1985 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation - 2010

2001 was a masterpiece that transcended genre. 2010, on the other hand, is just a decent science fiction film. Kubrick’s film certainly didn’t need a sequel, and it has a perfectly ambiguous ending. But, Arthur C. Clarke had continued the story, so I guess you can’t blame MGM for commissioning this film. Someone decided, quite wisely, not to emulate the visual style of Kubrick’s film - Peter Hynes (future director of Timecop!) certainly should not have tried, so 2010 is much more conventional.

It is the distant future year of 2010 AD. I know it may be hard to imagine what life will be like in that far off time, but I’m sure this movie is quite close with its depiction of a manned Soviet mission to Jupiter. Okay, so this film fails pretty bad as futurism. It does feel a bit closer than 2001, as it lacks that movie’s super-clean space station and collarless future-suits. The computers look quite a bit worse though; a big step back from HAL, who looked like he could be an Apple product with his simple sleek design. It’s odd that they thought we would have a sophisticated AI by the start of the twenty-first century, but computer screens would only have a couple dozen pixels.

The plot connects a great deal to the first film. The Soviets and Americans are both launching missions to investigate the disappearance of Discovery (which obviously never reported back between HAL’s hijinks and Dave’s journey into the LSD-monolith). The Soviets have a head start with a mission commanded by Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), but they agree to take on three Americans: Heywood Floyd (Roy Shneider), an expert on the ship named Dr. Curnow (an oft-hyperventilating John Lithgow), and HAL’s programmer Dr. Chandra (who’s supposed to be Indian, but ‘80s films didn’t take Indians seriously – see Short Circuit – so they cast Bob Balaban instead). They make it out to Jupiter and begin to investigate the fate of Discovery’s crew, HAL’s malfunction, and some odd occurrences on the icy moon of Europa. We already know the answers to the first two mysteries, so things can feel a bit pointless at times. But, there are some good effects - a nice spacewalk scene over to Discovery, for instance, and there is a great ending that almost makes It all worthwhile.

I haven’t mentioned yet that all ‘80s science fiction movies have to have annoying synthesizers in the score (unless Spielberg or Lucas is involved – they can get John Williams). We get it in Blade Runner, Terminator, and now 2010. You can imagine the though-process that went into this: “ooh, synthesizers sound like the future!” No, they sound like the ‘80s.

Hard sf films about space travel are pretty rare when you think about it, so I see why Hugo voters went for this one. It’s a decent sequel to an amazing film with some nice moments of its own, especially in the final fifteen minutes. In hindsight though, it’s pretty obvious that Terminator was more important, influential, and just plain better.

Grade: B

1985 Hugo, Philip K. Dick, 1984 Nebula - NEUROMANCER by William Gibson

I think it’s safe to say that William Gibson liked the movie Blade Runner. In the very influential Neuromancer, Gibson more-or-less single-handedly founds the genre of cyberpunk by merging the gritty world presented in that film with a sense of the coming importance of networked computers. The fact that the novel introduced the word "cyberspace" conveys some idea of its pervasive influence.

The novel begins in the dense, crime and technology-rich city of Chiba, Japan. It’s big, dark, and densely populated, like the LA of Blade Runner (we also get a dense megacity on the US east coast and orbital platforms as settings). The Cold War ended after a brief exchange that destroyed a chunk of Germany and led to heated technological warfare in the Soviet Union. Henry Case is a down-and-out drug addict and former hacker whose ability to connect to cyberspace was destroyed by a group of Russian mobsters. In a rapid fire series of events, he’s hired by a former special ops man named Armitage, a survivor of the war, his ability to connect to cyberspace is surgically restored, and his girlfriend is killed. Case grows closer to his fellow employee, a “street samurai” named Molly, as they steal an electronic reconstruction of a dead hacker called Flatline. Eventually the team relocates to space and attempts to accomplish their mission, which they discover involves the mega-corporation of Tessier-Ashpool and a sentient artificial intelligence called Wintermute.

