Big Worldcon Is Watching (Hugo Cinema 1984)

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

L.A. Con II, the 42nd Worldcon, was the largest World Science Fiction Convention of all time up to that point, with more than 8,000 fans in attendance (to this day, only the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu, China has eclipsed that number). Science fiction cinema was bigger than ever. The Hugo Awards were bigger than ever. But in 1984, the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation was still considered a second-tier award.

Star Wars producer Lawrence Kasdan
accepted the Hugo Award in person.
(Image via Fanac Fan History)

“We will now proceed with the minor awards: Best Dramatic Presentation,” Toastmaster Robert Bloch quipped as he introduced the nominees: Bradbury adaptation Something Wicked This Way Comes, special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm, early hacking movie Wargames, blockbuster Return of the Jedi, and Oscar Best Picture contender The Right Stuff.

It’s an uneven shortlist that reveals both a tension between the populism and the insularity to which the award was often prone. As they had often throughout the history of the award, nominators almost inevitably included the top-grossing science fiction movie of the year on the ballot … and Return of the Jedi’s whopping $250-million haul had almost doubled the revenue of any other movie in 1983. In contrast, voters also platformed lesser works made by favourite creators with deep ties to the Worldcon community.

The weakest movie on the shortlist is Brainstorm, the sophomore (and final) directorial effort by special effects genius Douglas Trumbull. The story of a scientist (played by Christopher Walken) experimenting with methods for recording and interpreting brainwaves. At times a parable about how the military industrial complex coopts new technologies, at times a portrait of obsession as the scientist tries to recapture bits of his past, Brainstorm’s own EEG readings would be scattershot. Although Trumbull is a master of crafting individual images, his ability to weave a coherent narrative is lacking, and the movie never coalesces into something meaningful or engaging.

Something Wicked This Way Comes eked onto the Hugo Award shortlist, earning only seven votes at the nominating stage. Based on a 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury, it portrays a small town through the eyes of two children, while a mysterious carnival undermines the lives of the adults around them. It’s mostly a creditable production, though overlong and often errs on the side of whimsy. Of note, the carnival leader Mr. Dark is played by Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, who imbues the role with a magnetic charm. The main problem with the movie is that it’s overlong; there’s enough here for an excellent half-hour episode of Twilight Zone, but not enough to sustain a two-hour feature. Although Bradbury himself would later list it as one of the best adaptations of his works, we were often left wondering if his works should be adapted at all; he’s a master of evocative language and internal dialogue, which rarely translates well into cinematic formats. 

A young Jonathan Pryce is possibly the best thing
about Something Wicked This Way Comes. 
(Image via IMDB)

Based on the 1979 novel by Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff is a historical drama-cum-mockumentary that explores the origins of the American space program. Though not technically science fiction, it’s genre-adjacent enough to be considered for the Hugos. The movie leans into the romanticism of the space race, and presents a mostly sanctified and sanitized version of the astronauts and test pilots at the core of the story. It’s a narrative that’s become part of the national mythology, but much like the Tom Wolfe novel it's based on, the movie is overlong and a bit bloated. Most of the first half hour has little impact on the second half of the story. These quibbles aside, it’s an impressive bit of filmmaking and storytelling, and one can see how it almost unseated Star Wars for the Hugo. It’s interesting to note that a remake of The Right Stuff released just four years ago is completely unavailable for viewing on any platform due to streaming service shenanigans. Sadly, until libraries have the statutory right to preserve and openly share these works, this trend will continue.

Hugo voters should be given credit for their foresight in nominating the first mainstream movie about computer hacking, Wargames. Starring Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick at the very beginning of their storied careers, it’s a tightly plotted technothriller about a high school student who starts communicating with the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence computer system … and accidentally almost starts a nuclear war. The slow tension build feels natural, the characters have depth — and the gender representation is significantly better than most entries on this list, as Ally Sheedy’s character has agency and motivation. Moreover, the warning about nuclear war and the fallibility of automated systems still resonates today. This prescient movie holds up better today than many of its contemporaries. Of the dozen people who watched this as part of our cinema club, all but one of us would have selected Wargames as the movie most worthy of the Hugo that year.

