Tag: Mark Clifton

How I would vote now: 1955 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley (also published as The Forever Machine)

The Actual Results

  1. They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley

How I Would Have Voted

  1. They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley

Explanation

Things worked a little differently back in 1955. This was only the second time the Hugo Awards were given out (the first was in 1953), though it was the thirteenth Worldcon. As far as I can tell, there was no formal ballot or nominating process, just the organizers of the convention getting together and deciding which winners to award.

They’d Rather Be Right was serialized in four issues of Astounding Science Fiction, before it was published as a novel by Gnome Press in 1957. Among the fans who regularly attend Worldcon, it is largely panned as the worst book to ever win a Hugo Award. For that reason, it is very difficult to find a copy (I was fortunate enough to find a used copy on Amazon that a small-town library in California happened to be selling, but I had to keep an eye out for a couple of months).

But does the book really merit the distinction of being the worst? Personally, I don’t think so. Don’t get me wrong—it’s nowhere near the caliber of Dune, Hyperion, or Ender’s Game, but it does tell a fun story with an interesting sci-fi premise and some entertaining twists. It wasn’t the greatest book I’ve ever read, but I did genuinely enjoy it.

So why does this book get panned so hard? Probably because of its underlying message, which is that 1) Malthus was wrong, 2) Freud was wrong, 3) most self-styled scientists are actually charlatans and quacks, and 4) the best way to safeguard a new technology from evil and conspiring men is to make it open source, even if that technology grants the user with god-like powers.

In short, this book gives a glorious middle finger to would-be authoritarian statists everywhere. For that reason, it will always have a special place in my heart. If the 1955 Hugos were held today, I would happily vote They’d Rather Be Right for best novel.

Reading Resolution Update: After Action Report

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

Earlier this month, I finished my last Hugo/Nebula book and ordered the last two ones that I hadn’t yet acquired. The first of those (Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin) arrived just this morning, and the other one (Way Station by Clifford D. Simak) is supposed to arrive next week, so I think that now is a good time to do a retrospective and share some of my thoughts.

There were 104 books in total, including the most recent award winners (I decided not to count the retro-Hugos midway through the year). Of those, I’ve read 35 through from start to finish, and decided that 24 were worth keeping. The rest of them (69, or almost exactly two thirds) I DNFed.

Finishing one in three books is actually about on par for me. I’ve found that if I don’t allow myself to DNF books early and often, I just don’t read. Also, it doesn’t really surprise me that nearly one third of the books I read all the way through didn’t really impress me. What can I say—I’ve a very opinionated man.

Of the 28 books that have won both a Hugo and a Nebula, I finished 12 (or about two-fifths) and found that eight (or a little over a quarter) were worth keeping. So not much different than the overall totals.

Of the 45 books that won only a Hugo, I finished 18 (exactly two-fifths) and found that 14 (about a third) were worth keeping. So my personal taste seems to be tilted more toward the Hugo than the Nebula. The difference becomes even more stark when you take out the 20 books that were nominated for (but did not win) a Nebula, a whopping 16 of which I DNFed. Excluding those, we’re left with 25 books, 14 (or more than half) of which I finished, and 11 (or just under half) I thought were worth keeping.

The contrast becomes even sharper when we look at the Nebula-only winners. Out of the 31 books that didn’t win a Hugo but did win the Nebula, I finished only five (less than one-sixth) and found that only two were worth keeping. Both of those were books that weren’t even nominated for the Hugo. When we look at the 16 Nebula-winners that were nominated for a Hugo but didn’t win, I finished only two of them (one-eight) and didn’t think that any of them were worth keeping.

So the best predictor that I wouldn’t like a book is if it won a Nebula and was nominated for a Hugo, but didn’t win. In other words, if the SFWA crowd (which is mostly authors) said “this is the best novel published this year!” and the denizens of Worldcon said “yeah… no,” that almost guaranteed I would hate it. In fact, just getting nominated for a Nebula is enough to make a book suspect.

This is why, earlier in the year, I posited the theory that SFWA has done more to ruin science fiction than any other organization. I saw this trend coming all the way back in the spring, when I was only halfway through the reading list. In the early years, SFWA was all about politicizing science fiction, and in the last few years, it’s basically turned into a nasty bunch of mean girls all trying to get a Nebula for themselves.

I tracked a few other awards just to see if there were any correlations. For the 18 books that placed in any category in the Goodreads Awards, there were only four books that I finished and two that I thought were worth keeping. Network Effect by Martha Wells received 22,971 votes in the Science Fiction category in 2020, which came to 9.69%. Blackout by Connie Willis gained only 337 votes in 2010, but that was 9.19% back then. Both of those books were keepers. The only other book that got a higher percentage for its year was Redshirts by John Scalzi, with 4,618 votes at 10.82%, but I DNFed that one. Most Hugo/Nebula winning books didn’t even clear the 5% threshold in the Goodreads Choice Awards, and in my experience anything under 10% that doesn’t immediately jump out to me probably isn’t worth reading.

