Space Nazis Must Die

Hitler’s goon squad casts a long shadow over science fiction.

 “We will fight them
on the beaches...”
(Image via IMDB.com)

It’s easy to see the outline of Nazi soldiers in the Impirial Military of Star Wars, Doctor Who’s Daleks, The Alliance in Firefly, or the Terran Federation shock troops in Blake’s 7.

Deliberate choices are made in films to offer the connotation of Nazi, often including immaculately tailored Hugo-Boss-style uniforms, Teutonic heel taps of the jackboots when marching, and Riefenstahllian visuals of parade grounds and iconic banners. Sometimes, there’s a suggestion that these fictional soldiers are motivated by some form of racist ideology, though the details of this are usually nebulous.

Let’s be clear here: Nazis are bad.

Nazis should be opposed wherever they exist: on the battlefield, at the ballot box, in the streets, and across the tenebrous depths of interstellar space. As such, depicting villains as Nazis — and therefore Nazism as villainous — has value.

But depiction without engaging with the premises of motivation is lacking. “Nazi” is such an easy signifier for evil, it often allows these narratives to avoid engaging with what evil actually means. Sure, Imperial Soldiers kill a lot of people in the Empire Strikes Back, but so do the zombies in Train to Busan, or the tornado in Twister, or the Xenomorphs in Alien. The faceless hordes provide little more than target practice for laser rays; there’s no interiority behind the mirrorshades and white perspex armour. 

Using the symbolic Nazi provides a type of worldbuilding and character shorthand for the viewer, or reader. It conveys a (false) dichotomy that provides comfort; a comfort in knowing that Nazi = bad and the other side = good. It gives the consumer a break from having to figure out bad from good for themselves.

Nazi-coded villains can be found in all kinds of SFF
from Star Wars to Planet of the Apes to Woody
Allen’s Sleeper. But do these movies invite the
viewer to consider what this iconography means?
(Image via Overture Magazine)

Science fiction’s depiction of fascism and of fascists is occasionally more pointed and valuable. Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers plays a brilliant bit of sleight of hand, first building up the Terran Federation as a heroic force through propaganda techniques, then slowly revealing to the audience that they’ve been duped into cheering for Nazis. Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream explores how heroic fantasy narratives are rooted in similar assumptions to the mythologized history that underpin fascist mythmaking. And Vernor Vinge’s Deepness In The Sky explores new ways for human freedom to be subverted by Nazis.

But the predominant conception of Nazis in science fiction is little more than a costume.

Consider: there are overt and unrepentant real-world fascists who are die-hard Star Wars fans. But we wonder – do they see the linkage? The classic trilogy encourages such minimal critical engagement that it would be easy to imagine someone spending a day at a polling station with an assault rifle intimidating BIPOC voters and then go home and watch the Special Edition of A New Hope and cheer for the Rebellion. Likewise, it’s not uncommon to see left-wing pro-democracy activists involved in

The fascist tendency to view human beings as
tools, and the prison system as a source of 
expendable labour is depicted well in Andor.
Some fans didn’t get the message. 
(Image via Polygon)

the 501st Legion and dressing up as fascist Stormtroopers on a regular basis. This is not to play any false equivalence between these two groups; but rather to point out how vague and tenuous the depiction of fascism has traditionally been in Star Wars and how this leaves the viewer free to engage with its narratives at a superficial level.

And all of this is why the most recent iteration of Star Wars is so refreshing. Andor presents a multi-layered view at the Empire that explores the seductive power that authoritarian systems can have on their participants: the capitalist class that profits from oppression and is lulled by the illusion of security; the mid-level bureaucrats who fetishize order and see the opportunity for advancement; the ground-level workers who sell out their peers just to escape the butcher’s block for another day. At the risk of hyperbole, it sometimes feels as if the series is building a taxonomy of fascists; an Audubon Guide to the Nazis In Our Midst.

Andor suggests that there is no one type of fascist in the Star Wars universe, and in doing so makes the empire more believable, and the imperial system to be far scarier. The genre needs more of this. These may be stories that are often set in a galaxy far, far, away … but fascism is never as distant as it should be.

