---

“An Honour to be Nominated…”

by Jacob Seinemeier

TRANSGALACTIC NEWS- straight from the feed to your screed!

“…and how exciting to be gathered here for this night of nights, as the Planetary Terraforming awards for the 346 billionth Galactic cycle gets underway here at the Ghentool™ Interdimensional Ballroom!

Whether you’re tuning in via tachyon wave-transfer from the distant future, or via mental projection from the dawn of time; hologram, Tachygram or gene-tweaked data-encoder, we have all the stars of the industry gathered together on the Vermillion Carpet. Faint at the latest fashion! Gasp at the gossip! Most importantly, stay tuned- because we will be broadcasting live and in person to answer that most sought after of life’s questions- who will be this cycle’s rising star? Who will take home the coveted Terraformer of the Cycle Award?

Only we can give you the answer…but if you want the answer to your thirst, don’t forget to reach for a pouch of cool, clammy Ghentool™ and quench that fire…!”

---

Clemk oozed out of the transport tube and padded out onto the vermillion carpet.

Nobody noticed.

It wasn’t unexpected. Certainly not unfamiliar. Still—of all the places to break the habit of a lifetime, the Walk of Fame at the Terraformed of the Cycle Awards would have been a great place to start.

No such luck, though. Every vibe-recorder with a would-be journalist stuck behind it was busy chasing down interviews with the various luminary ‘formers who’d arrived before him, and his appearance hadn’t raised a ripple. The crowds that packed the stands on either side were too busy gazing in adoration at the arrivals that hadn’t travelled here cheaply by tube. Even the camera-drones seemed to be avoiding him—and they were supposed to document everything.

An ear-splitting roar nearly caused him to bifurcate in terror, but it was just that blowhard Peerkin Stroob arriving on the back of a colossal four-legged feathered quetzadillo. The beast reared up and kicked out with its rear claws at the poor robot valets who’d arrived to park it, sending one flying and badly denting the other.

He was always pulling stunts like this; the planets he terraformed were inevitably vicious, gore-soaked nightmares celebrating the most brutal predatory hierarchies imaginable, and he enjoyed trotting out his latest creations at these sorts of events to stir up his fans.

Stroob waved the remaining valets away and led the beast down the vermillion carpet, grinning and giving four thumbs up to the crowds who cheered and screamed delightedly in terror, squeezing Clenk into the corner of the carpet like a forgotten half-eaten canapé at the edge of a overflowing buffet table.

Clemk shook his head and waved one suckered polyp at a passing collapsolid in a black-and-white jacket carrying a clipboard. They looked up, blinked, and folded space to appear at Clemk’s elbow.

“Name?” they grunted.

“Clemk Uoootha,” he answered. Whenever he had to give someone his name, he always sounded like he was apologising for something.

The collapsolid—it seemed like a male, flickering a vivid scarlet whenever they appeared and reappeared—nodded. “Welcome to the Ghentool™ Interdimensional Ballroom. Head straight on through to the end of the carpet. Make sure to pick up your welcome pack at the end.” He clicked a small silvery device in his hand, and a tiny hovering blue triangular icon appeared, circling around Clemk’s head.

“Thanks,” Clemk said. The teeny blue triangle was terribly distracting, orbiting just at the corner of his vision. He resisted the urge to flail one of his tentacles at it.

“You nominated for anything?” the collapsolid asked. Job done, now eighty-percent of his attention was focused on the gaudily dressed figures crawling, stalking, flapping and teleporting onto the carpet from their respective vehicles. He faded in and out periodically- his barely-there presence in three-dimensional space reflecting his lack of interest.

Clemk’s answer was a low mutter, whistled through his lower spiracles.

“Sorry?”

“Terraformer of the Cycle,” Clemk said, his voice now slightly above a whisper.

“Seriously?” the collapsolid raised one crystalline eyebrow, fading back into substantiality. Clemk had all of his attention now. “Anyplanet I would have heard of?”

“Probably not,” Clemk admitted, compulsively adjusting the translucent jacket of hardened slime he’d extruded a few hours before. He never could get the lapels quite right, but he hadn’t been able to afford a new suit for the event. Or even an old one.

