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On reflection

July 27, 2014 /

Writer and arts project manager Irenosen Okojie had this to say in today’s Observer about the Booker Prize longlist:

“If the panel was more diverse, then perhaps the list would be more inclusive. Here’s a radical idea – next time, perhaps the panel could be made up of an equal number of men and women as well as a few non-white people.”

Reading her piece, which is forthright, well argued and above all passionate, it seems to me that she is right on just about every level. Because although many of the individual titles on the Booker longlist may have strong literary merit and a reason for being, there is without a doubt something irredeemably safe about the list as a whole. What is it saying, exactly, this list? Is it saying that literature is ring-fenced, the property and prerogative of a narrow, self-replicating caste not so much of reader but of judge?

More than careful consideration, literature needs passion. Literature should not be in a vitrine, it should be out there. We need books to be authentic, raw, interrogative, questing, angry.

I was brought up short by what Sergio de la Pava said in a recent interview about the process of submitting his manuscript (A Naked Singularity) to agents and publishers:

“Replies varied. Some said ‘not interested’, others said ‘sounds great, send it to me’. I think what I found most dispiriting was that quite a few people were into the concept of a book about criminal justice, but when confronted with something that was complicated and not easily quantifiable, that interest disappeared. It was humiliating. It was horrifying.”

I felt so angry on de la Pava’s behalf, that a writer of such obvious passion and fierce originality faced with such hidebound attitudes should almost have been put off writing altogether. A book is allowed to be entertainment. A book might even be allowed to be an elegant intellectual bagatelle – provided of course that you’re reasonably well established as a writer – but complex and difficult? Hell no.  Eimar McBride came up against almost identical obstacles here in the UK:

“I really don’t think they have tied everything up neatly. I’m not interested in irony and I’m not interested in clever. I’m interested in trying to dig out parts of human life that cannot be expressed in a straightforward way, that don’t fit neatly into the vocabulary and grammar that are available. To do that you have to make language do something else. I didn’t really know how to do it, I just tried and that’s what happened… I didn’t want to crush what I liked about the book, which was the rawness of it. The one idea that I brought the whole way through was that I wanted to try to give the reader a very different type of reading experience.”

Should this – a very different type of reading experience – not be precisely what the judges of the Booker Prize are looking for?

My initial enthusiasm for the 2014 Booker longlist stemmed mainly (as with this year’s Clarke) from relief, that at least there was some good stuff on it. The good stuff is still good stuff, but on reflection, I think that in terms of literary discomfort, this year’s Booker longlist is falling short. As a writer, I have always found my greatest strength in looking to those writers who have gone before me, who have marked out some of the ground I nurture the ambition to encroach upon. As Okojie suggests, it would be wonderful indeed to think of new writers from any and every background being able to look at the Booker longlist and see their own personal champion in amongst it, marking out the territory, providing that secret kick up the arse to get them moving. That can’t happen with this list, or at least not nearly as much or as widely as it should.

The only discomfort the 2014 list provides lies in its seeming exclusivity. What are we doing?? Things need to change. Let’s hope at the very least that next year’s judging panel comes closer to the ideal that Okojie suggests above.

Booker’s Dozen

July 24, 2014 /

The longlist for the 2014 Man Booker Prize was announced yesterday:

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail)
The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)
J, Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape)
The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Sceptre)
The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)
Us, David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Dog, Joseph O’Neill (Fourth Estate)
Orfeo, Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
How to be Both, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
History of the Rain, Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)

 

My initial impressions are that I am liking it quite a lot. I feel a little disappointed that there are not more women on the list – but the women that are there are fantastic. I never got around to blogging about how much I loved Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a book that succeeds in being original, moving and fiercely important all at once. I’m delighted also to see Booker recognition for Siri Hustvedt, compellingly drawn to this her most recent novel, and indeed The Blazing World is already on my Kindle, demanding to be read. (For those who want to find out more about it – and you should – do please read this very special review by Amal El-Mohtar here.) And as for Ali Smith, what can one say except that she’s one of the most inventive and original writers working in Britain today.

How could I not be excited about seeing David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks on the list? It’s a book I’ve been looking forward to all year in any case, and as Mitchell’s most SFnal work to date, this can only be good for speculative fiction’s relationship with the Booker. Richard Powers is another writer I admire hugely – for the bold reach of his intellectual ambition as a novelist, for his fascination with music (unlike so many, Powers can actually write about music in a way that feels real), his wholehearted willingness to adopt speculative ideas into his personal lexicon.

Howard Jacobson? Science fiction? Two concepts I would never previously have included in the same paragraph in a million years. Jacobson is a relentlessly clever writer – the fact that he clearly knows it is the piece of evidence that counts most heavily in the case against him. Still, it’s interesting that the Booker judges have selected another science fiction work and I’ll be eager to see what Jacobson has come up with.

