At the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, the winners of the Retrospective Hugo Awards for 1944 were announced on August 15, 2019.

The winner in the short story category was Ray Bradbury's "King of the Gray Spaces", which of course is now better known as "R Is for Rocket", ever since it appeared under that title in 1962 and later reprints. It was of course originally published under the longer title in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1943.

Congratulations, Ray!

(For perfectionists: The 1944 Retrospective Hugo Awards are for works published in 1943 because, if such awards had been given in the 1940s under today's rules, awards for works of 1943 would have been given only the following year.)

This was the first Ray Bradbury story I ever read, way back in 1969. And you know, I've never been able to work out why the original title was "King of the Gray Spaces". Anybody?

"R is for Rocket" makes more sense. Great story and I wish Bradbury had written more like it.