I see that Harlan Ellison has been named the next SFWA Grand Master. I’m not an especial fan of his, but I predicted last year that he was the obvious next candidate (admittedly I made the same prediction the previous year when the title went to Robert Silverberg).

So, who will be next? The list of award-winning authors, excluding those who are deceased or who are already Grand Masters, ranked by the length of time since they won their first Hugo or Nebula, looks like this (first 11, with date of birth – those who have been Worldcon guests of honor are asterisked)

1960 Hugo: Daniel Keyes (b. 1927)
1966 Nebula: Samuel R Delany* (b. 1942)
1967 Hugo: Larry Niven* (b. 1938)
1967 Nebula: Michael Moorcock* (b. 1939)
1968 Nebula: Kate Wilhelm* (b. 1928)
1968 Nebula: Alexei Panshin (b. 1940)
1971 Nebula: Katharine MacLean (b. 1925)
1972 Nebula: Joanna Russ (b. 1937)
1973 Nebula: Gene Wolfe* (b. 1931)
1973 Nebula: Vonda N. McIntyre (b. 1948)

McIntyre is much younger than the others, so I guess she’s out of the running. I’m inclined to think that Keyes, Panshin and MacLean are excluded for not really having written very much. After that, it’s a pretty interesting choice. All the others can reasonably claim to have been pretty influential in the field. I don’t really envy SFWA having to make the choice for next year (if they choose to make the award at all), or the years to come.