The Spider's House

Nina Allan's Homepage

Category: writers (Page 14 of 21)

Women in SF #4

July 16, 2014 /

Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan

I love hearing about other people’s trades. We were in a cabinet maker’s workshop yesterday, hearing a young craftsman tell us about how his father, a former train mechanic, turned to working with wood when he was made redundant from the railways. I still remember an evening spent in a car park in Bedford, waiting for the AA to turn up after we inadvertently drove over a nail. The guy who dealt with our call-out changed the tyre in a matter of minutes, all the while recounting hair-raising stories of performing similar tasks on the hard shoulder of the M1 while huge juggernauts rushed past every ten seconds. I find specialism of any kind urgently compelling, and I could have listened to that AA mechanic all evening.

Knowing this, it won’t come as a surprise that I love books that feature work as a strong component. And the first section of Tricia Sullivan’s new YA novel Shadowboxer is all about work – the work of being a fighter. Jade Barrera is seventeen years old. She is a troubled teenager with a heavy baggage of personal and family problems. She is also a talented practitioner of mixed martial arts, just beginning to make her mark on the sport. When she lets her temper get the better of her (again), her trainer gives her an ultimatum: get smart or get out. He also offers her the chance to spend some time training in an authentic MMA gym in Thailand. Jade is given to understand that saying no to this opportunity is not an option.

I found the whole first third of the book spellbinding. A favourite novel of mine is Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit, large portions of which consist of little more than move-by-move descriptions of chess games, and I loved this initial section of Shadowboxer for much the same reason. Tricia Sullivan knows her MMA and her passion shows to wonderful effect. Jade herself is so well drawn that we enter her world with ease. Shadowboxer is being marketed as a YA novel but rich in detail and sophisticated in psychology as it is, I think this is a book that readers of any age would relate to.

The fantastical component is also strong. While she is in Thailand, Jade stumbles into a supernatural world of treachery and child trafficking, populated by human monsters and Buddhist deities. Her guide and confidante is Mya, a young Burmese girl who has been forcibly separated from her family and enslaved by Richard Fuller, a vile and corrupt individual who wishes to utilize Mya’s special talents for his own evil gain.

Mya’s sections are rich in imagic detail, chilling and beautiful and intensely felt. I actually wanted more of Mya, her story and background, more about what happened to her family and what brought her into contact with Richard Fuller. Of Fuller himself we learn less still, and if I have a criticism of Shadowboxer it is that the interleaving of the two stories – Mya’s and Jade’s – feels overly hurried. I think there is enough material here for Mya to have a book all to herself – and I suspect that readers (this one included) would have welcomed a measure of background information on the Himmapan Forest and its mythical beasts.

That being said, Shadowboxer is a very special book, partly because it feels so personal and so deeply felt, partly because of the very lovely quality of the writing. There is nothing artificial or cynical or manufactured about the art of Tricia Sullivan. What you find when you read her is originality, spontaneity, a deal of beauty and above all a spirit of enquiry that – truly – is what speculative fiction is all about.

Shadowboxer is published by Ravenstone/Solaris in October 2014.

Back in the Lot

June 29, 2014 /

While boxing up books this week, I’ve had Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot on audiobook to keep me company. I think I’m right in saying that SL is actually the first of King’s novels I ever had contact with – not through the text, but through Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV adaptation, starring David Soul and James Mason. I was thirteen at the time, and I don’t think I’m the only one who had the bejeezus scared out of me by the image of little Danny Glick, scraping at the window to be let in. I don’t know what it says about me that I forced myself against my will to watch Part 2, just to prove to myself that I could do it, but that’s how it was.

It was another twenty years before I read the novel. I remember being impressed by it, especially by King’s evocation of American small town life. Listening to the audiobook this past week I’ve found this aspect of the novel, if anything, even more impressive. In his essay on SL for his Rereading Stephen King series for The Guardian, James Smythe says:

When I was younger, it was the second half that enraptured me: the rush of the hunt (on both sides); the thrill of not knowing who would and wouldn’t survive; and the pain of how much this affected the characters… Now, it’s the start that I love most. It’s the slowest of slow burns, all hints and drip-feed. King infuses it with descriptions that start you thinking about vampires before they even factor in the novel. “She dipped her head to suck at the straw,” goess one passage, describing the drinking of a root beer. “Her neck was beautifully muscled.” Another, during a kiss, reads: “She thought: he’s tasting me.” When the chaos finally unfolds, it’s a real payoff. You care.

You certainly do. So much so that I’m still undecided about King’s decision to have Susan Norton turn vamp. Dramatically of course he has to – she’s the Lucy Westenra figure – but emotionally I still feel nooooo that’s so unfair. Such personal involvement on the part of the reader is a sure sign of a writer doing their job.

It’s more than that, though. This time around, I was even more captivated by some of King’s writing about the town – those little prologues at the beginning of each section, depicting the town waking up, or the Marsten house on its hill as the sun goes down. There are passages here that feel galvanised by inspiration, feverish with it. It’s the real deal.

King wrote this novel – his second – when he was just twenty-eight years old. His approach to vampires – the heavy Catholic iconography, the rigid adherence to the Stoker version of the mythos – feels dated now, but that’s not King’s fault. SL was published in 1975, decades before the vampire industry kicked into gear. At the time, what he was doing – recreating a nineteenth-century classic in a truly modern idiom – must have seemed very new to him, as indeed it was. The fact that the writing itself still stands up in spite of the narrative showing its age a little is sure proof of its quality.

Salem’s Lot is a novel of passion – for the story, and for the craft of story. This is what most communicates itself to readers, what makes the novel endure. We need more books like this. More twenty-eight-year-old writers with guts enough to slam down their soul on the table and dare us to take it or leave it, because that’s how it is.

