The Hugosauriad: A Dinographic Account of the Hugo Awards

By Camestros Felapton

A Dinographic Account of the Hugo Awards. Featuring essays on every Hugo finalist dinosaur story from 1952 to 2019, plus many more. This book traces a dual history. It is an account of how dinosaurs have been represented in notable science fiction stories from the 1950s onwards but is also an examination of the history of the Hugo Science Fiction Awards. Mixing humour and analysis, The Hugosauriad is a unique look at pop-culture over sixty-seven years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Camestros Felapton
• Release date: May 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463146842

Camestros Felapton

Camestros Felapton is an extended cosplay of a pair of syllogisms and their adventures in cyberspace. He is also the manager and amanuensis for Timothy the Talking Cat.

Book preview

Introduction to the collected edition

Part of the reward of running a blog is the capacity to set off on my own projects with little or no limits on how they will turn out. This particular project started as something little more than a list of stories with dinosaurs in them that in some way had a connection to the Hugo Awards. The reading and research turned that list into something more complex and more interesting.

It is a genuine exploration of an issue because I had little idea what I was going to find, particularly in the years before 2010 (which is most of them). The original introduction describes the process in more detail but I will state up front that I didn’t know what I was talking about until I finished and then I did know just a bit more.

I would like to offer special thanks to JJ who very bravely offered to proofread the collected version of the original blog posts. Since then I’ve tinkered further with the text and undone some of JJ’s good work. Any remaining typos, spelling mistakes and solecisms are purely mine.

I’d also like to thank those authors who dropped by to leave supportive comments for the project and also the many writers who have written dinosaur related stories over the years. The charismatic bird-cousins are part of the very real sense of wonder in our world and although the non-avian varieties have long since left us, we all benefit from how they power our imaginations.

Part 1: Introduction to a Dinography

Reading through the stories that have won a Hugo Award is a huge task and I am, fundamentally, a lazy man. I’m also somebody who likes to make a virtue of my laziness. Any read-through of the Hugo Awards is a matter of choices, and those choices hide aspects that make the awards interesting.

The obvious focus is on the winning novels, but this avoids the rich influence of shorter works or of other categories like Dramatic Presentation. Worse, winning is a category that disguises far too much about the dynamics of the Hugo Awards. Non-winning finalists themselves provide a fascinating insight into the choices of the Worldcon membership, as do those works that were nominated but did not make the finalist shortlist. There are even insights to be gained from works that were never acknowledged by the Hugo Award process in any form.

Yet such broad criteria turn a difficult task into an impossible one, and the premise I started with is that, above all else, I’m a lazy man. How then to look at novels and short stories, winners, finalists, also-rans, and ineligible works across sixty-seven years (and before anybody corrects me ‘1952’ isn’t an error – the first Hugo Awards in 1953 drew from works that included 1952).

The answer came from the 2019 Short Story finalist The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat by Brooke Bolander (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2018). Bolander’s dinosaurs are thoroughly-modern feathered protagonists in a genre-defying fairy tale. Not only is the style of the story both new and old but also the dinosaurs featured in it. That new-and-old quality is something that is intrinsic to dinosaurs as a theme – old, because they are from a long time ago, and new, because they represent a time when the Earth was younger.

The second point on my map was Rachel Swirsky’s Nebula winning short story "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" (Apex Magazine, 5 March 2013). The story provoked artistic debate about the nature of science-fiction, but also became an object of hate and ridicule by the reactionary Sad Puppy campaigns, whose actions came to dominate discussion of the Hugo Awards for several years.

Two points form a line, and following that line backward I could cut a rock sample through the Hugo Awards and expose the geologic layers. From there I could construct, not a biography of the Hugo Awards, but a dinography* – an account of a thing using the medium of dinosaurs.

A dinography requires some rules; specifically, a rule as to what counts as a dinosaur. For my purpose the dinosaur eligibility includes:

Actual dinosaurs as recognised by the palaeontology of the time a work was written.

Prehistoric reptilian creatures from the Mesozoic era that in popular culture count as dinosaurs such as large marine reptiles and pterosaurs.

