Hugo Nominees: 1993

One of the flaws Doomsday Book suffers from is the same one later books in the series – and I am looking at the two recent Hugo nominees here – suffered from, which is that Willis’ internal model of How Stuff Works in the UK and in particular how telecommunications work seems to have frozen technologically some time in the 1930s [1]. Now, in her defense, I cannot see any way for an American author in the 1990s to research a faraway semi-mythical land like the UK, as I assume there were no libraries in the US at that time and that all British people must have been kept carefully sequested from Americans, forcing her to rely entirely on Georgette Heyer and Dorothy L. Sayers novels as her guides to modern and future Britain. The alternative is to cast doubt on her basic research skills.

The other issue is that if any of the characters ever had a meaningful conversation with another character, rather than keeping vital, need-to-know information to themselves either on purpose or by chance, then Willis wouldn’t have the running-around-like-a-chicken-with-its-head-cut-off plots that she loves.

1: Except that somehow in the next fifty years, a time when some reading this may still be alive, all knowledge of the dark technology known as the revolving door will be lost to the extent a time traveller – a curiously ignorant supposed historian – will suffer SAN loss when confronted by one.

One is Algis Budrys’ Hard Landing,

Was that really this late? I could have sworn I read it in the 1980s.

Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland

Honest question: I didn’t like this back in the 1990s – did I misjudge it? I came across something recent by Greenland, don’t recall what, that made me wonder if perhaps I completely misread it.

All the Hugo novel nominees are problematic to my mind.

Doomsday Book is a time travel novel that non-genre readers can and do read with pleasure. But it’s poorly researched, and its plot depends on deliberately withheld information between the characters: it reminds me how modern horror movies have to address the problem of why cell phones don’t work. I don’t know anyone who has come fresh to it recently, so perhaps a new reader might find the blocks even more maddening.

Unfortunately, China Mountain Zhang is as big of a period piece as Norman Spinrad’s Russian Spring. It’s been eighteen years, and the social and political situations McHugh uses to add resonance to her novel have utterly changed. The human story — especially Zhang as a closeted part-Chinese American encountering problems as each of these — well, it’s another future that never was (and you could see strong signs of this in 1993). It’s a shame, because it’s the best human story of the lot.

A Fire Upon the Deep, sigh. Once it was clear that Vinge believed in the underlying model — not the space-operatic Zones, but a wholly unfalsifiable view of the technological “Singularity” [*] (as if the Singularity didn’t already take place in 1453) — it became very hard not to read it as esoteric or religious fiction, something like the Narnia books or the Theosophist legendarium.

Since the theological references crop up over and over again, beginning in “The Blabber”, it’s not like Vinge isn’t aware. I mean, the climax of A Fire Upon the Deep is a theurgic ritual! Yet people still think it’s “hard” science fiction. I’ve wondered if Vinge isn’t playing some deep Andy Kaufman-esque joke.

The Usenet references have dated badly as well: does anyone still think Henry “Sandor at the Zoo” Spencer is an infallible net.god any more? And if Vinge had to deliberately set up his universe to make intra-galactic communication like Usenet, well, that’s a force, not a natural consequence of extrapolation. It’s Tuckerization carried out at the level of communications medium, and judging by the squees it caused, it has to be considered deliberate fan pander. I would love to know what a young reader, immersed in Facebook &/or Twitter &/or text culture, makes of it.

Red Mars is, among other things, an airplane novel that relies on ethnic stereotypes for its characterizations, interspersed with sub-McPhee contemplations of Martian landscape and geology. It’s also a political novel, but I have never found Robinson’s politics convincing or engaging (not the same thing). It’s a shame, because Robinson is a talent. He doesn’t work well at novel length, and what he thinks his strengths are — evocations of the natural landscape, the politics of the left, the process of science — are wildly different from what his actual strengths are. (I would say gentle comedy.)

