Some of you may well be familiar with Des Lewis’s real-time reviews, which, rather than following the orthodox star-rated or synopsis-plus approach to literary criticism, offer instead something rather different: a personal journey through the book at the time of reading. Well, Des has been at it again, I’m happy to say, and reading his reactions to The Race has been a pleasure indeed. You can find his thoughts, reflections, explorations and discoveries at his live-blog here.
Category: the race (Page 2 of 3)
Exciting news! The guys over at Upcoming4me have just announced the first selection of titles to be included in their new annual ‘Book Box’ prize, a personal Year’s Best chosen from the books they’ve been reviewing over the past twelve months. It’s a fascinating list, and I’m delighted to see The Race in amongst it. The winner will be announced this Friday.
Upcoming4me’s review of The Race is here, and the Story Behind The Race, a short piece I wrote detailing some of the inspirations behind the novel, is here.
The Race is now available to order as a Kindle eBook! At just £2.59, I think that’s quite a bargain. There’s a generously sized free sample, too, so you can try before you buy.
The paperback edition is also up and available for pre-order at £12.99. There’ll be a link to the limited edition signed hardback very soon.
Over at Strange Horizons, Dan Hartland offers his thoughts on The Race in a review that is both articulate and deeply insightful:
“Allan is trying something rather unusual with The Race: a distancing novel about drawing in, a science fiction novel aware of its own artifice, a literary fiction impatient with mimesis.”
It is fascinating, discomfiting and rather wonderful to have one’s work subjected to such careful scrutiny. For anyone wanting to know what The Race is ‘about’, I would urge them to go and read Dan Hartland’s review – he explains things so much better than I do…
Just to let everyone know that The Race will be launched at LonCon on Friday August 15th at 16.30 as part of the NewCon Press launch event. We will also be celebrating the release of Adam Roberts’s collection of essays and non-fiction Sibilant Fricative, the completely revised and expanded new edition of Chris Beckett’s first novel Marcher, and the brand new NewCon anthology Paradox.
I’ll also be reading an extract from The Race earlier the same day at 11.30, so if you can’t make the launch, do come along to the reading and say hello.
Meanwhile, the very first review of The Race has just gone live at Rising Shadow:
“The Race is a beautifully written, complex and absorbing debut novel that deserves to be read and praised. It’s an exceptionally compelling and original speculative fiction novel that will resonate among readers who enjoy reading literary speculative fiction and quality novels.”
Which is good to hear.
The relocation has happened. The final few days leading up to it were pretty hectic, and the day of the move itself became fraught with problems when the guy choreographing our removals became convinced his truck wouldn’t fit down our road. Our stuff was so late arriving we had to settle the cats in the house and spend the night in a hotel. But unloading was successfully initiated early the following morning and we now have our hundred boxes of books safely awaiting shelving.
We are also online. We have spent our first days here painting our offices and the living room. We are eager to get the house into a functioning and comfortable state so that we can return to our various projects as soon as possible.
Our new house is an old schoolmaster’s cottage in a small village in North Devon. The surrounding landscape is unbelievably beautiful and I know it is going to take some time to assimilate it, to learn to be inside it. Both Chris and I have lived in Devon before – I studied and worked in Exeter for almost twenty years, and Chris lived at the western edge of Dartmoor for a couple of years in the 1980s – but this is a whole new place, unlike any in our previous experience.
So a lot of things are happening at the moment. One of those things is that as of the September issue (254) I’m going to be writing a column for Interzone. I’m extrememly excited about this, and hope the column will develop into a kind of ongoing enquiry into what SF is and where it is going.
Another piece of news to shout about is that The Race is now up for pre-order at the NewCon Press site. I have an ARC and it is beautiful. I have seen images of the limited hardback edition and that looks even nicer!
Hopefully we’ll be back to business as usual in the very near future.
I’ve packed seventy boxes of books this week, so please forgive brevity. The house-move is next Friday, so there is likely to be a blogging hiatus while we get ourselves sorted, but I’ll be looking forward to posting again as soon as I have a) internet and b) an office space that is halfway sane.
In the meantime, here is my schedule for the WorldCon. I have to say that from what I’ve seen so far (my own panel events, plus those of friends and colleagues I’ve been made party to) the programming for LonCon looks fantastic. The committee have clearly been working very hard to bring us a programme that is adventurous, relevant, diverse, entertaining and enjoyable to be involved with and I for one want to congratulate them on that.
I’m looking forward to LonCon. All the more so because I’m hoping we’ll have all our books out of boxes by then.
Friday 10:00 – 11:00 Don’t Tell Me What To Think: Ambiguity in SF and Fantasy
What does ambiguity (of setting, plot, identity, and so on) bring to a work of fantastic fiction? How is ambiguity created, and what effect does it have? Does it always work? Can a story be too ambiguous? The panel will discuss stories by Thomas M. Disch, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and M. John Harrison, exploring exactly how they achieve their effects, and asking what divides a satisfyingly ambiguous story from an unsatisfying one.
