Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 1: The Demolished Man

So. I had this funny idea, and...

Yeah, yeah, I know - funny ideas are usually the death of good ones, but not in this case; what this idea was is to look through all of the Hugo Award-winning novels I've read (mere nominees will have to follow sometime later, but I'll get around to it) in order to see how they stack up both in terms of how I remember them and how they stack up to a certain Mr. Torgersen's ideal of breakfast cereal (pretty much beaten to death here by MD Lachlan). I know I have a tendency to overwrite introductions, so without further ado here's the first victim of this experiment:

Hugo Winner: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (1953)

My view: It's been a good, long while since I've read this, and the one thing that's a drawback is that the dialogue even seemed dated to me when I read it in my late teens/early twenties. Then again, so what? TDM came out in 1952, which essentially means that it would seem dated in most contexts since this is over 60 years later. A fun romp of a book that can almost seem like a positively cheerful alternative version of Minority Report at times.

Nuggety? There's plenty of action, but somehow I don't think that this is quite the kind of book that Sad Puppies would go for since it has about as much to do with military SF as it does the Bolshoi Ballet.

Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 2: The Big Time

Hugo winner: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, 1958

My view: A war that runs through all of time and space as viewed through the setting of a futuristic USO station might have been a lousy idea in the hands of a lesser writer than Leiber, but although I don't like this nearly as much as his fantasy work he still pulls it off with a lot of flair and punchiness.

Nuggety? This is relatively close to what Brad Torgersen seems to prefer in terms of whiz-bang traditional (military) SF, but I doubt he'd find the moral ambiguity that underlies the plot and character motivation much of anything to write home about.

Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 3: The Man in the High Castle

Hugo winner: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, 1963

My view: It's not nearly as affecting to me - an old PKD fan if there ever was one - as either Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said or Ubik, but his alternate history version of a US occupied by a victorious Axis is both plausibly realized and suitably ominous, although the most important aspects of this novel (as with practically all of his work) are the disturbed inner psyches of the lead characters. It's a truism: the more deeply you read into a PKD novel, the more you get the sense that the workings of outward reality itself against those characters is the real enemy. This is a good place for a novice to start before heading off to even more challenging fare like the aforementioned novels and the likes of A Scanner Darkly, BTW.

Nuggety? Aw, c'mon. Not even close.