The Spider's House

Nina Allan's Homepage

The Last Lap?

A week or so ago a friend sent me a link to a Booktube video by Jules Burt, a book dealer and vintage paperback collector with a wealth of bookish knowledge and a love of science fiction. This particular video shows Jules unboxing his then most recent purchase, a consignment of titles issued by the British Science Fiction Book Club, which ran on a monthly subscription from 1953 until 1971.

The monthly selections are interesting and actually quite progressive – the club kicked off with the now classic but then just four years published Earth Abides by George R. Stewart and went on to feature more future landmarks of science fiction literature by Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano), John Christopher (The Death of Grass) , Chip Delany (Nova), and John Wyndham (Trouble with Lichen) among many others. The books were all issued in hardcover and featured bold, modern cover designs, not unlike the Penguin science fiction covers of the same era. I like them a lot. But the reason my friend sent me the video was less for the books themselves than for a flyer insert that Jules had discovered inside one of them while he was unboxing it: the SF Book Club’s monthly newsletter, which just happened to include a mini-essay called ‘The Last Lap’, by a certain Christopher Priest.

Chris often spoke of the SF Book Club – he still owned the SFBC edition of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, as well as several other titles – but he had never mentioned writing for the newsletter and I had no idea this essay existed. It was a delightful surprise, all the more so for being so quintessentially Chris.

‘The Last Lap’ was written in 1965. Chris was twenty-two years old, still a year out from making his first pro sale. (I was not even born.) But what is remarkable about the piece is how clearly it shows that even at this very early stage of his career, both the passion Chris had for science fiction and his insistence that those who wanted to write it be ambitious and demanding of their chosen material were already established.

‘Science fiction is supposedly a fiction above the general run,’ he writes. ‘Its assimilation into that run is close, frighteningly so. To regain that sublimation – call it “sense of wonder” if you will – SF must become first of all literate, then imaginative, and then experimental. When these qualities have been recovered, and they are something that have been lost, then SF will find itself possessed of a new and invigorating element: originality.’ Science fiction must in other words be technically well written, far-reaching in its scope and innovative in its manner of expression. I am tempted to say that if we had more twenty-two-year-olds in SF right now who felt equally moved to express such concerns we would have a better literature. But I think I’m done with carping, not only because those who carp inevitably end up preaching to the converted, but also because they run the risk of becoming wearyingly repetitive.

I find ‘The Last Lap’ incredibly moving, all the more so because for the sixty-year duration of the career that followed, Chris never gave up on the principles he outlined, nor lost interest in what they represented. Every novel and story he wrote strove to be original, exploratory, different from the one before it – it is this quality of intent that makes his oeuvre so consistent, so unified. The essay is fascinating in a broader sense, though, for what it says about us, and by us I mean those in science fiction with a love of polemic, of criticism, of argument. What is perhaps most notable about ‘The Last Lap’ is that – a scattering of date-specific minor details aside – it could have been written any time at all in the sixty years since. It could have been written last week. I would hazard a guess that it might equally have been written five or ten years earlier.

There have been some magnificent ‘SF is doomed’ polemics in recent years. Chris’s own ‘Hull 0: Scunthorpe 3’ from 2012 (fondly known as ‘Priestgate’) is one example, with another favourite being Paul Kincaid’s ‘The Widening Gyre’ in the LA Review of Books from the same year, in which Paul compares three of the annual ‘best of’ anthologies in an attempt to answer the perennial question: ‘Is SF exhausted?’, a question that – to those of us who are in deep with these matters at least – is becoming as over-familiar as ‘Is the novel dead?’

In ‘The Last Lap’, Chris points to symbolism in SF as ‘a passing fad’, just as ‘the death of the space story is upon us’. He fears that SF is ‘like a racing car that, having shown its paces around the track, now rests in the pits’. His essay is in this way similar to those that went before and many that came after – including a fair few of my own – that protest the condition of SF without being entirely sure of how, specifically, it should be remedied. In the end, what all these essays come down to is: SF should be less like [writer/s I don’t like] and more like [writer/s I do].

