Gernsback’s Grandchildren; or, A History Of The Hugo Awards In Seventy Sentences

William Shaw A poem composed of one sentence from every individual winner of the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, 1955-2025. * * * Let us not rely on the dubious assistance of Biblical characters.It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. It was a beautiful machine, light, low-slung, swift, red and shining.That was the train the drunks and the sinners rode — the gambling men and the grifters, the big-time spenders, the skirt-chasers, and all the jolly crew.I keep telling myself I’m the only person in the world who can describe what’s happening to me.Daughter of God, forgive me. There was no obvious illumination, but light was everywhere, exuding from the walls.Objects survived which had belonged to a small person with pigtails and starched frocks — a teddy bear loved to shapelessness, a doll house her father had built, her mother’s picture drawn by a corporal who stopped a bullet at Salt Lake.He was wounded in the body and I could not stop the bleeding.The System had been seven…