Tag: Samuel R. Delany

How I Would Vote Now: 1968 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson

Chthon by Piers Anthony

The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany

Thorns by Robert Silverberg

Lord of Light by Robert Silverberg

The Actual Results

  1. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
  2. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany
  3. Chthon by Piers Anthony
  • The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson
  • Thorns by Robert Silverberg

How I Would Have Voted

  1. No Award
  2. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Explanation

I’m not a huge fan of New Wave science fiction, and by 1968, that was the hot new trend that was sweeping the genre. Of the five books nominated, I DNFed three and screened out the other two using AI. Here’s the breakdown:

I tried to read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, but just didn’t get into it. It was too Eastern and pseudo-mystical for me. With that said, it’s not a bad book, so I could probably be persuaded to go back and try it again. It’s just not for me.

Strangely, I’ve found that to be true of most of Zelazny’s books and stories… except for his Chronicles of Amber, which I love. Granted, the last couple books in the series are turning into a bit of a slog (I’m currently in the middle of book 9), but the first five books following Corwin are absolutely fantastic. I was hooked from the first page of the first book, unlike every other Zelazny title, which usually loses me after 30 or 40 pages.

The Butterfly Kid was really hard to find, because the Orem Public Library AND the BYU Library don’t carry it—and the BYU Library has one of the best science fiction collections west of the Mississippi. So I read the free sample on Amazon, and that was enough to DNF it. Way too psychadelic and trippy for me. The whole book is basically a 200 page drug trip, with an alien invasion thrown in for good measure. No wonder BYU doesn’t carry it.

The Einstein Connection was probably the book that made me decide to blacklist Samuel R. Delany and never read anything else he’s written (that, and the fact that he endorsed NAMBLA). There’s a lot of weird and twisted sexual content, including (if I remember correctly) some sexual content involving children. There’s a reason why Neil Gaiman wrote such a glowing introduction to the book, extolling all the reasons why he loves all things Delany. Bunch of sick perverts if you ask me.

I’ve tried to read some Piers Anthony before, but found it very difficult because of all the sick old man vibes he gives off. Which is a shame, because he’s a pretty decent writer. But everything I’ve tried to read of his has a weird obsession with rape, or of the necessity of women to submit to male sexual needs (including the needs of strangers). So when ChatGPT told me this about Chthon, I decided I didn’t need to read it:

This appears to include rape, incest/Oedipal sexual themes, coercive/abusive sexuality, and a race of women whose narrative function is tied to abuse, desire, and destructive obsession. Several reader reviews specifically warn about rape, incest, misogyny, and violence against women, with one review describing “cold scenes of both rape and incest” and objecting that the story seems to frame the perpetrating character too sympathetically.

The setup itself is grim: Aton Five is condemned to the subterranean prison planet Chthon after falling in love with a dangerous “Minionette,” and the novel is described by SFWA’s Nebula page as dark, grim, and heavily prison-sequence driven. The tone seems psychologically oppressive rather than hopeful or adventurous.

Robert Silverberg has a very similar problem, though he’s not nearly as overt in his sick old man vibes as Piers Anthony. But I don’t think I’ve ever read a Silverberg novel that I didn’t end up DNFing for weird and disturbing sexual content. Here’s what ChatGPT said about Thorns:

High concern. There is definitely sexual content, and it sounds deeply uncomfortable rather than erotic in an ordinary adult-romance sense. Multiple reader descriptions flag a bizarre or disturbing sex scene, and the central relationship involves a seventeen-year-old girl paired with a much older, physically altered man under manipulative circumstances.

I did not find evidence of a conventional rape scene in the sources I checked, but the book’s whole setup involves sexual/reproductive exploitation: Lona is used by scientists for her eggs, becomes the biological mother of one hundred children, and is then denied access to them. That is not “sexual violence” in the ordinary on-page assault sense, but it is very much reproductive exploitation and psychological violation.

This sounds like one of Silverberg’s darker psychological SF novels. The central figure, Duncan Chalk, literally feeds on other people’s suffering and engineers misery as entertainment. The book seems interested in pain, isolation, bodily alienation, emotional manipulation, and the public consumption of private suffering.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that ChatGPT flagged its own description of the novel as potentially violating its content guidelines, which is never a good sign.

So there you have it. Another bad year for science fiction—which tends to support my thesis that SFWA ruined the genre by starting it down the long march through the institutions. SFWA was founded in 1965, and Silverberg was the president from ’67 to ’68.