Crab Your Enthusiasm

Evolutionary biologists have long studied a phenomenon known as “carcinisation.” It’s a term used to describe the process by which a variety of non-crab creatures facing similar environmental pressures evolve to become more crab-like.

We would suggest that something similar happens as long-running science fiction franchises evolve over time. 

Although individual episodes of television are not exactly randomly-varying-replicators, the non-random survival of such stories within the collective imagination can lead to similar outcomes to those of convergent evolution. Major television, movie, and comic book universes all feed on the attention spans and wallets of the SFF-consuming public, and are thus adapting to one shared ecological niche. It’s easier, and safer for large media conglomerates to produce the least-objectionable programming than it is to produce something unique.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and
also anything that isn’t a crab.
(Image CC BY 4.0 by J. Antonio Baeza)

The late Jerry Pournelle once observed that “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.” Fundamentally, we have to recognize that the creation of these long-running media franchises is a product of bureaucratic commerce first, and of art second. Those in charge of these media machines are dedicated to the survival of the corporation — and thus the franchise — first and foremost, and telling a compelling story is a tertiary objective at best.

So what does the carcinisation of mass-media science fiction look like? A franchise initially premised on historical time travel eventually adds antagonistic warrior aliens, while a franchise initially premised on aliens and space travel eventually ends up being about fixing the past. For example, over the past few decades Star Trek and Doctor Who have significantly converged. There might still be slight differences between the modern incarnations of the two shows; akin to the differences between king crabs and porcelain crabs … but they are not as dissimilar as their ancestors were.

Due to the ever-rotating nature of media franchise authorship, diverging creative visions essentially produce a near-random but finite variation of plot elements. When a narrative runs long enough, most of the stories that easily fit within the base premise get told. If there hasn’t been time travel yet in your science fiction or fantasy franchise, after about a decade one of the writers will likely feel the need to add it. If there hasn’t been an evil Lovecraftian god, that’s an easy hour of television to sell. Over time, the plot elements that are popular with audiences become encoded as tropes in the franchise, and eventually are seen as “integral” to an understanding of the series’ canon.

Let’s look at the case example of “your friendly neighbourhood” Spider-Man, a multi-media narrative

Does it seem odd than a story
about a school for teenage misfits
with psychic powers eventually
becomes space opera?
(Image via Marvel.com)

media franchise that began with a fairly simple premise: Peter Parker is a teenager with the abilities of a spider and uses those abilities to fight crime. Early stories stayed relatively close to this premise. Over the years, this fairly street-level and human-scale story became increasingly bombastic and less grounded: he battled his own clone (1973), was transported to a distant planet and bonded with an alien (1984), made a deal with the literal devil (2007), and fought a demented interstellar god of death with the fate of the universe on the line (2017). The “friendly neighbourhood” to which his tagline refers at some point became the entire cosmos of every universe across space and time. To someone approaching the character from a perspective not steeped in the history of the character, these stories would likely seem increasingly disconnected from the original premise.

To one degree or another, the same scope bloat has affected just about every mass-media franchise from Star Wars to Superman. Sadly, it leads to less diverse storytelling; it would take few changes to turn any of the most recent three Spider-Man movies into episodes of Doctor Who.

It could be suggested that the carcinisation of mass-media science fiction and fantasy has accelerated as

In the media landscape, just as in nature,
that which persists does so by
putting its survival first and
foremost, whether the result
is a butterfly or a botfly.
(Image via Karsten Heinrich)

the anglosphere media markets have consolidated; there used to be much more distinction between Canadian television and British television, but the internet has helped blur those lines. Thanks to increasingly interconnected communications networks, there is more of an intellectual monoculture across the English-speaking world than ever before. Rather than distinct media ecosystems, they have converged. This can be paralleled to an ecological niche that is declining in biodiversity; and in such situations the population of specific species can explode.

This is a phenomenon that we, as a community of science fiction enthusiasts, should be concerned about. I mean, how many crabs do we need? And what are they driving out of the habitat?

