I am delighted to announce that A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller has been shortlisted for a Hugo Award in the Best Related Work category.
With news like this comes the accompanying sadness that Maureen herself is not here to share in the excitement and to take her rightful place as nominee. But there is joy too in knowing how pleased she would be – in fact, knowing Maureen, I think the word would be gobsmacked!
I am especially pleased for Maureen’s husband Paul Kincaid, who has been so supportive throughout the process of bringing the book to publication, and for Francesca Barbini of Luna Press, who immediately came on board to give the book a home. I am looking forward to seeing both of them at the Hugo ceremony at the Glasgow Worldcon in August.
Huge congratulations of course to all other Hugo nominees and especially to Iain J. Clark, who so kindly gave permission for his beautiful artwork ‘Path’ to be used as the cover for Maureen’s book. You can find a complete list of Hugo finalists here.
The winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2022 is Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles.
This book was first on my radar some months before its publication and I ordered my copy from our local bookshop as soon as it came out. A science fiction novel. By an acclaimed Scottish poet. In Orcadian Scots with parallel English text.
This couldn’t have been more up my street if it tried. I was delighted, and amazed, when it turned up on the Clarke Award shortlist, not least because the shortlist as a whole is one of the boldest and most exciting – for me, at any rate – in some years.
I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of Aliya Whiteley’s Skyward Inn and found it as original and thought-provoking as everything I’ve read from Whiteley, who, I firmly believe, is one of the most important writers working in British science fiction today. With this, her second appearance on the Clarke shortlist, I thought 2022 might be her year. That pleasure still awaits us, but her repeat shortlisting in and of itself is a welcome recognition of her considerable talent.
I wasn’t the hugest fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun – I found it bland and sketchily imagined, too reminiscent of the children’s fable it was originally intended to be. But I like Ishiguro. I admire his willingness to experiment with ideas, to keep moving forward. Each new book from him feels meant, as if he’s still considering its challenges even as it’s published. That quality of nervousness means I’m always eager to read his next work, as I will be again. I am glad the Clarke jury picked him out once more for further discussion.
I have not quite finished reading Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time yet – the reason this post is so delayed – but I love the writing, very much, and I was gratified to see the jury make yet another bold choice.
A good year. And what I notice now, as I look down the list of previous winners, is how excellent those winners have been, these past few years. Deep Wheel Orcadia is no exception, and this excites me. When a book like this appears, it throws positive energy back into science fiction, illuminating its possibilities, inspiring fresh approaches. i love it when that happens. Congratulations, Josie Giles, and to the Clarke Award jury, for rewarding a work that so powerfully showcases the radical ambition that will always characterise the best SF.
I have frequently been surprised, these past couple of weeks, by the way in which even seasoned literary commentators still slip into the habit of referring to Alan Garner as a children’s writer. I am sure I’ve said this somewhere before, but I continue to think of my first encounter with Garner’s work – The Owl Service, which I first read when I was around twelve – as among my most significant primary encounters with adult themes in literature. I found the book utterly compelling – but if you had asked me then what it was about I would have found it hard to answer. There was simply a feeling I had, a palpable sense of having touched something mysterious, timeless and possibly dangerous. I experienced the same feeling, albeit with a greater understanding of what was going on, both in me and in the book, when I belatedly caught up with Red Shift, some years ago.
As regards the Booker commentators, what on Earth is wrong with saying that Alan Garner is a writer who often centres young protagonists?
Which is exactly what he does in his 2021 novel, Treacle Walker, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a fact that has made me feel more personally excited about the award than I have done since Anna Burns won it for Milkman back in 2018. The Booker has become generally much more innovative, inclusive and interesting in recent years, and I follow the annual discussion surrounding it with great enjoyment. Garner’s shortlisting though speaks to me personally. It counts, for me personally,. This is simply a feeling I have.
Treacle Walker tells the story of a boy, Joseph Coppock. Joe has recently been ill, and seems to spend a lot of time alone. Are his parents at work? Who looks after the house? We are never told. We live, for the duration of this short novel, entirely inside the world and mind of Joe as he encounters a mysterious rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, and falls into a daunting adventure that will alter his universe.
Treacle Walker speaks to Joe in riddles, an affectation he clearly finds simultaneously annoying and compelling. He is eager to learn the secrets the old man wants to impart to him, at the same time impatient, as any boy might be, to set his own stamp on the world, to interpret its signs and wonders in his own language. Most of the dialogue in Treacle Walker is conducted in the dialect of Garner’s native Cheshire, and one senses keenly Garner’s desire not to confuse or obfuscate but to set down, to save this unique language from annihilation in the twenty-first-century rush to refute the past. There is also a fierce feeling of privacy being accorded, the boy and the man who were always meant to come together sharing knowledge neither could fully fathom, until now.
It is notable that in the moments of highest tension and drama, the two cease with their mutual ragging and speak in terse, plain English. In these exchanges, it is almost as if the two are of a similar age and level of understanding.
As with all of Garner’s work, the action takes place against a vividly described, living landscape. One might almost say that Garner’s writing becomes the landscape, revealing it in all its aspects: peace, seclusion, discomfort, joy, alienation and terror:
But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joints and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering, silence, and on the floor the snow melted to tears.