On playing catch-up

June 4, 2014 /

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.

“Science fiction allows us the possibility of transgression.”

May 27, 2014 /

“To read good speculative fiction from multiple perspectives is to get a little drunk on unfamiliar liquors, so that one can no longer walk straight and oblivious through the pathways of one’s unexamined assumptions.  We need to intoxicate the imagination.  How else than through speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy that has realized its transgressive potential?”

If you read one new thing today, make it this scintillating essay on Alternate Visions by Vandana Singh. Inspiring, inclusive, positive and constructive, it should be absorbed and considered by everyone and anyone in the field of SFF, and beyond.

Judgement day

March 15, 2014 /

While I’m writing this, the Clarke Award judges and their chairman are in a meeting, making their final decisions (and, we would hope for nothing less, having their final arguments) about which six novels should make up this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. With the announcement of that shortlist just four days away, I thought it would be fun to cast a last look back over the list of submissions, and make my own final prediction about what that shortlist might look like. I’ve read a few more of the submitted titles since my first guesses, and in any case, two months is a long time in SF – opinions, emphases, gut feelings can change. So let’s do it! Here’s my predicted shortlist for March 18th:

The Secret Knowledge – Andrew Crumey. I’m reading this at the moment, and it’s lovely. Like all of Crumey’s work, The Secret Knowledge presents the perfect example of a ‘non-genre’ work that doesn’t shy away from science fictional ideas. It’s beautifully written (with Crumey you take that for granted) but it’s not overwritten. Direct, clear, engaging from the first page, I like this in the same way I liked Robert J. Lennon’s Familiar, but on balance I like it even more, probably because it’s less coy about being SF. I’m full of enthusiasm for The Secret Knowledge, and my Crumey Crusade goes on.

Wolfhound Century – Peter Higgins. Just a feeling, a sudden hunch. I reckon there’ll be an almighty row about the ending – in that there isn’t one – but that a couple of judges will be passionate enough about this book (the writing is very lovely, and the alt-Russia setting, whatever my own personal misgivings, will command significant attention) to see it win a place among the shortlisted six.

Ancillary Justice – Ann Leckie. I think this is going to be a shoo-in. Big, far-future SF, intelligently written and with some engaging core concepts, probably the most discussed SF novel of 2013 and how could it escape notice here?  I think its emotional range is limited, and my eventual verdict on this book will be determined by where and how far Leckie goes from here. But I can understand why the judges would want to select it, and I won’t mind seeing it on the shortlist if they do.

A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki. An interesting case, this. I think it will divide opinion – some will see it as tediously self indulgent, others will see it as sensitive, beautifully written and radical in its ideas and the way it conveys them. Oddly, it’s kind of both things at the same time. It’s actually a novel with a great deal to say, and – given the complexity of some of the subjects involved – it says it gracefully and well. But it is one of those novels (I’m becoming increasingly impatient with them, interestingly) that dance around their science fictionality without ever properly coming to terms with it. Chris bailed on this book after forty pages. I read the whole thing, with increasing enjoyment and appreciation, but without ever entirely losing my doubts. A sincere and talented writer, certainly, but will she take her Kitschies win as a signal to continue her explorations in SF? I don’t think so, somehow.

The Adjacent – Christopher Priest. This book does everything the Ozeki doesn’t do and then some. It’s proper SF, from a master of the genre, genuinely chilling, rapturously beautiful, compellingly mysterious. A novel that readers and critics will still be enthusing and puzzling over a hundred years from now, the judges would have to be mad not to include it.

The Machine – James Smythe. A small but perfectly formed novel. Great core conceit, beautifully executed with excellent sense of place and good characterisation. Demonstrates that British SF is alive and well and doing interesting things. I think this one will be a favourite of all the judges, and will wing it through to the shortlist as a result.

Well, that’s my guess – as it turns out, books from all three of my previous putative shortlists are on there, together with one title that wasn’t on any of them. But it’s so difficult to call! Quite a lot depends on how rigorous this year’s judging panel are going to be about the whole SF/Fantasy divide. If they’re fantasy liberals, we might well see Patrick Ness, Jess Richards, Andrei Kurkov or Wu Ming-Yi making an appearance. If they’re hardline SF purists, there’s a higher likelihood that Paul McAuley or even Greg Egan might make a showing. Meanwhile, I’m still carrying a personal torch for Matt Hill’s The Folded Man, Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies, and Tony White’s Shackleton’s Man Goes South.

Well, the decision is being made even as we speak. To say I’d love to be a fly on the wall is an understatement, but as always, all we ask is that the judges give us a shortlist that will make us think, argue, spark decades-long feuds and – most of all – help turn some new readers on to SF and its infinite possibilities for intellectual exploration and creative expression.

Let it be so.

Annihilation

March 9, 2014 /

“Will you come after me if I don’t come back? If you can?”

Reading Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel Annihilation this weekend, what struck me most forcibly was how old it felt as a text, how ingrained within the New Weird mythos, how well established. Like the gargantuan pile of abandoned journals discovered by the novel’s narrator (of which the book in your hands must necessarily be one), subjective experience insists it is other than logic dictates.

More than a couple of reviewers liken Annihilation to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. And while it is true that VanderMeer’s novel, in its account of an expedition into a mysterious and evidentially dangerous altered territory, Area X, would appear to owe at least some debt of inspiration to that seminal work, it is also something quite different, something other.

