Category: Weird Wednesdays (Page 2 of 3)

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.

*

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!

Five centuries from now, humankind will construct the Mothership, a multi-generation spacecraft that will carry thousands of colonists from a depleted Earth to their descendants’ future home on a new planet. January is a world that has the capacity to support life, but is different from Earth in one major respect: January is tidally locked, with one half existing in total darkness, the other broiling in perpetual, cancer-causing sunlight. The narrow strip of habitable land between the two dwells in twilight, a condition the human settlers adjust to in differing ways.

Many generations and wars later, the two surviving cities on January have arrived at a kind of stalemate. Xiosphant is authoritarian and austere. Its citizens live by clock-time, with day and night artificially simulated through a mandatory system of shutters and curfews The class structure of Xiosphant is equally rigid, with the respect a citizen is afforded largely dependent on which ‘compartment’ of the Mothership their ancestors travelled in. The city of Argelo, by contrast, is a free-spirited party-town, a capitalist oligarchy whose inequalities largely remain hidden from the general populace and whose nine ruling families seem more interested in internecine squabbles than the business of government. Between the two range the Smugglers, bands of rugged individuals who forge their livelihoods shunting goods from Argelo to Xiosphant and back again.

Far out in the frozen wastes there exists a third city, the City in the Middle of the Night, home to the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, key to the planet’s true nature. The human settlers have triggered a climate catastrophe on January without even realising it. If their new world is to survive, they must learn how to co-operate, not only with each other, but with the native inhabitants of the world they have almost destroyed.

The themes of the novel – the legacy of colonialism, racism, cultural appropriation and class prejudice, community, found family, the tensions between inherited tradition and lived identity – are familiar from much of the award-winning science fiction and fantasy of recent years. The City in the Middle of the Night though is ultimately a novel about climate change: the ways in which human behaviour impact on the environment, the cataclysmic effect of such behaviour on non-human populations. The story follows Sophie and Bianca, college friends from Xiosphant, and Mouth and Alyssa, members of a gang of smugglers based in Argelo, four characters facing personal crises whose narratives will eventually coalesce.

If I had to single out one book as the most disappointing from this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, this would be that novel. Though full of potential in terms of both story and subject matter, The City in the Middle of the Night annoyed and frustrated me on almost every level. Whilst The Last Astronaut and Cage of Souls had their problems (poor prose style and unforgivable bloat respectively) they did at least keep me moderately entertained, the former through its propulsive plot and giant centipede-space-worm-thingies, the latter through some halfway decent styling and characterisation. The City in the Middle of the Night, unfortunately, is one long eye-roll.

Let’s start with the material that had potential. One aspect of this novel that caught my attention in a positive way was the treatment and discussion of language and the problems of translation:

People in Argelo had no real way of reckoning the passage of time, but they had plenty of ways to talk about regret. A million phrases to describe what might have happened, what you should have done. Several major sentence constructions in Argelan had to do with information that had been knowable in the past: knowledge that a person had taken to her grave, observations that could have been collected, texts that were no longer readable. The Argelans had developed dwelling on lost opportunities into an art form, but they couldn’t say with any precision when any of these doors had closed.

I love the ideas on display here, the exploration of cultures through their spoken and written languages, and as with A Memory Called Empire, I found myself wishing this aspect of the book had been exploited more. Similarly, the final section of the novel, which deals with Sophie’s decision to transition to alien form, gives richly detailed insights into humanity’s journey to January as well as the history, science and culture of the planet’s original inhabitants. Here we find passages that edge us towards a genuine sense of wonder:

In my dream, I enter another level of the midnight city: a river of solid ice that encases but does not feel cold, rushing into a frozen reservoir under a sky full of stars. I’ve never seen stars, except once at the Sea of Murder, and these keep growing and shrinking, changing their position, flaring and subsiding. Time rolls backwards, and tall cities emerge from the tundra, great gleaming fortresses that withstand storms and quakes for countless generations. These cities climb into the night, drawing energy from the relentless wind and the flows of water and lava under the surface, and then I see them being built piece by piece. A whole earlier Gelet civilisation rises up in front of me, after I already saw it fall.

There is also some interesting discussion around the settlers’ unthinking oppression of indigenous cultures:

The Citizens never even knew what they had done. They invented myths about the Gelet – servants of the Elementals, or teeth in the jaws of eternal darkness – but all of those fables were about what the Gelet could do for people, or to people. The Citizens had stayed blameless in their own cosmology, until the very end.

