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Category: Shadow Clarke 2018

Into the Sharke tank

With just a few hours remaining before the winner of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award is announced, here are my thoughts on the shortlist in a guest post I wrote for the Sharke blog at the ARU CSFF website. 

My initial reaction to this year’s Clarke Award shortlist was that it was one of the strongest in recent memory. After having read all six shortlisted titles that is an assertion I would stick by, even as my reasons for believing this have shifted, and my hunches as to the identity of the eventual winner have become much less certain.

I still find last year’s shortlist disappointing. In terms of the kinds of science fiction on offer it feels less diverse: dissimilar though the novels are in terms of subject matter and storyline, Occupy Me, After Atlas, A Closed and Common Orbit and Ninefox Gambit all occupy a similar territory, and one that is largely defined by its adherence to genre tropes and conventions. Although widely enjoyed and praised, the eventual winner The Underground Railroad still reads bland to me, both in terms of its literary styling and its use of science fiction. One year on, it seems clear that the most radical work on that list in terms of both literary ambition and engagement with the genre is Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, although it could be argued that the form it takes – some will call it a fix-up, others will style it a story cycle – leaves it lacking the punch of a unitary novel.

The strength of this year’s shortlist lies in its showcasing of different approaches to science fiction, an aspect that only becomes clearer as you become better acquainted with the novels themselves. Whether intentionally or not, this year’s jury have managed to present a genuine snapshot of science fiction as it is being written and read in 2018, an achievement that would in itself be enough to merit applause. That the shortlist includes books of such quality as to make it difficult to call an obvious winner is the icing on the cake. As I write this in the run-up to the final announcement, I have absolutely no idea who is going to win.

The way it appears to me, the Clarke judges have presented us with six works that each occupy a distinct and readily identifiable category of science fiction, each of which is worthy of study and further analysis. Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters represents a category that for want of a better title I will name the debut crossover. Recent years have shown a distinct upsurge in this category, which consists of novels published by mainstream imprints and aimed very much at a literary market, whose premise nonetheless makes use of solidly science fictional materials. These novels appear from nowhere and we often have no idea at the time of publication whether their (often young and hitherto unknown) authors will continue to interest themselves in speculative fiction as their careers progress. Recent examples in this category might also include Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (2012), The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood (2011), The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (2012) and Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2014). Novels in the crossover debut category will often display a poetic literary sensibility and focus on character that makes them immediately accessible across genre divides, yet it could also be said that in terms of their use of science fiction they tend to be conservative, offering variations on a set of usually dystopian tropes that in science fictional terms at least have long ceased to be new. The most significant thing about this category is its popularity, among both readers and writers, and what such popularity tells us about how science fictional ideas are increasingly coming to be accepted as suitable subjects for mainstream literature.

While being a perfectly competent novel in many respects, Gather the Daughters did not win me over, mainly because – as outlined in my earlier review – I found the premise itself to be so unbelievable. I did enjoy Melamed’s character work, and I hope she chooses to dig deeper into speculative fiction in future novels. I am somewhat at a loss as to why the Clarke judges decided to shortlist this particular book however, and as a representative of the debut crossover category, I would have preferred to see Naomi Booth’s Sealed, a shorter but much more affecting essay in catastrophe, with a genuine sense of urgency as well as great sense of place.

C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust could best be described as IMAX SF. Novels that fit this designation are those that can most easily trace their ancestry back to American ‘Golden Age’ traditions and that occupy most of the shelf space in the science fiction section of your local bookshop. Other Clarke Award winners and shortlistees that fall into this group are Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three (2011), Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space (2001) Richard Morgan’s Black Man (2007) Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2016). A propulsive, plot-heavy approach is usually central to these novels, which abide solidly by genre conventions and are happy within their confines. IMAX SF is unashamedly uninflected, not seeking to subvert genre conventions so much as joyfully endorse them. Language here is utilised as a tool for driving the story rather than an end in itself. These are the books that have done most – for good or for ill – to shape the landscape of popular media SF and be shaped by it in their turn.

