This was actually posted by a fellow blogger K.L. Toth on the first of June, but I’d just put up a Hugo review and wanted to let that post run its course. Waited longer than I intended. Life happens, and when it happens fast enough, one thing crowds out another.
But here it is, at last!
I was quite pleased with this!
Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone series has always been a favorite of mine. The stories presented, and their manner of presentation, has always left me in awe. This is real storytelling, all the more amazing for being a television show! One of the outstanding characteristics of the show was the way stories of respectable depth and character development often unfolded in a very small setting, with some of the best never straying beyond a single room. “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” is an especially good example of this, and perhaps for this reason came to mind frequently as I read Fritz Leiber’s novel The Big Time.
This entire novel, with its dozen characters, takes place in a place called, well, The Place. It’s a facility, maintained by near magical technology, in the Void outside normal space and time. In it, soldiers of the Change War are given a chance to recover from the various traumas suffered in the course of their missions. The so-called Spiders and Snakes are locked in a titanic battle for the control of time itself, though none of the soldiers, or the “entertainers” of The Place, really have any idea of why. The Big Time is something of a locked room mystery, in which a dozen characters recruited from many periods in history (two are nonhuman) find themselves questioning everything they think they know about the Change War, as a potentially explosive situation develops. The device that maintains The Place, and would allow them to resolve their predicament, has vanished. No one seems to know how or why, and one or more of the denizens of The Place is playing his or her comrades false. More than one may have a motive to place them all in grave danger. In the course of unraveling the mystery, the arguments of the characters examine such matters as love and loyalty, the nature of time and history, and the price of blind obedience.
This is a short, dense, complicated novel, and an example of storytelling that relies almost entirely on character development to tell its tale. It’s who and what these people are that creates the story, not the physical action or the exotic setting. The setting is described with as light a touch as possible, leaving much to the reader’s imagination, while leaving out nothing vital. This includes the ultimate resolution of the crisis, an answer that was right there in front of them, and the reader, all the while.
I first read this book while in high school, and derived very little from it. The author’s name caught my eye on the library shelf because I’d just read Leiber’s “Ship of Shadows,” in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (A first for me, the copy was found in a local newsstand and purchased with a bit of change I had from running errands or some such. It was the summer before I started high school. “Ship of Shadows” is literally all I remember about it.) This is “grown up” sci-fi, however, and my frame of reference, such as it was back then, didn’t quite extend to the contents and nature of the story. Nothing exploded and there were no brain-sucking aliens, so it left only the vaguest of impressions. Reading it now from a more mature perspective (yes, mature, and let’s just leave it at that), I might as well have read it for the first time. This makes me very glad I took on this project of reading and discussing Hugo winners, as otherwise I’d have missed a very interesting experience.
Although written in the late ‘50s, of the first four Hugo Award novel winners, this one seems the least dated. The nature of the technology used in this vision of time travel is so fanciful that it touches nothing in the real world, then or now. The characters are taken from times past (relative to 1958) or from invented pasts or futures so distant, that they are either living period pieces, or – again – so fanciful as to touch nothing in the real world. The Big Time seems a novel that has, itself, drifted loose from its own place in the time stream, much like the characters it contains.
This is a first-person narrative, told by a female character who tends to stand on the edge of the situation, dodging the action (such as it is) and the arguments, playing witness to it all and hardly participating until the end. Her recounting of the events involving the other characters includes numerous asides and observations on the nature of The Place and the Change War, building in the reader’s mind a good understanding of why this all matters in the first place. The interplay of the characters she describes, and her inside knowledge of several of them, brings the tale to life.
While I enjoyed reading The Big Time, and can understand why it won the award in 1958, there are times when the tendency of certain characters to hold forth at length drags a bit. In each case the motive behind the oratory is an attempt to bring others around to the speaker’s point of view. By its nature, then, this is not a story that moves by changing scenes for the sake of whatever action takes place. These people are in The Place for the duration. Everything must happen in that room; everything must be said in that room. It works, the way those old Twilight Zone episodes worked, but it calls for some patience on the part of the reader. If you stick with it and let the characters have their say, a strange and fascinating tale will emerge.
