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Through the dark labyrinth

Through the dark labyrinth

Tag Archives: Iain Banks

A taxonomy of reviewing

08 Tuesday Feb 2022

Posted by Paul Kincaid in history of ideas, reviews

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Anthony Burgess, Christopher Priest, Iain Banks, Nicholas Ruddick, Robert Holdstock

In the last few years, I have written a series of short articles for Foundation, and a pair of articles for Focus, all on the subject of reviewing. And yet I still don’t feel I’ve got anywhere near to the heart of the matter. Part of the problem is that we have no clear language with which to talk about reviewing. What’s the difference between a review and criticism? Where do you draw the line between review, review essay, and critical essay? Is criticism, by definition, negative? Is a bad review the same as a negative review? We have no generally agreed upon way of answering any of these questions, and any general writing about reviewing is liable to get hijacked by trying to define terms.

I keep worrying away at the issue, without really getting anywhere. And yet there is a dearth of writing about criticism. So, I’ve started going back in my mind to the basics. What follows is a first shot at a list of the sorts of things we talk about when we talk about reviewing. I suspect it is not comprehensive. I also suspect that a lot of people will disagree with a lot of my characterisations. But if this is anything it is just the start of something that needs to be much bigger.

I’m going to start with what may be the most controversial statement of all: reviewing refers to any piece of writing about a text that isn’t written by the author of the text itself. (Sorry, bit of jargon in there: by “text” I mean any created work, whether it is a story, a book, a play, a film or whatever. I tend to write criticism about books, so my automatic inclination would have been to say: “a review is any piece of writing about a book that isn’t written by the author of the book itself”, but that excludes all sorts of other creative endeavours that can be reviewed. So, I used “text” as a catch-all term. But you begin to see the problem here.) I know that, for instance, Anthony Burgess once pseudonymously reviewed one of his own novels. It’s misleading, but I think in the long run I would not count that as a genuine review (it is more in the nature of a joke or a jeu d’esprit, but that is not to say that jokiness has no part in a genuine review). On the other hand, Christopher Priest once reviewed a book by Nicholas Ruddick about Christopher Priest; this does indeed count as a review, and a valuable one at that, because of the privileged information it contained.

Therefore, if I write about something that I haven’t myself written, then I am engaged in reviewing. Note that in this definition I say nothing about length, purpose, or critical content. All those things are important, but they can muddy the water, and what I am trying to do here is start from absolute basics (“I think, therefore I am”), and we can bring these other factors into the picture as that picture begins to develop.

By this broad, loose definition, reviewing can cover anything from a blurb to a monograph. And that’s fair enough, because these are all ways we have of writing about creative texts. They are not all critical ways, they are not all analytical, they are not all objective, but they are all to some degree an outside eye upon the text in question.

Let me start with the issue of purpose, because there is little in the way of specialist language involved here, but at the same time how we regard the purpose of a piece of writing can have a profound effect upon how we regard that writing.

Thus, we might write in order to announce the text. This is reviewing as a branch of publicity or advertising, its primary purpose is to let an assumed audience know that the text is available for them to consume. It is the sort of thing you are most likely to encounter in a blurb, in a catalogue (which often just reproduces the blurb, or, more likely, the blurb on the book just repeats what has already appeared in the publisher’s catalogue), or in a capsule review (some of which also do little more than reproduce the blurb).

In their purest form, such announcements contain no evaluative language whatsoever. But more often than not they overlap with writing to extol the text; that is, the writing of largely uncritical praise that is designed primarily to excite the audience about a new text. Again, this is writing more akin to advertising and publicity than it is to criticism, and is generally found in blurbs and capsules. (A blurb might, occasionally, offer a more measured view of the text. Probably the most famous example of this is the first UK paperback of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, which gathered a number of the most biting attacks that the novel had received. But this is rare, and is almost invariably the result of a careful calculation by the relevant publicity departments about how to best reach the intended audience for the work.) When we encounter such over-enthusiastic writing in a blurb we learn to take it with a pinch of salt; it also appears in some reviews, where it is generally a sign of a less experienced or less than competent reviewer.

This approach to extolling the text rather than evaluating it is also often associated with that curious phenomenon of the modern internet age, the cover reveal, the book blog, or what I have recently seen referred to as the “book influencer”. It may be unfair to tar all who indulge in these activities with the same brush, but that recent coinage, book influencer, suggests that this is how they are viewed by the publishing industry: an unpaid adjunct to the publicity department who can be relied on to manufacture uncritical excitement for the next product. But I suspect that the purpose of the writing here is slightly different: to express a personal relationship with the text. And this is something that you find in many forms of writing, from the book blog up to and including the critical essay. The text is something to be discussed not objectively, but subjectively, almost intimately. This expression of a relationship can take several forms. For instance, some seem to consider that liking a text is the equivalent of being best friends with the author; while for others, the text in question has had some profound, life-changing effect upon their private life. The common factor is that judgement is suspended in favour of personal preference: you have to read this book simply because it meant so much to me. Done well, such relationship writing can be engaging or even thrilling to read, though it is not always the most reliable way to judge a text.

Almost the polar opposite of this approach is what is, or at least what used to be, the standard form of review writing: evaluation. At its simplest, the writer who ends a capsule review saying: “Buy this book!” or, “Avoid like the plague!”, is evaluating the text. That is, they are standing back from the text to consider how it stands up against some critical standard. What that standard is might not be entirely clear, there are times when you just have to take it on trust. But any act of evaluation is a step away from taking the text on its own terms.

However, simple declarative statements – this is a good book, this is a bad film – are not very satisfactory for the reader, and, from experience, I can say that they are not very satisfactory for the writer either. What is needed is the next step: analysis. Evaluation can come in a capsule review, but analysis requires something a little longer (length is not the defining characteristic of different types of review, but it is a factor in what the review can achieve). Analysis is understanding why you have arrived at a particular evaluation, why you think the text is a good book or a bad film, and then conveying that explanation in what you write.

Of course, analysis is never simple, and those of us who have gone that route have found it to be a very slippery slope indeed. Because it is rarely as easy as saying that this text is good because of X, or bad because of Y. Indeed, the more carefully you look at any text to answer, to your own satisfaction, why you actually like it, the more things you are going to find. It can quickly get to the stage where not finding a complex multiplicity of things to consider counts against the text: it is too simplistic to be truly satisfying. That confusing multiplicity of things to consider will, in the end, get in the way of evaluation. If you determine that elements A, B and C are done well, but elements X, Y and Z are done poorly, how can you decide whether, on the whole, the text is good or bad?

