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The Weight of History

I’ve been thinking for much of this week about a recent essay in Strange Horizons, ‘Weight of History’ by Renay, in which she grapples with the question of what it is that makes a science fiction fan and, more precisely, what is it that a fan should have to know about science fiction. Is there such a thing as ‘the science fiction canon’ and if there is, who gets to say what’s in it? How much of it, if any, do you need to be familiar with before you can legitimately call yourself a fan of SF?SpecFic.2014

I’ve been enjoying Renay’s posts ever since she became a regular columnist at Strange Horizons and together with Shaun Duke she’s just finished putting together a particularly imaginative table of contents for Speculative Fiction 2014, an overview of online SFF criticism. I love the way Renay writes, the passion and open-mindedness of her approach. She is articulate, thoughtful and inclusive, and this essay in particular moved me because although I have a keen interest in science fiction history I often find myself dismayed by the attitudes on display in some of the more, shall we say entrenched segments of fandom, attitudes which seem to be more about a preening display of knowledge (in the manner of a peacock displaying its tail feathers) than the enthusiastic sharing and communication of love for science fiction literature. “How you’re introduced to something matters a lot,” writes Renay, “and if your introduction is a list of decades’ worth of writing and history that you’re subtly shamed for not knowing, that’s going to leave a mark.” Of course it is. A large part of the reason I’m writing this now is because of the frustration and anger I feel, that anyone should be made to feel they don’t know enough of the (frequently excruciating) backlist to be able to make a valid or useful contribution to the conversation.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Renay’s essay is the feeling she describes as the ‘cultural pressure to read stories by men’:

It’s hard to really feel dedicated to a communal storytelling space when the history of it is so steeped in one perspective that people outside the genre only see what floats to the top—those classics by men that everyone knows and that a quick google will help you find. And so that very limited vision is regurgitated over and over, pressing at you, reminding you there’s a history you don’t know and that not knowing it might be considered a failing.

So what exactly is going on here? Are the issues of historicity and sexism distinct, or are they inextricably a part of the same problem? I think it’s worthwhile to note here that SF is by no means alone in having this kind of baggage. In the exalted realm of mainstream literary fiction, ‘the canon’ is if anything even more restrictive, the power bases and cabals even more entrenched and aggressively protective of territory. From this we might infer that the canon as it currently operates within the field of science fiction is an almost entirely artificial construct, its main purpose to act as a kind of barrier to more progressive or divergent opinion: you don’t like our canon, we don’t want you in our discussion, end of.

heinlein moon is a harsh mistressAt the same time, nothing exists in a vacuum and history happened. We need to study history, to an extent, to come to a proper understanding of the present. Is it not particularly important that we make ourselves aware of the least savoury aspects of that history in order for it not to be perpetuated?

All interesting questions, and questions that got me thinking about my own experience as a science fiction reader. How did I first come to the genre, and what did I find there? What do I think of the canon, then and now?

I was an obsessive reader from a young age but I honestly cannot say what first brought me to science fiction. My mum reads a lot, and quite widely, but to this day she has no interest in science fiction in any medium (she likes my stuff, by and large, but is still less than comfortable with any of its more overt horror or fantasy elements). My dad prefers spy stories and thrillers. So aside from a couple of Penguin edition John Wyndham novels (which needless to say I devoured avidly as soon as I was old enough to read them) there was no science fiction or fantasy on the shelves in our house.

Perhaps these things are hardwired into our DNA somehow, because I imprinted on Doctor Who from the first episode I saw (at the age of six) and by the time I was old enough to go to the library by myself I was heading straight for the science fiction section, a habit that continued pretty much until I went to university.

The SF section in our local library consisted almost entirely of the now-gollancz best sffamous Gollancz ‘yellowjackets’ – very useful for anyone new to the genre because the books were so instantly recognisable. I used to browse the section happily for hours, eagerly looking for titles I’d not seen yet and knowing in advance that I’d be taking away stories crammed with all the stuff I was most into: weirdness, aliens, space travel, time travel, defiant rebels and renegade scientists, governments gone bad, deadly plagues, ideas and images and landscapes that were new to me and yet already so much ‘my thing’.

I read a lot of Golden Age science fiction, back in the day. I know I read quite a bit of Heinlein, shedloads of Asimov, Frederick Pohl was a particular favourite. I read Dune, I adored the ironical tone of Bob Shaw and Ian Watson – I read everything by Ian Watson I could get my hands on, although at the time I didn’t know he was British, I just presumed he and Shaw were American, like all the others. I loved anything dystopian or post-apoc – there was no bespoke YA back then, so after I’d read Brave New World and 1984 a couple of times I dug around and found bizarre and now totally forgotten books like Arthur Herzog’s Heat and IQ83 (‘Beans, beans, good for your heart…’) and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day. I had an inexplicable fondness for a novel by Edmund Cooper called The Tenth Planet, which I read at least five times. There was nothing systematic about my reading. I had no idea really that there was a semi-cohesive genre called science fiction that people were fans of or had conversations about, much less argued and started decades-long feuds over. What did I know? I just loved reading it.

You may have noticed that none of the above titles are by women. Did I avoid SF by women? Did I not like SF by women? Nope. There just wasn’t any on the shelves for me to read. At some point during my early teens I came across Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books and discovered a sense of wonder and identification that felt quite different from anything I’d found in any of the other, male-dominated science fiction I’d been reading. But I did not identify Le Guin with the Gollancz yellowjackets, and I had no idea she’d written other novels. The experience of reading Earthsea felt very private, a one-off. I did not explore further because I did not know how. (It’s sometimes difficult to remember how much harder it was before the internet, especially for young people, to zone in on the information they needed. Mostly you’d rely on teachers, or what was on the library shelves – if it wasn’t there it didn’t exist.)

I did not notice the lack of science fiction novels by women. Questions like this were never discussed, least of all in school. It didn’t bother me. I was too busy reading. I was certainly aware that many of the female characters in the science fiction I was reading did not appeal to me but I didn’t let that bother me overmuch either – I found sympathetic favourites among the male protagonists instead.

This is exactly how cycles of patriarchal reinforcement work, of course. But I didn’t know that then.

penguin sf omnibusI suppose the first time I started to become aware of science fiction as ‘different’ from other literature, a literature that not everyone automatically liked or understood came when my ‘O’ Level English class was assigned The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus as one of our set texts (we had an amazing teacher, Jean Stupple, who was studying for her MA at the time and was passionate about literature in all its aspects – I owe my whole approach to twentieth century poetry to her), I was rubbing my hands in glee – I couldn’t wait to get stuck into that great big book of science fiction stories – and felt completely bemused when, as it turned out, pretty much half the class didn’t like what they read. Some people felt the stories weren’t ‘serious’ or that they were ‘weird’. Others clearly felt confused about how they should begin to write about them. Quite a few of my classmates opted out of the book and chose another text instead.

I retain a huge fondness for the Penguin Omnibus because it was such a big deal to me at the time. There are stories in it I still remember as being rather good (‘Lot’ by Ward Moore, ‘The End of Summer’ by Algis Budrys, ‘The Tunnel Under the World’ by Frederik Pohl, ‘The Country of the Kind’ by Damon Knight) and other curiosities that I’ll always remember because I read them here first (‘Grandpa’ by James H. Schmitz, ‘The Greater Thing’ by Tom Godwin, ‘Skirmish’ by Clifford Simak). But here’s the thing: looking again at that table of contents this week, I find it utterly heartbreaking to see and to realise, thirty years after I first encountered the book, that out of the thirty-six stories presented, only one (‘The Snowball Effect’ by Katherine MacLean) is by a woman.

The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus was assembled from the three Penguin science fiction anthologies edited by Brian Aldiss in the early 1960s and containing stories written over a roughly twenty-year period between 1941 and 1962. It was compiled under the guiding principle of presenting an overview of where science fiction was at, what had been achieved, who was writing the most interesting and original and intelligent work. A book to demonstrate to the uninitiated reader, maybe, why they should consider reading science fiction. Clearly for Aldiss at that time, the most intelligent, original and interesting science fiction was being written almost exclusively by men. Clearly it did not matter to him in the least that his ‘comprehensive’ omnibus excluded women writers. I’d be tempted to say it almost looks like a point of principle, the imbalance is so stark, only I don’t believe that’s the case. I think it is more likely that the imbalance happened because Aldiss simply did not notice it, or consider it to be important.

This too is heartbreaking to me. Seeing women’s writing, women’s contribution to science fiction erased in this way – that it is erased unintentionally almost makes it worse – makes me feel furious, and tired, and sad all at once. What we have in the Penguin Omnibus, I see now, is ‘the canon’ writ large, the closed circle being perpetuated, ever onward. Given the writers from that time period Aldiss could have included – C.L. Moore, L. Taylor Hansen, Carol Emshwiller, Kit Reed, Zenna Henderson, Leigh Brackett, Kate Wilhelm, Andre Norton, Naomi Mitchison to name but a handful – had he been bothered or so inclined to seek them out, makes this all the more galling. The inclusion of writers like these would have shifted the tone and emphasis of the anthology substantially towards a more fully formed, multi-faceted vision of the genre, perhaps attracting more readers, more women readers even towards SF. Maybe some of these women, seeing themselves reflected in the table of contents, might even – shock, horror! – have thought about writing some science fiction themselves…

The tired, establishment rejoinder to such observations is that we shouldn’t let issues of gender affect our choice of the best stories. The obvious flaw in that argument is how do we know we’re getting anything like the best stories, if the criteria for selection are pre-set and those who are doing the selecting either refuse or can’t be arsed to look beyond them? I think one of the biggest problems for people unfamiliar with or uneasy about the rhetoric surrounding questions of industry or cultural bias occurs at a level of basic misunderstanding. ‘Where are the active impediments to women writing, submitting, publishing?’ they ask. ‘Where are the editors and commentators and critics deviously working to keep women out of science fiction?’ In the majority of cases, of course, such active impediments and devious editors do not exist, or at least have not existed for some time. No one is arguing that they do. That does not mean that there is not a problem. The problem is systemic, a system of passive reinforcement of the status quo that is so long and deeply established that for large numbers of people – both men and women – living inside it, it is invisible. You only have to look at this sample list of ‘The Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books’ to see how effectively the same-old same-old continues to be given the nod at a grassroots level. Unlike the Penguin Omnibus from the 1960s, this selection was compiled just five years ago. Of the hundred books listed, only twelve women writers. Surely even those who insist there isn’t a problem can see that’s pathetic? That is far from the only list with a similar imbalance, either – just Google and see. Some of them are even worse.

