Hello everybody! My name is Rachel and 
welcome to my first wrap-up of Hugo and
Nebula award winners... in my quest to finish all of these by the end of the year. Still doable!
I read three books for
this challenge in September, and they
were Way Station by Clifford D. Simak, the
1963 Hugo award winner; Powers by
Ursula K. Le Guin, the 2008 Nebula Award
winner; and Startide Rising by David
Brin, which was the joint winner of the
Hugo and Nebula awards in 1984. I've
already talked about Powers in a
separate video. I did an overview of the
series that it belongs to called The Annals
of the Western Shore. So if you want to
know more of the context for that
particular book in the series and what I
thought of all three of those books
individually, I will link that video up
there and down below, so you can go watch it. 
As I said there, I think this series
and this book by Le Guin are relatively
underrated and not so well-known
compared to the behemoths that are her
other famous classic sci-fi fantasy
works. But I ended up really appreciating
Powers and even since filming that
overview video, I have been reminded so
much of Powers. It has really stuck with
me. It was difficult to read because its
subject matter is slavery, something I
don't really enjoy reading about, though
it is an important topic to think about.
Seriously though, I have been constantly
reminded of this book through other
things that I've been reading since then,
and just in daily life. My mind just
keeps going back to this story and this
character and what he went through and that.
And it's great to discover a book,
like that. It's a joy to find a book that
sticks with you for so long.
Next I want to talk about Way Station by
Clifford D Simak. This is the first thing
I ever read by Simak and I was really
impressed. I enjoyed this book far more
than I expected to. Because not all the
time am I really impressed by or even
enjoy older science fiction. But this was
a standout one for me. I think that Way
Station fits into that tradition of
older science-fiction novels that talk
about humanity being ready to
join the rest of the galaxy, to become a
space-faring race, to take that next step
out there, and to be like accepted by
other alien species. And usually those
kind of books have aliens lifting up
humanity - giving us of technology or
science or a secret or changing us in
some fundamental way, like in Childhood's
End by Arthur C. Clarke. And Way Station
doesn't really do that. This is like that step 
before humanity even knows that aliens exist.
The story is about a man named Enoch
Wallace. He fought in the Civil War in
the 1860's, and after the war
ended he was recruited by an alien to
man a way station, as part of an
intergalactic transit system.
He's the only human who knows that
aliens exist and he meets them on a
regular basis. They converted his
Wisconsin family farmhouse into this way
station, and when he's inside of it,
time doesn't pass the same way. He only
ages for an hour every day when he goes
outside of the house to go get his mail
and talk to the mailman. At this point he
is over a 100 years old, and in 1961
(or thereabouts), a CIA agent stumbles
across this, like, legend of the man who
never ages and doesn't die in Wisconsin,
and investigates. This agent dives into
Enoch's history, and when he goes to the
family cemetery on the property, he finds
two headstones for Enoch's parents, and a
third grave with a headstone with
something else on it. He absconds with
the corpse that's buried there, which has
bad repercussions for humanity's future
and relationship with alien species.
The rest of this story is sort of flashbacks
to the past of when in Enoch met the alien who
recruited him, and then people that he's
met while manning the way station. And
then current events when his long-held
secret life begins to unravel a bit.
I love the tone and the style of
this, and I think a lot of it is that
Enoch is a good man, but he's also very
old-fashioned. He lives a very simple
life in some way, despite all the
magnificent things he learns from aliens.
He's very cut off from humanity, at the
same time that everything he's doing is
for humanity in some way. He's lonely;
something is missing. He doesn't really
have any human friends anymore because
he has outlived everybody, and he can't
betray his secret to them.
Another thing that I really like about
this story and about Enoch is that this
is about one good person who can make
the choices - the really important
choices - for our species. But unlike a lot
of other books a lot of other sci-fi
stories, he's a normal person for the
most part. He is ageless but he is a
normal person. He used to be a soldier.
He's not a scientist. He's not a government
bureaucrat. He's not an official of any
sort.
