Why awards don't matter
May. 29th, 2010 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteAs I've mentioned before, I'm rewarding myself with a long and delightful wallow in the works of Roger Zelazny. NESFA Press has issued the complete collection of his short stories and poems, most with comments by Zelazny and annotations by the editors about most of the obscure and less-so allusions in which his stories abound. If you love Zelazny, you owe it to yourself to drop unsubtle hints to your loved ones that this is a perfect gift for any occasion. (It worked for me. *grin*)
This post was inspired by a Zelazny novella I just finished reading, Damnation Alley, which was subsequently turned into a novel and a lamentable movie that Zelazny thoroughly disavowed and that probably spawned the equally bad Escape from New York some 13 years later. (In defence of the latter, Escape from New York was almost saved by a hugely charismatic performance by Kurt Russell, who clearly wanted to step away from his cloying record as a Disney actor.)
Apparently, this novella was nominated for the 1968 Hugo award, and therein lies the problem: it's an embarrassment of a story, and I can only see it being nominated due to the author's popularity, not due to any inherent merit.
The story has some interesting potential: Hell Tanner, the protagonist, is modeled on a member of a motorcycle gang Zelazny once met, and the story is intended to be nothing more than a pedal to the metal adventure tale. Over the course of the tale, Tanner develops a conscience and eventually tries to do the right thing despite his devil-may-care attitude and the lack of any real motivation to do the right thing. That's a strong premise for a story and a potentially interesting character. The framing story is that the U.S. has been nuclear-bombed nearly into extinction, with only California and the Boston area still existing as distinct political entities. A plague springs up in Boston, and several hard cases (including Tanner) are pressganged into carrying a vaccine from California to save Boston. Unfortunately, they must travel through a world infested by nuclear radiation–spawned monsters and whose weather patterns have been turned into storms that make those in The Day After Tomorrow seem plausible.
Mayhem ensues, but sadly, things fall apart right from the beginning.
Unfortunately, Tanner comes off as a crude and unsubtle parody of what could have been an interesting character in the right hands. It's as if Zelazny really liked the character, but simply couldn't empathize with Tanner sufficiently well to understand how to describe him. Contrast his depiction with any of Zelazny's contemporaneous character studies and it's hard to believe the same author was responsible for both. (Also, Zelazny continues his early trend of writing no believable or useful female characters. An artefact of the times, sadly.)
The sequence of events reminded me of nothing so much as Corwin's hellrides in the Nine Princes in Amber, but without the singular advantage of Corwin's accounts: the description of Corwin's travel between the planes of existence in Amber are self-indulgent exercises in purple prose, but they rarely last more than a couple of pages. In Damnation Alley, the hellride (Hell [Tanner] ride?) runs on for an interminable 80 pages. Both contain a great many memorable images, but here they become cloying and impenetrable and, frankly, tedious.
And don't even get me started on the plot holes, illogic, and overall lunacy of the events. If Zelazny had come right out and said that he was cynically writing this exclusively so that it would become a bad Hollywood post-nuclear-apocalypse movie that would earn him enough cash to work on real stories, it would explain Damnation Alley and you could at least admire his cynicism. But in his afterword, he claims to actually have liked this story! This is why I have long since resolved that should I ever have the fortune to become a successful fiction writer, I'd write a clause into my contract that my agent's responsibility would be to talk me out of perpetrating any such nonsense. The day you start buying into your own press releases is the day you should step away from the keyboard.
So today's moral is this: If you're trying to write memorable fiction, forget about the awards. They tend to be nothing more than popularity contests. That's particularly true when they're voted on by fans rather than critics, but critic-selected awards also have problems (specifically, they may not in any way reflect how many people enjoyed a story).
Write memorable fiction, and let the awards fall where they may. And hope that your friends and beta readers have the courage to tell you what they really think, thereby sparing you the embarrassment of publishing something regrettable.
This post was inspired by a Zelazny novella I just finished reading, Damnation Alley, which was subsequently turned into a novel and a lamentable movie that Zelazny thoroughly disavowed and that probably spawned the equally bad Escape from New York some 13 years later. (In defence of the latter, Escape from New York was almost saved by a hugely charismatic performance by Kurt Russell, who clearly wanted to step away from his cloying record as a Disney actor.)
Apparently, this novella was nominated for the 1968 Hugo award, and therein lies the problem: it's an embarrassment of a story, and I can only see it being nominated due to the author's popularity, not due to any inherent merit.
The story has some interesting potential: Hell Tanner, the protagonist, is modeled on a member of a motorcycle gang Zelazny once met, and the story is intended to be nothing more than a pedal to the metal adventure tale. Over the course of the tale, Tanner develops a conscience and eventually tries to do the right thing despite his devil-may-care attitude and the lack of any real motivation to do the right thing. That's a strong premise for a story and a potentially interesting character. The framing story is that the U.S. has been nuclear-bombed nearly into extinction, with only California and the Boston area still existing as distinct political entities. A plague springs up in Boston, and several hard cases (including Tanner) are pressganged into carrying a vaccine from California to save Boston. Unfortunately, they must travel through a world infested by nuclear radiation–spawned monsters and whose weather patterns have been turned into storms that make those in The Day After Tomorrow seem plausible.
Mayhem ensues, but sadly, things fall apart right from the beginning.
Unfortunately, Tanner comes off as a crude and unsubtle parody of what could have been an interesting character in the right hands. It's as if Zelazny really liked the character, but simply couldn't empathize with Tanner sufficiently well to understand how to describe him. Contrast his depiction with any of Zelazny's contemporaneous character studies and it's hard to believe the same author was responsible for both. (Also, Zelazny continues his early trend of writing no believable or useful female characters. An artefact of the times, sadly.)
The sequence of events reminded me of nothing so much as Corwin's hellrides in the Nine Princes in Amber, but without the singular advantage of Corwin's accounts: the description of Corwin's travel between the planes of existence in Amber are self-indulgent exercises in purple prose, but they rarely last more than a couple of pages. In Damnation Alley, the hellride (Hell [Tanner] ride?) runs on for an interminable 80 pages. Both contain a great many memorable images, but here they become cloying and impenetrable and, frankly, tedious.
And don't even get me started on the plot holes, illogic, and overall lunacy of the events. If Zelazny had come right out and said that he was cynically writing this exclusively so that it would become a bad Hollywood post-nuclear-apocalypse movie that would earn him enough cash to work on real stories, it would explain Damnation Alley and you could at least admire his cynicism. But in his afterword, he claims to actually have liked this story! This is why I have long since resolved that should I ever have the fortune to become a successful fiction writer, I'd write a clause into my contract that my agent's responsibility would be to talk me out of perpetrating any such nonsense. The day you start buying into your own press releases is the day you should step away from the keyboard.
So today's moral is this: If you're trying to write memorable fiction, forget about the awards. They tend to be nothing more than popularity contests. That's particularly true when they're voted on by fans rather than critics, but critic-selected awards also have problems (specifically, they may not in any way reflect how many people enjoyed a story).
Write memorable fiction, and let the awards fall where they may. And hope that your friends and beta readers have the courage to tell you what they really think, thereby sparing you the embarrassment of publishing something regrettable.