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Stalking the Atomic City

December 13, 2022 /

Even the floors in the houses are ugly. Old boards were ripped out to be used as construction materials, and you have to try hard to find a place where you can jump into your sleeping bag, zip up, and zonk out. The locals burned all the villages next to the wire with the enthusiasm of the thugs from Toretsk who dragged fragments of the downed Malaysia Airlines Boeing to local scrapyards – like a carcass, a mammoth, prey, whatever.

In 1972, a novel was published that is arguably one of the most influential science fiction stories of all time. Roadside Picnic, by the Russian writer-brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, tells of a world forever altered by a chance visitation. As readers, we never get to see the aliens – if there were any aliens – but we are offered glimpses of the things they leave behind. Objects saturated in mystery whose purpose is unknown, whose effects can be lethal, whose wider influence on Earth’s history and culture is incalculable and lasting. The contaminated zones are forbidden territory, fenced and guarded; for the stalkers who risk their lives and their sanity to penetrate these zones, they are something in the nature of an addiction.

In 1979 came Stalker, the film adaptation of Roadside Picnic, scripted by the Strugatsky brothers and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. In the years since, the Zone has continued and deepened its hold over the imaginations of games developers, film makers, musicians, artists and writers. Especially writers. M.John Harrison’s 2007 novel Nova Swing, the second book of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is an open letter to Roadside Picnic; Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling Southern Reach trilogy equally so. There is something in the premise that seems uniquely magnetic and eerily mystifying, a postmodern spin on the trope of the ‘lost domain’ as first made explicit by the French writer Alain-Fournier in his 1913 classic Le Grand Meaulnes. Roadside Picnic offers a vision that is both beautiful and cruel, prosaic in its essence – some aliens do a pit stop, dump some trash – and yet shimmering with a sense of wonder that can never be extinguished or fully explained.

I first read Roadside Picnic in the early eighties and it has remained a touchstone text for me ever since, one of those few works of science fiction that I read – eagerly and indiscriminately – as a young person that has followed me into my life as an adult writer. I have read it half a dozen times and love it almost beyond reason. I need only to open its covers to fall immediately back under its spell. For me, it is the way in which the prosaic is enmeshed with the seemingly miraculous – with the vexed and corrosive nature of those miracles – that makes the novel so special for me. Add to that the unconventional manner of its storytelling, its moral ambivalence, the fact that it is a classic of Russian literature.

I also love Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which I approach as an entirely separate work, an adaptation of the Strugatskys’ novel in the true sense of the word, that is, a wholly new artistic endeavour inspired by an original. Tarkovsky does not really do characterisation – the people in Stalker are archetypes, a point underlined by the fact that the cast list does not give them names but designates them simply as ‘writer’, ‘professor’, and of course ‘Stalker’. It is the atmosphere of the film that compels, the mingled sense of beauty and threat, captivity and unbounded freedom that offers a hyper-real visual translation of what the Strugatsky brothers convey through the written word.

Anyone who comes into contact with Roadside Picnic seems to grasp instinctively that the book is important, that it offers a commentary on human existence, on the danger and pain and wonder of being alive. What then can I say about Stalking the Atomic City, a book that is as much a naked homage to Roadside Picnic as Stalker or Nova Swing but that has the distinction of being a work of non-fiction?

The book’s author, Markiyan Kamysh, is a Ukrainian writer. His father was a nuclear physicist and one of the ‘liquidators’ who risked their lives in order to clear up and lock down the exclusion zone surrounding the Chornobyl nuclear reactor following the catastrophic explosion and meltdown in 1986. Kamysh’s father died in 2003. Kamysh describes himself as ‘a writer who represents the Chornobyl underground in literature’. He might equally be called a stalker, one of the many dozens of adventurers, thrill-seekers, scrap metal looters, tour guides and misfits who since the turn of the century have been venturing into the exclusion zone, hiking and mapping, photographing and itemising its vast and hazardous spaces, often at risk of ruining their health, both physical and mental.

Most of them, perhaps predictably, are men; there is an element of stalking that seems to be little more than a dangerous and elaborate form of cock-measuring contest. There is more to it than that, though. There is poetry and there is horror. There is a vitality, a rawness, a sense of contact with an utterly new and uncharted space, a enclave of strangeness that might as well be an alien planet. There is, above all, the freedom that comes with casting off the directives of a world too heavily circumscribed by outside command.

Reading Kamysh’s book – part ballad, part Bildungsroman, part psychogeographical investigation – has offered me my most uncanny reading experience of the year, because it appears to reflect a version of reality first described in a novel of the imagination written fifty years ago, first lived by a film director who died from the cancer caused by the toxins that pollute the site of his most famous movie. The layers of literature contained within it – for Stalking the Atomic City is both a wholly new homage to Roadside Picnic and a demolition of it – now find themselves cloaked in a new, still more terrible reality as the zone itself has become part of a new battleground, a frontline in the war launched by Putin’s forces against the people of Ukraine.

