A quick congrats to my longtime pal Morgan “The Morgman” Holmes, who just made the short list for this year’s Hugo Awards — honoring the best, or perhaps only the most popular, achievements in science fiction, plus fantasy and related forms.
Morgan is up for Best Fan Writer — which covers everything from kind of serious litcrit on the field to the most faanish of fan writings. The uber faan stuff used to concern itself more with sf fandom and its personalities than science fiction (hell, you didn’t even need to read much sf to be a Big Name Fan). I’ve met many, many BNFs in my day — Terry Carr, Paul Williams, Redd Boggs, Bill Donaho, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. . . . Bet if I sat down to it I could mock up a list easily topping one hundred, and who would have thought there’d be over 100 BNFs tromping about? After over seventy years of sf fandom, though, there could be thousands.
On the serious side of fan writing, Morgan has been at it for at least a couple of decades now, with lengthy stints in various amateur press associations, online forums, plus lots of published essays — a ton of writing, when you start to consider it all. I think he got his breakout moment when he picked up a blogging gig for Castalia House, which put him in the thick of the political action needed to crack the Hugo ballot.
Now, if only he had a book out collecting some of the best of his work. . . .