This is normal, natural, even healthy. I’ve enjoyed writing essays like that, mainly because they get me thinking, asking myself the same questions the essay is asking of others, and for this reason alone I would not be foolish enough to promise I’ll never write another. But the deeper conclusion that must be drawn is that nothing really changes: the state of play is always vexed, the industry is always toxic, and SF is always exhausted. The opposite is equally true. By the time he and I met, Chris had (almost!) given up on the idea of SF as a unified entity. ‘There’s no such thing as “the field”,’ he would say, ‘there are just individual books, by individual writers, many of which are bad, some of which are great.’ It was these individually great books and authors, he maintained, that we should read and pay attention to, that we should discuss with reference to themselves, and to literature as a whole, rather than subjecting them to an artificial analysis within the confines of a genre that had outlived – in terms of criticism at least – its usefulness.

How I feel about this argument varies – according to my energy levels, my state of mind, even the book I happen to have just read. But what is absolutely not in dispute is that there are and have always been superlative individual novels and writers of the fantastic, books that break boundaries and challenge norms even in the midst of the most conservative periods of genre complacency and orthodoxy. These are the books and writers that ultimately matter, that shape the literature going forward, even when, in the present moment, they appear to be outliers with zero chance of influencing anything, such is the quantity of identikit cosy fantasies and interchangeable space operas stacked against them.

I have spent the past year – the past two years, really – in the literary company of JG Ballard, a writer who, in his essays and reviews for New Worlds in the early 1960s, produced some of the greatest and most resilient ‘SF is exhausted’ polemics in the secondary literature. His novels, even when they contain no outwardly speculative elements, were from the first until the last written with what I like to describe as a science fictional sensibility: that is, through a lens of deeper imagining, through a habit of questioning and subverting the status quo. For Chris at the time he wrote ‘The Last Lap’, Ballard was a key inspiration, one of the outliers, the writers who showed by example some of the ways in which SF might reach its full potential. His decision to embark on a full-length study of Ballard’s life and work in the late autumn of 2022 was a kind of homecoming.

Working to complete that project has been a vital source of intellectual and emotional sustenance for me through the difficult, bewildering months of 2024, the only thing that made sense, firstly because it’s been so challenging and in the pursuit of writing at least that is what I thrive on, but mainly because it is the continuation of a conversation that will never end.

Keep asking the questions. Keep striving for better. Keep feeding the fire.

Per aspera ad astra. Happy New Year.

Books of this year

My reading through 2024 has been dominated by the demands of the Ballard project, taking in books about JGB as well as re-reads of most of Ballard’s novels. This kind of deeply immersive, intimate engagement with the work of one writer is something I have not experienced in the same way since writing my Masters thesis on Nabokov, getting on for thirty-five years ago now, but it is one that completely fits my mindset and that has, in some sense, reset my thinking and aspirations for where I might want to go as a writer, further down the line.

Other than that, it has been a strange and somewhat erratic year all round. From the first half of 2024 I would have to make particular mention of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story simply for existing and being there for me to read, with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency and Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue being in their own way similarly consolatory. Miranda Seymour’s wonderful biography of Jean Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once, and Richard Morton Jack’s superb Nick Drake: the Life were both exactly what I needed to remind me of what I was doing and why I was doing it. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos was an extraordinary reading experience, one that was personal to me in unexpected ways, and I was thrilled to see Erpenbeck, after several previous nominations, finally win the International Booker Prize.

Moving through into the second half of 2024, Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands and its follow up, Thunderclap were both equally magnificent, revealing Cumming in my eyes as one of the most accomplished writers working in Britain today. Janet Frame’s posthumously published short novel Towards Another Summer is a quiet, devastating miracle, and I could use exactly the same words of Rachel Cusk’s Parade, though the two books could not be more different. I was delighted to finally catch up with Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, which is a very good book indeed, and also – from somewhat further back – with Barry N. Malzberg’s Galaxies, which follows Ballard’s prime example in revealing science fiction as a radical, knotty form that is capable of just about anything. Indeed, one of the side-effects of the Ballard project has been a re-engagement with the ideals of the British New Wave and the literary possibilities of a mode of literature that – no matter how it is used, abused, sidelined and devalued – remains as powerful and significant as any given writer chooses to make it.