Fantastical creatures derived from dinosaurs such as creatures in Edgar Rice Burroughs Pellucidar series.

Aliens (intelligent or not) of a reptilian nature that humans would see as dinosaur like.

Dinosaurs as a metaphor for something either out of time or hanging on beyond their time.

The creatures I deemed ineligible include:

Dragons

Birds, unless they are there specifically to make the link with dinosaurs

Sea serpents, lake monsters, etc., unless they are specifically linked to dinosaurs of prehistoric marine reptiles

I think it is obvious why including any story that might have birds in it would distort the project. As with stories which include dragons, the creatures would overshadow the dinosaurs. Even the science-fictional dragons of Pern evoke a different set of themes than dinosaurs.

For categories I looked at novel, novella, novelette, short story, and dramatic presentation. I appreciate that there might be a hidden wealth of dinosaur fossils hidden in the strata of art and related work categories, but I chose not to look.

Where I could, I looked at finalists and winners. I did not look deeply into the longlist of nominated works that didn’t make the finals, except on a few occasions when I was aware of something dinosaur-related and I wanted to see how it tracked. In my final reading list, I included two short stories that pre-date the short story category for the Hugo Awards, for reasons that I will hope will be clear. I also included an episode of a television show that appeared on the longlist for Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), but which did not receive enough nominations to be a finalist. Again, I think my reasons will become clear when I reach it.

The structure of the Hugosauriad will be a set of semi-regular essays about the stories, their context and influences. They are grouped into geologic zones:

Palaeozoic: This introduction. The Palaeozoic being the era before the Mesozoic.

Triassic: 1950s, 60s and 70s of Hugo dinosaur stories.

Jurassic: 1980s and 90s of Hugo dinosaur stories

Cretaceous: 2000’s of Hugo dinosaur stories.

Cenozoic: a conclusion followed by appendices

Interestingly, the medium of dinosaurs misses a lot! The New Wave and the 1970s is more present by their absence, hence the dinography eras don’t match the normal ways we might split science-fiction history.

Of the twenty works in my original list, only five were by women and of those, most were written recently. The gender disparity in recognition of writing doesn’t shift for decades in this sample.

Part 2: Triassic 1952-1971

After leaving the Palaeozoic introduction our first stop is the Triassic – an age of beginnings and change.

For the deep past, this was a hot and dry period with a single supercontinent dominating the world. In science-fiction, it is an era of classic magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction.

The World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon) had been held since 1939, but beginning in the advent of World War 2 made the ‘world’ aspect of Worldcon more aspirational than actual. By 1948, the convention had a foray northward, with the 6th Worldcon being held in Canada. It would not be until 1957 that the convention would go overseas for the first time with Loncon 1 in London.

The first Hugo Awards (not their official name at the time) were presented in 1953 in Philadelphia at the 11th Worldcon. The guest of honour for the convention was Willy Ley. Ley is less well-known these days, but was a German-American science writer and something of an evangelist for the science of rocketry. Alongside his work and writing on rocketry and space was a fascination with dinosaurs and cryptozoology.

Ley’s 1949 article "Do Prehistoric Monsters Still Exist? helped popularise cryptozoology and the romantic notion of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s Lost World as genuine possibility. The article leads with DINOSAURS may roam the unexplored jungles of Africa!" and finishes with:

"Reliable sources have been hinting to us for generations that there are creatures existing which we have never seen. Will they be dreadful throwbacks to another age or inconceivable monsters of the future?"

"Do Prehistoric Monsters Still Exist?" by Willy Ley, Mechanix Illustrated, February 1949 (source link)

Although the world was widely explored by this point, the space of possibility was still great enough to entertain that there might be exotic mysteries yet to be encountered. Conceptually, this was mirrored in science fiction of the day, where it was still plausible to imagine Mars or Venus as inhabited planets.

After a shaky start (no Hugo Awards in 1954, and a less-than-stellar winner of Best Novel in 1955, and no Best Novel category in 1957) the Hugo Awards grew in strength. While the Best Novel category has been the centrepiece, these were awards that celebrated short fiction, and it was in science-fiction magazines that fans were looking for the dominant stories of the day.