Stalking the Atomic City reads as a dirty love poem to Roadside Picnic, just as Roadside Picnic reads as a shuddering premonition of Atomic City. Each seems to contain the other – not just in the likeness of the experiences they describe but in the beauty and intelligence of their language, their radical vision, the correlation of the word ‘stalker’ with the word ‘writer’.

The war in Ukraine is grounds both for anger and for deep grief. In its own impassioned, mysterious way, Stalking the Atomic City is an expression of that anger and that grief, as well as an undaunted assertion of Ukrainian identity. This book thrilled me and chilled my blood, even as I fell helplessly in love with it. I hope Markiyan Kamysh is doing OK, and that he is writing.

Weird Wednesdays #19: Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

September 14, 2022 /

I have frequently been surprised, these past couple of weeks, by the way in which even seasoned literary commentators still slip into the habit of referring to Alan Garner as a children’s writer. I am sure I’ve said this somewhere before, but I continue to think of my first encounter with Garner’s work – The Owl Service, which I first read when I was around twelve – as among my most significant primary encounters with adult themes in literature. I found the book utterly compelling – but if you had asked me then what it was about I would have found it hard to answer. There was simply a feeling I had, a palpable sense of having touched something mysterious, timeless and possibly dangerous. I experienced the same feeling, albeit with a greater understanding of what was going on, both in me and in the book, when I belatedly caught up with Red Shift, some years ago.

As regards the Booker commentators, what on Earth is wrong with saying that Alan Garner is a writer who often centres young protagonists?

Which is exactly what he does in his 2021 novel, Treacle Walker, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a fact that has made me feel more personally excited about the award than I have done since Anna Burns won it for Milkman back in 2018. The Booker has become generally much more innovative, inclusive and interesting in recent years, and I follow the annual discussion surrounding it with great enjoyment. Garner’s shortlisting though speaks to me personally. It counts, for me personally,. This is simply a feeling I have.

Treacle Walker tells the story of a boy, Joseph Coppock. Joe has recently been ill, and seems to spend a lot of time alone. Are his parents at work? Who looks after the house? We are never told. We live, for the duration of this short novel, entirely inside the world and mind of Joe as he encounters a mysterious rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, and falls into a daunting adventure that will alter his universe.

Treacle Walker speaks to Joe in riddles, an affectation he clearly finds simultaneously annoying and compelling. He is eager to learn the secrets the old man wants to impart to him, at the same time impatient, as any boy might be, to set his own stamp on the world, to interpret its signs and wonders in his own language. Most of the dialogue in Treacle Walker is conducted in the dialect of Garner’s native Cheshire, and one senses keenly Garner’s desire not to confuse or obfuscate but to set down, to save this unique language from annihilation in the twenty-first-century rush to refute the past. There is also a fierce feeling of privacy being accorded, the boy and the man who were always meant to come together sharing knowledge neither could fully fathom, until now.

It is notable that in the moments of highest tension and drama, the two cease with their mutual ragging and speak in terse, plain English. In these exchanges, it is almost as if the two are of a similar age and level of understanding.

As with all of Garner’s work, the action takes place against a vividly described, living landscape. One might almost say that Garner’s writing becomes the landscape, revealing it in all its aspects: peace, seclusion, discomfort, joy, alienation and terror:

But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joints and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering, silence, and on the floor the snow melted to tears.

This passage speaks to me particularly, both in its heady choice of words and in the symbols they carry. There have already been suggested many possible and plausible explanations of Treacle Walker’s meaning. For me, it is a book about the rising tide of chaos that accompanies change, the corresponding forces of growth and new imaginings that bring about progress. People have spoken of this novel as Garner’s last hurrah, a gathering together of his familiar themes, a farewell coda. It may be all of these things. Yet it is equally a work of bold experiment and dynamism, a book that makes use of ancient fable to speak to us in our own time with uncanny acuity.

Treacle Walker is tired, and Joe is ready and waiting to claim his future. As the two change places, or become one another, they mirror the unquiet yet seamless passing of one season to another.

Get well soon

August 15, 2022 /

“Literature is self-validating. That is to say, a book is not justified by its author’s worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been done.”

Salman Rushdie

In this stunning and prescient essay for the London Review of Books from 1982, Rushdie reminds us – if reminder were needed – how even at the start of his career he was already preoccupied with themes of identity, aesthetics, culture, the transformative power of the imagination and above all freedom of expression. We are so lucky to have him still with us. Everyone’s writing about Rushdie at the moment and that’s not surprising but what we are waiting for, really, is to hear from him again. Opinionated, fearless, controversial – writers like Rushdie are increasingly rare. If the past days have shown us anything, it is that voices such as his are more necessary and more valuable than ever.

Cat Brushing by Jane Campbell

July 21, 2022 /

Ageing is often presented as an accumulation, of disease, of discomforts, of wrinkles, but it is really a process of dispossession, of rights, of respect, of desire, of all those things you once so casually owned and enjoyed.

So reflects the narrator of ‘Cat Brushing’, the titular story of Jane Campbell’s original, engaging and important collection, out today.

