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Maureen Kincaid Speller

September 20, 2022 /

Yesterday we learned the terrible news that our dear friend Maureen Kincaid Speller had passed away. Maureen was diagnosed with cancer back in March, but she had made remarkable progress and at the beginning of the summer her prognosis looked a great deal better. Her death on Sunday came as a bitter blow. Death is always difficult to come to terms with, but in the case of Maureen it seems doubly so. She had so much more still to give. Her indomitable spirit, her keen intellect, her wicked sense of humour and the all round pleasure in being in her company – these things make her loss all the more painful. I don’t think I will ever get used to the knowledge that she is no longer with us.

I will value in particular the memories of our many discussions of science fiction – its definition and relevance, its unique contribution to literature, the state of the field. So much laughter and so much passion. I was delighted when Maureen was made senior reviews editor at Strange Horizons, because I knew how much she would relish this challenge and how much support and experience she could offer to newer writers. I will treasure especially the time we spent together immersed in the Shadow Clarke through most of 2017. Maureen wrote some excellent criticism – because of course she did – but there was also all the stuff behind the scenes, the free exchange of ideas and opinions, the joy in thinking.

Maureen’s work as a critic and commentator has been a lifelong commitment and I will have more to say about that in the coming months. For now, I just want to say Maureen, your loss to us is incalculable. We love you with all our hearts, and will miss you forever. Our sincerest condolences to Paul, Maureen’s beloved husband, and our beloved friend. Our thoughts are with you.

At the Clarke Award ceremony 2017: Paul Kincaid, Nick Hubble, Victoria Hoyle, me, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Helen Marshall. Photo by Will Ellwood – thanks, Will!

Get well soon

August 15, 2022 /

“Literature is self-validating. That is to say, a book is not justified by its author’s worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been done.”

Salman Rushdie

In this stunning and prescient essay for the London Review of Books from 1982, Rushdie reminds us – if reminder were needed – how even at the start of his career he was already preoccupied with themes of identity, aesthetics, culture, the transformative power of the imagination and above all freedom of expression. We are so lucky to have him still with us. Everyone’s writing about Rushdie at the moment and that’s not surprising but what we are waiting for, really, is to hear from him again. Opinionated, fearless, controversial – writers like Rushdie are increasingly rare. If the past days have shown us anything, it is that voices such as his are more necessary and more valuable than ever.

Home II

May 20, 2022 /

My new office is the perfect size, by which I mean perfect for me.

The office I had in our previous home was just that little bit too small. Most of my books had to be housed elsewhere in our home, a fact that was somewhat made up for by my magnificent view of the firth and of the ferry terminal, but it gave the room a feeling of incompleteness, and led to the annoying side-effect of having thirty to forty books piled up either side of my computer at any one time.

For someone who prefers their surroundings to have a semblance of order, this was not ideal. The office I had before that, in Devon, had room for my books, which blanketed the back wall like a layer of secondary insulation, but as a space was even smaller, almost a box room. The office I had in Hastings had the opposite problem – it felt too big. I like rooms that feel like burrows, enclosing and human-sized. The large, high-ceilinged rooms of our previous, Georgian home always felt overwhelming to me, as if I were a guest in them, or simply camped out. I never felt we properly owned that house, or ever could.

There is a rightness to my new office that makes it seem like the room I have been waiting to discover all my writing life. From my desk, which is immediately inside the doorway as you come in, I can see the firth, the ferry – more distant now as it ploughs its way to and from the harbour but still present, still essential, still ours – the Cowal hills beyond. My books fill the wall opposite and half of the wall that abuts it, and there is room for them all. Our bookshelves were made for us by a local carpenter. We had them dismantled so we could bring them with us from our previous home, in the first instance because we could not bear to part with them, though as it turns out the escalating price of timber means we would not have been able to afford to replace them, had we left them behind. Lucky.

My office is a warm mustard-yellow, the colour of gorse. It has crept up on me over the years, that yellow is my favourite colour for rooms. I feel enclosed, protected, energised. Warmed by the sun, through even the bleakest of Scottish winter days.

During the twenty years I spent working in retail, I was always aware that in order to write it was essential for me to have the kind of day-job where I could clock off at the end of my shift and not have to think about the work, at all, when I wasn’t there. This inevitably meant low pay, but the up-side – the essential up-side – was freedom of thought. During these past ten weeks of arranging our move and project-managing the renovation of our new house, it has been brought home to me, with bells on, how correct I had always been in this instinctive assumption. The move was timely and right. Giving the house an overhaul has been a landmark experience, a labour of love. But for the life of the mind it has been crushing, and uniquely stressful. The more or less absolute inability to think about anything else – an experience I have been referring to as ‘brain-wipe’ – has taken its toll on me and on those around me.

