The Ape Star

The climactic battle in Better Man is a frenzy
of ape-on-ape violence. This is clearly fantasy.
Image via YouTube.

In the climactic moment of Better Man, an anthropomorphic chimpanzee named Robbie Williams takes the stage at the Knebworth Festival in front of 125,000 fans to sing his pop anthem, “Let Me Entertain You.” Nearing the end of the song, he spots in the audience dozens — then hundreds — of younger and angrier chimpanzee versions of himself. Leaping into the crowd, he begins fighting them one-by-one, with each showdown getting bloodier and more outlandish.

With the leaping chimpanzees, the soaring camera work, and the colourful cinematography, it is as if the Battle of Isengard had been set on the Planet of the Apes and directed by Speed-Racer-era Wachowskis.

So let us be perfectly clear about this point: any movie featuring a battle royale between thousands of anthropomorphic apes is fantastical enough to be considered for a Hugo Award. Whether or not Better Man is a “pure” fantasy movie, it is at the very least a form of magical realism.

It’s also possibly the most audacious — and beautiful — science fiction or fantasy movie released in 2024.

Directed by Greatest Showman auteur Michael Gracey, the movie chronicles the rise of real-world, non-chimpanzee, UK superstar Robbie Williams, his feud with the boy band that launched his career, and his struggles with addiction. These are all the standard narrative beats of a Hollywood music biopic, but Better Man is elevated by the unusual approach to the subject (to whit the motion-capture ape), the panache with which the movie has been directed, and Williams’ sardonic voice.

The real-world non-chimpanzee Robbie Williams
is known for his self-serious dignity.
(Image via RobbieWilliams.com)

Unfortunately, the movie woefully underperformed at the box office — earning only $20 million on a budget that exceeded $110 million. Perhaps it struggled in cinemas because Americans have never really understood Robbie Williams, something explored in the recent Netflix documentary about his life … but not in this film. Americans like their bragaddocio unmitigated; every time Williams offers a bombastic line, he undermines it with a joke. His is a quintessentially British voice that did not appeal to enough people in the USA.

The film’s inability to reach a wider audience is a shame, because by wrapping its narrative in special effects and fantasy, the story becomes more universal. It makes no pretense of being an entirely true and factual depiction of Robbie Williams’ life. To quote Williams himself: “You don’t want the truth. Truth is boring.” This is a fantasy inspired by mostly inaccurate tabloid stories about a pop star. The viewer isn’t being offered the definitive biography of a person, but rather a fable about a dancing primate.

And this makes Better Man better cinema — and more interesting SFF. The movie is full of metaphor and surreal asides in which the chimpanzee Williams is constantly confronted by his personal demons in the guise of past versions of himself.

Williams has spoken about his cinematic simian alter-ego, explaining that he’s often described as “just a performing monkey,” that he’s “less evolved,” and that “fame makes monkeys of us all.” The effect was created by the special effects house Weta, the company that created Gollum in Lord of the Rings and Caesar in Planet of the Apes — they should get a lot of credit for making this central metaphor work, imbuing the animation with pathos while also maintaining its otherness.

One of the central relationships in the movie
is between chimpanzee Robbie and his
grandmother played by Alison Steadman.
(Image via Entertainment Weekly)

The cast is filled with scene-stealing turns by actors who are not yet household names. In the leading motion-capture performance, Jonno Davies manages to imbue the role with pathos and sincerity, while never downplaying the darker places to which the narrative takes him. Alison Steadman is simply superb as Betty Williams, Robbie’s grandmother. The movie’s most dislikeable character, Nigel Martin-Smith, is played with aplomb by Damon Herriman.

But the biggest star of the show is the cinematographer Erik Wilson, who offers infectiously joyful camera work during dance numbers that recall Golden Age movie musicals cranked up to 11 by modern technology. The “Rock DJ” scene in Oxford Circus is a stand-out.