I’ve not read Joshua Ferris at all yet, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about him, and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour has received especially favourable press. Again we see a nominally mainstream writer fencing around speculative ideas, with issues of identity theft and the double coming to prominence. I want to read this.

Paul Kingworth’s The Wake is notable for having been crowd-funded (it’s the only indie press title on this year’s longlist – as with the paucity of women writers, this seems a bit of a shame) and sounds like a Riddley Walker/Harvest mash-up. Fascinating.

Of the remaining longlistees, it’s nice to see Aussie Richard Flanagan up there – and he’s a Tasmanian to boot. Flanagan’s writing is always exemplary and I can’t see this being anything other than excellent.

The only novel I feel irrationally prejudiced against is David Nicholl’s Us. This is probably very wrong of me, but I can’t get my head past the warehouse-sized supermarket piles of One Day, or the gruesomely mawkish film adaptation of same, which qualified as my most finger-down-the-throat awful cinema-going experience of its given year. (It’s worse even than Richard Curtis’s About Time, and that’s saying something.) The brief plot summary in The Guardian’s longlist rundown describes Us thus: “Douglas Peterson faces life alone, as his son is about to leave for college, and his wife for good. But Douglas is devising a plan to use a family holiday around Europe to win back their love.” Heaven help us. I can’t help feeling there must be fifty titles more worthy of a place on the Booker longlist.

Still, every jury should be entitled to its moment of madness. Going by past performance, it’s in the nature of the game.

Women in SF #4

July 16, 2014 /

Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan

I love hearing about other people’s trades. We were in a cabinet maker’s workshop yesterday, hearing a young craftsman tell us about how his father, a former train mechanic, turned to working with wood when he was made redundant from the railways. I still remember an evening spent in a car park in Bedford, waiting for the AA to turn up after we inadvertently drove over a nail. The guy who dealt with our call-out changed the tyre in a matter of minutes, all the while recounting hair-raising stories of performing similar tasks on the hard shoulder of the M1 while huge juggernauts rushed past every ten seconds. I find specialism of any kind urgently compelling, and I could have listened to that AA mechanic all evening.

Knowing this, it won’t come as a surprise that I love books that feature work as a strong component. And the first section of Tricia Sullivan’s new YA novel Shadowboxer is all about work – the work of being a fighter. Jade Barrera is seventeen years old. She is a troubled teenager with a heavy baggage of personal and family problems. She is also a talented practitioner of mixed martial arts, just beginning to make her mark on the sport. When she lets her temper get the better of her (again), her trainer gives her an ultimatum: get smart or get out. He also offers her the chance to spend some time training in an authentic MMA gym in Thailand. Jade is given to understand that saying no to this opportunity is not an option.

I found the whole first third of the book spellbinding. A favourite novel of mine is Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit, large portions of which consist of little more than move-by-move descriptions of chess games, and I loved this initial section of Shadowboxer for much the same reason. Tricia Sullivan knows her MMA and her passion shows to wonderful effect. Jade herself is so well drawn that we enter her world with ease. Shadowboxer is being marketed as a YA novel but rich in detail and sophisticated in psychology as it is, I think this is a book that readers of any age would relate to.

The fantastical component is also strong. While she is in Thailand, Jade stumbles into a supernatural world of treachery and child trafficking, populated by human monsters and Buddhist deities. Her guide and confidante is Mya, a young Burmese girl who has been forcibly separated from her family and enslaved by Richard Fuller, a vile and corrupt individual who wishes to utilize Mya’s special talents for his own evil gain.

Mya’s sections are rich in imagic detail, chilling and beautiful and intensely felt. I actually wanted more of Mya, her story and background, more about what happened to her family and what brought her into contact with Richard Fuller. Of Fuller himself we learn less still, and if I have a criticism of Shadowboxer it is that the interleaving of the two stories – Mya’s and Jade’s – feels overly hurried. I think there is enough material here for Mya to have a book all to herself – and I suspect that readers (this one included) would have welcomed a measure of background information on the Himmapan Forest and its mythical beasts.

That being said, Shadowboxer is a very special book, partly because it feels so personal and so deeply felt, partly because of the very lovely quality of the writing. There is nothing artificial or cynical or manufactured about the art of Tricia Sullivan. What you find when you read her is originality, spontaneity, a deal of beauty and above all a spirit of enquiry that – truly – is what speculative fiction is all about.

Shadowboxer is published by Ravenstone/Solaris in October 2014.

Back in the Lot

June 29, 2014 /

While boxing up books this week, I’ve had Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot on audiobook to keep me company. I think I’m right in saying that SL is actually the first of King’s novels I ever had contact with – not through the text, but through Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV adaptation, starring David Soul and James Mason. I was thirteen at the time, and I don’t think I’m the only one who had the bejeezus scared out of me by the image of little Danny Glick, scraping at the window to be let in. I don’t know what it says about me that I forced myself against my will to watch Part 2, just to prove to myself that I could do it, but that’s how it was.

