The Wanderer

By Fritz Leiber

Rating: **

When I first started reading sci fi from the fifties and sixties, a recurring problem I saw was that the ideas the authors came up with were really interesting and exciting to read about, but the actual writing was bad. In some cases, the ideas were good enough and the writing decent enough that I could really enjoy myself. With other writers (I'm looking at you, Heinlein), I just couldn't do it. A lot of times I would get done reading something (or stop reading partway), and sigh to myself thinking that it was a really good idea, poorly executed.

Which sums up a lot of science fiction. A textbook example of this phenomena is 1965's The Wanderer. The idea is, an earth-sized planet shows up literally out of nowhere, and parks itself next to the moon. It doesn't come crashing down to Earth. It doesn't blow up the planet. There's no fleet of invading aliens. It just kind of sits there. Rotating. Most of the action of the book results from the the earthquakes, tidal waves, and resulting fires, floods, storms, and general chaos the planet's gravity creates.

This is an idea I've never seen before, or heard of before. Mostly because it's a ridiculous idea; but it's science fiction, and sometimes ridiculous things happen. And that's a large part of why I love science fiction.

The problem, as I said before, is in the execution. The author wants to show the effect that this would have to people all over the world, in every setting imaginable. The middle of the ocean, a plane in mid-air, along the coastline of an incredibly flat penensula, along a coast that already has regular earthquakes, the top of a sky scraper, in a subway station, and probably several more that I'm forgetting. Which makes sense, really; it's a catastrophe that's going to affect ever part of Earth. It's an ambitious task, but the author really isn't up to the task of juggling that many characters. I didn't find myself caring about any of the characters, largely because most of them were more caricatures than characters. There's the "weed brothers" in New York City, who's defining characteristic is that they smoke weed. There's the black servants in Florida who are more concerned with what people will think of their treatment of their white employer, than with their own safety. There's a would-be actress who tries to find a way to turn this catastrophe into an opportunity to get into film. There's a meteorologist who's too old and set in his ways to believe the reports of extraordinary weather and tides caused by the new planet. And on, and on, and the book describes all of these characters with roughly the same level of attention, care, and depth that I just gave them.

Characterization aside, there's more to the book that I could criticize. It's just cheesy at places; there's a green cat/human hybrid alien who calls herself Tigerishka, speaks broken English, and has sex with a daring male adventurer, even though Fritz Leiber (as far as I can tell) never had anything to do with Star Trek. The character motivation is baffling at times, which is odd since staying alive during natural disasters is so obvious and straightforward. The author, for the most part, ignores this. He decides that his main group of characters will spend the entirety of the novel trying to go talk to a scientist. Presumably so that the scientist can science the planet away. Or something. When they finally get to the scientist, does it resolve anything? Of course not. What is one scientist going to do about a giant planet hogging the sky? What could he possibly do in this situation? Why did this group not ask themselves these questions?

It's just not good writing. If I didn't set the unexpectedly-masochistic goal of reading all the Hugo winners, I would've dropped the book at Tigerishka.

This Immortal

 

by Roger Zelazny

(originally published as ...And Call Me Conrad)

Rating: ***

It's been a long time since I read this book, which means this post will be pretty brief. I kept notes on every other Hugo winner I've read, but apparently not this one. What was in your head, Sam-of-late-2011-possibly-early-2012? What did you think of this book? The only answers I have are two lines. The first, a summary: "An immortal man leads a group of humans and aliens on a tour of a post-nuclear apocalyptic world." The second a review that I'll do my best to build on: "Good. Fell apart, tone became too mythic and grand towards the end. None of the characters seemed that well developed."

From what I recall, I thought this was a pretty good book. I read it immediately after the unarguably worst Hugo Winner, and up to that point the only winner I read that I enjoyed was <i>A Case of Conscience</i>. This one was fairly well written, nicely paced, and had a solid, if unexciting plot. The main problem I remember is that in the last half of the book, the book somehow transitions from being a character-driven travelogue to an account of epic one-on-one battles, which I frankly didn't find that exciting. The last few chapters just felt like the stripped-down versions of classic myths you might read about in middle school. And that's about all I can say on the matter. Next up is The Wanderer, about which I can say slightly more. Probably.