So, getting back to Renay’s original conundrum: is there a continuing cultural pressure to read stories by men, and if there is, what should we do about it?

I think we’ve established that the answer to the first part of the question is yes there is, if only because the vast majority of so-called canonical science fiction that is presented for us to read – in anthologies, in SF Masterworks series, in best-of lists – is by men.  As readers we naturally gravitate towards what is readily available, the names made familiar by repetition, the books people keep insisting that we need to read. In an area where we might feel a bit at sea and especially in need of guidance – Golden Age science fiction, for example – that effect will be doubled. Which is exactly how the system perpetuates itself.

As for what to do, there are various approaches. One of the comments on Renay’s post, from Tansy Rayner Roberts, provides both a superb analysis of the problem and a brilliant solution:

The thing is, the terrible/wonderful truth, is that you can’t catch up. No one can. What you also can’t do is compete on “contextualised reading” because you can’t replicate the experiences that many older SF fans have in common. You can never go back and read Heinlein in the 1970’s or Asimov as a twelve year old (boy) if they didn’t do it already. Just like my elder daughter read Harry Potter differently to me, and my younger daughter will read it differently agains.

But this LITERAL IMPOSSIBILITY to have the same experience with someone else’s canon is quite freeing because you get to make your own history. Your own essential canon. And if you really want “proper context” well, that’s what history books are for.

I can highly recommend finding your own classics. For every “but have you read Heinlein” or “Asimov had a great female character,” you can holler back with “But have you read all of Joanna Russ? I would tackle Heinlein but I’m starting with Delaney. I TRUMP YOU OCTAVIA BUTLER.”

I absolutely love this idea of finding your own classics, of making your own canon, if you will. I have become so dissatisfied with the popular, male-biased consensus view of science fiction history that I’m more than ever inclined to spend extra time researching those lesser known but equally important works that tell a different story of what science fiction is about and where it came from. Or that alter our perspective on the story as it stands. Or that simply give us some other names to think about, for God’s sake. (I’m not massive on Golden Age SF in any case but I’m particularly interested in what started happening with women and science fiction in the 1970s – see Jeanne Gomoll.)

As we each find our own classics, so we all make our own science fiction. How great is that? If someone – a new reader or writer – were to ask me whether they needed to read the canon to be taken seriously I’d say absolutely not (and go tell the person who told you otherwise to STFU). The truth is that all the tropes of Golden Age SF will be familiar to you already – from games, from movies, from the cultural air that you breathe without even thinking about it. In a very real sense, you won’t be missing anything, and so if you can’t stomach the thought of wading through Heinlein or Herbert then don’t. You’d be far better off expending your time in reading science fiction that does inspire your interest, that speaks to you now and is relevant to the genre as it is evolving. Anyone who tells you you need to have read Arthur C. Clarke before you can form an opinion on Jennifer Marie Brissett is just plain wrong. (Those people won’t be reading Brissett anyway, they’ll be too busy getting stuck into David Brin or Greg Bear, ha ha.) In a very real sense, life is too short.elysium.jmb

On the other hand, if you are genuinely interested in investigating how we got here from there, then there should be nothing to stop you sampling some of the Golden Age canon, even if simply out of morbid curiosity. Personally I find aspects of the canon fascinating. Very little of it is great literature – I frequently find myself dipping into something I might have read thirty years ago, only to give up in despair after a chapter or two, wondering what on Earth I used to see in this stuff first time round. I think I’d be right in saying that the only works that have made it into my personal canon from those early Gollancz yellowjacket days are the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic and Keith Roberts’s Pavane, both of which I’ve read at least three times since and so can confirm they hold up magnificently. But I love the SF conversation, the SF argument. I like knowing what’s in the canon so I can mess with it a bit. If anyone asked me where would be a good place to start with old school science fiction, I’d say they could do worse than to take a look at The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus. It’s a fascinating overview, both because and in spite of the fact that it’s so flawed. Also, short stories are going to take much less of your time than novels. You can learn a lot by reading anthologies, from any period. Much more fun than slogging your way through The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. (In fact in this case I’d say just…don’t.)

triffids.wyndhamAs for my own science fiction, what does that look like? I think I can safely say that my time with Heinlein and Asimov is over now, although I will probably have a go at rereading Clarke at some point. In spite of their faults, I am always going to love and cherish the works of John Wyndham because they’re a part of who I am as a reader and as a writer (Wyndham made a real effort with his female characters too, which I like to think isn’t a coincidence). I tend to think of the eighties and nineties as a bit of a dead time for me in SF, although I continue to be very interested in especially the British science fiction of the 1970s (not Moorcock, who is overrated in my opinion, but people like Compton, Coney, Cowper, Holdstock, Bailey, Saxton). Ballard, especially the early novels and his genius-level oeuvre of short fiction, is a cornerstone of my belief. I want to read a lot more of Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy and Thomas Disch. I’ve not yet read Octavia Butler and I need to remedy that. I would like to read all of Delany because I think he’s one of the most brilliant and original writers science fiction has ever produced.  I continue to feel frustrated by a lot of contemporary genre SF, excited by the ideas that thrum through them yet disappointed by the rushed or stodgy or merely adequate quality of the writing itself. I hang around on the margins of genre, ceaselessly searching for those precious works which excite and innovate at a science fictional level and make you want to pump the air at their literary quality. That’s my science fiction and I love it.

What I also love more than I can say is the way the genre is beginning to diversify. The proliferation of fin-de-siecle essays about the exhaustion of science fiction were, to my mind, a reflection of the state of a genre that had been drawing from the same well for way too long – that is, the canon, the same old, the pulps, the Gernsbackian tradition. What science fiction desperately needed was a transfusion of new blood, not just younger writers but different writers, writers drawing on influences, traditions and experiences that were not necessarily centred upon Heinlein and Silverberg and the American SF writing of the 1950s. Happily, that transfusion is now beginning to take place.

If I’m drawing my influence from anywhere now I would like it to be from thehossain.efb sincerity and conviction of some of these new writers, writers whose ability to imagine and communicate often leaves what we are doing in western science fiction looking stale and flabby and tired. I want to read books that feel as if they mattered to the writer, urgently. I am finding this quality, more and more often, in novels by writers who come from way outside the canon but who will, and thank God for that, inject new life into it. I think Nnedi Okorafor is writing some of the most interesting stuff around now and her linguistic and stylistic palette is just stunning. Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria was one of the most accomplished debuts in recent memory and everything she writes is not only resplendent in its linguistic prowess but above all it feels meant. There’s a novel just recently come out by Saad Hossain called Escape from Baghdad! and it’s so bitingly funny, so original and so necessary I’d urge anyone and everyone to read it, science fiction fan or no. Especially in the field of short fiction, we are seeing a huge upsurge of work appearing from writers whose backgrounds and influences lie outside of the western mainstream, writers like Usman Malik who was recently nominated for a Nebula, writers like Kai Ashante Wilson and Alyssa Wong who have just been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award, writers like Vandana Singh whose work would seem to be one of the perfect fusions of science and fiction out there at the moment, writers like Zen Cho, whose story collection Spirits Abroad is so original and so accomplished I was disappointed not to see it appearing on some of the mainstream literary prize shortlists. Of the short fiction I read last year, ‘Autodidact’ by Benjanun Sriduangkaew lingers in my memory for its intensity of feeling and outstanding technical accomplishment. JY Yang’s ‘Storytelling for the Night Clerk’ has also stayed with me as the work of a powerful new voice with no fear of innovation. One of my favourite stories of this year so far, ‘Documentary’ by Vajra Chandrasekera, comes from a writer whose blog essays on science fiction and some of the issues surrounding it are also of a most superior quality – more, Vajra, please!

zen cho spiritsI hope we’ll be seeing novels from all these writers in due course – indeed Zen Cho already has one forthcoming. These writers and others like them are not just challenging the canon as it stands, they are beginning to reform it. They are making science fiction an exciting, innovative place to be again. As discussions of the Golden Age canon make little sense now without reference to the New Wave that challenged the old order and polarised opinion within it, so our discussions of ‘whither SF’ and the wearing out of genre materials make no sense at all if we don’t talk about what is happening in science fiction right now to reverse those predictions. A static canon is a dead canon. Fossils that are allowed to stay on the shelf simply because they’ve always been there are just that: fossils. We don’t have to throw them all out, necessarily, but surely we should re-examine them in the light of our thoughts, preferences and ambitions as they stand today, rather than leaving our evaluations under the sole control of memory, which is so often fickle, or tradition, which is so often stagnatory?

Science fiction is still the most radical literature alive. Radical means sticking two fingers up at the canon at least once a day. Don’t let anyone tell you what your experience of science fiction should be. This is something you should be deciding for yourself.

The tyranny of plot

“I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character – these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art.”

Rachel Cusk in an interview for The Guardian, August 2014.

For Levy, the line to tread lies between needing facts ‘to tune the reality levels of my books so I can do a deal with the reader and subvert that reality’, and veering away from ‘hyperintelligible, readable writing that has tragically died in the crib’… As a steely, soft-spoken critic of literary orthodoxy, Levy has a gift for languidly dismissive metaphors. Coherence is ‘the bloody, mauled fox’ of the writing process, while rigid narrative convention is ‘a sort of painkiller’ resulting all too often in the ‘sacrifice of poetry on the altar of plot’.

