# zelazny's story "no award" - hmmm *The Urth list — 6 messages, 4 voices, 22 May 2012* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Marc Aramini *22 May 2012, 05:11* I have been reading a lot of short stories from the New Wave to see if they had an impact on Wolfe's writing at all for our little short story project (I won't call it a failure yet heh heh) , a bunch of Ellison, Tiptree, Zelazny, etc. and I read Zelazny's 1977 "No Award" today. spoilers the hemispheres of a man's brain are separated on the corpus callosum and one of the personalities is promised an award for assassinating the president. There are telepaths protecting him, and when the catch phrase is spoken, the man must try to stop his left hand with his right hand to foil the assassination attempt. Okay, not EXTREMELY Wolfean, but in light of the No Award incident that cost Wolfe his first Nebula when Asimov mistakenly read The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories as the winner and the subsequent thematic inversion of that story that led to The Death of Doctor Island with the separated corpus callosum, I thought it might be a nice little in joke, as the second story DID win the award, published in 1973 . --- ### Jeff Wilson *22 May 2012, 05:50 · in reply to Marc Aramini* > On 5/22/2012 12:11 AM, Marc Aramini wrote: > Okay, not EXTREMELY Wolfean, but in light of the No Award incident that > cost Wolfe his first Nebula when Asimov mistakenly read The Island of > Doctor Death and Other Stories as the winner and the subsequent thematic > inversion of that story that led to The Death of Doctor Island with the > separated corpus callosum, I thought it might be a nice little in joke, > as the second story DID win the award, published in 1973 . Why did he lose the award from Asimov's mistake? ``` Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana < http://www.tamut.edu/CIL > ``` --- ### Mo Holkar *22 May 2012, 08:02 · in reply to Jeff Wilson* > At 06:50 22/05/2012, Jeff wrote: > On 5/22/2012 12:11 AM, Marc Aramini wrote: >> Okay, not EXTREMELY Wolfean, but in light of the No Award incident that >> cost Wolfe his first Nebula when Asimov mistakenly read The Island of >> Doctor Death and Other Stories as the winner and the subsequent thematic >> inversion of that story that led to The Death of Doctor Island with the >> separated corpus callosum, I thought it might be a nice little in joke, >> as the second story DID win the award, published in 1973 . > Why did he lose the award from Asimov's mistake? He didn't -- he hadn't won the award. Asimov's mistake was to say that he had. The actual 'winner' was No Award, although Wolfe's was the highest-rated of the contenders after that. best wishes, Mo # ~ # ~ # WolfeWiki -- a wiki about Gene Wolfe http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/ --- ### Jeff Wilson *22 May 2012, 08:39 · in reply to Mo Holkar* > On 5/22/2012 3:02 AM, Mo Holkar wrote: > At 06:50 22/05/2012, Jeff wrote: >> On 5/22/2012 12:11 AM, Marc Aramini wrote: >>> Okay, not EXTREMELY Wolfean, but in light of the No Award incident that >>> cost Wolfe his first Nebula when Asimov mistakenly read The Island of >>> Doctor Death and Other Stories as the winner and the subsequent thematic >>> inversion of that story that led to The Death of Doctor Island with the >>> separated corpus callosum, I thought it might be a nice little in joke, >>> as the second story DID win the award, published in 1973 . >> Why did he lose the award from Asimov's mistake? > He didn't -- he hadn't won the award. Asimov's mistake was to say that > he had. > > The actual 'winner' was No Award, although Wolfe's was the highest-rated > of the contenders after that. That was my understanding, but I'm puzzled why this is said to have cost him an award he didn't actually have. ``` Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana < http://www.tamut.edu/CIL > ``` --- ### Marc Aramini *22 May 2012, 13:42 · in reply to Jeff Wilson* Wolfe thought he won. He was announced. Then it turned out there was no award that year, and he just had to sit down and smile in front of everyone. Sucks. > --- On Tue, 5/22/12, Jeff Wilson wrote: > That was my understanding, but I'm puzzled why this is said to have cost > him an award he didn't actually have. He didn't have it, but the situation was tense and in my opinion must have been emotionally raw. --- ### Dan'l Danehy-Oakes *22 May 2012, 15:36 · in reply to Marc Aramini* > Marc Aramini wrote: > ...our little short story project (I won't call it a failure yet heh heh) Heavens, no it isn't. I've been wondering if you could get a book out of it, actually. I read an interview with Roger Zelazny, and he said that the reason he called the story "No Award" was because he noticed that, since the ballots were alphabetical by author, he always wound up right before No Award. He wanted to have two "No Award"s in a row and cause confusion. Unfortunately for his dastardly plot ( :) ), it didn't get nominated for anything. ``` Dan'l Danehy-Oakes ``` ---