1.21 Gigawatts of Pure Entertainment (Hugo Cinema 1986)

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

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

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

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

Moreover, it’s one heck of a movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of the shortlist is even more flawed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To The Daring Belongs The Future

"To the daring belongs the future"

— Emma Goldman, 1916

Women are often removed from history.

In their new novel, Annalee Newitz brings this fact to life by imagining a reality in which misogynists are enacting the planned and premeditated erasure of the socially vulnerable through time travel and murder.

Exuberantly feminist and unabashedly political, The Future Of Another Timeline is an intellectual

The cover of Future Of
Another Timeline was
designed by the great
Will Staehle.
(Image via Amazon)

heir to both Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale and Connie Willis’ Oxford Time Travel novels.

Newitz offers readers a covert war between time travelling factions battling over women's rights in particular and human rights more broadly. On one side of the conflict is a small group of academics from the 2020s conducting small edits to the historical timeline in order to promote equity and equality. On the other side of the conflict (and mostly unseen) is a faction from the 2300s who are trying to engineer a future in which women are entirely subservient.

The book pivots between two main points of view: a teenager named Beth in 1990s Irvine California, where women don’t have the vote or access to adequate reproductive health services; and Tess, a time-travelling activist. Beth’s work includes greasing the wheels of history to enfranchise women, improving access to abortion and contraception, and working to encourage more progressive cultural attitudes.

Newitz doesn’t concern the reader too deeply with the mechanics of time travel. It simply exists and always has. That said, creating lasting edits to the historical timeline is no easy task.

The level of research (and background knowledge) Newitz brings to the table enriches this story. Obscure historical figures, cultural movements and legal battles make the conflict more tangibly real. Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) founder Lucy Parsons makes a cameo, as does Emma Goldman.

It is also gratifying to see positive and thoughtful representation of labour unions — even tangentially — in a story. Prior to the existence of an organized feminist movement, several women worked through the labour union movement to advance gender equality. This implicit recognition of the power of collective action and of organizing is often neglected in genre fiction.

In fact, time travel novels in particular have often subtly endorsed the Great Man theory of history, as opposed to collective action as a historical force. Newitz provides a reasonably believable introduction to these ideas through the philosophical musing of a main character, providing arguments in both directions. Of course, in the end, it’s through collective action that women make gains.

References to historical feminist movements makes for a convincing exploration of the ways in

Author Annalee Newitz in 2014.
Photo Gregor Fischer
Who released the photo under a
CC-BY-SA 2.0 license. 

which history — and thus our present — might have been different. What would America be like if the puritanical right wing had built more influence in the 1890s? What might have happened if women received universal suffrage in the 1870s? These are questions that Alternate History (AH) rarely grapples with, and Newitz’ answers will be satisfying to AH fans. This is a book that we hope will be seriously considered by Sidewise Award judges.

One of the aspects of The Future Of Another Timeline that shows Newitz’ progress as a writer is the emotionally engaging and well-realized character moments of their two main protagonists. In particular, Tess’s turbulent family life. There are moments of her story that have stayed with us.

Although our book club enjoyed Newitz’ debut novel Autonomous, it was at times overly convoluted. In that novel, it felt like Newitz wanted to fit many of their clever thoughts into the text, leaving some

The odious Anthony Comstock is one
of the many historical figures who populate
the pages of this time travel novel.
Newitz’ research brings these
characters to life.
(Image via Wikipedia.) 

 ideas without enough room to breathe. We found Future Of Another Timeline to be more disciplined and focused in both writing and plotting, though even here there are digressions and other inclusions that seem unnecessary (such as the chapter featuring an extended communal masturbation scene). In addition, readers looking for effortless escapism will likely be disappointed. It takes effort to follow multiple intersecting points of view while jumping back and forth between at least four different time periods.

Despite the final twenty per cent of the book being somewhat less coherent and more difficult to follow, the strength of the overarching metaphor about historical revisionism is enough to carry one through.

Through the use of time travel, this novel makes it easy to see the real-world connections between crusading anti-women activists of the 1890s and today’s Incel movement. Time and again, we were reminded that the villains of The Future Of Another Timeline exist in our world, and we don't need time travel to draw a straight line between Anthony Comstock and Jordan Peterson.

This is a novel that will almost certainly appear on our Hugo nominating ballots for 2020.

Recommended "Light" Reading

If Starship Troopers had been written by the love child of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick, the

Kameron Hurley's latest
novel is one of her best.
(Image via Simon&Schuster)

result might be something like The Light Brigade.

It may seem grandiose to compare Kameron Hurley to three legends of the field, but her latest novel — her seventh so far — might just be worthy. The Light Brigade solidifies her emergence as one of the most important voices in recent science fiction.

Set against the backdrop of a corporatist dystopia that has completely abandoned any pursuit of the public good, The Light Brigade begins in a manner that is fairly typical of military science fiction. Humanity is attacked without provocation, and an idealistic youth joins the army to become a hero.

This time the prospective hero is a young woman named Dietz, whose family was killed when the city of Sao Paulo was destroyed. However, Hurley slowly turns the standard military science fiction paradigm on its head, peeling away the layers as Dietz discovers truths about the nature of the conflict, about the corporation she’s fighting for (Tene-Silvia), about Earth’s economic reality, and about her own temporal misplacements.

In this war, the six major corporations of the Earth are at war with the free peoples of Mars, who have developed a distinct culture, given their long-term estrangement from the rest of humanity. Hurley uses this setting to explore the dehumanization of adversaries via political rhetoric. For example, Earth leaders describe “Martians” as something other, something lesser, than people.

We are reluctant to reveal too much about the Martians, and about the politics underlying the conflict, because the main character’s shifting understanding is one of the great joys of the book.

Hurley does not shy away from the dark and intertwining complexities of political power, but explores this human condition in a way that will speak to a wide range of readers. Her ability to put forward political arguments without being didactic reminded us of Heinlein at his best.

Over the course of the book, Dietz becomes unstuck in time, leaping to different points in the war like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. In the hands of a less-skilled novelist, this nonlinear narration could have been aggravatingly confusing. But the clarity of Hurley’s prose, and the way her protagonist slowly begins to understand what’s going on is entertaining and engaging.

Using temporal dislocation as a metaphor for the alienation many soldiers experience when returning

Hurley at Worldcon 2017.
(Photo by Henry Söderlund,
who is an excellent photog.)

home from war has been a recurring theme in military science fiction, notably in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Dietz struggles with relationships, is constantly trying to figure out who knows what about her, and unsure of her role within her organization at any given moment.

This narrative was put together so thoughtfully — it made me want to go back and see how the story might unfold when pieced together in chronological order, rather than in the order experienced by Dietz. Reading the narrative as a straight chronology reveals both attention to detail and internal consistency.

Two years ago, this blog highly recommended Hurley’s previous novel The Stars Are Legion despite occasionally finding the narrative bewildering due to the protagonist’s amnesia. Happily, The Light Brigade includes the strengths of that previous work and exhibits few of its flaws.

While The Light Brigade does invite comparisons to several classic military science fiction novels, it is a wholly original work that pushes the boundaries of the subgenre. It is a page turner that feels fresh and modern, while being knowledgeable in conversation with decades of the genre’s legacy.

In 20 years, when people talk about the classics of military science fiction, we are willing to bet that the conversation will start with Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Old Man’s War, and The Light Brigade. Yes, it is that good.