Review - The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of
by Thomas M. Disch
1999 Hugo Winner for Best Related Book

Here's a sign of a bad book: I honestly cannot tell you what The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of is about. It reads like the old-kilter rants of drunk man that progress down strange, incomprehensible paths and leap from subject to subject with little concern for bridging topics. It's a mashed together mess of the history of science fiction, the affect science fiction has had on culture, an overview of the genre, and critique of all of that. Disch's lack of focus means that his critiques are poorly supported and it contributes to making this book feel pointless.

Let's start with his opening chapter since it establishes a concept that Disch returns to throughout the book while establishing how shaky his reasoning is. It argues that American culture is somehow attuned more than other cultures to revere the liar; that deception is an American virtue. Now as much as that may make some people say, "Of course!" his support for this assertions is the same appreciation of tricksters, conmen, and audacity that has been evident in humanity for as long as there has been a written record. It's not an American thing to enjoy the tweaking of authority's nose by a clever person, it's a human thing.

Similarly he declares that Edgar Allen Poe was the first science fiction writer. Most of you are going to be scratching your head and saying, "Yeah, he grew out of the same gothic traditions that science fiction grew out of but he never wrote anything that could be remotely mistaken for science fiction." Disch's argument is based on Poe's place in pop culture of the time and literary style rather than the context of his stories. It's an argument that makes me wince because it could be used to justify the absorption of nearly any popular author since the nineteenth century into science fiction.

And so it goes through this book. His arguments are so ridiculous that I half suspect that Disch was making them spuriously so that people would react to them. Whether it's "The Cold Equations" as an example of how misogynistic science fiction authors were or using a self-help book based on Star Trek as the strawman for Star Trek's ideals so much of the book comes across as just wackiness. And with that first chapter dedicated to lying I have to ask if the book is a bit of a prank. Of course in the end I don't believe that; I've read enough off-the-wall literary criticism presented as reality that I can accept Disch's as genuine.

Things aren't all bad in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. When Disch gets personal the book is much more interesting. His take on the political extremes in science fiction authors is tightly focused on a few individuals that he could be addressing directly. There are times when he's discussing the context of an author or movement without getting into theorizing that kept me going. Unfortunately these only lasted a few pages before things switched up again and I never knew what I was going to get next.

I can't recommend The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of for many reasons. Top of the list is the rambling of the Disch who comes across as the Andy Rooney of science fiction. There's better histories and examinations of science fiction out there; the only reason to read this one is if you're interested in Disch's personal take on authors.

Review - Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever 1998 - 2008
by John Scalzi
2009 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

In a sign of how much things have changed three of this year's Hugo winners were published on the web for free before being packaged up in a more permanent format. If we look into the nominees that didn't win you'll find new media lurking. Between the webcomic and the viral video phenomenon there is Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, a collection of entries from John Scalzi's blog Whatever.

I don't like being the greenhouse owner chucking rocks even if my greenhouse is an nearly microscopic hobbyist set up growing two or three orchids and the rocks are getting chucked at the giant agricultural conglomerate farm growing a dozen cash crops. Blogs are just too personal; it feels like I'm judging Scalzi rather than the book itself. I'm going to be even briefer than usual as a result. Unless you're a big fan of John Scalzi and his blog then you shouldn't bother with this book. And even if you are a fan it's going to be a tough sell.

The fundamental problem with Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded is inherent to its nature: it's a collection of blog entries. It is a set of short essays, hastily written, with no oversight beyond popping out whatever is on the author's mind. Some of them are witty, some of them are interesting, but on the whole they're nothing special and bundling them together in one large volume just highlights the problem.

For every interesting essay like "Being Poor" where Scalzi places the realities of American poverty down in simple facts there's three where he takes lazy swings and the low hanging fruit of people he objects to. Yes, creationists fail at basic reasoning skills but you can't swing a dead cat on the Internet without finding that. And for ever clever bit of political writing like a list of why you wouldn't want Ayn Rand as your mother there's a pile of demagoguery that's tiring to read.

It doesn't help that most of these essays aren't well written. For the most part they're off the top of the head fluff. On a blog that's less of a concern; as an online journal the quality of the writing takes a back seat to the day to day connection the readers get. Placing them all down on paper as essays on the other hand removes that context.

I don't dislike John Scalzi or his writing. I don't read his blog because I'm just not that interested in it; the few blogs I read are more focused and I don't read any author's blogs. Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded has not changed my mind about reading his blog though that's because I know that any time Scalzi writes a great essay I'll be able to follow the links back to it. The book has made me firmly believe that blog entries are not worth collecting unless there are major revisions.