As the largest sub-segment of science fiction, it is no surprise that IMAX SF shows the widest variation in quality, and I think it’s a shame that the Clarke jury selected Sea of Rust as their exemplar. As an adventure story pure and simple, it’s readable and entertaining, the kind of novel you might devour whole on a rainy Sunday afternoon before passing it on to your younger brother as an extra birthday present. As a serious contribution to the field, it has no significance whatsoever. Even from the first paragraphs I found I couldn’t help chuckling to myself over the implausibility of the point of view character, Brittle, as the narrative voice of an artificial intelligence. It’s so, so human – the human voice of a Hollywood screenwriter overdosing on exposition, to be precise. And as a citizen of the robot universe, just why would Brittle bother robo-splaining all this shit to me in any case? Come on, we can do better than this. If the jury wanted IMAX SF to be represented on the Clarke Award shortlist, why couldn’t they have gone for The Stars Are Legion, or Raven Stratagem, or New York 2130? Of all the novels on this year’s shortlist, Sea of Rust is the biggest mystery, and not in a good way. And to think the place could have gone to Gnomon instead…

Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia falls into that slippery category that I am going to term ‘of speculative interest’. Novels in this category are often referred to in genre circles as ‘literary SF’, a term I have come to distrust and dislike as being too catch-all and therefore inaccurate. What they have in common is that they are targeted firmly at the literary readership, contain little or no mention of science fiction in their marketing, and generally make use of speculative materials in a symbolic capacity rather than being a more hands-on exploration of science fictional ideas. Recent examples might include Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014), Richard Powers’s Generosity (2010), Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) and Jan Morris’s Hav (2006). Their writers usually originate from outside the science fiction conversation, but may – like Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell – end up joining it as their knowledge of and interest in science fiction becomes more central to their work.

Like Gary Wolfe in his review for the Sharke roundtable, I would argue that Spaceman of Bohemia is a strongly written, compelling novel that makes use of genre materials more as a binding agent for its true narrative and to little effect. In Spaceman’s witty and ironical protagonist Jakub we encounter a point of view – the son of a State-sponsored torturer – that is rarely encountered in post-Soviet literature or indeed anywhere. The chief problem with this novel is that the realworld segments – Jakub’s memories of his childhood and his grandparents, the difficulty of growing up in a world where the systems that supported him are suddenly withdrawn – are so well rendered, so compelling that the science fictional elements – Jakub’s mission to the Chopra cloud and his relationship with the spider-like alien – feel thin by comparison. We believe totally in Jakub, in his obsessing over his broken relationship with his girlfriend Lenka, in the home he is forced to leave in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We do not truly believe in or care about his space mission, and often find ourselves wondering if the book might have been better without it. I’m happy to see this novel on the Clarke Award shortlist because it reflects an open and flexible approach on the part of the jury, and of course because it is a good novel, but I don’t think it will win.

Omar El Akkad’s American War belongs to a category that is, if anything, even more slippery than ‘of speculative interest’ – indeed, some may claim it as an offshoot of that category and it’s so slippery I haven’t managed to come up with a name for it yet other than contemporary parable. American War is a novel that makes strong and overt use of speculative materials, yet is not truly interested in questions around the materials themselves. Other notable examples of science fiction as parable would include Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and James Smythe’s The Testimony (2011), novels in which a science fictional element functions primarily as a gimmick to enable a particular premise. American War is more overtly science fictional than any of these, yet I found it disappointing for similar reasons. In his eagerness to showcase his thesis, El Akkad is overly wedded to his parable template, not fluid enough in his approach to genre to allow his characters proper freedom of movement within its confines. In some ways, American War reads more like an essay than a novel. Though well written, it lacks something in personality, and could date very quickly. As regards the Clarke Award, American War does provide plenty of material for discussion and I still think it’s a contender.

