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 David Cronenberg 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 Unthinkable War

Nuclear war is usually described as “unthinkable.”

Jacobsen's book makes for grim
— but engaging — reading. 
(Image via Amazon)

Despite this, science fiction authors and fans have spent an awful lot of time thinking about this potential ending to humankind. By some accounts (such as Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev watching The Day After) the consumption of science fiction has helped stave off the threat of nuclear war by forcing people to think about what will actually transpire after the bombs go off.

There’s a long history of depicting nuclear war in SF. Decades before the Trinity test launched the real-world atomic age, genre fans were reading works like H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free (1914) or Cleve Cartmill’s Deadline (1944). But Hugo voters have usually eschewed celebrating such works. Leigh Brackett’s Long Tomorrow and Wilson Tucker’s Long Loud Silence — two of the earliest works that attempted to grapple with just how awful nuclear war might be — may have gotten close to winning Hugos, but neither of them took home the prize.

With the more recent increase in international conflict, decline in democracy, and erratic leadership at the reins of superpower governments, the threat of nuclear annihilation is more present than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario is therefore quite timely. It should be strongly considered for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

The book’s chapters alternate between a second-by-second speculative account of how a nuclear war might be experienced and chapters that provide history lessons about nuclear weapons, academic research, and military planning.

A national security journalist who has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, Jacobsen approaches the subject through meticulous research. The scenarios she paints are informed by recently declassified documents and dozens of interviews. The interviees include scientists who worked on early iterations of atomic testing, high-level military leaders, policymakers, and politicians.

By Jacobsen’s account — and the accounts of several of her interviewees, such as former STRATCOM commander Gen. Robert Kehler — it could all be over in as little as 72 minutes. America’s “launch-on-warning” policy, Russia’s flawed surveillance systems, uncertainty over third-party actors, and a multi-polar world with complex threat assessment all lead to a precarious nuclear position.

The narrative scenario features a single missile sent by North Korea targeting the United States, which — in accordance with American policy — prompts a disproportionate retaliation of more than 80 nuclear weapons in return. With missiles flying the circumpolar route from North America to the Korean peninsula, they end up going over Russia and being mistaken for provocation. By the end of an hour and a half, five billion people are dead.

Much like the BBC SF horror Threads, each detail is presented with gripping and grim misery.

BBC's Threads grapples with the aftermath of a 
limited nuclear strike. Jacobsen suggests that there
is no such thing as "limited" nuclear war, and
that there are no rules in a nuclear conflict.
(Image via BBC) 

Jacobsen never provides any ideas about how to avoid the ugly future she lays out as a real possibility, and perhaps the book might have been strengthened by a call to arms. Is nuclear disarmament the answer? It seems unlikely in a world where countries such as Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea have atomic stockpiles. Does she think the temperament of leaders and their willingness to navigate complex nuclear quandaries should be more of a factor in electoral politics? The book ends on a fairly bleak note with little in the way of hope.

It’s interesting that, despite careful research methods, the sources she was able to interview for the book are — with a handful of exceptions — American, and this leads to some biases in the work.

In fact, it is a flawed book in multiple ways. The prose is overblown and occasionally pompous. The descriptions of the extent of each atomic bomb’s devastation is sometimes repetitive. And the scenario that Jacobsen imagines almost entirely absolves her fictional American decision-makers, preferring instead to place the blame for the nuclear war on more irrational leaders of other countries. But perhaps this was the hand of an editor looking for a US audience. These criticisms aside, the work unveils a believable and perilous instability within the systems governing nuclear decision making. This helps make the book a compelling read.

Nuclear war isn’t the happiest subject in science fiction, but it is part of our genre. Consequently, this book is as Hugo-eligible as non-fiction about spaceflight (The Right Stuff, best dramatic presentation finalist 1984), evolution (After Man, best related work finalist 1982), and planetary sciences (Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, best dramatic presentation finalist 1981).

For all its flaws, the research and timeliness of Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario make it one of the most important science fiction-related works of 2024. 

