Hugo Nominees: 1982

More than in other years, I agree with your change of tastes over the years in this review. What I liked then and what I like now have changed. I guess it’s about time I re-read Downbelow Station.

Although it was “True Names” all the way for me, even though Varley is the author who somehow missed the Hugos so many times he should have gotten.

Incidently, it was at Denvention II when Vernor’s ex-wife won her Hugo – that she read “True Lies” at a reading, introducing his writing to me.

It’s a story of interstellar war and diplomacy set in a complex and thoroughly developed universe

Although many details of the universe appear to make no sense and only get worse the more we’ve learned about the Alliance/Union setting over the years. Prior to 2248, for example, nobody had FTL; what was worth shipping light years at sublight speeds? It had to be valuable, and whatever it was worth a war.

The significance of Pell’s world is that it let colonists grow their own food. This suggests that before they found Pell’s World, they were importing food from Earth. At sublight speeds. That banging sound is my forehead hitting the edge of my desk over and over.

How is it the Union, with perhaps ten million people scattered across many systems, can even be a superpower? And the Alliance apparently has even fewer people.

On a different axis than makes no sense, the use of Azi is repellent and we know from Serpent’s Reach will only become more abusive. It’s a pity Earth had no Sherman or at least a Lucas Trask to grant the Union the boons it so dearly needs.

And don’t get me started on how she has ships dock with rotating structures.

NOVELLA

“The Saturn Game,” Poul Anderson (Analog 2 Feb 1981)
“Blue Champagne,” John Varley (New Voices 4)
“Emergence,” David R. Palmer (Analog 5 Jan 1981)
“In the Western Tradition,” Phyllis Eisenstein (F&SF Mar 1981)
“True Names,” Vernor Vinge (Binary Star #5)
“With Thimbles, With Forks and Hope,” Kate Wilhelm (Asimov’s 23 Nov 1981)

Really? Gosh. The Anderson is okay, but the Varley and the Vinge are classics.

You are far too kind to the Anderson; it’s one of the stupidest stories he wrote. The moral is it’s bad to enter into delusional, hallucinatory states while exploring alien worlds. How is that worth a Hugo? How is it more worth a Hugo than the Varley or the Vinge? And why was this story inserted into the Polesotechnic timeline, guaranteeing that decades later as Anderson’s work is reprinted in the (quite worth getting, if not as splendid editions as NESFA’s Anderson collections) Baen reprints I would have to read it again?

I am literally incoherent with rage at the voters on this one.

Although I suppose it’s interesting as an early example of SF authors dealing the then-fairly new hobby of role-playing [1]. I preferred John M. Ford’s [2] take on rpgs, both the Mandalay stories and the articles he wrote for Asimov’s (sadly, not reprinted as far as I know and unlikely to be reprinted).

1: Actually, the Anderson does remind me of one of my favourite cartoons from the Fantasy Gamer: two nerds and a large, tattooed man in motorcycle leathers are at a bar. One of the nerds has a shocked, horrorified look on his face. The biker looks angry. The second nerd looks calm and is saying something like “Yeah? Well, my 12th level fighter could kick your ass.”

The caption reads “true story.”

2: Note to self: remember to be the only one enthusiastic about The Princes of the Air.

Gilliland had already won a Hugo as Fan Artist in 1980. He published six books between 1981-1992, none of which I’ve read.

Seven novels: three in the Rosinante series, three in the Wizenbeak series and one stand-alone, End of the Empire (although I think there are hints that it is in the same future history as the Rosinante books). I would recommend trying at least the first of the Rosinante series; it’s from olden times from before it became so acceptable to publish fragments of books and can be read as a stand-alone.

I know his career got crunched in the early 1990s due to the combination of chains tracking sales and Del Rey decreasing each successive print run. He had an MS he was trying to sell in the 1990s and an associated short story about what happens when two crooked senior officers discover one of their subordinates has listed as a hobby “forensic accounting”. The first has never appeared as far as I know but he used to give reading of the second.

Recently I discovered there are e-book editions of his Rosinante books. Just now when I checked the publisher’s [1] site, the Gilliland books are no longer there, but they seem still to be available on Amazon.

