Compared with a lot of other science fiction awards the Norma K Hemmings are quite new, having only started in about 2010. This year's will be presented at Swancon in only a couple of weeks. I've posted this on the ASIM blog, but as a fan, thought it might be nice to make this guest post available here as well.
The Norma K Hemming Award sponsored by the Australian
Science Fiction Foundation
Contributed by Bill Wright, ASFF awards administrator on 21 March
2015.
What is the Australian Science Fiction Foundation and what is it for?
The Foundation’s website at: www.asff.org.au says its main
purpose is to sponsor and encourage the creation and appreciation of science
fiction in Australia.
It does that through the sponsorship and administration of writing
workshops and short story competitions, seed loans to national conventions, and
the publication of its newsletter, The Instrumentality. The Foundation
has, since its inception, been a resource centre for everyone involved in
science fiction in Australia.
The Australian Science Fiction Foundation runs two jury awards, viz.
−
The A. Bertram Chandler Award for outstanding
achievement in science fiction, established in 1992, where the winner is
selected from eminent achievers nominated by Australian science fiction fans;
and
−
The Norma K Hemming Award for
excellence in the in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality,
class and disability:
What is the
Norma K Hemming Award, why is it given, and who is Norma K Hemming?
Established at
Aussiecon 4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne
in August 2010, the Norma K Hemming Award is given by the ASFF for excellence in the in the exploration
of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class and disability:
•
in the form of science fiction
and fantasy or related artwork or media.
•
produced either in Australia or
by Australian citizens;.
•
first published, released or
presented in the calendar year preceding the year in which the award is given.
The Norma K
Hemming Award is gaining in prestige. Its gestation was foreshadowed in the
late 1990s when academic researchers Van Ikin, Russell Blackford, Sean McMullen
and Paul Collins uncovered works by pioneer Australian feminist science fiction
writer and playwright Norma Kathleen Hemming.
Norma wrote in the 1950s, throughout the decade before her death from breast cancer in July
1960. She was 33 years young.
Her writing fizzes with potential. The science was not always sound
but it was on a par with the majority of science fiction writers of her day.
Most of her stories, but only two of her five plays, have survived.
Readers can visit Norma K Hemming’s Wikipedia entry
at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_K._Hemming for her
biography, her bibliography, and how to purchase a collection of her works by
Dr Toby Burrows, Principal Librarian, Scholars' Centre, University of Western
Australia Library (M209).
One of Norma’s plays, 'The
Matriarchy of Renok’, in which a cast of formidable and at
times vulnerable women wrest control of the galaxy from the depredations of
alpha-males, was read over two successive Swancons (peak WA sf conventions) in
the mid-noughties.
The Matriarchy of Renok was again performed at Aussiecon 4 (the 68th
Worldcon) in Melbourne in August 2010) as a staged reading produced by Sean
McMullen, with overhead space opera storyboard projections by Katoomba-based
artist and digital image pioneer Lewis P Morley.
Besides being a powerful drama with lots of interpersonal tension,
the play is a work of unalloyed, joy that is fun to read, fun to act in, and
fun to watch. I can’t understand why an enterprising movie
mogul hasn’t picked it up
for global release.
Given the patriarchal and, by today’s standards,
sexist mores of the fifties, it was more that a tad courageous of Norma and her
troupe, which she named The Acturians, to expose their parts to varying
degrees of hostile response from science fiction fans. Male chauvinist denizens
of the Sydney Futuran Society staged a mock auction where they sold he off to
the highest bidder. Such was the excitement – if that’s the word for it
– that they are rumoured to have accidently set
her hair on fire. She fared better in Melbourne, where she and her troupe were
welcomed by members of the Melbourne
Science Fiction Club at their conventions.
Gestation of the Norma K Hemming Award
The two Swancon readings were so popular that the Western Australian
Science Fiction Foundation thought of instituting an award in Norma Hemming’s memory,
However, they soon realised that her importance as the pioneer feminist
science fiction writer in Australials post-WWII history indicated a national
focus. So their spokesperson, Emma Hawkes, referred the proposed award to the
Australian Science Fiction Foundation for implementation.
