Hort is described in many ways by these voices, but I can always tell that they are talking about him. Him to me, she or it or they to others, and sometimes there are long pauses as the limitations of language are reached. Hort has been a lover, a murderer, an adventurer, a cataclysm, a God. But to him we have all been the trusty companion.
It wasn’t until I was almost three-quarters of the way through Aliya Whiteley’s new novel Greensmith (published by Unsung Stories on October 12th) that I realised I was reading an extended critique of Doctor Who. Not the show itself – no debating Classic versus New, no wrangling over who is or was the best Doctor here – so much as its moral universe. The lonely alien in the blue box, the scintillating, hyperactive superbeing whose sole mission, or so it seems in the stories, is to keep us – us personally – safe from harm. It is a seductive vision. The number of Who episodes that feature a lonely, chosen child, waiting by their bedroom window staring up at the stars, awaiting the return of the hero only they know exists – we have all been that child at some point, if only at five o’clock on a Saturday evening (apologies to younger viewers but that is still Doctor Who time for me).
What we learn through our time with the show is that all these hopeful children, sooner or later, will be discarded. The moment of parting is always searingly painful – watch any of those episodes again now and inevitably I’ll find myself in tears – and yet we conspire to forget. To believe that next time, for the next companion – for us – the outcome will be different, that we will be the One.
The wonder of myths is in their longevity, their ability to transcend time and place, to become as personal as they are universal. That mythologies can also be harmful – mendacious – is a truth we do not care to examine as deeply as we ought.
Of course, Greensmith is so much more than an extended essay on one particularly popular British TV show, though the plot synopsis does a pretty good impression of a Moffat story from Mat-Smith-era Who. Penelope Greensmith is fifty-three years old. She is a botanist and librarian. More importantly she is the keeper of the Collection, a ‘bank’ of every plant species on Earth, assembled by Penelope’s father with the help of a mysterious invention called the Vice.
When a deadly virus begins decimating all plant life on Earth, Penelope is taken under the wing of a being who calls himself the Horticulturalist, and who claims that together they can discover a way to fight the virus and save the planet. Reduced to a two-dimensional slip of information, Penelope is whirled away into time and space, embarking on a series of ever more fantastical adventures. The further she journeys, the more she begins to suspect that Hort is hiding the essential truth about his identity and his mission.
More so than with any other form of literature, science fiction tends to encourage discussion of what it does and what it is for. Fans talk enthusiastically of newness, of SF’s potential for the exploration of complex ideas, All too often, such potential is disregarded in favour of familiarity. Through the media of games, TV shows and movies as well as books, science fiction is more popular now than it has ever been. We are undoubtedly living through a new golden age of science fiction, with the uncertainty of the present moment providing a mirror to the multitude of fictional universes there are to choose from. Popularity always has a down-side, however, and the demands of an increasing fanbase have in many cases stymied the genre’s progress as a literary form. Readers say they want bold ideas, yet in reality what they prefer are ideas that are brightly coloured and easily digestible.
When science fiction is truly bold, truly ground-breaking, its very boldness can make it puzzling and harder to parse. Ideas that are truly complex take longer to absorb. I would argue that anyone who reads Greensmith and doesn’t find themselves wondering on at least one occasion what the hell they are reading, isn’t reading hard enough.
Greensmith is a backwards hero’s journey that questions the very concept of the hero. It is a novel with a middle-aged woman as its protagonist that actually talks about middle age, about the menopause, about the difficulty of forming relationships when one is fiercely attached to one’s independence. Greensmith is about family ties, loyalty that transcends logic, the love of one’s planet. Most of all it is a book about plants: plants glorious and multitudinous and various, plants that stir the imagination and stimulate the senses, plants that are beings sharing our world as opposed to material to be used by humans as food and shelter.
Greensmith is a novel that is not afraid to talk, at length, about complex ideas. The adventure portion of the novel – the first half – is in a sense simply the set-up for a philosophical argument about existence, eternity and the inherent moral danger in assuming one’s own interpretation of history to be superior to another. It is a novel that refuses to give us the happy ending we humanly yearn for – yet it does deliver another concept of rightness, one it takes time to come to terms with but that is ultimately more satisfying and more durable.
I have heard Greensmith described as a comedy. This judgement may say more about my seemingly irrepressible tendency to cry at Doctor Who than it does about the novel, but I found it to be one of the most poignant, elegiac and spiritual works of science fiction I have read all year.
Aliya Whiteley is a writer of rare originality and inventiveness. Her instinct for new ways of looking at things, her seemingly inexhaustible capacity for intelligent observation, her passion for asking questions and for ideas make her one of the most important writers of speculative fiction working today. That her books are quiet and often uncategorisable, that they require sitting with and thinking about, that they deny easy solutions and trite explanation – these qualities are what make them true to the spirit of science fiction, that will ensure their longevity. What Greensmith means to me will be different from what it means to you – and therein lies its glory.
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With ten episodes of Corona Crime Spree and sixteen Weird Wednesdays, this post marks exactly six months of weekly blogging – half a year’s worth of essays. It also happens to mark the week in which I completed a working draft of my novel-in-progress. The final chapter was written on the Isle of Mull, where an earlier version of the text was originally set. This gave me the weird sensation of inhabiting a ghost-version of the novel, almost as if the space I was occupying belonged to other characters.
Dervaig, Isle of Mull, September 2020
Completing a version of the book as it now is came as something of a relief, though I won’t really know what I’ve ended up with until I begin work on the second draft, in a few weeks’ time.
