(Edited to add: oddly, my RSS feed seems to be having trouble with the o-with-an-umlaut character that should go in Tlon. Please excuse the misspelling.)

Every so often the science fiction convention that runs the Hugo Awards also takes nominations for “Retro Hugos,” a Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy works published in years before the Hugos existed. Which is great, because there’s something peculiarly appropriate about a science fiction award that retcons itself.

Anyway, this year the Hugo Awards are running Retro Hugos for 1940, and I was amused to see the lineup for Best Short Story:

• “Martian Quest” by Leigh Brackett (Astounding Science”Fiction, Feb 1940)
• “Requiem” by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science”Fiction, Jan 1940)
• “Robbie” by Isaac Asimov (Super Science Stories, Sept 1940)
• “The Stellar Legion” by Leigh Brackett (Planet Stories, Winter 1940)
• “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges (Sur, 1940)

One of these things is not like the others. And yet this list isn’t as strange as it seems: for all that Asimov and Borges come to this shortlist from different literary worlds, any definition of fantastic fiction that can’t encompass the works of both authors is, I think, incomplete.

On the other hand, there’s a definite difference in quality here. I was tickled enough by this shortlist that I’d thought of rereading and reviewing all the stories, but it turned out to be a dispiriting experience. The two Leigh Brackett stories are perfunctory dramas built on pulp fiction tropes old-fashioned even for 1940. “Robbie” reads like an outline for the sort of treacly animated short I’d imagine coming out of a studio with the desire, but not the talent or the budget, to compete with Chuck Jones’s “Sniffles the Mouse” cartoons. When “Requiem” turned out to be unavailable from both the public library and my personal book collection I decided not to spend time or money tracking it down; a review I found suggested it wasn’t better than my vague memories of it, anyway.

“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” was, of course, still amazing, and I’m going to ramble about it a bit in a second post. But the exercise left me wondering: what are the Retro Hugos for?

That question is not rhetorical or sarcastic. I honestly think it’s an interesting question, and I don’t know the answer. I’m writing as an outside observer of the Hugo Awards, which are primarily nominated and voted on by the part of SF fandom that organizes and attends SF conventions. As an extreme introvert who counts any day in which I don’t have to leave the house as a success, this is very much not my thing. So I may have ideas about what SF’s most well-publicized award ought to be for[1], but I’m not particularly qualified to lecture the Hugo voters about them.

I’m definitely qualified to look at what they’re doing bemusedly, though, so let’s get on with it. It’s obvious what the regular Hugos are for: they’re supposed to honor the best SF work from the previous year. Not all the voters have the same standards for “best,” but (assuming no one is deliberately nominating crap to spoil other people’s fun) everybody agrees on the actual goal. But there’s more than one perspective from which to judge stories with 75 years of historical distance. What does “best,” mean in this context? In other words, what is this award measuring? I can think of three reasons someone might nominate stories for Retro Hugos, none mutually exclusive.

Historical reconstruction: Stories that, at least as far as anyone can tell, fans would have nominated at the time. This could be why the Leigh Brackett stories were nominated, as well as Heinlein’s “Requiem.” On the other hand, I can’t imagine many SF fans at the time would have been aware of “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and I’m not convinced the aggressively twee “Robbie” would have been a popular choice. Also, looking at the whole Retro Hugo ballot, there’s a lot of Heinlein there: out of the fifteen slots under Short Story, Novella, and Novelette, Heinlein took six. And the other two slots under Novella were taken by two stories in the same series by the same authors, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, just as two Short Story slots went to Leigh Brackett. This is unusual–Hugo shortlists rarely have more than one story by the same author in the same category. The amount of repetition on the ballot suggests we don’t remember enough SF from 1940 for today’s voters to guess what fans might have nominated at the time.

Historical significance: Stories that were important to the development of the SF genre. This is probably how “Robbie” found its way onto the ballot. It’s not good, but it was the first story Isaac Asimov published in the Robot series that made him famous. This might also be one reason for “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Borges wouldn’t have been on SF readers’ radar at the time, but he’s influenced a lot of writers. And Leigh Brackett is still remembered (especially for her script work) even if these specific stories aren’t very good. But the Heinlein story is just another Heinlein story, of no special importance. The same could be said of the Heinlein stories in the other categories.[2]

Actual quality: Stories that today’s readers, with 75 years of perspective, believe deserved an award on their own merits. This is, again, a good reason to nominate “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” It’s not a reason to nominate anything else on this shortlist. Or, indeed, a lot of other things on the Retro Hugo ballot: most of the stories on that list haven’t aged well.

What’s interesting about the Retro Hugos is that the voters apparently nominated stories for all of those reasons at different times. Some of these stories are on the ballot because they’re significant, some because they’re examples of SF that was popular at the time, and some because 75 years later we still read them with pleasure. All of these are perfectly good criteria, but based on the results there doesn’t seem to be any consensus on which criteria to follow.

This does mean that the Retro Hugos aren’t quite suitable for any specific purpose. If you want a snapshot of what was popular with science fiction fans in 1940, you’re going to want to look at a subset of the list. If you want to know what SF stories from 1940 are of historical interest, you want a different, overlapping, subset. If you want to read some of the actual best fantastic stories of 1940, you want another, much smaller subset. And probably some stories that aren’t even on this list.

On the other hand, the scattershot approach does produce the kind of list where Jorge Luis Borges can rub shoulders with unabashed pulp hackwork and a cornball robot story. Maybe a juxtaposition that weird is valuable in itself.