To say that the internet doesn’t always bring out the best in us would be an understatement. It’s so easy to hide behind a keyboard and tell it like you think it is, or how you want it to be, presenting your opinions and perceptions as “facts” in support of your point. Many people get a tremendous sense of empowerment by doing so as viciously as possible. A great deal of this so-called snark is seen by its creators, and their fans, as devilishly clever and loads of fun. Fan or creator, it’s an exercise in keyboard courage. It’s so easy to boldly overstate a point, and with a venomous flourish, when you don’t have to look the other person in the eye and see the harm you’ve done, or the anger you’ve unleashed. When you do this to deliberately provoke people into a response, it’s called trolling.
I’ve encountered this sort of poisonous nonsense many times, since allowing myself to be swept up in the digital age. I first encountered it on a gardening forum, of all things, where my evident fascination with the science of horticulture and plant biology was met with constant, trollish snipping from anti-science pseudo-intellectuals. I was so put off by this that I was a while giving the internet a second chance. I toughened my skin and learned to sift the valuable stuff from the sewage. My selectivity does not change the fact that keyboard courage remains the rule, though, whether you’re reading a weblog, comments following a news article, or conversations on Facebook. It’s annoying, and it’s kept me from being more addicted to the online experience than might otherwise have been the case.
The independent publishing movement has given rise to plenty of its own snarkiness, and you don’t have to try hard to find it. One theme that comes around all too often is the constant harping on the impending demise of the traditional publishing industry. “Trad” publishing has been having problems for a long time, troubles that predate digital self-publishing. When the flood tide of indie books was first unleashed, matters quickly grew worse, and gleeful predictions of the end of publishing as we know it became as commonplace as they were often ill-informed – the collapse was always seen as right around the corner, but never actually came to pass. Although these predictions seem to have declined in number over time, you still see bloggers recycle the theme on an all-too-regular basis. Curiously, the time when the alleged demise of traditional publishing will be at hand has increased from a couple of years to a decade or more, so even internet trolls can learn a little caution when repeating predictions. Two related motives seem to be behind the persistence of blog and op-ed pieces predicting that the end of the publishing world is at hand: a need to draw attention and simple spite.
As an attention-getting ploy, I can understand writing a weblog piece on the subject – after all, I’m after something of the sort even now, writing this essay. I’ll even read the piece if the author has done some research and provided a sound basis for his or her conclusions. Unfortunately, most of these “Hey! Look at me!” blog pieces do little more than reiterate the common knowledge that the publishing industry has hit the rocks and is in danger of sinking. While it’s true that traditional publishing is in trouble in this digital age, simply restating this current state of affairs doesn’t exactly make your blog stand out. “Hey! Look at me!” becomes “Me, too!” Now your blog is just part of the crowd.
On the trollish side of things are those giving vent to self-righteous anger as they dwell on the demise of the “gatekeeper” mentality of traditional publishing. Most (if not all) writers of such pieces are people who tried to become published by way of traditional means. I’m one of that crowd. I wrote and submitted my first novel to Del Rey Books in the late 1970s. My last attempt was the novel that ultimately became the foundation for The War of the Second Iteration, submitted to and rejected by DAW Books in2001 (to the best of my recollection). In the quarter of a century or so in between I wrote a lot of fiction, none of which saw the light of day. And yet, I take no delight in seeing the gatekeepers who sent me packing having a tough time of it. They did their jobs and gave me honest opinions based on the realities of life in their business. I surely didn’t care for the answers, and was troubled and terribly frustrated by it all. While I was not always graceful about it, somehow I came away disappointed, but not angered by these rejections. I take no satisfaction from the current troubles of traditional publishing.
The recent revolution in self-publishing has changed many things. I’ve taken advantage of this opportunity, and many thousands of would-be authors are doing the same. (Sheer numbers are creating their own challenges to book discovery, and in effect have made the elimination of gatekeepers something of a moot point). There are, in this growing crowd of author wannabes, no small number who took rejection from traditional publishing personally. They see the ability to do an end-run around the gatekeepers as a sort of personal vindication, proof the big publishers were wrong about them. They write of traditional publishing and its troubles as if the problems are well-deserved. Never mind for a moment how many of these people should have been rejected by competent editors. When someone with that attitude writes about the fate of publishing, their righteous indignation and keyboard courage combine to create some truly cringe-worthy material, often full of overstatements and wishful thinking.