This passage speaks to me particularly, both in its heady choice of words and in the symbols they carry. There have already been suggested many possible and plausible explanations of Treacle Walker’s meaning. For me, it is a book about the rising tide of chaos that accompanies change, the corresponding forces of growth and new imaginings that bring about progress. People have spoken of this novel as Garner’s last hurrah, a gathering together of his familiar themes, a farewell coda. It may be all of these things. Yet it is equally a work of bold experiment and dynamism, a book that makes use of ancient fable to speak to us in our own time with uncanny acuity.
Treacle Walker is tired, and Joe is ready and waiting to claim his future. As the two change places, or become one another, they mirror the unquiet yet seamless passing of one season to another.
More on the actual Clarke Award shortlist in due course, but in the meantime I wanted to highlight some of the submissions that didn’t make it, books I’ve been interested in reading but haven’t got to yet. Now seems like the perfect time to take a closer look at them, with the aim of putting together an alternate-world Clarke of the kind the Shadow Clarke jury experimented with back in 2017. Together with the novels from the submissions list I’ve already read, I should end up with an interesting pool to choose from. I’m going to start with Robbie Arnott’s novel The Rain Heron, which has recently been shortlisted for Australia’s Miles Franklin Award. I like the Miles Franklin, which tends to be more experimental than the Booker. This year’s shortlist also features one of my favourite novels from 2020, Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea, and the longlist featured The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay, one of the six shortlisted novels for this year’s Clarke Award.
The country that forms the setting for The Rain Heron is unnamed, though its landscape of mountains and temperate rainforests has much in common with Arnott’s home state of Tasmania. We learn that there has been a military takeover, an act of violence referred to only as ‘the coup’. The cities are subject to strict martial law, while outlying rural communities are forced to endure the periodic armed raids and plundering of resources that such an arbitrary seizure of power would inevitably entail. The story centres around two women – Ren, who has taken refuge in the mountains in the wake of some undescribed personal trauma, and Zoe, who has joined the army in an almost random act of self-sabotage and now finds herself made an instrument of its unelected masters.
Climate change is biting deep, setting neighbour against neighbour as towns are abandoned and wildfires rage. In their struggle to maintain their hold on society, those who perpetrated the coup find themselves drawn to an old legend, that of the rain heron, a mythical bird that is said to have the power to control the weather. Desperate to secure the bird, their eye falls on Zoe, who knows and understands the mountain country where the heron is said to roost. But Zoe has past trauma of her own to contend with, a hollowness at her heart that seems destined to lead her in a dangerous direction. Does she believe in the heron herself? She barely knows.
The Rain Heron is a masterclass in landscape writing, but it is equally interesting and provocative in its structure. The novel opens with Part 0, an apparently self-contained short story about a desperately unlucky farmer as she battles to keep her land fertile and productive in a hostile climate. Arnott then takes a bold narrative risk in introducing us to Ren, who we assume must be central to the action but who vanishes violently from our sight at the end of Part 1. The narrative then passes to Zoe, a character who Arnott has set us up to mistrust and dislike. How Arnott brings the various threads together and makes sense of what has gone before is an elegant sleight of hand. As a reader, I reacted strongly against Zoe, but the tightly packed, propulsive nature of Arnott’s storytelling kept me hooked. The novel’s ultimate resolution is both moving and apposite. No one gets off lightly and there are no solutions offered, but still there is light. By the end, my feelings about Zoe were entirely changed. I love that this happened. I love that Arnott was prepared to risk readers rejecting his story in the pursuit of what he actually wanted to say. The results are assured, heartfelt, genuinely special.
If they did consider this book, I can only imagine the Clarke jury’s decision not to include it on the shortlist would have centred around the question of whether it is, in fact, SF. I remember there was a lot of this kind of wrangling in critical discussions of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad in 2017. Railroad ultimately went on to win the Clarke, as well as the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in the US, though I’m sure the members of those juries were less concerned about whether their choice deserved to be categorised as science fiction or fantasy.
As with Railroad, The Rain Heron is, on the face of it, pure fantasy. Both the rain heron itself and the giant squid that are crucial to the economy of the port town Zoe comes from are mythological in essence, creatures with magical properties that do not, so far as we know, exist in nature. But again, as with Railroad, the fantastical elements of Arnott’s narrative are not so much plot devices as powerful metaphors. The rain heron itself is a symbol of power, and the lust for power – who has a right to it, who ultimately wields it. And what happens with the squid is a hymn of protest against the commercial exploitation of indigenous cultures and resources, against the displacement of animals and people in the path of the ecological vandalism being perpetrated against this planet:
I was mad at her, all of the time. The country was falling to pieces – at least, our part of the country was. My school had been closed for six months. People were breaking into shops, robbing pensioners. I was so furious, but my fury had no direction, and she wasn’t doing anything about it. She wasn’t doing anything at all. I had no father, no brothers or sisters, no other family. And my mother just kept on keeping to herself. Closing the curtains, drinking cheap wine.
In the end, the background to the coup, the identity of the people in power, the exact timeline of events – all those elements that form the ingredients of the more traditional kind of post-apocalyptic novel – are unimportant in The Rain Heron because Arnott has chosen to tell his story through character. His incorporation of magical elements results not in a diminution of the science fictional sensibility of his narrative but in a kind of hyper-realism, a vision of our immediate future that is all the more hard-hitting because of the risks it takes.
We could spend a lot of time fussing over whether Arnott’s book is ‘properly’ science fiction, but I don’t think it matters. What cannot be argued with is that as a novel of climate change and the savage realignments of power that are bound to accompany it, The Rain Heron is as hard-hitting as other novels three times its length. As a work of literature it is beautifully achieved; as a portrait of a possible near future it is serious and passionately questioning. I can only hope the Clarke jury gave it due consideration.
