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.

License Denied

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

Of the ten top-grossing film franchises of all time, nine of them have had at least one movie earn a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation.

The remaining franchise is clearly science fiction, having featured at various times a spaceship that eats other space ships, a device that can alter the user’s DNA, an invisible car, and a city at the bottom of the ocean.

The Spy Who Loved Me features sets that are
totally science fiction.
(Image via IMDB)

We are, of course, talking about Bond … James Bond.

It’s an aging and sometimes cringe-worthy cinematic espionage adventure institution that has spawned 27 “official” films as well as three James Bond movies made by other studios who claimed the right to do so based on nebulous questions about who authored one of the original novels.

Not a single James Bond movie has even appeared on the long-list of works that barely missed the cut for the Hugos.

The character James Bond is as old as the Hugo Awards themselves. He first appeared in the novel Casino Royale, published in mid-April, 1953 — just weeks before the Philcon committee announced they would hold an awards ceremony honouring works of science fiction.

There was a mostly-forgotten James Bond TV movie in 1954, but the first big-screen depiction was eight years later when Sean Connery starred in Dr. No. That was 1962, a year in which the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation was awarded to … nothing at all. Dr. No was the seventh-highest-grossing movie of the year and was instantly part of the cultural zeitgeist — it’s difficult to suggest that Hugo Award voters were unaware of the first James Bond movie, with its radioactive pool, space race sabotage, and cyborg villain with robot hands. An enormously popular science fiction movie, ignored by Hugo voters.

James Bond made his public debut in the same
month that the first Hugo Awards were announced.
(Image via Sotherby's)

One of the most popular Bond movies ever was released two years later. Goldfinger — which famously includes the first on-screen depiction of a deadly laser weapon — was the third-highest grossing movie of the year, and was a cultural landmark. The franchise had begun to introduce the high-technology gadgets that would quickly become synonymous with James Bond, and would cement its place in the science fiction canon. Given that there were only two Hugo finalists for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1965 — and that one of them was the execrably racist Seven Faces of Dr. Lao — it seems odd that Goldfinger didn’t make the cut.

Bond was a massive part of the cultural zeitgeist in the 1960s and 1970s, inspiring numerous parodies and imitators (ironically including Hugo finalist The Prisoner). Neither the success of James Bond — nor its sciencefictionality — seem to have escaped contemporaneous fandom; almost every edition of Yandro released in the 1960s has some reference to Ian Flemming’s spy; Australian Science Fiction Review has positive discussion of the space scenes in You Only Live Twice.

Over the next few decades, the exploits of James Bond became increasingly connected to SFF, as the super-spy would don jet packs, deploy laser wristwatches, and drive cars that transform into submarines. By 1979 — in the wake of the enormous success of Star Wars — the franchise would fully embrace its genre identity by sending James Bond into outer space in Moonraker.

A full quarter of all James Bond movies (seven of the 27 movies) involve nuclear terrorism. Two of the movies involve fictional space vehicles (the Vostok 16 in You Only Live Twice, the Drax Industry Shuttle in Moonraker). There have been genetically-engineered bioweapons (No Time To Die), and underwater bases (The Spy Who Loved Me). This is not to mention the plethora of fantastical gadgets proffered by Bond ally Major Boothroyd — AKA “Q.” A close reading of James Bond offers insights into the evolving relationship between power and technology, between authority and gender, between the human side of intelligence and that wielded by machines.

Bond production designer Ken Adams brought
The Drax Space Station to life in Moonraker.
(Image via Reddit) 

So why is it then that James Bond has never been on a Hugo Award ballot? We have some theories.

James Bond may have all the trappings of science fiction, but it has always been marketed to mainstream and non-nerd audiences. Long before science fiction gained acceptance with the masses, Bond movies were taking genre ideas and marketing them to the very people who were scorning science fiction. In the early days of the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Worldcon members seemed to be drawn to movies that wore their science fiction roots on their sleeve. To be fair, one can understand why George McFly wouldn’t want to give an award to something marketed to Biff Tannen.

