Given the amount of fuckshit that’s been going on with this year’s Hugos, a lot of which I can’t even explain properly, and given that it’s the 70th anniversary of the inaugural Hugos, it’s probably apt to do a retrospective editorial on that now-alien time in SFF history. Before I do that, I ought to give a brief explanation of what the Hugos are, what Worldcon is, and how these have been integral to the organization of SFF fandom. I’m not saying this as an expert, but as an enthusiastic young fan who hopes to travel to some corner of the world with a Worldcon membership in the future. (Let’s face it, it’ll probably be Canada.) I may not have all my facts straight, so bear with me. I’d like to thank Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog for their rundown of what might’ve been nominated at the 1953 Hugos (be sure to put a pin in that “might’ve been”) and Jo Walton for her unabashedly subjective series on the Hugos up to the turn of the millennium.

The World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, is, as you may guess, the world’s leading science fiction (and, more recently, fantasy) convention, held almost every year and in theory an international gathering of writers, artists, filmmakers, and fans, complete with all the usual convention hijinks (except for, as far as I’m aware, the selling of not-safe-for-work body pillows at exuberant prices). Worldcon has increasingly lived up to its premise, but it started out as thoroughly American, with the first five Worldcons being held in the US and the first Worldcon held outside an English-majority country not coming until 1970, in Heidelberg, in what was then West Germany. Indeed there would not be a Worldcon held in a non-white majority country until the one in Yokohama, Japan in 2007. Does SFF, historically, have a whiteness problem? The short answer is yes, but that’s an editorial for another day. Things have gotten better, so there’s that.

The Hugo awards have been consistently a part of the Worldcon experience since 1953, and in the world of SFF they’re often thought of as the field’s equivalent of the Oscars (although if we’re going by voting process it’d be more accurate to call the Nebulas the SFF Oscars). A novel could certainly catch more eyes on bookstore shelves if it had a sticker saying “HUGO AWARD WINNER” on the cover. The Hugo is named after Hugo Gernsback: author, editor, failed businessman, and founder of the first science fiction magazine in the English-speaking world. Gernsback brought Amazing Stories into the world in 1926 and explicitly made it out to be a magazine that would publish science fact and fiction pieces, as opposed to just a magazine that would sometimes happen to publish science fiction. Gernsback held control of Amazing Stories for only a few years before moving on to other projects, but he got the ball rolling and by this point it’s a snowball akin to Godzilla—or more appropriately, King Ghidorah, with its multiple heads and tails. Point being, you may not know who Gernsback is, but if you’re an avid SFF reader then you probably know about the Hugos.

As of now there are 17 Hugo categories, with these encompassing damn near everything from prose fiction to graphic novels to TV show episodes (although curiously the attempt to give video games their own category has not panned out as of yet), and that’s not even getting into fan projects. (Totally not relevant here, but Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance is itself eligible for Best Fanzine!) But in 1953 there were only seven categories, and only one of them is still in service. The 1953 Hugos were held at Philcon II, in Philadelphia, and while we can see the primordial slime that would evolve into the awards ceremony we now recognize, a few of the categories now read as utterly disconnected from what modern fans care about or would even be aware of. My thesis is that the Hugos were initially concocted to celebrate science fiction as published in the magazines… and sadly too few people read genre magazines these days.

To list the categories for 1953:

1. Best Novel
2. Best Professional Magazine
3. Best Cover Artist
4. Best Interior Illustrator
5. Excellence in Fact Articles
6. Best New SF Author or Artist
7. #1 Fan Personality

The Best Novel category stands out as not only being the only prose category this year, but the only category to still be around (although, like the dinosaurs and the birds, a couple other categories would leave behind close relatives for the modern age). And why not? There will always be demand for novels; frankly it’s impossible to imagine an SFF readership without a continual list of bestselling novels. The winner was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which incidentally (actually it was quite deliberate) was the first novel I reviewed in serial form for this site. A lot of people would say The Demolished Man is a fine winner, but it’s also a bit of an odd one for a couple reasons. The first is that Bester is not what we’d call a novelist at heart; he had been active as a short story writer for more than a decade prior to this, and aside from his first two novels (the second being the even more revered The Stars My Destination) his best work is arguably his short fiction. The second is that, according to the time for eligibility for this year’s Hugos (basically August 1952 to August 1953), The Demolished Man should not have qualified since it was first published in the January to March 1952 issues of Galaxy Science Fiction. Still, it’s a flawed but intriguing novel that set a standard for both ’50s SF and futue Hugo winners.