At the beginning of lockdown, it seemed important and helpful to post what became in effect weekly dispatches from my desk, charting the progress of my reading and thinking through this strangest of years. It still does feel important and helpful, and although I have decided to be more flexible with my schedule – this will be the last Weird Wednesday in this particular sequence – I intend to keep posting regularly through the autumn and winter.
I’ve spent a great deal of time considering what I want to say about the 2020 Clarke Award overall. If I’d never written a post like this before, the task would not be anywhere near so difficult. I would be able to talk about what I believe the Clarke is for and why it matters without the feeling of deja vu that seems to sweep over me whenever I think about how far this year’s shortlist appears to fall short of that ideal. Such arguments might feel more fruitful if there were more alternative commentary to bounce off, but aside from the initial barrage of tweets praising the shortlist to the rafters and the usual slew of puff-pieces, I have barely seen any. Had it not been for the characteristically even-handed and intricate criticism of Nick Hubble, and the superbly concise and forthright summation from Nandini Ramachandran over at Strange Horizons, I might have believed myself alone in a godless world.
OK, so 2020 has been weird and looks set to get weirder. At the time of writing, the Clarke is running three months late and counting. Normally by the time the Hugos are announced, we already have our Clarke winner. Correspondence between the two awards is traditionally rare. The Hugos are a fan award, with a US-centric voting pool and a different aesthetic – yet in this oddest of years, one part of the general oddness sees a fifty-percent overlap between the Hugo shortlist and the Clarke. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think this has ever happened before. Even in 2010, the last year to see a British writer winning the Hugo Award for best novel (unless you’re counting dual-national Jo Walton in 2012) the shortlists were radically different.
I was hoping to avoid bringing up the whole anxiety-of-American-influence thing because we’ve been there too many times before but this question of the Clarke/Hugo overlap means I cannot escape it. Part of my disappointment with this year’s shortlist lies in the lack of recognition for British talent. The Clarke is a British award, for novels published in Britain. This is one of the valuable and necessary ways it differs from the Hugos. The submissions list reveals a whole battery of British novels – M. T. Hill’s Zero Bomb, Vicki Jarrett’s Always North, Chris Beckett’s Beneath the World, A Sea, Temi Oh’s Do You Dream of Terra-Two, Jane Rogers’s Body Tourists, Ben Smith’s Doggerland, Will Wiles’s Plume, Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein – the presence of any one of which would have raised the overall quality of the shortlist by a substantial degree.
Which makes it all the more perplexing that the one British entry that was chosen by the judges is a journeyman work of genre fiction with no pretensions to innovation or radicalism whatsoever.
And that’s before we even consider the excellent novels not by British writers that were on the submissions list: Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff, The Migration by Helen Marshall, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James, From the Wreck by Jane Rawson, Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer, The Need by Helen Phillips, Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma, just for example. The judges had plenty to choose from, so what the hell happened?
In any given year – and again, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time going over the facts – there is at least one dud on the shortlist, a novel that seems so out of step with the others in terms of its quality and ambition that anyone with an interest in the award will find themselves asking what it is doing there. Often there are two such novels, the unfortunate result, one suspects, of disagreements between the judges that remain essentially unresolved even unto the day of the award ceremony.
I’ve been back over all the shortlists since the Clarke was first awarded in 1987 and never have there been three duds on the shortlist – until now. The shortlist that runs it closest is 2012’s – otherwise known as the Priestgate shortlist – but even that was more interesting. By virtue of its insanity maybe, but still more interesting. I would also argue that 2012 offered fewer decent submissions for the judges to choose from.
So that’s two firsts for 2020 – a fifty-percent overlap with the Hugos, a fifty-percent dud quotient. I could say I’m baffled by this year’s shortlist but that would be putting it too kindly. I’m sorely disappointed by the judges’ choices because for me they represent nothing less than a catastrophic failure of imagination, the kind of failure no amount of duct tape is going to fix.
The most positive thing I can say about this shortlist is that it (sort of) represents where the genre is at commercially, what kind of narratives are currently popular, how much contemporary science fiction is being influenced by other media. The books that have been chosen also centre a range of political and socioeconomic topics that are very much at the forefront of discussion within the community: most prominently empire and colonialism but also the power of the military, alien intelligence, the role of technology, bodily difference, race, gender and climate change. Exploring these issues and more is very much a central tenet of science fiction and that such themes are raised and discussed in the shortlisted novels is to be welcomed. But as I have suggested in previous posts, having the ideas present is not enough. So much of a novel’s effectiveness depends on subtlety, characterisation, depth of field. Though the list does feel highly contemporary in terms of topics covered, in terms of literary achievement it is pretty thin gruel.
So what does the 2020 shortlist tell us about today’s science fiction as a mode of literature? I am sorry to say that going by four out of the six books, the message seems to be that SF is derivative, repetitive, and mostly burned out. What this shortlist tells us most of all though is something we know already: the quality of an awards shortlist is entirely dependent on the process and critical standards employed by the award jury. From the evidence on display, I am forced to conclude that both have been sadly lacking in 2020. It’s been that kind of year.