“What’s your world called?”

“Earth.”

They blinked. “Never heard of it.”

Clemk shrugged. “Told you.”

“Still, an indie getting nominated? How’d you manage that?”

“I genuinely have no idea.”

The collapsolid waved the self-conscious terraformer away and went back to his concierge duties.

Clemk wove his way through the crowds towards the end of the carpet, hearts leaping in his chest every time he heard one of the interviewers calling out a name and feeling them plunge to the depths of his thorax every time it turned out not to be his.

One name did cause him to pause and turn, however.

“Lomutar! Lomutar!

Sure enough, there he was: kinetic exoskeleton polished and gleaming for the occasion, the gaseous form within swirling and glowing a pale seafoam green, indicating confidence and relaxation, which tended to be his default state. Lomutar had three different recorders trained on him from three different directions.

Bet they all get his good side, Clemk fumed.

“They’re calling you the next terraforming genius,” one interviewer breathed, leaning in close, her gleaming mauve fur rippling with excitement. “That your world this cycle might make you the successor to Spoerkin Berglin. How do you respond to that?”

“Look,” Lomutar responded humbly, flashing colours in a staccato burst of sub-light communications, translated by his suit into an unctuous, humblebragging drawl. “I’m nothing special. I’m just lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time to be inspired, you know? Some planets just, like, have to be born. I’m more of a midwife than an artist.”
If Clemk’s species had evolved teeth, he would have ground them in frustration.

He turned his back and stormed down the vermillion carpet towards the ballroom. He needed a drink.

Nearly as many people noticed him leave as remarked upon his arrival—which is to say, none at all.

---

The Ghentool™ Interdimensional Ballroom was constructed on multiple planes of existence- all the way up to the elevated spaces where the canapes and fizzing flutes of booze existed purely as conceptual ideals of their perfected existence; all the way back down to the densest underlayer of the bedrock of the universe, where the only ones who could survive the interminable pressures were those who were able to squeeze between subatomic particles where even gravity itself didn’t penetrate.

Clemk was somewhere in the middle, designed for corporeals like himself. His table for one was seventy rows back from the front of the stage, pushed right up against the giant square of suspended saltwater that allowed the finned and flippered aquatics to float, drink, and cheer their fellow creatives whenever an award was announced.

Every now and then a bubble of air escaped the watery cube and with it, the sound of enthusiastic burbling.

Clemk nibbled on a pickled eel that he had snagged off one of the passing waitroids. Three more just like it were lined up on his tiny plate; he had predicted correctly that the waiters would be few and far between and had grabbed a handful while he could. No sense being hungry as well as humiliated.

He still didn’t understand what he was doing here. Terraformers like him—working outside the studio system, relying entirely on gonzo teams of half-crazy volunteer genetweakers and landscape archetypists didn’t get invited to the awards. Like…ever. The votes needed for your planet to get nominated had to be in the trillions.

Earth was—well, it just wasn’t a contender.

It wasn’t nearly aesthetic enough to be appealing to the Transcendents. Since the dinosaurs got wiped out in that fucking frustrating asteroid collision, it wasn’t violent enough for the Brutalists. The Mathematics would turn their nose up at the lack of symmetrical, imaginary and prime numbers in the planet’s probability events…so what did that leave? The penguins?

He smiled. He did love the penguins.

Nevertheless, Clemk was still convinced that it had to be a mistake. Not so much that he’d refuse the invitation; he wasn’t crazy. There were six thousand planets on the list of nominees, and his baby was number six-zero-zero-zero-zero. It had made the cut, however it’d happened.

He intended to make the most out of this…maybe get some exposure for his team and their tiny, weirdo ball of rock.

“Clemk! You sorry excuse for a mudworm, there you are!”

Oh god, not now.

He glanced up and saw Lomutar striding towards him, his suit’s light array flashing a delighted purple. “I was wondering where they stuck you!”