Laura Garmeson, reporting on a seminar given by Deborah Levy on Form and Content in the 21st-century Novel at Birkbeck College.

 

I recently read Rachel Cusk’s Baileys- and Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted novel Outline, in which a writer travels to Athens to teach a creative writing workshop. She describes the flight, the apartment in which she is staying and its immediate environs in unfussy yet precise, quietly harmonious prose. She recounts in detail her conversations with those she encounters – the businessman who happens to be sitting next to her on the plane, two writers she has dinner with, the students on the course – and her internalised thought processes relating to those conversations. Nothing at all happens, apart from what happens. There is nothing in this novel that might be analogous with ‘narrative tension’. There is no such thing as plot. The book is what it is. It makes no claims for itself. It has the feel and texture of a found document.

The eschewing of plot elements is a very deliberate decision on Cusk’s part, of course, and whether Outline is a thinly fictionalised work of autobiography is beside the point. What Cusk is doing here is something other than ‘telling a story’. She is replicating the fabric of lived experience through the incompatible medium of words.

Cusk’s prose is certainly flawless, an act of mimesis so perfect that as a writer it is almost impossible not to admire it. Such moment-by-moment evocation of ordinary occurrences is notoriously difficult to achieve, the kind of writing that can only succeed through, as Cusk describes it, an ‘annihilated perspective’, a willed invisibility on the part of the writer, style that moves beyond style and into a kind of verbal photo-realism.

But to paraphrase Jerry Leiber, is that all there is to a novel? This question has been preoccupying me ever since I reread Cusk’s interview in the context of having read Outline, and the article about Deborah Levy only added to my feelings of fascination and unease. The warning bell began ringing for me, I think, when I realised why my reaction to Outline was so divided: as a writer, I found the book admirable, an experiment in form and fiction well worth pursuing. As a reader, I couldn’t think of a single reason to continue the book to its end. As a reader, you can learn everything there is to know about Outline in fifty pages (or even fewer, if you feel like being callous about it). As a reader, once you have grasped Cusk’s take on the tyranny of plot, there is nothing here for you. You will exit the narrative in the same semi-passive, semi enervated state in which you entered it.

I find it ironic that in a novel which seeks to annihilate authorial perspective, what you end up with, finally, is a novel that is wholly, tirelessly, overbearingly about authorial perspective: this is how it feels to be a writer, this is how we see, this is what we do, this is how we never switch off because everything is work, everything is live meat, everything must be exterminated captured and descrrrribed. Yes, fine – as a writer I’m kind of down with that. But as a reader? God, it’s tiresome.

I’m aware even as I write this that I may no longer be properly qualified to speak as a reader, to offer my opinions on what a reader may desire or find provoking. One of the unspoken penalties of being a writer (I’m not going to do a Cusk here, I promise) is that you give up your reader privileges. Everything you read, you read as a writer: what is the author doing, how did they do it, do I like it/hate it/agree with it/find it relevant or irrelevant to what I, as a writer, am trying to do myself? Those moments when you’re completely swept away, when you find yourself so lost in the narrative and your reaction to it – the very feeling that made you want to be a writer in the first place – become vanishingly few. Far more often you find yourself distracted by that crushing sense of yes OK I get it, so what now?

Which makes it all the more rewarding when it does happen. If a novel can succeed in not bugging you, if you find you’ve read 200 pages and not thought once about the next book you absolutely have to read before the month is out, you know you’re on to something amazing.

Need I add that this did not happen for me with Rachel Cusk’s Outline. My two top reads of the year so far have been Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, which is pretty much all description and character (so much for them being dead, then) and Sara Taylor’s The Shore, an act of mimesis every bit as convincing as Cusk’s, yet combined with elements of mystery and speculation that gave that mimesis – yes! – a narrative engine, a sense of urgency and relevance that felt almost entirely lacking in Cusk’s novel.

In terms of its form, there is nothing in the slightest bit revolutionary about The Wolf Border – and yet the power and urgency of the writing, the conviction Hall brings to her narrative, together with a plot hook (the importance of conservation and rewilding) I’m passionate about and (YES, I ADMIT IT!) a protagonist I loved and was totally rooting for, makes this novel a keeper, the kind of book people will still be reading and loving decades from now. The Wolf Border feels like a book Sarah Hall really needed to write and perhaps that’s the entire point.

Sarah Taylor’s The Shore is fired with that same passion for communication, the same depth of resonance – with a landscape, with its people. The Shore is a fractured narrative (my favourite kind) a multiplicity of mini-narratives that build a greater whole. Taylor is not afraid of being elliptical, in other words, she is not afraid to dispense with the concept of linear, mimetic narrative in favour of something more wayward, that owes as much to the imagination as to the author’s inner documentary maker. Yet this is also a novel that feels comfortable with the idea of story, not only as a vehicle for self expression but equally as a necessary and vital component of human experience. It is almost impossible, as a writer, to not bring an element of autobiography into your work. What you bring to the page is yourself, after all – not just your opinions and passions, but the amalgamated sum of your personal experience. This is bound to seep out somehow, no matter what area of literature you choose to work in. And this investment of self in the unlikeliest of places and characters – this is what makes a novel feel true, even if it happens to be set three hundred years in the future (or in sixteenth century London).

I said in an interview recently that as a writer and as a reader I am mostly allergic to linear narrative. I love the idea of ‘the novel’, not simply as a words-on-paper version of a drama or narrative that might just as well be played out on TV (and perhaps more compellingly so) but as a construct, an abstract idea – a symbol of intimate communication between one human mind and another. The novels I enjoy most are novels that play with the idea of what a novel should be – in the characters and events they describe, but mostly in the way they are constructed. I like to be in dialogue with the writer I am reading – I like to feel I am a part of the process, in other words. It doesn’t bother me at all if I’m not always one hundred percent sure of what is going on, or if the novel has loose ends that are never tied up, or if the protagonist is an absolute arse. So long as I feel compelled to discover more about what the writer had in mind.

For the most part, this means there has to be a story, a mystery, a reason for reading. This does not mean eschewing autobiographical or non-fiction techniques – if in doubt, read Emmanuel Carrere or Gordon Burn. It certainly does not mean adhering rigidly to nineteenth century models of narrative realism. But to deliberately withhold all forms of narrative tension, to deny story its importance or its seriousness, seems not only self-aggrandising but also selfish. I’ve ploughed through ‘stories’ that seem so wilful in denying the reader anything approaching ‘hyperintelligible, readable writing’ to quote Levy – so clever, so self-aware, so pedagogic in their pursuit of obscurity they have made me want to go away and read – I don’t know, Jeffrey Archer in retaliation.

I suppose that what I am saying is that as a writer I happen to believe I owe the reader something in return for their investment of time and patience, not to mention money. A reason to go on reading, in other words. A story they can care about, or even love.

 

On the side of the ogres and pixies

Ishiguro.buriedgiantMost people with even a passing interest in what we care to call the politics of genre will have been aware of the recent pseudo-spat between Ursula Le Guin and Kazuo Ishiguro. I say pseudo-spat because that’s exactly what it was. Le Guin reacted to something Ishiguro never said, or rather, he didn’t say it in quite the way she thought he meant it (he explains himself here). Two days later she apologises for any offence she might have caused, and then admonishes Ishiguro for taking her own words in vain. “Many sites on the Internet were quick to pick up my blog post, describing it as an “attack”, a “slam”, etc,” she says. “They were hot on the scent for blood, hoping for a feud. I wonder how many will pick up this one?”

Le Guin may have been a little hasty in ‘flying off the handle’, as she herself put it, but she is certainly justified in her assessment and condemnation of internet blood-lust. As Le Guin suggests, these kind of clickbait articles are annoying and pointless and increasingly tedious precisely because they polarise opinion so swiftly and so absolutely they shut off the opportunity for a more in-depth debate. Read what they’ve actually said and it’s quite obvious that Le Guin and Ishiguro have far more in common than divides them, and I for one would love to see a conversation between them in which they could discuss, as Le Guin suggested, the fictional validity of dragons versus pixies (and I’d lay money on Ishiguro being up for it, too). But then, so far as the internets is concerned at least, informed and reasoned discussion isn’t anywhere near as thrilling as gladiatorial combat.

Far from being dismissive, Ishiguro’s views on the uses of fantasy would appear to be cogent, inclusive and sophisticated.  In the original New York Times interview that sparked all the fuss, Ishiguro states the ‘barren, weird England’ of his fictional Dark Ages provides an ideal metaphorical landscape for the story of moral evasion and wilful forgetting he wanted to explore. In another interview for The Guardian, he explains his own magic system straightforwardly and without prevarication: “I didn’t want a fantasy world where anything weird could happen. I went along with what happened in the Samurai tales I grew up on. If it’s conceivable that the people of the time had these superstitions or beliefs, then I would allow it.”

I would say Ishiguro totally gets what fantasy is for and what it can do. So why the disinclination, in certain quarters, to admit that, even as a possibility?

The longlist for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced at midnight last night. It’s an odd one. It includes a number of books – historical, social-realist fiction – of the kind that I find least interesting, at least in outline. (Personally I much preferred Naomi Frisby’s hypothetical line-up at The Writes of Woman which, just in case you haven’t discovered it yet, is one of the best book blogs around.) But the list does include some outstanding writers (Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, Xiaolu Guo, Grace McCleen) and it also includes six novels that are either blatantly speculative, or that contain strong speculative elements. Looking down the longlist for the first time, I found myself wondering whether novels such as Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Laline Paull’s The Bees, or Sandra Newman’s The Country of Ice Cream Star (I’m a big Station Eleven fan, but seeing The Bees and Ice Cream Star here pleases me especially because these two books have been excluded from SFF discussions more or less entirely) would have stood a chance of being selected even a decade ago. Does the appearance of such books here now signal a genuine shift in literary attitudes towards the leitmotifs (see, I’m deliberately eschewing the word ‘tropes’) and preoccupations of science fiction and fantasy, as Ishiguro seems to suggest, as Le Guin appears so reluctant to believe?

