another worldcon statistic

[calimac]

The San Jose Worldcon bid wants to crowdsource suggestions for Guests of Honor. It says that among "the traditional criteria for Worldcon Guest of Honor consideration" is "an established career, usually considered to be 30 years from entry into the field."

And I wondered, how long has it been 30 years? In the early days, the SF field hadn't been around very long, and because it was small, new names could easily make a big impact. I remembered that Robert Heinlein was GoH at the third Worldcon in 1941, only two years after he sold his first story. That would be highly unlikely to happen today, even for another Heinlein.

So I made a list of all the professional fiction writers who've been Worldcon GoH over the years. Just the authors, because the SF Encyclopedia is conscientious about listing first published stories, but it's not so rigorous with the entry dates of artists or other categories of pros. Making a quick chart, I found that less than 30 years was the rule up until about 1970, and, that among authors, only Hugo Gernsback (1952, 41 years since his first published SF story, but he was really honored as an editor, and it was only 26 years since he'd founded Amazing), Murray Leinster (1963, 44 years), and Edmond Hamilton (1964, 38 years) exceeded it, though a few others came close.

Since 1970, under-30s have been less common, though for many years they still occurred frequently (Zelazny, 1974, 12 years; Le Guin, 1975, 13 years; Ellison, 1978, 22 years; Haldeman, 1990, 21 years; and some others). But since 2001, there have only been two authors with less than 25 years: Bujold in 2008 (23 years), and 2017's Nalo Hopkinson (who will be 21 years at that point).

I also calculated the age of the GoHs, not at the time of their GoH-hood, but at what age they entered the field as professional authors. That average has remained unchanged over the decades; averages over ten-year periods consistently come up with age 25-28.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Yeah, 30 seems remarkably long to wait for someone to be worthy of GoH. Sure, you want them to have a career, and for a very large chunk of Worldcon attendees to be aware of them, but if someone amazing comes out of the woodwork and blows everyone away then you'd want to be able to have them a lot sooner than that.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

"Worldcon’s Guest of Honor appointments function as a sort of lifetime achievement award. . . " does this mean we have to wait till the honoree is seen as on the brink of the grave?
Not to mention the dangers inherent in waiting till someone is "old enough"--though chronological age alone doesn't predict life expectancy, as witness this week's World Fantasy Con's original toastmaster,Graham Joyce, who was only 59 when he died in 2014. Come to think of it, John Brunner was 61 when he died at a Worldcon, [See memorial comments from this 1995 source http://www.boston-baden.com/smofs/intervom.mem (http://www.boston-baden.com/smofs/intervom.mem)though not the one at which he was Guest of Honor. That was 1983, and he was 49. That was over 30 years from his first novel (he got an early start. . .), though that was under a pseudonym.
Anyway, the longer we wait to honor our own, the more chance we'll have waited too long.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's a problem with the Nobel Prizes in science, where the award is typically given for work that was done some 30 years ago. Oftentimes who gets it from a team is determined simply by who's still living.

I suspect that the increase in the pre-honor career spans of GoHs is driven by the growth in the field, which has both increased the number of worthy candidates, creating a backlog, and making it harder for a new author to make a big impact quickly in such a large crowd.

But I worry that using length of career, and not simply "worthiness" (which will increase over the career span of any truly worthy candidate), as a criterion contains an element of "Buggins' turn," whereby the honor goes to the most senior person who hasn't had it already. This sense is increased by the requirement on San Jose's list that it be someone not already honored. Up to about 1980 it was not uncommon to have repeat GoHs.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Zelazny and Le Guin were extraordinary. But so was Delaney and it took another 20 years for him to be honored.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

It does seem as if someone on the bid committee pulled that number out of their ass and no one thought to challenge it.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

In thirty years tastes change; what was amazing and mind blowing thirty years ago might not seem so genre-changing three decades on. So then are those authors less deserving of a Hugo if their work didn't hold up over thirty years or their two important books fell by the wayside as others took off from the ideas they introduced?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've watched this phenomenon, and my tentative conclusions are 1) that with authors who were really worthwhile to start with, it takes considerable longer than 30 years for their work to get stale in this manner; 2) it often seems to correlate closely with whether they're still alive or not.