Hugo gernsbach was considered the father of science fiction he started the first science fiction magazine back in 1926 Amazing Stories Hugo gernsbach was primarily concerned with the scientific accuracy of the story The neatness of the new invention he was not particularly concerned about the quality of the writing in fact he didn't call it science fiction he called it scientification the next major back issues of Amazing Stories are only a small part of the collection at Hugo's bookstore in Min
neapolis Don bliley is the founder and owner of the store which has one of the largest collections of Science Fiction titles in the country I had been reading science fiction since third grade collecting science fiction for some time and decided it'd be interesting to try to open a science fiction bookstore so I ran through some numbers to see if it would work it looked good and 10 days later on March 2nd 1974 I opened for business and it's been running ever since we have some people who show up
once or twice a week every single week we see a lot of people from out of town we have customers who come in from all over the world we have customers especially from Australia and Europe that anytime they're in North America that's close enough to be an excuse to come to Minneapolis to buy at Uncle Hugo's sudden Galactic Transformations affected the certain earthlings in the 20th century when they overloaded their memory banks with data from the handheld printouts these Transformations were fr
equent at the data Emporium in the Minnesota Matrix called Uncle Hugo's [Music] Hugo guernsbach is also remembered for the literary award that bears his name a glittering silver spaceship called the Hugo award each year at the annual science fiction convention Hugo awards are presented to the authors of outstanding new work [Music] this Hugo right here is for Soldier astronaut and it won the award for the novella classification at the world science fiction convention which was held in London par
ticular year Soldier ask not is the fourth in a cycle of novels by Gordon Dixon one of a circle of internationally acclaimed science fiction authors who live in Minnesota Dixon started his career writing for magazines like Hugo guernsbach's Amazing Stories guernsback went a step farther than that he went into fantasy although not very far he went further into the possibilities of science now then as now if you read read the technical journals you were aware of things that were going to probably
become reality in about 10 or 15 years that the general public hadn't heard of and if you wrote about these things uh essentially scientific wonders and made them part of your fiction you had the makings of the Prototype of science fiction stories Hugo essentially coined a new word for the new kind of story he was after he called it scientification stf and uh this was abbreviated I don't know by him or simply by fans of the period to sci-fi sci-fi has now fallen upon hard times as I say the in-g
roup refers to it as SF and uses the term sci-fi to refer to anything that is old-fashioned poorly done be Western type of Science Fiction Uncle Hugo's bookstore is frequently a place to meet Hugo Award winners from other parts of the Country David Brin a San Francisco author visits Uncle Hugo's once or twice a year autograph his books and meet his fans I know this acid-free paper yes I told this joke before some of you heard it before but you know when you hold up a book like this to your ears
you can hear the sound of wood pulp turning into acid hold a broken acid free paper with sewn signatures up to your ear what you hear is your great grandchildren screaming at your great-great-grandchildren for getting peanut butter stains on it in the 23rd Century this could outlive any of us if it's kept in the right environment brynn's star tide rising earned him both the Hugo and the nebula Awards but he is somewhat skeptical of their actual value anybody who thinks that they're going to be a
writer or an Entertainer and other people are going to pay them to be themselves has more than enough ego already beyond that ego is death it's death to your ability to write and continue to craft all it does is make you into a prima donna and the award starts scaring me a little you know they start making me think boy are you going to start believing them what's it going to do to you nah I'll be okay because I have friends who know that Brynn no matter how big he gets can be drop kicked I was
a Starship boldly spreading the Legacy where no man has gone before science fiction the final frontier
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