2003 Hugo – HOMINIDS by Robert Sawyer

I knew going in to this novel that fellow Hugo blogger Das Ubernerd declared this his least favorite Hugo-winning novel.  I also knew that sf review podcaster Luke Burrage hated this book, despite not listening to the episode in question, because he rants about it on a regular basis.  Combined with my own dislike of www:Wake and, especially, The Terminal Experiment, I was really afraid of this one.  And…maybe this is the low expectations speaking...but it wasn’t that bad.

Ponter Boddit and his male life-partner Adikor Huld hail from a dimension in which Neanderthals became the dominant hominid lifeform on Earth rather than our own competing Cro Magnon ancestors.  They’re running an experiment with a quantum computer in an abandoned mine when something goes wrong, causing Ponter to be transported to our Earth.  While Adikor goes on trial for Ponter’s disappearance, Ponter hangs out with a small group of Canadian scientists in a house somewhere, discusses his sub-species’ differences, science, and religion, and….falls in love?

Okay, it’s kind of silly.  The idea that a Neanderthal visitor from another dimension would be allowed to relax with a doctor, an anthropologist and a physicist in a Canadian country home is just ridiculous, and the conversations they have are pretty inane.  There’s a remarkable lack of intellectual curiosity out of these scientists and the world as a whole.   The main human character, Mary Vaughan, is raped just before she meets Ponter.  It’s a bold move at character-development on Sawyer’s part, but it's also executed with maximum awkwardness, and means that we spend a lot of time seeing if Mary can learn to love again.  The novel just isn’t strong enough to support this level of serious drama.

Meanwhile, on the flipside, the trial feels a lot like a bad episode of Ally McBeal, complete with bizarre legal procedures, melodramatic reveals of evidence, and even more melodramatic motives for the participants.  I got the impression that the Neanderthal world is supposed to be some sort of utopia.  We see harmonious economics and politics, a focus on sustainability, gender equality and universal bisexuality, advanced science, and almost no crime.  On the other hand, there is universal surveillance and eugenics programs, which Sawyer doesn’t do much to condemn.  He also presents Neanderthals as pure rationalists, and quickly dismisses a whole pile of evidence of Neanderthal religion (which I find fascinating) with some hand-waiving.  At the same time, he builds his whole society around Lewis Binford’s far more controversial and unlikely ideas that Neanderthals kept the genders completely segregated most of the time.  Sawyer seems to do this a lot – promoting himself as a pro-science rationalist while using very arbitrary, and very convenient, evidentiary standards to push his own favorite ideas.

On top of these flaws, we get the standard Sawyerisms that I’ve really come to dislike: obscure geek references dominating casual conversation (Kira Nerys?  Really?), corny dialogue (“par-tay!”), characters spending all of their time debating what are clearly Sawyer’s own pet ideas (quantum consciousness!), and Canada-centrism.   Sawyer even returns to a device he used in Terminal Experiment – a series of dumb headlines reacting to the book’s world-changing events that reveal more about Sawyer’s blinkered view of humanity than anything else.

Okay, so I complained a lot.  I didn’t say it was a great novel, it’s just not as bad as I thought it’d be. The central idea is kind of cool, and I thought the Neanderthal society was interesting enough, despite my problems with it.  I know this is the first volume in a trilogy, and I’m actually half-intrigued to see where it goes.  Maybe they won’t spend all of the next book barbecuing in a random Canadian home!

Then again, considering that one of my all-time favorite sf books was also on the ballot (I'll get to it shortly), I probably could get pretty steamed about this choice.

Grade: C

1973 Hugo and Locus, and 1972 Nebula - THE GODS THEMSELVES by Isaac Asimov

Decades into his career, Asimov won his first real Hugo with The Gods Themselves (“The Mule” later won a retro Hugo and I arbitrarily handed a Fake Hugo to The Naked Sun). I grew up obsessed with Asimov, so I was excited to read this, his most highly recognized novel (awards-wise, that is), and his own personal favorite. And…boy, was I disappointed.

There are some interesting concepts here. In the late twenty-first century, beings from another dimension, where the laws of physics differ significantly, contact our planet and tell us how to build a Pump between the universes that will give us an endless supply of energy. The lucky scientist who makes contact, Frederick Hallam, turns out to be a jealous jackass who uses his notoriety to control the scientific community, and one of the main themes seems to be the sociological perils of science. The novel is divided into three parts. The first tells of a young upstart scientist Lamont who fears that the Pump might change the laws of our universe and cause the sun to explode within a few years. Lamont tries to contact and communicate with the interdimensional aliens, but he must also face the wrath of Hallam. The second takes us to the other side of the Pump, where a group of odd, abstract aliens work to grow up and form a family (and also consider the potential dangers of the Pump). The final third moves the action to the moon, as a group of scientists continue to work on the Pump problem (and we get a “Lunie” society that’s not quite as exciting as Heinlein’s).

There are a lot of intriguing ideas and concerns here. I think Asimov is at his best when he introduces a plausible technology (robots) and then explores the ethical and practical limitations of that technology (his three laws). The Pump almost qualifies, but it’s a bit too far out (and the eventual solution to the problem, while clever, is far too easy). Not much happens here. We learn that Hallam is an incredible jerk, aliens are really weird, and sex on the moon is fun (for some reason, reading sex scenes in Asimov is like listening to your grandparents talk about sex). I just wasn’t as enthralled. The pitfalls of scientific personality clashes is an interesting topic, but that section drags on too long. But, I found the alien section to be far worse. Yes, they’re appropriately weird (tri-sexual blobs with wildly different levels of intelligence and rationality), but that doesn’t necessarily make them interesting. And, as weird as they are, their problems are all too human. Family drama and wild sex with amorphous blobs just didn’t interest me.

I certainly don’t mind that Asimov is trying to stretch his horizons, but I still prefer his classic robot and Foundation stories. There’s nothing wrong with being good at what you do. I’d chalk The Gods Themselves up more as an interesting and fun experiment than an award-sweeping masterpiece.

Grade: B-