Hugo Nominees: 1985

Carr, a book editor rather than a magazine editor, only had Hugo recognition after his death.

Not true! This is the grand except to the general rule (prior to the split in Best Editor Hugo to long and short form) that book editors have to die to win a Best Editor Hugo. At this time Carr was editing his second Ace Science Fiction Specials series (the third Ace Science Fiction Specials series overall). In 1984, the books released in that series were Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, Carter Scholz and Glenn Harcourt’s Palimpsests, Lucius Shepard’s Green Eyes, Howard Waldrop’s Them Bones, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Carr died in 1987 and won the Best Dead Book Editor Hugo that year.

Neuromancer is Dante’s Inferno. Honest.

Personally, I loved it. I still do. It was the first SF book I read that had characters I could relate to at an everyday level, and I grew up very far away from the Sprawl.

I’d say it captures some of that strange urban 1970s magic — hence the ‘punk’ — glamour and tawdriness and crime, but also a sense of limitlessness. Opportunity in the teeth of despair. It’s an SF novel that could actually have a mix tape, which is rare enough, and one that is not Steeleye Span a good one too, and that is doubly rare.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand does a little of that, but from a more accomplished person’s perspective. I think it’s a deeper novel, but I’m not sure if it’s better art. (Delany himself is only a few years older than Gibson.)

Also, I think there’s a fair amount of “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” in Neuromancer, but with Chandler and/or Hammett as a guiding voice instead of Zelazny.

“Yet Another Modest Proposal: The Roentgen Standard” is in retrospect a step on the path to Niven’s proposal that – actually, this is the sort of thing where a sarcastic paraphrase wouldn’t be believed so let’s have the man’s actual words:

From an article on SF authors advising Homeland Security:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work,” Niven replied.

This will get Doug M’s goat, but I think Lucius Shepard as the Campbell winner is thoroughly deserved. “Salvador”, now that’s military science fiction!

I don’t see the connection between Shepard and Andre Norton myself, but Doug swears one is there. (I have never read Norton, and it’s likely I never will.)

And now I have a strange urge to read Life During Wartime — I am in Panama City at the moment, maybe that’s why.

13: Doug, as someone who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Vietnam War or hallucinogens, I love those stories.

Maybe I’m just that alienated!

his scam of making me buy an entire collection to get one new story and maybe a fix-up framing tale was the last straw.

This in in part caused in part by the fact that Niven’s output of short stories fell off dramatically in the 1980s. From the start of his career in the mid-1960s to about 1980, he had eight collection that didn’t overlap much (Shape of Space got cannibalized but since hardly anyone ever saw a copy, that was understandable) but just from 1970 to 1979, he had over 40 new short works. From 1980 to 1989, there were about 16. New collections pretty much require recycling old stories (and chunks of books) because there just isn’t enough new Niven material for more than a collection or so per decade.

I was fifteen when Neuromancer came out, and I was very impressed with it; it had the game-changing effect on me it was supposed to. But honestly, I’ve always liked Count Zero more. I was quite surprised to find out, years later, that this was a minority opinion.

If anyone didn’t like Neuromancer, but it is considering giving Gibson another go, I’d recommend starting with Zero. All the same themes, with a broader range of better-observed characters. Though it’s been years since I’ve read either of them, so maybe I’d change my mind in retrospect.

“The Return of William Proxmire” managed to pack about four different kinds of complete burbling idiocy into its 1500 words or so. Hearing that it was nominated for a Hugo makes me very, very sad.
— You know, I haven’t reread _Neuromancer_ in a decade or so. Yet as soon as the book is mentioned, I can name and briefly describe half a dozen of the characters. I can’t remember anything about a single character from _The Integral Trees_, except that there was one guy called “The Grad”.

Doug M.

The tendency to nominate “‘old masters’ with weak new works” plagued this year’s dramatic presentation category, what with substandard adaptations of works by Clarke and Herbert along with one of the weaker “Star Trek” films on the ballot. Ghostbusters was an effects-driven blockbuster with considerable humor (of varying degrees of subtlety) that nonetheless treated its fantastic premise relatively seriously. It was a silly film, but didn’t make people feel stupid for watching it. As for The Last Starfighter, who knows why that one’s there?

Incredibly, The Terminator–the one film many viewers today (including me) would cite as the best sf film of 1984–failed to make the ballot. At first I thought not enough viewers had seen the film at the time, but according to Box Office Mojo it grossed $38,371,200 at the U.S. box office–low by the standards of James Cameron’s later films, but enough to make it the 21st highest grossing film of 1984, ahead of Dune and The Last Starfighter and a little behind 2010. Of course many more people have seen The Terminator since then, and it’s also in the U.S. National Film Registry.