Annihilation doesn’t really remind me of M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing either – and that novel uses a quote from the Strugatskys as its epigraph. A narrative that takes place entirely from within Area X – Roadside Picnic without the wider world, Nova Swing without Saudade, without the spaceport – lends Annihilation a particular claustrophobia that makes the experience of reading it – this found text – entirely unique. The novel is rare generically as well – science fiction that is properly horror and vice versa. Lovecraft fans should adore this – but if you prefer your SFF to be grounded in a scientifically arguable reality you will (just stick with it) be seduced by it too. What you think you’re reading at the start, you turn out not to be. Whilst all the initial stages of this novel’s journey had me thinking of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, by the end my head was full of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.

This is a flawlessly written book. The prose is spare yet dense, allusive yet cogent, immersive yet objective. The descriptive passages are magnetic, without ever being overwritten. Perhaps the best summation of these seeming contradictions is to say that Annihilation will answer all your questions about itself, yet will nonetheless remain elusive, powerfully mysterious, and open-ended. In short, this is the very best kind of novel, the kind that eschews intrusive writerly mannerisms and promptings in favour of letting the reader get stuck into forming their own opinions from the very first page.

As a lifelong horror fan, I’m always on the defensive when it comes to what I tend to think of as Hollywoodisms. So there’s a team of explorers who volunteer to form a twelfth expedition into an ominously named patch of territory where the previous eleven expeditions have all gone AWOL in one (bad) way or another? The shadowy organisation that sent them in has forbidden them to use either each other’s first names or functioning digital technology? “Yeah right,” my Scream-self muttered. “Why would they do that?”

I soon found out why they did that. And it made sense. This is what I mean when I say that Annihilation feels established. This novel is so original and strange it feels as if several generations of horror writers have drawn their inspiration from it, rather than the other way around.

It defies logic, but it is so. Annihilation is a superior achievement, and although it works perfectly well as a standalone novel, I can’t wait to get my hands on the second and third instalments of the trilogy.

My Hugo Ballot 2014

March 5, 2014 /

Getting around to this has been a problem. Not because I don’t enjoy compiling nominations lists, because (as everyone who knows me knows) I do. Partly it’s that we’ve been so busy in recent weeks (more updates to follow in due course) that I’ve not had the time to give this ballot the full attention I feel it deserves. There’s also the fact that the more time passes, the more doubts I seem to accrue about the process in general. I’m not about to go off on a massive anti-Hugo rant – my general position on awards is that anything that gets people discussing, enthusing and arguing about books is bound to have more good in it than bad, and as for the Jonathan Ross thing, enough already – it’s just that I’m all too aware of how little I’ve read of what’s actually available. In the fields of short fiction particularly, my percentage coverage is lamentable. It follows from this that I’ll be voting for some works I think are good, rather than those works I know (through exhaustive reading) are at the top of the field. I know I’m no different in this from the vast majority of voters – but what it means, inevitably, is that the same small pool of works tend to enjoy a disproportionate amount of publicity, while other, equally fine and perhaps better works slip through the voting net.

I don’t like this state of affairs, and I don’t think it’s good for the field. I’m not sure what can best be done, but for now I’m going to let the rest of fandom go on arguing about it on my behalf. Time is running short, and if I’m going to nominate I need to get my ballot sorted pretty much now.

Maybe by next year I’ll have found a way of solving the various nomination dilemmas (yeah right). Until then, for what it’s worth, here’s my Hugo ballot for 2014:

 

Best Novel

MaddAddam – Margaret Atwood. Go read Adam Roberts’s review at Strange Horizons if you want to understand my reasons for nominating this heavily flawed, unique work of science fiction. Atwood should be celebrated, in my opinion, as a jewel in SF’s crown. So she doesn’t properly understand the nomenclature, so what?? She can write, by God.

The Accursed – Joyce Carol Oates. The fifth instalment in Oates’s decades-spanning loosely connected ‘gothic’ series. Oates is a genius, and I don’t use the word lightly. She should win everything.

The Adjacent – Christopher Priest. My favourite science fiction novel of 2013, bar none.

A Stranger in Olondria – Sofia Samatar. I think Samatar’s work is remarkable, full stop. Her command of language is superlative. She is a joy to read.

The Machine – James Smythe. I know I keep going on about this one, but it really is that good!

 

Best Novella

Memory Palace – Hari Kunzru. I’m nominating the text, not the exhibition. 10,000 words of top notch SF: radiantly alive, radical, a showpiece of the novella form.

Iseul’s Lexicon – Yoon Ha Lee. One of the most original, accomplished and compelling voices in SF today.

Dogs with their Eyes Shut – Paul Meloy. I’ve loved Meloy’s work ever since I stumbled across his collection Islington Crocodiles, which should have won every ‘Best Collection’ award going in its year of publication. My only problem with Meloy is that he doesn’t write enough!

Burning Girls – Veronica Shanoes. I came across this while I was reading for my Short Fiction Snapshot feature at Strange Horizons. My only reason for not selecting it was that it was too long to fit the format. It’s a remarkable work.

Six-Gun Snow White – Catherynne Valente. I love the way this is told, but then Valente is always amazing, so what did I expect? Wonderful work.

 

Best Novelette

‘Paranormal Romance’ – Christopher Barzak. I love Barzak’s voice, his tendency towards metafiction. He’s just a very good writer, and should be more widely appreciated.

‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’ – Ted Chiang. I love Chiang’s documentary approach, the way his words, and his worlds, sneak up on you. I also love stories about writing, about language. A damn fine writer.

‘Cave & Julia’ – M. John Harrison. The best short fiction of 2013. Period.

‘The Prayer of Ninety Cats’ – Caitlin R. Kiernan. I love everything Kiernan writes, and this is a classic.