Will 2025 be the year I finally read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Regular readers of this blog will know that I enjoy setting myself reading challenges, but I’m going to hold off on doing that, just for the moment. I would like to leave the reading horizon open and uncluttered, a space to inhabit as feels useful, inspiring and necessary, a year of new discoveries.

Yuletide…

… and what better time to finally catch up with a classic of weird fiction that I have read a lot about but never read?

Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow is one of those books. Written in 1895, this collection of stories has inspired and influenced writers all the way from HP Lovecraft to Nic Pizzolatto (and can you believe it has already been ten years since the first showing of True Detective??)

‘The King in Yellow’ is the title of a text-within-the-text, a play that brings insanity on anyone who reads it. I find it remarkable and rather wonderful, that the ‘cursed text’ trope is a hundred years old and more. So much of the power of the weird lies in its timelessness, the enduring appeal of its ideas and imagery. In the first story, ‘The Repairer of Reputations’, Hidred Castaigne is obsessed with the forbidden play, which he has read while convalescing from a head injury sustained in a horse-riding accident. Whether his madness stems from this accident or from reading ‘The King in Yellow’ is for the reader to decide. The glorious uncanniness of the story hinges on the fact that as readers we are drawn into Hildred’s delusion – that he is heir to a vanished kingdom – that we experience both shock and horror as his plan to assassinate his cousin in pursuit of his destiny comes closer to being enacted.

That the story is also science fiction – it is set twenty years in the future – adds another level of weirdness. The ‘future’ Chambers imagines is dark and sinister. There are suicide booths on street corners, a palpable sense of unease even in the most ordinary actions and interactions. All colours seem heightened, somehow. What I loved most about this story is how modern it feels.

Only the first four stories in the volume are explicitly bound by the ‘King in Yellow’ mythos. The remaining tales have often been dismissed or excluded from newer editions for not being weird enough, but I think this is a mistake. They are weird – very. There is a time-slip romance – a young man loses his way and ends up betrothed to a falconer in mediaeval France (very reminiscent of Le Grand Meaulnes) – and a brutal war story set during the Siege of Paris, which took place just twenty-five years before The King in Yellow was written. The chaos of war is written as a kind of haunting:

The fog was peopled with phantoms. All around him in the mist they moved, drifting through the arches in lengthening lines, then vanished, while from the fog others rose up, swept past and were engulfed. He was not alone, for even at his side they crowded, touched him, swarmed before him, beside him, behind him, pressed him back, seized and bore him with them through the mist.

Even in those stories where ‘lost Carcosa’ is not explicitly named, there is a sense that the realm of the lost king is there, waiting to reassemble itself, that the world we inhabit is the delusion, a temporary structure that might be swept away at any moment:

From somewhere in the city came sounds like the distant beating of drums, and beyond, far beyond, a vague muttering, now growing, swelling, rumbling in the distance like the pounding of surf upon the rocks, now like the surf again, receding, growling, menacing. The cold had become intense, a bitter piercing cold which strained and snapped at joist and beam and turned the slush of yesterday to flint.

That the overt weirdness of the stories recedes, reined back in the later tales to a suggestion, a supressed memory almost, makes the collection as a whole still more memorable and mysterious.

So much is left unsaid and unexplained. As if the writing of the book was interrupted, or prevented. It is unsurprising to me, that so many writers since have fallen in love with its atmosphere and – I use the term in its truest sense – obscurity. That they have felt bound to explore the yellow kingdom for themselves.

I may well become one of them…

All Hallows

Samhain, the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. Memories of Hallowe’en when I was a child, the dozens of paper demon faces I would cut out and colour, slipping them between the pages of books, under tea mugs and into cupboards, so that even months into the new year they still turned up unexpectedly, little ghosts from the past.

Memories of my grandmother, who would make up a new Hallowe’en story for me every year, then on the morning of the 1st of November I would hear her in the kitchen, putting on the kettle and singing the hymn for All Saints Day, her voice her one extravagance, that and her storytelling, my twin inheritance from her.

