SFWA's New Grand Master

SFWA has announced that the "Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master" for next year will be Harry Harrison, getting a jump on the April event and continuing the new regime's apparent policy of clearing their desks of all work as quickly as humanly possible.

This is a really, really early announcement, isn't it? I thought typically this news came out early in the year, two or three months before the Nebula Awards Weekend. I hope that doesn't mean that Harrison is very ill, but that's what came to mind first.

SFWA is digging deep into the apple barrel for Grand Masters at this point, choosing prolific and long-lived writers who each wrote a few seminal works but aren't the overarching giants of the field. (On the other hand, that description also fits just as well some of the very earliest Grand Masters, like Simak and Williamson. Grand Masters have only rarely been as "Grand" as they might possibly be.)

Personally, I read a lot of Harrison in my formative years, and enjoyed his books, particularly the "Stainless Steel Rat" novels. Most of those books, though, don't really hold up now. I suspect he's really getting the Grand Master-ship because he survived so long and because of Make Room! Make Room! (I also read a lot of Ron Goulart in those days, and I don't seriously expect to see him made a Grand Master any time soon; I'm not claiming I had wonderful taste at the age of twelve.)

I'm not complaining, exactly -- this is SFWA's award, for people who SFWA really likes, and it has never been explicitly for "great writers" -- just noting that I would put Harrison on a lower level than such recent winners as Le Guin, Silverberg, and Ellison.

And SFWA has now given a Grand Mastership every year since 2003 -- seven in a row. They also gave out GMs for seven years straight from 1994 to 2000, after a much more leisurely pattern in the award's first twenty years. It's hard to avoid thinking that SFWA is trying to hand these out to as many of their older friends and colleagues as they can, as quickly as they can, before those older writers die. Again, it's their award, so they can do what they want with it. But if they want to use the Nebulas to increase their prominence and influence -- as has been repeatedly suggested -- then loading up with a bunch of GMs might not be the optimum strategy.