But I don’t believe this is an absolute condition. We do not suspend disbelief in the face of absurdity, or laziness on the part of the author, or inconsistency, or the simply unbelievable. The job of the author is to do enough, to be convincing enough, that we feel suspending our disbelief is not too great a stretch. In other words, we suspend disbelief when we feel we are not too far from belief. We can accept the outrageous in a work when we feel that the world in which the outrageous occurs makes sense, or when we feel that those characters who seem closest to us respond to the outrageousness the way we might respond. But if there is something that triggers our disbelief, something in the condition of the story that does not make sense to us, then that contract is null and void. And it is null and void for the simple reason that we are unable in those circumstances to suspend our disbelief.

I make no absolutist claims here. There is no one thing guaranteed to trigger disbelief. In many cases it might well be knowledge particular to the reader such that what convinces everyone else does not convince her. It might be some aspect of the background or the situation that the reader likes to be just so, when everyone else is prepared things that are less precise, more cavalier.

When I say, therefore, that I was unable to suspend my disbelief when reading God’s War by Kameron Hurley, that in no way reflects on those whose judgements I respect who have praised this novel to the skies. Indeed, there are aspects of the novel that I can recognise are innovative, interesting and well done. If I were to concentrate on gender politics above all else, for instance, I might even be prepared to hail this as one of the best books of the year.

Unfortunately, I found myself unable to believe in the whole situation. And once that belief is lost, then the drama played out against that situation, the drama that is integral to that situation, stands no chance.

What did it for me, what threw me out of the story, was in many ways a small thing: in the background, rarely even glimpsed, there is a war that has continued for hundreds of years. And it is not a static war, where the two sides have reached a state of exhaustion such that the fronts barely move and life on the battle line carries on largely unaffected. There is such a war in Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago stories, but the war is fought on a different continent so that the citizens of the warring states are for the most part unaffected by the conflict. But that is not the war we find in Hurley’s novel. This is, even after so long, a dynamic and a destructive war, the front line is liable to move extensively and rapidly one way or the other, civilian centres are subject to attack, and the fighting kills so many young men so consistently that it has drastically and it would seem permanently affected the gender balance of the warring states.

Okay, this is a science fiction story, let us just accept the premise and see where it takes us.

But I found myself asking one simple, fatal question: what sort of society could sustain such a situation over so long a time? And the answer I came up with was: not the society shown in the book.

To keep such a war going over such a period of time at such cost would require a highly ordered state, one in which there is a high degree of central control. The state we are shown in the novel is highly disordered, and everything tends to lack of control.

There is a queen, which might suggest a centralised authority. But the queen is weak, and her writ does not seem to extend very far. There are the bel dames, a powerful yet secretive council that is beyond the queen’s control and that is, throughout the novel, acting directly against her interests. They operate by fear and assassination, and their writ seems to extend far wider than the legitimate authority. And there is yet a third power base, the magicians who control the world’s technology, insect power. They, too, have their secrets, and they too are operating against the interests of the queen, though not in concert with the bel dames. So there are three long-established and rival power bases. Interestingly, no-one who is not actually a member of one of these three bodies either proclaims or displays loyalty to any of the three. So you have three top-down power structures with no bottom-up organisation to support it, an inherently unstable situation.

As to the people, we know that the war has killed so many sons that they lament having boy children. These are not supporters of the war but its victims, and resentment and fear seem to be a part of everyday life. Fear in particular, since this is a society that is run on violence and fear. We see this in the way that deserters are hunted down by professional bounty hunters and beheaded. We see this in the fact that the only sport we encounter is boxing. We see this in the way that society is splintered, and anyone from another country or who professes a slight variant on the universal religion is routinely subject to abuse and assault.

Nothing we see in this world suggests a stable and ordered society. Nor is this disorder of recent origin, it is already an unquestioned part of the social situation. This is not a society that could have sustained a war for hundreds of years; this is a society that would have risen in rebellion or broken apart in disorder centuries before.

But everything in the novel follows directly from the situation of the ravaging and unending war, so if your suspension of disbelief in this wavers, then everything else falls apart. Whereupon, of course, you start becoming aware of other quibbles and discontents. Normally these might not intrude upon your pleasure in the novel, but if you once start to question one aspect, then these other discontents acquire substance. I found myself increasingly unhappy that the only way Hurley knew how to ratchet up the tension in the plot is to have yet another character kidnapped, mutilated, tortured of killed. The casual attitude towards the all-embracing violence of the story, by both the author and the victims of the violence, began to grate on me.

And yet, I recognise a distinct quality in the writing, a vigour in the storytelling, an originality in the world-building. There is so much here I should admire. But in the end the novel just does not work for me.

The contrast to the award was the fact that I went through something I hadn’t previously believed existed: a writer’s block. Heaven knows what caused it ­ it has been a year of many, many stresses and strains, mostly external to my writing though they do, inevitably, affect it; I even found being nominated for the award strangely disturbing. At its worst, I actually found opening a Word document was terrifying. I don’t know how or why the thing ended, somehow the dread just gradually lost its grip on me. Though it has had one lasting effect: I am far less confident of my writing now than I have ever been before, and even fairly simple short reviews can sometimes take days and days for me to get through them.

Nevertheless, I managed to write something over 63,000 words during the year, and that does not include any of the posts I made at Big Other, the all too few entries I wrote for the SF Encyclopedia, or the several thousand words of original material that have been going into the next book. So it has been a reasonably productive year, even if it feels like it has been against the odds the whole way.

In the end I produced:
14 reviews for SF Site (of which 1 remains unpublished);
2 reviews for the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (both of which are awaiting publication, along with one left over from 2010);
4 reviews for Strange Horizons (of which 1 remains unpublished);
3 columns and 3 reviews for Vector (1 column and 1 review are as yet unpublished);
1 interview and 4 reviews for Bull Spec (of which the interview and 3 of the reviews are in the forthcoming issue);
1 review for the New York Review of Science Fiction;
3 reviews for Interzone (1 of which remains unpublished);
2 reviews for Foundation (both of which await publication);
1 review for the web journal Requited
1 review for the LA Review of Books (which awaits publication, along with one left over from 2010);
2 reviews for the Telegraph.

In addition, Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered appeared from the BSFA, including an interview and an introduction by me, and I was part of the round-table discussion. And Teaching Science Fiction edited by Andy Sawyer and Peter Wright was published by Palgrave Macmillan, with my chapter ‘Through Time and Space: A Brief History of Science Fiction’.

In the year I also wrote 41 posts at Big Other, most of which were rather substantial essays.

1: Angelica Lost and Found by Russell Hoban, which I wrote about here.

2: * How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, one of the most intellectually exciting and engaging novels I’ve read in a long time. If you haven’t yet read it, go away and do so now. Science Fiction often works by rather obvious metaphors, but in this novel you can read it as either one very cleverly sustained metaphor, or you can read the events as real, and the book works equally well both ways. In fact the ability to switch mentally back and forth between a real and a metaphorical reading of the book is one of its great delights.

3: Elegy for April by Benjamin Black, which prompted this post.

4: Sunset Park by Paul Auster, which I wrote about here.

5: What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici, which prompted two posts, here and here.

