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CHAPTER 1
1953
Best Novel
Winner: The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester
Nominees: None
Between 1953 and 1958, the Hugo Awards were fairly disorganized. The categories weren't fixed, and there was only one round of voting — no nominees were announced. The 1953 first-ever Hugo Awards were presented at Philcon II, in Philadelphia. The winning novel was Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. It's not in print, but it was recently, in Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, and it's never been hard to find. I first read it when I was reading my way through all the science fiction in the library when I was twelve. It's an examination of how it might be possible to commit a murder in a world of telepaths where not even your thoughts are private. There are some aspects of it that seem dated, but I'd say it is an enduring classic, and a worthy winner.
So, what else might have been considered?
The International Fantasy Awards for 1953 had three nominees, all of which I think might well have been Hugo nominees too. The winner was Clifford Simak's City, one of his best books, a gentle pastoral and typically Simak story of post-civilization. It was a fix-up of short stories published in the '40s, put into novel form for the first time. It's in print in a beautiful small-press hardcover from Old Earth Books.
The other nominees were Kurt Vonnegut's first and very science-fictional novel, Player Piano, and C. M. Kornbluth's Takeoff.PlayerPiano, like most of Vonnegut, has leanings toward both surrealism and science fiction, but was published as mainstream. It is still in print.
Takeoff was one of Doubleday's early attempts at doing hardcover science fiction. Takeoff is not in print, and isn't one of Kornbluth's best-known works. I honestly can't remember whether I've read it or not. I think I must have, but I don't remember it.
The interesting thing about both of these is the reminder that there really wasn't much science fiction being published in book form back then — the real action was still in the magazines. It's also interesting that the Hugos emerged just as science fiction book publishing was getting established.
It's worth noting here that the Hugos and the International Fantasy Awards, a juried British award started in 1951, were the only awards for the genre in 1953, according to Locus's awesome database. It's easy to lose sight of that given the huge number of awards there are today.
Looking for novels published in 1952, I see a few other things that might have made the short list. Isaac Asimov had two adult books out that year: The Currents of Space and Foundation and Empire. Both of them had had earlier magazine publication, both of them are in series, which might have impeded their chances. But they're both in print, and I think they're both fairly well known almost fifty years later. There was also A. E. van Vogt's gloriously pulpy The Weapon Makers. I wouldn't have been surprised to see this on the short list, if there had been a short list. There's Cyril Judd's (C. M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril's) Gunner Cade, James Blish's Jack of Eagles, and Lester del Rey's Marooned on Mars.
In young adult and children's books, possibly E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, Mary Norton's The Borrowers, or C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader might have made it on. In straight SF juveniles, we have Lester del Rey's Rocket Jockey, Arthur C. Clarke's Islands in the Sky, Robert A. Heinlein's Space Family Stone (aka The Rolling Stones), or Asimov's David Starr: Space Ranger.
Other possibilities about which I know nothing: John Taine, The Crystal Horde, and Raymond F. Jones, This Island Earth.
So, did a good book win, worthy of the Hugo? I'd say yes. Was it the best book of the year? Well, arguably. I'd argue for City or MoreThan Human, or Foundation and Empire as worthy of consideration, but I certainly don't have any problem with The Demolished Man as a winner.
Was anything left out of the short list? Well, since there was no short list, everything was.
Other Categories
Best Professional Magazine
Winner: Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction
This was clearly a tie. The interesting thing to me is that there isn't a category for professional magazines today. But John W. Campbell's Astounding and H. L. Gold's Galaxy were unquestionably the best magazines of 1953. I think the real reason for stopping giving this award is that there just weren't enough professional magazines at the time to make a good short list. You don't just need five nominees, which they might have managed; you need a tail of things almost good enough, or which might be good enough next year. There should be at least ten worthy nominees for there to be a category.
Best Interior Illustration
Winner: Virgil Finlay
Best Cover Artist
Winner: Hannes Bok and Ed Emshwiller
My only comment is that this is another indication that we are still in the time of magazine prominence here. We don't divide art by "interior" and "cover" anymore.
Best New Author or Artist
Winner: Philip José Farmer
Farmer had recently burst onto the scene and taken science fiction by storm. He wasn't brand new in 1953; indeed, he wouldn't have been eligible by today's Campbell rules, as he'd been publishing for longer than two years. But he was a good winner nevertheless, as he was near the start of his career and he became a major science fiction writer.