I don’t know if this question has an answer yet. But it’s worth putting out there.

Nominating for the BSFA Awards – non-fiction focus

The non-fiction category of SF awards is often sorely neglected, not just in terms of the number and variety of nominations received, but in terms of overall discussion. We relegate this category at our peril, however, because an informed, rigorous and enthusiastic critical hinterland is what might be deemed a desirable necessity, crucial to the advancement and betterment of any field of interest, with science fiction being no exception.

As with short fiction, we are now in a position to access more information, speculation and argument about SF than ever before. Whilst some remain critical of the digital ‘democracy of opinion’, arguing that the sheer bulk of unedited, unsolicited and ill-informed commentary can have only a diluting and detrimental effect on the discourse, I am not one of them. I count universal access to critical platforms as unequivocally a good thing. The space available is infinite, ergo there is room for everyone and no ‘wasted space’. We should not forget that online magazines, forums, blogs and discussion boards have provided and continue to provide both platforms and entry points for those who might never have felt the confidence to submit articles to print magazines – magazines they might not have known about or could not have afforded to subscribe to in the first place. The diversification of commentary through digital media is one of the most welcome developments in our field in recent years. And if you happen to come across a piece of rhetoric that seems pointlessly aggressive, lacking in direction, badly written, offensive or just plain awful (as you surely will) it takes less than a second to exercise your discretion and close the window.

One criticism that I have some sympathy for is the claim that the current fashion for short, immediately assimilable ‘thinkpieces’ has led to a corresponding decline in sustained, quality criticism in online venues. Certainly, the perceived need for speed of response – to have one’s say on a current topic immediately and ahead of the rest – has tended to mitigate against essays that take longer than an hour to write or ten minutes to read. But surely this matter is in our own hands? Whilst it can be frustrating to see any number of half-arsed blog posts rattled off at the speed of light and before the author has given themselves time to form a properly constructed argument, there is no law that states that we ‘have’ to react, react, react, immediately and with venom. There is plenty of quality work out there, and we owe it to ourselves as readers, writers and critics to discover it, promote it, argue over it and contribute to it. One of the salient advantages of online criticism is the writer’s ability to link to other relevant works, thus bringing divergent voices and points of view simultaneously to the same arena. This is a whole new way of constructing criticism, and should not be downplayed.

Deciding what to nominate in the non-fiction category can be especially difficult because of the variety of what’s on offer and the differing modes in which it’s presented. How can we possibly decide between a full-length monograph, and a 1,000-word essay, for example? I’m not even going to try and answer that question at this point – that’s an argument for another day (or perhaps for two separate and distinct award categories..?) Rather I’d like to draw your attention to a number of non-fiction items, in various formats, that happened to catch my attention in 2014. In no particular order, then:

 

Call and Response by Paul Kincaid (Beccon Publications) This collection of essays on everyone from H. G. Wells to China Mieville showcases Paul Kincaid’s ongoing commitment to and engagement with science fiction literature to marvellous effect. The table of contents brings together essays culled from publications as various as Foundation, The TLS, Strange Horizons, the LARB and Vector, and includes all-new section introductions and a generous handful of previously unpublished pieces. Essential on every level.

Greg Egan by Karen Burnham (Modern Masters of Science Fiction, University of Illinois Press) I snapped this up when it was cheap on Kindle, because I enjoy Karen Burnham’s criticism and because I think Greg Egan is a writer I need to get to grips with, at entry level at the very least. I think this is a wonderful monograph. Burnham clearly knows Egan back to front at both a literary and a scientific level. She’s in sympathy with his ideals as a writer, but never lets her appreciation of what he’s up to blind her to the criticisms levelled against him. Her enthusiasm and knowledge bounce off the page, and if I wanted a travelling companion on the road to understanding a writer so unabashedly scientific in his approach to science fiction, I could not have asked for a better one. This book is entertaining, informative, and endlessly thought-provoking.  It has also left me with the resolution to read at least one Greg Egan novel this year.

Stay by John Clute (Beccon Publications) In common with the Paul Kincaid book, John Clute’s 2014 collection of essays boasts a new introduction, several previously unpublished pieces (including a never-before-seen short story) as well as updates and revisions to all previously published essays. John Clute is one of our greatest commentators bar none. His essays form some of the most astute and articulate literary criticism around; they are also works of art, and I live in a simmering state of outrage that he remains more or less unknown outside the genre. Included in Stay is ‘The Darkening Garden’, a ‘short lexicon of horror’ and one of the most persuasive and ingenious analyses of horror fiction I have ever read (even if you don’t agree with it, it’s still brilliant, and would be worth the cover price all by itself). Nor should we forget Clute’s irregular column for Strange Horizons, Scores. Particular highlights for me in 2014 would include his thoughts on Lucius Shepard’s Beautiful Blood and Jo Walton’s My Real Children and his side-by-side analysis of Howard Jacobson’s J and Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest.

Deep Forests and Manicured Gardens: a look at two new short fiction magazines – Jonathan McCalmont (Ruthless Culture) I truly don’t have enough good words to say about this piece. It’s a multi-part essay in which the two internally-linked sub-sections on the magazines in question (Terraform and Uncanny) form essential components. I don’t always agree with Jonathan on a point-by-point basis, but I admire his criticism enormously, and believe that if we had more commentators like him – rigorous, knowledgeable, engaged, and most importantly uncompromised by genre factionalism or the concerns thereof – the critical hinterland of science fiction would be in a much ruder state of health. In Deep Forests and Manicured Gardens, Jonathan discusses two seemingly opposed tendencies within genre short fiction (and one might argue within genre fiction as a whole), the reflection of said tendencies within the magazine culture and the implications for the vitality of new short fiction and emerging writers. Much of his concern is tied up in what he sees as the shifting of the centre ground of SF from a primarily ideas-based ‘branch of non-fiction’ towards a mulch of ‘over-written sentence fragments about magical people experiencing emotions’. He is just as keen to interrogate a literary landscape in which new science fiction stories are not so much a medium of communication with an audience as the currency of social advancement within the genre.

I remain undecided as to how much of Jonathan’s argument I agree with – all mulchy middle ground, me – but I find much that interests me in his viewpoint, and the gutsiness of his writing always leaves me feeling liberated and inspired generally. I feel wholeheartedly grateful that he has written this essay, as well as what might be deemed its companion pieces, Short Fiction and the Feels, and A Perspective on Perspectives. I am always genuinely shocked when I notice people feeling threatened by essays like these. If we are to evolve and compete as a branch of literature, objective, up-front criticism of this kind is what we need, and a lot more of it.

Transgressing Genre Boundaries and All That by Ethan Robinson (Marooned Off Vesta) Science fiction is a unique literature and a radical literature. Shouldn’t we be fighting to keep it that way? Like Jonathan McCalmont’s essay above, Ethan Robinson’s piece is an articulate and robust interrogation of the state of science fiction literature today, the direction it appears to be taking and whether the push towards the convergence of the science fictional and the mainstream is in any sense desirable. It’s a wonderful piece of polemic, one I’ve commented about before and recommend unreservedly. Whether you agree with it or not, Ethan’s argument is valuable, timely and absolutely necessary. More like this, please! (And if there’s any way we can group his ‘Sturgeonblogging’ series of essays under a single project heading, nominate that, too!)

Review: Interstellar by Abigail Nussbaum (Asking the Wrong Questions). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Abigail Nussbaum is shaping up to be one of our most knowledgeable and articulate critics. This essay on Nolan’s film is a fine example of what she does so brilliantly, commenting on the larger movements within science fiction by means of close focus on a single work or group of works. She’s such a good writer. Her piece Mad as Hell, Thoughts on Aaron Sorkin is also pretty much essential reading.

Random Snapshots of Book Hunting in Downtown Nairobi by Mehul Gohil. Exactly what it says on the tin. This is a wonderful piece, packed with insights, compelling writing and the love of science fiction. This was billed as Part 1, and though the essay is complete in itself I am still hoping Part 2 will appear at some point in the future.

The Unbearable Solitude of being an African Fangirl by Chinelo Onwualu (Omenana) A short piece, but an essential read.

Black Nerds , Black Cool, and Afrofuturism by Troy L. Wiggins is exactly the kind of longer, in-depth essay that is vital to the genre, to promoting diversity, understanding and exploration within the genre, and that I for one would love to see more of. Please read this.

China Dreams: contemporary Chinese Science Fiction by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld) Ken Liu is tireless in his promotion of Chinese science fiction, and it’s wonderful to see Clarkesworld taking the initiative here not just in bringing us more stories, but more information about them, too. This essay is a medium-length overview of the field as it currently stands. As Liu himself says upfront, giving anything like a comprehensive assessment of a literature so intrinsically diverse and multitudinous is pretty much impossible, but here at least is a place to start. A must-read.

I Love Writing Books – so I Need to Get Better at Writing Them by Kameron Hurley. I admire Kameron Hurley as a writer. I also like Kameron Hurley’s blog, and feel a generous measure of identification with the stuff she has to say about the writing process, emphasising the absolute necessity of consistent hard work and perseverance. She’s always worth reading, on any subject, and I admire her honestly. Her piece Some (Honest) Publishing Numbers, and (Almost) Throwing in the Towel is refreshingly candid about the whole getting-published-and-staying-published circus.

Me and Science Fiction: SF and Politics by Eleanor Arnason (Strange Horizons) “What I like about SF as a traditional category is that it has room for both slipstream and pop culture. It does not merely use pop culture, as a fine art writer might do, it includes it. The gamers and cosplayers and comic fans are not the subjects of our art. They are us.” Eleanor Arnason’s series of columns for Strange Horizons have been excellent and I hope there’ll be more of them. She has a way of inviting people into her writing, facing down challenging subjects in a dynamic and inclusive manner. Do also take a look at Me and Science Fiction: Books and the Death of the Middle Class, also in Strange Horizons.

