Inconceivable! (Hugo Cinema 1988)

This blog post is the thirty-first in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

Confusion about program item locations, registration difficulties, and a convention committee that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis. These are some of the reasons that the 1988 World Science Fiction Convention is remembered as a largely shambolic affair. Held in New Orleans on the weekend of September 1, it was described by Locus Magazine as “easily the most disorganized large-scale Worldcon ever held.”

The Metropolitan Auditorium in New Orleans
where the 1988 Hugo Awards took place has
lain vacant and in shambles since 2005.
(Image via NOLA.com)

The lineup to get into the Hugo Awards ceremony was also a mess, but once fans got inside the festivities were actually pretty entertaining. Toastmaster Mike Resnick had the audience roaring with laughter, and Gardner Dozois’ acceptance speech for his first Hugo Award was lauded as heartfelt and moving.

Not a single Best Dramatic Presentation finalist appears to have been in attendance for the ceremony, leaving Resnick to announce the award fairly quickly, hand the trophy to publicist Terry Erdman (who hadn’t even worked on the movie), and then move on.

Hugo voters had been enthusiastic in their support for The Princess Bride, with more votes being cast for the Best Dramatic winner than anything in any other category. With 493 votes, it eclipsed its nearest competitor Robocop, which garnered only 276 first-place votes.

The 1988 shortlist is a mixed bag. On top of Princess Bride and Robocop, there was Star Trek The Next Generation’s pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint,” Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator, and George Miller’s Witches of Eastwick. Two of these probably didn’t deserve to make the cut, but it’s difficult to think of other movies from that year deserving inclusion instead.

Perhaps the British anti-war low budget movie Friendship’s Death might have warranted inclusion on the ballot, or the classic Anime Neo Tokyo. Inner-Space, Batteries Not Included, and Spaceballs all have their adherents, but any of these would likely have been a marginal call. Harry and the Hendersons also came out that year.

It would be fair to say genre cinema was in a post-Star Wars lull. As unbelievable as it may seem in retrospect, there was not a single science fiction or fantasy film among the Top-5 highest grossing movies of the Hugo-eligible year. This had not happened in more than a decade, and has not happened since.

In fact, the highest-grossing science fiction or fantasy movie of 1987 was the mostly-mundane Witches of Eastwick, which earned $63 million and eighth in the box office rankings for the year (behind the mediocre Richard Dreyfuss cop comedy Stakeout).

David Foster Wallace dismissed Witches of Eastwick
author John Updike as “a penis with a thesaurus.”
(Image via New Statesman)

The Witches of Eastwick probably should not have been considered for a Hugo Award. It’s barely fantasy, and is a meandering and irritating movie. Based on a novel by Couples author John Updike, and brought to the screen by Mad Max director George Miller, it portrays three single women (Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Cher) who are seduced by a stranger who might be the Devil (Jack Nicholson). Each of the three women are portrayed as missing something in their lives, and the audience is supposed to accept that Nicholson’s devil has the power to change that. Insultingly, to the characters, each of them essentially gives up their career and artistic aspirations as soon as they’re with him. John Updike may have his admirers, but to us the portrayals of women and LGBTQ people in his works have aged extremely poorly, and Witches of Eastwick is no exception. There is also a tonal mismatch between the source material, the directorial vision, and the energy brought to the screen by the stars. As a reviewer in Variety Magazine noted, “Miller seems to become impatient with the material and tries to hike it up a notch toward the end with some inappropriate special effects.”

The Predator is probably not the best his planet has
to offer. The scorpion-faced alien is just a half-rate
nepo kid trying to pretend that he’s formidable
and worthy of his father’s affection.
(Image via Newsweek)

Released on the exact same day that summer, Predator is a well-constructed and highly quotable pulp adventure action movie featuring one of the best-designed alien creatures of that era’s cinema. The almost all-male cast is muscle-bound and somewhat cliched, with action beats interspersed with bro-handshakes between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers. But while Predator is on its surface a testosterone-fuelled jungle romp about heroic American soldiers put into conflict with a deadly alien who hunts them, it is often pointed out that the movie can be read as a condemnation of American trophy hunters who take high-tech weaponry with them on African safaris where they hunt whatever animals they can put their sights on. It’s a savvier movie than it’s often given credit for, and was a worthy Hugo finalist. As an interesting aside, as far as we can tell, Predator director John McTiernan is the first Hugo-winner to serve time in prison.