The time period I’m covering was a period of change. New writers and a greater variety of styles of works were nominated. Voices like Samuel Delany and Ursula Le Guin changed perceptions of the stereotypical science fiction writer, and established ‘greats’ such as Robert Heinlein pushed their own boundaries with works like Stranger in a Strange Land.

So why call this the Triassic, when it is a period of clear and visible generational shifts? Well, such is the way of a dinography. The shifts visible in the works I picked when I went looking for dinosaurs tap into a more conservative under-current. Worldcon is composed of, above all, fans – and the Hugo Awards represent fan choices. As well as reflecting changes in fashion, the Hugo Awards also reflect nostalgia and continuing love for past favourites. The cutting-edge and the traditional are sometimes conflicting currents in the Hugo Awards and sometimes complimentary aspects, but they are always present.

The names that bubbled up from my search for dinosaur fiction and which are covered in this period all have one thing in common. The authors were all adults by 1939 (in some cases, only just). Also, they each had established careers before the start of the Hugo Awards and as such were authors who, at least initially, were not shaped by the awards.

The generational change began long before 1971 and didn’t end after that, but for my sample, 1971 is a clear demarcation.

But I’m going to start just before the first Hugo Awards, in 1952. Partly this is because the choices of those first awards would have drawn on works including some from the previous year (originally the award had the previous 12 months as the eligibility period). It is also because I wanted to include two classic dinosaur-themed stories from an author who is widely celebrated but often overlooked by the Hugo Awards…

2.1: The Fog Horn and A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

There are many ways to tell stories with dinosaurs, but there are two fantasies about dinosaurs in particular that run through speculative fiction. The first are time travel stories in which people journey back to the age of the dinosaurs. The second is the idea that dinosaurs never went away, that somewhere they still exist. This second story, popularised by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s The Lost World, has become overtaken by our understanding of both the world and also of dinosaurs. In truth, they never did all die out but live among us as birds. Those who think birds lack the terrifying charisma of their Mesozoic grandparents should consider the cassowary: an armoured murder bird that is more than happy to execute severe damage to any upstart mammal.

We’ll meet some other kinds of dinosaur story as we progress, particularly dinosaurs-as-aliens and, in the Jurassic section, the more modern fantasy of bringing dinosaurs back by re-creating them from fossilised DNA. However, I really wanted to start with two stories that captured the time-travel and still-with-us types of dinosaur stories.

By happy coincidence, there were other issues I wanted to address with these first stories. I wanted some stories that came from the early 1950s but which weren’t picked up by the Hugo’s. I also wanted to have at least one of the big, big names of science fiction included. I’m not aiming to disparage the relative fame of the writers I have caught up in my prehistoric trawler net, but there are many names conspicuous by their absence: Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke for this first era, for example.

The bulk of Ray Bradbury’s most famous science fiction stories were published prior to the advent of the Hugo Awards. That is not to say he has been completely overlooked. Indeed, he’s clearly beloved by many Hugo voters. His most famous novel Fahrenheit 451 won Best Novel for 1954 but in the Retro Hugo Awards given in 2004 – the Retro Hugo’s being modern awards given by voters for years in which a Worldcon was held but Hugo Awards were not given. Comedian Rachel Bloom’s funny and sexually-explicit ode to Ray Bradbury (Fuck Me Ray Bradbury, YouTube, NSFW video link) was a 2011 finalist in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category. Other Retro Hugo nominations include short stories from 1939 and 1944. However, in the non-retro awards, Bradbury was only a finalist once, in 1956 for his story The Dragon which lost to Arthur C Clarke’s The Star (which, coincidentally, features a unusual type of SF protagonist that we will meet later in this series: a spacefaring Jesuit priest).

The influence of Bradbury on the Hugo Awards and in science fiction in general can be seen more obliquely in the Best Dramatic Presentation category. Rachel Bloom’s contribution aside, Bradbury’s name appears in multiple places for films and TV show episodes inspired by his stories. The 1954 Retro Hugo’s include The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (which we will get to) and It Came