The category into which Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time most naturally fits is arguably the most interesting, being as it is the intellectual engine room of science fiction, the category in which new ideas and new approaches most frequently spark to life. I’m going to call it the New New Wave, in honour of the British tradition of science fiction not as a pulp commodity but as a literature of ideas, as pioneered by Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells. Recent and notable New New Wave novels would include Dave Hutchinson’s ‘Europe’ sequence (2015-2018), Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (2015), Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (2003), Matthew de Abaitua’s If Then (2015), Nicola Griffiths’s Ammonite (1993), Paul McAuley’s Fairyland (1995) and Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent (2013). I would stress that there is no requirement on New New Wave authors to be British, and one could point equally to Nick Wood’s Azanian Bridges (2016), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2013), Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station (2016) Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium (2014) or anything by Ted Chiang as valuable exemplars of this strand of SF. New New Wave books are characterised above all by their interrogative nature, their knowledge of the speculative genres and willingness to be engaged with them – in a word, they are inside jobs. Another adjective that might be applied is progressive, and many New New Wave writers adopt radical approaches in terms of form, language, subject matter, social and political commentary and sometimes all four. I have always been of the opinion that this is the kind of science fiction that the Clarke Award should be seeking out and promoting, and I was delighted to see Dreams Before the Start of Time turn up on the shortlist for this reason.

With her three fine novels to date, Anne Charnock has embedded herself firmly at the heart of the New New Wave tradition. Using clear, declarative language and a character-based approach, Charnock engages directly and with a palpable sense of curiosity with those ideas that form the building blocks of contemporary SF: human reproduction, gender and sexuality, artificial intelligence (anyone curious about how an AI might actually think and speak should give Sea of Rust a miss and skip straight to Charnock’s PKD-Award-shortlisted A Calculated Life), genetics, robotic technology and climate change. Her novels are understated but deeply felt, and she is not afraid to ask the reader to step into the shoes of her characters: if this happened, what would you do? Rather in the manner of James Bradley’s Clade, Dreams Before the Start of Time follows the stories of one family over a number of decades, unravelling the relationships that bind them even as it asks searching questions about the possible futures we might be facing. As a novel it is astute, sensitive and thought provoking and one senses that Charnock’s best work is still very much in the making.

My final category is the modern classic. These are novels that stand a realistic chance of still being read generations from now, written from the heart of SF and yet not slaves to it, identifying a major trend or theme and exemplifying it with literary flair. A modern classic is not necessarily immediately identifiable. Some books – especially complex books – take time to be recognised and it may sometimes be years before we see them for the masterpieces they are. Modern classics associated with the Clarke – note that not all of them won it – would have to include China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993), Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993),Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Chip Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1986), Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden (1989), Ian MacDonald’s The Dervish House (2010), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), M. John Harrison’s Light (2002), and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). Perhaps the most interesting thing about this category is that a modern classic may originate from any of the other five categories.

Of all the novels on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne seems the most likely to earn its place as a modern classic. There is a beauty and simplicity in its manner of storytelling that makes it seem as if the book has always existed. That it will be read and enjoyed for many years to come is not in question. Undaunted by orthodoxies and unbothered by rules, VanderMeer’s approach to science fiction is as wayward as it is inventive, the mark of the true original. Yet VanderMeer is also telling us something important about our world, about the dangers and repercussions of human impact on the natural environment, about technology’s unpredictable impact on humans. As well as being superbly achieved and notable as literature, VanderMeer’s work is also important as science fiction. In its immediacy, its accessibility and its aesthetic beauty, Borne acts as a kind of summary statement of the author’s work to date and it is perhaps fitting that this is the novel that has finally won Jeff VanderMeer a place on the Clarke Award shortlist.

Better late than never, I say.

This is the first time for some years that I am not able to be present at the Clarke Award ceremony. I’ll be following the announcement online though, rest assured. I know which book I think should win, I know which book I want to win. I await the outcome of the judges’ deliberations with eagerness and great curiosity.

Nice one!

The shortlist for the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award was announced by Tom Hunter at Sci-Fi London at midday today, and what an interesting and delightfully surprising shortlist it is!

The only one of the six I actively predicted might be on there is Omar El Akkad’s alternate-world civil war novel American War.  Though the novel didn’t entirely work for me personally, there’s never been any doubt in my mind that this is exactly the kind of book the Clarke should be noticing. Well crafted and passionately told, you could discuss American War all day and still not get to the end of it. I’m keen to see what other people think.

Gather the Daughters slipped under my radar rather, as it was published after the Sharke had run its course last year and perhaps because the central conceit – which reminds me a little of Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys – seemed over-familiar. But a highly positive review from the brilliant Sarah Moss (others have compared it with Emma Cline’s The Girls, which is also a plus factor) leaves me insatiably curious about it and happy to see this somewhat under-exposed book brought to wider notice.