In ‘Cat Brushing’, first published in the London Review of Books in 2017, a retired teacher now living with her son and daughter-in-law feels a bond with her Siamese cat that is a kind of spiritual twinning: the cat is getting on in years now but still feisty, still independent-minded. She enjoys praise and comfort but not at the expense of her personal autonomy. When the cat’s presence in her life is threatened, the story’s narrator senses a further forced reduction in her own sense of self:

So in the absence of being able to please I try to be useful. And not disgusting. The cat got sick yesterday. She does sometimes. She hunts, she has always hunted, but is, I feel, less successful than she used to be. There it is again, the loss. She catches the slower prey, and eats bits of it and it may already be ill or diseased.

At the heart of each of the thirteen stories in Cat Brushing is an older woman. Some of these women, like the narrator of the title story, have been forced from their own environments into hostile domains. Others have so far escaped the attention of controlling relatives or concerned neighbours, determined to preserve their independence or to stake a new-found happiness on one final and possibly ill-advised throw of the dice.

The subject matter of these stories – ageing, dependency, loss, abuse, regret – is of the kind that will no doubt tempt some critics to describe this collection as ‘heartbreaking’. But while it is true that more than a couple of Campbell’s intensely private, thoughtful tales brought tears to my eyes, I am much more inclined to characterise her work as defiant, subversive, intelligent and singularly empowering. Even in their forgetfulness and physical frailty, Campbell’s women are garrulous, insightful and occasionally duplicitous. They never fail to retain agency over their own lives, even when that agency drives them, ultimately, to refuse what is on offer.

Stories such as ‘Susan and Miffy’ and ‘Lamia’ show older women in active possession of a vibrant sexuality. ‘The Scratch’ and ‘The Kiskadee’ touch on themes of abuse and control, but there are no neat answers, no tidy conclusions as Campbell opts for ambiguity rather than moral outrage. In ‘183 Minutes’, a story that might equally have been dreamed up by Ruth Rendell, the protagonist experiences a stark premonition of her own destruction yet still finds the hope of happiness trumping the fear of risk:

And she turned her face towards the window for she wanted to see if there was a reflection there of the woman she had suddenly become. But in the anonymity of the rushing fields she saw only her body dumped in an alley, at the bottom of a cliff, down a well, and then they flew under a bridge and against the momentary blackness she saw her face again.

Rather than taking refuge in the past, these characters are inhabitants of the modern world, equipped to deal with any challenges the future may hold. In ‘Lockdown Fantasms’, Campbell takes issue with the way older people have been further marginalised and forgotten during the COVID-19 pandemic, the key decisions about their ‘wellbeing’ taken by others. Social media and the metaverse in this story are magical, life-saving resources; in ‘Schopenhauer and I’ the reverse is true, with digital companionship used as a cover for surveillance and control.

How refreshing it is, to meet characters who are not careful about how they express themselves, who say what they think with relish and a crooked smile. The language of Cat Brushing, while spare and unadorned, is never simple. Literary allusions and philosophical experiment take their place alongside landscape writing that is richly imaginative and resonant, where a longing for lost realities is always tempered by mordant wit. The final story in the collection, ‘On Being Alone’, references Chekhov, and in its accretion of significant detail, its elegiac quality it has a distinctly Chekhovian melancholy about it:

As a child I already knew that I needed, craved, bathed myself in solitude. Being alone was my best place. As I grew through my teens I began to understand it better. I narrowed it down to a fear of belonging. Belonging to me meant losing something. not gaining anything. Losing individuality, losing, dare I say, specialness. I was a secretive and isolated child and I feared being identified with any other child as some people might fear the plague.

As so often in Chekhov, you don’t end up where you think you will. The past number of years have seen important conversations taking place not just about representation in literature but about who is doing the representing. While I would staunchly argue that one of the key skills of the fiction writer is imaginative empathy, that for the writer prepared to undertake the creative groundwork, no identity or set of experiences should be out of bounds, it seems equally important that in the portrayal of particular histories, experiences and worldviews we should amplify and pay attention to writers with first-hand knowledge of those situations and communities.

The increasing diversity of our prize shortlists and publishing schedules is both exciting and timely. How discouraging it is then, to see the matter of age so often excluded from these vital discussions, to see writers actively debarred from ‘first novel’ or ‘new writer’ awards or grant applications simply on the grounds of being over forty. On social media especially the increasing tendency is to tell older writers to shut up.

Age is not only the last taboo, it seems, but the last acceptable breeding ground for prejudice as well. For women especially, pressures relating to family and other gender-based expectations have often been contributory factors in narrowing down or closing off routes to publication. I have lost count of the number of post-war women writers I have come across in my reading and research whose careers have stalled or floundered, not through any lack of talent but through lack of opportunity or recognition.

All of which makes a collection like Cat Brushing doubly important. In their power and persuasiveness, their wily transgressions, their willingness to take risks, Jane Campbell’s stories reveal a reality that is relevant to all of us and too often ignored.

