Hugos 1962: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

Collection originally published: 1962
Contents originally published: 1961
Acquired: September 2020
Read: October 2020

Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

In 1962, Brian Aldiss won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction for the "Hothouse" sequence of stories. 1959 had seen categories for Best Short Story and Best Novelette, but from 1960 to 1966, there was just a singular Best Short Fiction category. Even beyond that, the rules didn't work the way they work now; the five "Hothouse" stories have a collective wordcount in the novel range, and thus if the sequence was nominated as a unit these days, it would have to be in Best Novel. The same year Aldiss won the Hugo (there is a funny story about this in my Penguin Modern Classics edition), the five stories were published as a fix-up, and I decided to read it as one of my Hugo "bonus" books between the winners of Best Novel for 1958 and 1963.

I both can and cannot see why this won. There definitely are arresting, interesting images. Though not the earliest by far, Hothouse is still a pretty early example of the climate apocalypse subgenre. The warming of Earth (from natural causes) has caused a massive proliferation and evolution of plant life, and thus the downfall of the human race, which exists only in isolated pockets of depressed intelligence. The book follows one human as he journeys across his world, often at the behest of a superintelligent morel, and encounters different aspects of the amazing ecosystem. I would say the world was the best part, but I actually found reading the worldbuilding and scene-setting a bit of a slog. There is some neat stuff here, but it feels buried in a dull, aimless travelogue about dull, aimless people, and the exposition itself was often dull and aimless too; I was rarely excited to pick the book back up, and it took me a while to read despite being only 250 pages. I've liked some of Aldiss's short fiction that I've read, and he made good editorial choices in his Galactic Empires anthologies, but this is the first of his novels that I've picked up (for certain definitions of "novel") and it doesn't make me want to read another one. Not bad per se... but it never clicked with me. I kind of feel like I'd rather look at some illustrations of the world that Aldiss created!

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Review: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Three edited Arthur C. Clarke and George W. Proctor

Hardcover, 623 pages
Published 1982 (contents: 1965-69)
Acquired January 2009
Read August 2019

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Three: Nebula Winners, 1965-1969
edited Arthur C. Clarke and George W. Proctor

My reading of the first two volumes of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (which actually occupied three books) predates this blog, but I enjoyed volumes one and two B, and found volume two A lacking. In the stronger volumes, it felt like every story was a great, just one after another after another. Which, one supposes, is what you want out of a series called "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame." Volume three is somewhere in the middle; while I remember mostly bouncing off volume two A, volume three contains some great work, some important work I'm glad to have read, and some stuff that while not terrible, did little for me.

Highlights included the two stories by Harlan Ellison: "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and "A Boy and His Dog." The latter, about a boy and his telepathic dog in a postapocalyptic wasteland, is kind of a predictable Twilight Zoneesque affair, but with more sex and violence, elevated by a strong sense of voice. The former was excellent sf-as-satire, and feels even more pressing in the 2010s than it did in the 1960s, I suspect. After reading Ellison's biography last year, I realized I'd read little of the man's actual work, so it was nice to have some fall into my lap.

There are a couple Roger Zelazny stories as well; while I found "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" kind of meh, I really enjoyed "He Who Shapes." More intelligent dogs, this time used to aid blind people. Interestingly, Zelazny can imagine self-driving cars... but not text-to-speech or speech-to-text technology! But it's a cool concept, well-executed, and the self-driving cars are kind of an incidental detail of the story, but one whose implications he pursues in interesting ways nonetheless.

Of course I was fond of Brian Aldiss's H. G. Wells pastiche, "The Saliva Tree," which does a good job of doing the Wellsian thing of reimagining humanity's place in the universe through biological analogy. The bit where he stuffs in all the story titles was a bit much, but overall this gets both the flavor and the mission of the early scientific romances.