I’ve heard nothing but positive things about Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia and it’s fantastic to see some Eastern European SF on the Clarke Award shortlist. I haven’t read Borne yet, but conversely that’s probably because I know in advance I’ll always find something to fascinate and inspire me in anything Jeff VanderMeer writes. C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust would appear to be more towards the centre of SF than would normally attract me, but its premise sounds meaty and original and it’s an interesting addition to the shortlist.

Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time is without a doubt the book I am personally most thrilled to see on the shortlist. I’ve long been saying that Anne’s particular brand of science fiction – thoughtful and thought–provoking, human, strongly contemporary and beautifully crafted – is exactly the kind of writing we need to be seeing more of in British SF, and to have the jury pick out Dreams is something of a milestone. Congratulations, Anne!

The most surprising omission, for me, would have to be Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon, possibly the most ambitious science fiction novel of 2017 and it’s a shame that we won’t be seeing it discussed within the context of the Clarke. However, with this year’s submissions list containing so many high-quality novels, it’s inevitable that some would have to fall by the wayside. This is the best Clarke Award shortlist in years: diverse, engaging, surprising, packed with literary excellence. Most importantly of all, it showcases a wide variety of science fiction through differing interpretations of what SF is and what SF is capable of doing, providing a well focused snapshot of where science fiction was at in 2017.

Congratulations to all the shortlisted writers, and to this year’s jury for making such intelligent and unpredictable choices. At last – something for the Sharkes to well and truly get their teeth into!

The starting gun

[Disclaimer: for the purposes of this essay, I am writing as if my own novel, The Rift, were not on the list.]

The 2018 Clarke Award submissions list is finally here! The number of books is slightly up on last year, with non-genre imprints – I’m delighted to see – making a particularly good showing. As always, there are any number of fascinating shortlists lurking amongst those 108 titles, with each combination highlighting a different and specific approach to genre. What such selections might theoretically reveal about individual critical standpoints – what constitutes science fiction and its current direction of travel – is what makes submissions list time so exciting and intriguing for me. While we must assume that the Clarke jury have already decided upon the six novels that will make up the official Clarke Award shortlist, for the Shadow Clarke jury, today is just the beginning. Even as I write this, they will be scanning the list intently, trying to decide which titles they hope will appear on the official shortlist, which they would most like to see discussed within the context of science fiction now.

I’m strictly an onlooker in the Sharke process this year – but of course that doesn’t stop me from wondering what I would pick! I’ve actually read more of the submitted titles in advance this time around, and there are even more on the list that I want to read. It’s interesting what hindsight will do. Looking at my choices from last year, it is clear to see that I made a conscious decision to go for a personal shortlist made up of titles from genre and mainstream literary imprints in equal proportions – in an attempt to curb my own biases, no doubt. If I had the choice again, and since having read the entire Sharke preference pool and then some, I would pick Don DeLillo’s Zero K, M. Suddain’s Hunters & Collectors, Joanna Kavenna’s A Field Guide to Reality, Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground, Catherynne Valente’s Radiance, and Aliya Whiteley’s The Arrival of Missives – all books that live in the memory in spite of any imperfections they may carry. My personal winner would still be Infinite Ground, a novel that even now is influencing my thinking, not just about science fiction but about the project and purpose of fiction in general.

In this revisionist state of mind, I’m going to play devil’s advocate this year and pick the shortlist I most want to see, a shortlist I know doesn’t stand a hope of actually happening – in fact I’d go so far as to say I’d be surprised if even one of these titles ended up on the official shortlist – but that best expresses my own current hopes and desires for science fiction literature. The reader might infer from this list that I have come to not give a damn about genre and they might well be correct, which is not to say that I don’t continue to believe that speculation in literature –  whether that be in the matter of subject, form or language – is its most radical expression.

My personal preferred shortlist is as follows:

H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker. This choice won’t come as any surprise to anyone who reads my blog. I have long believed that Barker is one of Britain’s most interesting and important writers. For me, H(A)PPY was a magical and deeply unsettling reading experience, a book that will last and – most crucially – would deliver an even richer experience on rereading. As science fiction it is provocative and new, making use of established concepts to create a narrative whose originality lies not so much in its synopsis as in its execution.

