1948 – DIVIDE AND RULE by L. Sprague de Camp

Where has L. Sprague de Camp been all my life? I vaguely knew the name, but I’d never read a word he’d written. About a year ago, I head a description of this book and though it sounded worth checking out (which is why I’m starting here rather than the obvious Lest Darkness Fall).

“Divide and Rule” is a short novel/long novella from 1939 about a future in which humanity has been conquered by giant rabbit aliens that everyone calls “hoppers.” They landed in South America and waged a long war of conquest (aided by epidemic alien disease in a very nice historical touch). Once they were finished they took action to suppress humanity so that it could serve as their labor force; they outlawed industrial technology and forced schools to teach that they were gods in the natural order. Most importantly, they decided to divide humanity (we have a title!) by imposing a new feudal order.

A couple of centuries later, Sir Howard van Slyck, the Duke of Poughkeepsie, has spent most of his young life raiding castles and fighting duels across New York. He meets a chain-mailed, whip-wielding commoner from the west named Lyman Haas. Haas and van Slyck team up to rescue a damsel-in-distress named Sally Mitten but earn the enmity of the hoppers in the process. Sally leads them to the resistance in hiding, and they learn the truth about their world.

It’s a fast-moving, fun adventure story with good characters, snappy dialogue, a strong concept, and some interesting sf ideas. The only flaw is that the hoppers have some very convenient weaknesses that allow the story to wrap up quickly. I really wouldn’t mind more of this story.

The bigger flaw with this product is that “Divide and Rule” was paired with a much weaker story called “The Stolen Dormouse” to fill out the book’s length. It’s not a bad story, and there is a thematic link – it’s another feudal order. This time, corporations become so powerful that they evolve into feudal states with inherited ranks. It’s an interesting idea and one that’s been fairly persistent in sf, but de Camp uses this setting first to do a Romeo and Juliet pastiche, then adds some slapstick action. Hawaiians get to play a fun role though, and de Camp throws in some decent sf concepts that were probably fairly new in 1941 – the titular “dormouse” is a person in a hibernation chamber and a few bioengineering ideas get thrown around. It’s short, clever, and funny, but not nearly as strong as “Divide and Rule.”

I will definitely be revisiting de Camp in the future. He checks a lot of sf boxes for me – he likes history and uses it to inform his speculative fiction, he’s a rationalist, he likes to mix comedy and adventure, and he’s fairly progressive on gender and racial issues…at least for someone writing in the late ‘30s. This was a great surprise.

Grade: A- (though that ignores “The Stolen Dormouse”).

2008 Hugo Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – STARDUST

Neil Gaiman’s had a pretty good decade at the Hugos. Something written by Gaiman (or adapted from something written by Gaiman, in this case) won in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, and 2009, he received nominations in 2000, 2007 and 2010, and he declined a nomination in 2006. I guess he took 2005 off. Anyway, there’s been some grumbling about this, and even a New Yorker profile of Gaiman spent most of its space mocking his rabid fanbase. So, when you see a movie like Stardust, which did mediocre box office then promptly disappeared from most of the world’s consciousness (my wife claimed to have never heard of it*), well, it’s easy to chalk this up to Gaiman’s fanbase tipping another Hugo vote. Thing is, it’s actually a very cute movie.

The English town of Wall lies next to a giant stone wall that divides our world and a magical land called Stormhold. Tristan Thorne (a relative unknown named Charlie Cox) is a teenager who works in a shop in Wall and loves a girl named Victoria (Sienna Miller), who prefers the wealthier Humphrey (Clark Kent). To prove his love, Tristan promises to recover a falling star from the other side of the wall, then learns from his father that his long lost mother may be on the other side as well. Tristan finds the star personified as a young woman named Yvan (Clare Danes) and leads her back to the wall. Meanwhile, an evil witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) hunts the star so she can consume its heart and regain her youth, and the surviving princes of Stormhold search for a necklace she wears so that they can ascend to the throne. Matthew Vaughn directs and manages to keep things light and make everything look good despite a moderate (though by no means small) budget.