Strange Horizons Bookclub: Tigerman by Niall Harrison, Aishwarya Subramanian and Maureen Kincaid Speller (Strange Horizons) A fascinating discussion of a book I thought I wasn’t going to get on with (because superheroes) but then did. (It’s stayed with me actually, far more than I thought it would.) The participants in this roundtable found plenty to talk about, and this article provides the perfect starting point for anyone wanting to get deeper into Tigerman, or simply to eavesdrop on an informed and entertaining analysis of some aspects of contemporary science fiction, beginning with the question of whether Tigerman can be considered properly science fictional in the first place.  These book clubs are a wonderful innovation at SH – I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Reviewing the Other: Like Dancing about Architecture by Nisi Shawl (Strange Horizons) This truly is an essential read for any reviewer, to be bookmarked and passed on at every opportunity.

Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn by Maureen Kincaid Speller (Paper Knife) The only thing wrong with MKS’s reviews is that we don’t see more of them! See also her review of Sarah Tolmie’s The Stone Boatmen at Strange Horizons, and let’s hope Maureen decides she’s up for blogging the Clarke again this year, because her 2013 posts were a highlight of the awards season.

Feminist World Building: Toward Future Memory by L. Timmel Duchamp (The Cascadia Subduction Zone) CZS is a fascinating periodical that really should be better known than it is. This essay blends the personal with the historical in an intricate and involving way and is exactly the kind of considered, informed non-fiction writing the genre needs more of. It’s powerfully argued and beautifully constructed. A keeper.

Biting Style: The Bone Clocks and Anti-Fantasy by Max Gladstone. This is a thoughtful and perceptive essay, arguing that Mitchell’s ham-fisted use of fantasy in The Bone Clocks was kind of intentional.  I was personally very disappointed by the novel, and (though I hate to admit it, even now) ended up coming down more on the side of James Wood’s less than generous analysis in the New Yorker. But I found Gladstone’s piece so fascinating and well argued that it almost – almost – persuaded me to reconsider. For an impassioned Joycean ‘yes!’ to The Bone Clocks (and an antidote to the Wood piece), see James Smythe’s affirmatory review at Strange Horizons.

The Expanding Borders of Area X: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach in the Context of a Weird Renaissance by Scott Nicolay (Weird Fiction Review). A great little essay on the history of weird fiction, the reasons for its current flowering, and how Jeff VanderMeer’s seminal trilogy fits into that. It’s also worth noting that Nicolay’s own debut collection Ana Kai Tangata has received some great press and is a likely candidate for some awards of its own this year. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Writing is a Lonely Business: James McKimmey, Philip K. Dick and the Lost Art of Author Correspondence by Jason Starr (Los Angeles Review of Books) A lovely piece that takes an in-depth look at a set of letters written by Dick and McKimmey ‘when they were both young, emerging genre writers’. Starr’s essay also makes some more general observations about the value of correspondence as an insight into a writer’s life and work. As someone who has derived significant pleasure from reading published volumes of writers’ letters over the years, this subject interests me a great deal. Only time will tell if the form will survive the internet (I think it will – writers love writing to each other, and we’re going to carry on doing it; whether that’s physically or electronically is of lesser importance) but this sensitive and personal reminiscence does a good job of reminding us of why such letters are to be treasured.

Rambling, Offensive and Unbeatable: Beam Me Up, Old School Sci-Fi by Sandra Newman (The Guardian) “The average reader is no longer a mind-blown teen who will accept any unpleasantness in exchange for cool ideas. The average reader is the average reader. So editors are acquiring books according to criteria that were formerly incidental to the genre – quality, readability, plots that make sense. The twisted misogyny is gone, and with it the bracing misanthropy. The cool ideas are still there, but a certain anarchic power has been lost.” There was a dismaying and predictably knee-jerk reaction to Newman’s piece in some quarters, with people choosing to interpret it as a call either to excuse or, even more bizarrely, put back the racism and misogyny that dogs many of the science fiction texts that are considered by the orthodoxy as classic. This is so obviously not what Sandra Newman was saying. Like Jonathan McCalmont and Ethan Robinson above, what she’s talking about is the slide towards a new orthodoxy in SF, a bland kind of crossover that doesn’t really say much of anything, much less voice opinions that might be considered provocative. The piece may be roughly worded in places, but what it has to say about the maverick tradition in science fiction is well worth reading and considering.

 

Don’t forget that nominations for the BSFA Awards close on January 31st. Get yours in now!

Ghosts of Christmas Past

The successful ghost story puts the reader into the position of saying to himself: ‘If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’

M. R. James

 

What is it with the British and their Christmas ghost stories? Despite resurgence in its popularity here in recent years, the Americans still do Hallowe’en better than us. Come midwinter though we are in our element. The idea that Christmas – and Christmas Eve in particular – should be the perfect time for gathering around the fire and taking it in turns to terrify the assembled company with ghoulish anecdotes seems so deeply rooted in British culture that it’s difficult to pin down exactly where it came from.

The most famous exponent of the tradition has to be M. R. James, the Cambridge don and antiquarian scholar who developed a passion for ghost stories and started writing his own to amuse himself and entertain his friends. It wasn’t long before his Christmas Eve readings – enlivened by some enthusiastic acting – became a highlight of the Cambridge year. The stories themselves are now seen as the mother-lode of English weird fiction, the standard by which all ghost writers since have been judged and often found wanting. M. R. James even had an adjective named after him: Jamesian, a word often used to describe a story characterised by an unsettling atmosphere of understated menace.

The Christmas ghost story didn’t start with M. R. James, though. His American namesake Henry James wrote his novella The Turn of the Screw in 1898, a full thirty years before the first publication of Montagu James’sCollected Ghost Stories. Henry James may have hailed from New York City, but he was an Anglophile at heart and eventually became a British citizen. The Turn of the Screw could be said to be the quintessential English ghost story and has probably been adapted for radio and screen more times than any other piece of weird fiction. It tells the story of an English governess and her battle to save her young charges from two particularly nasty apparitions. But the tale begins with a group of friends, gathered around the fire on Christmas Eve, telling each other ghost stories.

In other words, this business has been going on for centuries. There are those who insist it was Charles Dickens who started it all with his Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, who first appeared to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol in 1843. Personally, I doubt it. Christmas is an odd time of year. There’s nothing like the claustrophobia of enforced jollity to bring a family feud bubbling to the surface, and the staff on duty at police stations and hospitals over the festive season will tell you that there are more murders, drunken brawls and relationship breakdowns at Christmas than at any other time of year. What else can you expect when people who don’t normally see each other from one end of the year to the next are shut up together for days on end with nothing to keep them from each others’ throats but the Queen’s Speech and the Only Fools and Horses Christmas Special?

The whole baby Jesus business is a bit of a Johnny-come-lately in festival terms, anyway, and entirely the invention of the clerics. Before the Christian church got involved the traditional end-of-year junket used to be pagan, a kind of midwinter bacchanalia designed to deflect the Grim Reaper from his seasonal rounds. Could it be that our darker midwinter yearnings are actually a modern echo of this ancient custom? It’s interesting when you think about it: the very things that can make Christmas difficult – the cold, the dark, the glacial passage of time – are often dwelled upon in Christmas ghost stories and turned to creative advantage. Certainly the one thing that unites all members of a family, regardless of their age, gender or propensity to eat turkey, is the love of a good ghost story.

Weird fiction is a weird business, and it’s always fun to speculate about exactly where it came from and exactly why it does what it does. You won’t be surprised to learn that I love ghost stories, and that one of the things I still look forward to about Christmas is the wealth of ghost-related entertainment that’s usually on offer. I can’t remember precisely how old I was when I first discovered that along with the pigs-in-blankets and chestnut stuffing, Christmas also offered a televisual feast of ghoultide delicacies; I do know that no one else got so much as a glance at the special double issue of the Radio Times until I completed my investigations into what ghosts were haunting the schedules and when.

One has to get one’s seasonal priorities in order, and if any is more pressing than making sure The Hauntingisn’t going to clash with The Innocents I haven’t discovered it.

One thing you can say about the Christmas spirits: they tend to be a better class of ghost; if it’s vampires and werewolves you’re after, you’d better try Hallowe’en. When in 2002 the BBC commissioned a series entitledGhost Stories for Christmas, the format couldn’t have been simpler or more classic: Christopher Lee, seated in an armchair before an open fire, reading selections from M. R. James by the light of a guttering candle and not a staking or decapitation in sight. What’s more, it was a huge success. What the British have come to expect from their Christmas ghost stories is not buckets of blood but that indefinable frisson of Jamesian terror: footsteps in the snow, the wind moaning in the chimney, lamplight in an upstairs window. At the time M. R. James wrote them, his ghost stories were remarkable for featuring contemporary protagonists in modern settings. It is only with the passing of time that we have come to see them as deliciously romantic: the solitary professor, monk-like in his rooms, unwisely delving into arcane matters that would generally be best left alone… The haunted mezzotint, the copperplate handwriting on yellowed parchment, the repression of all rages and lusts behind a mask of punctilious Englishness – what most characterises the Christmas ghost story is an air of nostalgia.

In other words, we prefer our yuletide hauntings to be retro, with long shadows, and preferably in black-and-white.

Of course, childhood itself casts a long shadow, and those things that delighted and terrified us when we were younger can sometimes appear lacklustre and even dull when we encounter them again as adults. While thinking about and reading for this article I inevitably began to recall those films that were special for me, special because I’d never seen anything like them before, and with that irresistible taste of the illicit because I was only allowed to watch them in the first place because it was Christmas. Would they, could they possibly stand the test of time, and the burden of emotion they had been prevailed upon to carry? The only way to find out was to see them again, a venture I undertook with some misgivings. The nights were longer in childhood, and the films weredefinitely scarier. I wasn’t sure I wanted that illusion to get debunked.

