hugo award — Page 7

I answered questions from our fantasy baseball staff for a new Insider post today.

I’ve been an avid reader for most of my life, but often became burned out on reading when I was younger because I wanted to read something different from what was being forced on me in school. The drudgery of assigned reading in junior high school and my first two years of high school left me reading very little for pleasure, something exacerbated by a gift of a Commodore 64 around that same time that found me absorbed in games rather than pages. It was my chance discovery of a science fiction book that got me back on the reading track when I was 15, a spine that jumped off the shelf first because of the author’s name, Isaac Asimov*, and then because of the description of the book, which hooked me right away.

* I was familiar with Asimov’s name for a number of reasons, from the sci-fi rag that bore his name to the long out-of-print Realm of Algebra, which I used one weekend in sixth grade to learn the subject, because my school was switching me to a different math class. Any other famous sci-fi author’s name wouldn’t have had the same effect on me in the bookstore.

I wasn’t aware at the time that the book, Foundation, was an important work in the history of science fiction, or part of a long series. I saw what sounded like a cool story and bought the book, which prompted a stretch of reading for pleasure that ran right through college, through the entire Foundation series, then other Asimov titles, then the Dune series (pro tip: stop after book one), Lord of the Rings, the entire works of Kurt Vonnegut to that point, and even a dozen or so novels by Philip K. Dick, along with a handful of one-off works in the sci-fi and even fantasy genres.

There came a point in my early 20s, however, when that paroxysm of reading slowed to a near-halt. I gave up on fiction, for reasons I don’t even remember, and was only reading a book a month, if that. And when I gave up on fiction, I gave up on science fiction more or less for good. It wasn’t a conscious choice, nothing driven by disdain for the genre, but perhaps an association of science fiction with my own childhood that made me switch to more traditional, mainstream literature. There were exceptions, including the book that provoked my second wind as a reader, the first Harry Potter novel; I read that on a business trip to California in the fall of 2000 and have read over 600 novels since then because J.K. Rowling managed to reawaken in me the love of a great story, the desire to get lost in a dazzling plot with descriptions so vivid that I could be consumed by the words. (To this day, the only time I’ve ever had a dream that put me in a book was one where I was just a regular student at Hogwarts, witnessing the story as a classmate rather than a reader.) But even Rowling’s work didn’t push me to read more fantasy novels; I shifted to the classics, many of which appear to have been influences on the Harry Potter novels, and left science fiction almost completely behind me.

The closest I’ve come to sci-fi in the interim, aside from the two titles on the TIME 100 (Neuromancer and Snow Crash), are dystopian novels, those that depict an alternate society, sometimes set in the future, but nearly always incorporating some element of science into their visions of authoritarian regimes or personal struggles for identity and freedom. My interest in dystopian novels also dates back to that first fling with sci-fi in high school, when I read 1984 and Brave New World and Wells’ The Time Machine, but has never stopped even though the genre includes its fair share of solipsistic duds. (Its sister category, utopian novels, is even worse in that regard.) Reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We earlier this year made me seek out other highly-regarded titles in the catgory, which led me back into sci-fi and to The Dispossessed, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel by acclaimed sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Not only was it an excellent representative of what a good dystopian novel can accomplish, it balanced the fiction and the science beautifully, reminded me of what I once enjoyed so much about the genre.

Le Guin’s setup in The Dispossessed differs from those of all of the dystopian novels I’ve read previously. She’s set up two sibling worlds with antithetical societal structures, neither of them clearly utopian or dystopain. Shevek, the physicist and lead character, was born on Anarres, the large moon orbiting the planet Urras. Anarres was colonized by dissenters nearly 200 years before the events of the book, dissenters who called themselves “Odonians” and practice a form of true communism they refer to as “anarchy,” using the literal sense of the term (without government) than the colloquial one (chaos). Over several generations of isolation from Urras, the people of Anarres have organized into syndicates to allow for fundamental economic activities, but within those syndicates, there exist cliques and fiefdoms that stymie Shevek’s attempts to develop his science further (and his friend’s endeavors to develop his art), resembling authoritarian regimes in their denial of anything deemed subversive or unnecessary. Shevek chooses to become the first person from Anarres to visit Urras since the Odonians’ departure, hoping to expand on his research into “temporal physics” and to find the freedom the people of Anarres had lost.

Most dystopian novels focus on tyranny by a single, usually totalitarian government, but Le Guin doesn’t take sides between Anarres and the pseudodemocratic regime Shevek visits on Urras. (Urras also has a Soviet-style regime, Thu, and puppet states where the two superpowers fight proxy wars.) Anarres has a social safety net, no inequality, and a high degree of mobility. Urras has an actual government, with poverty, conspicuous consumption, disease, and waste, but offers a kind of liberty that Anarres lacks – until it becomes clear that Shevek’s ideas may challenge the government there, at which point he encounters the limits of Urrastian liberty and has to make a choice that will affect the histories of both worlds.