All too often, reviewing is considered to be a simple matter of making a judgement. But the more you get into reviewing, the more you realize that making a judgement is a very small part of the job of reviewing. Evaluation and analysis are both acts of comparison, but the more analytic you become, the more you realize that what is being compared and how it is being compared are fundamental to your own understanding of the text being reviewed, and therefore to your readers’ understanding. This leads, inevitably, to context. Again, while not invariable, this does tend to require more space than the types of writing we’ve considered to this point. Context, of course, can mean many things. It can be as simple as comparing the text to previous things by the same author, or you may look at how it fits with other works on the same topic, or other works from the same period. You may even fit the text into a broader artistic context: the art and literature of the Civil War, film and writing in the Great Depression, artists respond to the Cold War, that sort of thing.

By examining a text within a particular context, you are starting to do something more than evaluate, analyse, and review. It is somewhere in here, for instance, that reviewing tends to give way to criticism, though you won’t find anyone able to pinpoint exactly where that change might occur. What you are doing (another inescapable jargon term) is offering a particular reading of the text. Reading, in this sense, is a curious term. It is not an impersonal, objective review (to the extent that any review can be entirely objective), but neither is it subjective in the same way that relationship writing is subjective. When you offer a reading of a text you are not saying that this is the single and definitive way to approach that text. Indeed, to offer a reading is implicitly to acknowledge that there may be multiple other readings, each of which may be valid in its own way. What you are saying is that when I see this, and this, and this, in the text, bearing in mind such and such a context, I am led to interpret it this way. This is how the text seems to make sense to me.

Another way of interpreting reading in this sense, therefore, is understanding. This is what tends to be going on in most long-form writing about texts. Long form because it inevitably involves a deep dive into the text itself, considering things like word choice, sequence of events, the way characters are presented, etc, while at the same time producing a broad sweep of all sorts of other things that might impinge upon the text, from contemporary politics to the state of scientific knowledge. None of this can be done briefly, which is why this type of writing tends to be the preserve of the long critical essay or, more often, the monograph. And the purpose of such writing is not to extol the text, or to judge it, but simply to explain it. By this I mean explain it to the writer; the critic is trying to understand why the text is structured the way it is, why that structure works or does not work, and why the critic responds to it the way they do.

All of these terms – announce, extol, relationship, evaluation, analysis, context, reading, and understanding – help to explain why people might write about a text. The list is probably not exhaustive, but it does serve as a series of way stations we might notice as we turn to consider how people write about a text. For want of a better identifier I have subsumed all of what follows under the term “reviewing”, but this is reviewing in the very broadest sense. Basically, whenever someone sets out to write about a text there are at least as many ways to do it as there are reasons for what they do. The list that follows is roughly arranged in order of ascending size from shortest to longest, but length itself is no determinant of how a piece of writing should be categorized. There are overlaps in both length and approach between each of these types of writing, and in several cases the differences between two entries on the list are so imprecise that it is impossible to say where the line can be drawn, or even whether it should be drawn. Again, this list is surely not exhaustive, but it is intended to help find a starting point for any informed discussion of criticism and reviewing.

Let me start with what is probably the most questionable item on this list: the blurb. How can I justify including this among the extended family of reviewing? But a blurb is designed to encapsulate a book, to draw attention to its most salient features, and to explain why a potential reader would be well advised to pick the book up. And those are all characteristics that we will encounter again and again in this list. By blurb, I mean a short piece of writing, generally no more than around 100-200 words, that appears on the dustjacket of a hardback book or the back cover of a paperback. Pretty much the same text will have appeared in the publisher’s catalogue, and will also appear on Amazon and other bookselling sites. (There are equivalents for other forms of text, on the back of a DVD box, on Spotify, on the label beside a painting in a museum, but blurbs on books is probably the form we are most familiar with.) Blurbs will often be accompanied by quotations, either solicited from friendly authors or pulled from early reviews (I’ll come back to this later), but these are not part of the blurb as such.

I have written a few blurbs in my time, and believe me it is not an easy thing to do. I know some publishers try to save time and/or money by getting the author to produce their own blurb: this is not a wise decision. If you could sum up your book enticingly in 200 words, you wouldn’t have needed to write 200 pages. It takes distance from the text to be able to pick out something so immediately engaging that by the time the reader opens the book to page one they are already committed to reading it. It is advertising copy, therefore, but it still requires a degree of objective appreciation of the text.

When I say that the blurb is the shortest item on this list, that is not always the case. The capsule review, also sometimes referred to as the notice, can be shorter. When I used to write for the late, lamented Good Book Guide, I had no more than 50 words per book. Most capsule reviews you come across these days are in the form of round-up reviews, where the reviewer is given a set number of words to cover five or ten new books, usually in a given category. The Guardian, for instance, has monthly round-ups of science fiction and of crime fiction. There is enough flexibility in this format for the reviewer to make some over-arching judgement, and more attention might be paid to the better works on the list while others may receive little more than a sentence or two. For me, the archetype for the capsule review is at the back of the New Yorker, where there are four unsigned reviews in a single column. It is easy to quarrel with these very brief reviews, but they are a model for how to give just enough detail to convey a sense of the book and still provide some evaluation.

As a way of moving on to the next category, this is a story I have told many times, but it bears repeating. I was at a launch party for a book and was introduced to the head of the publishing house. As a way of making conversation, he asked what I did, and I said I was a reviewer. Where? I gave a list of rather prestigious print publications: Interzone, Foundation, TLS, that sort of thing. I could see his eyes glazing over. Someone else approached. What do you do? I’m a book blogger. And the publishing head honcho literally turned his back on me. There was a time when reviewing would have aroused more interest, but now it is the immediacy and the (presumed) uncriticality of book blogging that gets attention. Because this can be used, this is an unpaid adjunct to the publicity department.

I don’t want to call this category book blogging because that is too broad a term. I have a blog where I sometimes write about the books I read, though I don’t consider myself a “book-blogger”. I think the term I came across recently (I’m not sure, now, where I found it or how much currency it has) is a better fit: book influencer. There are all sorts of blogs, vlogs, YouTube channels and the like out there where “influencers” spend all their time spreading the word to their followers about everything from fashion to holiday destinations to investment opportunities. Book influencers make books just one more commodity to be exploited in this way. The ideal, for influencers, is to make the audience excited about each new product, and not to ask too many questions about it. It is to greet each book with squee and to treat something as mundane as the revelation of the cover of a forthcoming book as if it were of world-shattering importance. There is no distance, no objectivity; it is advertising by enthusiasm alone. There is something almost incoherent about the worst examples of this (and it is a model still so new that it tends to be judged by its worst examples), which seems to me to be a very strange way of responding to a literary text.

