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Month: July 2020

Weird Wednesdays 8: Hugo-nominated novellas 2020

July 29, 2020 /

Had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic, today would have seen hundreds of readers, writers, fans and artists touching down in New Zealand to attend ConZealand, the 78th annual World Science Fiction Convention. ConZealand was early to announce its plan to move the convention online and all kudos to everyone involved with what must have been a mammoth effort to rethink the event at relatively short notice. I’m sure there will be those, though, who will nonetheless be mourning the convention that might have been. Not only for the chance to meet up with those friends, colleagues and enthusiasts who look to conventions as the natural way to reconnect with the community after months scribbling away at their desks, but for what would have been for many a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a country they may have been dreaming of visiting for years before they booked their air ticket.

2020 will be the first year in ages that many of us – including myself – will not have attended a single science fiction convention. In order to celebrate the virtual opening of this year’s Worldcon (not forgetting the fabulous fringe for those of us on European time!) and in looking hopefully forward to the resumption of at least some physical con-going next year, I decided I’d like to read and assess the six novella category finalists for this year’s Hugo Award. It’s interesting to note that the shortlist in the novel category just happens to have a fifty-percent overlap with the Clarke shortlist (more on this in my Clarke summing up around the end of August/beginning of September) so I’ll have at least some idea of the overall vibe there, as well. But it seems to me that the novella category – and this could be said equally of other awards that choose to celebrate the form – is a particularly interesting showcase for where the field might be at in any given year. Like the other short fiction categories, the novella shortlist will often include works by newer, less established writers. But whereas the short story and even the novelette categories tend to be less cohesive overall – the brevity of the form often dictates this – the novella provides a broader canvas, both in terms of who is competing and the variety and ambition of the work on offer.

This has definitely proved to be the case this year. What pleases me most about the 2020 Hugo novella shortlist is that all the works in contention have something positive to offer the reader, and consequently all feel as if they’ve earned their place on the ballot. For me, this group of novellas was satisfying and most of all fascinating to read because it does give a genuine sense of the variety, texture, and concerns of science fiction and fantasy in 2020. I’m sure there are other works that deserve equally to be here and perhaps more so – and if I’d read more shorter fiction in 2019 I would probably feel more frustrated by those exclusions. As things stand, the current ballot offers a solid overview, whilst providing me with the opportunity to read some of the novellas and writers I’d been meaning to catch up with in any case.

Looking at the ballot as a whole, it seems to me to fall into three pairings of two, with each pairing being representative of a particular trend. If I had to brand one of these three pairings least satisfying overall – or rather least interesting in terms of their candidacy for the Hugo Award – it would be that of Seanan McGuire and P. Djeli Clark, whose novellas might best be summarized as ‘old tropes, new takes’.

Seanan McGuire’s In An Absent Dream is the fourth instalment in her ‘Wayward Children’ series, exploring the limits of enchantment. I have not read the other novellas in the series, and in fact this is my first direct encounter with McGuire’s writing. The novella tells the story of Katherine Lundy, a child who finds herself at odds with other members of her family and with society’s expectations at large:

Most of the kids she went to school with couldn’t see past her father to her, and the few who tried never seemed to like what they found when they reached her. She was too opinionated and too invested in following the rules. She liked the company of adults too much, she spent too much time reading. She was everything they didn’t want to spend time with, and if it hadn’t been for her father and for the reluctance many of them felt to hit a girl, she would almost certainly have spent her weekends nursing black eyes and telling lies about where they’d come from.

It would be difficult for any SF fan or writer not to identify with at least some aspects of Lundy’s story, which is perhaps part of what has made this series so popular with readers. The writing is clear, inviting, professionally executed, all of which makes for a smooth and enjoyable ride, and I can imagine the Wayward Children series, with its youthful protagonists and sensitive introspection, being particularly popular among readers of YA. But there’s no getting away from the fact that In an Absent Dream feels like very familiar territory indeed. The ‘you can visit fairyland but there is always a price to pay’ narrative is one of the most enduringly popular story archetypes in fantasy, and McGuire’s effort here put me in mind of Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairytale and most especially J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. This was a perfectly pleasant, mildly engaging story but not in any way unusual and I cannot see that the conversation would be enhanced by it winning a Hugo.

P. Djeli Clark’s The Haunting of Tram Car 015 sees us visiting a steampunk version of Cairo in which airships, flying tram cars and sentient AIs or ‘boilerplate eunuchs’ are all an accustomed and unremarkable part of the scenery. The story takes place in 1910, against a background of political realignment, social upheaval, and magical incursions. Our two hapless heroes, agents Hamed and Onsi of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities – better known as the Spooky Boys – have been called in to investigate a mysterious and potentially dangerous haunting of one of the city’s semi-sentient tramcars. Initially suspected to be a djinn, the entity in question seems particularly disposed to attack women, and the agents are perplexed not only as to its intentions but where it might have come from:

Trafficking of mystical creatures into the country was a well known problem to the Ministry. But smugglers usually traded in things like unhatched rukh eggs or re’em calves – selling unwary collectors infant animals that quickly grew into unmanageable monsters. There’d been a craze over lightning birds two years back. Just five of the things had wreaked havoc for days: disabling trams, shutting down factory machines, and setting off the blackouts in the posher streets of Cairo now lined by electric lamps. The Ministry had to fly in a troupe of Sangoma diviners from Bambata City to recapture them. But Hamed had to admit that he couldn’t believe anyone would have willingly smuggled in the ghastly spirit that now resided in Tram 015. More likely, the thing had snuck into a shipment while still in Armenia.

The weird police procedural is now a familiar staple in science fiction and fantasy, with Daniel Jose Older, Ben Aaronovich and Charlie Stross being well known exponents. P. Djeli Clark brings both writing talent and a sense of humour to this popular subgenre, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is entertaining and meticulously plotted, with wry political and social subtext on almost every page. The problem with the weird procedural though is basically the same as the problem with realworld procedurals in that they tend inexorably towards the formulaic. Although imaginative and smartly written, as with the McGuire there is nothing new or particularly notable here – a great little story but with nothing in particular that makes it stand out as being Hugo-worthy. In fact, I found myself wishing it had been nominated for a crime/mystery writing award instead, just to shake things up more.

For my second impromptu pairing, I would point to the Ted Chiang and Becky Chambers novellas as being the two core science fiction titles on the shortlist, both exploring traditional science fictional topics in individual ways. I actually read the Chambers last year, mainly out of curiosity. I don’t particularly get on with Chambers’s Wayfarers series, but I’d heard that this was different and so was interested to try it. To Be Taught, if Fortunate turned out to be one of those pleasant surprises that crop up every once in a while – a book that ought never to have worked for me yet nonetheless did. The novella’s premise is simple, and familiar: a bunch of astronauts head off into deep space to explore strange new worlds and catalogue their discoveries for the purposes of more detailed and targeted exploration in the future. The crew are put into suspended animation between planet-stops, and at each new awakening they find Earth’s relationship to their mission subtly changing. With their resources finite, the crew will have a momentous decision to make: continue with their mission in spite of the cataclysmic disruptions that are taking place at home, or return to Earth and a future that will be massively circumscribed by political and environmental catastrophe?

I’m obsessed with natural history, and so the basic drive of this novella – going down to a planet and observing new life forms and environments – held my attention and kept me absorbed. I loved the book’s quietness, its characters’ steady commitment to the tasks they were performing. I enjoyed their professionalism, their lack of interest in conflict or dicking about – in this respect they were pretty much the precise opposite of the crew in The Last Astronaut. Not a massive amount happens in terms of overt drama and I liked that, too – in the same way I enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama. In fact I’d draw a comparison between these two reading experiences in that both of them reminded me strongly of how and why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place.