It would be difficult to argue that Return of the Jedi lives up to the standards set by the previous two movies. Star Wars has always been a franchise steeped in nostalgia, but Return of the Jedi is the first installment that looks to the past of the franchise itself; returning to Tattooine, returning to a Death Star, returning to secret familial bonds as a plot twist. It’s an uneven effort where the parts that work (the heist-sequence to begin the movie, the confrontation in the throne room) really work, but the parts that don’t (the damned Ewoks) are really leaden, leaving some viewers to suspect contempt for the audience. But 1984 was a year when Star Wars fandom was at its height, and there would be no stopping the juggernaut — with 28 nominating votes, it was by far the leader in the nominating stage. The movie’s producer Howard Kazanjian was actually present to accept the Hugo Award — so at least the fan support was appreciated.

Set in New York ten years after socialism's triumph,
Born In Flames argues that no revolution is complete
without feminist emancipation. It's genuinely great.
(Image via NewFest)

Despite the fact that this was a pretty good year for the Hugos, there were still several excellent works omitted that are worth highlighting. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (時をかける少女) might have warranted consideration. Lizzie Borden’s intersectional feminist socialist semi-utopian Born In Flames would have been worth a nomination. It should also be noted that Canadian horror director had two of his greatest movies hit the cinemas in 1983: the Marshall McLuhan-inspired Videodrome, and the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone. Any of these would have been better choices than Brainstorm.

Possibly the most influential work of science fiction that year was the television miniseries The Day After. Directed by multiple Hugo-finalist Nicholas Meyer, The Day After chronicles the lead-up to, and immediate aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Heavily promoted by ABC television, it was watched by an estimated 100 million Americans when first broadcast. Despite the fact that it soft-pedaled the actual toll of such a conflict, it was grim enough that it helped convince policymakers to begin talks on a nuclear arms limitation treaty. Given the movie’s influence on policymakers and on the population at large, and that academic tomes have been published on its cultural impact, it’s somewhat surprising that The Day After only received three nominating votes. 

The TV series V introduces Dana, the leader of
 a race of lizard people who bring fascism
wrapped in the American flag.
(Image via Washington Post

Another work that has aged remarkably well in many ways is the television mini-series V. Depicting the arrival of alien Visitors, and their subsequent take-over of the world, V would spawn several spin-offs of much lesser quality. The original remains prescient as a metaphor for the creeping tide of fascism and the way fascists wrap themselves in a nation’s myths while owing no allegiance to the broader public. Only two people had the show on their nominating ballots.

In the 1980s, Star Wars reigned supreme, and Hugo Award voters seemed bound to recognize the franchise at almost every opportunity. As a populist award, it’s often tied to the most populist forms of entertainment. It’s a pretty good year for Best Dramatic Presentation, even though looking back, some of us might wish for more.

NOTE: This blog post would not have been possible without the assistance of Mike Glyer and PJ Evans, who were able to provide Hugo nominating statistics that were otherwise unavailable.

The Age of Empire (Hugo Cinema 1981)

Star Wars was inescapable in fandom.
At the 1981 Worldcon, Paul Cullen
dressed up as Luke Skywalker.
(Image via Fanac.org)

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

The sequel to Star Wars was a cultural juggernaut within fandom, anticipated with such intensity that whole issues of fanzines were dedicated to parsing out casting rumours and speculating about the plot. Most contemporaneous fan reviews hold up well today: “This movie moves so fast, is filled with so many delights for an SF fan, and is so well done that to tell about it is a disservice. See it!” wrote Richard E. Geiss in Science Fiction Review.

But as difficult as it is to believe today, many of the arbiters of ‘higher’ aka ‘mainstream’ culture were dismissive of the sequel. “The Star Wars series, now in unpromising infancy, basically asks us to imagine and believe nothing – its technological sophistication does away with the need for the former, and its camp melding of myths in storyline and characters acknowledges the impossibility of the latter,” Sight & Sound Magazine bemoaned in a scathing unsigned review. Ralph Novak was more succinct, writing for People Magazine “it’s not up to the original.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby opined that the movie was bland, and filled with hot air.

The Hugo best dramatic presentation win for Empire Strikes Back is another instance in which the prescience of science fiction fandom is revealed over time. Unfortunately, the rest of the shortlist in 1981 was remarkably uneven. While Cosmos, Lathe of Heaven, and Empire Strikes Back are excellent nominees, it’s difficult to see merit in either Flash Gordon or the Martian Chronicles.

Given the low quality of two of the finalists, it’s also difficult to explain the omission of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Ken Russel’s Altered States, or the third-season premiere of Blake’s 7.

