More retro than other Hugos

smofbabe has linked to a series of articles by Howard Waldrop on the Retro-Hugos being given by this year's Worldcon for the best sf of 1953.

It reminded me, again, that the only real virtues of the Retro-Hugos are 1) to give a long-overdue pat on the back to some worthy alte kochers who've survived this long, or their relatives if they haven't; 2) to give folks like Howard an excuse to write entertainingly about the sf of 1953. As an award, I think they're a bad idea, and I always have thought that. True, I administered the first Retro Hugos myself, but I thought they were a bad idea, not a mortal sin, ok?

Howard discusses at length one problem with the Retros, which is that the whole basis on which you consider the value of a work at 50 years' distance is different from that used when the work is new. The whole voting population is different as well.

He only alludes to a problem I consider even more serious: Where's The Demolished Man on the 1954 [for work of 1953] Retro ballot?, he asks. It's usually considered a 1953 book, as that was the year of its book publication. Well, it had already won the real 1953 Hugo, having been serialized in Galaxy in 1952. On this year's Retro ballot we have The Caves of Steel, which is a 1954 book, but it had been serialized in Galaxy in 1953, so that's all right.

But not quite. The minor problem is that, by voting on a book by its serialized publication date, you're theoretically voting on the magazine text, which is not always the same as the book text we're all familiar with.

The major problem is not with these examples, but only in the allusion: the early Hugos didn't use calendar year as its eligibility period; the Retro Hugos rigidly do. For instance, we can't give Retro Hugos for work of 1954, because the 1955 Worldcon already did. But it didn't! Both of the short fiction winners that year were published in magazine issues dated 1955. In those days the Hugos were just vaguely for work of the previous year, and at Labor Day of 1955 nobody was asking too hard whether "previous year" meant "1954" or "half of '54 and half of '55".

Then there's the problem which Howard also mentions in passing, that categories are created by literary warrant, and today's categories fit a little oddly with the literary warrant of a bygone age. Feature films in Dramatic Presentation Short Form? Separating them out from things like Chuck Jones cartoons was part of the reason DP was split in the first place. Oh well.

All of these problems are the result of trying to slot in Retros at years that the current Hugos missed, right next to the years they didn't. We're trying to park a gleaming new aircraft carrier at a decrepit old dock meant for little fishing boats. It would have been better to just institute a new retrospective award, not calling it the Hugos (a name which would never have been newly applied now anyway), as a one shot effort covering three broad time categories - the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s - and blithely ignoring whether anything eligible had ever won a Hugo or not.