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Weird Wednesdays #16: The Ministry of Truth

September 16, 2020 / Nina

Earlier this month, Chris and I spent a number of days away, exploring our neighbouring islands of Islay and Jura. The trip had originally been booked for the end of June, to coincide with the summer solstice and the longest day. The summer nights up here are very precious to me, the quality of light is extraordinary and I wanted to experience that on Jura, a place that was special to us already without having seen it for reasons of its literary legacy. It is well known that George Orwell went to Jura to find the seclusion he needed to work on his final novel, unarguably his masterpiece. I knew it would be difficult for us to gain access to the house itself but I was determined to try.

Port Ellen, Isle of Islay, September 2020

As things turned out, we did not get to see Barnhill; neither did we get to spend the summer solstice on Jura. That we were able to reschedule our trip and almost get to Barnhill seems something of a miracle, given the circumstances. Staff at the hotel where we were staying made enquiries about us taking a boat trip down the coast so we could glimpse the house from the water but on our one full day in Jura, the weather was ridiculously inclement (always a possibility when you’re in Scotland) and the boatman was having trouble making even his scheduled trip across from the mainland.

Machir Bay, Isle of Islay, September 2020

We drove instead, as far as we could – twenty-five miles along an increasingly tenuous strip of road and into a landscape I had scarcely imagined. I knew in my head that Barnhill farmhouse was isolated and inaccessible, but it wasn’t until we were in the landscape that I was able to appreciate just how much. I think I’d been imagining a bumpy track along the coast, something like the farm roads we were used to in Devon. In fact, the road turns inward, away from the coast and into the vast, moorland interior of the island. Stags leap across the road in front of the car. Mist sweeps in like bolts of gauze. The colours – those quintessentially Scottish colours of ochre and sage and grey, contoured with purple. The heather – at its finest when I travelled north just a fortnight before (another trip, another story) – was still in evidence, still everywhere. That particular purple, with that particular grey – glorious, favoured, northern.

Craighouse, Isle of Jura, September 2020

In the end we reached the point where the road seemed so precarious it would have been foolhardy for us to continue. Chris parked, or rather, brought the car to a standstill overlooking the valley. I left him listening (appropriately enough, given my work-in-progress, but more of that another time) to Science Stories on Radio 4 while I got out and walked for an hour, up to and past the signpost that indicates the end of the public road with still four miles to go until you reach Barnhill. It was raining pretty hard but I was singing at the top of my voice into the wind. I felt utterly alone, and yet utterly seen, utterly alive. It might sound like a leap too far to say I felt Orwell’s presence – yet I think anyone who travels there must feel that they do. The spirit of the book has somehow become enmeshed with the spirit of place: not the grimness of the book’s contents, but the wildness, the intellectual courage, the poetic insight that enabled its creation.

I am determined to return to Jura, sooner rather than later, so I can walk the whole distance, so I can reach the moorland ridge (I have seen it in photographs) from where you can look down and see the white, elongated block of Barnhill crouched in the valley below, the glistening sea beyond. But for now the immense privilege and joy of being in that place, of seeing and smelling and tasting the landscape that Orwell knew and loved, that acted as a spiritual counterweight to the unrelenting harshness of the work he was composing – these are the memories I want to carry out of this year, a counterweight to the increasing instability and grimness of this time in all our lives.

The Paps of Jura, Isle of Jura, September 2020

The book I took with me to read on this trip was Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, subtitled ‘a biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Lynskey’s aim in this book is to provide a biographical and cultural analysis of Orwell’s masterpiece, showing how the book came to be written, and the independent life it has gone on to lead in the absence of its author. Lynskey is at pains to stress that Nineteen Eighty-Four came as the culminating achievement of what, in a parallel universe, might have been just the first part of Orwell’s career. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War set in motion a period of intense thinking, reading and conversation that funnelled itself into the creation of what is, in effect, the summation of Orwell’s ideas on totalitarianism and political ideology. As a foundation stone of twentieth century literature, we can count ourselves lucky that Orwell lived long enough to complete it.

In the second half of his study, Lynskey examines the impact of NIneteen Eighty-Four on both literary and popular culture: through the years of austerity and McCarthyism, the later years of the Cold War, the post-Thatcher crises in unemployment and national identity, right up to the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Lynskey reveals how Orwell’s masterpiece – like all truly great works of literature – reinvents itself for each successive generation. Orwell drew his original inspiration primarily from his experience of Stalinist communism, Trotskyite international socialism and the acts of blind obeisance committed by both the British government and the British Labour and Communist parties in effectively eliding the atrocities committed in the name of socialism. But Nineteen Eighty-Four is too big and too brilliant to remain associated with one specific time period alone; it’s a shape-shifting, mutable text, Lynskey argues, the major proof of which resides in the fact that it has been called into service by every shade of political opinion, often at one and the same time.

I was so excited and so energised by The Ministry of Truth I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop talking about it. Lynskey’s work is informative, original and addictively readable, one of my books of this year for sure. What it also does – as well it should – is drive you back to the original text. I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was around fifteen years of age and still at school. I read it at least twice more over the following decade – but that was thirty years ago now and although I’ve thought about and referenced the book as often as anyone else, I haven’t reread it. I finished Lynskey’s book with a hunger to put that right – and I’m so glad I did.

When I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was in the context of a lot of other dystopias. The novel that is closest to Orwell’s in terms of its genesis and overall impact is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which I read at almost exactly the same time (it changed my life, but that’s another story). However, my young-adult self never thought to bracket those two books together: in my mind, Koestler’s book was a historical text specifically about the Soviet Union, whereas Orwell’s was a ‘true’ dystopia, set in the future (only a couple of years in my own future by the time I read it, but still) and built around concepts that seemed undeniably science fictional. It felt more natural to me to bracket Orwell’s work with other similarly science fictional novels: Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, even Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, which no one else seems to have read but I was obsessed with at the time.

Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four as a mature adult reveals how I was both right and wrong: Orwell’s novel is both horrifyingly realist, and one of the most perfect exemplars of the science fictional argument we have to draw on. Save for the unavoidable absence of computers, this novel could have been written yesterday. The fact that Orwell was not in a position to imagine the kind of digital infrastructure that would come to define our world is, in the context of this book, unimportant.

As a younger reader, the parts of Nineteen Eighty-Four that impressed themselves upon me most forcefully were those that were most outwardly expressive of the dystopian mode: the telescreens, the Thought Police, Winston’s hidden diary, the imprisonment and torture. Though my memory of the text proved near-photographic in places, I was astounded to discover on rereading that aside from casual mentions of hangings, and of course the ongoing war with Eastasia/Eurasia (take your pick) there is no overt violence in Nineteen Eighty-Four until someway past the halfway mark. What you get instead is an accumulation of circumstances, a portrait of postwar Britain, with all its griminess, everyday privations and grim sense of stasis that, although seventy years in the past now, will feel immediately resonant and present in our pre-Brexit reality to anyone born in Britain in the analogue age.

There are also minor yet touching details that draw directly from Orwell’s personal circumstances: the way Winston ‘hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing’, for example, a detail that reminds us instantly of how the author was suffering from TB at the time of writing, and edging closer to death.

Orwell’s attention to detail extends even to minor characters, Winston’s neighbour Parsons for example, the exemplary Party man who ends up being denounced (for absolutely nothing) by his own daughter. We have all met someone like Parsons, nodded hello to him on a Sunday morning as he washes his car. He’s the kind of man who votes UKIP, the kind who sticks a note through his neighbour’s letterbox during lockdown, warning them that he’s seen them taking an extra exercise session and feels inclined to report them for it. Orwell doesn’t demonise Parsons – he just shows him like he is, pathos included. I especially admired his characterisation of Syme, the passionate stickler who works alongside Winston at the Ministry of Truth, a man whose intelligence has been corrupted into the service of a monstrous master yet whose obsessive interest in his work still makes him interesting to talk to:

In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,’ Syme asserts, before discoursing on the essential redundancy of synonyms and antonyms. ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’ he says. ‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ What struck me most profoundly on reading the novel this time around was how its subject, more than any other, is the importance of language, not only in resisting tyranny but also in maintaining any kind of personal integrity. Anyone who cares about language and words will find Syme’s proposition for the shrinking and coarsening of language literally shiver-inducing, especially as we are already bearing witness to such a transformation across large segments of political and online discourse. One need barely ask what Orwell would have made of phrases such as ‘alternative facts’ and ‘the reality-based community’. If it weren’t so appalling it would be funny. Reading Syme’s words, I also found myself thinking of the ways in which Anglophone culture has forcibly suppressed indigenous languages, gaslighting, devaluing and at the worst extreme obliterating the identity and means of expression of entire peoples.

If I were to pass a negative comment on any aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I would have to say that Orwell is not particularly imaginative in his portrayal of women. Winston’s estranged wife Katherine is referred to as ‘stupid’ and moreover ‘too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of [Winston’s] opinions’. Wherever prole women are mentioned – and with the exception of an elderly man Winston talks to in a pub the proles described by Orwell are all women – they are invariably described as ‘enormous’, or ‘monstrous’. The idea that these women might have inner lives is never contemplated, and it is only shortly before his arrest that Winston is able to connect a prole woman’s singing with the idea of beauty..

The main female character Julia is bright and bold and courageous but again Orwell seems at pains to stress her physicality. “You’re only a rebel from the waist down,” Winston says to her – Julia is above all a sensuous being, showing no interest in the intellectual reasons behind her rebellion or the life of the mind generally. ‘She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.’ In spite of his love for Julia, Winston remains fundamentally alone in his search for answers about the nature of the Party and its hunger for power. The idea that women might be equal partners in counter-revolution seems barely to occur to him. Considered on the terms we are offered, Julia is excellently characterised: a warm-blooded, vital creation with a life force that is pivotal within the novel as a whole. Orwell clearly has a blind spot when it comes to feminism, which is a shame. In this respect it is interesting to compare Nineteen Eighty-Four with Zamyatin’s novel We, in which the male protagonist is schooled in the concepts of revolution and intellectual independence by a woman.

Though it might seem incongruous, there are many moments of illuminating beauty throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, moments that are not often mentioned or remembered but that form a crucial and definitive counterweight to the horror. Winston’s dreams of ‘the Golden Country’ for example, passages that in a sense represent the heart of Orwell’s vision, the necessity of ‘staying sane’ as an act of resistance. There is also much discussion to be had around the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Certainly when I first read the novel all those years ago I had no doubt that Winston’s final assertion, that he loves Big Brother, was a statement of utter defeat, that every last scrap of his integrity had been torn away. This time, I’m not so certain. ‘White always wins’, Winston says, as he moves chess pieces across the board in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, and I had the sense that it was this assertion about the ultimate triumph of good over evil that held the most weight, a coded message almost, even at the last: Winston says he loves Big Brother, but does he truly?