Should the Chambers win a Hugo? I wouldn’t mind at all if it did, but I’m tending towards the view that much as I enjoyed it, there are other novellas on the shortlist this year that have a stronger claim on the award.

Similarly with Ted Chiang’s novella. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom takes place in the near future, in a world where it has become technologically possible to communicate with parallel universes by means of a device called a prism. Prism users are able to speak with their ‘paraselves’, thus gaining insights into how they and their lives might have turned out had they taken different decisions. Using his trademark combination of thought experiment and character-driven narrative, Chiang examines the ramifications of such an invention, both on individual users and on society as a whole.

For me, Chiang is one of the finest modern exponents of ‘true’ ideas-based science fiction, with a clarity, complexity and directness of expression that few can match. You’ll never read a bad sentence from Chiang – and you’ll never find a sloppy thought process, either. The care and commitment he shows his art is a constant and continuing joy, as well as a reiteration of science fiction’s core values of innovation and intellectual engagement with a focus on ideas. That Chiang’s fiction is always emotionally as well as cognitively satisfying is doubly to its credit.

The only negative mark against this story with regard to its Hugo-worthiness is that it is ‘just’ another excellent Ted Chiang story. It does not break new ground for Chiang, in terms of either style or substance. We read it and love it without being particularly surprised by it, because this is Chiang, operating at the high level of excellence we have come to expect from him. With regard to the 2020 Hugo, I suspect he will end up being the victim of his own success.

Rivers Solomon was a finalist for the Astounding Award in 2018 and as I’ve not yet caught up with their debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, their novella The Deep was probably the work on this shortlist I was most keen to read. I’d already read a fair amount around the novella – this piece on how The Deep was born. for example, and so I already knew going in what the work was about. An innovative and exciting collaboration, The Deep draws its story from the mythos created by the electronica band Drexciya in the 1990s and further expanded by the experimental rap duo clipping. in their Hugo-nominated album Splendor and Misery.

‘SF is uniquely suited to address difficult political topics in any era, and Rivers is one of a handful of new writers that are going to drag our imaginations in the right direction,’ say clipping. in their afterword to The Deep. ‘Readers and listeners have before them three – let’s call them objects of study: the recorded oeuvre of Drexciya and its associated artwork and liner notes, the clipping. song ‘The Deep’ and Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep. We prefer to imagine each of these objects as artifacts – as primary sources – each showing a different angle on a world whose nature can never be observed in totality.’

Yetu is of the Wajinru, a mer-people evolved from the children of African women thrown overboard from slave ships while en route to the plantations. As the Wajinru’s designated Historian, Yetu is the keeper of memories too bitter and cruel to be properly assimilated by the mass of her people. Yet the strain of being an Historian is colossal, for Yetu herself and for those tasked with her care. In order to truly gain their freedom, the Wajinru will need to take on their past. Only in taking on their past, will they come to a proper understanding of their future.

In its themes of silencing and being silenced, freedom and captivity and the right to be considered human, The Deep has clear and fascinating echoes of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. I loved and appreciated these parallels, which cement The Deep firmly and irrevocably into the canon of fairytale literature. The Deep is so much more though than just another mermaid story, and I would argue that the work’s raw edge, its slightly unfinished quality adds greatly to its power,

My criticism would be that I think The Deep needed to be more fully realised in terms of both story and character. I wanted more – more detail around the women whose children became the original Wajinru, more history generally, more about Yetu. The Deep needed more space to unfold, and would have been still more effective as a full-length novel. Even so, this is a remarkable work, and I would urge you to read not only it, but also this excellent essay on ‘Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor and Misery‘ by Jonathan Hay.

And after you’ve read that, you can head back over to Vector to read this interview with Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone on the writing of This is How You Lose the Time War , the sixth and final novella on this year’s Hugo shortlist, the one I pair with The Deep for sheer originality and verve. This is How You Lose the Time War has been one of the most talked-about and award-nominated works of the year. As a reader who tends to resist jumping on bandwagons, this is the kind of hype that makes me instinctively recoil from a work, to both want and yet not want to read it. If I remember rightly (it’s only been a week but time can come to seem very dense when you’re trying to read six novellas as well as draft a novel) my personal push-pull around This is How You Lose the Time War was the reason I dreamed up this mini-project in the first place – to give myself an excuse to read the damn thing without feeling that I had capitulated to mere peer pressure.

Red and Blue are rival agents from alternate futures. Blue works for Garden, a world government based around ideals of environmental preservation and a humanity that remains true to its biological origins:

She notes the deep green of the trees. She measures the timing of their fall. She records the white of the sky, the bite of the wind. She remembers the names of the men she passes. (Most of them are men.) Ten years into deep cover, having joined the horde, proven her worth, and achieved the place for which she strove, she feels suited to this war.

Red works for the Agency, a mega-corporation that has taken humanity into a tech-based, post-human future where barriers of time, space and corporeality are of no account:

We grow in pods, our basic knowledge flashed in cohort by cohort, nutrient balance maintained by the gel bath, and there most of us stay, our minds flitting disembodied through the void from star to star. We live through remotes, explore through drones – the physical world but one of many, and uninteresting by comparison to most. Some do decant and wander, but they can sustain themselves for months on a charge, and there’s always a pod to go back to when you want it.

Ostensibly deadly enemies, Red and Blue discover ties of intellectual and spiritual kinship that run deeper than any allegiance to the governments that hire them, that seek to use them to bend the time-stream to their own ends. Communicating through encoded messages across the strands of deep time, they begin to fall in love, a relationship that will inevitably put their futures in danger, at both a personal and an interplanetary level. As their handlers become aware of their duplicity, will Red and Blue be forced to betray one another, or will they find a way to outrun time itself? This is How You Lose the Time War asks serious questions about the nature of power, the unavoidable link between unmitigated idealism and despotism, the toxic legacy of violence under any banner:

Red wins a battle between starfleets in the far future of Strand 2218. As the great Gallumfry lists planetward, raining escape pods, as battle stations wilt like flowers tossed into flame, as radio bands crackle triumph and swiftskimmers swoop after fleeing voidtrails, as guns speak their last arguments into mute space, she slips away. The triumph feels stale and swift. She used to love such fire. Now it only reminds her of who’s not there.

The moments in reading I cherish most are those moments in which my assumptions are proved to be wrong. When I change my mind about a book I previously disliked, or when I fall head over heels in love with a book I felt convinced I was going to hate. Reading This is How You Lose the Time War has been one of those moments. Reader, I loved it. What I loved most about it is the way it absolutely proves my theory that it’s not the material that maketh the masterpiece, so much as the way in which that material is put to use. The quality of execution, in other words. This is How You Lose the Time War takes many of the elements of contemporary, media-derived SFF – I get Doctor Who vibes from this, New Space Opera vibes, massive Killing Eve vibes – and raises them, through the power of language, of insight, of literary allusion, of formal innovation to the level of a classic in the making. The result is a work that feels utterly of the present moment, yet contains within it the depth of field, the knowingness and literary excellence that will enable it to stand the test of time.

There are moments in which you suddenly become aware that you are reading a work that is destined to become a landmark of the field. Bold, brilliant, and – yes, I cried – unashamedly moving, This is How You Lose the Time War is a one such, a stimulus to both heart and mind. It wins my vote for the Hugo, unreservedly.

Weird Wednesdays #7: Rendezvous with Rama

July 22, 2020 /

The crab showed no reaction whatsoever, nor did it slacken its pace. Ignoring Jimmy completely, it walked straight past him and headed purposefully into the south. Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.