Review - Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction

Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction
Edited by Jeff Prucher
2008 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

You might remember a few years ago where the OED was soliciting help from science fiction fans to help track the etymology of some terms that have an origin with science fiction. Consequently It isn't mentioned in the introductions to Brave New Worlds but I strongly suspect that this new dictionary of science fiction terms may have grown out of that earlier effort to trace some of these terms.

This dictionary is an interesting effort. Over the past century science fiction has generated a vast collection of jargon. Sometimes the jargon becomes so well integrated that it can be hard to remember that it is jargon. If you asked random people on the street what an "alternate universe" is the majority would be able to give you some kind of answer. Other terms like cyberpunk will be casually dropped by fans but have no meaning for the general public.

For that reason I don't think it's particularly helpful as a reference book even though science fiction fans are certain to find many fascinating facts in it. Unlike the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and it's Fantasy counterpart the dictionary isn't completely supplanted by the Internet. Searching for terms is more likely to find their use than an explanation of them. Authors who use unfamiliar terms are likely to explain them in the text or through context. The only place where you'd find a significant use for Brave New Words is if you weren't an SF fan and were conversing with SF fans about science fiction. In that case you're unlikely to even be aware of Brave New Words, let alone have a copy of it handy.

Taking the book from that perspective I referred to it as I read a few different message board and usenet threads that would have science fiction terms casually dropped into them. I was able to find much of the jargon used but I couldn't find things like "near-future" (it's an obvious construction but it has a specific meaning in science fiction) or the prefix "psi-" despite the presense of "psionics".

So I can't recommend it as a reference book but it does contain a lot of interesting etymological data for fans. Here's a good sampling of what I got from the dictionary. Who has the first recorded use of the following terms: sci-fi, sense of wonder, and deep space?

Robert Heinlein was the first person recorded to abbreviate science fiction as sci-fi and the first entry listed with sci-fi having negative connotations is 1974. That entry does make it clear that fans had already built up a dislike of the term.

That elusive sense of wonder that drives science fiction and fantasy was first mentioned by H. P. Lovecraft. I bet you thought he only created words like "squalmous".

The first reference to interstellar space as "deep space" goes to E. E. "Doc" Smith and that construction has leaked back into science.

In the end I liked Brave New Words. Despite the weaknesses in its format and design I appreciated the examination of the history of the words. Though I won't be pulling it off the shelf to check unfamiliar words going through it once is worth your effort.

Review - The Motion of Light in Water

The Motion of Light in Water
by Samuel L. Delany
1989 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

In the past I've usually paired these non-fiction reviews but that isn't going to happen for a while with Nebula award winners dominating my reading list. So I'm just sticking with a shorter review of these works as they come up.

The Motion of Light in Water is an autobiography of Delany's journey to a professional science fiction writer. It's also the story of an often unhappy marriage of convenience, of being a homosexual in New York in the early sixties, and his development as a writer. Delany uses a drifting style where short numbered sections that are usually just a paragraph or two but occasionally as long as a page change from topic to topic rapidly.

Delany in one of his earliest hetrosexual experiments got his partner pregnant during their first year in college. They eloped and moved to a tiny apartment in a slum where both continued to work on developing writing careers. Delany was an active homosexual and the book goes into detail on his sexual exploits which most commonly consisted of one night stands and mass encounters at secretive gatherings. Eventually while dealing with all of this Delany decides to write a science fiction novel which he manages to sell.

One of the things that I appreciated in The Motion of Light in Water is that Delany takes a very critical eye to his youth. Rather than just romanticizing his past Delany recognizes that he wasn't a good husband (his wife was well aware of his sexual activities; the problems were ones of emotional support) and he acknowledges the moment when he realized that as good as he was his writing was still falling short of the qualities he wanted.

It's that candidness that makes his autobiography effective. In addition Delany focuses almost exclusively on the first few years of his marriage before he separated from his wife and left the country with only a few diversions to illuminate those events. Delany's prose is just as sharp as it ever was which makes this an interesting autobiography to read.

Review - James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon and Wonder's Child

Before I get to the reviews I should say that I don't really care for biographies. I find most of them flawed on one basic premise: the subject is either "the hero" or "the villain" and everything is presented to support that position. Human beings are more complex than that and every life is a mass of contradictions that don't match. I find myself reading between the lines of the biography trying to puzzle out how much of it is true and how much are from decades old recollections recast to make the teller as sympathetic as possible. Also usually a life in a biography has a particular period that's of interest, and as a result the author of the biography feels it necessary to cover the entire life trying to relate each event to that period. The result of this is that for the sake of the "story" of the biography I feel that I usually get a very distorted view.

