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Category: Weird Wednesdays (Page 3 of 3)

Weird Wednesdays #5: China Mountain Zhang

July 8, 2020 /

“I never know what’s going on. Even when I’m in the middle of some secret, like a surprise anniversary party, or when I was at the scene of the event people talk about years later, I missed stuff and other people drew different conclusions than I did. I can’t imagine that other people really know how the government works. And if our government is beyond understanding, surely the Galactic Empire is beyond understanding. And I can’t believe that one evil genius has a clear understanding because I’ve been a peon in a big company and lord knows we were never doing what the brass thought we were doing.”

(Maureen F. McHugh ‘The Anti SF Novel’)

In considering the nature and essence of science fiction, there is one conundrum I return to more than any other: what is it that defines science fiction as a literary form, and how does it differ from other literary forms, if at all?

I remember when I was looking back over the experience of chairing the Clarke shadow jury in 2018, I made a personal resolution to try and avoid using the terms ‘literary SF’ and ‘genre SF’ as a way of distinguishing between science fiction published and reviewed as genre fiction and science fiction that happened to be put out by a mainstream literary imprint. I felt at the time and still feel that such distinctions tend to be arbitrary, a convenient way of pigeonholing books and authors without contributing anything substantive to the discussion.

But I’ve been looking at this question again in recent weeks, wondering whether this decades-long obsession within SF circles with how a book is published and presented might not be a clumsy but nonetheless valid attempt to grapple with more interesting questions. I have often had the feeling myself, without being able to properly quantify it, that the most dynamic and satisfying science fiction of all is the work of writers who pay attention to literary values yes, but who come from within the genre, who write science fiction because they believe it is a unique mode of literary expression and one they are committed to as a project. Writers who read science fiction and whose science fictional sensibility – that slippery concept – is on a par with their literary ambitions.

Of course, any attempt to name names is going to vary from reader to reader, and is likely to be as contentious as the accompanying insinuation that science fiction written from outside the genre is ‘not real SF’, which leaves us back where we started. Far more useful to try and identify the specifics of what makes the best science fiction so powerful, so galvanising and so resonant. This week and with this blog post in mind, I reread Joanna Russ’s 1975 essay ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction‘. I found it fascinating, provocative and, like all the best essays, a challenge to any preconceived notions I might have had.

“Science fiction, like medieval painting, addresses itself to the mind, not the eye. We are not presented with a representation of what we know to be true through direct experience; rather we are given what we know to be true through other means—or in the case of science fiction, what we know to be at least possible. Thus the science fiction writer can portray Jupiter as easily as the medieval painter can portray Heaven; neither of them has been there, but that doesn’t matter. To turn from other modern fiction to science fiction is oddly like turning from Renaissance painting with all the flesh and foreshortening to the clarity and luminousness of painters who paint ideas. For this reason, science fiction, like much medieval art, can deal with transcendental events.“

Russ’s thesis, that science fiction is by its nature a didactic form of literature that concerns itself with objective phenomena rather than subjective states, is one that immediately recalls that Ted Chiang quote about sense of wonder and conceptual breakthrough I alluded to the other week. It is a contention I have always resisted up until now, tending instead towards the conviction that if science fiction is to be successful as literature, it must adhere to the same standards as literary fiction – a thought-trap Russ identifies immediately in her ironic and mischievous way. I find Russ’s comparison of science fiction with Mediaeval painting an illuminating and pertinent one. As a writer and critic in sympathy with the Ballardian precept of allying science fiction with modernism, I also find it easier to get on board with as the parallels between Mediaeval art and Modernist art, the way they have more in common with each other than with the Enlightenment, Romantic and Social-Realist schools that are sandwiched between them, are self evident and fascinating.

Moreover, there is no doubt that I too have often felt that vague frustration on being confronted with a work that should, according to my own precepts and by virtue of its standard of achievement at the sentence level, be successful as science fiction, and yet feels somehow muffled and devoid of substance, lacking not only in conceptual breakthrough but unable or unwilling to commit to the very concept of conceptual breakthrough as a necessary element.

I have found trouble in defining what is wrong with it, and of course there is nothing wrong with it, except to say that it is not really science fiction. Rather, it is using the materials of science fiction in pursuit of a different goal. There is nothing wrong with that, either – but it is interesting, at least to me, to try and get to grips with these distinctions.

Reading Russ’s essay again (and admiring it tremendously) I am bound to admit that the works of science fiction that best succeed and best endure do fulfil her strictures, as they do Chiang’s – Russ and Chiang are saying the same thing using different words. But is it also true, as Russ suggests, that science fiction literature requires a different form of criticism from mainstream literature? That the tools and assumptions we bring to the analysis of a work by Philip Roth are simply not suited to the task of interpreting a novel by John Crowley, or John Wyndham? (The American critic Harold Bloom famously argued that science fiction was ‘not literature’ and therefore could not be criticised according to literary precepts. He was forced to reconsider his position when confronted by the works of Ursula Le Guin and Crowley himself, whose novel Little, Big, he later named as a masterpiece.)

Drawing this loop even tighter, do I as a critic need to rethink my approach? Have I been missing the point up till now, judging texts according to parameters that should not be applied to them, whilst failing to address the work on its own terms?

Thinking intensively about these matters over several days, I have come to the conclusion that the most valid approach for me in writing about science fiction is one that unites the opposed positions of Russ and Bloom, that looks at the work as text, whilst acknowledging the aims of science fiction in terms of underlying conceit and conceptual breakthrough. Look at it harder, in other words. Ask what a book is doing as well as how it does it. It is true that the best works of science fiction are as satisfying as any in the whole of literature. But is it at least possible – and yes, I think it is – that they satisfy differently?

*

Maureen McHugh’s 1992 novel China Mountain Zhang won the Tiptree Award and the Locus Award, and was shortlisted for both the Hugo and the Nebula.. With themes of empire and colonialism still fresh in my mind, I thought now would be a good time to read this book finally, that it might serve as an interesting point of comparison with A Memory Called Empire, both in and of itself and in the matter of its overall approach to science fiction. How right I was.

Surname: Zhang. Given name: Zhong Shan. China Mountain Zhang. My foolish mother. It’s so clearly a huaqiao name, like naming someone Vladimir Lenin Smith or Karl Marx Johnson. Zhong Shan, better known in the West as Sun Yat-sen, one of the early leaders of the great revolution in China, back in the first days, the days of virtue. The man who held up the sky like a mountain. Irony.

