The Anti-Retro Hugos

As we slog through all the Hugo accusations and counter-accusations, it's worth poking our heads up and taking the long view for a moment. The Hugos will continue as an institution. They'll survive. Probably. I mean, this Chronoviewer says they will. Do you doubt the Chronoviewer? I don't think you can.

I've been using it to track the Anti-Retro Hugos, a little-known clause of the WSFS rules which allows a Worldcon to award Hugos to the best science fiction to be published fifty years in the future. By that time the current contretemps (ha ha) will long be over.

(Anyhow, there can't be a question about Anti-Retro Hugo voting irregularities, because there's no voting. You just click forward a year and see who won.)

You'll notice some category shifts have occurred between now and 2065. Use the buttons below to explore subsequent years. According to this thing, the Hugos will survive a long time.

Year:


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The Chronoviewer was invented by Richard Hoen in 1948 in order to inspect science fiction headlines from future eras. A massive covert research program ensued to expand its capabilities to the political or historical arenas. This, unfortunately, was unsuccessful, and the device has remained a little-used curiosity.

As for this web page, it was built with Mutagen, a simple Javascript library for generating pseudorandom text. The source code for the Hugo titles is hugos.js; it was derived from a list of all of the Hugo-nominated novels from 1953 through 2014.

(Not the Retro Hugos, though. That would too much strain on the space-time continuum.)


Last updated April 17, 2015.

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