It was another twenty years before I read the novel. I remember being impressed by it, especially by King’s evocation of American small town life. Listening to the audiobook this past week I’ve found this aspect of the novel, if anything, even more impressive. In his essay on SL for his Rereading Stephen King series for The Guardian, James Smythe says:

When I was younger, it was the second half that enraptured me: the rush of the hunt (on both sides); the thrill of not knowing who would and wouldn’t survive; and the pain of how much this affected the characters… Now, it’s the start that I love most. It’s the slowest of slow burns, all hints and drip-feed. King infuses it with descriptions that start you thinking about vampires before they even factor in the novel. “She dipped her head to suck at the straw,” goess one passage, describing the drinking of a root beer. “Her neck was beautifully muscled.” Another, during a kiss, reads: “She thought: he’s tasting me.” When the chaos finally unfolds, it’s a real payoff. You care.

You certainly do. So much so that I’m still undecided about King’s decision to have Susan Norton turn vamp. Dramatically of course he has to – she’s the Lucy Westenra figure – but emotionally I still feel nooooo that’s so unfair. Such personal involvement on the part of the reader is a sure sign of a writer doing their job.

It’s more than that, though. This time around, I was even more captivated by some of King’s writing about the town – those little prologues at the beginning of each section, depicting the town waking up, or the Marsten house on its hill as the sun goes down. There are passages here that feel galvanised by inspiration, feverish with it. It’s the real deal.

King wrote this novel – his second – when he was just twenty-eight years old. His approach to vampires – the heavy Catholic iconography, the rigid adherence to the Stoker version of the mythos – feels dated now, but that’s not King’s fault. SL was published in 1975, decades before the vampire industry kicked into gear. At the time, what he was doing – recreating a nineteenth-century classic in a truly modern idiom – must have seemed very new to him, as indeed it was. The fact that the writing itself still stands up in spite of the narrative showing its age a little is sure proof of its quality.

Salem’s Lot is a novel of passion – for the story, and for the craft of story. This is what most communicates itself to readers, what makes the novel endure. We need more books like this. More twenty-eight-year-old writers with guts enough to slam down their soul on the table and dare us to take it or leave it, because that’s how it is.

Various updates

June 16, 2014 /

So – in just a couple of weeks we’ll be moving house.

We began this process back in February, and it’s been the predictable combination of acute stress and not much happening for ages, but finally we’re set to go and about to begin packing our books into boxes.

We’re both tremendously excited. It’s a new chapter, a new landscape, new sources of inspiration. More on all of this in due course.

Since my return from Australia back in April, I’ve been concentrating on short fiction – I’ve had some commissions pending, and also the whole house-moving thing has been so distracting that I decided to leave off working on the new novel until after the move has been completed. I’m itching to get back to it – and I have the feeling this short hiatus will have proved actively beneficial. In the meantime I’ve written two brand new stories (both should be out later in the year) and rediscovered a rather interesting novella that I’m currently in the process of redrafting. This has been an exhilarating experience – I’d forgotten how fascinatingly unpleasant the protagonist is – and I’m hoping to have the work complete by the end of this week.

After that, it’ll be time for some serious book-packing. We are in the interesting predicament of actually owning more books by weight than furniture by quite some distance…

Just a couple of random updates:

My story ‘Higher Up’ is being reprinted in Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy 2014, edited by Steve Haynes. This story was originally written for my limited edition collection Microcosmos, for NewCon Press. The ToC hasn’t been officially released yet, but I’ve seen the list, and with writers like Tim Maughan, Carole Johnstone and E. J. Swift in the lineup there’s no doubting it’s a fine selection, with a good balance between science fiction and fantasy as well. The book is due out in July.

I can also announce that I have a story in Solaris Rising 3, edited by Ian Whates. Similarly, the ToC hasn’t been officially released yet, but with Adam Roberts, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Ken Liu. Ian R. MacLeod. Aliette de Bodard and Rachel Swirsky among the contributors it looks like being a fascinatingly varied, thought-provoking anthology with some truly diverse interpretations of where science fiction is at in 2014. The book will be launched on August 13th, at Foyles bookstore on Charing Cross Road, and with a second launch event at LonCon just a day or two later.  I’m delighted to be a part of this one – my story, ‘The Science of Chance’, has a significant relationship with the novel-in-progress, which makes it a special story for me.