But better that than Rafael Luis.

Zhang is an engineer, living in a New York that is now the capital of a revolutionary socialist United States. China has become the dominant power, both politically and economically, with a standard of living and scientific outlook years in advance of the rest of the world. For an American-Born Chinese engineer like Zhang, the ultimate goal is to study in China, a sought-after privilege that would enable him to take his pick of jobs and effectively be set up for life. Zhang is talented and, when he wants to be, hard working, but he faces several obstacles. Firstly, he is mixed-race, his Chinese appearance effected through a gene-splicing technique that is now illegal. Secondly, Zhang is gay – in a time and place where homosexuality is illegal and punishable with the death penalty. Thirdly, through no direct fault of his own, he has managed to insult his boss and get fired from his job. With the career path he was set on suddenly closed off to him, Zhang finds himself back at the bottom of the pile, with a mountain to climb.

Zhang would not describe himself as a political animal, yet neither would he describe himself as a dissident. His aim in life is simply to live, to slip between the cracks of a state machine that views difference less as opportunity than as a problem to be solved. With his own innate talent for problem-solving, Zhang loves the theoretical and mechanical structures of engineering, but he is not sure yet what he should do with this passion, what kind of life he wants to lead. The novel follows Zhang through the next ten years and through a variety of settings as he works his way back up the professional ladder and finds ways of coming to terms with his personal predicament. Interspersed with Zhang’s chapters, we spend time in the company of others who come into contact with him, some without knowing anything about him other than his name: a kite-flier named Angel, a young woman who encounters prejudice because of her looks, an ex-army officer who is now part of a commune on Mars. a refugee from the resettlement camps of the American desert corridor:

I never pictured Mars like this – I grew up in a frontier town on the edge of the corridor, my daddy was a scrap prospector, not a farmer but there were a lot of farmers and so I had an idea of what frontier farming was like. Some years they got crops, some years the People’s Volunteers brought drinking water into town in trucks and when I was in senior middle school I used to go get water for my mother. We had two big fifty-liter containers that we put in the back of an old three-wheel bike. I’d get them filled and then have to stand on the pedals to get the bike to go anywhere. I wanted to join the PV, but after I finished school and married Geri there were too many applicants. Then the party said the drive to reduce carbon dioxide was working. That the global temperature was falling, and it would be possible to resettle the corridor… Three degrees, and they’ll get back to temperature levels in the 1900s and it’ll rain in Idaho and across north central Africa and who knows, maybe it’ll rain carp in Beijing, and flowers will bloom in the Antarctic, but Geri still died and Theresa spent half of her childhood in resettlement camps.

There have been readers who argue that China Mountain Zhang does not really have a plot. For me, that is part of the beauty of it. If science fiction satisfies differently, then mosaic novels, also, satisfy differently, allowing the author to reveal a world, and a set of characters as they relate to one another within that world, at a speed and with a logic more congruent with lived reality. The ‘plot’ of China Mountain Zhang is the story arc of ten years in Zhang’s lived reality, with all the setbacks and revelations and unexpected sub plots that result when characters and situations interact. It is easy to imagine China Mountain Zhang as a TV series, with individual episodes spent with different characters living their own stories, the connections between them only becoming apparent over time.

And it does not stop there. One of my chief complaints about A Memory Called Empire is that the world – the empire – it is set in is so lacking in physical texture it never feels real. With the forward-thrust of the plot allowed to dominate, the lived reality of Teixcalaan remains out of reach. The empire of China Mountain Zhang, by contrast, feels fascinatingly, disconcertingly real, the characters, scenarios and technological advances so convincing the novel reads almost as if it were mimetic fiction. McHugh’s novel is a masterclass in worldbuilding, because that worldbuilding is so thoroughly a part of the narrative it is pretty much invisible.

But what lifts this book beyond the realm of the well imagined, alternate-world ‘slice of life’ novel and properly into the realm of science fiction is its preoccupation with systems of engineering – mechanical, social and political. ‘Science fiction is the only modern literature to take work as its central and characteristic concern’, Russ says in ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction’. This position is reiterated by McHugh herself in her own essay ‘The Anti SF Novel’, in which she describes how aspects of the novel that are commonly viewed as background through being so familiar – technology, politics, society, philosophy – in the case of the science fiction novel can and often must step forward into the foreground to become the novel’s true subject. Thus we follow Zhang to Baffin Island and then to China, where he studies Daoist engineering, a discipline that is almost as much an art form as it is a science.

Once again, McHugh’s skill in imagining and clarity in explaining are such that Zhang’s struggles to gain mastery over his talent prove even more compelling than the colourful and occasionally tragic vacillations of his private life. Where else but in a work of science fiction could a discourse on engineering and Marxist dialectics be described as the climax of the novel? And yet, we have by this time become so invested in this character and his world, so attuned to McHugh’s skill as a storyteller that Zhang’s lecture on history and chaos has both power and structural significance, drawing the threads of the novel together to form an exquisitely executed argument that – in just half a dozen pages – both describes the work’s narrative structure and tells us, with beautiful clarity, what the book is about:

“History is also a complex system. It is not random, but it is non-linear. Marx’s predictions were based on the assumption that history is a linear system, and using those assumptions he predicted the future. But if weather is a complex system, it seems reasonable to assume that history is also a complex system. History is sensitive dependent on initial conditions. You cannot predict the future.”

There is a sigh in the classroom. I have said what everybody knows but no one says. It is in the room, hanging.

Marx was wrong.

Just as Zhang himself is a mass of contradictions and ambiguities, so China Mountain Zhang as a novel is politically pragmatic, preferring to imagine, describe, extrapolate and posit rather than propagandise in any direction, a quality, I need hardly add, that is vastly to its credit. The language of the novel is detailed and descriptive – the chapter set on Baffin Island is a highlight in this regard – whilst remaining clear, declarative, and never self-indulgent. In this it mirrors McHugh’s own apparent fascination with language as system, with the novel’s exploration of the differences between different language systems boldly in accordance with the science fictional conceit of conceptual breakthrough. For someone such as myself, with a pronounced fondness for linguistics in fiction, this aspect of the novel forms a particular highlight.

