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Locus poll round-up

December 3, 2012 /

The last days of November saw a final rush to place votes in the Locus All-Centuries poll before it closed at midnight on the 30th. I can’t say I blame anyone for leaving it to the last minute, because getting those lists finalised and then ranked added up to a pretty steep time commitment. I hope these eleventh hour participants, together with the consequent surge in online publicity for the ballot, did manage to up the voting figures a bit – I read somewhere that the response to the poll had been disappointing up till then. This is sad to hear, because of course the fewer the votes cast, the less meaningful the final result (shades of BFAs 2011 – either that or the recent Tory police privatisation bill… ) It seems to me that part of the problem in the case of the Locus poll has been the sheer size of the thing – the voting form looked daunting, even if in reality it needn’t have been. This issue could have been offset considerably by the introduction of two simple measures: 1) the poll ‘rules’ should have made it clearer that you didn’t have to fill in all the categories for your vote to be eligible – if you just wanted to vote for novels, or for SF and not Fantasy, for example, that was perfectly OK, and 2) the category for novelette should have been expunged (or, as I saw someone more memorably put it, killed with fire). The novelette is a pretty worthless category in any case – basically it’s just a long short story – and given that it’s difficult, not to say impossible, to obtain the word counts for eligible works outside of the Locus suggestions lists, it made the whole novelette segment feel not only superfluous to requirements but also an active discouragement to people filling in those massive voting forms.

The ballot is a good thing, because it’s interesting to see what the SFF hivemind is thinking, and it deserves to flourish, so let’s hope that Locus learn from their mistakes this year and make the next grand poll a little more user-friendly.

These issues apart, it’s been great to see some voters posting their ballots online. The selections have been genuinely interesting, and it’s been heartening to note how readily those people who did vote have been departing from the suggestions lists to include works more personally important to them. Niall Harrison, Ian Sales, Cheryl Morgan, Rich Horton and Martin Lewis have all posted their excellent lists, there’s another great one at SF Strangelove, and the whole business was discussed extensively on the Coode Street podcast. My own ballot, if you missed it earlier, is here. But the biggest round of applause must go to Matthew Cheney, whose ballot – so imaginative, so ambitious – was a balm to my soul. How wonderful to choose Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (raises fist and yells with delight). And Straub too! (I dithered long and hard between The Buffalo Hunter and The Juniper Tree in the 20th century novella category, eventually plumping for The Buffalo Hunter, so it’s good to see MC’s vote go to The Juniper Tree instead, although actually anything from Houses Without Doors would be a worthy candidate – I still feel bad for not including ‘A Short Guide to the City’ in the short story category, because I love it to bits.) Cheney’s choices could quite easily serve as the basis for a 2013 reading list as they include a good amount of stuff that I’ve had my eye on for some time: Thomas Disch’s 334 (I read the title section in the anthology Anticipations years ago and thought it was amazing), Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (I saw a ref to that just the other day and noted it down TBR pdq), Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation, and of course Delany, Delany, Delany, who I’ve not read anywhere near enough of and yet feel should be essential to me.

Matt Cheney’s ballot brings so many exceptional works and writers to the forefront of the mind – which should surely be the whole point of the Locus poll in any case – and comprises exactly the kind of radical and unorthodox thinking SFF readers, writers and critics need to be aiming for. Bravo.

The Muse at Tales to Terrify

November 23, 2012 /

I’m delighted to announce that my story ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’ is currently being featured as this week’s fiction at Tales to Terrify. You can listen to the podcast right here.

The nicest thing about this for me is that it offers the chance for me to experience one of my stories from the outside, as it were, to get a proper sense of how it might come across to readers. In the normal course of events, achieving this level of objectivity is next to impossible. Reading a piece of work aloud myself does help, but it’s not the same thing. I have to say I’ve loved hearing ‘Muse’. Dan Rabarts‘s reading is just perfect – he inhabits the various characters completely, and the whole thing (I am proud to say) does seem to have the feel of a classic ghost story.