Going Back To The Same Well

The Best Dramatic Presentation (short form) ballot seems to indicate that Hugo nominators are a group that like to go back to the same well, year after year. This year’s shortlist, in fact, may represent the nadir of this trend.

The final episode of She-Ra and the Princess of
Power earned the show its first Hugo nomination.
(Image via she-raandtheprincessesofpower.fandom.com)

Consider that between the six finalists there are representative entries from the three of the screen franchises most-often represented on Hugo ballots: Doctor Who (six wins out of 35 nominations) Star Wars (three wins out of ten nominations) and The Good Place (three wins out of six nominations). Of the entire ballot, only the She-Ra and the Princess of Power episode “Heart” represents a franchise that has never won a Hugo Award.

To be fair, many of the entries on this shortlist are excellent representatives of their respective fictional universes. “Gaugamela” from The Expanse plays with tension without descending into melodrama; an extraordinary hour of science fiction television. “The Jedi” from Mandalorian tells a mostly self-contained story exceedingly well, all while teeing up the narrative arc for the rest of the season. While not as carefully structured as the other nominated episode from Mandalorian, “The Rescue” provides the payoff that longtime fans likely want. And the funny, charming, and genuinely surprising “Fugitive of the Judoon” might be the finest episode of the Chibnall era of Doctor Who.

As has been widely noted across the Anglosphere, there has been an increasing reliance among media corporations to lean on their franchises instead of developing new content. It is simply a safer bet for movie and television executives to invest in iterations of existing intellectual property instead of trying something new. To some degree, it’s disheartening to see that at least the majority of those nominating for the short-form dramatic Hugo are reinforcing this corporate risk aversion. It might be noted that only once in the past decade has there been a Dramatic Presentation Short Form shortlist on which a majority of nominees were from franchises that had not previously won the award.

Last year there were several excellent science fiction and fantasy television shows that might have benefited from the attention offered by a Hugo nod.

The Robbie Amell post-cyberpunk comedy Upload, the oddly compelling Japanese series Alice in Borderland, Alex Garland's meticulously planned out Silicon Valley fable DEVS, and the intricate and beautiful German time travel epic Dark come to mind.

Critically acclaimed SF horror Lovecraft County
creator Misha Green was blindsided by the decision
to cancel the program. It deserved a Hugo nod, 
as well as a second season.
(Image via NBCNews.com)

The abrupt cancellations of Lovecraft County, I Am Not Okay With This, Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist and Tales From The Loop (among others) seem to indicate that even the best-reviewed original (non-franchise) content is now in constant jeopardy. If we want to enjoy a mass-media landscape that continues to produce diverse, nuanced, and engaging stories, it will take concerted collective effort to ensure that such stories thrive. Hugo nods (and Emmy nods) may not be enough to secure a place for such works, but we’d argue they are at least a part of the solution.

It is interesting to note that in the prose fiction categories, Hugo nominators have long shown an aversion to recognizing licensed franchise works. It seems that the voting public is averse to recognizing such works — even critically acclaimed, fan beloved, and bestselling works such as Diane Duane’s Star Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally, and Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novel Heir To The Empire. This is not a complaint on our part; we are entirely supportive of this unwritten rule to avoid franchize fiction in the prose categories, but it seems odd that other Hugo categories now embrace this sort of profit-chasing multimedia universe.

This year’s short-form dramatic Hugo ballot is one of the better ones in recent memory, with works that are at least mostly enjoyable delves into established (and perhaps somewhat tired) universes. If the nominees were all we watched this year, we’d be left wishing for new worlds to explore.

Ignoring Foreign Films in 1964

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

There was no Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1964.

Godzilla vs. King Kong remains
one of the most successful Japanese
movies of all time. Still didn't 
earn a Hugo Award nomination.
(Image via DenOfGeek)

As had happened in the previous several years, fans had been solicited for nominations in a variety of categories including Best Dramatic Presentation. But of the 165 people who sent in nominating ballots, fewer than a dozen people offered suggestions for what should be considered in this category.