It is immensely frustrating to me that the way the book is structured means that these passages – imaginative, detailed sequences in which the adolescent machinations of the plot finally give way to interesting ideas – came so late in the novel that I no longer cared. The effect as a whole is one of being top-heavy: the bulk of the book disposable, the remaining kernel of brightness mired in pulp. When I first began to read The City in the Middle of the Night, its themes of clock-time versus lived time, together with its emphasis on young protagonists reminded me somewhat of Karen Thompson Walker’s 2012 geo-apocalypse story The Age of Miracles. I found that book’s soft-centredness similarly irritating, and the novel as a whole was ill-thought-through, though it was at least proficiently written and its languid, somewhat earnest style had a certain charm. I don’t recall much about its plot now, though I seem to remember that the main character, Julia, had an annoying crush on a skater guy, a narrative strand that did not deserve the obsessive focus it was afforded.

Julia’s self-indulgence was as nothing though when compared with the on-again, off-again, overblown juvenile relationship drama between Sophie and Bianca. In terms of its character development and correspondence to lived reality, The City in the Middle of the Night reads less like science fiction and more like (bad) YA romance.

Everywhere we go, people stare at Bianca… She’s wearing a sheer silver dress that leaves her shoulders and most of her legs exposed, a wrap made of loose filaments, and silver sandals… I’m wearing a golden dress made out of some fabric I’ve never seen before that clings to my body in coruscating ripples.

‘Everybody is going to stare at me,’ I grouse under my breath.

‘Good,’ Bianca claps her hands. ‘They should. You look glorious.’

She’s wearing some fragrant oil, and every time I breathe it in, I feel dizzy, half wild with joy, out of control. We’re holding hands! In the street! We’re going to dance together, just the two of us, at some club that has walls made of speakers and air made of glitter. I can’t help feeling like this is buoyant fantasia, like I fell asleep watching an opera, and now I’m dreaming in song.

The whole Bianca/Sophie narrative is like something from a Mills & Boon novel, bubbling with heightened emotion expressed as a series of embarrassing cliches, bringing to mind the breathless crushes and apocalyptic breakups that characterised the picture-stories I remember from teenage magazines. There is little here that could be filed under ‘convincing, adult depiction of actual human relationship’. The segments (like the one above) set in Argelo, with their gushing descriptions of food and drink and clothing and vaguely outre behaviour have all the storm-in-a-teacup drama and faux transgressiveness of a midnight feast at Mallory Towers, and with an amusingly similar chasteness:

‘They’re hosting a giant formal ball, with two of the other families, and I just scored the two of us an invite. Absolutely everyone who matters in this town is going to be there.’ [Bianca] claps her hands together. ‘We’ll have to get ball gowns made, and borrow some jewelry, and dance until we can’t even see straight, and then dance some more, and it’s going to be epic.’

Seriously? In an adult novel?? And what is it with Bianca and the hand-clapping??? Every time Bianca is excited about something, there she is, clapping her hands. And this nonsense goes on and on. The relationship between these two emo kids (who are supposed to be plotting a revolution, by the way – some of the plot lines from Scooby Doo were more convincing) accounts for many, many pages and vast amounts of soul-searching. Clearly it’s intended to be the emotional centre of the novel. Yet the syrupy, one-note characterisation is simplistic and embarrassing; the banter, the smart, quippy dialogue, the unambiguous, feelgood morality tiresomely familiar from a hundred TV shows and superhero movies. And did the characters themselves – who we are supposed to like, to sympathise with, to feel empathy for – have to be so deluded? It’s obvious from page 1 that Bianca is a shallow, self-seeking manipulator. Why does it take Sophie three hundred-plus pages to get over her?

The characters’ naivete and lack of depth is a constant distraction from what might have been an interesting story. Neither is this broad-brush approach a problem that is limited to characterisation. Many of the key sequences relating to the novel’s thematic concerns are lacking in subtlety, manifesting as undigested chunks of polemic badly disguised as human interaction. Again and again, the theme and intention are clear but the execution is bland: characters shouting passages of semi-digested polemic at each other through a megaphone. Reading The City in the Middle of the Night put me in mind of how I felt as I struggled to find positives in Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit for Sharke 2018: you can see what the author is doing and while what she is doing might be valuable in terms of opening up science fiction to certain themes and arguments, in terms of their literary impact such novels fall disappointingly short. Flat, didactic and banal, they lack complexity, ambiguity, or nuance.