What could’ve beat out The Demolished Man for Best Novel? We’re not sure since there was no shortlist put together for this year, but we can make a few educated guesses. The biggest rival would’ve almost certainly been Clifford D. Simak’s masterful “novel” City, which won the International Fantasy Award that year (the only other SFF award of any significance at the time, and rather prestigious in its own right), and which in my opinion would’ve been an even worthier winner than Bester’s novel. Another big contender would’ve been Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s caustic corporate espionage caper The Space Merchants, which was serialized in Galaxy only a few months after The Demolished Man. Other notable novels from 1952 include Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire and The Currents of Space, Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones, and Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence. While we were seeing more SF novels get hardcover releases, the magazine serial was still a high-profile affair.

Speaking of which, no doubt the success of Bester’s novel contributed to Galaxy tying with Astounding Science Fiction for Best Professional Magazine, which is a little fucked up considering this would be H. L. Gold’s only Hugo win. Of the “dead” categories, Best Professional Magazine lasted the longest, only being replaced by Best Professional Editor in 1973—a good twenty years later. This was done apparently to acknowledge the rising prominence of book editors, with people such as Damon Knight and Judy-Lynn del Rey giving major credence to original anthologies and paperback releases; a bit of a sad joke, because there would not be a non-magazine Best Professional Editor winner until Terry Carr in 1985. Still, it’s hard to argue with what won in 1953, with the two sides of American magazine SF at the time being equally represented—the hardboiled adventure SF of Astounding with the more cerebral and socially aware SF of Galaxy. Of course, there were so many magazines active, and so many of them publishing good material, that it must’ve been hard to not have a tie.

The next three categories I’ll go over in rapid succession, as I don’t have much to say about them, but they’re also anomalies in the history of the Hugos for how much they illustrate the prominence of magazine publishing at the time. Best Cover Artist was a tie between Hannes Bok and Ed Emshwiller, who were at very different stages in their careers. Emshwiller was a hot new artist who would go on to dominate SFF illustrating for the next decade while Bok was, sadly, a burnout who barely did genre illustrations at that point, let alone covers; the latter is certainly meant as career recognition. Best Interior Illustrator went to Virgil Finlay, and this is a hard one to argue with; we’re talking about one of the top three best interior illustrators in SFF history. Then there’s Excellence in Fact Articles, which went to Willy Ley for his science column in Galaxy. Best Interior Illustrator especially strikes me as a dinosaur here, as interiors have become functionally extinct in the field; even Analog and Asimov’s, which did interiors for decades, rarely do them anymore. Most genre magazines now straight-up don’t have interiors, but they were a big deal in 1953.

The last two categories are interesting in that they have obvious descendants in the modern Hugos. Best New SF Author or Artist went to Philip José Farmer, who made his genre debut with “The Lovers” in the August 1952 issue of Startling Stories, and by the time he got his Hugo he had put out a few more stories that certainly helped his exploding reputation. What are the parameters for a “new” author here? I’m not sure. For the Astounding Award (which for some reason is not a Hugo, despite being given at the same ceremony, but which otherwise very much takes after the Best New SF Author or Artist Hugo) we know that authors have two years of eligibility within publication of their debut story. For this category I probably would’ve voted for Philip K. Dick, as he would not only become an 800-pound gorilla of the field, but even by the summer of 1953 he had amassed an impressive body of short fiction. Farmer had already published at least one story well before “The Lovers,” but it was, as far as I can tell, not science fiction or fantasy, and ISFDB doesn’t even mention it. Overall, I understand why Farmer caused enough buzz to win.

The last category is #1 Fan Personality, which went to Forrest J. Ackerman. What the fuck is this? #1 Fan Personality. There’s a lot to unpack here. This is not about the “best” fan, and it’s not even about who is the best fan writer necessarily. My assumption is that someone could have a certain reputation at conventions and fandom meetings and be eligible for this award. Keep in mind that members of what we call First Fandom, those who might’ve attended the first Worldcon in 1939, were extremely clique-y, and I mean to like a toxic degree. Of course, Ackerman was and would continue to be an important chronicler of SFF fandom for decades, so if anyone should get it it’s probably him. Still, this is primitive at best compared to what we now have, which is not one but four fan categories: Best Fan Writer, Best Fan Artist, Best Fanzine, and Best Fancast. Fandom has grown a profound amount in the past seventy years, but it’s also become way more scattered; it’s pretty common now to find earnest SFF readers who do not engage with fandom in any meaningful way.

The fan categories have consistently seen some of the lowest voter turnouts at recent Worldcons, despite Worldcon itself only existing because of fans from around the globe agreeing to make this thing happen. There are many fans who don’t read fanzines or listen to fan podcasts. There are many fans who read little to no short fiction and thus do not engage with magazines at all. There were no Hugos for short fiction in 1953, and even now the short fiction categories very much play second fiddle to Best Novel, which is the one that gets people riled up. It’s also safe to say Hugo voters by and large no longer care about science articles and interior illustrations, and there’s a reason why the Best Professional Magazine category turned to dust half a century ago. Fandom priorities have changed greatly; what they’re changing into I cannot say as of yet.