Talking of novels, ARCs of The Race are currently being sent out, pending the book’s official launch, also at LonCon, on August 15th. It was a deeply strange moment, finally holding the book in my hands, and seeing the stories of these characters – Jenna, Christy, Alex and Maree – take on reality in the world beyond my hard drive. I’m very excited about the launch, and about LonCon in general. I’ve just received my draft schedule, and this, together with various bits of info I’ve gleaned from friends and colleagues, leads me to believe that the organisers have come up with a once-in-a-lifetime-calibre programme. Can’t wait to get stuck in.

Finally and belatedly, just to mention that I have two nominations in the British Fantasy Awards, both in the novella category, for ‘Spin’ and for ‘Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle’. It’s thrilling news of course, and it’s particularly pleasing to see that Rustblind and Silverbright, the railway-themed anthology that David Rix edited for Eibonvale Press and Vivian Guppy’s original home, has also been shortlisted in the Best Anthology category. In her year’s summation for Best Horror of the Year 6, Ellen Datlow describes Rustblind as ‘a terrific anthology’ and notes that ‘the interstitial material by editor David Rix is consistently fascinating.’  For me personally, Rustblind demonstrates a quality of cohesion, of thematic intent, that is all too often lacking in anthologies. The stories that David has selected feel like they belong together, and each is strengthened and accelerated, if you like, by the others’ presence. Too many anthologies end up having a disparate, ‘rag bag’ feel – you don’t know where to start, and all too often you lay the book aside long before the finish. Rustblind is the opposite of that – you sense you’re being taken on a journey, which to my mind is the whole point of the format, and in a book about railways especially so.

The full list of BFA nominees can be found here.

The devil you know all too well

May 2, 2014 /

It would seem contrary and perhaps churlish to abandon a 600-page novel a mere 120 pages before the end. Yet this is precisely what I almost did with Marisha Pessl’s second novel, a voluminous horror epic entitled Night Film. I did soldier on to the end – more for reasons of fairness than out of any hope that the book might, after all, turn out to have been worth my time. I knew already in my gut that the enterprise was doomed, the one unanswerable question remaining: what was she thinking???

I was keen to read Night Film from the moment I first heard about it – a ‘serious’ horror novel about a fictional director of horror movies, examining ideas of truth and fiction and making use of a metafictional format, what’s not to like? Plenty, according to Steven Poole of The Guardian, although his  unequivocally damning review made me even more curious, if anything. Horror is a woefully misunderstood genre. Perhaps Poole’s review was yet one more instance of a mainstream critic getting it wrong. I loved the look of the book as object – all those found-footage-style embedded texts and general stuff.  I wondered if Night Film was, after all, the horror novel of the year that everyone had missed.

The short answer is: no, it isn’t. I’d say the only thing wrong with Poole’s review is that it doesn’t go far enough in unmasking an essay in genre that is flat, unconvincing, derivative and, most of all, in no way justifies its length. It’s ludicrous that a book that finally contains so little should run on for so long. I ask again: what was she thinking???

Horror film is an irresistible subject, both for horror readers and for horror writers. We might point to Ramsey Campbell’s Ancient Images and The Grin of the Dark, Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions, Theodore Roszak’s masterful Flicker, the late, great Joel Lane’s superb novella The Witnesses are Gone as examples of novels that delve into the idea of the ‘lost film’ or the ‘mad’ director whose work embodied the concept of the forbidden, the transgressive, the Bad Genius. I love books like this – both because I’m a (not so closet) horror film fan myself, and because the theme of the ‘lost text’ offers countless possibilities for the kind of fascinatingly complex narrative structure I particularly enjoy.

Night Film begins promisingly enough. Ashley Cordova, the daughter of notorious and reclusive film director Stanislas Cordova, is found dead at the bottom of a lift shaft of a derelict warehouse. Her death looks like suicide, but for journalist Scott McGrath, whose career was wrecked by a discredited investigation into the satanic mysteries of Cordova some years before, it also provides the perfect opportunity for him to reclaim his reputation.

Cordova’s films are extreme in nature, at least as scary as his devout legions of fans. Pessl’s narrative is interspersed with newspaper reports, police files, and screenshots taken from the underground internet fan site The Blackboards. (‘You shouldn’t be here – Get Out.’) For the first third of the novel I was entranced, convinced that Pessl’s reams of unnecessary italics and the dorkish sensibilities of her protagonist would turn out to contain some kind of ironic subtext, that the novel was setting itself up as a straightforward and increasingly predictable ‘hunt’ narrative only for the deliberate purposes of knowingly undermining itself later.

Why else would Scott McGrath be such a retrograde knob? Why else would each and every so-called witness, all desperately elusive only in fact not, commit the sin of the ‘you will die horribly, Mr Bond, but not until I have outlined for you in painstaking detail my dastardly plan for world domination’ trope, one after the other? Why else would the book be so… goddamned… long???

