Hugo Nominees: 1981

Somtow Sucharitkul. Well.

There are various theories about Sucharitkul. Is he an alien? A mutant? A time-travelling posthuman? Let’s take a look.

He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, then exploded on the Thai music scene as a western-style composer with a flair for the avant-garde. Around 1979 he got burned out on music and turned to (among other things) writing. In very little time he had established himself in SF, writing books, novellas and short stories alike.

Since 1979 he’s written about 40 books, of which maybe a dozen are SF, twenty or so fantasy and horror (mostly horror) and the rest mostly young adult. He’s probably best known as a horror writer; his vampire books are very influential among, well, vampire books. His book _Vampire Junction_ was voted one of “forty all-time greatest horror books” by the Horror Writers Association.

He has written two Star Trek novels and two “V” novels.

He has directed two movies: “The Laughing Dead”, a schlock B-grade zombie flick, and “Ill Met by Moonlight,” an art film based on Shakespeare.

His autobiography, _Jasmine Nights_, has caused him to be called “Thailand’s J.D. Salinger”. Certainly it’s one of the first books you encounter when you start looking for English books about Thailand.

He has written a fair amount of poetry, including several creepy sonnets about serial killers.

He has won one Locus, a Stoker, and a World Fantasy Award. Been nominated for a bunch more, including two Hugo and five Stoker nominations.

And that was mostly in one decade, the 1980s. Then he went back to music. By the early 1990s he was a conductor as well as a composer. He founded the Royal Thai Philharmonic and became the country’s leading conductor of classical western music. He’s a major cultural figure there. (He’s also involved in Thai politics, though I don’t pretend to understand the details of that. The Thais are like the French, apparently — major cultural figures are not just expected but almost encouraged to be political commentators as well.)

A few years ago, he took some time off from conducting and composing to write another Star Trek novel, just for the hell of it.

He paints — he’s had at least one exhibition.

And in his spare time, he blogs.

Sucharitkul (he also goes by S.P. Somtow) was the pretty obvious choice this year. And while he’s somewhat drifted away from SF, he still returns to it periodically. If you’re envisioning him scribbling a story for Asimov’s on a break between conducting “Carmen” and flying to L.A. for a convention of vampire fans… that’s probably about right.

Losers: It’s a little bit spooky… this year saw not one but two nominees competing posthumously, and a third nominee has since died.

Robert Stallman’s career was tragically cut short by his death in 1980 at the age of 50. He left behind a single fantasy trilogy (The Orphan, The Captive, and The Beast) which I’m told is pretty good — The Orphan was nominated for a Nebula.

Susan Petrey died that same year. She was only 35. Although she’d written only a handful of short stories, at least one — “Spidersong” — was good enough to get nominated for a Hugo. She’s memorialized by a scholarship to the Clarion workshop, which apparently is still being awarded every year.

Robert L. Forward would have been a strong contender in most years. A serious physicist with a raft of patents to his name (he invented the Forward Mass Detector, which is in wide use by astronomers and geologists), Forward turned to writing fiction in 1979. He memorably described his first novel, _Dragon’s Egg_, as “a textbook on neutron star physics, disguised as a novel.” Some would say not very well disguised, since it had some memorably awful prose… but it was a lively and enjoyable read anyway.

Dr. Forward was a popular and well-liked figure in both physics and fandom. He died of brain cancer in 2002 — R.I.P.

Diane Duane joins the ranks of the two-timed. Kevin Christensen seems to have been an early MilSF writer, with some story sales to New Destinies and such. Then he disappeared for 25 years, only to pop up with a hardcover — Knights of a New World — self-published by PublishAmerica in 2006. Then he seems to have disappeared again. Go figure.

All in all, this was a pretty strong Campbell class. It’s also striking in that it contained not one but two writers who are probably better known to a wider public for their work outside the genre — Forward’s inventions and physics work, and Sucharitkul’s… well, everything, but mostly his composition and conducting. Having two nominees like that in one year is pretty unusual; I can’t think offhand that it ever happened another time, before or after.

Doug M.

The Locus SF Award went to The Snow Queen. Nominees not already mentioned: C.J. Cherryh’s Serpent’s Reach (post), Stephen King’s Firestarter, Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, Philip Jose Farmer’s The Magic Labyrinth, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Two to Conquer. Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (post), Alfred Bester’s Golem 100, Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg, Marta Randall’s Dangerous Games. Norman Spinrad’s Songs From the Stars, Orson Scott Card’s Songmaster, Michael Bishop’s Eyes of Fire, Ian Watson’s The Gardens of Delight, Keith Roberts’s Molly Zero (post), James P. Hogan’s Thrice Upon a Time, M.A. Foster’s Waves, Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg’s First Channel and John Shirley’s City Come a Walking.