When I saw the film in the theaters, I walked away with the impression that it was a bit of a mess. There are a couple of minor continuity errors and some awkward voice-overs that suggested a lot of late tinkering to me. There are also a couple of obnoxious celebrity cameos. I like Ricky Gervais, but he seems to be playing a parody of himself in a couple of brief scenes. Robert DeNiro has a bigger part with a few surprises, and I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or look away in embarrassment for most of his screentime. It’s a good idea (that I won’t give away), but the humor's a little too broad, and DeNiro doesn’t entirely succeed. I’ve never liked him in a comedic role, and this film didn’t buck that trend, even if it’s not as bad as the Fokkers stuff.

Those are really minor issues though.  Everyone else does quite well, despite much of the main cast being a mix of unknowns and used-to-bes. Gaiman’s plot is charming as hell, Vaughn’s touch is light but effective, and, overall, it’s a very sweet, fun film. I hardly noticed the minor errors this time, and I think my impression from my first viewing was just off. The film flowed quite smoothly, as long as you’re not being hypercritical.

So, as I said, very cute movie. Normally, “very cute” doesn’t necessarily make for a worthy Hugo winner, but when you look at the rest of the field…yeah. Harry Potter 5 was decent, but Golden Compass was very disappointing, Enchanted doesn’t really rise above Disney kids fare (though I’ve only seen pieces of it on cable, and Heroes season one was fascinating, but flawed (and its reputation was sunk by the awful seasons to follow, so it’s good it didn’t win). This is actually the one year where I’d support Jo Walton’s contention that “no award” should win Hugos for Dramatic Presentation more often, but Stardust is the best film of the lot, and I don’t mind it being on the list of winners at all.

Grade: B+

*but she watched it with me this time and really enjoyed it.

2004 Hugo Drama Short Form – “Gollum Acceptance Speech at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards”

Oh, how cute.  Gollum wins “Best Digital Character” at the MTV Movie Awards, and we cut to Andy Serkis accepting the award only to be interrupted by an obscenity-laden rant from Gollum himself in which he screams “MTV sucks” and calls Dobby a “f***ing f*****.”  I approve of Dobby-bashing, though I don’t approve of the second “f” word there so much.

I seem to remember everyone sharing this video on youtube…which is weird because youtube didn’t exist yet.  Maybe it was streaming somewhere though?  Or, maybe so many of my LOTR-obsessed friends spouted lines from it that it felt like a ubiquitous youtube clip before such a thing existed.  Either way, it shows that this new short form category is perfect for the age of new media.  It’s inane, short, and stupid, but it’s also mildly humorous and a sign of internet-humor-to-come, so I can’t really object.  I mean, it must have been a very weak year…

…it’s not like this 90 second one-note video clip won over some kind of short-lived science fiction television classic…

…let me check the other nominees real quick just to be sure…

Oh, f%#$ me...

$#%^&@# you, you &#%@ing Worldcon fanwankers and your stupid bull$%^@!

This has to be the worst Hugo result I’ve ever seen.  This makes They’d Rather Be Right look like &#%@ing Dune.

2004 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation Short Form, a Hugo award which will live in infamy.

Grade: F-

2000 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – GALAXY QUEST

Galaxy Quest follows actors from a fictional Star Trek-like show of the same name that aired in the early 80s for three or four seasons. The actors now make their living touring the con circuit and dealing with obsessive fans. These fans include a group of real aliens, Thermians, who think the old episodes are “historical documents.” They need the crew from Galaxy Quest to save their species from the cruel alien overlord Sarris. Tim Allen plays the Shatneresque Captain, full of swagger and always trying to overshadow his crew. Alan Rickman plays his alien first mate, who, like Nimoy in the ‘70s, wants to be taken seriously and is somewhat ashamed of his role. Sigourney Weaver plays the female officer who never had much to do (her job was to repeat everything the computer says). Sam Rockwell gets some of the biggest laughs as a “red shirt” who died early in an episode. All of them are taken by the Thermians to a complete, thorough recreation of their ship.