I remember ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’ being an absolute beast to write. When Jonathan Oliver first asked me to contribute something to his House of Fear anthology for Solaris, I was well up for it – I love haunted house stories, and felt immediately excited by the idea of writing one. The inspiration for ‘Muse’  came from a trip Chris and I made to Maldon and the Blackwater Estuary. It’s a special place – you might almost say it’s hidden from view – and its understated landscape of brackish marshland and narrow inlets attracted me immediately as a setting for a ghost story.  The character of Johnny was there in my head from the first – for me, a story almost always begins with a single character – so that was the easy part. After that though nothing about this story wanted to be simple. I lose count of the number of false starts I made – I think it was four? – but I do know I almost gave up on it completely at one point.

I don’t know why it was so difficult. I know I wanted to write a ‘classic’ kind of haunted house story, my own personal take on the sort of thing that made me fall in love with weird fiction in the first place, and perhaps it was those cherished early memories of stories by Machen and Blackwood and Aickman (oh, especially Aickman) that gave me stage fright. Either way, hearing Dan’s wonderful reading this evening has made all the struggles I experienced getting the thing down on paper seem worthwhile. Thanks so much for that, Dan, and huge thanks also to Tony Smith of StarShipSofa and Larry Santoro of Tales to Terrify for inviting Johnny and Denny on to the show…

Boris Strugatsky R.I.P

November 20, 2012 /

photo by Sergei Berezhnoi

“He was an absolute, pure genius. With his departure, everything has become darker and more airless.” (Dmitri Bykov)

This feels like the end of an era. Read Miriam Elder’s reflections for The Guardian here. Russians really, really care about their writers.

Weighing anchor

November 9, 2012 /

Couldn’t resist a quick post about this.

It’s now exactly three months since Chris delivered the manuscript of his new novel The Adjacent (out next summer). In the weeks since then, an increasing number of sea- and ship-related books have been appearing on desks and bedside tables here, and last night I read the first three pages of the first draft of what will be Chris’s next book, The Mariners.

Anything more different from The Adjacent is difficult to imagine.

It is so good! The most intriguing, inviting and alluring beginning of a story I have read in ages.

To say I’m impatient to read more is putting it mildly…

Election Night

November 6, 2012 /

This month, Locus Magazine are hosting an ‘all-centuries’ poll for the best SF/F/H novels and short fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. It’s the first such poll since 1998 and therefore the first chance readers will have to reveal their thoughts on which works of the current century might be destined to emerge as future classics.

This is fascinating of course, especially since 1) the poll is open to everyone, not just Locus subscribers, and 2) the organizers have been sensible enough to respond to suggestions that this year’s ballot NOT be seeded with possible options (as has happened previously) and thus, theoretically at least, offering us a level playing field.

Is a level playing field truly possible, though? If you click on the link above, as well as the ballot form itself you’ll find four extensive and informative ‘suggestions lists’, one each for novels and short fiction for both the 20th and 21st centuries. It is clear that the poll’s organisers have been rigorously fair and thorough in compiling these lists (full details of the selection procedure can be found at the head of the 20th Century Novels list). Some questions, however, remain.

In the run-up to this year’s Fantasycon, the BFS ran a poll to determine the nation’s favourite ghost story, and because I’d been invited to take part in the panel discussion prior to the announcement of the winner I did a fair amount of research before the event. I started by rereading a number of my own favourite ghost stories. Then I checked out the ToCs of some landmark anthologies to see which stories featured and what I thought of them.

What I discovered was that although these anthologies featured many fine stories, they were also surprisingly conservative in their selections. The same stories tended to crop up again and again at ten-year intervals. It was as though editors had found themselves stymied, bound to choose certain works simply because they were already considered to be unassailable in their position as ‘classics’ rather than because they felt genuinely inspired to include them. So orthodoxy is born: stale, inflexible, and unthinking. A by-product of orthodoxy is the risk of losing sight of those works that didn’t fit the prevailing fashions of the time, those works that were odder, more uncomfortable, less easily categorized. Less orthodox, in other words. Awards, anthologies and works of criticism present an interesting picture certainly, but (as has been highlighted by recent debate) it can only ever be a partial one.