That's why I haven't been reading a lot of the biographies that have won the related non-fiction Hugo awards. However, I have read two of them: this most recent winner and the first proper biography that won. (Both King's Dance Macabre and Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction had a biographical section but the first was about horror in general and the second was about Asimov's stories not Asimov himself.)

Now that you know how I feel about biographies in general and can filter my opinions through that let's get on to the books.

James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
by Julie Phillips
2007 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

James Tipree exploded onto the scene in the late sixties. He had a style that was radically different from anyone else's and a distinctive, fresh point of view. Tiptree was also a figure of mystery; though he carried on lengthy correspondences no one ever met him, he never attended conventions, or even spoke to him. He hinted that he had a high government position and when Tiptree's writing stalled at the height of Watergate it only made the rumors grow wilder. Suddenly the veil was ripped away to reveal that James Tiptree was actually Alice B. Sheldon, a woman who hadn't started writing science fiction until well into her fifties. After she was revealed her writing continued sporadically until suddenly one night she killed her husband and then herself.

This book is a perfect example of the kind of biographies that I dislike. Phillips decided that Sheldon was a tragic heroine and so casts everything that occurred to her in that light. Sheldon is always presented as the victim in the biography even when her destructive behavior (which was much more than just her last acts) harms those around her.

A perfect example of this is when Tiptree is discovered. When Sheldon's deception is revealed Phillips focuses on only the few preceding years where Sheldon danced around her gender in her letters rather than the years of intentional lies that were used to set up the identity. The responses to the revelation are only her supportive friends with no mention of any hostility. Even when the harm is minimal people feel hurt when lied to for so long but the reader doesn't find any of that. Basically Phillips forgets the lies and ignores any response to the actual deception in order to put Sheldon in the best light possible.

A stylistic touch that I didn't care for was Phillips treating Tiptree as a separate person than Sheldon, but even in the text it is clear that Tiptree was a role Sheldon affected rather than a complete personality. Sheldon was conflicted and trying to keep her science fiction writing separate from the rest of her life however trying to split them into distinct individuals was a step too far.

I disliked The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon quite a bit. The story of Tiptree is one of the most unique ones in the history of science fiction (and when you consider science fiction authors that's really saying something) and despite flashes of interest I felt the structure didn't really give me a view of Sheldon's life. The best thing I can say about it is that it explores the sources of Sheldon's stories very well and that isn't enough to make it worth while.

Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction by Jack Williamson 1985 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

Wonder's Child by virtue of being an autobiography doesn't have the same tone problems but it reads like a set of anecdotes from a friendly uncle. Williamson made his first story sale to Hugo Gernsback in 1926 and proceeded to have a career writing science fiction that went off and on for nearly eighty years (his last book before his death was published in 2005).

I'm not a fan of Williamson but I appreciated his honesty in his autobiography. In his discussion of his writing for the pulps he makes it clear that he spent a lot of time mimicking other authors. Many early science fiction authors did but I don't recall any being so open to discussing who's ideas they were reworking.

I said the book reads like anecdotes but they are of the rambling kind that shift into digressions and back again. Williamson's youth is the focus of Wonder's Child, three-quarters of the book takes things up to 1950 but I didn't mind that since the portion I was most interested in were the remembrances of those pulp magazines.

Still I can't recommend Wonder's Child. It left me feeling ambivalent, I didn't really like it but I wasn't left annoyed or disliking it either. I'd say that the dividing line for readers is going to be if the like Williamson or are interested in the pulps. If you are then you may find something of interest in Wonder's Child but if you don't then it will leave you bored.

Review - The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Cosmos, and Dance Macabre

Time marches on and sometimes it marches some of the non-fiction Hugo winners right out of relevancy. These are the first three non-fiction winners and between them one has been supplanted by more efficient resources, one is badly out of date, and one is actually still fairly interesting and useful.

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia
by Peter Nicholls
1980 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

Starting with the easiest to review, this volume is the root of other encyclopedias that Nicholls has edited including the already reviewed The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. And just like that later book this one has been completely replaced by online resources. I did find it slightly more helpful than Fantasy mainly due to a comprehensive introduction which let me understand the book better even when I don't agree with some of their comments. Googling is always going to be faster and will typically return a lot more information than looking something up in this encyclopedia will but I've seen worse reference books.

Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
1981 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

Look at that cover, that grouping truly captures the vast majesty of space in a way that will never be surpassed...

Unless...

...Well, never mind then.

And that pretty much sums up what has happened to Cosmos. As a companion to the television series it made a fine overview of science, particularly astronomy, in 1980 but it's now 2008 and these days a book from 2006 would be badly outdated.

