i) births and deaths
23 June 1925: birth of Mary Ridge, who directed Terminus (1983).
23 June 2021: death of Jackie Lane, who played the First Doctor’s companion Dodo in 1966.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
23 June 1973: broadcast of sixth episode of The Green Death, ending Season 10 of Old Who; last regular appearance of Katy Manning as Jo Grant. The Doctor realises that Cliff’s fungus is fatal to the maggots, and destroys BOSS with the blue crystal; but Jo gets engaged to Cliff.
23 June 2007: broadcast of The Sound of Drums. The Master, as Harold Saxon, becomes Prime Minister, kills the cabinet and the American president, ages the Doctor by hundreds of years and unleashes the Toclafane on humanity.
One more week to go!
We appreciate the sympathy, but we knew for months that this would happen. In fact, this is a lot better than what we’d expected. Our goal for the first year was to make our site run and see how many people we could get interested in reading and talking about short fiction. We thought there was an outside chance that our work might make a difference for the Hugos this year, but we always knew it was a longshot.
Next year, though, with EPH in effect, it will still be important to get people to read and nominate. Even with EPH, the slates would have taken two of the five short-story slots, for example, and with just a small decline in “organic” nominations, that would climb to 3 out of 5.
So we still see a role, we’re not discouraged, and we’ll see you in Helsinki.