1: A company called Sizzler. Not Work Safe for the most part and an odd fit for Gilliland.

The Grand Tour, Ron Miller & William K. Hartmann (Workman)

I’ve owned a couple of editions of this; it’s a glorious celebration of the New Solar System and the New Solar System (updated), a setting SF authors have fleeing since space probes revealed what the Solar System was actually like.

I am pleased to report that in the last year or so I have seen a remarkable number of new(ish [1]) stories set in our Solar System: The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun, Up Against It, Rocket Girls, Rocket Girls: The Last Planet, The Quantum Thief, The Next Continent, Platinum Moon, and Leviathan Wakes all come to mind.

1: Some of them came out earlier in Japan but were not translated until recently

Campbell award, losers:

Paul O. Williams was best known for the six books of the Pelbar Cycle (_The Breaking of Northwall_, et seq.) He was an English professor who also wrote some important works about Japanese poetry and haiku. He died in 2009, age 74 — R.I.P.

Then we have David Brin and Michael Swanwick.

To have both these guys on the ballot should have marked this as a very good year for the Campbell. To have them both on the ballot, and then have both /lose/… to Alexis Gilliland… marks this as the year the river ran backwards, the sky rained frogs, and the cow gave birth to an insurance salesman.

You’re reading tor.com, so you know who these guys are. Let me just briefly run the numbers, then.

Brin: 16 novels, 3 collections. 3 Hugos, 1 Nebula, 1 Campbell Best Novel. Brin is notable for collecting a lot more nominations than wins; this was particularly obvious in 2002, when Kiln People came in second place for the Hugo, the Locus, the Campbell and the Clarke — each time behind a different book.

Brin seems to have wandered away from SF — his last book was in 2002 . Still, it’s a pretty respectable pile.

Swanwick: 7 novels, 10 collections. 5 Hugos, 1 Nebula, 1 World Fantasy Award. Swanwick has collected even more nominations than Brin. He’s been on the Hugo ballot about a dozen times in the last 15 years. And unlike many of our nominees so far, Swanwick seems to be getting better late in life; while we’ve seen a lot of people who never matched the promise of their early stuff, Swanwick seems to be going from strength to strength.

Still… in 1982 their stature was still far from obvious. So, while this definitely qualifies as one of the strangest Campbells, I’m not sure we can call it the worst.

Robert Stallman: Stallman was the only person ever to be nominated for two consecutive Campbells despite having been dead both times. In any other year, that would have been striking and weird.

Trivia: Between Gilliland (51), Stallman (50), and Williams (45), this was probably the oldest group of Campbell nominees ever. (Brin and Swanwick were both 32, so they’re both 61 or so today.)

Doug M.

A quick check: “The Saturn Game” has a ‘Judas Priest’ count of two, and a ‘yonder’ count of six. Did Anderson read a lot of pulp Westerns? It has all the sentence patterns you expect from late Anderson — ABSTRACTION ACTIVE-VERBED etc — which means much of it reads as though it was translated from one of the smaller, more obscure languages of Europe by someone paid in schnapps.

What else. Garcilaso and Minamoto for Andersonian ethnic characters’ last names. I wonder if non-English-speaking writers use Plantagenet and Chaucer for American last names.

A lot of television bashing, which is interesting. It’s a shame there aren’t anthologies of science fiction about the baggy pants kids today are wearing.

There’s a rather stinky reference to “a copy of The Machinery of Freedom which had nearly disintegrated but displayed the signature of the author” which is a shout-out to a Society for Creative Anachronism colleague (Milton Friedman’s wayward son) — maybe this had something to do with the award? the SCA and its sympathizers possibly a large enough voting bloc to swing the election — but it’s probably also a sign that Anderson’s critical faculties about politics had been irreversibly damaged by 1980. In a few years, the unsuspecting reader will find diatribes about the “Internal Reaming Service” shoehorned into Anderson’s fiction.

24: Yes, absolutely. Baen’s Universe was a legitimate publication.

And now that I think about it, I think Shoresteading (or a version of it) was collected somewhere…

Ah! It was in Elizabeth Ann Hull’s Gateways, a birthday tribute anthology for Fred Pohl.