Unfortunately, most of them have missed an important point. The freedom to self-publish that we now enjoy is in no way a validation of anyone’s status as an author. The ability to hit the “publish” button for Kindle Direct Press, Nook Publishing, or Kobo’s Writing Life does not mean the professional editors were wrong about you. The editors may well have been correct – about most of us – all along, and so dancing on their professional graves as if they deserve to see their careers come to an end for honestly looking after their company’s best interests, and telling you “No,” amounts to nothing more than trolling. You have accomplished very little, really, hitting that button. You’ve proven nothing. The real work of doing so comes afterward.
Now and then I peek inside a book published by such a blogger, and it’s no surprise I usually just close the sample and move on. Sometimes I do so with a shudder. I can’t help wondering how many of these purveyors of anti-traditional publishing troll pieces will still have books available ten years from now, the currently popular estimate for publishing’s demise as we know it. How many will have succeeded, and how many, in spite of their self-righteous zeal, will have been rejected by that ultimate and unavoidable gatekeeper, the world of book readers?
Until you try it, writing fiction from a first-person point of view seems a simple enough matter. What could be more straightforward than having the main character just tell the readers the story? And yet writing fiction in the first person can be surprisingly difficult. When a first-person narrative is mishandled by an author, it makes for an awkward reading experience.
Robert Heinlein often wrote in the first person and, although he didn’t hit the mark for me one hundred percent of the time when he did so, more often than not he managed to make it work. I found Have Spacesuit Will Travel and Friday to be a bit heavy-handed, but Job: A Comedy of Justice and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are among my all-time favorite novels by any author. But of all his first-person narratives, Heinlein in my opinion came closest to the bull’s-eye with one of his earliest – Double Star, the winner of the third Hugo Award ever bestowed upon a novel.
Double Star is the story of a down-on-his luck actor offered the job of impersonating a politician, who holds views with which Lorenzo Smythe does not agree. After having his pride tweaked in a way to compel him to take on the role, money or no money, he finds himself swept up in a solar-system-wide political intrigue. The longer he is involved, the more thoroughly ensnared he becomes, all the while finding that some of his most dearly held beliefs do not stand up well to reality. Where he ends up in the end is not something he would have predicted at the outset, and certainly isn’t a place he wanted to be, but by the end of the story Lorenzo isn’t the man he thought himself to be.
Although this novel, like most books written in the 1950s, does date itself (toadstool shaped Martians living along canals, caverns filled with data stored on microfilm, etc.), it remains an entertaining read to this day by virtue of a very believable first person voice. One of the great challenges of using a first-person point of view in telling a tale is showing the growth and development of the main character. The person telling the tale is looking back on his or her life, relating the events from the perspective of someone here and now who has been through these things. Whatever growth or change the narrator experienced in the course of those events is now something of the past and the tale is told by the person who has already changed. You may get a sense for how that change came to be, but it is often merely described, and not experienced by the reader.
Double Star manages to avoid this pitfall. The narrator tells this tale from his here-and-now perspective, but does so with a clear awareness of the man his younger self really was. He remembers it clearly enough to describe the process of change he endured, while providing the frame of reference needed to tell the story. By accomplishing this, Heinlein made it possible to see the personal growth of Smythe though the recollections of the more mature Smythe. When I first read this novel, sometime in the late 1960s, I did not pick up on this aspect of the story, and simply rolled along with the plot. The story just worked. This rereading was by a more “mature” reader, and my own frame of reference now includes a basic understanding of how to handle, or not handle, a first-person narrative. (I make no claims to being especially adept at it, myself.) Knowing this to be no easy trick to pull off adds a level of enjoyment to rereading this book.
Of course, Heinlein’s own personality comes through in the telling of the tale, with his philosophical and political inclinations right there, if you know how to look for them. In this old novel they’re not as blatant as would be the case late in his career, when Heinlein the author literally intruded upon his own stories. Smythe comes across as a bit of a Libertarian, but not especially polarized, and capable of changing his mind when he learns that things are not as they seem. And the degree to which he discovers that this is the case provides much of what moves the development of this character.
