Hugo Nominees: 1990

“a comic book (well done though it was)”

Tim Burton would actually be the first to argue that Batman ’89 was not particularly well done. The visuals are stunning, but he had almost no control or say in anything, the script can’t decide whether it wants to be an grittied up homage to the ’66 TV show or something else, and the one scene in the film where Bruce Wayne actually acts purely heroic is only there because Bob Kane happened to be on the set that day and demanded that they toss him a bone.

(There are so many great genre comics. So few film adaptations that capture what makes them great. I fear what’ll happen if they ever do Sandman or Bone movies.)

Being Alien, Rebecca Ore

Part of Tor’s Ben Bova Presents series; I don’t recall off-hand what else was published as a Ben Bova Presents book.

Second in a series about a former human criminal who was forceably drafted into the Federation of Sapient Planets’ diplomatic corps after he and his (meth-head?) brother were involved in the death of an alien observer; this turns out to be a great opportunity for him but not so good for his brother. I think this is the book where the Problem of the Sharwani: Cosmic Dickheads first appears.

As far as I can tell despite having been well received, it’s been out of print for over 20 years.

Is Dan Simmons’s Hyperion the Simmons with the heroic Muslim Palestinian? That’s not a character type one is likely to see from him ever again.

Effinger died much too young.

And lost much of his productive life to illness and other issues.

I have a soft spot for the Wolverton,

Do not, as I did, allow this to induce you to buy his subsequent novels, particularly the David Farland fantasies.

Wasn’t he one of Orson Scott Card’s acolytes? And obviously there’s the connection to L. Ron Hubbard [1] via the Writers of the Future thing. Wolverton was one of the winners.

I have faint memories that there was hilarity connected to his A Very Strange Trip (with L. Ron Hubbard).

1: Although it was created by the founder of Scientology and the publisher of the Writers of the Future anthology series appears to be staffed entirely by Scientologists, one does not have to be a Scientologist to judge, enter or win.

Political systems characterized by ethnic stereotype, on the other hand, will reappear in Simmons’ fiction regularly.

That was in the Wolverton as well, as I recall. Well, and throughout SF in general. Who can forget OSC’s Ender’s Risk Game, where we learn Chinese are just plain good at following orders (OK, you may have been distracted by the whole “Russia: surprisingly trivial to invade!” subplot) or whatever the book was I read a few years ago where the entire galaxy was divided into the Vast Chinese Enigmatorium, the United Islamic Bombtossery, the Holy Christian Fecundery[1] and The Confederation of Somewhat Ineffectual Secular Humanists.

1: Oddly, they had babies like crazy and a flat population growth rate.

Hyperion holds up better if you haven’t read Simmon’s later work. If you have, you start looking for the crazy and finding it.

One thing that’s really obvious now, but that nobody seems to have spotted at the time, is the crosswiring of Sex and Death in that book. This is made about as explicit as it could possibly be, in the soldier’s story (beautiful, mysterious woman turns into monster at the point of climax… and was that /ever/ explained?) and then again in the consul’s story. In fact, if you look a bit more closely, it’s in every single one of the tales: the Bikura are sexless but immortal, and they transmit their curse to the celibate priest; Rachel is stricken when she goes to Hyperion with her first lover; the Shrike’s first appearance onstage is murdering lovers in their bed; Brawne Lamia (ugh) has one night with the Keats-analog, and then he’s killed promptly thereafter; etc., etc.

It would be nice to think this was a deliberate aesthetic choice on Simmons’ part, but in retrospect no, it probably wasn’t.

Doug M.

14: James, fortunately I had a guinea pig who warned me ahead of time. On My Way to Paradise does have that “playing pattycake with Baby Huey” board-in-the-face action that Card so adores, and if memory serves, Wolverton based his knowledge of Latin American culture mainly from his time as a corrections officer. I have no idea where he got his knowledge of Japan from, but it was probably the same wellspring that most writers in the 1980s did.

Huh. It just struck me that while I’ve read good Peace Corps memoirs — let me throw the name of Moritz Thomsen out there — I have not read any good LDS missionary memoirs. Is this my gap, or is the nature of the work not really conducive to the introspection a memoir requires? (This only looks like a tangent.)

21: Doug, somewhere in Hyperion or The Fall of Hyperion, Simmons mentions that the other choice for historical reconstruction rather than John Keats was Ezra Pound. Pound, the cracked right-wing conspiracy theorist and great American poet. Pound was actually arrested for treason and lived in a cage in Pisa under the gentle care of the US Army for some time.

I am ashamed to say I would have read the hell out of that book. In retrospect, I think Simmons could have had remarkable psychological insight into the character of the Pound analog.