Given the uncanny similarity between the two award shortlists, it would seem appropriate to score the Clarkes as I would the Hugos. The Last Astronaut is a sensationalised and pointless retelling of Rendezvous with Rama. The City in the Middle of the Night is a pallid YA science-fantasy peopled with excruciatingly annoying characters. Cage of Souls is a derivative prison-break drama played out against a dying Earth background that could have been plucked from any one of a dozen game scenarios. For me at least, these three novels would all fall below the No Award line. I’m sure they have given readers pleasure, but that isn’t the point. The point is that in terms of their originality, innovation and all-round execution, none of them has any reason whatsoever to be considered the best science fiction novel of the year. As I have argued in my previous posts, the idea is preposterous, and what these books are doing on the Clarke Award shortlist, heaven only knows.
A Memory Called Empire has already won the Hugo Award for best novel and well it might. It wears its heart on its sleeve, it shows its working, it makes use of familiar forms and tropes to tell a story that lies close to the interests of fandom at this given moment – it’s a very Hugo kind of book. It’s also tightly plotted and written with care and attention to detail and with a seriousness of intent that raises it above more run-of-the-mill widescreen space fantasy. It is nonetheless still core genre, still very much of the field rather than challenging it, and I would consider it a very boring choice to win the Clarke.
Which leaves us with two wildly differing books that are both good novels. Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift is, I think, a great novel, though how it ended up on this year’s Clarke shortlist is almost a big a mystery to me as the presence of The Last Astronaut: by my reckoning, any judge who pushed for the latter would be likely to abandon reading the former halfway through, while any who championed the former would probably resign from the jury rather than allow the latter on to the shortlist. Oh to be a fly on the wall.
Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, by contrast, seems likely to have been the one book all the judges agreed on pretty much immediately: it’s highly contemporary yet fruitfully in dialogue with earlier works, it makes use of a traditional form – MilSF – yet renders it new and exciting, it’s progressive in outlook, adventurous in form, thrillingly alive. It is also well written, strongly characterised, with a feel for language and dialogue that serves the idea and the audience equally well. It is the best kind of genre SF: written with insight and knowledge of what has gone before yet never subsumed by it. It’s a great story, well told. For all these reasons, The Light Brigade would make a worthy Clarke winner – and with any luck one memorable enough to block out any recall of the shortlist as a whole.
That’s what my head says, and I’m fine with that. My heart though belongs to Serpell. The Old Drift is everything I look for in a novel: challenging, difficult, beautiful, heartbreaking, surprising, innovative and timeless. Of the six works shortlisted, this is the one I would personally point to as representing ‘my’ science fiction. I loved this book with heart and mind. I feel privileged to have read it. This is the kind of novel that reminds us not only of why we write, but of everything science fiction can be and do and imagine. I hope next year’s Clarke shortlist will be more like this all round: bolder in form, more adventurous in conceit, more out there in terms of what it offers us on the page. The writers are doing the work, creating the worlds. Looking for them in less well-trodden places would be a good start.
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And the winner is… THE OLD DRIFT, by Namwali Serpell! To say I’m delighted would be an understatement. Of all the book prizes awarded in 2020, I doubt there will be another that pleases me so much, or feels as significant. What a marvellous surprise. Bravo!
Earlier this month, Chris and I spent a number of days away, exploring our neighbouring islands of Islay and Jura. The trip had originally been booked for the end of June, to coincide with the summer solstice and the longest day. The summer nights up here are very precious to me, the quality of light is extraordinary and I wanted to experience that on Jura, a place that was special to us already without having seen it for reasons of its literary legacy. It is well known that George Orwell went to Jura to find the seclusion he needed to work on his final novel, unarguably his masterpiece. I knew it would be difficult for us to gain access to the house itself but I was determined to try.
Port Ellen, Isle of Islay, September 2020
As things turned out, we did not get to see Barnhill; neither did we get to spend the summer solstice on Jura. That we were able to reschedule our trip and almost get to Barnhill seems something of a miracle, given the circumstances. Staff at the hotel where we were staying made enquiries about us taking a boat trip down the coast so we could glimpse the house from the water but on our one full day in Jura, the weather was ridiculously inclement (always a possibility when you’re in Scotland) and the boatman was having trouble making even his scheduled trip across from the mainland.
Machir Bay, Isle of Islay, September 2020
We drove instead, as far as we could – twenty-five miles along an increasingly tenuous strip of road and into a landscape I had scarcely imagined. I knew in my head that Barnhill farmhouse was isolated and inaccessible, but it wasn’t until we were in the landscape that I was able to appreciate just how much. I think I’d been imagining a bumpy track along the coast, something like the farm roads we were used to in Devon. In fact, the road turns inward, away from the coast and into the vast, moorland interior of the island. Stags leap across the road in front of the car. Mist sweeps in like bolts of gauze. The colours – those quintessentially Scottish colours of ochre and sage and grey, contoured with purple. The heather – at its finest when I travelled north just a fortnight before (another trip, another story) – was still in evidence, still everywhere. That particular purple, with that particular grey – glorious, favoured, northern.
Craighouse, Isle of Jura, September 2020
In the end we reached the point where the road seemed so precarious it would have been foolhardy for us to continue. Chris parked, or rather, brought the car to a standstill overlooking the valley. I left him listening (appropriately enough, given my work-in-progress, but more of that another time) to Science Stories on Radio 4 while I got out and walked for an hour, up to and past the signpost that indicates the end of the public road with still four miles to go until you reach Barnhill. It was raining pretty hard but I was singing at the top of my voice into the wind. I felt utterly alone, and yet utterly seen, utterly alive. It might sound like a leap too far to say I felt Orwell’s presence – yet I think anyone who travels there must feel that they do. The spirit of the book has somehow become enmeshed with the spirit of place: not the grimness of the book’s contents, but the wildness, the intellectual courage, the poetic insight that enabled its creation.