I’ll be honest; when I first saw this film, I really didn’t like it. A lot of the satire, especially in the first half, is dead on… But, as the film goes on, it becomes more and more like the material it initially mocks. By the end, it’s much more of a love letter than a satire. It’s a full on space adventure with real action, and real stakes. Back in 1999, I was in my heady, pretentious college days. I was both too good for Trek and really sick of it, and I was in no mood for a corny knock-off, as I saw it.

On this review, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Mostly, I’ve just gotten over myself. The thing is, this film works both as a space opera and as a gentle, fun-poking love letter. In hindsight, it’s one of the best space operas between Star Trek: First Contact in ‘96 and Serenity in ’05. The Fifth Element is the only film during that almost-decade span that I can really say might be better. True, the rest of the qualifying films are horrible Star Trek: The Next Generation films, awful Star Wars prequels (none of which even received a nomination from the Hugo voters, amazingly), and failed Vin Diesel vehicles. After all of those trainwrecks, this film looks a lot more successful. It’s funny, fun, and it has a great cast.

That said, this is a spectacular era for films with speculative elements, and I would’ve been happy with any of this crop of nominees. I already talked about Malkovich and The Matrix. The Sixth Sense is a fine supernatural drama, that holds up despite the steep decline of its creator's reputation. The Iron Giant is a wonderful animated film by Brad Bird, who went on to greater fame with Pixar. I’d probably rank Galaxy Quest fourth or fifth out of that set of films, and it certainly doesn'r have the credentials or influence of The Matrix. But, I do have a much greater appreciation of it now.

I guess you could even argue that this movie continues our “what is reality?” theme in the film reviews of late, as it does rest on a misunderstanding about the nature of fiction in a sf tv show. That's kind of a stretch though.

Grade: B+

No post on Monday, but I'll be back Wednesday.

1999 Hugo – TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG by Connie Willis

Well, this is a change of pace. We’re back in the Oxford of the 2050s that we saw in Willis’ The Doomsday Book. Again, we have historians as time travelers, and again the science fiction aspect takes a backseat to a focus on characterization and English “comedy of manners” humor. Time travelling is important to the plot, especially the novel’s climax, but we spend most of the novel in Victorian England while our protagonists try to return a cat and discover the fate of an ugly vase.

In the 2050s, the historians are preparing for a celebration of the renovation of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed over a century earlier in the blitz. The inconsiderate and monomaniacal Lady Shrapnell has pushed young historian Ned Henry to the brink in her quest for a decorative vase dubbed “the bishop’s bird stump.” Professor Dunworthy tries to protect Ned by sending him to return a rescued cat to 1888, from whence it had been taken by another historian, Verity Kindle, after a near-drowning. Verity is close to a young Victorian woman named Tossie, and Ned meets a nice young man named Terrence, and soon the two Victorians fall in love. Unfortunately, they’re both supposed to marry other people and the course of history may depend upon their progeny. Verity and Ned, fearing that it is their involvement that has changed these relationships, desperately try to find Tossie’s true husband-to-be.

While the wonderful writing and clever dialogue of The Doomsday Book remain, the stakes are clearly much lower than the dual raging epidemics of Willis’s earlier novel, which managed to kill off most of the characters by its conclusion. You don’t often hear that a story falters because the stakes are too high, but The Doomsday Book may be the exception that proves the rule. It’s hard to laugh at fussy upper class twits when everyone is slowly and painfully dying in two different eras. However, in a light tale of Victorian love, this kind of comedy is quite a bit more welcome. This is a really fun and sweet novel, and I think it accomplishes more by doing less. It still has a lot to say about destiny and random chance, and it can still be quite suspenseful. Willis uses a Victorian historian, Professor Peddick, to introduce dueling theories of history – that it is the product of the agency of a few important, individual decisions or that it is the product of broader forces, from mass movements to weather and geography. These ruminations fit in perfectly with the novel’s themes and enrich the overall experience. At the same time, the relationship between Verity and Ned is cute, and gives the reader something to root for.