Lomutar parked his exosuit on the other side of the table, locked into a sitting position to make up for the lack of a second chair. “I saw you earlier on the vermillion carpet but you ran off before I could say hi. Sorry, those reporters wouldn’t let me leave. They’re like…what are those little fishy things on your planet? The ones that’re all teeth?”

“Piranhas.” Clemk swallowed down a knot of jealous rage, which bubbled and burned in his stomach. “They’re called piranhas.”

“Yeah, those guys. When you’re on top, they all want a piece of you.”

“Must be tough,” Clemk said flatly.

Lomutar’s exoskeleton nodded what passed for its head and the swirling gas within turned a vivid chartreuse. “Can you believe it? Who would have thought when we were coming up that we’d both be here for the Terraformer of the Cycle Awards?”

“The way I remember it,” Clemk said, catching a rare glimpse of a waitroid zooming pass and flagged them down for a drink, “we always thought the awards were bullshit. Nothing but a bloated industry high on its own sense of self-importance, patting itself on its collective back.”

“Careful buddy,” Lomutar said, his electronically generated voice amused, but with an edge to it. “Your bitterness is showing.”

“I’m quoting you,” Clemk said, downing his drink and feeling the mucus in his nodes begin to loosen.

“You could have been here with me,” Lomutar insisted.

The irony was, he was right. When the two of them were terraforming partners, they had both been offered the chance to work at FieldStar productions. Clemk had refused, citing the lack of creative control. Lomutar had taken the position.

Five cycles later, Lomutar was FieldStar’s golden gaseous genius. He’d been taken under the wing of Spoerkin Berglin himself and was now favoured to win the award for his latest creation: Folotoro. It was a soaring crystalline macroworld as beautiful as it was utterly, ridiculously predictable. There was nothing about it that wasn’t carefully chosen for award potential, from the dazzling shades of its emerald oceans to its endlessly spinning, perfectly symmetrical dominant species: a latticework of glittering interconnected single-celled lifeforms. There wasn’t a micrometer of it that hadn’t been exhaustively focus-grouped for marketability.

Clemk hated it. But to be fair, he wasn’t exactly objective.

“You could have been here with me,” Clemk shot back. “The two of us, terraforming planets that break the rules and make the establishment scratch their grey matter trying to figure out what the hell we were thinking.”

“And how’s that going for you so far?” Lomutar asked.

“I’m here, aren’t I? Somebody must have been paying attention.” Clemk reached for his drink.

All at once, the swirling mist that occupied Lomutar’s containment exoskeleton changed direction. The lights that decorated the suit flickered guiltily.

Clemk paused with the amber liquid hallway to his mouth. “What? What is it? I know that look.”

“Look, pal,” Lomutar said slowly. “You didn’t really think you got here on your own, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I pulled some strings. Asked Berglin to send out some psi-blasts to a few of the more heavily populated hive-mind dimensions. Enough to scrape up the minimum number of nominations to score you an invite.”

“Why the hell would you do that?”

“You haven’t been returning my calls. I tried to make an appointment, but your secretary must be incompetent, because they clearly didn’t pass on my message.”

“I don’t have a secretary,” Clemk deadpanned. “You left the message with one of my terraformers. She told me she thought it must be a crank hologram, because nobody could possibly be so arrogant and entitled over the wave on purpose. I didn’t have the heart to correct her.”

Lomutar ignored him. “So anyhow, I thought this’d be a good chance for us to bury the hatchet. I want you to work for me.”

“Work for you?”

“Yeah, man. Think about it, it’d be like old times again. You can ditch that mudball you’re stuck to—”

“Forget it.” Clemk quivered with rage. “Unlike some of us, I actually enjoy what I’m doing, and I don’t have to bow and scrape at the studio’s feet to get my planets spinning. Or leech off more talented people to get ahead.”

Lomutar’s running lights flashed an angry scarlet. “Whatever, you stuck up cephalopod. Last time I do you a favor.”

Lomutar’s exosuit unfolded itself and turned to leave. “Enjoy the party,” his speaker sneered. “It’s the last time you’ll ever see the inside of this place when you’re not watching it from the couch.”