‘Meet the President’ – Zadie Smith. Clearly out of the same mindset, stylewise, as her novel NW, Smith’s novelette is weird, spiky, interesting. Smith’s recently expressed interest in writing science fiction was greeted with the usual chorus of doubt from certain sections of fandom, Surely a writer like this should be encouraged??

 

Best Short Story

‘A Visit to the House on Terminal Hill’ – Elizabeth Knox. I wrote about this for my Short Fiction Snapshot feature at Strange Horizons and it has stayed with me ever since. I love Knox’s knowingness, her effortless command of genre tropes, and I love this story.

‘The 9th Technique’ – China Mieville. Distributed as a chapbook to members of the 2013 World Fantasy Convention as an ‘apology’ for his non-attendance, this is a story that deserves wider exposure. Written in a terse, tense prose that feels more pared down than Mieville’s more familiar high baroque but that is equally (if not more) compelling, I found it extraordinary, and wished it had gone on for longer.

‘Selkie stories are for Losers’ – Sofia Samatar. Loved this story. It’s a wonderful introduction to Samatar’s richly textured, evocative prose.

‘Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer‘- Kenneth Schneyer. I discovered this via Rachel Swirsky’s invaluable annual Short Fiction Recommendations and I’m so glad I did. Like Rachel, I like the art stuff, which is brilliantly done. Love it, wish I’d written it.

‘The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch over the Bride of the World’ – Catherynne Valente. Another one I discovered while reading for the Short Fiction Snapshot. For me, it seemed too good to spoil by trying to write about it.

 

Best Collection

North American Lake Monsters – Nathan Ballingrud. I’ve not read all the stories in this volume, but I’ve read enough to know how much I admire what Ballingrud is doing. Wonderful stuff.

The Ape’s Wife – Caitlin R. Kiernan. For me, Kiernan is one of the very finest writers working today, in any genre, period. Everything of hers I read, I wish I’d written.

Conservation of Shadows – Yoon Ha Lee. I just love these stories, and most especially the original forms many of them take. Maths, science, music, warfare – what more could you ask for in a collection? Lee’s command of language and imagery feels effortless and exhilarating. A wonderful discovery.

The Story Until Now – Kit Reed. I was put in the way of this volume by Paul Kincaid via Strange Horizons. Reed is one of those writers who seems criminally underappreciated.

How the World Became Quiet – Rachel Swirsky. And finally, a collection from Swirsky! Swirsky has a flawless poetic touch I’ve always envied, combined with pure, natural storytelling ability. Many of these mini-novels are just breathtaking.

 

Best Anthology

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells – Datlow/Windling. Some fine writers, some fine stories. I do find that my taste in SFF often coincides with Ellen’s, and so it’s no surprise that I always enjoy her anthologies.

Rustblind and Silverbright – David Rix. The fact that I have a story in this anthology has nothing whatsoever to do with my nomination. I’m nominating Rustblind because I love David’s concept. This is a properly themed anthology, beautifully arranged and considered, and amounting to so much more than many of the usual kind of ‘rag bag’ reprint anthologies. This project was a genuine labour of love for David, and deserves far wider notice.

The Lowest Heaven – Shurin/Perry. Great concept, and includes stories from some of my favourite new writers.

 

Best Related Work

The Transgressive Iain Banks – Colebrook/Cox

Here Be Dragons – Stefan Ekman

Speculative Fiction 2012 – Shurin/Landon

Wonderbook – Jeff VanderMeer

Afrofuturism – Ytasha L. Womack

For the most part, shamefully, I’ve only sampled bits and pieces of all of these. But I think the Best Related Work category is important, and unfairly neglected, and the above works all seem, for their various reasons, worthy of notice.

 

Best Dramatic Presentation (short form)

Another category where I feel inadequate to nominate. I love genre TV (it’s a favourite means of relaxation) but am so woefully behind on it my opinions are mostly valueless. We’re working our way through Fringe at the moment – lamentable, but such good fun I can’t resist it (although Chris most certainly could) – so you see how out of synch we are with the rest of fandom. Anyway, I’m nominating the below because (I confess!) I loved it, even if the appalling Christmas episode did its best to wipe all my good DW feelings off the map forever.

The Day of the Doctor


Best Dramatic Presentation (long form)

I found myself very disappointed by genre film in 2013. I don’t like franchises in any year, which always cuts down my choices in any case. Perhaps my biggest sad surprise though was how much I disliked Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (and for the record, I loved Primer). I’ve seen UC compared with late Malick, to which I would reply: yes, and that’s precisely the problem (have you seen To The Wonder? If not, you’ll find it in the dictionary under Self Indulgent). By far my favourite pure genre film in 2013 was Neil Jordan’s vampire movie Byzantium, which seemed to me to be the perfect small film. Other than that, I’m clutching at straws.

An Adventure in Space and Time

Byzantium

The East


Best Semiprozine

Strange Horizons. Because it rocks. Because the reviews section is second to none, because it actively seeks to encourage diversity across all areas and because its commitment to supporting and furthering excellence in SFF today is unquestioned. It’s largely because of Strange Horizons that I became interested in online fandom in the first place.

Interzone. Because it will always mean so much to me, and to British SF.

Los Angeles Review of Books (science fiction section). For publishing some of the most engaging and in-depth SF criticism around. I love this mag.

Lightspeed. A wonderful source of new fiction. Superb magazine.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone. Unique. Beautiful. Serious. Should be way better known.

