The Nominees
Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein
Dune World by Frank Herbert
Witch World by Andre Norton
Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Actual Results
- Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
- Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein
- Witch World by Andre Norton
- Dune World by Frank Herbert
- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
How I Would Have Voted
- Dune World by Frank Herbert
- Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
- Witch World by Andre Norton
Explanation
This was a pretty decent year, though I didn’t enjoy all of the novels. Still, I thought they were all good, even if not all of them were to my particular taste.
I really enjoyed Way Station by Clifford Simak. It’s about a civil war soldier who has quietly been living in the back country for the last hundred years, right up to the 60s, when someone in the government begins to notice how weird it is that this guy is still around, and still going daily to his mailbox on the country lane, carrying his old musket. When we learn what’s actually going on with the guy, and how he’s connected with the aliens who are deliberately keeping their existence secret from most of humanity, things get really interesting.
The ending could have been stronger, but the novel has a lot of heart, and I really enjoyed reading it. With that said, however, I would still put the serialized early draft of Dune higher, just because Dune is such a well-deserved classic, and the ending to Way Station did feel a little weak. But the ideas in the novel were absolutely fantastic, and very well explored.
I also enjoyed Witch World, though I don’t think I’ll follow up with the rest of the series. It was an interesting portal fantasy / adventure tale, though the fantasy world itself never really held my interest. Maybe it was the weird blend of science fiction with fantasy, or maybe it was Norton’s particular writing style, which almost rose to Shakespearean diction at points. I did like the characters enough to read to the end of the story, but not enough to follow them into the next book.
As for Glory Road and Cat’s Cradle, I DNFed both of them. Cat’s Cradle was just too stylistically dense for me to enjoy—it’s much more of a literary novel, and that’s not really my thing. Glory Road was alright, but it very quickly got explicity with the nudity and sexuality, and I have learned from personal experience that whenever Heinlein goes off about sex, the book is not for me.