I am determined to return to Jura, sooner rather than later, so I can walk the whole distance, so I can reach the moorland ridge (I have seen it in photographs) from where you can look down and see the white, elongated block of Barnhill crouched in the valley below, the glistening sea beyond. But for now the immense privilege and joy of being in that place, of seeing and smelling and tasting the landscape that Orwell knew and loved, that acted as a spiritual counterweight to the unrelenting harshness of the work he was composing – these are the memories I want to carry out of this year, a counterweight to the increasing instability and grimness of this time in all our lives.
The Paps of Jura, Isle of Jura, September 2020
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The book I took with me to read on this trip was Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, subtitled ‘a biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Lynskey’s aim in this book is to provide a biographical and cultural analysis of Orwell’s masterpiece, showing how the book came to be written, and the independent life it has gone on to lead in the absence of its author. Lynskey is at pains to stress that Nineteen Eighty-Four came as the culminating achievement of what, in a parallel universe, might have been just the first part of Orwell’s career. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War set in motion a period of intense thinking, reading and conversation that funnelled itself into the creation of what is, in effect, the summation of Orwell’s ideas on totalitarianism and political ideology. As a foundation stone of twentieth century literature, we can count ourselves lucky that Orwell lived long enough to complete it.
In the second half of his study, Lynskey examines the impact of NIneteen Eighty-Four on both literary and popular culture: through the years of austerity and McCarthyism, the later years of the Cold War, the post-Thatcher crises in unemployment and national identity, right up to the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Lynskey reveals how Orwell’s masterpiece – like all truly great works of literature – reinvents itself for each successive generation. Orwell drew his original inspiration primarily from his experience of Stalinist communism, Trotskyite international socialism and the acts of blind obeisance committed by both the British government and the British Labour and Communist parties in effectively eliding the atrocities committed in the name of socialism. But Nineteen Eighty-Four is too big and too brilliant to remain associated with one specific time period alone; it’s a shape-shifting, mutable text, Lynskey argues, the major proof of which resides in the fact that it has been called into service by every shade of political opinion, often at one and the same time.
I was so excited and so energised by The Ministry of Truth I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop talking about it. Lynskey’s work is informative, original and addictively readable, one of my books of this year for sure. What it also does – as well it should – is drive you back to the original text. I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was around fifteen years of age and still at school. I read it at least twice more over the following decade – but that was thirty years ago now and although I’ve thought about and referenced the book as often as anyone else, I haven’t reread it. I finished Lynskey’s book with a hunger to put that right – and I’m so glad I did.
When I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was in the context of a lot of other dystopias. The novel that is closest to Orwell’s in terms of its genesis and overall impact is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which I read at almost exactly the same time (it changed my life, but that’s another story). However, my young-adult self never thought to bracket those two books together: in my mind, Koestler’s book was a historical text specifically about the Soviet Union, whereas Orwell’s was a ‘true’ dystopia, set in the future (only a couple of years in my own future by the time I read it, but still) and built around concepts that seemed undeniably science fictional. It felt more natural to me to bracket Orwell’s work with other similarly science fictional novels: Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, even Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, which no one else seems to have read but I was obsessed with at the time.
Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four as a mature adult reveals how I was both right and wrong: Orwell’s novel is both horrifyingly realist, and one of the most perfect exemplars of the science fictional argument we have to draw on. Save for the unavoidable absence of computers, this novel could have been written yesterday. The fact that Orwell was not in a position to imagine the kind of digital infrastructure that would come to define our world is, in the context of this book, unimportant.
As a younger reader, the parts of Nineteen Eighty-Four that impressed themselves upon me most forcefully were those that were most outwardly expressive of the dystopian mode: the telescreens, the Thought Police, Winston’s hidden diary, the imprisonment and torture. Though my memory of the text proved near-photographic in places, I was astounded to discover on rereading that aside from casual mentions of hangings, and of course the ongoing war with Eastasia/Eurasia (take your pick) there is no overt violence in Nineteen Eighty-Four until someway past the halfway mark. What you get instead is an accumulation of circumstances, a portrait of postwar Britain, with all its griminess, everyday privations and grim sense of stasis that, although seventy years in the past now, will feel immediately resonant and present in our pre-Brexit reality to anyone born in Britain in the analogue age.
There are also minor yet touching details that draw directly from Orwell’s personal circumstances: the way Winston ‘hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing’, for example, a detail that reminds us instantly of how the author was suffering from TB at the time of writing, and edging closer to death.