Eyes Wide Open: Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

March 5, 2022 /

When earlier in the week I read Johanna Thomas-Corr’s excellent review in the Guardian of Maria Gainza’s new novel Portrait of an Unknown Lady, I was reminded that I never had caught up with Gainza’s first novel Optic Nerve, published in its original Spanish in 2014 and then latterly in an English translation by Thomas Bunstead in 2019. I remember reading reviews of it, noting it down in my ever-expanding ‘of interest’ file. I even remember, quite clearly, holding a copy of the book in my hand. I was in a big Waterstones somewhere – either Chris or I, I cannot recall now which of us it was, had been asked to come in and sign some books. I remember trying to decide between Optic Nerve and Laura Cuming’s elegantly articulated memoir On Chapel Sands, both books, coincidentally, with a central focus on art.

In the end I chose the Cuming, promising myself I would acquire the Gainza at a later date. But I never did. That morning, its details blurry, feels far away, on the other side of an unspeakable divide, with those books two of the sparsely connecting threads between then and now. Reading Thomas-Corr’s admiring retrospective words about Optic Nerve, I experienced a sudden and intense hunger for it, for that book precisely, no other would do. Not even wanting to wait the time it would take to arrive in physical form, I downloaded it in e-format and started to read it more or less immediately.

Novels by nearest and dearest aside, Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve – or so it feels to me in this moment – is the most beautiful book I have ever read. ‘It was clear that Gainza, like British authors Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett, was opening up new possibilities for the novel as a place of freedom,’ Thomas-Corr writes in her review, ‘where you could blend fiction, memoir, art history and anecdote. She immediately felt like a thrilling discovery.’ I agree with this totally. I agree also with her additional claim that Gainza’s fiction actually ‘has more in common with Roberto Bolaño’s, with its themes of art and infamy, craft and theft.’ There is, as Thomas-Corr maintains, a Bolano-esque depth of field to her ‘stories within stories, each with its own melancholy mood and unsolvable mystery.’

And there is something more, something still greater, a quality of emotional admission, of inclusivity and of risk-taking, of personal involvement – of vulnerability even – that reminds me of the stories and writing of Mariana Enriquez, a passion that dares to reveal, to expose the self in a way that others have not, and that includes myself.

I can say only that I am thinking on this, wondering and struggling with how to address it. I am getting to know the paintings Gainza writes about in Optic Nerve, studying them in detail, reliving the moments of their discovery through the filter of Gainza’s tapestried language, of a knowledge profoundly felt and acutely described.

I am saving Maria Gainza’s new book for the moment, as something to look forward to. To cherish and to rejoice in. We need voices like these, above all, voices that remind us of all that life and art can be and what it is for.

A Season in Null-Space: Transit by Rachel Cusk

February 28, 2022 /

A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable. It always surprised him, how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing, he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation.

Working on my current manuscript, I have been thinking a great deal about the weight we attach to ‘true’ narratives, and how objective truth might be said to differ from experiential truth.

If I say: ‘This happened to me’, is that enough to prove that it really did?

Since 2016, our experience of the world has become fragmentary and unstable, no longer measured in years, but in seasons, weeks and days. As a writer I feel I have become less capable and less desirous of constructing grand illusions. I have instead become obsessed with small details, with exploring the imaginative potential in day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute experience, with tracking the potential answers to the question: what really happened? My growing interest in true-crime narratives is both a response to and a driver of this. And precisely because much of the drama of such narratives lies in the mundane.

‘I don’t really believe in character,’ says Rachel Cusk in a recent podcast conversation with Sheila Heti, ‘I believe in moments of truth.’ In the second instalment of her Outline trilogy, Cusk demonstrates how the quotidian, when fully inhabited, can spiral outwards into a poetic hyperrealism, into the fire of language. How daily reality is never banal, but rather the greyish-brown outer crust of the entire luminosity of existence. The dinner party that forms the climax of the novel is, in its own subversive way, as revelatory and as disturbing as the family get-together that forms the subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s seminal 1998 movie Festen. Reading this book, in which ostensibly dull things happen in such a way as to make them seem life-defining, is to see reality, elusive as the leopard, changing its spots before our eyes.

Cusk’s writing truly is superlative. She has not only raised the bar for British literary fiction, she has opened up a new arena for the discussion and contemplation of what fiction is, and how it works.

*

Meanwhile and elsewhere, this marvellous essay by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky articulates brilliantly the shock, terror and heartbreak of these anxious days.

Winter warmers

November 25, 2021 /

A tad late for Hallowe’en, but if you’re looking for a new ghost story to read I can thoroughly recommend Alison Moore’s new novel The Retreat. Moore is an extraordinarily good writer. Each of her five novels to date has been in its own way perfect: not a dud sentence in sight and with the slowly brewing tension deliberately understated. Moore sees no need for shocks or histrionics or forced affect in her work – her deft, spare handling of language, her facility for creating weird situations, above all her intense yet utterly realistic evocation of character are more than sufficient for creating a unique body of work for which ‘unhallowed’ might turn out to be the defining adjective.

