The Hugo Winners

---

The very first book on the list (one of the Hugos that was awarded retroactively) turns out to be something I'd read before. The story The Sword in the Stone was later compiled (along with three other stories that T.H. White wrote based on the legends of King Arthur) into a lengthy novel called The Once and Future King. I read that book back in college (I think) and enjoyed it enough to keep the paperback around all these years. This Hugo quest gave me an excuse to give it another read.

When I dug that old paperback out of storage and started re-reading it as a near-50-year-old, I was shocked at how much "antique" British vocabulary, humor and phraseology there was just in the opening chapter. I read this as a teenager and enjoyed it?!? At least 20% of it had to have gone right over my head back then. At least 10% of it still does.

But White's writing style draws the reader in. Within a couple chapters, you feel like the young Arthur (or Wart as he's nicknamed in the story) is your best friend. Even if you don't understand some of the phrases, somehow the humor still comes through. And White found a clever way to work some 20th century references in by having Merlin the Magician age backwards, so he has already lived through our times and can reference things like World Wars and plastic surgery. He even comments on how some of the things he says and does are anachronisms.

The first section, The Sword in the Stone, is the part that won the Hugo. It's very light and humorous in tone, with Wart and his older brother Kay going on various adventures like meeting Robin Hood in the woods and helping him rescue people from Morgan Le Fay. They also meet the comic Sir Pellinore who constantly pursues (but never catches) the Questing Beast.

In order to prepare Wart for his future role as a great leader, Merlin occasionally transforms him into various animals, so he can see life from alternate perspectives. Near the end Wart becomes Kay's squire and goes with him to a tournament where Arthur unwittingly draws Excalibur from the stone and becomes King of England.

A quick summary of the rest of the book: in the second part, The Queen of Air and Darkness, Merlin tries to guide the young King Aurthur away from the philosophy of "Might Makes Right" and towards a more just and chivalrous reign. But most of the book is spent in the north where the future Sir Gawaine and his brothers are raised by their witchey mother Morguase. Next comes The Ill-Made Knight, which tells the story of the homely Sir Lancelot and his unfortunate love for Queen Guinevere. In order to keep the two separated, Arthur eventually sends all his knights out on the quest for the Holy Grail. By the end of the story, all the characters have become old. A Candle in the Wind is basically a short (around a hundred pages) epilogue to the saga, with Morguase's adult sons led by Arthur's illegitimate son Mordred in an attempt to destroy Camelot by using Arthur's new laws against him and proving that his wife was unfaithful with Lancelot.

At the very end of the book, Arthur is preparing for the battle against Mordred and has a premonition that no one is going to survive. So he calls a young page named Tom into his tent and tells him his life story, explaining why he created the round table and did all the other deeds of his life. It's a nice way to summarize and wrap up the book, but the extra "hidden" bit is that young Tom the page is actually Thomas Malory, who would grow up to write "Le Morte d'Arthur", the manuscript from the 1400s upon which all modern versions of the Arthurian legends are based.

I highly recommend The Sword in the Stone. After that it's a case of diminishing returns with each section not quite as satisfying as the previous one. But if you like the Arthurian legends and White's writing style, you might like the whole book.

Update April 2018: While looking for Hugo winners in various bookstores, I stumbled across a T. H. White book called The Book of Merlyn which I hadn't previously even known existed. Apparently it was originally intended to go with the other four books when they were collected into The Once and Future King, but White's publisher declined to include the fifth book due to a WWII paper shortage and because they didn't want to be connected with the book's anti-war theme while England was fighting the war.

The Book of Merlyn picks up where Candle in the Wind leaves off, with Merlyn coming to visit Arthur before his battle with Mordred. In a plot that would have given The Once and Future King nice symmetry if it had been included, Merlyn once again proposes to turn Arthur into various animals so he can learn from them (and so White can use their examples for his anti-war, anti-Nazi and anti-communist messages). White was so disappointed when the fifth book was rejected that he took two sections, where Arthur is turned into an ant and a goose, and snuck them into a "revised" version of The Sword in the Stone which then got incorporated into The Once and Future King. So about a quarter of Book of Merlyn had already been published when the book finally came out in the 1970s.

I greatly enjoyed Book of Merlyn and blew through it in just a few days (it's a very short book). It includes a lot of dry, British humor and even some self-referential bits such as Merlin confusing Arthur by telling him he's in a book being written by "poor White". Despite the duplication, I think this was my second favorite part after Sword in the Stone. Shame it didn't get included in Once and Future King.

---

Another retroactive Hugo and another magazine story that was eventually compiled into a novel (in this case, Foundation and Empire, part of Asimov's original Foundation trilogy). Asimov's Robot, Empire and Foundation saga is one of my favorite book series, and elsewhere on this web site you can find my write-up of the entire thing.

If you've never read it, to understand The Mule you need a bit of backstory. Asimov's series begins in the near future with the Robot short stories and novels, which explain how the three laws of robotics came about, and eventually how robots helped mankind leave the Earth and start colonizing the stars. The Empire trilogy are basically stand-alone books that were later worked into the saga, and tell tales set in an emerging galaxy-wide human empire. By the time of the Foundation books, that empire is starting to fall apart, with the prospect of a dark age lasting thousands of years looming over humanity.

A brilliant mathematician named Hari Seldon finds a way to statistically predict the future by mathematically studying history and using it to describe how large populations of people behave. He realizes that it's too late to save the collapsing empire, but he comes up with a plan to shorten the dark ages to just a thousand years, which will end with the smart people in charge, hopefully creating a second empire that will last.

Things go pretty well - in fact the long-dead Seldon occasionally appears via pre-recorded holograms and congratulates his Foundation on perfectly following his predictions. But then the Mule comes along. A seemingly unstoppable military leader, the Mule conquers planets with little resistance and seems poised to rebuild the empire as a military dictatorship. It turns out that he has powerful psychic abilities that he uses to bend people to his will. The Foundation meanwhile is on the verge of a civil war and to the shock of the Foundation's leaders, when Hari Seldon's hologram makes its next appearance, he talks about the successful conclusion of a civil war that never happened, because both sides were too busy worrying about the Mule.

