What does the nice old prostitute suffer as she allows half her mental furniture to be thrown out as the price of youth? The authors merely assure us that she has passed through the fire: we never learn what she felt about it. They tell us the points they want to make, in long lectures full of flat rhetoric they fail to show us these things through their effects on the characters. The idea, though, is flattened into the ground by the authors' reluctance to do the work which would make it convincing. It's fine – and at the time it was novel – to postulate a machine giving immortality, youth and a perfect complexion to those and only those who can cast aside preconceptions and prejudices, who can allow their minds to be computer-rebuilt on a newer and more cosmic scale. Unfortunately, though it contains an interesting idea, the book seems an implausible award-winner. Completists and historians should give three cheers. They'd Rather be Right is a historical curiosity of SF it won the second Hugo ever presented for a novel (1955) yet hasn't been reprinted since the heavily cut paperback retitled The Forever Machine (1957).
Though only available here through specialist dealers, the Starblaze line of books is an interesting experiment: handsomely produced large-format (trade) paperbacks with an offbeat coverage ranging from very good to horrid. Starblaze Editions, 1982, 173pp, illustrated, $4.95 They'd Rather Be Right Mark Clifton and Frank Riley
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