The answer is: I don’t know. The story revealed by Night Film is wholly unoriginal, itself a retread of so many bog standard Hollywood horror movies. Pessl’s pretty textual gimmicks turn out to be nothing more than stage decoration. An accusation commonly levelled at so-called ‘literary SF’ is that it insists on reinventing the wheel. In eight cases out of ten I wouldn’t find much to argue with in such a statement, only that the literary merit of some of these offerings makes them at least worthy of further discussion. In the case of Night Film, we have a novel that in terms of its contribution to horror literature is less than negligible. And while Pessl’s writing is competent and demonstrates some nice turns of phrase, these in no way justify the appalling bloat you have to wade through to get to them.

My advice to the author? Get out there and read some decent horror before you try writing any more. My advice to readers? This book is a time-thief – don’t go there.

Judgement day

March 15, 2014 /

While I’m writing this, the Clarke Award judges and their chairman are in a meeting, making their final decisions (and, we would hope for nothing less, having their final arguments) about which six novels should make up this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. With the announcement of that shortlist just four days away, I thought it would be fun to cast a last look back over the list of submissions, and make my own final prediction about what that shortlist might look like. I’ve read a few more of the submitted titles since my first guesses, and in any case, two months is a long time in SF – opinions, emphases, gut feelings can change. So let’s do it! Here’s my predicted shortlist for March 18th:

The Secret Knowledge – Andrew Crumey. I’m reading this at the moment, and it’s lovely. Like all of Crumey’s work, The Secret Knowledge presents the perfect example of a ‘non-genre’ work that doesn’t shy away from science fictional ideas. It’s beautifully written (with Crumey you take that for granted) but it’s not overwritten. Direct, clear, engaging from the first page, I like this in the same way I liked Robert J. Lennon’s Familiar, but on balance I like it even more, probably because it’s less coy about being SF. I’m full of enthusiasm for The Secret Knowledge, and my Crumey Crusade goes on.

Wolfhound Century – Peter Higgins. Just a feeling, a sudden hunch. I reckon there’ll be an almighty row about the ending – in that there isn’t one – but that a couple of judges will be passionate enough about this book (the writing is very lovely, and the alt-Russia setting, whatever my own personal misgivings, will command significant attention) to see it win a place among the shortlisted six.

Ancillary Justice – Ann Leckie. I think this is going to be a shoo-in. Big, far-future SF, intelligently written and with some engaging core concepts, probably the most discussed SF novel of 2013 and how could it escape notice here?  I think its emotional range is limited, and my eventual verdict on this book will be determined by where and how far Leckie goes from here. But I can understand why the judges would want to select it, and I won’t mind seeing it on the shortlist if they do.

A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki. An interesting case, this. I think it will divide opinion – some will see it as tediously self indulgent, others will see it as sensitive, beautifully written and radical in its ideas and the way it conveys them. Oddly, it’s kind of both things at the same time. It’s actually a novel with a great deal to say, and – given the complexity of some of the subjects involved – it says it gracefully and well. But it is one of those novels (I’m becoming increasingly impatient with them, interestingly) that dance around their science fictionality without ever properly coming to terms with it. Chris bailed on this book after forty pages. I read the whole thing, with increasing enjoyment and appreciation, but without ever entirely losing my doubts. A sincere and talented writer, certainly, but will she take her Kitschies win as a signal to continue her explorations in SF? I don’t think so, somehow.

The Adjacent – Christopher Priest. This book does everything the Ozeki doesn’t do and then some. It’s proper SF, from a master of the genre, genuinely chilling, rapturously beautiful, compellingly mysterious. A novel that readers and critics will still be enthusing and puzzling over a hundred years from now, the judges would have to be mad not to include it.

The Machine – James Smythe. A small but perfectly formed novel. Great core conceit, beautifully executed with excellent sense of place and good characterisation. Demonstrates that British SF is alive and well and doing interesting things. I think this one will be a favourite of all the judges, and will wing it through to the shortlist as a result.

Well, that’s my guess – as it turns out, books from all three of my previous putative shortlists are on there, together with one title that wasn’t on any of them. But it’s so difficult to call! Quite a lot depends on how rigorous this year’s judging panel are going to be about the whole SF/Fantasy divide. If they’re fantasy liberals, we might well see Patrick Ness, Jess Richards, Andrei Kurkov or Wu Ming-Yi making an appearance. If they’re hardline SF purists, there’s a higher likelihood that Paul McAuley or even Greg Egan might make a showing. Meanwhile, I’m still carrying a personal torch for Matt Hill’s The Folded Man, Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies, and Tony White’s Shackleton’s Man Goes South.

Well, the decision is being made even as we speak. To say I’d love to be a fly on the wall is an understatement, but as always, all we ask is that the judges give us a shortlist that will make us think, argue, spark decades-long feuds and – most of all – help turn some new readers on to SF and its infinite possibilities for intellectual exploration and creative expression.

Let it be so.