Steel Beach is a reimagining of Varley’s Eight Worlds setting. I suppose we would call it a “reboot” today, to borrow a term from the superhero world. It’s eighty percent brilliant, and I include the misanthropic and even plain mean streak which runs through it. (It’s a hard thing to balance: it clearly hurt Varley’s Titan trilogy, for instance. When done right, however, it’s like a refreshing splash of cold water in the face.) But as a reimagining, Steel Beach falls prey to the dangers of nostalgia — in this particular case, nostalgia for another science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein. Varley had obviously been influenced by Heinlein, but here he makes it explicit, and he sells it cheap.

Snow Crash should have been on the list, but it’s also problematic. Stephenson was still getting his narrative tones and shifts attuned to the general reader — a little like Matt Ruff’s Sewer, Gas, and Electric in that respect — and Stephenson made the reader work for an ending (which, to be fair, is something he didn’t stop doing until very recently). A lot of the infodumps are surprisingly lifeless for Stephenson.

Personally, had it been on the list of nominees, I would have voted for Last Call. Another book with out-of-genre appeal, and yet still classic Tim Powers, and I don’t think it has any glaring weaknesses, as all of the above do. It might be his best book. In its absence, China Mountain Zhang, I suppose.

Dark Sky Legion is an obscure personal favorite. It’s basically late Flandry (or early Jorj X. McKie) dealing with Whqrn pvepn guvegl naab qbzvav. Barton calls it an Ahrimanic novel. That’s about right.

Hm. Looking further down the list, I see Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, by Camille Bacon-Smith. I think that’s the one with a section on Starsky and Hutch fandom. It makes me want to write a study called, “From Huggy Bear to Hogwarts”.

[*] Dude is a computer scientist and doesn’t realize that not all infinite series diverge? really? I blame I.J. Good and Hans Moravec. Vinge’s Zones are brilliant — but I take it they were in the air at UCSD? I’ve read Russell Impagliazzo’s 1995 paper on possible worlds of complexity classes, which look a lot like Zones, but Impagliazzo says it’s a write-up of preexisting folklore in the field.

17: I don’t even know if technological progress can be ranked cleanly! I speak as someone with a professional interest in that question. It’s easiest to put it into a scalar and assume, but since when was the easy assumption correct in the human sciences? (And as for intelligence, forget about it.)

Not to derail: this idea is fairly common in SF, one of the strengths of the Campbellian tradition in fact. E.g., Heinlein’s “primitive” Venerians who can manufacture liquid oxygen in Space Cadet.

If the tie has been broken at all, I would think it was in favor of A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, which was important to the development of the New Space Opera. Both books remain very readable and entertaining, though.

I might myself have given it to ARISTOI, probably Walter Jon Williams’s best book, and one that certainly should have been on the ballot. Probably QUARENTINE and LAST CALL should have been on the ballot as well. CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG (developed from her first sold story, “Baffin Island,” for ASIMOV’S) is still powerful, although, of course, the relentless march of historical events has dated it by now. RED MARS is probably the best of the Martian trilogy. A MILLION OPEN DOORS would also have made a worthy addition to the ballot.

I myself wasn’t wildly impressed by SNOW CRASH, although lots of other people were. STEEL BEACH was disappointing, although not nearly as much so as his previous TITAN trilogy, which was REALLY disappointing, particularly the last two volumes. STEEL BEACH brings him a little closer to being back to form.

In novella, McHugh’s “Protection” is a very strong story, one of her best, although it’s been curiously overlooked, in spite of the Hugo nomination (it’s also one of the few stories that ever drew a six-page revision request from me, and the exchange of a half-dozen subsequent letters between us, back when letters were actually written on paper and sent through the mail). MacLeod’s “Grownups” is also very strong, and very strange. I think either of those might have the edge on “Barnacle Bill,” actually, although “Barnacle Bill” is entertaining. Also completely overlooked, oddly, is one of Fred Pohl’s strongest novellas ever, “Outnumbering the Dead,” which might well have gotten my vote. Wilhelm’s “Naming the Flowers” is also good, and the two Robertson stories are great fun. Also of at least historic interest is the last story Isaac Asimov submitted to me while he was still alive, “Cleon the Emperor,” which, to me, demonstrates the failure of the whole idea of “predicting” the future scientifically through social calculations, since in spite of all of Seldon’s intricate calculations, the Emperor is unexpectedly killed by a disgruntled gardener who’s pissed off over some minor offense.

