Modernisms

Tags

Anthony Powell, Constant Lambert, D.J. Taylor, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Ford Madox Hueffer, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Middleton Murry, Joseph Conrad, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Muriel Jaeger, Peter Quennell, Sarah Cole, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Walton

When I read Lost Girls by D.J. Taylor last autumn, I was disappointed. It seemed to me that the book only really came alive when Taylor was discussing the London literary scene during the 1940s, and the four young women who were the titular subject of the book were at best only peripherally involved in that scene. So I decided to try a book that seemed to more directly address his interests. Which is how his 2016 literary history, The Prose Factory, appeared on my Christmas list (very many thanks, Maureen).

At the moment I am only into the second chapter, but already it is obvious that this is a subject he is much more interested in writing about. The book is a literary history of Britain from 1918 until, more or less, the present, and it is as general and has the sort of blinkers as one might expect. A cursory glance, for instance, suggests that H.G. Wells is the only science fiction writer to appear in the index; which is fine with me, I wasn’t really expecting anything else. As a broad account of literary movements it is providing exactly the sort of historical context I was hoping for, and at times it can be quite revealing.

When you look at literary history from a science fiction perspective, for instance, modernism tends to come across as a monolithic force, an instant literary establishment that, as the result of a quarrel between Henry James and H.G. Wells, conspired to exclude Wells and, in his wake, science fiction as a whole, from serious academic consideration. It wasn’t exactly like that. Reading Taylor’s chapter on modernism in the 1920s I wasn’t surprised to find that it was quite a fragmented movement, but I was surprised to learn how tribal it was.

The father of literary modernism, as I suppose we might put it, was Henry James, who is barely mentioned in Taylor’s book primarily because he had died in 1916. He brought a number of his Romney Marsh friends and neighbours, such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, into the modernist camp on his coat tails, though it has to be said that at the time Conrad and Ford were more readily seen among the Georgians, the conservative, traditionalist literary movement that began with the end of the Edwardian era and fizzled out during the First World War.

It was after the war that modernism really got going, often lauded within the pages of the plethora of small magazines that were published throughout those years. These are magazines with famous names – Criterion, The Athenaeum – but they were still decidedly small. Even the best of them were lucky to have a circulation of 1,000, and those subscribers were fickle, if they grew weary of John Middleton Murry’s jeremiads in The Athenaeum, they would switch to T.S. Eliot’s austere pronouncements in Criterion. And though Taylor doesn’t say so, I get the distinct impression that this readership primarily consisted of academics in Oxford and Cambridge, and would-be writers in London plodding from the offices of one small magazine to the next in the hope of getting published. Despite this, the magazines were influential, at least in terms of how later academics look back on the modernists.

Middleton Murry was the cheerleader for one tribe of modernists, endorsing a number of the newer writers. But he seems to have been at war with everyone, and fairly soon lost his influence. Another tribe centred on the Sitwells, who were early advocates of the work of Eliot. Their circle included the composers William Walton and Constant Lambert, and they brought into their branch of modernism something of the polyrhythms and improvisation of jazz, the other great artistic movement of the decade but one that was not otherwise widely taken up by modernists. But the Sitwells were self-obsessed, idiosyncratic, and argumentative. Edith Sitwell in particular seems to have delighted in her feuds. There is one delightful vignette in Taylor’s book in which someone came upon Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf sitting side by side on a settee during one of their periodic truces, and I got a vivid impression of two tight-lipped women each preparing to spit venom at the other. Woolf, and Bloomsbury, introduces another tribe, one that encompassed the artistic as much as the literary, and whose publishing house, the Hogarth Press, brought out books by writers like E.M.Forster, Peter Quennell, and Muriel Jaeger, who weren’t all normally classed as modernists. Though the most notable title from the Hogarth Press was probably the first edition of “The Waste Land”, which brings us inevitably to Eliot himself, buttoned-up and puritanical, whose early poems, and especially “The Waste Land”, made him the torchbearer for post-war modernism. He inspired reverence – Taylor tells of a young Anthony Powell gazing in wonder when he chanced to spy Eliot dining alone at a Charlotte Street restaurant – and there were any number of would be writers trying to copy his work (as successfully as such copyists invariably are); but he also inspire mystification and condemnation, especially from critics like J.C. Squire, the last of the Georgians. Though Eliot himself, politically conservative and religiously inclined, probably had more in common with the Georgians than with the new generation of would-be revolutionaries who followed in his wake.

