Fritz Lieber won two Hugo Awards in the 1960s, first for his novella The Big Time and then for his novel The Wanderer, both of which I’ve read in the last two months. As with the early winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the early winners of the Hugo Award can be totally baffling, not least because of how incredibly dated much of the content seems. Many early Pulitzer winners are nonchalantly racist, and their stories are overly moralistic. Some of the early Hugo winners are great – the 8th, 9th, and 10th winners were Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, and Way Station, respectively – but some reflect the genre’s utter genre-ishness, descending into the sort of campy sci-fi stories I associate with pulpy magazines like Astounding Stories of Super-Science, where the emphasis was frequently on the fictional science part of science fiction. The Wanderer, which won right after Way Station, is one of the worst winners I’ve read, in part because Lieber was so obsessed with the science aspects of his setup, but even more so because the characters and story are so utterly one-dimensional.
The Wanderer is an object, initially presumed to be a planet, that appears suddenly in Earth’s sky, tearing the moon apart and causing huge shifts in the earth’s tides, including massive flooding that kills hundreds of thousands of people. Lieber shifts abruptly across at least a half dozen different narrative streams, following individuals or groups of people as they react to the Wanderer’s appearance and the immediate threats its waters pose, especially a gang of UFO-watchers who band together and try to head for higher ground, running into numerous threats from both the new object and from violent cliches marauding the countryside.
Some hard science fiction at least gets by on the strength of the science itself, but other than Lieber’s early discussion of hyperspace, using the hypothesis that is now known as “quantum graphity” as a starting point for explaining faster-than-light travel across the universe, The Wanderer gives us very little of the science to compensate for the lack of interesting characters. And the responses of those characters to the catastrophic events that follow the Wanderer’s appearance are similarly uninteresting – Lieber has them focused either on survival or on sex, but doesn’t exactly give us anything new to ponder here. Wikipedia cites freelance reviewer James Nicoll’s argument that this book won the Hugo thanks to “blatant and unabashed sucking up to SF fandom” within the text. I can’t argue with this, or Nicoll’s conclusion that this is a “terrible” book.
The Big Time isn’t any better, although it at least has the virtue of being in the public domain and thus free as an e-book. Imagine if Sartre’s No Exit were about competing forces traveling the spacetime continuum, fighting a temporal “Change War” across the history of the cosmos, and meeting up in this room that may exist outside of spacetime entirely. It’s about as thrilling as it sounds.
I’m still on the same two books I mentioned in the last two posts, but since I’m discussing Hugos, the next one I’ll read is James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, which won in 1959, the year after The Big Time took the prize.