The received wisdom regarding the IFA and 1956 is that no award was made that year. This is not so certain.
On 19th March 2020 I wrote on the Timegoggles mailing list -
DEPT. OF EVERYBODY KNOWS Everybody knows that the somewhat
unpopular and rather unloved International Fantasy Award ran from 1951 to 1957,
but that there was no award made in 1956. Not so certain.
The other day I was dealing with an enquiry from a Tolkien
fan who wanted information about the SFBC issue of LORD OF THE RINGS. We had a cheerful
correspondence which resulted in this.
Consequential on that exercise I became anxious about my webpage on the IFA
which has lain unadorned since 2006
and yes I am ashamed. So resolved to get with the program and start searching
for IFA-related material in the British sf magazines and fanzines.
A lot of leafing through showed that the IFA was essentially
unremarked in both AUTHENTIC and NEBULA, but NEW WORLDS as I had already known
was a substantial vein of useful knowledge. British fanzines bar SCIENCE
FICTION NEWS are a more intractable issue that hasn't been properly addressed
yet, but in general UK fanzines between 1951 and 1957 usually show a careless
unconcern with actual science fiction, and even those that do are inept.
Anyway in the process of all this I remembered reading a
retrospective piece by Walt Willis on his service as an IFA panel member for
the first Award in 1951. No idea where it was published, disinclined to page
through WARHOON 28, so try finding it via the web. And this is where an
alternate reality seems to break through.
Somehow I end up in Google Books with the page for Jo
Walton's 'An Informal History of the Hugos', specifically the section for 1957 and in the comments attached no less than David
G Hartwell
asserts
"Someone did in fact give International Fantasy Awards
in 1956, to Frank Herbert's The Dragon in the Sea, tied with William Golding's
Lord of the Flies. I have a copy of the Gollancz first UK edition of the Herbert,
with a band around it announcing the awards. And Frank showed me a picture of
him accepting the award. Best I can figure, the American meeting on the IFA did
not take place, but the UK one did, and the Brits unilaterally gave the awards.
And the US fans refused to record them (to this day)."
What? This goes totally against the received wisdom. Is the
man mad or what? But pretty much instantly an image of the Gollancz DRAGON IN
THE SEA is found (lots available via Google Images or on ABE) and right there
in big letters on a lovely Gollancz yellowjacket typographical cover it says
"The science fiction novel, which, as a prizewinner in
the International Fantasy Award tied with William Golding's LORD OF THE FLIES."
What? What? This makes no immediate sense. This is the
first publication of UNDER PRESSURE/DRAGON IN THE SEA in the UK, issued in 1960,
three years after the last IFA which was in 1957 for LORD OF THE RINGS. The
original UNDER PRESSURE was published in ASTOUNDING in 1956, but LORD OF THE
FLIES substantially predates it with book publication in 1954. There's no
apparent connection here. And most certainly it goes against everything we know
about there being no IFA award in 1956 or after 1957. And it seems inconceivable
that even if the US fans had somehow got the hump about this that no-one would
have written it up, even in passing, in the UK or US. (I should note here that
I have been going through US newszine FANTASY TIMES/SCIENCE FICTION TIMES and
IFA news was often reported therein.)
I research again on the web and among other things that
reflect the accepted wisdom I find a comprehensive sf/fantasy award database within which there is no mention either of a 1956 IFA or anything relating
to William Golding/LORD OF THE FLIES at any time, or for that matter UNDER
PRESSURE/DRAGON IN THE SEA ever winning anything other than probably justified
acclaim. Same goes for any other web-based asset. It almost goes without saying
that the SF ENCYCLOPEDIA, Tuck, Franson&Devore and any other printed
material to hand have no indication hint or clue of any such thing as there being
a 1956 IFA, or that either UNDER/PRESSURE/DRAGON IN THE SEA or LORD OF THE
FLIES won any awards at all, never mind the same award in the same year.
If there is such a thing as a journal of record for the IFA
it is NEW WORLDS; I go back to NEW WORLDS for 1956/57. As I actually expect there
is nothing relating to a 1956 IFA but there is a review of the Gollancz DRAGON
IN THE SEA by Les Flood in NW 97, August 1960. Les Flood was of course one of
the central motors of the IFA if not the actual progenitor. Flood goes on about
the general wonderfulness of the book for a page and a bit, but curiously at no
point refers to the business about the IFA quoted above. Did he perhaps not get
a dj with his copy? But he specifically says ..."has its familiar yellow dustjacket
emblazoned unashamedly with the description 'science fiction'..." This all
makes it even more confusing; here's the man who essentially invented the IFA
not mentioning it at all in relation to a book he is reviewing, never mind
swerving around an assertion about something that didn't actually happen (or so
we currently believe). Was he by 1960 so disenchanted with even the thought of
the rather ignominious failure of the IFA to even mention it? A point we're too
late to resolve.
To forestall some wrong ideas; none of this related to the
WORLD FANTASY AWARD because those were instituted in 1975, fifteen years after
the Gollancz TDITS of 1960. That Gollancz dj makes an assertion but there's no visible
evidence to back it up, therefore Hartwell in the quote above is right in that
he remembered the dj correctly, but where's the evidence that the dj is
correct. I have asked Malcolm Edwards, onetime Gollancz Supremo, about this and he responded with what I had
expected, which is that all Gollancz archives are long gone. And what award was
Frank Herbert photographed receiving? And regarding timeframes I quote from a
1952 Les Flood article in NEW WORLDS regarding eligibility for the IFA –
"To clear up the question of which books will he
eligible, it has been decided that the following conditions must apply: The
work of fiction shall be a complete novel, or series of stories by the same
author (mixed anthologies are therefore excluded), which is first published in
book form in any country during 1951. Thus, a story which has seen print
earlier in a magazine, perhaps serialised, and subsequently reprinted as a
book, more often than not revised or rewritten, is eligible. A new edition of
an earlier book is not."
Am I - we - missing something really obvious here, or did
some Gollancz jacket designer - and the people who approved it - just confuse
unrelated facts? But then even that makes no sense because there don't appear
to be any unrelated facts to confuse! The world may never know...unless you
know differently.
Greg Pickersgill
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