Le Guin succeeds so well here in crafting a philosophical treatise within a novel because she focuses more than anything else on the “fiction” part of science fiction, notably the plot. There are science aspects to the work, primarily the settings – and her imagining of an inhospitable world of Anarres is superb, to the point where you can feel the dust on the pages – and the many references to Shevek’s physics work and its importance for interstellar travel, but those details are superficial, laid on top of a very serious work about freedom, especially that of choice. What does it mean for a human being to be free? Is it intellectual freedom? Freedom from want, unless others are also wanting? Freedom from envy? Freedom to choose one’s work, one’s partner, one’s abode?How petty can one despot be and still despoil one man’s freedom?

The Dispossessed won both of the major awards for the year’s best science fiction novel, although the correlation between the Hugos and the Nebulas is so high as to render the two redundant. I did pull the list of Hugo winners and found a number of interesting titles, including the most recent winner, the comic novel Redshirts, which I’ve already picked up based just on the description. With only ten read out of 62 total winners, I imagine this will help keep me busy even as I’m winding down my sojourn through the classics.

Next up: I’ve only got about a thousand pages to go in Victor Hugo’s The Wretched (Les Misérables).

I’m not sure how I stumbled on Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Hugo Award-winning novel from 1961 that depicts a post-apocalyptic earth going through inevitable cycles of progress and regression. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t a reader suggestion, and I very rarely read science fiction, but somehow I added this to my queue about six months ago. I’d say it was worth reading for the obvious influence it had on later works, but found it an arduous read and a damn depressing one at that.

In Canticle, humanity has nearly wiped itself out through nuclear war, but survivors are rebuilding civilization or simply banding together in tribes habitable areas. The Catholic Church figures heavily in Miller’s book (he was Roman Catholic as well), and serves as a preserver not just of morality and faith but of knowledge after the remaining masses rise up against the intelligentsia, especially scientists, in retaliation for the unleashing of the destructive power of the atom, a passage that unfortunately presaged the real-life genocide of intellectuals in Cambodia under Pol Pot. As humanity moves forward again in fits and starts, the role of the Church changes in society in an exploration of the relationship between small-c church and institutions such as state and science.

The novel is actually a collation of three novellas, each depicting a different time period beginning about six hundred years after the nuclear holocaust, but all centered on a Catholic abbey in the Rocky Mountains dedicated to Saint Leibowitz, a former electric engineer who joined the clergy after the war and gave his life to preserve pre-war scientific knowledge. In the first section, a meek monk-in-training accidentally discovers a fallout shelter that may hold the remains of Saint Leibowitz’ wife, as well as other artifacts from his time deemed by the Church to hold great historical importance. In the second section, an agnostic scholar and researcher visits the abbey as one of the monks is preparing to demonstrate the first (post-war) electric lamp. In the third part, the abbey prepares to send several of its monks to a human colony on Alpha Centauri bearing both ecclesiastical “Memorabilia” and secular knowledge to escape an impending second nuclear war, bringing about a debate between the abbot and a nonreligious doctor over euthanasia for victims of the first attack. Through all three books a Jewish wanderer appears, perhaps the same person despite the span of centuries, waiting for the Messiah while assisting (sometimes in peculiar ways) one or more of the monks.

The three epochs demonstrated in the book mirror three major periods in modern human history – the pre-Enlightenment period where the church’s primacy in civilization and in the advancement of knowledge was largely unchallenged; the Enlightenment itself, where science took away domains of learning previously belonging to the church; and the twentieth century, with nuclear weapons, the repetition of past calamities, and, in what I presume was Miller’s view, a loss of morality tied to the gradual withdrawal of religion from the center of everyday life.

As a social document or a theological one, I imagine the book holds great value; Wikipedia – which we know is never wrong – mentions “a significant body of literary criticism, including numerous literature journal articles, books and college courses” around Canticle. That doesn’t make it a compelling read even if it might be an important one, and the lack of compelling or sympathetic characters left the text feeling more like a history than a great novel. I would imagine from the descriptions of both the local setting of the abbey and the state of humanity and its governance that the book had a heavy influence in literature and literary offshoots after its publication; On the Beach followed two years later, and the world described in part one of Canticle reminded me more than once of the post-apocalyptic setting of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Although I never got into role-playing games, I remember trying one from the 1980s called Gamma World that had to be drawn in part from Miller’s work or its literary progeny, and I’d imagine Wasteland and Fallout (which I’ve never played) drew either straight from Canticle or from it by way of Gamma World.

Influence or importance might get me to read a book, and Miller’s formal prose wasn’t as unbearable as that of Henry James or Theodore Dreiser. But I couldn’t give this much of a recommendation to anyone who reads strictly for pleasure.

Next up: J.P. Donleavy’s comic novel The Ginger Man.

The Dispossessed.

A Canticle for Leibowitz.

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