Her latest concerns an artists’ retreat, a rather uncomfortable house on a somewhat inaccessible island. Once you’re there it’s difficult to leave without making a scene, without deliberately setting yourself in opposition to your fellows, which is the last thing you want to be seen doing when you’re supposed to be forging a mutually supportive atmosphere of communal creativity. Sandra, a rather disappointed painter, finds her experience of the island falling far short of her expectations. Carol, a novelist in search of sanctuary, finds the ghosts becoming actively beneficial to her work in progress. Who gets out alive? Moore will keep you guessing until the very last page. I loved this book, which is effective and disturbing to a far more potent degree than any number of more deliberate or dramatic haunted house stories. The only problem with being a Moore fan is that the moment you’ve finished reading one of her novels you’re already looking forward to the next – and Moore, to her credit, is a writer who is prepared to give her books all the time they need to come into being.

Another November miracle comes in the form of Sarah Hall’s new novel Burntcoat. Like The Retreat, Burntcoat is sparse, economical and intense, carrying more emotional weight and resonance than you might expect to find in novels twice its length. Here we follow Edith, a sculptor who has found fame but at an immense cost, whose narrative is conducted during what we understand to be the final weeks of her foreshortened life. Edith’s background is traumatic – her mother Naomi, a writer, experiences a dramatic personality change following a brain haemorrhage when Edith is young. Yet still she drags herself back to life, relearning not only her passion to make art, but also her ability to adequately love and care for her daughter. It is Edith’s relationship with Naomi, as much as her all-consuming love affair with a refugee chef named Halit, which forms the armature of this novel, which in essence is a book about how love transforms us, and what real love means.

Burntcoat takes place against the background of a pandemic. The world is swept by a disease still more deadly than COVID, and with still more destructive implications both for individuals and for society. This is a harrowing firestorm of a book, and as a commentary on what we are currently experiencing, what it costs us to live through such a crisis, I cannot imagine many better ones coming along. As someone who has read most everything Hall has written, I would count Burntcoat as her crowning achievement to date.

Again, I can scarcely wait to see what she has planned for us next. Reading writers this good is always something of a game-changer, an electrical shock to the head, a reminder that the work of art is always worth the effort.

The End of the Whole Mess: the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2021

September 27, 2021 /

“People keep claiming we’re trying to be the Booker, but they’re wrong. If there’s any prize we’re looking at right now, it’s probably the Turner. I wanted to counter a perceived wisdom about how the Clarke Award harboured a not-so-secret ambition to defy the gravity of its own genre and head out for loftier, more literary stars.”

These are the words of Tom Hunter, the current director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, in an essay he wrote recently for Parsec magazine on the subject of his first fifteen years in office. He jotted the words down on impulse, he says, as a handy comeback to the kind of question he might get asked at a science fiction convention. And yet, Hunter insists, the lines have stuck with him, ‘copied from notebook to notebook’, because they hold ‘an accidental grain of truth’ about how he views the Clarke, especially with regard to the open-ended brief it sets itself each year, to select the ‘best’ science fiction novel of the preceding twelve months.

“It’s that slippery definition of science fiction that reminds me of the equally heated debate that surrounds the art world,” Hunter continues, “with Frieze art fairs standing in for our own conventions, and the definitions of science fiction and contemporary art forever shifting in a way I would suggest the Booker Prize doesn’t.”

This is the perceived wisdom about the Booker Prize, that it’s a staid and immovable behemoth, churning out endorsement after endorsement for establishment-approved worthies, upholding the literary status quo forever and ever amen. But repeating an untried thesis does not make it true. By sheer coincidence, the beginning of Tom Hunter’s reign as Clarke Award director roughly coincides with the time when I first began taking notice of the award, not just in a casual way but as a framework for considering the state of science fiction more generally alongside other arbiters of literary quality such as the Booker. I remember fifteen years ago being thrilled at M. John Harrison’s Clarke win for Nova Swing, and looking back at the 2007 shortlist now, we see it comprises three books of genuine and lasting stature, together with a further three interesting choices from authors of note.

When we look at the Booker shortlist and especially the longlist from 2007, what we notice most of all is a shift towards progressiveness yes, but a continuing uncertainty about how, exactly, progressiveness might be defined. The Booker’s speed of evolution towards a genuinely inclusive mindset whilst developing a more adventurous attitude towards literature generally has been both fascinating and marvellous to witness. 2021 might actually see a science fiction novel winning the Booker for the first time – a pretty radical shift, given that the chair of the Booker judges Richard Cobb went so far as to veto JG Ballard from winning back in 1984.   

But what of Hunter’s notional pairing of the Clarke Award with the Turner Prize? As a writer who was passionately interested in both contemporary art and experimental forms of literature, there is no doubt that Ballard would have been keen to affirm such a brave comparison – if only it were true. From its inception in 1984, just three years before the Clarke Award, the Turner has been one of the most progressive, contentious, radical, no-fucks-given arts prizes out there, certainly in the UK. The Turner is constantly pushing boundaries, questioning not only the nature of art but the nature of art criticism, promoting the value of art for society and campaigning for increased access and diversity at every level. Rather than shying away from controversy, the Turner has courted it, embracing its role as the enfant terrible, the award that actively encourages disagreement. It is only later – sometimes years later – that as a society we come to understand just how prescient, how far ahead of the curve an earlier shortlist selection actually was.