And this, I suspect, barely does justice to the internecine conflicts that characterised the first decade or so of literary modernism in Britain. I mean, where does one fit James Joyce, championed by Eliot but hardly the clubbable type one might find in Bloomsbury or at a Sitwell country home? So when Sarah Cole, in her truly wonderful book, Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century, argues that Wells was a modernist writer all along, the response has to be: of course, but what brand of modernist?

Boundaries

Tags

Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, Maureen Kincaid Speller, nina allan, Robert Holdstock, Steve Erickson

[This is, I suppose, a place holder for something I may want to explore at greater length elsewhere. But for now …]

I don’t normally listen to podcasts, I suppose I tend to be visually rather than aurally directed. But Maureen insisted that I should listen to an episode of Weird Studies, to be precise, Episode 81: Gnostic Lit: On M. John Harrison’s ‘The Course of the Heart’. She said I would enjoy it; she was absolutely right. In a sense it amplifies and runs variations on some of the things I was talking about when I discussed The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again a little while ago.

One of the things that caught my attention was an opening discussion about zones, specifically referring to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. (The two people hosting the podcast don’t seem to be overly familiar with Harrison’s other work, so they completely miss how closely this relates to the middle volume in his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Nova Swing. A pity, that could have opened up a much wider and even more complex discussion.) But I found myself thinking less of the zones, however we might choose to characterise them, than of the boundaries between zones. And I realised how much of my favourite literature, the literature that for me best exemplifies the fantastic, is specifically concerned with the identification and the examination of such boundaries.

Harrison is, of course, the prime example here. The Course of the Heart concerns the relationship between mundane reality and the pleroma, here identified as the vanished land of the Coeur. Typically, the pleroma is not real and its achievement is more associated with loss than with achievement, so in Nova Swing the story moves between everyday disappointment and the unfulfilled promise of the pleroma-like zone. Exactly the same dynamic is there in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, as it is in stories like “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” or, more recently, “In Autotelia”.

But it is not just Harrison who explores this boundary between the worlds. Think, for instance, of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. The edge of Ryhope Wood is exactly the sort of border between Saubade and the zone that we encounter in Nova Swing. Crossing that border, entering the wood, is less a journey into a land of myth than it is into a land of promise.

Or there is the boundary between England and the Dream Archipelago in Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation. It is not just that these are two sides of a shattered mind, it is that each is a realm of promise. To Peter Sinclair in Britain, the Dream Archipelago is the longed-for but ultimately unsatisfying pleroma; to Peter Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago, it is the other way round. As the boundaries between the two worlds become ever more porous, so the other land becomes more expressly the dream that is unfulfilled, the desire that is unsatisfied.

And there are others. The sister who disappears and then, perhaps, reappears, crosses one way and then the other across this very boundary in Nina Allan’s The Rift. The multiple Americas of Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach are separated one from the other by just such a boundary.

Of course, and it is probably rather bathetic to point this out, identifying and crossing such a boundary is commonly figured as an act of creativity. The two Peter Sinclairs are both writers, the secret of Ryhope Wood is first revealed in the pages of a diary, the story of the Coeur is imagined into life in the stories that one character tells to another. But still I can’t help thinking there is something here, something that might repay further consideration. Something to ponder upon further, I suspect.

folk rock

Tags

Al Stewart, Aleister Crowley, Amazing Blondel, Beatles, Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Cecil Sharp, Danny Thompson, Davy Graham, Donovan, Ewan McColl, Fairfield Parlour, Fairport Convention, Ghost Box, Jackson C. Frank, Jacqui McShee, John Renbourn, Magna Carta, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mr Fox, Paul Simon, Pentangle, Planxty, Ralph McTell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rob Young, Sandy Denny, Simon Nicol, Steeleye Span, Terry Cox, The Dubliners, The Spinners, Vashti Bunyan, William Blake

I grew up with folk-rock, that curious hybrid which took (so-called) traditional tunes and added rock instrumentation. For a decade or more throughout the 1970s, the most-played record I owned was Basket of Light by Pentangle, one of the first folk-rock outfits (though I’ve never been convinced that the term rightly applies to them, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee certainly came from the folk tradition, but what Danny Thompson and Terry Cox brought to the mix was more a jazz infusion than a rock sound). And then there was Leige and Lief by Fairport Convention, which certainly was folk rock, and Below the Salt by Steeleye Span, which always sounded to me like an outfit that wasn’t really convinced by what they were doing and thought the rock stuff was a little infra dig. Anyway, by the time they got to All Around My Hat and the abysmal Rocket Cottage, they had pretty much given up on being anything but a pop group.