If you’ve managed to miss this bit of early Heinlein, give it a try. It surely deserved its award, and though it now does seem a bit dated, the strength of the character, presented in the first person, makes it an engaging read all the same.
I almost literally grew up writing, and that may well be because I was raised in a family that placed a very high value on literacy; as each of the five siblings demonstrated an ability to read, it was cause for celebration. Reading and writing being the flip sides of literacy, it’s a good bet the habit of putting things down in words was encouraged, as well. We wrote thank you notes for gifts and letters to relatives at the urging of the adults around us, and all five of us became a bit better than functionally literate.
For me, for some reason, it went beyond that. Way beyond. My first attempts at writing stories happened in middle school. By the time I was in high school I knew writing would be part of what I did with my life, and by the time I made my first stab at college I’d realized that writing was going to be my life. By the time I met she-who-was-to-become my wife I’d sold some magazine articles and essays, and written (but not sold) dozens of short stories and several novels. I wrote with the conviction that any given project could be that all-important first sale, and I did so for more than fifteen years. The clerks at the post office I used in Phoenix all knew me by name, I was in there so often with brown 9×12-inch envelopes. All the while the publishing industry was tightening up, becoming a moving target I could in no way anticipate, much less hit. I just kept writing and tried to believe.
It eventually wore me out. I cut back on time spent writing and pursued other things. I got married – twenty-six years ago this very day, in fact. I went back to school and this time completed a degree in plant biology. I rediscovered the stars. I was looking for other things to do, other ways to spend my time, rather than writing more stories that would never see the light of day. I didn’t actually stop writing; astronomy saw to that as I began to post observing reports and book reviews on the Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews website. But writing with the aim of making it a profession, a way of life, faded to the background.
This was not, as it turned out, a good or healthy thing for me, as I’ve said before on this weblog.
In the autumn of 2011 my wife and I had lunch with a couple I’ve known for quite a few years, among the few friends I’ve held onto since the fade-out of the sci-fi fandom days. Frances writes as Frankie Robertson, and some of you saw an interview she did with me and posted to her blog not too long ago (one of a string of such, and all well worth reading). At lunch that day she told a tale of self-publishing, of ebooks and beta readers and other very intriguing things. I’d heard some of this from people enamored of Kindle ereaders, heard that people were turning their backs on traditional publishing and turning toward self-publishing. Going “indie,” in other words. I had doubts, and no few misgivings, but this was a friend I’d always thought of as having both feet firmly planted, so it was hard to just brush it off as some crazy fad, the digital equivalent of the vanity press schtick. So I listened, and I read a couple of books she recommended (David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Digital being the most influential). I Googled things, read more, and came to the conclusion that indie publishing was a thing to be taken seriously. It seemed worth a try.
So I did. I wrote a little book about rediscovering a bit of my younger self (Mr. Olcott’s Skies) and published it on Amazon for Kindle, and on Smashwords for everything else. I did that one year ago today, on a day that I was sure I would not forget when asked “When did you…?” The most important and rewarding episode of my life began twenty-five years before that first book. Somehow it just seemed right that another major development should be marked by that same date. Since then, I’ve seen Mr. Olcott’s Skies reach beyond its target audience in a way that still surprises me, and I’ve experienced the delight of hearing from people who have read my novels and short stories (two of each at this point). The reviews have been good.
In this past year I’ve sold only a small number of copies as such things are measured, less than two hundred all told. Some would be disappointed by such numbers, but I find myself unconcerned. In the scheme of things – and this is true regardless of what sort of career you pursue – a year spent on any endeavor is no time at all. I’ve just now built a foundation for my indie publishing adventure, and learned something of what I need to make this work. When the second novel in the Second Iteration series was released, it prompted sales of the first, proving that the key to all of this is to keep writing and publishing. That’s fine; it’s what I want to do anyway. I’ve only just begun to explore options for self-promotion, beyond simply publishing the next book, and by the way, the third book in the series is developing at a gratifying rate. But most of all I’m having a fine time writing, again. As it was with the Moon and stars, I’ve re-acquired a vital piece of who and what I am. I will not, years from now, be wondering how it might have been, had I gotten a book or two out there before the eyes of the literate public. I’m in the process of finding the answer to that one, right now, and the process is a joyful one.
