For those who weren’t around in 1983 … a history lesson. Because, as I’ve said before, science fiction’s culture wars have been with us always.

The Sad Puppies, who have successfully campaigned their slate onto the ballot, hope they can break the Hugo Awards in order to rebuild them—a sentiment which has, I’m afraid, a bit too much of a “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” ring for my comfort. But note this isn’t the first time such a concept has been put forward.

“If you too are unhappy with the Hugo system, it’s time to do your bit,” wrote Charles Platt in his editorial to the March-May issue of The Patchin Review. He didn’t put a full slate forward back then, just a single novel, written by … well … you can see the name of the author in a box at the bottom of the front cover.

That’s right—L. Ron Hubbard, whose novel Battlefield Earth had been published in 1982. (more…)

A research request from a colleague sent me scurrying back to The Patchin Review, a magazine edited and published by Charles Platt from 1981 through 1983. While skimming through my yellowing copies, I ran across the following item, which had nothing at all to do with my search, in issue number five, dated October-December 1982:

ED FERMAN of F&SF says his latest poll shows a drastic drop in teen readers since 1970—seems they’re playing videogames instead of reading books.

And that’s a report from a quarter of a century ago, when the state-of-the-art home videogames were Space Invaders and Donkey Kong!

I’d hate to think what a contemporary poll might reveal. If teen readers could be stolen away from fiction magazines by the gaming graphics of the early ’80s, so primitive in retrospect, what chance do they have of retaining them in the face of such current gaming juggernauts as Halo 3 and Mass Effect?

It’s a battle that’s being debated elsewhere, but this nugget is a reminder of just how long the war has been raging.