Ben Bova (1932–2020)

I almost wrote "it's hard for me to review this," since this was a treasured volume when I was an sf-devouring teenager, but it really isn't.

In a way, I wish it was. Hard, that is.

The SFWA-generated "Hall of Fame" volumes are good introductions to the whole "Golden Age" (it should really be "Golden Age Plus" since many of the stories post-date the typically-demarcated "Golden Age" of science fiction -- and one, the Wells, significantly pre-dates it) canon of science fiction -- as long as show more you don't think about it too much.

At this distance, even granting cultural this and historical that, it's hard for me to escape the feeling that the level of writing simply isn't very high. I know, I know: sacrilege! But reading through "Who Goes There?", though it proves anew how much more faithful to the source material John Carpenter was than Hawks, et al, really demonstrates that Campbell was a pretty bad writer. It's often difficult to tell exactly what's happening in "Who Goes There?" and although some of this is due to the attempt on the author's part to replicate a certain slangy way of speaking (as far as I can tell he fails miserably at this), most of it is due to the lumpiness of the prose. Cripes, is "tensity" even a word? Don't you mean "tension," Mr. Campbell? And it doesn't help that the author is predictably mired in a "Big Bronzed Men Doing Man Things in a Manly Way" place: boy does this kind of thing become tiresome after a while. It's not hard to see, reading this, where the obnoxious-ness of later Heinlein came from ... it's all here.

More to come. show less

I decided to go back and fill in some of the gaps in my reading of the Nebula Awards collections, and while I’d read the 2007 and 2009 volumes, I’d missed this one. Sadly, this is one of the years where the collection was lighter on content, with only five complete stories included. Naturally, there’s the winner in each of the short story, novelette and novella categories, alongside one runner up short story and a story by James Gunn, who won that year’s Grand Master award.

The book show more opens disappointingly with the winning short story, Echo by Elizabeth Hand. It seemed a rather pointless story, where the narrator talks about how her long distance lover never talked to her much, and now there’s been a disaster and communications are cut off most of the time, she hears from him even less. And that’s about it. The runner up story later in the book, The Woman in Schrodinger’s Wave Equations by Eugene Mirabelli, wasn’t a bad story, and was superior to the winner, though wasn’t outstanding. It’s about a man studying physics and his relationships with two women, and other than his area of interest, I’m not sure what qualifies it as science fiction. I try not to worry too much about genre boundaries, but I’m almost certain these can’t have been the best two stories they could have found out of an entire years output.

The novella dominates the book, and in fact was originally published as a book on its own. At over 120 pages, Burn by James Patrick Kelly takes almost a third of the space on its own. It’s based around the fighting of forest fires and the author’s apparent hatred of Henry David Thoreau, being set on a planet called Walden where everyone has to live a simple life and remain generally isolated. It’s not destined to become a favourite, but it was at least an enjoyable and well written story.

As was Two Hearts by Peter S. Beagle, the winning novelette. It’s a classic fairy tale fantasy story and perhaps my favourite of the book, despite the fact that I’m generally more interested in science fiction. It’s apparently a sequel to The Last Unicorn, which I’ve never read, so I don’t know how it links in with the original, but it worked perfectly well as a story in its own right.

There’s also the Rhysling Award winners for science fiction poetry included, which is a nice touch, especially as they don’t take a great deal of space. After that though, it’s onto the filler, of which there’s way too much in this volume. It’s nice to have a story from the year’s Grand Master winner, but James Gunn’s The Listeners is not only a fairly famous story already, it was already included in an earlier Nebula Awards volume back when it was a nominee itself, and I feel it would be better to include more of this year’s nominees. The novel excerpt is another completely pointless way of taking thirty pages away that could have been used for other stories in order to give you a random chunk of story with no beginning or end. The essays aren’t bad, but aren’t especially thrilling and don’t seem to have a great deal to say, and I could do without Orson Scott Card’s baffling talk about science fiction being a literary movement rather than just a genre.

That could sum up the problem I have with this volume. Some years the collection is amazing and some years disappointing, and this is one of the worst, but I don’t think it necessarily reflects on the quality of the fiction that year, just on the judging criteria. I understand that everyone is going to have different tastes, but the short story winner this year was so feeble, and half the stories barely fit into the genre anyway. I get the impression that the judges for that year were just going for anything that seemed “literary”, to use a term I particularly dislike, with references to Thoreau in Burn, mythology in Echo and untranslated foreign language quotes in The Listeners. Whether or not that is the case, this had the least content of any Nebula Award volume I’ve read, and none of what was there stood out enough to really make the book worthwhile. show less

Yes it's a silly mash-up of James Bond and Harlequin Romance featuring an unabashed capitalist who somehow manages to avoid getting killed while bringing every woman he meets to a shuddering orgasm. But there's something to Bova's easygoing writing style that just makes him fun to read, like a sci-fi summer beach novel. Although in this particular addition to his "Grand Tour" series the political landscape hits uncomfortably close to home with an aggressive Soviet Union lording it over the show more world while an ineffectual America cowers behind a wall of isolationism.....rather like an alternate history in which Russia wins the Cold War. Still, it's nice to read the occasional book with clearly delineated heroes and villains, and Bova takes care not to make either side look ridiculously obnoxious. show less

Neqarly half of this 1976 issue of Analog is taken up with the first part of the serialisation of Robert Silverberg's 'Shadrach in the Furnace'. I had forgotten what a good writer Bob Silverberg actually is.The other stories are fairly unmemorable; Eric Vinicoff & Marcia Martin's 'Render unto Caesar' is a pretty unpleasant piece of Republican flag waving; companies are as good as nation states, if not better, the UN is evil, taxation is slavery and the means always justify the ends show more (especially if you sign up to the previous four ideas). Fortunately, there is some balance through an interview with Carl Sagan, though the interviewer wastes everyone's time by asking Sagan's opinion of Velikovsky's theories and spending half the available space banging on about it. Sagan is remarkably tolerant. There's one of Bertram Chandler's tales of Commander Grimes which is quite amusing but resolutely old-fashioned - the spaceships are all rocket-shaped for a start off.

Finally, there is a little Easter Egg for the modern sf reader right at the end of this issue; a letter from John Gribbin on the search for magnetic monopoles and why it probably will fail; but as a good scientist, he does not rubbish the article he is writing about, simply points the reader to better sources and gives an example where one theory has been superceded by another but still satisifies most practical uses in the real world. Just as any good scientist should do. show less