“It is unfortunate, of course, but science fiction has become indelibly identified with interplanetary travel, time machines, Star Trek and Star Wars, that sort of Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon school,” said JG Ballard in a 1988 interview with James Verniere for The Twilight Zone. “I have my lonely struggle trying to get a broader definition of science fiction, a definition that incorporates Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson, on through H. G. Wells, on to that great genius William Burroughs, who uses huge elements of science fiction in his novels because it’s part of the air we breathe.”

To have a Clarke Award that bears legitimate comparison with the Turner Prize? That would be Ballard’s dream come true – and mine. As things stand, we have reached a point where for the second year running, the Clarke Award shortlist is fifty percent dead wood: books that should never have reached the shortlist either because they are badly written, derivative, insufficiently challenging or, in the case of two titles from last year’s shortlist, all three. As in 2020, the remaining three novels form a sadly curtailed line-up of the book that should win (The Animals in That Country), the book that could win (The Vanished Birds) and the book you could construct an argument in favour of but would make for a disappointingly trad-SF outcome if it did win (Vagabonds). Hardly enough to form a decent shortlist on their own.

The only valid comparison with the Turner Prize would be if the Turner judges unaccountably decided to shortlist a group of salon-approved genre painters rehashing popular bucolic scenes from the last decades of the nineteenth century. Only if they did, we could be sure they were being ironic. This year’s Clarke shortlist is anything but.

All this might be forgivable – understandable even – if the radical, ground-breaking work in science fiction were not being done, or remained the province of one or two pioneering souls like Ballard, fighting a losing battle against the forces of reaction. It would be understandable – forgivable even – if the Clarke Award submissions list did not include works of sufficient calibre to draw up a quality shortlist. That the work is both being done and being submitted for the consideration of the Clarke Award jury can only provoke the question of why the most interesting, certainly the best written science fiction novels of the year are being ignored in favour of derivative genre works that are inconsequential in the present, and certainly won’t be remembered fifteen years hence.

I am not going to comment on individual titles from recent Clarke shortlists. The authors of these works did not ask to be shortlisted, and do not deserve criticism or censure for celebrating their success. That their novels have been read and doubtless enjoyed by a large number of people is not the problem, indeed the quality of particular novels is not the point. What bothers me is the quality of critical discourse, not just on the part of the Clarke judges but within the larger confines of the science fiction community. If the overall quality of the shortlist is this poor, not just once but time and again, and there is no sustained wider discussion of that fact, this would suggest not only that the process of reasoning by which the shortlist is arrived at is substantially flawed, but also that the majority of readers primarily interested in science fiction are satisfied that journeyman works – back-slapping space operas, cute science fantasies and indifferently written post-apocalypse novels – are properly representative, the high point of achievement, the ‘best’ that science fiction has to offer.

Either that, or the very idea of engaged criticism, of substantive textual analysis as opposed to unexamined positive reinforcement has become so much an anathema within the science fiction community that the discourse around the literature has been irretrievably corroded. (On this point it is discouraging to note that for the first time in more than a decade there has been no long-form review of the Clarke Award shortlist at Strange Horizons.)

Of those works submitted for consideration for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2021, a generous handful is of outstanding quality, novels that demonstrate a rigorous engagement with a wide range of ideas and a level of literary ability that changes minds and attracts new readerships. Were a novel as original, urgent and brilliantly achieved as Martin MacInnes’s Gathering Evidence to lose out on a shortlist place in favour of a novel of equal originality and brilliance I’d have no complaints, but that is not what has happened. I have alas not yet had time to finish Rian Hughes’s monumental debut XX, but I have read enough of it to appreciate how deftly it riffs off much older scientific romances – The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle is the book that springs most immediately to mind – in pursuit of a whole new way of imagining science fiction, a novel in which the printed word itself becomes a speculative, dangerously mutable commodity. Given what did make the final cut, how this ambitious, formally innovative colossus was knocked out of the running beggars belief.

But to reiterate, I do not want to harp on the virtues or deficiencies of individual books so much as point to a wider deficiency in the overall discourse. When I was writing about Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country last week I quoted from an interview she gave on the subject of what makes speculative fiction both relevant and attractive to her as a way of thinking about the world and about writing. “I thought my next novel was a gritty realist story,” she said. “But the problem is if you write gritty realism now (in the way we usually think of realism), you’re writing historical or at least nostalgia fiction; and anything that used to be speculative is now realist. So what I’m working on has become rather speculative. I keep using that term – it’s not my favourite, but it’s what we have to describe what I think of as sideways fiction.”

There will be more than a few writers of sideways fiction who have felt so blindsided by the pace of social and political change in the last decade and since 2016 especially that the idea of writing about ‘the future’ has come to seem not just redundant but escapist. Like any other form of creative expression, for science fiction to survive and remain relevant as literature it needs to evolve, and the truth is that many of the traditional ways of framing science fiction, of imagining the future have become outmoded, derivative, decadent, a kind of comfort food. You can alter the baseline demographic of a starship crew all you want, but it’s still a bloody starship crew, travelling FTL into a vision of the future that might as well be a fairy story. Twiddling with the edges of things does not make them radical, does not render them any less risible than the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon school Ballard was fulminating about thirty years ago.