The shortlist for the 35th Arthur C. Clarke Award has landed. The six titles are:
The Infinite by Patience Agbabi
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang
Edge of Heaven by R. B. Kelly
The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay
Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes
For the first time ever, all six shortlisted titles are debuts, which is interesting. If I were to use one word to describe this shortlist, it would be unexpected. Every shortlist is different, of course, but there’s something about this one that makes it more different. Because none of the authors here have previously featured, there is a quality of newness, of unparsability. And I like that. I like not knowing exactly what I think.
There are three books on here that are already on my to-read list, which is great, because I now have a definite context in which to read them. There are two books on this list I don’t know much about, which again is great, because I’ll be coming to them with no preconceived opinions. There is one book on this list I think I can safely say I would not have thought of reading, had it not been shortlisted, and that’s good too, because now I will.
The winner is being announced in September, which – I am delighted and relieved to say – gives me a good eight weeks to read everything, I shall be blogging my findings here. Sharkes take no prisoners.
Simultaneously with the shortlist, the Clarke Award’s administrator Tom Hunter released the full list of books submitted to the Clarke Award, all published in 2020, all given equal consideration by the jury. There were 105 books this time around, a good number, though not the highest. I have perused this list with great interest, as I always do, noting the increasing diversity and expanding definition of science fiction, year on year. I think it would be true to say that SF is as various and unpredictable as its many readers, each of whom would doubtless have their own list of priorities, their own ideal version of what science fiction could and should be.
The longer I read SF, the more I demand from it. I demand rigour, not in relation to scientific accuracy but in intellectual engagement. I demand beauty, not in terms of sense of wonder but in relation to language and form. I demand ambition, not in relation to copies sold, but in terms of how far the author is prepared to push against the boundary of their own abilities. I want books that risk failure in their pursuit of excellence. I want science fiction that fulfils the radical potential that is inherent in the very idea of SF. Will all the books on this shortlist meet these criteria? I can live in hope. Will I ever stop banging on about this? Never.
If I’d been picking the shortlist myself, here’s what it would look like, bearing in mind I’ve not read everything (nowhere near) and the impact of my own very specific biases:
Hinton by Mark Blacklock (one of the toughest but best achieved novels I read last year)
Ghost Species by James Bradley (Bradley is ridiculously underappreciated, one of the most committed speculative fiction writers out there)
The Silence by Don DeLillo (people are going to argue with me over this – I know some who think this book is empty, pared down so hard it barely exists – but if there’s a novel that better sums up our current state of unease I have yet to find it)
Gathering Evidence by Martin MacInnes (except maybe this one – MacInnes’s first novel was a best-of-year for me and this, his second, is if anything even better)
The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay (my most anticipated novel on the actual shortlist, I’ve sampled the prose, straining with wild energy, and McKay has chosen an epigraph by Helen Garner – say no more)
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (a fantastic novel by a writer who remakes speculative fiction every time she puts pen to paper)
These are all novels I could read repeatedly, finding new insights each time. This also is a quality I demand from my SF. When I think of the books I return to time and again, in my mind as well as on the page, they all have about them the quality of mystery, of infinite possibility together with a certain inscrutability that is the hallmark of timeless classics in any genre. Here’s to discovering more of them, and good luck to all the shortlisted authors. Meet me back here soon for the first of six exciting voyages into the unknown.
Your desire to conquer, to colonise others, is both too fixed and too free. Nothing escapes your dull dialectic: either it takes a village to live or to each his own to survive. Even your debate on the best way to be falls on either side of this blade. The social contract or individual free will, the walls of a commune must keep us close or capital must run rampant. That’s how you froze your long Cold War, with this endless, mindless divide.
How often does it happen that you fall in love with a book? Not at first sight, but through continuing acquaintance? That you are persuaded, encroached upon, seduced? That you come to realise that your gathering conclusions about a text have all been reversed?
Some books you simply enjoy. Some you admire. Some you forget more or less as soon as you’ve finished reading them. I have found, almost invariably, that it is those books you come to have a relationship with, that you even struggle with at times, that tend to bring the most lasting satisfaction. There has been a resistance in certain quarters to describing books as ‘difficult’, as if difficult were code for elitist, as if the necessity of having to work at something automatically precludes the idea of pleasure or inclusiveness. What bollocks. Books don’t ‘have’ to be difficult to be enjoyable, of course they don’t. Books don’t ‘have’ to be anything, and neither do readers. But for some readers, the work is the pleasure, or at least a significant part of it. The sense that you have grown as a reader in the process of reading. That the book you have just completed has enhanced your perception both of the world, and the written word.
For its length alone, The Old Drift might be said to encompass an element of difficulty. To read six hundred pages demands commitment from the reader, not just of time but – with a text so richly detailed and intricately structured – of attention. The Old Drift begins – well actually, it begins with a family tree, a fact I had completely forgotten because I skipped over it, and stumble upon only now as I retrace my steps to find a particular quote. The family tree is printed too small for me to read without my magnifying glass. Not wanting to fanny about so early on I jumped the page and dived right in, knowing nothing, no names, no spidery outline of relationships, and now here I am wondering how that might have altered my relationship with the novel. Did it enhance my sense of difficulty, or not? Did it augment my pleasure in working out the network of familial connections (not difficult, if you’re concentrating) for myself? I’ll never know, and that fact also I love. Looking at the family tree now through the lens of my magnifying glass I feel the pleasure of remembrance, nostalgic already for the moments before I came to know these characters, those moments in which their lives lay still ahead of me.
