Reading the Nebula Award Winners - 1967 - The Einstein Intervention

Samuel R Delaney’s second Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel was bestowed for his book The Einstein Intersection (published in 1967). It was his last Nebula Award and having read two of his novels now, I know enough that I will never bother to tackle his famously impenetrable mid-70s bestseller Dhalgren which - as one reviewer put it “...genuinely has no plot or easily grasped points…” 

The Einstein Intersection hasn’t quite reached that level of impenetrability. It is a novel of the post human - a genre that is enjoying a renaissance at the moment with thoughts about AI singularities and so forth - but in the 1960s mostly meant post nuclear war telepaths.

The novel follows Lo Lobey through three acts that have familiar tropes: Overcoming the Monster, Containing the Beasts, and Journey into the Afterlife. Lobey is different - he can hear the music in people’s heads and his feet are hands.

The legend of Orpheus is specifically signposted in the text - what passes for a plot is driven by Lobey’s search for his dead lover Friza - but if one were looking for a mythological antecedent, the giant boar hunt in the first act put me more in mind of that part of the Epic of Gilgamesh where the titular king and his best buddy Enkidu fight and slay the Bull of Heaven - albeit the unknown author of that text took about a paragraph to describe what takes Delaney 50 pages or so.

The text is interspersed with postmodern elements - we read cuttings from the author’s journal as he travels around Southern Europe getting inspiration for a novel he is writing referred to as TEI. The characters recount myths including Orpheus and at one point the Legend of The Beatles:

“You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love even though she treated him tender? He was the one Beatle who did not sing - so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatle returned, finally at one with the great rock and the great roll.”

Ringo and Maureen Starkey got divorced in 1975 - but I guess it was well established prior to the divorce that he was an alcoholic and serial cheat - or so the legend goes...

There are great novels examining post humanism - emphasising the other as an understanding of our own humanity. If you want to read a good one from the 20th Century, I recommend Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, or John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The Einstein Intersection isn’t adding anything to the genre and was a slog to get through.

Reading the Nebula Award Winners: 1966

I decided I wasn’t reading enough, so I thought I would read all the novels that have won the Nebula Award for Best Novel. This is one of the two big prizes for science fiction literature. The first award was given out for a book published in 1965 for Frank Herbert’s Dune. I’ve read it twice before so I rewrote the rules of my game and decided I would read all the novels that have won the Nebula Award for Best Novel (that I haven’t read before).

Bizarrely, in 1966 there were joint winners due to a tied jury. I’m guessing they changed the rules or brought on more jurors because this has never happened since.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney

Babel-17 is a pulp sci-fi romp of the type popular in the 1960s. The heroine Rydra Wong is an attractive and sexually liberated spaceship captain, poet and linguist who is tasked by an ageing general with saving the Alliance from a new threat from the Invaders. The only clue she is handed is a series of transmissions in a language known as Babel-17. Can she translate the language and save the 5 galaxies? 

The parts of the novel that elevate it above the standard pulp of the era, are the bits that explore the impact on a mind of learning an alien language. This is done better than similar plotlines in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the Denis Villeneuve film Arrival (2016). 

“She didn’t ‘look at the room.’

“She somethinged the something. The first something was a tiny vocable that implied an immediate, but passive, perception that could be aural or olfactory as well as visual. The second something was three equally tiny phonemes that blended at different musical pitches: one, an indicator that fixed the size of the chamber at roughly 25 feet cubical, the second identifying the color and probable substance of the walls - some blue metal - while the third was at once a placeholder for particles that should denote a room’s function when she discovered it, and a sort of grammatical tag by which she could refer to the whole experience with only one symbol for as long as she needed it.”

The whole concept of your mind changing as a result of learning a new language is a popular trope in Science Fiction. A trope which draws rather heavily on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - a debunked linguistic theory that suggests that language determines thought rather than the other way round.

The novel falters for me when a plot point relies on a letter being delayed by a postal service customs inspection. And I don’t want to appear prudish, but the ghost sex chapter where the customs officer was seduced by a succubus was weird.

I’ll give it 4/10. It’s certainly no Dune and I won’t be rereading. However, this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Delaney. He won the Nebula again in 1968.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

This is one-note science fiction - the novelisation of a short story that was well received nearly a decade earlier. It zips along nicely and the central conceit - we are reading the diary of a man with low IQ who is given brain improving surgery that exceeds expectations then fails dramatically -  is well executed in the curve of the spelling and vocabulary. The main point I guess is the universal one - we all start out with lower intelligence in childhood, experience differing rates of intellectual and emotional growth during adolescence and start to sense our own mortality as brains and bodies become less capable. The central character, Charlie Gordon (the eponymous Algernon is the laboratory test mouse whose experiences foreshadow our hero’s journey) experiences this lifetime in a few weeks. 

The themes of personhood and intellect are well managed with the newly intellectual Charlie insisting that he was a person before the surgery and empathising more with his fellow test subject Algernon than the laboratory professors that he begins to outshine. 

Solid 7/10 though. I kept picking it up and reading a few more pages. And I can think of people who might enjoy it.

I’d be fascinated to hear your views if you’ve read either of these. Leave a comment below.