Orwell’s attention to detail extends even to minor characters, Winston’s neighbour Parsons for example, the exemplary Party man who ends up being denounced (for absolutely nothing) by his own daughter. We have all met someone like Parsons, nodded hello to him on a Sunday morning as he washes his car. He’s the kind of man who votes UKIP, the kind who sticks a note through his neighbour’s letterbox during lockdown, warning them that he’s seen them taking an extra exercise session and feels inclined to report them for it. Orwell doesn’t demonise Parsons – he just shows him like he is, pathos included. I especially admired his characterisation of Syme, the passionate stickler who works alongside Winston at the Ministry of Truth, a man whose intelligence has been corrupted into the service of a monstrous master yet whose obsessive interest in his work still makes him interesting to talk to:
In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,’ Syme asserts, before discoursing on the essential redundancy of synonyms and antonyms. ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’ he says. ‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ What struck me most profoundly on reading the novel this time around was how its subject, more than any other, is the importance of language, not only in resisting tyranny but also in maintaining any kind of personal integrity. Anyone who cares about language and words will find Syme’s proposition for the shrinking and coarsening of language literally shiver-inducing, especially as we are already bearing witness to such a transformation across large segments of political and online discourse. One need barely ask what Orwell would have made of phrases such as ‘alternative facts’ and ‘the reality-based community’. If it weren’t so appalling it would be funny. Reading Syme’s words, I also found myself thinking of the ways in which Anglophone culture has forcibly suppressed indigenous languages, gaslighting, devaluing and at the worst extreme obliterating the identity and means of expression of entire peoples.
If I were to pass a negative comment on any aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I would have to say that Orwell is not particularly imaginative in his portrayal of women. Winston’s estranged wife Katherine is referred to as ‘stupid’ and moreover ‘too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of [Winston’s] opinions’. Wherever prole women are mentioned – and with the exception of an elderly man Winston talks to in a pub the proles described by Orwell are all women – they are invariably described as ‘enormous’, or ‘monstrous’. The idea that these women might have inner lives is never contemplated, and it is only shortly before his arrest that Winston is able to connect a prole woman’s singing with the idea of beauty..
The main female character Julia is bright and bold and courageous but again Orwell seems at pains to stress her physicality. “You’re only a rebel from the waist down,” Winston says to her – Julia is above all a sensuous being, showing no interest in the intellectual reasons behind her rebellion or the life of the mind generally. ‘She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.’ In spite of his love for Julia, Winston remains fundamentally alone in his search for answers about the nature of the Party and its hunger for power. The idea that women might be equal partners in counter-revolution seems barely to occur to him. Considered on the terms we are offered, Julia is excellently characterised: a warm-blooded, vital creation with a life force that is pivotal within the novel as a whole. Orwell clearly has a blind spot when it comes to feminism, which is a shame. In this respect it is interesting to compare Nineteen Eighty-Four with Zamyatin’s novel We, in which the male protagonist is schooled in the concepts of revolution and intellectual independence by a woman.
Though it might seem incongruous, there are many moments of illuminating beauty throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, moments that are not often mentioned or remembered but that form a crucial and definitive counterweight to the horror. Winston’s dreams of ‘the Golden Country’ for example, passages that in a sense represent the heart of Orwell’s vision, the necessity of ‘staying sane’ as an act of resistance. There is also much discussion to be had around the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Certainly when I first read the novel all those years ago I had no doubt that Winston’s final assertion, that he loves Big Brother, was a statement of utter defeat, that every last scrap of his integrity had been torn away. This time, I’m not so certain. ‘White always wins’, Winston says, as he moves chess pieces across the board in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, and I had the sense that it was this assertion about the ultimate triumph of good over evil that held the most weight, a coded message almost, even at the last: Winston says he loves Big Brother, but does he truly?
We cannot know – or at least we can only know the answer that feels most true for us. What I do know is that Nineteen Eighty-Four is and remains a landmark work that deserves its fame and status. Not only in its prescience but in its historical acuity, not only in its polemic but in its literary assurance and raw beauty, this is an elegant, complex, mature work of fiction that rewards the reader’s attention on every level. Reading it again brought me not only intellectual satisfaction; I was equally excited to discover how well it has stood the test of time, how relevant this book still feels, precisely today. It also brought me uneasy dreams, a sense of being on the boundary between the known world and the most perilously unstable of futures. To share one’s fear with a like mind in this way is not merely a consolation, but a reason for hope.
Five centuries from now, humankind will construct the Mothership, a multi-generation spacecraft that will carry thousands of colonists from a depleted Earth to their descendants’ future home on a new planet. January is a world that has the capacity to support life, but is different from Earth in one major respect: January is tidally locked, with one half existing in total darkness, the other broiling in perpetual, cancer-causing sunlight. The narrow strip of habitable land between the two dwells in twilight, a condition the human settlers adjust to in differing ways.
Many generations and wars later, the two surviving cities on January have arrived at a kind of stalemate. Xiosphant is authoritarian and austere. Its citizens live by clock-time, with day and night artificially simulated through a mandatory system of shutters and curfews The class structure of Xiosphant is equally rigid, with the respect a citizen is afforded largely dependent on which ‘compartment’ of the Mothership their ancestors travelled in. The city of Argelo, by contrast, is a free-spirited party-town, a capitalist oligarchy whose inequalities largely remain hidden from the general populace and whose nine ruling families seem more interested in internecine squabbles than the business of government. Between the two range the Smugglers, bands of rugged individuals who forge their livelihoods shunting goods from Argelo to Xiosphant and back again.
Far out in the frozen wastes there exists a third city, the City in the Middle of the Night, home to the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, key to the planet’s true nature. The human settlers have triggered a climate catastrophe on January without even realising it. If their new world is to survive, they must learn how to co-operate, not only with each other, but with the native inhabitants of the world they have almost destroyed.
The themes of the novel – the legacy of colonialism, racism, cultural appropriation and class prejudice, community, found family, the tensions between inherited tradition and lived identity – are familiar from much of the award-winning science fiction and fantasy of recent years. The City in the Middle of the Night though is ultimately a novel about climate change: the ways in which human behaviour impact on the environment, the cataclysmic effect of such behaviour on non-human populations. The story follows Sophie and Bianca, college friends from Xiosphant, and Mouth and Alyssa, members of a gang of smugglers based in Argelo, four characters facing personal crises whose narratives will eventually coalesce.
