A Fantasy Of Suburbia (Hugo Cinema 1991)

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

All Hugo Award winners receive the same “rocketship” trophy, regardless of category. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the cultural norm of ranking some Hugo categories as more prestigious than others has extended to the presentation of the actual trophy.

Paul Verhoeven was shortlisted for the Hugo Award
three times for classic movies that critique capitalism,
but he never took home the trophy.
(Image via IMDB)

At the Chicago Worldcon in 1991 — as had happened at several previous conventions — the chrome rocket portions of the trophies arrived at the convention with minor imperfections. After a careful examination, the one with the fewest scratches and dents was used for the Best Novel trophy, while the second-best went to the Best Novella trophy.

In some previous years, Best Dramatic Presentation had received the worst trophy. But in 1991, it received the ninth-best trophy, with the most damaged ones assigned to Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist. This could be taken as a measure of the increasing prestige of the Best Dramatic Hugo.

More than 800 people voted in the category, as there were strong feelings expressed about the top two contenders. Paul Verhoven’s Total Recall had been the standard-bearer for fans of hard-edged classic science fiction, while Tim Burton’s gothic fable Edward Scissorhands was beloved by the more whimsical factions of fandom. The winner was decided by just six votes — a margin of less than 0.7 per cent. The shortlist was rounded out by the top-grossing movie of the year, Ghost, a well-liked sequel to the Hugo-winning Back To The Future, and The Witches, the last theatrically-released movie from iconic puppeteer Jim Henson.

In File 770, Mike Glyer noted that, “The Dramatic Presentation category clearly generated the most ardent feelings… on the other hand, the category was also far and away the highest in number of “No award” votes cast.”

There are some notable omissions from the shortlist. The time-loop movie 12:01 P.M. — adapted from a story by Richard A. Lupoff — earned a spot on the Academy Award shortlist for best live-action short film. Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch remains a cult classic and is filled with charm. And the big-screen debut of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles earned rave reviews and became the highest-grossing independent film of all time. It is also worth noting that one of the most well-remembered Star Trek episodes “Yesterday’s Enterprise” did not make the final ballot.

The weakest link on the shortlist is Disney’s The Witches, which eked on to the ballot with just 27 nominating votes, and earned less than 10 per cent of the first-place votes on the final ballot. Based on a story by Roald Dahl (who died shortly after the movie was released), The Witches follows a Norwegian child and his grandmother as they uncover a plot by an international cabal of witches. It’s a wildly uneven affair, with extraordinary puppet effects used when the child is turned into a mouse, and an excellent performance from Rowan Atkinson, but the pacing is off base and the whole thing is filled with drawn out, boring sequences featuring Anjelica Huston mugging for the camera. The gender depiction is painful for modern audiences. In addition to being extremely condescending, there are mean-spirited generalizations throughout, such as the dictum that every woman without children or who wears comfortable shoes is villainous. It’s a leaden movie that probably didn’t deserve recognition at the Hugos.

The final Back To The Future film returns to many of the same tropes that had been explored in the first two movies, this time sending Marty McFly (Canadian Michael J. Fox) to the 1880s. There’s the tried-and-true plot of having engineering challenges to overcome in pursuit of returning home, the requisite romance arc, and the time constraint that must be overcome. Variety magazine praised the film for its exuberance, for giving Christopher Lloyd a chance to take centre stage, and for letting the series go out on a high note. It’s all very entertaining, and a tight script, but the story doesn’t stand on its own, and it’s difficult to argue that it was worthy of Hugo Award recognition.

The iconic pottery scene from Ghost
is one of the most memorable moments
in all of 1990s cinema. 
(Image via Youtube)

Ghost, a romantic supernatural drama starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore was the top-grossing movie of the year and earned five Academy Award nominations — including best supporting actress for Whoopi Goldberg. It remains entertaining and charming, though many of us had forgotten just how silly the movie is. The movie stars Patrick Swayze as Sam, the ghost of an ethical investment banker who must protect his former girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore) when she is pursued by Sam’s former colleagues. Despite relatively solid special effects, we found the idea of a Wall Street investment banker who is ethical to be largely unbelievable.