We cannot know – or at least we can only know the answer that feels most true for us. What I do know is that Nineteen Eighty-Four is and remains a landmark work that deserves its fame and status. Not only in its prescience but in its historical acuity, not only in its polemic but in its literary assurance and raw beauty, this is an elegant, complex, mature work of fiction that rewards the reader’s attention on every level. Reading it again brought me not only intellectual satisfaction; I was equally excited to discover how well it has stood the test of time, how relevant this book still feels, precisely today. It also brought me uneasy dreams, a sense of being on the boundary between the known world and the most perilously unstable of futures. To share one’s fear with a like mind in this way is not merely a consolation, but a reason for hope.

Weird Wednesdays #14/Clarke Award #6: The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

September 9, 2020 / Nina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weird Wednesdays #13: The Taiga Syndrome

September 2, 2020 / Nina

I remember the boundaries on the map I either saw or anticipated in that moment. Long ago, when cartography was just beginning – though it was already a matter of life or death, and not just for those who went to sea – maps were called ‘Portolan charts’. From some place in my mind the words ‘Carta Pisana’ emerged. The date: 1290. The sophisticated outline of the shores. The details of life at the bottom of the enormous sea. Above all, I remember how, all at once, the whole forest closed in on us. I remember feeling suddenly small.

(From: The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Levine and Aviva Kana.)

The protagonist of Cristina Rivera Garza’s short novel is a detective, or rather an ex-detective. She is approached by a client whose wife has disappeared into the great forests of the taiga, ostensibly with another man. Accompanied by an individual known only as the translator, our nameless detective heads off in pursuit of the woman, to persuade her to return possibly, to discover her reasons for leaving at the very least.

The Taiga Syndrome won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella last year and it’s been on my reading list ever since. It’s wonderful to see work like this gaining prize recognition because now having read The Taiga Syndrome I can tell you it stretches the definition of ‘story’ till its bones begin to crack. Imagine what might have happened if the detective protagonist of Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground had been rejected by all his colleagues a little sooner. Imagine the fitful doomed pursuit of Anna Kavan’s Ice taking place in a landscape almost entirely denuded of human presence and you’ll get an inkling of what you’re in for here. The protagonist of The Taiga Syndrome appears to be in the grip of a breakdown, of acute mental distress – I kept seeing her as Nicole Kidman’s hell-bent cop Erin in Karyn Kusama’s underappreciated 2018 movie Destroyer. Like MacInnes’s cashiered police investigator, she is thwarted and confused, ground down by her alienation. In the grip of her own fugue state, she is one of the most unreliable narrators in fiction you will encounter.

As in Anna Kavan’s Ice, the landscape itself appears to exert a malign influence upon all who enter it. The taiga seems almost a sentient presence, and it does not welcome intruders:

The taiga is in fact a disease, a syndrome. Some people flee the monotonous terrain even when they know they can’t escape. Some people take flight, suicidal, without considering the speed, their goal, what lies beyond. Some of them dance. The more I talked the more incredible it all sounded to me. The more implausible. The angrier.

There are few answers here; even when the detective does finally catch up with her quarry, the conversation that ensues is anything but conclusive. Along the way we meet wolves, cannibalistic incarnations of Hansel and Gretel, nameless creatures issuing from the characters’ own bodies, a decaying metropolis built on top of a structure that resembles an oil rig. Nothing is fully articulated, much less explained. It is as if a story – a legend – existed, and was smashed with a hammer. As readers we search in the rubble, attempting to fit the fragments together, our efforts reflected in the dirty puddles of an unending rainstorm.

The novel ends with a playlist, which has its own chapter heading and is clearly intended to be interpreted as an integral part of the novel. Looking at the tracks Garza has chosen, this makes total sense. I love this touch in particular, working as it does to suggest that the entire novel is not a novel at all so much as a construct, a heap of found documents and sketches for fairy tale retellings, the disassociated, torn-up scraps from someone’s diary.

I won’t lie: there is a part of me that longs to fill in the gaps, to create from this abstract sketch of a novel the full-blooded beast of a fantastical journey it might alternately be. And perhaps in the end that is the point, that the author is inviting the reader to do exactly that, to recreate in their own mind not only the landscape they are passing through, but the reasons and answers the book does not yet provide. Its characters’ backstories and motivations, their eventual fates. The Taiga Syndrome is definitely the kind of work that would reward revisiting, and with its length so incandescently brief, this is a book you can easily devour – Red Riding Hood’s wolf-style – in a single afternoon.

In fact why not double the pleasure and take in Nona Fernandez’s Space Invaders at the same time? In this tantalisingly brief novella, the formations and imagery of the popular arcade video game are used to highlight a story of real shootings, real murders, real instances of sudden oblivion. Space Invaders follows the perspectives of a number of young people living out their schooldays in Pinochet’s Chile. As they revisit their memories of autocracy in the decade following, they cannot escape the fact that some of them – and one young woman in particular – are no longer among their number:

A green glow-in-the-dark hand. Riquelme keeps dreaming about it, can’t shake it. This time he sees it on a television screen. The hand advances rapidly, in pursuit of extraterrestrial children. They run back and forth, fleeing in terror, but the hand clutches at the first Martian within reach and at its touch there is an explosion. The body of the little Martian flies apart into coloured lights that vanish from the TV screen. On the screen the score goes up by one hundred points, but the amazing record set by Gonzalez’s brother stands unbroken. The green hand and many other green hands stream out of an Earthling cannon, on the hunt for more space invaders.

(From Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez, translated by Natasha Wimmer.)

Like The Taiga Syndrome, Space Invaders is a dense, dreamlike narrative, written as if its multiple narrators have grown used to speaking elliptically to avoid detection. Murders happen with such sudden matter-of-factness we find ourselves doubting the veracity of what we have been shown. When people disappear, it is as if we have been expecting it all along, as if these characters’ descent into darkness has been preordained.

What Fernandez’s work demonstrates most of all is the depth of scarring, the damage to the collective memory of an entire people. Her words are brief and potent and there are none that need be added. Our role as readers is to bear witness, to read between the lines of what is being said.

We would seem to be in the midst of a wild outpouring of talent among Latin American women writers at the moment: Rita Indiana (Dominican Republic), Ariana Harwicz (Argentina), Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), Fernanda Melchor (Mexico), Sylvia Moreno-Garcia (Mexico), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), and Nona Fernandez (Chile) among others are producing incredible work, much of it positioned somewhere on the speculative scale. The passion and fury that is often present in these writers’ stories is a lesson to us all in the form and dynamics of honest self expression, the limitless, undaunted reach of the imagination. Whenever I pick up a work by one of these writers I know I’m going to learn something. I know also that I’m going to be left reeling by the full-force visceral impact of words on a page. This is work I feel empowered by reading. It is also work that tells me I’m not doing enough, that I can go further, dig deeper. This is work that dares me to be more wolf.

Weird Wednesdays #12/Clarke Award #5: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

August 26, 2020 / Nina

Your desire to conquer, to colonise others, is both too fixed and too free. Nothing escapes your dull dialectic: either it takes a village to live or to each his own to survive. Even your debate on the best way to be falls on either side of this blade. The social contract or individual free will, the walls of a commune must keep us close or capital must run rampant. That’s how you froze your long Cold War, with this endless, mindless divide.

How often does it happen that you fall in love with a book? Not at first sight, but through continuing acquaintance? That you are persuaded, encroached upon, seduced? That you come to realise that your gathering conclusions about a text have all been reversed?

Some books you simply enjoy. Some you admire. Some you forget more or less as soon as you’ve finished reading them. I have found, almost invariably, that it is those books you come to have a relationship with, that you even struggle with at times, that tend to bring the most lasting satisfaction. There has been a resistance in certain quarters to describing books as ‘difficult’, as if difficult were code for elitist, as if the necessity of having to work at something automatically precludes the idea of pleasure or inclusiveness. What bollocks. Books don’t ‘have’ to be difficult to be enjoyable, of course they don’t. Books don’t ‘have’ to be anything, and neither do readers. But for some readers, the work is the pleasure, or at least a significant part of it. The sense that you have grown as a reader in the process of reading. That the book you have just completed has enhanced your perception both of the world, and the written word.

For its length alone, The Old Drift might be said to encompass an element of difficulty. To read six hundred pages demands commitment from the reader, not just of time but – with a text so richly detailed and intricately structured – of attention. The Old Drift begins – well actually, it begins with a family tree, a fact I had completely forgotten because I skipped over it, and stumble upon only now as I retrace my steps to find a particular quote. The family tree is printed too small for me to read without my magnifying glass. Not wanting to fanny about so early on I jumped the page and dived right in, knowing nothing, no names, no spidery outline of relationships, and now here I am wondering how that might have altered my relationship with the novel. Did it enhance my sense of difficulty, or not? Did it augment my pleasure in working out the network of familial connections (not difficult, if you’re concentrating) for myself? I’ll never know, and that fact also I love. Looking at the family tree now through the lens of my magnifying glass I feel the pleasure of remembrance, nostalgic already for the moments before I came to know these characters, those moments in which their lives lay still ahead of me.

As I was saying, The Old Drift begins with (the mosquitoes, then with Dr Livingstone, then) Percy Clark, ‘a wanderer, a brute, a cad, the forefather who started it all’. He’s come to Africa from Cambridge, under something of a cloud. In those early years of the twentieth century, the country of Zambia still does not exist, or rather has not been named as such. Percy makes his way inland in search of a place to be and a vocation to follow:

I set out for the drift five miles above the Falls, the port of entry into north-western Rhodesia. The Zambesi is at its deepest and narrowest here for hundreds of miles, so it’s the handiest spot for ‘drifting’ a body across. At first it was called Sekute’s Drift after a chief of the Leya. Then it was Clarke’s Drift, after the first white settler, whom I soon met. No one knows when it became The Old Drift.

For the settlers, the land is unforgiving and strewn with difficulties. Many die of disease. Those who survive forge a sense of ownership that is entirely unearned. Percy forms an acquaintanceship with Pietro Gavuzzi, the manager of the newly constructed Victoria Falls Hotel, where Percy earns a modicum of fame through being the first diner in the audaciously upmarket restaurant. The stories and families of Percy, Gavuzzi and N’gulubu, a Zambian boy assaulted by Pietro’s daughter Lina in the dining room of the hotel will, over the course of the following century, become inextricably linked and intermingled as a new country is born, a monumental engineering project is conceived, and history itself is laid down, fought over, and remade.

For more than half of its length, The Old Drift reads like a family chronicle. Dense in detail, rich in language and imagery, hugely intelligent in its insights and observations, it’s an impressive achievement on this level alone. In its examination of class especially I kept being reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. In its interweaving of familial bonds and human relationships, I couldn’t not think of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, though for me The Old Drift, with its rigorous underpinning of history and cogent analysis of colonialism and its long-haul aftermath, is the nittier, grittier, broader and deeper and more memorable reading experience by far.

All of that is just the beginning, though, for it is in its latter third that this novel truly begins to show its colours, to ripen and to reveal itself for the genre-busting, formally innovative, revolutionary and science fictional masterpiece it truly is.