…They'd Rather Be Right

A.K.A. The Forever Machine

By Mark Clifton and Frank Riley

In Short:
It's hard to imagine a worse book winning a major literary award.


Long-Winded.
Let's not bother ourselves with how …They'd Rather Be Right won. It's absolutely terrible, and it won the Hugo Award in 1955. That's just something we have to accept. Let's just focus on all of the reasons why it shouldn't have won. 


The authors unintentionally had one character answer this question by saying, "What a miserable string of worn-out cliches." And really, that's what the plot comes down to. You have a telepath, the next step of evolution, scorned and forced to hide as normal. A benevolent intellectual (who's nevertheless too set in his ways to listen to the younger generation) finds out his secret, and uses him on a top-secret government project to create artificial intelligence. People are afraid that this scientific advancement will mean the downfall of civilization, and an angry mob forms in reaction to scientific progress. After demonstrating the power of this new advancement, sinister forces try to take it away, only to be staved off by the cunning of a handful of people. Eventually, they share it with the world, and presumably everyone is happy. Also, all adults hate all children because of Freud.


There are more in there, but I'll leave it at that. In the introduction to a much better Hugo winner, 1970's Hugo winner, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. …Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer." I really can't say what carcinogenic trend or phenomena Clifton and Riley were trying to isolate, but the result is world where any and every deviation from accepted beliefs about the way the world works—be it mere speculation or actual scientific progress—is criminalized. Students receive failing grades for creative thinking, mobs form if professors work on something too revolutionary, that kind of thing. 


There's no indication why this happened, but for whatever reason the government puts a lot of effort into stifling creativity. At least, that's what the omnipotent narrator tells us. It also tells us that the same government has co-opted universities to be state-run research and development laboratories. Because apparently the best way to stifle creativity is to mandate that civilians do creative work for you. 


That's far from the only plot hole in the book. At one point the project to create an artificial intelligence (nicknamed "Bossy" because it resembles a cow; apparently Bossy is a name for cows) is said to go on for years, but in that time the main character appears to only age one year.¹


There's not much to redeem this book. The writing is clunky. Everyone's internal dialogue makes you want to punch them in the balls. It's preachy, but I'm not entirely sure what it's preaching against. Herd mentality, I suppose. There are typos all throughout it. I read the third or fourth edition of the book, and there were big, glaring typos. Even more noticeable were the page breaks that would come mid-conversation. At first, I thought this was some kind of printing error. What author would think that a new section should come in the middle of a conversation, in mid-thought? But at one point, not only are there page breaks, there are three asterisks emphasizing the page breaks. This happens in between a question and answer in a single conversation. It boggles the mind.


Overall, it's a breathtakingly bad book. I don't think I've ever read a worse book, though A. E. Van Vogt's The Weapon Shop (a short story) is worse. Now that I think about it, I read that in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Maybe the moral of the story is that there's a reason science fiction isn't taken seriously. This wad of wordy, insipid cliches is the what you present to the world as the best science fiction novel of 1955? Not something that's, you know, well written, like Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human? This is why you're in a ghetto, science fiction. You brought this on yourself.




1. The events of this book are said to take place forty years after either the development or first use of atomic weapons. So, this is taking place about thirty years ago. Ah, science fiction: you get it very, very wrong.

A Case of Conscience

by James Blish

In Short:


A fantastic look at the interplay between science fiction and religion, followed by an uninspired tale of what life could be like if Cold War trends continued.


