Yeah, people knew what was going on with conventions and awards by reading magazines and fanzines. The winning novels would advertise it on the covers and there would be anthologies of short fiction winners. I don’t know where else you would have heard about them before the internet. You could buy the magazines everywhere and the novels were much shorter, so it was easier to follow the field as a whole.

Maybe part of why The Left Hand of Darkness feels like it’s throwing alot of information at you is that it feels relatively short for something like that now, but at the time it was a little on the long side. It’s short compared to Dune or Stand on Zanzibar (which I still haven’t read), but I’m not sure that the late ’60s/early ’70s averaged even one book that long a year.