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A Voyage to Arcturus: a celebration

November 21, 2020 /

On Thursday November 19th I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel presentation and discussion to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus. The event was organised by Dimitra Fimi under the aegis of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and my fellow panellists were the Lindsay and Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson and Professor Robert Davis of the University of Glasgow, who specialises in religious and cultural studies and has a longstanding interest in speculative fiction.

The event was well attended and hugely enjoyable, and ended with the feeling that the discussion could have gone on much longer. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in making it such a success. Several people have asked me if I could make the text of my personal presentation available through my blog, and so here it is (an appropriate subtitle might be: me making trouble as usual). Thanks once again to Dimitra and the Centre for Fantasy, and here’s hoping our next meeting will be in person.

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS: A CELEBRATION?

My relationship with A Voyage to Arcturus is a strange one. I first read the novel more than thirty years ago, sometime during the period of my mid-to-late teens, when I was hoovering up science fiction more or less indiscriminately. My memories of it from that time are indistinct – I remember a wandering, quest-like narrative rather in the manner of Jules Verne (his Journey to the Centre of the Earth was one of the first science fiction novels I ever read) only much weirder. I knew nothing about the book’s author, David Lindsay – I had no idea he was Scottish, and I hadn’t realised how much earlier Arcturus had been written than some of the other novels of the fantastic I was reading at the time.

Something of the book’s poetry and mystery must have stayed with me, however, because when I came to write my novel The Rift I knew at once and almost subconsciously that one of its key sections would carry Lindsay’s title. The Rift tells the story of two sisters, Selena and Julie, who are reunited after a separation of twenty years, during which Julie claims to have been living on an alien planet called Tristane. Of course not everyone believes Julie – even her sister is uncertain of whether her account can be trusted – and I think it was this sense of ambiguity around what had happened to Julie that made me remember Arcturus. I was attracted by the poetic synchronicity between my novel and Lindsay’s, the lack of closure around what really occurs. Did the voyage take place, or not? Was it all in the mind? Also I loved the title, just the feel of the words, the chilly elegance of them. I don’t think it’s any accident that when Julie first arrives on Tristane she finds herself in a cold place – the word ‘Arcturus’ was resonating with me even then.

What a surprise to me then when I discovered that A Voyage to Arcturus was not the book’s original title! Lindsay’s working title for his manuscript – some ten years and more in the writing – was Nightspore in Tourmance. His publishers were afraid that sounded too obscure, so encouraged him to change it. A Voyage to Arcturus was first published in 1920 – the same year Isaac Asimov was born, a fact that helps us to remember perhaps just how new science fiction still was as a genre, how original and shockingly outlandish A Voyage to Arcturus must have seemed to readers at the time.

Rereading the novel some three decades after first encountering it, I was immediately struck by how closely Arcturus chimes with the fantastic literature of the age, yet also stands apart from it. Lindsay was known to have read and admired writers like Jules Verne and Rider Haggard as well as his fellow Scots Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott, and their influence is clear: A Voyage to Arcturus is an adventure narrative like no other – its protagonist, Maskull, states from the outset that he is ‘in search of adventure’ – and it’s not hard to find within the narrative echoes of novels such as Ivanhoe, Kidnapped, King Solomon’s Mines and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  But that is where meaningful comparison ends. Although A Voyage to Arcturus might usefully be grouped with science fiction’s early essays in ‘scientific romance’ – the novels of HG Wells being the most obvious example – it is not really like them. Where Wells and Verne style their novels as genuine attempts to imagine or to extrapolate how human society might develop, what wonders and dangers humanity might encounter in exploring the cosmos, the unsolved riddle of our own Earth, even, what Lindsay attempts in A Voyage to Arcturus might be claimed as one of science fiction’s earliest voyages into innerspace.

More even than Wells, I find it interesting to compare Lindsay’s work with Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita, the first full-length work of Russian science fiction and as important to Russians as Wells’s War of the Worlds is to us Brits. In Aelita, a maverick engineer who has constructed a spacecraft to take him to Mars advertises for a resourceful travelling companion to accompany him on his journey. His eventual comrade is a Bolshevik soldier who is finding it hard to readjust to civilian life in the wake of his experience fighting in the Russian civil war. The metal sphere in which they make their fantastical journey is not at all unlike the crystal torpedo used by Krag, Nightspore and Maskull in their voyage to Arcturus. But whereas Tolstoy uses his scientific romance to further illuminate and explore the harsh ideological landscape of revolutionary Russia, David Lindsay, once again, is doing something rather different.