Dean Ing’s Systemic Shock

This has the odd aspect that it is a sequel to someone else’s work; it’s set a few years after General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War (Hackett’s I Was a Stranger, his account of what happened after he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans as a consequence of Market Garden is worth looking for).

It’s also odd in that Canada emerges as a significant power after WWIV, not only batting well out of our weight class during the war but provided the northern third of the USA with a much needed protectorate after the war. What makes this truly remarkable is that not only is the region we conquer provide vital guidance to one that has more people in it than Canada does but Canada, being to a first order uninhabitable save through applied technology, is a very urbanized culture whose population is even more vulnerable to one second urban renewal than the US; a surprising fraction of our population can and could be found in Toronto and the lesser cities of Montreal and Vancouver. Logically Canada should have lost even more of its population than the US does (and the US loses a third in the first round) and yet there we are, a Great Power. Just shows the power of poutine and the Canadiens.

The funny thing is, nobody says the Wizenbeak books were dreadful. Apparently they were perfectly OK midlist fantasy.

I would go farther and call them charming.

The Rosinante books manage to show the Contra Darwinists (1) in a somewhat sympathetic light, despite them being the sort of people who would dash a child’s head out against a wall for ideological reasons and whose all consuming paranoia about losing control of the North American Union manages to trigger the events they were most afraid of.

1: it’s not really clear how it happened but Canada, Mexico, the US and several other nations end up in one big union after what seems to have been an energy crisis and a WWIII-lite. Right-wing protestant religious extremists of the YEC sort capture control of the federal government and then spend their time obsessing about whether elements of the Old Regime are conspiring against them. Once it becomes clear to people who could be seen as elements of the Old Regime that the choice is conspiracy or being dragged off on trumped up charges to an unjust execution, conspiracy starts looking really good even to the apolitical types.

Admittedly, in retrospect Texas Governor Panoblanco’s decision to raze the Alamo to make room for affordable housing may have been a tad inflamatory to the white minorities in Texas but it is unreasonable for reasonable accommodation to include preserving some rundown bit of 19th century architecture just to keep a handful of ethnic extremists happy. And anyway, taking Panoblanco out with a cruise missile turned out to be even more inflammatory.

“It’s a pity we don’t have an award for completed things that take more than one year to publish.”

I’m wondering how something like this would work…how many series have a definite finish in any given year? I know there are some–the Hunger Games just ended this year. I think Jim Butcher’s Codex series. And of course Steven Erikson’s Malazan books. Although it would still work against the open-ended series. Maybe we should just leave this category to cage-matches on suvudu.com.

32: From Neil Gaiman’s Monday, October 30, 2006 journal entry, “Important And pass it on….”

John M. Ford was pretty much the smartest writer I knew. Mostly. He did one thing that was less than smart, though: he knew he wasn’t in the
best of health, but he still didn’t leave a proper will, and so didn’t,
in death, dispose of his literary estate in the way that he intended to
while he was alive, which has caused grief and concern to the people who
were closest to him.

My understanding, which could well be incorrect, is that because Ford died without properly assigning his literary rights as he wanted, they were passed to his family, who did not care for his choice of career and who were, the last I heard, not inclined to allow reprints of Ford works that were out of print.

Note to self: remember to be the only one enthusiastic about The Princes of the Air.

Hey, I like The Princes of the Air. It’s not Ford’s best novel but that’s still better than most novels.

And I agree that Ford’s articles on RPGs were good (I have a few issues of Asimov’s containing them – probably not all). Of course, he actually played the games (and wrote gaming material, a few years later), which helps a lot.

Although Dilvish the Damned is out of print, it’s worth noting that all the stories are in the recent NESFA collections.

I loved THE CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR, but I must admit that it doesn’t stand alone as a novel even as well as THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER did, which at least brought one segment of Severian’s life to a close. Most of the other novels here don’t impress me all that much. I think I’d have gone for Vance’s THE BOOK OF DREAMS, a solid ending to the “Demon Princes” series, with some very unsettling undertones.

