Category: Shadow Clarke 2020 (Page 1 of 2)

‘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.

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.

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.

First up this week comes Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail, which I happened to be reading precisely now in an attempt to get ahead with my Clarke Award reading. What with the unusually long wait for this year’s submissions list, my ideas about what might be on the shortlist were uncharacteristically vague. My only solid hunch was Infinite Detail, and I was more than a little surprised to see it not just not make the cut but not even feature on the submissions list itself. That mystery was solved when someone kindly pointed out to me that there is currently no UK edition of Infinite Detail and so it is not eligible to be considered for the Clarke.

It seems counter-intuitive to me, to say the least, that a novel as British as Infinite Detail had to look to the USA to find its publishing home. There are some chapters (and beautifully executed they are, too) set in New York, but the bulk of the action and the whole sensibility of the novel are rooted in British culture, British politics and British social structures. Luckily, Infinite Detail is readily available to UK readers as a Kindle eBook, but even so, the idea that it will not be visible on bookshop shelves here does both the novel and its author a disservice, not to mention the incongruity of one of 2019’s most interesting SF novels being ineligible for what is arguably the world’s most respected and important juried science fiction award.

I am beginning to perceive a pattern here, though. There is a loose group – a new New Wave, if you like – of British writers whose work might best be described as the natural successor to the ‘mundane SF’ of the early 2000s. These writers are less interested in the widescreen formats of space opera, MilSF and interstellar travel, focusing instead on stories set mainly on Earth in a recognisable near-future, with an emphasis on contemporary politics and class inequalities, the impact of new technologies on ordinary lives. I would include within this group Maughan himself, from way back, but also Simon Ings, Matt Hill, Matthew de Abaitua, Carl Neville and James Smythe (whose 2014-Clarke-shortlisted The Machine stands as a key example of this kind of writing). I have been asking myself for a while now why it is that these writers are so much less visible than they ought to be, given the contemporary relevance and literary excellence of their output. Their work is (surely) right at the cutting edge of science fiction. It is using science fiction to engage directly with social and political questions, demonstrating SF as the radical mode of literature it has always been.

For genre publishing imprints not to acquire and promote this kind of science fiction seems short-sighted and again, counter-intuitive. These writers are important and talented and they deserve recognition. You could argue that it is in this brand of politically engaged, intellectually curious stripe of SF that the future of the genre lies. Especially in our current moment, audiences who look to science fiction for inspiration, information or even a warning about where future developments could take us are hungry for novels and stories that tread that uneven, liminal path between the present as it is experienced and the future as it might be. it seems ironic, to say the least, that both Maughan and Hill have seen their most recent work gain shortlist recognition in the USA, but not here at home.

Those who have been following Maughan’s career since his 2011 collection Paintwork, will find in his debut novel Infinite Detail everything they have been hoping for, and more. Set on his home turf of Bristol, Infinite Detail tells the intertwined stories of a number of individuals who find themselves present at a particularly brutal turning point in human history: the end of the internet. Incorporating story strands from immediately before and ten years after the crisis, one of the things I appreciated most about Maughan’s novel is that it refuses to take sides, concentrating its energies instead upon the human and environmental ramifications of an event that is viewed by some as catastrophe, by others as a new beginning. In the end – and Maughan is experienced and mature enough to know that the same could be said of most things – it is a bit of both. Infinite Detail is fast-paced without ever falling into the thriller trap, technologically articulate without descending into nerd-speak, intellectually rigorous whilst remaining accessible. What marks it out particularly though is its sense of place: the language, landscape and people of Bristol and especially their music are rendered with passion and that sense of familiarity that comes only through personal knowledge. More SF like this, please!

In one of those weird instances of reading synchronicity, my second book this week shares aspects of the first whilst seeming on the surface to be something completely different. Rupert Thomson’s Katherine Carlyle (2016) opens with its protagonist chucking her mobile into a river and leaving her laptop under a bridge, restored to its factory settings and labelled ‘free computer’. Kit is nineteen years old but for reasons that will become apparent she is also twenty-seven. Still grieving the loss of her mother, she has reached a state of personal alienation from which it seems the only escape route is to ‘go out on a limb,’ to cancel the life she is living and go in search of another. Taking her cue from a conversation randomly overheard between two strangers, she flies to Berlin, intent on tracking down a man she has never met.

There was a period of about a year when it seemed she had made a full recovery. Chemotherapy was over, and the operation to remove a tumour from her ovaries had been a success… Apart from the scar on her abdomen and the colour of her hair she was the same Stephanie Carlyle. That was how I saw it, anyway. But I was only twelve. Looking back, I think she behaved as if her time was limited, the pleasure she took in things disproportionate, nostalgic. Somehow the present was no longer the present, it was already past.

Kit drifts from place to place and from man to man: Klaus (a respectable orthodontist with an immaculate apartment and hidden tendencies to violence), Cheadle (a super-rich American with underworld contacts) and Oswald (who goes around carrying a piece of the Berlin Wall). For this first half of the novel, Katherine’s beauty acts as a passport and her quest is like a fantasy, the nineteen-year-old chosen princess moving through a potentially hostile world utterly without fear.

As the novel progresses, it gradually reveals itself as something other: magical and scintillating, an Odyssey with a female Odysseus, a story of time travel where the journeying mostly takes place within the space of the imagination. Thomson has Kit make repeated references to Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger and Katherine Carlyle shares many of the same dreamlike, uncanny resonances.

From the moment Katherine boards the train to Moscow the novel became a touchstone work for me, and the final sections in Archangelsk and Svalbard are like nothing I’ve read before. We understand that Kit is looking for somewhere cold – the winter temperatures in Svalbard range from -16 to – 46 degrees centigrade – in order to resolve the mystery and trauma of the eight years she spent in suspension as a frozen embryo. What she finds in the far-northern mining settlement of Ugolgrad is both more terrible and more revelatory than we could have imagined. The book’s ending could not be more perfect.

There’s a force at work, something I failed to anticipate. Since the place I’m heading for is clear in my mind only as an idea, and isn’t therefore, strictly speaking, a destination, I’m beginning to suspect that my eventual surroundings, whatever they might turn out to be, will have little or no relevance. The country I have chosen is hardly incidental, but this is not, at heart, a physical journey. It’s more like a journey back in time – or sideways, into another dimension.

Katherine Carlyle is speculative fiction in the most free-ranging, genre-bending sense of that term, hovering perpetually on the boundary between the lived and the imagined. Thomson’s language is note-perfect: never showy yet always elegant, always surprising, you won’t find a bad sentence from him here or ever. Turning the final page of Katherine Carlyle, I had to snap the book closed immediately, to shut myself in with it, to not look at or think about anything else for a while as I let myself assimilate what has immediately become a Book of My Heart.

The biggest mystery of all? Why are more people not reading and avidly discussing Rupert Thomson? His work shows a fascination with abstract concepts that makes it timeless, whilst remaining so deeply rooted in character it is always compelling as story. I remember feeling exactly the same sense of being overwhelmed and inspired when I read Death of a Murderer and then as now I think Rupert Thomson must be one of the most criminally underappreciated writers in Britain.