As Alexei Tolstoy’s experiences in the Russian civil war strongly influenced the writing of Aelita, A Voyage to Arcturus bears the marks and scars of having been written against the bloody backdrop of World War One. If Arcturus could be said to have a central question it could perhaps best be summed up as what makes human existence meaningful, and how do we bear the essential nihilism of a world in which death and suffering are all around? In matters of style and formal approach, there are useful comparisons to be made between the work of David Lindsay and HP Lovecraft. But whereas Lovecraft is obsessed with the terminal nature of everything, the inescapable madness of the howling void, the vision Lindsay offers up is more transcendent than nihilistic. Death comes to all, but in feeling ourselves at one with the universe, in surrendering our selfish desires, we can gain insights into a truer, more spiritual reality, and voyage there without fear.    

For me, the most successful aspect of A Voyage to Arcturus is Lindsay’s landscape writing. His visions of an alien planet are incandescent, wildly strange and often inspiringly beautiful. The breadth and depth of imagination on display in his descriptions of the terrain, flora and fauna of Tormance, not to mention its people might almost persuade the reader that Lindsay is describing his own dreams.

There is a Wagnerian grandeur to Lindsay’s vision, and I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that the composer and pianist John Ogdon had written a large-scale operatic composition based on Arcturus, bringing excerpts from the text into consort with passages from the gospels – Ogdon, like others, clearly saw Arcturus as a religious work, somewhat akin to John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress, with Maskull in the role of Christian.  

Equally fascinating is the new musical adaptation of this impossible novel. Its Australian creator and director, Phil Moore says he was actively drawn to Arcturus because of its philosophical underpinning and because it was ‘a real drama’ as opposed to satire or comedy, in the manner of earlier science fiction musicals like The Little Shop of Horrors or Rocky Horror Picture Show. He has cleverly cast Maskull as a young, attractive, sensitive man as opposed to the pedantic, sexist and peculiarly priggish character we meet in the novel.

For this is where we must ask ourselves how successful, exactly, Lindsay is in his ambition. The cult writer and alternative thinker Colin Wilson was a famous admirer of A Voyage to Arcturus – he called it a masterpiece of the twentieth century – but devotee though he was, he found his patience increasingly tested by what he saw as the stodginess of Lindsay’s style:

The man was a towering genius whose mind is cast in the same mould as that of Dostoevsky… [But] ordinary technical ability, the literary talent that so many third-rate novelists possess in abundance, was denied to him.

As a one-time Russian scholar with a particular interest in Dostoevsky, I found this quote from Wilson enlightening – because it’s not far wrong. Lindsay’s total commitment to and pursuit of an idea – not to say an ideal – is vividly apparent throughout Arcturus. Though his approach is radically different, Lindsay seems to be fired with the same epistemological zeal as the great Russian, and his work likewise offers a vast and tantalising array of possible meanings and interpretations. Dostoevsky though could write character, and did so with passion, as anyone acquainted with Rodion Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov would surely attest.

As a novel of character, A Voyage to Arcturus is an embarrassing failure, in which the demands of a simplistic quest narrative are the entire determinant of character action. For me it is not so much the style of Lindsay’s writing that is a problem – Lindsay was possessed of a vivid and singular imagination – so much as its peculiar turn of priggishness and rampant sexism. Lindsay does make some startlingly modern observations about gender and sexuality, even going so far as to invent a set of nonbinary pronouns for one character as he gropes towards a broader understanding of their nature, engaging with these issues in a way that prefigures writing by Ursula Le Guin or John Varley fifty years later.

However there is nothing to explain or excuse the all-round direness of his attitude towards women. In our journey through the landscape of Tourmance we meet Joiwind the angelic helpmeet, Oceaxe the temptress, Tydomin the jealous harpy and Sullenbode, who ‘is not a woman, but a mass of pure sex. Your passion will draw her out into human shape, but only for a moment. If the change were permanent, you would have endowed her with a soul.’