6: State of Emergency by Dominic Sandbrook, the third of his massive histories covering Britain from the mid-50s. This volume is devoted to the Heath government, 1970-74, and he seems rather more prepared to give Heath the benefit of the doubt than most other commentators I’ve read. Not so long ago I read Andy Beckett’s book on the same period, but while Beckett was better at the set-pieces, I got far more sense of context from Sandbrook. Perhaps because Beckett’s book was primarily a work of journalism, Sandbrook’s clearly a work of history. It’s curious, during the years in question I was at university in Northern Ireland and remember the time vividly; Sandbrook was only conceived during the blackouts of 1974. For me this is contemporary, for Sandbrook it is history; a strange feeling.

7: One by David Karp, reviewed for SF Site.

8: C by Tom McCarthy, which I wrote about as part of the Big Other’s book club here.

9: Zendegi by Greg Egan. I always feel with Egan that the surface is glittering and intricate and brilliant, but I can never feel my way to any depth below the surface. This is sentimental, in a way that made me feel manipulated, but everything is foreordained, moves along precisely laid out lines and never achieves anything that might pass for dramatic surprise. I must also say that, for a novel set in Teheran, I felt far less sense of place than I did, for instance, with Istanbul in The Dervish House.

10: The Anatomy of Utopia by Karoly Pinter, reviewed at SF Site

11: The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod, a novel that has one tremendous coup de theatre that comes about three quarters of the way through the novel. But this should have been the start of the story, and MacLeod uses it to close the story off. Up to this point it has been a fairly routine tale of an ordinary person getting caught up in dirty intelligence work. Disappointing.

12: All the Lives he Led by Frederik Pohl, another disappointment, this one reviewed for Strange Horizons.

13: Life on Mars edited by Jonathan Strahan, a YA anthology that I reviewed for Bull Spec.

14: New Model Army by Adam Roberts, which prompted this post at Big Other.

15: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth by Manuel Puig, which prompted this post at Big Other.

16: Starbound by Joe Haldeman, a perfectly competent piece of heartland sf that reads like a good writer who can’t really be bothered to come up with anything fresh any more.

17: * Kentauros by Gregory Feeley, a marvellous combination of essays and short stories that I reviewed at Requited.

18: This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan – the sequel to In War Times, which I reviewed for The New York Review of Science Fiction.

19: Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller, which I reviewed at Strange Horizons.

20: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes – there was an article about this book in the Guardian which made it sound interesting, and I remembered we actually had a copy on our shelves. It is interesting, but in a curious way. The first part is a fascinating meditation on photography that partly inspired this post at Big Other; the second part revolves around the death of his mother and is, frankly, bonkers. But I’m glad I read it.

21: The Immortalization Commission by John Gray – another interesting but bonkers book. Gray looks at ways the scientific community got involved in ideas about life after death. The first part of the book deals with the Society for Psychical Research in late Victorian and Edwardian England, and in particular exercises in automatic writing. There is a large cast of Victorian intellectuals, including eminent scientists and a prime minister (Balfour), though the cast isn’t really all that large since there seems to have been intermarriage and other family ties between the members of the group. The second part looks at Soviet science in the early years of the new regime, in particular focussing upon the embalming of Lenin which seemed to reflect a genuine belief that he might at some point be restored to life, and upon the curious figure of Moura Budberg who was at the same time the mistress of Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells and also, by various accounts, a KGB agent. It’s a broken-backed book, the two halves never really cohere, and also Gray doesn’t seem at all clear what sort of book he is writing, at times journalism, popular biography, general political and scientific history, and fairly heavyweight philosophical argument (far and away the best part of the book). For all that, it is a book that always holds the interest, and there are some fascinating arguments about the relationship between science and religion, and about the nature of belief, that are casually dropped in along the way.

22: The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder, which I wrote about at Big Other.

23: Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear, a very familiar sort of hard sf, there isn’t an incident that you won’t recognise from somewhere else, but quite nicely done in its way.

24: Among Others by Jo Walton, reviewed for SF Site. At the time I read it, I was sure this would feature in my best of the year, but somehow I find my estimate of the book has declined in memory.

25: Sleight of Hand by Peter S. Beagle, also reviewed for SF Site.

26: Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye, read in conjunction with the discussion currently taking place at PaperKnife, so far here, here and here.

27: Embassytown by China Miéville, reviewed for Interzone. Like the Walton, a novel that, at the time, I was sure I would rate higher.

28: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s years since I read any Sherlock Holmes, so I thought I’d start with the great man’s first appearance in this short novel, novella really, though it actually gives us no more of Holmes than we find in many of the short stories, and the structure of the novel is, to say the least, awkward, with the long interlude in Utah stuck clumsily in the middle.

29: Declare by Tim Powers, an overlong, over-fussy book. Powers is blatantly doing a Le Carre (he steals Le Carre’s reference to Moscow Central, every other spy writer I know, and all the non-fiction (including Philby’s My Secret War, which I first read many years ago) refers rather to Dzerzhinsky Street, and most of the tradecraft is also taken directly from Le Carre’s books), but unlike Le Carre, the line of story is not clear and straightforward. If he cut out about 200 pages and at least two of the plot strands, this would be a much better novel.

30: The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle. My reading of the Holmes canon continues.

31: On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, re-read and reviewed for Vector.

32: Nebula Awards Showcase 2011 edited by Kevin J. Anderson, reviewed for Foundation.

33: The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 27^th Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois, reviewed for Foundation.

34: * The Universe of Things by Gwyneth Jones, reviewed at SF Site.

35: Welcome to the Greenhouse edited by Gordon van Gelder, reviewed at SF Site.

36: Visions of Mars edited by Hendrix, Slusser and Rabkin, reviewed at SF Site.

37: * The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein. A new novel by Goldstein has been long overdue, and this is a real treat.

38: The Thirties by Juliet Gardiner, which partly inspired this post at Big Other.

39: Brave New Worlds edited by John Joseph Adams, reviewed at SF Site and also what lay behind this post at Big Other.

40: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle which inspired this post at Big Other.

41: Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift which I talked about at Big Other.

42: * The Islanders by Christopher Priest, quite simply the best novel of the year. I reviewed it for LA Review of Books, though the review has yet to appear.

43: * Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm by John Clute, which I argued with in a review for Vector.

44: The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction by Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, which I reviewed for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

45: All the Time in the World by E.L. Doctorow which inspired this post and this post at Big Other.

46: Amazing Adult Fantasy by A.D. Jameson which I reviewed at SF Site.

47: Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris which led to this post and this post at Big Other.

48: * Osama by Lavie Tidhar, which I reviewed for Bull Spec.

49: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

50: The Great Night by Chris Adrian which I reviewed at Strange Horizons

51: Look to the Lady by Margery Allingham, the first Allingham I’ve read and a great introduction to her work.

52: A World on Fire by Amanda Foreman, a superb history of the American Civil War from a British perspective, that is, it deals primarily with the diplomacy between the countries, though it also includes the many British nationals who founght on either side, and the stories of the Confederate raiders built in Britain.

53: Troika by Alistair Reynolds, which I reviewed at SF Site.

54: * The Silver Wind by Nina Allan, a collection of time stories that is greater than the sum of its parts, which I reviewed for Interzone.

55: Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham, my second Albert Campion novel.

56: The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock edited by Donald E. Morse and Kalman Matolcsy, which I reviewed for SF Site.