For anyone reading this book, hitting the 400 pp mark and thinking where’s the science fiction?? let me tell you I feel your doubt and bewilderment, because they were also mine. There are hints all along, of course, of where the book is going, what it is doing – the chorus of mosquitoes (some of the finest writing at the sentence level in the whole book), the building of the dam, the crazy Zambian space program – but for a long while they do not seem to add up to enough (not nearly enough) to make the book science fiction. I was all prepared to write an essay on how I admired The Old Drift in terms of its literary achievement but what was it actually doing on the Clarke Award shortlist?

But then, when Lionel Banda and later his son Joseph (they’re both descendants of Percy) begin and pursue researches into a vaccine for HIV, there’s a sort of seismic shift in the sensibility of the novel that acts not as a break in tone, but as a mechanism that transforms the very essence of what has gone before. You know that feeling you get when you’ve spent hours trying to assemble a piece of IKEA flatpack – all that ‘insert bolt A into bracket D’ stuff that never quite pans out as it is supposed to in the inadequate diagrams – and then suddenly you twist that little Allen key one more time and the whole thing slides into place and you have a piece of furniture? For me, reading The Old Drift really was like that, and to experience that paradigm-shift, in real-time, is going to count as one of my stand-out reading experiences of the year.

That HIV in the novel is referred to throughout simply as ‘the Virus’, and that so much of the discourse on immunology, a foreign subject to most of us until mere months ago yet now queasily familiar, is one more miraculous twist of the knife of perception:

Your beastly old tales know it all so well: we are Nature’s great superfluity. ‘What is this creature for?’ you still cry, raising your fist to the heavens. We pollinate little and feed very few, and no predator needs us to live… We’re an asterisk to Nature, a flaw, a digression, a footnote if ever there was one. We are not just an accident, but issue it too. .. Joseph himself has learned this the hard way: his vaccine, founded upon a mutation, has foundered on capital’s reef. But all sorts of things can slip through the cracks, especially genetically tweaked ones. Evolution formed the entirety of life using only one tool: the mistake…

The Old Drift ends up in the very near future. Climate change is a life-altering reality, new technologies are revolutionising the revolution of digital communication. The seeds of destruction sewn in the midst of the twentieth century – the displacement of peoples, the pillaging of natural resources, the inattention to the long-term environmental effects of human activity – are bearing bitter fruit. And yet, the silver seam of history continues. ‘I want to tell them that our minds are free, even if our hands are tied by poverty,’ insists Joseph’s half-brother Jacob, and it is this quality of endurance, of curiosity, of wild innovation, the determination to survive that most characterises the novel as a whole, that becomes its message.

The science writing, the existence of an overarching theme, the formal innovation, the propensity to surprise and to question assumptions, the imaginative reach, the view of time as infinitely flexible, the ability to postulate alternative futures and different worlds – these are some of the characteristics that help us to define what science fiction is and what it can do. These qualities are boundlessly present in The Old Drift. There are some books you receive as a gift, a light upon the way and this is one such. I feel lucky to have read it, inspired by a writer whose vision and reach seem set to take her wherever she wants to go. I can’t wait for her next novel.

Where does The Old Drift stand as regards my thoughts about the shortlist overall? Well, we still have one more book to go, so this will have to be a question of wait and see. In the meantime, I would encourage anyone with a passion for words, for indelible stories, for more inventive interpretations of the term ‘science fiction’ to read The Old Drift. Sink in, take your time. The book will reward you. At the very least, read Richard Lea’s excellent interview with Namwali Serpell here, or watch this fabulous online conversation between Serpell and Carmen Maria Machado here. We are so lucky to have writers of such talent and originality working in speculative fiction right now.

Weird Wednesdays #11: the question of lineage

August 19, 2020 / Nina

Somewhere along the line, people lose their courage over science fiction. They stop reading it, they stop thinking of it as literary.

(Una McCormack, Backlisted.)

The above quote is taken from a discussion on the Backlisted podcast of William Golding’s second novel The Inheritors. Backlisted is one of the best literary podcasts around, and for those who haven’t discovered it yet I recommend it heartily. This particular discussion though seemed especially resonant to me among the plethora of arguments and counter-claims that have sprung up recently around the question of the science fiction canon: does such a canon even exist, and if so, should it? If the idea of a canon of science fiction literature is important, what should be included?

This is a discussion that seems to resurface with predictable frequency, most recently in the aftermath of George R. R. Martin’s ill-conceived hosting of the Hugo Awards ceremony at virtual ConZealand. Whatever your feelings about Martin, or indeed the SFF canon, it would be difficult to deny at the very least that the parade of anecdotes trotted out on that evening, both by Martin himself and by guest-contributor Robert Silverberg, went on way too long. Given that many of the shortlisted authors had stayed up literally all night to be virtually present at the ceremony, the waiting times between award announcements – which seemed to get longer and more discursive as the ‘evening’ progressed – must have been agony. That Martin seemed disinclined to include any celebration of those authors, their works, or the tradition of speculative fiction in New Zealand were more bitter pills the audience were forced to swallow. It was almost as if Martin had forgotten the substantial time-differences that had to be juggled with, not to mention what the evening was supposed to be about. If so, then someone should have reminded him. Three-and-a-half hours of random talk is not a recipe for audience enjoyment, even for those members of the audience who have an interest in what is being said.

But what of the most substantive criticism levelled at Martin, that of harping on authors and ideas who have not only dominated the discourse for too long, but who are now largely irrelevant at best, harmful at worst to the writers and fans who have made the genre their home in more recent years? The boggy ground around this question might best be navigated through the prism of a single question: do you have to read Campbell, Asimov and Heinlein to truly know science fiction? While the shortest and most pertinent answer to that question is simply ‘no’, I do still find it interesting to consider whether the idea of ‘canon’ has any more value other than – as its most vehement detractors insist it is – as a gatekeeping device.

I happened to listen to the Backlisted discussion of The Inheritors pretty much exactly around the time the Hugo thing kicked off, and it had two distinct effects on me. The first was to reignite my interest in the writing of William Golding (more on that shortly), the second was to reaffirm me in my belief that whilst there is no such thing as the science fiction canon – canons are artificial constructs, set in place by whoever happens to have grabbed the establishment microphone at any given time – there is such a thing as a personal science fiction canon, and that it is through these individual responses to and movements towards that we learn most about ourselves as readers, writers, fans and critics of the literature we love.

Needless to say, it was something Una McCormack said on the podcast that began that train of thought:

I think science fiction as a genre changes significantly in the sixties as it starts to diverge from literary fiction. But there just seems to be a straight line, for me, from Wells, who supplies the epigraph for [The Inheritors], through Golding, to people like JG Ballard and Nigel Kneale. And then if you opened a book by Christopher Priest or Chris Beckett, you’ve got an absolute straight line there, I think, of literary British science fiction.

Her words literally raised the hairs on the back of my neck, because it is this straight line, this lineage, I have been banging on about in public and in private ever since I first began thinking critically about science fiction, yet I had never heard anyone express the same idea in terms that so exactly mirrored my own perceptions. I have never felt either affinity for or allegiance to the quintessentially American Analog route into SF: Campbell and the pulps, Asimov, Heinlein. The path I forged – though I did not think of it then as forging a path, I was simply reading books I loved and seeking out more like them – led precisely via Wells, Huxley, Orwell and Wyndham through Golding, Lessing, Kavan, Iris Murdoch, John Fowles and John Christopher to JG Ballard, (Keith) Roberts, (Mike) Harrison and Christopher Priest.

I have heard some fans repeatedly insisting that science fiction is an American form. I think this is nonsense. Whilst you can argue that the term ‘science fiction’ originated with Hugo Gernsback and came to define ‘the’ SF canon for many decades after, to maintain that this form of SF should continue to define SF is both illogical and limiting. ‘Science fiction’ is in a sense as illusory and artificial a construct as ‘the canon’ – it has no origin in empirical fact, it is simply what people say it is. Why should we grant primacy to one version of the construct over another?

When talking about science fiction, it is both useful and necessary to offer a more specific personal background to what, exactly, we are talking about.

I am ferociously proud of my science fiction lineage. Whilst I would never claim it as ‘the one true way’ – that would be ridiculous – its landscapes and aesthetic have immense resonance for me, and these writers form much of the basis for how I originally came to perceive and understand speculative fiction. I am still deeply attached to them today, and to a version of science fiction that cants towards literary modernism rather than the traditional ‘novel of ideas’ that arose from the pulp tradition. (Another gem gleaned from the Backlisted podcast: the TLS originally reviewed The Inheritors alongside John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.) I have no doubt this is the area I will continue to gravitate towards, both as a writer and as a critic. But that certainly does not mean that I denigrate other traditions as being inferior, or that I am not interested in them. I think much of the tragedy of Martin’s Hugo ramble is that he seems entirely incurious about what writers are writing now, and why science fiction matters personally, to them, for reasons that have nothing to do with Campbell and Asimov and Ellison, indeed rather the opposite.

New and diverse traditions of science fiction are not a threat to older or more established traditions – they are simply that: new and diverse, with all the excitement and expanded possibility such words encompass. For each of us to find our own way through the maze – to identify and draw inspiration from particular writers or groups or generations of writers we perceive as pursing interests or traditions or modes of expression in sympathy with our own – is that not exciting, enriching, instructive and something to be celebrated?

I have explored and will continue to explore some of the ‘canonical’ works from science fiction’s so-called Golden Age – not because I feel I should but because I am interested. I enjoy thinking about these things, I enjoy writing criticism, and I happen to believe that the more widely you read around a subject, the more fiercely you can argue your corner, the more enjoyment you can derive. And having said that, I saw an interesting comment somewhere at some point during the post-Hugo furore with words to the effect that it is actually the middle generation of science fiction writers – Le Guin, Butler, Russ, Delany, Disch, Haldeman, Pohl – who are the true pioneers of the American tradition, who not only wrote better then but speak better now to the generation of writers currently winning Hugos. That definitely rings true for me, though it might not for you. But that’s the beauty of such contentions: they are there to be discussed.

Returning to Golding specifically, I was also struck by what Una McCormack said in that Backlisted podcast about his 1964 novel The Spire:

I read The Spire as science fiction. They’re on a generation ship, it’s a tight crew of people in a hermetically sealed environment. They’re trying to get the navigational system to work, with the promise of a goal they’ll eventually get to. It’s incredible, the trappings that he takes, and then reformulates them through Paradise Lost, or Thucydides.

Her words intrigued me mightily, and I realised that although I had previously (and a fair while ago now) read four of Golding’s novels, The Spire had not been one of them. It is a short novel – just under two hundred pages in length – and with the need for something meaty and thought-provoking very much in mind, I decided to sneak it up my reading pile before launching myself into the next Clarke Award epic.

