Re: Hugos

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Dec 17 2000 - 20:30:30 MST


At 10:08 PM 17/12/00 -0500, Eliezer wrote:

>maybe I'm just being sentimental and I haven't been keeping up
>with the recent winners.

Here's a LoC I wrote to the Aussie zine SF COMMENTARY as long ago as 1996;
editor Bruce Gillespie is famously laggardly, so it's still awaiting
publication. I wrote:

============

Back in August, 1995, Australian Book Review ran a very nice piece by Peter
Nicholls on my Routledge book Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science
Fiction (`a significant book', `miracles of synthesis', `certainly be
required reading for future scholars in the field'). I was surprised,
though, by the following claim:

        It does every now and then, however, evoke (often in footnotes or sardonic
asides) a proud, peculiarly Australian, aggressive (but also defensive)
intellectual elitism. This sometimes interferes with Broderick's usual
clarity of vision. For example, he accepts as a proper source of sf's canon
of excellence, David Pringle's 1985 book Science Fiction: The 100 Best
Novels, while scorning the list of these novels that have won Hugo awards
(voted upon by fans). Accepting the judgement of one not very distinguished
critic over the consensus of 500 or so readers is to founder on shifting
sands, no good foundation for arguments about competent sf as a whole.

I sat down at once to draw up a list from Pringle's selections and match it
against the comparable Hugo winners. For technical reasons the selected
novels were sometimes offset by a year, but I made allowance for that as
best I could. Here are the two lists. Asterisks mark agreed choices:
         
         HUGO WINNERS
53 The Demolished Man
54 no award
55 They'd Rather Be Right
56 Double Star
57 no award
58 The Big Time
59 Case of Conscience
60 Starship Troopers
61 Canticle for Leibowitz
62 Stranger in Strange Land
63 Man in High Castle
64 Way Station
65 The Wanderer
66 `Conrad'/Dune tie
67 Moon is Harsh Mistress
68 Lord of Light
69 Stand on Zanzibar
70 Left Hand of Darkness
71 Ringworld
72 To Yr Scattered Bodies
73 Gods Themselves
74 Rendevous with Rama
75 The Dispossessed
76 The Forever War
77 Late the Sweet Birds
78 Gateway
79 Dreamsnake
80 Fountains of Paradise
81 Snow Queen
82 Downbelow Station
83 Foundation's Edge
84 Startide Rising
85 Neuromancer
86 Ender's Game
87 Speaker for the Dead
88 The Uplift War
89 Cyteen
90 Hyperion
91 The Vor Game
92 Barryar
         PRINGLE WINNERS
*
Childhood's End/More than Human/Space Merchants
Mission of Gravity/Mirror for Observers
The End of Eternity
Stars My Destination/End of Eternity
The Door into Summer
*
Time out of Joint/Sirens of Titan
*
no award
*
*
*
*
Crystal World
no award (Dream Master 66)
*
*
Tau Zero
no award (334 72)
Fifth Head of Cerberus
The Embedding
*
The Female Man
Woman on the Edge of Time
Michaelmas
Miracle Visitors
On Wings of Song
Timescape
Oath of Fealty/(Book of the New Sun)
No Enemy But Time
Birth of People's Republic of Antarctica
*
-------------------------------
 
So is it actually wrong-headed to `accept the judgement' of Pringle rather
than the 500-odd Hugo novel voters? Does Peter Nicholls really believe that
his own judgement as a specialist sf taster is not better and more reliable
than the majority vote of a small subset of several thousand fans
assembled? Can he really maintain that Gene Wolfe's long fiction must be
inferior because it has been passed over by a community which prefers to
honour David Brin and early Lois Bujold?
        Give me a break.
        That's the logic bit; more entertaining is the evidence of the above list,
which shows that in fact Pringle and Hugo voters agreed in 11 of the 31
comparable years! (Perhaps this populism is what marks him as a `not very
distinguished critic'?) What's more, his judgements do not vary in kind
from the conventioneers'. He likes Zelazny's Dream Master better than Lord
of Light, but the two are not Proust vs. Spillane. True, he regards Mirror
for Observers as a better book than They'd Rather Be Right, and it's hard
not to see this as a callously elitist move, but then again he does favour
The Stars My Destination over No Award as even a hardened old wardheeler
like Nicholls might do.
        We don't know what he'd have chosen in the last few years, but I suspect
Pringle, Nicholls and I could scratch up a few titles of greater worth than
the schlock that's listed since, say, 1988 (and while I enjoy Card's two
winners, they simply aren't the best of the year - are they? are they?).
        Peter Nicholls also complained that I `implied' an `astoundingly
arbitrary' American sf `canon'. I rushed to the citation. Was this some
list where I'd madly praised Ray Cummings, Nat Schachner, Piers Anthony,
Ian Wallace, Jack Chalker, Ed Earl Repp, George H. Leonard, Randall Garrett
and Richard S. Meyers? No, it was a far more egregious tally of eccentric
non-entities:
        Phil Dick, Tom Disch, Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ,
Theodore Sturgeon, Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny.
        It's true that some other obvious names were omitted, but that is because
I was trying to be epigrammatic rather than exhaustive (and I was drawing
on Samuel Delany's own choices for analysis, circa 1983). Maybe I could
have slotted in Isaac Asimov because of Delany's discussion of the
Foundation sequence. That leaves out a few from my personal canon (Bester,
Blish, Cordwainer Smith and van Vogt especially), and some other important
writers I like a little less or think less central (Bradbury, Budrys, Frank
Herbert, Phil Farmer, Leiber, Pohl, Sheckley, Vance, Vonnegut, Wilhelm).
Some truly important US writers were really too recent for inclusion in an
Important Old Farts List, although by calling on some later Delany pieces,
I could have - and perhaps should have - added Bill Gibson and John Varley;
obvious extras are Bear, Benford, Bishop, Crowley, Knight, James Morrow,
Stan Robinson, Schenck, Sterling, Swanwick, Vernor Vinge, Walter Jon
Williams, Connie Willis; one could, of course, go on, and many of these
were instanced anyway in the text proper.
        Despite such grizzles, I suspect the only writer I named that Nicholls
might cavil at is Zelazny (although I think his early work was utterly
important as a poetic/louche catalyst), and the unforgivable absences might
be Bradbury and Herbert; and maybe Pohl and Sheckley; even that illiterate
cretin Doc Smith. But that doesn't add up to an insanely idiosyncratic
Oz-resentful `canon'. Waddaya reckon, Bruce?

=======================

I haven't bothered updating that list comparison here, and Vinge of course
has since got a gong, but waddaya reckon, Eliezer?

Damien Broderick



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