The broader term, book blogger, of course, covers the influencers, but also a much wider territory from the capsule to the critical essay. In fact, it is a category defined not by its content but by its medium. So, when I heard that one blogger had allegedly said that they made sure that every single review they published carried at least one pull quote that the publisher could use to advertise the book, I knew that this person was admitting that what they wrote contained no critical judgement of value but was simply unpaid advertising. But I also knew that the same could have been said by writers of print only reviews. It is a dishonest way of writing about books (at least the blurb writers and influencers are honest about the intent of what they are doing), but it is a dishonesty you could find in every branch of reviewing. I have had occasional quotations lifted out of my reviews to appear in advertising, but the lines were never intended for that purpose, and in fact were not ones I would have expected to be used that way. To try and produce such lines deliberately and consistently in every single review can only do damage to the way you write about books in general.

Which brings us to the heart of this taxonomy: the review. Okay, I said at the start that reviewing covered any piece of writing about a text. In broad terms, and given how loosely we use the language, that is the case. But we also use review much more narrowly to mean a particular type of critical writing about a text. In general, what we call a review is a flexible enough definition to hide a multitude of sins. So, let us begin by saying that a review (in this sense) is a piece of writing devoted to one specific text. It is generally critical writing; that is, it tends to evaluate the work, and will usually provide enough analysis to support that evaluation. Where the text is fictional, then a plot summary is common; however, those reviews that rely excessively, or even totally, on plot summaries are generally less satisfactory, not least because they move the review closer to advertising. In terms of length, a review will sit somewhere between a capsule and a critical essay, but with quite a bit of overlap at either end of the scale. We might say they could be anywhere from around 200 words to around 2,000 words, though on average, depending on the venue, they tend to fall in the 400-500 word range or the 1,200-1,500 word range.

While this might serve as a template for a review, however, there are considerable variations (I’ve written reviews up to 5,000 words, for instance). The venue where the review is to appear might well have word limits, of course (when I’ve written for the Times Literary Supplement they tended to ask for around 800 words, while Strange Horizons tends to prefer around 1,500), but the text being reviewed will also affect the length. I’ve reviewed books where it has been a struggle to find as many as 1,000 words to say about it, and others where 2,000-3,000 words feels like I’m not doing it full justice.

Also, there are different types of review. What I have described here might be taken as the standard: a relatively concise critical appreciation of a single work. But you might also be writing about several different works in a review column, which is a sort of grown-up version of the round-up mentioned earlier. As with a round-up, you would have a certain number of words in order to write about a certain number of texts. There would be flexibility within this, so that some texts might receive more attention than others. And there is also the flexibility to provide either an overall critical judgement, or to make a judgement on each book in turn.

On the other hand, if you are reviewing a single text and find that 2,000 words or so doesn’t do it justice, then what you are writing may well be considered a review-essay. I recently wrote a review of around 1,500 words, but when I submitted the review I mentioned that I had enough notes to at least double that word length. I got an email in reply saying, effectively, go for it. The revised piece finally came in at around 5,000 words. To my mind it is still a review, a critical discussion of the pros and cons of one particular work, but the length alone makes me think it should probably be classed as a review-essay. But the distinction is, at best, fuzzy.

If it is hard to say where a review turns into a review-essay, it is even harder to distinguish between a review-essay and a critical essay. In fact, in many cases I think they are just two names for the same thing. Consider it as a spectrum: the majority of the spectrum, the middle ground, is where review-essay and critical essay overlap. But at one end, where review-essay shades into review, the term critical essay doesn’t really apply; while at the other end, where critical essay shades into academic writing, the term review-essay doesn’t really apply.

For me, a critical essay tends not to focus on one individual text, but rather looks more at context. This may mean the essay considers a body of work, a particular theme, a certain period, or some other idea. Therefore, any individual text is of interest more for how it relates to other texts than for how it achieves its own peculiar effects, but again this is not a hard and fast distinction. As I’ve noted before, venue may have a lot to do with where the writing sits on this spectrum. A journal like Science Fiction Studies, for example, divides its contents into three main groups, essays, review-essays, and reviews. Here, the review-essay is a slightly longer form of the review, but is not necessarily much shorter than any of the critical essays. And while the essays tend to be more thematic in structure, they are quite likely to deal with just one work; the difference between essay and review essay, then, tends to be that the review-essay addresses a recently-published book, while the essays turn to a somewhat older work. A review or review-essay, therefore, implies an immediacy in looking at something hot off the presses; while a critical essay implies a temporal distance, a cooler appraisal.

Should a critical essay be written for a book rather than a journal, it may well be referred to as a chapter. There is really no substantial difference other than venue.

The sorts of essays I’ve been talking about are likely to find their way into such (relatively) popular magazines as the Times Literary Supplement of the New York Review of Books, but they are probably most readily found in academic journals and books. For that reason, they can merge into critical theory. I’m inclined not to include critical theory as part of my excessively broad understanding of “reviewing”, because in the main it is not writing about texts, but rather writing about how texts are written about. I’m open to persuasion on this, and this paragraph is included as a marker on that score, but at the moment I’m not inclined to take this already overlong essay down that particular rabbit hole.

There is one more category to be included in this catalogue of how people write about texts, and that is the monograph. Monograph is just a fancy way of saying a book-length work by (usually) a single author on a single subject. Within the terms of this taxonomy, that single subject may be a creator’s entire body of work, but it may also be a single text. I am at the moment engaged in writing a short book about Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (when finished, my text is likely to come in at close to half the length of Holdstock’s original novel). Again, this is only a difference in length from the critical essay, though the various chapters of the monograph may well come across as a series of interconnected essays.

So, writing about a text can be done at any length from 100 words or so to 100,000 words or so. The infinite gradations between these two extremes tend to come under a whole string of different names, but the differences are not always readily apparent, and there is so much overlap along the way that the different terms can bring confusion rather than clarity.

There were a few other confusing terms I wanted to consider in this taxonomy. The first of which is criticism itself. The reason I called this a taxonomy of reviewing rather than a taxonomy of criticism is because of the problems with that word. In popular parlance, criticism doesn’t just have a negative connotation, it is actively antagonistic: to be criticised is to be attacked. In terms of reviewing, however, criticism is a much more neutral term. Criticising a work may involve both praising it and decrying it. But nobody outside what I suppose we might term the reviewing fraternity really grasps this nuanced difference. They may recognise that a film critic or a literary critic is concerned with looking at both good and bad within their chosen remit, but the practice of criticism continues to be negative. That’s why I wish we had another word for criticism. I am happy to include the word “critic” in my email address, but when asked what I do I invariably say I review books. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can entirely escape the word “criticism”, so we need to use it with care, wearisome as that may be.