My opinion is that you could throw a dart into that paragraph anywhere and find a better nominee than the ones we have.

Not if that dart hit Number of the Beast, the book that convinced me I didn’t need to finish every book I started (1)or Golem 100, perhaps Alfred Bester’s worst book (although The Computer Connection gives it a run for its money).

1: Note that not even the dreaded Algorithm had managed that.

Joan Slonczewski’s Still Forms on Foxfield,

My favourite of her novels, I think. Rare example of Quaker SF; about the only thing rarer is Amish SF…. (1)

1: Go ahead, name someone other than Karl Schoeder. At the least the Quakers have Joan Slonczewski, Gael Baudino, Olaf Stapledon and Judith Moffett.

For me, there’s no contest. The winner should have been THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER, my favorite of the Book of the New Sun volumes, and a reading experience unlike any that I’d ever had before; it’s the only one of the possibilities that approches greatness, and I think that it’s still one of Wolfe’s best three or four books. If, for some bizarre reason, it couldn’t be given to THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER, then I guess I would give it to TIMESCAPE–a solid book with a good deal of gravitas, but not really in the same league as far as invention and vividness are concerned.

THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST is probably Heinlein’s worst book, and the only one I was never able to finish; it makes TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE look good by comparison (and it’s probably significant that it didn’t even make the ballot). WIZARD was awful, a major disappointment, and so was GOLEM 100. FIRESTARTER is weak King (and the movie version wasn’t very good either). BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZON was okay, but not as good as GATEWAY. LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE and THE SNOW QUEEN probably deserved places on the ballot, but neither of them deserved to win over THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER or even TIMESCAPE.

THE ORPHAN is actually quite good, by the way, and I recommend a look at it as a worthy book now unfairly forgotten. Stallman was dead before it came out, I believe, or died shortly thereafter. There were two posthumous sequels, neither as good as the original had been.

I liked “Nightflyers,” but the novella Hugo should have gone to the heartbreaking “Slow Music,” in my opinion perhaps Tiptree’s last really good story, and one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read. It certainly shouldn’t have gone to a fair-to-middling Dickson novella. Other good novellas included Suzy McKee Charnas’s “Unicorn Tapestry,” and M.J. Engh’s troubling “The Oracle.” Davidson’s “There Beneath the Silky Trees and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me,” another Jack Limekiller story, is worth reading, although a bit over-complicated.

Novelette should have gone to Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens,” one of the strangest and most unique stories ever written; I’ll never forget Howard’s reading of it at some convention. Another worthy choice would have been Michael Swanwick’s “Ginnungagap,” a clear cyberpunk precursor. “Strata” was also good. Again, certainly not the Dickson.

Short story is the weakest category. I guess you’d have to give it to Simak, although I’m not wildly enthusiastic. Another good, and almost unknown, story was Naomi Mitchison’s “The Finger.” Le Guin’s “The White Donkey” is good, although not major Le Guin.

Somtow was the clear winner in the Campbell (although THE LAUGHING DEAD is one of the worst movies ever made), although Stallman was a significant talent who might have developed interestingly if he had survived.

Judith Moffett’s first novel, PENNTERRA, which I bought and published, was a Quaker SF novel.

Reading The Snow Queen was an odd experience for me that year. For the first 100 pages or so, I slogged through it as if it was an unpleasant chore. Then somehow everything clicked into place for me and I sailed through the rest of it. Vinge has a favorite of mine at the time, so I certainly think she deserved the nomination. In the end, I might of voted for Timescape or Mockingbird. The Shadow of the Torturer might have gone a little over my head at the time, and it certainly has become the classic novel from that year.

It was a great year for novellas. I echo those who noted the Schenk and Randall were also worthy of consideration. I might have gone for either Martin novella that year, although maybe “One Wing” hasn’t aged as well.

I do want to mention one other short story that no one has mentioned. It is probably too slight to deserve a mention, but it is one of my favorite “poetic revenge” stories ever. It is “All Things Come to Those Who Weight” by Robert Grossbach. Mr. Grossbach is probably best known for “Of Scorned Women and Causal Loops” which Gardner chose for one of the year’s best in 1999.

Dick Schatz

Whatever happened to Karl Hansen?

This was the year of eligibility for Restaurant at the End of the Universe, right?

I’m not as impressed by “The Autopsy” as Rich is–a good, solid, scary SF horror story, but something that any of a half-dozen authors could have written. Nobody but Howard could have written “The Ugly Chickens,” or would ever have thought to do so.

Besides, I’m almost positive that “The Autopsy” is a novella.

I’d still give novella to “Slow Music,” even with “The Autopsy” in the category. It and “Nightflyers,” though, another SF horror story, could fight it out for second place–with perhaps “The Autopsy” having a slight edge.

They were both pretty scary stories.