Probably the most anticipated science fiction event of the year had been on the small screen, as Star Trek launched The Next Generation — and earned a Hugo nomination in the process. Although the series would eventually become a classic, and possibly the most popular iteration of the franchise, it got off to a very rough start. The pilot episode “Encounter At Farpoint” is a fairly clunky two hours of television, with two plots that seem to work at cross purposes. On one side, the Enterprise D and its new captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stuart) gets accosted by a malevolent god-like being, while on the surface of a nearby planet half of the crew are trying to solve the mystery of how a city got built fairly rapidly. It’s rough around the edges, and occasionally very clunky in terms of dialogue. Whether or not this deserved to be on the Hugo shortlist probably depends on your affection for The Next Generation, but we would suggest “Hide and Q,” which aired on November 23 of that year, would have been a better pick.

However, two works on the shortlist — and indeed in that entire year — stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Given the militarization of police over the past three decades, the increasing corporate dominance of

It may be of fannish interest to note that in 1987,
Forrest J. Ackerman played the President of Earth
in the movie Amazon Women On The Moon.
(Image via Letterboxd)

America’s legal system, and the lack of accountability among those in power, Robocop’s grim satire seems more timely now than when it first hit cinemas. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, it’s an over-the-top social commentary peppered with immersive and organic worldbuilding and intense non-diagetic inserts. Depicting a near-future Detroit where the police force is being privatized, the movie follows a detective named Alex Murphy (Peter Weller). Murphy is killed and then brought back to life as a cyborg who must avenge his own murder. But the story is so much more than that, tackling the dehumanization of labour and the alienation of late-capitalism. The movie is occasionally witty, sometimes disturbing, and structurally perfect. Details introduced in the first act (e.g., the way Alex Murphy holsters his gun) are relevant to in the denouement (e.g. the reveal of who Robocop is), Some members of our cinema club argued that this is the most incisive and relevant science fiction movie made in the entire decade, as the movie offers brutal social commentary presented in an innovative manner.

Studios had struggled to market The Princess Bride, and as “Inconceivable!” as it might be now, the movie was widely regarded as a box-office disappointment. Opening on barely 800 screens, it hadn’t even cracked $30 million, and wouldn’t be popularly regarded as a significant movie for several more years. So the fact that fandom chose it as their favourite indicates that the Worldcon community was ahead of the curve. Told as a metafictional narrative read by a grandfather to his sick grandson, the movie follows a farm boy named Westley (Cary Elwes) on a quest to rescue his true love Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright). For at least one member of our cinema club, Princess Bride remains her “favourite movie of all time,” but some others found the delivery a touch too saccharine and the whimsy to be forced.

Although some of us still wish a more purely science fictional movie like Robocop could have won the Hugo that year, it’s difficult to quibble with the overwhelming vote of the 1988 Worldcon attendees. The Princess Bride was the film that represented the tastes of fandom voters that year. Considering the fact that it remains a cult favourite in the broader public, it’s probably the right pick for the award.

Art as a Video Game

The Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work presents the Hugo voter with a conundrum: should the works be judged based on the quality of the gameplay, or on the merits of the storytelling as science fiction or fantasy. As an example, Donkey Kong Bonanza might be one of the best video games of 2025, but its story is uninspiring. Consequently, for some, it is difficult to put forward as a Hugo contender.

The president of France celebrated the success of
Clair Obscur as a triumph of French art.
(Screen capture)

When making our selections, we view the Hugo Awards as being an institution that was designed to recognize story first and foremost. Although gameplay is a factor in our votes for this category, it is secondary to the quality of narrative and the artistry of how that narrative is expressed.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, however, offers no such tradeoffs, taking the framework of a standard role-playing game (RPG) and evolving it in ways that reinvigorates one's faith in the format. It is first-rate fantasy storytelling combined with well-balanced and compulsively playable action.

The story is set in a world where every year, people who have reached a certain age suddenly die, and every year that age gets younger. Now that the population is dying at the age of 33, an expedition is organized to try and find out why and to confront the villainous Paintress who is thought to be responsible.

One of the aspects of Clair Obscur that should be highlighted is the design. Rather than hewing to very standard, anime-inspired art, the game designers took inspiration from sources such as Belle Époque, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Symbolism, Dark Romanticism, and Surrealism. The resulting, eclectic art style makes gameplay encounters feel both unnerving and alien; emphasizing how little the player knows about their enemy.