Once Lomutar was gone, Clemk waved down another passing waitroid. Ignoring the buzzing droid’s objections, he snagged the entire tray of drinks. “Keep ‘em coming,” he insisted.

Lomutar was right about one thing, Clemk thought as he lined up the glasses and began to drain them one at a time. Might as well make the most of this while I can.

---

Two hours later, Clemk was racing shots with one of the Aquatic oceanic engineers on the other side of the self-contained cube of seawater and losing.

Badly.

Which makes no sense, he thought fuzzily. How the hell is he even drinking inside there?

He was only halfway to the end of his line of drinks when the Aquatic and his friends bubbled loudly and slapped fins. They’d beaten him again.

“One more round,” he slurred to the scaly humanoid, who was waving at him with his feathery tail in what Clemk assumed was an obscene gesture.

He was wrong; turned out they were just pointing. Behind you, they mouthed, a line of bubbles escaping their gill slits.

“Mr Uoootha? Might I disturb you for a moment?”

The voice was unctuous, officious, and attached to a heavyset Kiffuk leaning over Clemk’s table. Heavyset was the default for those folk. They were a high-gravity species, so they tended to take up a lot of room. Even for a Kiffuk, this sentient was big; squeezed into an exquisitely tailored silver dinner suit with yellow piping, the liquid in Clemk’s glass tilted sideways, drawn to the macrogravity of the looming figure’s mass.

“Hey, sorry, I just assumed these drinks were free—” Clemk babbled.

“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” the figure assured him. Their wide, flat features twisted into what might have been a reassuring smile, multifaceted eyes glittering. “My name is Erucc; I’m here to deliver a message from the Board of Selections. They would like to request a favour. More of an opportunity, really. For you.”

“Wait…the Board. The Board?” Clemk had to be hallucinating from a combo of booze and too much eel. He shook his head and tried to bring the Kiffuk back into focus, but they stubbornly insisted on being three wobbly people instead of a more traditionally in-focus one.

The Board were the ones who organised the Terraformer Awards every cycle. They ran the show, tabulated the nominations, and (if rumours were to be believed) secretly decided who was going to win in each category—not based upon the votes, but based on their own arcane math.

“Yes, of course.” Erucc agreed indulgently. “You see, we find ourselves short a presenter. Peerkin Stroob was set to give out an award, but he’s had a small…accident.”

“What happened?”

“Unfortunately, his pet quetzadillo broke free and savaged him rather badly. It will take the better part of a day to reattach his limbs. Let alone his head.”

“Wow.”

“Indeed.” Erucc raised an eyebrow. “A cynical person might express astonishment that it has not happened sooner.”

“So…what do you need from me?”

“The Board has long been interested in promoting independent voices and creators. Your name was recommended to us by someone on Spoerkin Berglin’s team to present the award for Most Innovative Planet. Quite an honour.”

“They want me to present? Wait—” Clemk extruded an extra pair of polyps from his neck and ran them across his face. “The person who dropped my name. Would that be Lomutar, by any chance?”

“I believe so, yes.”

That foggy bastard, Clemk fumed to himself drunkenly, swaying slightly. Everybody with half a brain knows he’s guaranteed to win. He just wants to rub it in my face by forcing me to present the award to him. What a colossal twa—

With a start, Clemk realised that he was moving. Somehow the Kiffuk had increased its personal gravity, and Clemk was trapped in it, bobbing along behind them as the colossal sentient strode towards the front of the stage, weaving between tables. Clemk spun counterclockwise and found himself dangling upside down. All the fluid in his thorax slid into his abdomen with an audible squwilch. This was not helping his rising nausea.

“Hey wait!” he called out.

“So glad you could assist,” Erucc called, without looking back.

The Board was not, it seemed, taking no for an answer.

---

What felt like mere moments later, Clemk was standing shakily to one side of the stage, holding a small crystalline envelope in one trembling suckered hand.

He tried lifting it up to one of the small synchrotronic lamps installed on the side of the stage. No luck. Stupid thing was impenetrable. Not that he needed to see it to know what was in it.