My first encounter with M. R. James came when I was about eleven, when I saw Jacques Tourneur’s film Night of the Demon as part of a Christmas double bill of scary movies. Night of the Demon was made in 1957, so I suppose to my concerned parents it seemed pretty safe. The movie it was paired with, Freddy Francis’s 1975 film The Ghoul, was another matter. It was in colour, for a start, and it went on until well after midnight. It was agreed that seeing as it was Christmas I could stay up and watch Night of the Demon just as long as I went to bed straight afterwards.

Never one to go down without a fight, I made a huge fuss about not being able to see Peter Cushing as the mad Egyptologist with a cannibal son locked in the attic (what’s not to like?) but the truth is I was glad to have a get-out clause. I saw the trailer for The Ghoul more than once in the run-up to Christmas, and the sequence showing Don Henderson’s bloodstained feet creeping down the attic stairs was in and of itself enough to give me nightmares. Night of the Demon, with its country-house setting and clipped bourgeois accents, did seem safer, and in a good way.

At any rate, I reckoned I could handle it.

I’d reckoned without the Jamesian influence. In his foreword to the 1924 anthology Ghosts and Marvels, MRJ makes no secret of his personal formula for a successful ghost story:

Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way. Let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.

This is the very essence of ‘Casting the Runes’, the original MRJ story Night of the Demon was based on. In fact James doesn’t let you see the demon at all except as a lithographic illustration. Luckily for both film-lovers and weird fiction enthusiasts, Jacques Tourneur had both the sense and sensibility to similarly understate his case when he made Night of the Demon. I don’t think I properly appreciated the cleverness of the story at the time of that early first encounter, but I do know that the atmosphere of the film, the sense of the not-quite-seen, the insistently threatened, the horror just around the corner terrified and transfixed me long before the final revelatory sequence on the railway line.

I had fond, fond memories of this film, and when I viewed it again recently I was delighted to discover that Tourneur’s Night of the Demon lived up to every one of my recollections and even surpassed them. Dr John Holden, the classic Jamesian sceptic, is personified with dapper brilliance by Dana Andrews as he pursues his ill-advised scholarly enquiry into the nature of evil, and Peggy Cummins shows a lot more backbone than the average fifties heroine as Joanna Harrington, the niece of the demon’s first victim. The script, rich in the dramatic conventions of the day, is finely wrought, and the central message of the story – that it is impossible to outrun your fate once it has singled you out – is conveyed with conviction and evident enjoyment of the ideas at stake. There are some genuinely frightening moments. Night of the Demon is not just a good scary movie; it is a great film, full stop.

I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw the Ealing Studios movie Dead of Night. I know only that it was during the Christmas holidays, and that the ‘haunted mirror’ segment scared the bejesus out of me. I hadn’t read Borges then, and the story’s premise – that a mirror might be more than just a sheet of window glass silvered with mercury, that it might be the gateway to a world of nightmare – was new to me and horrifying.

I’m ashamed to say that perhaps because this one sequence had made such an impression on me I could barely recall what happened in the rest of the movie. The surprise when I saw it again was therefore all the more marvellous.

Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1945 film Dead of Night was the first of what came popularly to be known as ‘portmanteau’ horror films, movies that take the form of a set of shorter, separate stories-within-the-story linked together by a framing narrative. Portmanteau horror is most (in)famously exemplified in the films of Amicus Studios, makers of the late, great Asylum, but this fascinating little subgenre has proved something of an unquiet spirit, revived in 1993 with Necronomicon and still more recently in the super little triptychs of Asian horror, Three Extremes andThree Extremes 2Dead of Night though was the original, and in many ways it remains the best. This film is now getting on for seventy years old, yet I was thrilled by its freshness, its vigour, its deft touches of modernism and ironic sense of humour. The movie looks superb, and showcases some fine acting, that of the young Michael Redgrave in particular. His portrait of a man on the edge of madness in the ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’ sequence is 24 carat.

One of the nicest things about Dead of Night is that as well as being a masterpiece of British cinema it is an archetypical reformatting of the classic Christmas ghost story. Here we have a group of friends, comfortably ensconced in the elegant drawing room of an English country house, telling each other scary stories as they attempt to unmask the secrets of the supernatural. A stranger arrives with the warning that they are all in danger, while a professional sceptic – Frederick Valk as redoubtable psychiatrist Dr van Straaten – seeks to reassure them of the omnipotence of science.

It seems curiously in keeping with the spirit of Christmas that its ghost stories often have a philosophical slant: do ghosts exist, is there life after death, is it possible to predict the future? There is almost as much talking as action in Dead of Night, a characteristic that is, once again, typically Jamesian.

The British are famous for their love of tradition, and woe betide those foolish enough to try messing with it. Christmas especially is a time when repetition tends to dominate over innovation, and perhaps that is why, where scary movies are concerned, we tend to keep recycling old favourites instead of experimenting with contemporary adaptations. There’s nothing wrong with the old favourites – as we have seen, quite the opposite – but to close the door on a haunted house simply because it’s new and therefore different would be to fossilize the canon, which would be a tragedy. The modern reworking of The Turn of the Screw screened for Christmas 2009 came under fire for being too explicit in its handling of the subject of child abuse. While it’s true that some might have to read Henry James’s original novella two or three times before grasping the darker implications of the story, it is also true that the molestation of minors does form the central tenet of that story, and I would have thought that one of the chief advantages of living in the modern age is that we are more accustomed to artists who say what they mean. I myself thought Sandy Welch’s adapted screenplay was inventive and thought-provoking.

I was similarly impressed by the new adaptation of what is perhaps M. R. James’s most famous story, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, commissioned by the BBC for Christmas 2010.  Whistle and I’ll Come to You was scripted by Neil Cross, who worked on the BBC TV MI5 drama series Spooks, and directed by Andy de Emony, who also directed the two classic Red Dwarf episodes ‘Rimmerworld’ and ‘Gunmen of the Apocalypse’. It upset a lot of devout Jamesians, mainly because it deviated rather substantially from the original text. There are more characters, for a start. You don’t find many women in M. R. James stories (it’s easy to forget that women were not made full members of Cambridge University until 1947, and MRJ’s college did not admit women until the 1970s) but Cross’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You gave Gemma Jones a central role as Alice, wife to John Hurt’s melancholic Professor Parkin and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of this adaptation is that it gives its protagonist, James Parkin, a proper backstory. MRJ’s professors tend to exist in monastic seclusion. We cannot imagine them having families or sex lives, and the most interesting thing about them is their talent for stirring up ghosts. Hurt’s Parkin is a man with a past, grieving the loss of his life’s companion and racked by guilt for having to put her in a nursing home. The ghosts he stirs up are as much his own demons as the disembodied wraiths that, if we are to believe Monty James at least, are worryingly common along Parkin’s particular stretch of the Suffolk coast. The terror he experiences is all the more appalling for having its roots in Parkin’s personal reality.

I read the reviews of de Emony’s film with interest. I was delighted at the continuing passion expressed by so many viewers for the work of MRJ and for the tradition of the Christmas ghost story in general. But I have to say I had little sympathy for their proprietary insistence on textual rigidity. It’s important to remember that even the most controversial adaptation is just that: an adaptation, and does not affect the integrity of the original in the slightest. James’s stories never set out to be comfortable, and I found Neil Cross’s reworking to be beautifully imaginative, genuinely frightening (watch out for the bit when Alice’s hands come under the door!) and replete with a sense of elegiac Englishness that made it a truly satisfying dramatic experience. What I thought it proved – and far more convincingly than Jonathan Miller’s stiflingly dull 1968 adaptation of the same story – was how versatile the English ghost story is, and how timeless. James’s story is more than a hundred years old now, yet it is as popular today as it always was and perhaps more so. The fact that a screenwriter might choose to reinterpret it for our own time rather than slavishly reconstructing it as a period drama is in my view a measure of the love and respect still felt for these stories within our literary culture. I think M. R. James himself would be pleased and intrigued, to see how his work has endured and expanded in our collective imagination.

But it’s time to stoke up the fire now, I think. Our guests will be arriving soon, and I feel certain one of them at least will have a story to tell…

Happy Christmas, everyone!

 

(This piece was originally written for and appeared at the Starburst magazine website, December 2011.)

On playing catch-up

David Hebblethwaite of Follow the Thread recently wrote this fascinating post about his recent experience of being a ‘shadow judge’ for this year’s Desmond Elliot Prize and Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, as well as reading and critiquing this year’s Clarke Award shortlist and last year’s Man Booker. The conclusions he draws are worrying for SFF:

“I think that, ten or fifteen years ago, [SFF] was certainly keeping pace [with the literary mainstream]: writers like China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer were emerging at the same time as (say) Sarah Waters and Michel Faber. These days, however, it seems to me that SF is struggling to keep up.”

David argues that SF has become increasingly conservative, not only in terms of textual form, but also in its willingness to actively engage with contemporary political and social issues – the arena where SF is naturally constituted to excel, in other words. I’m afraid I would tend to agree with him, and would probably go on to add evocative and original use of language to the charter of lack.

Of course, one year’s Clarke Award shortlist does not reveal the full picture of what is (or is not) happening in SFF. The six books we end up shadow-judging have not been selected by an infallibly correct AI, hardwired to home in on objectively the best (as if there even were such a thing) science fiction novels published in the UK in any given year, but by five very human judges whose personal tastes and inclinations are always going to vary considerably and thank goodness for that. And yet, in a year when our five judges could have selected works by Marcel Theroux, Margaret Atwood or Robert J. Lennon yet somehow conspired to come up with Ramez Naam and Philip Mann, instead of forewarning the terminal decline of SFF, might it not be more reasonable simply to ask (as per usual) what the hell were they thinking? The Kitschies had Ruth Ozeki, Anne Carson and Thomas Pynchon on their shortlist, after all, so the game can’t be over just yet.