He doesn't have a lot of power or
authority in the normal everyday world.
He's just a person.
This is a really welcome change from so
many sci-fi novels that focus on
captains and the officials and the
people in charge - the privileged few,
basically. I would totally recommend this
as a classic older science fiction
story for people to read, because I think
it has a real humaneness about it, a lot
of respect and dignity in the story.
The final book I have to talk about in this
video is Startide Rising by David Brin.
This is a hard science fiction novel
from the 80's and it's actually the
second book in the Uplift Saga, though I
haven't read the first and I don't think
they're super related. This is set in the
far future, maybe about 500
years and humans are now a spacefaring
race. In this world all species are
uplifted to complete sentience and
technological advancement. They become
spacefaring species when another species
intervenes and genetically modifies them,
gives them technology, and they get
access to the "Library".
The twist is
that nobody knows who uplifted humans or
if they had an intervention like this. So
there's a system of patron-client. You
have patron races that take other
species as clients and uplift them or
lift them up...
How does that verb even work? ... Humans have
uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins. And in
this story a dolphin-human crewed ship
goes on a mission to fact check
items from the Library, and they stumble
across a billions year old derelict alien
space fleet, and then after a slight
disaster, take off with one of the
mummified alien remains. Their branch of
the Library, which is very restricted,
refuses to identify what the species is
or even what this fleet is. And when
they'd rather naively call home to
report what they found, all the other alien
species converge on them because they
want this information - it must be
important.
Their ship is damaged. They crash land on
a planet, and then they had to figure out
how to get off of the planet while a
space war happens above them. A lot of
stuff happens in this book, but the plot is
pretty straightforward. There are lots of
divergences - where we go off with different
characters and not much of it furthers
the main plot. By the last third - maybe
the last quarter - I was really
ready for some resolution. And kind of
got it, but then it stopped abruptly. And
then the major mysteries, like what's up
with the Library? and what is this
derelict fleet? what is the mummified
alien? They're not answered in this book.
I'm trying to reserve some judgment on
this story,as a whole because I think
that the second half of it is in the
next book, which I will be reading
because it's a Hugo Award winner. But I
was a little disappointed at how little
seem to have happened by the end.
That's one of my major complaints. Another
complaint I have, that I noticed from the
very beginning, is the writing is really bad!
It's clunky. It is just -- it doesn't
flow and there's a little bit of bloat,
and there are so many exclamation points!
It felt like it was trying to be
dramatic and intense, and instead was over
dramatic in a rather cheesy way. I do
have to give Brin props for imagining
dolphins in space.
I don't think this works as well as it
could have, but the idea is cool. And
speaking of dolphins: in their original
languages they speak in poetry, in haiku.
So there's a lot of verse in this, where
both dolphins and humans are
communicating their dialogue in haiku or
in verse. Which means, honestly, there's a
lot of really bad poetry.
Complaint number three is about the ethics of the
patron-client uplift system. This system
is basically slavery or indenturing
an entire species for 100,000
years, and then drastically modifying
their physiology and biology - potentially
in ways *against their wishes*. But it all
boils down to the way that uplift is
described - the rules of it, what you can
and can't do, and even what the good and
nice and supposedly ethical species do.
It all comes across as *really* unethical.
And there's no justification for some of
the things that happen. And I was
disappointed in some of the decisions
made near the end of the book when
humans and dolphins kind of have an
opportunity to take another species as a
client species, and the situation struck
me as really, really wrong, since I think
this is so similar to slavery. I will be
really disappointed if Brin never
acknowledges the ethics of the situation
in the next book. And if you know if he
does or not please tell me, because
that would make me feel a lot better
about reading the next one!
Those are the three Hugo and Nebula
Award winners I
finished in September - and I'll be
reading a lot more of them in October, so
stay tuned for more. If you have read any
of these books, or any books by these
authors, and you want to talk to me about
them - please comment down below. And thank
you for watching! I will talk to you
again in my next video. Bye!