Samuel Delany is someone else I'm always meaning to read more of. "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" was strong on atmosphere, but a little impenetrable; however, I was very impressed by "Aye, and Gomorrah . . .", which imagines not only a group of sexless spacers (the radiation of space damages the sexual organs), but a group of people who would be attracted to them.

I was also pleased to read some more of Robert Silverberg's short sf, another person I feel like I haven't read enough of; "Passengers" is grim and well put together. And I've read Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonrider" before (it's a novella that became the middle third of her novel Dragonflight, which I read as part of The Dragonriders of Pern omnibus), but it mostly works on its own, too, and I enjoyed it all over again; it reminded me that I have a few more Pern novels I have never read.

Other good stories, though not as strong as the above, included Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man" and Richard Wilson's "Mother to the World." And then there are several more besides. It's a big book, with sixteen stories ranging from about ten pages to ninety. There were only two stories I bounced off completely: Richard McKenna's "The Secret Place" and Kate Willhelm's "The Planners." I don't think either was bad; they just never grabbed me. It's a good hit rate for an anthology.

Unlike volumes ones and two, volume three of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame is no longer in print, but if you come across it in a used bookstore (as I did), it's worth your time and money. I look forward to reading volume four and beyond in time.

Review: Lemistry edited by Ra Page & Magda Raczyńska

Trade paperback, 292 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 1959-2011)
Acquired June 2012
Read April 2016

Lemistry: A Celebration of the Work of Stanisław Lem
edited by Ra Page & Magda Raczyńska

When I picked this book up, I thought it was a collection of essays about Stanisław Lem with a couple Lem stories thrown in. It turns out to mostly be works of fiction assembled in tribute to Lem. This genre of anthology is always a bit tricky, I think-- I remember not being a very big fan of Foundation's Friends, for example, which was written in tribute to Isaac Asimov, and the fiction in the Ursula K. Le Guin tribute 80! was its weakest part. The problem here is that Lem is in my Top Five science fiction authors and that the contributors here, well, aren't. So when they attempt direct pastiche of Lem, they come up short, and when they try to do something more oblique, you wonder what it has to do with Lem at all.

The book begins, however, with three stories by Lem-- for all of them, this is their first appearance in English. The best of them is definitely "The Lilo," about a man who starts to wonder if he's been placed in virtual reality without his consent or knowledge, and wants his psychiatrist to help him out of this dilemma, but the psychiatrist can't... or won't. Like a lot of Lem stories, this takes a strange premise to its logical conclusion with perfection.

The pastiche of the other authors is at its most direct with Ian Watson's "The Tale of Trurl and the Great TanGent," a tale of Trurl and Klapaucius of The Cyberiad fame. It's okay. It feels more random and arbitrary than the actual Cyberiad tales that I remember, like Watson doesn't quite grasp what makes those stories work so well. I was surprised that this was the only story to reuse Lem characters directly: there are no tales of (say) Pirx the Pilot or Ijon Tichy here, no return to (thankfully, I suppose) Solaris.

Some just seem to be about robots with little else that makes them obviously Lemmian, like Toby Litt's "The Melancholy." Annie Clarkson's "Toby" is about a man who married a robot woman contemplating adopting a robot boy: I'm not sure what it has to do with Lem, though I did find the central conceit pretty interesting. It just kind of fizzles out at the end, though, after an interesting start. "Terracotta Robot" by Adam Marek is just kind of baffling, about a guy, his son, a newly married woman, and her husband all on a sightseeing tour of an ancient robot factory. The guy keeps hitting on the newly married woman even though it's her honeymoon. It's more like a piece of literary fiction that has a robot in it for no explicable reason. Take the robot out and put it in a different book, and I probably would have liked it a lot; as it is, I was baffled.