Lindsay has read Nietzche and Schopenhauer and boy it shows. DH Lawrence can get away with a lot when it comes to being a patronising sexist because he’s one hell of a writer. In A Voyage to Arcturus, Lindsay’s prejudices are embarrassingly on display.

Having reread the novel, I would have to frame its relationship to my own novel as ironical. In The Rift, Selena is faced with the choice of believing her sister and cutting herself adrift from her conventional worldview, or clinging to what logic tells her must be the truth and dismissing Julie’s experiences as post-traumatic madness, and I find a renewed satisfaction in the fact that these philosophical arguments are conducted between women – men here are strictly an optional extra. As we turn the final page of Arcturus, we find ourselves faced as readers with a similar dilemma: did any of it happen? Or are we back where we started, on the north east coast of Scotland on a stormy night, wondering why we came here and where we are going?

A Voyage to Arcturus is a singular, frustrating, baffling and ultimately rewarding book – rewarding precisely because of its obscurity, its own inner conflicts and confusion, its refusal to be typecast. It is possibly unique in science fiction, and shines a revelatory light on science fiction’s early development. Once you read it, you may not like it, but you’ll never forget it. I for one will be queuing up to see the musical!    

Girls Against God #1: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

November 19, 2020 /

Jenny Hval’s prickly second novel turns out to be the perfect place to begin my current reading project, because Girls Against God is a confronting text in every sense. At the surface level, the novel poses as an autofictional account of a young woman growing up in the stiflingly religious, provincial atmosphere of southern Norway. Raging against a society that presents a whiter-than-white face to the world whilst harbouring and nurturing attitudes of racism, intolerance and petit-bourgeois philistinism, our narrator finds a focus for her rebellion through the world of black metal music and its aggressive iconoclasm. Her passionate desire to ‘be in a band’ allies her with two other like-minded young women, Venke and Terese. Together they flirt with various styles of performance and expression, entwining their musical experimentation with the practice of modern witchcraft. They begin to think of themselves as a coven, an irritant in society’s gut, a literal ‘trash stench’.

The timeline jumps between the narrator’s schooldays and her years at college to residencies in London and New England to a moment in the near-present in which an older version of the narrator is engaged in the making of an experimental film. Girls Against God rejoices in filmic imagery and references. Derek Jarman makes an appearance, and Dusan Makavejev’s ultra-transgressive 1974 film Sweet Movie is referenced and analysed before being partially re-enacted in a scene of phantasmagorical weirdness in a school canteen. The Blair-Witch-like film Forest, whose description and analysis forms the third part of the novel, is both a metaphor for the book as a whole and a marvellous act of ventriloquism; Hval is able to translate the elusive visual language of film to the written word with remarkable acuity and power.

There is still more to be had from this book, though. Girls Against God reads almost as a polemic, a manifesto – Hval’s examination of the taboos around women’s self-expression, the persecution of ‘witches’ (and witches) and the authoritarian suppression of individual acts of rebellion and protest is the cold steel, the anger that gives this narrative its resonance. As a piece of weird fiction that places passages of memoir alongside strange slides into hallucinatory otherness and sublime terror, this book is unique, The Craft on LSD. As a record of the slow commodification of Nordic Black Metal, Girls Against God works as a fascinating piece of documentary. As a rebel yell, a scream of protest in the endless white night of Norwegian summer, it is lacerating, eloquent and exhilarating.

The novel goes still further in examining the nature and purpose of writing itself in breaking down atrophied systems and challenging norms. I especially admired Hval’s juxtaposition of the forest interludes with her startling and imaginative use of the electronic sounds (text tones, old dial-up modem sounds, skype calls) that make up the ‘cosmic internet’, a parallel natural history, a modern cosmology.

Impassioned, original and revelatory, Girls Against God is a dense, occasionally stubborn book that rewards the effort involved in reading it. Hval opens up the possibilities of fiction, fusing together music, image and thought in a web of text that is refreshing and inspirational in its integrity. One to keep.

Girls Against God

November 12, 2020 /

Late last month I happened to be reading an interview/conversation between the American writer Alexandra Kleeman (author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) and the Norwegian writer and musician Jenny Hval, whose second novel Girls Against God has just been published. Both writers share an interest in transgression, in breaking down genre boundaries and in the idea of literary experimentation. It’s a fascinating piece, and one I found resonated with me a lot, most especially their discussion of how the radical-experimental space in writing has tended to be colonised by men. Helen de Witt in particular has written brilliantly about this, as of course has Rachel Cusk.

