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Month: August 2020

Weird Wednesdays #12/Clarke Award #5: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

August 26, 2020 /

Your desire to conquer, to colonise others, is both too fixed and too free. Nothing escapes your dull dialectic: either it takes a village to live or to each his own to survive. Even your debate on the best way to be falls on either side of this blade. The social contract or individual free will, the walls of a commune must keep us close or capital must run rampant. That’s how you froze your long Cold War, with this endless, mindless divide.

How often does it happen that you fall in love with a book? Not at first sight, but through continuing acquaintance? That you are persuaded, encroached upon, seduced? That you come to realise that your gathering conclusions about a text have all been reversed?

Some books you simply enjoy. Some you admire. Some you forget more or less as soon as you’ve finished reading them. I have found, almost invariably, that it is those books you come to have a relationship with, that you even struggle with at times, that tend to bring the most lasting satisfaction. There has been a resistance in certain quarters to describing books as ‘difficult’, as if difficult were code for elitist, as if the necessity of having to work at something automatically precludes the idea of pleasure or inclusiveness. What bollocks. Books don’t ‘have’ to be difficult to be enjoyable, of course they don’t. Books don’t ‘have’ to be anything, and neither do readers. But for some readers, the work is the pleasure, or at least a significant part of it. The sense that you have grown as a reader in the process of reading. That the book you have just completed has enhanced your perception both of the world, and the written word.

For its length alone, The Old Drift might be said to encompass an element of difficulty. To read six hundred pages demands commitment from the reader, not just of time but – with a text so richly detailed and intricately structured – of attention. The Old Drift begins – well actually, it begins with a family tree, a fact I had completely forgotten because I skipped over it, and stumble upon only now as I retrace my steps to find a particular quote. The family tree is printed too small for me to read without my magnifying glass. Not wanting to fanny about so early on I jumped the page and dived right in, knowing nothing, no names, no spidery outline of relationships, and now here I am wondering how that might have altered my relationship with the novel. Did it enhance my sense of difficulty, or not? Did it augment my pleasure in working out the network of familial connections (not difficult, if you’re concentrating) for myself? I’ll never know, and that fact also I love. Looking at the family tree now through the lens of my magnifying glass I feel the pleasure of remembrance, nostalgic already for the moments before I came to know these characters, those moments in which their lives lay still ahead of me.

As I was saying, The Old Drift begins with (the mosquitoes, then with Dr Livingstone, then) Percy Clark, ‘a wanderer, a brute, a cad, the forefather who started it all’. He’s come to Africa from Cambridge, under something of a cloud. In those early years of the twentieth century, the country of Zambia still does not exist, or rather has not been named as such. Percy makes his way inland in search of a place to be and a vocation to follow:

I set out for the drift five miles above the Falls, the port of entry into north-western Rhodesia. The Zambesi is at its deepest and narrowest here for hundreds of miles, so it’s the handiest spot for ‘drifting’ a body across. At first it was called Sekute’s Drift after a chief of the Leya. Then it was Clarke’s Drift, after the first white settler, whom I soon met. No one knows when it became The Old Drift.

For the settlers, the land is unforgiving and strewn with difficulties. Many die of disease. Those who survive forge a sense of ownership that is entirely unearned. Percy forms an acquaintanceship with Pietro Gavuzzi, the manager of the newly constructed Victoria Falls Hotel, where Percy earns a modicum of fame through being the first diner in the audaciously upmarket restaurant. The stories and families of Percy, Gavuzzi and N’gulubu, a Zambian boy assaulted by Pietro’s daughter Lina in the dining room of the hotel will, over the course of the following century, become inextricably linked and intermingled as a new country is born, a monumental engineering project is conceived, and history itself is laid down, fought over, and remade.

For more than half of its length, The Old Drift reads like a family chronicle. Dense in detail, rich in language and imagery, hugely intelligent in its insights and observations, it’s an impressive achievement on this level alone. In its examination of class especially I kept being reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. In its interweaving of familial bonds and human relationships, I couldn’t not think of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, though for me The Old Drift, with its rigorous underpinning of history and cogent analysis of colonialism and its long-haul aftermath, is the nittier, grittier, broader and deeper and more memorable reading experience by far.

All of that is just the beginning, though, for it is in its latter third that this novel truly begins to show its colours, to ripen and to reveal itself for the genre-busting, formally innovative, revolutionary and science fictional masterpiece it truly is.

For anyone reading this book, hitting the 400 pp mark and thinking where’s the science fiction?? let me tell you I feel your doubt and bewilderment, because they were also mine. There are hints all along, of course, of where the book is going, what it is doing – the chorus of mosquitoes (some of the finest writing at the sentence level in the whole book), the building of the dam, the crazy Zambian space program – but for a long while they do not seem to add up to enough (not nearly enough) to make the book science fiction. I was all prepared to write an essay on how I admired The Old Drift in terms of its literary achievement but what was it actually doing on the Clarke Award shortlist?