Even describing just the fantastic elements of the movie fails to highlight just how bloody weird the film is. For one thing, Robbie Williams is much younger than you would expect for the subject of a valedictory movie like this; with the exception of movies about stars who died far too young (La Bamba was made when Ritchie Vallens would have been 46, Notorious was made when The Notorious B.I.G. would have been 35, The Doors was made when Jim Morrison would have been 48), the only example of a major Hollywood biopic about a living star as young as Robbie Williams is the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (Lynne was 48 in 1980 when the movie was released). Williams' most recent studio album is barely five years old, and topped the album charts in the UK, Australia, and Ireland. Moreover, the movie skips some of Robbie Williams’ biggest hits. Millennium, Something Stupid, Strong, and Kids are absent.

Speculative fiction — and the Hugo Awards — can and have embraced off-board picks in the past. Better Man was never marketed as fantasy, but it clearly fits any reasonable definition of genre cinema … and it is among the most bonkers, surreal, and beautiful movies of 2024. Seriously consider giving it a Hugo Award nomination.

Interview with Worldcon Poet Laureate Brandon O'Brien

Worldcon poet laureate Brandon 
O'Brien chatted with us at UHBCB
about the value of speculative poetry.
(Image via Facebook)

Speculative poetry is as old as the genre itself, and perhaps even started it. From the epic poems of antiquity like Gilgamesh, to the poetry of utopian fantasists of the 1800s such as William Morris, to Robert Heinlein’s Green Hills Of Earth, there is a long tradition of using the form of poetry to express emotions and convey ideas about how the world might be different. This year, for the first time, the Hugo Awards will feature a category for poetry.

Many Hugo awards recommendations lists — including our own — have been slow to include poetry. Poetry is not typically central to SFF consumption, and it can take some effort to disclose and discover speculative poetry. The form can also feel mystifying to readers who sidestepped learning about poetry in middle school and never stumbled across a welcoming introduction to it later in life.

Earlier this year, we had a conversation with 2025 Worldcon poet laureate Brandon O’Brien. He suggested that all readers have an ear for poetry. There are few people more qualified to speak to the question of speculative poetry than O'Brien, whose work has garnered multiple awards and has been published in almost every relevant genre publication.

Our conversation, below, has been edited for brevity.


UHBCB: What is the value of speculative poetry?

Brandon O’Brien: What I particularly find valuable about speculative poetry is the balance between what speculative fiction does well and what poetry does well — it's a form where you get to explore the unexpected and the unreal, to imagine the myriad pasts and futures of our world, but you also get to use its brevity and its strong formal quality as a place to play with sound and language and rhythm.

UHBCB: Does everyone have an ear for poetry? Should everyone vote in this year's Hugo for best poem?

Brandon O’Brien: Here's the thing — I think everyone undeniably has an ear for poetry, and everybody knows in their heart that they do. I just think that lots of little biases get in the way of how we see poetry.

It's the same way that I think everyone has a feel for dance even if they can't dance well, and then we grow up and we see expert dance as too technical or too high-art to judge, and it limits our appreciation — but when we see good dance, we know it, and good dance is not just ballet, but folk dancing and breakdancing and swing and salsa, and we can feel all of those, too.

O'Brien's collection Can You Sign My Tentacle
is a first-rate little book, and one of the only tomes
of poetry that's on our shelves. 

And in that same way, everyone is feeling poetry all the time: if you're listening to music you're listening to poetry, and depending on your favourite genre or favourite artist, whether you're listening to Kendrick Lamar or Metallica or Fiona Apple, you're probably listening to very challenging poetry, too. And if you're already a fan of speculative fiction you also know enough about the genre and its trappings to make an assessment of whether its tropes are being played with in interesting or revealing or emotional ways.

So if everyone who can nominate and vote in the Hugo Awards just used those senses that they already have, they're just as capable of deciding what should win in the Best Poem category.

UHBCB: What does speculative poetry do that prose fiction just can't?

Brandon O’Brien: I shudder to say ‘can’t’, because not only are there some very talented prose writers, but if I may give some love to my contemporaries, some of my favourite SFF prose writers are also poets.

Two things I think poetry gives you, as a reader and a writer, is both a sense of sound and a sense of weight. Sound because obviously you're playing with rhythm and meter in ways that should make the reader inherently imagine how the words flow on the page, how they create their own flow and their own timing. And in terms of weight, it's knowing that every word has a duty to perform, because you only have so many lines.

Even if you're writing a longer poem, you can only work with so much space before you're kind of stretching beyond your poem's range. So it's about finding ways for your poem to do more than one thing, or for them to do one thing so terribly well that your other words can do other things.