He had seldom been so humiliated in his life. Then Jimmy’s sense of humour came to his rescue. After all, it was no great matter to have been ignored by an animated garbage truck. It would have been worse if it had greeted him as a long-lost brother… (Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.)

After my less than satisfactory experience with The Last Astronaut, I decided it might be interesting to revisit what I took to be that novel’s originating influence. I was curious to see not only how well the older book fared by comparison (I took comfort from the fact that it could hardly be worse) but also how well it stood up as a novel at a distance of forty-plus years since its publication. I was pretty sure I had read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama during my late teens, along with a shipload other other classic science fiction both of that period and earlier, though I had almost literally no memory of it aside from the basic premise: an unknown object is detected entering the solar system, a team of astronauts are sent up to investigate. I hadn’t read any Clarke for decades anyway, so this rereading promised to be fascinating on several levels.

It is 2131, and humanity has founded settlements on several of the other planets in our solar system as well as their moons. When an interstellar object is detected beyond the orbit of Jupiter, satellite images reveal that it is not an asteroid, as previously imagined, but a perfectly cylindrical vessel, some fifty kilometres in length and clearly alien in origin. The unidentified craft is named Rama, after the Hindu god, and a party of astronauts leave Earth on a mission to discover what kind of threat – or otherwise – it might pose to human civilization. The Endeavour is commanded by William Norton, who in matters of personal integrity and exploratory zeal identifies strongly with the long-dead captain of his own ship’s much older namesake.

On entering Rama, the crew of the Endeavour are met with a series of marvels and mysteries that defy human understanding. They know their time on Rama is limited – the vessel will soon pass too close to the sun for the Endeavour to continue safely with its mission. Gathering as much information as they can, they must also contend with the increasingly hostile rhetoric of representatives from the planetary settlement on Mercury. The Hermians believe themselves to be at particular risk from Rama, and given the fact that the vessel’s intentions cannot be verified, they are minded to shoot first and ask questions later.

I felt certain The Last Astronaut had taken inspiration from Rama. I was unprepared for quite how much. The narrative trajectory of TLA follows that of Rama pretty much identically: the long and exhausting climb down into the vessel, the discovery of a breathable atmosphere, the melting ice, the gradual awakening of native life forms – everything, right down to the captains of both missions being the same age. Intentional homage or unpardonable laziness? I don’t know and frankly, aside from a feeling of mild to middling outrage on Clarke’s behalf, I don’t even care that much. If The Last Astronaut were a better book, these ‘coincidences’ might matter more. As things stand, The Last Astronaut is a disposable potboiler, while Rendezvous with Rama is deservedly a classic of Western science fiction. No argument over who wins this particular battle of the BDOs.

One embarks on reading older science fiction novels braced for an onslaught of square-jawed heroes and unpalatable opinions, but aside from one highly unfortunate likening of a crew member to a monkey, and one ridiculous and totally uncalled-for meditation on the motion of women’s breasts in zero gravity, Clarke does pretty well. He is consciously progressive in his treatment of sexuality – homosexual and polyamorous relationships are seen as normal in his 2100s – and women on board the Endeavour (the odd lapse into innuendo aside) enjoy not only equal status, but equal respect. In a particularly notable sequence, Sergeant Ruby Barnes, a master mariner, is granted control of the mission when members of the crew are suddenly threatened by an enormous tidal wave:

She’s magnificent, thought the Commander – obviously enjoying every minute, like a Viking warrior going into battle.

Not a hint of gendered language in sight, with Norton readily deferring to Barnes’s greater expertise. It is Ruby who makes the decisions here, proving how capable Clarke was of imagining women in positions of command. I also liked Clarke’s treatment of religious faith. One of the Endeavour’s crew members is a devout member of the Church of Christ Cosmonaut (Jesus was a spaceman, basically). Whilst Norton does not share his beliefs, he does not belittle them either; rather, he takes particular note of this crewperson’s integrity, commitment and logical approach in trusting them to undertake a crucially important and potentially hazardous manoeuvre at a critical time.

Just as impressive is the novel’s overall attitude towards alien life. The concept of the alien as hostile and/or disposable has become so much the norm within Hollywoodised media that as an audience we have become more or less inured to it. In The Last Astronaut, the wonders of 21 are ultimately of no account when set against the terrifying threat to Earth the vessel poses, a threat that must be destroyed – with enormous weapons – as noisily as possible. (And yes, if monstrous megaworms really were about to eat the planet then I’d be first to press the button, but it is important to remember that this is fiction and authors have choices.)

The life forms encountered in Rama are not only imaginatively drawn, they are also notable in that Clarke makes a proper attempt to describe creatures that are alien without being monstrous. The attitude of the crew towards these beings is also significantly refreshing. Even Jimmy Pak, ‘a man of action, not introspection,’ feels guilt over his purloining of a botanical specimen, and Norton is determined they do nothing to harm the Raman ‘spiders’ that invade their camp:

Training was one thing, reality another; and no one could be sure that the ancient, human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency. Yet it was essential to give every entity they encountered in Rama the benefit of the doubt, up to the last possible minute – and even beyond.

Commander Norton did not want to be remembered by history as the man who started the first interplanetary war.

What a relief and a delight, to travel with a crew whose first instinct is to observe rather than to interfere or destroy.. That the tripedal spiders and other ‘biots’ are allowed to remain essentially a mystery is also to Clarke’s credit. Rama is vast and time is short. At least for now, the secrets of this alien civilization must remain unknowable, a tactic that renders them immortal and endlessly alluring. The novel’s penultimate sequence, in which the crew of the Endeavour are briefly caught in the wake of this vast alien structure as it prepares to take on fuel for its onward journey, has a poetry and a grandeur that reduced me to tears.

It was dropping out of the Ecliptic, down into the southern sky, far below the plane in which all the planets move. Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.

Rendezvous with Rama earns its classic status not just through its expert deployment of classic tropes but in its conscious invocation of classical archetypes. Clarke’s novel is an Odyssey, a hero’s journey in which the hero is Rama itself as much as Norton. The tests and trials we encounter along the way are provided not by hydra or sirens but by physics and maths, while the end of the journey transcends anything so simple as ‘closure’ precisely because the central mystery remains unsolved.

There will be those who argue that Rama is unsatisfactory as a novel through being more or less plotless; for me, the book’s imaginative reach, its stylistic economy, its ability to inspire debate makes that irrelevant.

We could have a long debate over how The Last Astronaut’s mirror-likeness to Rama might be justified or defined. It could be argued, for example, that Wellington’s novel is actually intended to be an anti-Rama – a deliberate examination of how the story might have played out had the alien vessel been actively hostile. I would counter that for such a strategy to be successful, The Last Astronaut would have to be Rama’s equal in terms of literary achievement. What is beyond doubt is that the quality of Clarke’s writing – marked by age in places yes, but always cogent, cleanly descriptive, economical and stylish – raises his novel to a level Wellington’s never approaches. Eschewing cheap thrills, Rendezvous with Rama is characterised throughout by that philosophical stateliness, that sense of rapt idealism and thirst for knowledge that has helped to define science fiction as a mode of literature.

Weird Wednesdays #6/Clarke Award #2: The Last Astronaut by David Wellington

July 15, 2020 /

When I was in my young teens, I borrowed a novel from my local library entitled Journey to Jupiter. I had never heard of the author – Hugh Walters – and did not yet know that Journey to Jupiter was the eighth novel in a series recounting the adventures of Chris Godfrey and comrades, a team of astronauts working under the auspices of the (fictional) United Nations Exploration Agency, or UNEXA. I took the book and its characters to my heart more or less immediately, and over the course of the next year or so I burned through the rest of the series, revisiting my favourite volumes multiple times.

