Hugo Award Reviews Thread

Wow, surprised I've actually read 20 of these. I thought it'd be lower. I prefer my sci-fi to be on screen. I don't tend to read much of it. Though, looking at this list makes me realize that the sci-fi/fantasy I read tends to be written by women.

I loved Speaker for the Dead, although I'm not sure why, or if it holds up.
I didn't know 'To Say Nothing of the Dog' or 'The City and The City' were hugo winners.  I read them when they were on the 'new books' shelves.
American Gods is great, but I almost like Anansi Boys better.  AG won me over with the night sister giving Shadow the moon, though - I'm a sucker for coin symbolism.  I don't know why.  Probably the opening pages of Wolfe's Severian books.

1953


Hey, so I'm finally back with the much-delayed first installment of my Hugo Awards review thread. In the interval between my first post and now I've realized a couple of things. One is that most of the short fiction winners shouldn't actually be that difficult to find, so I'm going to make this thread more of a review of the Hugo Awards in general. There's still going to be a lot of awards that I won't be doing more than simply listing the winners and nominees for, but for the short fiction categories, most of the winners for Dramatic Presentation, and occasionally some other awards, I might offer a fairly brief overview of my thoughts, in addition to longer reviews of the winners for Best Novel. The second thing that's changed about this review series is that I've started reading Jo Walton's book An Informal History of the Hugos (thanks to @wearytraveler for telling me about this), which I'll probably regularly referring to while doing these reviews. Anyway, here's my review of the 1953 Hugo Awards. The only award for fiction in 1953 was Best Novel, and I don't really have any input on any of the other award winners, so I'll just list them here, and then get into my discussion of the first Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel, The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. The Hugo Awards are generally given to works published or released in the previous year, but this doesn't appear to have been a hard-and-fast rule for the first couple of years, and The Demolished Man's publication history reflects this, as it was initially serialized in the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction in 1952 and only published as a full book in 1953. Also, while winners would eventually be selected from a shortlist of nominees, for the first couple of years this system was not in place, but I'll be listing nominees as well once I get to the point where they started announcing those. Anyway, here are the winners for the 1953 Hugo Awards:


Best Professional Magazine - Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction



Best Interior Illustration - Virgil Finlay



Best Cover Artist - Hannes Bok and Ed Emshwiller



Best New Author or Artist - Philip José Farmer



Excellence in Fact Articles - Willy Ley



#1 Fan Personality - Forry Ackerman



Best Novel - The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

Who was Alfred Bester?



Alfred Bester (1913-1987) was a science fiction writer from New York City, who wrote the short stories and novels that constitute his best known work in the 1950s.  But he had a career that saw him engaged in a number of creative endeavors; in addition to his on-and-off work as an author of sci fi prose fiction, he also wrote for DC comics (including work on both Superman and Green Lantern in the '40s), was a screenwriter for radio and television programs, and a magazine editor. Yet while this other work was the primary source of his creative output for the majority of his career, Bester's influence on science fiction literature has been immense, with his contemporary Harry Harrison declaring that "Alfred Bester was one of the handful of writers who invented modern science fiction". He is one of the overlords of the genre. The Demolished Man (his first novel) and The Stars My Destination are probably what Bester is best known for today, and while the former was his only work to win a Hugo Award, four of his short stories, and his 1975 novel The Computer Connection also received Hugo nominations.

I wonder what role the notorious standards of low pay for authors in sci-fi magazines set in part by this award's namesake played in Bester's bouncing from job to job over the course of his career in spite of his distinction as the first winner of the marquee award in science fiction. In 1939, Bester's first story was published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, after winning a story-writing contest that had a $50 prize. This was a contest which another young writer who would go on to be a major figure in the genre, Robert A. Heinlein, considered entering, but decided not to, as he could make $70 selling his 7,000 word story at a penny per word to a different magazine. Later, after both had achieved success as writers, Bester jokingly complained to Heinlein that "you beat me by twenty dollars". It's an amusing anecdote, and Bester and Heinlein are both among the foundational giants of SF, for whatever that's worth, but it also makes me wonder how many potentially great science fiction writers had to cut promising careers short when they found that it was not feasible to write for science fiction magazines for payouts of $50 or $70. Of course, this isn't true only of writers of science fiction or genre fiction; people have lived in financial precarity in order to make art for as long as there have been money-based economies. But it's worth thinking about.


