1990 Hugo and Locus - HYPERION by Dan Simmons

Of all the wide range of sub-genres that you can fit under the broad rubric of speculative fiction, I have the softest spot for the space opera. I’m not really sure why – too much Star Wars and Star Trek, I guess – and in some ways it’s the most staid and trope-ridden of them all. In the ‘80s, Brin made some innovations with some really alien aliens and some really bizarre technologies, but otherwise, I’m not sure there’s that wide a gap from Lensman and Foundation to Vorkosigan and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In Hyperion, however, Dan Simmons manages to shake the genre up by melding it with literary history to create a unique space opera setting.

The novel takes place in the 28th century. Earth has been destroyed, but colonists have fanned out to other worlds. Farcasters provide almost instantaneous travel between them and have forged a Web of worlds, ruled by the Hegemony. There’s also a hostile group of earlier, breakaway human colonists called Ousters, and then there are a few other worlds that remain rough frontiers outside the Web. One of these planets is the mysterious Hyperion, home to strange alien artifacts like an ancient Labyrinth and the Time Tombs. It is also inhabited by the Shrike, a murderous and god-like being, covered in metal spikes.

The novel unfolds through the stories of a group of pilgrims who go to visit the Shrike and ask him for favors on the eve of a massive war. These stories span genres and styles – the soldier’s story is military sf (told in 3rd person); the priest’s tale begins exploring the challenges of faith in an alien encounter (a bit like Case of Conscience), is told through journal entries, and ends as Lovecraftian horror; the detective’s tale is pure noir cyberpunk, narrated in first person; the scholar’s tale is family melodrama with horror elements (not so far from Song of Kali’s best features, really). Some of the stories are stronger than others, though the only one I didn’t like was the final story, which is a reprint of an older Simmons’ short “Remembering Siri.” I’m not sure I would cast this novel as literary sf, as some do, but it’s certainly literate in ways that many sf books are not. The structure follows the middle English classic, The Canterbury Tales and the title comes from English Romantic poet John Keats, who we see more of throughout the novel.

Each of the stories is exciting and skillfully told, and they each reveal further details about the Web and more mysteries about Hyperion while providing rich character development for the pilgrims. Again, it’s the setting that most captivated me here, and I look forward to reading more novels in the quartet. In fact, my biggest complaint is that there’s not much forward motion in the plot in this entry, and it ends, more or less, on a cliffhanger.

Grade: A

1987 BFS - IT by Stephen King

I wanted to discuss Stephen King at some point. I went through a Stephen King phase starting in Junior High, and I eventually read all of his novels (though I haven’t read any since 2000). It is one of his best, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity for a review, though the pronoun name is a pain.

It occurs in two time periods, as a group of seven people in the small town of Derry, Maine, must twice combat a shapeshifting supernatural creature. Every generation, the monster emerged to eat the town’s children. In the late 1950s, it appears as a clown to lure children in before devouring them. A group of adolescents who play in the Barrens outside of town begin to investigate the disappearances and form a strong bond, calling themselves the Losers Club. In the mid-80s, the creature returns and the Losers must reunite to fight it. Basically, the novel is Stand by Me (based on a Stephen King novella called “The Body”) but with the epilogue expanded to a story of its own (oh yeah, and also with an evil spider/clown monster).

It’s about 1200 pages, but it moves at a fast pace. It digresses a lot from the main plot (it’s more digression than plot really), but the point here is really to enrich the characters to create seven very believable children and follow them into their (somewhat damaged) adulthoods. The children, and King’s depiction of the mysteries and tragedies of adolescence as a whole, really are the greatest strength of it.

I haven’t read it for a decade, but it holds up very strongly in my memory. I didn’t have much trouble remembering it for this review, and I think that’s a testimony to the its simplicity and power.