At the time, in mid-2007, I had just been appointed to the ASFF
board, taking over the position of A. Bertram Chandler Award administrator from
Julian Warner who was, and still is, a tireless effectuator acrpss a wide range
of activities in Melbourne’s science fiction
community. Needless to say, my job description was upgraded forthwith. With no
experience in awards administration and no small press contacts (except from
being part of the audience at panel discussions at science fiction conventions)
I was thrown in at the deep end and told
to set up from scratch an ASFF-sponsored Norma K Hemming Award with a national
focus.
I quickly discovered that an ASFF board member had access to a vast
array of resources, most of them human, chief among whom was the Foundation’s academic
representative Van1kin.
Van Ikin the Icon
Van Ikin is an academic and science fiction writer and editor. He
was, until his retirement in 2015, a Professor in English at the University of
Western Australia, where he acted as supervisor for a number of Australian
writers completing their post-graduate degrees and doctorates. They include
such literary luminaries as science fiction and fantasy writers Terry Dowling,
Stephen Dedman and Dave Luckett. In 2000, he received the University of Western
Australia's Excellence in Teaching Award for Postgraduate Research Supervision.
He has reviewed science fiction and fantasy for The Sydney Morning
Herald since 1984, but he is best known in the Australian science fiction
community for his editorship of the long-running critical journal Science
Fiction - A Review of Speculative Fiction.
Van was the inaugural winner of ASFF’s prestigious A.
Bertram Chandler Award for outstanding achievement in science fiction in 1992.
With Van smoothing contacts in academia and my awesome title giving
me the clout to negotiate program space with with peak State and National
convention organisers, I spent the next three years hobnobbing with my
intellectual betters in the academic streams of those conventions. Taking our
cue from the feminist bias in Norma’s stories, Gender
was an obvious criterion for the award. Universities being hotbeds of
disputation on social issues, my academic collaborators sought to identify
additional criteria in that milieu.
The ‘Eureka’ moment came when I suggested they look for skify
elements in their search. Being possessed of minds of power that, for all I
knew, might have been stable at the third level of stress (ref. Gray Lensman by
E. E. Smith Ph D. first published in book form in 1951 by Fantasy Press), they ascended into realms of abstraction
inaccessible to mortals of lesser degree.
Coming down from on high, they evinced humorous `literary allusions
that were opaque to me. Venturing to intrude where Angels fear to tread, I
sought to enter the conversation with an observation to the effect that their
gestalt was passing strange. Suddenly I was in there, informed by past reading
from Weird Tales and Face in the Abyss by A. E. Merritt and
wrestling with postmodernism with the
best of them.
Strange carved out of mind space by science fiction is acknowledged
as its sovereign territory. Strange is the key word. Look for Strange in the
human condition. Gender is strange, Sexuality is strange. Class differences are
strange. The concept of Race as applied to human beings is very strange.
Engulfed in a tide of memories long suppressed, I fought for stability on a
mental plane of utter desolation contemplating the isolation of people in our
midst whom many regard as strange.
Such was the gestation of the Norma K Hemming Award for race, class,
gender and sexuality in speculative fiction
Disability was added as an additional category for the 2011 competition.
Establishment of the Norma K Hemming Award at Aussiecon 4
Despite its aforementioned careful gestation with inputs from the
academic community at every turn, the inaugural Norma K Hemming Award
presentation at Aussiecon 4 came at speculative fiction writers, editors and publishers
from left field, so to speak. No other award encourages writers to have
something worthwhile to say about all categories of otherness in the
human condition. Isolated minorities have been have been ignored or
characterised in negative stereotypes too often, and it is time to redress
that.
Anyone who doubts the efficacy of having such an award to set
standards for speculative fiction writers has only to read the 2013 winning
entry, ‘Sea Hearts’ by Margo Lanagan, to be convinced that ASFF’s full on
approach works. In her novel, Margo shines fresh light on what it is like to be
a man, what it is like to be a woman, what it is like to be human.
Parallel initiatives on the way to establishing the Norma K Hemming
Award
As mentioned
earlier, In the late 1990s a small number of fannish scholars including Van
Ikin, Russell Blackford, Sean McMullen and Paul Collins researched the life and
times of pioneer Australian feminist sf author and playwright Norma Kathleen
Hemming (September 1928 - July 1960) whom a few surviving oldies such as Doug
Nicholson (Sydney) and Mervyn Binns (Melbourne) knew well. Among publications
arising from that research was a biography of Norma K Hemming in ‘Strange
Constellations : A History of Science Fiction’ by Russell
Blackford, Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, published 1999 in the USA by Greenwood
Press.