One of our group called The Martian Chronicles
“the last gasp of the Disco era of science fiction.”
(Image via IMDB) 

The most egregious inclusion of the year is The Martian Chronicles. Airing over three nights on NBC, the TV adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story collection is a meandering hot mess that should have had no place on a Hugo shortlist. Over the course of six hours, director Michael Anderson weaves together elements from the Bradbury stories “Silent Towns,” “Rocket Summer,” “I'll Not Ask for Wine,” “The Settlers,” and “The Watchers” (among others). His apparent need to create a cohesion between the stories not envisioned by the author ends in narrative disarray. Separately, it would be easier to forgive the shaky special effects if it weren’t for the fact that on the other side of the Atlantic Blake’s 7 weren’t doing significantly more interesting model work with fewer resources. The Martian Chronicles scripting is leaden, the acting campy, the plot unengaging. Bradbury himself summed it up best, describing the series as “simply boring.”

A big-budget flop based on a 1930s comic serial, Flash Gordon is somehow even campier and more difficult to sit through than The Martian Chronicles … but it does at least have the benefit of weirdly beautiful production value and a ludicrously great soundtrack by rock legends Queen. Although supporting actors such as Brian Blessed and Timothy Dalton bring a lot to their roles, the nominal star Sam J. Jones is excruciating to watch as he lifelessly enunciates his lines as if sounding them out one-by-one off a teleprompter. It has to be noted that because Flash Gordon is relatively faithful to the source material, the movie is weighed down with painfully regressive attitudes towards gender and race. It has not aged well.

With a slightly campier script and a worse lead
actor, Flash Gordon compares poorly to the 
1974 movie Flesh Gordon.
(Image via IMDB)

The Lathe of Heaven is the hidden gem of this shortlist. It’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, made on a shoestring PBS budget by avant garde video artist Fred Barzyk. Given that Barzyk had previously directed the somewhat substandard 1973 Hugo Finalist Between Time and Timbuktu, some of our cinema club had gone into the movie with a bit of trepidation. Happily, many of us found it engaging and interesting, thanks to a script that retains much of the philosophical musings of Le Guin’s original, a strong cast, and thoughtful use of locations and other setting elements. The movie can be read as a rebuttal to utopian intellectuals proposing simplistic top-down solutions to all of mankind’s problems, ignoring the experiences of everyday people. It’s a genuinely clever little movie that holds up remarkably well — and probably would have ended up at the top of the ballot for at least one of our cinema club members.

Cosmos was a cultural juggernaut, the significance of which is difficult to appreciate today. Planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s 13-part documentary series tackles the vastness of the universe, mankind’s place in that cosmos, and speculates about what else might be out there. Built in part around Sagan’s own research into the possibility of extrasolar life, the documentary lays out an argument that we might not be alone in the universe. Because Sagan had evident love for science fiction and legitimized fandom’s embracement of these ideas, the documentary was beloved in science fiction circles. Sagan’s book of the same name, released in conjunction with the series, won him a well-deserved Hugo for best related work. But there are a few aspects of the show that have dated oddly; a lot of time is spent with Sagan looking off into space with a quasi-fanatical, beatific smile on his face, which is a bit off-putting. And while some current viewers might find the soundtrack by Vangelis to be oddly outdated and weirdly religious, others will enjoy the synthesizer-driven evangelism of it. At the time, there were complaints that documentaries shouldn’t be in the dramatic presentation category, but to our minds this is a creditable inclusion on the shortlist … and might have been a worthy winner.

The biggest controversy of the Hugo Awards that year, however, was the exclusion of Superman 2 from the shortlist. At the time, Hugo administrators lacked clarity on which year the movie would be eligible in, as it had a small number of showings in 1980, before a wider release in 1981. One of the greatest superhero movies ever made never appeared on a Hugo shortlist, and consequently the awards improved their rules on eligibility.

But even if Superman 2 had been on the ballot, we suspect that the Star Wars sequel would have bested it. Replete with iconic dialogue, memorably great locations, and some snappily edited action sequences, Empire Strikes Back is a movie that has stood the test of time and remains beloved by generations of Star Wars fans. On a purely technical level, The Empire Strikes Back was an impressive feat of cinema, featuring what could arguably be described as the greatest stop-motion sequences ever put to film. However, it does not have the streamlined narrative of the original movie and the plot suffers from a lack of focus. The story has no through-line, and as much as it’s a movie filled with truly great moments, some of us were left feeling that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Regardless of these slight quibbles, and regardless of what else might have appeared on the shortlist, it’s difficult to argue with The Empire Strikes Back as a winner. With the benefit of hindsight, fans were proven right and the mainstream critics were just … wrong.