I have sometimes wondered whether the practice of criticism derived in some way from the study of moral philosophy. Certainly, as critics we are very free with words like “good” and “bad”. But we must be wary of the fact that these, too, are ambiguous terms. What do we mean by good? Morally uplifting? Well achieved? Satisfying? A particularly fine example of its type? Some or all of these at the same time? And when we identify a particular piece of writing as a bad review, do we mean a review that is overall critical (that word, again) of the text in question? Or do we mean a notably poor example of a review, regardless of the text in question? We use good and bad liberally, indeed carelessly, to mean all of these things, often at the same time.

One of the things we look for as critics is the quality of the writing. How clearly concepts are expressed. How succinctly complex ideas are put across to a non-specialist audience. And yet the language of criticism itself is so full of ambivalence, so open to myriad different interpretations, that it sometimes seems impossible to write criticism clearly and succinctly. That’s why, whenever I write about reviewing or criticism, I feel that the language is working against me. I can write criticism in plain English with no problem, yet the moment I write about criticism every word seems to be freighted with ambiguity. Can I talk about analysing and contextualizing as though they are the same thing? Is there any relevant difference between a review and a critical essay? What on earth do I mean by saying something is good? These are words we use all the time, but we use them badly(?) because we never stop to think what the words are saying. And if we can’t be precise in our language, if we can’t disentangle words so that their meaning is clear to a lay audience, is it possible to write about criticism at all?

At war with time

14 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

≈ Comments Off on At war with time

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Amal El-Mohtar, Fritz Leiber, Iain Banks, Max Gladstone, Nick Bantock

One of the Facebook groups I’m a member of has recently been discussing This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. This was my contribution to the discussion.

I have finally, at the second attempt, managed to read This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It was a struggle that seemed to get harder the further I got through the book. And I remain mystified by the adoration it has received, and the fact it has won just about every popular vote award going. What is it that everyone else seems to see in this book that remains completely opaque to me?

Okay, it’s nearly Christmas, do I really want to play the Grinch here? But what the hell, this is why I felt so depressed, so alienated by the book.

For a start it felt wearily familiar. In the end I decided that it is a rehash of Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time (1958), a novel that is probably shorter than this novella. Any story about a time war is probably influenced by Leiber, and when the two characters talk of themselves as “Change agents” (60) it is, I am sure, an explicit acknowledgement of Leiber’s Change War. The Big Time is then mashed up with Transition by Iain Banks (2009) which, if anything, is probably a bigger influence than Leiber, though it goes unacknowledged. And this unholy melange is then recast as if it is part of Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine (1991). Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of these origin stories, but a half-baked and sentimentalized rehash does nothing to thrill me with a sense of the new.

[Among the comments on my original post was the suggestion that readers today probably haven’t read the Leiber, and perhaps not even the Banks (he’s on a lot of TBR lists, someone said, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is read). All of which is perhaps true. But my comment was about the authors of the work (and about this particular reader). The passing reference to “Change agents”, a formulation that I remember encountering only once in the novella, is so at odds with every other reference to the time war that I feel sure it is meant to be a nod towards Leiber’s Change War stories. So I think there is that influence in there, and anyway these were the things that leapt out at me as I was reading the story, so they certainly affected my own response.]

But this familiarity is not limited to the so-predictable source material. The story structure plays exactly the same riff over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The book is made up of pairs of chapters, each pairing following an identical pattern. In a chapter told in third person, one of the two central characters takes part in what is presumably a mission within the ongoing time war. This mission may involve lots of deaths, though any brutality is off screen and the dead are so anonymous that they could as easily be a mass of shop window dummies lying in the field of battle; or it may involve saving someone, though again the people involved are so anonymous that we cannot care whether they live or die. Either way, the exploits are so shorn of context that they tell us absolutely nothing about the war, other than the fact that it is an incoherent mess of unconnected incidents that reveal nothing of any aims, abilities or strategy that either warring side might possess. When, at one point, Blue writes: “what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I” (36), she tells us precisely nothing about either the war or the characters. This first chapter in the pair invariably ends with the viewpoint character discovering a letter that is encoded in the most ludicrous way imaginable, in the feathers of a bird, in seeds, in water bubbling in a kettle.

The second chapter of the pair is, of course, the letter. There are only two characters in the book: Red is an agent for one side in the war, Blue is an agent for the other. The exchange of letters spells out the developing love story between the two putative enemies. Honestly, if I were exchanging letters with an enemy who, moments before, was tasked with killing me, I might be rather more suspicious of their motives than either Red or Blue seems to be. But then, the cards are heavily stacked in favour of romance in this novel; that the background is a war seems to be an incidental matter, there for nothing more than local colour.

I did, at first, imagine that in an epistolary novel written by two authors, each would take one character to give her a distinctive voice. Well, if it happened here, the chapters were then edited to within an inch of their life, yielding up a smooth voice without any distinction between the two characters. This, of course, is at least partly intentional (really, if you don’t spot the only possible way this story could play out within the first three or four chapters, you’re simply not paying attention), but I think the greater intent is to give the whole a romantic, poetic feel. Though in truth the language is poetic only because none of it is rooted in anything concrete. The actual within this work is so tenebrous that it eludes anything remotely resembling a referent. That lack of substance, the sense that there is no solid world to anchor the airiness of the romance, extends to the non-letter chapters also, so much so that there is an unforgiveable sense that exactly the same voice is providing the narration as well as both of the letters. I suppose that part of the fun of the story lies in the extravagance of the scenarios through which the two characters move as they seek out the next letter. Though it does bother me that none of this makes sense, so that when you get “a game of chess in which every piece is a game of Go” (109), for example, I really don’t have any idea what that is supposed to mean.

[Some of those who commented on my post said that they discerned a distinct difference between the two voices. To each his own, but that certainly didn’t come across to me.]