It’s very different from most of the Hugo winners, which tend to feel like important epics even when they’re brief. There are no intergalactic worlds or dark dystopias here. If I had to describe my experience reading this novel in one word, it would be “relaxing.” That might sound like damning with faint praise, I wouldn’t want every book I read to take the same attitude, but I rather enjoyed this sandwiched between Forever Peace and A Deepness in the Sky.

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-

1990 Clarke and Campbell – THE CHILD GARDEN by Geoff Ryman

In The Child Garden, Ryman brings a welcome quirkiness to the usually bleak genre of the post-apocalyptic dystopia. The novel has a dreamlike quality, and it’s heavy on metaphor. I hate to sound like a literary lightweight, buy I do generally prefer a more narrative-oriented approach; ambiguity can get old for me. But, this novel was effective nonetheless.

In the future, humanity discovers a cure for cancer and spreads it through viruses that prevent the disease among all people. Unfortunately, they later realize that they have shortened everyone’s lives by half or more as an unintended consequence, so that few people live past the age of 35. This is the sort of irony that Ryman builds the entire novel around.

Viruses are the great technology of Ryman’s future world. Viruses have been designed to convey different skills, information, and even opinions, and they propagate through the population, so that babies can be infected with a high school education. At adulthood (10 years), people’s personalities are integrated into a Consensus group mind, which rules their Communist society. Due to the side effects like the above mentioned shortened lifespan, and also apparently due to global warming, most technology has broken down. At the beginning of the novel, London is without electricity and messages are conveyed via runners.

In this world, we meet Milena, a girl who has a resistance to the viruses. She doesn’t have the knowledge or instant-learning skills of the others, but she is better equipped to learn things that are not part of the standard battery of virus-conveyed material. She also better appreciates things that are novel and different. She meets a musically talented, genetically engineered polar bear woman named Rolfa and begins to work on a massive artistic project – a holographic opera based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Society seems both fearful and hopeful of the new ideas that Milena plans to provide.

The book fails quite spectacularly as a dystopia. To do a humorous dystopia right, I think a writer would have to lean on wry satire, but Ryman prefers sincerity and quirk. In fact, it seems at times that he’s just thrown all of the quirkiness he can think of against the wall to see what sticks – some of it works, but far from all of it. The novel seems to contradict itself at a fundamental level: the horror of this society is that everyone knows and thinks the same things due to the viruses, and we’re often told how conformist this future world is. But, the characters are all so wildly idiosyncratic that we never see that conformity. The dullest character is Milena, even though she is the one resistant to the viruses.

So, as biting social satire, The Child Garden doesn’t cut it. But I still enjoyed it quite a bit. It is fun and, at times, quite beautiful. Ryman is a skilled writer, and there are wonderful, lyrical passages describing childhood , art, love, and death. Ryman repeatedly refers to the work as a comedy, in the dramatic sense, and the transcendent and hope-filled finale was quite poetic as well.

Grade: B+

1988 Hugo Dramatic Presentation, 1987 Saturn Fantasy – THE PRINCESS BRIDE

Like Empire, Raiders, and Back to the Future, The Princess Bride is one of those universally beloved ‘80s classics that I find hard to talk about. There’s not much left to say beyond “it’s great!” Everyone I know in my generation can recite any number of the movie’s eminently quotable lines.

The brilliant conceit of the novel, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, is that he’s taken a fictional political satire by S. Morgernstern and edited it into the comic fantasy his father used to read to him by cutting out the dry political sections. The Rob Reiner film manages to replicate this with a framing story wherein a grandfather (Peter Falk) reads the novel to his grandson (Fred Savage). The story itself follows a young couple, Buttercup (Robin Wright) and Westley (Cary Elwes), who are separated by the latter’s apparent death. Buttercup becomes engaged to the scheming Prince of Florin, but she’s kidnapped by three rogues (Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patankin, and Andre the Giant, who collectively steal the movie). The kidnappers are pursued in a brilliant sequence by the Dread Pirate Roberts, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Westley. From there, lovers are reunited and separated again, alliance shift, and we get a couple of great swordfights and some of the most memorable dialogue in film history.