Annihilation

March 9, 2014 /

“Will you come after me if I don’t come back? If you can?”

Reading Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel Annihilation this weekend, what struck me most forcibly was how old it felt as a text, how ingrained within the New Weird mythos, how well established. Like the gargantuan pile of abandoned journals discovered by the novel’s narrator (of which the book in your hands must necessarily be one), subjective experience insists it is other than logic dictates.

More than a couple of reviewers liken Annihilation to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. And while it is true that VanderMeer’s novel, in its account of an expedition into a mysterious and evidentially dangerous altered territory, Area X, would appear to owe at least some debt of inspiration to that seminal work, it is also something quite different, something other.

Annihilation doesn’t really remind me of M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing either – and that novel uses a quote from the Strugatskys as its epigraph. A narrative that takes place entirely from within Area X – Roadside Picnic without the wider world, Nova Swing without Saudade, without the spaceport – lends Annihilation a particular claustrophobia that makes the experience of reading it – this found text – entirely unique. The novel is rare generically as well – science fiction that is properly horror and vice versa. Lovecraft fans should adore this – but if you prefer your SFF to be grounded in a scientifically arguable reality you will (just stick with it) be seduced by it too. What you think you’re reading at the start, you turn out not to be. Whilst all the initial stages of this novel’s journey had me thinking of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, by the end my head was full of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.

This is a flawlessly written book. The prose is spare yet dense, allusive yet cogent, immersive yet objective. The descriptive passages are magnetic, without ever being overwritten. Perhaps the best summation of these seeming contradictions is to say that Annihilation will answer all your questions about itself, yet will nonetheless remain elusive, powerfully mysterious, and open-ended. In short, this is the very best kind of novel, the kind that eschews intrusive writerly mannerisms and promptings in favour of letting the reader get stuck into forming their own opinions from the very first page.

As a lifelong horror fan, I’m always on the defensive when it comes to what I tend to think of as Hollywoodisms. So there’s a team of explorers who volunteer to form a twelfth expedition into an ominously named patch of territory where the previous eleven expeditions have all gone AWOL in one (bad) way or another? The shadowy organisation that sent them in has forbidden them to use either each other’s first names or functioning digital technology? “Yeah right,” my Scream-self muttered. “Why would they do that?”

I soon found out why they did that. And it made sense. This is what I mean when I say that Annihilation feels established. This novel is so original and strange it feels as if several generations of horror writers have drawn their inspiration from it, rather than the other way around.

It defies logic, but it is so. Annihilation is a superior achievement, and although it works perfectly well as a standalone novel, I can’t wait to get my hands on the second and third instalments of the trilogy.

My Hugo Ballot 2014

March 5, 2014 /

Getting around to this has been a problem. Not because I don’t enjoy compiling nominations lists, because (as everyone who knows me knows) I do. Partly it’s that we’ve been so busy in recent weeks (more updates to follow in due course) that I’ve not had the time to give this ballot the full attention I feel it deserves. There’s also the fact that the more time passes, the more doubts I seem to accrue about the process in general. I’m not about to go off on a massive anti-Hugo rant – my general position on awards is that anything that gets people discussing, enthusing and arguing about books is bound to have more good in it than bad, and as for the Jonathan Ross thing, enough already – it’s just that I’m all too aware of how little I’ve read of what’s actually available. In the fields of short fiction particularly, my percentage coverage is lamentable. It follows from this that I’ll be voting for some works I think are good, rather than those works I know (through exhaustive reading) are at the top of the field. I know I’m no different in this from the vast majority of voters – but what it means, inevitably, is that the same small pool of works tend to enjoy a disproportionate amount of publicity, while other, equally fine and perhaps better works slip through the voting net.

I don’t like this state of affairs, and I don’t think it’s good for the field. I’m not sure what can best be done, but for now I’m going to let the rest of fandom go on arguing about it on my behalf. Time is running short, and if I’m going to nominate I need to get my ballot sorted pretty much now.

Maybe by next year I’ll have found a way of solving the various nomination dilemmas (yeah right). Until then, for what it’s worth, here’s my Hugo ballot for 2014:

 

Best Novel

MaddAddam – Margaret Atwood. Go read Adam Roberts’s review at Strange Horizons if you want to understand my reasons for nominating this heavily flawed, unique work of science fiction. Atwood should be celebrated, in my opinion, as a jewel in SF’s crown. So she doesn’t properly understand the nomenclature, so what?? She can write, by God.

The Accursed – Joyce Carol Oates. The fifth instalment in Oates’s decades-spanning loosely connected ‘gothic’ series. Oates is a genius, and I don’t use the word lightly. She should win everything.

The Adjacent – Christopher Priest. My favourite science fiction novel of 2013, bar none.

A Stranger in Olondria – Sofia Samatar. I think Samatar’s work is remarkable, full stop. Her command of language is superlative. She is a joy to read.