Marooned in the Undying Lands

Not too long ago, we lived at Francis Fukayama’s “End of History.”

It’s difficult to convey to younger SFF fans —
say those under the age of 40 — the degree to
which fears of Soviet domination once preoccupied
the public imagination, or the degree to which many
were convinced that democracy had
triumphed once and for all. 
(Image via CNN)

As risible or foolish as the idea seems now, in the early 1990s there was a near-consensus within the chattering classes that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union had ushered in the final triumph of American-style liberal democracy. According to those who subscribed to this theory, the Last Great Battle had been fought — and won. Social evolution had completed its mission; we had arrived at its pinnacle. The story of history had reached its resolution and now all that was left was to sail into the west.

With the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, it seems redundant to say that the Cold War was no Last Great Battle, and of course there was no White Ship and no Undying Lands.

There’s an obvious malaise to the idea that we have nothing left to achieve, or evolve into. If history is over, all that’s left is stagnation and of stasis. If the Last Great Battle has been fought, there are no more stories left to tell.

This idea of finality is ingrained into much of now-mainstream popular culture. Over the past few years, too many major SFF media franchises are stagnating in a post-eschatological malaise, seemingly afraid to venture into truly new territories. With little narrative momentum left, they seem marooned in the Undying Lands. They want their Last Great Battle, but don't have the integrity to accept the implied End of History.

It’s easy to think of examples: Star Wars, The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Babylon 5, and more. In each, the evil empire has been defeated, good has triumphed, and history has ended.

Franchises with some degree of narrative integrity allow the story to be over in a dignified manner, and to avoid attempts to monetize the goodwill and nostalgia of fans. However, some are compelled by the mandates of corporate profit-seeking to endlessly create new instalments in their narrative universe — and have all struggled to define what’s next.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings may have been
released after 9/11, but principal filming on all
three movies had all occurred from 1999 to 2000.
It is the product of an End-Of-History mindset.
(Image via Entertainment Weekly)

One approach that several franchises have taken to avoid the End of History hurting revenues is to plumb the mythologies of their narrative universe through a series of prequels. Unsurprisingly, the relevance of these works diminishes over time and can even dilute the original narrative. For example, the Last Great Battle of Westeros in the television series Game of Thrones neither lived up to the hype nor left room for grand adventures afterwards. This has left HBO with little more than prequels on its production roster.

This is not a new phenomenon. John Christopher returned to his Tripods Trilogy — which ends with a Last Great Battle — to write a prequel in 1988. Once Katniss Everdeen had won her Last Great Battle, all that was left was a Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Battlestar Galactica went back to Caprica. And of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, the less said the better.

Possibly the apotheosis of this trend has been Amazon Prime’s How Galadriel Got Her Groove Back The Rings of Power, a prequel of little interest to anyone other than the most hard-core fans.

But prequelization isn’t the only way that franchises attempt to deal with the End of History problem. The early years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are generally regarded as creatively their most successful — in large part because they were building up to a universe-shaping showdown with their ultimate foe Thanos in Avengers: Endgame. To their credit, the decision makers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have largely avoided the siren’s call of nostalgic prequelization, instead trying to continue as if the Last Great Battle hasn’t changed anything. The results have been mixed.

In the 1990s, no popular narrative embraced Francis Fukuyama’s ideas as wholeheartedly as Star Trek did; The Next Generation presented the American-analogue United Federation of Planets as the pinnacle of civilization; want had been conquered, social problems resolved, and now Jean-Luc and friends would act as emissaries of an idealized human society. But in a post-End-of-History world, this vision of Star Trek no longer makes sense. Since then with the possible exception of Deep Space Nine, the franchise has struggled to advance a coherent vision of what comes next; between stuck-in-the-past prequels (Enterprise, Strange New Worlds) nostalgic revisiting of past lore (Picard, Lower Decks) the franchise has often been treading water. 

The theory of an “End of History” has an obvious appeal; people tend to understand the world through a framework of narrative … and that all stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Perhaps it’s time to allow some of these franchises a dignified ending.