What's it about?

Non-spoilery one sentence premise: A powerful industrialist attempts to kill a rival in a society where the presence of telepaths means that nobody has gotten away with premeditated murder in decades.

A very spoilery synopsis:

What did I think of it?

The Demolished Man is often held up as one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, and while I wouldn't rate it so highly myself, it's easy to see why so many people do, and why it's so influential. Bester has crafted a science fiction novel with some impressive and at times subtle world-building, with an experimental, reality-bending conclusion. But it's also a detective novel, a Freudian psychological drama, and, according to author Harry Harrison in his introduction to the novel, the book is influenced by Jacobean revenge plays. I don't know that this book would be particularly unusual in its scope today, but at a time when most science fiction novels (including this one) were still being serialized in pulp magazines, The Demolished Man comes across as a really ambitious sci-fi novel. But does it hold up in 2019?

That's a pretty reductive question, of course, and I think the answer is a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no. To start off with what I liked about the book, while it's a very 50s sci-fi novel, it rarely feels hackneyed or dated. There's plenty of old-timey sci-fi gadgets and other well-worn tropes, but with a couple of exceptions, they're not really the focus of the story, or, they're handled in a way that's well thought out. The prose is also pretty solid. Normally I think that cyberpunk spellings of normal words and names with numbers and other typographical symbols is insufferable unless it's being incorporated in the name of a Braniac song, but I actually find the proto-cyberpunk character names (Sam @kins, Duffy Wyg&, Jo 1/4maine, etc.) to be a really charming touch. There's also some memorable lines in the book, from the "Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun" lyric from the earworm that Duffy Wyg& plays for Reich, to the experimental way that Bester conveys complex telepathic conversations between the Espers, to this grand and thematically resonant passage which opens and closes the novel:

I also think the world-building is quite good. As with a lot of science fiction, especially '50s science fiction, the book has it's fair share of clunky expository dialogue. But when it comes to depicting what it's like to actually live in this fictional universe, Bester doesn't resort to directly moralizing to his readers. The book contains an implicit critique of a hyper-capitalistic society with a handful of corporations monopolizing every sector of the economy, and an extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top of society. There's a dynamic at play between different parties in this society that feels nuanced and well thought out. Take for instance the relationship between the Esper Guild and other elements of society, and the internal conflicts within the Guild itself. Judging from the opinions expressed by a number of characters (from wealthy industrialists like Reich to the Chief of Police to latent Espers like Chooka Frood illicitly using their powers) regarding Espers, there is clearly a lot of hostility towards telepaths in this society. And yet their society depends on Espers to function. Ben Reich may feel threatened by Espers but they are a necessary component to his workforce, and likewise, Powell and other telepaths have become an indispensable element of law enforcement. And Reich, in spite of his bigotry, funds the League of Esper Patriots, because it's clearly in his economic interests to do so, whether to have leverage to convince the likes of Gus Tate to help him break the law, or to have a hand in controlling Guild policy, or to destabilize a body which regulates ethical behavior for the telepaths in his employ, or what have you. So there may be tensions between the Guild and other economic and political interests, but these are tensions with some nuance.

Likewise, while the book sets up the Guild as one of the primary forces, which, through the proxy of Lincoln Powell, is opposed to Reich, the Guild is itself hardly a force for pure good, and its divisions reflect this. For one thing, the Guild isn't opposed at all to a highly exploitative capitalist system. They may seek to regulate its excesses by setting strictly enforced rules of conduct for Espers, and they may join together at the end to take down a corrupt oligarch like Reich when he presents a threat to the very structure of society, but as I mentioned above, they're also an essential part of this economic system. Indeed, hardly radical, they provide industry with a highly skilled segment of a professional class that contains a disproportionate number of people content with the status quo, and the use of the Mass Cathexis Measure at the end of the novel has no goal more radical than saving capitalism from itself.