Hugh Walters became a science fiction writer by accident. Born Walter Llewellyn Hughes, he once said in a newspaper interview that he chose to write under a pseudonym because he was afraid writing science fiction might cause his friends and colleagues in the business community to take him less seriously. A keen amateur astronomer, Walters was asked to give a talk on space exploration for his hometown rotary club. His lecture was so well received he was invited to repeat it, this time for a local library as part of a week-long festival of science fiction. As preparation for the event, Walters read a number of recently published science fiction novels and found them disappointing. He felt that American science fiction writers especially were not sufficiently engaged with actual science, leaning instead towards the kind of pulp sensationalism that gave science fiction a bad name. Walters felt instinctively that science fiction should entertain, but that it should also educate. With ideals similar to those of the writers and producers of the first Doctor Who adventures, Walters wanted his books to inspire young people, to make them interested and passionate about science in the way he was himself.

For the first fifty or so pages of The Last Astronaut, I believed the book I was reading might have been conceived with a similar purpose. In considering this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, one of my aims has been to ask myself why each individual title has been selected, why, in the minds of the judges, the book stands out. My initial impression of The Last Astronaut was that it had been chosen as an example of the kind of space fiction that draws so many fans into the genre: a story that generates the excitement we remember from our first encounters with SF, with the added intention of exploring a speculative idea from a scientific standpoint. I get it, I thought. The Last Astronaut is like The Martian, with added aliens.

Reader, I was mistaken. And I’m sad about that.  

The Last Astronaut is set in 2065. Following the catastrophic failure of the first manned mission to Mars twenty years earlier, NASA has been defunded, leaving the exploration and exploitation of space to private enterprises. The beginning of our narrative sees an employee of one of the hungriest and most successful space corporations, KSpace, jumping ship to a NASA that, though almost defunct, still retains the framework of its earlier idealism. Sunny Stevens is an astrophysicist who always wanted to be an astronaut, and he has made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery: a body previously identified as an asteroid is decelerating, which means it must be moving under its own power. If asteroid 21/2054D1 is not in fact an asteroid, but an alien spacecraft, the implications are seismic. Stevens wants to make a deal – his information and expertise for a place on the team. With ‘21’ clearly headed for Earth, NASA chief Roy McAllister, now in his seventies, has a problem: action is clearly needed, but there are no astronauts qualified to take it. NASA’s only option is to make the best of what they have.

And so our rag-tag team of spacefarers is duly assembled. Sally Jansen previously captained the Orion 6 Mars mission and is the only one of the four with spaceflight experience. Still traumatised by the death of a colleague on that earlier mission, she believes she has something extra to prove in commanding this new one. In theory, Sunny Stevens knows everything there is to know about being an astronaut – but it is all theory. Parminder Rao is an astrobiologist, still young and misty-eyed at the thought of being the first to make contact with alien life. Windsor Hawkins is ex-military, more recently an expert in the art of tracking and capturing spy satellites. He is there to represent the interests of the US Defense Department, and if necessary to take command if things get out of hand.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to guess that’s exactly what things are going to do, and rapidly. Unbeknown to our heroes, a rival mission has launched and overtaken theirs – if there is anything of value to be gained from the incoming aliens, KSpace mean to be the first to seal the deal. As the Orion 7 approaches 21, the crew’s attempts to communicate with the KSpacers’ vessel the Wanderer return a negative. Anxious that they might be in trouble, Sally jets across to the Wanderer to investigate more closely. On boarding the craft, she finds no one at home. She can only assume the rival crew have decided to gain a headstart in exploring the alien ship. With memories of her first disastrous captaincy still fresh in her mind, she is determined to head off in pursuit and, if necessary, rescue.

In its outline and premise, the Last Astronaut has a great deal in common with Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendezvouz with Rama, although in the way it unfolds it reminded me equally of Jules Verne’s 1864 classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Both are noble examples to follow, and thus it is all the more dispiriting to discover that The Last Astronaut has neither the plainspoken competence of the Clarke, nor the timeless elegance of the Verne. In terms of both narrative plausibility and technical expertise, Wellington’s updated version reads like the novelisation of an inferior commercial genre movie we happened to see five years ago and didn’t much like.  

Fiction is fiction, and whilst it would seem churlish to hold The Last Astronaut too stringently to account for being factually improbable, the subgenre of exploratory science fiction to which this novel owes its allegiance depends on at least an appearance of verisimilitude. Novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora or the Mars trilogy, for example – or indeed a film like Gravity – gain much of their effect through reminding us that space exploration is painstaking, hazardous, and often repetitive work, that its thrills are hard won, dependent on planning and strict adherence to scientific protocols. Indeed such close observation of truth is part of the attraction of this kind of fiction. Yet those with only the vaguest awareness of scientific etiquette will quickly come to the conclusion that what transpires on board Orion 7 is pretty much codswallop – not because the astronauts are chasing UFOs, but because their methods and decisions are farcical from the beginning. The crew leave the Orion 7 ‘parked’ just 2 kilometers from where 21 is in orbit when they have no idea what the object is, what danger it might pose. Sally Jansen undertakes an unauthorised EVA then boards the Wanderer without a clue of what might have happened there. Stevens pilots the Orion closer to the Wanderer when he knows there is a malignant alien life form on board, and so on. It is all so tiresome, the kind of plotting that occurs when the author needs something to happen, but cannot find an organic, realistic-seeming way of progressing the action. Instead, characters are moved around like puppets, or like pieces on a game board.

Read any astronaut’s memoirs and you will be in no doubt that the actions of the Orion crew are about as far from anything resembling reality as you could get. What we have instead is a plot that appears to be strung together from a series of movie clichés. Here is the scene from Interstellar in which Michael Caine reveals that NASA never really died, it just went into hiding. Here is the scene from Alien where Ripley warns against bringing the infected Kane back on board the Nostromo only to have her veto countermanded. The big reveal recalls Sam Neill’s defection to the dark side in Event Horizon (‘I don’t need eyes where I’m going.’) and there is even a rehash of a classic scene from Indiana Jones – you’ll recognise it when you come to it. Windsor Hawkins plays the ubiquitous power-mad egotist with the ‘secret’ Chekhov’s gun in his pocket, ready to be used as the catalyst for the final confrontation. The tediously violent showdown-as-climax as per every derivative, hackneyed, lazy Hollywood screenplay you’ve ever seen is the final letdown. Wellington couldn’t resist the duct tape, either, or the robot pal. Add a dash of Final Girl Theory to complete the recipe.

Such reliance on overripe material does not end with the plotting. A lot of argument has been expended on the language of science fiction and what is the most appropriate mode of expression for a literature of ideas. Personally I would argue there is no right way to write science fiction; the dense rococo of Catherynne Valente is as fit for purpose as the visionary optimism of Arthur Clarke, the social realism of Le Guin, the factualism of Stan Robinson or the modernist and post-modernist approaches of Ballard and Gibson. What can never work – in any mode of literature – is the language of cliché. Thus in The Last Astronaut you have to put up with a lot of stuff like this:

It was the first time the two of them had been alone since they’d danced in the air, since the day Wanderer blew right past them. It was the first time she’d had to think about what being alone with him meant…

Rao knew what she wanted from him. She also knew she was very, very good at controlling her impulses when she needed to focus. Most of the time.

She reached under the collapsible shower unit for a bolt that had floated away from her. When she came back up, Stevens put his hands on her shoulders. He leaned in close to kiss her neck. She’d kind of been expecting that, so she stiffened up.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Was that… OK?’