But then, when Lionel Banda and later his son Joseph (they’re both descendants of Percy) begin and pursue researches into a vaccine for HIV, there’s a sort of seismic shift in the sensibility of the novel that acts not as a break in tone, but as a mechanism that transforms the very essence of what has gone before. You know that feeling you get when you’ve spent hours trying to assemble a piece of IKEA flatpack – all that ‘insert bolt A into bracket D’ stuff that never quite pans out as it is supposed to in the inadequate diagrams – and then suddenly you twist that little Allen key one more time and the whole thing slides into place and you have a piece of furniture? For me, reading The Old Drift really was like that, and to experience that paradigm-shift, in real-time, is going to count as one of my stand-out reading experiences of the year.

That HIV in the novel is referred to throughout simply as ‘the Virus’, and that so much of the discourse on immunology, a foreign subject to most of us until mere months ago yet now queasily familiar, is one more miraculous twist of the knife of perception:

Your beastly old tales know it all so well: we are Nature’s great superfluity. ‘What is this creature for?’ you still cry, raising your fist to the heavens. We pollinate little and feed very few, and no predator needs us to live… We’re an asterisk to Nature, a flaw, a digression, a footnote if ever there was one. We are not just an accident, but issue it too. .. Joseph himself has learned this the hard way: his vaccine, founded upon a mutation, has foundered on capital’s reef. But all sorts of things can slip through the cracks, especially genetically tweaked ones. Evolution formed the entirety of life using only one tool: the mistake…

The Old Drift ends up in the very near future. Climate change is a life-altering reality, new technologies are revolutionising the revolution of digital communication. The seeds of destruction sewn in the midst of the twentieth century – the displacement of peoples, the pillaging of natural resources, the inattention to the long-term environmental effects of human activity – are bearing bitter fruit. And yet, the silver seam of history continues. ‘I want to tell them that our minds are free, even if our hands are tied by poverty,’ insists Joseph’s half-brother Jacob, and it is this quality of endurance, of curiosity, of wild innovation, the determination to survive that most characterises the novel as a whole, that becomes its message.

The science writing, the existence of an overarching theme, the formal innovation, the propensity to surprise and to question assumptions, the imaginative reach, the view of time as infinitely flexible, the ability to postulate alternative futures and different worlds – these are some of the characteristics that help us to define what science fiction is and what it can do. These qualities are boundlessly present in The Old Drift. There are some books you receive as a gift, a light upon the way and this is one such. I feel lucky to have read it, inspired by a writer whose vision and reach seem set to take her wherever she wants to go. I can’t wait for her next novel.

Where does The Old Drift stand as regards my thoughts about the shortlist overall? Well, we still have one more book to go, so this will have to be a question of wait and see. In the meantime, I would encourage anyone with a passion for words, for indelible stories, for more inventive interpretations of the term ‘science fiction’ to read The Old Drift. Sink in, take your time. The book will reward you. At the very least, read Richard Lea’s excellent interview with Namwali Serpell here, or watch this fabulous online conversation between Serpell and Carmen Maria Machado here. We are so lucky to have writers of such talent and originality working in speculative fiction right now.

Weird Wednesdays #11: the question of lineage

August 19, 2020 /

Somewhere along the line, people lose their courage over science fiction. They stop reading it, they stop thinking of it as literary.

 (Una McCormack, Backlisted.)

The above quote is taken from a discussion on the Backlisted podcast of William Golding’s second novel The Inheritors. Backlisted is one of the best literary podcasts around, and for those who haven’t discovered it yet I recommend it heartily. This particular discussion though seemed especially resonant to me among the plethora of arguments and counter-claims that have sprung up recently around the question of the science fiction canon: does such a canon even exist, and if so, should it? If the idea of a canon of science fiction literature is important, what should be included?

This is a discussion that seems to resurface with predictable frequency, most recently in the aftermath of George R. R. Martin’s ill-conceived hosting of the Hugo Awards ceremony at virtual ConZealand. Whatever your feelings about Martin, or indeed the SFF canon, it would be difficult to deny at the very least that the parade of anecdotes trotted out on that evening, both by Martin himself and by guest-contributor Robert Silverberg, went on way too long. Given that many of the shortlisted authors had stayed up literally all night to be virtually present at the ceremony, the waiting times between award announcements – which seemed to get longer and more discursive as the ‘evening’ progressed – must have been agony. That Martin seemed disinclined to include any celebration of those authors, their works, or the tradition of speculative fiction in New Zealand were more bitter pills the audience were forced to swallow. It was almost as if Martin had forgotten the substantial time-differences that had to be juggled with, not to mention what the evening was supposed to be about. If so, then someone should have reminded him. Three-and-a-half hours of random talk is not a recipe for audience enjoyment, even for those members of the audience who have an interest in what is being said.  

But what of the most substantive criticism levelled at Martin, that of harping on authors and ideas who have not only dominated the discourse for too long, but who are now largely irrelevant at best, harmful at worst to the writers and fans who have made the genre their home in more recent years? The boggy ground around this question might best be navigated through the prism of a single question: do you have to read Campbell, Asimov and Heinlein to truly know science fiction? While the shortest and most pertinent answer to that question is simply ‘no’, I do still find it interesting to consider whether the idea of ‘canon’ has any more value other than – as its most vehement detractors insist it is – as a gatekeeping device.   