 

Best Fanzine

The Book Smugglers

Pornokitsch

SF Mistressworks

SF Signal

The Speculative Scotsman

 

Best Fan Writer

Abigail Nussbaum. For me, Abigail is in a class of her own at the moment. She writes with all the passionate enthusiasm and insider knowledge of the true fan, whilst combining these assets with the erudite articulacy of a professional critic. Abigail’s pieces are a joy to read, and whether I wholly agree with her opinion of a book, story or argument or not, she always leaves me with something to think about, some new angle to check out. I’m in awe of her knowledge and her skill. She absolutely deserves a Hugo, and her shortlisting is long overdue.

For my other nominations in this category, I’m going for writers I always love reading, people who speak their minds – usually in gloriously entertaining fashion – whilst displaying the objectivity and core knowledge necessary to a rigorous and reasoned argument and without recourse to lazy ad hominems. (Anyone who resorts to ad hominems, ever, is going to have to work pretty hard to make me find lasting value in their offerings.) Here are four great fan writers whose reviews, postings and comments I always look forward to and wish there were more of:

Liz Bourke

Kameron Hurley

Martin Lewis

Jonathan McCalmont


Best Editor – Short Form

John Joseph Adams

Andy Cox

Ellen Datlow

Michael Kelly

Ian Whates


John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Helen Marshall

Sofia Samatar

E.J. Swift

Enough said.

Women in SF #3

February 14, 2014 /

Cataveiro by E. J. Swift

On a forgotten day some time between two hundred and three hundred years ago, the musician Juliana Cataveiro pulled her daughter’s limp body from a street flooded with the South Atlantic and carried her home through a hurricane. The storms raged for three days. During that time, Juliana sat in the attic of her home with her daughter and sang to her. On the first day, the South Atlantic plucked things from houses and bore them down the streets in strange, floating processions. On the second day, the wind took the roof off Juliana’s house. She dared it to take the body of her child and it did not. The child turned blue and cold. When the rain ceased and the sea fell flat and glimmered as if it had never stirred, never mind drowned souls in their hundreds, Juliana Cataveiro burned her daughter, put the ashes in a tin and her guitar on her back and came south, which was the only way to go. (Cataveiro p107)

While it may be true that everybody has a book in them, what proves your mettle as a writer is how you handle that difficult second novel.

It’s often said of first novels that they rely too heavily on autobiography. You know the kind of thing – stories of teenage angst and dysfunctional families, misfit loners finding themselves in the big city and naive ingenues falling in with the wrong kind of company amidst the dreaming spires all remain popular subjects among debut novelists. There’s nothing wrong with these subjects per se – their very universality makes them readily accessible and often compelling. But with so many pre-existing novels in the same vein, it becomes increasingly difficult for the aspiring novelist to bring anything new or interesting to these timeworn themes.

The first-time SF novelist faces a similar obstacle to originality. While she may not draw so heavily on her own childhood and adolesence, she may find herself tempted – subconsciously or otherwise – to keep the books and stories she read and reread during those formative years too close to hand. It was these novels that inspired her to become a writer, after all. Who would not aspire to creating such magic? And so the derivative cycle of genre fiction continues.

The most positive attribute of E. J. Swift’s debut novel Osiris was undoubtedly the writing. The book possessed a stylistic assurance that takes many writers two or three novels to come close to mastering. Its finely tuned lyricism, gentle but persuasive, demonstrated that Swift is an author who takes her craft seriously and to whom language is of central importance. Reading Osiris, you were left in no doubt that you were in the presence of a sensitive artist at work, and certain scenes – the opening execution scene in particular – continued to resonate long after the story itself had been concluded.

For me though, the story itself had problems that became impossible to ignore. I’d read it all before, basically: spoiled little rich girl meets poor revolutionary boy and gradually becomes alive to the horrifying injustices inherent in the system that supports her. Girl goes against corrupt and decadent family to fight the system alongside boy. Regime is challenged, calamity ensues. An overcautious structure also results in a serious pacing issue – as information is needlessly repeated, any sense of urgency is lost. The end product winds up somewhat stodgy and a tadge overcooked.

Swift finished the manuscript of Osiris soon after completing an MA in Creative Writing. There was then a delay of some years while the author found first the right agent and then the right publisher – problems every writer gets to know about, sooner or later, but that inevitably result in some level of authorial dissociation. The writer moves on, tries new things, starts a new novel. By the time that first book comes out, there is every risk that it will feel like old material. In spite of admiring the novel’s ambition and being impressed by the Swift’s evident feel for language and imagery, I could never escape the sense that in terms of its overall concept, Osiris was not original enough to stand out from all the other, similar debuts that had gone before it.

Swift’s follow-up, Cataveiro, is a whole different story. In terms of its plot, those rather predictable black-and-white certainties are gone, replaced by a world of swarming ambiguities. The pacing issues have been solved, as the action flows effortlessly forward in a series of cleverly constructed intertwining stories. Osiris‘s jejune lovers make way for nuanced, individually defined characters whose motives and drives range over a broad canvas of possibilities. Most gratifying of all, the standard dystopian set-up has given way to a compellingly drawn post-collapse world that feels scorchingly real and virtually limitless in its horizons. This is a very human book, a boldly compassionate book, a novel bulging with important questions about our own world which cannot fail to engage the sympathy and imagination of the reader. I try to avoid the term worlduilding wherever possible, but I have to concede that I found the worldbuiding in Cataveiro to be a thing of great beauty: both robust and poetical and – that word again – enviably assured.

Cataveiro is cunningly conceived to work as a standalone. Although the action takes place shortly after the events of Osiris, you don’t need to have read Osiris to make sense of it. Defying the laws of trilogy, Swift has created a work that issues naturally from of the events of her first novel and yet dispenses with all but one of that novel’s main characters. There are no tedious recaps, no desperate striving for continuity. Instead there is a whole new story, with Osiris nestled within that story as an integral yet unobtrusive part.