(As an interesting side note, every one of these novels had at least one edition featuring cover art with topless female nudity and visible nipples.)

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

Reading Resolution Update: February

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

I didn’t read nearly as many books in February as I did in January. Part of that might have been enthusiasm for the resolution waning a bit, but a good chunk of it was due to the fact that my grandmother passed away, and we took off a week for the funeral. Also, potty training completely upended our daily routine. I also went ahead and finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, after reading Annihilation, so that took off a lot of reading time that otherwise would have gone toward this goal.

But I’m not too worried about it, since I’m already well past the halfway point and should be able to finish before the end of the year. In fact, I went ahead and made a similar spreadsheet of all the short stories, novelettes, and novellas that won a Hugo/Nebula, and may move on to those after I finish the novels. It’s going to be a lot more challenging to hunt down all of those titles, though, so I might just move on to the Dragon Awards instead.

In any case, here are all the Hugo/Nebula award-winning novels that I read or DNFed in February:

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

  • The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans. (2015 Hugo)

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

  • Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1944 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2019)

Books that I did not finish:

  • This Immortal by Roger Zelazny (1966 Hugo)
  • Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (1967 Nebula)
  • The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1990 Nebula)
  • Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick (1992 Nebula)
  • Slan by A.E. Van Vogt (1941 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2016)

Reading Resolution Update: January

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

I had expected to DNF a lot of these books, but I was a little dismayed at how terrible they are. Or rather, how some of them can be so well-written and yet so idelogically possessed.

For a while, I worried that I was pre-judging some of these books too harshly, based on my opinions of the author. After all, shouldn’t art be treated separately from the artist? But then I decided that it would be better to lean into that bias, and trust my intuition. After all, it’s impossible to approach reading without a personal bias—and even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be advisable.

One of the key things I’m hoping to take away from reading these books is a better understanding of my own personal tastes. Toward that end, it’s much better to DNF early and often, since that tells me something valuable about my own tastes. I’ll get much more out of this exercise if I pay attention to that than whether or not I’m being “fair” to a particular book or author.

As for how my bias against an author might prejudice me against a book, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem so long as I’m aware of those biases. Yes, it makes it more likely that I’ll read a book with a critical eye, and not in the way that I typically read for enjoyment, but that goes both ways, since if I do enjoy a book, that’s going to improve my opinion of the author (or at least make me reconsider my opinion). So long as I’m aware of my biases and make sure that they aren’t set in stone, I think it should be fine

Besides, it’s not like I have anything to prove. Sure, China Mike Glyer might pull out an excerpt from this post to use as content (hi China Mike!), but I couldn’t care less what that particular corner of fandom thinks about my public ruminations. I will know if I’m being too “unfair” to a book or an author, and the only criterion that really matters is whether I have a clear reason for DNFing the book, separate from my biases about the author.

And honestly, what I’ve found so far is that my biases are pretty spot on. Authors who behave insufferably in public or on the internet tend to write some pretty insufferable books, especially if they’re woke.

Fortunately, I have found a few new-to-me books and authors who are really fantastic. And my decision to DNF early and often is helping to keep it from becoming too much of a slog, which is good. It also means that I may complete this resolution a lot sooner than I’d expected, at which point I’ll probably move on to the Dragons or the Prometheus awards.

In any case, here are all the Hugo and Nebula awared-winning novels that I read or DNFed in January 2022:

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

  • Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1964 Hugo)
  • Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov (1983 Hugo)
  • The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (1991 Hugo)
  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2015 Nebula)

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

  • None

Books that I did not finish:

  • The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (1958 Hugo)
  • A Case of Conscience by James Blish (1959 Hugo)
  • The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1965 Hugo)
  • The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany (1968 Nebula)
  • Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (1969 Hugo)
  • Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin (1969 Nebula)
  • Man Plus by Frederik Pohl (1977 Nebula)
  • Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1979 Hugo and Nebula)
  • A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (20000 Hugo) (My wife recommended this one, and I will probably try it again, since I took a break midway through and forgot who all of the characters were. But for now, I’m counting it as a soft DNF.)
  • Camouflage by Joe Haldeman (2006 Nebula)
  • The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Redshirts by John Scalzi (2013 Hugo)
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2014 Hugo and Nebula)
  • All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2017 Nebula)
  • The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (2019 Hugo and Nebula)
  • A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2020 Hugo)
  • A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker (2021 Nebula)