Long-winded: 

This book has the distinction of being the only book I've read for the Hugo Project that I've actually liked. This isn't counting the 13 that I've read beforehand—some of those are among my favorite books. It's only counting the seven that I've read for this Project. The Demolished Man had a good idea but squandered it, Double Star was too predictable and written by Heinlein, and I haven't enjoyed the four I've read but not written about (They'd Rather Be Right, ...And Call Me Conrad, The Wanderer, and The Big Time). 

There are a few reasons I can think of for why I've only liked one out of seven Hugo winners. One reason, proposed by my brother J, is that there just weren't any better sci fi books that came out that year. That between 1953 and '59, no one wrote decent science fiction. I don't really believe it. I think that Sturgeon's Law (90% of science fiction is trash, but so is 90% of everything) is more or less true; for all the terrible sci-fi out there, there is great literature. And speaking of Sturgeon, his novel More Than Human came out the same year as They'd Rather be Right—which is considered the worse Hugo winner ever. It's a classic of the genre, and holds up to this day. Revisiting the Hugos goes through and discusses what else could've won, and usually there's some solid competition, even when the reviewer thinks the book that won was worthy.¹ 

Someone, somewhere online, posited that the reason They'd Rather Be Right won is that the authors produced widely praised short fiction, and that no one bothered to read their novel while voting. No one really knows, and no else has really made any claims as to why that won, and maybe it's true that the Hugo voting system is to blame. 

But whatever the reason why 1953's through 58's winners are unenjoyable, 1959's winner was really quite entertaining. A Case of Conscience starts out on Lithia, an alien world in the far future. A four-person surveying mission is wrapping up, and the members debate what they'll report back to earth. One, Cleaver, wants to exploit the planet and its sentient inhabitants to produce nuclear weapons. Another, Michelis, wants to mostly leave the Lithians alone, and use it as a minor refueling stop for long flights. The third suggestion, made by Father Sanchez, a Jesuit priest, is to leave the planet and make sure that no human ever sets foot on it again. He's convinced that the planet and all its inhabitants are an elaborate plot by Satan to lead mankind astray from the Truth. (Agronski, the fourth member of the team, doesn't have any strong opinions, and mostly sides with Cleaver or Michelis, depending on who said something last.) The party leaves the planet undecided, with a gift from one of the natives: an embryonic Lithian, to be raised on earth.

The party arives on earth, and the powers that by decide to weaponize the planet. Meanwhile, Sanchez and some of the others look after the infant Lithian, Egtverchi, and look after him as he grows to maturity in the entirely inadequate environment created for him on earth. He speaks English, goes to parties, and sees human society as flawed. Being amagnificently charming outsider, he encourages a rebellion against the status quo. Enough people join him that riots break out. Meanwhile, Sanchez is appaled to learn that humans have returned to Lithia, and further apalled that they're weaponizing the planet. In a move that is only meaningful if you've followed Sanchez's internal arguments, Sanchez effectively exhorcizes the planet from the universe. Suck it, Satan.

It may say something about me that I liked the first half of the book (basically, four guys sitting around discussing the ethical ramifications of a decision) more than I liked the last half (with its revolutions, explosions, swarms of giant, mutated bees and, well, action). It may just be that Blish does better dialogue than prose. When he has people acting, and their motivations and thoughts evident through that, the chracters seem boring and bland. It's only when they're explicitly describing what they're thinking and why that I found them interesting.

Actually, I think it goes beyond that. In the first half, it's unclear what's going on. Has Cleaver been lying about being in communication with the other party? Why would he do that? What about the conversation with the Lithian troubled Sanchez so much? 

In the second half, the way the story plays out is much more formulaic. An outsider causes disruption to a seemingly ordered society. The details are different, naturally, but it's been done before. (Most notably, at least in Sci Fi, in A Brave New World, which came out twenty-six years prior). The only thing is, the outsider in Conscience isn't that compelling. Oh, it's a more imaginative outsider than some, at least on the surface: an alien species raised imperfectly in an unfamiliar environment, who feels like he could not fit in on either the planet of his origin or his new home². But he's described in the book as being incredibly charismatic, of being able to capture the hearts and minds of Earth and lead them to a new, more chaotic, place. None of that charisma comes across. The book deliberately avoids actually showing any of Egtverchi's demagoguery, probably because Blish wasn't up to the task of convincingly writing a speech that could compell people to rebellion. Not many authors are. But Blish did manage to do one thing that the previous Hugo winners couldn't: write a good novel.