If I had to single out one book as the most disappointing from this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, this would be that novel. Though full of potential in terms of both story and subject matter, The City in the Middle of the Night annoyed and frustrated me on almost every level. Whilst The Last Astronaut and Cage of Souls had their problems (poor prose style and unforgivable bloat respectively) they did at least keep me moderately entertained, the former through its propulsive plot and giant centipede-space-worm-thingies, the latter through some halfway decent styling and characterisation. The City in the Middle of the Night, unfortunately, is one long eye-roll.
Let’s start with the material that had potential. One aspect of this novel that caught my attention in a positive way was the treatment and discussion of language and the problems of translation:
People in Argelo had no real way of reckoning the passage of time, but they had plenty of ways to talk about regret. A million phrases to describe what might have happened, what you should have done. Several major sentence constructions in Argelan had to do with information that had been knowable in the past: knowledge that a person had taken to her grave, observations that could have been collected, texts that were no longer readable. The Argelans had developed dwelling on lost opportunities into an art form, but they couldn’t say with any precision when any of these doors had closed.
I love the ideas on display here, the exploration of cultures through their spoken and written languages, and as with A Memory Called Empire, I found myself wishing this aspect of the book had been exploited more. Similarly, the final section of the novel, which deals with Sophie’s decision to transition to alien form, gives richly detailed insights into humanity’s journey to January as well as the history, science and culture of the planet’s original inhabitants. Here we find passages that edge us towards a genuine sense of wonder:
In my dream, I enter another level of the midnight city: a river of solid ice that encases but does not feel cold, rushing into a frozen reservoir under a sky full of stars. I’ve never seen stars, except once at the Sea of Murder, and these keep growing and shrinking, changing their position, flaring and subsiding. Time rolls backwards, and tall cities emerge from the tundra, great gleaming fortresses that withstand storms and quakes for countless generations. These cities climb into the night, drawing energy from the relentless wind and the flows of water and lava under the surface, and then I see them being built piece by piece. A whole earlier Gelet civilisation rises up in front of me, after I already saw it fall.
There is also some interesting discussion around the settlers’ unthinking oppression of indigenous cultures:
The Citizens never even knew what they had done. They invented myths about the Gelet – servants of the Elementals, or teeth in the jaws of eternal darkness – but all of those fables were about what the Gelet could do for people, or to people. The Citizens had stayed blameless in their own cosmology, until the very end.
It is immensely frustrating to me that the way the book is structured means that these passages – imaginative, detailed sequences in which the adolescent machinations of the plot finally give way to interesting ideas – came so late in the novel that I no longer cared. The effect as a whole is one of being top-heavy: the bulk of the book disposable, the remaining kernel of brightness mired in pulp. When I first began to read The City in the Middle of the Night, its themes of clock-time versus lived time, together with its emphasis on young protagonists reminded me somewhat of Karen Thompson Walker’s 2012 geo-apocalypse story The Age of Miracles. I found that book’s soft-centredness similarly irritating, and the novel as a whole was ill-thought-through, though it was at least proficiently written and its languid, somewhat earnest style had a certain charm. I don’t recall much about its plot now, though I seem to remember that the main character, Julia, had an annoying crush on a skater guy, a narrative strand that did not deserve the obsessive focus it was afforded.
Julia’s self-indulgence was as nothing though when compared with the on-again, off-again, overblown juvenile relationship drama between Sophie and Bianca. In terms of its character development and correspondence to lived reality, The City in the Middle of the Night reads less like science fiction and more like (bad) YA romance.
Everywhere we go, people stare at Bianca… She’s wearing a sheer silver dress that leaves her shoulders and most of her legs exposed, a wrap made of loose filaments, and silver sandals… I’m wearing a golden dress made out of some fabric I’ve never seen before that clings to my body in coruscating ripples.
‘Everybody is going to stare at me,’ I grouse under my breath.
‘Good,’ Bianca claps her hands. ‘They should. You look glorious.’
She’s wearing some fragrant oil, and every time I breathe it in, I feel dizzy, half wild with joy, out of control. We’re holding hands! In the street! We’re going to dance together, just the two of us, at some club that has walls made of speakers and air made of glitter. I can’t help feeling like this is buoyant fantasia, like I fell asleep watching an opera, and now I’m dreaming in song.
The whole Bianca/Sophie narrative is like something from a Mills & Boon novel, bubbling with heightened emotion expressed as a series of embarrassing cliches, bringing to mind the breathless crushes and apocalyptic breakups that characterised the picture-stories I remember from teenage magazines. There is little here that could be filed under ‘convincing, adult depiction of actual human relationship’. The segments (like the one above) set in Argelo, with their gushing descriptions of food and drink and clothing and vaguely outre behaviour have all the storm-in-a-teacup drama and faux transgressiveness of a midnight feast at Mallory Towers, and with an amusingly similar chasteness:
‘They’re hosting a giant formal ball, with two of the other families, and I just scored the two of us an invite. Absolutely everyone who matters in this town is going to be there.’ [Bianca] claps her hands together. ‘We’ll have to get ball gowns made, and borrow some jewelry, and dance until we can’t even see straight, and then dance some more, and it’s going to be epic.’
