Long-term readers of this column with long-term memories may remember the following nine paragraphs, which were published here exactly four years ago, and which I am going to reprint now for reasons that I’ll make clear very shortly for those who haven’t already figured it out from the heading above:

The Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America is one of the two highest distinctions our field confers–the other being the Guest of Honor designation at the World Science Fiction Convention. These awards recognize a lifetime of significant work; and anyone who wants to understand the history of science fiction in the twentieth century need only look at SFWA’s list of Grand Masters.

It was Jerry Pournelle, when he was President of SFWA nearly thirty years ago, who dreamed up the idea of the Grand Master award. Since 1965 SFWA had been giving its Nebula trophy annually to the authors of the best novels and short fiction of the previous year; but Pournelle felt that the accomplishments of some of our greatest figures were being slighted, because they had done their outstanding work in the years prior to the Nebula’s inception. So he proposed a special award–an oversized version of the handsome block of Lucite that is a Nebula–to be awarded by vote of SFWA’s officers and past presidents in acknowledgment of the significant work those writers had done over the long term. And, to avoid cheapening the value of the award, Pournelle stipulated that it should be given no more often than six times every decade.

Pournelle’s suggestion was eagerly accepted by the membership, and in 1975 the first Grand Master Nebula was given to Robert A. Heinlein, surely one of the defining figures of modern science fiction. Heinlein’s recent work had come under attack by critics who found fault with it on literary and even political grounds, but no one questioned the greatness of the man who had written Methusaleh’s Children, Double Star, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the Future History stories. (And, in fact, his career was far from over even in 1975: he would go on to produce such well-received novels as Friday and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls in the years following his receiving of the award.)

In those days nearly all the writers who had clustered around the great editor John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction to create the so-called "Golden Age" period of the 1940s were still alive, and they were the obvious choices for grand-masterhood in the next few years. And so Jack Williamson, who had given us The Legion of Space back in the 1930s, and such Golden Age Campbell-era classics as the Seetee and Humanoids books, became the second Grand Master in 1976. Clifford D. Simak, of City and Way Station fame, joined the group the following year.

Because the original rules, since amended, stipulated only six awards per decade, no Grand Master was chosen in 1978; but in 1979 another golden-age favorite, L. Sprague de Camp, he of Lest Darkness Fall and The Incomplete Enchanter and ever so much more, was honored. Another year was skipped, and then in 1980 Fritz Leiber (Conjure Wife, The Wanderer, Gather, Darkness!) was the pick.

Under the rules then in effect no further award could be given until 1984, when Andre Norton became the first female Grand Master (a designation that created certain grammatical problems that have never been adequately resolved) and also the first who had not been associated with the Campbell editorship.

You may be wondering, at this point, why the name of Isaac Asimov has not yet been included in the list. As it happened, Isaac was wondering the same thing, since he, too, had been a key member of the John Campbell team, and by the 1980s the name of "Asimov" was virtually synonymous with science fiction, as the very magazine you are reading now will testify. And so, in his goodnaturedly self-promoting way, Isaac was given to observing, far and wide, that a certain conspicuous figure of the era had not yet been given his due. He said it playfully, of course, and made it clear that he was just joking–but in fact there was no small degree of seriousness beneath his clowning. He privately suspected that he was not going to live many more years, and he wanted to win that award before he died.

It is quite true that one of the considerations involved in nominating people for the award is an actuarial one. Even great writers don’t live forever, and we have always tried to honor our oldest ones first. Heinlein and De Camp had been born in 1907, Williamson in 1908, Leiber in 1910, Norton in 1912, Simak all the way back in 1904. Isaac–born in 1920–was a veritable youth by comparison. No one was aware in the 1980s of how quickly Isaac’s health was weakening, though. So, despite his otherwise quite valid claim and all his yelps, he simply had to sit by and wait, even while his great friend and rival, Arthur C. Clarke (born 1917) carried off the 1986 trophy.

But of course a group of Grand Masters of Science Fiction that did not include Isaac Asimov was plainly incomplete; and his torment came to an end in 1987 at a ceremony in New York. I went up to him afterward to congratulate him as he stood there cradling the trophy in his arms; and as I put out my hand he feigned a look of great alarm, as though I were trying to take it away from him, and cried, "You can’t have it! You can’t have it! You have to wait another fifteen years!"

Well, lo and behold, etc., the fifteen years predicted by Isaac went by, and two extra by way of lagni-appe, as they say in New Orleans, and then in the spring of 2004 the Science Fiction Writers of America named its latest Grand Master, and indeed the award went to the writer of these very words.

I thus become the twenty-first of the Grand Masters, and although I am not the youngest to have been chosen (not only Isaac Asimov but also Heinlein and Williamson were younger at the time of winning than I am now), I am the first of the winners who was born in the 1930s, a significant generational shift. An award whose winners were, in the beginning, exclusively drawn from that gifted crew who created the John W. Campbell Golden Age of science fiction in the 1940s (Heinlein, Williamson, Simak, de Camp, Leiber), has begun to pass to the innovative figures that built on the achievements of those titans to create the SF of our own day.

Since the rules of the award stipulate that it can be given only to living writers, the pool of eligible Golden Age authors eventually was used up, as Lester del Rey, Alfred Bester, A.E. van Vogt, and Hal Clement joined the ones I’ve mentioned above. (Theodore Sturgeon and L. Ron Hubbard, two other conspicuous figures of the Campbell era, did not live long enough to be named.) Then came a group of writers who established their claims to the Grand Master trophy in the period immediately following World War II: Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Vance, Philip José Farmer, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, and Poul Anderson. More recently, two writers who came to prominence a little later than that group joined the roster: Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, both of them a few years older than I am. And now it is my turn. Though my own writing career goes back to the middle of the 1950s, I didn’t hit my full stride as a writer until 1966 or so, which makes me part of the Aldiss-Le Guin group rather than of the Knight-Farmer-Anderson-Pohl contingent. And within the next few years we will see winners drawn from the imposing pool of writers who entered the field in the last thirty years, as the great generational wheel keeps turning.

On the most obvious level, I feel terrific about it. I regard it as confirming that I did actually succeed in what I set out to do many decades ago: to write science fiction that would be as important to other readers as the science fiction of the writers I’ve listed above was to me in my own formative years. Since I’ve put in half a century of hard work at that goal, I’m not going even to make a pretense of modesty here: I think that much of what I wrote over those decades was pretty damned good, and the fact that I’ve now received the Grand Master award indicates that I’m not the only one who feels that way.

But–but–there is this generational issue–

The eerie thing for me, because I am the first Grand Master who was born in the 1930s, is that I find myself swept up into a pantheon populated almost entirely by writers whose work I read with awe and reverence when I was twelve and thirteen and fifteen years old. I’m talking primarily about Heinlein and Asimov and van Vogt, about Vance and Leiber and Anderson, about de Camp and Bradbury and Clarke and Williamson, about–well, just about the whole bunch of them, other than Aldiss and Le Guin. (Fine writers that those two are, they began their writing careers after I had already become an adult, and I can’t look upon them in quite the same way as I do the idols of my childhood and adolescence.)

My shiny new trophy tells me that I am now regarded as the peer of all those people. But somewhere within me is what remains of my inner adolescent self, who warns me to walk humbly among them, making the proper gestures of respect, and remembering to speak softly and say "Yes, sir" when spoken to. There’s something to that. A Grand Master I may indeed be, now, but in the company of Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Williamson and L. Sprague de Camp and Frederik Pohl and Clifford D. Simak I’m always going to feel like the new kid on the block.