Furthermore, the Guild's vision of a utopian future is one where everyone is an Esper, and they are engaged in a eugenic program to make this a reality. In addition to the chilling implications of an intellectual milieu that promotes eugenics, the Espers' own freedom is restricted by the requirement that they all marry another Esper by age 40. What's even more alarming about this is that the closest thing to opposition to these policies is expressed by the League of Esper Patriots, in their rage at the high taxes assessed to support Guild programs, and this antipathy is not born out anything resembling a concern for the well-being of non-Espers or notions of equality. Even Sam @kins, who believes that everyone is a latent Esper, who, as an act of charity invites people to his estate to help them recognize their latent telepathic abilities, and who is probably the most progressive Esper we're introduced to in the book, has a patronizing attitude toward anyone who hasn't developed telepathic abilities which borders on outright disgust, as demonstrated at one point when he starts mentally screaming at a group of people who have sought out his help when they prove unreceptive to his telepathic messages.  There's no evidence that @kins or Powell or any of the relatively progressive Espers is opposed to eugenics.  This all bears a lot of striking parallels to the real-world eugenics movement, which a generation before the publication of The Demolished Man held appeal to a lot of people across a broad range of ideologies. Many of the most elegant opponents of scientifically cruder and more nakedly cruel forms of eugenics, such as the famous evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, still supported their own form of eugenics, as with Haldane's rather creepy and elitist idea of "eutelegenesis". When a morally repulsive ideology becomes a part of a society's intellectual and cultural milieu, it never manifests in a way that neatly divides that society into evildoers who accept said ideology wholeheartedly set against good guys who reject the ideology entirely, whether it be the ideology of improving humanity's genetic stock, racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia or any other form of bigotry. And in recognizing this where a lot of other sci-fi authors of his time wouldn't, Bester has created a world which seems realistic, even if it's in a way that's rather depressing.

On a related note, another thing I like about The Demolished Man is that, while a lot of science fiction books would have presented Espers as "the next stage in human evolution" and treated this as an entirely good and positive thing, Bester has a lot of the telepaths in the book articulate sentiments along these lines, but it's always kind of chilling. Will humanity really "all be mind to mind and heart to heart", as Lincoln Powell blithely contends, in a world where everyone is an Esper? And more crucially, what will have been the fate of the non-Espers during the transitional period to this world? The "next stage of human evolution" trope is one with some troubling implications that I feel most science fiction isn't willing to grapple with, and while it's hardly the main focus of The Demolished Man, I think Bester has addressed it in a way meant to evoke a deeply uneasy ambivalence at the idea in the reader, which I think is good.

Another thing I love about the book is its penultimate chapter, wherein via the Mass Cathexis Measure, Powell subjects Reich to a hallucination wherein the world slowly shrinks around him until he comes to believe, with horror, that he is the only thing that exists in the entire universe. It's a really brilliant bit of horror, as an increasingly agitated Reich runs about trying to convince people of the existence of the stars, and later the planets, the moon, etc, and comes to feel that he's losing his mind. There's elements of this that do feel very much like 1950s science fiction, but it's never stale, despite being written over 65 years ago.  It was also clearly the inspiration for "Remember Me" one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Also, old-timey sci-fi computers saying things like "There are no stars," may be a little cheesy in 2019, but I am all about old-timey sci-fi computers saying weird bullshit like that. It's a really awesome chapter, and it's probably the single element of the book that I'm most enthusiastic about. It also makes for a thematically relevant climax to the book. As Bester writes in the book's introductory epigraph: "There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproduceable." When Reich is made to confront a horrifying hypothetical world in which he is all that exists, it is a fitting punishment for such an egotistical man, especially when, per Powell, he was on the cusp of achieving a sort of hegemonic domination over the solar system, or perhaps even reality itself.