“True Names” is the clear winner here in retrospect, and the only one of these novellas of any historical importance or that is still read today, although I too liked “In the Western Tradition.” “The Winter Beach” was also good.

“Unicorn Variations” is cute and amusing, but I don’t think I’d have given it a Hugo. Novelette seems weak this year. Might have gone for Jack Dann’s “Going Under.”

With the advantage of 20.-20. hindsight, the sh0rt story probably should have gone to “Johnny Mnemonic,” the story which heralded the birth of cyberpunk, and was certainly doing something different from what anybody else was doing at the time. The much quieter “Exposures” was also good, as was “Venice Drowned,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s first major story.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK certainly WAS a genre movie, with a clear and obvious fantasy element, and probably deserved its win. TIME BANDITS was two-thirds of a brilliant movie that fell completely to pieces in the last third. I though EXCALIBUR was laughably bad, particularly the scene where the knight fucks a woman while wearing a complete suit of armor. Nicol Williamson’s accent was also very strange, almost like something out of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL.

My opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt, since I was Swanwick’s mentor and we’ve remained close colleagues and collaborators ever since, but I think Swanwick deserved the Campbell even on the strength of the work he’d already done by that point, particularly the brilliant “Ginnungagap.”

Downbelow and Sardonyx Net remain tightly linked in my head, so it is reassuringto see they came out in the same year, which was also, coincidentally one of the years I was working and could afford a fistful of books.

The only thing I remember about the Mays books was one of the protagonists. When I am particularly cheerful, I will still sing to myself “Peo Peo Mox Mox BURKE!!!!” The rest has faded into a happily remembered and happily forgotten haze.

“Johnny Mnemonic,” the story which heralded the birth of cyberpunk,

Web of Angels heralded the birth of cyberpunk; it’s just that sometimes people don’t listen carefully enough.

Although the cyberpunks would always contend that the movement had sprung full-grown from the head of William Gibson, there was other work being done here and there simultaneously that had at least some of the same elements and feel to it. “True Names,” for instance, which is certainly at least “cyber” if not particularly “punk.” Or the aforementioned “Ginnungagap,” for that matter. That’s why I’ve always believed that cyberpunk was an organic evolutionary movement–it was Cyberpunk Time, so several different artists were independantly trying to invent it, without consulting with each other at all. It was Gibson, though, who pretty much set the tone and aesthetic feel of it with high-profile stories like “Johnny Mnenomic” and “Burning Chrome,” and subsequent work was at least in dialog with that to some extent, even if not directly influenced by it.

Huh. I can’t seem to find an edition of the proto-cyberpunk novel The Shockwave Rider that is more recent than the 1990s. That can’t be right, can it?

Huh. I can’t seem to find an edition of the proto-cyberpunk novel The Shockwave Rider that is more recent than the 1990s. That can’t be right, can it?

While the most recent edition is dated 1995, it appears to still be in print. Or at least it is available as a new book from Amazon, which is not necessarily the same thing.

I ran many of his cartoons in ASIMOV’S in my day. He’s a brilliant cartoonist. Many of them are not only funny, but slyly smart.

Here is how I voted in 1982:

Best Novel
1. Little, Big John Crowley
2. The Claw of the Conciliator Gene Wolfe
3. Downbelow Station C.J. Cherryh
4. The Many-Colored Land Julian May
5. Project Pope Clifford D. Simak

Best Novella
1. “Blue Champagne” John Varley
2. “Emergence” David R. Palmer
3. “True Names” Vernor Vinge
4. “The Saturn Game” Poul Anderson
5. “With Thimbles, with Forks and Hope” Kate Wilhelm
6. “In the Western Tradition” Phyllis Eisenstein

Best Novelette
1. “The Fire When It Comes” Parke Godwin
2. “The Quickening” Michael Bishop
3. “The Thermals of August” Edward Bryant
4. “Unicorn Variation” Roger Zelazny
5. “Guardians” George R.R. Martin

Best Short Story
1. “The Pusher” John Varley
2. “The Quiet” George Florance-Guthridge
3. “The Woman the Unicorn Loved” Gene Wolfe
4. “Absent Thee from Felicity Awhile…” Somtow Sucharitkul