Thankfully, this mental burden has been lifted. Just a week after moving in, I find myself back at my desk, picking up not where I left off, exactly, but somewhere close to it. The work feels exciting, re-invigorated, above all, possible. Given the state of the wider world, there have been moments these past months when I have found myself wondering if it was in fact possible, if there was a point to it – the kind of feelings I have been lucky enough, for many, many years, to have entirely escaped.

To have felt them again, even for a day or two, has reminded me of what is at stake, if not for me then for thousands of others, daily, hourly.

While I can, I will. While we can, we must.

Thank you for being here. Reading, writing, thinking – it’s who we are.

Home

May 14, 2022 /

We moved into our new home on Thursday. In the two days since we’ve been here, we have spent the majority of our time unpacking books. Books on shelves mean we are settling in. We have a little way to go still, but in essence, our move is complete. The cats, who endured their six weeks of indoor living with patience and grace, have begun to get acquainted with their new territory.

Shortly after we moved north to Scotland I wrote a piece for a magazine enumerating the various house moves I have made during my life. From memory, there have been more than twenty in total, a tally that still feels vertiginous to me, a catalogue of displacement and disruption. This particular move has been easier in some ways – we are, in a sense, still in the same place, still on familiar ground – but in others it has seemed all-consuming, exhausting, seminal.

I am sitting in my new office, looking out at the Firth of Clyde. It is a gentle, pale blue evening. I am so glad to be home.

Well, that was unexpected

April 2, 2022 /

We have moved house. Or rather, we find ourselves between houses, in temporary accommodation while we do work to the house we have just bought, two miles down the road from the house we just sold, smaller in scale but already, for me at any rate, larger in the imagination.

We were very happy in the house we have now left. This was the house that brought us to the island, the house that sheltered us through lockdown and that features, in various guises, in several of our novels. The decision to sell it was difficult and arrived at only gradually, founded upon the fact that the house was too big and too expensive for us to maintain, that its unsuitability would only increase with the passage of years.

The past six weeks have seen us undergoing all the familiar, unavoidable, anxiety-inducing accompaniments to moving house: the sense of disjuncture, the inevitably upsetting process of dismantling a home and the queasy feeling of unreality that comes in its wake. There has also been the intensely practical problem of downsizing our library of books, CDs and DVDs. It has been incredibly important to us that they find their way into the hands of readers and listeners who will appreciate them, which has meant several trips into Glasgow in order to donate them. I am terribly glad we did this, but it has, in the midst of the numerous other chores and missions of madness, been exhausting.

Keeping me sane through the whole process has been Laura Thompson’s unusually candid and spontaneous biography of England’s most famous crime writer, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. I am sure there will be those who find Thompson’s approach too open, too opinionated and too personal, but Thompson’s singular willingness to put her own heart and soul on the line has been precisely what I like and admire about the book, a hefty volume that nonetheless has been stimulating and thought-provoking through the whole of its length, and that I have always felt eager and grateful to return to at the end of another tiring day.

Now begins the process of building back up. I love our new home. I feel especially lucky to have retained my cherished view of the Firth of Clyde, albeit from a different angle. I cannot wait for us to move in properly, to get back to work. My current work-in-progress seems like a distant, unfamiliar land. I will need to reacquaint myself with it. I know there will be changes, because I have changed. I look forward to finding out exactly where I have arrived.

Cloak and Dagger 2022 – a crime reading challenge

December 31, 2021 /

2021 is a difficult year to describe. 2020 felt fraught, urgent, dangerous and tense. 2021 has felt more nebulous, more fractured, characterised by uncertainty and an increasing sense of restlessness. In terms of personal achievement, I delivered a new manuscript, a book that for me feels very much like the product of 2020, seamed and studded with all the furious contradictions that year brought but referenced obliquely rather than colliding with them head-on. It’s a novel I’m hugely proud of, and one I look forward to sharing with you in 2023.

In the months since completing that book, I have begun inching my way towards the next work, a transition that has felt more complex and troublesome even than usual. The times we are living through throw up searching questions; as a writer, it does not seem altogether surprising if those questions end up being framed around the process of writing, not just the how but the what and the why. There is never any doubt in my mind that writing – art – has value, that whatever trauma is being addressed, the practice of reflection and analysis, of creative re-imagining inherent to all art is intrinsic to the experience of being human.

Such knowledge should not prevent us from being robust in our seeking out of our own best practice. I count myself fortunate in that this period of not-knowing – familiar in its outline, yet different in its particular details every time – has always felt energising to me. I never quite know how I will come out of it, or what will result. If I can feel certain of anything, through this time as all times, it is the joy I find in the power and the talent of other writers. Discovering new works, new directions, new attitudes, visions and modes of expression – the excitement and the gratitude never lessens.