But we all know perfectly well that David isn’t talking about Pynchon or Carson, writers who, brilliant and innovative as they are, are drawing their influence from SF, rather than contributing actively to the SF conversation. It is not the SF conversation that interests them – I’m sure they barely know it exists – but the metaphorical possibilities of speculative ideas within a mainstream literary context.

(Before I go any further I ought to add that I get terribly nervous around these concepts – or not nervous around the concepts themselves so much as the difficulty of explicating them. I am a writer who works largely by instinct – by touch, if you will, rather than by sight – and my critical apparatus for analysing positions I instinctively understand are fundamentally opposed is not anywhere near so finely tuned as that of Ethan Robinson, say, who earlier this year produced an essay on this subject that is so articulate, so adroit and so necessary I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it in all the months since.)

David writes:

“I’m excited to see authors like Eleanor Catton (who, to my mind, is squarely at the cutting edge of English-language fiction) and Eimear McBride emerging in the mainstream – and especially to see them winning and being shortlisted for multiple awards. But, when I look at genre sf published in the UK, I simply can’t see that they have equivalents emerging. I wish I could.”

The term ‘genre’ is often employed as an adjective of general disparagement for writers or works that are ‘not literary’, but what science fiction critics mean when they talk about ‘genre SF’ is something rather different and a lot more constructive: works that are written from within science fiction consciously as science fiction, as active contributions to the SF conversation, as opposed to essentially mainstream works that happen to make use of science fictional conceits.

I have wasted a whole lot of time in my time, trying to pretend that the latter can be the former, but it just ain’t so (for reasons why, see Mr Robinson’s essay. The only example of a contemporary mainstream writer I can think of who has written ‘proper’, contributory SF is, ironically, Margaret Atwood). The former can and do leapfrog their way in among the latter, though – a fact many mainstream critics dislike so much they will seldom if ever admit the truth of it – and this is where the crux of David’s argument lies. He maintains that fewer SF works than previously are making that leap, and that SF as a whole is on a downward trajectory as a result. I agree. But why is it so? And what needs to happen for this unfortunate trend to be reversed?

I had an interesting experience the other day. I was sitting on the floor of my office, trying to put a call through to the council tax department of Hastings Borough Council (long story). Beside me on the floor was a stack of books (it’s still there) and while the hold music droned on I picked up the book on top of the pile and began leafing through it. That book was/is Samuel R. Delany’s Driftglass, in its Gollancz ‘yellowjacket’ edition. Out of curiosity and perhaps in an attempt to prove something to myself (the issue at the core of this essay is on my mind a lot of the time) I began reading the first paragraphs of all the stories in that collection. I found, as I suspected I would, in each and every one of them language that was chewy and textured and gorgeous and capricious, ideas that sneaked out and bit your ass, storylines that had you caught from the first sentence. Fuck, I thought. This is how it’s done. Out of idle curiosity (and because I still hadn’t got through to the council tax office) I then glanced at the book’s back flap, which displayed a list of ‘Recent Gollancz SF’. Not classics, or Masterworks, just recent Gollancz SF. The works listed there, in no particular order, were by Philip K. Dick, George R. R. Martin, Frederik Pohl, Ian Watson, Robert Silverberg, Algis Budrys, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

I thought about this – what a fascinating snapshot of the science fiction writers Gollancz just happened to be publishing in 1971 – and then I found myself wondering what a comparable back flap from a book published today (let’s say a Gollancz book, for the sake of consistency, though I want to make it clear that this argument is by no means about Gollancz specifically) might have to tell us about the current state of British SF publishing and I tell you, it didn’t make for happy contemplation.

With M. John Harrison, Christopher Priest, Adam Roberts, Ian McDonald and Simon Ings on their roster, Gollancz still surely boasts some of the finest writers in the business. But we’d do well to remember that authors with decades-long careers behind them will always constitute less of a financial risk for the publisher. When it comes to new blood – where the risk lies, in other words – aside from Hannu Rajaniemi I couldn’t think of one new-generation writer Gollancz publish who is actively innovative, who comes anywhere even close to doing what Delany was doing in 1971. That was a scary, scary thought. And if Gollancz, with their venerable back catalogue of masterworks and estimable track record in promoting fresh talent, isn’t actively seeking out newer writers who want to do more than write commercial core genre, who the hell is?

I heard from a reliable source recently that [a certain major SF publisher] are steering away from ‘difficult’ SF at the moment, because the sales of [probably the best book they’ll publish this year] have proved so disappointing. If sales are so disappointing, perhaps they should ask themselves if this might have anything to do with the fact that they’ve devoted precious little effort to publicizing the book – they didn’t even organise a launch event for it. Perhaps it’s they that have fallen down on the job, because it certainly isn’t the author, or the book. I heard from a second trusted source that another big SF imprint have only acquired one new writer in the past twelve months – too bad then that the book they decided to give their backing to is a pallid, half-hearted dystopia that will make zero impact on the genre and will fade away unnoticed within two months of publication. Meanwhile, one of the few seriously good new writers is being threatened with contract curtailment due – again – to disappointing sales figures, and not a word about the likely cause of those figures, that the imprint cocked up their marketing policy, effectively separating the book from its core readership.

I think there’s actually a serious problem with the way the larger publishing imprints view SF in the current market. Back in the day, when Gollancz was publishing Delany and Disch and Dick, SF was seen by publishers as the next big thing, the literature of the new, wilfully different from mainstream social realism, something they might well benefit from promoting. We had Faber publishing new young SF writers like Christopher Priest, Brian Aldiss and Kit Reed. We had Kingsley Amis writing New Maps of Hell. We had the formal innovations of the New Wave. I’d go so far as to say that science fiction was viewed by both its readers and its promoters as a warrior literature that threw down a challenge to the old order. It’s always tempting to hark back to ‘the good old days’ as a kind of golden age of literary enlightenment, and I don’t mean to suggest that was the case at all – but it does seem to me that SF today, far from being a warrior literature, is seen by the industry as a readily marketable, easily packaged, tasty junk food full of ‘cool stuff’ and bits of shiny. They don’t want it to throw down a challenge, because conventional wisdom states that challenge frightens readers. So much easier to publish another low-grade zombie novel, especially when that’s precisely what your colleagues over at [-] will be doing, too.

It would seem self evident that cowardly publishing makes for cowardly writing, and it’s a vicious circle. The SF commentariat has preoccupied itself a great deal – and rightly so – in recent years with the industry’s continuing inequalities in terms of gender split. When faced with the question of why they don’t publish more women, industry representatives have often tended to fall back on the truism that they can’t publish what isn’t being submitted. To me at least it would seem self evident that if these same industry representatives genuinely considered it important and/or financially worthwhile that more SF by women be published, they would be pretty damn quick about getting off their arses and finding some. I would suggest that the same principle is also true of innovative, challenging, paradigm-shifting SF: the reason that so little of it is being published is not because it’s not being written, but because the industry is not going out of its way to find it, promote it, stimulate demand for it. Because stimulating demand, promotion, acquisition of talent – are these not after all the industry’s key functions?

If that’s what’s (not) happening, what can we do about it? In one of the comments on David’s post, Tomcat in the Red Room writes:

“You’d think 10 years after Light and the New Weird and the rise of Michael Cisco etc, that there would, indeed, be more new writers trying/(influenced by) that kinda stuff. Does SF need its own David Foster Wallace to write a novel in fractals, I wonder?”

The short answer to that, Tom, is yes, we do. We also need a publishing industry that believes enough in its readers to offer them something more than the literary equivalent of processed white bread, we need readers to keep on complaining and debating and arguing the toss. Most of all, we need writers to stop drawing their influences from Supernatural and The Walking Dead – to switch off the crap SFF derivatives and start taking some risks. As writers, we need to remind the world that we are still a guerrilla literature. Writers who let themselves be conned by the major imprints into moderating their voices may think they’re buying themselves some security, but they’re not. What they’re actually purchasing is their own expendability.

Tell them you won’t buy it.

Angry on the internet

I don’t often show my anger in public. I prefer the considered, properly argued response. It’s more Machiavellian. You burn less adrenalin that way. More importantly, you give yourself time to work out what you really think. Today though, I am angry. Seriously. And it really didn’t take me long to work out what I thought.

Earlier this afternoon, I came across this extract from a profile in The Times of the novelist (and winner of the Booker Prize) Eleanor Catton, which Rose Tremlett, the press officer at Little, Brown, had posted on Twitter:

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My first reaction was disbelief. I mean, how much more condescending, insulting and sexist could you get? If the piece had been in The Sun or the Daily Mail, I would still have been angry, but as this is precisely the kind of rhetoric we’ve come to expect from such venues, I would ultimately have shrugged my shoulders, muttered w**kers, and moved right along. But this was The Times, formerly a respected broadsheet. Not any more. This article offers proof that it’s now fully Murdochized. Shame on you, Times, shame on you.

I was busy writing a book review, but ended up breaking off from it as I felt there was no way I could let this abomination go. Not wanting to fall into the trap of reacting to something on the internet without fully ascertaining the facts, I popped straight round to our local newsagent and bought a copy of The Times so I could read the full article in situ. Perhaps Twitter had it all wrong, I thought (well, it wouldn’t be the first time). Perhaps the article was actually some lamentably misguided attempt to be ironic, or contentious. In the interests of fair-mindedness, I felt I ought at least to check.

Nope. It’s exactly as written. Worse, it’s written by a woman, Kate Saunders, an experienced journalist and, one would hope, both old enough and young enough to know better. In keeping with my resolution to try never to say anything online that I wouldn’t say in person to the person concerned, I wish I could tell Kate Saunders face to face that this piece is a despicable betrayal of Eleanor Catton, of women in general and women writers in particular. Kate Saunders, you should apologise publicly for your article, and retract it.

I’ve had several (amicable) conversations in the past year with male friends who seem somewhat bemused at the idea that there is ‘still’ an equality problem for women in the UK, with particular reference to the world of books, and the world of SFF. To those who doubt the continuing relevance of such issues, I would tell them to go away and read the above article. If you still think there isn’t a problem, read it again. It’s not just that one person wrote it – it’s that a national newspaper printed it, unironically, and that a large number of that paper’s regular readers will no doubt consume it unironically also.

