The Hugo Project: 1965 – The Wanderer

Previously on the Hugo Project…No longer hot and bothered by the Cold War.

I’ve decided I’m just crazy enough to try to read every book that’s ever won the Hugo Award for Best Novel…and, of course, that I want to share this insane experience with all of you. We’re checking in with Fritz Leiber again, though he’s letting us stay on Earth this time.  Please keep all hands and legs inside the vehicle as we enter our second decade of sixty-odd posts of science fiction, speculation and social justice!

The Wanderer

Fritz Leiber
published in 1964

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A big purple-and-gold planet from outer space (though really, where else would a planet come from?) shows up in orbit next to the Moon. Across the globe, members of the human race struggle to fold this new planet into their worldviews even as the gravitational effects of the Wanderer kills thousands. Above all, they wonder: who belongs to this strange new planet? And what do they want with us?

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Warning! Mild spoilers ahead!

(Side note regarding the cover of the edition I read: what the hell does that spaceship have to do with anything? It appears nowhere in the novel.)

Well, Fritz dear, once again I love the way you write and wish to strangle you for your female characters.

 

The Hugo Project: 1958 – The Big Time

Previously on the Hugo Project…Bobby Heinlein and the Story of Meh.

I’ve decided I’m just crazy enough to try to read every book that’s ever won the Hugo Award for Best Novel…and, of course, that I want to share this insane experience with all of you. On this, the last day of 2012, we step backwards…er, sideways in time to a calm in the temporal storm of The Change Wars. Please do keep all arms, legs, and tentacles inside the vehicle; I haven’t tested the time-travel engine on this thing yet, and I think we’d all prefer to make it to 2013 intact. We still have the better part of sixty-odd posts of science fiction, speculation and social justice waiting for us in the new year!

The Big Time

Fritz Leiber
published in two parts in Galaxy Magazine in 1956
published as a separate novel in 1961

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Somewhere outside of space and time is the Place, where soldiers in the Change War go to recuperate between battles that occur everywhere in space and everywhen in time. Greta Forzane and her fellow Entertainers do their best to jolly these soldiers back to health and sanity. One day the Change Winds blow in a motley crew of soldiers ranging from an idealistic English poet, to a Nazi commandant, to a Cretan warrior woman, to a furry, tentacled Lunan. Keeping some semblance of sanity in the ever-shifting reality of the Big Time is never easy, but in addition to their fatigue, these soldiers have brought something nearly as dangerous – an atomic bomb…

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Warning! Mild spoilers ahead!

The best thing about this book: One character speaks in iambic pentameter,  and another in trochaic tetrameter. If nothing else, seeing modern slang dropped into blank verse and high-tech battles narrated with all the drama of the Odyssey will delight anybody who loves theater, literature, and/or language. The only thing better would be to hear these speeches delivered by a fantastic Shakespearean actor.