On the other hand, I'm a bit ambivalent on how consistently Bester actually applied this theme of individuals considering themselves unique in a universe of "men without number suffering from [this] megalomania", and it largely centers on how heavily influenced the book is by Freudian psychology. Towards the beginning of the book, when Reich resolves to murder D'Courtney, it seems as though he is merely an agent of capital who, despite his company's status as one of the most successful corporations in the solar system, feels compelled by economic forces beyond his control to murder his competitor in order to keep that company afloat.  But it turns out that this wasn't the case at all, and that instead the murder only occurred because Ben Reich has an Oedipal complex (and this twist is made to feel very uncompelling and contrived by the fact that Reich is only subconsciously aware of who his father even is, and subconsciously misinterprets D'Courtney's message accepting the merger of their corporations, and later subconsciously sets traps for himself - in her review of the book, Jo Walton referred to this as "a cheat" and I entirely agree). So instead of Reich being a man possessed of delusions of grandeur, it turns out that his individual problems are in fact extremely momentous and, given the fact that his control of Monarch Enterprises and the D'Courtney Cartel is supposed to be the prelude of his domination of the entire solar system, he is in fact a uniquely important person, and his opponent, Lincoln Powell, the only man able to defeat him, is likewise such a uniquely important individual. Similarly, the Oedipal complex comes into play between Powell and Barbara, wherein Barbara falls in love with Powell while he is serving as a father figure throughout the course of her Déjà Éprouvé Series treatment, which is just as immensely gross and creepy as it sounds (but I'll discuss this at greater length in a moment). Also, in 2019, when a lot of Freudian psychoanalysis has been discredited, the fact that it seems to inform so much of 24th Century psychology is rather hard to believe, and that, more than any of the very 1950s sci-fi tech, felt really dated in a way that made it harder to take the book seriously.

On the other hand, there is some evidence that perhaps Reich isn't such a unique threat to humanity, and that Powell may well be overstating his case when he claims this. At the Esper Guild Council meeting, @kins suggests this, but Powell insists that Reich is an extremely serious threat, and convinces the Council that the Mass Cathexis Measure must be undertaken.  But the reader is given no unbiased indication that this was, in fact, the truth.  Powell clearly believes this to be the truth himself, but it's impossible to tell if he was actually right. It is, in fact, very likely that he has overstated the uniqueness of Reich's position, given how Bester undercuts Powell's argument at the very beginning of the book with the claim that "in this endless universe there is nothing new, nothing different."

I do feel that one area in which the book is decidedly not very successful is as a detective story. It's just not very compelling. A lot of it is quite predictable. Bester uses the same couple of tricks over and over again, and they're usually pretty transparent to begin with. For instance, there's a number of cases of a character giving something away by saying or hearing something that they shouldn't have (like Reich knowing that Barbara fled Maria Belmont's estate naked, or Chooka Frood saying that she'd found the murder weapon when she shouldn't have known what it was, or, in a slight twist, Barbara hearing her father's yell for help despite him being unable to speak in anything louder than a whisper). And that's really the extent of the "solving" that the reader is really able to reasonably do. Because a lot of the rest of the detective work involves a bunch of sci-fi technobabble, and the reader simply has to take the characters at their word when they explain how Reich used a bunch of gadgets to commit the murder. I think this is the one area in which the book suffers from having a lot of cliched 1950s sci-fi tech, because most of the technology that Reich uses to commit the murder feels pretty contrived. And then there's the fact that Reich only commits the murder because of an Oedipal complex, which is heavily foreshadowed, but also involves a lot of him subconsciously hiding the truth from himself in a way that's also deeply contrived and doesn't really make for an interesting detective story at all. Also, midway through the book, when Tate is murdered, there's no discussion of bringing his killers to justice, which is weird, given the book's very premise that it's nearly impossible in this society to get away with murder.  You'd think that Quizzard's goons wouldn't have been so cavalier about attempting to murder some people given the immense care that Reich, a man with nearly limitless resources, needed to put into committing just one murder.  The Demolished Man is honestly pretty mediocre as a detective story, and as this book is a detective story, the fact that it mostly fails at that is a pretty seriously affects its quality, in my opinion.