The result of the ghost story poll came as no surprise to anyone, and for me at least the winner served to epitomise the problems of orthodoxy. M. R. James’s ‘Oh! Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ still has its thrilling moments and James’s influence on later writers is undeniable. Yet ‘Oh! Whistle’ is also very much a product of its time and place. It is a story of surface affect but precious little psychological depth. Its convoluted mode of address makes it feel irredeemably dated now – it’s retrospective, not revolutionary, more of a comfort blanket than a tale of terror. I’m not suggesting that we should stop loving M. R. James (or Heinlein, or Clarke) – just that we should consider them honestly before including them in our personal canon, that we should not take the assumed importance of any writer for granted. Historically significant these ‘classics’ may be, but how good are they now, really? Does the writing still speak to us in a language that is actively inspiring, or is it time for a changing of the guard?

Polls like this current Locus poll give each individual voter the chance to be his or her own editor, compiling a personal ‘century’s best’. Which is a great thing – just so long as we remain aware of our own biases as we make our selections. What are our own personal criteria when we sit down to fill out our ballot forms? The most obvious point to underline is that no one has read everything – no matter how much we read or how widely, we all have built-in blindspots, gaps, hobby horses. Given that this is so, is it more worthwhile to try and make an ‘objective’ listing – those works we genuinely consider to be groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting, historically important, regardless of how much we personally actually like them – or would selecting works on such grounds prove so subjective and in its own way dishonest that it’s better simply to go for works we love, regardless of how they sit ideologically within the genre or how clever or well thought of they are. Should nostalgia play a part? What about books that completely changed our outlook when we were sixteen, but (being brutally honest) we’re no longer that keen on?

For my own ballot, I allowed my personal response – my gut feeling, in other words – to determine my choices as much as possible. I studied the suggestions lists carefully, but my final votes included a good number of works that are not on those lists. I voted only for works that I have read in their entirety. I also laid down an additional rule for myself in only voting for one work per author per category – it just seemed more interesting that way. I’ve listed my voting choices in a pdf, which you can view here. I hope to see more people posting their ballots online as the deadline for voting (November 30th) draws closer. The bigger the turnout, the more meaningful the result. The more dissenting the opinion, the better.

Result!

November 5, 2012 /

We heard last night that Lavie Tidhar has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel with his superb Osama. This is such brilliant news, not just for Lavie himself (I forget exactly how many publishers turned this book down originally, or wanted Lavie to change the title – bet they’re kicking themselves now… ) but also for SFF. Osama was so clearly the right choice – and what a wonderful way to end this year’s awards season.

At his recent gig at Foyles to launch the Solaris paperback edition of Osama, Lavie talked passionately about speculative fiction and the European tradition, why genre is irrelevant, and some of the difficulties he experienced in getting Osama out to us. The man lives and breathes ideas, which for some might be explanation enough as to why he’s so readily found a home within the SFF community. But the other thing about Lavie – the most important thing – is that he’s a bloody good writer. Read Osama and you won’t just find one of the most daring and original alternate histories of recent years – you’ll also find muscular, evocative prose, a resonant sense of place, a revelling in detail and criss-crossing everything the acknowledgement that our existence here is above all a human story, not just an ongoing historical and technological experiment.

I’ve just been reading ‘Strigoi’, a short story by Lavie recently published in Interzone. It’s set in an Israel of the future, the ‘Central Station’ which is now Earth’s chief space port. But what we have here is not the bright, shiny, impossible and rather tedious future we’re already tired of (the way SF has so often been misrepresented in and by the mainstream). We don’t have a doomsday scenario either. What we have is pragmatism, a kind of positive uncertainty. Above all we have detail:

The Shambleau called Carmel came to Central Station in spring, when the smell in the air truly is intoxicating. It is the smell of the sea, of salt water and tar, coming from the west. It is the smell of orange groves, of citrus trees in bloom, coming from the distant plantations of the Sharon region. It is the smell of the resin or sap that sometimes drips from a cut in the eternally renewing adapto-plant neighbourhoods surrounding Central Station, sprouting like weeds high above the more permanent structures of the old neighbourhood; it is the smell of ancient asphalt heating in the sun, of shawarma cooking slowly, drenched in spices, on a spit, close to a fire; it is the smell of Humanity Prime, that richest and most concentrated of smells. There is nothing like it in the Outer Worlds.