Put simply, China Mountain Zhang is a science fiction masterpiece and a joy to read. Moreover, it demonstrates perfectly how the language of science fiction does not need to ape the language or preoccupations of mainstream literary fiction to maintain equality with it in terms of – again, a slippery concept – literary worth. Science fiction has its own preoccupations; science fiction that fully succeeds will be adept in the use of language that best explores them. Good writing is itself a skill, a tool, a conceptual breakthrough. Paying attention to how that skill is employed is itself an inseparable part of writing good science fiction.

Weird Wednesdays #4/Clarke Award #1: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

July 1, 2020 /

Early on in lockdown and following the splendid BBC documentary timed to coincide with the release of the third volume in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Chris and I decided to watch the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which we had missed the first time around and streaming on iPlayer. Mark Rylance’s superb portrayal of Cromwell, together with a wonderful score, the most incredible set designs and costuming and all round attention to detail made Wolf Hall one of my standout small screen experiences of the year so far. The care that had been lavished on this production and above all a deep love and understanding of the source material was evident in every frame and I was only sorry I hadn’t got round to watching it sooner. I enthused about the series to my mother (oh yes, and Morse Suppers are back!) encouraging her to get into it if only for Rylance.

“I don’t think so,” she said, once I’d finished rhapsodising. “All those people in cloaks and big dresses, politicking and then having their heads cut off. Not for me.”

I could have gone on about how unfair a judgement that was on the magnificence of what had been achieved, but then, I realised, I couldn’t exactly tell her she was wrong, either. As a baseline summary, hers was actually pretty fair, one that caused me to consider the nature and purpose of historical fiction more generally and how closely allied that genre is with space opera, a comparison that sounds unlikely but that becomes more resonant the more I think about it.

As Jonathan Strahan said on a recent episode of The Coode Street Podcast (do listen, it’s great), ‘any stirring space opera adventure is by its nature epic fantasy,’ and for me at least, looking at space opera through the lens of historical fiction has come to seem far more apposite and useful than trying to interrogate it as science fiction. The paraphernalia of most space opera – planet-spanning empires, faster-than-light travel, jump-gates, fleets of intergalactic battle-cruisers, sworn allegiances and deadly betrayals – is surely the stuff of fantasy by any other name, and as the most popular recent TV franchises demonstrate, this kind of epic fantasy draws much of its inspiration either directly from realworld history, or from the fiction derived from it. Being honest about this, rather than attempting to squeeze space opera inside an ill-fitting science fictional rationale, not only makes better sense in terms of writing criticism, it actually renders the genre more enjoyable, engaging and rewarding, as Strahan himself put it. Or at least it does for me.

The protagonist of Arkady Martine’s debut A Memory Called Empire is Mahit Dzmare. Mahit is a native of Lsel Station, the hollow bathysphere that is the population centre of the Lsel system, a small group of uninhabitable planets whose metallic ores form the main export and livelihood of the thirty thousand souls for whom Lsel Station is home. Lsel Station is a relatively young polity, its history spanning just fourteen generations. It is nonetheless proudly independent, and determined to preserve its integrity against the vast and ancient neighbouring empire of Teixcalaan. When Lsel Station’s ambassador to Teixcalaan stops communicating with home, Mahit is hastily dispatched to the City in his place. As a new and inexperienced negotiator, she must both seek to maintain the good diplomatic relations that have been established, whilst at the same time endeavouring to discover exactly what happened to her predecessor and what he had been planning. When Mahit learns that Yskandr Aghavn, the former ambassador, is dead, she quickly comes to suspect that he has been murdered.

Though fluent in Teixcalaanli and steeped in City culture and politics from a young age, Mahit is viewed by her Teixcalaanlizlim hosts as a barbarian. Largely incurious about Stationer culture, language and social mores, the Teixcalaanlizlim have until now remained ignorant of Lsel Station’s reliance on symbiosis to preserve their collective memory and body of knowledge. As Mahit takes up her position in the ambassador’s apartments, her hosts do not know that she carries within her an imago, a digital copy of her predecessor that allows her not only access to Yskandr’s memories, experience and knowledge, but also creates of the two of them a kind of joint entity, a person that is still entirely Mahit Dzmare whilst embodying the living spirit of Yskandr Aghavn. That Yskandr’s imago is fifteen years out of date, and therefore has no knowledge of why or how he came to be dead, provides an additional problem Mahit will have to navigate. With terrorist incidents and increasingly violent protests suddenly rife in the City, Lsel Station seems more at risk than ever of losing its independence, of being subsumed by an empire that views it as disposable.    

One of the complaints most commonly levelled at genre science fiction is that the proliferation of characters, combined with the ‘funny names’ and ‘unfamiliar technology’ that constitute its trappings makes it difficult to get to grips with unless you are a seasoned and practised reader of SF and fantasy. I am and always have been in two minds about this complaint. Yes, A Memory Called Empire does require a degree of concentration and commitment from the reader, especially at the outset – there is a lot to get to grips with, and quickly. Does it require more concentration than Wolf Hall though, or War and Peace, come to that? I’m not sure that it does. Martine helpfully provides a glossary of terms and character names – as Tolstoy provides a family tree at the opening of War and Peace – but as I was reading the book on Kindle I didn’t know it was there until I reached the end, by which time I was comfortably familiar with all the information it contained and so did not need it anyway.

I am under no illusion that many readers of mainstream literature would reject this book as ‘unreadable’ a couple of pages in. But are they any less closed-minded than readers of space opera who are unwilling to give James Joyce’s Ulysses a try on the grounds that it is ‘too difficult’? I’ve thought about this a lot, even written about it sometimes, and have broadly come to the conclusion that all readers have their comfort zones, many are unwilling to get out of them and most genres and modes of literature are ‘specialist’ to a degree. In order to determine how far a book is successful, or satisfying, we need to dig deeper. We need to look further than at the label that has been attached to it.

I have read a lot of Hilary Mantel (three of her contemporary novels as well as her memoir and her most recent short fiction collection), but I have not read the whole of the Wolf Hall trilogy. I have read Bring up the Bodies, because I thought it was important to get the sense of what these books were like and because I have always been fascinated by the power struggle that ensued around the rise and cataclysmic fall of Anne Boleyn. I found the book engaging and entertaining, full of intelligence and witty analysis, elegance personified. I also found it rather one-note, almost bland when compared for example with Beyond Black or Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Mantel is one of my writing heroes, but I know I am something of an outlier in preferring her contemporary works to her Cromwellian magnum opus. I also know that this comes down to my personal preferences rather than any diminution of quality in Mantel’s work.

