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)