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. 

SFF Criticism Needs Iconoclasts Like Brian Collins

Brian Collins is among the most provocative bloggers writing about science fiction and fantasy today. They should be considered for a Hugo for best fanwriter.

Through their blog, the 28-year-old New Jersey native tackles topics that vary wildly between more staid fare such as the value of reading old science fiction, to more incendiary ideas such as the role that military science fiction has played in rationalizing genocide. Their work tends to be engaging, interesting, well-reasoned, and highly readable. 

In an insightful blog post,
Collins points out that
military SFF sometimes
wears its pro-genocide
politics on its sleeve. 
(Image via goodreads)

Over the past four years, Collins has amassed an enviable set of bylines. They began their blogging at Young People Read Old SFF in 2021, contributing to collaborative discussions in the project that Hugo finalist James Davis Nichol curates. Subsequently, they started their own blog at SFF Remembrance, reviewing stories in their original context, as they were first published in magazines. They’ve also contributed to Galactic Journey, Journey Planet, and to Tor.com.

Examining older works in context is one of Collins’ ongoing projects. Each of these reviews — which they publish almost every week — discuss the author’s background, where the work fits into the author’s career, what the publishing magazine was like at the time, etc. Opting for a more conversational style, Collins peppers their writing with asides and interesting digressions. Some highlights include Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse (short story), Damon Knight’s Earth Quarter, and Wyman Guin’s Beyond Bedlam.

Collins wears their politics on their sleeve, and reads through an intersectional lens. Though they’re agnostic, there’s a subtext of liberation theology that runs through much of their analysis — which makes sense given that they took a minor in religious studies while pursuing film studies at Elon University. When discussing the work of Manly Wade Wellman, for example, Collin’s examination of the Angolan-born author’s character and contradictory career add richness to the interpretation of the story.

Brian Collins writes fearlessly, expressing opinions that seem heartfelt even when they go against the public consensus. Some of their iconoclasm can likely be chalked up to the hotheadedness of youth — but at the same time, this willingness to disregard tin gods can lead to interesting insight. This is most evident when they tackle more complex matters in their Observatory editorials. Their piece on Starship Troopers is one of our favourite critiques of Heinlein published in recent memory. To quote from the editorial: 

“Starship Troopers is one of the most famous and misremembered “canonical” SF novels; and unfortunately, no matter how you look at it, it also set a horrible precedent from which the genre still has not recovered. It’s totally possible the genre will never recover from such an impact so long as there are creative minds in the field (and by extension likeminded readers) who believe in Heinlein’s argument: that sometimes extermination is the only option.”

Although they’re a relatively new voice in the SFF community, Brian Collins deserves consideration for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. They’re a writer with a lot of talent, and we look forward to seeing what they do next.

A Future Philosophy Of Justice

There’s a lot to recommend Gautam Bhatia’s new novel The Sentence; the book has compelling characters, an engaging plot, and often delightfully urbane turns of phrase. But the real star of the show is the speculative legal system at the heart of the story.

Set in an India-inspired alternate future city state called Permua, The Sentence follows Nila, a graduating student of law who is commissioned to investigate an assassination. The crime occurred almost 100 years in the past and the convict has been in suspended animation pending an appeal. The deadline for appeals ends at the 100 year mark, after which the cryogenic suspension pod is switched off permanently.

The Sentence is a meditation on
governance, on the death penalty
and on how we construct history.
(Image via Goodreads)

Bhatia has created this setting with evident care; centuries of history permeate the conflicts that tear at the city of Permua. Characters are informed by class-related aspects of this background and the weight of history makes the setting feel more immersive. This history is clearly inspired by real-world history (including the Paris Commune). At times, however, this depth of history can also bog down the story.

Permua — riven between two halves separated by class conflict — has adopted a legal system that depends on neutral arbiters, known as “guardians,” who have to forsake their upbringing and live a quasi-monastic life after completing law school. Consequently, Nila is torn between the anarchist commune in which she was raised, and the guardian culture in which she is apprenticing.