Rao laughed. ‘It was… extremely OK. Honestly,’ she said. ‘But Sunny – we’re working…You must be as excited to meet the aliens as I am, don’t lie.’

‘I’m excited about a lot of things,’ he said… He put his mouth very close to her ear. ‘Are you seriously going to tell me you don’t want to be the first person to have sex in space?’

And this:

The interior walls were covered in thin padding with a white vinyl covering, and back near the airlock leading to the command module, someone had drawn on the padding with a red pen. At first she thought it was a note – maybe left behind by a desperate crew in case anyone ever found their abandoned ship. She steeled herself to read the last words of a dying astronaut.

Then she saw there were no words. Just crude drawings of a woman with exceptionally large breasts, and next to her a giant penis with hairy testicles.

It’s all very ‘I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper’ (if this reference passes you by, you’d be advised to keep it that way), steeped in the affectless banter that has become the accepted currency of Hollywood sci-fi. The writer has made little attempt to imagine what real people and more specifically real astronauts might say in these circumstances; he relies instead on pre-imagined scenarios, pre-imagined dialogue of the kind spoken not by human beings under stress but by actors playing roles.

Similarly, the main body of the text suffers from an overabundance of ‘dead’ words – adverbs and qualifiers that serve no purpose except to leave the prose feeling clogged and overburdened with waffle. Writers are drawn to this manner of expression because they think it adds realism and immediacy. That certain words and phrases feature frequently in spoken English should act as both an instruction and a warning: used sparingly in colloquial dialogue they can be effective, used in narrative prose they are a menace to society. Most writers’ first drafts are littered with spare verys and actuallys – that’s how we talk and think, especially when we’re working out a new idea. Part of the work of the second draft is to weed them out. Here’s a brief extract from The Last Astronaut:

When NASA actually answered his message, he’d basically just walked out the door. He’d never actually expected this to happen, and he hadn’t thought to prepare. Now it was time to make an actual decision. He could still walk away – say he was sorry, but he’d made a mistake. Take the train all night to get home and go to bed and pretend he’d never even thought of this crazy plan.  Go back to work tomorrow at the Hive and hope nobody was monitoring his email.  

And here’s how I would redraft it:

He hadn’t expected a reply to his message, and so when NASA called him he left immediately and without preparation. Now he had to decide. He could still walk away, say he was sorry, that he’d made a mistake. He could get back on the train, fall into bed then go to work at the Hive the following morning as if nothing had happened. Hope no one was monitoring his email. Pretend he’d never thought of this crazy plan.  

This new version conveys the same information, but with greater economy and precision. Just cutting those three actuallys and the basically would leave the passage neater and cleaner. Apply this simple method to the text as a whole and even if you made no other material changes you’d have a better book.

Writing is, as we all know, the devil, and it would be unfair of me to suggest that The Last Astronaut has no redeeming features, or that it is an entirely negative reading experience. As I suggested above, my initial encounter with it reminded me pleasurably of my own early forays into the genre: the thrill of adventure, the sense that anything was possible, the intimation that something marvellous and possibly dangerous was about to happen. The book reminded me of how exciting science fiction can be, while the pace of action kept me hooked and entertained. I mentioned in an earlier post how quickly I become invested in stories, and in spite of my mounting annoyance at the novel’s technical shortcomings, I still wanted to know what happened. I would have kept reading even if I hadn’t committed myself to writing this essay.

I would also add that The Last Astronaut does make some gestures towards the science fictional principle of conceptual breakthrough. There are several key moments in the novel where the parameters shift, where our understanding of what is happening becomes radically altered. It is interesting to note that these are also the moments when Wellington’s imagination becomes more fully engaged. In his descriptions of the interior of 21 there is passion, finally, and a sense of wonder, a clearer, more precise language that more adequately serves the novel’s key ideas:

After the continuous darkness of 21, the flare’s light was blinding and Rao had to look away. When she dared to lift her head again she saw it, a red comet blazing across the air above them. For a second, just a second, she could see for kilometers, she could see the arcing walls of 21, the walls of the drum curving up and away from her, walls covered in water dotted with the last scraps of ice. She saw all the bubble mounds and hand-trees and arches, the vast domes and wells and things she couldn’t describe, saw just how much of this dark lake had come to life. She saw, directly above her, the roof of the drum, saw hand-trees up there that must be kilometers tall, saw their slender fingers twitch and curl up. She saw the arches rising over her head, hundreds of them, arches growing from the curves of other arches like the staircases in an Escher painting. The air over her head was crisscrossed by a network that branched and rebranched very much as the tendrils ramified. A pale scaffolding that crossed from one side of the drum to the other.

If only Wellington had trusted his own resources more; freed from the hackneyed dialogue, the dodgy romance plot, the clumsy in-paragraph point-of-view shifts, the (God help us but at least they’re short) dream sequences, how much truer to its inspirations this novel might have been.

Why does this matter, I hear you asking. Why am I expending so much time and energy in excavating the perceived faults of a novel for which I am and never was the intended audience? Because The Last Astronaut is on the shortlist for the Clarke Award of course, and any proper examination and evaluation of that shortlist should mean subjecting the book to the level of critical scrutiny one would expect from an award jury.

Having concluded my critical examination of The Last Astronaut, I am forced to admit that I cannot understand the process by which the Clarke jury came to select it as one of the six best science fiction novels of 2019. The book is derivative, generic, reliant on stereotypes and awash in cliché. The Big Dumb Object novel is an honourable tradition within science fiction, but taken as an example of it The Last Astronaut does not demonstrate any notable qualities of rigour or originality. Thus for it to merit inclusion on the Clarke shortlist, it would need to showcase some other arbiter of excellence – linguistic dexterity perhaps, or formal innovation. Sadly, as we have seen, it possesses neither. The only reason I can imagine for its presence here is that one or other of the judges really, really enjoyed reading it. If this were a fan award, then fair enough. But it isn’t, and it’s not. The Clarke deserves better.

Weird Wednesdays #5: China Mountain Zhang

July 8, 2020 /

“I never know what’s going on. Even when I’m in the middle of some secret, like a surprise anniversary party, or when I was at the scene of the event people talk about years later, I missed stuff and other people drew different conclusions than I did. I can’t imagine that other people really know how the government works. And if our government is beyond understanding, surely the Galactic Empire is beyond understanding. And I can’t believe that one evil genius has a clear understanding because I’ve been a peon in a big company and lord knows we were never doing what the brass thought we were doing.”

(Maureen F. McHugh ‘The Anti SF Novel’)

In considering the nature and essence of science fiction, there is one conundrum I return to more than any other: what is it that defines science fiction as a literary form, and how does it differ from other literary forms, if at all?

I remember when I was looking back over the experience of chairing the Clarke shadow jury in 2018, I made a personal resolution to try and avoid using the terms ‘literary SF’ and ‘genre SF’ as a way of distinguishing between science fiction published and reviewed as genre fiction and science fiction that happened to be put out by a mainstream literary imprint. I felt at the time and still feel that such distinctions tend to be arbitrary, a convenient way of pigeonholing books and authors without contributing anything substantive to the discussion.

But I’ve been looking at this question again in recent weeks, wondering whether this decades-long obsession within SF circles with how a book is published and presented might not be a clumsy but nonetheless valid attempt to grapple with more interesting questions. I have often had the feeling myself, without being able to properly quantify it, that the most dynamic and satisfying science fiction of all is the work of writers who pay attention to literary values yes, but who come from within the genre, who write science fiction because they believe it is a unique mode of literary expression and one they are committed to as a project. Writers who read science fiction and whose science fictional sensibility – that slippery concept – is on a par with their literary ambitions.