My own interest in fragmented narratives, in narratives that push beyond ‘story’ to examine not only the urge to record but also our relationship as both readers and writers with words on a page and especially in our current reality the value of words as resistance, protest, the proposition of counter-realities has become all-consuming of late. This obsession with narrative structures, with the purpose and meaning of the written word has resulted in notable and repeated upheavals in my work-in-progress as well as a renewed focus on and fascination with writers whom I perceive as sharing these ideals – writers whose engagement with language itself is relentless and searching.

The challenge of being a woman in such spaces is a matter of particular fascination and sometimes vexation. With this in mind, I have decided I would like to spend some of this winter exploring works by women writers that I see as radical and/or transgressive. Two years ago I read a series of such works one after the other: Ann Quin’s Berg, Eley Williams’s Attrib, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Break.up by Joanna Walsh, Milkman by Anna Burns, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, Exposure by Olivia Sudjic and Hell by Kathryn Davis. The effect of encountering these works so closely together, as a concentrated block of ideas, was profoundly energising and remains a touchstone experience, not just in and of itself but for the inspiration it provided, the example set: this is what is possible.

Trying to process this experience, to persuade it to bear fruit – that is the tricky bit. It is also the most exciting part of the work I am attempting to do. I thought it might be useful and interesting to share my thoughts on some of works I am finding most relevant, engaging and challenging at the moment, to discover them on the page, to set down my impressions as they are being gathered. In honour of the interview that inspired it, I am going to call this project Girls Against God, though we may well find as many girls who are pro god as anti. I am not going to set myself a strict timetable for posting, nor even a specific day, though I am hoping to put up something new for you to read roughly once a week.

I plan to start next week sometime with Girls Against God itself. In the meantime, let me commend to you Jenny Hval’s stunning album The Practice of Love, which seems to tie into everything she says in the interview with energy and grace.

When words do not suffice

November 9, 2020 /

Like everyone else, I have spent much of the past week being exhausted by the American presidential election. I didn’t get a proper night’s sleep until Saturday, and still feel on edge because of the dishonourable and disreputable behaviour of much of the Republican party. Seemingly there are those who will continue to give lip service to what they know are lies (because they, unlike Trump himself, are not morons) because it seems politically expedient to do so. When they do, as seems inevitable, begin to peel off in droves, this will not be through any sense of personal honour or desire to uphold the democratic process, but because they fear the damage that might accrue to their own careers through sticking their colours to the burning mast of a despot in the twilight of his reign. 

This for me does not compute. For me, the worst aspects of Trump have not been his personal loathsomeness, his inane generalisations, his total inability to form any kind of political argument, his racism or his misogyny or his financial malpractice (vile though they all are) but the fact that he has been enabled as President of the United States to stand on a world stage, making statements that are known to be lies by all of those around him and yet still stand unchallenged by the bulk of the party he claims to represent (he doesn’t, as they all know, but that’s a longer argument). I despise him, I loathe his politics but his attempt to dismantle democracy and to erode the infrastructure of democracy has been, for me, an existential horror that outflanks any and all partisan considerations. And this is still going on. There are still those – again, American citizens with intelligence and decades-long political experience – who seem prepared to support him in what now amounts to a toddler’s tantrum, no thought for what is best for their fellow citizens or for the constitution whose ideals they are sworn to serve. These people are more dangerous even than Trump because they know what they’re doing. Seriously, they should go away and read their Hannah Arendt. Personally I won’t breathe easy until he is actually out of the White House.

This past week has been enervating and at certain moments thrilling, a week that has included along with the tension the headiest moments of relief and thanksgiving. There is such a long way to go but this is a hugely important step, for all of us, all over the world. One of the worst aspects of Trump’s ‘presidency’ has been the way his attitudes and actions have been a green light for demagogues, racists and climate deniers everywhere, producing a hothouse environment for hate, intolerance and social division not seen for a century.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are fine people, whose ambitions for their term in office – healing, inclusion, rebuilding and hope – are the only valid reasons to be in politics, basically. May they flourish and prosper.

