They'd Rather Be Right
by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley
Summary
Two university professors build a computer called Bossy, which is designed to reason without the assumptions its makers carry. A mob destroys the laboratory and the professors flee with the machine to San Francisco, helped by Joe Carter, a young telepath who has spent his life concealing what he can do because people who find out react badly.
Bossy turns out to be able to do more than think. Working through a person's mental blocks, it can remove the false beliefs they hold, and the effect of clearing them is physical: the subject becomes young again, healthy, and immortal.
There is a catch, and it supplies the title. The cure only works on someone willing to give up every conviction they hold dear, and almost nobody is. Offered eternal youth at the price of admitting they might be wrong about anything, people would rather be right.
The premise is genuinely interesting. The execution is not. The characters explain the theme to each other at length, the prose is flat, the plotting is thin, and the whole thing reads as an argument with a nonfiction thesis attached.
Where it does come alive is in the public reaction. People queue for the machine and then refuse the terms, politicians try to nationalise it, and the authors are sharper about crowds than about anyone in particular.
Around one hundred and ninety pages, so at least the disappointment is brief.
It is honestly the weakest book on this list and is chiefly of historical interest, which is exactly why it is worth knowing what it is: the second Hugo ever given for a novel, and the one that proved from the start that the award could get it wrong. Recommended only to completists working through the winners.
Historical Context & Significance
They'd Rather Be Right won the 1955 Hugo Award for Best Novel, only the second awarded, and it has spent seventy years as the category's designated embarrassment. It is routinely named the worst Hugo winning novel by critics and by fans, with the Guardian's Sam Jordison calling it appalling and "a basic creative writing how not to".
One standing explanation is that Mark Clifton was a popular writer of short fiction in Astounding at the time, and that voters were rewarding a reputation rather than a book many of them had read, since it was serialised rather than published in hardcover.
Its ideas about clearing mental blocks to achieve health and longevity closely track Dianetics, which John W. Campbell had promoted heavily in Astounding a few years earlier, and the connection is part of why the novel is now read as a period artefact.