Unlike some other RPGs, Clair Obscur offers a fairly lean cast of characters, including earnest and loyal Maelle and fanciful giant Esquie. However, this cast is well developed enough to offer satisfying gameplay and story telling. The characters’ interactions feel organic and the relationships develop naturally. Each party member gets fleshed out through vignettes in the game’s camp, developing their relationships with the game’s main character and each other.

It's clear that Clair Obscur directors Guillaume
Broche and Maxance Playez understand and love
the history of this type of RPG game.
(Image via liesofp_official Instagram)

This cast eschews much of the adolescent power fantasies that have been staples of video game narratives for far too long. This is, instead, a story about adults who are facing their mortality and decide that it is better to carry on in a quest for the sake of future generations. There are discussions about the dangers of optimism, the morality of euthanasia, and the value of perseverance in the face of declining health.

At first glance, Clair Obscur’s gameplay might seem slightly antiquated. Turn-based combat is so out-of-fashion that most flagship titles from AAA studios (such as Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy series) have done away with the whole concept. Clair Obscur’s designers have breathed new life into this mechanic, however, through a combination of balanced options and attention to detail. It’s a turn-based system with real-time dodges and parries that make the action energetic and exciting. This may not be a complete reinvention of the system, but it is a thoughtful implementation of it.

This actually points to one of the aspects of Clair Obscur that is worth celebrating; it is a mid-budget title, something that has become rare in the era of AAA vs indie. French games developer Sandfall Interactive doesn’t have the resources of a gaming titan like Electronic Arts or Sony Interactive — but neither is it a tiny indie studio putting out titles solely via Steam or itch.io. They have the resources to devote to a project like this, and the nimbleness of a smaller studio to take some risks with it. It’s a subsector of games development that has unfortunately become less common in the industry.

The people at Sandfall Interactive seem to really care about the storytelling traditions of RPGs. They created a work that is in conversation with classics of the genre, adding thoughtfully to the canon. We look forward to seeing what Sandfall Interactive does next.

The Nukes Of Hazard

(This is one of two blog posts discussing nuclear war depicted in cinema and television. The other one is about fallout shelter stories in the 2020s and was posted simultaneously.)

With the Cold War in full swing, and fears of nuclear catastrophe looming large, there was a moment in popular culture in which mainstream cinema and television grappled with what impacts an atomic war might really have on humankind.

From the perspective of cinema, the 1980s were the golden age of nuclear war. 

There was a time in the 1980s when nuclear war
felt very present on television screens and theatres.
(Image via New Yorker)

There had of course been movies about atomic warfare prior to the 1980s — Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe to name two — though these had mostly to do with the political decision-makers and military types responsible for launching the weapons. There had been movies set in the decades after such a conflict (A Boy And His Dog or Mad Max as examples), but they mostly didn’t engage with or depict the actual bombs dropping.

Over the course of only a few years, mainstream audiences around the world were inundated with horrifying on-screen attempts to realistically portray a fully nuclear global conflict. Lynne Lyttman directed Testament for PBS in 1983. Within the same month, ABC’s The Day After hit screens. Less than a year later, the BBC offered the bleakest take on the subject with Mick Jackson’s Threads. In 1984, Canada’s CTV made Countdown to Looking Glass, a mock news broadcast showing how a nuclear war would appear to TV viewers. In 1986, Jimmy Murakami offered a small-scale view of nuclear war in his animated film When The Wind Blows. In the Soviet Union in 1986, Konstantin Lopushansky depicted survivors of a nuclear war in the basement of a museum in his film Dead Man’s Letters.

What made this flourishing of nuclear cinema unique was that these are depictions not of how the atomic war might have happened, but about what impact such a catastrophe would have on everyday people — people like those watching the movies.

Prior to the 1980s, the likely and potential consequences of nuclear war had been suppressed by governments. The British Government blocked the distribution of Peter Watkins’ 1966 movie The War Game, in which he tried to accurately depict what atomic warfare would mean for everyday citizens (the movie would not in fact be aired by the BBC until the 1980s). Information, when it was shared at all, focused on the blast and its effects on the immediate vicinity, not on the consequences to the globe and to populations removed from the impact sites. 