I happened to listen to the Backlisted discussion of The Inheritors pretty much exactly around the time the Hugo thing kicked off, and it had two distinct effects on me. The first was to reignite my interest in the writing of William Golding (more on that shortly), the second was to reaffirm me in my belief that whilst there is no such thing as the science fiction canon – canons are artificial constructs, set in place by whoever happens to have grabbed the establishment microphone at any given time – there is such a thing as a personal science fiction canon, and that it is through these individual responses to and movements towards that we learn most about ourselves as readers, writers, fans and critics of the literature we love.

Needless to say, it was something Una McCormack said on the podcast that began that train of thought:

I think science fiction as a genre changes significantly in the sixties as it starts to diverge from literary fiction. But there just seems to be a straight line, for me, from Wells, who supplies the epigraph for [The Inheritors], through Golding, to people like JG Ballard and Nigel Kneale. And then if you opened a book by Christopher Priest or Chris Beckett, you’ve got an absolute straight line there, I think, of literary British science fiction.

Her words literally raised the hairs on the back of my neck, because it is this straight line, this lineage, I have been banging on about in public and in private ever since I first began thinking critically about science fiction, yet I had never heard anyone express the same idea in terms that so exactly mirrored my own perceptions. I have never felt either affinity for or allegiance to the quintessentially American Analog route into SF: Campbell and the pulps, Asimov, Heinlein. The path I forged – though I did not think of it then as forging a path, I was simply reading books I loved and seeking out more like them – led precisely via Wells, Huxley, Orwell and Wyndham through Golding, Lessing, Kavan, Iris Murdoch, John Fowles and John Christopher to JG Ballard, (Keith) Roberts, (Mike) Harrison and Christopher Priest.

I have heard some fans repeatedly insisting that science fiction is an American form. I think this is nonsense. Whilst you can argue that the term ‘science fiction’ originated with Hugo Gernsback and came to define ‘the’ SF canon for many decades after, to maintain that this form of SF should continue to define SF is both illogical and limiting. ‘Science fiction’ is in a sense as illusory and artificial a construct as ‘the canon’ – it has no origin in empirical fact, it is simply what people say it is. Why should we grant primacy to one version of the construct over another?

When talking about science fiction, it is both useful and necessary to offer a more specific personal background to what, exactly, we are talking about.

I am ferociously proud of my science fiction lineage. Whilst I would never claim it as ‘the one true way’ – that would be ridiculous – its landscapes and aesthetic have immense resonance for me, and these writers form much of the basis for how I originally came to perceive and understand speculative fiction. I am still deeply attached to them today, and to a version of science fiction that cants towards literary modernism rather than the traditional ‘novel of ideas’ that arose from the pulp tradition. (Another gem gleaned from the Backlisted podcast: the TLS originally reviewed The Inheritors alongside John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.) I have no doubt this is the area I will continue to gravitate towards, both as a writer and as a critic. But that certainly does not mean that I denigrate other traditions as being inferior, or that I am not interested in them. I think much of the tragedy of Martin’s Hugo ramble is that he seems entirely incurious about what writers are writing now, and why science fiction matters personally, to them, for reasons that have nothing to do with Campbell and Asimov and Ellison, indeed rather the opposite.

New and diverse traditions of science fiction are not a threat to older or more established traditions – they are simply that: new and diverse, with all the excitement and expanded possibility such words encompass. For each of us to find our own way through the maze – to identify and draw inspiration from particular writers or groups or generations of writers we perceive as pursing interests or traditions or modes of expression in sympathy with our own – is that not exciting, enriching, instructive and something to be celebrated?

I have explored and will continue to explore some of the ‘canonical’ works from science fiction’s so-called Golden Age – not because I feel I should but because I am interested. I enjoy thinking about these things, I enjoy writing criticism, and I happen to believe that the more widely you read around a subject, the more fiercely you can argue your corner, the more enjoyment you can derive. And having said that, I saw an interesting comment somewhere at some point during the post-Hugo furore with words to the effect that it is actually the middle generation of science fiction writers – Le Guin, Butler, Russ, Delany, Disch, Haldeman, Pohl – who are the true pioneers of the American tradition, who not only wrote better then but speak better now to the generation of writers currently winning Hugos. That definitely rings true for me, though it might not for you. But that’s the beauty of such contentions: they are there to be discussed.   

*

Returning to Golding specifically, I was also struck by what Una McCormack said in that Backlisted podcast about his 1964 novel The Spire:    

I read The Spire as science fiction. They’re on a generation ship, it’s a tight crew of people in a hermetically sealed environment. They’re trying to get the navigational system to work, with the promise of a goal they’ll eventually get to. It’s incredible, the trappings that he takes, and then reformulates them through Paradise Lost, or Thucydides.

Her words intrigued me mightily, and I realised that although I had previously (and a fair while ago now) read four of Golding’s novels, The Spire had not been one of them. It is a short novel – just under two hundred pages in length – and with the need for something meaty and thought-provoking very much in mind, I decided to sneak it up my reading pile before launching myself into the next Clarke Award epic.  