Yeah, it’s great. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I find it impossible to resist these '80s adventure films.

Grade: A

1985 World Fantasy Award (tie) – BRIDGE OF BIRDS by Barry Hughart

Bridge of Birds tied with Mythago Wood for the World Fantasy Award in 1985. There are interesting comparisons, but they are two dramatically different novels. Hughart’s work actually addresses one of my pet peeves about fantasy novels – the fact that they draw so heavily on medieval European tropes – by setting his work in seventh century China and drawing heavily upon Chinese folktales to tell his fantasy adventure (with a heavy comedic element).

Tragedy strikes the small village of Ku-fu when all of its children accidentally ingest poison while cultivating silk worms; they are all completely paralyzed and doomed to a slow death unless an improbable cure can be found. The young Number Ten Ox is tasked with hiring a sage to help solve the problem, and he gets the century old Li Kao at a discount because the sage has a slight flaw in his character. Li Kao is extremely amusing and fun, as he concocts elaborate multi-stage plans to find a powerful ginseng root. These plans usually involve an elaborate con game to gain a small fortune followed by a confrontation with a cruel and powerful Chinese autocrat that leaves Number Ten Ox and Li Kao in an impossible bind that they somehow escape. Eventually, the novel turns into a very fast-paced and elaborate quest.

It can read a bit like China’s greatest hits from a very western point of view. It doesn’t feel of China. For instance, Ku-fu has a piece of the Great Wall next to it despite being hundreds of miles off course due to bureaucratic mistake. Why? Because it’s China (and because it’s a funny story). But even if it does not feel one-hundred percent authentic, it does seem solidly researched, and it captures the mood of Chinese folktales quite well.

Another slight complaint would be the lack of strong female characters - they do tend to be either beautiful and vapid or mean and shrewish. It’s not incredibly egregious, and I probably wouldn’t have even noticed that if I hadn’t just read Mythago Wood, not to mention the super-macho Amber books I’ve been working my way through for a future review. It’s been a while now since I’ve seen a strong female character in one of these novels. Overall, though, this novel was great fun.

Grade: B+

2010 Hugo nominee, graphic fiction: Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse Written and Illustrated by Howard Tayler

Like Girl Genius, this is another webcomic. Unlike Girl Genius, this is much more of a daily comic strip (there used to be these things called “newspapers” that originated the concept. I hear they still publish a few for nostalgia purposes). This is the one nominee that I really wanted to pass on. Not that I thought I wouldn’t like it, but just because it’s so hard to compare to the other works, and also because I was so far behind. I had to read 365 strips to catch up, some of them quite wordy; I think this took longer than some of the Hugo-nominated novels this year. And, I didn’t even consider reading the nine years worth of previous strips, which means that I didn’t know the characters and world nearly as much as I’d like to.

What I did get out of it is that our main characters are mercenaries led by Captain Kaff Tagon, and including mad scientist Kevyn Andreyasn, a snarky floating AI called Ennesby, and the titular Schlock, a violent and blobby alien (?). In this volume, they escort an aid shipment to Credomar, where the delicacy of the local political situation frustrates the mercenaries to no end. It’s a more cynical and militaristic Star Trek. Much of the humor comes from sci-fi in-jokes. The rest of the humor comes from characters deadpanning in the face of over-the-top action sequences or their own callousness.

The cartooning is very simplistic, and even though some of the other nominees had occasional artistic inconsistencies, they’re all still miles ahead of this. The plot seems pretty thin as well; it feels quite padded. However, my biggest problem is how one-note the characters are. They’re all variations on a theme: no-nonsense, cut-through-the-bs military types who are a bit unstable. It got old fast. I also got the impression that Tayler had much more sympathy for the mercenaries’ violent attitudes than for anyone else. I’m all for black humor, but watching the mercenaries gleefully attack a world of aid-recipients was…a little unpleasant?