A small group goes in search of the Mule, in the hope that they can convince him to spare the Foundation or else help them overthrow the current government and return the Foundation to democracy. They're joined by a top military spy and one of the Foundation's best psychologists, who has been trying to duplicate Hari Seldon's work. They also end up harboring a fugitive clown named Magnifico, who was previously the Mule's court jester. As they flee from world to world, the Mule always seems to be one step behind them, conquering each planet they visit - even the Foundation's capitol planet Terminus.

When the Foundation was created, there were hints that a Second Foundation was also set up, but its location was described vaguely as "the opposite end of the galaxy" or "at Star's End". Desperate for help, our heroes travel to the great library on what's left of the Empire's capital planet Trantor, hoping to find hints to the Second Foundation's whereabouts. Magnifico seems oddly intent on helping them, even to the point of killing the Emperor's son with a "visi-sonor" (a musical instrument that can generate nightmares). After nearly killing himself by researching night and day for weeks straight, the psychologist finally discovers the location of the Second Foundation, and that's when the real surprises begin.

If you've never read any Asimov, I highly recommend starting with the Robot novels and working your way through to the Foundation series (maybe skipping the two prequels Asimov wrote late in his life). His writing style makes for quick and easy reading, despite the complications in the plots, and if the ending of the final Foundation novel doesn't blow your mind, you're better at seeing plot twists coming than I am.

---

I started reading this via an ancient-looking paperback copy I got from Amazon, but part-way through reading that one I found a newer, much nicer, large-format paperback with a glossy cover in a book store and switched to that. The "replacement" copy was used (but still in very good condition) and cost less than three bucks, so I wasn't too upset about buying the same book twice.

The Demolished Man won the very first (non-retroactive) Hugo for best novel. It's the story of powerful businessman Ben Reich who has nightmares about a man with no face, and who is obsessed with finding a way to defeat his main business rival. He finally misinterprets a coded message from his rival as a declaration of war and resolves to murder him. The problem is that this is a future where many people are "peepers" - mind-readers whose ESP powers make it very likely that anyone thinking about murdering another human being would be spotted and committed to "demolition" almost immediately.

The protagonist (anti-hero?) comes up with a brilliant work-around. He gets his commercial jingle writer to craft a song that's such a massive earworm that it is constantly running through his head, thereby blocking the mind-readers from seeing his underlying intentions. Of course, when it comes time to commit the actual murder, things don't go as smoothly as he expects and there's a major complication. For the rest of the book he has to figure out how to stay one step ahead of the police, including head dectective Powell who is a first class peeper.

One of the interesting aspects of this book is the way wordless conversations between the peepers are presented. There's a chapter where a bunch of mind-readers are having a party, and the pages look more like paintings done with words than normal text pages. There are lines of words running diagonally, up the page, down the page, etc. It's a neat effect. The author also predicted the text shortcuts of the internet several decades early by having characters who have changed their names to include symbols, like "@kins" instead of Atkins.

One downside of the book is that the language occasionally tends to be fairly arch. Very dramatic and film-noir. During the murder scene the main character blurts out strangely stilted dialog. Other sections also had me thinking "OK, Bester, tone it down a bit." I was also surprised that this book (along with other sci-fi from the 50s) has people living on Venus. I didn't realize that it wasn't discovered until the late 1960s that temperatures on Venus are way too high to support human life.

This is a fairly short book, at least for sci-fi. Maybe it just seemed that way because I blew through it pretty quickly. The older paperback copy I have is around 175 pages long, and the newer edition (which uses a larger font) is around 250. But each time I'd sit down to read the book, I'd quickly blow through 30-40 pages, and I'm not one who usually cruises through books that fast.

My biggest criticism of this one would be that there are just too damned many characters. I kept finding myself saying "wait, who's he again?" and having to page back through the book until I found the paragraph or two where this character was last mentioned. Oh, and there are punchlines to running jokes like "I'm just one of the tourists" and "Who stole the weather", but they make little sense because the reader is never let in on the joke.

Ben Reich's character almost drops out of the second half of the book as it focuses on policeman Powell's attempt to solve the case. Actually "solve" isn't the right word - he knows exactly what happened and is always one step ahead of Reich, but just can't gather enough evidence to pin the murder on him. Which gets a little annoying after a while, considering that Powell practially has superpowers that let him get whatever information he needs from anyone, even Reich's accomplices.

The end of the book gets a little surreal, reminding me strongly of Philip K. Dick especially in the second to last chapter. The author attempts to raise the stakes by turning Reich into Hitler-level monster who could possibly destroy all of human society, and Powell into a martyr who has to use the combined psychic force of all peepers to stop him. But this sudden escalation of the story to "world shaking" proportions seems more than a little forced. Personally, I think the book would have been better if it had just been left as a simple police procedural (with psychics).

Overall though, I liked this book a lot. I can see why it was chosen to kick off the Hugo tradition.

---

This book was also published under the title The Forever Machine, and you'd think the fact that it was the second-ever Hugo winner and had multiple publications would mean it'd be easy to find. But nope - no local library or store had a copy, and when I looked on Amazon used hardback editions were priced at over a thousand dollars! So I used an Amazon gift card I got for Christmas to buy an e-book called The Second Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack. That's a terrible and misleading name since it has nothing to do with any "age" of sci-fi but is just the second in a series that collects short works by early sci-fi authors, in this case Mark Clifton. But it was cheap (99 cents) and it included They'd Rather Be Right, split into three sections (I'm guessing it's another novel that was originally a magazine serial). I'm not a big fan of e-books (I've tried, but the glowing text and glare off the screen just tires my eyes out after 10 minutes or so - I vastly prefer a physical, printed book), but the price was right and since it was delivered directly to my Kindle I was able to start reading it right away while working on collecting that big pile of Hugo winners pictured at the top of this page.