Excellence in Fact Articles
Winner: Willy Ley
Yes, his scientific articles were in fact excellent. No argument there. I'm not sure who any other nominees might have been — had Asimov started writing his Fantasy & Science Fiction science essays then?
#1 Fan Personality
Winner: Forry Ackerman
Well, he certainly was a memorable fan personality, who was a prominent fan then and remained a prominent fan until his death in 2008. So the Hugos did recognize lasting ability with this one.
Comments on 1953
7. Bob
Jo, the years were rather fluid in those first years of the award. You'll find that the awards for 1958 and 1959 both cover the same year — 1958! I would add one other 1952 novel — Limbo, by Bernard Wolfe. It was not published as SF but is pure quill dystopian fiction along the lines of We, 1984, and Brave New World. Still surprisingly good and has just been republished. I would have to include The Paradox Men, by Charles L. Harness, and Ring Around the Sun, by Clifford Simak.
9. Rich Horton
You're quite right, of course, about the fluidity of the time eligibility rules for the early Hugos. Anything published from the calendar year preceding the Worldcon up to the time of the con itself seemed to be eligible. I think codification of the rules came in the late '50s or maybe very early '60s. (Though of course they keep changing.)
Telepaths, Murder, and Typographical Tricks: Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man
I hadn't reread The Demolished Man for a long time, perhaps twenty years. It's a great idea book, but it's also tense all the way through, and none of the characters are people I care to spend time with.
Sometimes I read old books and they feel clunky, but I can enjoy them despite that. This isn't one of those. This is a surprisingly modern-feeling novel — though, of course, very short. It reads like cyberpunk — apart from the cyber bit. It has everything I don't like about cyberpunk: unpleasant immoral characters, bribery, an underworld, a fast pace, lots of glitz, a metropolitan feel, chases, and a noir narrative voice that doesn't want you to get too close.
This is a good book, certainly a classic, unquestionably influential, but I don't warm to it. There are excellent reasons for reading it, and if you like William Gibson, you might well like this too, but while I love The Stars My Destination and Bester's short stories, I don't like this one.
This is a future world where humanity is inhabiting three planets and three moons — and a rich man's clock gives him the time on the meridian of all six of them, but he has to do sums to know what time it is in New York, where he happens to be. It's a future that's had some considerable technological advances on 1953, not just in one area but in many. It's a New York that has different classes, and people of both genders, though they all seem to be white. Most of the story takes place in Manhattan, with one excursion to a space habitat.
Society is full of Espers, called "peepers" — telepaths. Not even your thoughts are private, and there's not much significant crime, though there's still an underworld. We're told there hasn't been a premeditated murder in seventy years, because some peeper would see the intent and prevent the crime. The Espers are organized into a Guild with an Oath, they're very moral, but they're also trying eugenic breeding to produce more Espers with a goal of a totally telepathic world. They require intermarriage and children, they classify themselves into rigid classes, and they earn a lot seeing through people's secrets. Their punishment for breaking their oath is total ostracism from Esper society — and we see poor ostracized Jerry Church pressing up against the outside of a telepath party just to be able to overhear mental communication.
Bester describes the mental communication as making patterns impossible in speech, and represents this with typographical trickery. There's quite a lot of "@kins" and "Weyg&" kind of thing, which must have seemed very innovative in 1953, which is sufficiently ahead of 133tspeak that Bester can reasonably be considered to have either predicted or invented it. It seems a little precious now.
The patterns made by telepathy are also slightly too clever for my tastes — an eye in a stein, meaning "Einstein." I generally like them better when he describes them than when he attempts to convey them on the page. However, this was clearly the precedent for Walter Jon Williams's Aristoi. Generally, the telepathic communications are clear and well conveyed. Bester actually does succeed in making the Espers seem as if they have another channel of communication that isn't just silent speech — except when it is.
There's a computer justice system that can analyze very complex things, but on punch cards. There's a brief interlude among the decadent rich. (I am unaware of decadent rich people like this, but since they appear here, in James Blish's A Case of Conscience and Dorothy L. Sayers's Murder Must Advertise, then I have to believe that if three people satirize what is recognizably the same thing, they're probably working from a common original.) We see these decadent rich and the lowlifes at the fortune-tellers and the pawnshop, and much more unusually, the middle classes in the person of the girl who writes the earworm and the scientist who invents the rhodopsin capsule and others of Reich's subordinates.