Of course, any attempt to name names is going to vary from reader to reader, and is likely to be as contentious as the accompanying insinuation that science fiction written from outside the genre is ‘not real SF’, which leaves us back where we started. Far more useful to try and identify the specifics of what makes the best science fiction so powerful, so galvanising and so resonant. This week and with this blog post in mind, I reread Joanna Russ’s 1975 essay ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction‘. I found it fascinating, provocative and, like all the best essays, a challenge to any preconceived notions I might have had.

“Science fiction, like medieval painting, addresses itself to the mind, not the eye. We are not presented with a representation of what we know to be true through direct experience; rather we are given what we know to be true through other means—or in the case of science fiction, what we know to be at least possible. Thus the science fiction writer can portray Jupiter as easily as the medieval painter can portray Heaven; neither of them has been there, but that doesn’t matter. To turn from other modern fiction to science fiction is oddly like turning from Renaissance painting with all the flesh and foreshortening to the clarity and luminousness of painters who paint ideas. For this reason, science fiction, like much medieval art, can deal with transcendental events.“

Russ’s thesis, that science fiction is by its nature a didactic form of literature that concerns itself with objective phenomena rather than subjective states, is one that immediately recalls that Ted Chiang quote about sense of wonder and conceptual breakthrough I alluded to the other week. It is a contention I have always resisted up until now, tending instead towards the conviction that if science fiction is to be successful as literature, it must adhere to the same standards as literary fiction – a thought-trap Russ identifies immediately in her ironic and mischievous way. I find Russ’s comparison of science fiction with Mediaeval painting an illuminating and pertinent one. As a writer and critic in sympathy with the Ballardian precept of allying science fiction with modernism, I also find it easier to get on board with as the parallels between Mediaeval art and Modernist art, the way they have more in common with each other than with the Enlightenment, Romantic and Social-Realist schools that are sandwiched between them, are self evident and fascinating.

Moreover, there is no doubt that I too have often felt that vague frustration on being confronted with a work that should, according to my own precepts and by virtue of its standard of achievement at the sentence level, be successful as science fiction, and yet feels somehow muffled and devoid of substance, lacking not only in conceptual breakthrough but unable or unwilling to commit to the very concept of conceptual breakthrough as a necessary element.

I have found trouble in defining what is wrong with it, and of course there is nothing wrong with it, except to say that it is not really science fiction. Rather, it is using the materials of science fiction in pursuit of a different goal. There is nothing wrong with that, either – but it is interesting, at least to me, to try and get to grips with these distinctions.

Reading Russ’s essay again (and admiring it tremendously) I am bound to admit that the works of science fiction that best succeed and best endure do fulfil her strictures, as they do Chiang’s – Russ and Chiang are saying the same thing using different words. But is it also true, as Russ suggests, that science fiction literature requires a different form of criticism from mainstream literature? That the tools and assumptions we bring to the analysis of a work by Philip Roth are simply not suited to the task of interpreting a novel by John Crowley, or John Wyndham? (The American critic Harold Bloom famously argued that science fiction was ‘not literature’ and therefore could not be criticised according to literary precepts. He was forced to reconsider his position when confronted by the works of Ursula Le Guin and Crowley himself, whose novel Little, Big, he later named as a masterpiece.)

Drawing this loop even tighter, do I as a critic need to rethink my approach? Have I been missing the point up till now, judging texts according to parameters that should not be applied to them, whilst failing to address the work on its own terms?

Thinking intensively about these matters over several days, I have come to the conclusion that the most valid approach for me in writing about science fiction is one that unites the opposed positions of Russ and Bloom, that looks at the work as text, whilst acknowledging the aims of science fiction in terms of underlying conceit and conceptual breakthrough. Look at it harder, in other words. Ask what a book is doing as well as how it does it. It is true that the best works of science fiction are as satisfying as any in the whole of literature. But is it at least possible – and yes, I think it is – that they satisfy differently?

*

Maureen McHugh’s 1992 novel China Mountain Zhang won the Tiptree Award and the Locus Award, and was shortlisted for both the Hugo and the Nebula.. With themes of empire and colonialism still fresh in my mind, I thought now would be a good time to read this book finally, that it might serve as an interesting point of comparison with A Memory Called Empire, both in and of itself and in the matter of its overall approach to science fiction. How right I was.

Surname: Zhang. Given name: Zhong Shan. China Mountain Zhang. My foolish mother. It’s so clearly a huaqiao name, like naming someone Vladimir Lenin Smith or Karl Marx Johnson. Zhong Shan, better known in the West as Sun Yat-sen, one of the early leaders of the great revolution in China, back in the first days, the days of virtue. The man who held up the sky like a mountain. Irony.

But better that than Rafael Luis.

Zhang is an engineer, living in a New York that is now the capital of a revolutionary socialist United States. China has become the dominant power, both politically and economically, with a standard of living and scientific outlook years in advance of the rest of the world. For an American-Born Chinese engineer like Zhang, the ultimate goal is to study in China, a sought-after privilege that would enable him to take his pick of jobs and effectively be set up for life. Zhang is talented and, when he wants to be, hard working, but he faces several obstacles. Firstly, he is mixed-race, his Chinese appearance effected through a gene-splicing technique that is now illegal. Secondly, Zhang is gay – in a time and place where homosexuality is illegal and punishable with the death penalty. Thirdly, through no direct fault of his own, he has managed to insult his boss and get fired from his job. With the career path he was set on suddenly closed off to him, Zhang finds himself back at the bottom of the pile, with a mountain to climb.

Zhang would not describe himself as a political animal, yet neither would he describe himself as a dissident. His aim in life is simply to live, to slip between the cracks of a state machine that views difference less as opportunity than as a problem to be solved. With his own innate talent for problem-solving, Zhang loves the theoretical and mechanical structures of engineering, but he is not sure yet what he should do with this passion, what kind of life he wants to lead. The novel follows Zhang through the next ten years and through a variety of settings as he works his way back up the professional ladder and finds ways of coming to terms with his personal predicament. Interspersed with Zhang’s chapters, we spend time in the company of others who come into contact with him, some without knowing anything about him other than his name: a kite-flier named Angel, a young woman who encounters prejudice because of her looks, an ex-army officer who is now part of a commune on Mars. a refugee from the resettlement camps of the American desert corridor:

I never pictured Mars like this – I grew up in a frontier town on the edge of the corridor, my daddy was a scrap prospector, not a farmer but there were a lot of farmers and so I had an idea of what frontier farming was like. Some years they got crops, some years the People’s Volunteers brought drinking water into town in trucks and when I was in senior middle school I used to go get water for my mother. We had two big fifty-liter containers that we put in the back of an old three-wheel bike. I’d get them filled and then have to stand on the pedals to get the bike to go anywhere. I wanted to join the PV, but after I finished school and married Geri there were too many applicants. Then the party said the drive to reduce carbon dioxide was working. That the global temperature was falling, and it would be possible to resettle the corridor… Three degrees, and they’ll get back to temperature levels in the 1900s and it’ll rain in Idaho and across north central Africa and who knows, maybe it’ll rain carp in Beijing, and flowers will bloom in the Antarctic, but Geri still died and Theresa spent half of her childhood in resettlement camps.

There have been readers who argue that China Mountain Zhang does not really have a plot. For me, that is part of the beauty of it. If science fiction satisfies differently, then mosaic novels, also, satisfy differently, allowing the author to reveal a world, and a set of characters as they relate to one another within that world, at a speed and with a logic more congruent with lived reality. The ‘plot’ of China Mountain Zhang is the story arc of ten years in Zhang’s lived reality, with all the setbacks and revelations and unexpected sub plots that result when characters and situations interact. It is easy to imagine China Mountain Zhang as a TV series, with individual episodes spent with different characters living their own stories, the connections between them only becoming apparent over time.