He took a deep shuddering breath through all twenty of his spiracles. Keep calm, he told himself. Just do it and get the hell out.

The size of the backstage area made the ballroom seem tiny by comparison. And that was a space that existed in sixteen dimensions, took up a trillion cubic feet in volume, and which took close to a week to walk through from one side to the other without the benefit of spacial folding—only this was chaos…a hive of sprinting costumers, camerapeople, journalists, talent and hangers on. Not to mention one very pissed off quetzadillo which was still rampaging through the back rooms, as yet uncaptured.

A flock of small furry PAs surrounded him, spraying his extruded slime suit with some sort of matte dust, intended to avoid reflection from the glare of the approximately twenty million lights that would be trained on him at once. He coughed, staggered and nearly fell over.

There was a sweeping buzz of orchestral music as the presenter and recipient of the Most Evolved Proto-Sapien Crustacean Award strolled off, stage left.

“Okay, you’re on,” Erucc called to him from the wings, waving him over.

“Hey, do you have any Sober Syringes™, by any chance?” Clemk asked the massive sentient. “I’m really not feeling all that—”

One shove from a gigantic hand the size of an armchair, and he stumbled into the spotlight.

He moved into the centre of the stage, blinking, countless camera drones surrounding him like an inquisitive swam of judgmental hornets.

He stared out at the ballroom and realised he couldn’t actually see anything. He blinked nictitating eyelids and squinted. The rows upon rows of glaring lights cast everything shy of the third tier or so into shadow. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Someone in the first row waved. Ah shit.

It was Lomutar, of course. His gaseous exoskeleton was sitting next to Spoerkin Berglin at his table of oceanic, geographic, atmospheric and spacial engineers. Berglin himself was perched on a small pedestal, one just large enough for him to clasp with his bottom hindclaws, greying feathers fluffed out, hands clasped over his voluminous stomach. He smiled up at Clemk indulgently.

Clemk took another shaky breath and began reading the words projected in front of his face on the one-way holoprompter.
“Firstly,” he said, and belched slightly. There was a titter from the audience. He flashed a quick and sickly smile and went on, trying to enunciate every word so he didn’t sound as drunk as he felt. “Firstly, I just want to say how honoured I am, as an indie planeeter, to be standing on this legendary stage. I spoke to Peerkin Stroob’s head earlier, and he wishes you all a wonderful evening, and is sorry he couldn’t be here. We all wish him a speedy recovery, and please remember if the quetzadillo approaches you- do not pet it.

“The Most Innovative Planet Award,” Clemk continued mechanically, “is intended for those whose worlds are at the cutting edge of both aesthetics and extraspacial mechanics. The ultimate symbiosis of art and science.”

Lomutar’s running lights flickered and smirked at him from the front row seat.

Clemk fumed. At that moment, all he wanted to do was run his former partner’s exoskeleton through a trash compactor. The arrogant shit. Sitting there in the front row like he was better than everybody else. Like he had somehow earned the award he was definitely going to walk away with, rather than riding Berglin’s tail feathers with his nose firmly up the Board’s collective backsides.

Clemk suddenly realised that he hadn’t said anything in a long time, and the crowd was beginning to mutter. He dragged his eyes away from Lomutar and squinted at the holoprompter.

“And the finalists are—” Clenk took a breath. “Glerggol Moist-hans for Thallasa Four.”

A polite popping of bubbles from the aquatics.

“Peerkin Stroob for Sanguina Prime.”

Hooting and hollering from the gallery, plus a muffled “hell yeah” from the box containing Stroob’s head backstage.

“Clemk Uoootha, for Earth.”

A couple of uncertain claps and thumps, which died away quickly, leaving him feeling like curling up into a sticky ball and hibernating for a century.

“Lomutar for Folotoro X-316.”

This affirmation from the crowd was loudest and longest…but seemed to Clemk almost bored. Like it was expected of them.

“And so, I am happy to announce that the winner of the Most Innovative Planet Award is…” Clemk cracked the crystal envelope, which evaporated into mist between his fingers. He stared at the octagonal metal chit grasped in his tentacles.
LOMUTAR, it read. FOLOTORO.