In response to the extraordinarily low number of ballots cast in the Best Dramatic Presentation category in 1961, a paragraph was added to the WSFS constitution as Section 2.1: “At the discretion of an individual convention committee, if the lack of nominations or the final votes in a specific category shows a marked lack of interest in that category on the part of the voters, the Award in that category shall be cancelled for that year.”

And for the first time in 1964, this clause was invoked by the Worldcon Committee, who called the disappointing ballot count evidence of a “total lack of interest in the category.”

But we would suggest that this ‘lack of interest’ in 1964 reflects both that it was an exceedingly mediocre year for celluloid science fiction in North America, and that the Hugo Awards remained a largely parochial award that rarely recognized works made outside of the United States or the United Kingdom.

During a 40-year stretch from 1964-2003, no foreign films were shortlisted for the Hugo Award: no nominations for Stalker, Akira, Fantastic Planet, City of the Lost Children, Solaris, Planet Of The Vampires, or for Alphaville.

In terms of the 1964 Hugo Awards, it seems a travesty that the Chechoslovakian epic Ikarie XB-1

Ikarie XB-1 is among the best science fiction movies
ever made, and far ahead of its time on many fronts
including depiction of competent women astronauts.
(Image via JanusFilms.com)

didn’t get any recognition. Loosely based on Stanisław Lem’s The Magellanic Cloud, the movie chronicles the multi-year voyage of humanity’s first expedition to Alpha Centauri. The production design by Karel Lukás is among the most influential in the history of science fiction cinema, inspiring everyone from director Stanley Kubrik to designer Matt Jeffreys to architect Eero Aarnio.

The sets built by Lukás help bring to life one of the most mature and human-focused science fiction stories on screen that had been filmed to date. Although the story starts slowly, the filmmaker builds viewer’s emotional investment in the crew and their relationships, and the payoff is excellent because it makes later moments connect.

There are numerous details that we loved about Ikarie XB-1: The non-military international crew, the belief in science, the reaching out to new civilizations in peace and friendship, the fact that the crew has women in positions of authority, the moments of philosophical musing. Combined with the high production value and the technical expertise of the editing and filmmaking, this is a stone-cold classic of science fiction.

Another notable omission from Hugo contention in 1964 was The Mouse On The Moon, an odd

One of the many shots from Ikarie XB-1 that gets
compared to Kubrik's 2001.
(Image via JanusFilms.com)

science-fictional sequel to Peter Sellers’ surprise 1959 hit The Mouse That Roared. This was a great-looking movie despite being made on a shoestring budget with only one member of the original cast returning for a second movie. Notably, the recasting included future Doctor Who companion Bernard Cribbins, Terry Thomas who received a Golden Globe nomination for the movie, and Margaret Rutherford who would go on to win an Academy Award a few months later for her performance in The V.I.P.s.

This little-remembered sequel, which depicts the fictional European micronation Grand Fenwick using their terrible wine-making skills to develop a space program to rival the Soviets and Americans, is charming.

Given its then-unknown director, lack of resources, and insane plot, the movie has all the ingredients of a flop. But inventive reuse of props and sets from other productions, breakout performances from some then C-list actors, and first-rate cinematography made this one of the most surprisingly winsome science fiction movies of the year.

The Mouse On The Moon helped propel director
Richard Lester to a longstanding collaboration 
with The Beatles, directing multiple movies
with the various members of the band.
(Image via ParkCircusFilm.com)

The movie (along with his short film The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film) helped Director Richard Lester earn the opportunity to direct The Beatles’ first movie A Hard Day’s Night.

Several more mainstream movies might also have merited some attention from the Worldcon voting membership: Roger Corman’s X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes is a well-done mad-science gone wrong parable whose narrative arc is not dissimilar from that of The Invisible Man. It’s among the best movies Corman has ever directed.

Likewise the 1963 cinematic adaptation of John Wyndam’s The Triffids is a competent and visually interesting film, though it excises the novel’s most interesting themes surrounding labour and colonialism. The result is mostly similar to a decent zombie movie.