There were others, of course. One of the things that first drew Maureen and I together was that I was the only other person she’d met who knew who Mr Fox were. But those three, Pentangle and Fairport in their pomp, with a little bit of Steeleye on the side, were the great triumvirate of folk rock. There were a couple of live albums by Fairport, Live at the LA Troubadour and Full House, that you don’t seem to get any more. There’s a version of Full House that has been released, but it’s not quite the same as the original; Simon Nicol’s version of “Matty Groves” is different, and the original was superior (in the original, Nicols sang: “Lord Arnold struck the very next blow, and Matty struck the floor”; the other version, more familiar but less dramatic, goes “Lord Arnold struck the very next blow, and Matty struck no more”). But those albums were ones I always listened to with amazement, even though it would be many years before I ever saw a Fairport line-up on stage.

I had grown up on the Beatles, (I was 11 when I watched their first ever appearance on British television), and my musical taste continued to be informed by what were then known as beat groups. So I never had any particular interest in or liking for the old finger-in-the-ear traditional singer, but when the folk song and the rock music merged, suddenly my ears pricked up. For a while my record collection held some real oddities (anyone remember Magna Carta, Fairfield Parlour, Amazing Blondel? No, me neither, not any longer.) but as the folk-rock wave of the 70s began to recede, my tastes began to shift back to the rockier side of things. Though with some variations: the astonishing and idiosyncratic songs on Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens and Sandy, certainly had a folk heritage, but they were hardly what I’d call folk songs, and the new direction they were opening up was one I was very interested in pursuing.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to talking about Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young. I was drawn to the book because it is largely a history of British folk rock, and in so far as that is what the book is, it’s a good book. Unfortunately, Young tries to cast his net wider than that, and that bit is problematic.

He starts with a chapter about Vashti Bunyan, which is a mark against him right from the beginning. Really! Surely, she had the most anaemic singing voice ever recorded, and her album, Just Another Diamond Day, justifiably sold about 20 copies. But in the decades since then, she has somehow been transformed into an iconic figure in the history of British folk music. I don’t understand this, but Young is far from the only person to put her up on that pillar. This chapter does tell us some things about Young’s book. In the first place, when it comes to actually writing about music, Young is crap. But then, there are very few people who are able to write well about music, though not many of them reach for the sort of extravagant and laboured metaphors that Young employs. In the second place, Young is largely uncritical: if the song or album or group can be squeezed into his history, then it is by default good. Okay, as the book goes on there are a couple of albums which he doesn’t greet with unalloyed praise (Rocket Cottage, of course, being one), but this is not exactly a work of criticism. Thirdly, the book is only accidentally about folk music; the clue is in the sub-title, “Visionary Music”, though he never actually explains what visionary music is, and for much of the book he blurs the boundaries so that folk rock is inevitably equated with visionary music. So Vashti, setting off in her gypsy caravan for Donovan’s Scottish island, which he has already left, is of interest because she is visionary rather than because she is a folk singer.

Now it is when we come to that term, “folk singer”, that things become interesting. Leaving Vashti to wander off stage, never to return, Young now goes back in time to the early collectors, Cecil Sharp, the Child Ballads, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and so on. This is where the book becomes interesting, because you start to realize how problematic the whole thing is. The whole collecting thing was tied up with a strand of late-19th century nationalism that echoed similar movements in Europe, and therefore inevitably has a rather dubious right-wing vibe. It was also rather indiscriminate, the collectors picked up on anything that grizzled country folk liked to sing, whether traditional ballads or music hall songs or something they had extemporized themselves, but because of where they came from they were all deemed authentic. “Authentic” became a nonce-word that plagued folk music for decades after, everything was geared to digging back to find the most ancient and therefore most authentic version of every song. The truth is that there is nothing authentic about folk music: tunes are remembered and forgotten, lyrics get changed constantly, lines are misremembered and new lines are cobbled together, and one set of words could be put to a different tune then the words would be changed to fit the tune. But for the panjandrums of Cecil Sharp House, the songs were set in stone, their authenticity an earnest of their importance. By the 1950s, Ewan McColl (or Jimmy Miller from Salford, as he was originally) was so insistent on authenticity that singers at his folk club had to employ the accent of whichever region the song had been collected from. Folk music was associated with various popular, left-wing causes, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in the 1930s, the Aldermaston Marches in the 1960s, and yet the traditionalists were extraordinarily authoritarian.