With When The Wind Blows, Jimmy Murakami
attempted to show the toll that nuclear war
would have on a pair of senior citizens.
(Image via BBC) 

There were numerous scientific and journalistic reports over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s that completely reshaped how the public imagined nuclear war. The SCOPE report (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment), specifically SCOPE 28, detailed the catastrophic and potentially extinction-level ecological and agricultural environmental consequences of nuclear war. Hugo-winning author Carl Sagan in 1983, brought the concept of nuclear winter (in which global climate is fundamentally altered by dust in the atmosphere) to the public's attention. 

By the end of the decade a combination of factors — the cooling of the Cold War, and increased public awareness of the global effects of such a conflict — nuclear war seemed both less likely, and less survivable. (If nobody survives a conflict, there would be no more stories to tell in its wake.)

In a tangible way, these films are amongst the most important science fiction movies ever made. Then-president Ronald Reagan later said he had watched The Day After, and been inspired to reach out to his Soviet counterpart to begin talks about nuclear disarmament. Threads is credited with turbo-charging the British anti-nuclear campaign. Russian State Broadcaster Первая программа broadcast The Day After in 1987, making the unusual concession to the American director that they would not change a word in their translation. In the subsequent decade, the policy results could be seen: the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991 limited the number of nuclear weapons hoarded by the two superpowers. It was followed by additional limitations in 1994, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996.

The explosion of nuclear war cinema in 1980s film might seem like and odd obsession for younger audiences, but examining them provides a window into the concerns and preoccupations of that time, as well as a warning about the inability of governments to stick to peaceable agreements.

We would suggest that a related explosion of screen storytelling will help audiences decades from now understand who we are in the 2020s.

Bunker Mentality

(This is the second of two blog posts discussing nuclear war depicted in cinema and television. The other one is about a flourishing of Atomic War fiction in the 1980s and was posted simultaneously.)

From Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth (1964) to Jeanne DuPrau’s City of Ember (2003), post-apocalyptic narratives set in bunkers often reflect how humans create, respond to, and survive authoritarian control and the destabilization of shared truths.

Say what you will about the shadowy builders of
Silo 18, they had a flair for brutalist architecture.
(Image via Apple+)

So what does it say about our present moment that there are three major television series all playing with the same trope?

• On the Apple+ TV series Silo, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) slowly begins to realize that citizens of “Silo 18,” the underground bunker in which she lives, are being deceived and that a shadowy cabal is manipulating the populace. 
• Over on Amazon Prime’s Fallout, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) sets out on a quest to uncover a conspiracy surrounding “Vault 33,” the underground bunker in which she was raised. 
• On Hulu’s Paradise, Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) investigates the mystery surrounding the construction of a post-apocalyptic bunker in which the last vestiges of the American government are now sheltering.

These fictional nuclear bunkers provide a relatively controlled environment for narratives about authoritarian systems of control being replaced by a more egalitarian system. These are stories in which protagonists live in a home that they did not choose, can not control, and from which they (at least in principle) cannot escape. Systems of coercion and control are baked into the very walls by which the citizens are surrounded, because those walls were designed and built at the behest of an unseen elite. Architectural features such as the levels of Silo 18 can be designed to keep one class of citizen separated from another class. Surveillance — either overt or covert — can both enable authoritarian policing and be used as a panopticon that motivates individuals to police themselves. 

Fallout depicts a society that relies on propaganda
and the manipulation of shared notions of history.
(Image via Amazon)

Fundamentally, these are all narratives about a distrust in institutions and in authority — and the hope that they can be overtaken and replaced with something that provides more integrity and more space for hope. The villain in Fallout isn’t the atomic weapons, it’s the shadowy elites who make decisions without regard to the consequences for the masses. This resonates with audiences living in an era of global declines in trust towards institutions, and each other. They can also be about the idea that mere survival isn’t enough, that we need to do better by one another even in the face of catastrophe.

In the modern context, these stories can serve as allegories for climate change. It’s been long observed that climate change affects those on the lower end of the economic spectrum more than it affects the more privileged classes and countries. Consequently, those making decisions at the top do not have as much skin in the game when it comes to dealing with carbon emissions, for example. Essentially, whether the world burns in nuclear fire or is cooked in a runaway greenhouse effect, those at the top of the economic pyramid will be able to hide away in their bunkers and preserve their privileged position. This is the narrative conclusion of Frederick Jamieson’s famous maxim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; the post-apocalyptic bunker story portrays the persistence of capitalism-derived hierarchies when all else is dust.