Dr Helen Merrick is
co-editor, with Tess Williams, of ‘Women of Other
Worlds: Excursions through Science Fiction and Feminism’ (University of Western Australia Press, 1999) in which the
contribution of the feminist fan community to science fiction is strongly
acknowledged. This scholarly and informative publication makes the point that
Australian SF fandom, in tandem with American fandom, has over the last 40
years moved to include issues of racial, sexual and cultural diversity and has
contributed to major feminist fan movements such as slash fiction and the
femmefan movement of the 1970s.
In a contribution
to the work, Helen recalls that trailblazing Canadian femmefan Susan Wood
visited Australia in 1975 for the first Aussiecon, meeting with and being
strongly influenced by principal Guest of Honour Ursula Le Guin who ran the
seminal writers workshop at that first Australian Wordcon. A year later Susan
ran the first identity-oriented panel at a SF convention, entitled ‘Women and Science
Fiction’. The following
year WisCon (the feminist Worldcon in Madison, Wisconsin) was established as an
annual event. Obviously, Australian fandom benefited from these influences. Today,
women are involved in Australian science fiction as authors, editors,
publishers and fans at all levels.
Interestingly, Helen Merrick’s co-author, Tess
Williams, is one of the four distinguished permanent Jurors for the Norma K
Hemming Award.
The 2015 Norma K Hemming Award
The 2015 Norma K Hemming Award will be presented to the winner at
Swancon 40, the 54th Australian National Science Fiction Convention
in Perth on 2-6 April 2015. The judges, writer and editor Russell Blackford;
editor Sarah Endacott; writer, editor and publisher Rob Gerrand; and writer
Tess Williams, have released their shortlist:
Collection:
‘The Female Factory’ by Lisa L
Hannett and Angela Slatter published by
Twelfth Planet Press in November 2014
Novel: ‘Nil By Mouth’ by
LynC published by Satalyte Publishing in June 2014
Novel: ‘North Star Guide Me Home’ by
Jo Spurrier published by
HarperVoyager in May 2014
Novel: ‘Razorhurst’ by Justine
Larbalestier published by Allen and Unwin in
July 2014
Novel: ‘The
Wonders’ by
Paddy O’Reilly
published by Affirm Press in July 2014
Why is there is no cash prize for the Norma K Hemming Awards?
The Norma K Hemming Award has no cash prize because it is a fan
award. Fan activity is much the same all over the world, conforming to
traditions of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated entity
described in its Wikipedia entry at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcon#World_Science_Fiction_Society.
Fan activity includes convention running, encouraging sf small press
enterprises, and writer and reader education at conventions, writing groups and
workshops - all run on a not-for-profit basis
by volunteers drawn from, and trained within, our ranks.
Within socially acceptable parameters of passion and dispassion, we
capture the young and imprint them with a sense of wonder, respect for science
and the scientific method, and an appreciation of good story telling in
literature, art and theatre. That
community of interests breeds talent.
It is why there is no cash prize for the Norma K Hemming Award, and
why ASFF cannot afford to cover competition winners’ travel
expenses. It is also why we go out of
our way at conventions to have high profile luminaries in Literature and the
Arts ‘on tap’ to represent award winners when they can’t be present to
receive their trophies.
In conclusion, I wish to make the observation that ASFS does not have an exclusive patent on Norma
Kathleen Hemming. She belongs to all of us. There is nothing to prevent any
fannish institution, e.g. the Canberra Speculative Fiction Group (CSFG),
setting up, say, the Norma K Hemming Medallion for Romance of Science in
Science Fiction, under criteria that support respect for science and the
scientific method in storytelling.
Norma Hemming confronted gender issues head on. For its own purposes
ASFF added additional categories of otherness in its award. Peak fannish
institutions in each State may take different approaches.
It has been a privilege to have been entrusted with the development
of the Norma K Hemming Award under the auspices of the Australian Science
Fiction Foundation and it has been a
pleasure as its administrator to have developed the award to its present
stature.
Health issues in old age may force me to pass the baton to a younger
administrator. Or ASFF might have a succession plan. In either event, having
fought the good fight and won, I am content.
Bill Wright
Australian Science Fiction Foundation (ASFF)
ASFF awards administrator Website: http://asff.org.au/,
21st March 2015