How glad I am that I did. The Spire is ostensibly a historical novel, inspired by the pioneering construction of Salisbury Cathedral (Golding taught for many years at Bishop Wordsworth’s school, situated in Salisbury’s Cathedral Close) in the thirteenth century. Its protagonist Dean Jocelin is a man obsessed. He believes that he has been put on Earth by God to oversee the completion of a cathedral spire to dwarf all others and dedicated to the eternal glory of his Lord. He has engaged a master builder, Roger Mason, the only craftsman with the necessary skill – and foolhardiness – to see the project through. Mason has warned Jocelin that the cathedral’s foundations are too shallow to withstand the almighty pressure of such a behemoth construction. Jocelin is determined that even if he is right, they are bound – bound in faith – to continue:

‘I understand you, my son. It’s the little dare all over again. Shall I tell you where we’ve come? Think of the mayfly that lives for no more than one day. That raven over there may have some knowledge of yesterday and the day before. The raven knows what the sunrise is like. Perhaps he knows there’ll be another one. But the mayfly doesn’t. There’s never a mayfly who knows what it’s like to be one! And that’s where we’ve come! Oh no, Roger, I’m not going to preach you a sermon on the dreadful brevity of this life. You know, as well as I do, that it’s an unendurable length, that none the less must be endured. But we’ve come to something different, because we were chosen, both of us. We’re mayfly. We can’t tell what it’ll be like up there from foot to foot; but we must live from the morning to the evening every minute with a new thing.’

Roaming the cloisters and climbing the scaffolding, Jocelin sees and hears all, including some terrible things that would best remain hidden. Tormented by his vision – and by his unholy passion for a married woman – Jocelin clings desperately to his belief in angels as a means of protection. But the devil is at his back – literally. And when a tragedy strikes the small community, it is not just Jocelin’s physical body that lies at risk, but his soundness of mind.

The Spire is utterly grounded in its sense of place, not just the cathedral cloister itself, but the changing of the seasons, the work of farmers and masons and shopkeepers, the intimate, often prurient atmosphere of a provincial town. And it is this grounding in the quotidian that gives the novel’s increasingly fantastical trajectory its atmosphere and power. The Spire is a rural fantasia, a work of folk horror:

After that, he got up and began to move about, restlessly. The evening turned green over the rim of the cup. Then the rim went black and shadows filled it silently so that before he was well aware of it, night had fallen and the faint stars come out. He saw a fire on the rim and guessed it was a haystack burning, but as he moved round the rim of the cone, he saw more and more fires round the rim of the world. Then a terrible dread fell on him for he knew these were the fires of Midsummer Night, lighted by the devil-worshippers out on the hills. Over there, in the valley of the Hanging Stones, a vast fire shuddered brightly. All at once he cried out, not in terror but in grief. For he remembered his crew of good men, and he knew why they had knocked off work and where they had gone.

It is also a densely symbolist narrative of the struggle between good and evil. The early passages in which the cathedral’s foundations are shown to seethe with maggots, and those near the end where Father Jocelin climbs the tower to drive in the Nail, in which ‘the sweetness of his devil was laid on him like a hot hand’, are blood-chilling, imaginatively persuasive to the point you can almost believe that Golding himself has become complicit in Jocelin’s madness. Above all, the rich allusiveness of the language has the texture of modernism – modernism as it is defined by Gabriel Josipovici, unbound from its traditional historical associations with Joyce and Woolf, revealed as an active force for literary radicalism that renews itself with every generation.

It is this ideal, this idea that for me has always been the driving force of speculative fiction. I love Una’s idea of The Spire as a generation starship novel and I could run with that. But for me it resembles more closely the hallucinatory, arcane view of the speculative rendered by Wolfe and Hoban, Crowley and Kiernan. Time-travelled forward into the twentieth century, Dean Jocelin, in all his madness and his muddled philosophy, could be a thwarted magus figure straight out of one of Iris Murdoch’s quasi-fantasies. Not that time matters much here, because the story of The Spire is essentially timeless. Golding’s use of language and the power of his imagination – his vision, inchoate as Jocelin’s – makes it so.

Thank God indeed for books such as this. The inspiration to be gleaned from such a text – not just in terms of one’s own work but in thinking about the work of others – is not just timeless, but immeasurable.

I am happy to say I also found time to read Judy Golding’s The Children of Lovers, a personal memoir of her father that offers valuable insights into his creative process. Judy Golding is a writer of quality. She is so remarkably candid in her assessments, not just of her father but in her exposure of self. It’s a brave book, and clear-eyed. Written fifteen years after William Golding’s death, his spirit – and his shadow – remain undiminished. I am now greedy to read John Carey’s biography of Golding, written at around the same time as Judy Golding’s, but in the meantime, let me leave you this week with some words from The Childhood of Lovers, and Judy’s memories of her father telling a story to his grandson Nicholas:

To distract him, my father started telling him the story of the Odyssey. I saw then, with envy, his practical understanding of what a story needs, of the economy to be employed. I saw how he placed necessary details carefully but unobtrusively in the listener’s mind. I saw the way he kept description to a minimum, making it serve the narrative. Poetry, if there at all, was carefully disguised by vigour.