Actually, this use of language for effect rather than for sense, this notion that if you bundle enough images together somehow they will create an impression of something awesome, brings me to another problem I have with the story. There is a carelessness here that is evident both in the way the language is used and the story that the language is used to tell. When we are told, for instance, that “Red wins a battle between starfleets in the far future” (98), you wonder, given that the characters wander freely back and forth through time, what is meant by far future? Far future of what? That is thoughtless writing. But then, on the evidence of this story, I don’t think that either El-Mohtar or Gladstone has sat down to work out what a time war might be like and how it might be structured. Presumably Red and Blue are immortal (or at least as near immortal as makes no difference) agents who travel backwards and forwards through time changing events in order to create a different future that favours their side. So far so simple, but then Red tells us that “strands bud Atlantises to thwart her” (47), that 30 or 40 times she has walked away from a different sinking island. So there are multiple timelines; changing one event doesn’t change the future, it just births a new timeline. In which case, what are they fighting for? What could possibly constitute a victory, or a defeat, in such a situation. If everything goes wrong, then there is another timeline where everything has gone right. And if there can be no victory, there can be no cause for war. How do you go to war with an enemy who has just got everything they want in a different timeline? Over and over again throughout the novel I came up against the same notion: that none of this makes sense. There is a time war not because there is any functional purpose in the war, but because the authors need their two lovers to be on opposite sides in a conflict. This is Romeo and Juliet with two Juliets but otherwise no change: starcrossed lovers on either side of an age-old quarrel they cannot repair, needing to keep their affair secret, and leading to seeming death. Make the houses of Montague and Capulet into the enemy camps in a time war and lo you render the whole thing science fiction.

In other words, all of this, the time war, the battles and escapades, the ludicrous devices for hiding a letter, are meaningless. They are the one-dimensional, crudely-painted scenes designed to be pushed out onto the stage behind the star-crossed lovers so we can pretend their romance is being played out in something that passes for a real world. Anything actual, anything that might involve the crude and the cruel, the bloody and the miserable, the things that go wrong and the things that raise doubts, is banned from this world. This is all about the feels – “Red likes to feel. It is a fetish.” (4) we are told right at the start of the novel – about the sweetness, about things not going wrong, about happy ever afters. It is a story for children who want to be reassured about the world, not for those of us who want to explore and understand and confront the world. It is saccharine and it sets my teeth on edge, and that in the end is what I really dislike about this facile fantasy.

Writing about Christopher Priest

29 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

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Adam Roberts, Christopher Priest, Iain Banks

In his blurb for my book (The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest – did I mention I’ve written a book?), Adam Roberts notes that Priest’s work is resistant “to conventional critical approaches”. That is only too true, and it contributed to the problems I had writing this book.

My first idea when I set out on this project was to follow essentially the same plan I had when I wrote my book on Iain Banks, that is a more or less chronological account of his career. I even started a draft of the book on this plan. It didn’t work, I knew it even as I was writing it. Everything that Priest has done in his fiction works against any straightforward chronological reading. I don’t just mean the way he returned to the Dream Archipelago twenty years after The Affirmation, though that introduces complexities enough. There is also his habit of revisiting and revising his earlier work. Do you write about Indoctrinaire in 1970 or its revised edition of 1979? What about Fugue for a Darkening Island, first published in 1972, which reappeared in an extensively revised edition in 2011. Or The Glamour, which went through several different iterations between its original publication in 1984 and its revised edition of 1996. Since the past is fluid in Priest’s writing, it is only logical that it is fluid in his bibliography also, which tends to make a nonsense of a straightforwardly chronological approach. And that is not to mention the way themes, devices, and even occasionally characters, recur throughout his career. The more I went on this track, the more I realised I was going to end up tying myself in knots as I necessarily referred backwards and forwards in time.

But if not chronology, what structure could I use for the book? Thematic? Years ago, writing about Priest (which I’ve been doing, off and on, for something like 40 years now, lord help us), I noted that there are recurring devices that run through most if not all of his oeuvre: the island, the double, the book. So I began to plot out how I could construct my book by taking each of those themes in turn. And again I ran into an immediate problem: a novel featuring islands is as likely as not going to feature twins also. Keeping strictly to a thematic structure would entail constant repetition.

I was stuck. Both approaches seemed to offer benefits in discussing Priest’s fiction, but there were just as many problems. And whichever I chose I could foresee that by the end I would be tying myself into such convoluted knots that even I wouldn’t be able to see a way through, let alone the poor reader.

Then I had a silly idea: why not do both. It is easy to periodize Priest’s career: his engagement with the New Wave as he was getting started; what we might call the science fiction years from Indoctrinaire to The Space Machine; the noticeable stylistic change in his writing that takes us from “An Infinite Summer” to The Affirmation; the period when he seemed most distant from science fiction from The Glamour to The Separation; and the return to the Dream Archipelago with The Islanders. Each of those would work as a coherent, unified chapter, providing a context for his career. And I could intersperse those chronological chapters with thematic chapters taking, in turn, career-spanning ideas such as islands, the nature of reality, doubles, and the arts.

There are advantages to this. By providing thumbnail sketches of the books in the chronological chapters, I wouldn’t need to keep repeating them in the thematic chapters; while devoting individual chapters to each of the main recurring themes, I wouldn’t need to spell these out every time they came up in another work. So I would obviate a significant cause for repetition throughout the book. But there would still be repetition, of course. Some key works, such as The Affirmation, The Prestige or The Islanders, might need to be discussed in anything up to half a dozen different chapters. But maybe, I thought in a self-justifying way, this need not be a major problem. If I take as my thesis, as I do, the notion that Priest’s work is unstable, that there is no consistent and unified reading of his work, then by approaching each of these works from a different perspective, by emphasizing different characteristics in them, I could illustrate this very point. Here is not one reading of Priest’s work, but a variety of different readings. After all, I’ve read The Affirmation more times than I can count, and it seems like a different book every single time.

I admit, one of the reasons I finally went for this somewhat convoluted structure is that, when I started putting it down on the page, I found I could make it work. Whether it works for anyone else, of course, is not up to me, but this is the structure I ended up with:

Author’s Note
Or mea culpa, in which I explain that Priest is a long-time friend, but also try to lay out the complexity of the way he revisits older work.

Abbreviations
To be more accurate, this is a bibliography of his books. But the quotations I use throughout the body of the book are identified by abbreviations, which are spelled out here.

A Complete List of Short Fiction
The second part of the bibliography basically does what it says on the tin.

Chapter One: Ambivalence
The book is published as part of a series called SF Storyworlds, so I begin by laying out the troubled and complex (two adjectives that seem inevitable wherever Priest is concerned) relationship between Priest and science fiction. He is ambivalent, often antagonistic, towards science fiction; science fiction is ambivalent, often antagonistic, towards him.

Chapter Two: Accounting
The first of the chronological chapters takes us from his failed career in accountancy to his part in coining the term “New Wave”, to his early stories and eventually the first novel, Indoctrinaire.

Chapter Three: Insularity
Islands play an inordinately large part in Priest’s fiction, from the island in time of Indoctrinaire to the island city of Inverted World to the psychological and ontological distortions of the Dream Archipelago, all covered here.

Chapter Four: Inversions
For a time Priest was primarily and intentionally a science fiction writer, with Fugue for a Darkening Island, Inverted World, and The Space Machine, but in this chapter I trace how quickly a conventional approach to sf exhausted the advantages the genre offered to his ambitions as a writer.