UHBCB: How did you become interested in speculative poetry?

Brandon O’Brien: I've been writing both poetry and prose since I was very young. In high school, writing poetry consumed so much of my life that even before I started performing, before I was interested in being published or anything, my classmates and my teachers noticed how invested I was in reading and writing poetry. But at that point, I wasn't aware that speculative poetry was a thing — I was writing the same sappy, emotional poetry I thought other teenagers elsewhere were writing.

It wasn't until I started widening my range that I found my way to speculative poetry. First it was discovering spoken word, and getting deep into performance; then it was performing in other spaces with other writers and discovering how many writers from the Caribbean were writing science fiction and fantasy, and wanting to be a part of that as well.

Discovering beyond those things that there was room for poetry in genre as well, that there was this whole other form that I didn't know had a name — and feeling like some of my younger poetry was actually scratching at the edges of this, trying to find a way to say unreal things — was actually really inspiring, and I've latched on ever since.

UHBCB: Is there a tension between the literalism and positivism of classic ("hard") science fiction and the genre of poetry?

Brandon O’Brien: I don't think there has to be. There is lots of room for poetry to be 'hard'. I think this is bias coming into play before the work does, again — the twin biases of real science, and therefore hard science fiction, being too pointed and strict with its language, and poetry being somehow universally defined by a freedom of language that some people interpret as looseness, as 'softness'.

But funnily enough, I'd argue that one thing I consider a strength of poetry is also undeniably present in hard scientific text such that it can be present in science fiction — a deliberateness with language, a series of strong choices about what words have weight in terms of defining the state of the world of that work.

So much of what we consider hard scientific language is inherently poetic in its application — the way scientists name things like plants or the suffixes of chemical compounds or the names of the quarks — that in a lot of ways they just blend together seamlessly with proper effort.

UHBCB: Who are some poets you think are doing interesting things in the genre right now?

Brandon O’Brien: There is a wealth of outstanding poets doing really neat work in the form. Off the top of my head: Terese Mason Pierre, Shivanee Ramlochan, Woody Dismukes, Sara Norja, Maria Schrater, Tiffany Morris, Uche Ogbuji, Sara Omer, Holly Lyn Walrath, Tamara Jerée... I could keep going for ages, but I probably mustn't.

UHBCB: Why is the Hugo Award for Best Poem important? How is it different from the Rhysling Award?

Brandon O’Brien: The Hugo Awards are one of the most prestigious awards in the genre, so having that accolade is important especially as a reminder that poetry is an equal element of the genre to prose.

The Rhyslings are just as valuable, to be sure, but it matters that there is a Hugo that values poetry just as much as it does the short story and the novella and the essay and the work of artists and podcasters.

We are in a new age as a genre community where more award spaces are opening up to rewarding the effort of poets, and I'm excited that the Hugos are a part of that mission especially because it's an award open to the public. Anyone can get a membership to the Hugos and nominate work right now as we speak, and become a part of shaping what earns an award. Especially right now, that reminder that your voice matters just as much as anyone else's is important.

On Our First Decade

This is a particularly special year for the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog, as it marks our tenth anniversary of sharing irreverent, iconoclastic, incendiary and often incorrect opinions about science fiction, fandom, and nerd culture.

The bloggers in question.

So much has changed over the course of 10 years. Back when we started this blog, everyone was wearing skinny jeans and button-front skirts, Taylor Swift was Shaking It Off, and some people still believed that climate change was real. Younger readers may not remember this, but way back then science fiction fandom often named important literary awards after famous racists.

When we started this project in 2015, the Hugo Awards were facing multiple crises: WSFS membership numbers were down, a politically motivated cadre tried to hijack the awards, and worst of all the movie Zardoz was not yet available on Netflix.

There were debates about how to handle the crisis, but prior to the launch of the UHBC Blog, nobody had considered writing reviews of science fiction novels and then posting those reviews to what was then still called the “world wide web.”

And how technology has changed as well! Although today, we’re all reading fanzines in the Mark Zuckerberg-memorial fanzine archive in the metaverse, when this blog was launched, most of us were visiting rough-hewn text-only web sites that could be accessed only via dial-up modems. We can still remember the buzzing noise of our Pravetz IMKO-1 personal computer as it slowly downloaded editions of Journey Planet, the villainous fanzine that quickly became our nemesis.