The Machine – James Smythe. I know I keep going on about this one, but it really is that good!

 

Best Novella

Memory Palace – Hari Kunzru. I’m nominating the text, not the exhibition. 10,000 words of top notch SF: radiantly alive, radical, a showpiece of the novella form.

Iseul’s Lexicon – Yoon Ha Lee. One of the most original, accomplished and compelling voices in SF today.

Dogs with their Eyes Shut – Paul Meloy. I’ve loved Meloy’s work ever since I stumbled across his collection Islington Crocodiles, which should have won every ‘Best Collection’ award going in its year of publication. My only problem with Meloy is that he doesn’t write enough!

Burning Girls – Veronica Shanoes. I came across this while I was reading for my Short Fiction Snapshot feature at Strange Horizons. My only reason for not selecting it was that it was too long to fit the format. It’s a remarkable work.

Six-Gun Snow White – Catherynne Valente. I love the way this is told, but then Valente is always amazing, so what did I expect? Wonderful work.

 

Best Novelette

‘Paranormal Romance’ – Christopher Barzak. I love Barzak’s voice, his tendency towards metafiction. He’s just a very good writer, and should be more widely appreciated.

‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’ – Ted Chiang. I love Chiang’s documentary approach, the way his words, and his worlds, sneak up on you. I also love stories about writing, about language. A damn fine writer.

‘Cave & Julia’ – M. John Harrison. The best short fiction of 2013. Period.

‘The Prayer of Ninety Cats’ – Caitlin R. Kiernan. I love everything Kiernan writes, and this is a classic.

‘Meet the President’ – Zadie Smith. Clearly out of the same mindset, stylewise, as her novel NW, Smith’s novelette is weird, spiky, interesting. Smith’s recently expressed interest in writing science fiction was greeted with the usual chorus of doubt from certain sections of fandom, Surely a writer like this should be encouraged??

 

Best Short Story

‘A Visit to the House on Terminal Hill’ – Elizabeth Knox. I wrote about this for my Short Fiction Snapshot feature at Strange Horizons and it has stayed with me ever since. I love Knox’s knowingness, her effortless command of genre tropes, and I love this story.

‘The 9th Technique’ – China Mieville. Distributed as a chapbook to members of the 2013 World Fantasy Convention as an ‘apology’ for his non-attendance, this is a story that deserves wider exposure. Written in a terse, tense prose that feels more pared down than Mieville’s more familiar high baroque but that is equally (if not more) compelling, I found it extraordinary, and wished it had gone on for longer.

‘Selkie stories are for Losers’ – Sofia Samatar. Loved this story. It’s a wonderful introduction to Samatar’s richly textured, evocative prose.

‘Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer‘- Kenneth Schneyer. I discovered this via Rachel Swirsky’s invaluable annual Short Fiction Recommendations and I’m so glad I did. Like Rachel, I like the art stuff, which is brilliantly done. Love it, wish I’d written it.

‘The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch over the Bride of the World’ – Catherynne Valente. Another one I discovered while reading for the Short Fiction Snapshot. For me, it seemed too good to spoil by trying to write about it.

 

Best Collection

North American Lake Monsters – Nathan Ballingrud. I’ve not read all the stories in this volume, but I’ve read enough to know how much I admire what Ballingrud is doing. Wonderful stuff.

The Ape’s Wife – Caitlin R. Kiernan. For me, Kiernan is one of the very finest writers working today, in any genre, period. Everything of hers I read, I wish I’d written.

Conservation of Shadows – Yoon Ha Lee. I just love these stories, and most especially the original forms many of them take. Maths, science, music, warfare – what more could you ask for in a collection? Lee’s command of language and imagery feels effortless and exhilarating. A wonderful discovery.

The Story Until Now – Kit Reed. I was put in the way of this volume by Paul Kincaid via Strange Horizons. Reed is one of those writers who seems criminally underappreciated.

How the World Became Quiet – Rachel Swirsky. And finally, a collection from Swirsky! Swirsky has a flawless poetic touch I’ve always envied, combined with pure, natural storytelling ability. Many of these mini-novels are just breathtaking.

 

Best Anthology

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells – Datlow/Windling. Some fine writers, some fine stories. I do find that my taste in SFF often coincides with Ellen’s, and so it’s no surprise that I always enjoy her anthologies.

Rustblind and Silverbright – David Rix. The fact that I have a story in this anthology has nothing whatsoever to do with my nomination. I’m nominating Rustblind because I love David’s concept. This is a properly themed anthology, beautifully arranged and considered, and amounting to so much more than many of the usual kind of ‘rag bag’ reprint anthologies. This project was a genuine labour of love for David, and deserves far wider notice.

The Lowest Heaven – Shurin/Perry. Great concept, and includes stories from some of my favourite new writers.