(David Hebblethwaite, Nina Allan, Scott Edelman, Patrick Nielsen Hayden)
Friday 11.30 – 12.00 Reading (probably something from The Race)
Friday 16:30 – 17.30 NewCon Press launch event
This event will see the official launch of The Race, along with a thoroughly revised edition of Chris Beckett’s novel Marcher, Adam Roberts’s collection of reviews and essays Sibilant Fricative, and the new NewCon anthology Paradox. I’m very much looking forward to this. Do please come along, say hello and get your signed copies!
Saturday 10:00 – 11:00 The Lexicon Gap
Prose Stylings, Voice, and Narrative Structure: As a reader, why should I care? These terms are often thrown around, but what do they really mean? And more importantly how should a reader translate them in to something useful for evaluating what they read?
(Alistair Rennie, Nina Allan, James Patrick Kelly, Stanislaw Krawczyk, Gary Wolfe)
Sunday 13:30 – 15:00 The Wrong Apocalypse
Zombies, aliens, and monsters from the deep are all very well, but — unlike climate change and other ongoing environmental damage — they’re not actually likely to cause the downfall of industrial civilisation. Are contemporary TV and film neglecting the apocalypse-in-progress? Where can ecological perspectives be found in SF and fantasy on screen, and how are they portrayed? What are the strengths and weaknesses of visual climate narratives, compared to their prose counterparts?
(Ramez Naam, Nina Allan, Jeff VanderMeer, Tiffani Angus, Ivaylo Shmilev)
Sunday 16.30 – 18.00 The Darkening Garden
John Clute’s The Darkening Garden (2007) argues for horror as a core mode of twenty-first century fiction. It proposes a narrative “grammar” for horror stories that progresses from SIGHTING through THICKENING to the REVEL and then AFTERMATH. What implications does this structure have for our understanding of horror, as a commercial genre and as a literary form? What works escape its grasp, and why?
(Paul Kincaid, Paul March-Russell, Nina Allan, Lisa Tuttle, Jeff VanderMeer)
So – in just a couple of weeks we’ll be moving house.
We began this process back in February, and it’s been the predictable combination of acute stress and not much happening for ages, but finally we’re set to go and about to begin packing our books into boxes.
We’re both tremendously excited. It’s a new chapter, a new landscape, new sources of inspiration. More on all of this in due course.
Since my return from Australia back in April, I’ve been concentrating on short fiction – I’ve had some commissions pending, and also the whole house-moving thing has been so distracting that I decided to leave off working on the new novel until after the move has been completed. I’m itching to get back to it – and I have the feeling this short hiatus will have proved actively beneficial. In the meantime I’ve written two brand new stories (both should be out later in the year) and rediscovered a rather interesting novella that I’m currently in the process of redrafting. This has been an exhilarating experience – I’d forgotten how fascinatingly unpleasant the protagonist is – and I’m hoping to have the work complete by the end of this week.
After that, it’ll be time for some serious book-packing. We are in the interesting predicament of actually owning more books by weight than furniture by quite some distance…
Just a couple of random updates:
My story ‘Higher Up’ is being reprinted in Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy 2014, edited by Steve Haynes. This story was originally written for my limited edition collection Microcosmos, for NewCon Press. The ToC hasn’t been officially released yet, but I’ve seen the list, and with writers like Tim Maughan, Carole Johnstone and E. J. Swift in the lineup there’s no doubting it’s a fine selection, with a good balance between science fiction and fantasy as well. The book is due out in July. 
I can also announce that I have a story in Solaris Rising 3, edited by Ian Whates. Similarly, the ToC hasn’t been officially released yet, but with Adam Roberts, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Ken Liu. Ian R. MacLeod. Aliette de Bodard and Rachel Swirsky among the contributors it looks like being a fascinatingly varied, thought-provoking anthology with some truly diverse interpretations of where science fiction is at in 2014. The book will be launched on August 13th, at Foyles bookstore on Charing Cross Road, and with a second launch event at LonCon just a day or two later. 
I’m delighted to be a part of this one – my story, ‘The Science of Chance’, has a significant relationship with the novel-in-progress, which makes it a special story for me.
Talking of novels, ARCs of The Race are currently being sent out, pending the book’s official launch, also at LonCon, on August 15th. It was a deeply strange moment, finally holding the book in my hands, and seeing the stories of these characters – Jenna, Christy, Alex and Maree – take on reality in the world beyond my hard drive. I’m very excited about the launch, and about LonCon in general. I’ve just received my draft schedule, and this, together with various bits of info I’ve gleaned from friends and colleagues, leads me to believe that the organisers have come up with a once-in-a-lifetime-calibre programme. 