Early editions of this fanzine were typeset entirely in the font Jokerman, mimeographed onto Zip Discs, and then physically mailed to the server farms from which they’d be accessed. It is unfortunate that so many of these early issues of the UHBC Blog are inaccessible now because we no longer have a Zip Drive.

The past decade has had many ups and downs for the UHBC Blog, from highs such as getting nominated for a Hugo Award and interviewing such iconic figures as Billy Zane, to lows such as repeatedly losing the Hugo Award and getting sued by such iconic figures as Billy Zane for claiming to have interviewed him.

Thank you to all those who have contributed to the blog, read the blog, commented on the blog, or hurled invective at the blog. Without your help and disdain, we could never have become the definitive source for reliable factually accurate barely news and almost information about science fiction.

Here’s to 10 more great years together.

Sincerely,
Olav and Amanda (the latter under duress)

The Nerd Reich

Science fiction has long been the literature of nerds. The dudes in lab coats, the chess prodigies, the guys tinkering with computers. At a time when socially awkward science-obsessives were scorned by society, science fiction was sometimes a refuge … and became a haven for nerd-empowerment fables.

As such, the genre often portrays societies where eggheads and dweebs are central in the fate of society. Intellectual elites or highly skilled individuals dominate, reflecting a vision where scientific knowledge and technical prowess are the ultimate sources of power. It is not lost on us that these “nerds” are mostly depicted as male and white.

In his recent book Speculative Whiteness, Jordan S. Carroll tackles the problematic consequences of this legacy. The book traces a history of the ways in which the genre was and continues to be co-opted by the alt-right.

It’s an excellent work, and probably the most important book about science fiction written this year.

The term “speculative whiteness,” Carroll explains, is the racist notion that future orientation (i.e., the ability to imagine the long-term of the species) is an attribute unique to a specific pale-skinned subset of the species. He writes: “By laying bare [the] irresolvable inconsistencies in speculative whiteness, this book hopes to wrest speculative fiction from those who would limit it to the service of oppression.”

Over the course of a brief 100 pages, Carroll makes a strong case for not only the willful misreading of science fictional texts by far-right figures such as Richard Spencer and Giorgia Meloni but also how science fictional tropes and figures within fandom have occasionally been complicit in creating a field that is open to such interpretations.

Despite being an academic work, Speculative Whiteness is generally approachable. Carroll’s writing is occasionally urbane and witty; displaying the absurdity of racist worldviews through the irrationality of their assumptions. Carroll’s research is broad, touching on everything from Norman Spinrad’s satire of fascistic themes in the heroic fantasy The Iron Dream to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s most problematic book Lucifer’s Hammer.

Jordan S. Carroll won awards
for his previous book.
An excellent interview with
him can be found
at SFF Ruminations.
(Image via the author's BSKY)

Carroll is clearly familiar with both the literary history of science fiction, and its cultural history, as he cites discussions from conventions and fanzines. Although some revered figures in fandom are not depicted in flattering light, Carroll does not ignore the leftist and anti-fascist traditions within the community and notes the work of people like Judith Merrill, Ursula K. Le Guin and P. Djèlí Clark.

The book might have been stronger if it included more about deconstructing some of the negative subtexts in some mainstream modern science fiction. One can find current examples of nerd supremacist fables among best-sellers and works by highly paid mainstream authors. Even authors with relatively strong progressive bona fides have published tomes in which one can find troubling subtext that would fit neatly in the pages of Speculative Whiteness. In particular, we would note stories that emphasize the superiority of technological competence over more traditional sources of authority such as corporate power structures or government bureaucracy. Moreover, the subtext in these works reflect a positivist approach to human society, and sometimes reveals a level of contempt for social sciences and humanities.

We read a warning from Speculative Whiteness — in short, that nerd supremacist fables can always be co-opted by other forms of supremacism.

As a future-oriented genre, science fiction will always appeal to people who have political ideas about what the future should look like. As readers — and as critics — we should be conscious of the subtexts inherent within the imagined futures we celebrate. Speculative Whiteness is an important contribution to this discourse.