Reading the Hugos: Related Work

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos. Today we continue our series on the 2020 finalists with a look at Related Work.

3.3.6: Best Related Work. Any work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year, and which is either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and which is not eligible in any other category

Related Work is a hodge podge of a catch-all category. It’s for work that is primarily non fiction and that is related to science fiction and fantasy, and which is not otherwise eligible elsewhere on the ballot. The history of the category will see critical works next to art books next to encyclopedias next to podcasts next to essays next to speeches next to documentaries next to websites. There may also be a single blog post competing and winning in the category. In this case of this year there is one memoir, two critical biographies, one documentary, another biography (though not a critical one like the other two) and an acceptance speech. Related Work is an interesting cross section of another side of the genre and another side of fandom.

• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood, by J. Michael Straczynski (Harper Voyager US)
• Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones (University of Illinois Press (Modern Masters of Science Fiction))
• The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, by Mallory O’Meara (Hanover Square)
• The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn (Unbound)
• “2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech”, by Jeannette Ng
• Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, produced and directed by Arwen Curry

Photo Credit "naye" @unnaye https://twitter.com/unnaye/status/1163170453244010496/

2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech: In 2012 an acceptance speech from the editors of The Drink Tank fanzine (Christopher Garcia and James Bacon) was a finalist for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Up against three episodes of Doctor Who and one of Community, it didn't win (the Neil Gaiman penned "The Doctor's Wife did). So, it's interesting that Jeannette Ng's Campbell Award acceptance speech was nominated as a Related Work this year - though it does fit somewhat better here than in Dramatic Presentation. The Drink Tank also would have fit better in that year's Related Work category, matched up against Seanan McGuire's Wicked Girls album and a season of the Writing Excuses podcast, but that isn't really here nor there.

Jeannette Ng won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer last year and her speech was fiery, inflammatory, and absolutely perfect for the moment. You can read it or watch it if you need a refresher on what Ng said, but if you pay attention to the genre at all (if you're a reader of Nerds of a Feather and follow the Hugo Awards) you're probably already aware of it.

Ng's speech is important. It crystallized conversation within the genre that has been taking place for a number of years and was the final push that helped drive the change of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. That was an important and necessary change that ever so gradually moves the field forward and Ng's acceptance speech was a significant part of that change (though not the whole).

It seems that honoring Ng's acceptance speech here is a recognition of what the speech did more than what the speech was. Ng's speech was passionate, but it was not necessarily the best piece of genre related work from last year. What Jeannette Ng's speech did, however, that was vital and likely merits its inclusion here.

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein: I wonder if I was more familiar with Heinlein's work if I would have appreciated this more. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein is a scholarly look at the works (and partially the life) of Heinlein. Farah Mendelsohn digs deep into Heinlein's work and examines his attitudes and beliefs as presented in the text - whether it is on guns or race or equality and the answers are more complex and surprising than a cursory understanding of Heinlein might suggest.

This is a major biography of one of the giants of the genre's history and it lives up to its billing. Unfortunately for me, I've only read Starship Troopers and Job and have no familiarity with any of Heinlein's short fiction - and that's left the The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein to be a bit of a dry tome. On the other hand, Paul Weimer reviewed the biography last year and described it as an "essential volume of genre criticism", which is certainly true.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin: I've joked with Adri the last couple of years about there always being another Ursula K. Le Guin work eligible for the ballot and there always will, whether it is a work you could reasonably consider being created by Le Guin or "simply" about her and her work. Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is this year's / last year's Le Guin.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin also happens to be a rather excellent documentary and is engrossing from minute one to the end. I watched it back in August 2019, so my memories are a little fuzzy - but what I remember most clearly is that it was one of the best genre related documentaries I was likely to watch. It's a thoughtful film of a thoughtful writer and I won't be surprised if it wins this year - especially after Le Guin won Related Work in 2017, 2018, was a finalist in 2019 and her illustrated Earthsea book won for Art Book based on the illustrations of Charles Vess. It's the late resurgence of non-fiction Le Guin.