On television, and in retrospect, the obvious major contender for a Hugo Award casts a very long shadow: the first season of Doctor Who. Revisiting these episodes with 50 years of hindsight is an eye-opening experience because within the first two serials (those that aired in 1963) you can see almost everything that made the show such an enduring classic: the sense of wonder, the dynamic between the Doctor and companions, and the engaging plots.

If we had been nominating in 1964, the serial we would have put on our ballots would be the second one The Daleks. Although that series introduced Doctor Who’s most enduring foes, the story has more in common with the 1960 movie The Time Machine than it does with later Dalek stories; the bifurcation of a race into a hideous violent species (Morlocks/Daleks) and a peaceful beautiful race (Eloi/Thals), the moralizing over the effects of global warfare. Made on less than a pittance of a budget, with barely two sets, the actors make extraordinary use of what little space they have to act.

In 1963, the best science fiction on screen was not coming from America: It was coming from Czechoslovakia, from Japan, and from England. If Hugo voters had been able to cast their nets a little more widely, they would have found some dramatic presentations worthy of a Hugo Award in 1964.

The Textual and the Intertextual

Are Best Dramatic Presentations celebrated too much for their context, rather than on their text?

In 2018, Westworld’s second season was lifeless, but for those who waded through the robotic acting and pedestrian plotting, the eighth episode of the season “Kiksuya” stood alone as an exploration of loss, grief, and cultural genocide. Kiksuya’s text was excellent, the context sub-par.

Fuelled by nostalgia and avarice, X-Files returned to television screens in 2016 with two new seasons that have been described as bewildering, threadbare, and out-of-touch. But amidst a morass of repetitive and pointless episodes, writer-director Darin Morgan managed to craft a near-perfect parable about the fallibility of human memory with his one-off episode “The Lost Art Of Forehead Sweat.” Again, an excellent text is found in a sub-par context.

One of the weirder episodes of X-Files
aired in 2016, and was better than
anything the show had delivered
in several seasons.
(Image via xfiles-fanclub.blogspot.com)

If an audience had still been paying attention to The X-Files or Westworld, one of those episodes might have garnered awards attention. Conversely, it is hard to imagine works like Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, or “The Family Of Blood” being recognized on their own merits rather than on the strength of the series of which they were a part.

Which raises the question of whether the Hugos for Best Dramatic Presentation are awarded based on the textual or on the intertextual. In essence, many dramatic presentations seem to serve as avatars of their respective Cinematic Universes, rather than being judged strictly on what is in that individual episode or film.

This leads to many excellent one-off works being overlooked in favour of run-of-the-mill entries of popular franchises. With the benefit of hindsight, is Dr. Who’s “Planet Of The Dead” really better than Misfits “Episode Six,” or Sarah Connor Chronicles’ “Adam Raised A Cain”? In our eyes, the answer is a resounding “No.”

Of all TV series, Dr. Who might mean the most to fandom overall because of the weight of 50 years of goodwill built up by stories like "Blink", "Fury From The Deep", "Delta and the Bannerman", and "The Happiness Patrol". It is understandable then, that there is a block of voters for whom Dr. Who will always be on their nominating ballot, because it is first considered on the basis of being Dr. Who, rather than being assessed as whether or not it is absolutely the most sterling example of science fiction.

We would suggest that two of the most egregious examples of honouring a work based on associations that have little to do with the work itself were on the ballot just last year. These were the cacophonous mcguffin quest Avengers: Infinity War and the execrable and racist Batman film that made the Retro Hugo ballot. Batman is clearly a popular franchise with a strong fanbase, but we highly doubt that most Hugo nominators had actually seen the character’s first foray into cinema. Avengers: Infinity War is three hours of visual noise that capitalized on the good will generated by 10 years of good MCU movies.

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(image via NME.com)

We have previously argued that annual awards are in some ways the ‘first draft’ of the cultural canon. The shortlisted works are often the standard by which science fiction is judged, and are an important vehicle for continued rediscovery of classic works by future SF fans. With this in mind, imagine how mystifying Avengers: Infinity War might be to someone who watches it 40 years from now, and experiences it without the context of 18 previous movies: Steve Rogers’ reunion with Bucky would fall flat; Peter Parker’s death would be stripped of impact; the revelation that The Red Skull is guarding an Infinity Gem would have little resonance.

