Award Winners that Don’t Hold Up over Time

In her 2014 article on literary awards, Barbara Cohen notes: “Cultural prizes notoriously reward the wrong works for the wrong reasons: On the long list of worthies deprived of the Nobel for literature are Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce.” I’ve been discussing influences on the awards over the last few blogs, and of course these issues are likely to result in some winners that don’t hold up over time.

Checking around, I found The Hugo Award Book Club (HABC), which has a page discussing the issue of poor choices. The group awards the “Worst Hugo Award” title to 1973, when Isaac Asimov won his first Hugo for a novel with The Gods Themselves. Here was the lineup of finalists that year. As was standard in those times, there were no concerns about diversity, so the finalists are all white men.

• The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov [Galaxy Mar/Apr,May/Jun 1972; If Mar/Apr 1972]
• When Harlie Was One by David Gerrold [Ballantine, 1972]
• There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson [Signet, 1972]
• The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg [Scribner’s, 1972]
• Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg [Galaxy Jul/Aug,Sep/Oct 1972; Scribner’s, 1972]
• A Choice of Gods by Clifford D. Simak [Putnam, 1972]

The HABC briefly reviews all these works, along with some other worthy contenders that year. Asimov’s winner was a three-part series published in Galaxy Magazine where aliens in a different dimension steal energy from ours, causing the sun to go nova. The HABC notes that the physics is interesting, but that the end result was dull and boring and the book has not aged well in comparison to the other contenders that year. In the comments Steve Davidson mentions that the work was recognized at the time for its risks with sexual content, but that isn’t anything exceptional these days, so the novel’s shortcomings are what stand out.

So what affected the WorldCon membership that year to make this choice? Asimov’s reputation as a short story writer? Frederik Pohl’s reputation as the editor of Galaxy? The ascendancy of hard SF? Promotion? Some kind of groupthink issue? Whatever it was, the vision affected the Nebula and Locus voters, too. The novel also won the Nebula in 1972 and the Locus Award in 1973.

Getting back to the present time, which of recent choices in the awards will hold up best over time? It’s an interesting question, eh?

Suppression of ideas at File 770

I’ve just had an experience on File770 where a number of people came out very strongly in favor of suppression of ideas, and I’m feeling the need to write something about it. This shouldn’t reflect on the magazine, or on Mike Glyer, who provides an excellent venue. He’s not responsible for the views of his readers.

The initial question was whether David Riley, who had reportedly expressed racist views, should be allowed to serve on the HWA awards panel, but the discussion soon devolved into a fight about whether some ideas should be suppressed for moral reasons. For people of a certain age, this echoes an era when leftists were accused and persecuted as traitors with little or no evidence. It meant that you had to be really careful what you said or wrote, or you could end up “blacklisted” and unable to work, if not in prison. In response, I’d like to review Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Guy Montag is a “fireman” on a squad that burns books. These are sniffed out by electronic “hounds” operated by a totalitarian government. Where people have hidden books in their homes, the entire house is burned down. Montag is on assignment to burn a woman’s home. She is defiant and self immolates, burning up with her books. Wondering at her attitude, Montag steals a book. He returns home to his wife and finds that Clarisse, a young neighbor with free-ranging ideas, has disappeared.

Montag is disturbed and tries to discuss the woman’s death with his wife, but she gets angry, thinking his subversive ideas will cause him to lose his job. Mildred insists the woman was to blame for the whole thing because she was hiding books. At work the next day, Montag’s boss tells him that most firemen steal books from time to time, but that they need to be promptly destroyed. Over the next few months, Montag accumulates a stash of stolen books and comes to realize that he knows nothing about what the government is doing, as there are no newspapers and nothing on the media but entertainment. There are signs of a war looming—he sees formations of jets in the sky. One day a fire alarm comes in, and when the squad responds, Montag finds it is his house they are set to burn. His wife has turned him in.

Montag does his duty, burning the house, but then he turns the flamethrower on his boss, burning him up. Montag is attacked by a sniffer hound, but manages to escape. He flees into the countryside, looking for others who have fled, and finds a band led by a man named Granger. As they watch, the city is destroyed by a nuclear bomb, everyone burning up in the conflagration. Granger explains that history is full of repeated falls of civilization, and that it is their job to help rebuild.

The book was published in 1953. Groff Conklin, reviewing for Galaxy, called the novel “among the great works of the imagination.” P. Schuyler Miller, reviewing for Astounding Science Fiction, called it one of Bradbury’s “hysterical diatribes.” Bradbury had previously investigated these ideas in short stories and wrote the novel in 18 days on a rented typewriter. Ironically, Fahrenheit 451 is often found on banned book lists, and words like “abortion” or cursing are redacted when it is used in high school lit classes.

See the next blog for more oomments on the issue.