For the most part, I have always found this kind of reconstructive historical fiction – novels in which historically famous people are made to say things and think thoughts we cannot for the most part know they ever said or thought – difficult to get on board with. Reading Bring Up the Bodies, I kept thinking how much I’d love to get away from the royal palaces – compelling though the court intrigue is – and out into the provinces. How much I would have preferred to be reading a novel about a young woman in an English market town, learning to read and write against her stepfather’s wishes, becoming obsessed with the new queen maybe as the royal drama unfolded down in London. About the claims and counter-claims amongst the villagers and tradespeople as the rumour that Boleyn was a witch began to spread and take hold. Similarly, I wouldn’t now be overwhelmed with enthusiasm at the prospect of a novel about the occupants of No 10 Downing Street scrambling to conduct damage limitation strategy on the Barnard Castle fiasco – we have Tim Shipman for that. I would be more inclined to read about a nurse bringing up three kids on her own whilst working on the medical front line, her daughter worried about her university place amidst the cancellation of exams, her youngest son trying to mitigate his unspoken terror of the virus by incorporating it into the world of his favourite computer game.

I prefer close focus, intimate worlds, the armreach of history revealed through the handsbreadth of personal experience. I don’t want to watch an advert for the latest iteration of digital technology – I want to see how that technology affects individuals, here, on the ground.  

These preferences, I hope, go some way to explaining why I always get something of a sinking feeling around space opera. It is all too tidy, too forward-thrusting, too shallow. I remember having exactly the same feeling when I read Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and more recently Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit. In both cases I became mildly invested in the story – I find getting invested in stories remarkably easy – and even enjoyed my time spent in its world. But once I’d finished reading, that was that. As text, neither of these novels made much of an impression, and beyond a basic plot outline I could barely tell you now what actually went on in them.

This is not – and I want to stress this – for want of ideas or ambition on the part of the authors. What I find most admirable about the new space opera is the way in which a fresh generation of SF writers are using space opera actively to deconstruct and analyse aspects of our realworld politics, past and present, in ways not too dissimilar from what Mantel is doing in her Wolf Hall trilogy. There is a wealth of intellectual engagement in A Memory Called Empire, as Arkady Martine uses both her characters and her setting to examine the experience of colonised peoples, the relationship between the individual and the body politic, the social and cultural morality of assimilation. Much has already been written about these aspects of the novel, and I would encourage anyone reading this essay to also take a look at Catherine Baker’s excellent review at Strange Horizons for a view of the novel very different from my own.     

Because what I don’t get from A Memory Called Empire is any real depth. The characters have characteristics and yes, they are distinguishable from one another but they exist entirely in subservience to the plot. We have no idea what kind of upbringing either Mahit or Yskandr enjoyed on Lsel Station. We have no idea what Nine Adze was like at school. We don’t have a clue how His Brilliance the Emperor Six Direction likes to spend his downtime. The novel is all events: this happened, then this, then this, then this. And sadly it is the same with sense of place. Yes, we know that the City is rapturously beautiful around its centre with some slummy outer districts none of the tourists ever get to see. But the setting feels disappointingly generic, the blocked-in backdrop to a game, a hodge-podge of pre-used tropes (marbled halls, elegant formal gardens, super-highways linking one part of the City to another). What of the rest of the planet? What of the climate, the terrain? And again, how and where do ordinary people live when they’re not demonstrating in the streets either for or against the emperor incumbent?   

I would undoubtedly have found more tolerance for this lack of an emotional and geographical hinterland had a stronger attempt been made by Martine to create an alien culture and way of life I could genuinely believe in as alien. What I get instead is a world saturated with the assumptions, language, humour (oh so millennial) and even fannish in-jokes of the American demotic, twenty-first century variety. In other words, even the worldbuilding, which appears so inventive and richly textured at first glance, is thin, overly reliant on a readership already familiar with these kinds of milieux to fill in the gaps. For comparison, have a look at the solidly constructed, deeply imagined, bracingly tactile worldbuilding on display in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, or the powerful, nerve-jangling testimony of Severian in Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of th Torturer, and you’ll see what I mean.     

I did appreciate Martine’s decision to include short sections of ‘found texts’ from both Stationer and Teixcalaanli sources at the head of each chapter – I always love stuff like that, and it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that the most interesting part of the novel for me is the role played by epic poetry in Teixcalaanli culture. The section near the end, in which Mahit helps her official liaison (and love interest) Three Seagrass to construct a poem that will also act as an encoded statement of resistance to the unfolding military coup, the way in which that poem goes viral and evolves its identity as it reaches more users – I liked this very much, indeed I would vastly have preferred it if the entire book had been about Mahit’s conflicted relationship with Teixcalaanli poetry and her parsing of its contradictions through scholarship. That, or her rejection of the imperial tradition as she begins to forge a new form of modernist poetry that is inalienably of Lsel Station.

I am always going to prefer Ulverton to Bring Up the Bodies. I am always going to prefer China Mountain Zhang to A Memory Called Empire. I am just that kind of reader, and writer. Whatchya gonna do?

In terms of its worthiness to be included on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, I will say that I understand perfectly why this book has been selected. In the themes it addresses as well as the smart, progressive and action-filled manner in which it addresses them, A Memory Called Empire is a good example of contemporary space opera, one many of today’s readership will enjoy and feel passionately about. As a debut novel in this subgenre it is entertaining, enjoyably complex and professionally executed. Whether the novel is outstanding per se, and whether being a good example of something – a measure of where the field is at as opposed to where it might set its sights – is a good enough reason for choosing it as one of the six best science fiction novels of the year, will, as always, come down to the judgement and proclivities of individual readers.

Weird Wednesdays #3

June 24, 2020 /

First up this week comes Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail, which I happened to be reading precisely now in an attempt to get ahead with my Clarke Award reading. What with the unusually long wait for this year’s submissions list, my ideas about what might be on the shortlist were uncharacteristically vague. My only solid hunch was Infinite Detail, and I was more than a little surprised to see it not just not make the cut but not even feature on the submissions list itself. That mystery was solved when someone kindly pointed out to me that there is currently no UK edition of Infinite Detail and so it is not eligible to be considered for the Clarke.