Swanwick’s “Griffin’s Egg,” discussed last time, became eligable for the Nebula this year with its American reprint, and I think I would have given the award to it if it had been on the ballot. It would have been between it and “Outnumbering the Dead” for me, probably. (Both printed first as novella chapbooks in England.)

In novelette, I lean towards something that didn’t even make the ballot, Greg Egan’s “Dust,” another curiously overlooked story, although I think it contains some of Egan’s most profound thinking about the nature of reality. “Vanilla Dunk” is one of the field’s best sports stories, written before Jonathan Lethem ascended into the Godhood of mainstream acceptance. Yes, as Rich pointed out, political satire dates fast, and the Sargent was dated within months of it coming out; I thought she was rather kinder in her portrayal of Quayle than he deserved, actually. There was also a powerful Alternate History story by Ian R. MacLeod (who was having a very strong year), “Snodgrass,” where the change in history is that John Lennon had left the Beatles very early on, before they became famous, and it follows, movingly, what the rest of Lennon’s life might have been like. Another good overlooked story is Maureen McHugh’s “The Missionary’s Child.”

When she won the Hugo for “The Nutcracker Coup,” Janet went up to the podium and blurted out, “This was supposed to be Cadigan’s!” That was very Janet.

I remain fond of “Even the Queen,” although it’s no longer really SF, since products to keep you from having your period are actually out on the market now. It did provide me with my moment of fannish immortality, when, accepting her Nebula for the story, Connie said at the podium that she didn’t know how to describe it to friends, and I shouted out from the audience, “Call it a period piece!” Kress’s “The Mountain to Mohammed” is also good, as is a little story by Robert Reed called “Birth Day.”

I’m pleased to be able to point out that once again all of the short fiction winners were from ASIMOV’S.

“The Inner Light” was one of the best STAR TREK episodes ever. ALADDIN is certainly a fantasy, and so if fantasy is eligable for the award, and it is, deserves its place on the ballot–since it impressed a whole generation of kids, there’s probably lots of people who would vote for it. The rest of the ballot, weak.

The Campbell ballot is also weak. In retrospect, it clearly should have been won by Maureen McHugh.

Yes, as Rich pointed out, political satire dates fast,

I would just like say at this moment how very, very surprised I have been in recent months to have encounter not one but two works that are set in the present day, do not seem to be set in worlds where 1991 was markedly different from ours and yet feature Soviets (and not as historical figures).

Red Mars bored me to tears. It’s the kind of novel I usualy love but it just didn’t work for me. I was so bored by it that I have never bothered to read anything else by K.S.R.

To paraphrase (one of the cyberpunks? Was it Bruce Sterling?) everyone needs to read at least one KSR work to discover for themselves what it is about his work that they dislike.

That said, Red Mars is better than his Antarctica. Who knew a book set there could be dull?

Flying in Place, Susan Palwick

Depending on how one sees a particular element of the story, this is either fantasy or purely mainstream. This won the the Crawford Award for best first novel.

Her second novel, The Necessary Beggar, did not come out until 2005. In the interval there was rueing and lamenting [1].

1: Exactly the sort of issue my idea for an Elliot Lake-based humane encouragement facility for writers could address. Writers may fret about the radiactivity but it’s not so bad; it’s the bears that will get them if they wander too far into the woods.

31: Rich, for me the “sense of wonder” depends on whether something could happen, if not within the physical universe itself, at least within a setting with rigorous rules, where the wonder doesn’t depend on out-of-the-box genre devices. (So the use of faster-than-light travel is neutral, and a passage meant to evoke a sense of wonder by describing it, not so much.) Does Vinge play by consistent rules? It’s not at all certain.