I find it interesting to note that in the case of both Anders and Chambers (and Arkady Martine, come to that) the parts of their novels I found most satisfying by far were those sequences in which their authors seemed to forget about the plots and characters, concentrating instead on the factual aspects, the subjects – linguistics, geology, biology, xenobiology, post-humanity, climatology – that form their novels’ scientific underpinning. Stripped back to their essence, we see the trajectory of what might have been. There is so much here worth examining. I only wish writers were being encouraged to examine it better.

Neither does it help to see a text scattered with the kind of inappropriate word usage and inconsistencies that seems designed to throw any observant reader out of the story. ‘The layers of permafrost unfold like wings, spreading open to reveal the naked ocean below’, and ‘unsteady fragments of tundra’ are both startlingly inaccurate depictions of what Anders is actually trying to describe, which is a layer of sea ice, or pack ice, breaking apart beneath her attack vehicles. There are also occasional, inappropriate references to time as it is measured on Earth, not January, detailed descriptions of battles that ‘even with the night vision’ would in fact be mostly experienced as a terrifyingly indistinct blurring of shapes and movements, Sophie immediately knowing how to operate a computer when ‘nobody talks to the Mothership, not for twenty generations’. Oh, and here we go again with the permafrost: ‘Alyssa executed a three-point turn, and then coasted the vehicle across a thin sheet of permafrost that seemed to tremble as they passed over it.’ Permafrost, n, is ground that remains continuously frozen for two or more years, located on land or under the ocean. In other words, not ice. It feels mean of me to harp on details like this, and anyone can make a mistake, but for me as a reader, such carelessness at the sentence level serves only to further weaken a text that is already weak.

I suspect that The City in the Middle of the Night has come in for particularly harsh criticism from me at least in part because I came to it straight after reading The Old Drift, a novel that in terms of its depth of field, technical ambition and all round literary ability surpasses it in ways and means too numerous to mention. Once again, I find myself in the position of having to explain that it is not the book as such that is a problem – it has a right to exist, and readers certainly have the right to enjoy it – but the fact of its position on the Clarke Award shortlist. It is easy to see why the judges might have been attracted to some of the themes Anders’s novel is centred on, but like so much of the current output, The City in the Middle of the Night is suffused with the sense of having been written for a particular fandom at a particular time. The nomination of such books for awards would seem to be the result of a current and increasingly widespread tendency to judge novels according to what they appear to be about, rather than how those themes are tackled in terms of words on the page. For me personally, this counts as slipshod, one-sided criticism, a criticism that is concerned with the promotion of particular ideas as opposed to the promotion of texts of genuine literary substance – texts that allow those ideas the depth and quality of consideration they deserve.

I believe passionately in the value of the written word in exploring and disseminating ideas. I believe especially passionately in the value of science fiction in pursuing a radical, progressive and diverse agenda. But I believe equally in close reading, for both readers and writers, in the study of how words are used and how stories are told. In the case of awards, and especially awards shortlists, I believe such attention to detail is of the highest importance, that it cannot, or at least should not, be deemed of lesser importance than context, theme or historicity.

The Clarke Award is for the best science fiction novel of the year, not the most popular. This is something every current and future award judge should bear in mind.

When your choice is to work or to die, that is not a choice. But Sao Paulo was no choice, either. It was a bad death, when this world was more than rich enough to ensure we could all eat, that no one needed to die of the flu or gangrene or cancer. The corps were rich enough to provide for everyone. They chose not to, because the existence of places like the labor camps outside Sao Paulo ensured there was a life worse than the one they offered. If you gave people mashed protein cakes when their only other option was to eat horseshit, they would call you a hero and happily eat your tasteless mush. They would throw down their lives for you. Give up their souls.

The future of Earth looks grim. Ten generations hence, the world’s premier power-brokers are not elected governments, but massive corporations, engaged permanently in a battle for supremacy amongst themselves. If you’re lucky enough to be a full citizen, you have access to healthcare, safe working conditions and subsidized training programs. As a mere resident you would be less privileged, able to live and work without persecution but with few actual rights. Fall foul of the status quo in any way and you’ll end up a ghoul, scavenging for resources in one of the vast undocumented labour camps, no one giving a damn if you live or (sooner rather than later) die.

