1996 Campbell and Philip K Dick, 1995 BSFA –THE TIME SHIPS by Stephen Baxter

This novel racked up lots of awards and even more nominations, and it heralded a new wave of hard sf writers consisting of mostly British authors, like Baxter. The novel was authorized by the H. G. Wells estate as a sequel to The Time Machine to celebrate that landmark work’s centennial.

It does pick up right where The Time Machine left off; in fact, I had to put the book down after the first couple of chapters, read The Time Machine, and then start over with The Time Ships. This was fine, since a) it’s pathetic that I hadn’t read The Time Machine earlier, and b) The Time Machine is a very short work, under a hundred pages. Anyway, the unnamed Time Traveler sets off on another trip almost immediately after the events of Wells novel. He moves hundreds of thousands of years into the future, but quickly finds that something is wrong, and he is now in a different future populated by super-smart Morlocks with astounding technology. Working from the multiple universes of quantum theory, Baxter posits that the Traveler’s jaunts through time take him into different histories. He takes a New Morlock companion named Nebogipfel and continues his travels through a wide array of pasts and futures, many of them references to H. G. Wells books (including an alternate World War II with giants tanks like his “Land Ironclads”).

It’s a wild ride and a very fast-paced read. Baxter managed to explain some very big ideas and complicated scientific concepts without ever losing me for a second. His prose is straightforward and unadorned, and thus unlikely to get a lot of notice, but I do think this kind of communication skill deserves more appreciation. I’ve read enough bad non-fiction science writing to know that understandable explanations aren’t as easy as they look.

Still, I’m not quite sure that this is a worthy successor to The Time Machine. Wells managed to use his adventure tale to comment on the growing class divide he saw in industrial Britain. Baxter doesn’t make the same sort of comment on contemporary society, though there is some discussion about human nature, war, etc., none of it that deep, specific or revaltory. Also, even though it’s narrated in first person (and over five times as long), we don’t learn all that much more about the protagonist, and the rest of the characters are even slighter. The focus is on Big Ideas and action, but at least it’s very fun. The Time Ships could have said a bit more and delved a bit deeper, but it is a very entertaining and worthwhile read.

Grade: B

1996 Hugo and Locus – THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. His 1992 novel Snow Crash, a hyperbolic, hyperactive cyberpunk novel set in a future where the state has crumbled, is probably his most famous work, but it didn’t win any of the awards I’m covering. This is probably for the best, since I don’t think it’s a great novel. It’s funny, exciting, fun, and interesting, but it’s also silly, ridiculous and swerves erratically between over-the-top action scenes and infodumps about Sumerian religion. Every novel since has won an award though (apparently, Locus readers adore Neal Stephenson), so I get to talk about him a lot.

The Diamond Age is Stephenson’s one Hugo win. The novel is an homage to Charles Dickens’ class-oriented Victorian fiction, but it takes place in a future world dominated by nanotechnology. Matter compilers can create just about anything a person could need or want, but it’s an expensive and potentially deadly technology – sentinels have to protect people from deadly nano-viruses and the majority of the world’s population still have to toil to afford their basic necessities. Meanwhile, a select few live with immense wealth, but to protect that wealth they congregate in “tribes” that enforce social order. The action in this novel takes place in Hong Kong where the Han tribe dominate, though there is also an enclave of Neo-Victorians. The Neo-Victorians have retreated to the strict social mores and class deference of 19^th century Britain to bring order to the modern world.

The leader of the Neo-Victorians, Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, commissions an amazing educational text that combines nano-technology, sophisticated interactive software, and live remote actors to give his granddaughter a well-rounded understanding of the world, morality, and her own emotions. When its creator is mugged, the book accidentally ends up in the hands of a very young, abused working-class girl named Nell. The rest of the novel follows Nell’s education and mimics the style of enlightenment novels (which obsessed over the idea of education and what we would call “nature or nurture”). As always with Stephenson, there’s a variety of entertaining side stories, including my favorite involving a Neo-Confucian judge. There’s also a secret society of hackers trying to bring down the hierarchical social order that has evolved.

The ending is the one point where the novel seems to fall down a bit (a common problem for Stephenson), but this is a fantastic and original novel, especially the portions involving Nell or Judge Dee. Highly recommended.

