‘00s Wrap

What a wacky decade, eh?  As in the ‘90s, the awards are very diverse, and there’s a lot going on, but I did notice some clear trends.

The blindingly obvious trend in the Hugos is the rise of fantasy and the fall of the most traditional forms of science fiction. We went three-and-a-half decades without a fantasy winner, and then we have more than half of the Hugo awards for best novel going to fantasy books. That’s quite a sea change. As I’ve said many times before, I don’t know if this is an issue of gender, a rise in the quality of fantasy, or a decline in sf, but I’m not going to fret over it, even though I do lean more towards the science fiction end of the speculative spectrum. Hooray for variety!

SF is clearly in some kind of decline though. The most obvious change is the fall of space opera, which had dominated the genre in its golden age, and had a long and powerful resurgence through the post-Star Wars era. Space operas or books about alien visitors won 2/3rds of the ‘50s Hugos, more than half of the ‘60s, 70% of the ‘70s Hugos, 90% of the ‘80s Hugos, and more than half of the ‘90s Hugos.  And then, in the ‘00s, one. And even that one focuses more on contemporary characters responding to big changes with the aliens distant and mysterious. So, something has clearly happened. The limited reading I’ve done on latter day space opera writers like Alistair Reynolds tells me that space opera has become far less accessible to the average reader. I’m not sure about cause and effect though. Were space operas abandoned because they got too far out and self-referential, or have they moved off to their own little corner to play with Big Ideas because no one pays attention any more? Big Ideas did abound in this decade though.

Other trends? Everyone loves history all of the sudden, which makes me happy. The Baroque Cycle takes science fiction to a new frontier, Jonathan Strange does the same with fantasy, and lots of other books follow suit, like Brasyl, or, deeper into the past, Lavinia. Also, globalization is clearly on sf&f writers' minds. Bacigalupi and Ian McDonald (and Air) provide obvious examples, but detailed and respectful explorations of exotic settings became the norm in these (mostly) English-language books. This is another trend I welcome, and I hope both stay alive. The Years of Rice and Salt nicely combines both trends.

Favorite books:
1. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
2. Kafka on the Shore
3. The Baroque Cycle
4. The Years of Rice and Salt
5. River of Gods
6. A Storm of Swords
7. American Gods
8. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
9. Anathem
10. The Windup-Girl


Least Favorite:
1. Ilium
2. Nova Swing
3. www.Wake (not Hominids! Take that Sawyer h8ers!)

Favorite films:
1. Wall-E
2. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
3. Children of Men
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
5. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
6. Serenity

Least favorite films:
1. Cloverfield
2. AI
3. Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith

And, my recap of the awards is done!

The rest of this week, I'm going to look forward to this year's Hugo nominations as I try to fill out my ballot. I'm also going to take on Worlds Without End's Grand Master Reading Challenge, because WWE is awesome and has been the fuel of this blog.

And then…something. I don’t know…

Where are you 2012 Hugo nominations???  I need you now!

So lost….

90s Wrap

There are a couple of clear trends that immediately leap out when I look over the ‘90s. First of all, series! Increasingly, books are part of a greater whole, and repeat winners were more common than ever. Four writers won nine of the eleven novel Hugos this decade. And, they stick to traditional sci-fi realms – space exploration/opera, time travel, and a couple of post-cyberpunk works. They are a very good set of winners though – this was probably the most consistent decade for Hugo winners yet (it certainly is based on my grades).

The Nebulas went in a very different direction. They rewarded a variety of women writers (Hugo only gave awards to two, though they did so five times), which is nice to see, and they continued to expand their definition of sf, a trend which began for the Nebulas in the ‘80s. Again, this is great on paper, but the Nebulas were much less consistent than the Hugos. I almost wonder if they were working harder at stretching themselves than rewarding great books. They had their least consistent decade, based on my grades. Again, I don’t think that this should be an indictment of the SFWA’s strategy of casting a broad net (Hugo voters will go much the same way in the ‘00s), and it certainly has nothing to do with gender (the Nebulas are dragged down the most by a couple of male authors in the ‘90s), they just chose some stinkers.

The one big notable trend, or maybe a fad, in ‘90s sf is probably the influence of Michael Crichton. The doctor/lawyer/techno-thriller writer became a massive success in the ‘90s on the back of Jurassic Park. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that he was the bestselling sf author of the decade. He didn’t win any of these awards, but I think you can see this influence on works like Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment and Bear’s Darwin’s Radio. Again, I hated both of these books, but I was a fan of the genre at the time. The X-Files hit a similar note as a forensic-based show that looked at sf ideas from a very grounded, contemporary perspective. And again, it didn’t win any awards (well, it received Saturn tv awards, which I haven’t covered), but I was a fan, and I think its influence on the genre is evident.