Sealed by Naomi Booth. I’ve been hearing such great things about this and Booth’s novella, The Lost Art of Sinking, was excellent, beautifully written and tautly imagined. Going by the online preview, Sealed is even better, playing with themes similar to those that appear in Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From but with a harder edge. I liked the Hunter and it has stayed with me but I think I’m going to admire Sealed even more.

Memory and Straw by Angus Peter Campbell. ‘I know now that my ancestors had other means of moving through time and space, and the more I visit them the simpler it becomes. For who would not want to fly across the world on a wisp of straw, and make love to a fairy woman with hair as red as the sunset?’ I will be writing in greater detail about this book in due course. Angus Peter Campbell is a poet as well as a prose writer, as every page of this short novel about time, place and memory amply demonstrates. Campbell’s writing is pure imagination, made word.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. The big beast on this list in more ways than one! At more than 700 pages in length, Gnomon requires some commitment, but the reader will find that commitment amply rewarded. Freedom, information, truth – Harkaway paints big themes across a sprawling canvas in what is without doubt his most strongly achieved and important novel to date. The truly odd thing about Gnomon is how much in common it has with H(A)PPY in terms of its subject matter and what it chooses to do with it, though comparing the two might prove as difficult, if I may continue with the art analogy for just a moment, as comparing Vermeer’s The Lacemaker with Delacroix’s The Raft of the Medusa. My outright preferred Clarke winner this year would be either H(A)PPY or Gnomon, and I can see arguments for choosing either. To ignore them both would be a serious failure of nerve and imagination.

Euphoria by Heinz Helle. As far from Gnomon in terms of scope as it is possible to get, Helle’s novel focuses closely on a small group of friends at the dawn of an unexplained apocalypse. The language is terse, fractured, a shattered mirror to what is going on within the narrative. With a distinctly European accent on existential crisis, Euphoria was one of my favourite books of 2017 and one I will definitely be revisiting.

Black Wave by Michelle Tea. Billed as a ‘countercultural apocalypse’, this was on my list of books to read with the Clarke in mind in the immediate aftermath of last year’s award. I have only just got round to it, but I am loving it so far and it seems like exactly the kind of novel – existential, metafictional – the Clarke should be taking notice of, not to mention the Goldsmiths. The language alone – direct, abrasive, provocative – qualifies it for a place on my preferred shortlist in and of itself.

Very narrowly missing my cut are The White City by Roma Tearne – the writing is so wonderful that if I’d actually read the whole of this book at this stage then I might well have found it edging out one of the others – and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, which is a vitally important text right now and a strong novel. Ask me tomorrow and you might find either or both of these on my list, and I’d be more than delighted to see the jury select them.

In my column for this month’s Interzone, I examined the reasons why science fiction might have found itself considerably better off had Hugo Gernsback never ‘invented’ the science fiction genre. Before Gernsback, speculative conceits floated freely in the mainstream of literature alongside every other kind of idea: political, social, metaphysical, confessional. Now more than ever, the ideas that for decades found themselves confined to the science fiction ghetto have been leaking out into the broader river of world literature, which – now more than ever – is where they belong. For proof of my thesis – that there is no such thing as ‘science fiction’, only books that make use of speculative ideas – look no further than the six (or indeed eight!) very different, challenging and original books above. If science fiction is truly to have a future, then this is it.

H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time so I’m just going to say it: if Nicola Barker were a man, she would immediately become Significant, hailed as one of most exciting and innovative British writers of the postmodern era. As things stand, she is more usually sidelined into ‘quirky’, ‘whimsical’, ‘difficult’ or ‘depressing’. She has ‘a devoted cult following’, of course she does, and anyway, she was shortlisted for the Booker, so what does she have to moan about?

Why then is she still not discussed alongside Pynchon, Foer, Amis, Rushdie or even Mitchell? Barker’s oeuvre is remarkable in its depth of field, its social comment, its capacity for formal innovation. Her dialogue is incisive and brilliantly funny. The stories she tells offer an often excoriating commentary on the way we live now. Yet Barker is only ever discussed as an anomaly, a domestic comedian, an acquired taste. Why is this? The answer seems more depressingly clear with each new novel: women writers (still) aren’t expected to do this kind of stuff, so the narrative they get written into becomes subtly twisted.