The guitar, for example, was not an authentic instrument, and so it didn’t start to creep into the folk music scene until the late-50s and 60s. But the young masters of the guitar who came on the scene around this time, Renbourn and Jansch, Davy Graham, and so forth, began to change the scene. They brought a more fluid, fluent style to the traditional songs they played; they began writing their own pieces in the style of their vamped-up traditional songs; and they were listening to other popular music around at the time. After all, if guitars aren’t common in your chosen area of music, who do you listen to for techniques and ideas? The folk guitarists who came on the scene in the early-60s brought influences from jazz, from classical music, and from rock ‘n’ roll; and in time they brought in electric guitars.

One of the things that comes across in the longest and best part of the book is how eclectic folk music became between the mid-60s and the mid-70s. Failing rock groups reinvented themselves as folk groups; most of the drummers who played in folk groups had originally started in rock bands. The folk musicians were listening to jazz and classical and rock; rock musicians were listening to folk; and from all of this new hybrids emerged. And thus were born Fairport and Pentangle and their ilk.

So far, so good. This is, of course, a partial account of British folk music during the period. There is no mention, for instance, of groups like The Spinners, The Dubliners or Planxty, though they were all very successful (The Spinners never seemed to be off British television screens throughout the 60s). No mention, either, of other performers who arose on the folk scene, like Al Stewart or Ralph McTell, even though these would go on to have very successful careers in ways that played very adroitly with the borders between folk and rock. And though there are nods to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Jackson C. Frank, the ways that the British folk scene interwove with the American folk revival of the 50s and 60s isn’t really developed. Nor, given the whole issue of authenticity that plagued folk music, is there any real discussion of whether folk musicians who wrote their own songs (which is the case with practically all of the performers I’ve mentioned so far, including the austere Ewan McColl) could be said to be part of the folk tradition. Can things like “Pentangling” by Pentangle or “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” by Sandy Denny really be considered folk songs? And if so, what is it that makes them folk?

But we come back, yet again, to that subtitle: “Visionary Music”. It is undefined; sometimes it means a songwriter who read William Blake, sometimes a song that refers to the landscape, sometimes a piece that pays homage to Aleister Crowley, sometimes it seems to be just a band that Rob Young happens to like. And over the course of the book, it transmutes into something called “acid folk” (don’t ask, I’ve no idea), or psychedelic folk (ditto); and by the end of the book he’s talking about obscure experimental musicians whose work, so far as I can see, bears no relationship to folk in any way. Which is another problem with the book, it is unfocussed, the subject drifts. It may be that those who like Ghost Box will find the final chapters of the book enthralling, but for me they have moved away from the area I was particularly interested in. Which to my mind makes the book over-long (660-odd pages) and rather bitty.

But the bits that I was interested in are very good indeed.

Shadowing the Clarke

Tags

Adam Roberts, Anne Charnock, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Christopher Brown, James Bradley, Jaroslav Kalfar, Jeff Vandermeer, John Dos Passos, John Kessel, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Kim Stanley Robinson, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mohsin Hamid, Nick Harkaway, Nick Hubble, Nicola Barker, nina allan, Omar El Akkad, Paul McAuley

This time last year, I was engaged in the struggle to compile my personal shortlist for the first Arthur C. Clarke Award Shadow Jury. It was an interesting and revealing exercise. I was glad to step down from the Shadow Jury this year only because it is a time-consuming process and time is something I don’t have right now. But in every other respect, I was sorry to go and a part of me is itching to put together a personal shortlist again this year.

So why the hell not?

Greece

Tags

Dirk Bogarde, George Katsimbalis, Gerald Durrell, Henry Miller, John Craxton, Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Niko Ghika, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Nash

Many years ago, not long after Maureen and I had got together, we went up to Edinburgh to visit her friend Moira. At one point, Moira got out a bunch of photographs she had taken while on holiday in Greece some ten years before (in other words, let me be clear, some ten years before I even knew Moira existed). In one photograph, taken on the Acropolis, the central figure, perfectly framed and in sharp focus, striding directly towards the camera, was me.