What makes these stories affecting is not just their dystopian premises, but how plausibly they mirror the realities experienced by today’s viewers. As climate anxiety grows and wealth inequality deepens, the idea that a select few might retreat into secured, climate-controlled sanctuaries while the rest of humanity suffers outside doesn’t feel like science fiction. Rather, it feels like a logical extension of gated communities and private police forces.

In Paradise, the connection between bunker and
gated community is made fairly explicit.
(Image via Hulu. 

You don’t have to look hard to find real-world parallels: from billionaire bunkers in New Zealand to Silicon Valley doomsday preppers investing in underground shelters, the fantasy of survival for the elite is already in motion. The bunker trope is a narrative reflection of this quiet but chilling shift in priorities for the privileged classes. Elon Musk’s pipe dream fantasies of building underground slave colonies on an uninhabitable planet seem strangely benign and kind when compared to the prepper billionaires preparing for the depopulation of our current planet.

Fundamentally however, the current crop of bunker-mentality television shows reflect a world where escape is privatized and survival is monetized. Perhaps audiences turn to these shows for a glimmer of hope, since they all seem to argue that those in power can not perpetually escape the consequences of their decisions.

The Alien Conquest of Brighton (Hugo Cinema 1987)

This blog post is the thirtieth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.

It had been an unusually cool August in Brighton, the English seaside town that hosted the 45th World Science Fiction Convention. But on the day of the Hugo Award ceremony the weather had turned pleasant.

The Brighton Metropole Hotel, site of the 1987 
Hugo Awards. (Image via Doubletree.com)

The event was held at the Brighton Metropole Hotel. It was possibly one of the most architecturally significant venues ever to host the Hugos, having been designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who was famous for the Natural History Museum in London and Strangeways in Manchester.

The ceremony had to conclude by 10 p.m. sharp, owing to timed fireworks that would conclude the Worldcon. This meant short shrift for categories without acceptors in attendance. Per usual, there was nobody present to accept the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, but the win for Aliens was greeted by the audience with a robust cheer. It had won by a considerable margin.

Some weeks after the ceremony, Hugo Administrator Paul Kincaid stopped by the offices of 20th Century Fox and left the Hugo trophy with the receptionist.

It was an eclectic and interesting year for science fiction and fantasy film, with numerous and impressive titles failing to make the shortlist. The Park Plaza Mall was terrorized by security robots in Jim Wynorski’s send-up of Regan-era capitalism Chopping Mall. Autobots and Decepticons battled it out in the first — and best — big-screen outing for the Transformers. A rural British couple faced the aftermath of a nuclear war in Jimmy Murakami’s animated movie When The Wind Blows. And in the Russian movie Dead Man’s Letters, a scientist huddled in the basement of a decimated museum trying to imagine what he’d say to his son.

Clancy Brown is a memorably
great villain in Highlander.
(Image via IMDB)

A surprising omission from the shortlist is Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander, a stylishly directed epic about immortals destined to fight each other to the death. Although it was not particularly successful in the cinemas, the movie had decent buzz within fandom, and has held up better than most movies of the era. Mulcahy, who had a background as a music video auteur, took a rock-and-roll sensibility to the direction and livened up the editing with thoughtful transition wipes. It is impressive how clear and easy the movie is to follow given that the narrative is told in two parallel tracks, following the protagonist Connor McLeod (Christopher Lambert) in the present day in one and in the 1700s in the other. Notably, the soundtrack was by Queen, and featured several top-charting hits. Highlander is one of the most technically accomplished SFF films of the year, despite a leaden and hammy performance by Christopher Lambert.

But to be fair, there’s only really one movie on the 1987 shortlist for Dramatic Presentation that probably doesn’t belong there: Labyrinth, Jim Henson and Brian Froud’s follow-up to The Dark Crystal. Like many other Henson productions, the movie has some charm and is visually appealing, but the story meanders and blunders from event to event with little direction. Featuring David Bowie as the Goblin King, the movie is oddly paced with what little plot there is interrupted by largely irrelevant musical numbers. It does get some points for being the only non-remake, non-sequel movie on the shortlist in 1987.

Labyrinth was one of two musicals on the shortlist, which was the only time multiple musicals were shortlisted for the Hugo in the same year. Little Shop of Horrors (adapted from a Broadway play based on the 1960 Roger Corman movie of the same name) could be considered the first Kaiju movie ever shortlisted for a Hugo Award. It’s filled with top-tier talent (such as Rick Moranis, Steve Martin, John Candy, and Jim Belushi) and has an incredible amount of energy in the first half, leaving the second act in, well, second place. There was a fair amount of disagreement in our viewing club, with some of the viewers complaining that the music was “very Boomer,” and that the lead actress Ellen Greene was cloying in her theatrics.

