Hugo definitions of the past

Got another batch of the usual year-old Vanamonde from John Hertz. Oh, look, A.J. Budrys died. No. 822 of 2/25/09 includes a letter of mine referring to a comment a year earlier which in turn refers to a question over a decade old even then. John is a skilled trimmer of letters, but just in case it might be desired to have the whole thing out there, here's my uncut observations:

Whether the film Apollo 13 was eligible for a Hugo Award as Best Dramatic Presentation is more problematic than you imply. You state that “it wasn’t fiction,” but in fact it contained dialogue, episodes, and entire subplots (the hostility between Haise and Swigert and its resolution) that were frankly invented for dramatic purposes. As with many other films based on historical events, it occupies a space on the fact-to-fiction continuum rarely seen in print. Though the film is based on a memoir by Lovell that contains reconstructed as well as transcribed dialogue, had Lovell’s memoir contained as much invention as the script did, publishers might have been uneasy to classify it as non-fiction, and if written as a narrative by other persons – as the film script in fact was – it would, I think, have to have been considered an unusually strictly fact-based historical novel.

In fact I would say that almost every acted film (as opposed to a documentary), no matter how historically veracious, can in practice be considered fiction by these standards. The only exception I can think of was a television program consisting of actors – if indeed they were professional actors and not simply readers – reading aloud verbatim the released transcripts of the Watergate tapes, in an attempt to restore the unavailable tapes to sound form for public edification. Lacking even stage directions, it contained no literary or dramatic invention by the filmmakers whatever. (And no artistic merit either.)

Once Apollo 13 is considered fiction, whether it is therefore science fiction is another question. Not all fiction concerning technology is science fiction. But my opinion is that anything which would have been unquestionably science fiction, if written as a story at an earlier date well within the memory of many persons living at the time of the film, qualifies as SF by the spirit of a field one of whose leading magazines once bore the slogan, “Extravagant Fiction Today, Cold Fact Tomorrow.”

But both of these questions have enough subtleties and subjective points that, as the Hugo Administrator responsible for either letting Apollo 13 on the ballot or forbidding it, I decided it was not my place to speak ex cathedra on this subject, but to decide by letting the voters decide. By the nature of things it was necessary to make this decision in public before the nominating period opened, simply to allow voters to know whether they’d be wasting one of their limited nominating slots by entering it. One or two people were very upset by what they read as an implied endorsement of the film for a Hugo by the administrator, but they forgot that the voters still had to nominate it. I could not do so myself, even had I expressed a positive opinion of its merits – although my opinion was, and is, very positive.

where in the world is Henry Cowell?

The composer (not the redwoods state park guy) whose chamber music concerts I went to a couple months ago. It is only the success and satisfaction of that which reconciles me at not being at this tonight.

I thought about it, I actually did. But it's a considerable distance away from here, and that kind of a trip is a bit beyond me at this point. I'll just have to hope the American Symphony records some of this some day, a question they waffled on when I called them up and asked about it.

Besides liking his music, I feel a personal affinity to Cowell on the grounds of geographical proximity. As all reference sources will tell you, Cowell was born in 1897 in Menlo Park, California, a town very near here, which I often visit, and where I lived myself for a couple of years. And while he moved around a lot, spending part of his childhood in the Midwest and using San Francisco and New York City as alternating bases in his active years of concertizing in the 1920s and early 30s, he maintained ties to Menlo Park, and was living there at the time of his infamous arrest for homosexuality in 1936. After his release from prison in 1940, he moved to the Hudson River Valley and never lived in California again.

But where, exactly, in Menlo Park did he live? As a local, I was curious. It's a long, stringy town, from oak-festooned grass hills to soggy baylands. Biographical sources didn't say, though they did refer to him walking in those hills, so I presumed it was near that end of town. I checked city directories from the 1930s, which didn't give a street address for him, only a rural postal delivery code.

The author of a forthcoming biography spoke at the festival in November, and I was planning on asking him, but it turned out I didn't have to. The program (now online at the infamous Scribd) gave the answer. Pages 24-25 are on Cowell's life in the Bay Area, and it gives an address, 2156 Harkins Avenue. That's just off Alameda de las Pulgas, right near the famous Flea Street Cafe, at the top of the alluvial plain just below the hills.

Later on I went by. That address is now occupied by a brown shingle house that looks old enough; is it true, as the book said, that the original home no longer exists? More recently I visited the town historical society. The elderly man volunteering there said that as a boy he'd known Cowell, who came by his home in that area to play the piano. He showed me photographs that demonstrated that the house was a different, smaller building, and we found maps confirming the street pattern of the time.

So that's one minor historical question answered. But I still will miss being at that concert.