They'd Rather Be Right starts out as the story of a young boy named Joe who has telepathic abilities (why was early sci-fi so obsessed with ESP and mental superpowers?). His abilities have made him an outcast amongst children his own age, and towards the beginning of the story a psychologist even turns his own mother against him. The author(s) of this book REALLY seemed to dislike and have a very low opinion of psychologists (and scientists in general). In fact, they also disparage the government, religious leaders, the military, and especially the common man. Seems like they felt superior to nearly everyone (except Einstein), which gave the book a preachy vibe. Anyway, all seems lost for our hero Joe until he meets a dog that he's able to communicate with telepathically. Seems like the story is going to be about a telepathic boy and his dog...but nope.

We immediately jump forward 12 years to find Joe in college, working on a project to create a guidance system for airplanes that avoids crashes better than human pilots can. But the project succeeds beyond anyone's expectations, and the machine becomes artificially intelligent. Turns out Joe is behind it all, manipulating people on the project with his telepathic abilities. He hopes the machine, nicknamed "Bossy" can give other people telepathic abilities, so he'll have someone who understands him. But the public gets wind of the device and riots, fearing that it will replace them and take their jobs. Joe and the two project leads manage to smuggle Bossy out of the school just before an angry mob tears the place apart.

Eventually they hole up with some career criminals and continue work on Bossy. Kind of out of the blue the story changes the machine into a medical device, and the first person to receive "treatment" is an elderly ex-hooker named Mabel. It rejuvenates her, turning her into a beautiful 21 year old. The problem is, the process only works on people who are willing to give up all their prejudices, preconceived notions and core beliefs so their minds can be re-wired to see the world as it really is, which somehow rejuvenates the cells and de-ages you. Thus the book's title - the scientists soon find that most people would rather hold on to their beliefs and be "right" than be made immortal.

The new Mabel forgets things like the effect a completely naked 21 year old woman walking down the sidewalk would have. She ends up getting thrown in jail...until a mysterious benefactor hires a top legal team to get her released. Joe finds this benefactor and sets out to use his resources (along with Bossy) to change the world.

This was a quick, entertaining read...but the "science" behind it is absolutely horrendous. They must have had fairly low standards in the early days of the Hugo. And for some reason the authors were obsessed with the word "somatic". I had to look it up - it means "of the body, as opposed to of the mind". They use that word every chance they get, sometimes more than once per page, even when it clearly doesn't fit. I started to wonder if that was a popular buzzword in 1955, so I looked it up on Google and sure enough, right around the early 1950s usage of that word spiked sharply upwards.

Another downside of the story was that it didn't have a whole lot of plot, so the authors kept repeating things and making the same points over and over. But despite it all, I enjoyed this story and the rest of the "megapack". There was one other lengthy story in the pack about a colonist planet called Eden that I think I liked more than the Hugo winner. Unfortunately I can't describe much of it because nearly anything I say would be a major spoiler, and it's off-topic for this page anyway.

---

Observant readers may have noticed that I skipped over 1957. What's the deal? Well, for some reason the Hugo award for best novel wasn't awarded that year. It also wasn't awarded in 1954 (but they later filled that hole with a retroactive award). My guess is that in the mid-1950s the Hugo awards were still a new thing, and hadn't evolved into a annual event yet. From here on out though, there's a winner for each year (sometimes more than one).

I downloaded The Big Time to my Kindle because it was free, but then later found a $7 hardback edition that was in very good condition, so I bought it. Based on the thinness of the book, this looks like it might be the shortest of all Hugo winning novels (the copy I have is only 130 pages, including a 5 page introduction), which is odd when you consider the robustness of the world the novel creates. This is the sort of idea that most modern sci-fi writers would probably turn into a twenty volume series of books of several hundred pages each.

The basic premise is that two shadowy forces called the Spiders and the Snakes are fighting a war across all of space and time. The characters in this story are on the Spiders' side, although none of them are really certain who the Spiders are, or what their overall objectives might be. Each side has the ability to create Doppelgangers - they come to a person shortly before death and offer them the chance to be restored to their prime and live outside of time...with the catch being that they have to spend the rest of their lives serving the side that revived them. Since each side has all of time to choose from, the characters in this story cover a wide range including a roaring '20s flapper, a Nazi, a Roman centurion, an Amazon warrior, a Mississippi riverboat gambler, a London actor who knew Shakespeare personally and even non-human creatures from the distant past and far future.

Most of the revived people (who go by the term Demons, as opposed to normal people who they call Zombies) are soldiers who fight battles in the future or the past. One example given early in the book is that the Snakes have changed history by kidnapping Einstein as a child, and the Spider forces are fighting to get him back. But there's a "conservation of history" law in the universe - no matter how many changes the two sides make, history always reverts back as much as possible to what it would have been if no changes were made.

Interestingly, this book doesn't tell a tale of time-battle (although it seems like a ripe field to choose from, and alternate history buffs will have fun untangling some of the references in the first half of the story). Instead, The Big Time is set in an "Entertainment Place" - a haven outside of the cosmos where soldiers can go for medical treatment, musical and dramatic entertainment and...a little attention from the opposite sex.

At one point the characters have a heated debate about the nature of the war and whether it's even worth fighting, and while everyone's attention is on that, someone steals the device that creates doorways back to reality. Our motley crew find themselves trapped together in vault outside of time and space, and the tension is quickly turned up when one character decides to put them all in a life or death situation in order to smoke out the culprit.

Despite its short length, this book was a challenge. Leiber throws references to his fictional universe at the reader like we're just supposed to know what he means, and it might be a few chapters later that we finally get an explanation of what he was talking about. On top of that, he throws in phrases in German, Latin, slang lingo from ages past and even bits he made up of fictional languages...so not exactly easy skating. Probably didn't help that I was reading this while also keeping half an eye on the TV to watch the Winter Olympics. And I couldn't shake a feeling of Deja Vu, like I might have already read this book decades ago and just couldn't quite remember when. Or maybe I read it in an alternate timeline that has since been changed by the Big Time war.

At any rate, I rather liked this book and I'm betting (since it's such a short one) that I'll eventually read it again.