With the advancements made in the past ten years it can be hard to remember how exciting the Mariner, Pioneer, and Voyager probes were. I have a NASA publication called Mars Through the Eyes of Mariner 9 that features breathless quotes by people who worked on the project about what it meant to planetary science (including some by Carl Sagan!), but the photographs that accompany it are grainy, low resolution black and white. It's an interesting historical artifact but it's not very good for the science.

The history lessons in Cosmos are fascinating and Sagan makes them very enjoyable. He goes into the how and why of the facts, something that most science books gloss over. Unfortunately this only covers about a third of the book.

That's appropriate since any value for the modern reader in Cosmos is going to come from history. It's one of the first pop-science books, the state of astronomy and planetary science in 1980 is captured well, and the actual history lessons are very good. But I don't think that's enough to recommend it to a modern reader.

Dance Macabre by Stephen King 1982 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

I don't think that a publisher could find someone better than Stephen King to write a book about the horror genre. Besides being the best known author in the field he's made a study of his genre and knows it inside and out. The result is a book about scary stories that may lack a few details on modern writers but doesn't feel lacking.

I wish I had read this right after I read Aldiss's Trillion Year Spree as it stands as a strong counterpoint to everything I disliked in Aldiss's book. Dance Macabre doesn't make a pretense toward being a scholarly work but it conveys just as much information about its broad subjects and in a more interesting tone. King also doesn't try to cover the entire breath of the horror genre. He discusses its rise (from much of the same roots that Aldiss covered) but makes a point of sticking to what he knows best: roughly everything from 1950 to 1980.

I can think of only two major shifts in horror that King doesn't cover due to when the book was written. The first is the rise of the neo-gothics such as Anne Rice. The second is television returning to be a viable medium for telling horror stories. Things like the slasher craze of the 80's or it's descendant the torture porn of recent years aren't directly mentioned in the book but their look-alike parents, the exploitation films of the 1970's, are.

Dance Macabre does a fine job of giving the reader an overview of the horror genre in that thirty year period as well as quite a bit of details on the genre itself. As a result I found it to be an interesting and informative book despite being twenty-five years behind the times.

Review - "Trillion Year Spree" and "Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction"

Trillion Year Spree
by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove
1987 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction Book

Criticism is the theme of the day and one of the biggest books around is Aldiss's and Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree which covers the history of the genre in its entirety. Unlike some others who link science fiction back to any fantasy with a foot in the real world Aldiss traces science fiction back to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein which he calls the first book to solidify the themes and structure of science fiction. He then goes back to cover the proto-science fiction novels before charging into the key figures and major movements in science fiction.

Trillion Year Spree is at its best when it covers the big picture of movements. The shifts that occurred when Astounding started pushing new material or when science fiction became mainstream. The best chapter, in my opinion, traces the waning years of seven of the biggest science fiction authors and how they've been impacted by the market forces.

The worst is when Aldiss and Wingrove simply run through a list of authors and titles with minor comments on each. I don't get any feeling for the author or their place in the history of science fiction when they choose to do this.

I like the fact that the authors are typically unwilling to just forgive poor writing. Too often I see fans of a genre willing to gloss over some poor quality swill for the sake of some narrow fetish (see the vast majority of current fantasy epics). Their commentary attacks just about anything that moves which takes it a bit further than I like to go but they dismiss a lot of popular works out of hand.

Unfortunately the book is also host of editorial problems. Repeatedly the topic changes mid-paragraph and then goes on to describe the new title or author for several paragraphs before telling the reader what they're talking about. Even when they remember to let the reader in on the discussion the text drunkenly lurches from subject with very few transitions to be found. I can't count how often I had to double back just to make sure I didn't miss something when the topic suddenly changes. Often these sudden shifts result in some very contradictory concepts turning up in the book.

I think a perfect example of the contradictions in Trillion Year Spree is how it deals with Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell. Gernsback gets two pages while Campbell get a chapter. Gernsback is attacked for claims that he popularized the term "science fiction" due to a single reference in a book from 1851 that by their admission had not been opened in over a century when they looked up the reference. Campbell is credited with most of the major creative decisions in science fiction during the 1940's. Gernsback is derided for publishing childish fiction while Campbell's narrow view of acceptable science fiction is glossed over. In short, they're brutally unforgiving to Gernsback going so far as to attack him for things that aren't really a problem while being very forgiving of Campbell's faults.