As I was saying, The Old Drift begins with (the mosquitoes, then with Dr Livingstone, then) Percy Clark, ‘a wanderer, a brute, a cad, the forefather who started it all’. He’s come to Africa from Cambridge, under something of a cloud. In those early years of the twentieth century, the country of Zambia still does not exist, or rather has not been named as such. Percy makes his way inland in search of a place to be and a vocation to follow:
I set out for the drift five miles above the Falls, the port of entry into north-western Rhodesia. The Zambesi is at its deepest and narrowest here for hundreds of miles, so it’s the handiest spot for ‘drifting’ a body across. At first it was called Sekute’s Drift after a chief of the Leya. Then it was Clarke’s Drift, after the first white settler, whom I soon met. No one knows when it became The Old Drift.
For the settlers, the land is unforgiving and strewn with difficulties. Many die of disease. Those who survive forge a sense of ownership that is entirely unearned. Percy forms an acquaintanceship with Pietro Gavuzzi, the manager of the newly constructed Victoria Falls Hotel, where Percy earns a modicum of fame through being the first diner in the audaciously upmarket restaurant. The stories and families of Percy, Gavuzzi and N’gulubu, a Zambian boy assaulted by Pietro’s daughter Lina in the dining room of the hotel will, over the course of the following century, become inextricably linked and intermingled as a new country is born, a monumental engineering project is conceived, and history itself is laid down, fought over, and remade.
For more than half of its length, The Old Drift reads like a family chronicle. Dense in detail, rich in language and imagery, hugely intelligent in its insights and observations, it’s an impressive achievement on this level alone. In its examination of class especially I kept being reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. In its interweaving of familial bonds and human relationships, I couldn’t not think of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, though for me The Old Drift, with its rigorous underpinning of history and cogent analysis of colonialism and its long-haul aftermath, is the nittier, grittier, broader and deeper and more memorable reading experience by far.
All of that is just the beginning, though, for it is in its latter third that this novel truly begins to show its colours, to ripen and to reveal itself for the genre-busting, formally innovative, revolutionary and science fictional masterpiece it truly is.
For anyone reading this book, hitting the 400 pp mark and thinking where’s the science fiction?? let me tell you I feel your doubt and bewilderment, because they were also mine. There are hints all along, of course, of where the book is going, what it is doing – the chorus of mosquitoes (some of the finest writing at the sentence level in the whole book), the building of the dam, the crazy Zambian space program – but for a long while they do not seem to add up to enough (not nearly enough) to make the book science fiction. I was all prepared to write an essay on how I admired The Old Drift in terms of its literary achievement but what was it actually doing on the Clarke Award shortlist?
But then, when Lionel Banda and later his son Joseph (they’re both descendants of Percy) begin and pursue researches into a vaccine for HIV, there’s a sort of seismic shift in the sensibility of the novel that acts not as a break in tone, but as a mechanism that transforms the very essence of what has gone before. You know that feeling you get when you’ve spent hours trying to assemble a piece of IKEA flatpack – all that ‘insert bolt A into bracket D’ stuff that never quite pans out as it is supposed to in the inadequate diagrams – and then suddenly you twist that little Allen key one more time and the whole thing slides into place and you have a piece of furniture? For me, reading The Old Drift really was like that, and to experience that paradigm-shift, in real-time, is going to count as one of my stand-out reading experiences of the year.
That HIV in the novel is referred to throughout simply as ‘the Virus’, and that so much of the discourse on immunology, a foreign subject to most of us until mere months ago yet now queasily familiar, is one more miraculous twist of the knife of perception:
Your beastly old tales know it all so well: we are Nature’s great superfluity. ‘What is this creature for?’ you still cry, raising your fist to the heavens. We pollinate little and feed very few, and no predator needs us to live… We’re an asterisk to Nature, a flaw, a digression, a footnote if ever there was one. We are not just an accident, but issue it too. .. Joseph himself has learned this the hard way: his vaccine, founded upon a mutation, has foundered on capital’s reef. But all sorts of things can slip through the cracks, especially genetically tweaked ones. Evolution formed the entirety of life using only one tool: the mistake…
The Old Drift ends up in the very near future. Climate change is a life-altering reality, new technologies are revolutionising the revolution of digital communication. The seeds of destruction sewn in the midst of the twentieth century – the displacement of peoples, the pillaging of natural resources, the inattention to the long-term environmental effects of human activity – are bearing bitter fruit. And yet, the silver seam of history continues. ‘I want to tell them that our minds are free, even if our hands are tied by poverty,’ insists Joseph’s half-brother Jacob, and it is this quality of endurance, of curiosity, of wild innovation, the determination to survive that most characterises the novel as a whole, that becomes its message.
The science writing, the existence of an overarching theme, the formal innovation, the propensity to surprise and to question assumptions, the imaginative reach, the view of time as infinitely flexible, the ability to postulate alternative futures and different worlds – these are some of the characteristics that help us to define what science fiction is and what it can do. These qualities are boundlessly present in The Old Drift. There are some books you receive as a gift, a light upon the way and this is one such. I feel lucky to have read it, inspired by a writer whose vision and reach seem set to take her wherever she wants to go. I can’t wait for her next novel.