57: The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan, possibly the worst book by Egan that I have so far read, reviewed for Bull Spec.

58: The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham which prompted this post at Big Other.

59: Wind Angels by Leigh Kennedy, at last, a new collection, though after reading it I discovered that the proof copy I’d been sent did not include all the stories, and they were not arranged in the correct order, so I am going to have to revisit the book before I write my review for Foundation.

60: Manhattan in Reverse by Peter F. Hamilton, which I included in my round-up review for the Telegraph.

61: A Life in Pictures by Alasdair Gray, just a wonderful collection of his pictures arranged in something that loosely resembles an autobiography.

62: The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

63: In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood, which I reviewed for the Telegraph.

64: The Judges of the Secret Court by David Stacton, which I wrote about at Big Other.

65: The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth, which I wrote about at Big Other.

66: Consuming Passions by Judith Flanders, essentially a history of shopping, entertainment and daily life in Britain in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

67: The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge, I reviewed this book and interviewed Vinge for Bull Spec.

68: Watergate by Thomas Mallon, not officially published until February. I’ve no idea why I got a copy so early, but since Mallon is one of my favourite historical novelists, I was heartily pleased to read it. I might still write an essay about it sometime soon.

69: A Short History of the Future by R.C. Churchill, which I am still intending to write about here.

70: Home Fires by Gene Wolfe, reviewed for Foundation.

71: The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz by Jules Verne, reviewed at SF Site.

72: In the Lion’s Mouth by Michael Flynn, reviewed for Interzone.

73: The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, a novel I’ve wanted to read for a long time, and a very strange piece of work it is.

74: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, which inspired this post at Big Other.

75: Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies by Lucy Sussex, reviewed for SF Site.

76: Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin Smith, reviewed for Vector.

77: Millennium People by J.G. Ballard reviewed at SF Site.

78: * After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh, reviewed for Strange Horizons.

79: The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo, which I wrote about at Big Other.

80: Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, which I wrote about at Big Other.

81: The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, which inspired this post at Big Other.

82: Snow by Orhan Pamuk, an extraordinary piece of work, though ev en now, a week or so later, I’m not entirely sure what I make of it.

83: The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle, which is really just barely a Sherlock Holmes novel.

84: * A Man of Parts by David Lodge, which I wrote about at Big Other.

85: A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black, Black is becoming more and more like Banville; this is a novel that is all about silences, things unsaid, inchoate feelings. Wonderful stuff.

There he claimed to have done “a little NEGATIVE good” by keeping Martin Amis and Angela Carter off the shortlist, “and manoeuvred so that Ballard did not get the prize”.

My dilemma is that I am a great supporter of awards (given my history, you wouldn’t really expect much else), but I can’t help seeing problems with them.

Popular vote awards are unreliable because a vanishingly small proportion of voters will have read all the eligible works. Even when it comes to the shortlist, the chances are that a sizeable proportion of voters, if not an outright majority, will NOT have read all the works on the list. Any result is inevitably going to be partial, and based to a plethora of external factors such as word of mouth, reputation, previous works, likeability, and so on.

Juried awards are unreliable because they can be manipulated (as Cobb clearly did) by the prejudices of one member, because the jury is never representative of the readership, and because if the jury changes year by year then then the standards and attributes they wish to honour will vary, yet if the jury does not change it will grow hidebound in its opinions and attitudes.

Worst of all, NONE of them is actually choosing the best book, even though that is the only ostensive purpose of any literary award. Because no two people can ever agree on what ‘best’ actually means, let alone on what work most closely achieves that mythical status.

I think, therefore, that we misinterpret awards if we think they are meant to pick the best. (In a sense, perhaps, we are meant to misinterpret them?) ‘Best’ is our interpretation of what they do, looking from the outside (I admit I am not entirely an outsider on this, but for most awards and in most instances I am). ‘Best’ is shorthand for ‘the work that such-and-such an award has picked this year’; but best is meaningless, even in the narrow confines of any individual award. Awards do not pick the best book. Juried awards pick the book that the majority of the jury can agree on; popular vote awards pick the book that most members of the electorate are prepared to vote for. In every instance, the individual voters or jurors may well believe they are picking the book that is best for them, but that does not translate into the eventual winner being the best book.

So when people call for awards to be reformed, or when they create new awards to put things right, my response is to shrug and say: sure, if you want. It’s not going to make much difference. All awards have a systemic problem, and reformation will only change one systemic problem for another. And a new award will not correct a fault in old awards; it will just do something different that has faults of its own. The real problem, that we are never going to solve, probably because we are never really going to address it as a problem, is us. We invest emotionally in awards. We know we shouldn’t, we know it’s foolish, we know it’s meaningless, but we do. Because we know, inside ourselves, that one book is better than another, that one writer is better than another. We don’t always know how or why, but it is an inherent part of our approach to literature. And we believe that, in some way, awards should address and demonstrate this. And in fact they do, but never quite in ways we accept or respect or agree with.

So awards are always necessary, and always wrong.