Another major problem I have with the book is that they put a lot of stock in the concept that everything has a subtle metaphoric meaning to be explored. Sometimes there can be but in my experience the symbols chosen reveal more about the critic than they do about the author. It's hard to deny that there's plenty of sexual imagery in Shelly's Frankenstein but they felt the need to credit one passage with the imagery based on wording that picked up cultural significance in the mid-twentieth century. Then there's the Ring in The Lord of the Rings as sexual metaphor (so what does it mean that when you do penetrate it you vanish and get stabbed?). They see support for American imperialism in the anti-war science fiction novels of the 1980's (apparently Ender's Game is pro-America conquering the world and not an indictment of a military that chews up children).

And that's another issue: I'm uncertain about his partner but Aldiss is British and the book shows a serious European inferiority complex (that unfortunate disease that affects Europeans who then feel the need to spout loudly to Americans how much better they are at everything than Americans). I appreciate them pointing out some obscure science fiction works and magazines hidden in Europe in the early twentieth century but denigrating science fiction being written in the United States by comparing to non-science fiction by Kafka (and trying to claim the works as science fiction when they fall well outside even his broad definition) is a real stretch. They dismiss Ellison's Dangerous Visions because Moorcock was pushing the same kind of material in the UK magazine New Worlds but it was the anthology and not the magazine that caused the shift in the publishing industry. (As I stated in the past, the revolution was inevitable since so many authors from around the world were pushing that way; Dangerous Visions was a catalyst.) Telling science fiction fans in the United States that they're bad fans because they don't learn Swedish and get a novel that had a small printing in 1935 is just going overboard.

When they stick to history Trillion Year Spree is pretty good but too often they run off on odd tangents and the criticism even when I agree with the conclusions left me annoyed at their poor reasons for those conclusions. In the end I can't recommend Trillion Year Spree.

Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction
by James Gunn
1983 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction Book

Gunn's focus was much tighter with this book on Asimov and while he doesn't have the problems that Aldiss and Wingrove have he also doesn't have any of their good points. The book contains some minor biographical information but it was published just a year or two after Asimov's first autobiographies so that is downplayed for a description of his science fiction works up to around 1980.

Gunn's book is slight; he provides detailed synopsis for every story and novel but the commentary on them is rather thin. There's nothing on the shifting perspectives or how Asimov attempted to push his previous material further through exploring the same ideas. You won't find much actually criticism in this book.

Gunn is also very forgiving in his biographical material. Asimov's notorious womanizing is a playful quirk to Gunn, his sleazy legal maneuvering in his divorce is somehow transformed to a strong moral stance. I suspect that Gunn is simply too close to his source in this case. I enjoy Asimov's fiction but I can't share the rose-tinted glasses that Gunn views him through.

Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction provides a nice overview of Asimov's works but because Gunn provides complete synopsis I can't recommend it to someone looking for information on what he wrote. And since Gunn's commentary on the books is so weak I can't recommend it to someone looking for that. And finally since the biographical information is so tainted and there are many other sources for it I can't recommend the book for that either. It simply was not worth my time.

Review - The World of Charles Addams

The World of Charles Addams
1992 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction


Well if there were any of these books where it doesn't matter one bit what a reviewer says this is it. The World of Charles Addams is just a collection of some of the better known cartoons by Charles Addams. His work was familiar to readers of the New Yorker and his morbid sense of humor became iconic. He was The Far Side before Gary Larson thought of The Far Side. If you're not familiar with his work then I definitely recommend checking it out, if you like his work then you'll probably want to get this book, and if you don't like his work then this isn't going to change your mind.

The only thing I can ever talk about is the presentation and despite a few flaws it is as reasonable as one can expect. The vast majority of the cartoons are presented one for each very large page. There are four pages where the cartoons are doubled up. The pages are glossy and bright making it easy to see the subtle details in the work. There are about a dozen full color illustrations as well in two sections which look just as great as their counterparts.

My problem is with the selection of a few of the cartoons. Addams repeated some ideas later in his career and a few of those cartoons are inside. The book only represents about a quarter of his total output so did we really need two nearly identical illustrations of a child releasing something dangerous among model boats? Also the introduction offers no insight into Charles Addams or his process of creation. It is a generic "He was so great!" puff piece.

But that comes down to not liking roughly ten of three hundred pages and half of those I wouldn't consider to be really part of the book. The book can be found for not much money (I think my copy was less than ten dollars shipped in a state that might as well have been new) so there's no reason not to get it.

Let me leave you with one of my favorite cartoons from the book:

Deathray? Fiddlesticks! Why it doesn't even slow them up!

Review - Storyteller and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop
by Kate Wilhelm
2006 Hugo Winner for Best Related Book

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
by Orson Scott Card
1991 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction Book

I am beginning to suspect that the extended titles for the non-fiction category of the Hugos is intentional.