The real future is very much with us, and its demands are urgent and frightening. They need a literature, and a critical hinterland, that is capable of seriously engaging with the questions we face, both as individuals and as a society. When Ballard claimed science fiction as the true literature of the twentieth century, he would have known the requirement he felt for literature to reinvent itself would only become more pressing in the twenty-first. I do not think he would have been surprised to see a rapidly increasing awareness and acceptance of speculative ideas among mainstream critics, a demand and enthusiasm for speculative ideas among the reading public, because this is what is happening, right now. It is a discomfiting fact, but one we are increasingly having to accept, that much of the most challenging and innovative work in science fiction – the ‘best’, if you like – is being published outside the genre imprints. Would Ballard have been surprised by this? Given that he understood the innate tension between science fiction and the science fiction community better than most, I doubt it.

Sharke’s Choice #4: The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

September 22, 2021 /

“I thought my next novel was a gritty realist story. But the problem is if you write gritty realism now (in the way we usually think of realism), you’re writing historical or at least nostalgia fiction; and anything that used to be speculative is now realist. So what I’m working on has become rather speculative. I keep using that term – it’s not my favorite, but it’s what we have to describe what I think of as sideways fiction. ” (Laura Jean McKay, Write or Die November 2020.)

Jean works as a guide in an animal sanctuary. She is what might best be termed a tough cookie, battered by life, abandoned by her husband Graham and a barely functioning alcoholic. There are two things in life that keep her going: her passion for animals, and her love for her young granddaughter, Kimberley. Those, and her general bloody-mindedness. As this remarkable novel opens, Jean’s instinctive rapport with animals and her capacity for survival are both about to be tested in ways she could never previously have imagined.

There is a new disease sweeping the country, the so-called zooflu, a strain of influenza that clears up quickly but that leaves those infected with the ability to understand and intuit the thoughts and language of animals. Unlike simple hearing, this new form of understanding is bone-deep, felt in the skin and in the brain. For some, it takes on the aspect of a new religion; for others – many others – it is the gateway to madness. Driven insane by the ceaseless communications of insects, birds and fish, the worst afflicted resort to extreme measures to keep the psychic white noise out of their heads.

When Jean’s errant son Lee goes on the run with Kimberley, Jean is determined to find them and bring them home. She travels in the company of Sue, a dingo bitch she rescued as a pup, and who is capable of tracking Kimberley from hundreds of miles away. Ahead of Jean lie many obstacles, not least the toxic fallout from her own inner demons. But for once in her life, she is determined not to cock up.

I had a hard time getting to know Jean. She’s damaged, often illogical, a slave to her addiction. She’s also smart and ruthlessly determined, and by the time I reached the end of her story she and I had reached a better understanding. The fact that I found Jean difficult to like, not to mention bloody annoying at times, I count as testament to the skill of the author in creating a uniquely human, porous, breakable and thoroughly believable character. There are thousands of Jeans, and they won’t all make it. McKay does a magnificent job of fleshing out the why. Jean is unforgettable, though even more affecting is McKay’s imaginative rendition of animal thought-language, a feat of literary virtuosity that for me is the absolute highlight of this book, a form of rough, driven poetry that is as luminous as it is convincing.

The scenes with the pigs and cows. The Animals in That Country – the title is drawn from a poem by Margaret Atwood – would be necessary reading for those passages alone.

I suppose in that respect I am this novel’s natural audience. The ways in which the animals expressed themselves, hinting at sentient lives and independent consciousness beyond and apart from the human sphere, an alien realm in our midst did not seem at all unlikely to me. Rather, the thought-speech felt utterly right, an act of translation rather than imagination. (I guess I’m there with the spider.)

In talking about the novel’s use of speculative materials, it’s all in that quote from McKay that I’ve posted above, really. She has taken the threads of the life we are in the midst of and twisted them, just a little, to reveal the hidden trajectory of our realworld predicament. This, for me, is exactly what science fiction should be about, especially now. McKay wrote and sold Animals long before we knew what 2020/1 had in store for us; when she talks about the wearing of masks, the disinfecting of whole environments, the division of communities, the sudden, indelible shift in perspective that crisis brings, there is an extra frisson of the uncanny, a looming prescience that will colour and shape our understanding of her work.

It is this kind of prescience – a deep reading of the musculature of society, rather than a fixation on surfaces, on ‘stuff’ – that, again, makes The Animals in That Country radical and innovative science fiction. Its politics – a terse and unsparing examination of social and environmental inequalities – is integral to its being, its warp and weft. Not grafted on as a ‘theme’, but realised through keenly observed characterisation and active inter-character relationships.

This novel is as daring in its literary experimentation as in its speculative premise; proof, if any were needed, that no element of literary excellence need be sacrificed in the pursuit of science fictional innovation.

If only we could have seen James Bradley’s Ghost Species sitting alongside Animals on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. And what is it about Aussie SF right now that seems to put it so far ahead of the curve?

Sharke’s Choice #2: Ghost Species by James Bradley

August 12, 2021 /

In the second of my posts looking at the Clarke-shortlist-that-might-have-been, I want to focus on James Bradley’s Ghost Species, a novel that takes place against a background of climate change, imagining a future we might already recognise, with some additional surprises.