Top novels:

Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernon Vinge

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Bottom novels:

The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer

Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear

Top dramatic presentations:

Being John Malkovich

T2

"The Inner Light" Star Trek TNG

The Matrix

12 Monkeys

Star Trek VI

Dark City

Worst films:

Men in Black

Armageddon

The Hugos change in some big ways in the ‘00s, and it happens almost immediately with the first clear fantasy winner. So, stay tuned! But first, a week or so off while I do a temp job in Kentucky, and then I dive into the 2011 Hugo nominations

1980s Wrap

In the 1980s, 8 out of 10 of the Hugo winning novels were from multi-book space operas. That compares to 1 (arguably 2) out of 11 in the ‘60s; 4 or 5 in the ‘70s; 5 in the ‘90s; 1 in the 00s. In other words, this is the peak of the space opera. Shall we call this "the Star Wars effect"? In the '80s, even as the Cold War flared up again in the early '80s, President Reagan spent more time evoking Luke and Vader than he did nuclear Armageddon. They’re generally pretty good space operas at that, with Hyperion and the Uplift books (and The Snow Queen, for that matter) especially trying to do some different things with unfathomable technologies and aliens to create a fantastic feel.

The Nebula award seemed to go out of its way *not* to give wins to this new wave of space opera classics. They recognized Ender and Startide Rising, and gave an early nod to Bujold, but they also made some odd choices. No Enemy But Time, Falling Woman, and Healer’s War are all of a piece: they’re personal character-driven stories, more fantasy than science fiction, that deal with topical or controversial issues. I’d also say they’re all, to varying degrees, failures that have not aged particularly well.

I always thought of the ‘80s as the era of cyberpunk, but the awards didn’t seem to take much notice. Neuromancer deserved its wide recognition, but other than some glancing references in Hyperion, I didn’t see nearly as much cyberpunk as I expected.

I don’t have a lot of other trends to point to. The awards I’m covering are diverse enough that they’re harder to spot, and there are no clear movements like the New Wave or the ‘70s retrenchment. It was interesting to watch the development of gender in sf over the decade. For several books in a row I noted the lack of strong female characters. It actually started to get ridiculous by ’87 or so. Then, suddenly, there was a wave of sf self-consciously focused on gender, and specifically feminist issues. I don’t know if this is coincidence or the latter is a reaction to the former. Either way, it will be interesting to see where things go moving forward.

Top 5 novels:

Book of the New Sun (kind of cheating, I know – I’d choose Claw of the Conciliator if I had to pick one)

Hyperion

Startide Rising

It

Replay

Again, in my opinion, the Hugos do a pretty solid job of capturing the best sf compared to the other awards, though they missed the boat on Gene Wolfe.

Bottom 3 novels:

Integral Trees, The Many Coloured Land, No Enemy But Time

None are as bad as The Wanderer or the novel that shall be named, but they’re close.

Top 5 movies:

Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Back to the Future, Aliens, The Princess Bride

Sorry, sf world, no Blade Runner. It’s up there though.

I actually enjoyed all of the ‘80s films to some extent, so no bottom this time.

I'll probably be back first Monday of the New Year with the beginning of the '90s, unless I find some time after Christmas.

1970s Wrap

I’ve always thought of the ‘70s as a hangover after the wild party of the ‘60s. All that positive social change, wild-eyed optimism and experimentation came home to roost or led to extreme reactions. We go from mind-opening drugs to addiction and violence, from civil rights to urban violence and persisting poverty, from Camelot to Watergate. Nuclear war had been the overriding fear, now it was environmental catastrophes, overpopulation, race war, or just the general disintegration of society.

It’s not surprising that the dystopia became the dominant genre, especially in film. I was generally pretty bored with the parade of interchangeable dystopian films that dominated the genre. At least A Clockwork Orange had Kubrick’s vision behind it; Soylent Green and Rollerball pale in comparison. I think novels tended to execute these ideas better: The Forever War managed to place these crises in historical context by stretching out its timeline, and The Lathe of Heaven, especially, uses these fears as a background for exploring ideas about dreams, escapism, and the dangers inherent in seemingly easy solutions.

It’s also not surprising that fantasy began to take off as a genre in this period. The future no longer seemed like the ideal place for escapist fiction. As the future got scarier, suddenly the past…or a mythical world, seemed like a better locale for escapism. Not only did fantasy begin to take off in the ‘70s, it would soon rival (and surpass) sf in popularity. I don’t think fear of the future is the only reason for this (fantasy stories tend to be more universal, and I think fantasy writers have a better record with female audiences), but I do think it’s a significant factor. Film takes the same turn – it’s a great big leap from the parade of dystopias to the (light)sword and (jedi)sorcery adventures of Luke Skywalker or the capable-of-defeating-even-death power fantasy of Superman.