Normally when I do these I've been dividing them with a nice little section on each. That's not occurring this time. These books are closely related and I am going to be setting them side by side in a duel to the death! Or just a rough comparison of their different strengths. One of those two.

You'll have to search awfully far to find a science fiction fan who hasn't at one time entertained the idea of becoming a writer. It's one of those things that seems so easy from a distance. Storyteller (you're crazy if you think I'm typing that whole title every time) and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy offer a hand to would be writers moving from scribbling in your notebook to writing things that sell.

Wilhelm's book also doubles as a memoir of her time teaching at Clarion, a six week long live in workshop designed to take amateur writers, stick them in a pressure cooker, and then spit out people who could be professionals. I found most of the anecdotes interesting but Wilhelm is merciless with her former students. The griping about their problems overwhelms these sections of the book and what I took from them were a lot of object lessons about exactly what not to do. Particularly amusing to me is the group that threw fit when Wilhelm eliminated all of the most clichéd story ideas and insisted that as a result there was "nothing to write about". I recognized a lot of the problems that her students had as common ones with bad fiction.

When it comes to writing advice the books take very different directions. Wilhelm starts from a position that the reader is just someone who slaps words down on the page and needs refining from the start. Card takes the contrary option and starts from a position that the person reading the book can write to a reasonable standard and concentrates his advice specifically on science fiction and fantasy.

Wilhelm's format is essentially "Writer's workshop in a book." She offers a handful of exercises and things to consider when pacing your work. Of special interest is her explanation of what point an editor would stop reading and throw the manuscript away. Storyteller has a great deal of advice on structuring your sentences and pacing your work.

How to Write has a little bit of advice along those lines but Card skips to the big things. He's got a very large chapter on world building, for example, where he points out the practical considerations that have to be used when writing speculative fiction. He touches on all the major traps that get inexperienced SF authors: how to not overload on exposition, naming conventions, limiting the scope of magic and technology, and how much the reader can assume versus what the author has to explain. Perhaps most importantly for the budding author he has a lengthy chapter on how to sell your work.

For me the most surprising section is how both authors answered that timeless question, "Where do you get your ideas?" That's a question that ranks at the bottom of questions that I care about from authors since the real answer is everywhere and nowhere but Card and Wilhelm step through the creative process for them. Card focuses on the moments of freehand inspiration which eventually crystallize into a work for him while Wilhelm is more structured in her thought process.

A problem I had with Card's How to Write is that it is badly out of date in some places. Since it was written in 1990 that is to be expected. Card doesn't anticipate the shrinking science fiction market and the boom in fantasy which makes some of his information inaccurate and not as focused as current reader may want. It is my understanding that there is a more recent edition of How to Write but I have not read it since my collection is being built on getting all of the Hugo winning books.

Storyteller's greatest weakness also its greatest strength: the book has a very harsh tone. I suspect it comes from Wilhelm's view of of the Clarion seminar as a "boot camp for writers" and some readers may be turned off by that.

If these were books on house building How to Write book would be about drawing up plans and selling it while Storyteller would be about how to install plumbing and electrical wiring. Both are very short and have a wealth of details in them, but they have different goals. I'd cheerfully recommend Storyteller to anyone who is interesting in writing in general mainly because of its confrontational tone which can trigger moments of introspection that any would be writer needs. Card's book I'd recommend for someone constructing any creative work that features science fiction or fantasy not just books or short stories since he provides a lot of backing on how to do them well. There's plenty of room for both on the shelf of someone interesting in becoming the next Wilhelm or Card.

Reviews - Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder, The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art, and Science Fiction of the 20th Century

So do those books have long titles or what?

The related non-fiction Hugo winning books tends to fall into a handful of narrow categories. There's the encyclopedias (two of which I've already touched on), there are the biographies (Isaac Asimov could be a category unto himself), and then there are the art books.

I am not an art critic. I can't even pretend to play one on television. The best I can do is look at something and say, "I like that." So take any judgments on the art with that grain of salt. Instead I'm going to be concentrating on the presentation of the art in these three books. So let's get started.

Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder
by Michael Whelan
1988 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction Book

I'm not a fan of Whelan's work though he is one of those artists that the Hugo voters latched onto for a decade and selected over and over again for the best professional artist. I find much of his work to be too stiff and lifeless, like manikins instead of people are staring out into the vague middle distance from his covers. I have seen works by him that I liked but they are almost all a decade into the future at the point that this collection was published.