Night after night, my father would point away into the distance, and Nick’s eyes would follow, seeing not the white walls of the dining room, nor the sideboard with photos of old ladies in Breton costume, but the pink-tipped fingers of the dawn, the dark sea with oil holding the rough waves in a snood to calm them, the fights, the mysterious islands on the horizon, the tired, intelligent face of Odysseus at the helm of his boat.

[Afterword: there’s an extended discussion of the questions surrounding the idea of a science fiction canon on this week’s Coode Street podcast. Excellent listening!]

Weird Wednesdays #10/Clarke Award #4: Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

August 12, 2020 /

‘I do not know who he was, nor do I care,’ the Marshal said. ‘That was an example. You are less than nothing to me and my staff, and we will kill any one of you without a second thought. If you wish to remain alive you will do everything in your power to avoid angering us, and even that may not be sufficient. You have no rights. You are nothing more than vermin and the boat brings more of you every month. I could have the lot of you killed here and now, and not want for workers.’

Strap on your gun-belts, guys. It’s going to be a bumpy ride…

Stefan Advani, whose family once owned a grand house and whose father had a way of charming even his most persistent creditors, has fallen from grace in the most conspicuous manner possible. Escaping poverty through education, Stefan’s resourcefulness and mental agility have seen him gain a promising reputation within the cloisters of the Academy. But there are those who would rather the clever-dicks remained in their ivory towers as opposed to raising the consciousness – literally – of the working people. Charged with incitement to revolution, Stefan is captured and shipped to the Island Chemical Mining Corporation Colony, aka the Island, aka a forced labour camp no one escapes from except through death. And death stalks the island constantly, in multiple guises. ‘This is the oubliette,’ Stefan informs us, ‘the cage of souls. Sending an enemy to the island was as good as killing him. Better, because the island could deal out years of suffering.’

Not that the world beyond the Island is a bed of roses in any case. Ravaged by climate change, environmental degradation and wave after wave of genocidal wars, not to mention a sun that has entered its declining years, the Earth is a dying planet. Its jungles, deserts and waterways swarm with hostile, mutated life forms. What people remain cluster together in Shadrapar, the last city on Earth: sanctuary, bunker, redoubt, criminal underworld, all sitting in the shadow of the Weapon, an annihilating force turned memorial whose original purpose and origins are long forgotten. Shadrapar is no utopia but it is the only home Stefan knows and the focus of his determination to escape the island.

As he learns the pitfalls and occasional pleasures of prison life, Stefan makes friends as well as enemies. When the Marshal’s reign of terror is finally challenged, the comrades know they have only a limited time in which to make their escape.

Regular readers of science fiction will be quick to recognise Cage of Souls as a ‘dying Earth‘ novel, a subgenre in which the action is played out at a purported ‘end of time’ against a background of societal decay and environmental degradation, with technology absent or half-forgotten or assuming the properties of magic. Dying Earth stories have their origins in the fantastic literature of the late nineteenth century, though the subgenre was named and popularised by Jack Vance, with his 1950 collection The Dying Earth. The most complex and ambitious example of dying Earth literature is almost certainly Gene Wolfe’s four-novel sequence The Book of the New Sun, which appears at first to be traditional epic fantasy but reveals itself gradually and through a series of bravura literary manoeuvres as science fiction.

Well, I love Gene Wolfe’s work, and if you’d rather not be present at a blood-letting, look away now. Better still, go away and read this masterful essay by Brian Phillips on the literary legacy of Gene Wolfe – it’s one I return to whenever I get depressed about the state of the field, which is depressingly often. All I really knew about Cage of Souls going into it was that it is a dying Earth novel, a fact that made me hopeful that I was going to enjoy it. It’s not just Gene Wolfe I love, it’s the tropes of dying Earth stories in general, not only their elegiac resonance but also the seeds of hope and regeneration and new beginnings they carry within them. The omens were good. So were did it all go wrong?

Where do I start?

The chief problem with Cage of Souls is that it’s not really about anything. And when a novel is six hundred pages in length, that’s one hell of a problem. Stripped to its bare essentials, Cage of Souls is a prison-break novel: Advani is a young man riding high who makes a crucial mistake. He ends up in jail with no hope of release. He forms a pact with other prisoners and manages to escape (none of these details are spoilers, 1) because the chapter headings lay out the map for you and 2) because the trajectory of the plot is obvious from the start). He returns to his old stamping ground to find himself and his erstwhile home irrevocably changed. What’s wrong with that? I hear you ask. Thousands of novels have been built on less. Aren’t the simplest plots the best, because they leave space for the writer to focus more on character?

Yes, and yes, but focus on character is not what Tchaikovsky chooses to do. The question I asked myself most often throughout the course of my reading, and in tones of increasing desperation, was why? Why should we care about Stefan, other than that he is the narrator of this bloated shaggy dog story? Is our focus supposed to be Stefan, or his world? Are we supposed to care about the reasons for society’s collapse, or are we just in this world now, marooned in a kind of Mad Max situation where the point of the novel is literally the action, nothing more?