Although the broader public flocked to see Ghost, the leading two vote earners at that year’s Hugo Awards were Total Recall and Edward Scissorhands.

The second of Paul Verhoeven’s trilogy of Hugo-shortlisted science fiction movies about capitalism, Total Recall was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” On a Worldcon panel a couple of years after the movie’s release, Daniel Kimmel complained that the movie strayed too far from the original story. The film was released at the peak of Arnold Schwarzenegger's action star era, with the Austrian bodybuilder taking on the role of Douglas Quaid, a blue-collar worker whose reality becomes unglued during a memory-implant holiday. Made with directorial panache and clever use of Mexico City’s brutalist architecture as a backdrop, it’s a surprisingly good action movie with interesting commentary on colonialism, power, and the construction of self. Total Recall quickly caught the attention of academics, including Donald E. Palumbo, who wrote about the film’s use of ambiguity, deception, and illusion in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Despite the prevalence of bare breasts in the movie, the female characters have agency. “Total Recall reveals surprising intelligence and humor beneath the muscle. It has a sharp, witty script. The plot is sinewed with ingenious twists,” wrote Brian Johnson in MacLeans magazine. For most members of our cinema club, it was the best screen science fiction of the year.

Tim Burton’s oddball Frankenstein knock-off Edward Scissorhands was praised by fans for the director’s rococo directorial style and lead actor Johnny Depp’s soulful performance, but the mainstream reaction at the time was more negative. In the Hollywood Reporter, Duane Byrge compared the movie to a Saturday Night Live skit gone wrong, and wrote “Seemingly trying to hack out a sort of Capraesque fable from its crudely welded parts, Scissorhands never imparts any sort of glowing, humanistic message.”

It is not lost on us that Edward's only value to most
members of normative society is as a worker or servant.
His ability to tend to yards, groom dogs, or cut hair
is the only value that middle-class citizens find in him.
(Image via IMDB)

The movie follows an artificial human constructed by an inventor who didn’t have time to finish his creation, leaving the title character with eponymous scissors for hands. Given the name “Edward,” he’s taken in by a suburban family and impresses their neighbours with tricks until his presence threatens existing relationships, after which his oddity becomes a focal point for social exile. Australian fan Alan Stewart praised the movie’s “rich commentary on suburbia,” and others suggested it was a parable about how fans are excluded from mundane society.

Although several members of our group did not care for Edward Scissorhands, at least one found the movie meaningful as a metaphor for neurodivergence. The protagonist of the movie has difficulty expressing himself verbally and emotionally. He often says very little, and people misinterpret his intentions, which can be interpreted as a reflection on how many neurodivergent people struggle with typical communication styles, are misunderstood despite good intentions, and may express care in nontraditional ways.

One aspect of the film that most of us felt has aged poorly is its approach to gender representation. In Burton’s depiction of society, every woman is a gossiping shrew, and every man is emotionally stunted. For some, this made the movie unpalatable, though others defended it as representing the social estrangement felt by some people with autism.

Contemporaneous discussions of the Hugo Award race for Best Dramatic Presentation put in stark relief the tension within fandom between those who prefer whimsical speculative fiction and those who yearn for high adventure with spaceships and jetpacks. It was a year where the standard-bearers for each side of the debate were very clear, and the vote was extraordinarily close.

Much as had occurred when the vote was taken in 1991, the tension between these two visions of speculative fiction continued to inspire strong disagreements.

The Year That Science Fiction Won The Culture War (Hugo Cinema 1983)

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

At 1:30 p.m. on Friday, September 2, 1983 at the Baltimore convention Centre, a panel discussing the previous year’s best movies and television shows was held as part of ConStellation, the 41st World Science Fiction Convention.

In 1982, audiences flocked to see Spielberg's
watered-down and mawkish remake of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
(Image via Cult Following)

“It is obvious,” opined one of the panelists, “that E.T. will win the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.”

There seemed to be a consensus that E.T. — a $360-million blockbuster box-office juggernaut — was going to win the award … though some fans such as Richard E. Geis (who himself won a Hugo that year) groused that they were, “sick of the Steven Spielberg juvenile sweetness-n-light approach to SF.”