Of the six Hugo/Nebula books that were nominated for a Dragon Award, the only one I even really finished was Network Effect by Martha Wells. But that makes sense, since it’s no great secret that the Hugo/Nebula crowd is trying to sabotage the Dragons by pulling exactly the same shenanigans that they accused the Sad Puppies of doing. Accusation is projection is confession, after all. As of 2022, there has never been a Hugo/Nebula winning book that has also won a Dragon, and while part of me hopes that it stays that way, another part of me is very curious to read the first book that does.

Almost all of the 104 Hugo/Nebula winning books placed somewhere in the various Locus recommended reading lists, which isn’t surprising since those lists are generally regarded as feeders for the Hugos and Nebulas (and used to get more people voting in them, too). Of the seven books that weren’t on a Locus list, the only one I finished was They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, which also has the distinction of being the most difficult book to find.

(A lot of people think They’d Rather Be Right was the worst book to ever win a Hugo, but I actually enjoyed it. Unlike most Hugo/Nebula books, it was remarkably anti-Malthusian, which is probably why it’s so hated. As for the worst book to ever win a Hugo, I personally grant that distinction to Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre.)

There were only ten Hugo/Nebula books that won or were nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and I only finished two of them (and didn’t think either were worth keeping). Perhaps that means that makes it the actual best predictor that I’ll hate a book, but ten is a pretty small sample size, so I’m holding off judgment for now.

The best two decades for me were the 50s (7 books, 4 keepers) and the 00s (16 books, 6 keepers), though the 80s came in close with five keepers out of sixteen books—and let’s be honest, Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis are basically two halves of the same book. In contrast, the worst two decades were the 70s (only one keeper out of 13 total books) and the most recent decade, the 10s (15 books, 2 keepers).

So far, the 20s aren’t shaping up to be much better. In fact, I think it’s entirely fair to say that given the state of fandom since the election of President Trump (and the general state of insanity in this post-Trump era), a Hugo or a Nebula should count as a mark against a book, rather than for it. That is, the primary value of these awards is to tell you which books to avoid. Perhaps this will change at some point in the future, like it did after the madness of the 70s or the malaise of the 90s (not a good decade for science fiction, apart from books published by Baen), but I’m not holding my breath.

So that was my reading resolution for 2022. If I hadn’t allowed myself to DNF, I can guarantee that I never would have accomplished it. As it stands, though, I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

What sort of reading resolution should I set for 2023?

Reading Resolution Update: March

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

So March is usually the time where people get tired of their new year’s resolutions and either give them up entirely or put them on the back burner for a while. But at this point, I’m a little more than halfway through achieving this one, so I will definitely keep pressing on since I don’t think it will take the whole year to accomplish it. In fact, I may actually expand it to include all of the short stories, novellas, and novelettes. I’ve already filled out the spreadsheet (with a huge thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which also lists all of the collections and anthologies where each story can be found).

With that said, my enthusiasm for reading all of these books is starting to flag, and I’m not pushing on as vigorously as I did back in January. There have been a lot of DNFs… a lot of DNFs. But now, I’m starting to get to the books that aren’t obvious DNFs, which is frustrating, because when you get more than halfway through a 600 page book before you realize it isn’t worth finishing, that really does take the fun out of reading, at least in the short term.

But it has been very eye-opening to see what kinds of books tend to win Hugos and Nebulas. I’ve noticed some interesting patterns that have given me real insight into the people who vote in these awards, which consists of the old guard in fandom for the Hugos, and members of SFWA (mostly professional authors) for the Nebulas.

One book in particular I found really eye-opening in this regard, and that was They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. Mark Clifton was a science fiction short story writer who was fairly prolific, but died tragically about ten years after They’d Rather Be Right came out in 1955. Frank Riley was a newspaper man who dabbled a little bit in mystery short stories but only ever co-wrote this one novel.

They’d Rather Be Right is a notoriously difficult book to get your hands on. An abridged version with the title The Forever Machine is on sale on Amazon somewhere north of $100, and neither version was available at either my local library or the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU, and that’s unusual because the HBLL’s science fiction and fantasy collection is one of the best in the country. I eventually bought a used version of They’d Rather Be Right on Amazon from a third-party seller for $10: it was an old library copy from a small town in Arizona, and I think the seller was the actual library.

In reading about this book, I discovered that it’s been widely panned as the “worst book to win a Hugo.” However, after reading it, I can definitely say it is not the worst book. It’s not the best book either, but it is far from the worst, and I enjoyed it enough to put it on the “books worth keeping” list. So why is it considered the worst Hugo-winning book, and why has it been forgotten so thoroughly?