As for the sex-and-death thing, I think it’s because it’s so obvious, especially in the horror genre, where Simmons cut his teeth. No one ever mentions it in Alan Moore either, where Moore does everything but hammer nails into the reader’s forehead spelling out the word “LIEBESTOD”.

“Mountains of Mourning” is a very assured journeyman work. 20 years later, it creaks just a little bit, but still holds up. One thing to like: everyone in the story — even the poor, the ignorant, and the horribly wrong — has agency and some sort of dignity.

IMS “Dogwalker” has what looks a lot like a gay relationship, except that the narrator insists it’s purely Platonic and protective. Okay, Uncle Orson, we believe you.

I’m the only person I know who loved “The Price of Oranges”. Yes, it’s kind of an obvious and shameless story. Shut up.

I’ll differ with Carlos on “Dori Bangs”. While SF fandom can be horribly insular, Lester Bangs and Dori Seda were not exactly household names even in 1990. (And I am speaking as someone who has written althistory starring Big Bill Knudson and Hiroshi Saito.) The story actually inspired me to find out who Bangs was, which I guess is good — but while this is a very good story, it’s also a piece of hipster name-dropping, and a Hugo nomination was probably about what it deserved.

I’m very fond of “Boobs”, and pleasantly surprised that it won. Yes, it’s a revenge fantasy. (Is it wrong of me to wonder what the gender breakdown on the voting was?) But it’s a well done revenge fantasy, and a fine little story. ‘He doesn’t know it, but he’s got until the next full moon’.

Doug M.

Wait a minute. “Great Work of Time” came out this year? And didn’t even get a mention?

“Great Work of Time” is excellent. You can spin away a pleasant ten minutes just discussing whether it’s SF, fantasy, or althistory; it works as all three. Oh, and it’s also steampunk. It’s awesome. I can’t believe it didn’t get a single nomination.

“No Spot of Ground” is, I would agree, one of the best althistory stories of its length. Very few works in the subgenre are remotely as good.

Carrion Comfort is an expansion of an earlier novella, so Simmons didn’t have to write the whole thing all at once. It shares with Hyperion, and several others of Simmons’ works, what can only be described as creepy Semitophilia. (“Jews are awesome! Isn’t it horrible how bad stuff keeps happening to them? Like how they keep getting KILLED and KILLED and KILLED? “)

Doug M.

Infinity Hold, Barry B. Longyear

Apparently this was the year I stopped encountering Longyear books because I don’t have this or much after it. I see a while back he sold something called “Confessions of a Confederate Vampire” but don’t appear to be having much luck getting a useful description of it.

Also a mainstream novel with fantastic elements, pretty good despite the author later joining the “I don’t write SF because I don’t write about squids in space” crowd (after writing a really obviously SF novel): Sexing the Cherry, by Jeannette Winterson.

I read Stone Gods by her. Is that what you meant by “a really obviously SF novel”?

It was a pretty wretched book, as I recall, so SF is not missing much if it cannot claim it.

What James said. Also, I don’t think it’s possible for an author’s later works not to affect our rereading of the earlier ones. In Simmons’ case, that includes stuff like his “Time Traveler” post.

This isn’t something like “did Arthur C. Clarke being closeted affect his fiction”. It’s Simmons own writing — stuff that he put out there and asked, nay, insisted that we read. Having done that, are we supposed to unread it somehow?

Doug M.

Another vote for “Great Work of Time.” Really a fantastic story.

And speaking of which, I remember Views from the Oldest House as being a pretty obvious imitation of Crowley. Unfortunately Crowley’s prose seems to be easy to imitate, though no one ever captures the brilliance of the original.

Only those with a particular political axe to grind are likely to get bent out of shape by them in any of his novels, I reckon.

Imagine if someone wrote a horror novel in which a US Republican politician or demagogic preacher was a vampire or demon or whatever. Would that occasion wailing and gnashing of teeth from the same people who object to such a characterisation of the late Ayatollah Khomeini? Far from it, I suspect! (I’ll take the poster’s word that this is in Carrion Comfort, but I don’t even remember it.)

Simmons views about the threat from Islamic fundamentalism may be unsubtle, but many authors hold equally unsubtle views about other and often apparently lesser threats, and their novels at times reflect these also. SF and horror are not the most nuanced of genres – one might even posit that an excess of subtlety in the author’s thought processes might often impinge unfavorable on the vigour of the resulting work.