Where does The Old Drift stand as regards my thoughts about the shortlist overall? Well, we still have one more book to go, so this will have to be a question of wait and see. In the meantime, I would encourage anyone with a passion for words, for indelible stories, for more inventive interpretations of the term ‘science fiction’ to read The Old Drift. Sink in, take your time. The book will reward you. At the very least, read Richard Lea’s excellent interview with Namwali Serpell here, or watch this fabulous online conversation between Serpell and Carmen Maria Machado here. We are so lucky to have writers of such talent and originality working in speculative fiction right now.
Had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic, today would have seen hundreds of readers, writers, fans and artists touching down in New Zealand to attend ConZealand, the 78th annual World Science Fiction Convention. ConZealand was early to announce its plan to move the convention online and all kudos to everyone involved with what must have been a mammoth effort to rethink the event at relatively short notice. I’m sure there will be those, though, who will nonetheless be mourning the convention that might have been. Not only for the chance to meet up with those friends, colleagues and enthusiasts who look to conventions as the natural way to reconnect with the community after months scribbling away at their desks, but for what would have been for many a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a country they may have been dreaming of visiting for years before they booked their air ticket.
2020 will be the first year in ages that many of us – including myself – will not have attended a single science fiction convention. In order to celebrate the virtual opening of this year’s Worldcon (not forgetting the fabulous fringe for those of us on European time!) and in looking hopefully forward to the resumption of at least some physical con-going next year, I decided I’d like to read and assess the six novella category finalists for this year’s Hugo Award. It’s interesting to note that the shortlist in the novel category just happens to have a fifty-percent overlap with the Clarke shortlist (more on this in my Clarke summing up around the end of August/beginning of September) so I’ll have at least some idea of the overall vibe there, as well. But it seems to me that the novella category – and this could be said equally of other awards that choose to celebrate the form – is a particularly interesting showcase for where the field might be at in any given year. Like the other short fiction categories, the novella shortlist will often include works by newer, less established writers. But whereas the short story and even the novelette categories tend to be less cohesive overall – the brevity of the form often dictates this – the novella provides a broader canvas, both in terms of who is competing and the variety and ambition of the work on offer.
This has definitely proved to be the case this year. What pleases me most about the 2020 Hugo novella shortlist is that all the works in contention have something positive to offer the reader, and consequently all feel as if they’ve earned their place on the ballot. For me, this group of novellas was satisfying and most of all fascinating to read because it does give a genuine sense of the variety, texture, and concerns of science fiction and fantasy in 2020. I’m sure there are other works that deserve equally to be here and perhaps more so – and if I’d read more shorter fiction in 2019 I would probably feel more frustrated by those exclusions. As things stand, the current ballot offers a solid overview, whilst providing me with the opportunity to read some of the novellas and writers I’d been meaning to catch up with in any case.
Looking at the ballot as a whole, it seems to me to fall into three pairings of two, with each pairing being representative of a particular trend. If I had to brand one of these three pairings least satisfying overall – or rather least interesting in terms of their candidacy for the Hugo Award – it would be that of Seanan McGuire and P. Djeli Clark, whose novellas might best be summarized as ‘old tropes, new takes’.
Seanan McGuire’s In An Absent Dream is the fourth instalment in her ‘Wayward Children’ series, exploring the limits of enchantment. I have not read the other novellas in the series, and in fact this is my first direct encounter with McGuire’s writing. The novella tells the story of Katherine Lundy, a child who finds herself at odds with other members of her family and with society’s expectations at large:
Most of the kids she went to school with couldn’t see past her father to her, and the few who tried never seemed to like what they found when they reached her. She was too opinionated and too invested in following the rules. She liked the company of adults too much, she spent too much time reading. She was everything they didn’t want to spend time with, and if it hadn’t been for her father and for the reluctance many of them felt to hit a girl, she would almost certainly have spent her weekends nursing black eyes and telling lies about where they’d come from.
It would be difficult for any SF fan or writer not to identify with at least some aspects of Lundy’s story, which is perhaps part of what has made this series so popular with readers. The writing is clear, inviting, professionally executed, all of which makes for a smooth and enjoyable ride, and I can imagine the Wayward Children series, with its youthful protagonists and sensitive introspection, being particularly popular among readers of YA. But there’s no getting away from the fact that In an Absent Dream feels like very familiar territory indeed. The ‘you can visit fairyland but there is always a price to pay’ narrative is one of the most enduringly popular story archetypes in fantasy, and McGuire’s effort here put me in mind of Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairytale and most especially J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. This was a perfectly pleasant, mildly engaging story but not in any way unusual and I cannot see that the conversation would be enhanced by it winning a Hugo.
P. Djeli Clark’s The Haunting of Tram Car 015 sees us visiting a steampunk version of Cairo in which airships, flying tram cars and sentient AIs or ‘boilerplate eunuchs’ are all an accustomed and unremarkable part of the scenery. The story takes place in 1910, against a background of political realignment, social upheaval, and magical incursions. Our two hapless heroes, agents Hamed and Onsi of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities – better known as the Spooky Boys – have been called in to investigate a mysterious and potentially dangerous haunting of one of the city’s semi-sentient tramcars. Initially suspected to be a djinn, the entity in question seems particularly disposed to attack women, and the agents are perplexed not only as to its intentions but where it might have come from:
Trafficking of mystical creatures into the country was a well known problem to the Ministry. But smugglers usually traded in things like unhatched rukh eggs or re’em calves – selling unwary collectors infant animals that quickly grew into unmanageable monsters. There’d been a craze over lightning birds two years back. Just five of the things had wreaked havoc for days: disabling trams, shutting down factory machines, and setting off the blackouts in the posher streets of Cairo now lined by electric lamps. The Ministry had to fly in a troupe of Sangoma diviners from Bambata City to recapture them. But Hamed had to admit that he couldn’t believe anyone would have willingly smuggled in the ghastly spirit that now resided in Tram 015. More likely, the thing had snuck into a shipment while still in Armenia.