My working theory is that They’d Rather Be Right isn’t actually bad, it’s just heretical. Science fiction has always skewed toward the political left, and this book thoroughly ridicules some deeply held left-wing beliefs of its day. For example, it goes out of its way to ridicule scientists as a class, and makes it seem ludicrous that they have any business deciding on how the rest of society should be governed. It also pokes fun at some of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, which is notable because so many of the Hugo and Nebula winning novels of the 60s and 70s are so thoroughly Freudian.

So what happened, I believe, is that after the Hugos became a regular feature of Worldcon (They’d Rather Be Right was only the 2nd novel to ever win a Hugo), the influencers and kingmakers within fandom decided that this one won on a fluke, and did everything they could to suppress it. And perhaps it really was a fluke, since the Hugo Awards weren’t yet established, and Worldcon itself was only a little more than a decade old.

Because here’s the thing: the Hugos and the Nebulas have always been radically left-wing. Science fiction in general has always leaned hard to the left, and those of us who consider ourselves right-wingers have always been a despised minority to most of the rest of fandom. That didn’t start in the 50s either: if anything, it started with the Futurians, as Donald Wollheim himself (founder of DAW Books) said that science fiction “should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence.” The Futurians were the ones who founded both Worldcon and SFWA, as well as several other establishment institutions in the SF&F field.

But I think it started before the Futurians, because it makes a lot of sense that science fiction would attract left-wingers more than it would right-wingers. Left-wingers are the kind of people who think that traditions should be thrown out and new ideas should be implemented, whereas right-wingers are the kind of people who think that new ideas should be treated cautiously, and traditions should be upheld.

There’s a cycle that happens about every 50 to 100 years, and it goes like this: someone comes up with a Beautiful Idea that almost everyone on the left becomes enamored of. They pore over this idea, ponder it, debate it amongst themselves, and spill copious amounts of ink over it, mostly in the form of academic discourses and thesis papers.

Gradually, this idea matures into a General Theory, and the left constructs a whole worldview around it. But at this point, it starts to come into conflict with reality—not in a catastrophic way at first, but definitely in a way that causes some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. But because the Beautiful Idea was so beautiful, none of the theory’s proponents really want to give it up, so they start to build a bulwark of apologia to explain the theory’s inconsistencies and contradictions.

After a while, though, that isn’t enough, and reality begins to intrude in ways that simply cannot be ignored. At this point, the General Theory morphs into an Ugly Ideology, possessing all of its followers and driving them into incredible pathologies. Groupthink and doublespeak become de rigueur, and hypocrisy infects everyone. Values like diversity, curiosity, open inquiry, freedom of speech, and intellectual honesty are all thrown out, as nothing is more important than promoting the ideology. Right and wrong cease to matter as well: the only thing that matters is power.

Eventually, reality intrudes in such a way that the entire edifice comes crumbling down, completely discrediting the Beautiful Idea and everyone who ever believed in it. But if the Ugly Ideology persists for too long, it culminates in a reign of terror, with guillotines, gas chambers, firing squads, holocausts, and genocides.

Fortunately, there are people who drop out at every stage of this cycle: “That’s a Beautiful Idea, but it’s still flawed.” “I like the General Theory, but I don’t think it explains everything.” “I am a true believer in this Ugly Ideology, but I’m not going to pull the trigger on those people.” And if enough people drop out, the pendulum swings back, the left goes into retreat, and culture and politics swing back to the right again… until someone discovers (or rediscovers) a Beautiful Idea.

In the 60s and 70s, the left was in the early stages of the Ugly Ideology phase of this cycle. Not surprisingly, the science fiction of that time was pretty terrible. Then the Reagan era happened, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, and left was thrown on the back foot for a generation. During this time (the 80s and 90s), the award-winning science fiction was actually pretty good.

But that was also the time when the ideas that underpin critical race theory began to take root—the “Beatiful Ideas” that gave us, among other things, Defund the Police, the George Floyd riots, the epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies, and the ongoing collapse of leftist-run cities like Chicago and San Francisco. In science fiction, this culminated in the sad and rabid puppies, at which point the Hugos and Nebulas became total garbage again, because the left-leaning fandom had become so ideologically possessed.

So anyways, that’s my take on it. I really did enjoy They’d Rather Be Right, and not just for the insights into fandom. In any case, here are all of the other Hugo and Nebula winning books I read or DNFed in March:

Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired:

  • They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley (1955 Hugo)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

  • The City & The City by China Mieville (2010 Hugo)

Books that I did not finish:

  • Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1962 Hugo)
  • To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer (1972 Hugo)
  • Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (1977 Hugo)
  • The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1981 Hugo)
  • The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (2008 Hugo and Nebula)