Chapter Five: Instability
As a schoolboy Priest was knocked off his bike and suffered amnesia, with several days of his life that have never been recovered since. This created a sense that reality is unstable, a theme that crops up repeatedly from “Real-Time World” to The Islanders.

Chapter Six: Dreaming
Opinions differ on when the change came in Priest’s writing, but I date it to his story “An Infinite Summer”. There can be little doubt, however, that a more austere and literary approach to his fiction gathered pace through A Dream of Wessex, the early Dream Archipelago stories, and The Affirmation.

Chapter Seven: Doubling
Priest’s own children are fraternal twins, a curious example of life following art since he had been writing about twins and doubles throughout his career, and they would continue to be a symbol of the uncanny nature of reality.

Chapter Eight: Authorities
In the 30 years between The Affirmation and The Islanders he produced fewer books than in the first ten years of his career, but these complex and challenging works established a literary language for dealing with the issues of unreality that have been central to his work.

Chapter Nine: Authorship
It is very rare to find a novel by Priest that does not involve a stage magician (The Prestige), a painter (The Islanders), a musician (The Gradual), a photographer (The Adjacent), or more frequently a writer (The Quiet Woman, An American Story), so in this chapter I explore the symbolic weight of these artists.

Chapter Ten: Revisiting
Late style in the case of Christopher Priest seems to involve a new urgency (the last ten years of his career have been as productive as the first ten); an increasing simplicity of language tied to a complex and often oblique structure; and above all a return to the Dream Archipelago.

Chapter Eleven: Stories
A return to some of the questions I was asking in the first chapter, in which I try and fail to resolve what sort of a writer Priest is.

Works Cited

Index
And here, after 235 pages and 80-odd thousand words, the book comes to a close. Is it some sort of a victory that after all of this I still love Priest’s work?

A Better Place

25 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, history of ideas

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Brian Aldiss, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon, Roger Penrose, Thomas More, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia

Two roads converged in a dark wood.

Or, to be more accurate, two pieces of reading converged in the darkness of my mind. They are distinct pieces, unrelated, but the coincidence of reading them at about the same time untethered connections that, I suppose, have meaning to me more than anyone else.

The first was an essay in the Paris Review: Michael Chabon writing about Ursula K. Le Guin. What struck me in this essay was when Chabon talks about Le Guin’s attitude towards reading, and literacy in general. For Le Guin, Chabon tells us, literacy was “defined not simply as the capacity to read a text but as a means of training the imagination—and ultimately of constructing an authentic self—through sustained encounter with literary art.” In other words, literacy and imagination are the same thing: to read is to imagine; and it is through our imaginations that we become who we are.

Taking the next step, therefore, the function of any piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, is to excite and exploit that imagination. Literature that does not engage the reader imaginatively, that does not make us think, see, wonder, learn, enjoy, is failing in its most basic purpose as a piece of literature.

Which takes me onto that second road, a novel I was reading before I chanced upon that Chabon essay, and that I have finished reading now only after having put aside the essay. This is White Mars, written by Brian Aldiss in collaboration with Roger Penrose. Now, it has to be said that Aldiss could be, shall we say, hit and miss as a writer. He wrote a number of things that were extraordinarily good: beautiful, vivid, engaging. But he also wrote a number of things that were simply bad. However, this is the only one of his novels that is not just bad, it is dull. It is only as you engage with the tedium of this book that you realise that even novels that were catastrophically bad, like The Eighty Minute Hour, were never actually boring.

But it is not the faults of White Mars as an individual novel that concern me here, but rather as an exemplar of a type of novel.

White Mars, which came out in 1999, is a utopia. In fact it is a utopia of an almost classic form, a form that generally hadn’t been written throughout the preceding century. The model of the classic utopia stems from Thomas More’s ur-text: the perfect society has been established some time before in the image of its progenitor, King Utopus or his avatar, and has since remained fairly static as a society since once perfection has been achieved there is nowhere else to go. H.G. Wells began to challenge that formulation at the beginning of the 20th century with A Modern Utopia, which suggested that utopia was not a destination but a process. Wells would continue to develop this notion in his subsequent utopia writings, such as The Shape of Things to Come, but already the environment in which utopias prospered had been changed. The technological consequences of modernism, evident in the First World War, made people start to distrust the future. And then we saw the brutal and authoritarian consequences of utopian political aspirations in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, militaristic Japan, China, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Utopia gave way to dystopia as a vision of the planned society.

One of the things that is odd about White Mars is that it is a utopia at at time when the dystopia is in full flood. The few utopias that were being written were ambivalent about the notion (Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia or more tellingly “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”), or imagined radically changed circumstances, such as the universe of plenty in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. Nobody was writing the sort of guided tour of the institutions that were making everybody’s life better. Oh there is some scientific hand-waving in the novel, but it is at its core the sort of political, social, cultural utopia that Wells and his predecessors used to write. The sort of book where dealing rationally with everything makes everything perfect.

Take such ideas alongside Le Guin’s dictums about how vital the imagination is, and it seems a natural fit. Shouldn’t we all find our imaginations stirred by the notion of making a better world? But in fact, it is dystopias that have better engaged with our emotions through the simple device of telling a story about someone caught in the laocoonian coils of a dystopian system. Utopias fail so often because that is precisely what they do not, what they cannot do. There is no story in utopia. There should be: imagine how exciting it is in a crime story or a science fiction story to read about someone solving a puzzle, working their way towards a position that makes sense and that makes things right. Isn’t that exactly what a utopia should be: solving a social puzzle and making it right.

But that is not the story that utopian writers (and I am definitely including Aldiss in this) have chosen to tell. Thomas More had two models to draw on for his original Utopia, the traveller’s tale typified by recent books by Amerigo Vespucci, and philosophical disquisitions typified by the work of his friend Erasmus. Those who use More as their model have concentrated almost exclusively on the traveller’s tale, and that model has barely changed in the centuries since. More presented an argument; his successors present a status quo, a fact that has to be explained, described, but not dramatised.

Aldiss (and I am assuming that Penrose’s contribution is largely connected to the handwavium concerning the search for something beyond the Higgs boson) sets the story up as if it is going to be a sort of intellectual detective story. Economic collapse on Earth leaves a small Mars colony stranded, so they have to start working out how to govern themselves. That should be fine: a succession of social issues (what to do about sex, about crime, etc) become the puzzles to which utopian thinking provides the solution. But having set the situation up, Aldiss immediately resorts to the standard utopian model of the traveller’s tale, as if that is the only way that anyone can think of presenting a utopia. So we get the puzzles, but as soon as a rational response is suggested everyone falls in with it, nothing is complexified, nothing is made dramatic. It is the besetting sin of utopian writers that they consider their own particular utopia so obvious that everyone will immediately see its rational wonderfulness. Aldiss is no different from anyone else in being unable to see why anyone might disagree with his oh-so-rational solutions.