Swift’s writing also shows increasing maturity. There is a tactile quality, a perfume, an innate sensitivity to Swift’s control of language that both echoes and builds upon everything that proved most satisfying in the first book. There are no dull sentences. Swift’s interest in her characters and her story shines throughout the novel’s entire length. There are passages in Cataveiro that approach radiance. There is nothing so gratifying as watching a talented writer begin to fulfil her promise, and such solid development from one book to the next is a pleasure to see. I have the feeling though that Swift is only beginning to flex her muscles here. Should she choose – and I’m sure she will – to experiment still further with form, to stretch the boundaries of the genre in which she works, to break entirely free of the particular set of reader expectations that trilogy-writing inevitably entails, then I think she could be not just very good but seriously brilliant.

Wolves at our door

February 6, 2014 /

Dogmen have me surrounded. They yip and slaver, waving crude knock-off AKs, their bandoliers glittering in the Middle’s glass reflections of a red and bloated sun. The streets are swimming in their oil-black blood but still they mass, overcoming the city’s defences… The armies of the Augmented are already massing at the gates. The best we can do now is set the place to self-destruct, robbing them of their prize. If they seize control of the city and its weaponry, then there can be no hope for the human diaspora pouring from the gates. (Wolves p150)

The wolves in Simon Ings’s new novel Wolves are artificial constructs, figments of augmented reality that can be perceived only by those in possession of the most up-to-date digital hardware. They are also, more metaphorically, the forces of change, the barbarians at the gate, the overwriters of the physically real with the digitally invasive. They are the capitalist powers that seize ideas, like prey, and subvert them to their will. They are the demons of doubt that urge us to sell out our dreams.

The story of Wolves is narrated by Conrad, a guy in his forties who at the opening of the novel is just about to walk out of one life and into another. He’s been in a car accident, a traumatic experience for him, and one that leaves his girlfriend Mandy maimed for life. Her hands are sheared off at the wrists, and Conrad, realising only now that he has never truly loved her, sees in her ultra-sophisticated, (and to him) ultra-creepy prosthetic hands everything that has been going wrong with their relationship. Unable to confront his failure head on, he leaves Mandy without a word and heads north, seeking sanctuary with Michel, a childhood friend he has not seen in years. But there is a secret buried in Conrad’s past, and the renewal of his friendship with Michel is threatening to bring that secret to the surface. As matters complicate in Conrad’s present, the world he grew up in becomes increasingly subsumed in a future that is threatening to run out of control. In the age of augmented reality, is analogue actuality about to be permanently outmoded?

I am more or less exactly the same age as Simon Ings. Like him, I grew up in the 1970s and came of age in the 1980s. Like him, I am part of the final generation who will be able to say they experienced a childhood and adolescence that had no knowledge of the internet. By the time I left school, ‘A’ Levels in IT were just about becoming an option. Our school boasted two – yes, that’s two – computers. My brother lusted after a ZX Spectrum. I didn’t start using a computer regularly myself until I was 25. In a very real sense, this analogue world is still my world, the world of my groundwater memories and therefore the world that is the repository of my creative iconography. It is a world that certain friends of mine, people half my age, can barely comprehend.

In the world of Wolves, such facts are important. As SF readers and writers, we’re used to novels set in the future, books that extrapolate current technologies and either rebuild the world with them or run amok. We’re used to novels set in the queasy ambience of our present day – the continually birthing future, in other words – where we all share the ominous sense that anything could be about to happen and probably already is happening. What we’re less used to are novels that straddle that uneasy gap between the analogue past and the rapidly expanding digital future. If I were to name the salient feature of Wolves it would be precisely this, that it is that gap-bridger, a novel written from the mindset of one world whilst furiously trying to get to grips with the dawn of another.

The plot feels less important to this novel than its sense of place, its physical landscape, an anchor constantly threatening to be torn free. At its centre, both in actuality and as metaphor, is the river that runs through Conrad’s home town. Conrad’s childhood and young adulthood is shaped by the river in both good ways and bad, it teems with significance, yet by the end of the novel it has been subjugated and destroyed by what planners like to euphemise as forward progress. We see a force of nature trammelled, customised, sanitized, commodified. Such incidental and wholesale destruction of natural environments continues to be one of the most insidiously dangerous and under-documented desecrations inflicted upon this small island by governments driven by expediency and lethally unsustainable short-termism. The world of Wolves highlights such accumulating minor atrocities to powerful effect. Ings has described Wolves as a novel about the end of the world: what he shows us is not the atomic fire or meteor impact or mutant plague-type of catastrophe so beloved in the mansions of Hollywood, but a slow apocalypse, the inexorable concreting-over of everything that matters:

On the way back to Poppy’s house we detour by the river. Or we try to.

“Where is it?”

Though Michel knows the town better than I do, he is as shocked as I am by this change: “Fucked if I know.”

It’s not in flood. It’s not in spate. It’s not even here. It’s been paved over. Canalised. There is no millrace, and no bridge crossing the millrace, just a horseshoe of low stairs and a concrete ramp for prams and wheelchairs, and where the river used to be, a bicycle lane winds through landscaped parkland, and the underbrush and low trees that used to conceal the water have been cleared away and lime green exercise machines put in their place. It’s nothing like I remember. It’s devastating. In a way I can’t put into words, it’s almost the opposite of what I remember, and as we walk I can feel the memories of my youth begin to fizz and react in the solvent of this new real. I stare at my feet, afraid of how much of myself I am losing. (p210)

And where does Wolves sit, exactly, within the landscape of British SF? In an editor’s note to accompany the ARC (I don’t know if this personal endorsement has been carried over to the published text, but I think it would be a shame if it has not) Simon Spanton of Gollancz lays his own cards on the table:

This is a bleak but oh so powerful read. But other authors have created wonderful art from bleakness. Dare I saddle Simon with this comparison? Yes, why not. Wolves reminds me quite a lot of J. G. Ballard.