 

Best Related Work

The Transgressive Iain Banks – Colebrook/Cox

Here Be Dragons – Stefan Ekman

Speculative Fiction 2012 – Shurin/Landon

Wonderbook – Jeff VanderMeer

Afrofuturism – Ytasha L. Womack

For the most part, shamefully, I’ve only sampled bits and pieces of all of these. But I think the Best Related Work category is important, and unfairly neglected, and the above works all seem, for their various reasons, worthy of notice.

 

Best Dramatic Presentation (short form)

Another category where I feel inadequate to nominate. I love genre TV (it’s a favourite means of relaxation) but am so woefully behind on it my opinions are mostly valueless. We’re working our way through Fringe at the moment – lamentable, but such good fun I can’t resist it (although Chris most certainly could) – so you see how out of synch we are with the rest of fandom. Anyway, I’m nominating the below because (I confess!) I loved it, even if the appalling Christmas episode did its best to wipe all my good DW feelings off the map forever.

The Day of the Doctor


Best Dramatic Presentation (long form)

I found myself very disappointed by genre film in 2013. I don’t like franchises in any year, which always cuts down my choices in any case. Perhaps my biggest sad surprise though was how much I disliked Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (and for the record, I loved Primer). I’ve seen UC compared with late Malick, to which I would reply: yes, and that’s precisely the problem (have you seen To The Wonder? If not, you’ll find it in the dictionary under Self Indulgent). By far my favourite pure genre film in 2013 was Neil Jordan’s vampire movie Byzantium, which seemed to me to be the perfect small film. Other than that, I’m clutching at straws.

An Adventure in Space and Time

Byzantium

The East


Best Semiprozine

Strange Horizons. Because it rocks. Because the reviews section is second to none, because it actively seeks to encourage diversity across all areas and because its commitment to supporting and furthering excellence in SFF today is unquestioned. It’s largely because of Strange Horizons that I became interested in online fandom in the first place.

Interzone. Because it will always mean so much to me, and to British SF.

Los Angeles Review of Books (science fiction section). For publishing some of the most engaging and in-depth SF criticism around. I love this mag.

Lightspeed. A wonderful source of new fiction. Superb magazine.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone. Unique. Beautiful. Serious. Should be way better known.

 

Best Fanzine

The Book Smugglers

Pornokitsch

SF Mistressworks

SF Signal

The Speculative Scotsman

 

Best Fan Writer

Abigail Nussbaum. For me, Abigail is in a class of her own at the moment. She writes with all the passionate enthusiasm and insider knowledge of the true fan, whilst combining these assets with the erudite articulacy of a professional critic. Abigail’s pieces are a joy to read, and whether I wholly agree with her opinion of a book, story or argument or not, she always leaves me with something to think about, some new angle to check out. I’m in awe of her knowledge and her skill. She absolutely deserves a Hugo, and her shortlisting is long overdue.

For my other nominations in this category, I’m going for writers I always love reading, people who speak their minds – usually in gloriously entertaining fashion – whilst displaying the objectivity and core knowledge necessary to a rigorous and reasoned argument and without recourse to lazy ad hominems. (Anyone who resorts to ad hominems, ever, is going to have to work pretty hard to make me find lasting value in their offerings.) Here are four great fan writers whose reviews, postings and comments I always look forward to and wish there were more of:

Liz Bourke

Kameron Hurley

Martin Lewis

Jonathan McCalmont


Best Editor – Short Form

John Joseph Adams

Andy Cox

Ellen Datlow

Michael Kelly

Ian Whates


John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Helen Marshall

Sofia Samatar

E.J. Swift

Enough said.

SpecFic 2013

February 24, 2014 /

I’m very chuffed indeed to announce that I have a piece in the forthcoming Speculative Fiction 2013, an anthology bringing together the best SF essays, reviews and comment published online during 2013. Edited by the wonderful Ana Grilo and Thea James of The Book Smugglers, you can read the full (and awesome) list of contributors here.

It’s fashionable to criticise the new ‘democracy of self expression’ for the trivial arguments, poor writing and total bollocks that inevitably get spewed forth by the truckload on an hourly basis. The great thing about that though is that all you have to do to get rid of it is close the tab, and no amount of nonsense negates the fact that one of the finest aspects of internet fandom is the way it is allowing new writers, bloggers, critics and reviewers to develop their voices. Even in the few years I’ve been active online myself, I’ve seen an increase in the quality, robustness and diversity of debate in and around SF and I find that very exciting. This kind of ongoing online conversation between readers, writers and fans simply does not exist in the same way in the world of mainstream literature – just one more thing that makes SF such a unique and stimulating field to be working in.

As someone who very much enjoys the theory-and-criticism side of SF (a good argument, in other words) I feel honoured to be a part of this anthology.

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