In terms of directing, let’s compare the movie that built the emotional weight of Gamora’s relationships to the other characters (Guardians of the Galaxy) with the movie that offers us the “payoff” (Avengers: Infinity War). GoG’s directing provides some thoughtful and interesting camera work (remember those amazing opening shots of a tiny figure dancing in the ruins of an ancient civilisation?), at every turn Infinity War’s directors offer pedestrian tried-and-true techniques like snap-zooms on falling figures and jerky camera work for fights. More importantly, major moments in Avengers: Infinity War (such as the death of Gamora) aren’t meaningful unless the viewer assesses them with knowledge of texts other than Avengers: Infinity War.

In December, the New York Times’ published a list of what they considered the best individual episodes of television to have aired in 2019 — its an interesting list with a lot of hidden gems in it (including a reminder that in an otherwise critically scorned season, Game Of Thrones turned in one excellent episode). Tellingly, there’s very little overlap with a separate article published a few days earlier in which the same critics had selected their list of the best overall series to have aired in 2019. Perhaps it is worth recognizing that there is a difference between what is a ‘best series,’ and ‘best individual episode.’

Some might suggest reorganizing the Best Dramatic Presentation categories into ‘Best Series,’ ‘Best Episode,’ and ‘Best Movie’ … but this risks both adding to the confusion, and could exacerbate the already unmanageable amount of media consumption needed to make informed choices as a Hugo voter.

As with many aspects of Hugo Award voting, we suspect that more discussion of these systemic biases is the way to address these issues.

Make Time For Years And Years

Russel T. Davies has usually been the wet firecracker of television writers. Despite this, he has given

Emma Thompson headlines a superb cast
in the BBC/HBO series Years and Years.
(image via iNews) 

viewers possibly the best science fiction on television in 2019 with his six-part miniseries Years And Years.

Over the course of more than 20 years writing for television, Davies has built a reputation as a capable writer who crafts diverse and emotionally compelling characters, builds suspense and tension effectively, and then pulls the rug out from under viewers through trite and banal endings.

This tendency was the signature aspect of his work on Doctor Who. As we have noted before, deus ex machina is his stock in trade. In the penultimate episode of DW’s Season 2 (The Sound of Drums), The Master is built up into an imposing and compelling adversary, but in the finale he’s defeated by people thinking happy thoughts. In Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks, the entirety of the plot of the two-part episode is undone in seconds through largely incomprehensible means.

His new six-episode series premiered on HBO on Monday night, shortly after completing its initial run on the BBC. True to his oeuvre, Davies’ sixth and final hour-long episode of Years And Years might not stick the landing, but the previous five episodes are compelling enough to make up for that.

The series chronicles the intertwined stories of a multi-generational family living in and near Manchester over the course of 15 years starting in 2019.

The four middle-aged siblings; Stephen, Daniel, Rosie and Edith Lyons, their grandmother, their spouses and their children provide viewers with different vantage points of a rapidly changing future that is marked with chaos and uncertainty. Woven throughout the series are the rise and ramifications of a far-right political figure Vivienne Rook, which give viewers cause for reflection on current populist political movements.

There’s a soap-opera nature to the series that occasionally feels improbable, but that same aspect

Russel T. Davies can't deliver a good
ending, but for once that doesn't
spoil the overall greatness of a show.
(image via BBC)

makes it easy to suspend disbelief about technological speculation while being pulled into the emotional lives of compellingly flawed characters. When banks fail and brownouts become the norm, you both see and feel the impact on consumers and homeowners. When medical technology advances and health care is privatized, you see and feel what it means for both the person affected and those close to them.

Some of the brilliance of the series is not even what it shows explicitly, but in what is implied in throw-away lines. Bananas are extinct? It’s not safe for U.K. citizens to visit the U.S. anymore? The Tower of Pisa is no longer leaning? There are so many details to appreciate.