But my biggest issue with The Demolished Man is that it's extremely misogynistic. This is most notable in the incredibly creepy relationship between Powell and Barbara D'Courtney. The fact that Powell is falling in love with Barbara while, on a conscious level, she is reliving her childhood, is really gross. He's also engaging with the adult Barbara on a subconscious level, but this is hardly any less creepy, as the subconscious Barbara is deeply traumatized by what she's witnessed, and clearly not in a situation where she would genuinely be falling in love with someone. The best you could say for this subplot is that it's arguably slightly critical of Powell and his outwardly charming persona for falling in love with a woman who was both deeply traumatized and also, on a conscious level, a child, and for entering into a relationship with that woman less than a week after she has ostensibly recovered from these conditions, but really, the whole thing is really just wholly irredeemable.

Furthermore, none of the female characters in the book are particularly well written, and they're all subject to shitty sexist tropes. Not only is all the stuff between Powell and Barbara really creepy, but she's literally diagnosed at the hospital with the pseudoscientific "Hysterical Recall". Powell's friend Mary Noyes' main characteristic is that she's in love with Powell and desperately wants him to love her back. She only exists to add some conflict to the Powell-Barbara love subplot. Maria Beaumont is a character obsessed with sexual decadence, and is a weird, creepy caricature of nymphomaniac. She walks around everywhere naked, and her futuristic plastic surgery is described in a kind of gross, sexist manner, and doesn't really make much sense, in that I'm not sure what "pneumatic" surgery is supposed to be. And while we're on the subject of Bester's unwoke views, there's also a brief moment of needless homophobia where a couple of minor characters are described using a homophobic slur.

All in all, The Demolished Man is a mixed bag. There's a lot of material in this book that's really thought-provoking, in that there's a lot of stuff that's deliberately left ambiguous. Was Reich truly on the verge of conquering the solar system, for instance? What are we to make of Powell's vision of a utopic future where everyone is an Esper? Is Reich really a great man who unfortunately happened to be evil, as Powell proclaims at the end of the novel, or is he just a rich piece of shit with the resources to do whatever he likes? It's generally a well-written, ambitious novel, and there's a couple of chapters that make for really thrilling reading. On the other hand the stuff that didn't work for me (most of the Freudian stuff, the weak detective story, the creepy misogyny) left me feeling rather ambivalent about the book. I'm still glad I read it, it's certainly more memorable than most books that I've had mixed feelings about, and I plan to read more of Bester now that I've read this book, but this was not one of my favorites.


Was it a deserving winner? Is there anything you'd have picked instead?

I don't have a problem with this novel being the winner for Best Novel. I personally have some issues with it, but I also understand why it's considered a classic and why it's usually included in the Canon of science fiction (except for the Powell-Barbara romantic subplot, which is awful and has no redeeming virtues). I haven't read a lot of other science fiction or fantasy novels from 1952, but I really liked Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Empire when I read it about 15 years ago, although as I was still a kid at the time, I'm not sure how realiable my judgment on it is.  But I probably would have picked that as the winner over The Demolished Man if it had been up to me.





What will you be reviewing next time?

Next up are the 1955 Hugo Awards (there were no awards given in 1954).  I'll be reviewing They'd Rather Be Right (also known by the alternate title of The Forever Machine) by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, that year's winner for Best Novel, and also "The Darfstellar" by Walter M. Miller, Jr., the first winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novelette.  I plan on posting these fairly regularly from now on, probably roughly every three weeks, so I should have this next review posted at some point later on in July.

Re: the ending:  Yeah, it's super Freudian in a way that's really frustrating and unbelievable, and it also makes the solution to the mystery feel like a total cop out.  Makes the book considerably worse than it could've been.

Re:  the chapter where reality collapses around Reich:  I really did love that chapter; I think it's fantastic if one has some degree of tolerance for old-timey sci-fi stuff.

Re:  They'd Rather Be Right:  So I knew basically nothing about the book coming in, and basically nothing about the authors, although I might have heard of Mark Clifton's short story "Star Bright".  I'm like 3/4 of the way through it, and I don't think it's terrible, but it's definitely not a all-time-great book by any means, there's some goofy sci-fi stuff that hasn't aged that well, and the fact that it was serialized really shows in the books structure and tone, but I think it's fine, personally, although ymmv.  I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this project, I'd rank it as one of the lesser Best Novel winners, though, and I know there were better books published in 1954.  Iirc, The Fellowship of the Ring was published that year, for instance, although from what I understand I don't think Hugo voters were really considering fantasy novels by this point.

