…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.