And it does not stop there. One of my chief complaints about A Memory Called Empire is that the world – the empire – it is set in is so lacking in physical texture it never feels real. With the forward-thrust of the plot allowed to dominate, the lived reality of Teixcalaan remains out of reach. The empire of China Mountain Zhang, by contrast, feels fascinatingly, disconcertingly real, the characters, scenarios and technological advances so convincing the novel reads almost as if it were mimetic fiction. McHugh’s novel is a masterclass in worldbuilding, because that worldbuilding is so thoroughly a part of the narrative it is pretty much invisible.

But what lifts this book beyond the realm of the well imagined, alternate-world ‘slice of life’ novel and properly into the realm of science fiction is its preoccupation with systems of engineering – mechanical, social and political. ‘Science fiction is the only modern literature to take work as its central and characteristic concern’, Russ says in ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction’. This position is reiterated by McHugh herself in her own essay ‘The Anti SF Novel’, in which she describes how aspects of the novel that are commonly viewed as background through being so familiar – technology, politics, society, philosophy – in the case of the science fiction novel can and often must step forward into the foreground to become the novel’s true subject. Thus we follow Zhang to Baffin Island and then to China, where he studies Daoist engineering, a discipline that is almost as much an art form as it is a science.

Once again, McHugh’s skill in imagining and clarity in explaining are such that Zhang’s struggles to gain mastery over his talent prove even more compelling than the colourful and occasionally tragic vacillations of his private life. Where else but in a work of science fiction could a discourse on engineering and Marxist dialectics be described as the climax of the novel? And yet, we have by this time become so invested in this character and his world, so attuned to McHugh’s skill as a storyteller that Zhang’s lecture on history and chaos has both power and structural significance, drawing the threads of the novel together to form an exquisitely executed argument that – in just half a dozen pages – both describes the work’s narrative structure and tells us, with beautiful clarity, what the book is about:

“History is also a complex system. It is not random, but it is non-linear. Marx’s predictions were based on the assumption that history is a linear system, and using those assumptions he predicted the future. But if weather is a complex system, it seems reasonable to assume that history is also a complex system. History is sensitive dependent on initial conditions. You cannot predict the future.”

There is a sigh in the classroom. I have said what everybody knows but no one says. It is in the room, hanging.

Marx was wrong.

Just as Zhang himself is a mass of contradictions and ambiguities, so China Mountain Zhang as a novel is politically pragmatic, preferring to imagine, describe, extrapolate and posit rather than propagandise in any direction, a quality, I need hardly add, that is vastly to its credit. The language of the novel is detailed and descriptive – the chapter set on Baffin Island is a highlight in this regard – whilst remaining clear, declarative, and never self-indulgent. In this it mirrors McHugh’s own apparent fascination with language as system, with the novel’s exploration of the differences between different language systems boldly in accordance with the science fictional conceit of conceptual breakthrough. For someone such as myself, with a pronounced fondness for linguistics in fiction, this aspect of the novel forms a particular highlight.

Put simply, China Mountain Zhang is a science fiction masterpiece and a joy to read. Moreover, it demonstrates perfectly how the language of science fiction does not need to ape the language or preoccupations of mainstream literary fiction to maintain equality with it in terms of – again, a slippery concept – literary worth. Science fiction has its own preoccupations; science fiction that fully succeeds will be adept in the use of language that best explores them. Good writing is itself a skill, a tool, a conceptual breakthrough. Paying attention to how that skill is employed is itself an inseparable part of writing good science fiction.

Weird Wednesdays #4/Clarke Award #1: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

July 1, 2020 /

Early on in lockdown and following the splendid BBC documentary timed to coincide with the release of the third volume in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Chris and I decided to watch the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which we had missed the first time around and streaming on iPlayer. Mark Rylance’s superb portrayal of Cromwell, together with a wonderful score, the most incredible set designs and costuming and all round attention to detail made Wolf Hall one of my standout small screen experiences of the year so far. The care that had been lavished on this production and above all a deep love and understanding of the source material was evident in every frame and I was only sorry I hadn’t got round to watching it sooner. I enthused about the series to my mother (oh yes, and Morse Suppers are back!) encouraging her to get into it if only for Rylance.

“I don’t think so,” she said, once I’d finished rhapsodising. “All those people in cloaks and big dresses, politicking and then having their heads cut off. Not for me.”

I could have gone on about how unfair a judgement that was on the magnificence of what had been achieved, but then, I realised, I couldn’t exactly tell her she was wrong, either. As a baseline summary, hers was actually pretty fair, one that caused me to consider the nature and purpose of historical fiction more generally and how closely allied that genre is with space opera, a comparison that sounds unlikely but that becomes more resonant the more I think about it.

As Jonathan Strahan said on a recent episode of The Coode Street Podcast (do listen, it’s great), ‘any stirring space opera adventure is by its nature epic fantasy,’ and for me at least, looking at space opera through the lens of historical fiction has come to seem far more apposite and useful than trying to interrogate it as science fiction. The paraphernalia of most space opera – planet-spanning empires, faster-than-light travel, jump-gates, fleets of intergalactic battle-cruisers, sworn allegiances and deadly betrayals – is surely the stuff of fantasy by any other name, and as the most popular recent TV franchises demonstrate, this kind of epic fantasy draws much of its inspiration either directly from realworld history, or from the fiction derived from it. Being honest about this, rather than attempting to squeeze space opera inside an ill-fitting science fictional rationale, not only makes better sense in terms of writing criticism, it actually renders the genre more enjoyable, engaging and rewarding, as Strahan himself put it. Or at least it does for me.

The protagonist of Arkady Martine’s debut A Memory Called Empire is Mahit Dzmare. Mahit is a native of Lsel Station, the hollow bathysphere that is the population centre of the Lsel system, a small group of uninhabitable planets whose metallic ores form the main export and livelihood of the thirty thousand souls for whom Lsel Station is home. Lsel Station is a relatively young polity, its history spanning just fourteen generations. It is nonetheless proudly independent, and determined to preserve its integrity against the vast and ancient neighbouring empire of Teixcalaan. When Lsel Station’s ambassador to Teixcalaan stops communicating with home, Mahit is hastily dispatched to the City in his place. As a new and inexperienced negotiator, she must both seek to maintain the good diplomatic relations that have been established, whilst at the same time endeavouring to discover exactly what happened to her predecessor and what he had been planning. When Mahit learns that Yskandr Aghavn, the former ambassador, is dead, she quickly comes to suspect that he has been murdered.

Though fluent in Teixcalaanli and steeped in City culture and politics from a young age, Mahit is viewed by her Teixcalaanlizlim hosts as a barbarian. Largely incurious about Stationer culture, language and social mores, the Teixcalaanlizlim have until now remained ignorant of Lsel Station’s reliance on symbiosis to preserve their collective memory and body of knowledge. As Mahit takes up her position in the ambassador’s apartments, her hosts do not know that she carries within her an imago, a digital copy of her predecessor that allows her not only access to Yskandr’s memories, experience and knowledge, but also creates of the two of them a kind of joint entity, a person that is still entirely Mahit Dzmare whilst embodying the living spirit of Yskandr Aghavn. That Yskandr’s imago is fifteen years out of date, and therefore has no knowledge of why or how he came to be dead, provides an additional problem Mahit will have to navigate. With terrorist incidents and increasingly violent protests suddenly rife in the City, Lsel Station seems more at risk than ever of losing its independence, of being subsumed by an empire that views it as disposable.    