Thought experiment: if A Fire Upon the Deep were written with magical and high fantasy tropes, as Vinge alludes to in his text, and as Jo has tested herself, as opposed to pseudo-scientific ones, would it be even a tenth as powerful? The book uses the goodwill its readers have built up toward the idea of scientific and technological progress as a source of wonder.

But if the ideas that drove the novel were actually viewed as a beta test for a new crackpot religion? (Something that SF is no stranger to.) Unlike the obvious example, A Fire Upon the Deep would still be a pretty good adventure novel. The Tines are a well-designed alien species, the Fall of Relay is a bravura set piece, etc, the plot and pacing are in the tradition of Anderson, Piper, and so on. I think people would hold their noses at the DC-8s and read past those passages. But an award winner? (Well, the Usenet pander would still be there. It wasn’t enough to sway voters to give Vinge a clear win, so.)

I *know* that for some readers, the thought that the Singularity could actually exist in the universe made A Fire Upon the Deep especially compelling. How do I know? They said so. As Eliezer Yudkowsky explained, “Short of experiencing our actual Singularity, the Vinge novels come as close to drawing a picture of What Lies Beyond, as we will ever see… A Fire Upon the Deep is probably the best of these; it comes right out and shows you the Transcendents, awesome, moving on a galactic scale. And oh, yes, it won a Hugo.” For these people, the wonder was in seeing the applied theology, not the adventure.

35: Rich, Vinge’s creed has a pathway for “Failed Dreams” too. But he literally can’t imagine (or admit, perhaps) that the basic premise of the Singularity is ill-formed. There might be reasons it won’t happen — Vinge hypothesizes software failures as a primary reason, or we could wreck the planet — but that infinite series should still diverge, dammit!

It’s a rich and imaginative theology, make no mistake. But it is literally unfalsifiable. If we don’t get a Singularity, it’s because our software isn’t good enough. This informs the backstory of A Deepness in the Sky, where a sort of induced idiot savant technology is used to get a few more percentage points improvement over the most advanced software in the Slow Zone. It’s all of a piece.

By the way, he’s still using that “flatworm at the opera” metaphor from Marooned in Realtime. The reality is that the basic workings of the universe seem to be encompassable by the average human mind. (This ties into a slan tendency from Vinge’s earlier work: brighter is better! Hah.) It’s worrisome when authors start believing their own fiction.

The only reason I read Doomsday Book was because it tied with A Fire Upon the Deep. I wanted to see what could tie with Vinge’s astoundingly fun and inventive novel. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. People missing phone calls as plot devices for the future means that either the author thinks her readership is stupid, or she… well, let’s not go there. While I enjoyed some parts of the events taking place in the past, for the most part it read very poorly. I was quite astonished that this had tied with Vinge and made me realise I had to re-evaluate what I thought about the Hugos.

As for AFUTD:
“I would love to know what a young reader, immersed in Facebook &/or Twitter &/or text culture, makes of it.”

– hello, I thought it was still amazing. Yes the texting seemed quaint, but Vinge made it quite specific that bits cost a LOT of money, and over long haul communication routes, the simpler messages were likely to be the de rigeur. Video communication was described (like the puppet-controlled dictator giving an apologetic piece) but the text formatted messages provided a sense of immediacy and involvement which engaged me as a reader.

Note, I have never used ‘usenet’ or was at all familiar with it when I read it.

The translation paths (Triskweline->Samnorsk->????) were a lot of fun and provide information on just how far the original message may have diverged from the intended. In this case, the spirit of Claude Shannon was on full display! Does anyone remember ‘Hexapodia as the key insight‘ summary, it always makes me smile to reread that phrase.

Greg Egan’s work is always worth a read, but I feel I could never suggest his work to someone else, it’s quite intellectually dense. I feel like my university math only just gets me though some of his work!

Still, as someone stated, this year was an embarasment of riches, and we are lucky to have got so much great fiction to read in one year.

:Does anyone remember ‘Hexapodia as the key insight‘ summary

It, like Gregor Mendel, is not forgotten.

–Dave