By this same time last year, the document on my hard drive entitled ‘Books 2021’ was already filling up with upcoming works of fiction and non-fiction I was eager to read. Many of them were books whose publication dates had been postponed, pushed over from 2020 into 2021 in the hope that by the time they were released, in-person events and book festivals would be happening again. This turned out not to be the case, and on the far side of 2021, I cannot help noticing that the number of books on my ‘Books 2022’ list is considerably smaller. There is a sense of uncertainty affecting all of us: what shall we be reading, what shall we be writing? There is an eerie sort of silence.

Here also, there is opportunity. Not knowing – feeling less sure of what I’m going to be reading leaves more space for new discoveries. It also leaves space for me to go back and read more of the books I did not manage to get to in 2021. A year of regrouping, maybe. A year of finding out what is important.

I enjoy reading challenges because they give my reading a focus. This can be especially valuable if the challenge is related in some way to a problem or question that has a bearing on my work in progress. I also enjoy reading challenges because they provide me with a framework for talking to readers. With all of this in mind, I have created my own crime reading challenge for 2022. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I am always on the lookout for original, challenging and imaginative approaches to genre archetypes, with the mystery archetype foremost among them. For pure reading pleasure, there’s nothing to beat a mystery. There is also no stronger template for withstanding the often punitive process of literary experiment.

I have created thirty prompts, some of them leaning heavily towards my particular interests, others designed to take me into less familiar territory. Thirty seems like a good number – big enough to make the challenge interesting, not so huge that it becomes burdensome, squeezing out all other reading. The individual challenges can be completed in any order, and can be based around any aspect of crime writing: fiction, true crime, journalism, history or memoir can be considered and included for any of the prompts. I am hoping to have completed and blogged all thirty by the end of the year. Here are the prompts. Let’s see how we get on:

  1. Published in 2022
  2. By a debut author
  3. Translated from the French
  4. Translated from the German
  5. Translated from the Italian
  6. Translated from the Spanish
  7. Translated from the Japanese
  8. Set in South America
  9. Nordic
  10. Set in Australia
  11. By an author based on the African continent
  12. By an African-American author
  13. Historical mystery
  14. Experimental published since 2000
  15. Experimental published before 1980
  16. Published by an independent press
  17. Classic noir
  18. Neo noir
  19. Golden Age
  20. Nineteenth Century
  21. Published before World War 2
  22. By a Scottish author
  23. Legal thriller
  24. Financial or military
  25. With a speculative element
  26. Award-winning
  27. Has been adapted for the screen
  28. Woman detective
  29. Based on real events
  30. Any crime but murder

I have some ideas already for how I might fill some of the categories, books I have been wanting to read for a while and now have the perfect incentive to tackle. Others I have not yet started to think about. Mainly I am hoping to be surprised. Surprised and inspired. Here’s hoping we can all find something of the same in 2022.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Forces and Loads

October 21, 2021 /

Earlier this summer I had the great joy and privilege of creating a piece of work based around an interview with the disaster risk engineer Josh Macabuag. The resulting story, ‘Forces and Loads’, is now live as part of the Inventive podcast initiative from the University of Salford, which places writers together in creative collaboration with workers in STEM.

I found Joshua’s interview and the insights it gave me into his work to be instantly inspiring, and I hope I have conveyed some sense of the power of his story through my own interpretation of it. ‘Forces and Loads’ runs in Episode 2 of the second series of Inventive, and you can listen to that episode here.

I am hugely grateful to Anna Scott-Brown and Adam Fowler of Overtone Productions for their help and expertise in making the experience so enjoyable and of course to Josh himself for allowing me an insight into his world. As I say in my own portion of the interview, I found enough material here for an entire novel and ‘Forces and Loads’ is a story I might well find myself revisiting in the future.

The Folklore Podcast

October 4, 2021 /

A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of talking with writer and folklore enthusiast Mark Norman, the creator and host of the very excellent Folklore Podcast. We had a wonderful conversation about The Good Neighbours, diving deep into the original inspiration behind the novel and the long tradition of fairy folklore within literature. The opportunity to talk about this aspect of the book with someone so deeply attuned to it was especially welcome, and if you’d like to find out more you can listen to the episode here. While you’re at it, you might also want to check out the wealth of resources available at The Folklore Network, including all previous episodes of the podcast. It’s an inspiration.

Talking of which, now seems like an excellent time to give a shout-out to Mark’s latest book, Dark Folklore. Written together with folklore historian and playwright Tracey Norman, this book is an exploration of the more sinister side of folklore and looks like an absolute must for anyone interested in folk horror, either from a reader’s or writer’s perspective. You can buy the book here.

