and
Fletcher Pratt (Unknown, Aug 1940)
"The Roaring Trumpet" by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
(Unknown, May 1940)
BEST NOVELETTE (310 ballots)
"Blowups Happen" by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding
Science-Fiction, Sept 1940)
"Darker Than You Think" by Jack Williamson (Unknown, Dec 1940)
"Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates (Astounding
Science-Fiction, Oct 1940)
"It!" by Theodore Sturgeon (Unknown, Aug 1940)
"The Roads Must Roll" by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding
Science-Fiction, June 1940)
BEST SHORT STORY (324 ballots)
"Martian Quest" by Leigh Brackett (Astounding Science-Fiction,
Feb 1940)
"Requiem" by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science-Fiction,
Jan 1940)
"Robbie" by Isaac Asimov (Super Science Stories, Sept 1940)
"The Stellar Legion" by Leigh Brackett (Planet Stories,
Winter 1940)
"Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges (Sur, 1940)
BEST GRAPHIC STORY (92 ballots)
Batman #1 (Detective Comics, Spring 1940)
Captain Marvel: "Introducing Captain Marvel" by Bill Parker and
C. C. Beck (Whiz Comics #2, Feb 1940)
Flash Gordon: "The Ice Kingdom of Mongo" by Alex Raymond and
Don Moore (King Features Syndicate, Apr 1940)
The Origin of the Spirit by Will Eisner (Register and Tribune
Syndicate, June 1940)
The Spectre: "The Spectre"/"The Spectre Strikes!" by Jerry
Siegel and Bernard Baily (More Fun Comics #52/53,
Feb/Mar 1940)
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (LONG FORM) (250 ballots)
DR. CYCLOPS
FANTASIA
FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE
ONE MILLION B.C.
THE THIEF OF BAGDAD
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (SHORT FORM) (123 ballots)
THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN: "The Baby from Krypton" (WOR)
THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS (Universal Pictures)
LOONEY TUNES: "You Ought to Be in Pictures" (Warner Bros.)
MERRIE MELODIES: "A Wild Hare" (Warner Bros.)
PINOCCHIO (Walt Disney Productions, RKO Radio Pictures)
BEST EDITOR (SHORT FORM) (183 ballots)
John W. Campbell
Dorothy McIlwraith
Raymond A. Palmer
Frederik Pohl
Mort Weisinger
BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST (117 ballots)
Hannes Bok
Margaret Brundage
Edd Cartier
Virgil Finlay
Frank R. Paul
Hubert Rogers
Note: Category has 6 finalists due to a tie for 5th place.
BEST FANZINE (63 ballots)
Futuria Fantasia by Ray Bradbury
Le Zombie by Bob Tucker
Novacious by Forrest J Ackerman and Morojo
Spaceways by Harry Warner, Jr.
Voice of the Imagi-Nation by Forrest J Ackerman and Morojo
BEST FAN WRITER (70 ballots)
Forrest J Ackerman
Ray Bradbury
H. P. Lovecraft
Bob Tucker
Harry Warner
Mark Leeper
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