The Best of the Hugo Awards

Sometime in the early nineties I agreed to take a trip with a friend of mine to Florida to visit - you guessed it -- his grandparents. Knowing how this would play out, I decided to take some reading along. While I read a lot of books between the ages of 10 and 15 (mainly fantasy), I had neglected reading fiction during my later teens to pursue other activities that crop up when you have a group of friends that like to knock on your window at 2am.

I knew I wanted to read science fiction, but since I didn't know where to start, I decided to buy some books that had this "Hugo Award Winner" label on the cover. I reasoned that Hugo knew what he was talking about because wherever I went, the science fiction/fantasy section had these books diplayed prominently.

The novels I chose worked out well for me and I was able to deal with the borrowed dinner jackets and Philharmonic-festive evenings. Until I was able to find my favorite authors, the Hugo award served me well as a guidepost to good speculative fiction.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Starting 600 years after nuclear war has devastated 20th Century civilization, A Canticle for Leibowitz tells the story of mankind's mellenia-long return to technological civilization with the assistance of a monastic order. Founded by a Jewish engineer named Issac Edward Leibowitz who worked for the United States military before the war, the Albertian Order dedicates itself to preserving knowledge in a world plunged into a new Dark Age. The story contains three parts, separated by 600 years each: the so-called Age of Simplification, a new renaissance, and Man's eventual climb back to full-scale technological civilization.

This was the first book from the Hugo Awards that I read knowingly (on my pilgramige to the Land of the Ancient Ones), the other being Dune (see below), which I read in my senior year of high school. Considered a classic even outside its genre, A Canticle for Leibowitz is widely studied for its various themes such as separation of church and state and the inevitablity of history repeating itself. It's also just a damn good story. Because of the novel's smallish size, it makes for good reading on vacation or a long trip.

It's one of those stories that stands apart from most other science fiction novels. Sure, post-apacalyptic stuff is not exactly new, even in the very early 1960s when this book was published (during a time when the book's premise seemed almost inevitable). But the characters, the structure, and the style of writing set the book on a pedestal that even writes such as David Brin and Greg Bear can't touch (not yet, anyway).

And it was another To Kill a Mockingbird moment...the author never went on to write anything else of note, except co-authoring a sequal to Canticle that pales in comparison.

Dune

When I was a child, I thought science fiction books were mainly about guys in spacesuits being attacked by giant worms with human faces, thanks to the prominent book stands containing the latest Frank Herbert installment. In high school, I stumbled across Dune in my school library and decided to give it a try.

There's not much I can say about this book. I can reasonably assume that if you're reading this site, you've already read Dune. If you haven't, what the hell are you waiting for? It's got fuedal families, space ships, ninja-concubines, messiahs...the list goes on. Maybe you watched the movie and/or the Sci-Fi Channel mini-siries, in which case please put them out of your mind and check out the real deal. Also, it's best to ignore the prequals released by Herbert's son and Kevin J. Anderson. Just...put them back on the shelf and step away.

What really made the book for me was the detailed universe Herbert created. When I imagine Asimov's Trantor in my mind, I see something out of Star Wars. When I imagine Caladan, or the city of Arrakeen, I see a baroque world, envisioned in minute detail from the largest Guild Heighliner to a Mentat's stained lips.

Ringworld

Larry Niven's novel about a ring-shaped world that spins around a star is a perfect example of a novel whose premise is almost completely defined by its setting. It still has some great characters if you can set aside the fact that Ringworld probably hasn't won over many female readers with its depiction of hapless Teela Brown. Still, the novel keeps you reading with the sheer wonder about the scale of the world they explore.

My favorite aspect of the story, besides wanting to explore the impossible construct and find out who built it, was the interaction between the protagonists: Louis Wu, the 200 year-old Every Man, Speaker to Animals, a giant feline alien that only Louis can command respect from, and Nessus, a walking periscope called a Pierson's Puppeteer...a species whose power is forged from their incredible cowardice.

The interaction of these three can make for some great comedic moments, while not pigeonholing the story into a Terry Pratchet-like niche.

The only downsides to Ringworld is a less than satisfying conclusion, made more puzzling by Niven's admission that sequals were not intended. However, he relented and subsequent installments such as Ringworld Engineers have been written. In fact, I like the second book better.