Tchaikovsky’s writing is professional and competent. The story flows smoothly enough – at least for the first three hundred pages – to keep you interested and coming back for more, the characters are well enough defined to encourage at least a modicum of personal investment. But there is no true depth of field; no one ever does anything you haven’t been expecting them to do for the preceding fifty pages, no one achieves autonomy over and above their designated archetype. The unwilling hero, the comic relief (although I did rather enjoy Lucian, actually), the guard with a heart, the thuggish despot, the evil nemesis, the good aliens – they’re all here, all playing to type. The dialogue’s fine so far as it goes (this is no Last Astronaut) and we do get some women in play, but their characterisation isn’t great, to be honest:

Like so many others brought up in strict religious purity she gambled, cheated at cards, drank stuff that made men blind, swore like an Outrider and flirted with everybody. Everybody but myself.

That’s Rosanna, our hero’s first serious girlfriend (until she’s fridged) and classic kickass ladette. Kiera and Hermione are just bit-parts, the cool girl and the big girl. Lady Ellera the ‘Witch Queen’? Speaks for herself. And the mysterious Faith – is she an android or a genetically modified human? Who cares, except that every man who encounters her is left with a suicidal/homicidal Helen of Troy complex. Faith’s plot strand is never resolved – which is pretty much the story of every plot strand and detail that might conceivably have been interesting. For example:

In Shadrapar we ate what we grew in the ground. Raising animals for food was a disgusting process abandoned in ancient times. The idea of consuming the flesh of another creature was vile and turned my stomach.

This kind of societal shift could have been a fascinating premise to explore, but sadly it’s a gesture only, never properly imagined or invested in. The supposed vegetarian lifestyle of Shadrapar’s citizens feels wildly out of kilter with the dawn-to-dusk random killing that goes on throughout the rest of the book, and we could say the same of the ‘back to the earth’ culture of burial, so respectfully alluded to at one point, never mind the genocide of the Underworlders. I can’t see anyone finding the time to feed that mountain of bodies back into the great circle of life.

An early expedition into the desert could have provided a rich opportunity for Tchaikovsky to give us more detail and discussion of the trajectory of the disasters that led us here. Instead, it’s just a loosely disguised opportunity to fight more monsters. And while we’re on the subject, Tchaikovsky’s constant, undifferentiated, literally hundreds of usages of the word ‘monster’ are in themselves indicative of a failure of imagination. Language gains power through specificity: to be told a tree is a tree is one thing, to be told a tree is an oak is to be furnished with a richer and more resonant image. The more precise we can be, the more accurately our vision is transmitted to the reader. Used incessantly and ubiquitously as it is here, ‘monster’ is a dead word and a lazy one; it tells us nothing. For a book that clearly prides itself on its worldbuilding, there’s not enough of it going on.

Similarly with the past-cultural references, which are a time-honoured tradition in dying Earth stories. On the aforementioned trip into the desert, Stefan and his, uh, short-lived comrade Jon de Baron find an ancient copy of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark – we know what it is from the line Stefan quotes from it. Is the appearance of this particular text supposed to underline the dangerous futility of their quest? Cast a light upon past cultures and the attitude towards them now? Turns out it’s just casual name dropping. Similarly:

Sergei [a time-travelling cosmonaut from 1972] had joined up with the Morlocks first of all. They were a proactive and impolite debt-recovery crew who put his imposing appearance to good use.

which I present without comment. H.G. Wells in-jokes aside, Sergei as a character has more potential than any other to give this novel some backbone – yet again he’s just a bit-part, comic relief.

There are germs of ideas everywhere in Cage of Souls, gestures towards consolidating a vision, each one abandoned in the service of yet another killing spree. Indeed, there is precious little to be told that doesn’t involve people running around with big swords. Cage of Souls is basically Grimdark fantasy that just happens to be placed in a dying Earth setting.

And the point of all this?

The agitators behind that crowd had been selfish and evil reactionaries, and Peter was a good man. I was unsure that this was a material difference. I was also unsure that once a man has raised the mob (for there is really only one mob, waiting in potentia to be raised) whether anyone can keep it from the barbaric acts of violence it strains for. We must be careful what we become when we seek to change things. An old principle of physics: if you push, you yourself are pushed in turn.

Power and the struggle for power, the inbuilt limitations of the Marxist dialectic – this is the gist of what the book is about, though the pointlessness of the journey massively overwhelms the destination. The novel’s philosophical underpinning, when set against the kapok-stuffed vastness of its interior spaces, is scant, and ultimately, the battles and the killing are not about anything save what is literally described. Let us be clear: it is not the violence per se that is an issue – there is plenty of violence in The Light Brigade, and what is more, Hurley’s violence is more upsetting because the story and characters are deep and rich enough to make us care about its outcome. The point is, the subject of The Light Brigade is military violence – a subject that is explored, investigated, argued over and confronted, the novel’s plot and action seamlessly in service of its central idea. It would be impossible to argue that Cage of Souls is ‘about’ violence and power in the same way; there is simply a lot of violence in it, an endless array of battles, stand-offs and executions that become excruciating not so much through their cruelty as through their unending narrative tedium. Ironically, this is something Stefan himself is made to realise:

The Marshal stared about him, and there was less of a reaction than he was expecting. Deep inside, I was not the only one who was becoming jaded. One can only live with random violence for so long before the shock wears off.