The weird police procedural is now a familiar staple in science fiction and fantasy, with Daniel Jose Older, Ben Aaronovich and Charlie Stross being well known exponents. P. Djeli Clark brings both writing talent and a sense of humour to this popular subgenre, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is entertaining and meticulously plotted, with wry political and social subtext on almost every page. The problem with the weird procedural though is basically the same as the problem with realworld procedurals in that they tend inexorably towards the formulaic. Although imaginative and smartly written, as with the McGuire there is nothing new or particularly notable here – a great little story but with nothing in particular that makes it stand out as being Hugo-worthy. In fact, I found myself wishing it had been nominated for a crime/mystery writing award instead, just to shake things up more.
For my second impromptu pairing, I would point to the Ted Chiang and Becky Chambers novellas as being the two core science fiction titles on the shortlist, both exploring traditional science fictional topics in individual ways. I actually read the Chambers last year, mainly out of curiosity. I don’t particularly get on with Chambers’s Wayfarers series, but I’d heard that this was different and so was interested to try it. To Be Taught, if Fortunate turned out to be one of those pleasant surprises that crop up every once in a while – a book that ought never to have worked for me yet nonetheless did. The novella’s premise is simple, and familiar: a bunch of astronauts head off into deep space to explore strange new worlds and catalogue their discoveries for the purposes of more detailed and targeted exploration in the future. The crew are put into suspended animation between planet-stops, and at each new awakening they find Earth’s relationship to their mission subtly changing. With their resources finite, the crew will have a momentous decision to make: continue with their mission in spite of the cataclysmic disruptions that are taking place at home, or return to Earth and a future that will be massively circumscribed by political and environmental catastrophe?
I’m obsessed with natural history, and so the basic drive of this novella – going down to a planet and observing new life forms and environments – held my attention and kept me absorbed. I loved the book’s quietness, its characters’ steady commitment to the tasks they were performing. I enjoyed their professionalism, their lack of interest in conflict or dicking about – in this respect they were pretty much the precise opposite of the crew in The Last Astronaut. Not a massive amount happens in terms of overt drama and I liked that, too – in the same way I enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama. In fact I’d draw a comparison between these two reading experiences in that both of them reminded me strongly of how and why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place.
Should the Chambers win a Hugo? I wouldn’t mind at all if it did, but I’m tending towards the view that much as I enjoyed it, there are other novellas on the shortlist this year that have a stronger claim on the award.
Similarly with Ted Chiang’s novella. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom takes place in the near future, in a world where it has become technologically possible to communicate with parallel universes by means of a device called a prism. Prism users are able to speak with their ‘paraselves’, thus gaining insights into how they and their lives might have turned out had they taken different decisions. Using his trademark combination of thought experiment and character-driven narrative, Chiang examines the ramifications of such an invention, both on individual users and on society as a whole.
For me, Chiang is one of the finest modern exponents of ‘true’ ideas-based science fiction, with a clarity, complexity and directness of expression that few can match. You’ll never read a bad sentence from Chiang – and you’ll never find a sloppy thought process, either. The care and commitment he shows his art is a constant and continuing joy, as well as a reiteration of science fiction’s core values of innovation and intellectual engagement with a focus on ideas. That Chiang’s fiction is always emotionally as well as cognitively satisfying is doubly to its credit.
The only negative mark against this story with regard to its Hugo-worthiness is that it is ‘just’ another excellent Ted Chiang story. It does not break new ground for Chiang, in terms of either style or substance. We read it and love it without being particularly surprised by it, because this is Chiang, operating at the high level of excellence we have come to expect from him. With regard to the 2020 Hugo, I suspect he will end up being the victim of his own success.
Rivers Solomon was a finalist for the Astounding Award in 2018 and as I’ve not yet caught up with their debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, their novella The Deep was probably the work on this shortlist I was most keen to read. I’d already read a fair amount around the novella – this piece on how The Deep was born. for example, and so I already knew going in what the work was about. An innovative and exciting collaboration, The Deep draws its story from the mythos created by the electronica band Drexciya in the 1990s and further expanded by the experimental rap duo clipping. in their Hugo-nominated album Splendor and Misery.
‘SF is uniquely suited to address difficult political topics in any era, and Rivers is one of a handful of new writers that are going to drag our imaginations in the right direction,’ say clipping. in their afterword to The Deep. ‘Readers and listeners have before them three – let’s call them objects of study: the recorded oeuvre of Drexciya and its associated artwork and liner notes, the clipping. song ‘The Deep’ and Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep. We prefer to imagine each of these objects as artifacts – as primary sources – each showing a different angle on a world whose nature can never be observed in totality.’
Yetu is of the Wajinru, a mer-people evolved from the children of African women thrown overboard from slave ships while en route to the plantations. As the Wajinru’s designated Historian, Yetu is the keeper of memories too bitter and cruel to be properly assimilated by the mass of her people. Yet the strain of being an Historian is colossal, for Yetu herself and for those tasked with her care. In order to truly gain their freedom, the Wajinru will need to take on their past. Only in taking on their past, will they come to a proper understanding of their future.