One of the most endearing relationships in the novel is between Nila and her high-born classmate Meru. Although the duo share a reverence for the law — and an allegiance to the guardian system to which they have dedicated their careers — their disparate class backgrounds inform their thinking and the interactions between them, often to entertaining effect.

These characters are well developed, with internally consistent personal philosophies informing their actions and interpersonal conflicts. These distinct points of view help the narrative avoid the didacticism of many other works in social science fiction. This is not a book filled with easy answers, nor absolutes. Rather, it sometimes feels like a constructive intellectual debate between students of philosophy and political science. There’s an effervescent quality to the book that makes it a joy to read, especially for policy nerds.

Legal systems in science fiction too often mirror the courtroom dramas that populate American television, possibly because it can be more difficult to offer counternarratives to established social structures and hegemonic ideas than it is to imagine differences in technology. The fact that Bhatia’s alternate legal system is one that is believable and engaging speaks to both his skill as a writer, and the clarity of his thinking.

Bhatia has a gift for aphorisms, and the novel is peppered with succinct and pithy observations such as “economic wounds make it so much harder to live your ideals.” Another favourite passage describes a building whose architect wanted it to be known as “The Fortress of Dreaming Spires,” but that the result was more of “a bedraggled hedgehog.” At times, the politically charged wry humour and wit of lines like these had us reminiscing about the 1980s sitcom Yes, Minister.

In a world unafraid of technology and unburdened by monopsony, The Sentence would be easily available in North American bookshops and online retailers, but its publisher Westland Books does not have wide distribution outside of India. It is worth tracking down a copy. The Sentence is among the best novels published this year.

Hugo Cinema Goes Mainstream (Hugo Cinema 1982)

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

Science fiction cinema of the 1980s holds a special place in the hearts of many fans … perhaps because so many of them fell in love with the genre during a decade in which the genre entered the mainstream.

Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in Escape From
New York. The movie somehow didn't earn
a Hugo Award nomination.
(Image via IMDB)

During that decade, Hollywood studios watched the stratospheric box office revenue being generated by movies such as Halloween, Alien, and of course Star Wars … and wanted to get in on the action. Suddenly, studios were willing to finance up-and-coming talent, and took the chance to take swings at genre, hoping to strike gold.

This influx of new SFF cinema allowed bold ideas to be rewarded at the box office, and in time get the critical praise that it was missing at the time of release.

The Hugos of 1982 marked an inflection point in the evolution of cinema. The previous year, the Hugos celebrated the likes of Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, old serials like Flash Gordon, and the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan. Now, a new guard was taking centre stage, as fresh new ideas shook up the industry.

There’s also a shift in the coverage that these films would receive in contemporaneous fanzines. While discussions of science fiction movies were once relegated to the occasional dismissive rant on the letters page, many fanzines now engaged seriously with cinema. In particular, Jim Harris’ Science Fiction Review regularly provided pages of reviews.

This sea change was most evident in some of the movies that did not end up on the ballot. Our cinema club had universal praise for John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.. Like a lot of Carpenter’s work, it’s a masterclass in effective use of resources; star Kurt Russel served as costume director, while Carpenter himself wrote the score. Protagonist Snake Plissken may not be the first antihero in genre cinema, but he is among the most memorable.

Another film that does a lot with a little is the low-budget Canadian film Scanners. A hidden psychic war is a neat premise that’s elevated by how director David Cronenberg leaned into the body horror. While it wasn’t to everyone’s taste the animated film “Heavy Metal” also did something unique by showing an adult vision of science fiction using a medium primarily shown to children (something Japan had been doing for years).

There was Clash of the Titans which showed that there was still life left in the Ray Harryhausen extravaganza and Superman 2 was a blockbuster that was denied a nomination for technical reasons.

