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(The sixth volume of my John W. Campbell Awards/New Voices anthology series had been completed and delivered and was weeks away from publication when Bluejay Books collapsed in late 1986. I was not able to find another publisher to continue the series, so JWC-6 was never published. This was my preface to the book, which has hitherto been seen only by the handful of critics and reviewers fortunate enough to have a copy of the [very rare] bound galley.)

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The 1978 worldcon was called Iguanacon, and it was held in Phoenix, Arizona on the traditional Labor Day weekend. There were five finalists contending for the sixth Campbell Award, chosen by the fans from among all the new writers who had made their professional debuts during 1976 or 1977. The nominees were Orson Scott Card, Jack L. Chalker, Stephen R. Donaldson, Elizabeth A. Lynn, and Bruce Sterling. Chalker was making his second run for the award, having lost out to C.J. Cherryh in the 1977 competition; the other four were new to the ballot.

When the envelope was ripped open, Orson Scott Card was the winner.

Card's victory was regarded at the time as something of an upset; Donaldson and Chalker had been the favorites going in, and most of the fan handicappers seemed to think the fight was between them. As with every award, and especially with the Campbell, there was a fair amount of second-guessing and armchair quarterbacking afterwards. The class of 1978 was an unusually diverse one, among them representing just about every major school, style, and sub-genre in SF and fantasy, and opinions ran hot and heavy about who was good and who wasn't, who would last and who would fall by the wayside.

It's been a fair while since 1978. The debates conducted in the apresHugo parties in the suffocating heat of Phoenix are a fading memory now, and it turns out the Campbell Class of 1978 fooled everybody -- they all went on to become raging successes.

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And as for the winner, Orson Scott Card went on from the Campbell to compete for Hugos and Nebulas on a regular basis, to become one of the field's most opinionated, articulate, and diligent critics, and to create a broad and distinguished body of work that included everything from hard SF to horror to fantasy.

Of the Campbell Award, Card says, "The Campbell Award, which was given to me by surprise, by strangers, had a powerful effect on my confidence in my ability to move people with prose fiction. Until that time I had been sure only of my playwriting, and fiction was still something of a lark. The award changed my direction. I began to concentrate most of my efforts toward mastering the techniques of telling stories to an invisible stranger. I'm still working on it. But it's a wonderful road to travel on, and it was the Campbell Award that firmly set me on my way.

"Now, looking back, I marvel that I received the award. The common wisdom today is that to win the Campbell Award, you must either be a novelist or well known among fans. I had never been to a science fiction convention; I had not published a book; indeed, at the time of my voting only three of my stories had appeared, and only one of them, Ender's Game, had attracted any attention. I believe it speaks well of fandom that the award could be won by an outsider with a very small body of work. And I do feel a tingling, now and then, of an obligation to make sure that the rest of my work is of such a quality that in future years people will not read my name on the list of Campbell Award winners and say, 'They gave the award to him?' I owe that much, at least, to the winners who deserved the award far more than I."

As I write, Card's latest novel, Ender's Game -- appropriately enough, an expansion of the short story that launched his career and helped him win the 1978 Campbell Award -- bids fair to sweep the novel category for this year's Hugo and Nebula. There's many a surprise in the awards game, as Card himself proved one hot night in Phoenix, but regardless of how many trophies Ender's Game ultimately takes home, one thing is clear -- Orson Scott Card, like the rest of the Class of 1978, is here to stay, and the readers of SF are all the richer for it.


George R. R. Martin Santa Fe, New Mexico March, 1986

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