Reading and writing are flip sides of being literate, and with this first year behind me, I can once again see both sides of that coin. Give it a toss. Heads or tails, I win.
Just a brief update to alert followers of this weblog that I’ve been interviewed by fellow indie author Frankie Robertson here:
http://frankierobertson.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/blazing-a-trail-interviews-thomas-watson/
This is one of a series of interviews that includes such authors as Jennifer Roberson, Doranna Durgin, and Dennis L. McKiernan – among others. Not a bad company in which to be included, I must admit.
I very much appreciate being included in this project!
It doesn’t take much of an effort to find weblog pieces and online discussions filled with curmudgeonly commentary on the possible elimination of “real” paper books. Books printed on paper, the curmudgeons fear, will soon be rendered extinct, unable to compete with the convenience of eBooks and magazines available on laptops, tablet computers, and dedicated ereaders. This looming apocalypse clearly arouses the disgust of many book lovers, with a few foolishly adopting the “cold dead hands” rhetoric for which NRA activists are known. Most are merely resigned to the changes in progress, shaking their heads (and sometimes fists) and grousing in fine curmudgeonly fashion that the world that follows this apocalypse will be inferior to the world they knew.
For lovers of books and reading, it will surely be a different world. But inferior? I don’t buy that. I’m eager to own my first ereader.
Now, like the curmudgeons bemoaning the sad fate of “real” books, I’m a heavy reader. I understand their love of reading. Books have been a major element of my life for as far back as I can remember. It wasn’t a proper Christmas unless one of the packages contained books, and when asked my preference for a birthday gift I usually had a title or two in mind. (If I didn’t, the adults in my life were very good at picking out volumes that pleased me.) So I can say with complete sincerity that I love books and reading. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the smell of books, and the sound of the pages turning. Most of all, I find the interaction between the words and my mind and imagination enormously gratifying – I always have. And in the joy I so often feel while reading, whether for entertainment or edification (or both at once), I have found an understanding of why my reaction to eBooks is acceptance, not resistance.
I love to read. Reading, not the book itself, is the thing. Flipping the pages, smelling the paper, feeling the weight – all of these things are sensations I associate with reading, but they are not the act of reading. The central matter is my mental and emotional interaction with the words, and through them the ideas and stories presented by the authors who arranged those words in the hope that someone might one day read them. Whether I’m adding to my knowledge of history or science, or escaping reality for a few minutes or hours, it’s the reading that does it for me. That’s the experience that counts. Once I’m into a book, the sounds and smells of bookishness are lost on me. It turns out that this happens as readily for me with an eBook as one made of paper. So whichever way the reading world turns in terms of delivery methods – and it’s pretty obvious where things are headed – my reading habit won’t be affected. In fact, the most likely effect will be an increase in the amount of reading I do. I’m not getting any younger, you see, and I feel an ache in hands and wrists when I hold a substantial volume, and it’s ever more common for me to set a book aside because arthritis is having its way with me, and not because I’ve run out of time to read. But all books weigh the same when in a digital format, and a good ereader weighs next to nothing.
The books I currently own will stay where they are; I won’t be replacing many volumes with digital counterparts. Except for a few frequently used references, I can’t see any point. But many new books, especially works of fiction, will come my way in a digital format. I’ve already used the Kindle and Nook reading apps on my laptop to discover new authors, and this process will only accelerate when I have a dedicated ereader. I see myself, in years to come, buying either paper books or eBooks, whatever suits the needs of the moment, and for as long as both exist.
But if paper ever does go the way of the dodo, I’ll still be reading. I’ll be reading eBooks.