Tricks and treats

October 30, 2020 /

As an opportunity for partying and dressing up as the Witchfinder General (I really do need that cloak) it looks like Hallowe’en is pretty much cancelled this year. All the more reason then to bake some skeleton cookies and curl up on the sofa with a favourite horror movie or a volume of ghost stories (or indeed both).

Luckily for all of us, there is some wonderful new gothic reading to be had, and as a Hallowe’en treat this year I am delighted to recommend a brand new anthology I’ve just finished reading. It’s called HAG (because of course it had to be) and is subtitled ‘forgotten folk tales retold’. As a concept it is wonderful: ten contemporary women writers offer their own take on some of the more obscure regional folk tales of the British isles. We’re all familiar with retellings of popular fairy tales such as Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid, and there are some superbly innovative interpretations out there. But the stories in HAG are different: obscure and often remembered only in the particular part of Britain from which they originate, they offer microcosms of rural life from the time when they were first being told. The Britain that emerges from these tales is a place of dark magic, eerie transformations, fairy mischief and supernatural retribution. As with so much British weird, landscape often plays a central role in these stories, grounding the magic firmly in a reality that is stark and dangerous to navigate.

The original folk tales that inspired HAG are reprinted in full, together with an introduction from Carolyne Larrington that sets the stories in context, examining the influence of fairy tales on our national literature, then and now. It is this kind of attention to detail that helps to make HAG such a magical book and a genuinely informative one, a project that clearly means a great deal to everyone involved with it. And yet to experience the power of this anthology in its purest form, I would recommend that readers leave the original tales and the excellent introduction to one side until they have finished reading the stories themselves. Each of the ten new stories offers a brilliantly original modern interpretation of an old, old tale, its own world of magic and beauty and occasionally terror. Each one is radically different in style and form, and although it’s a cliche to say it, there really is something here for everyone.

The standout story for me is Daisy Johnson’s ‘A Retelling’, based on the old Suffolk tale ‘The Green Children of Woolpit’. I loved the blend of autofiction and fairy tale, the one segueing seamlessly into the other to create an unsettling yet ultimately transcendent effect. (Reading this story reminds me I really do need to grab myself a copy of Johnson’s new novel Sisters.) Stories by Naomi Booth, Natasha Carthew and Imogen Hermes Gowar (so painful to read but bravo that ending!) offer their own delights, and I deeply appreciated Eimear McBride’s tongue-in-cheek subversion of the entire brief. The wonderful thing about HAG though is that every reader will find their own favourite story. Needless to say, this book, which has one of the most beautiful covers I’ve come across this year, would make the perfect Hallowe’en gift.

Hallowe’en is a time of transformations, and in this light I would also like to recommend Wild Time, a short novel by the writer, artist and performer Rose Biggin in collaboration with her partner Keir Cooper. I know Rose – we have appeared in several anthologies together – and I was intrigued to see what she would do with a longer-form narrative. Rose is boldly experimental in her theatre work, and I am delighted to say her latest project is every bit as daring, not to mention fabulously entertaining.

Wild Time takes as its template what is possibly Shakespeare’s most popular and well known play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is the way it honours its source material: the bawdiness, the humour, the word play, the theatrical chaos – they’re all here, all mined knowingly and inventively and to delightful effect. As in HAG, the reinterpretation of the characters and situations to fit a modern idiom is expertly handled (Titania, Queen of the Fairies, sweeping along the platform at Bank station was a particular highlight for me and a moment I will no doubt remember with affection when I eventually get the chance to visit London again). The authors’ willingness to be bold and innovative in terms of language and form adds extra verve, and their understanding of and appreciation for theatre in every sense of the word results in a work that almost demands to be adapted for the stage. Take note, Wild Time contains some pretty explicit action, shall we say, though the poetry, humour and sheer joy with which these erotic elements are handled is refreshing and beautiful (and may indeed leave some readers opting for an early night :-)) Wild Time is a lovely book, and one that will raise a sorely needed smile as these dark days encroach.

For those daring a walk in the woods this Hallowe’en, let me heartily recommend as a companion to their trip Aliya Whiteley’s The Secret Life of Fungi, an exploration of the kingdom of mushrooms and Whiteley’s first non fiction book.