I would urge anyone who takes The Times to boycott that newspaper forthwith, until the editorial staff issue an unreserved apology to Eleanor Catton.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that Kate Saunders appears to be of the opinion that Eleanor Catton has to actually believe in astrology in order to use its intricate structures in her novel. Saunders also has this to say on the subject of SFF:

What next? Catton, with an admirable calm that might distress her publishers, says she’s not writing at the moment. Yet she is, of course, working. “I’m looking at two areas,” she says. “Systemised magic and time travel.” This is intriguing. These are not serious subjects outside fiction for children.

Expletive deleted.

I shall be writing about The Luminaries as soon as I can, as part of my crime blog. I’m currently just over half way through it, but other reading commitments have set me back a bit. But in the meantime, congratulations to Eleanor Catton, one of the most gifted young writers currently working, on her wonderful Booker win, and congratulations to the jury under Robert Macfarlane on making such a brave choice. Too bad for dear old Robert McCrum that they did after all ‘inflict this monster on the reading public.’ (What an arse.) Re-sult.

“On YA”

I read a blog post by Adam Roberts over the weekend, in which he talked interestingly about the cultural significance of so-called Young Adult fiction and the challenge it presents to literary prizes like the Booker, which, as Adam would have it, ‘likes complex, challenging art’ but that which ‘never, ever rewards primitivist art.’

Adam wrote his post in response to an article on the OUP blog by a colleague of his at Royal Holloway, Robert Eaglestone, and a follow-up discussion on Twitter about the Booker shortlist. Eaglestone argues that said shortlist is diverse and innovative, Adam counters that in ignoring SF, crime, and YA, the Booker is deliberately avoiding engagement with three of the most culturally significant literary trends of the present time, thereby rendering itself irrelevant and parochial.

Familiar arguments then, and I’d say I’ve found myself on Adam’s side in those arguments far more frequently than not. I admire Adam’s literary criticism hugely – it combines erudition with a sharpness of wit that do not always make a natural pairing. His commentary on last year’s Booker was a tour de force and a joy to read. Why then, apart from the fact that I normally respect Adam so much as a critic, did I find myself becoming more and more uncomfortable with his post on YA? Why did I spend a significant amount of time over the weekend thinking about it, and coming finally to the decision that I had to reply?

Well, mostly because of this:

Imagine a music prize that has, through the 70s and 80s and up to the present, shortlisted only abstruse jazz, contemporary classical and Gentle-Giant-style prog rock concept albums. I love my prog rock, and partly I do so because it ticks all those aesthetic boxes I mention above—it is complex and challenging and intricate music. But I wouldn’t want to suggest that prog has had anything like the cultural impact or importance as pop, punk or rap. That would be silly. So how would you tell the judges picking those shortlists about the Ramones, the Pistols and the Clash? How would you persuade them that they’re missing out not just good music but actually the music that really matters?

Which is all well and good – once again, I agree with Adam. The problem is that the analogy he is presenting seems utterly false, because the literary equivalents of The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash (and Kristin Hersh and Siouxie and Patti Smith) are not Suzanne Collins, J. K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, as Adam would have them here, but Charles Bukowski, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Sarah Kane, Janice Galloway and (much though he pisses me off a lot of the time) Bret Easton Ellis. In terms of sophistication, formal achievement, and the way their product is received by its intended audience, Meyer et al are actually closer to the manufactured boy- and girl-bands that (like Meyer, Rowling and Collins) started coming to prominence in the nineties and noughties. Both are a cultural phenomenon, yes – but in terms of what one might call the Ongoing Literary Project (and the Booker Prize is expressly about the Ongoing Literary Project) their status is negligible. Complaining that Booker will never reward the ‘artistic primitivism’ of Breaking Dawn is like complaining that the jury will never award the prize to Fifty Shades of Grey.

There is another crucial point here that Adam never addresses. The punk and alternative bands of the 1970s (and continuing into the present day) were and are themselves made up of (necessarily slightly older) young adults, making music for themselves, for their peers, in the way that best expresses their view of the world and their fears for its future. Commercial YA fiction is (in the vast majority of cases) written by adults, for consumption by readers younger than they are, or to call it by its proper name, for the young adult market. Moreover, the market certainly and in many cases the books Adam names in his blog post are not progressive, as he suggests, but didactic. The Twilight series certainly is, and both his books and his many interviews make it impossible to forget that Philip Pullman was a teacher before he ever became a full time writer.

Mass market YA is not representative of some kind of social revolution, nor is it even properly zeitgeisty. Adam talks about the Harry Potter novels as ‘one of the great representations of school in Western culture,’ yet how many kids in Britain today could realistically compare their own schooldays with Harry’s time at Hogwarts, and I’m not just talking about the magic? Adam lauds the way sex is characterised in the Twilight books as ‘something simultaneously compelling and alarming, that draws you on and scares you away in equal measure’ – well, if that’s how you want to describe the bizarre and (to me) seriously dodgy amalgam of titillation and partisan prudery that is the strongest characteristic of these narratives, then OK.  If you don’t, then you’ll be bound to admit that most of the most popular YA series are – like the manufactured pop that dates even as you download it – anodyne and half baked even in cultural terms, let alone in literary terms.

Let me make myself clear: it is not YA as such that I’m objecting to (much though I personally dislike the rather pointless label that has been slapped on it) but Adam’s (devil’s advocate? can he really be serious?) insistence on the lowest common denominator, on his confusion here of the popular with the excellent or culturally significant.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with young adults reading, enjoying, discussing, role playing or writing fan fiction about Harry Potter or Twilight. There’s no doubt that the power of story that exists in these books is considerable, and marvellous, and that the authors can and should be congratulated and rewarded for helping to instil in younger people an enjoyment of reading and perhaps also of writing that will often continue into adulthood. There’s nothing inherently wrong with adults reading and enjoying this kind of popular YA either, so long as they acknowledge it for what it is, which is literary comfort food. But what Adam seems to be doing in his article is the equivalent of demanding that Star Trek novelisations should be placed on a level playing field, in literary prize terms, with seriously intended and formally accomplished works of speculative fiction such as those produced by M. John Harrison or Liz Jensen or Simon Ings or even Adam himself. Bollocks, is what I say to that. If we want YA to be taken seriously, shouldn’t we be pointing readers – and critics, and the judges of literary prizes – away from the sludge at the bottom of the literary barrel and towards those books and writers that genuinely do represent excellence, and cultural significance, and literary innovation in their writing for young adults? I’m sure that’s what Adam would do if he were arguing a similar case for SF, so why not here? Because (as with SF, as with crime) there are a wealth of books that fit into the young adult bracket that are also worth reading as literature. Natasha Carthew’s Winter Damage, Sally Gardner’s Maggot Moon, Helen Grant’s The Glass Demon and Rachel Hartman’s Serafina to name but four recent examples, the fiction of Melvyn Burgess and Frank Cottrell Boyce and Frances Hardinge and wonderful Margo Lanagan. As with science fiction itself, the list is extensive.

Nor is it correct to assume that YA will ‘never’ be rewarded or even acknowledged by the likes of the Booker. YA is already making its way on to the shortlists of the major ‘adult’ speculative fiction prizes – see Patrick Ness’s Monsters of Men in 2011, Rachel Hartman’s Serafina earlier this year. Jenni Fagan’s YA-friendly The Panopticon, also a finalist for this year’s Kitschies, has been widely praised in the literary mainstream and Fagan was herself named as one of 2013’s Granta Best of Young British Novelists. There was plenty of discussion, both before and after it won the Clarke Award in 2012, as to whether Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb should be classified as YA – and yes, there it was on the Booker longlist. These books have been recognised by prize juries because they are good books – that is, demonstrating significant accomplishment in terms of style, use of language and literary form. Whether they are YA or not (or SF or not, or crime or not) is of secondary importance.

Adam complains that the Booker never rewards ‘primitive’ art. I’m not sure if he’s wanting to categorise the whole of SF as primitive art along with mass market YA – I know I wouldn’t (just read Light) – but the central question here is: do we want it to? What could possibly be gained by a panel of Booker Prize judges deciding to give the nod to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? This surely is not what the Booker – or the Clarke, come to that – is for. The way mass consumables work in the marketplace should never be confused with what literature does, which is to be sceptical, to question, to call to arms, to stretch the imagination and the intellect, to further the possibilities of what printed words on a piece of paper can accomplish. One could argue, perhaps rightly, that reaching a lot of people is in and of itself a significant literary achievement. But The Daily Mail reaches a lot of people and I don’t see Adam arguing that the Mail – that most perniciously conservative of daily rags – should be held up as an icon of the zeitgeist.

The task of literature – and that includes our YA literature – is not to reflect mass trends, but to buck them. The task of the Booker Prize, surely – and of the Clarke, and the Kitschies – is to recognise writers who are genuinely striving to do that.

Another quick note…

… to point the way towards DF Lewis’s real-time review of Spin here. A deeply personal response, as one would always expect from Des, and much appreciated. I am very taken with the images he has chosen to illustrate his words. Also his own spin on the music of Xenakis…

Thought for the day

“Cultures change and the ceaseless churn builds empires just as easily as it razes kingdoms. There is always some part of a culture that is dead, dying or lying dormant in wait for the right person to come along with the right set of ideas and the right type of audience. Complaints about the exhaustion of the field have always been with us and will hopefully always be with us as they are a sign that the world of written SF is still complex and vibrant enough to contain multiple factions with different ideas about what SF ought to be doing. The only time people should really start to worry about the exhaustion of SF is when people stop complaining about it as that means that people have stopped disagreeing and when people stop disagreeing it’s generally a sign that people have also stopped caring.”

(Jonathan McCalmont, ‘Cycles of Exhaustion’)

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