Two fine low-budget, low-grossing sf films that would have enhanced the ballot are Repo Man and The Brother from Another Planet; in a period with readier access to home video they might have had as much of chance at a nomination as, say, Moon. Besides Ghostbusters, several of 1984’s fantasy and supernatural horror films (e.g. The NeverEnding Story, Gremlins and Nightmare on Elm Street) have held up at least as well as The Last Starfighter.

Finally, one significant 1984 release that wouldn’t have much impact in the English-speaking world for decades is Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Hayao Miyazaki’s first original film as a writer/director and a breathtakingly imagined and rendered far-future scenario that may be the closest anyone’s come to putting a Jack Vance novel on screen (speaking of “old masters”). Hardly anyone outside of Japan saw Nausicaä at the time, and it was drastically re-edited for the initial English-language release (as Warriors of the Wind). Today I would count it as my other favorite sf movie of 1984.

Count me as another who disliked Neuromancer. I think there are a lot of problems with that book, but the one that stands out in my memory is how completely egregiously wrong it got computers. And not only did it blow computer technology completely, it did so in such an influential way that the same egregious errors continue and multiply in other influenced works to this day. (See, for example, Robert Sawyer, particularly The Terminal Experiment.) I blame Neuromancer, at least in part, for the fictional conception of computers that lead to programs that run on any computer they find, running programs “moving” through a network, ridiculous visual representations of computer security, and the general tendency to portray computer security as an analog to medieval fortresses, leading to innumerable major errors about how computer security actually functions.

Note: I do not blame Gibson for this. Computers and networks were very new to the general population, and extrapolation is very hard. Neuromancer wasn’t any more wrong than many, many other “predictions” in SF. It just had the misfortune (from my perspective) to be wrong in ways that for me make it very difficult to read, and it was wrong in such a persistant and influential way that it turned cyberpunk and cyberpunk-derived writing into a sort of magical alternative technology subgenre that has nothing to do with how computers actually work, but which is persistantly used by others as a model for computers.

Most people I talked to who hated Neuromancer thought it was depicting a dystopia, while those who liked it thought it was just the future waiting to happen and that there was nothing wrong with that future. At the time when I read it, I loved it and didn’t pick up on the dystopian aspects either.

Thought the only book after Neuromancer by Gibson I really enjoyed was Idoru, both the two Neuromancer sequels and the first bridge novel left me cold. Thought these days I avoid him completely, every writer who thinks the future is imaginable anymore when so much excellent SF is written has lost me.

I seem to like the fantasy from 1985 much more than the sf.

My recall of rereading Neuromancer several years ago was that it didn’t have as much technical stuff in it as I thought it had, much more allegory and imagery. And would probably make a good movie. I like the idea of it as Inferno above, but it wouldn’t help me much without reading Dante first.

“The nonsense about computers certainly contributed to my overall negative reaction.”

Just generally speaking, and not to pick on any one person, but I would bet money that anyone who says this about Neuromancer will have some favorite work of SF that uses even more unrealistic depictions of computing technology than Gibson does: “Doc” Smith, Heinlein, Asimov, Star Trek, Vinge, etc.

It’s a little curious.

In attempting to judge who was “in fact” the best new writer all those years ago, subsequent sales figures and major award nominations are not necessarily sound criteria, given the rubbish that so often tops sales charts, and given the lame works that so often win major awards (check out Kij Johnson’s recent Nebula win for “Ponies”).

Cyberpunk is over?
I guess it may depend on your definition, but I personally don’t believe any part of that blanket notion. Cyberpunk, like technology, is merely evolving.

The reason NEUROMANCER seems overly familiar today is, of course, because it influenced everything that came after it–not just novels and stories, but movies, TV shows, comics, games…its influence widened out way beyond typical genre boundaries, and in fact it may have had more influence outside the genre than it even did inside it. Yes, it’s almost certainly directly responsible for THE MATRIX, and for dozens of other movies and TV shows, and, as someone pointed out, for tropes in those shows right down to the current day. It was one of those rare books that, for better or worse, changed the direction of SF; it influenced dozens of young authors, and almost everything that came afterward, from cyberpunk through post-cyberpunk to the Posthuman/Singularity work of the ’90s to the New Space Opera of the Oughts was reacting either to or against the novel; a lot of the aesthetic of Steampunk can also, I think, be traced back to Cyberpunk, which ultimately means, to NEUROMANCER. It may have used computers wrong–although even today, the authors who use them RIGHT are probably a very small subset–but it literally invented the subculture of the computer hacker (or computer hacker wantabees, anyway) and determined what their lifestyles would be like–it actually convinced some people, again for better or worse, to actually BECOME computer hackers, as is clear if you read Bruce Sterling’s non-fiction book THE HACKER CRACKDOWN. It also got a very large number of people who had never read science fiction before to become interested in reading SF. Although many of you don’t like it, in retrospect it’s by far the most important SF book of the year historically–and was widely recognized as a game-changer even at the time–and it’s hard to take any of the other candidates winning seriously.