How glad I am that I did. The Spire is ostensibly a historical novel, inspired by the pioneering construction of Salisbury Cathedral (Golding taught for many years at Bishop Wordsworth’s school, situated in Salisbury’s Cathedral Close) in the thirteenth century. Its protagonist Dean Jocelin is a man obsessed. He believes that he has been put on Earth by God to oversee the completion of a cathedral spire to dwarf all others and dedicated to the eternal glory of his Lord. He has engaged a master builder, Roger Mason, the only craftsman with the necessary skill – and foolhardiness – to see the project through. Mason has warned Jocelin that the cathedral’s foundations are too shallow to withstand the almighty pressure of such a behemoth construction. Jocelin is determined that even if he is right, they are bound – bound in faith – to continue:

‘I understand you, my son. It’s the little dare all over again. Shall I tell you where we’ve come? Think of the mayfly that lives for no more than one day. That raven over there may have some knowledge of yesterday and the day before. The raven knows what the sunrise is like. Perhaps he knows there’ll be another one. But the mayfly doesn’t. There’s never a mayfly who knows what it’s like to be one! And that’s where we’ve come! Oh no, Roger, I’m not going to preach you a sermon on the dreadful brevity of this life. You know, as well as I do, that it’s an unendurable length, that none the less must be endured. But we’ve come to something different, because we were chosen, both of us. We’re mayfly. We can’t tell what it’ll be like up there from foot to foot; but we must live from the morning to the evening every minute with a new thing.’

Roaming the cloisters and climbing the scaffolding, Jocelin sees and hears all, including some terrible things that would best remain hidden. Tormented by his vision – and by his unholy passion for a married woman – Jocelin clings desperately to his belief in angels as a means of protection. But the devil is at his back – literally. And when a tragedy strikes the small community, it is not just Jocelin’s physical body that lies at risk, but his soundness of mind.

The Spire is utterly grounded in its sense of place, not just the cathedral cloister itself, but the changing of the seasons, the work of farmers and masons and shopkeepers, the intimate, often prurient atmosphere of a provincial town. And it is this grounding in the quotidian that gives the novel’s increasingly fantastical trajectory its atmosphere and power. The Spire is a rural fantasia, a work of folk horror:

After that, he got up and began to move about, restlessly. The evening turned green over the rim of the cup. Then the rim went black and shadows filled it silently so that before he was well aware of it, night had fallen and the faint stars come out. He saw a fire on the rim and guessed it was a haystack burning, but as he moved round the rim of the cone, he saw more and more fires round the rim of the world. Then a terrible dread fell on him for he knew these were the fires of Midsummer Night, lighted by the devil-worshippers out on the hills. Over there, in the valley of the Hanging Stones, a vast fire shuddered brightly. All at once he cried out, not in terror but in grief. For he remembered his crew of good men, and he knew why they had knocked off work and where they had gone.

It is also a densely symbolist narrative of the struggle between good and evil. The early passages in which the cathedral’s foundations are shown to seethe with maggots, and those near the end where Father Jocelin climbs the tower to drive in the Nail, in which ‘the sweetness of his devil was laid on him like a hot hand’, are blood-chilling, imaginatively persuasive to the point you can almost believe that Golding himself has become complicit in Jocelin’s madness. Above all, the rich allusiveness of the language has the texture of modernism – modernism as it is defined by Gabriel Josipovici, unbound from its traditional historical associations with Joyce and Woolf, revealed as an active force for literary radicalism that renews itself with every generation.

It is this ideal, this idea that for me has always been the driving force of speculative fiction. I love Una’s idea of The Spire as a generation starship novel and I could run with that. But for me it resembles more closely the hallucinatory, arcane view of the speculative rendered by Wolfe and Hoban, Crowley and Kiernan. Time-travelled forward into the twentieth century, Dean Jocelin, in all his madness and his muddled philosophy, could be a thwarted magus figure straight out of one of Iris Murdoch’s quasi-fantasies. Not that time matters much here, because the story of The Spire is essentially timeless. Golding’s use of language and the power of his imagination – his vision, inchoate as Jocelin’s – makes it so.

Thank God indeed for books such as this. The inspiration to be gleaned from such a text – not just in terms of one’s own work but in thinking about the work of others – is not just timeless, but immeasurable.

I am happy to say I also found time to read Judy Golding’s The Children of Lovers, a personal memoir of her father that offers valuable insights into his creative process. Judy Golding is a writer of quality. She is so remarkably candid in her assessments, not just of her father but in her exposure of self. It’s a brave book, and clear-eyed. Written fifteen years after William Golding’s death, his spirit – and his shadow – remain undiminished. I am now greedy to read John Carey’s biography of Golding, written at around the same time as Judy Golding’s, but in the meantime, let me leave you this week with some words from The Childhood of Lovers, and Judy’s memories of her father telling a story to his grandson Nicholas:

To distract him, my father started telling him the story of the Odyssey. I saw then, with envy, his practical understanding of what a story needs, of the economy to be employed. I saw how he placed necessary details carefully but unobtrusively in the listener’s mind. I saw the way he kept description to a minimum, making it serve the narrative. Poetry, if there at all, was carefully disguised by vigour.

Night after night, my father would point away into the distance, and Nick’s eyes would follow, seeing not the white walls of the dining room, nor the sideboard with photos of old ladies in Breton costume, but the pink-tipped fingers of the dawn, the dark sea with oil holding the rough waves in a snood to calm them, the fights, the mysterious islands on the horizon, the tired, intelligent face of Odysseus at the helm of his boat.

[Afterword: there’s an extended discussion of the questions surrounding the idea of a science fiction canon on this week’s Coode Street podcast. Excellent listening!]

Weird Wednesdays #10/Clarke Award #4: Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

August 12, 2020 / Nina

‘I do not know who he was, nor do I care,’ the Marshal said. ‘That was an example. You are less than nothing to me and my staff, and we will kill any one of you without a second thought. If you wish to remain alive you will do everything in your power to avoid angering us, and even that may not be sufficient. You have no rights. You are nothing more than vermin and the boat brings more of you every month. I could have the lot of you killed here and now, and not want for workers.’

Strap on your gun-belts, guys. It’s going to be a bumpy ride…

Stefan Advani, whose family once owned a grand house and whose father had a way of charming even his most persistent creditors, has fallen from grace in the most conspicuous manner possible. Escaping poverty through education, Stefan’s resourcefulness and mental agility have seen him gain a promising reputation within the cloisters of the Academy. But there are those who would rather the clever-dicks remained in their ivory towers as opposed to raising the consciousness – literally – of the working people. Charged with incitement to revolution, Stefan is captured and shipped to the Island Chemical Mining Corporation Colony, aka the Island, aka a forced labour camp no one escapes from except through death. And death stalks the island constantly, in multiple guises. ‘This is the oubliette,’ Stefan informs us, ‘the cage of souls. Sending an enemy to the island was as good as killing him. Better, because the island could deal out years of suffering.’

Not that the world beyond the Island is a bed of roses in any case. Ravaged by climate change, environmental degradation and wave after wave of genocidal wars, not to mention a sun that has entered its declining years, the Earth is a dying planet. Its jungles, deserts and waterways swarm with hostile, mutated life forms. What people remain cluster together in Shadrapar, the last city on Earth: sanctuary, bunker, redoubt, criminal underworld, all sitting in the shadow of the Weapon, an annihilating force turned memorial whose original purpose and origins are long forgotten. Shadrapar is no utopia but it is the only home Stefan knows and the focus of his determination to escape the island.

As he learns the pitfalls and occasional pleasures of prison life, Stefan makes friends as well as enemies. When the Marshal’s reign of terror is finally challenged, the comrades know they have only a limited time in which to make their escape.

Regular readers of science fiction will be quick to recognise Cage of Souls as a ‘dying Earth‘ novel, a subgenre in which the action is played out at a purported ‘end of time’ against a background of societal decay and environmental degradation, with technology absent or half-forgotten or assuming the properties of magic. Dying Earth stories have their origins in the fantastic literature of the late nineteenth century, though the subgenre was named and popularised by Jack Vance, with his 1950 collection The Dying Earth. The most complex and ambitious example of dying Earth literature is almost certainly Gene Wolfe’s four-novel sequence The Book of the New Sun, which appears at first to be traditional epic fantasy but reveals itself gradually and through a series of bravura literary manoeuvres as science fiction.

Well, I love Gene Wolfe’s work, and if you’d rather not be present at a blood-letting, look away now. Better still, go away and read this masterful essay by Brian Phillips on the literary legacy of Gene Wolfe – it’s one I return to whenever I get depressed about the state of the field, which is depressingly often. All I really knew about Cage of Souls going into it was that it is a dying Earth novel, a fact that made me hopeful that I was going to enjoy it. It’s not just Gene Wolfe I love, it’s the tropes of dying Earth stories in general, not only their elegiac resonance but also the seeds of hope and regeneration and new beginnings they carry within them. The omens were good. So were did it all go wrong?

Where do I start?

The chief problem with Cage of Souls is that it’s not really about anything. And when a novel is six hundred pages in length, that’s one hell of a problem. Stripped to its bare essentials, Cage of Souls is a prison-break novel: Advani is a young man riding high who makes a crucial mistake. He ends up in jail with no hope of release. He forms a pact with other prisoners and manages to escape (none of these details are spoilers, 1) because the chapter headings lay out the map for you and 2) because the trajectory of the plot is obvious from the start). He returns to his old stamping ground to find himself and his erstwhile home irrevocably changed. What’s wrong with that? I hear you ask. Thousands of novels have been built on less. Aren’t the simplest plots the best, because they leave space for the writer to focus more on character?

Yes, and yes, but focus on character is not what Tchaikovsky chooses to do. The question I asked myself most often throughout the course of my reading, and in tones of increasing desperation, was why? Why should we care about Stefan, other than that he is the narrator of this bloated shaggy dog story? Is our focus supposed to be Stefan, or his world? Are we supposed to care about the reasons for society’s collapse, or are we just in this world now, marooned in a kind of Mad Max situation where the point of the novel is literally the action, nothing more?

Tchaikovsky’s writing is professional and competent. The story flows smoothly enough – at least for the first three hundred pages – to keep you interested and coming back for more, the characters are well enough defined to encourage at least a modicum of personal investment. But there is no true depth of field; no one ever does anything you haven’t been expecting them to do for the preceding fifty pages, no one achieves autonomy over and above their designated archetype. The unwilling hero, the comic relief (although I did rather enjoy Lucian, actually), the guard with a heart, the thuggish despot, the evil nemesis, the good aliens – they’re all here, all playing to type. The dialogue’s fine so far as it goes (this is no Last Astronaut) and we do get some women in play, but their characterisation isn’t great, to be honest:

Like so many others brought up in strict religious purity she gambled, cheated at cards, drank stuff that made men blind, swore like an Outrider and flirted with everybody. Everybody but myself.

That’s Rosanna, our hero’s first serious girlfriend (until she’s fridged) and classic kickass ladette. Kiera and Hermione are just bit-parts, the cool girl and the big girl. Lady Ellera the ‘Witch Queen’? Speaks for herself. And the mysterious Faith – is she an android or a genetically modified human? Who cares, except that every man who encounters her is left with a suicidal/homicidal Helen of Troy complex. Faith’s plot strand is never resolved – which is pretty much the story of every plot strand and detail that might conceivably have been interesting. For example:

In Shadrapar we ate what we grew in the ground. Raising animals for food was a disgusting process abandoned in ancient times. The idea of consuming the flesh of another creature was vile and turned my stomach.