Others, and these ones felt more Lemmian, play with concepts of reality. "The 5-Sigma Certainty" by Trevor Hoyle is about a journalist who interviews Philip K. Dick, who tells him that Lem isn't a real person but a Communist committee. (This is a thing that Dick actually believed.) The journalist decides to go to Poland to investigate for himself. I liked the story at first, but in the end, it didn't seem to have much to say; there's a punchline of sorts, but it doesn't justify the buildup. The best along these lines is "Stanlemian" by Wojciech Orliński, about people who gamble in a virtual reality simulation of pre-9/11 New York City. The title is mean to be in opposition to "phildickian": whereas phildickian describes situations where reality is difficult to determine, stanlemian is used to describe situations where the problem has been solved. The premise of the story is that everything goes when it comes to getting money out of the simulation back into the real world, and so the protagonist is a guy hired on behalf of a gambler to extract the money from the simulation without running afoul of the gambler's crooked girlfriend. Great ideas that develop some stuff Lem played with, especially in Summa Technologiae, but in directions I don't think Lem would or could have gone, which is surely what you want out of this kind of volume, but it rarely achieves.

Some of the stories ape the way Lem would play with genre: "'Every Little Helps' by Frank Cottrell Boyce, reviewed by Stanisław Lem," for example, is Boyce writing as though he's Lem reviewing a nonexistent story by Boyce. I like the idea, but the execution is not very compelling: you're basically just reading a synopsis of a story that seems somewhat interesting, but not interesting enough.

It's one of these, though, that's the best story in the whole book: "The Apocrypha of Lem by Dan Tukagawa, J. B. Krupsky, and Aaron Orvits, reviewed by Jacek Dukaj" reviews a book about the novels written by three different computer simulations of Lem. One was programmed with the conditions of Lem's life, one was programmed with Lem's DNA and brain scans, and one is but one of millions of people simulated in a construct of twentieth-century Europe as a whole. Dukaj is playful and inventive in the best Lem tradition; this is like the best parts of Imaginary Magnitude, but playing with Lem himself. For example, he points out that one might want one's Lem simulation to write more Lem books (naturally), but Lem decided he had said all he wanted to: "the more faithful their postLem was to the original, the less likely it was that he would write anything new." The different postLems end up suing each other for copyright over their works, and the review attacks the idea the biological Lem is the best instantiation of Lem, anyway: "Where does the certainty that Stanisław Lem, born 12th September 1921 and deceased 27th March 2006 in Krakow, is such an ideal model of Lemness, come from? Simply because he was reflected in a biological form and not in a digital one? But that is pure racism!" All the works of all the postLems together will give you the data you need to isolate who Lem really was, and why should it happen to be the one that was a physical human being? It's a very fun little thought experiment.

And then there are the ones that have no obvious reason to be here, like Brian Aldiss's "Less Than Kin, More Than Kind," which feels like he just sent the editors a story he hadn't been able to get published anywhere else.

The book ends with a few nonfiction pieces. The best was "Stanisław Lem - Who's He?" by Andy Sawyer. I didn't expect to like this, since I thought I knew already, but Sawyer provides a nice overview of Lem's fiction and its major themes, and I especially liked his consideration of Lem's place within the genre of science fiction itself, given Lem's disdain for the genre.

The book has its highlights, but it really does illustrate the peril of its own project: Lem is too good at what he does for most others to be able to touch him. The few good stories show it can be done, but most of what's here reveals what an immense achievement it was to write and think like Stanisław Lem.

Review: Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2011 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 131 pages
Published 2010
Acquired September 2012
Read August 2013

Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2011
edited by Clayton Hickman

Okay, it's a little weird to be reading a guide to the first series of eleventh Doctor adventures just after the last one has gone out, but whatever. The Brilliant Book 2011 is a charming guide to the 2010 series, but much more besides-- it's filled with interviews, original fiction, and goofy features like a map of Amy Pond's hometown of Leadworth, instructions for dancing like the Doctor, "twitbook" and updates from Rory's stag party. I appreciate that they got Brian W. Aldiss(!) to write fiction for the book, but "Umwelts for Hire" didn't entirely come off, I'm afraid. The book is gorgeous overall; I love Anthony Dry's collage illustrations for each episode, and Paul Lang's visual design is top-notch.