The best of the rest of the nominees is probably THE PEACE WAR, although MYTHIGO WOOD is considered a classic in some circles. Dann’s THE MAN WHO MELTED is post-cyberpunk from before Cyberpunk even finished gelling, and has some brilliant innovation, although as a novel it’s too episodic. IN THE DRIFT is a lot of fun, although Swanwick would later write much better novels. Waldrop’s THEM BONES is also a lot of fun, although it doesn’t quite measure up to the standards of the best of his short fiction.

STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND is a quarter of a great book that never got entirely written. The opening half of the existing volume is compulsively readable, paced like a runaway freight train, and ranks up with the best stuff Delany ever did. The second half slows way down, and becomes a lot more mannered, and is not, in my opinion, as effective. And of course, the OTHER half of what was originally intended to be a long single novel broken into two parts was never written or published at all, leaving everything up in the air. For this reason, I don’t think you can really give STARS IN MY POCKET the Hugo, good as parts of it are.

Novella is a bit weak this year. “Press Enter” was a product of its time, and inevitably has dated quite a bit by now. In retrospect, the best novella of the year was Geoff Ryman’s “The Unconquered Country,” but as it appeared in INTERZONE, which wasn’t being seen much on this side of the Atlantic at the time, very few people actually read it. (A few more might have seen it if Ryman’s then-agent had let me use it in my Best of the Year that year, but he would not.) Nancy Kress’s “Trinty” was also first-rate, one of her first major stories. Lucius Shepard’s “A Traveller’s Tale” was also vivid and good, and, in retrospect, any of these novellas would have made a better choice than the Varley.

Novelette and short story are both very strong this year, with lots of good stuff both on the ballot and left off of the ballot.

In novelette, it’s hard to argue with the emotionally grueling “Bloodchild” as the winner, although “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” is acknowledged as a fantasy classic by now, and “Blued Moon” is still funny, one of Connie Willis’s first major stories. There was lots of good stuff that didn’t make the ballot. I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for Frederik Pohl’s “The Kindly Isle,” and Swanwick’s “Trojan Horse” (also edging toward post-cyberpunk before cyberpunk had even fully developed) and Shepard’s “Black Coral” are also good, as is Robinson’s “The Lucky Strike,” although it’s heavy political content makes it controversial, and I know some (usually those who don’t agree with its politics) who loathe it. Joanna Russ’s little-known “Bodies” is also good.

In short story, leaving my own two stories out of consideration, Shepard’s “Salvador” is my clear choice among the stories that made the ballot. There was lots of good stuff that didn’t make it, though, including Gibson’s “New Moon Hotel” (which I think is the only story on this entire ballot that was later made into a movie, for what that’s worth), Richard Cowper’s chilling “A Message to the King of Brobdingnag, Bruce Sterling’s “Sunken Gardens,” Molly Gloss’s early story “Interlocking Pieces,” Tanith Lee’s “Draco, Draco,” O. Niemand’s “Two Bits,” and Gene Wolfe’s classic fantasy short, “A Cabin on the Coast.”

In movie, the one I enjoyed most and the only one that will be remembered is GHOSTBUSTERS, which is certainly a classic of sorts. 2010 comes much closer to being an actual SF movie, although it lacks the ambition of 2001; the movie of 2010 is actually better than the book, and many of the glaring flaws of the movie were imposed on it by Clarke’s novel, to which it was pretty faithful, perhaps unwisely. DUNE sucked, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and I don’t even remember THE LAST STARFIGHTER. The STAR TREK was routine.

Based on the work that was available to be read at the time, there’s absolutely no doubt that Lucius Shepard deserved the Campbell. He had one of the biggest explosions of high-quality stories in one year the field had seen since Varley, with “Salvador,” “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” “A Traveller’s Tale,” and at least a half-dozen other stories coming out that year, plus a novel. It was overwhelming, and it seemed like a good new Shepard story was coming along every five minutes. In retrospect, most of Shepard’s subsequent impact would be on horror/fantasy, while Ian McDonald, who you really couldn’t have picked on the basis of the work he’d produced to that point, would turn out to be far more influential on science fiction–in fact, I think McDonald may be one of the best, if not THE best, SF writers working in the field today. It was a strong ballot, though, and all of the other candidates have subsequently produced good work, especially Geoff Landis, who’s on the Hugo ballot again here in 2011.