The final episode is a disappointment in exceptionally predictable ways. Bad guys are defeated in a particularly trite (and improbable) ending that undermines some of the emotional weight of the series, though at least Davies has the courage to imply that the systemic issues that led to fascism have not been overcome completely.

Years And Years is a series that is more than the sum of its parts. No single episode deserves a Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form Hugo, but the whole should be seriously considered in the Long Form category. The continuous march of technology (and those who control it) – and the creeping rise of fascism – are examined in an engaging way by the birdseye view of years and years of development over the course of all the episodes.

Does Years And Years bear all the hallmarks of Russell T. Davies’ writing? In both the best and worst ways, it does. It may also be his masterwork. Years And Years deserves very serious consideration for a Hugo.

An appreciation of Alasdair Stuart

Alasdair Stuart’s mild Manx accent might be one of the more recognizable voices in science fiction.

Alasdair Stuart and his Escape Artists
crew at the 2018 Hugo Awards
(Photo via Olav Rokne & Amanda Wakaruk) 

Any science fiction fan who listens to podcasts is likely familiar with his work as host of Pseudopod, as well as his frequent contributions to other podcasts in the Escape Artists network.

In addition to this high-profile work, Stuart’s contributions appear in a variety of venues including the Barnes and Noble’s website, Tor.com, SYFY.com, his personal blog, and many, many more. Stuart is prolific and varied in his output, and much of it could be classed as fan writing. 

Which is why it is surprising that Stuart has yet to appear on the Hugo Award ballot in the Best Fan Writer category. Last year, he was a scant 13 nominating votes shy of being a finalist. Several members of our book club have had him on our nominating ballots repeatedly over the past few years; hopefully this will be the year that finally sees him recognized by his peers.

In terms of simple quality of writing and argumentation, Stuart has long been one of the finer writers

Stuart may be a bigger fan of Doctor
Who than we are. But his analysis
is always worth reading.
(Image via Variety.com)

engaging in critical examinations of science fiction, fantasy, and fan culture. This is not to say that we necessarily agree with Stuart’s analysis of every matter (particularly when it comes to his unflagging support of Doctor Who), but his arguments are always worth consideration.

But more than this, 2018 has so far been a particularly good year for Stuart’s oeuvre. He’s provided us with an examination of storytelling as a tool, he’s written an ode to Burt Reynolds work in science fiction, he offered an argument for hope, and he’s watched and reviewed all the Predator movies (so you don’t have to).

In one of our favourite pieces, he writes: “Stories teach us how to live in the world and how to make the world better for those who follow us and for ourselves. They are a memetic exoskeleton that has wrapped around humanity as long as we’ve been humanity. Stories teach us how to be us.”

Stuart also contributes to the science fiction community through guesting on innumerable podcasts and blogs. He has shown a willingness to help out small-time operations, and to signal-boost causes he feels are worthwhile.

Eligibility for the Fan Writer category explicitly excludes work that appears in professional publications. However, any person’s Fan Writing is going to be judged within the context of their overall output, and many professional and semi-professional writers have been honoured as fan writers. For example, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the people voting for Bob Tucker in 1970 were unaware of his professional work or his significant contributions to fandom.

In that spirit, it’s worth noting Alasdair Stuart’s broader works within fandom this year, such as his examination of Hugo finalist The Deep, by Clipping, his interview with Brooke Bolander on Barnes and Noble’s website, and his hosting of Pseudopod. 

To bolster the case that Stuart’s active fandom should be recognized, we ask Worldcon members to consider his rescuing of the Escape Artists network when they were going through troubled times in 2013, his strong presence on Twitter, and his contributions to innumerable conventions and panel discussions.

As the owner of — and part of the team that creates — the Escape Artists podcast network, Stuart had a hand in one of last year’s Best Semiprozine finalists. But that is a group nomination, and it doesn’t recognize Stuart individually as a writer or as a fan. 

Even if the award for Best Fan Writer has only existed since 1967, variations such as “Actifan,” “Reviewer” and “Fan Personality” filled a similar role in earlier years. In its current form as one of our most community-driven awards, Best Fan Writer might be the award that is at the heart of what the Hugo Awards represent. Fan writing is a community-building activity that has been important to the genre since before the Golden Age of science fiction.