The superspy is a rich, good-looking dude who always got the girl. He represented the prom king, the star quarterback, the boss at work. He was never the underdog, he was never the outcast, he was never picked last in gym class. Nerd culture in the 1960s did not want to celebrate that.

Another possible factor is that there seems to be an inverse correlation between the quality of a James Bond movie and how science fictional it is. Moonraker, Die Another Day, and View To A Kill are among the most science fiction-forward James Bond movies, but they’re also generally considered some of the worst. Arguably the best James Bond movie — From Russia With Love — is virtually bereft of any genre elements.

The final reason that James Bond might have been ignored by Worldcon voters in recent years is that modern perceptions of the franchise are shaped by the overt sexism and racism of several early Bond movies. Some of the early Bond films are appalling. It’s for the best that You Only Live Twice — with its Sinophobia — got snubbed, and that the homophobia of Diamonds Are Forever was not rewarded. Although for the most part these movies are no more sexist or racist than some contemporary movies that did get Hugo nominations, they are more well-remembered for that racism and sexism, and consequently these skeezy and unacceptable aspects of the franchise have become a defining feature of James Bond in the public imagination. To many Hugo voters, we suspect that nominating the 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall — no matter how good a movie it might be — would seem like an implicit endorsement of the racism and sexism of the character’s 1960s origins.

Today, Bond has become a shadow of its former glory, a franchise that exists out of momentum and brand synergy rather than being a relevant part of the cultural zeitgeist. James Bond has transformed from a science fiction character into a lifestyle brand. For the past two decades, movies in the franchise are rarely about who Bond is, and more about what brand of vodka he drinks and what model of car you should drive if you want to be suave like him.

Given the weight of the character’s sordid history — and given the way the franchise has been veering away from overtly futuristic adventures — it seems unlikely that any James Bond work will be shortlisted for a Hugo Award. Whether or not any of the previous movies of the franchise deserved consideration is another matter.

1.21 Gigawatts of Pure Entertainment (Hugo Cinema 1986)

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

If we had a Delorean, a flux capacitor, and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity, we wouldn’t change anything about which movie won the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

Back To The Future — which hit cinemas 40 years ago today — was a cultural juggernaut. It was the top-grossing movie of the year, completely blowing away the competition. It made stars out of Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox. It spawned sequels, tie-ins, spin-offs, a Broadway musical and eventually a Lego set.

Singer Huey Lewis (left) and star Michael J. Fox
on the set of Back To The Future. How the heck
did The Power Of Love lose an Academy Award
to a Lionel Ritchie song from White Nights?
(Image via Entertainment Weekly)

Moreover, it’s one heck of a movie.

But a science fiction movie achieving mainstream success does not guarantee a Hugo trophy — only a couple of years previously E.T. The Extra Terrestrial had earned a bazillion inflation-adjusted dollars, but failed to take home a Hugo award.

The Back to the Future script — which was also nominated for an Academy Award — works with clockwork precision that speaks to careful editing. Almost every plot point is expertly foreshadowed, all characters are believably developed, and every joke feels timed to the nanosecond. The viewers in our movie club felt that their time and attention was well spent, and that every frame was relevant to the story.

Some have suggested that modern science fiction cinema started with Star Wars, but we’d like to suggest that due to its tight pacing, quippy dialogue, and breezy writing, Back To The Future might be the first truly modern science fiction movie.

Our one disappointment isn’t about the actual film. Despite scriptwriter Bob Gale being a University of California classmate and acquaintance of Worldcon stalwart Mike Glyer, there was nobody from the Back To The Future team on-hand to accept the Hugo Award at the 44th World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta.

Although the post-Star Wars boom was starting to fade, it had still been a good but eccentric year for science fiction and fantasy at the cineplexes. The Quiet Earth, hauntingly filmed in New Zealand, provided a tale of a world after people. Martha Coolidge’s Real Genius kept audiences rapt with Cold-War superweapon antics. George Miller made his third — and weirdest — Mad Max movie. George A. Romero cranked up the zombie mayhem in Day of the Dead. And Larry Cohen’s The Stuff remains possibly the greatest film ever made about cursed, evil frozen yogurt.