One last note, the audiobook version of Ringworld available at audible.com is excellent...the narrator does an great job of bringing the characters alive.

Startide Rising

Startide Rising isn't the first book in David Brin's Uplift series, but it's the best one to start with. The first novel of the series, Sundiver, doesn't have much to do with the ongoing events in the rest of the series and takes place two hundred years or so before Startide Rising.

The novel has the typical Brin mixture of humor, big ideas, and action. I've always been a fan of underdogs -- and the humans, along with their "uplifted" dolphin and chimp friends sure get the short end of the stick. So you cheer like crazy when Gillian Baskin, the human physician on board the embattled Streaker, mocks the aliens chasing them.

This was one of my first picks on the Hugo list, and it was with this book that I realized I had made the right choice by starting with the award winners. I had so much fun reading this one. I just wish Brin wouldn't have left some of his plot points hanging the later books, or get off his ass and write some more Uplift books. I still haven't managed to force myself to finish Kiln People.

Note: It seems he will be writing another Uplift book, according to information on his very professionaly designed site!

Neuromancer

Yep, you knew it was coming. William Gibson's oh-so influential novel paints a dark landscape behind the future of our technologically obsessed culture, and I can't wait for it to get here.

For cyberpunk lovers, this novel has it all, and anyone who thought the Matrix movies were so original needs to read this book and study up on their history. Many poeple lobbed the word "cyberspace" around during the early days of world-wide Internet adoption without knowing where this term originated.

Many people finally getting around to reading Neuromancer for the first time are surprised to note that the book was written in 1984. Some details in the story give it away, such as references to ridiculously small amounts of memory storage available during the novel's future setting, but there is no denying Gibson's prescience.

And Molly just warms my heart.

Hyperion

Ah Dan Simmons' ode to Chaucer and Keats. This is one of my favorite books of all time. I've already gone into this one in depth so I won't repeat myself.

A Fire Upon the Deep

A Fire Upon the Deep introduces us to the Zones of Thought, Vernor Vinge's wildy imaginative breakdown of the galaxy where faster than light travel, artificial intelligence, and other good stuff are possible in the very outer reaches (called the Beyond), while these possibilities breakdown as one gets closer to the galactic core (first the Slown Zone where Earth is, then the Unthinking Depths near galactic center).

Humanity has found its way to the Beyond. A human expedition to the next higher zone, called the Transcend (where hyper intelligent "races" called Powers reside) uncovers an ancient data archive, which releases a sort of godlike super-virus called the Blight. The expedition is compromised and the Blight begins to spread across the Low Transcend. A single family from the expedition escapes with a cargo of children in suspended animation and lands on a planet inhabited by a non-spacefaring species. Meanwhile, civilization in the Beyond receive the ship's distress signal and a plan is hatched to save the ship's crew and passengers and stop the Blight. Hilarity ensues.

I have a weakness for books that treat the universe like I treated my backyard as a kid. This is space opera at its best and yet manages to mix in medieval action -- replacing nobles and knights with a very original and clever alien species. I really enjoyed how the author introduces the aliens by dropping the reader into their viewpoint...all the head-scratching pays off when you figure out what's going on.

Vernor Vinge follows this one up with another Hugo shoo-in...

A Deepness in the Sky

Another novel set in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep, this one goes back in time and deep into the Slow Zone to explore some of the backstory to the Zones of Thought universe that was introduced in the first novel.

Two space-faring human cultures, the Qeng Ho and the Emergents, travel to a planet whose star remains dormant for 215 out of every 250 years. The arachnid-like species that inhabits the planet are nearing a point in their technological development where they are ripe for trade and/or exploitation. Again, wild antics and crazy situations take place.

If you're a programmer and you like science fiction, this is the book for you. While the book is nowhere near as good as Fire Upon the Deep, the story has interesting ideas about what it would be like to have thousands of years of code to dig through.

And who wouldn't like a title like Programmer-At-Arms?

Conclusion

That's the best of the Hugo Award winners that I have read so far, not including the recent winner, Rainbows End (incidentally, another Vernor Vinge novel...the guy is on fire).