This is one of a series of posts I am doing as I read the short stories that have won the Hugo award since it was started in 1955.

Source: The Hugo Winners Vol. 1 and 2 Edited by Isaac Asimov

With Jack Vance’s “The Dragon Masters” we enter an odd period were the Hugo Award for Short Stories was won by war stories for three years straight. The Dragon Masters is filled with extensive descriptions of terrain, troop movements, and tense conversations between commanders. In between there are aliens, spaceships and dragons (that are breed from the aliens apparently) thrown in, but ultimately this is a story about armies and their operations. This military focus would continue in the Short Story Hugos for the next two years.

Of course, given the time-period (early 1960s) this focus is not surprising. The threat of armed conflicted between the USA and the USSR were at their peak and the USA was heading towards direct involvement in Vietnam. So it is understandable that the more conservative members of the science fiction writing community would respond with tales of battles and heroics. Yet these tales have not aged well and are generally not really remembered now.

With that said the pro-military stories that won the Hugo in this three year period (1963-1965) do get progressively better. “No Truce for Kings” features an army rebelling against an unlawful government and most of the characters come to loath the war by the end. “Soldier, Ask Not” introduces us to the Dosadi universe, which is probably the second best military science fiction series after “Starship Troopers” by Robert Heinlein.

“The Dragon Masters” was the worst of these military stories from the mid-1960s though. It was hard to keep track of where anything was in the story due to the plethora of place names thrown around. I felt like I needed a map of the setting to really make sense of the story’s geography. In addition, I had a hard time keep track of the action as there was so much going on. There are non-sentient dragons, which were bread from captured sentient aliens. Meanwhile a pacifist faction of humans is doing something underground. And the aliens are conquering space and doing something to humans to make them into the dragons and use them against the unconquered human population.

Suffice it to say that I was confused and bored by this story, which is bad combination in pretty much anything. I contemplated not finishing it several times but powered through for the sake of reading all the Hugo short story winners. I would not suggest this story to anyone except a die-hard science fan or a scholar of the genre. It is interesting for its place in the military science fiction trend of the 1960s. It is also interesting for its place in the struggle between the science fiction traditionalists with hard science (Larry Niven with “Ringworld”) and adventure stories (Poul Anderson’s “The Longest Voyage” from the 1961 Hugos) and the New Wave writers with their focus on soft sciences (LeGuinn’s focus on anthropology), prose and style (Harlan Ellison’s flare in stories like “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”), and the development of complex characters and settings (like we find in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”). Outside of this historical context the story is not really worth reading though and I can see why this story and Jack Vance have faded from the collective consciousness.