Readers familiar with Whiteley’s novella The Beauty (and if not, why not?) will already have more than an inkling of her interest in mycology. The Secret Life of Fungi takes us deeper into her world, unearthing facts and folklore around fungi that will offer something new to even the most seasoned enthusiast. Beautifully written, this book is an intensely personal narrative, tracing Whiteley’s interest in fungi from childhood walks with her father through to her continuing fascination with these mysterious life forms in the present day.

As you might expect from Whiteley, there is some lovely nature writing here, evocations of landscape that will stir a personal response in every reader. Above all, one gains a sense of going on a journey – of accompanying Whiteley both on her walks and in her contemplation. This is a book that throws up more questions than answers and I love it all the more for that. For those who cherish books as physical objects, The Secret Life of Fungi is exquisitely made and conceived and like HAG, would make a beautiful Hallowe’en or even Christmas gift.

As the Scottish winter closes in on us yet again, we take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be visiting the mainland much at the moment in any case. Very much on the up side, there’s plenty of reading and writing going on, and I’m hoping to begin a new winter blogging project before the end of November. In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe, and here’s to Hallowe’en, a time of change, transformation, and gratitude for the landscape, artistic creations and people that fuel our imagination. For ourselves, we’ll be settling down tomorrow evening with the 1989 Nigel Kneale adaptation of The Woman in Black. Fondly remembered, unseen for thirty years – let’s hope it holds up!

Assessing The Evidence

October 15, 2020 /

One of the harsher effects of lockdown for writers has been the narrowing of opportunities to come out of our studies and meet with people – with each other, and also with readers. We’ve all done our best with Skype and Zoom, and the ingenuity and enthusiasm of booksellers and events organisers in making the most of the tools at their disposal has been incalculable. We all know by now though that online meetings are not the same, and even as we enjoy catching glimpses of one another across the internet, there’s nothing like coming together in person to celebrate the announcement of a prize shortlist, the launch of a new novel or simply to compare notes on what we’ve all been reading lately.

This privation has been especially difficult for authors who have had books scheduled to be published in 2020. Even under normal circumstances, there’s a significant gap between completing work on a novel and sending it out into the world. Having to wait an extra six months or even a year before their work sees the light of day has been deeply discouraging. For those writers whose novels have been released this year, there is the sadness of not being able to participate in book festivals, conventions, and all the other events that would normally mark a novel’s rite of passage. As we re-enter a heightened state of lockdown, even the opportunity of celebrating quietly at home with friends has been pushed into an indefinite future. Which makes it all the more necessary for us to gather the resources we do have: to read, to celebrate and talk about the books we love.

Christopher Priest’s new novel THE EVIDENCE is published today. This is Chris’s sixteenth novel to date, which is achievement enough in itself. It is also a fantastically inventive, original and unexpected novel, a true delight to read. The Evidence brings us into the company of Todd Fremde, a crime writer who has been invited to give a lecture at a university some two days’ travel from his home island – for yes, this is a Dream Archipelago novel like no other. On arrival in the icy outpost of Dearth City, Todd finds himself with more than dreary weather to contend with as he is drawn rapidly into a situation that seems increasingly to resemble the plot of one of his own police procedurals.

As Todd struggles to make sense of what is going on around him, he begins to examine the activity of crime writing itself: why are we addicted to it, and what does it actually have to say about the nature of crime? The Evidence is a funny, thought-provoking, thoroughly entertaining book, a crime novel that undermines itself at every turn whilst retaining and honouring all the elements of mystery that make detective stories so satisfying.

I love this book, and I know you will, too. In fact I would go so far as to say it’s a novel that’s perfectly timed to bring some much needed joy and humour to our reading lives. If you’ve never read Priest before, The Evidence might be exactly the right place to start.

In a time of radical hope…

October 14, 2020 /

Reading James Bradley’s daunting yet powerful essay on climate catastrophe for the Sydney Review of Books yesterday, I was struck most of all by a passage near the end, which seems to speak as much to the current situation with COVID-19 as to the overarching horror of the climate crisis:

Like deep adaptation, radical hope is a psychological practice as well as a political position. It requires us to accept the past is gone, and that the political and cultural assumptions that once shaped our world no longer hold true. It demands we learn to live with uncertainty and grief, and to face up to the reality of loss. But it also demands what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence’, a deliberate fostering of the flexibility and courage necessary to ‘facilitate a creative and appropriate response to the world’s challenges’ that will enable us to envision new alliances and open up new possibilities, even in the face of catastrophe.