It seems counter-intuitive to me, to say the least, that a novel as British as Infinite Detail had to look to the USA to find its publishing home. There are some chapters (and beautifully executed they are, too) set in New York, but the bulk of the action and the whole sensibility of the novel are rooted in British culture, British politics and British social structures. Luckily, Infinite Detail is readily available to UK readers as a Kindle eBook, but even so, the idea that it will not be visible on bookshop shelves here does both the novel and its author a disservice, not to mention the incongruity of one of 2019’s most interesting SF novels being ineligible for what is arguably the world’s most respected and important juried science fiction award.

I am beginning to perceive a pattern here, though. There is a loose group – a new New Wave, if you like – of British writers whose work might best be described as the natural successor to the ‘mundane SF’ of the early 2000s. These writers are less interested in the widescreen formats of space opera, MilSF and interstellar travel, focusing instead on stories set mainly on Earth in a recognisable near-future, with an emphasis on contemporary politics and class inequalities, the impact of new technologies on ordinary lives. I would include within this group Maughan himself, from way back, but also Simon Ings, Matt Hill, Matthew de Abaitua, Carl Neville and James Smythe (whose 2014-Clarke-shortlisted The Machine stands as a key example of this kind of writing). I have been asking myself for a while now why it is that these writers are so much less visible than they ought to be, given the contemporary relevance and literary excellence of their output. Their work is (surely) right at the cutting edge of science fiction. It is using science fiction to engage directly with social and political questions, demonstrating SF as the radical mode of literature it has always been.

For genre publishing imprints not to acquire and promote this kind of science fiction seems short-sighted and again, counter-intuitive. These writers are important and talented and they deserve recognition. You could argue that it is in this brand of politically engaged, intellectually curious stripe of SF that the future of the genre lies. Especially in our current moment, audiences who look to science fiction for inspiration, information or even a warning about where future developments could take us are hungry for novels and stories that tread that uneven, liminal path between the present as it is experienced and the future as it might be. it seems ironic, to say the least, that both Maughan and Hill have seen their most recent work gain shortlist recognition in the USA, but not here at home.

Those who have been following Maughan’s career since his 2011 collection Paintwork, will find in his debut novel Infinite Detail everything they have been hoping for, and more. Set on his home turf of Bristol, Infinite Detail tells the intertwined stories of a number of individuals who find themselves present at a particularly brutal turning point in human history: the end of the internet. Incorporating story strands from immediately before and ten years after the crisis, one of the things I appreciated most about Maughan’s novel is that it refuses to take sides, concentrating its energies instead upon the human and environmental ramifications of an event that is viewed by some as catastrophe, by others as a new beginning. In the end – and Maughan is experienced and mature enough to know that the same could be said of most things – it is a bit of both. Infinite Detail is fast-paced without ever falling into the thriller trap, technologically articulate without descending into nerd-speak, intellectually rigorous whilst remaining accessible. What marks it out particularly though is its sense of place: the language, landscape and people of Bristol and especially their music are rendered with passion and that sense of familiarity that comes only through personal knowledge. More SF like this, please!

In one of those weird instances of reading synchronicity, my second book this week shares aspects of the first whilst seeming on the surface to be something completely different. Rupert Thomson’s Katherine Carlyle (2016) opens with its protagonist chucking her mobile into a river and leaving her laptop under a bridge, restored to its factory settings and labelled ‘free computer’. Kit is nineteen years old but for reasons that will become apparent she is also twenty-seven. Still grieving the loss of her mother, she has reached a state of personal alienation from which it seems the only escape route is to ‘go out on a limb,’ to cancel the life she is living and go in search of another. Taking her cue from a conversation randomly overheard between two strangers, she flies to Berlin, intent on tracking down a man she has never met.

There was a period of about a year when it seemed she had made a full recovery. Chemotherapy was over, and the operation to remove a tumour from her ovaries had been a success… Apart from the scar on her abdomen and the colour of her hair she was the same Stephanie Carlyle. That was how I saw it, anyway. But I was only twelve. Looking back, I think she behaved as if her time was limited, the pleasure she took in things disproportionate, nostalgic. Somehow the present was no longer the present, it was already past.

Kit drifts from place to place and from man to man: Klaus (a respectable orthodontist with an immaculate apartment and hidden tendencies to violence), Cheadle (a super-rich American with underworld contacts) and Oswald (who goes around carrying a piece of the Berlin Wall). For this first half of the novel, Katherine’s beauty acts as a passport and her quest is like a fantasy, the nineteen-year-old chosen princess moving through a potentially hostile world utterly without fear.

As the novel progresses, it gradually reveals itself as something other: magical and scintillating, an Odyssey with a female Odysseus, a story of time travel where the journeying mostly takes place within the space of the imagination. Thomson has Kit make repeated references to Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger and Katherine Carlyle shares many of the same dreamlike, uncanny resonances.

From the moment Katherine boards the train to Moscow the novel became a touchstone work for me, and the final sections in Archangelsk and Svalbard are like nothing I’ve read before. We understand that Kit is looking for somewhere cold – the winter temperatures in Svalbard range from -16 to – 46 degrees centigrade – in order to resolve the mystery and trauma of the eight years she spent in suspension as a frozen embryo. What she finds in the far-northern mining settlement of Ugolgrad is both more terrible and more revelatory than we could have imagined. The book’s ending could not be more perfect.

There’s a force at work, something I failed to anticipate. Since the place I’m heading for is clear in my mind only as an idea, and isn’t therefore, strictly speaking, a destination, I’m beginning to suspect that my eventual surroundings, whatever they might turn out to be, will have little or no relevance. The country I have chosen is hardly incidental, but this is not, at heart, a physical journey. It’s more like a journey back in time – or sideways, into another dimension.

Katherine Carlyle is speculative fiction in the most free-ranging, genre-bending sense of that term, hovering perpetually on the boundary between the lived and the imagined. Thomson’s language is note-perfect: never showy yet always elegant, always surprising, you won’t find a bad sentence from him here or ever. Turning the final page of Katherine Carlyle, I had to snap the book closed immediately, to shut myself in with it, to not look at or think about anything else for a while as I let myself assimilate what has immediately become a Book of My Heart.