Evil alien plant Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors
was voiced by Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops.
(Image via Letterboxd)

David Cronenberg’s The Fly is one of the few cinematic remakes that is generally considered to have outshone the original. Set almost entirely in the apartment and laboratory of scientist Seth Brundle (a young Jeff Goldblum), it centres on his relationship with journalist Veronica Quaife (an even younger Geena Davis) as an experiment causes him to slowly transform into a human-fly hybrid. The movie is carried by two truly terrific lead performances, and viscerally disturbing body horror. In another year, it might have competed for the trophy, but 1987 was a very strong year.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home came in second in the final vote, and it’s easy to understand why. With the crew time travelling back to 1980s Earth to save humpback whales and humanity, it’s probably the most unserious of all Star Trek movies. It was, however, also one of the most engaging to watch, especially for those in our cinema club who are not hard-core Trekkies. This would have been at, or near the top of most of our ballots despite some dated gender dynamics in the (somewhat forced) romance between captain James T. Kirk and marine biologist Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks).

But the winner for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1987 was never in doubt. It’s easy to see why Aliens — the sequel to 1979’s Hugo-winner Alien — earned more than twice as many votes as its nearest competitor on the shortlist. The sequel sees Ripley return to the alien-infested planet, this time with marines and massive firepower. Much like the Hugo ceremony in 1987, it ends with fireworks. Aliens is a truly exceptional action movie that counterpoints the isolating horror of the original.

YASSSS QUEEN! Hashtag #Slay!
(Image via IMDB)

What is really stunning to see with the benefit of hindsight is just how efficiently written Aliens is, and the technical skill evident in the craftsmanship. Characters are introduced in as few lines of dialogue as possible, and yet seem fleshed out and real; as an example a female marine named Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) has fewer than a dozen lines in the movie, but connects with the audience. It’s also worth noting that the pace of editing in Aliens is beyond anything contemporaneous audiences were used to, using almost twice as many cuts per minute than anything else on the Hugo shortlist that year. The overall effect is a percussive, and deeply engaging action movie that puts science fiction at the forefront.

The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation was just finishing its third decade in existence, and was now clearly one of the most popular categories with voters. More votes were cast with Aliens as a top choice than had been cast in the entire Fan Artist category that year, for example. The award had come into its own, and did it in style by recognizing a movie that is inarguably the best of the year.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Hogwarts

Warning: Semi-Spoilers Contained Within

There is a trope in genre literature set in a wizarding academy that long predates Harry Potter. However, most books published over the past two decades that lean on this setup seem to be responding in some way to Hogwarts and to J.K. Rowling.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
(Image via Goodreads)

Lev Grossman’s excellent The Magicians trilogy used the premise of Brakebills Academy for Magicians to play with the lack of character development in the Harry Potter novels, suggesting that magic — like wealth and power — allows young men to remain emotionally undeveloped and callow.

In Magic For Liars, Sarah Gailey introduces Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, which provides an exploration of the classism, gender essentialism, and racial undertones of the British elite private school system on which Hogwarts is modelled.

There have been magical academy stories set in Stryxhaven Academy in Magic: The Gathering, and depictions of magical departments in Scholomance, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale. There are literally dozens of similar stories published in the past few years, most of which seem like reflections and responses to the Harry Potter cultural juggernaut.

And so we come to Chetwood School, the setting for Emily Tesh’s recent novel The Incandescent. A novel which is likely to be on our Hugo nominating ballots. 

Like many wizarding schools, it’s located in England, is steeped in the British class system, and is modelled on boarding schools such as Eton and Wycombe Abbey. But rather than introduce the reader to the school through the eyes of yet another gifted kid, magical prodigy, or child of prophecy, Tesh offers readers the perspective of one of the teachers, Dr. Saffy Walden.

Walden — a former student at the school — heads up Chetwood’s department of magical pedagogy. Now in her late 30s, she leads a comfortable, if stunted, life. Her work is her passion, and her activities rarely stray from the confines of the school.