It is hard to compare the daily strip to collected volumes, especially when you’re reading it in big bunches rather than daily, but I could name a lot of examples that are funnier, better looking, or even have better sf concepts.

Still, I won’t say that I wouldn’t have enjoyed this more had I been prepared and followed the characters longer. But, I’m pretty confident that it wouldn’t be getting my Hugo vote. The whole series is available for free here, so you can decide for yourself.

2010 Hugo nominee, novelette: "Overtime" by Charles Stross (Tor.com 12/09)

This is quite a different story from Stross’s “Palimpsest,” and he deserves credit for his versatility. “Overtime” focuses on a poor schlub who has to cover at work over the Christmas holiday. The twist is that he works at a secret supernatural watchdog agency run by the British government. So, it’s basically “The Office” meets Torchwood.

There’s a fair amount of magical hijinks and supernatural horror here, but Stross plays it all pretty light. It’s a Lovecratian Christmas Comedy Special. The story is at its best when it captures the full absurdity of that juxtaposition. Rather than a jolly old man, Santa Clause is “the hideous threat of the Filler of Stockings, who oozes through chimneys and ventilation ducts ev­ery Dead God’s Birthday-eve to perform unspeakable acts against items of hosiery.” The wry takes on Christmas rituals, government bureaucracy, and office politics that take up the first half of the story are very fun. And, I enjoyed Stross’s depiction of magic (much easier in the Information Age, appartently). When the story bothers to try to have a plot in the second half, I did check out a bit. It’s not that it’s bad, but as well as horror and comedy can mesh, suspense and comedy don’t work as well for me. I just didn’t feel involved. And Stross does wander back into his world of paradoxes and causality loops. The last line was worth a chuckle though, and the whole was an enjoyable read (actually, listen, as Tor.com has it available as a podcast – again, I wholeheartedly endorse the audio short-fiction format).

Grade: B-

1978 BFS - A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON by Piers Anthony

I'm more than a little ashamed to admit how much I loved Piers Anthony's Xanth novels in Junior High School. The Xanth novels are parodies of fantasy novels, like Terry Pratchett's Discworld books dumbed down a level. Or maybe Discworld is a more clever version of Xanth, since the latter came first (I will take an opportunity to talk about Discworld in the future). Xanth is a magical kingdom shaped like Florida that actually coexists with our world, which the Xanthians call Mundania. It occasionally replaces various peninsulas, like Florida, Korea, etc., so that people can travel between the worlds. Xanth has the usual assortment of magical creatures - centaurs, nymphs, ogres, dragons - but every human being has a "talent," which is basically a superpower. Some people can control time or fly, and others can only project a spot on a wall. So, you have a merging of superhero comics with sword and sorcery, but the main appeal is the humor, which is...somewhat less than mature. Most of the humor revolves around bad puns, and there's also a fair share of Flintstones-esque replacement of modern conveniences with fantasy versions. There's also a large share of sexual humor - though it's of a very tame and juvenile sort. There's no real sex (when it does finally appear in the later novel it's described as "rolling around together"), but, for instance, there is an entire plotline in a later novel about seeing a girl's panties, and there's gratuitous nudity throughout. It's all perfectly suited for the not-sexually-active but very sex-obsessed 'tween mind.

A Spell for Chameleon is the first Xanth novel, and among the better ones. It involves Bink, who appears not to have any special talent. As a result, he is exiled to Mundania, where he runs into some other exiles from Xanth. Hijinks ensue, and Bink eventually discovers his power, gets the girl, and his friend becomes king. The novel was very successful and there have been thirty-two sequels (another similarity to Discworld), and this is apparently how Piers Anthony makes his living now. The books at least skip forward in time quickly so that you get a new generations of characters every two or three novels. I read the first umpteen of them, but I remember that they began to go downhill after book five or so. But those first five books were good, clean fun for me as a thirteen/fourteen year old boy. Still, I'm not so sure that I'd recommend them to adults, and I have no real desire to revisit them. Xanth is, at least, an original and entertaining fantasy setting.