Seriously? In an adult novel?? And what is it with Bianca and the hand-clapping??? Every time Bianca is excited about something, there she is, clapping her hands. And this nonsense goes on and on. The relationship between these two emo kids (who are supposed to be plotting a revolution, by the way – some of the plot lines from Scooby Doo were more convincing) accounts for many, many pages and vast amounts of soul-searching. Clearly it’s intended to be the emotional centre of the novel. Yet the syrupy, one-note characterisation is simplistic and embarrassing; the banter, the smart, quippy dialogue, the unambiguous, feelgood morality tiresomely familiar from a hundred TV shows and superhero movies. And did the characters themselves – who we are supposed to like, to sympathise with, to feel empathy for – have to be so deluded? It’s obvious from page 1 that Bianca is a shallow, self-seeking manipulator. Why does it take Sophie three hundred-plus pages to get over her?
The characters’ naivete and lack of depth is a constant distraction from what might have been an interesting story. Neither is this broad-brush approach a problem that is limited to characterisation. Many of the key sequences relating to the novel’s thematic concerns are lacking in subtlety, manifesting as undigested chunks of polemic badly disguised as human interaction. Again and again, the theme and intention are clear but the execution is bland: characters shouting passages of semi-digested polemic at each other through a megaphone. Reading The City in the Middle of the Night put me in mind of how I felt as I struggled to find positives in Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit for Sharke 2018: you can see what the author is doing and while what she is doing might be valuable in terms of opening up science fiction to certain themes and arguments, in terms of their literary impact such novels fall disappointingly short. Flat, didactic and banal, they lack complexity, ambiguity, or nuance.
I find it interesting to note that in the case of both Anders and Chambers (and Arkady Martine, come to that) the parts of their novels I found most satisfying by far were those sequences in which their authors seemed to forget about the plots and characters, concentrating instead on the factual aspects, the subjects – linguistics, geology, biology, xenobiology, post-humanity, climatology – that form their novels’ scientific underpinning. Stripped back to their essence, we see the trajectory of what might have been. There is so much here worth examining. I only wish writers were being encouraged to examine it better.
Neither does it help to see a text scattered with the kind of inappropriate word usage and inconsistencies that seems designed to throw any observant reader out of the story. ‘The layers of permafrost unfold like wings, spreading open to reveal the naked ocean below’, and ‘unsteady fragments of tundra’ are both startlingly inaccurate depictions of what Anders is actually trying to describe, which is a layer of sea ice, or pack ice, breaking apart beneath her attack vehicles. There are also occasional, inappropriate references to time as it is measured on Earth, not January, detailed descriptions of battles that ‘even with the night vision’ would in fact be mostly experienced as a terrifyingly indistinct blurring of shapes and movements, Sophie immediately knowing how to operate a computer when ‘nobody talks to the Mothership, not for twenty generations’. Oh, and here we go again with the permafrost: ‘Alyssa executed a three-point turn, and then coasted the vehicle across a thin sheet of permafrost that seemed to tremble as they passed over it.’ Permafrost, n, is ground that remains continuously frozen for two or more years, located on land or under the ocean. In other words, not ice. It feels mean of me to harp on details like this, and anyone can make a mistake, but for me as a reader, such carelessness at the sentence level serves only to further weaken a text that is already weak.
I suspect that The City in the Middle of the Night has come in for particularly harsh criticism from me at least in part because I came to it straight after reading The Old Drift, a novel that in terms of its depth of field, technical ambition and all round literary ability surpasses it in ways and means too numerous to mention. Once again, I find myself in the position of having to explain that it is not the book as such that is a problem – it has a right to exist, and readers certainly have the right to enjoy it – but the fact of its position on the Clarke Award shortlist. It is easy to see why the judges might have been attracted to some of the themes Anders’s novel is centred on, but like so much of the current output, The City in the Middle of the Night is suffused with the sense of having been written for a particular fandom at a particular time. The nomination of such books for awards would seem to be the result of a current and increasingly widespread tendency to judge novels according to what they appear to be about, rather than how those themes are tackled in terms of words on the page. For me personally, this counts as slipshod, one-sided criticism, a criticism that is concerned with the promotion of particular ideas as opposed to the promotion of texts of genuine literary substance – texts that allow those ideas the depth and quality of consideration they deserve.
I believe passionately in the value of the written word in exploring and disseminating ideas. I believe especially passionately in the value of science fiction in pursuing a radical, progressive and diverse agenda. But I believe equally in close reading, for both readers and writers, in the study of how words are used and how stories are told. In the case of awards, and especially awards shortlists, I believe such attention to detail is of the highest importance, that it cannot, or at least should not, be deemed of lesser importance than context, theme or historicity.
The Clarke Award is for the best science fiction novel of the year, not the most popular. This is something every current and future award judge should bear in mind.
I remember the boundaries on the map I either saw or anticipated in that moment. Long ago, when cartography was just beginning – though it was already a matter of life or death, and not just for those who went to sea – maps were called ‘Portolan charts’. From some place in my mind the words ‘Carta Pisana’ emerged. The date: 1290. The sophisticated outline of the shores. The details of life at the bottom of the enormous sea. Above all, I remember how, all at once, the whole forest closed in on us. I remember feeling suddenly small.
(From: The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Levine and Aviva Kana.)