You said it, Stef. Yet Tchaikovsky only seems to become invested in his narrative when describing a battle or other scene of conflict, and it is clear from the beginning that it is these fight scenes – not just the set pieces themselves, but the technical aspects of choreographing them – that form the core of the author’s purpose in this novel. I wanted to be interested by his interest, by his own immersion in the nuts-and-bolts detail, because I am fascinated by specialist knowledge whatever the area. But God alive, the fight scenes in Cage of Souls must add up to at least fifty percent of the narrative. That’s three hundred pages of stuff that reads like the screen directions for House of Flying Daggers. ENOUGH ALREADY!! It gives me no pleasure to say this, but rarely have I felt so bored and so trapped when reading a book. Towards the end, my sense of being held mentally captive began to assume the discomfort of being physically restrained.

*

Helplessly immured within the six hundred pages of Cage of Souls, there is a tightly woven, intensely descriptive three-hundred-page novel begging and crying to be set free, and I don’t think I’d be nearly so wound up about this book if it weren’t so frigging long. To write at such length, to demand the reader’s attention over such a prolonged stretch is a presumption, and there should be a reason for making it. One would expect at the very least that the author has something urgent, important and complex they wish to communicate. Cage of Souls waffles on for a very long time but it has nothing of significance to say, either in the manner of its telling, the power of its story or its contribution to the dying Earth genre.

Where Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade and indeed Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire stand in dialogue with earlier works, challenging and directly subverting them, Tchaikovsky does little beyond aping the style and story furniture of Vance and Wolfe, neither making commentary upon it (as M. John Harrison does in his Viriconium sequence) nor extending or augmenting our understanding of dying Earth archetypes. As science fiction, Cage of Souls is basic and largely derivative, a series of events as opposed to an overarching concept. Although Cage of Souls purports to be SF, this lack of a guiding central conceit leaves it insufficient impetus to be properly science fictional in its sensibility. Its loose, episodic structure and extended trajectory have much more in common with works of epic fantasy. This is an old-school, high action adventure story, composed with intelligence, some style and a sound knowledge of its predecessors. But to what end and, most importantly for our purposes, why the Clarke?

As with my commentary on The Last Astronaut, I find myself in an uncomfortable position, a position I would not willingly have chosen. For the purposes of entertainment and reading pleasure, for those who enjoy action-adventure in a fantastical setting, Cage of Souls holds up OK. The tropes are hoary and the situations predictable but the world Tchaikovsky creates is colourful and textured, peopled with a cast of characters we come to know and if not exactly love, then at least enjoy following. I was never the intended audience for this book, and I would not normally have presumed to comment on its fitness for consumption. But as a critic and as a writer of speculative fiction I take a passionate interest in the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and if a novel is presented to me as one of the six best science fiction novels of the year, as reader and writer I am bound to sit up and take notice. As critic and commentator, I am bound to subject that work to the kind of critical scrutiny I would expect from the Clarke jury.

As critic, writer and reader, I am hereby mind-boggled. Even from my own reading of 2019 novels – not nearly so deep and so wide as the reading undertaken by the jury – I can attest with some confidence that Cage of Souls is not one of the six best science fiction novels of the year, and I could point to a dozen and more on the submissions list that would easily take precedence. I have read and searched in vain for a single good reason why Cage of Souls has been selected for the shortlist, and I cannot find one. As with The Last Astronaut, the only explanation I can think of for how it ended up there is that one or other of the judges really got a kick out of reading it. That is not a good reason, or at least it is not a proper deployment of critical process.

To give Cage of Souls a place on the shortlist is necessarily to deny that place to another, with all the publicity and attendant benefits such a placing implies. Bizarre anomaly or critical laziness? Either way, I am disappointed.

Weird Wednesdays #9/Clarke Award #3: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

August 5, 2020 /

When your choice is to work or to die, that is not a choice. But Sao Paulo was no choice, either. It was a bad death, when this world was more than rich enough to ensure we could all eat, that no one needed to die of the flu or gangrene or cancer. The corps were rich enough to provide for everyone. They chose not to, because the existence of places like the labor camps outside Sao Paulo ensured there was a life worse than the one they offered. If you gave people mashed protein cakes when their only other option was to eat horseshit, they would call you a hero and happily eat your tasteless mush. They would throw down their lives for you. Give up their souls.

The future of Earth looks grim. Ten generations hence, the world’s premier power-brokers are not elected governments, but massive corporations, engaged permanently in a battle for supremacy amongst themselves. If you’re lucky enough to be a full citizen, you have access to healthcare, safe working conditions and subsidized training programs. As a mere resident you would be less privileged, able to live and work without persecution but with few actual rights. Fall foul of the status quo in any way and you’ll end up a ghoul, scavenging for resources in one of the vast undocumented labour camps, no one giving a damn if you live or (sooner rather than later) die.