Grade: A-

1986 World Fantasy Award - SONG OF KALI by Dan Simmons

I get the feeling that Dan Simmons took a vacation to India in the late '70s/early '80s and did not enjoy himself. There's a school of thought in horror (I think I got this from a Stephen King essay) that you take a rather mundane fear and magnify it. In this case, Simmons considers a vacation to a foreign country and makes it go about as poorly as possible. He does this effectively, though I'm not entirely thrilled with the results.

Bobby Luczac has a pretty great life at the beginning of the novel He has a beautiful and wealthy wife (who was born in India) and a baby girl, and he's a poet who is actually employed - he works for both Harper's and a small literary magazine. He grabs an assignment to track down an elusive Indian poet thought dead for almost a decade. He packs his family off to Calcutta for what he believes will be a quick and enjoyable vacation, but he immediately hates the dirty, poverty-stricken Indian city. He is also ensnared in a web of intrigues concerning the possibly-dead poet that includes the snooty Indian Writers' Union and a group of cultists to the goddess of destruction, Kali. Because this is a horror novel, these intrigues are bound to take a nightmarish turn.

Simmons has a clear but strong narrative voice, and this novel made me look forward to the upcoming Hugo winner, Hyperion, but this novel never quite grabbed my attention. There are clear mysteries at the novel's beginning, but none of them quite hooked me - the spookiness level remains relatively low until the final quarter of the novel, and then it ramps up a little too quickly. It was only in the epilogue, where Simmons begins to hint strongly about the wider implications of what has happened to the Luczacs, that I really had any emotional response to the book, which is a problem for a horror novel; it's too subtle for the first two-thirds and too much in the final third.

I also had a problem with the novel's slight (unintentional, I think) xenophobia. As I said, Simmons makes exotic travel scary, but he offers little redemption for India. The message seems to be "you think travel to a poverty-stricken foreign country might be frightening? Well, it could be even worse among the poor, dirty, superstitious pagans of Calcutta!" I'm not saying that I think Simmons is in any way racist, but I do think it's unfortunate that a side-effect of this sort of horror set-up is that Calcutta and India come off as so inherently flawed - there's no historical context, just deep, ancient, and foreign evils.

Grade: B-

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-

2010 Hugo nominee, novella: SHAMBLING TOWARDS HIROSHIMA by James Morrow (Tachyon)

This book is the perfect companion to Adam Roberts’ Yellow Blue Tibia, reviewed here last week. That novel saw Soviet sf writers brought together in the wake of World War II to create a story that would pay off in the 1980s. This novel, also narrated from the perspective of the 1980s, is about the US government bringing together Hollywood horror legends in 1945 to create a monster movie that would frighten Japan into surrender. It’s really a mirror-image of Roberts’ book, and I’m trying to figure out why this idea of blending fiction and reality in the wake of World War II/Cold War is in the zeitgeist all of the sudden. Or is it just pure coincidence?

The narrator is a fictional (to my knowledge) Hollywood actor named Syms Thorley who has starred in a series of monster films in ‘40s Hollywood. He’s tasked to play a fire-breathing lizard and wreck a scale-model of a Japanese city (the set-up to get to that point is pretty ridiculous, but believability is not Morrow’s central objective here). Thorley is joined in this plot by a host of real Hollywood legends like director James Whale (Frankenstein) and early special effects wizard Willis O’Brien (King Kong). There are plenty of hints in the framing narration that this plot has something to do with the popularity of kaiju (giant monster) films like Godzilla in Japan.

The plot is fairly rudimentary – there are a few obstacles along the way, but Morrow's focus here is more on conveying the atmosphere of B-movies during Hollywood’s golden age. Morrow does a great job of it, and the novella is worthwhile for the setting and prose alone. But, as the title hints, the novel is really about the atom bomb, and the way it haunts – or maybe how it should haunt – America as well as Japan. Just like Yellow Blue Tibia, Shambling point out that the horrors of the atomic age can be stranger and more terrible than anything the science fiction of the era produced.