Certainly the most eccentric and polarizing of all was Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In the run-off balloting, it had received almost as many first-place votes as Back To The Future, but earned few second-, third-, or fourth-place votes. According to one con report, it had placed below “no award” on the most ballots that year. According to a contemporaneous account from Evelyn C. Leeper, “Almost everyone who didn’t vote for it ranked it last.”

I suspect that every human character in Cocoon
 would have voted for Trump, even Steve Guttenberg.
(Image via IMDB)

As Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times said: “Watching Brazil, the exploding cigar in the face of the future, is like watching the contents of Terry Gilliam's head erupt in public.”

Although it is often compared to a satirical version of George Orwell’s 1984, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil presents a far more politically conservative view of dystopia. This is a world oppressed by regulation and by bureaucracy, rather than a dictator. The rebellious freedom fighters are those who flout labour union contract terms and fix things without paperwork. The movie is visually incredible, and meticulously crafted from every technical perspective, but is laden with a script that careens from one half-baked idea to the next. While some of those in our viewing group still harbour nostalgic fondness for Brazil, it was hard to argue with the decision to recognize Back To The Future ahead of it.

The rest of the shortlist is even more flawed.

Cocoon was popular with the mainstream media. Beloved by the New York Times, praised in the New Yorker, lauded by the Winnipeg Free Press. Somehow, it won the Oscar for best Special Effects ahead of Back To The Future … a decision that makes us suspect that Hugo voters have more discerning tastes than members of the Academy.

Vacillating between saccharine and crass, Cocoon is a cringeworthy wish-fulfillment fantasy about septuagenarians who receive a miraculous dose of alien Viagra. Most of the acting is either listless (Brian Dennehy) or campy (Steve Guttenberg). Don Ameche — who earned an Academy Award for his performance — is just about the only actor giving the movie any gravitas.

While much has been made of the fact that Wilford Brimley was only 49 years old when filming Cocoon, we found it more unbelievable that Ron Howard was only 31 when writing and directing it.

The Chicago Tribune described Louis Gossett Jr.’s
performance as “dressing up like a
toad and giving birth.”
(Image via Rottentomatoes)

Many of our viewing club had a lot of residual fondness for Ladyhawke, Richard Donner’s fantasy about a cursed knight set in 1300s France. Starring science fiction all-stars Matthew Broderick and Rutger Hauer, as well as a very young Michelle Pfeiffer, it’s the story of a woman who is cursed to turn into a hawk every time the sun is up, while her soulmate turns into a wolf whenever the sun has set. It’s an interesting concept, and one that provides some very good moments, and Rutger Hauer provides a first-rate performance. Unfortunately, the pacing is odd, the plot meanders all over the place, and the villain seems sort of generic. The movie was a lot … less than we had remembered.

The worst film on the shortlist — the only one that certainly didn’t warrant a Hugo nod — was Enemy Mine. Based on a very fine Hugo-winning novella by Barry B. Longyear, the movie follows human fighter pilot Willis (Dennis Quaid) stranded on a wild planet alongside one of humanity’s enemies, a Drac soldier named Jariba (Louis Gossett Jr.). Naturally, the two end up having to cooperate to survive. It’s a bad sign when Battlestar Galactica 1980 not only produced an episode with the exact same plot (“The Return of Starbuck”) five years earlier, but somehow did so with more verve and emotional depth.

Despite being made on a lavish budget by Oscar-nominated director Wolfgang Peterson, Enemy Mine looks incredibly shabby. Janet Maslin of the New York Times described it as costly, awful-looking, and derivative. “Perhaps such things are more fun to read about than they are to watch,” she quipped, noting that the original story had won awards.

Overall, the 1986 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation is an exemplar for the continued relevance of the awards. This was one of the years in which Worldcon attendees' choices not only reflected the state of science fiction and fantasy cinema at the time, but they honoured what was almost unquestionably the best movie of the year.