The plot starts out as standard heist material, and then gets increasingly weird and byzantine. I started out enjoying the plot immensely, and I liked its conclusion, but for most of the novel it’s too obscure to really matter. The pacing is also less-than-perfect, as the novel is filled with frenetic action, but the actual story develops very slowly, then resolves itself in moments in the final chapters. But plot and pacing are almost beside the point here. As in Blade Running, the main attraction is the revolutionary setting – the mixture of dystopia, noir, and computers that we call cyberpunk. Gibson looks at the ecological dystopias of the ‘70s and basically asks, what if it’s that bad, but the world doesn’t end? People just go on living in a polluted, overcrowded, plutocratic world.

The other big attraction is Gibson’s prose. It’s lean and muscular, but full of evocative technological metaphors. The oft-cited first line is a great example: “the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

I didn’t love Neuromancer – the characters felt-like noir cut-outs, and there are the aforementioned problems with the pacing – but I liked it quite a bit, and there’s no denying the strengths of Gibson’s craft, and I found the world absolutely compelling. It’s easy to see how this work launched a new subgenre.

Grade: A-

2010 Hugo nominee, novel: WAKE by Robert J. Sawyer

I think the title is technically www:Wake.

Since I’ve started this project I’ve been reading more sf book reviews, and there does seem to be a very strong contingent of Sawyer haters out there. And yet, he’s won a Hugo and a Nebula and he keeps popping up as a nominee. This is the first Sawyer novel I’ve read, and I’m not really sure how it compares to his other work, but I do think I can see why some fans would love him and others would hate him.

I’ll go ahead and get this out of the way: my feelings on the book were mixed, but no matter what, it does not seem deserving of a Hugo nomination for the simple fact that it is the first novel in a planned trilogy, and is pure set-up. The plot is short and simple, and sub-plots go absolutely nowhere (I assume that they’ll pay-off in future novels). For most of the novel, we follow Caitlin Decter, a blind teenager who has recently moved from Texas to Canada. A Japanese scientist invents a device that may help her gain sight, but instead, it allows her to visualize the world wide web. This connection to the global network, along with a massive interruption in Chinese internet service, causes the Web to gain sentience (the web appears to be the narrator of the novel…or at least portions of it). There’s also a subplot about a painting chimp.

Caitlin is a likable character, and Sawyer includes a lot of rich details about the life of a modern blind person that I found fascinating. The basic idea also has potential, and I liked some of Sawyer’s musings on consciousness through Helen Keller, chimpanzees, and the awakening internet (though he also leans a bit too heavily on Julian Jaynes’ rather weak hypothesis that human consciousness emerged in historical time). On the other hand, the prose is flat and dull. Caitlin and her family can be too precious (and they usually are), and the novel is drowning in pop culture references. Do I really need to know that one of the minor characters likes to edit together fan videos of the new Doctor Who series? Sawyer seems to be announcing that this is a novel by an internet geek for internet geeks – let the internet navel-gazing begin!

In the end, I still wasn’t sold on the trilogy’s basic concept; I imagine were heading towards some sort of wish fulfillment fantasy where the sentient internet brings "freedom" (as defined by a certain segment of bloggers) to the world! I hope I’m wrong and there’s more conflict and insight to come, but nothing about Sawyer’s plain vanilla writing and philosophy presented here seems to suggest that.

I see Sawyer’s appeal to a certain group of Hugo voters – lots of them will probably see themselves in his characters - but I found this novel boring and pedantic. I really hope I don’t have to read the rest of the trilogy.

Grade: C-

1969 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation - 2001

The late 60s were quite the era for game-changing “dramatic presentations;” first Star Trek, now 2001, a fantastic classic. I bought this film on Blu-ray and watched it for this project, and I can attest that it holds up as a brilliant and haunting spectacle. There’s no question that this is one of my favorite films, though its long dialogue-free scenes keep it from being a particularly accessible film (there is no dialogue for the first half-hour).

Based on a short story by sf legend Arthur C. Clarke (and later expanded into a novelization with 3 sequels), 2001 takes place in the distant future year of 2001 AD. There are two main threads. 1) There’s an alien black monolith that seems to have played a role in shaping human evolution. The film begins at the “dawn of man” and shows several apelike creatures learning to use tools after interacting with the monolith. Later, in that futuristic space age future of 2001 AD, humans investigate another monolith that they have uncovered on the lunar surface. 2) the spaceship Discovery makes a long trip to Jupiter to investigate yet another monolith. Along the way, they experience problems with their artificially intelligent shipboard computer, HAL 9000.