1: The Rapture by Liz Jensen –- reviewed at SF Site
2: Slightly Behind and to the Left by Claire Light – I really didn’t like this, the writing was thin, I felt uninvolved (actually I felt like the characters, often first-person narrators, were uninvolved), and the situations were not explored to any degree that felt satisfactory.
3: The Secret History of Science Fiction edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel –- reviewed at Strange Horizons
4: Geosynchron by David Louis Edelman –- reviewed at SF Site and in Interzone
5: Finding Words by Karen Anne Mitchell –- occasionally fine writing put at the service of a schematic plot with a penchant for soft porn that the author seems to have explored in several books before this. I was distinctly underwhelmed.
6: Lifelode by Jo Walton –- reviewed at Strange Horizons
7: Ooku, volume 1 by Fumi Yoshinaga –- the joint Tiptree winner, and well worth it.
8: Ooku, volume 2 by Fumi Yoshinaga –- the joint Tiptree winner, and well worth it.
9: Ice Song by Kirsten Imani Kasai –- starts well, but gets progressively weaker as it goes along, becoming overly dependent on chance and coincidence to move the plot along. And to be honest I never believed in the sub-arctic setting or any of the characters, it seemed mostly an excuse to use fairy tales as a model for a non fairy story, and those sorts of things take a lot more skill to pull off than Kasai displays here.
10: Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts –- I’m not a great fan of Adam’s fiction, and though I enjoyed this a lot more than I usually like Roberts’s fiction, I still had major problems with it, mostly with the characters. There is one major character who suffers from a curious mash-up of asperger’s syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder; yet every character talks as if they have the same problem. There are no conversations in the book, people talk to display their own ironic cleverness not to listen to what anyone else has to say. And everything is over-emphasised. We have the central character going on with some variant on the excluded middle argument so repetitively that when the multi-worlds twist comes the reaction is not: oh, that’s a neat twist, but rather: oh, that explains why he was going on about excluded middles at such tedious length.
11: Under the Rose edited by David Hutchinson –- reviewed at SF Site
12: Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon – reviewed at SF Site.
13: Cold Earth by Sarah Moss –- reviewed at Strange Horizons.
14: Makers by Cory Doctorow – reviewed at SF Site.
15: The Utopian Vision of H.G. Wells by Justin E.A. Busch – and
16: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells –- jointly reviewed at SF Site.
17: The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe –- reviewed in Interzone (along with an interview with Wolfe). Not, by any means, as bad as some of the early reviews have made out, but Wolfe is certainly going through a fallow patch at the moment.
18: Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson –- reviewed at SF Site.
19: Point Omega by Don DeLillo –- which I wrote about at Big Other.
20: Solar by Ian McEwan –- personally I prefer McEwan when he’s doing this stuff seriously (Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday) than when he’s repeating it all for laughs, mostly because McEwan is no more a natural comedian than I am.
21: Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt –- a pedestrian re-working of familiar time travel paradoxes.
22: Mind Over Ship by David Marusek –- which I wrote about here.
23: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer –- which I wrote about at Big Other.
24: Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction edited by Mark Bould and China Mieville –- reviewed at SF Site.
25: A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration by Jenny Uglow – in the end I think it revealed a man who was able, adept, and quite as clever as I had always imagined.
26: Pinion by Jay Lake –- reviewed at Strange Horizons.
27: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest –- covered in these posts at Big Other.
28: Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds –- reviewed at SF Site.
29: Cheek By Jowl by Ursula K. Le Guin –- and
30: Imagination/Space by Gwyneth Jones –- reviewed jointly at Strange Horizons.
31: Into Your Tent by John L. Ingham –- revied for Vector, I begin my review by asking do we need a biography of Russell, and if so is this the review we need. Let’s say I’m undecided on the first part and very decided on the second.
32: Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress –- It starts out derivative but interesting, then all the interest is frittered away.
33: Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson –- which I wrote about in these posts at Big Other.
34: News of the Black Feast by Brian Stableford –- and
35: Jaunting on the Scoriac Tempests by Brian Stableford –- and
36: Gothic Grotesques by Brian Stableford –- jointly reviewed for Science Fiction Studies, poorly proof read or copy-edited collections of often over-wrought reviews.
37: Metrophilias by Brendan Connell –- which I wrote about at Big Other.
38: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi –- which I wrote about in these posts at Big Other.
39: The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang –- reviewed at SF Site.
40: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell –- which I wrote about at Big Other.
41: The Rocket’s Red Glare by David M. Peak –- which I wrote about at Big Other.
42: Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber –- reviewed in Interzone, and a reminder of just how good Leiber could be.
43: Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker –- a biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, practically the first woman in Britain to have books published under her own name, constant critic of the Royal Society, instigator of a rather eccentric theory of knowledge and author of the very eccentric science fiction novel Blazing World (1666). One of the more colourful characters from that extraordinarily colourful period the Interregnum and the Restoration, she was also highly intelligent and yet had to spend her whole life battling against the conception that as a woman she really couldn’t be that intelligent. Although not quite the groundbreaking proto-feminist that some modern commentators describe, she is still a fascinating person to read about. This biography (clearly based on a thesis) is rather pedestrian in its account of her life, but very good in its account of her ideas and her writing.
44: Wolfsangel by M.D. Lachlan –- reviewed at Strange Horizons.
45: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi –- reviewed for Vector, and a book I didn’t like anywhere near as much as everyone else seems to have.
46: The Legions of Fire by David Drake –- reviewed for Bull Spec, okay-ish but very predictable fantasy redeemed by a quite well done setting in a version of early 1st century Rome.
47: The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon –- I enjoyed (with reservations) his previous novel, but this one is rather too obviously trying to pull the same trick. It even has a return visit to that wonderfully Borgesian invention: the library of lost books. It’s a mixture of grand guignal and spirit of place, with the now rather commonplace conceit of being all about writing a mixture of grand guignal and spirit of place. In sum: it’s about 100 pages too long (the middle section in particular drags in places and could profit from trimming) but at its best, especially the first section, it is every bit as good as its predecessor.
48: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel –- which inspired this post at Big Other.
49: Sunnyside by Glen David Gold –- the long-awaited follow-up to Carter Beats the Devil, and I found, as with Zafon, that he is trying too hard to recapture some of the feel of the first book, with the inevitable result that it doesn’t quite work.
50: H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life by Michael Sherborne –- reviewed for LA Review of Books. I suspect Wells lived far too many lives to ever fit within the covers of one biography. Sherborne presents a narrative approach that tries to bring all the different facets of Wells together into one coherent tale, and though it works pretty well you still end up feeling that there are inevitably bits that get away.
51: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald –- reviewed at SF Site.
52: Return by Peter S. Beagle –- reviewed at Strange Horizons.
53: Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears –- which prompted this post at Big Other.
54: Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers –- my annual Wimsey, not one of the best.
55: The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas –- I don’t really see why everyone went ga-ga over the book, it strikes me as a rather messy generic mash-up. The old bit of advice to crime writers used to be that when things slowed down, have someone walk in with a gun. Thomas seems to have updated that advice: when things slow down, have someone walk in with a new genre. For me the book was pleasingly but not brilliantly written, and the plot was incoherent.
56: Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos – the book that finally gave me a way in to my review of the McDonald.
57: Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder –- reviewed for Foundation.
58: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks –- reviewed in Interzone, overlong, vivid, readable and something of a mess.
59: Generosity by Richard Powers –- my book of the year, reviewed at Strange Horizons.
60: Sacred Space by Douglas E. Cowan –- reviewed for Bull Spec. A study of the idea of transcendence in science fiction (mostly sf film and television, though there is a very interesting discussion of the different approaches to religion in the novel and film versions of The War of the Worlds). There’s good stuff in here, but I was distinctly inclined to argue with it on a lot of points.
61: Bearings by Gary K. Wolfe –- reviewed at SF Site.
62: The Infinity Box by Kate Wilhelm –- which inspired this post at Big Other.
63: The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot –- which inspired this post at Big Other.
64: Defined by a Hollow by Darko Suvin –- reviewed for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, which I’ve described as the most difficult, the most troubling, the book I argued with and fought with from first page to last, but still my non-fiction book of the year.
65: An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley –- just one of the great plays.
66: Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan –- reviewed for Interzone, and another of my books of the year.
67: The Secret History of Fantasy edited by Peter S. Beagle –- and another big review for what is in one respect a superb collection of stories, but in another a very partial and flawed account of what fantasy is.
68: Nexus: Ascension by Robert Boyczuk –- reviewed for The New York Review of Science Fiction, a first novel that is very weak in the first half and quite a bit better in the second, though the plot still doesn’t make any sense.
69: Search for Philip K. Dick by Anne R. Dick –- reviewed for SF Site, a revised edition of the memoir that was a primary text for most of the biographies.
70: A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson –- which inspired this post at Big Other.
71: 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin –- reviewed for Strange Horizons, a sort of festschrift, the most interesting thing contained within it is what appears to be an extract from a biography by Julie Phillips.
72: Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages –- and
73: Stable Strategies and Others by Eileen Gunn –- two collections I’ve been meaning to read for ages, both by authors who are far less productive than they should be, even though in both collections you can see the same themes and approaches recurring. And both collections contain makeweight stories that the books could have done without.
74: The Tree by John Fowles –- which inspired this post at Big Other.

First published at LiveJournal, 1 January 2011.