Grade: B

1975 Hugo Dramatic Presentation - YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN

As I said last week, Hugo voters were quite fond of comedies in the mid-70s. Young Frankenstein, filmed in black and white, is a parody of Frankenstein (the classic 1930 film moreso than Mary Shelley’s novel). It was directed by Mel Brooks and scripted by Gene Wilder, who also gives a great performance as the infamous mad scientist’s grandson. Dr. Frankenstein inherits his grandfather’s Transylvania estate (and his manservant Igor), and eventually begins to work at replicating his dark research in reanimation. The doctor manages to create his own monster (played brilliantly by Peter Boyle) and debuts the creature with an elaborate broadway number that goes horribly wrong.

It’s a hilarious movie, and one that’s always been a favorite of mine. Wilder's script avoids some of the typical Mel Brooks groaners, and Brooks direction, in homage to James Whale's work on the original, is probably the best of his career. It’s maybe a bit short on the science fiction; there aren’t any big ideas here (even less so than in Sleeper), but it’s fun. The cast really makes the film. This may be Wilder’s best performance, and Boyle’s monster is legendary; Terri Garr is gorgeous as Frankenstein’s young assistant, and Madeline Kahn and Marty Feldman are hilarious as the doctor’s fiancée and Igor, respectively. Highly recommended.

Grade: A-

1974 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation - SLEEPER

The WorldCon voters were really into comedies in the mid-70s apparently. Sleeper is a Woody Allen film (writer, director and star, as is often the case with his films), and it is from the earlier slapstick era of his career. He clearly wants to be Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, and there are long sequences of physical comedy.

Allen plays health-food store owner and jazz afficianado (there’s a wonderfully inappropriate ragtime soundtrack throughout the film) Miles Monroe. Miles goes to the hospital in the 1970s for treatment of an ulcer and wakes up two-hundred years later in a dystopian future. Society is ruled by a totalitarian “Supreme Leader,” everyone has robot butlers, and people who disagree with the are brainwashed. Oh, and people just spend a few seconds in the “orgasmatron” rather than having sex.

Allen is revived by revolutionaries and then forced into hiding. He eventually disguises himself as Diane Keaton’s butler, and when she discovers him, he exhorts her to join him in rebellion.

The film is funny, though some of the slapstick material gets a bit tired (Allen is not Chaplin or Keaton). As science fiction, there’s nothing too original here (there is a parody of HAL9000), but it’s certainly amusing.

Grade: B

1965 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – DR STRANGELOVE

There were 4 nominees but no winner in this category in 1963 (apparently, WorldCon attendees were sick of The Twilight Zone by then; it was nominated but did not win). No award was given in 1964. In 1965, however, one of my all time favorite movies won: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

I never really thought of this film as science fiction. It does, in the end, revolve around an unlikely bit of fictional doomsday technology, but the device is more satirical than speculative. I’ll probably have chances as we go to get into the question of what qualifies as science fiction. Either way, Dr Strangelove is a fantastic and timely comedy worthy of recognition. It’s probably obvious by now how much the Cold War dominated early 60s science fiction – we have the advent of post-apocalyptic fiction like A Canticle for Leibowitz just in time for the world to almost blow up in 1962. Dr. Strangelove takes nuclear war head on. A crazed, paranoid American air force officer launches a nuclear attack on the USSR (provoked by fluoridated water, of course) and the Russian and American governments desperately try to stop him before his actions trigger an unstoppable chain of events ending in nuclear Armageddon. Black comedy rules the day, as the film expertly satirizes the prejudices and self-serving attitudes at the heart of the Cold War mentality. Peter Sellers steals the film with three brilliant performances as a British exchange officer, the American President, and a bizarre Nazi scientist. George C. Scott is also brilliant as a dull-witted, belligerent, and paranoid military adviser. If you haven’t seen this film, go see it now (and keep in mind that it takes about half-an-hour to really get going).

Grade: A