On Mars, colonists who were once citizens have broken away from the corporations to form their own ‘free’ republic. Sensing that the Martian revolution could spread back to Earth, the corporations have vowed to wipe out their insurgency. Dietz grew up as a resident of the corporation city of Sao Paulo, only to see what was left of her family destroyed in an act of genocide known as the Blink. The corporation insists the Blink was perpetrated by Mars. Dietz joins the army hoping for the chance to make a difference – and possibly to become a hero. As she readies herself to face the Martian enemy, Dietz must also prepare for the additional dangers of life as a soldier in the Light Brigade: in order to cross the vast distances of space, soldiers are made to attain the speed of light by literally becoming light. Not all of them survive the process. A few, like Dietz, are being transfigured in ways the corporation never intended.

As Dietz’s timeline becomes ever more confused, she begins to understand that the enemy she has been fighting is not who she thought they were, that the war designed to defeat them appears to be unending. Even as her knowledge grows, each ‘drop’ presents a new risk of death. As Dietz struggles to outrun her masters, she finds her old ideas about heroism and soldiering coming increasingly under fire.

What a ride, what a charge. Kameron Hurley was last shortlisted for the Clarke Award back in 2014, for her debut novel God’s War. I enjoyed and admired God’s War, but had fallen somewhat out of touch with Hurley’s work since, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to read her latest within the context of the Clarke. What a delight it is to see a writer fulfilling her potential. What I loved most about God’s War and the short fiction from Hurley that I’d read in the interim was its densely textured language, and The Light Brigade is immediately, thrillingly identifiable as by the same hand. Time (and increasing fame) has done nothing to slow or flatten the vividness and immediacy of Hurley’s approach, nor compromise its intelligence or conceptual ambition.

What time (and experience) has done for Hurley is exactly what it should do for a writer, that is, to strengthen and deepen her technique. The Light Brigade is a remarkably complex piece of plotting. In less capable hands, the timeline could have become either too confusing or else reliant on clumsy exposition. Hurley nails it beautifully, presenting us with a story that is not only fast paced (and how!) but finely detailed and emotionally impactful. All questions are finally answered, and in a satisfying way. The order of events is complex but stick with it and you’ll discover everything makes sense. The characterisation is deft and moving – you really do get to know these soldiers, to fear for them, to care for them. Hurley’s language is leaner and meaner than it was in God’s War, maybe, but its beauty and personality is present, correct, and firing on all cylinders. The dialogue is particularly commendable: pacy and entirely contemporary whilst retaining a genuine individuality and never sliding into movie cliche.

For anyone who enjoys MilSF – and equally for those who think they don’t – The Light Brigade could be their novel of the year. Hurley’s interrogation of war’s crossed purposes, its vested interests, its abuses of loyalty and twisting of facts, its many ways of consolidating power in the hands of the powerful is righteous and damning and expertly argued. I need hardly mention that her treatment of gender and personal identity is not only bang on, but seamlessly integrated into the text. This novel is exciting and highly charged and it augments and enhances those qualities by being politically literate in a way that is deeply relevant to our times.

The everyday person doesn’t want war, but it’s remarkably easy to convince them. It’s the government that determines political priorities, and it’s easy to drag people along with you by tapping into their fear. I don’t care if you have a communist mecca, a fascist regime, or a representative democracy, even some monarchy with a gutless parliament. People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbours will do it for them.

Although The Light Brigade works perfectly well as a standalone novel – you don’t need to have read any of Hurley’s other work or even any science fiction to get on board – it is important to note the many and clever ways in which it is directly in conversation with older works of SF. I have not yet read Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers but from my brief researches around the text I can see how a good portion of The Light Brigade’s polemic lies in strenuously confronting Heinlein’s glorification of the military lifestyle and moral code, his proposition that only those who bear arms should have full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote (???!) I have read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, the other novel that Hurley’s is clearly in dialogue with, and while ideally I would have reread that book in order to have a proper discussion of it here, time has run out on me. Whilst confirming and supporting many of the arguments set forth by Haldeman, Hurley updates, redresses and clarifies issues of gender and representation that were (perhaps understandably) less fluently handled in the earlier novel.

This is all part of the joy of what the SFF community calls the conversation. Hurley has not only written a tense, original and beautifully executed novel, she has contributed at a high level to the ongoing SFF discourse, using her knowledge of (and beef with) works and writers that have gone before to expand and advance the arguments and preoccupations of science fiction as a literature. There’s even a nod to Ursula Le Guin’s 2014 National Book Award speech about the divine right of kings.

This kind of homage can only be fully successful if the newer writer is technically and creatively the equal of her predecessors. Hurley is all of that and then some. Politically astute, expertly handled and a damn fine read, The Light Brigade is fully deserving of its place on the Clarke Award shortlist, and sets the standard for military science fiction for years to come.

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