Curmudgeons will no doubt read these words (assuming any of them read weblogs online, which come to think of it is rather unlikely) while frowning and shaking their heads. I’ll leave them to it. There’s no point arguing with those who espouse a lost cause, and eBooks are not going to be a “fad” as so many predicted when the Kindle first hit the market. As evidence of this, consider the UofA student union, in which I am typing this entry. Yesterday I strolled through the union and kept a count of people I noticed reading. Those reading something on a laptop only counted if I saw nothing animated on the screen, a small number. I found 58 people reading, and 33 of them were using ereaders of some sort; you really don’t need to do the math to know what those numbers reveal. Of greater interest to me was the fact that readers of print and eBook alike had the same fixed stares of readers everywhere when lost in a story. There was no visible difference between readers of books and eBooks; the experience seemed the same for them, either way. The current generation of eBooks has succeeded because, for those who desire the experience of reading, they ultimately provide exactly the same thing. Being hung up on the superficial aspects, paper crinkling and the scent of ink, often amounts to little more than grasping after rationalizations to hide a knee-jerk reaction to change.
Study history and you will soon learn that it’s the nature of human civilization to change. And when you understand the pervasive nature of social change you realize there are only two ways to react. You can embrace change, work it and direct it and try to mitigate its less savory aspects. Or you can dig in your heels, hit the brakes, and circle the wagons. But history also teaches us that those who simply try to prevent change are eventually swept away and rendered irrelevant. Those who argue against eBooks and ereaders, especially those who try to prove there’s actually something harmful in such things will, with their objections, soon be forgotten. Their point is already moot, as my informal count in the student union yesterday showed. Books in digital form, or whatever eBooks evolve into, will be the way people read in the near future. And since I plan to read in the future, I will read eBooks.
A couple of years ago a friend acquainted me with the idea that self-publishing, or independent publishing, was now a viable route for getting a book out to readers. Having struggled for years to sell a book to a traditional publisher, and having seen a few people burned by “vanity publishing” scams, I was both curious and skeptical. But I looked into the matter, and curiosity quickly overwhelmed skepticism as I discovered the still new world of self-published ebooks on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, and the options presented by “print on demand” book production. There appeared to be something to all of this “indie publishing” talk, after all, something perfectly legitimate. It really was a chance to get books out there in front of people, without an agent or a publisher. (Of course, that’s all it is. A chance. You can publish a book this way, but contrary to the claims of countless internet carpetbaggers, producing sales of that book is another matter entirely! And a subject best examined separately.)
In that lunchtime conversation, the same friend suggested I dig out one of my unpublished novels, clean it up, and give it a chance out there in the big, bad digital world. When I convinced myself that it would actually be worth the effort to try the self-publishing route, I did just that. I pulled out a book I gave up on sometime between 1998 and 2000, with the title The Way of Leyra’an, and started working it over. I meant to make an experiment of it, but that’s not how things unfolded. It very quickly became a renewed commitment to writing. Rereading and rewriting that book in the last half of 2011, two things became very clear. First, there was a lot more to this story than I’d originally imagined. Second, I still enjoyed writing, and getting back to it again was like discovering that I really could go home again. So the revision became extensive and laid the groundwork for a series, and being at home with words again sort of pulled the cork from the bottle. Words poured forth.
I rewrote what became The Luck of Han’anga. When I found volunteers to beta read the book (one of them the very same person who set this all in motion) and the book passed out of my hands for a time, I turned my attention to the shorter work that I published as the memoir Mr. Olcott’s Skies. This was a test, a way to quickly learn the ropes of indie publishing. It worked, and developed a small following of its own into the bargain. By the time I had The Luck of Han’anga in hand for necessary revisions, I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing. By the middle of 2012 I was ready to launch my first novel, and did so, even as work progressed on the next novel in the War of the Second Iteration series. (A draft of Book Three took shape as Book Two went the rounds of beta readers.)
On Valentine’s Day, 2013, I released Book Two of the War of the Second Iteration: Founders’ Effect. That makes three books out in the span of a year – March 21st being the anniversary of Olcott’s Skies. As I watched the first few sales I was reminded of what a strange and wonderful thing this is, to be putting my work out there in the real world of readers. There is a touch of the unreal to it, because I’d given up hope of ever seeing it happen. And now – here I am, with three books published and a fourth well underway. That’s a huge change, in only a couple of years, from having no hope at all, to taking the first steps forward on a grand adventure. All the more so, as I didn’t see this coming.