48: you would be mistaken. I wasn’t fond of Charlie Stross’s portrayal of various American political personages when he used them in his Merchant Princes books, and I told him so. I thought the suggestion to Jo Walton that she use Prescott Bush as the American president sympathetic to Nazi Europe in her Small Change series was one of the most asinine political things to come out of SF fandom recently, and that’s a long list.

Among the five Hugo nominees here, I’ve already criticized Effinger for not doing the research to sell his portrayal of an early twentieth century Muslim woman physicist in “Schrodinger’s Kitten” — a vision I politically wish had happened. I haven’t mentioned Tepper so far, because I am not following every impulse that comes to mind on this thread, but Tepper is from the left possibly even more obnoxious than Card or Simmons. Grass has a vicious extrapolation of the Mormon church as part of its background, and Tepper has not mellowed in the meantime. I have been waiting for someone else to bring this up, because I don’t want to monopolize this discussion.

Of course, that really shouldn’t matter. It’s purely luck of the draw that a weird political nut from the left is among the Hugo nominees. Less so than from the right, because science fiction had a far-right no-kidding white supremacist as its flagship editor for decades during its formative years — John W. Campbell, Jr. — and there’s an obvious founder effect. It’s still a wonder to me that the genre has turned out as well as it has.

So, fan with supposed psychic powers, maybe you should stop reading minds for a living. Maybe there’s a Dr. Who episode on somewhere.

What various others have said about Crowley’s “Great Work of Time.”

The short story or novelette from 1990 that stands out for me in memory and stood out for me then — far more than anything on the lists or anything anyone here has mentioned — is/was “The Caress” by Greg Egan.

Gardner bought “The Caress” for ASIMOVS and it was in the January 1990 issue, so actually available in November or December of 1989. But I remember reading it and thinking, huh, that feels like something new and considerable in SF. It was the first thing by Egan I’d read and almost the first thing he published in the U.S.

Count me in on the “Great Work of Time” – one of the very best SF pieces of the last few decades.

(…) Tepper is from the left possibly even more obnoxious than Card or Simmons. Grass has a vicious extrapolation of the Mormon church as part of its background, and Tepper has not mellowed in the meantime. I have been waiting for someone else to bring this up, because I don’t want to monopolize this discussion.

People were complaining that I was mentioning her malevolent views too much. And I think I am going to have start paying Thompson’s estate royalties soon.

Oh, and I think sometimes the manner in which I critique the “let’s stop brown people and degenerate second handers from having kids” crowd leads people to think I must lean towards the involuntary pro-natal side, which I don’t. Trillion Person Earth is interesting to me but only if we get there through billions upon billions of free choices.

(I wrote the bulk of this a little more than 12 hours ago, and decided to leave it as it was instead of revising it to take further comments into account.)

Huh. I actually remembered this as a pretty good year for the dramatic Hugos, with only one nominee (The Abyss) being widely disparaged both then and now (and even The Abyss has its fans today). I’m especially struck by the comments here on Tim Burton’s Batman which seem to boil down to “great visuals, lousy narrative”, and I can see where this characterization could be applied to all the 1990 dramatic nominees. Even my own favorite, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, could be seen as a cluttered, overblown version of the sort of witty fantasy epitomized by The Princess Bride.

One of the things I remember about the dramatic voting this year was that Field of Dreams had the most 1st-place votes but very few for 2nd and 3rd. It wound up finishing 4th, while the “Indiana Jones” movie came from behind with the most 2nd-place votes. Last Crusade was a “least polarizing” rather than a “most-liked” winner, but I’d have preferred any of the other nominees except The Abyss; better their fitful brilliance than Last Crusade‘s mere craft.

And hey, the slate of nominees could have been worse. Except for the winner, there were no actual sequels on the ballot (Tim Burton’s Batman being what would now be called a “reboot”)–no Ghostbusters II, no Back to the Future II, no (thank heaven) Star Trek V. The Hugo nominators could also have gone with a less-than-stellar adaptation of a work by a fan-favored author, Millennium (from the John Varley novel, itself an expansion of the short story “Air Raid”). By comparison Field of Dreams is a fairly brave pick from outside the usual genre boundaries, notable as the first dramatic Hugo nominee since The Right Stuff six years earlier to also be nominated for a “best picture” Oscar.

A few funny and/or spoofy sf/fantasy films might have also made the ballot, with some (e.g. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) possibly livening up the selection a bit, others (e.g. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) not so much. The scabrously funny Meet the Feebles enjoys a cult following, though back when it was released even its fans would have been incredulous at the suggestion that its director would go on to helm an ambitious and hugely beloved adaptation of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. My favorite funny fantasy film of 1989 (after Munchausen) is Oedipus Wrecks, Woody Allen’s segment of the omnibus film New York Stories. It’s Allen’s most purely funny venture into sf/fantasy territory on screen since Sleeper (both Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo being more bittersweet concoctions).