This was a well-written and engaging book that was both funny and haunting. Very nice stuff, and I’m looking forward to more Morrow coming up when I get to the ‘90s.

Grade: A-

1980 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1979 Saturn – ALIEN

Science fiction movies made a giant leap in the late 70s, and it seems that every year from ’77 to the early nineties produces at least one incontrovertible classic. Alien, Ridley Scott’s blending of space travel and horror, is about as incontrovertible as it gets.

The world of Alien is basically the opposite of Star Trek’s. Our heroes are deep space prospectors – blue collar miners who work for a giant, amoral corporation. There is no faster-than-light travel, and instead, the crew of the ship Nostromo goes into stasis for the long journeys they must undertake in the hopes of a decent profit. They are awakened by a strange transmission and dispatched by the corporation to investigate. They land and find a large alien spaceship, its giant crewmen apparently violently killed. There are other odd signs, and eventually a parasitic organism latches onto the face one of the miners. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid spoilers for this film, I won’t say much more. Suffice it to say, we get one of the most shocking scenes in film history, and before long, the crew of the Nostromo find themselves being knocked off one by one while the titular being chases them around the ship, slasher-movie style.

There are some fantastic performances here – this was, of course, a breakout role for Sigourney Weaver, but Ian Holm, John Hurt, and Tom Skerritt are also fantastic, as is Homicide’s Yaphet Kotto. The real appeal of this film, however, is the mood. The sets are wonderfully gritty and run-down, and the scenes exploring the crashed alien ship, designed by H. R. Giger, are awe-inspiring. For the first hour, this may be the greatest science fiction film ever made. From there, at least for me, the film loses a lot of its appeal. I’m not a big fan of the slasher formula, and Scott stretches the tension well beyond the breaking point. If you are a horror fan though, as well as a science fiction fan, and you have somehow missed this film, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll love it.

Grade: A

1978 World Fantasy Award - OUR LADY OF DARKNESS by Fritz Leiber

One thing that worried me about the World Fantasy Award was that Fritz Leiber won one. He was not my favorite Hugo-winning novelist, but I know that his fantasy work was pioneering, genre-establishing stuff. Our Lady of Darkness isn’t really science fiction or fantasy though; it’s a horror novel. And it’s horror of the subtle, “there’s something dark and unsettling out there” style pioneered by Lovecraft (who warrants several mentions within the novel).

The main character is a genre writer named Franz Westen (which is similar enough to Leiber’s name to raise an eyebrow). Westen is living in San Francisco, and he’s become fascinated with a book called Megapolisomancy by a turn-of-the-century spiritualist named de Castries. Megapolisomancy turns out to be a form of magic that uses the reality distorting nature of big cities with their high (and, in San Francisco’s case, even sometimes pyramid-shaped) buildings to work. Most of the book actually reads like a love letter to San Francisco, which is my personal favorite city, so I enjoyed this quite a bit. The first third consists almost entirely of Westen hanging out with his quirky neighbors, and it almost feels like an Armistead Maupin knock-off. But, there are hints that something creepy is going on in Westen’s building, as he seems to witness a strange creature lurking in his room from a nearby hill. The next third of the novel consists entirely of a discussion of de Castries' life with a fellow connoisseur of the supernatural, and here we basically get Leiber’s love of Lovecraft and a discussion of Crowley and other figures of early twentieth-century mysticism.

It’s a bit creepy, but it’s not until the final third that any real sense of thrill, horror, or even suspense works its way into the book. The climax comes rather suddenly and ends even more quickly. In other words, the pacing is a little off. Still, compared to the other novels of his I’ve read, Leiber has reined in his reliance on stereotypes and his need for over-the-top, oddball characters (though neither is entirely gone). I didn’t mind the fact that this rather short book consists almost entirely of conversations or that the plot moved slowly, and I found megapolisomancy an interesting enough concept to make it all worthwhile. This was definitely my favorite Leiber book of the three I've now read.