Can’t wait to get stuck in.
Finally and belatedly, just to mention that I have two nominations in the British Fantasy Awards, both in the novella category, for ‘Spin’ and for ‘Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle’. It’s thrilling news of course, and it’s particularly pleasing to see that Rustblind and Silverbright, the railway-themed anthology that David Rix edited for Eibonvale Press and Vivian Guppy’s original home, has also been shortlisted in the Best Anthology category. In her year’s summation for Best Horror of the Year 6, Ellen Datlow describes Rustblind as ‘a terrific anthology’ and notes that ‘the interstitial material by editor David Rix is consistently fascinating.’ For me personally, Rustblind demonstrates a quality of cohesion, of thematic intent, that is all too often lacking in anthologies. The stories that David has selected feel like they belong together, and each is strengthened and accelerated, if you like, by the others’ presence. Too many anthologies end up having a disparate, ‘rag bag’ feel – you don’t know where to start, and all too often you lay the book aside long before the finish. Rustblind is the opposite of that – you sense you’re being taken on a journey, which to my mind is the whole point of the format, and in a book about railways especially so.
The full list of BFA nominees can be found here.
I’m thrilled to be able to reveal the cover artwork for my novel The Race, out this summer from NewCon Press. The image is by Ben Baldwin, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say that it is stunning.
Ben has illustrated my stories many times, and when he enquired about designing the cover artwork for The Race I was delighted. Ben prefers to read a work in full before beginning to think about how he might illustrate it, and his understanding of what I write has always been so intuitive and so accurate I knew I would love whatever he came up with. I was not wrong.
Like all Ben’s work, the cover for The Race has a lyrical and haunting quality that meshes perfectly with the novel’s main themes. I asked Ben if he would design a wraparound cover, because I have a particular liking for them. The design draws inspiration from the work of Escher, with its dance-like, repeating rhythms.
Thank you, Ben. I love it.
The most inspiring thing I’ve read this week is Lisa Allardice’s interview with Alice Munro for The Guardian. I remember the day Munro won the Nobel because I was just able to catch the live result before we went to collect John Clute from the station – he was here for lunch. As a Canadian, John was delighted by the news, and we spent some time discussing exactly what it is that makes Munro so special.
For me, it’s the deftness of her sentences (never showy but always rich, always perfectly finished) combined with the hyper-reality that characterises all of her stories. It would be wrong to call Munro a magical realist – her use of the fantastic is not so overt as that – but there is something about the world she creates, nonetheless, a particular way of seeing that seems tinged with a constant awareness of the un-usual.
She writes about ordinary people, people who are often trapped within lives that seem too small for them, yet they are made extraordinary by their gifts of perception.
It seems clear that in this respect at least all of Munro’s characters are versions of Munro herself. Reading about her life difficulties filled me with that odd mixture of anger and gladness that always overcomes me when I hear about writers – often women, but not always – who have faced a disproportionate struggle to be heard.
With hindsight, it seems inevitable that a talent such as Munro’s would be recognised. But for her, at the time, her isolation was a source of genuine despair.
Reading about her writing process – “…everything by hand just the way it comes to me and then I rearrange, and rewrite and rewrite. It might take me six months at least. It might even take me a year. I will be going over it and over it.” – is just massively helpful and inspiring. To know that the apparent spontaneity of these perfect stories, their intrinsic rightness, is something that even Munro has to pick away at – I find that greatly comforting.
I’m still working on the final edits for The Race. The edits Ian suggested are very light indeed, so it’s not his fault – but as usual I’m finding dozens and dozens of things I want to change, and so the process is taking longer than I thought it would. I’m seeing this less as a problem and more as a god-sent opportunity to get the manuscript exactly how I want it.
It’s fascinating, reading the book again after almost seven months of not looking at it at all. I hope it’s now better than it was when I sent it in. And the first responses have been so generous, which is hugely encouraging.
Meanwhile, work on the new book continues. Chris finally let me read the first section of his new one earlier in the week. I think it might be the most exciting thing he’s yet written.
Not helped by having two cats more or less permanently in residence on top of his printer.
I’m working on the final edits for The Race at the moment, and so it’s particularly exciting to be able to post a first reaction to the book from E. J. Swift, who read it in manuscript recently and delivered her generous and positive verdict at her blog:
“The directness of the writing cuts right to the emotional heart of the characters, but it is also the details, the sensory descriptions, which linger. Allan’s work always reveals a strong affinity with the natural world, and in this case the novel is a damning indictment of the environmental consequences of fracking on the Sussex countryside; an engagement with place at once lyrical and political. Evocative and compelling, this is an irresistible read.”
At this stage, with some months still to go before the novel is published, and with only a handful of people having read it, it’s really very gratifying and cheering to get this kind of reaction, and I’m looking forward to posting more snippets of news about The Race in the near future.