1. One problem with Jo Walton's approach is that he includes a lot of fantasy books like the Lord of the Rings series or Narnia books. While these are excellent books, the Hugo was, at that time, very much a science fiction award. I'm not sure when it is that the first fantasy book won a Hugo. Certainly it's not in the fifties or sixties, maybe not in the seventies. I remember reading Neil Gaiman comment on the small controversy over his not-at-all science-fictional American Gods winning in 2002.

2. Then again, this may not be such a novel idea; it's actually happened.

The Damndest Thing

I was talking to someone on Tuesday, having a fairly typical conversations. We were just about finished when he started repeating the words "yeah" and "okay" over and over. His arms and legs started flexing and unflexing. I asked if he was okay, but he didn't seem to hear me. After a minute or so, it looked like he was finished with whatever happened. He looked at me briefly, and then he started adjusting and smoothing out his sweatshirt, over and over. This when on a little while longer, and the repetitions of "yeah" and "okay" were replaced by labored breathing. Eventually, this too stopped. There were no more jerky movements, his breathing returned to normal, he was sweating a little, but other than that, everything was back to normal. I asked him if he wanted me to call a nurse over, or if I could get him a glass of water. He didn't say anything. His expression was blank, emotionless. He just looked at me for a second or two, and then he got up and put his hand to my throat and squeezed. 

I got away before too long. He's about my same height and visibly stronger than me, but I'm pretty sure I was more motivated to not be strangled than he was motivated to strangle me. Also, he had just had a seizure, so he probably wasn't giving it his best effort.

Afterward, he was talking to someone else, who asked him, “Why did you attack Sam?”

“Who’s that?”

"Tall guy, wears glasses?"

"I don't know who that is."

As far as I can tell, he had no reason to act violently. There was no obvious trigger, nothing that set him off. One minute, he was sitting in a chair, talking to me. The next minute, his body began moving beyond his control. Then, he attacked me.

Sitting.

Spasming.

Strangling.

All without any discernible trigger from one to the next. 

My wife's response when I told her all of this was that it sounds like he was possessed by a demon. I'm pretty sure that's not what happened, but I can definitely see where she's coming from. I know what seizures are. I have a basic grasp of what happens to the brain during a seizure. I know that this person has had trouble with the law in the past. And yet, even knowing all of these things, I simply could not understand at the time why he was attacking me, why he went on to try to attack others. 

What if I didn't know any of this; didn't know what seizures are? What if I saw him visibly contort and lose all emotion? What if he attacked me after all this, and then had no recollection of ever seeing or attacking me? This would've made even less sense. It sounds insane. It seemed insane at the time, and it still seems unbelievable, even though my throat is still sore. Demons are easier to understand than postictal violence.

Double Star

by Robert Heinlein
Rating: ***




I'm not a fan of Robert Heinlein*. This is not an aversion born of ignorance. Prior to the Hugo Project, I've read some of his short stories, most memorably "The Roads Must Roll" (I also heard the X Minus 1 radio broadcast of the same), and two of his novels: Job: A Comedy of Justice and Stranger in a Strange Land. The former I picked up because somewhere I came across a quote from it and found the quote sufficiently interesting to read the entire novel. The line in question was, "I had no objection to calling Armageddon by the name 'Ragnarok.' ... But Loki? Ask me to believe that a mythical demigod of an ignorant, barbarian race has wrought changes in the whole universe? Now, really!" Stranger in a Strange Land I found far less enjoyable; I stopped reading it sometime shortly after the protagonist starts to really dig in to setting up a religion around himself. I'll talk about the reasons why later, doubtlessly, as Stranger is the 1962 Hugo winner.