And that, alas, is how we come across in too much science fiction. Load in the gosh-wow tech, fire up the mechanical twist, and who cares about people? Well, once upon a time, I didn’t. I remember the adolescent me first encountering big concept sf, and it was just a torrent of wonders. “It’s got this, and there’s this, and gosh there’s this, and wow just think it’s got that …” I would gush, and not really notice the expression of pained indulgence on my parents’ faces. Whenever the story slowed a moment to try, a little clumsily, to establish the fragile humanity of the characters, I would start to lose interest.

Now my reaction is exactly the opposite. Now I glaze over at each catalogue of geekery and find my interest only really snagged when I engage with the humanity of the characters. Of course, science fiction has a fine line to tread. One of the most important things that sf does is address our own encounter with the new, the other, the different. In order to do this it is often useful to deploy tactics ranging from transcendental wonder to some appeal to our desire for the new cool, which can often end up sounding like the next Apple sales pitch. All of this is necessary: you can have examples of science fiction without it, but you can’t have science fiction as a whole without it. So I accept the catalogue of geekery, but if it is the only thing the author is interested in, then this reader is likely to be uninterested in the result. I also accept that, over the last 30 or 40 years, sf writers as a whole have become far more adept at creating characters and sustaining human interest. Nevertheless, the chrome-plated notion of sf as things not people still crops up with alarming regularity, sometimes in works that win a huge amount of acclaim.

For me the latest example is Mind Over Ship by David Marusek (which is the reason I singled out business and technology at the start of this brief pensée, since they are the themes that guide the whole novel). I missed his first novel, Counting Heads, but I’ve loved his stories ever since I first encountered them in a Dozois collection probably a decade or more ago. So I came into this novel expecting to be swept away and really wanting to like it. And I tried, I really tried, but I kept finding myself skidding off the shiny surface. In fact, the more this happened as I painstakingly worked my way through the novel, the more I suspected that there isn’t actually anything below the surface: lots of glitter and gloss, signifying nothing.

Let us start with an overcrowded world in which many hundreds of thousands of people are willing to submit themselves to the risks of cryogenic freezing or generations aboard a starship in order to reach a new world. Yet for all this overcrowding there are no obvious shortages of food or water or other necessities at all. In fact, the earth’s resources are plentiful enough to allow rejuvenation techniques to be readily available to everybody, and to allow the manufacture of millions of clones to serve as the planet’s workforce. And nobody, even in passing, thinks there might be a contradiction in this.

But all of this – the space ships, the regeneration, the clones and the rest – are there primarily to allow the host of cool new tech he wants to display before us. And host is the right word. This is a book overloaded with novelties, there is something fresh to get your head around on every page, you could get future shock just by opening it. And that is what the book is about, the volume of novelty that can be squeezed into its pages. This is literature designed precisely for those whose critical reaction is along the lines of: “It’s got this, and there’s this, and gosh there’s this, and wow just think it’s got that …”

Oh there are plenty of people in the book, some of whom Marusek goes to considerable length in trying to establish the messy piss and snot and tears of their common humanity. Except that they are then forgotten the moment there is no fresh novelty for them to observe: because they are there primarily as viewpoints to let us see the cool tech around them. Mary occupies the bulk of the first half of the book because she happens to witness quite a lot of the new stuff, but then largely disappears from the tech when there’s nothing much for her to see. Her husband, Fred, on the other hand, is pretty much an invisible presence during the first half of the book because he doesn’t really have much to see; but then Marusek manoeuvres him out into space and suddenly he occupies more of the last half of the book than any two or three other characters put together.

The most important character in the novel is, probably, Eleanor, who is dead when the book opens. Then we learn her personality has been distributed among myriads of fish, then it is transferred to different specially-reared fish, then to two bodies that have been grown for the occasion; and throughout all of this she is masterminding a globe-spanning business deal of stunning complexity. So complex a deal, in fact, that it depends on countless variables which, of course, all turn out exactly as they need to do. Now I don’t mind a human personality distributed among fish as an sf conceit, in fact I find it clever and fun, but I do object to the fact that not only is there no human cost to this but she behaves like a superhuman in the way she manipulates events. The result is a cartoon, mechanistic and contrived, which expects the response: “Oo shiny”; not: “So this is what it would be like to live in this future”.

First published at LiveJournal, 13 April 2010.

1: The Best of Gene Wolfe by Gene Wolfe – reviewed for Interzone. There is so much essential stuff here: ‘The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories’, ‘The Death of Dr Island’, ‘The Eyeflash Miracles’, ‘The Hero as Werwolf’ and, of course, ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’. All of which, and many others, appeared before we knew anything about The Book of the New Sun. Strangely, after the New Sun appeared his short fiction continued at the same frequency but notably declined in quality.

2: Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed by Robert Freeman Wexler- a chapbook of surreal stories also reviewed for Interzone.

3: Journey into Space by Toby Litt – yet another book reviewed for Interzone, and an absolutely charming work.

4: H.G. Wells’s Fin de Siecle edited by John S. Partington – reviewed for SF Studies. Yet another book about Wells that complains of the dearth of books about Wells. The very best piece here examines why Wells’s work was critically mauled by the modernists and makes a strong case for a critical re-evaluation of what he was doing. There are good pieces also on some of his social comedies, but the essays on his sf try too hard to express their adherence to Theory and end up saying nothing useful or interesting about Wells himself.

5: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. I’ve read a lot of history this year, but this account of the relationship between the romantic imagination and the development of science in the time of Joseph Banks, William Herschel and Humphrey Davy is easily the best, an absolutely rivetting work.

6: The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl – reviewed for SF Site.

7: Critical Practice by Catherine Belsey, a slim volume that forms part of my on-going autodidactic efforts to understand Theory, mostly useful as a broad outline and an introduction to some names I will pursue elsewhere.

8: Drood by Dan Simmons.

9: Northwest of Earth by C.L. Moore – reviewed for SF Site.

10: Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers: This is fairly early Sayers, I think, and one in which the emphasis is clearly on the detection and less on the social setting. Certainly the location, an artists colony on the west coast of Scotland, really doesn’t allow Sayers to say much about anything more broadly relevant, whereas the plotting, though it starts with an illogicality, is ingenious and engaging. Not by any means my favourite Sayers, but it suited the occasion.

11: The Voice of the Heart by G. Peter Winnington – reviewed for Science Fiction Studies. A book length study of the work of Mervyn Peake covering not just his novels but also the plays and illustrations. An interesting thematic approach, considering Peake’s work metaphor by metaphor, draws extraordinary attention to Peake’s inability to present any sort of meaningful relationship between his characters (symbollically he sees people as islands, rocky and isolated, and any relationship took place in the depths of the ocean between islands), and also explains something of why I’ve never really got on with his work.

12: The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros – reviewed for Strange Horizons.

13: Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth – which I wrote about here.

14: Making an Elephant: Writing from Within by Graham Swift – which I wrote about here.

15: Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer – reviewed for SF Site.

16: This is not a game by Walter Jon Williams – reviewed for Vector.

17: Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow – reviewed for SF Site.

18: Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery. I really expected (hoped) to like this book a lot more than I did, but what we end up wth is a sort of superannuated hippy view of America that I thought we’d got beyond twenty years ago. You know you’ve got problems if a novel is set in the near future yet its most recent cultural reference is from 1974.