This kind of societal shift could have been a fascinating premise to explore, but sadly it’s a gesture only, never properly imagined or invested in. The supposed vegetarian lifestyle of Shadrapar’s citizens feels wildly out of kilter with the dawn-to-dusk random killing that goes on throughout the rest of the book, and we could say the same of the ‘back to the earth’ culture of burial, so respectfully alluded to at one point, never mind the genocide of the Underworlders. I can’t see anyone finding the time to feed that mountain of bodies back into the great circle of life.

An early expedition into the desert could have provided a rich opportunity for Tchaikovsky to give us more detail and discussion of the trajectory of the disasters that led us here. Instead, it’s just a loosely disguised opportunity to fight more monsters. And while we’re on the subject, Tchaikovsky’s constant, undifferentiated, literally hundreds of usages of the word ‘monster’ are in themselves indicative of a failure of imagination. Language gains power through specificity: to be told a tree is a tree is one thing, to be told a tree is an oak is to be furnished with a richer and more resonant image. The more precise we can be, the more accurately our vision is transmitted to the reader. Used incessantly and ubiquitously as it is here, ‘monster’ is a dead word and a lazy one; it tells us nothing. For a book that clearly prides itself on its worldbuilding, there’s not enough of it going on.

Similarly with the past-cultural references, which are a time-honoured tradition in dying Earth stories. On the aforementioned trip into the desert, Stefan and his, uh, short-lived comrade Jon de Baron find an ancient copy of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark – we know what it is from the line Stefan quotes from it. Is the appearance of this particular text supposed to underline the dangerous futility of their quest? Cast a light upon past cultures and the attitude towards them now? Turns out it’s just casual name dropping. Similarly:

Sergei [a time-travelling cosmonaut from 1972] had joined up with the Morlocks first of all. They were a proactive and impolite debt-recovery crew who put his imposing appearance to good use.

which I present without comment. H.G. Wells in-jokes aside, Sergei as a character has more potential than any other to give this novel some backbone – yet again he’s just a bit-part, comic relief.

There are germs of ideas everywhere in Cage of Souls, gestures towards consolidating a vision, each one abandoned in the service of yet another killing spree. Indeed, there is precious little to be told that doesn’t involve people running around with big swords. Cage of Souls is basically Grimdark fantasy that just happens to be placed in a dying Earth setting.

And the point of all this?

The agitators behind that crowd had been selfish and evil reactionaries, and Peter was a good man. I was unsure that this was a material difference. I was also unsure that once a man has raised the mob (for there is really only one mob, waiting in potentia to be raised) whether anyone can keep it from the barbaric acts of violence it strains for. We must be careful what we become when we seek to change things. An old principle of physics: if you push, you yourself are pushed in turn.

Power and the struggle for power, the inbuilt limitations of the Marxist dialectic – this is the gist of what the book is about, though the pointlessness of the journey massively overwhelms the destination. The novel’s philosophical underpinning, when set against the kapok-stuffed vastness of its interior spaces, is scant, and ultimately, the battles and the killing are not about anything save what is literally described. Let us be clear: it is not the violence per se that is an issue – there is plenty of violence in The Light Brigade, and what is more, Hurley’s violence is more upsetting because the story and characters are deep and rich enough to make us care about its outcome. The point is, the subject of The Light Brigade is military violence – a subject that is explored, investigated, argued over and confronted, the novel’s plot and action seamlessly in service of its central idea. It would be impossible to argue that Cage of Souls is ‘about’ violence and power in the same way; there is simply a lot of violence in it, an endless array of battles, stand-offs and executions that become excruciating not so much through their cruelty as through their unending narrative tedium. Ironically, this is something Stefan himself is made to realise:

The Marshal stared about him, and there was less of a reaction than he was expecting. Deep inside, I was not the only one who was becoming jaded. One can only live with random violence for so long before the shock wears off.

You said it, Stef. Yet Tchaikovsky only seems to become invested in his narrative when describing a battle or other scene of conflict, and it is clear from the beginning that it is these fight scenes – not just the set pieces themselves, but the technical aspects of choreographing them – that form the core of the author’s purpose in this novel. I wanted to be interested by his interest, by his own immersion in the nuts-and-bolts detail, because I am fascinated by specialist knowledge whatever the area. But God alive, the fight scenes in Cage of Souls must add up to at least fifty percent of the narrative. That’s three hundred pages of stuff that reads like the screen directions for House of Flying Daggers. ENOUGH ALREADY!! It gives me no pleasure to say this, but rarely have I felt so bored and so trapped when reading a book. Towards the end, my sense of being held mentally captive began to assume the discomfort of being physically restrained.

Helplessly immured within the six hundred pages of Cage of Souls, there is a tightly woven, intensely descriptive three-hundred-page novel begging and crying to be set free, and I don’t think I’d be nearly so wound up about this book if it weren’t so frigging long. To write at such length, to demand the reader’s attention over such a prolonged stretch is a presumption, and there should be a reason for making it. One would expect at the very least that the author has something urgent, important and complex they wish to communicate. Cage of Souls waffles on for a very long time but it has nothing of significance to say, either in the manner of its telling, the power of its story or its contribution to the dying Earth genre.

Where Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade and indeed Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire stand in dialogue with earlier works, challenging and directly subverting them, Tchaikovsky does little beyond aping the style and story furniture of Vance and Wolfe, neither making commentary upon it (as M. John Harrison does in his Viriconium sequence) nor extending or augmenting our understanding of dying Earth archetypes. As science fiction, Cage of Souls is basic and largely derivative, a series of events as opposed to an overarching concept. Although Cage of Souls purports to be SF, this lack of a guiding central conceit leaves it insufficient impetus to be properly science fictional in its sensibility. Its loose, episodic structure and extended trajectory have much more in common with works of epic fantasy. This is an old-school, high action adventure story, composed with intelligence, some style and a sound knowledge of its predecessors. But to what end and, most importantly for our purposes, why the Clarke?

As with my commentary on The Last Astronaut, I find myself in an uncomfortable position, a position I would not willingly have chosen. For the purposes of entertainment and reading pleasure, for those who enjoy action-adventure in a fantastical setting, Cage of Souls holds up OK. The tropes are hoary and the situations predictable but the world Tchaikovsky creates is colourful and textured, peopled with a cast of characters we come to know and if not exactly love, then at least enjoy following. I was never the intended audience for this book, and I would not normally have presumed to comment on its fitness for consumption. But as a critic and as a writer of speculative fiction I take a passionate interest in the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and if a novel is presented to me as one of the six best science fiction novels of the year, as reader and writer I am bound to sit up and take notice. As critic and commentator, I am bound to subject that work to the kind of critical scrutiny I would expect from the Clarke jury.

As critic, writer and reader, I am hereby mind-boggled. Even from my own reading of 2019 novels – not nearly so deep and so wide as the reading undertaken by the jury – I can attest with some confidence that Cage of Souls is not one of the six best science fiction novels of the year, and I could point to a dozen and more on the submissions list that would easily take precedence. I have read and searched in vain for a single good reason why Cage of Souls has been selected for the shortlist, and I cannot find one. As with The Last Astronaut, the only explanation I can think of for how it ended up there is that one or other of the judges really got a kick out of reading it. That is not a good reason, or at least it is not a proper deployment of critical process.

To give Cage of Souls a place on the shortlist is necessarily to deny that place to another, with all the publicity and attendant benefits such a placing implies. Bizarre anomaly or critical laziness? Either way, I am disappointed.

Weird Wednesdays #9/Clarke Award #3: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

August 5, 2020 / Nina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weird Wednesdays 8: Hugo-nominated novellas 2020

July 29, 2020 / Nina

Had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic, today would have seen hundreds of readers, writers, fans and artists touching down in New Zealand to attend ConZealand, the 78th annual World Science Fiction Convention. ConZealand was early to announce its plan to move the convention online and all kudos to everyone involved with what must have been a mammoth effort to rethink the event at relatively short notice. I’m sure there will be those, though, who will nonetheless be mourning the convention that might have been. Not only for the chance to meet up with those friends, colleagues and enthusiasts who look to conventions as the natural way to reconnect with the community after months scribbling away at their desks, but for what would have been for many a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a country they may have been dreaming of visiting for years before they booked their air ticket.

2020 will be the first year in ages that many of us – including myself – will not have attended a single science fiction convention. In order to celebrate the virtual opening of this year’s Worldcon (not forgetting the fabulous fringe for those of us on European time!) and in looking hopefully forward to the resumption of at least some physical con-going next year, I decided I’d like to read and assess the six novella category finalists for this year’s Hugo Award. It’s interesting to note that the shortlist in the novel category just happens to have a fifty-percent overlap with the Clarke shortlist (more on this in my Clarke summing up around the end of August/beginning of September) so I’ll have at least some idea of the overall vibe there, as well. But it seems to me that the novella category – and this could be said equally of other awards that choose to celebrate the form – is a particularly interesting showcase for where the field might be at in any given year. Like the other short fiction categories, the novella shortlist will often include works by newer, less established writers. But whereas the short story and even the novelette categories tend to be less cohesive overall – the brevity of the form often dictates this – the novella provides a broader canvas, both in terms of who is competing and the variety and ambition of the work on offer.

This has definitely proved to be the case this year. What pleases me most about the 2020 Hugo novella shortlist is that all the works in contention have something positive to offer the reader, and consequently all feel as if they’ve earned their place on the ballot. For me, this group of novellas was satisfying and most of all fascinating to read because it does give a genuine sense of the variety, texture, and concerns of science fiction and fantasy in 2020. I’m sure there are other works that deserve equally to be here and perhaps more so – and if I’d read more shorter fiction in 2019 I would probably feel more frustrated by those exclusions. As things stand, the current ballot offers a solid overview, whilst providing me with the opportunity to read some of the novellas and writers I’d been meaning to catch up with in any case.

Looking at the ballot as a whole, it seems to me to fall into three pairings of two, with each pairing being representative of a particular trend. If I had to brand one of these three pairings least satisfying overall – or rather least interesting in terms of their candidacy for the Hugo Award – it would be that of Seanan McGuire and P. Djeli Clark, whose novellas might best be summarized as ‘old tropes, new takes’.

Seanan McGuire’s In An Absent Dream is the fourth instalment in her ‘Wayward Children’ series, exploring the limits of enchantment. I have not read the other novellas in the series, and in fact this is my first direct encounter with McGuire’s writing. The novella tells the story of Katherine Lundy, a child who finds herself at odds with other members of her family and with society’s expectations at large:

Most of the kids she went to school with couldn’t see past her father to her, and the few who tried never seemed to like what they found when they reached her. She was too opinionated and too invested in following the rules. She liked the company of adults too much, she spent too much time reading. She was everything they didn’t want to spend time with, and if it hadn’t been for her father and for the reluctance many of them felt to hit a girl, she would almost certainly have spent her weekends nursing black eyes and telling lies about where they’d come from.