So for me the art was a bust but if you like Whelan the package is superb. Each work is given a two page spread. On the right is a large reproduction of the original painting while the left page has the final book cover, preliminary sketches, and a short text piece by Whelan about the painting. The downside of this format is that there's only about thirty of Whelan's paintings in the book and he was far more prolific than that. Large chunks are taken up by demonstrating each painting for a particular series like his covers for all of the then published Piers Anthony Incarnations of Immortality series.

I would have liked to have seen more works and a more diverse selection in this book but the layout did work to give you everything you could want on the paintings included. If you love Whelan there are more recent books of his art that you may prefer but I don't think you'd be unhappy with this.

The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective
by John Grant, Elizabeth Humphrey, and Pamela D. Scoville
2004 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction Book

On the far side of the spectrum this collection of the winners of the Chesley Awards features works from over fifty artists. Their work covers the full range of fantastic images from high fantasy to horror which means that there's something in it for every taste.

The book is broken up into years with large pictures of the winners for each category and a multipage spread of the major works of the winner of the Artistic Achievement award. Occasionally there is a very brief comment from the artist on the work. The awards for specific works are given a minimum of a quarter of page with most of them being larger. In the retrospective sections the images are occasionally smaller but it features a fine selection.

My biggest problem is that the Chesley award selection seems rather similar to the Hugo selection for best professional artists: they tend to pick the same people for the major awards over and over again. I'm not completely familiar with the fantasy art scene but I suspect that it should be large enough that the same four or five people should not dominate awards for decades. Even the achievement awards are given to the same people repeatedly.

Also it bothered me that in some years all of the winners were not included. Too often there was a tiny box that told me who two or three of the winners not depicted were. If this book is intended to cover all of the winners, as it appears to, then not being complete is flaw.

Still if you just want a book featuring a wide variety of high quality fantasy art then you can do worse than this.

Science Fiction of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History
by Frank M. Robinson
2000 Hugo Winner for Best Related Book

There's something that cover image doesn't convey. This book is a monster. This is the book that makes the OED say, "Blimey, 'e's 'uge!" I've had cars smaller than this book. Paperbacks fall into orbit around it. In short, it's big.

To be honest I wasn't expecting an art book. The entry in my list for the collection was simply "Science Fiction of the 20th Century". And the impression I had when I ordered it was that the book was just a history book.

Well the history portion of it stinks. Three quarters of it is dedicated to different magazines where most of what was written about them were different editorial changes. Magazines are obviously a big part of the history but half way through the century they got rolled under by the rise of the mass market book publishers. The result is that the "history" feels like it has huge gaps. It's also dry and sterile. There's only one personal anecdote in the entire text, only three or four anecdotes told second hand that reveal anything, and the rest is just bland.

On the other hand it is packed with over 400 images of just about every major and minor science fiction magazine ever published. Even a few of the major fanzines get a bit of coverage. There is a bit of context given with each picture. It does have a focus on first and historically important issues but sometimes the issue described in the text isn't shown. A common bit is telling us how awful the first issue of a short lived magazine was and showing us that cover and then going on to say that the covers for the other two issues are great without providing them.

In order to pack in that many images there are few full page images and often a cover might be printed relatively small. This is a case where the size of the book helps, though, since relatively small still means a few inches and the text is clearly visible.

As a history book Science Fiction of the 20th Century is terrible but it is an impressive overview of magazines, major book covers, and movie posters. The selection of magazine covers is particularly good and if you are interested in them then it makes a fine coffee table book.

Reviews - Science Fiction: An Illustrated Encyclopedia and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia
Edited by John Clute
1996 Hugo Winner for Best Non-Fiction Book

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
Edited by John Clute and John Grant
1998 Hugo Winner for Best Non-Fiction Book

If we old folks had a question before there was the Internet and Google and Wikipedia then we needed to try to find the answer in books. Now I hear some of you young people shouting, "How is this possible? You can't put in words to search a book?" And that's true but for the more general questions we could look those words up in an encyclopedia (it's like Wikipedia, but with less random editing).

There's actually four encyclopedias that have won the Related Non-Fiction Book Hugo over the years (one French encyclopedia also won an honorary Hugo) and for my first reviews of non-novel winners I thought I'd pick a matched set. It turns out I was wrong. Even though both were compiled in part by John Clute these books couldn't be more different and the result is one that's nice to pick up an have even if it's a little out of date and one would be of dubious value when it was current.

The descriptions I read of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia had it as a slight reworking of Clute's The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction which won in 1994 only with some illustrations and updates added. Since it was the "updated" version of the Encyclopedia I chose it and I received not an encyclopedia like I thought I was getting but a very nice coffee table book that hits the high points of science fiction up to 1994 when the book was published.