The Lady from the Black Lagoon: If you haven't paid much attention to the history of animation in the United States (or even if you have), you may not have heard of Milicent Patrick - one of the first female animators at Disney and the primary creature of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Lady from the Black Lagoon has a dual narrative - the triumphs and drama of Patrick's life, as much as could be gleamed from limited records, and that of Mallory O'Meara's quest to discover what she could of Patrick's life. There's as much story in the discovery as there is in Milicent Patrick herself. As such, this is a less traditional biography but is an effective way to tell the story of a woman so central to monster movies and yet so erased. It seems that Milicent Patrick never quite shared the sense of loss for the career she could have had if only she had any real institutional support for her skill and her craft - but Mallory O'Meara conveys it all the same - it's a loss that occurs time and again in so many fields.

Joanna Russ: I can be a sucker for an accessible critical biography and that is exactly what Gwyneth Jones has delivered with this look at Joanna Russ. This is a deep dive into the work of Joanna Russ, not quite into her personal life and Jones examines the scope of Russ's career.

In her earlier review of this volume, Adri wrote "Jones's reading of The Female Man, in particular, was interesting in the way it presented a radically different lens than the one I had read the novel in, taking the different aspects of the Joanna personality as a reading of identity across time rather than dimensions. It's a reading which brings Russ into conflict with her own identity as an SFF writer and Jones doesn't hold back from the implications of that reading, tracing it throughout the rest of her work and noting where the seeds come in at earlier points. If, like me, you don't often approach literature from a strongly academic lens, some of this will probably be well in the realms of "well I'd never thought of it like that", but it never comes across as particularly prescriptive or inherently dismissive to other readings, so I was able to enjoy the different ways of thinking about the texts rather than feeling put in my place by them, as is always the risk with more academic takes."

I generally agree with Adri's take here, both in her wishes about more of Joanna Russ's conversations with other writers, as well the general appreciation of the breadth of this volume. It's exceptional.

Becoming Superman: For more than half of this book I came out of each chapter wanting to give J. Michael Straczynski a hug. If someone made a movie of his life and incorporated his childhood and then his family's backstory, it would be unbelievable. Straczynski's childhood is just about as bad as it can get, and yet each time a revelation about his family comes up - it gets even worse.

The good thing is that we know from the subtitle that this is his "journey from poverty to Hollywood" and we know as science fiction fans that he is the creator of Babylon Five, winner of two Hugo Awards and a finalist for two others. We know that he makes it out and he is successful. Becoming Superman is an incredible story and Straczynski keeps it engaging the entire time. He never shies away from the worst, but the worst never overpowers either - possibly because we know there is a better life ahead.


My Vote
1. Becoming Superman
2. Joanna Russ
3. The Lady of the Black Lagoon
4. Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin
5. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein
6. 2019 John W. Campbell Acceptance Speech



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Microreview [book]: The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein By Farah Mendlesohn proves to be an essential volume of genre criticism about one of the giants of the field.

Heinlein was among the earliest science fiction I tried to read, when my age was barely in double digits, back in the early 1980’s. After my introduction to science fiction, I took to reading my 7 year older brother’s works. The cover with a guy seated with a kilt, surrounded by beautiful women--well, it attracted me quite frankly, and so the first Heinlein I tried to read was not one of his juveniles, not his short fiction, but rather, Time Enough for Love. I didn’t quite understand all of it, even as the premise on the back cover of that edition was completely wrong (Lazarus Long does NOT become his own ancestor!). It took me a couple of years to try again with Heinlein, going to his short stories first, and then as his work got reissued in the late 80’s, his novels. I also read my first piece of real genre criticism, Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension, which covered his work until the late 60’s. I wondered if anyone had done similar criticism of Heinlein’s work after that (I Will Fear No Evil and subsequent books) but found nothing. Once I had finished reading Heinlein, I had let him lay fallow for a long time, with a couple of audiobooks re-reads as my only exposure to him. I had mostly moved on.