It would be difficult for any SF fan or writer not to identify with at least some aspects of Lundy’s story, which is perhaps part of what has made this series so popular with readers. The writing is clear, inviting, professionally executed, all of which makes for a smooth and enjoyable ride, and I can imagine the Wayward Children series, with its youthful protagonists and sensitive introspection, being particularly popular among readers of YA. But there’s no getting away from the fact that In an Absent Dream feels like very familiar territory indeed. The ‘you can visit fairyland but there is always a price to pay’ narrative is one of the most enduringly popular story archetypes in fantasy, and McGuire’s effort here put me in mind of Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairytale and most especially J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. This was a perfectly pleasant, mildly engaging story but not in any way unusual and I cannot see that the conversation would be enhanced by it winning a Hugo.

P. Djeli Clark’s The Haunting of Tram Car 015 sees us visiting a steampunk version of Cairo in which airships, flying tram cars and sentient AIs or ‘boilerplate eunuchs’ are all an accustomed and unremarkable part of the scenery. The story takes place in 1910, against a background of political realignment, social upheaval, and magical incursions. Our two hapless heroes, agents Hamed and Onsi of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities – better known as the Spooky Boys – have been called in to investigate a mysterious and potentially dangerous haunting of one of the city’s semi-sentient tramcars. Initially suspected to be a djinn, the entity in question seems particularly disposed to attack women, and the agents are perplexed not only as to its intentions but where it might have come from:

Trafficking of mystical creatures into the country was a well known problem to the Ministry. But smugglers usually traded in things like unhatched rukh eggs or re’em calves – selling unwary collectors infant animals that quickly grew into unmanageable monsters. There’d been a craze over lightning birds two years back. Just five of the things had wreaked havoc for days: disabling trams, shutting down factory machines, and setting off the blackouts in the posher streets of Cairo now lined by electric lamps. The Ministry had to fly in a troupe of Sangoma diviners from Bambata City to recapture them. But Hamed had to admit that he couldn’t believe anyone would have willingly smuggled in the ghastly spirit that now resided in Tram 015. More likely, the thing had snuck into a shipment while still in Armenia.

The weird police procedural is now a familiar staple in science fiction and fantasy, with Daniel Jose Older, Ben Aaronovich and Charlie Stross being well known exponents. P. Djeli Clark brings both writing talent and a sense of humour to this popular subgenre, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is entertaining and meticulously plotted, with wry political and social subtext on almost every page. The problem with the weird procedural though is basically the same as the problem with realworld procedurals in that they tend inexorably towards the formulaic. Although imaginative and smartly written, as with the McGuire there is nothing new or particularly notable here – a great little story but with nothing in particular that makes it stand out as being Hugo-worthy. In fact, I found myself wishing it had been nominated for a crime/mystery writing award instead, just to shake things up more.

For my second impromptu pairing, I would point to the Ted Chiang and Becky Chambers novellas as being the two core science fiction titles on the shortlist, both exploring traditional science fictional topics in individual ways. I actually read the Chambers last year, mainly out of curiosity. I don’t particularly get on with Chambers’s Wayfarers series, but I’d heard that this was different and so was interested to try it. To Be Taught, if Fortunate turned out to be one of those pleasant surprises that crop up every once in a while – a book that ought never to have worked for me yet nonetheless did. The novella’s premise is simple, and familiar: a bunch of astronauts head off into deep space to explore strange new worlds and catalogue their discoveries for the purposes of more detailed and targeted exploration in the future. The crew are put into suspended animation between planet-stops, and at each new awakening they find Earth’s relationship to their mission subtly changing. With their resources finite, the crew will have a momentous decision to make: continue with their mission in spite of the cataclysmic disruptions that are taking place at home, or return to Earth and a future that will be massively circumscribed by political and environmental catastrophe?

I’m obsessed with natural history, and so the basic drive of this novella – going down to a planet and observing new life forms and environments – held my attention and kept me absorbed. I loved the book’s quietness, its characters’ steady commitment to the tasks they were performing. I enjoyed their professionalism, their lack of interest in conflict or dicking about – in this respect they were pretty much the precise opposite of the crew in The Last Astronaut. Not a massive amount happens in terms of overt drama and I liked that, too – in the same way I enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama. In fact I’d draw a comparison between these two reading experiences in that both of them reminded me strongly of how and why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place.

Should the Chambers win a Hugo? I wouldn’t mind at all if it did, but I’m tending towards the view that much as I enjoyed it, there are other novellas on the shortlist this year that have a stronger claim on the award.

Similarly with Ted Chiang’s novella. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom takes place in the near future, in a world where it has become technologically possible to communicate with parallel universes by means of a device called a prism. Prism users are able to speak with their ‘paraselves’, thus gaining insights into how they and their lives might have turned out had they taken different decisions. Using his trademark combination of thought experiment and character-driven narrative, Chiang examines the ramifications of such an invention, both on individual users and on society as a whole.

For me, Chiang is one of the finest modern exponents of ‘true’ ideas-based science fiction, with a clarity, complexity and directness of expression that few can match. You’ll never read a bad sentence from Chiang – and you’ll never find a sloppy thought process, either. The care and commitment he shows his art is a constant and continuing joy, as well as a reiteration of science fiction’s core values of innovation and intellectual engagement with a focus on ideas. That Chiang’s fiction is always emotionally as well as cognitively satisfying is doubly to its credit.

The only negative mark against this story with regard to its Hugo-worthiness is that it is ‘just’ another excellent Ted Chiang story. It does not break new ground for Chiang, in terms of either style or substance. We read it and love it without being particularly surprised by it, because this is Chiang, operating at the high level of excellence we have come to expect from him. With regard to the 2020 Hugo, I suspect he will end up being the victim of his own success.

Rivers Solomon was a finalist for the Astounding Award in 2018 and as I’ve not yet caught up with their debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, their novella The Deep was probably the work on this shortlist I was most keen to read. I’d already read a fair amount around the novella – this piece on how The Deep was born. for example, and so I already knew going in what the work was about. An innovative and exciting collaboration, The Deep draws its story from the mythos created by the electronica band Drexciya in the 1990s and further expanded by the experimental rap duo clipping. in their Hugo-nominated album Splendor and Misery.

‘SF is uniquely suited to address difficult political topics in any era, and Rivers is one of a handful of new writers that are going to drag our imaginations in the right direction,’ say clipping. in their afterword to The Deep. ‘Readers and listeners have before them three – let’s call them objects of study: the recorded oeuvre of Drexciya and its associated artwork and liner notes, the clipping. song ‘The Deep’ and Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep. We prefer to imagine each of these objects as artifacts – as primary sources – each showing a different angle on a world whose nature can never be observed in totality.’

Yetu is of the Wajinru, a mer-people evolved from the children of African women thrown overboard from slave ships while en route to the plantations. As the Wajinru’s designated Historian, Yetu is the keeper of memories too bitter and cruel to be properly assimilated by the mass of her people. Yet the strain of being an Historian is colossal, for Yetu herself and for those tasked with her care. In order to truly gain their freedom, the Wajinru will need to take on their past. Only in taking on their past, will they come to a proper understanding of their future.

In its themes of silencing and being silenced, freedom and captivity and the right to be considered human, The Deep has clear and fascinating echoes of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. I loved and appreciated these parallels, which cement The Deep firmly and irrevocably into the canon of fairytale literature. The Deep is so much more though than just another mermaid story, and I would argue that the work’s raw edge, its slightly unfinished quality adds greatly to its power,

My criticism would be that I think The Deep needed to be more fully realised in terms of both story and character. I wanted more – more detail around the women whose children became the original Wajinru, more history generally, more about Yetu. The Deep needed more space to unfold, and would have been still more effective as a full-length novel. Even so, this is a remarkable work, and I would urge you to read not only it, but also this excellent essay on ‘Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor and Misery‘ by Jonathan Hay.

And after you’ve read that, you can head back over to Vector to read this interview with Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone on the writing of This is How You Lose the Time War , the sixth and final novella on this year’s Hugo shortlist, the one I pair with The Deep for sheer originality and verve. This is How You Lose the Time War has been one of the most talked-about and award-nominated works of the year. As a reader who tends to resist jumping on bandwagons, this is the kind of hype that makes me instinctively recoil from a work, to both want and yet not want to read it. If I remember rightly (it’s only been a week but time can come to seem very dense when you’re trying to read six novellas as well as draft a novel) my personal push-pull around This is How You Lose the Time War was the reason I dreamed up this mini-project in the first place – to give myself an excuse to read the damn thing without feeling that I had capitulated to mere peer pressure.

Red and Blue are rival agents from alternate futures. Blue works for Garden, a world government based around ideals of environmental preservation and a humanity that remains true to its biological origins:

She notes the deep green of the trees. She measures the timing of their fall. She records the white of the sky, the bite of the wind. She remembers the names of the men she passes. (Most of them are men.) Ten years into deep cover, having joined the horde, proven her worth, and achieved the place for which she strove, she feels suited to this war.

Red works for the Agency, a mega-corporation that has taken humanity into a tech-based, post-human future where barriers of time, space and corporeality are of no account:

We grow in pods, our basic knowledge flashed in cohort by cohort, nutrient balance maintained by the gel bath, and there most of us stay, our minds flitting disembodied through the void from star to star. We live through remotes, explore through drones – the physical world but one of many, and uninteresting by comparison to most. Some do decant and wander, but they can sustain themselves for months on a charge, and there’s always a pod to go back to when you want it.

Ostensibly deadly enemies, Red and Blue discover ties of intellectual and spiritual kinship that run deeper than any allegiance to the governments that hire them, that seek to use them to bend the time-stream to their own ends. Communicating through encoded messages across the strands of deep time, they begin to fall in love, a relationship that will inevitably put their futures in danger, at both a personal and an interplanetary level. As their handlers become aware of their duplicity, will Red and Blue be forced to betray one another, or will they find a way to outrun time itself? This is How You Lose the Time War asks serious questions about the nature of power, the unavoidable link between unmitigated idealism and despotism, the toxic legacy of violence under any banner:

Red wins a battle between starfleets in the far future of Strand 2218. As the great Gallumfry lists planetward, raining escape pods, as battle stations wilt like flowers tossed into flame, as radio bands crackle triumph and swiftskimmers swoop after fleeing voidtrails, as guns speak their last arguments into mute space, she slips away. The triumph feels stale and swift. She used to love such fire. Now it only reminds her of who’s not there.

The moments in reading I cherish most are those moments in which my assumptions are proved to be wrong. When I change my mind about a book I previously disliked, or when I fall head over heels in love with a book I felt convinced I was going to hate. Reading This is How You Lose the Time War has been one of those moments. Reader, I loved it. What I loved most about it is the way it absolutely proves my theory that it’s not the material that maketh the masterpiece, so much as the way in which that material is put to use. The quality of execution, in other words. This is How You Lose the Time War takes many of the elements of contemporary, media-derived SFF – I get Doctor Who vibes from this, New Space Opera vibes, massive Killing Eve vibes – and raises them, through the power of language, of insight, of literary allusion, of formal innovation to the level of a classic in the making. The result is a work that feels utterly of the present moment, yet contains within it the depth of field, the knowingness and literary excellence that will enable it to stand the test of time.

