Sharke infested custard

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Arthur C. Clarke Award, David Hebblethwaite, Jonathan McCalmont, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, Nick Hubble, nina allan, Vajra Chandrasekera, Victoria Hoyle

I am, it turns out, a puritan.

This comes as something of a surprise to me. After a childhood brought up on The Children of the New Forest and its ilk (in my last year of primary school, when the class was told to write a story, I produced an 11-chapter, 22-page “novel” that was effectively a rewrite of The Children of the New Forest), I have always felt more inclined towards the wrong but wromantic Cavaliers than the right but repulsive Roundheads.

Nevertheless there it is: when it comes to science fiction, I would appear to be a puritan. Not, I hasten to add, in terms of what constitutes science fiction. On that issue I am decidedly catholic. But when it comes to criticism of, and commentary upon, science fiction, then I am most certainly a puritan.

Shadow Clarke: Occupy Me

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Ali Shaw, Arthur C. Clarke Award, David Hebblethwaite, Emma Geen, Joanna Kavenna, Jonathan McCalmont, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, Matthew de Abaitua, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, Naomi Alderman, Nick Hubble, nina allan, Steph Swainston, Tricia Sullivan, Victoria Hoyle

Discussions of the Shadow Clarke choices continue apace. Since my last piece here, several more reviews have appeared.

Jonathan McCalmont on A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna

Nina Allan on Fair Rebel by Steph Swainston

David Hebblethwaite on The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen

Megan AM on Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton and The Destructives by Matthew de Abaitua

Victoria Hoyle on Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

Nick Hubble on The Power by Naomi Alderman

Maureen Kincaid Speller on The Trees by Ali Shaw

and me on Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan

I’ve included my review below the fold, but you really should go and take part in the discussions.

Shadow Clarke: Azanian Bridges

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Arthur C. Clarke Award, Christopher Priest, Colson Whitehead, David Hebblethwaite, H.G. Wells, Nick Wood

My reviews for the Shadow Clarke jury are coming just a little too thick and fast right now. There’s only been time for one other review since my last one: this very interesting piece on Christopher Priest’s The Gradual by David Hebblethwaite.

And now here’s my review of Azanian Bridges by Nick Wood, which I very carefully position in relation to Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

My review is below the fold, but as ever you should go to the Shadow Clarke hub to join the conversation.

From the Shadows

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Anglia Ruskin Centre, Arthur C. Clarke Award, David Hebblethwaite, Helen Marshall, Jonathan McCalmont, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, Nick Hubble, nina allan, Vajra Chandrasekera, Victoria Hoyle

You may have seen that a Shadow Jury has been announced for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, (follow that link to keep up with announcements and other stuff about the Shadow Jury).

I am pleased, if somewhat daunted, to say that I am on the jury, along with David Hebblethwaite, Vajra Chandrasekera, Nick Hubble, Megan AM, Victoria Hoyle, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Jonathan McCalmont, and of course Nina Allan whose idea this was.

I have never been involved with a shadow jury before, so I’m probably going to be making it up as we go along. But my take on it is that the Clarke Award has become central to the way we see science fiction in Britain, so the shadow jury will use it as a jumping off point from which to expand the discussion of science fiction.

We’ll be starting with the submissions list, which is due to be published shortly and which is probably the best and most convenient way to discover what science fiction has been published in Britain during any particular year. From this we will each, individually, draw up our own preferred shortlists, based on what we’ve read and what we want to read. (No plan survives an encounter with the enemy, so I assume that as we read through our chosen books our views about what should or should not be on the shortlist will change. In many ways, I suspect that will be the most interesting part of the exercise.) We will also, of course, be reading the actual shortlist when that is announced, so the whole exercise will be a scaled-up version of Maureen Kincaid Speller’s wonderful Shortlist Project from a few years back.

All of these readings and discussions will of course be online, thanks to Helen Marshall and the Anglia Ruskin Centre, and I suspect I’ll be reprinting some at least of my contributions here.

And at the end of the day: I suspect and hope that we will have a spectacular multivalent view of the state of science fiction in 2016, and we will be seeing the Clarke Award winner and the shortlist in the wider context of what they emerged from. More important, I hope we will have had an informative and enjoyable conversation that changes the way all of us look at contemporary science fiction.

 

Borderlands

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Andrew Crumey, Ann Leckie, Brian McHale, Christopher Priest, David Hebblethwaite, Hugh Howie, Hugo Gernsback, Ian Sales, J.M. Sidorova, James Joyce, John Scalzi, Karen Joy Fowler, Kate Atkinson, Keith Ridgway, Laurence Sterne, Marcel Theroux, nina allan, Paul McAuley, Ruth Ozeki, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Pynchon, Tom McCarthy, Tom Robbins, Tony Ballantyne, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson

It never goes away, does it? It’s two years now since I put into words (or, perhaps more precisely, into a word), some of my enduring dissatisfactions with science fiction. The word was ‘exhaustion’. And the debate I generated then still rumbles on. It takes other forms, of course, but at heart Nina Allan, in this excellent blog post, in turn referencing this excellent blog post by David Hebblethwaite, is making much the same point: science fiction is losing interest in the new.