(Incidentally, there are two other Hugo books that I've stopped reading partway through in the past: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Originally, looking over the Hugo list, a part of me was dreading returning to these three books. And also to reading a book called Cyteen. The thought of going back to them doesn't give me pause anymore, though. I've read They've Rather Be Right. They don't get any worse than that. When Jo Walton wrote his series for tor.com called "Revisiting the Hugos," he decided to skip right over They'd Rather Be Right, which is universally regarded as the worse Hugo winner, claiming "I don't know if the book deserves this reputation because I have not read it, because when absolutely everybody tells me that the jar contains marmelade all the way down, I don't feel compelled to take the lid off." While I've only barely started my own Hugo Project, I think I can confidently say that everyone is right. None of the other books will be that bad. And I got through every bloated preachy paragraph. I can handle Stranger's weirdness or Left Hand's dullness. I don't quite recall why I stopped reading Yiddish; I think I wanted a lighter read and had a hard time getting into it.)

One of my main problems with 1956's Hugo winner, Double Star, was that Heinlein was clearly trying to make his protagonist unlikable-in-a-likable-way in the beginning, and he fails. (My other main problem was the cover illustration. Just a terrible cover.) Oh, Lawrence Smith (a.k.a. Lorenzo Smythe) is hard to like. He's pretentious, smarmy, whiny, cowardly, conniving, and a whole lot of other adjectives that make it difficult—but not impossible—to have a compelling character. But Heinlein couldn't pull off making the reader like him in spite of these flaws. You can have a terrible human being as a nearly addictive protagonist, but you need other qualities to balance it all the flaws. Or you need to have the flaws be so exaggerated that they cross over from being pathetic to being amazing. 


Smith has no redeeming qualities. At least not at first. He's just some poor sap who might make an entertaining side character in another book, but isn't cut out to be in the lead role. In fairness, this problem gradually lessens throughout the novel, and this makes sense, and fleshes out the character far beyond the Generic Male Protagonist that Heinlein seems fond of; but, honestly, it's so annoying in the beginning that I'm not sure it was worth it.

Smith is an out of work actor, who at the start of book uses his last coin to try to begin to sucker someone out of a lot more money. His target is interested in kidnapping him, so it's a little hard to feel sorry for the would-be mark. Smith is quickly conscripted into assuming the role of Bonforte, a prominent politician who was, himself recently kidnapped. This kidnapping, however, would most likely spark a war between Martians and the human empire.

Yes. There are Martian. They carry around ray guns. There are also Venusian and Jovians. Much of the early part of the book takes place on a rocket. It's science fiction from the '50s. There are going to be a lot more Martians and rockets before we finish. We're going to see flying saucers and alien invasions of various flavors. There'll be telepaths, post-apocalyptic earths (usually of the post-nuclear war variety), extradimensional beings, robots, monsters and every other trope from science fiction worth naming. For the most part, these books handle them well.
Anyway, thanks to Smith's impersonation, a war in averted. This is only halfway through the book, though. In a move surprising to no reader, Smith is forced to keep up his impersonation for various reasons. In time he takes on more and more of the characteristics of Bonforte, and in the process becomes a better person and a less grating narrator. Which is nice, but by that point the narrative runs out of steam, and just sort of coasts to a finish. There's no sense of urgency in anything that happens past the initial impersonation, and no real doubt that Smith will somehow be unable to continue pulling off a performance he mastered. Things keep on happening, but there's just no reason why the reader should care about the. The world that Heinlein builds is an interesting one, but parts of the book just seem like a lecture on the politics of a future empire, framed around a bit player in the history of that empire. It's not a bad book, but it's not Heinlein's best. It has a well-developed protagonist, but nothing interesting for him to do past the midpoint. I'm still not a big fan of Robert Heinlein.

*The first time I started writing this review, that was as far as I got. I toyed around with the idea of leaving it at that.