One Giant Leap Backwards For Science Fiction On Screen

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

“The dramatic Hugo is the least satisfactory category under today's reality.” - Harry Warner, Jr., 1970

“I didn’t see anything worth giving it to.” - Buck Coulson on Best Dramatic Presentation 1970

To say that the fictional works on the shortlist for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo in 1970 was a step backwards would be an understatement.

On first glance, the shortlist seems like an aberration, comprising such unloved and unmemorable works as Marooned, The Bedsitting Room, Illustrated Man, and The Immortal. Watching these movies, we wondered what Hugo voters could have been thinking in nominating them. 

Hugo finalist dramatic presentation Marooned has
the unique distinction of being the only Academy
Award winner to be lampooned on MST3K.
(Image via IMDB)

But the more we looked at cinema from that year, the more we realized that Hugo voters had done as good a job as possible in selecting the shortlist, considering that the eligible films for those Hugos (movies released in 1969) included such celebrated works as Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, Moon Zero Two, Night of the Bloody Apes and The Curious Dr. Humpp.

Reality had overtaken screen SFF. The decision to honour news footage rather than fiction (a decision we had initially questioned) seems rather brilliant in the context of the rest of the shortlist and the state of science fiction cinema. 

The nomination process wasn’t helped by a moral panic among a recalcitrant conservative faction of fandom. With the site selection vote having given the 1970 Worldcon to Heidelberg, West Germany, there were fears that the Hugos would be taken away from the English-speaking West, that the United States might never have another Worldcon, and that the Best Novel shortlist would be comprised of nothing but Perry Rhodan books. Members of the 1969 WSFS business meeting passed several motions trying to prevent this speculative calamity, including provisions that put restrictions on the language that the Hugo finalist could be published in (spoiler: English only).

Thankfully, fandom has moved beyond this type of knee-jerk panic. There’s no object lesson to be learned from what happened in 1970, and none of these events are at all relevant to anything going on in Worldcon fandom in 2023.

This change meant that in 1970, the Japanese action movie Latitude Zero and the Italian-French comedy Hibernatus were ineligible. Although neither movie is a classic, either one would have been a more interesting finalist than most of the works on the shortlist.

Of the films that did make the shortlist, the most serious is the high-budget Marooned, a Martin Caidin-penned tale of three American astronauts dealing with technical problems during a NASA mission. Although the movie has high-wattage star power featuring (among others) Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman, it is astonishingly dull and monotonous.

There are a few redeeming moments in Marooned; the heroic role of Russian cosmonauts and the international cooperation depicted is certainly refreshing for the era. And there is an excellent taut sequence in which one of the astronauts is asked to sacrifice himself to save oxygen for the rest of the crew. But overall, it is an astonishingly dreary movie to endure.

It’s interesting that Marooned and 2001: A Space Odyssey were filmed on comparable budgets at approximately the same time. Although it won an Academy Award for special effects, Marooned seems cheap and shoddy by comparison to Kubrik’s masterpiece.

The Illustrated Man, based on Bradbury’s collection of stories, is mediocre in more perplexing ways. Much like the collection it’s based on, the movie uses a man’s tattoos as a narrative framework to tell various stories, including Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” “The Long Rain,” and “The Last Night of the World.”

While any of these stories could have been adapted into serviceable episodes of The Twilight Zone, they don’t work well when combined into one overarching narrative. Compounding this tonal mismatch is leaden dialogue and hammy acting.

The most controversial of the shortlist for us turned out to be The Bedsitting Room, a frankly bizarre post-apocalyptic comedy set in the ruins of London in the wake of a nuclear war. Based on a stage play by Goon Show legend Spike Milligan, the movie rambles between the 20 or so survivors of the atomic fires as they go about their daily lives and come into incredibly petty conflicts and surreal misadventures.

The Bedsitting Room is elevated by an exceedingly strong cast including Dudley Moore, Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, and Marty Feldman (in his film debut).