1989 is the year the animation renaissance really started to catch fire, but with one major exception relatively little of it showed up on movie screens, at least outside of Japan. Hayao Miyazaki’s marvelous Kiki’s Delivery Service wouldn’t get a proper English-language release for almost a decade, while Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland has less interest for animation fans as a movie than spotting the living animation legends (including Disney’s Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston) who pop up in the credits, most of them working on conceptual art or as “story consultants” with a largely Japanese crew animating. (Two recognizable names from the fantasy genre also worked on Nemo, Ray Bradbury and Brian Froud.)

Then there’s The Little Mermaid, which restarted Disney’s fairy tale franchise in a big way. I saw it for the first time recently and was a little underwhelmed, possible because so much of the film’s visual and narrative style has become familiar in other films to the point of cliche. Nonetheless, Mermaid remains an effective spectacle and a terrific musical, and even leaving aside its position in animation history (and its influence on fantasy cinema) I don’t think it would have disgraced itself among 1990’s dramatic Hugo nominees.

Finally I have to acknowlege one of the non-fiction nominees, the kick-ass collection of movie criticism known as Harlan Ellison’s Watching. To the extent the dramatic Hugo nominees got better during the 1980’s–compare the 1990 nominees to the ones from 1981 and 1982 if you don’t believe me–I think Harlan deserves a good deal of credit. Obviously the opportunity to view and re-view films on home video helped, as did the slight increase in the number of filmmakers who took sf and fantasy seriously (and the willingness of producers to fund them). But access to better films might have come to nothing without Harlan prodding the sf/fantasy movie audience from behind, urging them to demand the best instead of settling for the least worst. Harlan Ellison’s fiction left an indelible mark on sf, but his criticism and other non-fiction may have altered its course.

61: Jo, I’ve seen a episode or two this year (not bad, though I’m clearly not the target demographic). I could have given him spoilers.

Thurmond, much as I dislike the man, just doesn’t work as a Nazi sympathizer. A stranger man than his thumbnail biography might indicate. (The classic old school Southern case, to my mind, is James Vardaman, the pro-lynching senator from Mississippi, who was also an ardent philo-Semite, up to and including in the halls of Congress.) It is also hard to get him into the White House electorally.

Lindbergh is obvious, but he’s obvious for a reason. I really should get my Joe McCarthy/German-American Bund rally poster framed at some point.

“The Caress” is the first Egan story I bought for ASIMOV’S, and may be his first publication in the United States, although he’d had several stories, mostly technohorror, published in England previously. It’s also the first time he stops writing horror and steps into his more familiar identity as a hard SF writer.

It was in a 1990-dated issue, though, so for me it’s a 1990 story.

One of the things I was proud of during my ASIMOV’S tenure was nagging Steven Utley into starting writing again. By now, his “Silurian Tales” series, which started in ASIMOV’S, may be not only one of the longest-running series in SF, but perhaps the only one to have appeared in three or four different magazines at one time or another.

“Snow” is one of my favorite stories, and all of the then-Best of the Year editors would have used “Gone” if his agent would have allowed it.

Postscript: because people might not know this, the Klan in Heinlein’s time was also an anti-Catholic organization. But Catholicism isn’t a race, so that makes it okay, I guess.

Heavy stuff for a Monday morning, so back to science fiction.

Actually, I’ve seen quite a bit of anti-sentiment towards other religions on in this thread. As a member, I could get all upset and and lecture people on how they are corrupt and evil and obviously cannot withstand my honesty and purity, or I could try something else. Something that wouldn’t come off as being inflammatory under the cover of being a crusader for justice.

That’s the problem with crusades. Once one proclaims one is on one, suddenly people start expecting you to live up to the standards you’re expousing.

As far as I can tell, the Ben Bova Presents series consisted of at least the following books:

Cortez On Jupiter by Ernest Hogan
High Aztech by Ernest Hogan
Father to the Man by John Gribbin
Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore
Being Alien by Rebecca Ore
Human to Human by Rebecca Ore
Phylum Monsters by Hayford Peirce

I cannot swear that there were not others.

And also that Hemmingway book from a bit earlier whose name I can’t recall right now for that matter

Is that the one where the academic, having destroyed his life with an ill-fated affair with a student, decides the most sensible thing to do at that point in his life is move back to the small town where monsters once massacred his friends? That’s A Winter Haunting.

those here who are capable of separating Author from Work

There are authors, like Dave Sim or Dan Simmons, who make it very difficult to separate Author from Work on account of them putting their obsessions center stage in their books (and in Sim’s case, providing helpful commentary to assist readers who e.g. failed to realize how EVILE JAKA IS!!!!).