"Let this 'We' be the title of my records."

Most of my memories of my brother J growing up involve literature in some way or another. He's ten years older than me, and I was always sort of struck with awe at that things that he did. He ran an underground newspaper with his friends in high school. He wrote poetry, and printed and distributed collections of his works with titles like, "The Pot of Goldfish at the End of the Rainbow." Each stapled-together book would come with a hand-drawn cover illustration (by the author, of course), done in pastel crayons, and coated with hair-spray, so that the pigment wouldn't rub off on whatever it touched. He has an advanced degree in poetry (I was there in Amherst for his graduation), and has been working on a novel for the last few years. Most of the gifts that he gives to other people are books. Probably my favorite one that he's given me has been The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry (who, presumably, was a prospector who turned to writing as a way to support himself after realizing he could no longer make it panning for gold, the rivers having been depleted). He's turned me on to other books that I've loved, too; Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and American Gods are the two that stand out sharpest in my mind.

For reasons I won't get into, I found myself today looking for a Christmas present for J. I had an hour to kill at the local thriftstore, and was browsing through the mass of books people have discarded over the years. For the most part, the books were arranged by binding rather than subject matter, so you'd see books on how to become a millionaire next to the fourth book in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, which was just a few books down from a pulpy sci-fi book with a scantily clad cyborg on the cover and a young-adult historical fiction novel with the unsettling title, My Brother Sam Is Dead. (I've given instructions that this book will be delivered to my surviving siblings upon my death, preferably early enough that it will inform them of my passing.) Unsurprisingly, I didn't find anything there that I felt Joe would appreciate. The book I was looking for, I explained to V, would need to be considered a work of classic literature that is all but completely unknown. 

While searching through the thrift store, something triggered a memory of a book I read and loved once, during my senior year of high school. I had come across it while reading the book Science Fiction: History—Science—Vision by Rabkin and Scholes. I find myself coming back to that book a lot, thinking over my personal reading history. It put me on to my favorite author, Karel Čapek, and inspired me to read a greater range of science fiction starting with Frankenstein and moving on to H.G. Welles and Poe, then on to John W. Campbell and the authors he cultivated. It also lead me to the book We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

History described We as the prototypical dystopian novel, that would go on to directly inspire 1984 and foreshadow Brave New World. I found the book profound when I read it, so much so that I decided to perform it for speech and debate competitions. This involved trying to condense the book's plot down to ten minutes while still maintaining the soul of the book. It was my first attempt to do such a thing, and it didn't go over well. I could never stay within the ten minutes. Key sections of the plot were missing, and I stuck in poetic passages that didn't make sense out of context. My inexperienced performance and inability to create distinct voices for several characters* mashed all of these problems together into an unstoppable boulder of mediocrity, rolling downhill and picking up speed as it heads towards elimination from the tournament. But I digress. 

While pasting the speech together, I would usually have the book pressed down flat to the page that I wanted as I copied the words to a computer. Between this and frequent re-readings, the cover fell off of my first copy of the book within a year. After this happened, I kept that book bound together with rubber bands for sentimental reasons, and decided to get a more durable edition. I found a used library-bound edition from the late '80s, and figures that it would be a good replacement. It was only after the book arrived that I realized I had overlooked a crucial factor: the translation was grating compared to the version I had spent six months memorizing. The first copy I owned was a reprint of Clarence Brown's 1993 translation; this new copy was from Mira Ginsburg's 1972 translation. I don't have either book in front of me now; they're both boxed up in the basement of my parents' house, if I'm not mistaken. And I can't remember why it is that I disliked Ginsburg's translation so much. But I know that I thought it made the book weaker than Brown's version.