---

So I finally finish reading all the Hugo winners of the 1950s (and earlier retroactive winners) and am looking forward to starting on the books from the decade I was born in...and of course it turns out the first one is another Heinlein. Counting his retroactive Hugo, he's won the best novel category five times (Farmer in the Sky, Double Star, this book, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), a record which has yet to be matched. But Lois McMaster Bujold (who is still writing) may give him a run for his money - she won her fourth in 2004.

I've seen the Starship Troopers movie and heard the song by Yes - I should be able to fake a book report from that, right? Probably not, so I found a paperback copy of this one at 2nd and Charles that looked to be in really good condition. It wasn't until I started reading it that I discovered that it had been sliced somehow - in the cover pictured here, imagine a vertical slash that goes from the middle of the top edge to near the bottom of the "P" in "STARSHIP" and extends down through the first few pages of the book. Oh well, nothing I can do about it now except apply some tape.

In my entry for Double Star I mentioned that Heinlein's books often seem as if they started out life as World War II stories that were then converted to sci-fi. And I made that comment before I read Starship Troopers. In the first chapter alone, we see paratroopers dropped from outer space wearing super-armor that lets them leap tall buildings in a single bound and survive atomic bomb blasts. For some reason I was expecting this book to be a step up from Heinlein's work of the '50s, but other than it being preachier and harder edged it's actually pretty similar to the earlier book Space Cadet, just with more killing (but still zero remorse or emotional impact).

Our narrator is young Johnny. Right out of high school he joins the military, not due to any sense of patriotism but because his best friend is signing up and Johnny goes along and signs up too in order to impress a girl. It turns out he doesn't have the aptitude for any "desk" jobs, so he gets assigned to infantry and undergoes brutal training in boot camp. The boot camp section takes up most of the first half of the book. Hey Heinlein, I got it after the first 50 pages of beatings - boot camp sucks but it's what turns boys into men. At any rate it turns young Johnny into a hardened warrior, and a hundred pages later he and his companions are finally off to fight in an interstellar war against a bug-like species. Eventually Johnny attends officer's school, which gives Heinlein another opportunity to expound his world view.

That world view is the thing that makes this a "controversial" book (it says so right on the cover). For example, in Heinlein's future only military veterans can vote or run for office. Anyone who decides to go to college or pursue a career right after high school gets no say in how the government is run. Maybe that seemed like a great idea to an author who was a WWII veteran, but I think I can see a few problems with it. He apparently also believes that public floggings would keep people in line and end crime. Because, you know, that's worked so well in the parts of the world that currently practice it. Wikipedia says that some have criticized this book for being fascist propaganda, and I can totally see their point.

But the book's biggest failing is that, for a supposed action/adventure story, a goodly percentage of it is given over to deadly dull military tedium and trivia. For example, towards the end when it's clear that they're gearing up for a climactic battle against the bugs and Heinlein should be drawing the reader in and amping up the action, instead he decides to double down on the details to explain the chain of command, how many of each type of officer there are and how many men they have under them, etc, etc...even who sits next to who at dinner. It had me frequently checking to see how many more pages I had to slog through before I'd be finished with this damned book, and that's just a sign of bad writing as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, I was hoping that this, the eighth Heinlein novel I've read in the past few months, would somehow be better than his previous works, but...I should have learned by now. His stuff is like the pulp sci-fi equivalent of junk food - empty calories that are occasionally tasty going down but in the end aren't very filling and leave me feeling like I should have consumed something better for me. The straw man political arguments in this one were a chore to get through, almost to an Atlas Shrugged level of tedium, but thankfully Heinlein kept his ramblings to just over two hundred pages (compared the thousand-or-so pages of Atlas which seem more like ten thousand).

This will probably make most long-time fans of sci-fi books write me off as an idiot, but...I genuinely think Robert Heinlein is hugely overrated. The kicker is that I could have read a Kurt Vonnegut novel if The Sirens of Titan hadn't lost out to this bit of military propaganda for the 1960 Hugo. Oh well.

---

Heinlein's fourth Hugo winner and possibly his most famous book. Even people who never read science fiction have probably at least heard the title of this one. The hippie generation really took to this book due to its questioning of established norms. It's kind of hard to believe that the same author who wrote the very conservative, pro-military Starship Troopers published a book just a couple years later that appealed to the counterculture of that era. I think it was Stranger's reputation as "hippie sci-fi" that made me read it back in college (or possibly even high school). I didn't remember much of it though, so I bought a cheap paperback copy in good condition to give it a re-read.

Then just a few days later I found this "uncut" hardcover edition for $8, so I returned the paperback and went with this version. According to the introduction written by Heinlein's widow, the original manuscript he submitted was over 220,000 words. His publisher thought that that was way too long, and also objected to some of the sexual and controversial content, and so insisted that he cut a lot out and reduce the book to around 150,000 words. He finally got it down to 160,000, and that's the version that was originally published. But Heinlein kept his first manuscript, and now that original, much longer version is available. Considering that I haven't really enjoyed much of the Heinlein I've read so far, buying a version that is expanded out to nearly 500 pages seems like a questionable choice, but what the heck. In for a penny, in for a pound.

The book tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, aka "Mike", a young man who was born during the first mission to explore Mars. His parents (and the rest of the crew) died when he was an infant, so he was raised by Martians. A subsequent mission a couple decades later finds him and brings him to Earth. This all happens in the first few pages and sets up a story in which a man who is completely "alien" in his language, social customs and even his physical and mental abilities learns about humanity (thereby letting the author comment on the subject). Not exactly a new concept - it's a similar tale to Tarzan and stories about humans raised by wolves, but this time it's set in the future and involves spaceships and Martians, so it's sci-fi.

Heinlein liked to maintain consistency from book to book, so the Martians described in this book are the same as the ones from Red Planet - they start life as round, fuzzy, energetic nymphs, grow into giant, slow-moving, tripod beings that live communally and eventually "discorporate" into Old Ones who run Martian society as sage, all-knowing ghosts. They seem to take little interest in humans...but that's because they could easily destroy our planet if they wanted to. Another recurring idea in Heinlein's works is that the asteroid belt used to be a fifth planet until the Martians decided that it needed to be destroyed.