In the bright cold air, you seemed as innocent
and fair as Rita Tushingham in 1969.
(Image via IMDB)

Very little in the movie makes sense, whether it’s an elderly woman spontaneously turning into a piece of furniture, an aquatic bishop swimming up from a lake to perform a forced marriage, or the cast being listed in the credits by order of height. While those of us with strong cultural ties to the United Kingdom found some of these moments funny, overall it was a difficult movie to appreciate.

The nearly forgotten and short-lived television series The Immortal may have been the strongest fictional work on the ballot in 1970.

The show is a story about Ben Richards, a race car driver whose genetics render him impervious to disease and likely to live an extended lifespan. The show puts him in conflict with a billionaire who wants to kidnap him and harvest his blood. Much like Richard Kimble, The Incredible Hulk, or Johnny Bago, the series follows the protagonist as he flees across the country.

The Immortal — which didn’t even last a full season — wasn’t great. They took a decent novel by James E. Gunn, sanded the rough edges off it and made it safe and generic television. However, the fact that most of our cinema club would have put it on the top of our ballots is an indictment of the quality of screen SFF that year.

Produced by Universal's famous "factory" model
of television storytelling, the Immortal is remarkably
similar to many of the studio's shows. 
(Image via ComfortTV)

In light of the year’s fiction in this category, the selection of news footage from Apollo XI as the winner for Best Dramatic Presentation looks rather inspired. Certainly the special effects were extraordinarily realistic (given that they were real), viewers were emotionally engaged by the memorable characters such as Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong, and the work did provide some of the most quotable dialogue in dramatic presentation history (who could ever forget lines like “One Giant Leap For Mankind”?).

The news footage is interesting, but needed an editor to tighten it down to a shorter run time and to provide context. Rather than going back and watching the original news footage, we would recommend watching the spectacular IMAX documentary Apollo 11. The event and the documentation holds up remarkably well 53 years later.

There was at least one major omission from the Hugo Awards ballot: Destroy All Monsters. The ninth, and arguably most bonkers, of Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla movies brings together kaiju from all previous entries in the series. This is the Avengers: Endgame of the GCU (Godzilla Cinematic Universe.) It is likely that among our viewing group, this would have been the top pick amongst actual movies and TV shows that year. Likewise, it's possible that one of the late episodes of Star Trek such as "All Our Yesterdays" might have warranted an inclusion … though even this might be a stretch. 

After several years in which Hugo nominators had an embarrassment of riches to choose from, the well had gone suddenly dry, and there was little top tier science fiction on screen.

It still feels weird to honour real history in a category that has otherwise been exclusively dedicated to fiction, but if not for Apollo XI, this might have been the first year that we suggested a No Award result. 

Best Dramatic Presentation Boldly Goes Forward (1967)

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

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems only natural that Star Trek should win a Hugo Award in its first season.

The Hugo shortlist in 1967 included Fantastic Voyage,
Fahrenheit 451, The Menagerie, The Naked Time, &
The Corbomite Maneuver. (Image via IMDB)

At the time, however, this decision was not without controversy.

The Worldcon chair for 1967, Ted White, published a screed against the show calling its writers patronizing and ill-informed. Hugo-winning fan writer Alexei Panshin opined that Star Trek was filled with cliches and facile plots.

But for every voice criticizing the new show, there were several voicing their support. Big-name authors like Harlan Ellison and A.E. Van Vogt campaigned for the television series to win a Hugo, hoping that the recognition might buy it a second season. Writing in the fanzine Yandro, Juanita Coulson offered the definitive counterpoint: “The scorners of Star Trek do not seem to have an alternate dramatic piece of science fiction to offer; they usually do not like anything TV calls science fiction or fantasy.” 

It was by far the most talked about Best Dramatic Presentation ballot up to that point, with various pundits at turns praising Fahrenheit 451’s elegant direction, complaining about plot points in Fantastic Voyage, and analysing the merits of “The Corbomite Maneuver.” The quality of this debate, the resulting shortlist, and the final vote all look exceptional from the perspective of 2021; this was the year that the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation came into its own. 

In 1967, Gene Roddenberry was
one of the few Best Dramatic
Presentation winners to accept
the award in person.
(Photo by Jay Kay Klein) 

Considering the eligible works for this Hugo shortlist, one member of our cinema club (Paul) watched no fewer than 43 science fiction and fantasy movies that had hit cinemas in 1966, and concluded that Hugo voters could hardly have done better.