On the Sunday evening of the convention at the Hugo Awards ceremony (which featured a crab feast), however, the audience reacted with stunned silence — and then rapturous applause — as toastmaster Jack L. Chalker read out that Blade Runner had taken home the trophy.

It was not an uncontroversial decision; Blade Runner seems to have been championed by old-school science fiction fans and those who wanted the genre to take itself seriously, while E.T. was the choice of more whimsical fans. One fanzine churlishly chalked up Blade Runner’s win to nostalgia and a desire to give a Hugo to the recently deceased Philip K. Dick. 

Not all science fiction movies
of 1982 are certified classics.
(Image via IMDB)

It had been an impressive year for science fiction cinema. The Hugo shortlist featured classics like Blade Runner, E.T., and Mad Max: The Road Warrior alongside The Wrath of Khan (often regarded as the best Star Trek movie) and The Dark Crystal (which retains a cult following today).

Beyond the shortlist were even more important classics, almost too many to talk about in a blog post. John Carpenter’s The Thing remains one of the greatest science fiction horror movies ever made. Special effects juggernaut Tron kicked off the digital revolution in how movies were made. Don Bluth’s first movie as a director, The Secret of Nimh, is still beloved by younger audiences. Rainer Wenrer Fassbender’s Kamikaze 1989 brought the cyberpunk movement to Germany. French director René Laloux worked with famed illustrator Mœbius on an animated space opera Les Maîtres du Temps. John Milius brought Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian to the screen. In Poland, Piotr Kamler wowed audiences with the visually lush stop-motion of Chronopolis. Not to mention, that television shows Knight Rider and Voyagers! both hit the airwaves that year!

Rewatching these films with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, the shortlist looks pretty darned good. Even Jo Walton (who has often griped about the Best Dramatic Presentation category at the Hugos) conceded that in 1983, “there’s not only a worthy winner in this category, but something that almost looks like sufficient nominees to be worth running it.”

The weakest movie on the shortlist is The Dark Crystal. Although the set design is lush and the technical details are impressive, the story is pedestrian and the dialogue is dull. It’s a standard fantasy epic in which a hobbit gelfling has to travel to mount doom the citadel and destroy a ring crystal shard. None of the characters are particularly memorable, other than in appearance.

The soundtrack to Mad Max is a bit too much like
Yakety Sax for our tastes, but the visuals are great.
(Image via SlashFilm)

Even early in his directorial career, George Miller’s talent for visual storytelling is evident in the kinetic, engaging, and over-the-top bonkers Mad Max: The Road Warrior. Watching it in the context of its era, it’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was for post-apocalyptic movies; compared to the frenetic violence of Mad Max, the previous decade’s offerings such as Omega Man, A Boy And His Dog, and No Blade Of Grass all seem quaint. Although we’re generally not fans of opening and closing monologues, Mad Max does enough visual storytelling to have earned its exposition. Despite his later descent into antisemetic buffoonery, it’s easy to understand why the young Mel Gibson became a star. Just 21 years old at the time of filming, he’s able to carry the movie on his performance.

Given that the franchise has become increasingly focused on nostalgia, it’s interesting to note that The Wrath of Khan is the first Star Trek film that is mostly looking at the past. Not only does the movie deal with an antagonist that had appeared in a previous episode, James T. Kirk (William Shatner) spends much of the film pining for the old days and contemplating his own mortality. One of the reasons this works is that — unlike another former Trek captain’s navel-gazing nostalgia fest — The Wrath of Khan also explores generational change. Some might argue that director Nicholas Meyer’s other Trek film is better but there’s a lot to love in this movie and it’s easy to understand why it placed second on the Hugo shortlist. It’s not just good Star Trek, it’s a good movie.

What aged less well, however, is E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Despite good special effects, and Steven Spielberg’s skill with lighting and shot framing, we might argue that it doesn’t meet the standards of science fiction or of storytelling that should be expected of a Hugo finalist — especially in a cinematic year as strong as 1982. The movie often feels like an overlong sitcom episode with a pedestrian alien plot and wacky elementary school hijinks. Moreover, most of the younger characters are surprisingly mean to each other pretty much all the time; dialogue is delivered as yelling which can be exhausting for today’s audience. That being said, it was the top-grossing movie of the year, so clearly it resonated with audiences of the day.