In its themes of silencing and being silenced, freedom and captivity and the right to be considered human, The Deep has clear and fascinating echoes of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. I loved and appreciated these parallels, which cement The Deep firmly and irrevocably into the canon of fairytale literature. The Deep is so much more though than just another mermaid story, and I would argue that the work’s raw edge, its slightly unfinished quality adds greatly to its power,
My criticism would be that I think The Deep needed to be more fully realised in terms of both story and character. I wanted more – more detail around the women whose children became the original Wajinru, more history generally, more about Yetu. The Deep needed more space to unfold, and would have been still more effective as a full-length novel. Even so, this is a remarkable work, and I would urge you to read not only it, but also this excellent essay on ‘Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor and Misery‘ by Jonathan Hay.
And after you’ve read that, you can head back over to Vector to read this interview with Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone on the writing of This is How You Lose the Time War , the sixth and final novella on this year’s Hugo shortlist, the one I pair with The Deep for sheer originality and verve. This is How You Lose the Time War has been one of the most talked-about and award-nominated works of the year. As a reader who tends to resist jumping on bandwagons, this is the kind of hype that makes me instinctively recoil from a work, to both want and yet not want to read it. If I remember rightly (it’s only been a week but time can come to seem very dense when you’re trying to read six novellas as well as draft a novel) my personal push-pull around This is How You Lose the Time War was the reason I dreamed up this mini-project in the first place – to give myself an excuse to read the damn thing without feeling that I had capitulated to mere peer pressure.
Red and Blue are rival agents from alternate futures. Blue works for Garden, a world government based around ideals of environmental preservation and a humanity that remains true to its biological origins:
She notes the deep green of the trees. She measures the timing of their fall. She records the white of the sky, the bite of the wind. She remembers the names of the men she passes. (Most of them are men.) Ten years into deep cover, having joined the horde, proven her worth, and achieved the place for which she strove, she feels suited to this war.
Red works for the Agency, a mega-corporation that has taken humanity into a tech-based, post-human future where barriers of time, space and corporeality are of no account:
We grow in pods, our basic knowledge flashed in cohort by cohort, nutrient balance maintained by the gel bath, and there most of us stay, our minds flitting disembodied through the void from star to star. We live through remotes, explore through drones – the physical world but one of many, and uninteresting by comparison to most. Some do decant and wander, but they can sustain themselves for months on a charge, and there’s always a pod to go back to when you want it.
Ostensibly deadly enemies, Red and Blue discover ties of intellectual and spiritual kinship that run deeper than any allegiance to the governments that hire them, that seek to use them to bend the time-stream to their own ends. Communicating through encoded messages across the strands of deep time, they begin to fall in love, a relationship that will inevitably put their futures in danger, at both a personal and an interplanetary level. As their handlers become aware of their duplicity, will Red and Blue be forced to betray one another, or will they find a way to outrun time itself? This is How You Lose the Time War asks serious questions about the nature of power, the unavoidable link between unmitigated idealism and despotism, the toxic legacy of violence under any banner:
Red wins a battle between starfleets in the far future of Strand 2218. As the great Gallumfry lists planetward, raining escape pods, as battle stations wilt like flowers tossed into flame, as radio bands crackle triumph and swiftskimmers swoop after fleeing voidtrails, as guns speak their last arguments into mute space, she slips away. The triumph feels stale and swift. She used to love such fire. Now it only reminds her of who’s not there.
The moments in reading I cherish most are those moments in which my assumptions are proved to be wrong. When I change my mind about a book I previously disliked, or when I fall head over heels in love with a book I felt convinced I was going to hate. Reading This is How You Lose the Time War has been one of those moments. Reader, I loved it. What I loved most about it is the way it absolutely proves my theory that it’s not the material that maketh the masterpiece, so much as the way in which that material is put to use. The quality of execution, in other words. This is How You Lose the Time War takes many of the elements of contemporary, media-derived SFF – I get Doctor Who vibes from this, New Space Opera vibes, massive Killing Eve vibes – and raises them, through the power of language, of insight, of literary allusion, of formal innovation to the level of a classic in the making. The result is a work that feels utterly of the present moment, yet contains within it the depth of field, the knowingness and literary excellence that will enable it to stand the test of time.
There are moments in which you suddenly become aware that you are reading a work that is destined to become a landmark of the field. Bold, brilliant, and – yes, I cried – unashamedly moving, This is How You Lose the Time War is a one such, a stimulus to both heart and mind. It wins my vote for the Hugo, unreservedly.
Each time this shortlist gets announced, I find myself wondering why the Rathbones Folio Prize isn’t given more attention. Is it because the award was founded as a riposte to the Booker, or rather to the Booker’s sporadic tendency to succumb to popular pressure (and I’m sure we can all find examples) around which novels or which kind of novels should be considered? Is the Folio Prize’s unabashed pursuit of literary excellence seen as unfashionable or – and I can’t believe I’m using this word – elitist? Or is it something as banal as the prize organisers not being massively clued up on publicity? (Or not having a massive publicity budget?) Whatever it is, it’s a shame, because the Folio Prize has produced some of the most consistently interesting shortlists year on year.