In his review for The Guardian, Toby Litt furthers the comparison, with the proviso that to describe Wolves simply as Ballardian would be to offer an incomplete analysis, citing precisely Ings’s skill as a ‘landscape artist – almost an SF Thomas Hardy’ in defence of his position:

…what is strongest in Wolves, and what gives the novel its greatest power to dominate the mind, is something it has in common with Graham Swift’s Waterland, Alan Warner’s These Demented Lands or Nicola Barker’s Wide Open. That is, an action that comes out of those scraggy edgelands where earth and water mix, where the shore is never certain. Ballard was never concerned about a sense of place.

Litt is absolutely right to talk about those scraggy edgelands, and might well have gone on to mention the fact that Wolves is a liminal novel not just in the literal sense, but also in terms of its relationship with science fiction. Wolves is a novel that inhabits the edge-of-genre, that infinite and flexible space between the soundly mimetic and the outright fantastic.

In its intimate relationship with the British landscape, its tense preoccupation with personal alienation and social change, Wolves is clearly related to and descended from the those texts that have been variously branded ‘miserabilist’ or ‘mundane SF’ (or more recently, by Adam Roberts in a review at his blog, ‘Glumpunk’) but that are arguably the true heirs to the British New Wave, the new New Wave, if you will, a kind of ultra-near-futurism that holds up a divining mirror to contemporary reality. We read Wolves and remember Christopher Kenworthy’s decaying Barrow-in-Furness in The Quality of Light, the stark weirdness of Nicholas Royle’s Counterparts, Joel Lane’s fury at Thatcher in From Blue to Black. But it is in its relationship with the new New Wave’s urtexts, M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life and the story collection The Ice Monkey, that Wolves displays its allegiance most clearly. Harrison’s influence on Ings in Wolves feels pervasive and persuasive, a guiding principle. If Ings’s previous novel, Dead Water, is an intricate fugue, Wolves is its freewheeling toccata, a novel rife with personal anger that reads like it needed to be written. I sense that this is a transitional work for Ings, a move towards a fiercer, less restrained aesthetic and all the more effective for that.

One of the greatest dangers faced by British science fiction following the decline of the New Wave has been its co-opting by the commercial mainstream, its commodification at the hands of a nervous publishing industry in rabid pursuit of the next sure thing. As Ings himself recounts in his striking and bravely candid short essay at upcoming4me The Story Behind Wolves, when he first presented his then-editor with the manuscript of his new novel, that editor was less than enthusiastic:

My editor at the time told me Wolves was not publishable. He went so far as to say that publishing it would spoil my reputation.

Gather half-a-dozen writers together in a bar and the chances are they’ll all have a story like this. It’s sometimes hard to escape the feeling that British SF has suffered from a lack of direction in recent decades, a diminution of commitment arising at least in part from a willingness – fostered by an over-cautious publishing environment – to actively embrace the iconography and language of generic ‘sci-fi’ and all its bankrupt armoury of creative exhaustion. In a climate like this, it’s easy to forget that SF has been and always should be the literature of change, of innovation, of higher imagining. It’s in novels like Wolves – and in the willingness of the braver segments of the publishing industry to nurture and sustain their writers – that science fiction and the new New Wave will rediscover its purpose and its sense of direction.

(Jeffrey Alan Love’s unique and beautiful cover for Wolves – if this doesn’t win a strew of ‘best artwork’ awards next year there’s no justice in this world. Read Love’s moving account of how he came to create this cover here.)

Here we go again…

January 30, 2014 /

So – the full list of novels submitted for the 2014 Arthur C. Clarke Award was released, via SFX magazine, at 2pm today. Numbering 121 books in total, it clocks up a record number. With both the Kitschies and the Clarke receiving increasing numbers of submissions year on year, this would seem to signal a growing awareness of and enthusiasm for these awards specifically and for speculative fiction in general both within the literary community and among the public at large. This can only be a good thing. It is even better that the diversity of submissions is also increasing, with more translations, edge-of-genre novels and experiments in form appearing alongside the usual core SF suspects.  It is through the promotion, evaluation and celebration of such books that SF evolves. The Clarke exists precisely to encourage and facilitate this process.

There’s some great stuff on the subs list this year. By my first reckoning, I’d say there were more active contenders – by that I mean novels that are genuinely shortlist-worthy – than there were last year. This again is to be applauded. There are a good many equally possible, equally interesting shortlists hiding among those 121 submissions, and I have no doubt that if we had four sets of judges, say, working the list instead of just the one, we’d end up with four completely different shortlist picks and sets of emphases. That is both the beauty and the danger of the Clarke – there is no objectively perfect shortlist, just as there is no objectively perfect definition of what might constitute the year’s best science fiction novel. The shortlist that will be revealed to us in six weeks’ time will not be definitive, it will be a snapshot. Like all snapshots, it will illuminate but one moment, from a particular angle. It will tell part of the story but not all of it. No single snapshot ever can.

And that is part of why we love the Clarke so much.