The biggest mystery of all? Why are more people not reading and avidly discussing Rupert Thomson? His work shows a fascination with abstract concepts that makes it timeless, whilst remaining so deeply rooted in character it is always compelling as story. I remember feeling exactly the same sense of being overwhelmed and inspired when I read Death of a Murderer and then as now I think Rupert Thomson must be one of the most criminally underappreciated writers in Britain.

Weird Wednesdays #2

June 17, 2020 /

She was thirsty and hungry. Her skin was cold. She shivered a little. There was an aching in both knees, as if her body had retained the memory of covering miles and miles. She peeked through the gaps in the carriage: more lightly frosted pathways, the silhouettes of dark candlesticks in the windows of large houses, pale people with strange formal clothing that seemed to restrict their movements somewhat, particularly the women. Her eyes swam. She thought back to waking after seeing a man’s hands reaching for a large wooden chest, folding her naked limbs into it, tossing it in choppy white waters, the chest tumbling inside the sea while she screamed. And the sea’s creatures floated above the coppery lock and chain, bright and bewildered, as if something had been lost in translation.

This is a passage from ‘Zinzi from Boketto’, the penultimate story in Irenosen Okojie’s most recent collection Nudibranch (2019) and possibly the best carnival story I have ever read. This section in particular reminded me of Sergei Loznitsa’s 2018 movie A Gentle Creature – the night journey sequence of course, but more generally Loznitsa’s sparing but potent use of speculative elements, which positions his film right on the boundary between the speculative and the mimetic, a kind of dream-reality, or nightmare reality – because it is at this juncture also that Nudibranch seems to be sited.

This book. As with Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season earlier in the year, my relationship with Nudibranch did not begin smoothly. I was finding it difficult to gain traction with it, kept getting the sense that everything was too disjointed, words for words’ sake, that the stories were deliberately eluding me, slipping away down the cracks in the pavement.

Okojie’s use of language was so good I knew this was my fault, not hers, that I was doing Nudibranch a disservice by reading snatches of it late at night when I was too tired to focus properly on what the writer was doing. I began again, making sure to read at least one story in full at each sitting, and bringing the approach that always works for me when I’m finding a text difficult to get to grips with: I started by reading the stories as if they were poems, relaxing my demand for ‘meaning’ in favour of a more instinctive response to the language in and of itself.

It was like a door opening. Less than halfway through the book I realised I was utterly gripped by Okojie’s vision, and by the time I finished Nudibranch, I knew it to be a book I would always want with me, a desert island book that contains so much in terms of both style and content you could keep reading it once a year for the next decade and never get tired of it. Like you could with Bruno Schulz, or Julio Cortazar.

As with both those authors’ works, the incredible thing about Nudibranch is that it combines powerful and intensely moving human drama with stylistic and linguistic experiment of a masterful order. This combination of narrative power with formal innovation is what writing is for me, basically, the aim, the goal, the ambition. And to see that ambition so successfully achieved in Nudibranch did actually move me to tears. I am so glad I read it, so glad it exists.

As speculative fiction, Nudibranch is important because it not only shows what is possible in terms of pushing the genre envelope but also because it reveals the inherent porousness of everyday life, the frequency and power of our daily interactions with the weird, their propensity to be transformative.

The Abbey was a carcass of its former self, its high walls reduced to mere remains. The sound of cars on the roads around it was jarring, alien. Mouth dry, barefoot, he stood slowly, noting the curfew tower in the distance. Exits at either end of the gutted green gladiator-like pit beckoned. He decided to take the exit in front rather than the one behind him. He crossed some stone steps before landing in the graveyard. St Margaret’s Church stood to his right behind the tower a short walk away, bearing a flimsy white banner that said Cafe Open. People passed him, throwing curious looks. Their clothing appeared odd and unfamiliar. He ran his hands over a few gravestones. The rough stone was cold to the touch. {‘Filamo’)

Literary and cultural allusions bloom magically in the midst of the text, bright and familiar flowers amidst a forest of the strange. The power of these stories to tear a hole in societal assumptions, to reveal inequality, to point to commonality – their political activism forms an inalienable part of their richness, their capacity to delight, surprise, terrify and occasionally enrage.

And so Berlin.

I like its slower pace. I like that I could cut a record here incognito and nobody would give a fuck. I could disappear in as much as a black man in Berlin can fly under the radar. I like some of the old memorial architecture, the Turkish areas, the cafes, the bakeries that pop up frequently. Every other person rides a bike. They have content expressions cycling through the city, their corner of a flattened atlas. I watch. It’s a kind of meditation. I search for the scars of breaks just below the surface of skin. I contemplate the dichotomy of how black men really are and how the world expects us to be, how difficult it is to breathe between the tropes that come at you, the roles already written. I think of my own break before Berlin, tectonic plates shifting. {‘Komza Bright Morning’)

For anyone who thinks these stories might be ‘too difficult’ or ‘not quite their thing’, I would urge them to try ‘Grace Jones’, or ‘Cornutopia’, or – possibly my own favourite – ‘Komza Bright Morning’. This story, which forms a beautiful counterpoint with the Kevin Barry story set in Berlin that I read and loved earlier in the year, contains no overtly speculative elements and yet seems to hover, like all the stories in Nudibranch, perpetually on the boundary between the seen and the imagined, the lived and the dreamed.

A talisman of a book, Nudibranch leaves me simultaneously in awe of and headily inspired by the huge and important talent that is Irenosen Okojie.

I have also been reading Broken Places and Outer Spaces (2019), Nnedi Okorafor’s memoir of the spinal surgery that left her temporarily paralysed, her subsequent recovery and journey to becoming a writer.

As a child, Okorafor was a talented athlete who in spite of suffering from scoliosis competed in tennis tournaments at national junior level. In school, she was drawn towards the sciences, with her passionate interest in insect life pointing towards a future career in entomology. At the age of nineteen, Okorafor underwent an operation intended to correct the curvature of her spine. The surgery did not go as planned however, and soon after coming round from the anaesthetic Okorafor was told she would probably never walk again. The battle to regain her mobility left Okorafor feeling isolated and traumatised, the path of her ambition permanently altered:

On the tennis court, there were days when I could see through time. It happened most times when things got really heated. Something inside me would align. The tennis term for this heightened state of being is ‘treeing.’ It is when you are playing out of your mind, when you can do no wrong, when you can make the universe yield to your every whim. I know it sounds intense, because it is. When I treed, sometimes I could predict the future. Not that far, about one second. I’d know exactly where my opponent was going to hit the ball because I’d see it happen right before it did. It was just enough time to make use of the knowledge.