The 2020 selection is better even than usual. Fiona Benson’s Vertigo and Ghost is a masterpiece. There can be no questioning that fact, no suggestion that the use of the word masterpiece is yet another instance of book world hype. Vertigo and Ghost will be being read in a hundred years’ time and hopefully long after. It’s won prizes already but it absolutely deserves this further accolade. Ben Lerner is so good it’s fashionable to hate him now. After having read the whole of the Adam Gordon trilogy virtually back-to-back towards the end of last year, I’ve been wondering whether Lerner will get the Booker nod, hoping of course that he will, preparing to feel unsurprised if he doesn’t. All the better then to see his third novel The Topeka School featuring here. (And yes of course the book can be criticised, but only at the level where you know you’re nitpicking. Lerner’s writing – his thought process – is so advanced that it doesn’t matter about the nitpicks, which I guess is what the Folio Prize is all about.)
How lovely to see Laura Cumming’s beautifully written investigative memoir On Chapel Sands recognised. Cumming’s art criticism is so consistently excellent and On Chapel Sands is a joy: understated, refined, powerful. It’s not had enough attention, in my view, and so my heart leaped when I saw it on the Folio shortlist. James Lasdun is another underappreciated writer. I read his memoir Give Me Everything You Have last year, and found it an uncomfortable book to read on many levels, yet once again the writing is so good, the approach so thoughtful and self-questioning, that it’s worth the discomfort, and shouldn’t all literature aim to be this self-exposing? I’m hoping Lasdun will find more readers as a result of this overdue recognition for a major prize.
I’ve not read Grand Union yet, but I did read two of Zadie Smith’s essay collections last year and found such joy in them. Smith is one of our most assured writers, no doubt about it, but – like Lasdun – she is also one of our most reflective and self-questioning. The piece in which Smith explores her decision to keep away from social media (because she believes it is essential that a writer retain the ‘freedom to be wrong’) should be read and at least considered by every writer. As with Lerner, Smith has to an extent reaped the anti-rewards of literary fame, which has meant a tailing-off of engaged interest in what she is actually writing. This shortlisting will hopefully encourage a generous measure of re-engagement.
Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. What can I say, except that it was a source of sadness and frustration to me, to see this important, formally innovative, searching novel dropped from both the Booker and the Women’s Prize at longlist stage last year (the Women’s Prize decision especially had me grinding my teeth). This fact alone might place Luiselli as my favourite for winning the Folio but we shall see. I have only read part of Constellations so far but the form of the book, the quality of thought and writing, makes Sinead Gleeson’s shortlisting a no-brainer and I’ll make sure I absorb her book in full before the year is out. Similarly, the Folio shortlisting for Azadeh Moaveni’s Guest House for Young Widows has put it back on my radar. Given the often-appalling discourse around Muslim women, not to mention the appalling (and illegal) treatment of Shamima Begum (could our government please remember that Begum was a child when she left Britain??? What she must have been through since can scarcely be imagined by those who have taken the decision to leave her stateless – that’s if they even tried) I would consider Moaveni’s book essential reading for everyone, now.
The Folio Prize shortlist is diverse in every sense of the word. It is also profound, and thoughtful, and interesting. If there is one quality – literary excellence aside – that could be said to unite these eight books it is that of being ruminative, of inviting a personal response. This desire, this ability, this courage to look inward even as we look outward, to make the political personal, is an approach I would hope to see more of on every prize list and it is inspiring, and a source of solace, to see it here.
I begin each reading year curious about which will be the first truly great book I stumble across and how long I’ll have to wait before that happens and this year I’m lucky: less than a month of 2020 has elapsed and I’ve already encountered Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier, his third novel, longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and as I’m turning the last page I’m wondering to myself how the judges could have had the hearts or minds to dismiss it from the running. It was a good longlist, I get that, a strong set of interesting books. Half of it had to be dispensed with, one way or another, but even so.
Night Boat to Tangier is not just a book about two Irish ex-gangsters. It’s a book about freedom and imprisonment, love (of course), exhaustion, despair, mental illness, the iron grip of history and personal trauma. Magic and folklore. Landscape, landscape and landscape. Poetry – because Night Boat to Tangier is an epic poem. If the definition – or a definition – of a work of art is a conceived artifact that is at one and the same time dreadfully specific yet utterly universal then Night Boat to Tangier is a work of art. (I keep thinking about John Banville, that quote of his just after he won the Booker about it being about time a work of art took the prize. I love it when writers come out with stuff they shouldn’t.)
Night Boat to Tangier fits wholly, sublimely into the song-tradition of Irish writing. But the feeling it gives me as I finish reading is – illogically, incongruously, absolutely – the same feeling I get reading or seeing a performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Barry’s interpolation of magical elements into his text is the capstone of genius and I am coming to think that Barry must be a magician. At the very least, he reminds us with every sentence why writing matters. A book to sear the heart and thrill the mind.
I’m thrilled to announce that La Fracture – the French-language edition of The Rift – has this past week been longlisted for two of France’s most prestigious and enduring literary prizes: the Prix Medicis, established in 1958 to recognise authors ‘whose fame does not yet match their talent’ and the Prix Femina, established in 1904 and decided each year by an exclusively female jury.
Glancing down the list of past recipients, I feel quite overwhelmed! This year’s longlists can be found here, and here. Finding myself in such company is surreal, to say the least.
I am incredibly pleased for my French publishers, Editions Tristram, who have been staunch and stalwart in their commitment to my work right from the beginning, and doubly indebted to my translator, Bernard Sigaud, without whom none of this would be happening.
They’re all amazing people and these longlist placings belong equally to them. Salute!
