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 Demolished Man

by Alfred Bester
Rating: ***
The thought that I kept on having all throughout reading this book was that it really doesn't stand up well after nearly sixty years. With a lot of sci-fi from the fifties (or sixties, or seventies for that matter), you can tell it's decades old pretty easily.  It might set cataclysms in the futuristic years of the 1990s, it might talk about the endless Cold War (or, just as often, actual war) between Russia and the United States, or it might take seriously the idea of Martians. For the most part, this isn't too distracting. If the writing's good enough, the fact that it's 2011, or that the Cold War ended before I was old enough to understand what it was, or that there aren't any canals on mars won't bother me for more than a paragraph.

But outdated ideas aren't the problem with this book. At its core, it's an interesting story: a sizable minority of humanity develop the ability to sense people's emotions. A smaller subset of them can read people minds if the person is willing, and a much smaller portion can forcibly read someone's mind. There are enough of these people wandering around that committing a crime becomes difficult, if not impossible: anger, hatred, will to commit violence are easily detected, and—while telepathic testimony is inadmissible in courts—crimes are generally prevented before they happen. The villain protagonist of the story sets about to evade all the telepaths around him and murder a rival. The idea that a telepathic police officer can't use what he reads in someone's mind as evidence is one of the most compelling devices in the story; the antagonist hero knows for a fact what the protagonist did, having read it all in the protagonist's mind, but he can't do anything about it without first finding real, physical evidence.

It's not the ideas that date the book.  There no overload of predictions about the future that seem laughable now. There isn't an over reliance on science that was sound sixty years ago but seems laughable now.
 it's the writing. It's the writing itself, the language the author uses, that seems incredibly dated. The most grating example of this was having people greet each other by alternating,
"Bip."
"Bop."
"Bim."
"Bam."
It looks clanky on the page and just seems silly. Less annoying, though far more common throughout the book, was the main term for telepaths: peepers. No one uses that word anymore, no one has for years. It's hardly Bester's fault that language has moved on, but it's all the more frustrating because he also refers to telepaths as espers. This is a term that Bester coined in an earlier story (derived from "ESP") that doesn't sound dated because it's never been in common parlance. This is frustrating because Bester uses peepers about five times as often as espers. I know it's trivial and not at all the author's fault, but I would've enjoyed the book a lot better with fewer peepers running around.

Looking past linguistic preferences, the book has flaws that seriously detract from the central concept. The characters' motivations are spelled out hamfistedly, and the characters are all fairly flat. There are several references throughout the book (usually at the end of a chapter) to Demolition, some vague, dreadful fate—distinct and different from death—that the protagonist is trying to avoid. You don't find out what Demolition is until the last few pages, and then it's simply explained by the narrator. The threat of Demolition would've been a lot more meaningful to the story if the audience had any idea what it meant at some point before the denouement.


My biggest problem with the book, though (my biggest actual problem, leaving aside the peepers), is that it kicks to pieces it's central concept. Murder is built up as an impossible crime in this society, something that only a psychotic genius could pull off, something that takes years of planning. Then, in a dramatic scene that undermines the entire book, we find out that low-level thugs kill people frequently and efficiently. Gang leaders have squads of assassins that are routinely arrested, but hey, there's always more people willing to commit murder.


It's an engaging book—especially towards the middle—despite all these flaws. But getting to the good parts was frustrating.