Founders’ Effect – War of the Second Iteration, Book Two is available, and a few people have already begun to read it. This is all for real. Book Two is my way of pinching myself, to make sure I’m not dreaming. But I’m wide awake after all, it seems, and in a way that has not been true in far too many years.
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Founders’ Effect is currently available as an ebook for Kindle and Nook ereaders, and in multiple formats from Smashwords.
Book One, The Luck of Han’anga, is available from the same sources, and as a paperback from Amazon. (The paperback version of Founders’ Effect is in production.)
Sometime in 1981, on my way to reading all of the Hugo Award winning novels published up to that point in time, I found the Starblaze Editions illustrated reissue of They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. I had, by then, read several Hugo winners; unable to find copies of some of the earliest, I was not going down the list in strict order. They’d Rather Be Right (alternatively titled The Forever Machine) was the second novel to win the Hugo, and was one of those that took a while for me to find. My admittedly vague recollection of reading the book was one of surprise that it had won the award, especially on the heels of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Still, I don’t recall actually disliking the book, and so I was surprised recently, while browsing reviews of They’d Rather Be Right on Goodreads, to discover that it draws a lot of rather venomous criticism. It’s widely held to be the worst novel to ever win the Hugo Award.
Rereading it, I find it difficult to argue the point. It’s certainly the weakest novel to win the award; it truly does not hold its own against either its predecessor, or the novels that followed. While full of interesting – if now somewhat dated – ideas, it does not blend them smoothly into the story as it unfolds. Instead, the authors stop frequently to lay things out to the reader, sometimes through unspoken thoughts of the characters, but all too often as simply narrative exposition that does little to advance the story. It also starts out awkwardly. Reading this novel felt like sitting down in a theater to watch a movie twenty minutes after the start of the film. Much had already happened before the first chapter began, and none of it was adequately explained in the setup. There had been a great public outcry against the mechanical mind at the heart of the tale, leading to the persecution of those responsible for its invention, but the exact reason for the outcry and the incident that set it off is never clearly explained.
The characters are often mere sketches, set up to serve a particular role, and developed no further. In a few cases, characters are almost painful caricatures of people in particular professions; military and law enforcement professionals are treated especially unkindly. However the characters are handled, they offer little that engaged me as a reader. I get the feeling I’m not supposed to care about them so much as just listen to them as they convey the ideas on which the story rests. The tendency to caricature, unfortunately, extends to the social commentary that seems a central (and rather blunt) theme in this novel. That leads to scenes and passages that play like an early Peter Sellers comedy gone wrong. The impression that comes across is that the authors were looking down their noses at society, the one around them in the mid-1950’s, as they wrote the book. It comes across, at best, as naïvely elitist.
And that observation leads to one regarding a very significant difference between this book and the only other Hugo winner at that time, a difference that leads some modern-day readers to be dismissive of the book when they review it. The Demolished Man was clearly set in the future, and Bester made an effort to imagine how that future would look, feel, and sound. They’d Rather Be Right is supposed to be in the future, but that holds only if everything about the 1950s carried through to whatever vaguely defined future the authors had in mind. As a result, while The Demolished Man remains fresh and interesting today, They’d Rather Be Right comes across as a period piece. If you’ve ever read an anthology of early-to mid-1950s short sci-fi stories, you’ll recognize the feel of this book; it hasn’t aged well. I point this out merely as an observation, one that is true of many novels from any given decade. Saying a book falls short because of this is more than a little unfair. This book is flawed in ways that have nothing to do with when it was written, and that provides plenty of legitimate grist for the critical mill.
Given the book’s numerous problems (and I’m by no means alone in pointing them out) it’s no surprise that so many people are puzzled by the fact that this book won the Hugo Award. I’ve seen plenty of explanations, everything from the thought that the ideas driving the story were outstanding for their time, to conspiracy theories involving voter fraud. I think a closer look at the times during which the book was written may provide a better explanation. They’d Rather Be Right was published on the heels of the McCarthy Era and the Second Red Scare. In many ways, the society the authors describe as a setting for their story reflects the fears many intelligent people had during that episode. “Opinion control” is frequently invoked to describe an underlying cause for the troubles experienced by the society described in the novel. Characters in the book fear Soviet-style tattling by neighbors and co-workers. Even a casual examination of McCarthyism reveals that fears of such things were anything but groundless. Then as now, many, if not most, science fiction fans were wide open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and doing, and these were traits viewed with suspicion by the anti-Communist witch hunters of those days. I’ve met fans from that era over the years, and several have confessed they spent much of the Fifties looking over their shoulders and watching what they said in public. It was not, by all accounts, a happy time to have an active mind and imagination. So it isn’t much of a stretch to see They’d Rather Be Right as a response to the hysteria and paranoia of the time, and in fact, it almost certainly was a response of sorts. If that’s so, winning the award is less of a surprise. The novel spoke to the fans of that time and held their fears up to the light. That’s the sort of impression that might lead someone to cast a vote.