As we started watching movies and television shows from 1966, many of us had expected Fahrenheit 451, directed by François Truffaut to be the shortlist standout. However, we were surprised to find the movie had aged far more poorly than other works. Most readers will be familiar with the source material, which criticizes anti-intellectualism and post-literate culture, but this is an adaptation that does not live up to the provocative premise. The first half of the film moves at a pace that makes the Mendenhall Glacier look like quicksilver; and although the second half provides some good moments, it’s undermined by questionable choices around gender representation. That being said, Truffaut is a master of building individual shots, and some of the imagery continues to hit hard. Scenes which center the action on the television in Guy Montag’s apartment are visually arresting and prescient. The set design — both the use of existing architecture and the film’s own props — is iconic and lush. There are moments of brilliance in the movie; particularly a speech in which Captain Beatty cynically dismisses the value of books. In several other years, this might have been at the top of our ballots, but in 1967 it was outshone.

The most expensive science fiction movie to have been made up to that point, Fantastic Voyage, holds up somewhat better. Sparingly and effectively directed by Richard Fleischer, the movie follows a five-person submarine crew who are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into a scientist in order to perform life-saving brain surgery. Although far too many movies of the era over-explained their premise, Fleischer’s dialogue-free opening sequence is a masterclass in visual storytelling, showing the events that kick off the movie’s action.

A pleasure to burn perhaps, but not a pleasure to watch.
(Image via Pintrest)

It’s worth noting the quality of the visuals in Fantastic Voyage, which earned the movie two Academy Awards. Art Cruickshank’s visual effects pushed the limits of compositing technology at the time, while Jack Martin Smith and Dale Hennessy’s clean and functional design work made the secret military base setting seem real. The movie may have had a leg up on some of its competitors that year, since Isaac Asimov’s novelization of the movie had received mostly positive reviews. This might have been a very worthy Hugo winner, if it hadn’t been for the genre-defining presence of Star Trek.

From the day that Gene Roddenberry first showed “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” at the 1966 Worldcon in Cleveland, Star Trek had dominated discussions of science fiction. One unsigned complaint in the fanzine Algol notes “somewhat more than half of every fanzine I have seen this year was concerned with one subject and one subject alone: Star Trek.” Three episodes made the ballot in that first year: “The Menagerie,” “The Corbomite Maneuver,” and “The Naked Time.” 

“The Naked Time,” which aired first of the shortlisted episodes, is without a doubt one of the most well-remembered episodes of the original series, if for no other reason than the image of a shirtless Sulu wielding a fencing sword. The episode — which depicts a touch-transmitted disease that causes the protagonists to become disinhibited and act drunk — features some of the earliest moments of the series that show the range and depth of the characters. While “space makes people go mad” storylines were already a tired trope by the 1960s, the panache of the direction and the strong performances elevate the material. For at least one member of our viewing club, this would have been the top pick from the year.

In a slightly less-well-remembered episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver,”  the Enterprise crew is

We’d suggest that of the eligible episodes
(those that aired in 1966) both "The Conscience
of the King," and "Balance of Terror" might
also have made very solid inclusions on the ballot.
(Image via Youtube)  

confronted by an immense and implacable alien ship that seems intent on destroying them. At the risk of offering a heterodox opinion, the primary plot of the episode is less clever than its authors seemed to think, with Captain Kirk’s bluff reading as ham-handed. But despite this criticism, there’s enough in the episode to make it a worthy inclusion on the ballot. The theme of resolving conflict and building bridges between cultures is well handled. And this is one of the first opportunities to observe Kirk as a trusting and supportive captain.

“The Menagerie” is the only two-part episode of the original series of Star Trek. Making use of the original unaired pilot, it brings back the original captain Christopher Pike on a quest to return to the planet of Talos IV. Though it would be difficult to argue that it’s one of the best Trek episodes, it’s fine and provides backstories and insights about the show’s intentions. But fans had other reasons to support “The Menagerie” for the Hugo Award.

“We're agreed that we vote for “The Menagerie” and get the Hugo for Roddenberry personally, even though that wasn’t really the best episode,” Hugo-winning fanzine editor Buck Coulson wrote. “It's the only way to honor the man who made all the Star Trek episodes possible.”

Given how significant Roddenberry’s contributions to the genre would prove to be, it’s difficult to argue that Hugo voters got it wrong.

