These men were authorial giants. This is a brilliant undescribable book that would have been a solid Hugo winner – one of the best five books of any year….The runner up was Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity! The legendary A. E. van Vogt went so far as to give up writing in order to head the Los Angeles branch of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation; when that fell through, he returned to writing, partially in order to fund his own center for dianetics. They’d Rather be Right concerns itself with three men who build a supercomputer named Bossy for the authoritarian United States government. The International Fantasy Award that year went to Edgar Pangborn’s A Mirror For Observers. Asimov published stories in Astounding in 1954, too. They’d Rather Be Right might fail to offer a plausible or dramatically satisfying vision of a world faced with the prospect of immortality, but it does a remarkable job of laying out the implications of affordable personal computers and the Internet, a full three decades before it was even conceivable. We call it disease, old age, death.”. But imagine you’re a sci-fi writer in late 1953, early 1954. I have no idea how anyone would be able to follow They’d Rather Be Right without reading those two stories first, and indeed, I think it’s safe to assume that Hugo voters in 1955 would certainly have read them. And frankly, I don’t see the Scientology explanation as all that far-fetched. They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. They'd Rather Be Right does have a lot — like, a lot — of those sort of pontificatory passages about How Dumb People Are and How Smart We Could Be. The advice given above is highly relevant. It was the only cultural arena in which Campbell held a position of true power, and given the aforementioned trending of the 1955 Hugos toward Astounding, it would make perfect sense to believe that Campbell helped swing the vote in Clifton’s direction. When Jo Walton wrote about They’d Rather Be Right for her “Revisiting the Hugos” series, she admitted she had never read the story, but expressed her shock that it won over a host of much worthier contenders: “1955, like 1953, did not release a list of nominees, so any guess as to what was in the voters’ minds is just a guess. by Mark Clifton with Alex Apostolides (December 1953, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction). ", under the title They’d Rather Be Right wasn’t awful, necessarily, but it sure as hell wasn’t good. In other words, Bossy’s therapy isn’t for your mind, it’s for your cells. Witch!" [4], Langford has also addressed conspiracy theories attributing They'd Rather Be Right's win to Scientology, saying it is more likely that Clifton was popular for his short stories. makes up the second section, entitled "Bossy. The MEGAPACK claims They’d Rather Be Right was published in 1958, which is weird, considering it won the Hugo in 1955; my guess is that this particular version of They’d Rather Be Right was compiled in 1958. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Sometimes those things worked and sometimes they didn't. They'd Rather Be Right Frank Riley; Mark Clifton Published by Nelson Doubleday, Inc. / SFBC Seller: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A. Marie Myung-Ok Lee - 10.17.2016 | 7 “I ran into a girl…She said I was a strange person and she told me why. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. & Riley, Mark Gnome Press, 1957 Original dust jacket, hardcover, 189 pp. The post reveals some burning issues and questions that should be discussed and explained, found something Wait, no – less than a dollar. Even if the ‘55 Hugo voters were purely zoned in with Campbell’s magazine, totally unfamiliar with authors published elsewhere, They’d Rather Be Right still seems like a bizarre choice. But when it came to the power of the mind over the body, Campbell was a believer. New Price: $79.99. Witch! Only here’s the thing about Bossy’s therapy: it makes you immortal, and also provides you with psionic powers, and also makes you more intelligent than pretty much everyone else. A quick history lesson: In 1926, Amazing Stories, the first pure science fiction magazine, was launched by a radio and electronics entrepreneur named Hugo Gernsback. But we’ll get to that soon. Meanwhile, it’s only three or four years out from Dianetics, Campbell has been openly championing Hubbard’s theories, Hubbard has just demonstrated his “e-meter,” and the Church of Scientology is only a couple of years away from being officially recognized as a religious organization. But to be honest, Clifton doesn’t take up very much time explaining why the world might contain a telepath — he essentially provides the “next stage in human evolution” rationale that, for example, the writers of X-Men provide when explaining Jean Grey. Theodore Sturgeon became an auditor. One is that it’s a mediocre novel that didn’t deserve to win a Hugo and the other is that it’s an underachieving novel that inexplicably won a Hugo. Mr JM 17:50, 12 November 2010 (UTC) Uh? They'd Rather Be Right adalah sebuah novel fiksi ilmiah karya penulis Amerika Mark Clifton dan Frank Riley. If provided with the correct facts about a problem, Bossy produces the optimal solution, without fear or favor. Download They'd Rather Be Right Study Guide. Setting aside the reasons why none of this can possibly be true, it all sounds suspiciously familiar to me. Subscribe Now In the story, the America of 1985 is a repressive oligarchy in which originality is a crime. Okay, so according to the book, everybody is naturally immortal. “Like the amoeba, barring accident, they are immortal – that is, they have the potential of immortality through continued self renewal.”, He goes on: “They renew and multiply through the growth of the child to its maturity. "Some paranoid fans blamed the weird 1955 Hugo result on Scientology. Hide! Witch!" Notes. Gold’s Galaxy Science Fiction in a tie; Galaxy also published that year’s novel winner, The Demolished Man. "[11] ISBN 978-0881848427, "Mark Clifton and Frank Riley: They'd Rather Be Right", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=They%27d_Rather_Be_Right&oldid=1013379395, Works originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 21 March 2021, at 09:23. They'd Rather Be Right is a science fiction novel about Bossy, a cybernetic marvel, and the men who insist on building her. CONTENT WARNINGS: Spoiler. In the post, one can easily find something How could they not have voted for Mission of Gravity — sometimes described as the only genuine hard science fiction novel?”. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. “The cells renew themselves with a healthy vigor,” he says. The online “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” refers to Clifton’s treatment of psi abilities as “inflamed Campbellian propaganda,” which is to say that the book treats telepathy as plausible because Campbell believed telepathy was plausible. A likelier reason is that Mark Clifton was very popular for the short stories – far better than that novel – he was then publishing in the flagship magazine Astounding SF.”. Aldous Huxley got audited. At the very least, it’s worth considering that Clifton’s story lines up very nicely along the lines of John Campbell’s personal ideology. ( Log Out / They'd Rather be Right By David Pietrusza I hardly expected to find the musical version of Amity Shlaes' bestselling critique of New Deal economic … ( Log Out / Clifton didn’t incorporate alien civilizations into his book, but his explanations of Bossy’s therapy are very similar to L. Ron Hubbard’s explanation of achieving the state of “Clear,” removing the engrams (traumatic memories) from the thetan (the brilliant immortal being with superpowers that thinks it’s a regular human) thus allowing it to reach its full potential. A dollar was the total price for the Kindle download of a book called The Second Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK: Mark Clifton. They'd Rather Be Right (also known as The Forever Machine) is a science fiction novel by American writers Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. Written in English — 181 pages One of 3 novels by early Hugo winner Mark Clifton, exploring ideas re closed vs. open mind, individual vs. group thinking Read more. "[1] However, when given the choice of admitting they were wrong and therefore being able to benefit from Bossy's abilities, most people would rather be right, and Bossy's ability to confer immortality is almost made ineffective by humanity's fear of "her." 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