There are moments in which you suddenly become aware that you are reading a work that is destined to become a landmark of the field. Bold, brilliant, and – yes, I cried – unashamedly moving, This is How You Lose the Time War is a one such, a stimulus to both heart and mind. It wins my vote for the Hugo, unreservedly.

Weird Wednesdays #7: Rendezvous with Rama

July 22, 2020 / Nina

The crab showed no reaction whatsoever, nor did it slacken its pace. Ignoring Jimmy completely, it walked straight past him and headed purposefully into the south. Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.

He had seldom been so humiliated in his life. Then Jimmy’s sense of humour came to his rescue. After all, it was no great matter to have been ignored by an animated garbage truck. It would have been worse if it had greeted him as a long-lost brother… (Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.)

After my less than satisfactory experience with The Last Astronaut, I decided it might be interesting to revisit what I took to be that novel’s originating influence. I was curious to see not only how well the older book fared by comparison (I took comfort from the fact that it could hardly be worse) but also how well it stood up as a novel at a distance of forty-plus years since its publication. I was pretty sure I had read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama during my late teens, along with a shipload other other classic science fiction both of that period and earlier, though I had almost literally no memory of it aside from the basic premise: an unknown object is detected entering the solar system, a team of astronauts are sent up to investigate. I hadn’t read any Clarke for decades anyway, so this rereading promised to be fascinating on several levels.

It is 2131, and humanity has founded settlements on several of the other planets in our solar system as well as their moons. When an interstellar object is detected beyond the orbit of Jupiter, satellite images reveal that it is not an asteroid, as previously imagined, but a perfectly cylindrical vessel, some fifty kilometres in length and clearly alien in origin. The unidentified craft is named Rama, after the Hindu god, and a party of astronauts leave Earth on a mission to discover what kind of threat – or otherwise – it might pose to human civilization. The Endeavour is commanded by William Norton, who in matters of personal integrity and exploratory zeal identifies strongly with the long-dead captain of his own ship’s much older namesake.

On entering Rama, the crew of the Endeavour are met with a series of marvels and mysteries that defy human understanding. They know their time on Rama is limited – the vessel will soon pass too close to the sun for the Endeavour to continue safely with its mission. Gathering as much information as they can, they must also contend with the increasingly hostile rhetoric of representatives from the planetary settlement on Mercury. The Hermians believe themselves to be at particular risk from Rama, and given the fact that the vessel’s intentions cannot be verified, they are minded to shoot first and ask questions later.

I felt certain The Last Astronaut had taken inspiration from Rama. I was unprepared for quite how much. The narrative trajectory of TLA follows that of Rama pretty much identically: the long and exhausting climb down into the vessel, the discovery of a breathable atmosphere, the melting ice, the gradual awakening of native life forms – everything, right down to the captains of both missions being the same age. Intentional homage or unpardonable laziness? I don’t know and frankly, aside from a feeling of mild to middling outrage on Clarke’s behalf, I don’t even care that much. If The Last Astronaut were a better book, these ‘coincidences’ might matter more. As things stand, The Last Astronaut is a disposable potboiler, while Rendezvous with Rama is deservedly a classic of Western science fiction. No argument over who wins this particular battle of the BDOs.

One embarks on reading older science fiction novels braced for an onslaught of square-jawed heroes and unpalatable opinions, but aside from one highly unfortunate likening of a crew member to a monkey, and one ridiculous and totally uncalled-for meditation on the motion of women’s breasts in zero gravity, Clarke does pretty well. He is consciously progressive in his treatment of sexuality – homosexual and polyamorous relationships are seen as normal in his 2100s – and women on board the Endeavour (the odd lapse into innuendo aside) enjoy not only equal status, but equal respect. In a particularly notable sequence, Sergeant Ruby Barnes, a master mariner, is granted control of the mission when members of the crew are suddenly threatened by an enormous tidal wave:

She’s magnificent, thought the Commander – obviously enjoying every minute, like a Viking warrior going into battle.

Not a hint of gendered language in sight, with Norton readily deferring to Barnes’s greater expertise. It is Ruby who makes the decisions here, proving how capable Clarke was of imagining women in positions of command. I also liked Clarke’s treatment of religious faith. One of the Endeavour’s crew members is a devout member of the Church of Christ Cosmonaut (Jesus was a spaceman, basically). Whilst Norton does not share his beliefs, he does not belittle them either; rather, he takes particular note of this crewperson’s integrity, commitment and logical approach in trusting them to undertake a crucially important and potentially hazardous manoeuvre at a critical time.

Just as impressive is the novel’s overall attitude towards alien life. The concept of the alien as hostile and/or disposable has become so much the norm within Hollywoodised media that as an audience we have become more or less inured to it. In The Last Astronaut, the wonders of 21 are ultimately of no account when set against the terrifying threat to Earth the vessel poses, a threat that must be destroyed – with enormous weapons – as noisily as possible. (And yes, if monstrous megaworms really were about to eat the planet then I’d be first to press the button, but it is important to remember that this is fiction and authors have choices.)

The life forms encountered in Rama are not only imaginatively drawn, they are also notable in that Clarke makes a proper attempt to describe creatures that are alien without being monstrous. The attitude of the crew towards these beings is also significantly refreshing. Even Jimmy Pak, ‘a man of action, not introspection,’ feels guilt over his purloining of a botanical specimen, and Norton is determined they do nothing to harm the Raman ‘spiders’ that invade their camp:

Training was one thing, reality another; and no one could be sure that the ancient, human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency. Yet it was essential to give every entity they encountered in Rama the benefit of the doubt, up to the last possible minute – and even beyond.

Commander Norton did not want to be remembered by history as the man who started the first interplanetary war.

What a relief and a delight, to travel with a crew whose first instinct is to observe rather than to interfere or destroy.. That the tripedal spiders and other ‘biots’ are allowed to remain essentially a mystery is also to Clarke’s credit. Rama is vast and time is short. At least for now, the secrets of this alien civilization must remain unknowable, a tactic that renders them immortal and endlessly alluring. The novel’s penultimate sequence, in which the crew of the Endeavour are briefly caught in the wake of this vast alien structure as it prepares to take on fuel for its onward journey, has a poetry and a grandeur that reduced me to tears.

It was dropping out of the Ecliptic, down into the southern sky, far below the plane in which all the planets move. Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.

Rendezvous with Rama earns its classic status not just through its expert deployment of classic tropes but in its conscious invocation of classical archetypes. Clarke’s novel is an Odyssey, a hero’s journey in which the hero is Rama itself as much as Norton. The tests and trials we encounter along the way are provided not by hydra or sirens but by physics and maths, while the end of the journey transcends anything so simple as ‘closure’ precisely because the central mystery remains unsolved.

There will be those who argue that Rama is unsatisfactory as a novel through being more or less plotless; for me, the book’s imaginative reach, its stylistic economy, its ability to inspire debate makes that irrelevant.

We could have a long debate over how The Last Astronaut’s mirror-likeness to Rama might be justified or defined. It could be argued, for example, that Wellington’s novel is actually intended to be an anti-Rama – a deliberate examination of how the story might have played out had the alien vessel been actively hostile. I would counter that for such a strategy to be successful, The Last Astronaut would have to be Rama’s equal in terms of literary achievement. What is beyond doubt is that the quality of Clarke’s writing – marked by age in places yes, but always cogent, cleanly descriptive, economical and stylish – raises his novel to a level Wellington’s never approaches. Eschewing cheap thrills, Rendezvous with Rama is characterised throughout by that philosophical stateliness, that sense of rapt idealism and thirst for knowledge that has helped to define science fiction as a mode of literature.

Weird Wednesdays #6/Clarke Award #2: The Last Astronaut by David Wellington

July 15, 2020 / Nina

When I was in my young teens, I borrowed a novel from my local library entitled Journey to Jupiter. I had never heard of the author – Hugh Walters – and did not yet know that Journey to Jupiter was the eighth novel in a series recounting the adventures of Chris Godfrey and comrades, a team of astronauts working under the auspices of the (fictional) United Nations Exploration Agency, or UNEXA. I took the book and its characters to my heart more or less immediately, and over the course of the next year or so I burned through the rest of the series, revisiting my favourite volumes multiple times.

Hugh Walters became a science fiction writer by accident. Born Walter Llewellyn Hughes, he once said in a newspaper interview that he chose to write under a pseudonym because he was afraid writing science fiction might cause his friends and colleagues in the business community to take him less seriously. A keen amateur astronomer, Walters was asked to give a talk on space exploration for his hometown rotary club. His lecture was so well received he was invited to repeat it, this time for a local library as part of a week-long festival of science fiction. As preparation for the event, Walters read a number of recently published science fiction novels and found them disappointing. He felt that American science fiction writers especially were not sufficiently engaged with actual science, leaning instead towards the kind of pulp sensationalism that gave science fiction a bad name. Walters felt instinctively that science fiction should entertain, but that it should also educate. With ideals similar to those of the writers and producers of the first Doctor Who adventures, Walters wanted his books to inspire young people, to make them interested and passionate about science in the way he was himself.

For the first fifty or so pages of The Last Astronaut, I believed the book I was reading might have been conceived with a similar purpose. In considering this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, one of my aims has been to ask myself why each individual title has been selected, why, in the minds of the judges, the book stands out. My initial impression of The Last Astronaut was that it had been chosen as an example of the kind of space fiction that draws so many fans into the genre: a story that generates the excitement we remember from our first encounters with SF, with the added intention of exploring a speculative idea from a scientific standpoint. I get it, I thought. The Last Astronaut is like The Martian, with added aliens.

Reader, I was mistaken. And I’m sad about that.

The Last Astronaut is set in 2065. Following the catastrophic failure of the first manned mission to Mars twenty years earlier, NASA has been defunded, leaving the exploration and exploitation of space to private enterprises. The beginning of our narrative sees an employee of one of the hungriest and most successful space corporations, KSpace, jumping ship to a NASA that, though almost defunct, still retains the framework of its earlier idealism. Sunny Stevens is an astrophysicist who always wanted to be an astronaut, and he has made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery: a body previously identified as an asteroid is decelerating, which means it must be moving under its own power. If asteroid 21/2054D1 is not in fact an asteroid, but an alien spacecraft, the implications are seismic. Stevens wants to make a deal – his information and expertise for a place on the team. With ‘21’ clearly headed for Earth, NASA chief Roy McAllister, now in his seventies, has a problem: action is clearly needed, but there are no astronauts qualified to take it. NASA’s only option is to make the best of what they have.

