Loncon 3 has announced they are doing retro Hugo awards for works that would have been eligible in 1939 (the Worldcon 75 years before theirs) (meaning works published in 1938).
Boy, 1938 was quite an exciting year. Looking just at novels, my eye is immediately captured by:
- Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis
- The Sword in the Stone, T. H. White
- Galactic Patrol, E. E. Smith
What is this thing with good authors not having first names, anyway?
(I don’t mean nothing else published that year is worth considering, either; just that those leaped out at me on an initial scan of this early list. All of those works are currently in print, and I believe have been in print continuously for 75 years; that’s an amazing achievement in literature.)
I believe we just missed The Hobbit by one year, too. It won’t get a chance, since there wasn’t a Worldcon the year it would have been eligible for a Hugo. Fantasy existed before 1965! Who knew?