The old collides with the new here in a form we can recognise and thus feel a part of. Here is a world that is still in the future and yet all around us, a world we have a stake in, even as it arrives. It is the fine detail, the minutiae, that make this world real to us, as much as any overarching concept. Tidhar’s world is a world we feel as well as imagine.

We sense its reality.

This is the kind of SF I want to be reading.

Congratulations to Lavie Tidhar, and to all this year’s World Fantasy Award winners. This has been a good one.

Oh, and you can read another of Lavie’s Central Station stories, ‘The Lord of Discarded Things’, right here at Strange Horizons. I recommend it.

“Nothing cancels out bum aliens.”

November 4, 2012 /

I’ve just been enjoying the latest instalment in James Smythe’s marathon Stephen King Reread for The Guardian, a great little essay about Cujo that focuses on the rabid dog as a metaphor for alcohol and drug addiction. The series has been brilliant so far and I look forward to each new ‘episode’. It’s also inspired me to do something I’ve been meaning to get around to for years but have thus far never managed to allocate the time to: read the Dark Tower series. I’m almost at the end of The Gunslinger now (early days I know) and just… loving it. The sense of place – the acrid harshness of the hardpan desert – is majestic (King’s consistent attention to sense of place is in my opinion one of the things that makes his fiction great) and the idea of the book – as the first step on this monumental fictional journey – makes me jealous. That’s the simplest way I have of putting it.

I wish that I could write something like this.

As well as duelling with the green eyed monster, I have also been writing. I’ve just finished work on a new story (a long one) and am about to begin on another (not so long). I have also been trying to get my voting choices in order for the Locus All-Centuries Poll of SFF – a strenuous task, of which more in the near future.

Listening to: Cowboy Junkies Open, Bob Dylan’s Tempest. We bought this a week ago and it’s fantastic. I don’t think any lyrics could ever equal the incandescent poetry of some of those earlier albums (for me at least) but this is a good record.

BSFA London Meeting Weds Oct 24th

October 22, 2012 /

Just to mention that I’m (very proud to be) the guest at this month’s BSFA London meeting on Wednesday. The venue is the cellar bar of The Argyle pub on Leather Lane, just 2 minutes’ walk from Chancery Lane tube. (NB: the food there is excellent value.) The meeting kicks off at 7pm. I shall be reading a short extract from What Happened to Maree, following which I shall be interviewed by Niall Harrison, editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons. Hopefully there’ll also be time for a Q&A.

I’m very much looking forward to this event. Niall’s knowledge of SFF is legendary, and he’s always had insightful things to say about my stuff, so we should definitely find plenty to discuss.

Do come along and say hello if you’re in the area – this looks like being fun!

A word about Strange Horizons

October 21, 2012 /

As a kind-of SF writer it pains me to admit this, but I never get overly excited at the thought of interfacing with new technology. I always maintain that by the time I’ve adopted something it’s safe to assume it’s ubiquitous, and then comfort myself with the fact that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a portable typewriter and has been using the same Macbook now for more than a decade. If I tell you that when I upgraded my mobile last week (under some protest) it was to an identical model, basically, only with the next serial number up and in a different colour (I was still pretty traumatised) it probably won’t surprise you to learn that it took me a little while, when I first re-entered the SFF community at the beginning of the 2000s, to appreciate the growing importance of online media. I read a lot of print magazines back then and it was some years before I caught up to Strange Horizons – but it was SH more than any of them that began to re-attune my senses to what was happening and what was possible in SFF today and into tomorrow.