Grade: A

1995 Saturn SF – 12 MONKEYS

I’m surprised that this is my first and only chance to talk about Terry Gilliam in this awards round-up. He has one of the best sf film resumes of any director this side of Spielberg and Cameron, and his body of work is far more diverse and surprising than theirs. He received Hugo nominations for Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1978, Time Bandits in 1982, Brazil in 1986, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1990, and 12 Monkeys in 1996. That’s one hell of a list of great sf movies, but none of them managed to win. At least 12 Monkeys picked up a Saturn, and this is one of those instances where Saturn’s pick is more exciting and original than Hugo’s (more on that in a week). Gilliam likes surrealist stories about mentally unstable people which he augments with unsteady, drunken camera-work. This film, alongside The Fisher King, probably represents his most commercial work, but it’s also perhaps his best.

12 Monkeys is based on an experimental French film called La Jetee, which is a surrealistic romance involving a time traveler from a post-apocalyptic world. Here, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is the post-apocalyptic survivor of a horrific plague in the year 1997. He’s part of a gritty underground society that sends expeditions to the surface (where we see New York City overrun by zoo animals) and back in time to understand the plague. But, we’re warned again and again that the past cannot be changed. Cole travels back to the 1990s where he meets a mental patient named Jeffery (Brad Pitt) who spouts revolutionary rhetoric and a sympathetic psychiatrist named Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). Cole and Railly are drawn to each other due to some mysterious memories, and they eventually begin to explore the origins of the virus, which they link back to Jeffrey and his 12 Monkeys group.

It’s a tightly plotted story with incredible visuals from Gilliam and some brilliant acting. This is the first film where Brad Pitt showed his range. Stowe is wonderful, and every time I see this film, I wish she’d had a more extensive career. Willis does pretty good for Bruce Willis. Its eerie atmosphere, great story, and exploration of destiny and apocalypse make it one of the best time travel films ever made.

Grade: A

1995 WFA – TOWING JEHOVA by James Morrow

God is dead. Even more surprising, he was a two-mile tall bearded Caucasian dude, and his body has fallen from Heaven into the Atlantic Ocean. The archangels, dying of grief, contract with the Vatican to hire disgraced oil tanker captain Anthony Van Horne to tow the Holy corpse to a burial site. However, the Church wants to disobey the angels’ orders and cryo-freeze Yahweh, Walt-Disney’s-head-style. At the same time, a team of rogue atheists want to destroy the corpse before anyone catches wind of it.

Yeah, it’s a plot so intriguing/weird that I had to lead with it. It’s in the irreverent, cynical-yet-insightful tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, but wacky blasphemy only takes you so far. Morrow won the 1991 World Fantasy Award as well, for Only Begotten Daughter, a book about Jesus’s little sister who is born into the modern world, becomes a lesbian and writes a tabloid advice column. Other stuff probably happens in that novel, but I put it down halfway through. It’s not that I was offended…in fact, I think the problem was that I was in no way offended. The story’s humor and narrative hooks depend on the reader caring about Morrow’s twisting of religious ideals…and I didn’t. I feel much the same about this work, though I did finish this one.

Both novels were actually well-written and full of well-rounded characters. I really liked the female Messiah’s adopted father in Only Begotten Daughter, for instance, and Van Horne and his Vatican counterpart, a Jesuit physicist named Thomas Ockham are quite nice here. There’s also a decent set of themes – faith and forgiveness, parents and children, and a discussion of the source of ethics similar to The Terminal Experiment’s but infinitely more logical, erudite, and funny. There’s plenty of good here, I just never felt like there was enough story to float the novel. I really liked Morrow’s recent novella, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, and there are many similarities; to destroy God’s body, the atheists hire a bunch of World War II-obsessed special effects gurus that would have fit right into Shambling’s oddball origin-of-Godzilla story. Towing Jehovah has the same play of slapstick and morality tale, cynicism and humanism, and absurdity and metaphor as Shambling…the only real difference is the additional two hundred pages of length. But, I think that is the crucial difference. It’s a good conceit, and well-told, it’s just too long for that conceit to carry. This could’ve been a great novella, but, for me, it’s merely an okay novel.

Grade: B-

History of science fiction

This is an incredible infographic of the history of science fiction by artist Ward Shelley.

via worldswithoutend.

1995 Nebula – THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT by Robert J. Sawyer

There are lots of little things that annoy me about The Terminal Experiment. 1). The humor is awful (an actual punchline to a real joke in the book: “Vulcan mind melt”). 2). The novel takes place in the distant future year of 2011, and yeah, people watch TV on DVRs and use eReaders, but they also use video phones, have voice-controlled houses, and they have special sleep monitors so they know how much noise they can make when their partner seems to be asleep, possibly the dumbest invention I’ve seen in a sf book. 3). Sawyer also gives us his typical barrage of pop culture references, which would be fine if they weren’t so damn…surfacey. We learn that the main character likes Star Trek and Robert Parker novels, not because they illuminate his character all that much, but because Sawyer likes those things. 4). There’s some petty moralizing as the main character looks down his nose at people drinking alcohol during Friday night happy hour. And then there’s 5). the misguided crusading against organ donation (?!), or 6). the meticulously researched but ridiculous and overwrought “assassination by food-drug interaction” scene. Not to mention 7). the general sense you get from Sawyer novels that Canada is the center of the universe.