Blade Runner is visually immersive, lush, and 
compelling. It's stood the test of time.
(Image via IMDB)

But Blade Runner was the Hugo winner, and it deserved to be honoured. Visually immersive and moody, it was a revolution in what serious science fiction could be. As Richard E. Geiss wrote at the time: “Blade Runner captures something on film I thought to be almost impossible -- the near-future claustrophobic paranoid polluted urban landscape so prevalent in most of [Philip K.] Dick’s more memorable novels.”

It’s also worth noting that the 1983 Worldcon was attended by an unusually large number of movie stars and cinema professionals. Makeup artist Rick Baker was in attendance to talk about Greystoke. Producer Gary Kurz (Empire Strikes Back) was there to talk about his Return to Oz. Jim Henson attended his second Worldcon in two years, this time to promote The Muppets Take Manhattan. The entire primary cast of The Right Stuff was in attendance, as well as the movie’s inspiration Chuck Yeager. In keeping with a continuing tradition, however, the movie that won the Hugo did not have anyone in attendance to accept the award.

There was little consensus in our group as to what should have won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1982, but we did agree that no matter what won the award, something truly great would be snubbed. Many of us wished The Wrath of Khan could have won, while others felt The Thing should have been honoured.

It was simply a great year for science fiction and fantasy cinema. 

Imagining the future of organized labour (part one of three)

List of unions.

This is the first of a three-part blog post about the historical invisibility of organized labour in science fiction. The second post, was published in mid-February explores recent works that address this notable absence. A third blog post examines labour unions in science fiction TV and movies. These articles could not have been completed without the help of science fiction historian Alec Nevala-Lee and labour researchers Mark McCutcheon and Bob Barnetson. 

Science fictional narratives are filled with depictions of employment.

Whether it’s Gaal Dornick taking a job with the mathematics department at the University of Trantor, or Robinette Broadhead leaving his job in the protein mines to pursue an opportunity with the Gateway corporation, the genre is rife with examples of standard capitalist employment relationships.

Often given less focus, however, are the rights of those workers, and the means by which those rights are asserted. When it comes to employment, the majority of science fiction offers either utopian visions in which everyone has a share in societal prosperity, or dystopian nightmares in which the elites have all the power and workers are crushed underfoot.

For example, neither Star Trek nor Babylon 5 ever explore the reason why productivity gains of new

The character Robocop crosses a picket
line to appease the corporate masters
of a privatized police department.
In the labour movement, he would be
called a 'scab.'
(Image via DenOfGeek.com)

technologies have not been concentrated into the wealth of an ultra-elite. Conversely, neither Altered Carbon nor Neuromancer offer explanations for why the working class has failed to organize solidarity-driven or democratic responses to societal problems.

Few of us have memories of the might of the North American union movement in the 1940s and 1950s. It was this movement that accorded workers stability and living wages that increased on par with productivity gains. It is probably this era of increasing income equality that made expansive utopian imaginings without explanation seem plausible.

In 1951, famed science fiction editor John W. Campbell wrote to H. Beam Piper, one of his regular writers, asking the author to tone down anti-union language in the story Day Of The Moron. He did so not because he supported the labour movement, but because he was afraid of offending members of the printers’ union that his magazine, Astounding, relied upon.

At their peak in 1954, unions represented almost a third of workers in the United States, and it was easy to take their existence — and their action as a counterbalance to the power of capital — for granted. Even employees in non-union workplaces enjoyed gains because employers had to keep up with union shops to retain and recruit labour.

But despite their prevalence in society, labour unions were largely absent from science fictional narratives during the Golden Age, and their few portrayals in the genre are usually either comedic or antagonistic.

As labour activist and science fiction author Eric Flint pointed out at WorldCon76, the major

At Worldcon 76 in San Jose, Eric Flint,
Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Cory
Doctorow discussed the dearth of
labour unions in science fiction.
(Photo by Kateryna Barnes)

contributors to the development of science fiction — from the dawn of the Golden Age of Science Fiction through this era of union organizing and stability — were largely drawn from academic circles or the upper middle class. Despite working for a living, these authors and editors did not see themselves as part of the proletariat, and thus based their narratives on assumptions that their privileged working relationships allowed them to hold.