It has felt difficult to write here, lately. How many times can you say that you miss someone without the words becoming shadows of themselves?

Samhain.

Samhuinn.

Sauin.

Some of you will know that I have been contracted to complete the biography of JG Ballard that Chris was working on before he died. Our book, as we came to think of it, has been a source of comfort, consolation and huge satisfaction to me through this difficult year. This is without doubt the most demanding and challenging project I have yet undertaken, for all kinds of reasons, but I am happy to say it has been going well and is getting closer to completion. Coming to know a writer’s work in such intimate detail is both a privilege and an inspiration. Chris and I talked about the project endlessly. He knew that this is how I would be spending the year, basically, and knowing that he knew has been a strength and continues to be.

My thoughts are turning also to what will come next. I have ideas, and they excite me, which I know is a good thing. Samhain is all about return, reappraisal, reconnection. Lighting the fire.

Going home

Today I waved goodbye to Chris’s literary archive – thirty-two boxes of manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and notebooks covering the whole of his life and career – as they began their journey from our home on Bute to their new one at the British Library. The archive will in due course be open to readers, researchers, scholars and fans. Chris knew this was the plan, and I know he would be delighted to see that plan fulfilled. He would have been delighted also by the great care that has been taken by the archivists at the BL who have been dealing with the acquisition. Their sensitivity, expertise and appreciation have been extraordinary, and a great comfort. It is wonderful to know that Chris’s papers are in such safe hands.

Glasgow 2024

Chris knew there would be a memorial for him at the Glasgow Worldcon and I know he would have been delighted and touched to see so many people gathered together to celebrate his life and writing. The event was everything I hoped it would be, and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who came along. Thanks especially to Meg MacDonald, who was such a support to me in the run-up and who made sure everything happened, basically. How she managed to fit this in alongside everything else she had to do will remain forever a mystery, but the event would not have been the thing it was without her commitment, understanding and energy.

Birthday wishes

Today would have been Chris’s eighty-first birthday. How I wish he were here to see it.

Isle of Bute, October 17th 2018. Mary Turner/Panos Pictures

It is a perfect July morning here on Bute, the hills reflected in the waters of the firth, truer likenesses of themselves than you might see on more unsettled days. Reading Sarah Gristwood’s piece in the Guardian about her recent bereavement – her husband the film critic Derek Malcolm died last year – I find much that resonates. Like Gristwood, reading the words of other writers who have been here before me has been both incredibly helpful and strangely reassuring.

I find it difficult to say the word ‘widow’; the photograph above still feels truer to me than most things about the current situation. I have been luckier though than many of the writers Gristwood talks about in that work – writing – has been an unerring support to me. Some of you may know that Chris had been working on a biography of JG Ballard, a project he had very much hoped to complete but sadly did not. It was agreed between us before Chris died that I would finish the book, an undertaking we very much saw as our way of continuing to be together.

As the practical tasks that follow in the wake of a death are gradually completed, so I have been able to transfer more of my time and energy to working on the book. At times this still feels surreal but for the most part it is energising, life-giving. I know Chris would be pleased with how it is going.

Reading also continues to be a constant. At the moment I am finding great pleasure in rereading Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, a novel I discovered with wonder and joy in my late twenties, the first Highsmith I read. On rereading it is if anything even better – darker and more Machiavellian. I am certainly finding it less funny this time around!

To coincide with rereading the book, I am finally catching up with Steven Zaillian’s TV adaptation on Netflix, and what a thing of terrible beauty it is. I love the 1999 Minghella adaptation – Chris always said it was too long, but it’s in my Top 25 films of all time for sure – but Zaillian’s vision keeps more of the novel’s cruelty, its sense of unease. If anything, Minghella’s film is too beautiful, too – dare I say it – joyous? Maybe I’m placing too much emphasis on that incredible jazz sequence with Guy Barker but whenever I think of the Minghella film, in spite of the horrible things that happen in it I feel bathed in the endless sunshine of Positano. The black-and-white cinematography of the Zaillian adaptation is equally masterful but it lends to everything it touches – intentionally – a sense of the end-times, of dissolution. Andrew Scott is a more sinister, more morally bankrupt Ripley than Matt Damon, whose portrayal I love, I think, precisely because it allows me an emotional insight into the character. There’s no coming to terms with Scott’s Ripley; he is cold, selfish, opaque – exactly as Highsmith intended.