2001 is all about visual spectacle. It was originally shown in Cinerama, a giant wraparound format using multiple projectors that was designed to differentiate the theater-going experience from the increasingly dominant television. The use of color is brilliant. The special effects are fantastic and hold-up next to anything produced for at least the next 10 years. I’m usually not a fan of the psychedelic, but the surreal final sequence really is sublime, even if you’re not high. 2001 is also the first real entrance of hard sf onto the silver-screen. Kubrick, Clarke and the producers attempted to remain as accurate as possible in their depiction of near-future space age technology (the vacuum of space is actually silent – an obvious but rarely seen point of accuracy). Obviously, as futurism, the film fails. But it’s still one of the realest visions of the future you’ll see. And, there’s no denying this films influence on everything from the look of the startships of Star Wars to the claustrophobic feeling of Alien, not to mention the dozens of parodies of the opening sequence or HAL that have appeared over the years.

Things do move slowly, and Kurbick’s not afraid to let scenes unfold for minutes and minutes within almost total silence (though usually there’s a relaxed piece of classical music playing on the soundtrack). The film is designed for the viewer to sit back and drink in the spectacle (or feel a maddening sense of tension in some of the later scenes). If you’re not prepared for that, you may very well hate this film. If you are patient though, it’s an amazing experience.

Grade: A

1967 Hugo Winner – THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS by Robert Heinlein

The fifth and final novel by Robert Heinlein to win a Hugo (and the third in eight years) reenacts the American Revolution on a lunar colony. This is another novel that I read, and loved, when I was a teenager.

It’s the late 21^st century and the moon is home to several million people, most of them descendants of criminals sentenced to the penal colony there. The inhabitants call themselves Loonies, and they’re beginning to get fed up with taking orders from Earth. The colony is managed by a supercomputer called HOLMES, and the novel centers around a technician named Mannie who discovers that the computer has become self-aware. Instead of bumping everyone off like HAL-9000, HOLMES (who Manny soon renames “Mycroft,” or just “Mike” after Sherlock Holmes’ brother) has a sense of humor and likes to play childish pranks on the Loonies.

Before long, Mycroft is holding meetings with lunar dissidents and hatching a plan to rebel against the Earth, which is taking too much of the moon’s food production. An anarchist professor named Bernardo de La Paz (really more of a libertarian, but Heinlein prefers the term Rational Anarchist) discusses political philosophy with Mycroft and becomes a mouthpiece for Heinlein’s personal politics in the process. The moon begins to use its infrastructure to launch some devastating attacks on the Earth, and soon, the dissidents have their independence and are charged with forging a new society.

In a lot of ways, this novel is an extension of Farmer in the Sky. That novel gave us a heroic story of frontier settlement; this novel gives us a frontier society that has grown up and is ready to strike out on its own. Turner’s frontier thesis of American history is still very much in effect in Heinlein’s writing, but we’ve moved to the “American Revolution” phase. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is much concerned with Heinlein’s libertarian politics, which he apparently felt the need to spell out after the accusations of fascism that accompanied Starship Troopers. He also manages to work in some of his pet ideas about unorthodox sexual relationships and open partnerships with a concept of polyandry he calls “line marriage.”

There’s a lot about Heinlein’s politics that I don’t really agree with, and this novel is almost nothing but Heinlein’s politics. Yet, this is by far my favorite Heinlein novel and probably my favorite Hugo winner thus far. The political discussions are at least well-informed and interesting, the Lunar society created by Heinlein is fascinating, and the sentient computer Mycroft Holmes is incredibly fun and lovable. Heinlein’s writing is, as always, clear and direct but also amiable and energetic. He’s the closest thing to a 20^th century science fiction Mark Twain this side of Kurt Vonnegut.

In the 70s and 80s, Heinlein’s novels get a bit more sex-obsessed (sometimes in disturbing ways), and there’s a lot of navel-gazing as his later novels focused on tying together is older novels into a multiverse. But, if you have any interest in science fiction and have somehow missed out on Heinlein, you need to give Stranger or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress a chance.

This novel came in second in the Nebula voting after the dual winners in 1966, while Flowers for Algernon and Babel-17 came in second and third in the Hugo voting. It’s the first time the awards diverge at all, and I’ve got to give the edge to the WorldCon Hugo voters on this one.

Grade: A