Review: Trillion Year Spree by Brian W. Aldiss with David Wingrove

Trade paperback, 511 pages
Published 1986
Acquired April 2012
Read August 2012

Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction
by Brian W. Aldiss with David Wingrove

Perhaps the most important place for the history of a genre to begin is with defining its topic. Aldiss and Wingrove open by calling science fiction "the search for a definition of mankind in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode" (25). Later they clarify that the Gothic emphasizes "the distant and unearthly" and carries "us into an entranced world from which horrid revelations start" (35). This definition is at least partly circular, for it makes Frankenstein (1818) the first work of sf-- but it seems to have been designed to do so. Every now and then they let loose with another (usually perceptive) defining nugget:

• Stipulations apply only to individual writers, not a genre. (155)
• One of the pleasures of sf is considering its plausibility, experiencing a “sense of veracity” (155). Perhaps this is why so much early sf has plausibility-increasing frame stories? (Frankenstein, The Last Man, The Mummy!, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Purple Cloud, &c.)
• Sf is like Nazism(!) in that both link modernity and the past into a sort of "technological romanticism" (176).
• Prophecy is uninteresting. (340)
• Good sf speculates and entertains. (363)
• The delight of a first novel (in a series) is a new world; the delight of later novels is reacquaintance. (398) Not necessarily lesser, just different.

In any case, though Aldiss and Wingrove claim that they will modify the definition as they go, it comes up virtually never again. The idea that it involves "the search for the definition of mankind" seems unnecessary, but to reformulate it along the lines of saying something like that it 'takes us into an entranced world made possible through our advanced state of knowledge' would seem to come close to something more accurate and useful. I also like their comment that "transposition of reality" is what distinguishes sf from fantasy (49). They perhaps overplay the influence of the Gothic, but it’s a useful point to make.

The most useful thing that Aldiss and Wingrove do with genre is simply to be very, very careful about it. They point out that genres exist for readers, writers, and publishers, and though Swift was certainly not writing sf (they push against the tendency of genre fans to claim things for their genre), readers now read Swift for much the same reason that they read Wells or Asimov. Hence, their history of the genre charts not just works that exist within the genre, but the works that the genre is responding to, other works read by its readers, and writers outside of the genre undertaking similar projects.

They do fall into the trap of confusing the rhetorical project of genre with its features. For example, they mention Hardy as someone who has a "tremulous awareness set against the encompassing mysteries of space and time" and deals with the scientific revelations of his time, including Darwin (98). Surely the thing that stops Hardy from being an sf writer is that he doesn’t undertake a transposition of reality that relies on our advanced state of knowledge? But according to Aldiss and Wingrove, the reasons Hardy is not an sf writer are: 1) the changes in the social order he records aren't for novelty or sensation, but to impact characterization, 2) his tone is not rapid and light, and 3) he is a genius, whereas sf attracts talents at best (99-100). None of these are defining aspects of sf: Le Guin gives us changes in the social order for characterization, no one would accuse Orwell of being rapid and light, and sf has probably had more than one genius, and even if it hadn't  that’s a stupid thing to say. But otherwise, their tracing of these people outside the genre is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of their project, as is their careful delineation of who is connected to whom within the genre: when discussing the 1930s, they separate out the magazine tradition of Gernsback and Campbell from folks responding to the same ideas like Čapek, Kafka, Huxley, and Lewis.

Their discussion of 19th-century sf is interesting, but not groundbreaking. I suspect the Frankenstein thing was at the time, but now it's a critical commonplace! (Still right, though.) Part of the problem with this section is that it doesn't get the time the other ones do; the careful delineation that shines in most of the book isn't present here, with utopian fiction, future-war fiction, Verne, and the dime novels all dealt with together a little carelessly. His connection to Sherlock Holmes is nice: in talking with a friend, I suggested that both sf and mysteries rely on the existence of a rational universe to some degree.