Strange Horizons has done and continues to do a great deal to promote new and exciting writing in SFF, fiction that pushes the boundaries and widens the remit, and their occasional ‘retrospectives’ featuring more established writers are every bit as imaginative as their promotion of fresh talent. But it’s as a forum for review and debate that I personally have found SH to be essential reading, unique in the field, an invaluable resource that is now as much a part of my creative life as any newspaper or print magazine and probably more so. It was at Strange Horizons that I first discovered and read the reviews and criticism of John Clute and Paul Kincaid, Dan Hartland and Matt Cheney, Jonathan McCalmont, Martin Lewis and Niall Harrison, all writers whose engagement with, knowledge of and commitment to the field of speculative fiction is a constant and continuing delight and inspiration, not to say a provocation and a challenge. SH has an archived index of reviews dating back to 2004 – a first port of call for anyone needing to check the back catalogue of critical writing on a particular work, as well as a fascinating snapshot of how opinion and criticism in SFF has evolved and shifted through the last decade.

The reviews team now under Abigail Nussbaum (Nic Clarke, Erin Horakova, Niall Alexander, Sofia Samatar, Michael Levy, Duncan Lawie, Lila Garrott, Liz Bourke et al I’m looking at you) is just awesome, and I feel genuinely honoured to be able to make my own contribution from time to time.

Strange Horizons is a paying market that takes the trouble to acquire the best work and that treats its contributors as professionals. It is staffed by volunteers, and run entirely on reader donations as a not-for-profit venture. SH are currently holding their annual fund drive to raise the money that will finance this irreplaceable magazine for another year and I would encourage anyone who loves SFF to support them.

I can’t imagine the critical landscape without SH. I’m looking forward to 2013’s SFnal controversies already…

Pendle etc

September 23, 2012 /
Approaching Pendle Hill
From Ilkley Moor

The Parsonage, Haworth

Ribblehead Viaduct

The Devonshire Inn, Skipton

We’ve been spending the past week exploring the Yorkshire/Lancashire borderlands, a part of the country neither of us had previously visited and that we found incredibly inspiring, both in terms of landscape and literary heritage. I’ve loved the work of the Brontes all my life, and in spite of the tourist trappings that are Haworth’s inevitable burden I felt very much moved to find myself inside the parsonage, stepping into the space where Anne and Emily and Charlotte read and wrote and discussed their work. The rooms of the house are surprisingly small. They have presence, or rather there is a presence, still tangible, within them, especially in the dining room, where the sisters read aloud to each other most evenings.

Unlike Haworth, the village of Mytholmroyd, where Ted Hughes was born, is – aside from the blue plaque beside the front door of No 1 Aspinall Street – completely untouched by tourism. It has grown in size of course, but the village Hughes would have known and remembered is still plainly visible, easily mappable. The warmth of the place (as with so many northern townships), its tie to the land, is palpable. I’ve known for a long time what it looks like – I was fifteen or sixteen when I first saw a photograph of the small terraced house that is Hughes’s birthplace – but still the impact of finally being there, of standing in the street outside, was considerable, a special moment.

Pendle Hill, Ilkley Moor, the journey by rail from Settle to Appleby, the Devonshire Inn at Skipton (where the opening chapters of The Space Machine take place) – these were all special moments. Most of all just the sense of space, both literal and imaginative, of high and narrow roads that might lead anywhere. The Forest of Bowland – an isolate domain of heather moorland and woodland trails – was a revelation.

A way-too-good-to-miss book sale in Skipton (silly prices) meant we returned with considerably more in our luggage than we started out with. I came away with Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud, Nicola Barker’s The Yips, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. I was also able to pick up Philip Almond’s new book about the Pendle witch trials, The Lancashire Witches. So that’s me sorted for the next couple of months. And when Chris has finished with Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton I’ll be reading that, too.

An amazing week.

Now that we’re back, I’ll be giving What Happened to Maree a close going-over – there are some line edits and other bits and pieces I need to attend to. After so many months of working on the book in isolation, having it read by another – Chris is, of course, the one reader I can trust absolutely – has somehow released it. Now, finally, I’m getting a sense of the novel as a whole – what it is, how it reads, what I meant by it – and I’m happy to say I’m feeling very excited.

Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd

The old church, Heptonstall

Singing Ringing Tree, Burnley

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