I’ve had my usual fun with the list, which I’ll share with you here. Need I add that I have not read all of the books, nor even a goodly proportion of them. My thoughts and opinions are the product of research, sample-reading, reviews by sources I trust, and unabashed personal bias. Taking all that into consideration, here we go…

Firstly, my pick of six books that don’t have a prayer of getting on the actual shortlist, but should, absolutely, have been considered:

Andrew Crumey – The Secret Knowledge. Crumey is one of my favourite writers, full stop. Was his wonderful Sputnik Caledonia submitted for the Clarke back in 2008, I wonder? This guy is just a superb writer and criminally under-exposed.

Dave Eggers – The Circle. This is Eggers’s near-near future satire on the vast, corporate powerbases of our ever-expanding internet companies. The preview makes it irresistible and I’m eager to read the whole thing.

Adrian Hon – A History of the Future in 100 Objects. Oh, please let this be on the actual shortlist! A science fictional riff on the idea of that coffee table bestseller from a couple of years back, The History of the World in 100 Objects, Hon’s book is an edge-of-novel experiment in form that I find genuinely inspiring.

Andrei Kurkov – The Gardener from Ochakov. Kurkov is a wonderful writer, who uses speculative elements naturally and effortlessly as an integral portion of his stories. His writing is also extremely funny, as only sardonically aware, post-Soviet writing can be.

Robert J. Lennon – Familiar. I loved this so much I read Lennon’s previous novel, Castle, straight afterwards and loved that too. Wish I’d written this one myself.

Wu Ming-Yi – The Man with the Compound Eyes. I’ve read great chunks of this while standing in Waterstone’s and loved the mood of it, the texture, the imagery, the poetical weirdness. Eager to read the whole thing asap.

Shortlist I think the judges should pick (this is less obstinately esoteric than the one above, a genuinely plausible Clarke shortlist that would give the excellent Kitschies Red Tentacle a run for its money):

Margaret Atwood – MaddAddam. I’ve got big issues with the Oryx and Crake series (the Crakers, mainly), but the quality of Atwood’s writing means she absolutely deserves a place at the table, and should be awarded one.

Ionna Bourazopoulou – What Lot’s Wife Saw. Several people whose opinions I value have been recommending this. I’ve read the preview and liked it a lot. Intriguing, independent, innovative science fiction.

Ruth Ozeki – A Tale for the Time Being. I’ve just started reading this and am rapidly falling in love with it. This pick should be a no-brainer.

Christopher Priest – The Adjacent. Chris is one of the only writers producing ‘real’ SF as loved and accepted by core genre fans who could also hold his own on any Booker shortlist. This is a magnificent book, showcasing innovative ideas in terms of both subject matter and form. It would be madness to exclude it.

James Smythe – The Machine. I loved this book. One of my personal year’s best, in fact. It’s beautifully written, with never a sore sentence. Also, I just couldn’t put it down. Near future British SF of the finest calibre.

Marcel Theroux – Strange Bodies. Again, I’ve seen people I trust loving this, and I loved the preview. If this makes the shortlist I’ll definitely be reading it next.

Shortlist I think the judges might settle for (it’s safer than the above, more trad, and therefore much less interesting):

Stephen Baxter – Proxima. I’ve not read this, but I have given it as a Christmas present to someone who’s crazy about core SF. People are saying it’s Baxter’s best book in ages.

Ann Leckie – Ancillary Justice. Otherwise known as the steamroller. It seems to appeal across a wide sector of fandom. It’s the people’s choice.

Stephanie Saulter – Gemsigns. A well-received debut, classic dystopian tropes.

James Smythe – The Machine. With any luck, The Machine will manage to steal the soul of any jury, because it has everything.

Lavie Tidhar – The Violent Century. I have issues with this book, mainly because I’m just not a fan of superheroes. But Tidhar writes with flair and from the gut, always with serious intent. The general consensus is positive. I reckon it’s a cert.

Paul McAuley – Evening’s Empires. Paul Kincaid rates this as almost the equal of its series precursor The Quiet War. McAuley is one of our most articulate and intelligent writers of core genre. I have the feeling it would be a popular choice.

NB: All other things being equal, I would have named Kameron Hurley’s God’s War as a shoo-in for this shortlist, but I reckon its prior publication in the US will have counted against it. There’s a feeling that this book has been around for some time, and its impact on the judges will have been lessened as a result.

Six interesting outliers:

Pippa Goldschmidt – The Falling Sky. I really enjoyed this. It’s beautifully written, sensitive, as well as being a fascinating insight into the working life of an astronomer. The speculative element is very slight, though.

Matt Hill – The Folded Man. I love this book. In a just world, it should be shortlisted. I just have the feeling the judges might look askance at its radical interpretation of what SF can be.

Charlie Human – Apocalypse Now Now. Again, I started reading this in Waterstone’s while I was looking for Christmas presents and it’s insane but I found myself enjoying it immediately. It’s witty and it’s fun. I can see this being optioned for a movie.

Robin Sloan – Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Easily my favourite from the Kitschies Golden Tentacle (debut novel) shortlist.

M. Suddain – Theatre of the Gods. This is massively overwritten but I couldn’t help admiring its madness. Sure evidence of an original and gifted writer at work.

Tony White – Shackleton’s Man Goes South. I’ve not read the whole of this yet, but I love the combination of documentary history and near-future SF. There are ideas here I’d like to work with myself.

Well, that’s my take on things. Now that’s over and done with I can sit back and look forward to reading other people’s predictions, meditations, and machinations. Let’s have some good rants, please!

As in any year, the most exciting thing about the Clarke is that anything could happen. I’m already itching to see the actual shortlist, to be revealed, so I believe, on March 18th. In the meantime, here’s to the judges – may their choices be wise ones.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 The Spider's House

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