There is imagination in utopian fiction, but the imagination is expended on the idea, not on the story. In that respect it fails Le Guin’s test: it is an engagement with the imagination of the writer, a sort of literary onanism, not with the imagination of the reader. Just as the utopian writer cannot imagine an antagonist who might, for perfectly rational reasons, work against the version of the perfect state they have just invented, so they cannot imagine a reader who will not instantly see the sense of their invention. So the classic model of a utopia is a series of showcases for different aspects of the perfect state, it does not attempt to dramatically win the reader over to the benefits of such a state. The argument is assumed to have been won before the reader even opens the book. Which is why so many utopias, and White Mars is just such a case, are dull, because the literary engagement is not an imaginative engagement.

Siri Hustvedt

20 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, history of ideas

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Iain Banks, Margaret Cavendish, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Virginia Woolf

The Kent Literature Festival, which started lo these many years ago (though after most of the country’s other literary festivals) has gone through a fair number of name and location changes over the years. It now seems to be settled as the Folkestone Book Festival. One thing has been consistent over all this time: it has been something of a tail-end Charlie of book festivals, coming late in the year and drawing on a number of participants already familiar and tired from a year on the circuit. There have, from time to time, been somewhat misplaced attempts to live the thing up. I remember one notorious occasion when they had Iain Banks, and the organiser therefore decided it would be a Scottish Evening with himself and all the staff in tartans.

The more recent incarnation of the festival does seem rather more adventurous, however. This year, the cast included Siri Hustvedt, which felt like a real coup to me, though I did wonder if anyone else in Folkestone would have even heard of Siri Hustvedt (it didn’t help that they misspelled her name in the programme). I am inveterately early for things like this, and for a while my worries about how popular she might be seemed to have borne out: I was sitting outside the auditorium for over 20 minutes before anyone else turned up. Still, in the end there were around 40 of us in the audience, though I hadn’t taken on board that she seems to have become something of a feminist idol, and the only other few men in the audience were accompanying more intense wives.

Initially, I confess, I was disappointed. It turned out that we were not having an audience with Siri Hustvedt, we were having a Skype chat with her: she was sitting in a sunny room in her home in Brooklyn, we were in a dark theatre in Folkestone. It is, admittedly, a creative way to broaden the range of writers we might get to see at our tired little late-year book festival, but at the same time, bang goes my hope of getting her to sign The Blazing World. And I was a little annoyed that this wasn’t made clear in the programme: the Siri Hustvedt talk was under a heading “Words from a Wider World”, and if you worked your way patiently through the programme book you would find, several pages away, a note about this thread that, mid-paragraph, included a passing reference to “live link-up”, but that wasn’t at all clear.

On the plus side, her head filled a six-foot screen, which meant we had a wonderful view of how animated she is. Her eyes were particularly expressive, opening wide, rolling, glancing away to left or right. Her face was never still, and she laughed a lot; maybe, being in her own home, she was more relaxed that she might have been on stage. When we came to questions from the audience, someone asked inevitably about what conversations were like over the Siri Hustvedt/Paul Auster dining table. I saw Auster once at a reading, and I suddenly had an image of the light and lively Hustvedt against the dark and static Auster, and nearly burst out laughing.

The real problem was the interviewer. She wasn’t a writer or a critic, or even a psychiatrist (Hustvedt is a lecturer in psychiatry, so that might have been an interesting dynamic); she was an artist interested in “text and image”, the sort of bland phrase that means nothing. I’m not sure she’d had much experience interviewing, because her questions were rambling statements to which she somehow managed to append a question mark. And she had a habit of still hesitating and qualifying her question long after Hustvedt had started trying to answer it, which for me is a capital offence among interviewers.

But Hustvedt was gold: full of perceptions and ideas that moved effortlessly and revealingly from the structure of writing to the history of science to the character of memory to the role of women to the fluidity of gender. Everything was grist to her mill, everything interweaved with the way she wanted to write her novels. It was fascinating.

From the audience, after the usual fluffy questions from people who don’t really know how to talk to writers (the Hustvedt/Auster dining table, can you tell me something about that picture on the wall behind you) I managed to ask how she came to Margaret Cavendish. She immediately started on an excited five-minute talk about researching 17th century science and how the name Cavendish kept coming up and how she knew it from Virginia Woolf’s dismissive comments and how she therefore hadn’t read any Cavendish (because, well, Woolf), but then she did and how the scientific ideas still resonate with ideas we’re asking about today. When she finally wound down, she added: “And thank you for asking that question.”

So, a good evening. But I still don’t have my copy of The Blazing World signed.

Brian W. Aldiss

19 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

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Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Iain Banks

I have just signed and delivered the contract which means I will be writing a book on Brian Aldiss for the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series.

This will be my third volume on a British science fiction writer, following the Modern Masters of Science Fiction volume on Iain Banks, which came out last year, and the volume on Christopher Priest that I am currently researching for Gylphi. It is also, in its way, the most problematic.

The Iain Banks book was scary, because I had never written a single work of that length before (my previous books had been collections of much shorter essays and reviews). But it was not at all scary in the sense that I knew Iain and liked (most of) his work; also, there was a single coherent narrative thread to follow, which simplified the process a great deal.

The Christopher Priest volume is slightly more problematic. I’ve known Chris a long time (he was my best man when I got married) so there is the issue of retaining a certain distance in what I write. And I am not planning to follow the same basic chronological structure that I did for the Banks book, this volume is meant to be more thematic in approach. In other words I am giving myself a little more of a structural challenge in writing the book, and I won’t really know until I am writing it whether I am up to that challenge.

But Aldiss is different. For a start, I am far more ambivalent about his work. Some of his fiction is, I think, wonderful; some of it, I think, is terrible. This is partly because Aldiss was an inveterate experimenter as a writer, and in the nature of things some experiments fail. He was also, at his peak, far more prolific than either Banks or Priest, and the scattergun technique means that a lot of the work did not hit the target. Yet, at his best he was one of the most important writers in the history of British science fiction, and somehow I have to get that dichotomy across, and explain it.