Grade: B

1960-1962 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – THE TWILIGHT ZONE

After The Incredible Shrinking Man, the Hugos gave no award in 1959 (though there were three nominees). In 1960, the category was renamed from “outstanding movie” to “best dramatic presentation” and the award went to the brainchild of writer Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, an anthology show of odd tales that generally fit into the categories of sci-fi or horror. The show also won in 1961 and 1962, and was nominated in 1963 (though no award was given in that year). Later, Hugo would reward individual episodes of tv series, but it seems that these awards were given to the show’s entire body of work in those years.

I hadn’t seen a lot of episodes of The Twilight Zone (though I watched about thirty or so of the reputed best for this blog post). I know this is sacrilege for a classic sci-fi fan, but I’ve never really been into short stories. That’s why I’m skipping some important Hugo categories here (novella, novelette, short story). In my opinion, there’s generally not enough time to develop a really engrossing world or compelling characters that you can get attached to. And, I often feel like I’m waiting for a punchline.

All of these critiques apply to anthology shows as well.

Better episodes avoid the “punchline” problem – like “Walking Distance,” where a man inexplicably travels back in time to recapture lost childhood. The story isn’t about what’s happening, but how the character feels about it.

But, an episode like “Eye of the Beholder,” is not only totally beholden to its surprise ending to succeed, but pretty much everyone already knows that ending. Still, it wasn’t hard to sit through these episodes because they have such high production values and incredible visuals, not to mention some fine performances by a wide array of great actors and actresses. For these reasons, I could enjoy an episode like “Time Enough at Last,” the classic about a bookworm who wants more time to himself to read and gets his wish. Even though I knew the ironic conclusion, I could still delight in Burgess Meredith’s brilliant work as the central character.

If you’ve seen The Simpsons Halloween Special, you know the “punchline” of “To Serve Man,” (turns out that aliens love puns) but it’s still a wonderfully written and produced piece of vintage television and excellent science fiction.

I think I liked the show best when it veered into the delightfully weird and stayed there. Case in point: “The Invaders,” an almost completely dialogue-free affair in which a rural woman fights off tiny aliens with kitchen knives. I won’t spoil the twist.

As I see it, the show has three major problems that cripple some episodes. There’s the aforementioned issue of being too dependent on the punchline. Furthermore, some episodes seem really stretched – a wonderful idea that would work very well as a six or seven minute short film often gets padded out to 25 minutes (I’d actually say that “Eye of the Beholder” suffers from this problem). Finally, some episodes have ideas that are just too big to work with the show’s shoestring budget and primitive special effects (“Little People”).

To sum up, a lot of episodes are one-note throwaways, but a select few are really worthy of their classic status, and this show certainly revolutionized science fiction on television. It’s easy to see why it won three years in a row (nor did the film industry offer up much competition, based on the losing nominees).

My top ten (of the episodes I watched from the winning first three seasons):

1. The Invaders (mentioned above)

2. Walking Distance (a man takes a quick walk to his hometown and ends up visiting his childhood)

3. And When the Sky Was Opened (the survivors of a crashed experimental space plane begin to disappear)

4. A World of His Own (A playwright can make his characters literally come to life)

5. Time Enough at Last (a bookish fellow survives a nuclear war then heads to the local library)

6. It’s a Good Life (a young boy who controls reality holds a rural town hostage to his immature whims)

7. Eye of the Beholder (a disfigured woman is an outcast in a dictatorship obsessed with conformity)

8. Kick the Can (an old man tries to flee his nursing home – and old age – by playing a child’s game)

9. Nick of Time (a newlywed - William Shatner! - becomes obsessed with a vague fortune telling device)

10. To Serve Man (aliens have come to aid humanity, but one man doubts their motives)

Grade: A for all of the above episodes.

A- for the series as a whole (not every episode's a winner)