In Stranger, Mike himself is just a background character for most of the book. We occasionally see things from his point of view, but more often the story is told from the perspective of Ben the newspaper reporter who explains how rich and politically powerful Mike is, or Jill the nurse who breaks him out of the hospital where he's being held prisoner by the government, or Jubal the wealthy writer and ex-lawyer who is clearly a wish-fulfillment version of Heinlein himself. Jubal lives in a mansion with three beautiful women who serve his every need and is always the smartest guy in the room, constantly two steps ahead of everyone else. He tries to set Mike up for a relatively "normal" life on Earth.

But then around three fifths of the way through the novel, the tone changes sharply. It's almost like the first sections were written for the old sci-fi pulp magazines, but the last couple hundred pages were written for Playboy. Mike wakes up one morning and decides he has learned all he's going to learn from Jubal, so he sets out to see the world. Jill, who up until this point was practically engaged to Ben, goes with him as his translator, assistant, teacher, student and sex partner.

Yes, Mike has finally discovered sex, and he really gets into it. The Martian friendship ceremony that used to just include drinking water from the same glass now includes having sex. Mike gets a job as a carnival magician, and it's not long until he and Jill are having a three-way with the tattooed lady. Mike becomes a Las Vegas casino dealer, and Jill becomes a showgirl so she can teach Mike more about lust. It's just...what the heck? Was Heinlein going through a major mid-life crisis when he finished this book? Eventually Mike starts his own church so he can sell his message to the masses - peace and fulfillment through communal living, nudity, wife swapping and group sex. Which I guess makes this both the third Hugo winner in four years that involves religion, and the sci-fi equivalent of the "smutty" historical romance novels that my wife likes to read. Although here it's all presented as being very spiritual and uplifting.

I was actually enjoying this book more than any previous Heinlein I had read, up until it started getting...icky. I was OK with all the sex stuff - like Jubal says, if I were twenty years younger I'd probably join Mike's church. But there are gratuitous homophobic bits and at one point Jill even puts forth the proposition that if a woman is raped, nine times out of ten she was asking for it. Granted, this book was written in a different era, but damn Heinlein - if you needed to cut some words out of the story, those would have been the ones to start with.

If for nothing else, Stranger will be remembered for inventing the word "grok", which for the most part can be translated as "understand". It's the Martian word for "drink" (a deeply meaningful activity to them, since water is so scarce on Mars), but its wider meaning is to experience and understand something so fully that it becomes a part of your being. Grok became a fairly common buzzword that was still popular when I was a kid, so I asked my daughter who just started college in 2017 if she'd ever heard the word. She had no idea what I was talking about, so I guess its popularity has faded. On the other hand, I just read an article on the web a couple weeks ago where the author casually used grok as if it were standard English.

I really didn't like this book when I read it as a teenager, and the last couple hundred pages reminded me why. But even aside from the "controversial" content, I can see why Heinlein's editor insisted on cuts - this expanded version is way too wordy, often making the same point over and over until I was left thinking "OK, you've driven this well and firmly into the ground, can we move on to the next plot point now?" This summary is making it sound like I hated the book, but I didn't, not really. The story had its moments and Heinlein's writing style makes for easy reading. But it's not a book I'd be likely to recommend to anyone.

---

The original magazine serialization of this story went by the title Here Gather the Stars, but when it was released as a novel the title was changed to Way Station. That's what the copy I found in the local 2nd and Charles used book store was called. I walked in a couple days after Christmas 2017 armed with $100 in cash that my father-in-law had given me and walked out with a pile of Hugo-winning books so big I could barely carry it, including a nice, new-looking large-format paperback copy of this book. I went back a week or so later and found that they had re-stocked the shelves, and once again walked out with a load of books that it took two arms to carry. I probably picked up at least half the books on this list during those two trips.

Since I've been reading the books in (mostly) the order they were published, it wasn't until April Fools Day in 2018 (which also happened to be Easter Sunday) that I got around to reading this one. The day was one of the first really nice days of Spring, with sunny skies and (almost) warm temperatures, and I had most of the day to myself because my wife was off visiting our daughter at college. So I put some music on, grabbed a six pack and a couple cigars and sat out on my deck and read for most of the afternoon and into the early evening. I got through the last hundred or so pages of Man in the High Castle and then started on this one.

Way Station starts with the question of how a man who fought in the civil war could not only still be alive in the 1960s (when this story is set) but also look like he hadn't aged much past 30 years old. The answer turns out to be aliens. In the mid-1800s, Enoch Wallace was recruited to turn his house into a station in a transportation system for various advanced alien races traveling through our neck of the galaxy. One big bonus is that while he's inside the house/station, time basically stands still for him - he only ages when he goes outside, which he only does for an hour or two a day.

Because of the remote, backwoods location of his house, it took the government over a century to figure out there was something weird going on. But now they know, and they have agents staked out all around Enoch's place, trying to figure out how he could have remained young all these years, what he's up to, and why his house seems to be an impregnable fortress. Meanwhile, the only humans that Enoch has contact with are his mailman (who brings him news of the outside world and any supplies he needs to survive) and a deaf-mute girl who appears to have supernatural powers of healing.

About mid-way through the book, everything starts to go wrong. Enoch loses his only friends - artificially intelligent "holograms" that he created with alien technology. He also gets embroiled in a feud with his hillbilly neighbors which causes him to break the cardinal rule of being a gatekeeper by bringing another human into the station. Government agents steal the body of an alien who had died in the station and was buried in Enoch's family plot. All of these things are being used as arguments to shut down the way station by powerful alien groups who want to abandon our spiral arm of the galaxy and invest their resources elsewhere, ending humanity's chances of someday joining galactic society. And it turns out that all of these things, to one degree or another, result from the loss of a spiritual talisman that has kept peace in the galaxy for centuries.

But worst of all, Enoch has used advanced statistical models that he learned from an alien race to determine that humanity is irrevocably headed towards global nuclear war. When he mentions this to a visiting representative from Galactic Central, he's offered a solution that would eliminate any chance of nuclear war...but the price to humanity would be nearly unbearable. And as Earth's sole representative, Enoch must decide for us all whether the solution is worse than the problem...or find another way out.