Even before I began to write science fiction, though I didn’t know it, I was sci-fi.

I was lucky enough to see Nnedi Okorafor interviewed by Tade Thompson at the Harrogate Eastercon in 2018. I was especially delighted to learn of Okorafor’s passion for the world of invertebrates, which chimed so exactly with my own I felt instantly on her wavelength. I found her affinity for language and for speculative ideas equally inspiring.

Most traditional science fiction depicts a white world where I was not able to freely exist. But in the science fiction of what I’ve come to call ‘African futurism’ (which is somewhat similar to Afrofuturism, but is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and perspective, where the center is non-Western), my characters inhabit worlds in which I can fight, play, invent, run, leap and fly.

Okorafor is without doubt one of the key voices in contemporary science fiction, and I hoped Broken Places and Outer Spaces would give some extra insight into her working methods and her writing life more generally. In the Afterword, Okorafor tells us about the many revisions and substantial cuts the book has been through since she first started writing it in 1994, just weeks after her botched surgery, and I can’t help wishing she had been a little less brutal with the carving knife.

Broken Places and Outer Spaces was published as a companion piece to Okorafor’s 2017 TED talk on African futurism, and the book seems deliberately designed to echo the approachable, inspirational nature of these popular short lectures. In her TED talk, Okorafor states that ‘science fiction is one of the greatest and most effective forms of political writing’, and she has certainly proved the truth of this in her novels and stories. Her power of expression and originality of approach to science fiction makes spending time in her real world all the more rewarding, and the book would have benefited from more background detail, more insights into her family, more specific commentary on her own work. I would have liked Broken Places to show more of the expressionism and imaginative daring that is so present in her fiction. As it stands, it feels too much like the TED talk it has been paired with, and I can only hope that Okorafor will revisit the memoir form eventually, at greater length and depth.

I was fascinated to read Octavia Butler’s story Bloodchild (1984), winner of both the Nebula and the Hugo for best novelette. Butler writes in a bracingly clear, muscular style that carries the reader effortlessly along, and for me this story had the feel of the kind of 70s and early-80s science fiction that first drew me into the genre. I was reminded in particular of a story by Kristine Katheryn Rusch about a young alien female living secretly among humans (I can’t for the life of me remember the title!) which shared similar themes of co-operation and accommodation between aliens and the human colonists who first arrive on their planet.

Butler has said that Bloodchild is not about slavery. I don’t entirely buy that – my gut reaction to the queasily unequal relationship between the Tlic and their human hosts, the service the human hosts are forced to perform directly as a result of that inequality makes it difficult for me to interpret the ‘symbiosis’ between human and Tlic as a fair exchange, and to describe it as a love story – as Butler specifically does – is going waaay too far for me. But I greatly enjoyed Butler’s afterword to the story, in which she talks candidly about her own feelings concerning Bloodchild’s themes and motivations, describing how the story was written partly as an antidote to her horror of botflies and their parasitic life cycle. ‘When I have to deal with something that disturbs me as much as the botfly did, I write about it. I sort out my problems by writing about them,’ Butler says. going on to give a fascinating account of her response to the Kennedy assassination. I love these kinds of insights into a writer’s world and work, and this encounter with Butler left me eager to get to Parable of the Sower sooner rather than later.

To wind up the week, I also had the pleasure of reading Vajra Chandrasekera’s most recent story ‘The Translator at Low Tide‘, published in the May edition of Clarkesworld:

Eesha is a little younger than me, I think, but her hair is still gray. Her library is just one medium-sized room with a few thousand books piled up. I browse through them every week and have grown familiar with these stacks that don’t change. They are like acquaintances I nod to. I’m comfortable with them. They make no demands on me that I can’t answer, but more than that, I know there is no crisis that could make them turn on me, cut me out, leave me to die. You can’t say that about people anymore. There is always some threshold, some hard limit to friendship, to solidarity, even to kinship.

This story reads less like science fiction and more like someone’s real-life journal entries from the year 2060. I’ve never read a story by Chandrasekera I didn’t like, and ‘The Translator at Low Tide’ shows how the depth and fluency of his art continues to increase. I find it interesting to consider this story in conjunction with Ballard’s The Drowned World. Some of the images stand close together but the prevailing moods of the two stories make them quite different. What you have in Ballard is a kind of manic laissez-faire, let it all burn. Chandrasekera shows what life might actually be like if it did all burn. I love both stories and I find value in both approaches but at the time of reading Chandrasekera’s story feels harder-edged, offering none of Ballard’s wilful escapism, and is more frightening as a result.

You can read a recent interview with Vajra here. He says he’s working on a novel. I cannot wait.

Weird Wednesdays #1

June 10, 2020 /

This past week I have mainly been reading John Crowley’s 1979 novel Engine Summer. It seems incredible that this book is now forty years old. It might also explain why, several times while reading it, I found myself thinking about John Christopher’s The White Mountains (1967), which for me has something of the same atmosphere, with Rush and Will’s quests and voices not so very dissimilar, and which I would probably have been reading for the dozenth time more or less exactly as Engine Summer was published.

Engine Summer is not what you would call an easy read. From the first page it is elliptical, self-concealing, with a sense not so much of the mysterious as the actively mystical. I enjoy tricky books a great deal, but I became aware early on that Engine Summer was setting itself up to be the kind of novel I don’t normally get on with at all – I’m not keen on fabulism, as a rule, and Engine Summer is not only fabulistic, it is at least partly about fabulism. As it turned out, I not only adored Engine Summer but now feel profoundly grateful to it. For being one of those texts that come along, periodically (and they always do) to jolt me out of my disillusionment with the science fictional mode, to remind me that no matter what kinds of arse might be going on in the community at any given moment, no matter how derivative so much of what is written can begin to seem, there will always be a through-line of texts that create and sustain the field, that provide the intellectual and aesthetic roughage to enliven and stimulate and further the conversation.

And what a stunning, humane, enlightening text Engine Summer is. What liberties it takes with our patience, always rewarded. Crowley’s handling of the post-apocalyptic (old tech viewed as magic, hidden connections with the long-past that are invisible to the narrator but of profound significance to the reader) is sure-footed and brilliant, and much appreciated by me, because old-tech-posing-as-magic is a trope I happen to love.