Arthur C. Clarke’s scientist and astronaut heroes exist in a rarefied academic bubble that’s divorced from more typical job markets. Even when tackling a worker’s revolution in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Heinlein defined the conflict in terms of nationalism rather than solidarity. Ray Bradbury seems to be largely unaware of conflicts about labour conditions. And the Amalgamated Union in Alfred Bester’s classic The Demolished Man is largely a force for ill due to corrupt leadership.

Of all the big-name authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, special notice should be given to Isaac Asimov’s troubled relationship to organized labour. Despite the fact that Asimov came from a working-class background, his portrayals of workers is often problematic and condescending - In Caves of Steel (1954), workers who are displaced by robots are shown to be semi-literate at best, using pidgin like “‘Maybe it’s time the gov’min’ reelized robots ain’t the only things on Earth.”

If his portrayal of individual labourers is dismissive, his depiction of organized labour is actively hostile: In Robbie (1940), the labour movement forms an unholy alliance with religious fanatics to oppose progress in the form of robots; in the Foundation saga, nepotistic labour guilds are in part responsible for the collapse of the Empire; and to make his antipathy more obvious, he wrote the story Strikebreaker (1957), in which the heroic lead character forces a worker to accept employer demands.

A hero to many left-wing science
fiction fans, Isaac Asimov had feet
of clay on some subjects, including
workers' rights.
(Image by Rowena Morrill) 

It is disappointing to note that Asimov, member of the Futurians and an author often perceived as a progressive voice, might have had such a significant blind spot.

Even one of the most labour relations aware works of that era, Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s comedic novel The Space Merchants, is far from a paragon. The novel introduces us to the United Slime-Mold Protein Workers of Panamerica, a union that both exploits its membership through unfair fees, and is unable to stand up against the corporation’s might.

The progressive New Wave of science fiction of the late 1960s may have addressed the genre’s blind spots around race and gender, but when the subjects of class and labour were examined, it was usually with a sense of despair. This viewpoint is understandable in the context of the times: after declining for most of the previous four decades, American inequality was on the rise; trust in liberal democratic political institutions was being undermined; and the worst aspects of hierarchical business unions were on full display through such figures as Jimmy Hoffa and Carlo Gambino.

Those few representations of labour-rights organizations are presented with either antipathy or comedic disdain. When Douglas Adams introduces the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Professional Thinking Persons in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the union’s representatives Vroomfondel and Majikthise are actively fighting against knowledge and research. Arnie Kott, the antagonist in Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, is a broad caricature of a union leader and is presented as bigoted, corrupt, egotistical, and thin-skinned.

One notable exception to this anti-union sentiment was found in Larry Niven's 1966 short story A Relic Of Empire, in which unions are described as a necessity

Depictions of workers rights and the struggle to defend those rights are few and far between by the

Has anyone from the Occupational
Health and Safety department
completed an ergonomic assessment
 of this power armor?
(Image via TheVerge) 

late 1970s and 1980s. Employees of the Weyland-Yutani corporation in Alien have little-to-no recourse when it comes to their right to refuse unsafe work. Neoliberal assumptions around employer-employee relations are reflected in more and more depictions of independent contractors in the genre. Johnny Mnemonic is a precarious worker, as are most denizens of the sprawl.

It could be argued that the cyberpunk subgenre is the apotheosis of despair over the state of workers’ rights. In The Diamond Age, the thete (lower-class) citizens have absolutely no rights, let alone employment rights, while workers like Molly in Neuromancer are even stripped of their right to remember the tasks they perform.

In these corporatist dystopias, workers are either unwilling or unable to organize in opposition to these measures, and what few escapes from serfdom exist are accomplished through heroic personal narratives. This view of the struggle for workers’ rights can be seen again in Neil Bloekamp’s 2013 box-office dud Elysium, in which a disenfranchised worker fights an unfair system, but does so on his own through violent action, rather than by organizing his workplace.