Friday, March 6, 2020 C.E.

It is well into Saturday, March 7th, 2020 C.E. in several countries in Eastern Europe and eastward to the International Date Line. However, in the only time zone that matters (Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5)) there are 8 hours and 31 minutes remaining, so you are technically correct.

1955:  Best Novelette - "The Darfsteller" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.



The first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novelette was Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1923-1996), a science fiction author best known for A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), which went on to win the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Novel.  "The Darfsteller" was published in Astounding Science Fiction in January 1955.

Premise

A former actor schemes to get himself one last role in a theater scene dominated by automatons.


Synopsis




What did I think of it?

This is probably my favorite story I've read thus far for this project. In his presentation of Thornier, Miller explores questions about what makes great art, and the tension between artistic integrity and the need to make a living. Thornier is a sympathetic character in many ways; his career was derailed by technological change, his new boss exploits him, and there is something noble in his refusal to let his performances be used in autodrama. But he's also not an easy person to work with.  Furthermore, people have always had to compromise some artistic integrity to make a living off of art, and his condescension towards his former theater colleagues is rather nauseating. The reader is also given many reminders that plenty of performances using human actors have been far from great, and that even great actors have poor performances.

"The Anarch", a fictional play about Andreyev, the Soviet Commissioner of police as the USSR is overthrown by revolution in the late 1980s (while this probably wasn't a prediction on his part per se, and it wasn't an armed revolution that ended the Soviet Union, Miller wasn't too far off in pinning down when the USSR would fall), manages to be a neat sort of Shakespearean play-within-the-play, that manages to thematically mirror what's happening with Thornier and Mela without being too on-the-nose. Andreyev is fanatically devoted to a cause which has long since lost any resemblance to the revolutionary egalitarian impetus that led to the overthrow of the Czar, and now he is simply the arm of repression for an authoritarian state (I'm not sure what Miller's politics were, but the play doesn't come across to me as some sort of anti-left-wing screed, and indeed, the actual overthrow of a capitalist society is seen as having nobility to it, it's just that there is nothing left of that nobility in Andreyev's time). Marka is his love interest, who betrays him, and later shoots him rather than let him be torn apart by an angry mob. Likewise, Thornier's suffering for the integrity of his art goes beyond the point of being admirable to the point that it becomes incredibly unhealthy.

And Thornier's attitudes are unhealthiest in that he attempts to commit suicide as an artistic statement. This is arguably the most poorly handled element of the story (although Millher himself tragically took his own life, and I certainly wouldn't say that he handles the subject in glib fashion in "The Darfsteller"). It at least doesn't treat his attempted suicide as an actually profound artistic statement, as I've seen done in some works of fiction (like the pilot episode of Black Mirror, for instance), but the way that it's treated as though Thornier was being incredibly selfish in his decision is a pretty shitty way to write about suicidal ideation.  

There were a couple of other flaws in "The Darfsteller", perhaps most prominently, the fact that the comedy is painfully unfunny at times. His boss speaks in a broad Italian accent, which is hacky and not especially cool, and the other attempts at humor mostly fall flat. In my experience, Miller was a very talented author, but his jokes were almost universally unfunny.  Also, Miller spends a lot of time presenting how economic forces beyond Thornier's control have ruined his career, and how he is exploited by his shitty boss in his job as a janitor, and despite this, I get the sense that the reader is meant to think "Oh, good, the bum finally grew up and decided to get a real job," at the end of the story.  It's both jarring, and a shitty message to send, but I found this and "The Darfsteller's" other flaws easy enough to overlook given how much I enjoyed the rest of the story.


Was this a deserving winner?  Is there another story that you would rather have won?

I do think this story was a deserving winner.  The premise feels a bit anachronistic in 2020, but it's still a compelling and nuanced story, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  And I haven't read much sci fi from 1954, so I can't think of anything that I'd have rather won.[/spoiler]

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