The plot concerns a murder, first finding a way to commit it and then finding a way to prove the murderer did it. A murder mystery in a science fiction society isn't unusual now, but it was innovative in 1953. We begin in Reich's point of view as he plans the murder, finding ways to get around telepathic surveillance with an earworm, and then afterwards we switch to Lincoln Powell, Esper 1st, detective.
The best and the worst things about the book are closely allied. The whole thing is as Freudian as The Last Battle is Christian, and it causes the same kind of issues. First, it gives it some extra and interesting depth. We begin with a nightmare, and the absolutely best part of the book is another long nightmare toward the end that does the kind of sense-of-wonder things that only SF can do. But the adherence to the Freudian view of people also limits it unrealistically.
This is especially a problem with the female characters — not so much the dames, who are sufficiently stylized that it doesn't matter, but the actual characters Mary and Barbara really suffer. Indeed, the whole plot needs the Freudian thing to work, but while it's quite clever, it's a cheat. We've been in Reich's head, but Reich himself doesn't consciously know why he killed D'Courtney, or that D'Courtney is his father; he's just reenacting primal oedipal urges.
I feel as if I've spent this whole time tearing the book to shreds, and yet I do admire it. It contains images that I've remembered for decades — especially the nightmare image of Reich thinking he has everything he wants and then realizing the world has no stars and when he mentions stars nobody else knows what he's talking about.
1954
There were no Hugo Awards in 1954.
The 1954 International Fantasy Awards considered The Demolished Man and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human.More Than Human should definitely have been a Hugo nominee if it was eligible. It's another enduring classic, Sturgeon at his best and on his favorite topic.
Comments on 1954
6. Rich Horton
The list for the awards that might have been, in 1954, is REALLY REALLY impressive, as the Retro Hugo nominees from a few years ago show: The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov; Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury; Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke; Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement; and More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon. (Other potential choices, not as good but still quite good: Robert A. Heinlein's Revolt in 2100 and Starman Jones, Fritz Leiber's The Sinful Ones and The Green Millennium, John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes aka Out of the Deeps, Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, and Wilmar Shiras's Children of the Atom.)
1955
Best Novel
Winner: They'd Rather Be Right, by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley
Nominees: None
There's kind of a trick fannish trivial pursuit question, which is, "Which is the worst book ever to win the Hugo?" The answer is They'd Rather Be Right, by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, 1955's winner.
I don't know if the book deserves this reputation, because I have not read it, because when absolutely everybody tells me that the jar contains marmalade all the way down, I don't feel compelled to take the lid off. I have never heard a good word for this book. Sometimes these things worked and sometimes they didn't. This one didn't. The book is generally believed to be so awful that there are conspiracy theories about why it won. Goodness knows what the voters at Clevention in Cleveland in 1955 were thinking. The most sensible suggestion I've heard is Dave Langford's — Clifton had written good short stories, the voters hadn't read the novel and were going on past performance. In which case, oops. It isn't in print. It isn't in the library. It is barely in the memory of having been in print. It's quite clear that this has not stood the test of time.
Nineteen fifty-five, like 1953, did not release a list of nominees, so any guess as to what was in the voters' minds is just a guess.
The International Fantasy Award that year went to Edgar Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers. This is a brilliant, indescribable book that would have been a solid Hugo winner — one of the best five books of any year. It's in print in a gorgeous small-press edition from Old Earth Books.
The runner-up was Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity! How could the Hugo voters not have voted for Mission of Gravity — sometimes described as the only genuine hard science fiction novel? It's in print in an Orb edition, along with some stories set on the same planet.
Looking at 1954 novels, I am instantly struck dumb with amazement. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave and The Broken Sword! Asimov's The Caves of Steel! The Fellowship of the Ring! Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Pohl and Kornbluth's Search the Sky!
In young adult, I see Heinlein's The Star Beast, Andre Norton's The Stars Are Ours, Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and C. S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy.
Also in SF I haven't read but wouldn't be surprised to see on a Hugo short list, E. E. "Doc" Smith's Children of the Lens and L. Ron Hubbard's To the Stars.
I could easily compile a Hugo short list out of these books — either a "Jo's favorite five books published in 1954" or "What I imagine other people would have preferred," but in fact, any five of the books listed here would seem to me to be a pretty decent Hugo ballot that had stood the test of time. I'd somehow imagined that 1954 must have been a poor year, but it wasn't; it was a vintage year. Wow. The actual voters at Clevention inexplicably turned away from all these great things and chose They'd Rather Be Right.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "An Informal History of the Hugos"
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Copyright © 2018 Jo Walton.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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