19: Half a Crown by Jo Walton. I was hoping for something as tight as Farthing but it comes across as thin, and with the sort of contrived happy ending that I saw coming a mile off and didn’t believe for one moment.

20: The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr – reviewed for SF Site.

21: Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod. A deserving winner of the Clarke and Campbell Awards.

22: UFO in her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo – reviewed for SF Site.

23: Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. On the Hugo shortlist, though I’m not sure why.

24: Canary Fever by John Clute – reviewed for Interzone.

25: Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties by Peter Hennessey. This looks like it should be a social history of the period (there’s a picture of Roger Bannister on the cover, for instance) but it is actually a political history. One chapter only deals with everything from literature and the movies to sport and recreation, every other chapter concerns the workings of the various Conservative governments of the period. I discovered a lot of very interesting stuff in here, but it is slow going.

26: Reading Science Fiction edited by James Gunn, Marleen Barr and Matthew Candelaria – reviewed for SF Site.

27: Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald – reviewed for SF Site.

28: The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway. Harkaway and I were fellow guests at the BSFA/SFF AGM, so I felt I should read his novel, and I’m glad I did. It is sprawling, prone to coincidence, and out of control a lot of the time, but it is also vigorous and great fun.

29: The Patriot Witch by C.C. Finlay – along with its two sequels, this was reviewed for Strange Horizons.

30: A Spell for the Revolution by C.C. Finlay – see above.

31: The Failure of Certain Charms by Gordon Henry Jr. I met Gordon during his recent tour of the UK and felt I’d like to read some of his poetry, excellent stuff full of fascinating and at times haunting repeated images from Native American life.

32: The Demon Redcoat by C.C. Finlay – see above.

33: The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science by Frank McConnell – reviewed for SF Site.

34: Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore – reviewed for SF Site.

35: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany which I wrote about here and here.

36: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, another book I re-read in order to write an entry for a reference book. After all these years and any number of re-readings, it still stands up remarkably well.

37: Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi. Another novel on the Hugo list, it’s clever, sentimental, and again I’ve no idea what it’s doing on the shortlist.

38: The Fire in the Stone by Nicholas Ruddick – reviewed for Foundation. If not for Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s book, this would easily have been the best non-fiction of the year.

39: Distances by Vandana Singh. A beautifully written novella, but I found myself curiously unmoved and unconvinced by the story it was trying to tell. Still worth it for the prose, which is lovely.

40: The City and the City by China Mieville. The best science fiction of the year for me because of the way it plays with the intellectual idea of the border as heterotopia, even if the plotting is somewhat less convincing.

41: Four Freedoms by John Crowley, which I wrote about here.

42: The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black. I’m a great fan of John Banville, but some day I really must try to do a comparison between his prose as Banville and his prose as Black, which is tighter, faster, but still as atmospheric. As a thriller this is odd and not a little unsatisfactory, as a novel it is intriguing.

43: The New Uncanny edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page – reviewed for Strange Horizons.

44: Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 edited by Ellen Datlow – reviewed for SF Site.

45: Transition by Iain Banks – reviewed for Interzone. It’s by Banks, so you know it’s pacy, entertaining, and features a fair helping of gruesome comedy. But the plot is an almighty mess that doesn’t come close to beginning to make sense. And why this slipped out without the ‘M’ in the UK is beyond me.

46: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I re-read this because I’m contributing to a book on film adaptations. Well the film doesn’t hold up as well as I remember, but the novel certainly does. This has to be one of the greatest of all sf tragedies.

47: The Inter-Galactic Playground by Farah Mendlesohn – reviewed for Vector. A critical study of sf for children and young adults, though it is at its liveliest where it is a polemical attack on some of the assumptions made about children’s fiction generally.

48: The Mere Future by Sarah Schulman. Naive, ill-structured, poorly written, this was the worst book of the year for me.

49: Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, another book re-read because of that book on film adaptations.

50: The Infinities by John Banville – reviewed for New York Review of Science Fiction. This is Banville’s first novel under his own name since taking on the personna of Benjamin Black (see above). I wrote about the book here.

51: William Golding: The Man Who Wrote The Lord of the Flies by John Carey. I’ve already noted this one here; it’s a superb literary biography, a model of its kind.

52: Cloud & Ashes by Greer Gilman – reviewed for SF Site. My novel of the year, though I suspect it is a work people will admire rather than love.

53: The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster. Re-read for an essay I needed to write for a reference book. This is still one of my favourites among Auster’s novels, perhaps because (along with The Brooklyn Follies) it’s one of the most humane books he’s written. And I would love to see the silent comedies by Hector Mann that he describes.

54: The American Epic Novel in the Late Twentieth Century by W. Gilbert Adair – reviewed for Science Fiction Studies. First of all: W. Gilbert Adair is not the novelist Gilbert Adair, which is perhaps a pity. Secondly, this is a book that doesn’t even bother to explain two of the key terms from its own title: Super-Genre and Imperial State. Thirdly, this is a study of four big novels from the1970s, including Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany; the close reading of the four books contains some interesting (though not always convincing) stuff, but Adair really does nothing to say why these particular books were chosen (other than their size) or what might link them. In other words, it is a book that significantly fails to do what it says on the cover.

55: On Joanna Russ edited by Farah Mendlesohn – reviewed for SF Site.

56: The Prestige by Christopher Priest. Another re-read for the film adaptations book. This is the first time I’ve re-read the novel since I saw the film, and it brings home to you how much the film and the book differ, and yet how true they are to each other.

57: When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett. My fascination with recent British history brings me up to the 1970s, a decade I remember all too clearly. Beckett’s one sentence reference to the Protestant Workers’ Strike in Northern Ireland reminds me all too easily of reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by candlelight while studying for my finals. As history, it is interesting simply because so much of what it covers was stuff I lived through and remember. As a history book it is perhaps less satisfactory because it is about 30% journalism: many of the key players in the decade are still alive (or were when Beckett was researching the book) and rather too much of the book is taken up with descriptions of going to visit them, what they are like now, the character of their homes, and so forth. I don’t think this provides quite the context for judging the decade that Beckett reckons it does.

58: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. I have a rather tentative relationship with Conrad. There is no author I have started to read and given up on more than Conrad, including this novel which I first tried to read probably in the 1960s. Revisiting it now, I don’t really see why I had so much trouble, except that the prose is rather denser than my usual taste and the story, for all its colour and exotic locale, is remarkably slow moving. I enjoyed it more the further I got into it, with the final section where Jim gains redemption but loses his life, the best of all for my money.

59: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton. Another re-read for the film adaptations book, I wrote about it here.

60: Brain Thief by Alexander Jablokov – reviewed for New York Review of Science Fiction. A slick sf thriller that was rather too mechanically structured for my taste.

61: Interfictions 2 edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak which inspired some thoughts here.

62: White Ravens by Owen Sheers – reviewed for Strange Horizons along with …

63: The Ninth Wave by Russell Celyn Jones. Two retellings of the Mabinogion (the second and first branches respectively), clever for what they do but I have my doubts about how well they stand as individual works, though I continue to be delighted by Sheers as a prose stylist.

64: The American Future by Simon Schama. This is not so much history as polemic, generally well done if a little chaotic in places. Interesting to read a view of American history that differs from what we tend to learn over here, a work that argues consistently that the most persistent and fundamental forces that have gone to build America have been discrimination, racism, religious bigotry, class distinctions and a fundamental resistance to democracy that becomes more overt the more democracy itself is trumpeted as the spirit of America.