I really liked this book. Simak's writing style mixes twentieth century literature with Stephen King, by which I mean that his descriptions and prose have that simple but highbrow feel to them (after writing this, I saw someone on a sci-fi newsgroup describe Simak as "Steinbeckian", which is exactly what I was trying to get across), yet the pages flow by pretty quickly, the characters are odd outsiders and Simak knows how to add a disquieting low-level anxiety to the story. I wasn't surprised when I read the "about the author" blurb on the back of the book and saw that he had been given a lifetime achievement award by the Horror Writer's Association. This book seems like a pretty even mix of sci-fi, literature and light horror.

My only criticism might be that Simak packs the story with too many ideas. As I read it, I got the impression that there were a lot of plot elements that were just added to pad the story out to novel length or because the author thought they were neat, but which don't have any bearing on the plot. But then, much to my surprise, Simak managed to make it all come together in the end, although he had to resort to a bit of a deus ex machina (a character who hadn't been in the story at all up to that point somewhat illogically shows up with exactly what's needed to solve everyone's problems). The ending also features an interesting twist that I didn't see coming, although in hindsight it made perfect sense.

Another feature this book shares with a lot of Stephen King books is that, as I was reading it, I was picturing it as a movie. I'm surprised no one ever filmed it. The story has a lot of visual elements, and the novel almost reads like a screenplay. According to Wikipedia, a group called Revelstone Entertainment bought the movie rights in 2006, but never did anything with them. What are they waiting for?

---

So as you can tell from the above reading history, I've read this one (and its related series) a few times. I must really like this book, hunh? No, not really. I've read it a bunch of times because I keep feeling like I must be missing something. Everyone I've known who has read it just raves about it, but it does nothing for me. The first book in the series is the only one I find even tolerable, the rest go downhill on a rocket sled.

I think my dislike for this series can be summed up by way David Lynch's movie version had to have the characters constantly doing whispered voice-overs to explain what was going on. There's just way too much hand-waving, mystical mumbo-jumbo in this series. That said, it's entirely possible that the problem is me, and all the brilliant, subtle plot points are just going over my head.

The story of the first book follows young Paul, son of a planet-ruling Duke. It turns out that Paul is the grand result of a centuries-long breeding program being run by an ancient sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit who have mysterious powers and are trying to create a genetic superman. His mother is a Bene Gesserit member, but she is somewhat of an outcast because she was not supposed to have a son - she was to give birth to a daughter who would have been the miracle man's mother. But she decided to skip ahead a generation because her beloved husband wanted a son. So no one is quite sure if Paul is the real deal.

Paul's father is forced to take control of a planet called Dune as part of an elaborate plot to discredit and destroy his family. The desert planet is the only source in the universe for a plant called "the spice" which has magical abilities and is desired by basically everyone. When the Emperor's forces storm the Duke's home, Paul is forced to flee into the desert, where he befriends the natives and learns their water-conserving ways. He takes a massive overdose of the spice and develops the mental powers that are supposed to only be available to members of the Bene Gesserit. He also learns how to control the giant worms that live in the desert, and eventually leads a force of desert dwellers on giant worms to capture the Emperor and take control of Dune.

If all that doesn't sound too preposterous, in one of the sequels Paul's son figures out a way to merge with a sandworm to become a monstrous giant worm with a human face...and becomes the near-immortal emperor of the galaxy.

This one has always been a head-scratcher for me. I find it hard to put into words, but the book just seems to me to spend most of its time trying to convince the reader of how mind-blowing it is and how super-awesome the characters and concepts are...but never delivers much in the way of a story that actually justifies any of it. That said, I've been reading the analysis of some big fans of the series on the written sci-fi newsgroup, and they seem to find it every bit as deep as I find it ridiculous. They see warnings about how disruptive sudden, massive changes can be on a society. They see a tale of multiple generations being given the chance to save the future of mankind at horrible cost to themselves. They see the dangers of knowing everything about your ancestors, if you choose to listen to the most powerful and evil of those ancestors. And they see Herbert's message boil down to "beware of heroes".

But I find the whole thing...well, I was going to say "ham-fisted", but it's not that, not exactly. It's just too convoluted, too far-fetched. The books work so hard to make all their big-picture points that the actual details (you know, the stories themselves) suffer and become a tough slog. But that's just me. Considering how many hard-core fans there are of Dune and its sequels, I'm obviously in the minority on this one.

---

We finally get to Heinlein's last Hugo winner, published the year I was born. Maybe that's why I'm not a huge Heinlein fan - he's just too much "before my time". But I think I just don't care for his writing style. He usually has some good ideas, but the early writing is just a little too simple and by-the-numbers for my tastes, and his later stuff is too right-wing or obsessed with sex or trying to hard to be controversial. To be fair, I haven't read this one yet.

---

---

This is one that I've been wanting to read for a while. I first heard of it decades ago and thought it sounded interesting, but somehow never got around to buying a copy. In fact, Niven wrote a bunch of sequels to this book and somehow I've never encountered any of them.

Actually, I think I might be confusing the Ringworld series with the Discworld series. At some point I wanted to read one or the other. Or possibly both.

---

I'm a big Asimov fan and have read a bunch of his books (the entire Robot, Empire and Foundation series for example, plus several others) but somehow I never got around to this Hugo winner. I'm looking forward to correcting that. I found a copy of this one in kind of an odd way - my wife got us tickets to go see a local symphony perform in Hershey, PA. We arrived very early, so I looked up local book stores on my phone and found one about ten minutes away. We drove there and discovered it was actually a comic book store located in someone's house. There were also used paperbacks scattered all over the place, unfortunately most of them were romances. But in the ten minutes or so that I had to browse, I stumbled on this book I needed for my Hugo quest. It took almost as long to find the owner and pay him. Fortunately we got back to the theater in time to find our seats before the performance started.

---

So, having awarded the Hugo to a female author in 1970, the voters went hog wild and did it again just five years later. Of course, it was the same female author, but hey...baby steps.