(Did Cerebus really never get a Hugo nomination? Or did I just overlook it? Anyway, up to the point Sim went m- decided to explore various implicates of a non-consensus model, it was a significant book in its field)

JDN@96:
No. Historical, Cuba and Spies and such. (Checks Amazon) The Crook Factory. That one. (Unlike the others I’d mentioned, no SF or horror elements whatsoever in that one.)

Anyhow, that’s what I was pointing out: those books are ones in which Simmons kept his obsessions (or at least _those_ obsessions) entirely off-stage.

I believe that Cerebus was over a bit before the GN category first appeared, and that the backlash over Watchmen and the Sandman Shakespeare issue foreclosed the prospect of squeezing them into any other categories for the majority that period. He did get one Eisner, though (for a fairly minor part of the story).

@johntheirishmongol

I don’t see what’s personal about what Carlos is arguing. Nor do I see how the relationship between a trend of Islamophobic bigotry and the US’ current wars – a relationship which I agree exists, though I wouldn’t put it quite how you do – excuses said bigotry in any way.

There’s a difference between expressing political ideas in an SF book – a virtue of the genre; letting political ideas take over a book in a heavy-handed, lecturing way – an all-too-common artistic problem; and expressing bigotry, racism, sexism, etc – which is a problem independent of aesthetic considerations. It’s not a right/left issue, but all political ideas are not created equal.

I agree that expressing bigotry is, like many other things we disapprove of, a problem largely independent of aesthetic considerations. That’s why I object to people trying to conflate the two.

Simmons’ views on the extent of the threat from militant Islamic fundamentalism and the necessity of a robust response to it may be strategically incorrect and/or distressing to some readers. But it is tedious to listen to continual diatribes to the effect that these views irremediably vitiate the quality of his books, which generally don’t have anything in particular to do with such matters. [Maybe he does include stereotypes here and there, but what matter – ALL literature is crammed with stereotypes, largely because stereotypes reflect aspects of reality, and literature that tries too hard to avoid them comes across as patently unrealistic.]

@93 sez: “During the Cold War, there were a lot of Soviet bad guys. Currently,
the bad guys tend to be Muslims because we are fighting Muslim
extremists all over the world. What do you expect?”

Yes, but during the Cold War people were able to separate the Soviet form of government from the Russians (as you did, in the above quote). And today it’s important to separate peaceful Muslims from the very few extremists that appear within their ranks. An author who consistently presents every Muslim he writes about as evilllle has a problem with bigotry, I think.

105: My problem is that with reviewing for four or five editors at Direct, for three or four at Publisher’s weekly, for Natalie at Romantic Times,the Tiptree jury reading list and the ongoing quest to read and review every Haikasoru novel and collection published, my unallocated spare time consists of 1 AM to 1:22 AM and I’ve put that aside to watch anime. Generally I don’t get to choose what I read.

Scary foreigners goes way back in Simmons but xenophobia falls within the range of expected human behavior; see Sayyid Qutb’s account of visit to the US. Why nobody has ever used it as the basis of a Song of Kali-style horror book I don’t know.

“The wackadoodle stuff about Muslims! UNDER THE BED AND 100% EVIL is a post-9/11 development for Simmons, as I recall.”

That’s true — but in retrospect, the seeds of it are already clearly visible in his earlier work. Not so much the Iranian thing, I’d say, as the willingness to indulge in Quik’n’Easy ethnic and religious stereotyping. (Well, that and the ready consignment of large swathes of humanity to the categories of “victims, dupes, or willing tools of evil”.)

Frex, there’s that bit at the end of Fall of Hyperion where he describes the response of the different ethnic planets to the catastrophe near the end of that book. It’s a series of quick vignettes that go something like, “On the Arab Planet, there were riots, mass hysteria, and then a new jihad. On the Japanese Planet, there was contemplation and a turning inward. On the Catholic Planet, they prayed and then elected a new Pope. On the French Planet, they turned to threesomes and really good cheese.”

Doug M.

Rob T. @60: The 1989 movie Millennium is actually not an adaptation of Varley’s novel Millennium; both are expansions of the short story “Air Raid,” but Varley wrote early versions of the screenplay that preceded the novel. This is why the novel is “copyright 1983 by MGM/UA Home Entertainment Inc.” (I suppose Varley may have regained copyright since then but haven’t seen a recent edition.)