And so our rag-tag team of spacefarers is duly assembled. Sally Jansen previously captained the Orion 6 Mars mission and is the only one of the four with spaceflight experience. Still traumatised by the death of a colleague on that earlier mission, she believes she has something extra to prove in commanding this new one. In theory, Sunny Stevens knows everything there is to know about being an astronaut – but it is all theory. Parminder Rao is an astrobiologist, still young and misty-eyed at the thought of being the first to make contact with alien life. Windsor Hawkins is ex-military, more recently an expert in the art of tracking and capturing spy satellites. He is there to represent the interests of the US Defense Department, and if necessary to take command if things get out of hand.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to guess that’s exactly what things are going to do, and rapidly. Unbeknown to our heroes, a rival mission has launched and overtaken theirs – if there is anything of value to be gained from the incoming aliens, KSpace mean to be the first to seal the deal. As the Orion 7 approaches 21, the crew’s attempts to communicate with the KSpacers’ vessel the Wanderer return a negative. Anxious that they might be in trouble, Sally jets across to the Wanderer to investigate more closely. On boarding the craft, she finds no one at home. She can only assume the rival crew have decided to gain a headstart in exploring the alien ship. With memories of her first disastrous captaincy still fresh in her mind, she is determined to head off in pursuit and, if necessary, rescue.

In its outline and premise, the Last Astronaut has a great deal in common with Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendezvouz with Rama, although in the way it unfolds it reminded me equally of Jules Verne’s 1864 classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Both are noble examples to follow, and thus it is all the more dispiriting to discover that The Last Astronaut has neither the plainspoken competence of the Clarke, nor the timeless elegance of the Verne. In terms of both narrative plausibility and technical expertise, Wellington’s updated version reads like the novelisation of an inferior commercial genre movie we happened to see five years ago and didn’t much like.

Fiction is fiction, and whilst it would seem churlish to hold The Last Astronaut too stringently to account for being factually improbable, the subgenre of exploratory science fiction to which this novel owes its allegiance depends on at least an appearance of verisimilitude. Novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora or the Mars trilogy, for example – or indeed a film like Gravity – gain much of their effect through reminding us that space exploration is painstaking, hazardous, and often repetitive work, that its thrills are hard won, dependent on planning and strict adherence to scientific protocols. Indeed such close observation of truth is part of the attraction of this kind of fiction. Yet those with only the vaguest awareness of scientific etiquette will quickly come to the conclusion that what transpires on board Orion 7 is pretty much codswallop – not because the astronauts are chasing UFOs, but because their methods and decisions are farcical from the beginning. The crew leave the Orion 7 ‘parked’ just 2 kilometers from where 21 is in orbit when they have no idea what the object is, what danger it might pose. Sally Jansen undertakes an unauthorised EVA then boards the Wanderer without a clue of what might have happened there. Stevens pilots the Orion closer to the Wanderer when he knows there is a malignant alien life form on board, and so on. It is all so tiresome, the kind of plotting that occurs when the author needs something to happen, but cannot find an organic, realistic-seeming way of progressing the action. Instead, characters are moved around like puppets, or like pieces on a game board.

Read any astronaut’s memoirs and you will be in no doubt that the actions of the Orion crew are about as far from anything resembling reality as you could get. What we have instead is a plot that appears to be strung together from a series of movie clichés. Here is the scene from Interstellar in which Michael Caine reveals that NASA never really died, it just went into hiding. Here is the scene from Alien where Ripley warns against bringing the infected Kane back on board the Nostromo only to have her veto countermanded. The big reveal recalls Sam Neill’s defection to the dark side in Event Horizon (‘I don’t need eyes where I’m going.’) and there is even a rehash of a classic scene from Indiana Jones – you’ll recognise it when you come to it. Windsor Hawkins plays the ubiquitous power-mad egotist with the ‘secret’ Chekhov’s gun in his pocket, ready to be used as the catalyst for the final confrontation. The tediously violent showdown-as-climax as per every derivative, hackneyed, lazy Hollywood screenplay you’ve ever seen is the final letdown. Wellington couldn’t resist the duct tape, either, or the robot pal. Add a dash of Final Girl Theory to complete the recipe.

Such reliance on overripe material does not end with the plotting. A lot of argument has been expended on the language of science fiction and what is the most appropriate mode of expression for a literature of ideas. Personally I would argue there is no right way to write science fiction; the dense rococo of Catherynne Valente is as fit for purpose as the visionary optimism of Arthur Clarke, the social realism of Le Guin, the factualism of Stan Robinson or the modernist and post-modernist approaches of Ballard and Gibson. What can never work – in any mode of literature – is the language of cliché. Thus in The Last Astronaut you have to put up with a lot of stuff like this:

It was the first time the two of them had been alone since they’d danced in the air, since the day Wanderer blew right past them. It was the first time she’d had to think about what being alone with him meant…

Rao knew what she wanted from him. She also knew she was very, very good at controlling her impulses when she needed to focus. Most of the time.

She reached under the collapsible shower unit for a bolt that had floated away from her. When she came back up, Stevens put his hands on her shoulders. He leaned in close to kiss her neck. She’d kind of been expecting that, so she stiffened up.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Was that… OK?’

Rao laughed. ‘It was… extremely OK. Honestly,’ she said. ‘But Sunny – we’re working…You must be as excited to meet the aliens as I am, don’t lie.’

‘I’m excited about a lot of things,’ he said… He put his mouth very close to her ear. ‘Are you seriously going to tell me you don’t want to be the first person to have sex in space?’

And this:

The interior walls were covered in thin padding with a white vinyl covering, and back near the airlock leading to the command module, someone had drawn on the padding with a red pen. At first she thought it was a note – maybe left behind by a desperate crew in case anyone ever found their abandoned ship. She steeled herself to read the last words of a dying astronaut.

Then she saw there were no words. Just crude drawings of a woman with exceptionally large breasts, and next to her a giant penis with hairy testicles.

It’s all very ‘I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper’ (if this reference passes you by, you’d be advised to keep it that way), steeped in the affectless banter that has become the accepted currency of Hollywood sci-fi. The writer has made little attempt to imagine what real people and more specifically real astronauts might say in these circumstances; he relies instead on pre-imagined scenarios, pre-imagined dialogue of the kind spoken not by human beings under stress but by actors playing roles.

Similarly, the main body of the text suffers from an overabundance of ‘dead’ words – adverbs and qualifiers that serve no purpose except to leave the prose feeling clogged and overburdened with waffle. Writers are drawn to this manner of expression because they think it adds realism and immediacy. That certain words and phrases feature frequently in spoken English should act as both an instruction and a warning: used sparingly in colloquial dialogue they can be effective, used in narrative prose they are a menace to society. Most writers’ first drafts are littered with spare verys and actuallys – that’s how we talk and think, especially when we’re working out a new idea. Part of the work of the second draft is to weed them out. Here’s a brief extract from The Last Astronaut:

When NASA actually answered his message, he’d basically just walked out the door. He’d never actually expected this to happen, and he hadn’t thought to prepare. Now it was time to make an actual decision. He could still walk away – say he was sorry, but he’d made a mistake. Take the train all night to get home and go to bed and pretend he’d never even thought of this crazy plan. Go back to work tomorrow at the Hive and hope nobody was monitoring his email.

And here’s how I would redraft it:

He hadn’t expected a reply to his message, and so when NASA called him he left immediately and without preparation. Now he had to decide. He could still walk away, say he was sorry, that he’d made a mistake. He could get back on the train, fall into bed then go to work at the Hive the following morning as if nothing had happened. Hope no one was monitoring his email. Pretend he’d never thought of this crazy plan.

This new version conveys the same information, but with greater economy and precision. Just cutting those three actuallys and the basically would leave the passage neater and cleaner. Apply this simple method to the text as a whole and even if you made no other material changes you’d have a better book.

Writing is, as we all know, the devil, and it would be unfair of me to suggest that The Last Astronaut has no redeeming features, or that it is an entirely negative reading experience. As I suggested above, my initial encounter with it reminded me pleasurably of my own early forays into the genre: the thrill of adventure, the sense that anything was possible, the intimation that something marvellous and possibly dangerous was about to happen. The book reminded me of how exciting science fiction can be, while the pace of action kept me hooked and entertained. I mentioned in an earlier post how quickly I become invested in stories, and in spite of my mounting annoyance at the novel’s technical shortcomings, I still wanted to know what happened. I would have kept reading even if I hadn’t committed myself to writing this essay.

I would also add that The Last Astronaut does make some gestures towards the science fictional principle of conceptual breakthrough. There are several key moments in the novel where the parameters shift, where our understanding of what is happening becomes radically altered. It is interesting to note that these are also the moments when Wellington’s imagination becomes more fully engaged. In his descriptions of the interior of 21 there is passion, finally, and a sense of wonder, a clearer, more precise language that more adequately serves the novel’s key ideas:

After the continuous darkness of 21, the flare’s light was blinding and Rao had to look away. When she dared to lift her head again she saw it, a red comet blazing across the air above them. For a second, just a second, she could see for kilometers, she could see the arcing walls of 21, the walls of the drum curving up and away from her, walls covered in water dotted with the last scraps of ice. She saw all the bubble mounds and hand-trees and arches, the vast domes and wells and things she couldn’t describe, saw just how much of this dark lake had come to life. She saw, directly above her, the roof of the drum, saw hand-trees up there that must be kilometers tall, saw their slender fingers twitch and curl up. She saw the arches rising over her head, hundreds of them, arches growing from the curves of other arches like the staircases in an Escher painting. The air over her head was crisscrossed by a network that branched and rebranched very much as the tendrils ramified. A pale scaffolding that crossed from one side of the drum to the other.

If only Wellington had trusted his own resources more; freed from the hackneyed dialogue, the dodgy romance plot, the clumsy in-paragraph point-of-view shifts, the (God help us but at least they’re short) dream sequences, how much truer to its inspirations this novel might have been.

Why does this matter, I hear you asking. Why am I expending so much time and energy in excavating the perceived faults of a novel for which I am and never was the intended audience? Because The Last Astronaut is on the shortlist for the Clarke Award of course, and any proper examination and evaluation of that shortlist should mean subjecting the book to the level of critical scrutiny one would expect from an award jury.

Having concluded my critical examination of The Last Astronaut, I am forced to admit that I cannot understand the process by which the Clarke jury came to select it as one of the six best science fiction novels of 2019. The book is derivative, generic, reliant on stereotypes and awash in cliché. The Big Dumb Object novel is an honourable tradition within science fiction, but taken as an example of it The Last Astronaut does not demonstrate any notable qualities of rigour or originality. Thus for it to merit inclusion on the Clarke shortlist, it would need to showcase some other arbiter of excellence – linguistic dexterity perhaps, or formal innovation. Sadly, as we have seen, it possesses neither. The only reason I can imagine for its presence here is that one or other of the judges really, really enjoyed reading it. If this were a fan award, then fair enough. But it isn’t, and it’s not. The Clarke deserves better.

The Spider's House

Page 10 of 64

Weird Wednesdays #16: The Ministry of Truth

Weird Wednesdays #14/Clarke Award #6: The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

Weird Wednesdays #13: The Taiga Syndrome

Weird Wednesdays #12/Clarke Award #5: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

Weird Wednesdays #11: the question of lineage

Weird Wednesdays #10/Clarke Award #4: Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Weird Wednesdays #9/Clarke Award #3: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

Weird Wednesdays 8: Hugo-nominated novellas 2020

Weird Wednesdays #7: Rendezvous with Rama

Weird Wednesdays #6/Clarke Award #2: The Last Astronaut by David Wellington

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