---

Hey, we've got a different female winner! It's starting to become a trend. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this is a book that probably shouldn't have won the Hugo. It's pretty bad. But considering that one of the other nominees that year was Children of Dune, I'm guessing the pickings were slim.

Anyway, I found a paperback copy of this book on a lunchroom table at work where people drop off books that they've read and are now giving away. I almost didn't pick it up due to its flowery title and the romance novel style artwork on the cover. But a glance at the back cover showed that it was a Hugo winner about cloning - maybe I should give it a shot. Here's a slightly condensed version of the review I wrote for the book on Amazon:

On the plus side, the relatively short 200 page length and the author's writing style makes it a quick read. Wilhelm keeps the story moving and doesn't get bogged down in the sort of details that would have made this a 500 page novel or even a series of books had it been written by some other sci-fi writers. Her characters are generally likable and well written - you can usually see the "bad guys" side of things and why they would do what they do.

On the other hand, I have to laugh at the Amazon editorial review's assertion that the book is "rigorous in its science". There are some scientific elements to the story, but the author never lets facts or even logical consistency get in the way of her tale of individualism triumphing over collective group think.

The plot starts with a series of world-wide catastrophes that nearly wipe out the human race and cause the survivors to become sterile. Fortunately the patriarch of the Sumner family sees this coming and builds a fortified hospital for his extended family with a secret research lab in an attached underground cave (and even gets the government to foot the bill). They manage to continue the species by cloning themselves, but soon learn that the clones have no use for their biological originals. The clones set up a society of their own, with the goal of creating more and more clones to try to rebuild the ruins of nearby cities and restore "humanity" to the technological level they were at before the world fell to ruin. About half-way through the book, the last person born through natural methods tries to convince the clones of the error of their ways, and eventually starts sabotaging them in an attempt to set up a new society that's not so dependent on quickly failing technology.

So that sounds like it could be interesting - where does the book go wrong? Well, the whole thing is so far-fetched. First off there's the apocalypse. It involves a whole bunch of unlikely catastrophes all happening at the same time. The book also can't seem to decide if the root cause was pollution or nulcear war. But the kicker is that all living creatures become sterile. Good thing that one family had the resources and expertise to get the cloning program going.

And then there's the clones. They act like a completely different species from the the people they were cloned from. They're pure logic like Mr. Spock, they always act in groups, they panic when separated from their "bothers" and "sisters", and they can nearly read each other's minds. Each new generation of clones gets further and further from human. They eventually devolve mentally to the point where they can only do tasks that involve step-by-step instructions - imagination or ingenuity is beyond their grasp.

Another annoyance is that just when you start getting attached to a character, they literally walk out of the story. The first third of the book focuses on genetic engineer David, but once he realizes how badly the clones are turning out, he just walks into the woods never to be seen again. In fact, all of the original "biological" characters just vanish from the story.

The author also seems obsessed with sex. When David finds his long-lost love Celia early in the novel, they immediately have sex in the woods in a rainstorm despite the fact that she's sick and nearly starving to death. And the clones are constantly boinking each other, having heterosexual, homosexual and group sex. It's really kind of creepy how often Wilhelm returns to the subject, and makes me think the romance novel cover was actually pretty accurate.

At least the book was a quick read (unlike this review), but the bad science, glossing over of details and illogical plot devices just to move the story forward made it a less than satisfying experience.

---

This is another one that I'm trying not to judge by the cover. Every cover I saw had a scantily-clad woman holding a snake up to the heavens. As if the title Dreamsnake wasn't bad enough.

---

The local used book store has the sequel to this one, The Summer Queen, so I get excited every time I go there and see it, then I remember that that's not the Queen I'm looking for.

---

Now we're getting into the era when I was in my prime sci-fi book readership. I distinctly remember reading this one in high school (which would put it no later than early 1985), because a guy in my class asked if he could borrow it when I was done. Then he did a book report on it, and I was annoyed because the teacher wouldn't let me use the same book for my report. She also wouldn't let me use Lord of the Rings because she knew I'd read it before. I forget what I did end up reading.

Anyway, I have an impression that I saw this book in a rack of cheap paperbacks at a grocery store and liked the cover, and that's what started my whole Asimov (and really, my whole sci-fi) fanhood. I could be completely misremembering that though. It's just as likely that I ran across it during one of my habitual trips to the late, lamented Walden Books in the Park City mall in Lancaster, PA.

There was no way this book wasn't going to win the Hugo. After a couple decades writing mostly non-fiction, Asimov decided to return to science fiction and with a sequel to his legendary Foundation trilogy no less. This book gave Asimov room to stretch out - it's around three times longer than the longest previous Foundation story, and he used that space to add a lot of detail and character development. And for the first time, the story is told as much from the Second Foundation's perspective as the First's.

Foundation's Edge features a couple of my favorite characters of the entire saga, the adventurous politician Golan Trevize and his scholarly bookworm sidekick Janov Pelorat. Both are members of the (First) Foundation. Trevize believes that the Second Foundation was not really destroyed at the end of the original trilogy, because the damage that the Mule did to the Foundation's thousand year plan seems to have repaired itself, and the original plan is right back on schedule. While most attribute this to the brilliance of founder Hari Seldon, Trevize is convinced that the Second Foundation is still secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes. But when he starts announcing this publicly, the mayor of Terminus sends him into exile, saying that it's for his own good - if the Second Foundation really does still exist, she doesn't want them coming after him. Secretly, she believes that they do still exist and is hoping that Trevize will act as a "lightning rod" that will draw them out into the open where she can destroy them. Asimov originally wanted to call the book Lightning Rod, but the publisher insisted on a title with the word "Foundation" in it, since it would probably sell better.

As a cover story, the mayor sends Trevize and Pelorat on a quest to find the mythic planet of human origin, Earth. As the hunt proceeds, Trevize begins to wonder if the clue that the Second Foundation is located at "the other end of the galaxy" might be speaking chronologically, meaning that they're based on the oldest populated planet in the galaxy, since Terminus was the newest at the time that Seldon made that statement. He thinks that such a forgotten planet would be the perfect home for the secretive Second Foundation, and soon he's more determined to find Earth than historian Pelorat.