Getting back to today, I called up the largest used book store in the county to see if they have a copy of the book. After some confusion over the author (Yevgeny can be anglicized to Eugene, and Zamyatin could be spelled Zamiatin), they informed me that they did indeed have a copy, with a translation by Gregory Zilboorg. To my recollection, I'd never heard the name before, so I decided to go in to check it out. When I got to the store, I skipped to my favorite chapter in the book, the one whose opening lines I had forcibly kept in my speech even though it didn't advance the plot whatsoever. From memory, Brown's Record 32 begins, 

     "Do you believe that you will die? Yes; man is mortal, I am a man, ergo...No, that's not what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind, but with your body? Actually felt that the very fingers holding this page will one day be yellow, and icy?... 
     "No, of course not. And that is why, up to now, you haven't thrown yourself from the tenth floor to the pavement. It's why you've gone on eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing.
     "It is the same—yes, exactly the same—with me today."

Eighteen-year-old Sam found these lines incredibly profound, so much so that 26-year-old Sam can remember them with ease, despite having not read the book in at least seven years. The same passage from Zilboorg's translation (you can see it in it's entirety here) reads, 

     "Do you believe that you will die? Oh, yes, "Man is mortal; I am a man; consequently .. ," No, not that; .I know that; you know it. But I ask: Has it ever happened that· you actually believed it? Believed definitely, believed not with your reason but with your body, that you actually felt that someday those fingers which now hold this page will become yellow, icy? ...
     "No, of course you cannot believe this. That is why you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement before now; that is why you eat, turn over these pages, shave, smile, write.
     "This very thing, yes, exactly this is alive in me today."

Looking at the two side by side, I will admit that I like the the "alive in me today" better than "we me today" in the concluding line of the passage. On the whole, though, I think that Brown's translation has a number of advantages; most notably that having the five activities in the second paragraph as active verbs ("eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing.") makes them feel more immediate, which underscores the point of the passage. Another thing came to mind a while ago, just before I started writing this post. Zilboorg has the narrator responds to the flippant answer that "I know that; you know it," which is quite different from Brown's "I know that you know that." On a whim, I checked the original Russian text. (I took Russian classes in college, in large part because of this book.) Sure enough, the original line is «я знаю, что вы это знаете». Word-for-word, this translates to "I know, that you it know;" more fluidly, it translates to "I know that you know that." Zilboorg misses the meaning on a rather straightforward phrase. 

I can't really say how well his translation compares to the original text beyond this; I've forgotten enough Russian that a sentence more complex or advanced than "I know that you know that" (one standard verb with two declinations, and a handful of pronouns) completely baffles me. I will say one more thing about Zilboorg's translation: the omnipresent, oppressive government that dystopias love so much is called, in We, "One State." Or, at least it was in Brown's and Ginsburg's translation (I think Brown may have actually called it "OneState"). Zilboorg calls it "United State." This is closer to the original Russian (at least according to my favorite Russian-to-English translation site; again, I've forgotten nearly everything), but has the connotation of being one letter away from the United States, which completely changes the feel of the book. This is a pretty big thing. Big enough that I might not want to give J this copy of the book.

Yikes. Looking over Zilboorg's translation just now to make sure I got "United State" right, I saw that he calls the head of the United State "the Well-Doer." Ginsburg and Brown have enough sense to call him "the Benefactor," which has the advantage of not sounding silly. Dictators cannot have silly names in dystopias. It just cannot be done. 

*Actually, I think I may have narrowed it down to three. I couldn't come up with three separate voices. 