Interestingly, even in Ursula LeGuin’s exploration of anarcho-syndicalism The Dispossessed, workers rights are defended in neither the capitalist society of Anarres, nor on the anarchic world of Urras. On the latter world, the protagonist is forced into manual labour due to societal strictures, while on the former he’s part of a labour protest that’s violently put down. In neither world do we see an example of an effective labour movement.

As Mark A. McCutcheon and Bob Barnetson argue in their 2016 paper Resistance is Futile: On The

"THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE!
YOU WILL BE PRIVATIZED!
PRI-VA-TIZE! PRI-VA-TIZE!"
(Image via BBC.com)

Under-Representation of Unions in Science Fiction, “The paucity of realistic representations of unions in SF thus has political implications: it reinforces the absence of alternatives to ... neoliberal capitalism.” This observation is mirrored by Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan, “There Is No Alternative.”

The rigid adherence to one paradigm might be understandable in memetic (non-genre) fiction that strives to represent the world as it is, but in a genre like science fiction, which purports to be based on imagination, it is deeply disappointing. As Cory Doctorow noted this summer at a Worldcon76 panel on the working class in science fiction “There is no sentiment more antithetical to science fiction than ‘there is no alternative,’ … what we do as science fiction authors is exactly to imagine alternatives.”

Thankfully, a new generation was about to do exactly that.

Part two of this blog post, covering a renewed interest in organized labour in science fiction in the 1990s and 2000s, was posted on February 18, 2019. 

As strange as fiction: 1963's Hugo shortlisted authors

The novels that were up for the Hugo Award in 1963 are amongst the most confounding ever on a shortlist. But that is not to say that they’re bad.

The list ranges from the emotionally challenging (Man In The High Castle) to the technical (Fall Of Moondust) and from the approachable (Little Fuzzy) to the befuddling (Sylva).

Other than Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Sword of Aldones, it’s easy to see why these novels were contenders for the top prize in science fiction. But possibly even more interesting than the novels themselves, are the lives of those who penned them.

In the 65-year history of the Hugo Awards, the shortlist has included a wide variety of dreamers, eccentrics, heroes and zealots. But in no year has there ever been a group of people like those whose names were on the ballot for best novel in 1963. The lives of the Best Novel Hugo shortlisted authors that year were variously heroic and tragic, inspiring and contemptible.

Jean Bruller lived so interesting a life
that writing a completely insane
Burt Reynolds movie is one of the most
mundane episodes in his biography.
(Image via Movieposter.com )

Amongst English-language science fiction readers, Vercors — AKA Jean Bruller — is probably the least well-known of the nominated authors, but he may be the most inspiring. Born to middle-class Parisian parents, Bruller graduated as an engineer before embarking on a successful career as a cartoonist. During the Second World War, he became famous as a resistance fighter. He guerilla-published an anti-fascist novel while living in Nazi-occupied France in 1942. After the war, the French government presented him the Legion of Honour, which he turned down in protest over his government’s ongoing mistreatment of Algerians.

Bruller’s 1960 novel Sylva, translated by Rita Barisse in 1962, was his only Hugo-shortlisted work, and is mostly forgotten. The plot — which involves a man torn between his love for a drug addict and his love for a humanoid fox — is significantly less interesting than the author’s life. It should be noted that Barisse did outstanding translation work. The writing is poetic, although the story has aged poorly. On this level alone, the book belongs on the shortlist.

Is the moon covered in
oceans of dust that will
swallow anything that
lands on it? In 1963,
scientists weren't certain.
(Image via Abe.com)

If Bruller has any competition amongst interesting lives lived by Hugo Award shortlisters, Arthur C. Clarke would be it. The sage of Sri Lanka’s exploits are well-documented: his work on the invention of radar during the Second World War, the discovery of sunken archeological treasures, his work on groundbreaking movies. Clarke was on the shortlist for the first time in 1963 for A Fall Of Moondust, a brilliant little novel about tourists trapped in a lunar transport vehicle that has sunk to the bottom of electrostatic quicksand.

It’s a memorable novel, in part because it was hard science fiction when it was published — theories abounded about what the surface of the moon was like — but was almost immediately overtaken by real science.

As with many Clarke works, the challenges to overcome are purely technical, but are worked through in interesting ways. Memorably, issues of heat dissipation and oxygen provide narrative tension.

