As previously discussed, the question of why Mark Clifton’s They’d Rather Be Right won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1955 is one that has a few different answers depending on how you look at it – though I believe the connection between editor John W. Campbell and L. Ron Hubbard’s pseudoscientific/quasi-religious doctrine of Scientology to be the most likely culprit. A somewhat more straightforward question, however, is why science fiction fans are so dumbfounded by its victory in the first place.
Source: The Way The Future Blogs, “Me and Alfie, Part 6: John W. Campbell and Dianetics.” You can read the conversation between Frederick Pohl and Alfred Bester here, and I highly recommend doing so, because it’s a fascinating and, frankly, hilarious, first-hand take on the relationship between Campbell (pictured, right) and the work of L. Ron Hubbard (left).
My copy of They’d Rather Be Right cost me one dollar. Wait, no – less than a dollar. A dollar was the total price for the Kindle download of a book called The Second Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK: Mark Clifton. It’s a collection of Clifton’s work that happens to include a Hugo Award-winning novel, as the book cover loudly proclaims. While I think the works of Mark Clifton are probably worth more than a buck American, I’m certainly not upset that I didn’t pay more. They’d Rather Be Right wasn’t awful, necessarily, but it sure as hell wasn’t good. I have officially managed to power through it in pretty good time, thanks to a combination of actual narrative enjoyment (“Hey, I really do want to know what happens next”) and growing impatience with the author’s endless pseudoscientific diatribes and contradictory proclamations about the nature of humankind, both dripping with made-up jargon that is never satisfactorily explained. It’s probably needless to point out that, while the former shouldn’t be discounted, the latter formed the bulk of my experience.
But we’ll get to that soon. For now, I thought it appropriate to begin with the first question anyone ever asks about They’d Rather Be Right, which is, “How the hell did this win a Hugo Award?”
Universes of the Mind 