If only there were more widespread recognition that simply getting back to how we were before should not be our overriding goal, the potential for change that has already been demonstrated could be effectively harnessed. This is a matter not of logistics, but of political will.

Bradley’s essay also chimed eerily with the novel I have just finished reading. Madeleine Watts’s debut The Inland Sea is a short, powerful work that hovers on the boundary between the mimetic and the speculative, combining personal, seemingly autofictional elements with issues of climate change and the embedded aftershocks of colonialism in Australia. The narrator is a writer, looking back from some unspecified time period at the year she spent working as a telephone operative on the 111 (read 999) switchboard, connecting incoming calls with the appropriate emergency service. The calls she has to deal with are acutely distressing, often coming from people in immediate danger of their lives. Yet the narrator is told – encouraged, even – not to engage with callers beyond the basic requirements of her job. The life of the office is conveyed with grim and often hilarious accuracy. Unsurprisingly our narrator frequently questions her suitability for the job, wondering aloud how long she will be able to keep going with it.

The atmosphere of transience – the sense that the life she is living is already in flux – is compounded by the steady accretion of climate events that are taking place in the background of the narrative: devastating fires (we hear the literal cries for help coming through the switchboard) unnatural floods and violent storms. The narrator’s destructive relationship with a tutor at the university further pushes the unreliability envelope. Significantly, we learn that the narrator’s great-great-great grandfather was John Oxley, a British explorer of the early nineteenth century who spent years in an obsessive search for the ‘inland sea’ he was convinced must exist at the heart of the Australian interior. Needless to say, he never found it. Watts points towards the futility of his quest as a metaphor for the settlers’ mishandling and misunderstanding of Australia generally.

As a chronicle of our current moment, with all its uncertainty, uprootedness, personal and political floundering and disquiet, The Inland Sea forms a fascinating and persuasive argument, a beautifully imagined, hauntingly memorable work of fiction that spoke to me deeply. It’s worth noting that I came to it via this essay Watts wrote about Helen Garner and the relationship between autofiction and lived reality. I loved the essay, both in what it said about Garner (whom I tend to hero-worship, just a little) and its exploration of writing the self as an imaginative act. I segued straight from this piece of non fiction into Watts’s novel and couldn’t have been more satisfied.

It is a comfort at least, to know that important work is still going on.

Ruby Resplendent!

October 6, 2020 /

Today sees the UK publication of the brand new Titan edition of my book Ruby, formerly known as Stardust: the Ruby Castle Stories. (US readers will have to wait a week or two for this release but have no fear, copies are on their way.)

Ruby is a cycle of stories centred around the figure of Ruby Castle, a horror movie actor who ends up in prison following the murder of a lover. Through a series of shifting glimpses, we learn not only Ruby’s story but the stories and intertwined fates of those in her orbit. There’s a circus story, an alternate-Russia story with cosmonauts, an island horror story, a full-on piece of folk horror – in fact you could almost call Ruby a journey through the weird.

This new edition, which has been thoroughly revised and re-edited, also contains an extra story I wrote specifically to celebrate the book’s reissue and that I hope casts extra light on the fate and character of Ruby herself.

This book is very dear to me, for many reasons. I felt deep personal involvement in the stories at the time I was writing them, and the process of reappraising and revising them for new readers has been a real pleasure, offering many moments of surprise and recognition as I renewed my acquaintance with the varied cast of characters.

There’s a distinctly autumnal feel to Ruby – something about carnival in general, I think – and this October publication date feels particularly appropriate. So here’s to Ruby, at large in the world – I hope you grow to love her as much as I do. Huge thanks to Gary Budden, whose idea this was, and to Cath Trechman and the amazing team at Titan who brought the project to fruition.

Weird Wednesdays #16: Greensmith and after

September 30, 2020 /

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 hope you’re all doing well meantime.

Weird Wednesdays #15: Clarke Award shortlist 2020 – the reckoning

September 23, 2020 /

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!

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