Clemk swallowed back rage and bile. Then some more bile. Then rage again.

He looked up at the darkness filled with invisible crowds, his peers.

He glanced down at Lomutar, swirling slowly in his suit in a self-satisfied spiral.

Clemk’s mouth began moving, but he wasn’t running it. His voice spoke, but it was like his head was a megaphone a stranger had their lips pressed up against.

“Clemk Uoootha,” he said. “Earth.”

He was suddenly, painfully, appallingly sober.

Lomutar’s running lights all turned a vivid, furious crimson.

Spoerkin Berglin frowned.

“Hey,” Clemk said, and grinned. “That’s me.”

There was a long silence. Then a smattering of polite applause from those with hands, and a faint burbling noise from the Aquatics. Stumping thumps and subaudible cries from an assortment of thousands of other species rose in volume, then faded away as he raised his hand.

“Thank you!” Clemk called out. “I gotta say, this is such a surprise. I can’t believe it.”

Lomutar leaned in towards Berglin and they conversed furiously. Berglin nodded and waved a feathered hand at a collapsolid PA standing attentively nearby. They ‘ported beside him. Berglin stuck his beak in their ear, whispering.

“Look,” Clemk said, “we all know that sentients like me; artists like us, terraformed planets like mine usually don’t have a chance at something like this. But they should!”

Another patter of noise, louder this time.

The camera drones moved closer, circling ominously.

The collapsolid nodded and vanished. There was a sudden susurration in the wings of the stage.

“A planet doesn’t have to appeal to everybody,” Clemk insisted, voice rising. “It can be strange, or niche, or just confusing. It can have avians that don’t fly—penguins, seriously look them up, they’re flipping adorable—airbreathers that swim like aquatics, and complex crystalline lattices that don’t know higher mathematics.”

Thudding footsteps echoed to his left. He darted a quick sideways glance and saw three towering Kiffuk gathering beside the curtain, talking quietly amongst themselves, occasionally looking over at him as he spoke. One of them was Erucc, he was pretty sure.

More booming bootsteps to his right showed him another pair of the high-gravity sentients hovering at stage right. Screw it. Go big, then go home.

“You can even have a planet,” Clemk laughed, “that you’ve populated with a dominant species of squishy bipeds so convinced of their own superiority and importance that they completely missed the fact that the Octopids moved in a thousand years ago and took over their entire society. It’s so…fucking…funny!”

“Hell yeah!” called a voice from the crowd. “Eight leggers for life!”

Clemk began to feel a dragging sensation on his left, like something had stuck a hook through him and was steadily tugging him sideways. It felt like it was originating from Erucc’s group. Then another dragging feeling from the right. Both groups of Kiffuk were trying to yank him off stage by increasing their gravity, but they were somehow cancelling each other out, leaving him in the tiny pocket between both sets of forces. Clemk squelched painfully towards the front of the stage. It was like being on a moving sidewalk walking backwards.

“So be weird!” Clemk cried to the darkness. “Do something only you can do! Don’t play it safe! If people like it—great. If they don’t… if they hate it?”

Lomutar didn’t have eyes, but if he had, they’d be boring holes through him. Red running lights pulsed. Pulsed. Pulsed.
The walk-off music started playing.

“Then that’s bloody amazing, because it means they feel something, that you’ve made something that somebody gives a damn about, even if it’s just to rant on all the ways you could’ve done the mountains different, or why gravity works the wrong way around.”

The Kiffuk were done being subtle. They emerged from the wings and moved in on him. They left divots in the polished marble of the stage as they approached. Cracks radiated outwards towards him from each rumbling step.

“Thank you very much!” Clemk shouted. He flipped the metallic chit with Lomutar’s name on it at the encroaching battalion of massive sapients- and leaped off the stage into the crowd.

He may or may not have landed on Lomutar.

---

TRANSGALACTIC NEWS: straight from the feed to your screed!
BREAKING: AWARD SHOW MARRED BY TECHNICAL MALFUNCTION

The Terraformer of the Cycle Awards suffered a brief broadcasting issue, with a misprinting of one of the award envelopes resulting in the honour being mistakenly and temporarily issued to the wrong recipient.