The protagonist of Cristina Rivera Garza’s short novel is a detective, or rather an ex-detective. She is approached by a client whose wife has disappeared into the great forests of the taiga, ostensibly with another man. Accompanied by an individual known only as the translator, our nameless detective heads off in pursuit of the woman, to persuade her to return possibly, to discover her reasons for leaving at the very least.
The Taiga Syndrome won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella last year and it’s been on my reading list ever since. It’s wonderful to see work like this gaining prize recognition because now having read The Taiga Syndrome I can tell you it stretches the definition of ‘story’ till its bones begin to crack. Imagine what might have happened if the detective protagonist of Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground had been rejected by all his colleagues a little sooner. Imagine the fitful doomed pursuit of Anna Kavan’s Ice taking place in a landscape almost entirely denuded of human presence and you’ll get an inkling of what you’re in for here. The protagonist of The Taiga Syndrome appears to be in the grip of a breakdown, of acute mental distress – I kept seeing her as Nicole Kidman’s hell-bent cop Erin in Karyn Kusama’s underappreciated 2018 movie Destroyer. Like MacInnes’s cashiered police investigator, she is thwarted and confused, ground down by her alienation. In the grip of her own fugue state, she is one of the most unreliable narrators in fiction you will encounter.
As in Anna Kavan’s Ice, the landscape itself appears to exert a malign influence upon all who enter it. The taiga seems almost a sentient presence, and it does not welcome intruders:
The taiga is in fact a disease, a syndrome. Some people flee the monotonous terrain even when they know they can’t escape. Some people take flight, suicidal, without considering the speed, their goal, what lies beyond. Some of them dance. The more I talked the more incredible it all sounded to me. The more implausible. The angrier.
There are few answers here; even when the detective does finally catch up with her quarry, the conversation that ensues is anything but conclusive. Along the way we meet wolves, cannibalistic incarnations of Hansel and Gretel, nameless creatures issuing from the characters’ own bodies, a decaying metropolis built on top of a structure that resembles an oil rig. Nothing is fully articulated, much less explained. It is as if a story – a legend – existed, and was smashed with a hammer. As readers we search in the rubble, attempting to fit the fragments together, our efforts reflected in the dirty puddles of an unending rainstorm.
The novel ends with a playlist, which has its own chapter heading and is clearly intended to be interpreted as an integral part of the novel. Looking at the tracks Garza has chosen, this makes total sense. I love this touch in particular, working as it does to suggest that the entire novel is not a novel at all so much as a construct, a heap of found documents and sketches for fairy tale retellings, the disassociated, torn-up scraps from someone’s diary.
I won’t lie: there is a part of me that longs to fill in the gaps, to create from this abstract sketch of a novel the full-blooded beast of a fantastical journey it might alternately be. And perhaps in the end that is the point, that the author is inviting the reader to do exactly that, to recreate in their own mind not only the landscape they are passing through, but the reasons and answers the book does not yet provide. Its characters’ backstories and motivations, their eventual fates. The Taiga Syndrome is definitely the kind of work that would reward revisiting, and with its length so incandescently brief, this is a book you can easily devour – Red Riding Hood’s wolf-style – in a single afternoon.
In fact why not double the pleasure and take in Nona Fernandez’s Space Invaders at the same time? In this tantalisingly brief novella, the formations and imagery of the popular arcade video game are used to highlight a story of real shootings, real murders, real instances of sudden oblivion. Space Invaders follows the perspectives of a number of young people living out their schooldays in Pinochet’s Chile. As they revisit their memories of autocracy in the decade following, they cannot escape the fact that some of them – and one young woman in particular – are no longer among their number:
A green glow-in-the-dark hand. Riquelme keeps dreaming about it, can’t shake it. This time he sees it on a television screen. The hand advances rapidly, in pursuit of extraterrestrial children. They run back and forth, fleeing in terror, but the hand clutches at the first Martian within reach and at its touch there is an explosion. The body of the little Martian flies apart into coloured lights that vanish from the TV screen. On the screen the score goes up by one hundred points, but the amazing record set by Gonzalez’s brother stands unbroken. The green hand and many other green hands stream out of an Earthling cannon, on the hunt for more space invaders.
(From Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez, translated by Natasha Wimmer.)
Like The Taiga Syndrome, Space Invaders is a dense, dreamlike narrative, written as if its multiple narrators have grown used to speaking elliptically to avoid detection. Murders happen with such sudden matter-of-factness we find ourselves doubting the veracity of what we have been shown. When people disappear, it is as if we have been expecting it all along, as if these characters’ descent into darkness has been preordained.
What Fernandez’s work demonstrates most of all is the depth of scarring, the damage to the collective memory of an entire people. Her words are brief and potent and there are none that need be added. Our role as readers is to bear witness, to read between the lines of what is being said.
We would seem to be in the midst of a wild outpouring of talent among Latin American women writers at the moment: Rita Indiana (Dominican Republic), Ariana Harwicz (Argentina), Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), Fernanda Melchor (Mexico), Sylvia Moreno-Garcia (Mexico), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), and Nona Fernandez (Chile) among others are producing incredible work, much of it positioned somewhere on the speculative scale. The passion and fury that is often present in these writers’ stories is a lesson to us all in the form and dynamics of honest self expression, the limitless, undaunted reach of the imagination. Whenever I pick up a work by one of these writers I know I’m going to learn something. I know also that I’m going to be left reeling by the full-force visceral impact of words on a page. This is work I feel empowered by reading. It is also work that tells me I’m not doing enough, that I can go further, dig deeper. This is work that dares me to be more wolf.