The Talented Mr Ripley happened to be the last of Highsmith’s novels Chris read. ‘How is this so good!’ he kept exclaiming. He had been looking forward to the new series. I think it would have gone down very well.

Summer’s lease

Today I finished checking the proofs of my next novel, A Granite Silence, which will be published next spring. The book reads well, I think. It feels ready to go.

The months since Chris’s death have been overwhelmingly busy but I am making progress with work, which still is the thing that feels most normal for me to be doing, as well as the most sustaining. I will be speaking more about my current project in due course.

I am also looking further ahead, trying to figure out exactly where I am with my work right now, what kind of writer – more difficult, at the moment, than it sounds. As always when I’m asking myself these kinds of questions I turn to other writers for insight and inspiration. At the moment I am reading John Banville’s The Book of Evidence as a kind of corollary to Mark O’Connell’s very excellent A Thread of Violence, which I read last year. O’Connell’s book is a true account of the life and crimes of Malcolm MacArthur, a ne’er do well aristocrat who committed two apparently random and senseless murders in 1982. Banville’s 1989 novel, inspired by these events, takes us deep inside the mind of a gifted man whose fatal capacity for self-delusion brings about his downfall.

I first read Banville when he won the Booker – I loved that thing he said about it being good to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize! Since then I’ve read more than half of everything he’s written and it’s always a relief, to spend time with someone who seems incapable of writing a bad sentence. What I’m paying particular attention to in The Book of Evidence is the relationship between fiction and fact. What is Banville’s relationship to this story? What is in it for him?

Other recent reads of note include Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, which I was delighted to see win the International Booker and that felt to me almost like a chapter of my own life. This was not a comfortable feeling, a fact which made me appreciate the novel all the more. I also loved Ia Genberg’s The Details, and Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren, luminous and profound and so well written. The way Enright is able to make convincing use of modern idioms and still write like an old master is deeply impressive. The poems, too, are small miracles.

Last week I spent a few days in the Lake District with my very dear friends the writers Helen Marshall and Malcolm Devlin and their little son Davey. We had some wonderful conversations, and they were wonderful to me. I was also deeply moved to visit Dove Cottage for the first time, to look out across the same view that would have been familiar and beloved to William and Dorothy Wordsworth, two hundred years ago. One of the TV programmes Chris and I most enjoyed watching last year was the Wordsworth and Coleridge Road Trip on Sky Arts, in which Frank Skinner and Denise Mina explore the turbulent relationship between the two poets, whilst visiting the locations in which they lived and which inspired their writing. Dove Cottage was one. I know Chris would have loved being there. He would have thought it was fantastic.

At Cautley Spout, near Sedbergh

Spring and Fall

We are not idealised wild things.

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all…

I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious about, her ‘self-pity’, her ‘whining’, her ‘dwelling on it.’ Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.

(Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Time and the Hugos

I am delighted to announce that A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller has been shortlisted for a Hugo Award in the Best Related Work category.

With news like this comes the accompanying sadness that Maureen herself is not here to share in the excitement and to take her rightful place as nominee. But there is joy too in knowing how pleased she would be – in fact, knowing Maureen, I think the word would be gobsmacked!

I am especially pleased for Maureen’s husband Paul Kincaid, who has been so supportive throughout the process of bringing the book to publication, and for Francesca Barbini of Luna Press, who immediately came on board to give the book a home. I am looking forward to seeing both of them at the Hugo ceremony at the Glasgow Worldcon in August.

Huge congratulations of course to all other Hugo nominees and especially to Iain J. Clark, who so kindly gave permission for his beautiful artwork ‘Path’ to be used as the cover for Maureen’s book. You can find a complete list of Hugo finalists here.

« Older posts

© 2025 The Spider's House

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