One of the complaints most commonly levelled at genre science fiction is that the proliferation of characters, combined with the ‘funny names’ and ‘unfamiliar technology’ that constitute its trappings makes it difficult to get to grips with unless you are a seasoned and practised reader of SF and fantasy. I am and always have been in two minds about this complaint. Yes, A Memory Called Empire does require a degree of concentration and commitment from the reader, especially at the outset – there is a lot to get to grips with, and quickly. Does it require more concentration than Wolf Hall though, or War and Peace, come to that? I’m not sure that it does. Martine helpfully provides a glossary of terms and character names – as Tolstoy provides a family tree at the opening of War and Peace – but as I was reading the book on Kindle I didn’t know it was there until I reached the end, by which time I was comfortably familiar with all the information it contained and so did not need it anyway.

I am under no illusion that many readers of mainstream literature would reject this book as ‘unreadable’ a couple of pages in. But are they any less closed-minded than readers of space opera who are unwilling to give James Joyce’s Ulysses a try on the grounds that it is ‘too difficult’? I’ve thought about this a lot, even written about it sometimes, and have broadly come to the conclusion that all readers have their comfort zones, many are unwilling to get out of them and most genres and modes of literature are ‘specialist’ to a degree. In order to determine how far a book is successful, or satisfying, we need to dig deeper. We need to look further than at the label that has been attached to it.

I have read a lot of Hilary Mantel (three of her contemporary novels as well as her memoir and her most recent short fiction collection), but I have not read the whole of the Wolf Hall trilogy. I have read Bring up the Bodies, because I thought it was important to get the sense of what these books were like and because I have always been fascinated by the power struggle that ensued around the rise and cataclysmic fall of Anne Boleyn. I found the book engaging and entertaining, full of intelligence and witty analysis, elegance personified. I also found it rather one-note, almost bland when compared for example with Beyond Black or Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Mantel is one of my writing heroes, but I know I am something of an outlier in preferring her contemporary works to her Cromwellian magnum opus. I also know that this comes down to my personal preferences rather than any diminution of quality in Mantel’s work.

For the most part, I have always found this kind of reconstructive historical fiction – novels in which historically famous people are made to say things and think thoughts we cannot for the most part know they ever said or thought – difficult to get on board with. Reading Bring Up the Bodies, I kept thinking how much I’d love to get away from the royal palaces – compelling though the court intrigue is – and out into the provinces. How much I would have preferred to be reading a novel about a young woman in an English market town, learning to read and write against her stepfather’s wishes, becoming obsessed with the new queen maybe as the royal drama unfolded down in London. About the claims and counter-claims amongst the villagers and tradespeople as the rumour that Boleyn was a witch began to spread and take hold. Similarly, I wouldn’t now be overwhelmed with enthusiasm at the prospect of a novel about the occupants of No 10 Downing Street scrambling to conduct damage limitation strategy on the Barnard Castle fiasco – we have Tim Shipman for that. I would be more inclined to read about a nurse bringing up three kids on her own whilst working on the medical front line, her daughter worried about her university place amidst the cancellation of exams, her youngest son trying to mitigate his unspoken terror of the virus by incorporating it into the world of his favourite computer game.

I prefer close focus, intimate worlds, the armreach of history revealed through the handsbreadth of personal experience. I don’t want to watch an advert for the latest iteration of digital technology – I want to see how that technology affects individuals, here, on the ground.  

These preferences, I hope, go some way to explaining why I always get something of a sinking feeling around space opera. It is all too tidy, too forward-thrusting, too shallow. I remember having exactly the same feeling when I read Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and more recently Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit. In both cases I became mildly invested in the story – I find getting invested in stories remarkably easy – and even enjoyed my time spent in its world. But once I’d finished reading, that was that. As text, neither of these novels made much of an impression, and beyond a basic plot outline I could barely tell you now what actually went on in them.

This is not – and I want to stress this – for want of ideas or ambition on the part of the authors. What I find most admirable about the new space opera is the way in which a fresh generation of SF writers are using space opera actively to deconstruct and analyse aspects of our realworld politics, past and present, in ways not too dissimilar from what Mantel is doing in her Wolf Hall trilogy. There is a wealth of intellectual engagement in A Memory Called Empire, as Arkady Martine uses both her characters and her setting to examine the experience of colonised peoples, the relationship between the individual and the body politic, the social and cultural morality of assimilation. Much has already been written about these aspects of the novel, and I would encourage anyone reading this essay to also take a look at Catherine Baker’s excellent review at Strange Horizons for a view of the novel very different from my own.     

Because what I don’t get from A Memory Called Empire is any real depth. The characters have characteristics and yes, they are distinguishable from one another but they exist entirely in subservience to the plot. We have no idea what kind of upbringing either Mahit or Yskandr enjoyed on Lsel Station. We have no idea what Nine Adze was like at school. We don’t have a clue how His Brilliance the Emperor Six Direction likes to spend his downtime. The novel is all events: this happened, then this, then this, then this. And sadly it is the same with sense of place. Yes, we know that the City is rapturously beautiful around its centre with some slummy outer districts none of the tourists ever get to see. But the setting feels disappointingly generic, the blocked-in backdrop to a game, a hodge-podge of pre-used tropes (marbled halls, elegant formal gardens, super-highways linking one part of the City to another). What of the rest of the planet? What of the climate, the terrain? And again, how and where do ordinary people live when they’re not demonstrating in the streets either for or against the emperor incumbent?   

I would undoubtedly have found more tolerance for this lack of an emotional and geographical hinterland had a stronger attempt been made by Martine to create an alien culture and way of life I could genuinely believe in as alien. What I get instead is a world saturated with the assumptions, language, humour (oh so millennial) and even fannish in-jokes of the American demotic, twenty-first century variety. In other words, even the worldbuilding, which appears so inventive and richly textured at first glance, is thin, overly reliant on a readership already familiar with these kinds of milieux to fill in the gaps. For comparison, have a look at the solidly constructed, deeply imagined, bracingly tactile worldbuilding on display in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, or the powerful, nerve-jangling testimony of Severian in Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of th Torturer, and you’ll see what I mean.     

I did appreciate Martine’s decision to include short sections of ‘found texts’ from both Stationer and Teixcalaanli sources at the head of each chapter – I always love stuff like that, and it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that the most interesting part of the novel for me is the role played by epic poetry in Teixcalaanli culture. The section near the end, in which Mahit helps her official liaison (and love interest) Three Seagrass to construct a poem that will also act as an encoded statement of resistance to the unfolding military coup, the way in which that poem goes viral and evolves its identity as it reaches more users – I liked this very much, indeed I would vastly have preferred it if the entire book had been about Mahit’s conflicted relationship with Teixcalaanli poetry and her parsing of its contradictions through scholarship. That, or her rejection of the imperial tradition as she begins to forge a new form of modernist poetry that is inalienably of Lsel Station.

I am always going to prefer Ulverton to Bring Up the Bodies. I am always going to prefer China Mountain Zhang to A Memory Called Empire. I am just that kind of reader, and writer. Whatchya gonna do?

In terms of its worthiness to be included on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, I will say that I understand perfectly why this book has been selected. In the themes it addresses as well as the smart, progressive and action-filled manner in which it addresses them, A Memory Called Empire is a good example of contemporary space opera, one many of today’s readership will enjoy and feel passionately about. As a debut novel in this subgenre it is entertaining, enjoyably complex and professionally executed. Whether the novel is outstanding per se, and whether being a good example of something – a measure of where the field is at as opposed to where it might set its sights – is a good enough reason for choosing it as one of the six best science fiction novels of the year, will, as always, come down to the judgement and proclivities of individual readers.

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