Jason Aukerman, managing director of the Center for Bradbury Studies, accepted the 1945 Retro-Hugo award for Ray Bradbury’s “I, Rocket” at the virtual CoNZealand WorldCon convention. The Retro-Hugo honors works published in years when no Hugo awards were awarded. In 2019, Bradbury’s “King of the Gray Spaces” from R is for Rocket received the 1944 Retro-Hugo for best short story.
Published in 1944, “I, Rocket” was Bradbury’s first sale to the iconic science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. Narrated by the rocket itself as it lies alone and broken on some distant planet after a lifetime of service, “I, Rocket” offers an uplifting story of the love of work and others. Surprisingly, this award-winning story was not anthologized in Bradbury’s own collections but it can be found in Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The War Years 1936-45.
Read “I, Rocket”
(Amazing Stories) Read “I, Rocket”
(EC Comics)