I don’t think cover art gets enough love in these threads. There are several cases where I suspect it’s propelled a novel into the finalist pool, and a couple where it may have determined the winner. In the case of _The Snow Queen_, both the Dillon and Whelan covers were absolutely gorgeous. The Dillon cover came first:

That’s just a terrific cover on multiple levels, really one of the best for any SF novel ever: It’s beautiful in its own right, it’s intriguing, it depicts an actual scene from the novel, and it contains a number ofvisual references to elements or themes of the book. See, for instance, how the eye is drawn downwards from the white of the Snow Queen to the gradually warming yellows and golds of the painting’s lower half, and finally to the sybil’s trefoil like a punctuation mark at the bottom. Just great.

The Whelan cover is pretty spiff too. Whelan revisited the image a decade later with the cover to _Summer’s Queen_. Put “Snow Queen Vinge” into google images to see ’em.)

I don’t love _The Snow Queen_ — the whole “oh noes the creatures we are killing for our immortality drug turn out to be INTELLIGENT” thing strikes me as painfully obvious and heavy-handed — but there are a few things to be said for it. Not only is it on the short list of Hugo Winners that pass the Bechdel Test, but it’s on the even shorter list of Hugo winners in which most of the major characters are female. (How long is that list, anyway? Depending on who you call a “major character”, I’m coming up with between one and four.)

Doug M.

I’d like to strongly endorse the positive vibes above for Robert Stallman’s trilogy. I remember buying these as the Pocket/Timescape mmpbs came out, and loved all three. Werewolf novels like no others, and I don’t particularly like werewolf books! The first two, at least, had stunning covers by Don Maitz, possibly the first time I really noticed his work. See

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/robert-stallman/

& go to the page for The Orphan to see a larger image.

I do think the Whelan cover might have contributed to the success of THE SNOW QUEEN; I remember there being a buzz about it at the time.

Be interesting for someone to take a look at THE ORPHAN as a precursor to the later paranormal boom; certainly there can’t be many werewolf novels with its gravitas and literary quality.

There was a book called I WILL FEAR NO EVIL?

Dream Makers, Charles Platt (Berkley)

Was it this one or the sequel that has the interview with Pournelle in which he admits to having been a damn dirty Red Commie Marxist Left-leaning ssssssssssssssssssssssssssocialist?

A little googling turns this up:

After I got out of the Korean war, and came back and was an undergraduate, I fell into the hands of those who kept telling us that Marxism was within the Western tradition, and so forth. I was also a victim of the snigger-theory of philosophy, which is that if you admire anyone other than a leftist then you’re barely tolerated in the university department, and they laugh at you.

As something quoted in The Stuff Our Dreams Are Made Of (a often silly SF crit book by the late Thomas Disch] but I am sure it comes from an interview between Charles Platt and supposedly former damn dirty Red Commie Marxist Left-leaning ssssssssssssssssssssssssssocialist Jerry Pournelle in one of the Dream Makers books.

Best not misinterpret the faith in the Soviet Union angle shown in the CoDominium series or how the author tried to salvage that setting after the Big Politics Mixup of the early 1990s. Many right-wingers of the era had a touching faith in the Soviet Union that would have done Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov credit; I think it’s related to how any current Existential Enemy of America is seen as eternal and unbeatable and the US is always doooooooooooomed despite all previous dooooooooooms [The Coming Race War! The Great Famines of the 1980s! Atomigeddon: 1979!] having not panned out.

I’ve also heard people refer to its word for inter-species sex fairly recently, so maybe everybody else likes it.

I think it’s more that the only thing that anyone remembers from the book is that it gave us a word for a concept that was in need of one.

Here is how I voted in 1981:

Best Novel
1. Wizard John Varley
2. Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Frederik Pohl
3. The Snow Queen Joan D. Vinge
4. Lord Valentine’s Castle Robert Silverberg
5. The Ringworld Engineers Larry Niven

Best Novella
1. “Nightflyers” George R.R. Martin
2. “One-Wing” George R.R. Martin & Lisa Tuttle
3. “Lost Dorsai” Gordon R. Dickson
4. “The Brave Little Toaster” Thomas M. Disch
5. “All the Lies That Are My Life” Harlan Ellison

Best Novelette
1. “The Lordly Ones” Keith Roberts
2. “Beatnik Bayou” John Varley
3. “The Autopsy” Michael Shea
4. “The Cloak and the Staff” Gordon R. Dickson
5. “The Ugly Chickens” Howard Waldrop
6. “Savage Planet” Barry B. Longyear

Best Short Story
1. “Spidersong” Susan C. Petrey
2. “Guardian” Jeff Duntemann
3. “Grotto of the Dancing Deer” Clifford D. Simak
4. “Our Lady of the Sauropods” Robert Silverberg
5. “Cold Hands” Jeff Duntemann