“I know that piece.” The Stranger – Savannah – nodded towards ****, but his eyes remained fixed on me. “There are three parts to it. The Prelude was written long after the other two movements, but now it sits at the start. It is wistful, melancholy. There are bells ringing throughout. And an organ plays Bach. The composer – Augustin Barrios – was of indigenous blood. A great Romantic. A genius.”

“He died, in poverty, of syphilis,” **** sneered. “What possible romance is there in that?”

Nicola Barker’s new novel H(A)PPY is remarkable in many ways.  The dystopia it portrays is all the more chilling because it is presented as a utopia: there are no mass killings, no persecution, no banned books. All that is understood to be in the past. The social coercion that exists – to be perfect, to be happy, to discard the depressing march of history in favour of universal progress – exists because it has been chosen, because people accede to it willingly. No one is hungry, confused or in need. For Mira A, her desire to find out about a particular figure from the past – the Paraguayan musician and composer Augustin Barrios – is dangerous only in that it throws her preconceptions – her notion of happiness – into doubt. Like turning back the corner of a rug to reveal the dirty floor beneath, one small revelation can lead to a greater, more far reaching revelation that has huge implications. So it is for Mira A. So it is with H(A)PPY. So it is for the question over the reception of Barker’s writing.

In H(A)PPY, even the choice of the guitarist as hero is significant. The guitar has often been looked down upon as a folk instrument, an instrument lacking in subtlety, flexibility or repertoire, insignificant precisely because of its accessibility. The great novels of music have tended to place their focus upon the piano or the violin – glamorous and complicated, the instruments of record for tortured, glamorous, misunderstood males. Barker’s choice of the guitar – available to everyone, easily portable, a ready accompaniment and partner to the human voice, the natural instrument of protest – is in itself an act of rebellion, a way of smuggling subversive ideas between the cracks of cultural orthodoxy.

I scowl and turn again to the native – the performer – the patriot – the humiliation – the farce. Which of these two should I address? I wonder. Which do I prefer? Both are unreal. Both have been so carefully, so painstakingly constructed. Can these two – the one so civilised, so polite, so careful: the other so fearless and ridiculous and romantic – be merely one entity? Is that feasible? How might I conceivably hope to address them when I am not even able to unite them successfully within my own consciousness.

The native Barrios sits down on a pew and begins to play. The kneeling Barrios covers his ears. 

Here Barker illuminates the duality of Barrios, a natural genius forced to adopt Western models of excellence in order to be taken seriously as a composer, whilst simultaneously being driven to perform his nationality in order to enhance his stage persona. As she is drawn to examine Barrios’s inner conflict in greater depth, so Mira A discovers a similarly corrosive dichotomy within herself.

H(A)PPY addresses Barker’s recurring concerns – class, celebrity, capitalism, the slippery, explosive power of the written word – whilst also exploring questions of power inequalities between citizens and state, Western nations and indigenous peoples. I found in H(A)PPY some of the same quietly oppressive quality that characterises Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka, a chilling vision of the alternate near future that is all the more effective for being so understated.

As science fiction, H(A)PPY is brilliant: inventive and thought provoking and unlike anything you’ll have read so far this year. In the games it plays with scrambled fonts and typographic art, you will probably be reminded of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, always a good thing in my book. Barker recommends reading H(A)PPY whilst listening to the music of Barrios, a ploy some might dismiss as a gimmick but that I would go along with, one hundred percent. In fact it’s a shame the publisher couldn’t have gone the extra mile and included a CD recording tucked into the back flap. Luckily you don’t have to search far to find what you’re looking for. As a novel about music, H(A)PPY is one of the most imaginative and powerful I’ve ever read.

In many ways, this is the novel I wanted Joanna Kavenna’s A Field Guide to Reality to be. H(A)PPY is more successful for me as science fiction through being more explicit, and Barker’s writing about Augustin Barrios was never not going to resonate. I love this book. I think Nicola Barker is a genius. Should H(A)PPY end up on the Clarke shortlist in 2018? Hell, yes.

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