The early chapters provide terrific and well-thought-out details about how the protagonist navigates the magical academy. Walden worries about pedagogy, and how to keep the interest of easily distractible students. Magic is more like the humanities than an applied science, it turns out, with few students pursuing it at the post-secondary level. Walden’s believer syndrome encourages her most gifted student to continue studying magic because a good degree will open doors, whatever major one selects. The mundanity of these details, and the effortless way they are conveyed to the reader helps make the setting more believable.

There are long portions of the book that seem to meander, and it’s difficult to figure out if the narrative will add up to much more than a day-to-day slice of life at this elite institution. Even once the main villain is revealed, there’s a lack of immediacy about the conflict. Despite the lack of tension and obvious plotting, the general well-roundedness of the main characters kept us engaged.

One satisfying element of the novel — one that’s often missing from other magical academies — is that the primary antagonist has a compelling and believable motivation. Although we would wager that few readers have met someone resembling Voldemort, the villain of The Incandescent is someone we have all met in our day-to-day lives.

Dr. Saffi Walden — much like many 30-somethings in the real world — has spent decades obsessed with a magical academy for young wizards. But over the course of the novel, she realizes that obsession has stifled her personal growth, and that the academy has a darkness that should be avoided.

There are those who stay obsessed with Hogwarts … and there are those who simply walk away. The Incandescent is a perfect novel for the latter.

Hot Take: The Abstraction of Science Fiction

Hot Take (noun): a deliberately provocative heterodox opinion

article that seems intended to attract detractors and invite debate.

In 1921 at Max Ernst’s first Dadaist exhibition, the poet André Breton proclaimed that photography had dealt a mortal blow to traditional modes of technology-enabled expression.

André Breton was often
referred to as the Pope
of Surrealism.
(Image via Wikipedia)

Breton theorized that since cameras could accurately capture the world as it is, they had transformed visual art. The artist’s role of striving for realistic expression was no longer as necessary. In order to remain relevant, painters and illustrators would need to explore abstraction and metaphor.

Over the subsequent decades, Breton’s prognostications have been borne out, as painters have been freed from the need to imitate reality. Painting evolved into a medium for personal expression and conceptual ideas rather than rote documentation.

There was — of course — a backlash against these more abstract and expressive forms of art, including from such conservative critics as Max Nordau and Paul Schultze-Naumburg. Nordeau’s book Degeneration (1892) in which he coined the term “Degenerate Art,” tied Impressionism and other less detail-oriented forms of visual expression to what he perceived as the moral decay of society. The pseudo-intellectual works of such critics were often used by fascist movements to justify their cultural conservatism.

While we are no poets, we would observe that, similarly, the advent of photorealistic special effects in the late 1990s and early 2000s has fundamentally changed speculative fiction literature in many of the same ways — and with many of the same consequences.

The comparison between the effect of photography on painting and the impact of special-effects laden movies on prose speculative fiction is an imprecise one. For example, the advent of photography was far more sudden than the evolution of special effects. Also, literary speculative fiction that is difficult for some readers to comprehend has existed throughout the genre’s history. But in our opinion, the similarities between the two technological shifts are worth discussing.

It should not be lost on
us that among the artists
who rejected abstraction
in the 1920s was a
painter in his 20s
named Adolph.
(Image via Wikipedia)

Photorealistic special effects in live action film transformed speculative fiction by visually realizing imaginative worlds once limited to prose. In the 1980s, if you wanted to experience a story about small, hairy-footed country folk befriending talking trees and fighting dragons the primary way to do so was to read a book and imagine much of the associated world-building.

If you’re looking for a cinematic turning point, you could name Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs in 1993 or the seamless use of digital compositing in 1997’s Titanic. But Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings should be seen as the watershed moment; the moment at which filmic reality became virtually indistinguishable from documentary footage for the viewer. Film and television are the primary access points for viewing and engaging with The Lord Of The Rings. Although approximately 40 million copies of the first volume of the trilogy have been sold across the globe with a readership of likely triple that number, somewhat in excess of 200 million documented viewers have seen Peter Jackson’s movie. The work has been flattened out in its filmic form, the poetry stripped from the page, and Tom Bombadil relegated to a footnote. While this might offend militaristic bibliophiles, there’s no question that the story found a wider audience through film.

It has often been observed that speculative fiction won the culture war, becoming the ascendant genre and providing most of the popular culture touchpoints in current society, but what’s left unsaid is that it is filmic speculative fiction and fantasy that was the victor, not works of prose. Speculative fiction film and television are the lingua franca of North American culture in the new millennium, but speculative fiction literature is not. As movies took over spectacle and futuristic imagery, written speculative fiction — which is still a relatively niche pursuit — was freed from the need to describe elaborate visuals.