On Mars, colonists who were once citizens have broken away from the corporations to form their own ‘free’ republic. Sensing that the Martian revolution could spread back to Earth, the corporations have vowed to wipe out their insurgency. Dietz grew up as a resident of the corporation city of Sao Paulo, only to see what was left of her family destroyed in an act of genocide known as the Blink. The corporation insists the Blink was perpetrated by Mars. Dietz joins the army hoping for the chance to make a difference – and possibly to become a hero. As she readies herself to face the Martian enemy, Dietz must also prepare for the additional dangers of life as a soldier in the Light Brigade: in order to cross the vast distances of space, soldiers are made to attain the speed of light by literally becoming light. Not all of them survive the process. A few, like Dietz, are being transfigured in ways the corporation never intended.

As Dietz’s timeline becomes ever more confused, she begins to understand that the enemy she has been fighting is not who she thought they were, that the war designed to defeat them appears to be unending. Even as her knowledge grows, each ‘drop’ presents a new risk of death. As Dietz struggles to outrun her masters, she finds her old ideas about heroism and soldiering coming increasingly under fire.

What a ride, what a charge. Kameron Hurley was last shortlisted for the Clarke Award back in 2014, for her debut novel God’s War. I enjoyed and admired God’s War, but had fallen somewhat out of touch with Hurley’s work since, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to read her latest within the context of the Clarke. What a delight it is to see a writer fulfilling her potential. What I loved most about God’s War and the short fiction from Hurley that I’d read in the interim was its densely textured language, and The Light Brigade is immediately, thrillingly identifiable as by the same hand. Time (and increasing fame) has done nothing to slow or flatten the vividness and immediacy of Hurley’s approach, nor compromise its intelligence or conceptual ambition.

What time (and experience) has done for Hurley is exactly what it should do for a writer, that is, to strengthen and deepen her technique. The Light Brigade is a remarkably complex piece of plotting. In less capable hands, the timeline could have become either too confusing or else reliant on clumsy exposition. Hurley nails it beautifully, presenting us with a story that is not only fast paced (and how!) but finely detailed and emotionally impactful. All questions are finally answered, and in a satisfying way. The order of events is complex but stick with it and you’ll discover everything makes sense. The characterisation is deft and moving – you really do get to know these soldiers, to fear for them, to care for them. Hurley’s language is leaner and meaner than it was in God’s War, maybe, but its beauty and personality is present, correct, and firing on all cylinders. The dialogue is particularly commendable: pacy and entirely contemporary whilst retaining a genuine individuality and never sliding into movie cliche.

For anyone who enjoys MilSF – and equally for those who think they don’t – The Light Brigade could be their novel of the year. Hurley’s interrogation of war’s crossed purposes, its vested interests, its abuses of loyalty and twisting of facts, its many ways of consolidating power in the hands of the powerful is righteous and damning and expertly argued. I need hardly mention that her treatment of gender and personal identity is not only bang on, but seamlessly integrated into the text. This novel is exciting and highly charged and it augments and enhances those qualities by being politically literate in a way that is deeply relevant to our times.

The everyday person doesn’t want war, but it’s remarkably easy to convince them. It’s the government that determines political priorities, and it’s easy to drag people along with you by tapping into their fear. I don’t care if you have a communist mecca, a fascist regime, or a representative democracy, even some monarchy with a gutless parliament. People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbours will do it for them.

Although The Light Brigade works perfectly well as a standalone novel – you don’t need to have read any of Hurley’s other work or even any science fiction to get on board – it is important to note the many and clever ways in which it is directly in conversation with older works of SF. I have not yet read Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers but from my brief researches around the text I can see how a good portion of The Light Brigade’s polemic lies in strenuously confronting Heinlein’s glorification of the military lifestyle and moral code, his proposition that only those who bear arms should have full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote (???!) I have read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, the other novel that Hurley’s is clearly in dialogue with, and while ideally I would have reread that book in order to have a proper discussion of it here, time has run out on me. Whilst confirming and supporting many of the arguments set forth by Haldeman, Hurley updates, redresses and clarifies issues of gender and representation that were (perhaps understandably) less fluently handled in the earlier novel.

This is all part of the joy of what the SFF community calls the conversation. Hurley has not only written a tense, original and beautifully executed novel, she has contributed at a high level to the ongoing SFF discourse, using her knowledge of (and beef with) works and writers that have gone before to expand and advance the arguments and preoccupations of science fiction as a literature. There’s even a nod to Ursula Le Guin’s 2014 National Book Award speech about the divine right of kings.

This kind of homage can only be fully successful if the newer writer is technically and creatively the equal of her predecessors. Hurley is all of that and then some. Politically astute, expertly handled and a damn fine read, The Light Brigade is fully deserving of its place on the Clarke Award shortlist, and sets the standard for military science fiction for years to come.