Pseudoscience, Belief and Science Fiction

Guest post by Michael Hoskin, Calgarian friend to the club

Authors are apt to develop certain peccadillos in their writing. You would not have to read many stories by Nelson S. Bond before realizing he loved telling tales of the ‘fourth dimension’; Isaac Asimov’s fondness for robots is well-documented; Ray Bradbury loved Mars so much he spoke often of his desire to be buried on the Red Planet.

Ray Bradbury loved Mars so much,
 he got the first martian drivers'
license. (Image Via File770.com)

For some authors, these recurring ideas are merely quirks. Unfortunately, for others their obsessions become quasi-religious themes for which they feel the need to evangelize. Particularly within science fiction and fantasy, this tendency has undermined the later works of many great authors. 

As we look over the ranks of authors in speculative fiction, we not only see those who had recurring themes but also a desire to see their fiction become reality. There is precedent for such transmogrification: Jules Verne lived long enough to see submarines such as his Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) become practical inventions; H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) became an infamous hoax and panic in the hands of radio maestro Orson Welles in 1938. Further, Wells wrote of tank-like vehicles in The Land Ironclads (1903) and then saw tanks appear in real life. Although Wells confessed he knew the idea of the tank was not original to him, he still said of the first tanks: “They were my grandchildren - I felt a little like King Lear when first I read about them.”

To some extent, fans of speculative fiction are prepared for epistemological musings from their authors,

Battlestar Galactica is basically just
the Book Of Mormon in space.
(Image via Space.ca)  

perhaps the more so when there is a shade of doubt as to whether the author’s belief or evidence is genuine. For instance, some of the bile directed to authors Orson Scott Card and Stephanie Meyer derives from their status as believing Mormons. Non-believers take offence when they perceive elements in those authors’ fiction that they view as an exhortation of the authors’ faith or exist to convert the audience.

As fans of speculative fiction, how far can you and I take the Death of the Author Theory? Based on the sales of Call of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft remains fandom’s favourite virulently racist uncle. Is it icky to know Theodore Sturgeon and his wife were swingers? If you learned Fritz Leiber was a practicing pagan how would it affect your reading of his sword & sorcery tales?

I can speak plainly of one speculative fiction author whose beliefs interfered with my ability to enjoy his work. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remains best known for his Sherlock Holmes tales but for our purposes, we remember him for his five Professor Challenger stories (beginning with The Lost World, 1912). Although Doyle’s protagonists tended to be sound, rational men (Holmes, Challenger) Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
pictured here with a fake
ghost, hoped he would
be remembered for his
writings on spiritualism
more than his Sherlock
Holmes stories.
(Image via prairieghosts.com)

himself drifted into the less-than-rational realm of spiritualism. Doyle believed not only in the power of séances but (notoriously) fell for the Cottingley Fairies hoax. This influenced Doyle’s Challenger novel The Land of Mist (1926), told as work of spiritualism advocacy wherein Challenger and his friends were exposed to spiritualism and all went from skeptics to firm believers. As I do not believe in séances, I found this novel extremely difficult to appreciate. I enjoy ghost stories that send a chill down my spine, unnerve me enough to think ‘what if it’s true?’ I do not at all enjoy stories where the author repeatedly tries to convince me, ‘oh no, these ghosts truly exist – just wait, I will convince you.’ One of those whom Doyle did convince was J. B. Rhine, the man who coined the term ‘extrasensory perception’ (ESP).

Ayn Rand is one science fiction author whose personal philosophies have a large life outside of their fiction. Rand’s philosophy of objectivism was born in her fiction and developed a large following that remains closely aligned to libertarian-leaning politics of today. Further, her fiction influenced many in the science fiction fields. Her fans have included: Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J. Ackerman, author Ray Bradbury (who said of The Fountainhead (1943) “It gave me courage to just stand and say to people, 'Go away and leave me alone.'”), comic book artists Steve Ditko & Trevor Von Eeden, author Terry Goodkind, and performer Penn Jillette (renowned for his towering performance on TV’s Babylon 5). Although objectivism seemingly reached its peak in the 1970s and the recent film adaptations of Atlas Shrugged (2011-14) were subject to ridicule, Rand’s philosophy remains effervescent.