Much of the heft of worldbuilding was suddenly provided to the consumer, in a more passive visual format. We would posit that this shift provided authors with the freedom to delve deeper into complex ideas, philosophical questions, and experimental narratives. Rather than focusing on detailed scene-setting, prose speculative fiction seems now to focus more on literary styling, metaphor, and ambiguity, perhaps redefining itself in response to cinema’s dominance over visual storytelling. It is also possible that there are writers who would have turned to prose in the past, who are now writing for the screen because the medium is in demand, supports the stories they want to tell, and arguably provides more reliable remuneration.

We wonder if speculative fiction authors have had to become more poetic to compete with the hard-edged realism of screen special effects and more demanding readers. The classic work There Will Come Soft Rains — praised in its day for Bradbury’s elegiac style — seems hard-nosed and unambiguous when compared to John Chu’s Hugo-winning magical realist fable The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere.

It should not be lost on anyone that there is an ongoing backlash against abstract (and dare we say more literary) work. Those who preferred the prose style that Heinlein and Asimov had popularized have taken aim at a style of writing that is more metaphorical. 

Anti-Nazi art critic Hermann Broch summed up the
fascist tendency of aesthetic conservatism: “The
maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is
not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be
evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather he
is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.”
(Image via Wikipedia)

It is also worth talking about similarities between the Sad Puppies and the turn-of-the-century fascist artists who saw surrealism and abstraction as overly chaotic and even degenerate. In the 1920s, reactionaries embraced classical forms as symbols of order, purity, and heritage — and became enraged by the conceptual work of artists like Marcel Duchamp. Fascist scholars such as Margherita Sarfatti called for art based on rigid cultural norms that elevated ‘high culture’ of the past as an ideal. Sarafatti excoriated Cubism, Dadaism, and expressionism and called such art disrespectful to the shared aesthetic values she saw as underpinning “Western Civilization” (it is not lost on us that many of Sarafatti’s arguments are today repurposed by TradFash Twitter accounts that use Greco-Roman statues as their profile pictures). In the eyes of those who hew to conservative interpretations of art, the move away from strictly representational forms threatened traditional values by undermining normative conceptions of beauty.

Today, there is also a cottage industry of those who lash out at the Hugo Awards and mainstream publishers, and argue that the genre should return to “old-school science fiction.” Public appeals for a return to traditional “pulp” aesthetics, and “Campbellian” science fiction could be understood as being essentially similar in nature to the calls from the 1930s-era German Reichskulturkammer for visual arts to return to easily understood forms with heroic themes in styles modeled on classical Greek and Roman works.

It is often presumed that the rejection of modernity by some figures in speculative fiction is a rejection of diversity, that what these figures are objecting to is the inclusion of authors who are non-white or non-male. That is, of course, part of the phenomenon. But we would suggest the “pulp revolution,” and “make science fiction fun again” mantras expressed by this conservative wing of fandom suggest that the aesthetics of fascism exert a significant pull on many. Within speculative fiction, the idea of “pulp” hearkens back to the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” a mythical era in which the genre was supposedly free of “mundane” influences — this is at its heart an aesthetic argument.

The increasing literary flair of speculative fiction has not entirely driven out the prosaic plot-forward storytelling that used to be the staple of the genre. Without casting aspersions, we can think of several progressive and forward thinking mainstream authors who have embraced a traditional “classic” speculative fiction style without being a part of the reactionary movement.

McLuhan predicted the Global Village, but
neglected to mention that the village in question
is Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.
(Portrait by Yousuf Karsh)

When discussing the 2015 Hugo Awards, the balkanization of fandom, and the emergence of an overtly right-wing movement within the genre, critics of the speculative fiction genre have often focused their analysis on polarization within broader society. The culture of speculative fiction has changed in the past 25 years, and as McLuhan once wrote, “a theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratio effected by various externalizations of our senses.”

The impact of technological changes on the consumption of speculative fiction should not be understated. We think its impacts have brought a broader public under the wing of fandom, prompting inevitable and uncomfortable splits within the subculture. Much as technological advances in the early 20th Century inspired a reactionary movement among painters and labour writ large, similar technological advances in the past 30 years have been at play in the formation of a reactionary movement amongst some groups of speculative fiction creators.