I’d forgotten about Knight’s THE MAN IN THE TREE. I thought that the first half of the novel was brilliant and stunning–but then the tone changes dramatically, and the second half of the novel falls to pieces.

Check out Bradley Denton’s novella coming up in my anthology DOWN THESE STRANGE STREETS. It’s very, very good.

Repo Man is something of a period piece now. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

I like the characterization of Ghostbusters as “silly, but not stupid”.

Niven, Niven… yeah, the collapse of his ability to actually, you know, /write/ is striking. I’ve said this before, but: “Neutron Star” is a near-perfect little gem of a short story. Yes, there are at least three major logical flaws, plus he got the math wrong. But you never notice that, because the story is perfect /as a story/. Everything fits, everything works, there’s not a word out of place. The quality of the prose is more than adequate — “curdled stars, muddled stars, stars that had been stirred with a spoon” is just fine.

Collaborations… what was the last Niven book that wasn’t a collaboration? _Destiny’s Road_? I have the feeling there’s been one in the last decade, but I can’t think of it. [google] Ah ha, the last Ringworld book. 2004.

Anyway, the sad fact is that most of his collaborations have been nearly as wretched; over the last 20 years, they’ve ranged from mediocre through bad to to truly dire. See, e.g., _The Gripping Hand_, _The Burning City_, _A Darker Geometry_, _Beowulf’s Children_, and of course _Fallen Angels_.

Sigh. — Anyway, back to this year’s Hugo winner: Gibson’s not terribly prolific — 10 novels and a couple of short story collections over 25+ years — but he’s continued to chug along. SF readers and critics seem to have ignored the Bigend Trilogy. Which is odd, since it’s pretty clearly SF, but OTOH I suspect Gibson was quite deliberately writing near-future novels that would not read or “feel” like SF.

Doug M.

I used to room above a bunch of Rice University expats in NYC — some are blogging for the Chronicle now, go figure — and while they weren’t SF readers at all, they had passed around Denton’s Lunatics, a Texas post-college slacker sexy romcom fantasy.

You know, this would be an excellent place to put some Shepard love. Just offhand (and without checking):

— the twisted voudoun/high fantasy/revenant/biotech cosmology in Green Eyes;
— among other things, he Sammy fights, the revelation about who was behind the Cold War, and the ghost of Eligio in the firebase in Life During Wartime;
— “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”, period — inspired by the Ballard story about the drowned giant, perhaps?
— the roses fertilized with Hitler’s blood in “A Spanish Lesson”;
— the phrase “hooker eyes and Vassar bones” in “The End of the World as We Know It”. Context: a man used it to compliment his girlfriend on the first page of the story, and it tells so much. I didn’t even know what Vassar was, and it stuck with me for these many years, which probably says something about *my* character too.

That was a white-hot period for Shepard, though I agree, his influence was more in horror than in SF.

54: Anyway, the sad fact is that most of his collaborations have been nearly as wretched; over the last 20 years, they’ve ranged from mediocre through bad to to truly dire. See, e.g., _The Gripping Hand_, _The Burning City_, _A Darker Geometry_, _Beowulf’s Children_, and of course _Fallen Angels_.

I am inclined to forgive Niven for the weaknesses of A Darker Geometery on the grounds that A Darker Geometery was written by Mark o. Martin and Gregory Benford, not Niven. Martin and Benford do use the Known Space setting, sort of, although as I recall the book they didn’t seem to have read any of Niven’s books in that setting immediately before writing their book [1], which may be why A Darker Geometery is considered definitely non-canonical by Niven.

1: Shades of the Benford “sequel” to Clarke’s The City and the Stars. To give an idea of how closely Benford followed the original, in Clarke’s story the Moon is gone. In Benford’s, it’s right where it has always been.

@54 In a way, I agree with you that it’s odd that the SF community has mostly ignored the Bigend trilogy considering Gibson is such a major figure, and they paid plenty of attention to Cryptonomicon, which seems similar in many ways. But I have to disagree that the Bigend books are SF. In my opinion, they do feel like SF: they have an SF sensibility. But Gibson quite deliberately set them in the present. There are a lot of signs of this– the mention of 9/11 in Pattern Recognition, the reference to Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner in Spook Country, etc. Gibson was writing in the present, but part of his point was that the present seems very science fictional. I am a big Gibson fan, but Neuromancer was never one of my favorites. It seemed a bit too immature and the prose wasn’t quite up to the standards of his brilliant short stories. I thought it was a good book, but not nearly as good as Count Zero or Spook Country.

Just read “Morning Child” by Dozois and it was truly haunting, my runner-up to the Effinger.