So, Robert Sawyer is an author with a few tics, and those tics are bound to get on the nerves of certain of his readers – something annoyed me in almost every chapter here. Still, I’d be willing to overlook these problems if the novel came even close to living up to its central premise(s).

The Big Idea here is that biomedical engineer Peter Hobson accidentally discovers the soul after he invents a super-sensitive nanotech EEG while trying to prove that life-saving organ donation procedures are immoral (?!?!). Oh, and someone else has used nanotech to make people immortal (remember, it is the far-future year of 2011!). We do get some interesting news-clippings about the cultural effects of these discoveries, but Hobson decides that his main goal should be to test their effects on individual personalities…by making three exact computer copies of every aspect of his mind (!!!!). Any of these biotech revolutions would be worthy of an epic science fiction novel, but in The Terminal Experiment, they play out in tandem through a small domestic drama and a generic murder mystery.

Hobson’s copies include an exact “control” copy, a copy that believes itself immortal, and a copy that thinks it is disembodied spirit. Sawyer glosses over the extremely important details of how Hobson and his partner program these differences. But, Peter has recently learned that his wife cheated on him, and one of the copies decides to seek vengeance! There are murders, an uncannily brilliant detective with implausible instincts, and there’s some sort of (dumb) philosophical point about marriage and morality in there. In the end, Sawyer’s writing is okay, but his tics grate. His future feels half-assed, delusionally optimistic, and contrived. And, the Big Ideas trample over each other – they’re jumbled, then buried in a mystery story. The end result is not good at all. I’d say this novel is significantly worse than www:Wake, and I’m again disappointed by the Nebula awards.

I needn’t bother have written all that – Ubernerd pegs this one perfectly in probably his longest review.

Grade: D

1995 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION: “All Good Things…”

Ron Moore and Brannon Braga wrote this final episode of The Next Generation. They had become fairly integral to the show by this point, and I think their aesthetics added a lot to the show – it became less episodic, more serious and just a tinge darker under their watch.

Like, “Inner Light,” this is a fine example of what Star Trek: The Next Generation does well, and, again, it focuses on Patrick Stewart, by far the show’s strongest actor and biggest presence. It’s also an amazing model for how to do a series’ finale: it looks back to the show’s beginning and looks forward to see where the characters might go without losing sight of the present. The godlike entity Q (John DeLance) causes Picard to skip back and forth, Slaughterhouse-Five-style, through three periods in time – the show’s present, seven years earlier when the Enterpise-D launched (the show’s pilot episode, “Encounter at Farpoint,” which was nominated for a Hugo), and twenty-five years into the future. In all three time periods, Picard must investigate a cosmic MacGuffin – these leads to doubts from his fledgling crew in the past, and, in the future, Picard has to “get the band back together” while his old crew suspects that he is suffering the effects of a degenerative brain disease. The MacGuffin is rather pointless and nonsensical, but the writing and acting are excellent, and it’s a brilliant way to send off the show.

Star Trek has yet to pick up another Hugo, though there is some good material out there after this – at some point maybe I’ll take an opportunity to say a bit more about DS9. There’s also a lot of really bad Trek after this as well, including a few awful Next Generation films, including Generations, written by the same Braga-Moore team and filming almost immediately after this episode. You can’t win them all.

I wonder how many more Hugos TNG would have won if they had separated the dramatic presentation categories as they do now. There wasn’t much competition; I think The Next Generation prompted a lot of the sf shows that appeared in the 90s. These two Picard episodes are very deserving, especially “The Inner Light,” but it would have been nice for some of the Klingon episodes to get more attention – the show builds a fairly rich culture for these aliens that were just swarthy moustache-twirlers in the Original Series. “Sins of the Father” and “Reunion” are very good. The alternate timeline action episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise” is also worthy of attention, as are some of the Asimovian robot stories about Data, like “Measure of a Man.” Then there’s the more action-oriented battle with the Borg in “Best of Both Worlds.” I’m sure the show was bad as often as it was great, but those great episodes really are some of the finest science fiction television of all time.

Grade: A-