65: Avilion by Robert Holdstock – reviewed for SF Site. On the day I picked this book up to read for this review I learned of Rob’s death, which made this perhaps the most difficult review I have ever had to write. It helps that this is a good book, a worthy closure to the Mythago cycle.

66: Austerity Britain 1945-51 by David Kynaston. I’ve been reading this book, off and on, for most of the year. Fascinating to read a history that deals far less with the politics of the period and far more with what people were buying in the shops, what radio programmes they listened to, how they responded to the birth of the NHS, the nature of housing and town planning, the day to day experience of ordinary workers, and so on.

67: Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley. The sequel to The Quiet War, which was one of the best novels of 2008. If this feels a little less focussed, if the drama is more dissipated, it is still a fascinating and evocative account of what it might be like to live among the outer planets.

68: Invisible by Paul Auster. After the relative misfires of his last two novels, this is a return to form. A promising student in the late 1960s gets involved with a strange Frenchman and his sexy girlfriend. The Frenchman promises money for a magazine, but as the student is drawn into their circle there is a sudden act of violence, which affects the future of all three of them. The novel is constructed as three chapters describing the events and their aftermath written by the student and compiled posthumously by a novelist friend, but at the same time we are encouraged to question the veracity of the account. Not a particularly groundbreaking novel from Auster, but well done, engaging and interesting.

69: Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow. Doctorow’s fictionalised take on the story of the reclusive Collyer brothers extends their lives by some 20-odd years, but otherwise does a really convincing job of getting inside their strange little world. The narrator is Homer, the blind brother, and they live a conventional wealthy life on Fifth Avenue until their parents die in the flu pandemic following the First World War and Langley returns physically and mentally changed by the experience of the trenches. Slowly their horizons shrink while Langley falls prey to a succession of obsessions and a variety of visitors from prohibition-era gangsters to 1960s hippies invade their home. I’ve always been a fan of Doctorow’s work, but this is one of his best.

70: Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd. An ex-pat returns to London and almost immediately falls in with a stranger who passes on a piece of vital information but is then brutally murdered. The ex-pat finds he has to go on the run with the police, the murderer and the sinister organisation that arranged the murder after him. Yes, this is the plot of The Thirty-Nine Steps, it is also the plot of Ordinary Thunderstorms (which I think is a dreadful title, by the way). In this instance our ex-pat, Adam, doesn’t flee to Scotland but starts living rough in London where he gradually moves through the underbelly of society. As a thriller I found it efficient but fairly routine, but part way through I realised it was also a howl of outrage about the malign effect of money on every level of our society. It is, in other words, a state of the nation, credit crunch novel that doesn’t mention banking once. How else to write about how money shapes and destroys loyalties, relationships, families, moralities than by creating a hero who has no money? As long as it does this, it is a superb novel, but when the thriller plot reasserts itself towards the end in order to tie off all the loose ends, it becomes weaker once more.

First published at LiveJournal, 1 January 2010.

It was bitterly cold, we struggled down Hampstead High Street thinking it might be quite nice if we came on a warmer day, and we’d have walked straight past the chapel if we hadn’t run into Steve Jones, who led us to the secret entrance round the side. I had no idea what to expect of a Unitarian Chapel, but it looked like an Anglican Church with stained glass in the windows (and what looked disturbingly like angels in alien space ships high above the altar), but it felt far more relaxed. And in it was a confusion of sf people, several of whom I’d not seen in 20 years or more (Kevin Smith, Andrew Stephenson). At one point I caught sight of Rob’s younger brother, Chris, whom I’ve never laid eyes on before, and thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice, Rob’s turned up’, before I did a double take.

We began with a few words from the Minister, and stood as the wickerwork coffin was brought in and laid on tressels at the front of the chapel. Then Malcolm Edwards, who had orchestrated the event, took over, and for the next hour and a quarter we had a succession of family and friends sharing their memories of Rob, starting with Chris who recalled their childhood. I was honoured to be asked to read a message from the French writer, Christian Lehman, who was unable to attend; after the ceremony I spoke to Sarah and I think they might put all the messages up on the web site, I hope so because it was a wonderful piece and I just hope I did it justice. Other contributions came from Roy Kettle, Chris Evans, Jim Burns, Wendy Froud, Malcolm, Chris Priest (who spoke very simply about how Rob had died, without pain or any awareness of what was happening, which somehow allowed us all to relax after that), Lisa Tuttle, Garry Kilworth, and Matilda Verrells (Rob’s god-child and niece, who spoke very eloquently about what Rob meant to his extended family). Everyone spoke well, and there were, inevitably, a lot of comic memories, though it was obvious that several people were really struggling not to break down.

After the ceremony, while a very small group accompanied the coffin to the crematorium, the rest of us found food and wine laid on at the chapel (you’ve got to love a chapel that serves wine). An army of young family members did a steriling job of pushing sandwiches and pieces of cake on the assembly. Meanwhile the rest of us formed groups and chatted, and it was impossible, as such things always are, to exchange words with more than a very small percentage of the people there. We spent most of our time with Lizzie Priest while Chris and Leigh went to the crematorium, but I also managed to speak with Farah, Garry, Chris Evans, Malcolm, Roy Kettle, Kev Smith, Dave Langford, Andrew Stephenson, Judith Clute, and, in passing, Al Reynolds and Kim Newman, and, of course, with Sarah.

Rob, I think, would have loved it – good people, good food and drink, good conversation, what is there not to like? – except, as Garry remarked, for the black ties.

First published at LiveJournal, 17 December 2009.

The question was: why did you give up science fiction for fantasy?

There are slick answers to this. The success of Mythago Wood and its immediate sequels made it commercially stupid to go back to sf. Or you might argue that he never wholeheartedly wrote science fiction, considering the earthy, myth-laden character of his first two novels. But these are cheap, superficial answers to a deeper and more complex question, and both Rob and I recognised that such answers would have been unsatisfactory.

I realised, belatedly, that the essay I had in Vector this summer was an attempt on my part to answer the question. The essay argued that there is a particular view of time, a sinuous, riverine view, that runs through all his work. I think it is this conception of time that lies at the heart of his shift from sf to fantasy.

His first two novels, Eye Among the Blind (1976) and Earthwind (1977), were rich, complex, a little self-indulgent, and full of sometimes clumsy attempts to layer a long view of ancient time and mythology onto fairly standard science fictional tropes of alien worlds and far futures. Pretty much the same can be said about Necromancer (1978), his third novel, with horror substituting for sf. They were good journeyman novels (I particularly liked Necromancer), though I think the short stories he was writing at the time (collected in In the Valley of the Statues (1982)) were rather better, even if these stories did rather too often live up to another running joke, that he always wrote about men fucking the earth.