On the Order of Things

As I mentioned earlier, initially I was planning on reading all sixty Hugo winners in chronological order. This did not last past the first book. I quickly realized that being a Hugo winner doesn't guarantee that a book will sell well decades later, or even be considered important enough to be found in the local library. 1955's Hugo went to They'd Rather Be Right, which (as far as I can tell) was out of print from 1958 to 1981. After a brief and baffling resurrgence, it hasn't been in print since 1992. My local library didn't have a copy of it, nor did the local used book store. I didn't bother checking chain book stores; seemed like a waste of time. Fortunately, a town by some measures a tenth the size of my hometown has a library surprisingly well-stocked in old sci fi. The interlibrary loan said that it would take up to three weeks to get the book. I couldn't just abandon the Hugo Project so early on, so I decided to just skip Right for the moment, and go on to 1956's winner. I had hope that that would be the only deviation from the timeline I encountered, but it was not meant to be. I finished 1956's and was a good way into'57's Hugo winner before Right came through. And in the meantime, fearing similar breaks, I ordered 1965's and one of '66's Hugo winner through interlibrary loan, figuring that I might get them by the time I'd plowed through the earlier winners. It turns out that books on interlibrary loan cannot be renewed, and have a fifty cent a day late fee. The books came when I was still trudging through They'd Rather Be Right and, with their rather strict deadline, it made sense to read them in order of return date rather than publication order. So here's how I'm going to go through these:

1953: The Demolished Man
1956: Double Star
1959: A Case of Conscience
1955: …They'd Rather Be Right
1966: …And Call Me Conrad
1965: The Wanderer [currently reading]
1958: The Big Time [Not sure what happened to this one. I guess that'll be my next read.]

The Hugo Winners

I should probably put this in at some point:

1953: The Demolished Man — Alfred Bester
1955: They'd Rather Be Right — Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
1956: Double Star — Robert A. Heinlein
1958: The Big Time — Fritz Leiber
1959: A Case of Conscience — James Blish
1960: Starship Troopers — Robert A. Heinlein
1961: A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller Jr.
1962: Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert A. Heinlein
1963: The Man in the High Castle — Philip K. Dick
1964: Way Station — Clifford D. Simak
1965: The Wanderer — Fritz Leiber
1966: Dune — Frank Herbert
1966: …And Call Me Conrad — Roger Zelazny
1967: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress — Robert A. Heinlein
1968: Lord of Light — Roger Zelazny
1969: Stand on Zanzibar — John Brunner
1970: The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin
1971: Ringworld — Larry Niven
1972: To Your Scattered Bodies Go — Philip Jose Farmer
1973: The Gods Themselves — Isaac Asimov
1974: Rendezvous with Rama — Arthur C. Clarke
1975: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia — Ursula K. Le Guin
1976: The Forever War — Joe Haldeman
1977: Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang: A Novel — Kate Wilhelm
1978: Gateway — Frederik Pohl
1979: Dreamsnake — Vonda Mcintyre
1980: The Fountains of Paradise — Arthur C. Clarke
1981: The Snow Queen — Joan D. Vinge
1982: Downbelow Station — C. J. Cherryh
1983: Foundation's Edge — Isaac Asimov
1984: Startide Rising — David Brin
1985: Neuromancer — William Gibson
1986: Ender's Game — Orson Scott Card
1987: Speaker for the Dead — Orson Scott Card
1988: The Uplift War — David Brin
1989: Cyteen — C. J. Cherryh
1990: Hyperion — Dan Simmons
1991: The Vor Game — Lois McMaster Bujold
1992: Barrayar — Lois McMaster Bujold
1993: Doomsday Book — Connie Willis
1993: A Fire Upon The Deep — Vernor Vinge
1994: Green Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
1995: Mirror Dance — Lois McMaster Bujold
1996: The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer — Neal Stephenson
1997: Blue Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
1998: Forever Peace — Joe Haldeman
1999: To Say Nothing of the Dog — Connie Willis
2000: A Deepness in the Sky — Vernor Vinge
2001: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — J. K. Rowling
2002: American Gods — Neil Gaiman
2003: Hominids — Robert J. Sawyer
2004: Paladin of Souls — Lois McMaster Bujold
2005: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel — Susanna Clarke
2006: Spin — Robert Charles Wilson
2007: Rainbows End — Vernor Vinge
2008: The Yiddish Policeman's Union — Michael Chabon
2009: The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
2010: The Windup Girl — Paolo Bacigalupi
2010: The City & The City — China Mieville
2011: Blackout — Connie Willis