. . . 'til Dr. Seuss's hundredth birthday, on March 2.<\/p>\n
Back in 1992, I read somewhere (probably on some newsgroup) a nice little article which suggested that we (the sf community) really ought to give Dr. Seuss some kind of lifetime achievement award. The idea was presented somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I thought it was a great idea. (I've always had a vague notion that Paul di Filippo wrote it, but I can't find any evidence of that.)<\/p>\n
But no, the sf world let Seuss's 90th slip by without fanfare.<\/p>\n
But this year we have another chance.<\/p>\n
Dr. Seuss was almost certainly the first writer of science fiction or fantasy that most American fans ever read. His works featured talking animals, strange nonhuman intelligences, weird made-up words for things that don't exist in the real world, and unusual foodstuffs (surely someone must've written Soylent Green Eggs and Ham<\/cite> by now). They featured microscopic intelligent life forms, and creatures that were a recombined mix of two different species, and various kinds of magic. In many cases, they addressed real-world issues and concerns through the metaphor of a fictional story about an unreal world. They were often, in various ways, about the power of the imagination; many of them had plenty of sensawunda. One of them even features a zoological and linguistic exploration of a speculative alphabet.<\/p>\n I'm not sure what award there is that he'd be eligible for. There aren't so many lifetime achievement-type awards in the field to start with, and a lot of awards, quite rightly, focus on living authors. I imagine Seuss Enterprises wouldn't even notice the award.<\/p>\n But I think it would be a great symbolic gesture.<\/p>\n Anyone have suggestions for awards committees we could pester about this?<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" . . . ’til Dr. Seuss’s hundredth birthday, on March 2. Back in 1992, I read somewhere (probably on some newsgroup) a nice…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}