And so now years later, my interest in Heinlein reawakened with scholarship and thought about the man and his work, to point, the latest work of Heinlein scholarship, Farah Mendlesohn The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein. The title itself is a play on the Heinlein story “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”. The book was crowdsourced to its publication, and a list of supporters is at the back of the book.

The question is in this day and age if there is a place for Heinlein criticism, even given the supporters who backed the book. Has the field moved on from him so much that his worth is not worth discussing? The author very clearly thinks otherwise and lays out her arguments in the book.

The book opens up with a short biography of Heinlein, which for me extended and fleshed out the story of Heinlein I had gotten from Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction². For the first time, the pieces I had, from Heinlein himself, from that book and others are now fused together to give me a better view of the man and his story. How his life influenced his fiction is very meticulously laid down¹. I personally learned a fair amount of about Heinlein's life. This biography provides a solid grounding for the reader in Heinlein's life story and prepares the reader for the rest of the book.

The real meat of the book, though, comes in the subsequent chapters. The author handles her analysis of Heinlein’s work by theme. Heinlein’s Narrative Arc, Technique, Rhetoric, Racism and more are the framework for her to explore Heinlein’s oeuvre multiple times from multiple points of view. There is even a chapter on Heinlein’s relationship with cats, and I did not quite realize the scope of cats in Heinlein’s fiction before reading this book. This does mean that a single work of Heinlein's, like Farnham’s Freehold, for instance, is discussed in detail in the chapter best suited to it, and elsewhere in the book at all. This thematic approach allows the author to discuss the writer’s oeuvre as a holistic whole with each section, rather than rabbit-holing down the stories and novels in succession. I found the index at the back of the book helpful, and the text itself signposts when the author intends to discuss a book in greater depth elsewhere in the work.

The author provides a nuanced and well argued point of view (and giving credit in footnotes where appropriate to people who have influenced her thinking on particular matters) and the book has made me reevaluate significant aspects of Heinlein’s work and his oeuvre for myself. In a world where Heinlein’s work has become a touchstone of divisiveness, Mendlesohn lays out what she thinks of it all, the good, the bad, the nuanced, and the ugly in Heinlein’s work.

As she says herself in the preface:

“The purpose of this book is to tease out what I find fascinating about Heinlein, good, bad and reprehensible, and to understand his work as a close-to-fifty-year-long argument with himself and those he admired.”

I maintain that Mendelsohn has accomplished this in spades. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein is the most detailed and comprehensive look at the man and his work that exists today. Sometimes that detail goes a tad long on length, but any genre reader or critic who wants to grapple with Heinlein’s work would stand very well to read Farah’s work. Just like the aforementioned Heinlein in Dimension, this is a crucial piece of Heinlein scholarship that also makes the case that reading Heinlein can be and still is worthwhile. That’s no mean feat.



¹ The book is meticulously footnoted as well. Some of them are rather funny and I found reading all of them worthwhile.

² Dey Street Books, 2018.

³ The full list is Biography, Heinlein's Narrative Arc, Technique, Rhetoric, Heinlein and Civic Society, Heinlein and the Civic Revolution, Racism, Anti-Racism and the Construction of Civic Society, The Right Ordering of Self, Heinlein's Gendered Self and the Epilogue, The Cat Who Walked Through Genres (itself a play on The Cat Who Walked Through Walls). There are also appendices.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for meticulous analysis in a well reasoned point of view.

+1 for being cogent enough to persuade a skeptical reader like me about some aspects of Heinlein's work.

Penalties: -1 for maybe just a little too much overwhelming detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10: very high quality/standout in its category. Very nearly a 10.

Reference: Mendlesohn, Farah, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Unbound, 2019]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.