From a certain perspective, the most successful science fiction author of all time is L. Ron Hubbard. Although Hubbard never won a Hugo or a Nebula for his fiction, how many other authors in his field can claim to have developed a powerful international organization/religion? Perhaps it is hard (or painful) for science fiction fandom to recall it now, but when Hubbard introduced Dianetics in 1950

From a certain perspective, Hubbard
is one of the most successful authors
of all time.
(Image via Bridgepublications.com) 

he was met with glowing reviews from seemingly all corners. Boosters included such as authors James Blish (who is a Hugo winner and resides in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame) and Hubbard’s early ally A. E. Van Vogt (Science Fiction Hall of Fame). Excepting Lester Del Rey and Theodore Sturgeon (Hugo winner, Nebula winner and Science Fiction Hall of Fame; he recalled Hubbard saying to him: “If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion.”), virtually all of science fiction passively let Hubbard tell them how ‘clear’ they were. Hubbard’s Church of Scientology remains a powerful and influential body in spite of the motion picture flop Battlefield Earth (2000) and despite Hubbard’s nearest brush with prestige in the sci-fi community being his controversial 1987 Hugo nomination for Black Genesis.

Another proponent of Dianetics was one of science fiction’s most lauded names: John W. Campbell (Hugo winner, Science Fiction Hall of Fame). Campbell wrote only one well-remembered story (Who Goes There?, 1938) but his tenure as editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog; 1937-71) produced some of the most consistently great sci-fi literature in the medium’s history. Yet despite his accolades, he was a racist, a homophobe and a believer in pseudoscience. His pseudoscience beliefs frequently interrupted the pages of Astounding to champion the hokum of not only Dianetics but also ESP, the Dean Drive, the Bridey Murphy hoax and the Hieronymus Machine.

As it turns out, there is no
secret lost civilization living
beneath the Earth's surface.
(image Via Wikipedia.org)

Editor Raymond Palmer of Amazing Stories (1938-49) fell along similar lines to those of Campbell, but courted controversy in the 1940s when he presented various stories by Richard Sharpe Shaver as though his fanciful tales of an underground civilization were factual accounts. The ‘ShaverMystery’ ended in 1948 (due in part to complaints from Amazing Stories readers) but Palmer, embittered by the series’ end, leaned hard into similar ideas. His magazines (such as Fate) ventured outside the bounds of science fiction in order to serve as proponents for all the related pseudoscience, parapsychology, cryptozoology, UFOlogy and suchlike.

In the instance of television’s Star Trek (1966-69), the rabid fandom that sprang up around that program seemed to spur its creator Gene Roddenberry into fashioning a philosophy to support it. When the series returned with the feature film Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) Roddenberry opted to jettison much of the interpersonal sparring and

Star Trek sometimes seems
like a Utopian Cult.
It's adherents are caught
up in a holy war over
which captain is better.
(Image via Pintrest.com)

emotionalism of the television version, believing it antithetical to the ‘utopianism’ he retroactively believed Star Trek embodied. Regarding Roddenberry’s novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Darren Mooney felt it “almost reads like the sacred text of a utopian cult.” This sense of utopianism would permeate the remainder of Roddenberry’s contributions to the franchise (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1987) but would be noticeably absent elsewhere in that franchise (i.e., Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982).

There are also those science fiction creators who have unintentionally caused a belief system to spring up without intending to. Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) helped inspire the creation of the Church of All Worlds, a religion that persists to this very day.

We of fandom have often encouraged the idea that our favourite creators are more than mere tellers of tales; they are ‘visionaries’ or perhaps ‘futurists.’ Doyle, Rand, Hubbard, Campbell, Palmer and Roddenberry each reached points in their careers where the applause of their fans was not enough; they felt the need to use their stage as a means to impart some philosophy or impart ‘secret knowledge.’ 

Many fans no longer worship the science fiction author as ardently as before – but perhaps only because the pantheon of science fiction gods is constantly wheeling out new deities to affirm.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made of (Free Press, 1998).

John R. Eller, Becoming Ray Bradbury (University of Illinois Press, 2011).

Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Dover, 1957).

L. Ron Hubbard, Theodore Sturgeon and Lester Del Rey, The Dianetics Question (Marvel Science Stories, May 1951).

Darren Mooney, Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Gene Roddenberry (Review) https://them0vieblog.com/2014/06/04/star-trek-the-motion-picture-by-gene-roddenberry-review/

Jonathan Rosen, Doubles: Wilkie Collins’s Shadow Selves (The New Yorker, July 25 2011).

H. G. Wells, War and the Future (Simon & Schuster, 1917).