Whether or not this is what happened, I can’t say for sure. The above is informed speculation, and from things I’ve recently read on the matter, makes as much sense as most of the other explanations floating around out there. However it happened, They’d Rather Be Right did in fact win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1955. If you have an interest in the history of science fiction, read this book for the sake of understanding its place in that history. If you’re just looking for a good story, however, you might want to skip to the third Hugo winner.
To help keep up-to-date with the world of independent publishing, I make it a habit to “lurk” on a large forum devoted to ebooks, ereaders, and their fans. A subset of this forum is devoted to authors, and it has indeed been a gold mine of information. It is also, typical of the online realm, a font of opinions and a dumping ground for venting and rants. (Some of these are also informative, in their way, though perhaps not quite the way the ranters and venters might believe.) Browsing through all of this, I am struck time and again by how much of it amounts to complaints by writers that they don’t enjoy what they are doing. Define an aspect of being a writer, indie or otherwise, and do a search. You will find a discussion on those boards about what a loathsome pain in the ass it is. Editing, proofreading, and even writing itself (which absolutely baffles me) – each seems to have someone out there with their knickers twisted.
Some of the complaints are a bit disingenuous, much like listening to someone’s gripes about his or her spouse or children, even though that person wouldn’t be parted from that spouse or those children if life depended on it. But some of what I read is quite sincere, with a touch of surprise mixed in the generally aggrieved tones. The only explanation that makes sense for these complaints is that these people entered into the process largely ignorant of what it takes to “make” a book. Romanticized notions of what it means to be an Author rarely survive contact with the reality of it, and don’t usually die gracefully. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most of those who wring their hands over this or that unpleasantness, discovered in the writing process, give it up and quit writing after that first book, which likely didn’t sell in any case.
But many don’t give it up. For some, a strange sort of balancing act comes into play. Something about writing, or about seeing a book published (and if the luck is with you, selling), provides enough motivation to keep them going – or, at least, posting on that forum. They find joy in the process of writing, then roll their eyes and moan when it comes time to clean up the manuscript. Writing is something apart from the other aspects of the process of producing a book. It’s the fun part, like watching the flowers bloom in the garden. If only you could have a garden without all that dratted digging and weeding. But you can’t, of course, any more than you can succeed as an indie author without seeing to the editing and proofreading of your work. Even if you hire professionals, you still need to do these things, if only to reduce your expenses.
Commonplace as these gripes happen to be, they puzzle me. I see editing and proofing as inseparable parts of the same process, the one I think of as writing. Generating the text of the story is just the beginning, and since I’m worrying over such things as word usage and watching for dumb spelling mistakes while I work, I don’t have a sense of moving from one thing or phase to another when the emphasis shifts from spinning the tale to making it readable. After all, I’m just as aware of the story and the characters while “editing” as I am while “writing.” I pretty much have to be, to make it all work. That involvement with the story, all the way through, keeps the other aspects of the job from seeming like separate chores. I don’t finish the story and then edit it. I’m finished with the story when the thing goes live on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and others of that ilk.
All aspects of the process are for me as necessary as they are gratifying. I may speak of each as something apart from the rest when reporting progress (or when I hit a snag), but that’s a matter of convenience, for the sake of efficient communication. Whether I’m forging ahead, going back over the material to make sure it hangs together, or cleaning the manuscript up for beta readers (Yes, guys, I do proof the thing before you see it. Hard to believe, right?), I am writing, that thing I most love to do in life. For me there’s nothing to hate about any of it.
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