Jay and Kate are geneticists. When they receive an invitation to visit a secret research facility deep in the Tasmanian bush, Kate suspects they are being scammed. When they discover the identity of their host – tech billionaire Davis Hucken – her reservations deepen. The Hucken Foundation is engaged in a series of highly advanced genetic engineering projects of borderline legality, designed to offset the effects of climate change by reverting large swathes of the planet’s depleted ecosystems to their original wilderness condition. Davis reveals that their experiments have entered startling new territory: by using strands of DNA harvested from the remains of long-dead specimens, they have succeeded in resurrecting the Thylacine, the elusive Tasmanian Tiger whose last living relative died in Hobart zoo in 1936. The Foundation is already progressing its plans to revive other species – the woolly rhino, the mammoth – and reintroduce them into the wild.

But these replenished ecosystems would not be complete, Davis explains, without the presence of Earth’s original human ancestors, the Neanderthals. Will Kate and Jay, experts in their field, come on board? Davis insists their pioneering work can help save the planet. Kate instinctively distrusts him – he’s a man too used to getting everything he wants – but Jay is excited, thrilled at the prospect of unlimited resources and the chance to make history.

What follows is the story of Eve, the first Neanderthal child in forty millennia. Still processing her grief over the loss of her own pre-term baby, Kate forms an almost instantaneous bond with Eve that goes against everything the ‘experiment’ demands of her. Eve is not an experiment, she is a person , and Kate is determined that she should be treated as one, that she should receive the personal love and care that is owing to any human child. When she goes on the run with Eve, Kate knows the Foundation will not allow their liberty to extend indefinitely. But her actions have already altered the trajectory of their research, winning Eve the time she needs to grow into her identity.

Although it takes place over a more compressed time period, in the way it is structured Ghost Species is not unlike Bradley’s previous novel Clade, the narrative progressing in discrete chapters, each focusing on a different time period, each moving the action forward by a number of years. Thus we see Eve grow from an infant into a toddler, a pre-pubescent and then a teenager, at which point the narrative point of view shifts from that of Kate to Eve herself. And as Eve grows, the world around her changes, the climate crisis becoming ever more pressing and wide-ranging until the world’s order shifts irrevocably, sliding towards disaster and the end of human civilisation as we currently understand it.

To say that Ghost Species is ‘more’ than just a novel of climate change is something of a misnomer: there is no subject more important than climate change, and James Bradley is among its most passionate literary advocates. There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about how writers should best engage with our current crisis, and if there is any criticism to be levelled at science fiction writers in particular it is that their narratives of climate change have too often been set in some unspecified ‘future’, with over-familiar scenes of mass destruction and fleeing multitudes cementing the illusion of climate change as little more than a convenient set of post-apocalyptic tropes.

By contrast, Ghost Species might as well be set right now. The environmental changes Bradley pinpoints have this week been the living subject of media headlines. For those of us – and for that read all of us – who feel an increasing sense of anxiety and helplessness in the face of government and corporate inadequacy the final chapters of Ghost Species are confronting and hard to read, hard to come to terms with. But that’s exactly how they should be. Bradley is unflinching in his approach, without ever resorting to the kind overblown disaster imagery that is in danger of becoming ineffective through over-exposure. And as in Clade, what Bradley has given us is an entirely believable, quotidian story of real people, none more human than Eve.

Eve’s story is the heart of Ghost Species, an examination not only of human rights but of the many and varied ways of being human. We have seen similar discussions and arguments rehearsed through the many narratives of artificial intelligence that exist in science fiction; Kate and Jay’s arrival at the isolated research facility has strong Ex Machina vibes, and there are some clear parallels between what is happening in Ghost Species and the action of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-longlisted novel Klara and the Sun. But Bradley’s vision is more original than Garland’s, and his competency in imagining a future already with us, his determined and responsible grasp of his subject matter vastly outflanks Ishiguro’s.

Bradley’s extrapolation of research into character – what might a Neanderthal person actually be like, how might she respond to the modern world of Homo sapiens? – is itself a beautiful and, for me at least a highly successful experiment. revealing to us those aspects of our own selves that have been lost through our rush towards progress, and much to our detriment.

Ghost Species is a quietly devastating and immensely affecting novel, wrought with sensitivity and precision, and I cannot get my head around why it does not feature on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. In many ways, Ghost Species presents an ideal of the science fiction novel, a realistic imagining of the whole through the sum of its parts, the universal via the particular. Where other novels splash about in the comfort zone of derivative tropes, playing games in future worlds that are never going to happen, Ghost Species dives deep into now and tomorrow and next week, asking how we are going to survive and what survival might do to us.

In its humanity and in its willingness to ask difficult questions, Ghost Species has a clear affiliation with the science fiction of Anne Charnock, whose third novel Dreams Before the Start of Time won the Clarke Award in 2018, During the first lockdown in 2020, Charnock and Bradley participated in an online conversation at the Los Angeles Review of Books, focusing specifically on writing fiction in the age of climate catastrophe. It is well worth the read.

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