Meanwhile Stor Gendibal of the Second Foundation has also become concerned that the Seldon Plan is progressing far too perfectly. Granted, the Second Foundation has been pulling strings to keep everything on track, but some deviation should still occur. The fact that the plan has been unfolding absolutely perfectly makes Gendibal suspect that some even more subtle power must be behind it, with the same goal - to eventually control the second Empire. When Gendibal finds evidence that inhabitants of the planet Trantor have been tampered with in a way too subtle to have been the Second Foundation's work, he is given the task of pursuing Trevize in the hopes that he'll lead the Second Foundation to this unknown new group.

The story reaches its climax on the planet Gaia, where an unexpected third option for the galaxy's future is presented, and Trevize must make a choice that will affect all of mankind.

I really liked this book, possibly more than the original trilogy. And I think the next sequel, Foundation and Earth was almost as good (with a fantastic twist ending that wraps the entire saga up nicely). Probably heresy to say the sequels were better than the original, but this book's Hugo win wasn't just given as a "lifetime achievement" award to a living legend author - it really deserved the win. Unfortunately, instead of continuing the story, Asimov decided to spend the rest of his life writing unnecessary prequels to the original trilogy that don't add much and frankly weren't very good.

---

Famous for being one of the first (if not the first) cyberpunk novels, where the story is largely told in terms of technology and virtual realities. I get the feeling this might be a challenging one.

---

It's hard to discuss this one without spoiling the ending of Ender's Game...so I'm just going to go ahead and spoil it. Turns out the big "wipe out the entire bug species" simulation wasn't a simulation. Ender feels terrible that he was responsible for genocide against an entire intelligent species, even if they had nearly wiped out mankind.

So in this book he travels to a planet that the bugs had inhabited and discovers that one Queen managed to survive. If I remember right, she was hidden in an area that somehow resembled the video game with the giant that Ender played in the first book. It might have been that she was mentally projecting those images to Ender to try to get him to call off the attack or something like that.

Anyway, the bugs are telepathic and somehow explain to Ender that they didn't mean to kill all humans, they just didn't realize that we were an intelligent species because we don't have a hive mind. Or something like that.

Ender has to rescue the Queen and keep the other migrants from Earth from destroying her. Or something like that. I honestly can't remember many of the details from this book - it made that little of an impression on me. I can't believe it won a Hugo. It certainly didn't make me decide to read the rest of the series.

---

Apparently this book was originally published in three parts, but the author has stated that her preferred version is the one that has the whole story combined into a single novel. So I was holding out for that one, but after many searches I couldn't find it. Eventually I broke down and bought the three-volume paperback version. Oddly, one used book store that I frequent (2nd and Charles) had Parts 1 and 3, and the other (Cupboard Maker Books) had Part 2.

---

This book was compiled into a collection called Young Miles which contains other, related books in this saga. That was the version I was looking for, so I could read this book in context, but when I stumbled on a cheap paperback copy of just The Vor Game I decided to pick it up. It'll be a while yet until I get to Bujold's "Vorkosigan saga" (which contains three Hugo winners) so I have time to figure out how I'm going to approach it.

---

---

This is book two of a trilogy about terraforming Mars. Oddly, the first book in the series, Red Mars, didn't win the Hugo but both of its sequels did. Sci-fi voters are funny sometimes. I found a cheap paperback copy of Red Mars and bought it anyway, because I'm not going to read books two and three of a trilogy without reading book one first.

My daughter found me paperback copies of Green Mars and its sequel Blue Mars at a farmer's market. They both looked like they were once used as mold farms, so when I found another paperback copy of Green Mars in much better condition for just a few bucks, I went for the upgrade. Later I found a nice, used hardcover edition Blue Mars and upgraded that one too.

---

---

After months of searching for this one, I finally found it in a little store called the Paperback Exchange in Lemoyne, PA, along with its non-Hugo-winning sequel Forever Free. I was so happy to finally find it that I bought both books.

---

The last Hugo winner of the 20th century. I can hear people saying "surely you mean 'the first winner of the 21st century'." No, dammit. There was no year zero so the first decade was 1-10, the first century was 1-100, the second century was 101-200, and so forth. So 2000 was the last year of the 20th century. Yes, I'm still annoyed about that.

---

This is another one that I'm...not necessarily looking forward to reading. I've heard of Gaiman before, usually in glowing terms, but always in terms of his graphic novels. Or, as normal people call them, comic books. I've never been a comic book reader, even as a child, so that seemed like a red flag to me.

But apparently Gaiman also writes novels, and this is one of them. It's even been turned into a TV series, and I've had multiple people recommend both the book and the TV show to me. Still...I'll give it a chance, but I'm leery.

---

This book is a sequel to the fantasy novel The Curse of Chalion. Fortunately, after discovering that fact I went back to the book store where I'd found Paladin and they also had a nice, used, hardcover copy of Curse. As far as I can tell, these books are not part of the Vorksigan saga which had already won Bujold three Hugos.

---

---

---

---

Confusingly, this year's winner was actually two books by the same author. They came out the same year and are both continuations of the fictional world Willis created in previous Hugo winners Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. So they got nominated and won as a single entry.

---

This is the most recent Hugo winner that I've been able to find (so far). For some reason that I'm not quite clear on, I assumed this would be one of the harder books to locate but it was actually one of the first ones I found (or, to be more accurate, my daughter found for me).

---

I found the third book in this trilogy (Death's End) as a used trade paperback in good condition and bought it figuring I'd want the entire trilogy eventually. Then it bugged me that I didn't have the first two, so when I saw a full-price new copy of The Three-Body Problem in a book store I broke down and paid full prices for it (the only one on this list so far that I didn't buy used). Still haven't found the middle book, The Dark Forest.

---

The second book of the Broken Earth series, and second Hugo winner in a row for Jemisin. The series continues with a book called The Stone Sky which is already seeing talk of a third consecutive Hugo win.