There were twists and turns in time evident, if only as asides, in those early novels and in a few of the stories. But then came his fourth novel, Where Time Winds Blow (1981), and time stopped being a device in his fiction and became the subject of it. This was, to my mind, the breakthrough novel, a work of genuine, paradigm-shifting science fiction, as breathtakingly original in its conception and as taut in its execution as, say, Christopher Priest’s Inverted World. It would, I am sure, have been the novel for which he is best remembered, if he hadn’t followed it with Mythago Wood (1984), but I’ll come to that in a moment. Science fiction has often written about time as a dimension, through which one can move forwards, backwards or sideways; but Where Time Winds Blow imagines time as a medium in which one is immersed, a flood sweeping through and around and across you, buffeting you in different directions at once. ‘Later,’ I wrote in that essay, ‘time would flow so sinuously that it affected the very landscape through which it passed, changing the ecology along its banks, leaving behind curious abandoned ox-bow lakes.’ Though characters move in time, they do not control it, they cannot determine direction or destination.

Where Time Winds Blow was far and away the best work of science fiction that Holdstock produced, it was also just about the last. He had written a novel that was audacious in its imagination and successful in its execution, and immediately turned away from the genre. Hence my question.

It surely wasn’t coincidence that in the same year he published Where Time Winds Blow, he also produced ‘Mythago Wood’, the original story from which the entire sequence grew. He had found a subject, and was exploring it in two works that are, in key ways, the same.

It may seem counter-intuitive, if not downright controversial, to aver that a novel set on an alien planet in the future and a novel set in rural England immediately after the Second World War are the same, but they are. Both equate time and identity. In both novels time has sculpted its own unique landscape (and landscape was always important in Holdstock’s work). In both novels, time is wild, non-linear, disordered and disordering, identified with all that is primitive and threatening: time is an object of primal fear. In both novels a man with psychic scars from the past must plunge into time, not to heal the scars but to accept them. In both novels the past that haunts the protagonist and the wilderness of time in which he must seek healing are separate: the past is as much outside the raging sweep of time as is the present (let me explain: the present is coherent, we understand it as part of a linear sequence from yesterday into tomorrow; the past is part of that same coherent, understandable sequence; but time as represented by the rift valley or Ryhope Wood is not coherent, is not susceptible to being understood. The journey in both novels takes us from a place where we think we know ourselves because we are established within a familiar, comforting sequence of linear time, into a place where time is not familiar but wild, is not comforting but raw, is not linear but disordered, and hence where that self-knowledge must be undermined.)

In that essay I suggested that this notion of time as a sinuous river which twists and turns upon itself through every single one of the novels Holdstock wrote after Where Time Winds Blow, was an extravagantly science fictional idea, which explains the dramatic impact that Holdstock’s work had upon fantasy. This was a way of perceiving the shape of the world that the genre had not known before. This is, I still believe, true; but it is only part of the story. Or rather, it only goes part of the way towards answering my question.

Science fiction is remarkably profuse in the way it uses time: time machines, future settings, parallel times, people coming unstuck in time or killing their own grandfather. Yet for all these tropes, sf is remarkably conservative about the nature of time. Whichever of these tropes you might pick, the master-plan of time is still strictly linear, there is still a steady flow from yesterday to tomorrow, from past to future, from beginning to end. The difference lies in where or how you access the line, not in the nature of the line itself. Were Holdstock to continue to explore his sinuous, non-linear time in science fiction, there would be nowhere else to go. Where Time Winds Blow is a one-off, it could be repeated but not advanced.

But the structure of time plays no part in the conception of fantasy. Most fantasy, in fact, is static in time. Each story has its conventional chronology, but with very rare exceptions (Merlin living backwards in The Once and Future King) the shape of time itself is not affected by the story. And this absence paradoxically opens up fantasy for Holdstock’s explorations of non-linear time. Which is exactly what he did in novel after novel. We remember the forests in his stories, we remember the crude mythic archetypes, we remember the conflation of different myths in the Merlin Codex, but look at what is happening to time in these stories. Not one of them has a conventional chronological structure, a conventional line of time. Different times, sometimes centuries apart, juxtapose each other, rub against each other, intertwine with each other.

So I think I know why Holdstock moved from science fiction into fantasy: because he found a perfect science fictional idea that could be most satisfactorily explored through the medium of fantasy.

First published at LiveJournal, 7 December 2009.

For a start, I think the understanding of what is meant by interstitial has changed. In the early interstitial presentations I saw at Wiscon, and again in the first Interfictions anthology, I got the distinct impression that interstitial was regarded as a genre between the genres. In other words, if you drew a Venn diagram of sf, fantasy, horror and mainstream, then interstitial would occupy that gap where they didn’t quite overlap. The very name, interstitial, supports this interpretation. But it didn’t make sense to me because no such gap actually exists.

This new anthology reinterprets the word to mean not the gap between literary forms but the point where they overlap. Now this actually makes a great deal more sense, because literature is full of such overlaps. On the other hand, it negates the whole idea of interstitial, because literature is full of such overlaps.

There is, to my mind, no such thing as a pure example of genre. Throughout the history of literature, writers have plundered modes, approaches, styles, forms, genres, in exactly the way that contributors to this volume ascribe to interstitial. Thomas More’s Utopia is a combination of themes taken from the writings of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci and structure taken from works of philosophy such as The Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus. Five hundred years later, China Miéville’s The City and the City is a combination of approach taken from any number of crime novels and theme taken from Foucault’s notion of the Heterotopia. In between, practically every work of fiction you can name has borrowed liberally from history, biography, science, travel, philosophy, other fictions, and so on (and conversely, every work of history, biography, philosophy and such has borrowed liberally from other fictions and the rest). In other words, if interstitial fiction exists, then it is indistinguishable from fiction as a whole.

Of course, none of this is new. Writers have always chaffed against what they see as the narrow restrictions of the established literary norm (whatever that might be), and so have continually come up with new forms. They call this modernism or postmodernism, the avant garde or the new wave, slipstream or any of a myriad of other names. Mostly such movements are short lived; they tend to get absorbed into the general arsenal of the writer, or they disappear to be reinvented later. The avant garde has been reinvented several times over the last century, the ‘experimental’ fiction of the 1920s being pretty hard to distinguish from the ‘experimental’ fiction of the 1960s. The British new wave in science fiction (the American new wave was a rather different beast) primarily incorporated modernist techniques (stream of consciousness, unreliable narrator, intertextuality) into science fiction.

The generic mess that is science fiction, fantasy and horror seems particularly prone to this urge to invent some new literary lebensraum (new wave, new weird, new hard sf, new space opera, slipstream, interstitial). It all depends, I think, on a category error: you want literature to be broad, accommodating, flexible; but you perceive genre to be fixed, rigid, narrow. The category error lies in perceiving genre as some prescribed, inalterable territory marked off from the rest of literature, rather than as an ill-defined area within literature whose borders are porous at the least.

Therein lies my problem with the interstitial as much as with slipstream and all the other pseudo-genres the literature has brought forth. I believe that these forms can only truly exist as an independent entity if we regard science fiction and fantasy and horror (and, indeed, all other generic forms, including mainstream) as an absolute. If there are hard and fast limits, an immoveable wall sealing off sf, then anything that partakes of sf outside these walls can be presented as something new, daring, transgressive. But that is not how I see genre. I have consistently argued that genre is a relative thing, indefinable precisely because it is constantly reinventing itself, because it has no set limits. In such a case, if there are no walls you cannot have an ‘outside the walls’. For me, therefore, things like slipstream and interstitial are not new genres, but a manifestation of the malleability of genre.

First published at LiveJournal, 3 December 2009.