Finally, we do also have the return to classic sf elements over the ‘60s New Wave. LeGuin is often associated with the New Wave, but I think next to the likes of Brunner, her stories were always more conventional in form, even as they contained very original content. Silverberg’s Time of Changes was the last novel that really felt like New Wave sf to me (though Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is closer to a New Wave tone). Instead we have the rise of Larry Niven, who has always seemed like the secret love-child of Clarke and Heinlein to me. You also get two big wins for Clarke and one for Heinlein. Overall, we have a lot more old fashioned swashbuckling space adventures and/or engineering challenges and triumphs – the stuff is ‘40s and ‘50s sf. It was also a decade for clear-cut sf classics, as more books than any other decade swept the awards.

Top 3 novels of the ‘70s:

Rendezvous with Rama

Lathe of Heaven

Ringworld

Honorable mentions for Gateway, Fountains of Paradise, and Forever War (great decade for sf!). I had problems with all three, but found them memorable and exciting in the end.

Bottom 3 novels of the ‘70s:

Lord Foul's Bane

A Time of Changes

Dr Rat

Top film:

Star Wars: The unheralded cult classic.

Alien a close second.

A Clockwork Orange third and winner of the illustrious Best ‘70s Dystopia award.

Bottom film:

Rollerball edges out Logan’s Run. Rollerball is probably the better film, but who thought sports clichés went together with sf?

1960s Wrap

As I’ve hinted before, the ‘60s brings us a new generation of science fiction writers. The big three: Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, and editors like the famous John Campbell had pioneered a number of stylistic tropes that dominated the genre in the ‘50s: a focus on discoveries in physics or mathematics, humanoid aliens with familiar traits, spaceships, galactic empires, robots, ray-guns, etc.

In the ‘60s, the New Wave emerged, and a cohort of writers began to focus on more human issues like language, gender and sexuality, religion, stranger aliens, modern politics. This group
included Delany, Brunner, and LeGuin, and looked more to the darker and more ambiguous works of Dick and Bester than to the Big Three. I admire this new direction, and yet, there is something I like about the more classic sci-fi (and I think that’s reflected very much in my rankings). The ‘70s brings a welcome swing back to hard science fiction with grounded narrative, without completely abandoning the intriguing lines of inquiry posed by the New Wave.

Speaking of New Wave science fiction, one of the biggest changes is probably the inclusion of frank sexuality in most works of science fiction (not that Bester didn't hint pretty strongly at it back in the 50s). One collection of stories in particular, Dangerous Visions, was very groundbreaking in this regard and highly influential. It was edited by Harlan Ellison, includes works by Dick, Zelazny, Brunner, Delany, Leiber, Niven, Farmer, Silverberg, and so on. It dominated most of the Hugo and Nebula categories in 1968, including novella, novelette and short story, and received its own special Hugo. I considered reviewing it, but decided to pass because a) As I said before, I'm not a tremendous fan of the short story, and b) I expect "groundbreaking" stories of '68 to be more of the pointless psychedelia and sex that I've been seeing in the novels. I really have no problem with graphic sex in a book, so long as it serves a purpose. But a lot of the sexuality in the '60s and '70s feels gratuitous, awkward, and more than a little sexist. It's less about portraying normal human activities or providing intimate character moments, and it's much more "Look! I just wrote a sex scene! Look! Look! Sex! Naked women! Totally naked horny women! Look!" We've seen it in Heinlein and Leiber, and we'll see it soon in Niven, Farmer, and even Asimov. Yes, because of lessening restraints in society, the depiction of sex in science fiction grew up in the late '60s - unfortunately, it's growing into puberty. I'm hoping it grows into real maturity sometime soon.

Anyway, my rankings so far (I'm including the '50s, since I didn't do a wrap for that decade's few awards):

Top 3:

1. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
2. Dune
3. The Left Hand of Darkness


Bottom 3:

1. They'd Rather Be Right
2. The Wanderer
3. The Big Time

Finally, I’ve decided to add the Locus awards to the mix. Subscribers to Locus magazine get to vote for these every year – so, it’s another popular award like the Hugo, though maybe less self-selecting (or maybe more?). From what I’ve seen, the Locus does not have the prestige of Hugo or Nebula, but it is a very interesting set of winners, many of which I’d like to talk about anyway. I won’t always look at the Locus, but I’ll include it when a Hugo or Nebula winner takes it, or when I find it particularly interesting or significant.