Despite being dated, A Fall of Moondust is among Clarke’s finer works, and deserved the consideration it received in 1963.

It’s interesting to note that not only was 1963 the last year in which all the authors on the Hugo Awards Best Novel shortlist were first-time nominees, it’s also the first year in which a sequel (The Sword of Aldones) was up for the award.

That sequel, The Sword of Aldones was the second of the Darkover books. Both it and its predecessor

Hugo Award nominee Jean Bruller
is commemorated at the Pont Des
Arts in Paris with a plaque that
describes how he "Allowed French
intellectualism to retain its honour
during the occupation."
(Image via Pinterest.com)

hit the shelves in 1962, continuing the Darkover stories that Marion Zimmer Bradley had been writing since 1958.

The Sword of Aldones’ unpolished first-person narrative was unsatisfying enough that 20 years later, Bradley decided to revisit the story. In 1981, she re-wrote it from the ground up, and re-published it as Sharra’s Exile, a longer, more fleshed out book written in the third-person, and moving the protagonist's first-person observations into sections that are supposed to be quoted from his journal. If you’re reading through the Darkover novels, we'd argue that The Sword of Aldones is more of a published oddity than it is a key part of the narrative.

It is also hard to read Bradley’s works without having the experience tainted by the revelations about her complicity in the abuse of children. I would argue that there are few Hugo Award-shortlisted authors whose conduct has been as reprehensible.

Conversely, there is a goodness and a nobility to the book Little Fuzzy, and protagonist Jack Holloway’s passionate advocacy for the rights of the titular characters.

I first read Little Fuzzy when I was 12 years old, and appreciated H. Beam Piper’s classic book as a fun, interesting, engaging novel about the plight of a possibly intelligent species on a recently colonized world, and the political and economic consequences of their existence.

On re-reading it as an adult, I was struck by the maturity of Piper’s worldview, the anti-corporate politics, and the subtle undercurrent of melancholy.

Some critics have noted that Piper’s cute and primitive aliens can be seen as a metaphor that

Perhaps without H. Beam Piper, there
never would have been a
Caravan of Courage.
(Image via TVOvermind.com)

infantilizes tribal indigenous peoples, and that is a fair criticism. However, the childish nature of the Fuzzies can also be interpreted as a discussion point on liminal areas around sapience, and the rights of intelligent wild species such as dolphins and great apes.

Little Fuzzy has influenced generations of writers. The book’s legacy echoes through Star Wars’ Ewoks and the Na'vi from James Cameron’s Avatar. Piper’s work, however, remains more fully thought out, and more nuanced than its imitators.

It is a tragedy that in 1964, H. Beam Piper took his own life in the wake of arguments related to the rejected publication of a sequel to Little Fuzzy. One suspects that had he continued writing, he might have ended up on the ballot again in subsequent years.

The entire text of
Little Fuzzy is in the
public domain, and free
to access on the internet.
It's worth your time.
(Image via Wikipedia)

The winner that year, Phillip K. Dick, was another of science fiction’s tragic figures. Suffering from mental illness, visions, and depression, Dick attempted suicide in 1974, but survived and continued writing for another decade, until his death at the age of 53 in 1982.

The Man In The High Castle is one of the most confounding novels ever to win the Hugo Award. It’s shapeless, meandering, unsatisfying in its conclusion, deeply sad and entirely brilliant.

The narrative mostly goes nowhere, in part because Dick was plotting it by casting random lots with the I Ching. But the plot of this alternate history is less important than how it depicts an America of learned helplessness. This is a book about succumbing to tyranny and the ways in which we become complicit through inaction.

As with many of Dick's works, one of the key ingredients is the ontological malaise that is woven into the narrative. The Man In The High Castle asks the reader to question what we know to be true.

Although most fans will probably get more enjoyment from the tightly-plotted, tense, action-packed television adaptation of the novel, the show entirely misses the philosophical underpinning that made the book so great.

The shortlist in 1963, would have presented a difficult choice for Hugo voters weighing the merits of the joyful brilliance of Little Fuzzy against those of the ponderous and meandering The Man In The High Castle. But we’d argue that they probably got it right.