By carrying on traditions that have existed since the dawn of fandom, Alasdair Stuart embodies exactly the type of fandom that the Best Fan Writer Hugo should celebrate.

Tedium And Relative Dimensions In Sheffield

Since the BBC brought the series back in 2005, slightly more than 42 per cent of all finalists for the

It took the BBC too long to cast a
woman as the Doctor. But representation
is not enough — the stories need to
be better than they have been.
(Image via Variety.com)

Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form have been episodes of Doctor Who. That is too high a proportion.

In each of the past 12 years, there has been at least one episode on the shortlist, and sometimes three or four. This was even true in 2017, a year in which only one episode of Doctor Who was eligible, and it was execrable.

This is evidence of a constituency of Hugo voters who love the show enough to reward even its most mediocre output. Given this level of support, and the hype surrounding Jodie Whittaker’s claiming of the mantle, “Doctor,” it seems inevitable that Sunday night’s premiere of Season 11 "The Woman Who Fell to Earth" will be on the 2019 Hugo Award shortlist.

It’s easy to understand why many people will argue that this episode — or another one from the upcoming season — is worth nominating. For one thing, the cinematography is better than we’re used to from Doctor Who. And there are some good moments in the writing. And Jodie Whittaker is a superb actor who embodies the character of the Doctor.

Whittaker’s excellence should come as no
surprise. As anyone who has seen the 2007
remake of teenage boarding school comedy
St. Trinian’s can attest, Whittaker is able
to elevate even the weakest of material.
(Image via IO9.com)

This is certainly good by the standards of late-era Doctor Who. What is less certain is whether or not any Doctor Who over the past five years or so has been worth recognizing with a spot on the Hugo Award ballot.

When Russell T. Davies rebooted the series in 2005, several of his writerly quirks became emblematic of the series. These include the misunderstood alien, the reversal of expectations, and of course the glowing energy that fixes everything in the end.

At first, these quirks were unexpected, as in the 2005 two-parter "Empty Child" / "The Doctor Dances", when the misunderstood alien is revealed to be a medical device, and suddenly every victim of the plague is instantly healed with magical glowing energy. As the series became a runaway hit, and nobody wanted to mess with a winning formula, these quirks became templates, and the series became stale.

How many times over the past decade have we seen plots in which the world is certain to be

Frankly, the most daring choice that
show runner Chris Chibnall has made
is to set Season 11 in Sheffield.
(Image via BlogtorWho.com)

destroyed, or humanity wiped out, only to have everything solved by magical glowing energy? This is fairy-tale science fiction devoid of internal logic, where every explanation is hand-waiving, and no resolution is final because the wizard can do anything that is convenient for the plot.

There is little hope that new showrunner Chris Chibnall will break the series out of this template. Although he’s done brilliantly with shows like Life on Mars and Broadchurch, his contributions to previous seasons of Doctor Who have been entirely uninspiring, ranging from the melodramatic ("42" and "The Hungry Earth") to the risible ("Dinosaurs On A Spaceship").

What does give us some hope are the rumours that both Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Sharon Horgan will be writing episodes this season. In the unlikely event that they are given the freedom to take narrative risks, the result could be quite good.

Returning to last Sunday’s pilot episode, despite Jodie Whittaker’s strength, and despite the

It's actually kind of embarrassing to
realize that The Return of Doctor
Mysterio was included on the Hugo
shortlist.
(Image via Space.ca) 

significant improvement to cinematography, the monster-of-the-week plot is largely interchangeable with 95 per cent of the episodes that have aired in the past decade. The villain is exceptionally boring, the dramatic tension is nonexistent and the supporting cast is pleasantly multicultural in an unchallenging way.

With a BBC that now depends on revenues brought in by Doctor Who fandom, there is substantial pressure for the showrunner to engage in franchise maintenance, rather than construct compelling and potentially challenging stories.

Viewers deserve better than safe narrative choices that lead to mediocrity. The Hugos should reward greatness.