After a few minutes’ interruption of the signal, the show continued, although Lomutar, the winner of the Most Innovative Planet Award was not able to accept it in person, due to unexpected impact damage to his exoskeleton.

NEXT UP:
Newly constructed planet Earth—terraformed barely 4.5 billion years ago and relatively unknown until just recently—has been flooded with flybys from geoengineering enthusiasts looking to check out the “next hot thing.”

Officials are suggesting that the sheer number of saucers visiting just this past week may completely exhaust the planet’s supply of penguins.

---

Host Commentary

And that was “An Honor to be Nominated,” by Jacob Seinemeier.

About the story, the author had this to say: “In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, self-effacing terraformer Slartibartfast tells Arthur Dent that he won an award for his work on Norway’s fjords. I always wondered what that awards ceremony looked like, and if it was as overblown and self-important as the Oscars.”

I have to commend Valerie, my co-editor, who schedules all of the stories, in placing this one right here. Because we are in awards season right now, the part of the year where most authors and editors I know have a greater chance for acid reflux and high blood pressure.

(For the record, Escape Pod is eligible for Best Semiprozine, Valerie and I are eligible for Best Editor (short form), and any original story you heard last year is eligible for the short story Hugo. Just saying.)

I’ve had the disappointment in not being nominated, I’ve had the joy of being nominated and then the sour feeling of having my name mispronounced. I’ve had the disappointment of not winning, and i’ve had the baffling joy over winning. I was talking to my friend Ursula (T Kingfisher) about awards, and she said that around her first or second award she tried to do the math to see what they were worth, taking into account if there was a sales bump after the award. Because the award is not just kudos and a shiny trophy; we also hope it will affect our careers and get more people interested in our work.

In fact I’ve felt almost everything described in this story, except for being drunk on stage and then enacting a coup during the presentation. But it does sound like fun.

I think this story, aside from being quite funny, accurately encompasses creative work and the emotional highs and lows. So many of us create without anyone taking note. And we get so used to doing it that if someone does take notice, our first reaction is like Clemk’s: “Wait, why is this happening? What’s your angle?” You hope that the awards show might let you wear a slick outfit and get some free booze. You don’t dare hope for more. You might rub elbows with famous folks, or influential folks. Or you might want to crawl into a seat in the back and just rot away with your feelings.

And even though the award was fixed, and they used the nomination to lure Clemk to the ceremony and make sure he was set up to fail, or be humiliated, he still managed to boost his career because of the nomination. It’s not a move I would endorse, but sometimes drastic times call for drastic measures.

Science fiction has been rocked by infighting and scandal over the last twelve years or so: Gamergate’s fringes leaking over into our world, bringing us the Sad Puppies who were convinced that people really weren’t reading and enjoying books by queer people or people of color or feminists, and therefore the game had to be fixed, so they figured out how to fix it to benefit them. Then we had a corrupt Hugo administration from three years ago just casually dropping people from the ballot because they wanted to. Then when called on it, they spitefully kept the trophies they were supposed to distribute. I met Chris M Barkley recently at a con, the Best Fan Writer who went to court for to get his trophy. He won, and he was proudly displaying the Hugo at the con. Good on you for fighting, Chris.

I think my point here is we don’t do it for awards, but if we do get nominated, then be ready to lose them, and if you lose them it’s more comfortable to be in sweatpants than a gown, but you don’t want to be that guy that wore sweatpants to the awards.

Escape Pod is 100% audience supported, and we count on your donations to keep the lights on and the servers humming. Head to https://escapeartists.net/support-ea/ to see all the available donation and subscription options, including Patreon, PayPal, Ko-Fi, and Twitch.

You can also support Escape Pod for free by rating or reviewing us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app.

Escape Pod is distributed on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Our music is by permission of Daikaiju. You can hear more from them at daikaiju.org.

That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from Jack Benny, “I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.”

Thanks for listening. We will see you next week with more free science fiction. Stay safe, stay kind, and have fun.