The Nominees
Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sing by Kate Wilhelm
The Actual Results
- Where Late the Sweet Birds Sing by Kate Wilhelm
- Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
- Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
- Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman
- Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg
How I Would Have Voted
- Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
- No Award
- Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
- Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg
Explanation
It’s interesting to see which of these books hold up after nearly fifty years, and which of them really don’t. Of the five here, I think Children of Dune is the only one that still has any lasting cultural relevance, and that only because of the first book, Dune.
Children of Dune is also (perhaps not surprisingly) the only book that I would consider worthy of voting for. It’s nowhere near as good as Dune, but of the Dune sequels, it’s the best one I’ve read so far (though the way Leto transformed into a… whatever really seemed to come out of nowhere). Man Plus and Shadrach in the Furnace weren’t terrible, but I didn’t finish them. I can’t speak to Mindbridge, because I didn’t bother reading it: I’ve read enough Haldeman to know that he has a penchant for nihilism that really rubs me the wrong way.
As for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, it was really awful. I don’t remember the plot exactly, but the book is full of leftist 70s doom porn regarding climate change and Malthusian resource shortages, combined with a resurgence of The Patriarchy that forces all the female characters into becoming breeders. It’s dark, dystopian, and apocalyptic in all the worst ways, with a very strong political bent to it that holds up about as well as all of the end-of-the-world predictions that the climate cultists have been peddling since the 70s. Basically, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is why I’d vote “No Award” after Children of Dune.
Man Plus had some interesting writing, but it didn’t really hold my interest, probably because of all the Malthusian and Freudian undertones. It wasn’t insufferably political, though, which is why I would actually affirmatively vote for it after “No Award.” I would certainly rather that Man Plus had won out over Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Same with Shadrach in the Furnace, which isn’t terrible, though it does have some weird communist power fantasies in it. I really love the way Silverberg writes, but the things he chooses to write about just seem totally pointless to me.
The 70s was a very weird time for science fiction… and probably a weird time for the world in general. As you can probably tell, I’m not a huge fan of New Wave science fiction (with a few notable exceptions). Things got a lot better after Reagan’s Morning in America, not just for the country, but for science fiction as well. Then we hit the 90s, which the Zoomers tend to look on as a simple, idyllic time when all was bright and wonderful in the world, which strikes me as hilarious because I remember it as a time of rampant school shootings and MTV-driven cultural decay. But that’s a subject for another post.