Clash of the Titans may have been the last great
stop-motion epic.
(Image via IMDB)

There was even more to be impressed with from our cousins in the horror genre. Sam Raimi got his start with Evil Dead, the psychological horror drama Possession with Sam Neill and the Academy Award-winning special effect powerhouse An American Werewolf in London. The film club felt that any of these movies would be worthy of nomination and yet none of them were.

What was nominated was a little more mainstream.

While a lot of the group had fond memories of watching Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits as children, even its most ardent fans admitted that the script was a little bit more “shaggy” than they had remembered. While it had some charm, the movie played out like a series of disconnected skits flowing awkwardly from time period to time period. The group felt that maybe the script could be a little tighter, and some of us loathed it. 

The movie Outland was somewhat the opposite of Time Bandits. Dream logic and whimsy were replaced with the grunge of a mining town (in space!), with black-and-white morality. It was essentially “High Noon in space” … but that turns out to be a fairly good setup for a movie. A lone sheriff standing up for what’s right for the whole when everyone else is only looking out for themselves. Whether it is 1952 or 2024 that premise will always work with a certain audience and many in the club felt that it worked well here. Sean Connery puts in a remarkably restrained performance that ranks among his all-time best roles, as Marshall William O’Niel. Set on Jupiter’s moon of Io, Outland critiques corporate exploitation of workers in a mining colony. What makes this movie shine are the details: O’Niel’s family turmoil seems like a natural reflection of his dedication to his job. Marion Lazarus (played by Frances Sternhagen) provides an interesting ally to the protagonist. At least one member of our cinema watching group thought this deserved to win.

Sean Connery (left) and Frances Sternhagen
anchor the movie Outland with restrained
performances and a gritty charisma.
(Image via IMDB)

In between these films lies Excalibur, an example of muscular filmmaking at its worst. Retelling the archetypal western fantasy King Arthur through a grim-and-gritty lens, it is essentially a movie about men covered in metal swinging swords, trying to get unobtainable women, and making poor decisions that doom everyone around them. This might have been an interesting movie if it had anything new to say about the legend of Arthur, but sadly it does not. The group was somewhat lukewarm on this film. It is fairly well made and looks great and is replete with British/Irish acting legends but is an enormous let-down after John Boorman’s previous movie.

Conversely, we were surprisingly impressed with Dragonslayer, a Disney live-action sword and sorcery directed by Matthew Robbins. Most of us had never seen it, and the consensus was that it was a lot more enjoyable than it had any right to be. This mix of a sorcerer’s apprentice tale with a quest to defeat evil may not have been fresh or bold, but was the right kind of “likeable” for some members of the group. The dragon effect (made by ILM in their first work for another studio) was surprisingly effective for the era. As Richard E. Geiss wrote in Science Fiction Review: “Who would have thought the Disney studios would ever create such a realistic, honest, quality sword and sorcery film as this?”

This brings us to the gravity-crushing neutron star in the room Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hugo-winners George Lucas and Steven Spielberg teamed up to launch one of the biggest movie trillogies of the 1980s, remixing classic adventure serials of the 1930s to create something fantastic. Much of the movie has aged well -- Harrison Ford is at the height of his magnetic charisma, Spielberg’s visual storytelling prowess makes the action comprehensible and engaging, and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe’s beautiful lighting makes every frame a piece of art. However -- at the risk of being castigated for nerd heresy -- there were some aspects of the movie that simply didn’t hold up. Despite being introduced early in the movie as Indiana Jones’ equal, romantic lead Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) ends up being kidnapped repeatedly and spends much of the movie haplessly calling for help. The narrative structure may have intentionally aped that of a 1920s cinema serial, but several of those episodic sections simply fell flat (in particular the chase through Cairo). Despite these quibbles, most of our cinema club felt that it was still the best choice to take home the Hugo that year.

Going forward this decade will be remembered as the one where science fiction cinema finally became accepted as mainstream, not to mention cool and profitable. Even today, Hollywood leans on a SFF-adventure template as their tentpole for big releases, planning their annual schedule around their leases. Directors’ visions from this decade will shape cinema for generations to come. From where we sit, it looks like there is no going back.