Tiny Bookcase, Empty Tank

August 9, 2021 /

I recently had the pleasure and the privilege of recording an episode of The Tiny Bookcase podcast with the show’s wonderful and talented hosts, Nico Rogers and Ben Holroyd-Dell. Their approach, so far as I am aware, is unique: guests and hosts each write a short story especially for the podcast, based around a prompt selected (by the guest) from a choice of three. The first half of the podcast consists of readings of all three stories, followed by a discussion. In the second half of the podcast (which will go live next week) the hosts interview the guest about their life, work and any upcoming projects.

I found the whole experience highly enjoyable and one of the most interesting gigs I’ve yet taken part in, not least because the word limit for the story – 1,200 words – presented me with a challenge I had not attempted before. My stories tend to sprawl, rather, and so getting the job done in less than 2,000 words? Not easy. The prompt I chose was ‘Empty Tank’, feeling lucky because the story idea came to me more or less instantaneously. As you’ll discover if you listen to the podcast, the guys interpreted the title very differently – and that is the beauty of this kind of exercise. I have always maintained that one hundred writers sat in a room working from an identical first sentence will each produce a completely different piece of writing and here, in microcosm, is the proof of that.

For those of you who have read The Rift, I’m excited to tell you that ‘Empty Tank’ is a brand new creef story. For those who haven’t, welcome to their world!

Huge thanks to Ben and to Nico for inviting me on to the podcast, and for making me feel so welcome. I had a great time.

‘Well, here you are again, I thought you were gone forever…’: Arthur C. Clarke Award 2021

June 30, 2021 /

The shortlist for the 35th Arthur C. Clarke Award has landed. The six titles are:

The Infinite by Patience Agbabi

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang

Edge of Heaven by R. B. Kelly

The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay

Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes

For the first time ever, all six shortlisted titles are debuts, which is interesting. If I were to use one word to describe this shortlist, it would be unexpected. Every shortlist is different, of course, but there’s something about this one that makes it more different. Because none of the authors here have previously featured, there is a quality of newness, of unparsability. And I like that. I like not knowing exactly what I think.

There are three books on here that are already on my to-read list, which is great, because I now have a definite context in which to read them. There are two books on this list I don’t know much about, which again is great, because I’ll be coming to them with no preconceived opinions. There is one book on this list I think I can safely say I would not have thought of reading, had it not been shortlisted, and that’s good too, because now I will.

The winner is being announced in September, which – I am delighted and relieved to say – gives me a good eight weeks to read everything, I shall be blogging my findings here. Sharkes take no prisoners.

Simultaneously with the shortlist, the Clarke Award’s administrator Tom Hunter released the full list of books submitted to the Clarke Award, all published in 2020, all given equal consideration by the jury. There were 105 books this time around, a good number, though not the highest. I have perused this list with great interest, as I always do, noting the increasing diversity and expanding definition of science fiction, year on year. I think it would be true to say that SF is as various and unpredictable as its many readers, each of whom would doubtless have their own list of priorities, their own ideal version of what science fiction could and should be.

The longer I read SF, the more I demand from it. I demand rigour, not in relation to scientific accuracy but in intellectual engagement. I demand beauty, not in terms of sense of wonder but in relation to language and form. I demand ambition, not in relation to copies sold, but in terms of how far the author is prepared to push against the boundary of their own abilities. I want books that risk failure in their pursuit of excellence. I want science fiction that fulfils the radical potential that is inherent in the very idea of SF. Will all the books on this shortlist meet these criteria? I can live in hope. Will I ever stop banging on about this? Never.

If I’d been picking the shortlist myself, here’s what it would look like, bearing in mind I’ve not read everything (nowhere near) and the impact of my own very specific biases:

Hinton by Mark Blacklock (one of the toughest but best achieved novels I read last year)

Ghost Species by James Bradley (Bradley is ridiculously underappreciated, one of the most committed speculative fiction writers out there)

The Silence by Don DeLillo (people are going to argue with me over this – I know some who think this book is empty, pared down so hard it barely exists – but if there’s a novel that better sums up our current state of unease I have yet to find it)

Gathering Evidence by Martin MacInnes (except maybe this one – MacInnes’s first novel was a best-of-year for me and this, his second, is if anything even better)

The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay (my most anticipated novel on the actual shortlist, I’ve sampled the prose, straining with wild energy, and McKay has chosen an epigraph by Helen Garner – say no more)

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (a fantastic novel by a writer who remakes speculative fiction every time she puts pen to paper)

These are all novels I could read repeatedly, finding new insights each time. This also is a quality I demand from my SF. When I think of the books I return to time and again, in my mind as well as on the page, they all have about them the quality of mystery, of infinite possibility together with a certain inscrutability that is the hallmark of timeless classics in any genre. Here’s to discovering more of them, and good luck to all the shortlisted authors. Meet me back here soon for the first of six exciting voyages into the unknown.

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