Also, he was a prickly bugger at the best of times. I remember, once, mildly disagreeing with his notion of the cosy catastrophe, and I received a postcard from him which, in effect, said: why do you hate me so? That was far from being the only such postcard I received. This prickliness, I think, comes across in his extreme ambivalence towards science fiction: he would extol it and decry it at one and the same time; he would encourage others and then try and distance himself from the genre; he would celebrate the crudest, pulpiest sf and then insist on being considered by mainstream standards; he wanted to be down in the gutter and up with the literary establishment all at the same time. I don’t think he ever resolved these contradictions, in his work or in his life. Do I have to resolve them? I certainly have to present them and try to explain them.

And structurally I feel the only way to cover the variety and the contradictions of his work is with something that is half way between the chronological approach of the Banks book and the thematic approach of the Priest book. Which means I have given myself another formal challenge just when I am approaching my most difficult subject yet.

Right now, I am pleased to have this challenge, and I am delighted if a little daunted to have the next two years plotted out for me. But my overwhelming reaction is to wonder: what on earth have I got myself into?

Awards

01 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in awards

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Alexandra Pierce, Anne Charnock, Iain Banks, Jim Burns, Liz Bourke, Mimi Mondal, Nat Segaloff, nina allan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Victo Ngai, Zoe Quinn

Iain M. BanksHow can sitting in bed drinking champagne be so exhausting? But last night was exhausting.

It started with the announcement of the BSFA Awards. My default response when I know I’ve been shortlisted for an award is to convince myself that I cannot win. But even so there’s a rogue part of the brain that’s going: maybe, just maybe … And then I saw a tweet. I am slow and clumsy on twitter, can never really make it work for me; so it turned out that Maureen had known the result for about a minute already and was just waiting to see how long it would be before I noticed.

The upshot is, I won. Or, to be more precise, my book, Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction) published by University of Illinois Press, won. It is now, what, 12 hours since I heard the news and I am still flabbergasted, surprised, delighted.

BSFA AwardFor the record, the full list of winners was:

Best Novel: Nina Allan – The Rift (Titan Books) (I am particularly pleased about this, I have been saying how wonderful this book is ever since I read it.)

Best Shorter Fiction: Anne Charnock – The Enclave (NewCon Press)

Best Non-Fiction: Paul Kincaid – Iain M. Banks (University of Illinois Press)

Best Artwork:
Joint winners:
Jim Burns – Cover for The Ion Raider by Ian Whates (NewCon Press)
Victo Ngai – Illustration for ‘Waiting on a Bright Moon’ by JY Yang (Tor.com)

My heartiest congratulations to all.

Then, less than an hour later, came the announcement of the shortlists for the Hugo Awards, and my book was on the list in the Best Related Work category. I’ve known about this for a week or so, but it was a relief that it was now out in the open (I hate keeping secrets). And coming immediately after winning the BSFA Award it was elating in a way that just learning the news in an official email from the award administrators hadn’t been.

hugo awardYou can see the full list of nominees here, but the shortlist for the Best Related Work is:

Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, by Zoe Quinn (PublicAffairs)

Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), by Paul Kincaid (University of Illinois Press)

A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, by Nat Segaloff (NESFA Press)

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (Twelfth Planet Press)

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Liz Bourke (Aqueduct Press)

That is some serious opposition (and isn’t it nice to see this curiously hodgepodge category given over entirely to serious critical work). I’m proud to be in this company; let’s celebrate them all.

Iain Banks Chronologies

15 Thursday Feb 2018

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Iain Banks

I’ve just now needed to look back at something I wrote in Iain M. Banks, and I was reminded again how complex the chronology of his work is. The order in which his books were published is not the same as the order in which they were composed, and both differ again from the internal chronology of the Culture sequence.

So here, just for the record, and just to keep things clear in my own mind, are the three chronologies (for extra clarity, I’ve highlighted the Culture novels):

Order of composition

The Top of Poseidon (unpublished)
The Hungarian Lift-Jet (unpublished)
The Tashkent Rambler (unpublished)
Use of Weapons
Against a Dark Background
The State of the Art
The Player of Games
The Wasp Factory
Consider Phlebas
Walking on Glass

O (unpublished)
The Bridge
Espedair Street
Canal Dreams
The Crow Road
Complicity
Feersum Endjinn
Whit
Excession
A Song of Stone
Inversions
The Business
Look to Windward
Dead Air
Raw Spirit
The Algebraist
The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Matter
Transition
Surface Detail
Stonemouth
The Hydrogen Sonata
The Quarry

Note the long gap, more than a decade, between writing Consider Phlebas and the next Culture novel, Excession. The gap doesn’t look so huge when you consider the next chronology:

Order of Publication

The Wasp Factory (1984)
Walking on Glass (1985)
The Bridge (1986)
Consider Phlebas (1987)
Espedair Street (1987)
The Player of Games (1988)
Canal Dreams (1989)
The State of the Art (novella, 1989)
Use of Weapons (1990)
The Crow Road (1991)
The State of the Art (collection, 1991)
Against a Dark Background (1993)
Complicity (1993)
Feersum Endjinn (1994)
Wilt (1995)
Excession (1996)
A Song of Stone (1997)
Inversions (1998)
The Business (1999)
Look to Windward (2000)
Dead Air (2002)
Raw Spirit (2003)
The Algebraist (2004)
The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007)
Matter (2008)
Transition (2009)
Surface Detail (2010)
Stonemouth (2012)
The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)
The Quarry (2013)

Here, the long gap in the composition of Culture novels is less apparent, but what does become noticeable is the stutter in the first decade of this century, when various personal issues broke up the smooth sequence of a book a year.

But the order in which the various Culture novels should be read is different again:

Internal chronology of the Culture novels

Consider Phlebas
Excession (500 years later)
The State of the Art (100 years later)
Matter (60 years later)
The Player of Games and Use of Weapons (both around 55 years later)
Look to Windward (75 years later)
The Hydrogen Sonata (200 years later)
Surface Detail (500 years later)

The whole sequence, therefore, covers some 1,500 years. These time periods can be calculated from internal evidence, usually references to the war in Consider Phlebas, (for instance, Look to Windward is built around the 800th anniversary of the war) though there are direct connections between The State of the Art and Use of Weapons. Inversions is the one Culture novel that does not have any obvious dating information.

 

2017 in Review

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of. Continue reading →

Reprint: Violence

13 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

≈ Comments Off on Reprint: Violence

Tags

Anthony Burgess, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Harry Turtledove, Iain Banks, Jack Womack, Keith Roberts, Martin Amis, Norman Spinrad, Philip George Chadwick, Piers Anthony, Richard Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve nearly finished gathering together all of my Cognitive Mapping columns from Vector. This is the penultimate one, and it first appeared in Vector 193, May-June 1997. Continue reading →

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