(This is really making me wonder what book the descriptions I was reading was about. It claimed that the text was the same only with occasionally magazine and book covers added in.)

This is a coffee table with all of the benefits and detriments that come with that. The book is lavishly illustrated with huge images of covers, frames from movies and television, and illustrations filling each page. The text is very sparse outside of the author biographies but there are nice touches like the illustrated time lines that bring together science fiction publishing, popular culture, and world history. There is a fairly large listing of short "TV Guide" style reviews of science fiction films as well.

By far the best section of the book are the authors. The biggest names get a full two large pages (the book measures about 10 inches by 11 inches) while the rest get a full page or half page. Everyone has fairly complete bibliographies (some authors being so prolific that this takes up the bulk of their space). A fun touch is that each biography feature's the author's autograph. There's roughly one hundred of these profiles and they occupy over a third of book's space.

The organization and focus leave something to be desired. The book is divided into short chapters for major themes and history. Magazines receive a scant eight pages which are far from encyclopedic. Illustrators in general only get two pages. Since the book only covers "major" authors and titles you may have some trouble finding them and they are divided up by what decade their major works are in. Quick questions: is Vonnegut in the 50's or 60's? Niven in the 60's or 70's? At least there is an index so you can find someone quickly.

Still, even with these shortcomings Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia looks nice and it has a good overview of the entire genre. You can find inexpensive copies so I'd recommend grabbing one; it's a fun addition to a fan's library.

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy I have to judge more harshly. Unlike Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia it actually attempts to be an encyclopedia. It claims that it contains more than 1,000,000 words spread across 4000 entries and it does contain an awful lot of information. Still I found that this massive tome just wasn't that useful.

One factor is its age. In the 13 years since Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia was compiled not an awful lot has happened with science fiction. We've gotten a few more movies and television series along with the usual new authors and releases but there hasn't been a major upheaval. Fantasy on the other hand has exploded. I suspect that a revised edition of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy would have to double in size to cover the last ten years. To use an obvious example, the year after it was compiled an obscure British book called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was released and absolutely nothing happened. No wait, I have that backward: everything changed. It wasn't J.K. Rowling changing fantasy on her own, of course; the success of Harry Potter and everything that followed was a symptom rather than a cause of the greater interest. The fantasy genre is everywhere now and a lot of the material in The Encyclopedia is hopelessly out date.

There's a real problem with editorial voice in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy also. Sections about authors are often accompanied by judgments on their writing. I am not turning to an encyclopedia for reviews, I'm looking for information. It's one thing to mention that an author has major themes that are controversial, had their stories strongly influenced by another author, or has done the majority of their fantasy in licensed works. It's another to say that they're "disgusting", wrote "a weak copy of" something, or "set their sights low". A very good example of this editorial confusion is the entry on for "goddess" which appears to be an attempt to compromise one author's absolute belief in new age mysticism and another's referencing actual anthropology and archeology. It makes for a very odd entry.

Finally the organization of the encyclopedia makes things very difficult. There are entries for authors, movies, television series, and major fantasy themes but no entries for individual books. If you can remember the title of that book you liked but not the author then you're out of luck. There's also some odd oversights; I noticed comic book illustrators in the entries but when I looked up the most famous one of them all, Jack Kirby, he was missing (yes, Kirby's comic book work is better described as science fiction but he had more than his fair share of fantasy such as his run on Thor). Japanese animation which was booming with fantasy at that point only gets one lump mention as "anime" while a handful of key movies have entries that simply refer back to that anime entry. Children's fantasy outside of written works is almost completely missing. There is also a very heavy UK bent with many UK authors getting space far out of proportion to their importance.

Despite these failings there are good points. The entry on opera covers every major opera with fantastic elements that I can think of and is an example of The Encyclopedia's detailed entries on fantasy that pre-dates the twentieth century. The attempts to categorize the shapeless all-encompassing form of "fantasy" is interesting to nerds like me who feel the need to break everything down though I've never heard most of the terms found in the encyclopedia used in the same context ("Crosshatching", for example, they define as settings where the fantastic and mundane coexist but do not intermingle much). And if you do know an author you want to find out more about you will find them along with a listing of their major works.

This book has been supplanted by the Internet it just isn't worth it to go back. While writing this I tried to compare the shorter entries found in The Encyclopedia to Wikipedia to see if there was any place where The Encyclopedia had an advantage. I found one entry for Sir William Russell Flint (an early twentieth century illustrator) where the hard copy had more detail on his works than this one online resource. I'm not a fan of Wikipedia but I have to concede that it is more efficient than reference books like this and it is not the only source of free information out there. In the end The Encyclopedia of Fantasy just isn't worth it.