Most of all, Engine Summer is a beautiful book and a beautiful story. Crowley’s language – his landscape-writing especially – is the hook it all hangs on, the hook that kept me, well, hooked even in those early stages when I wasn’t sure about the rest of it. In laying out, further exploring and ultimately revealing its central conceit, Crowley’s novel is masterful – at no point could any science fiction purist accuse Crowley of taking refuge in either the stolidly mimetic or the overtly fantastical. That it is also masterful as a piece of text, in maintaining and indeed glorying in its core components – language and form – is a much needed poke in the side of anyone, and I mean from whichever side of the barricades, who insists on insisting that science fiction cannot be literature.

Blink said: ‘It was as though a great sphere of many-colored glass had been floated above the world by the unimaginable effort and power of the angels, so beautiful and strange and so needful of service to keep afloat that for them there was nothing else, and the world was forgotten by them as they watched it float. Now the sphere is gone, smashed in the Storm, and we are left with the old world as it always was, save for a few wounds that can never be healed. But littered all around this old ordinary world, scattered through the years by that smashing, lost in the strangest places and put to the oddest uses, are bits and pieces of that great sphere; bits to hold up to the sun and look through and marvel at – but which can never be put back together again.’

See what I mean about it being difficult to believe this book is four decades old? I came out of Engine Summer on a kind of high, feeling energised and nourished and excited and so glad I’d read it. Reading around and behind the book afterwards, i discovered that Ted Chiang cites Engine Summer as a formative work for him, and I’m not at all surprised. In an interview I read with him at The Believer, Chiang makes a comment I think more or less sums up the approach taken by Crowley in his science fiction, but that also seems to encapsulate for me, in a manner I’ve never found so satisfyingly and succinctly expressed, the essential difference between the speculative and the mimetic:

“Science fiction is known for the sense of wonder it can engender, and I think that sense of wonder is something that is generated by stories of conceptual breakthrough. I don’t know if a sense of wonder is engendered by stories of personal epiphany.”

Chiang uses ‘conceptual breakthrough’ here to mean making a discovery that allows the reader to understand the world in a different way, to consider the possibilities for change or development that such a conceptual breakthrough might allow. Looking back on my own reading, I can see it has been these kinds of breakthroughs – intellectual epiphanies, maybe, as opposed to personal epiphanies – that have provided my most energising and memorable moments of engagement with the genre.

Chiang is also great in describing what it is that makes him identify as a science fiction writer rather than simply a writer:

“Genre is a conversation between authors, between books, that extends over decades. And one of the reasons I definitely identify as a science fiction writer is because I want to be a participant in the ongoing conversation that is science fiction. My writing is informed by the books I’ve read, so it is a response to what other writers have written. I want to be in conversation with other works of science fiction.” 

The full interview is here, and very worthy of your time.

I also made time to read Paul Park’s A City Made of Words (2019), one of the very excellent chapbooks in the Outspoken Authors series from PM Press. Each of these chapbooks features at least one previously unpublished story as well as an author interview, bibliography and other scarce material and one could gain a fantastic overview of what science fiction is ‘about’ and what it is capable of, simply by reading the volumes in this series. (Now there’s a project waiting to happen.)

Like John Crowley, Paul Park is an author clearly interested in stretching science fiction well beyond its generic envelope, and the results, for me, have made him a touchstone author. I hadn’t previously read any of the stories in A City Made of Words, but the metafictional techniques and original spins on traditional tropes familiar to me from previous encounters with Park’s work are all present and deployed to superb effect. In ‘A Conversation with the Author’ for example, what starts out looking like exactly what it says in the title quickly morphs into a surreal interrogation scene, in which the titular author is subjected to far more than just the standard interview techniques as the questioner attempts to wrest from him his professional secrets:

‘Let me sum up,’ I said. ‘According to you, the study of fiction writing is important to literary scholars, or might be if they agreed with you. The techniques of your discipline are important to essayists, or might be if they studied them. In addition, you have noticed many ancillary benefits. But the one thing you cannot claim is any improvement to your students’ work. Would that be a fair assessment?’

And then after a moment: ‘Why do you think that is?’ This is how quickly the cancer spreads. I was curious despite myself.

And like many people in his situation he seemed eager to speak, to take me into his confidence in order to improve his chances. Though perhaps he had been storing up some venom for a long time. ‘Because it’s based on lies! The things we teach people, it’s not what we do! No writer in the world takes our advice, or at least no good one. Plot, idea, character, tone, voice, setting, description, exposition – no one thinks about those things. It is a vocabulary invented by idiots to describe concepts that don’t exist. No one has any ‘ideas’, and if they do, they’re a waste of time. Once you start asking yourself how to do something, you can’t do it anymore.’

Glorious, hilarious, and never a truer word. Other stories in the volume include the densely knotty ‘A Resistance to Theory’ in which a scholar attempts to investigate the death of her supervisor literally through the theories of the linguistic philosophers she is studying. How Park manages to sustain this I have no idea but it’s brilliant. Still more brilliant is that the story is also a riff on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For a (slightly) more traditional science fiction story, ‘The Microscopic Eye’ is both ingenious and moving – a perfect demonstration of Chiang’s conceptual breakthrough theory in just a few pages. Reading Park always leaves me both full and hungry for more – and there’s enough in this short book to engage the mind and the imagination long after reading.

For one final recommendation from my reading this week, please turn your attention to an essay by Rob Latham in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Amidst the slew of pandemic and post-pandemic reading lists, think pieces and calls to arms, Latham’s ‘Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus‘, which examines George Stewart’s 1949 science fiction classic Earth Abides within the context of the present moment, stands out for its clarity, intelligence and knowledge of its subject matter, not to mention the fact that it is beautifully written.

‘And this is what science fiction as a genre has to offer us: not blueprints for specific futures, but rather a radical openness to change itself, a willingness to shed old habits and expectations and embrace the new,’ Latham says towards the end of his essay. One of the stranger phenomena – though perhaps not a surprising one – that has come to define these weeks and months is an upsurge in popular interest in science fiction, a curiosity about what science fiction might have to tell us about our current predicament. I hope this interest and curiosity will be lasting, one of the things we bring with us as we move out of lockdown. A willingness to ask questions, and to look in new places. To see where the limits are, and push beyond them.

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