Somehow, that weird coincidence encapsulates Greece for me. It is a locus made up of coincidences and connections, it is where all things come together.

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–1994), Study for a poster. Tempera on cardboard, 1948. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. © Benaki Museum 2018.

I first encountered Greece (if that is the right way to put it) through Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which remains one of the funniest books I know, and also one of the loveliest. This led me inevitably to the work of his brother, Larry, particularly those exquisite travel books, Reflections on a Marine Venus and Bitter Lemons. From Lawrence Durrell I moved on to his friend, Henry Miller, and The Colossus of Marousi, the only one of Miller’s books I’ve been able to read with unalloyed pleasure.

That is one set of connections. Another set sprang also from Durrell, in a way. I developed a taste for travel literature, which I kept up for quite a few years until I OD’d on the stuff while reviewing it for places like The Good Book Guide and British Book News. Along the way I happened upon a book called A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. When, as a result, I grabbed everything I could by Fermor, it was somehow no surprise that this led me back to Greece. (Although it seems only tangential to my literary discovery of Greece, I also devoured anything on TV relating to the country, such as the 1970s series like The Lotus Eaters and Who Pays the Ferryman?, and of course old films such as the Dirk Bogarde wartime adventure, Ill Met By Moonlight which seemed to be on TV endlessly when I was young. And Bogarde, of course, was playing Paddy Leigh Fermor, though it took me a little while to make that connection.)

In truth, the more I read about Leigh Fermor (and I’ve read biographies and letters and the like) the less I think I would have liked him in person. He was an incurable snob who spent much of his life freeloading on the rich and aristocratic types he fawned over. And yet I find him endlessly fascinating: he wrote like a dream, of course, and he had a genuine and admirable gift for friendship. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone in the postwar world of art and letters, and everyone loved Paddy.

Niko Ghika, John Craxton, Joan Fermor, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Barbara Ghika

Two of his lifelong friendships were with the Greek painter, Niko Ghika, and the English painter, John Craxton. (To give you a glimpse of what a peculiar world this was, Craxton first went to Greece immediately after the Second World War when he was encouraged to do so by the wife of an ambassador, who then gave him a lift in a bomber. “Of course she did,” Maureen commented, when I pointed this story out to her.) Now this triumvirate is the focus of an exhibition at the British Museum. I will probably write about this exhibition at greater length when I’ve had a chance to absorb the substantial catalogue that goes with it. For now, these are a few initial thoughts.

Although Leigh Fermor was clearly the glue binding this group together, he was strangely absent from this exhibition, or at least he was out of the limelight. He was there in photographs, in quotations from some of his books and articles dotted about the place, but the focus, rightly, was on the magnificent paintings by Ghika and particularly Craxton. Though it was amusing to see a handful of Leigh Fermor’s letters on display, all with “IN HASTE” scrawled across the top; that seemed to be the only way he ever wrote anything.

Ghika’s paintings could be, I think, somewhat disturbing. They were crowded with labyrinthine twists and turns in which the more you looked at them the more you seemed to be lost. But they were overgrown with a profusion of plants and leaves and flowers, a riot of colours, as if they were something out of a Jeff VanderMeer novel. And there, among Ghika’s friends, among the regular visitors to his home on Hydra, was George Katsimbalis, who was Henry Miller’s Colossus of Marousi, which brings us back round to tie in another set of connections.

But the work we both fell in love with was by John Craxton. Bold lines, often very few colours, and an incredible vigorous sense of life, especially in the numerous paintings of groups of men around cafe tables or performing Greek dances. I’d seen his work before, since he provided the cover illustrations for all of Leigh Fermor’s books from Mani onwards, but I hadn’t realised this until we got to the exhibition. There is something pivotal in his work, we kept catching echoes of Paul Nash in one direction, Picasso in another, and was there something Ruralist or even possibly Preraphaelite in some individual pictures? Certainly I need to see more of his work.

 

Sharke infested custard

Tags

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

Tags

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: The Underground Railroad

Tags

Aliya Whiteley, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Colson Whitehead, Joanna Kavenna, Johanna Sinisalo, Jonathan McCalmont, Lavie Tidhar, Matthew de Abaitua, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, N.K. Jemisin, nina allan, Victoria Hoyle

The work of the Clarke Award Shadow Jury continues apace. The jurors are now taking turns to review the books they chose for their personal shortlists. So far you can find:

Nina Allan on The Destructives by Matthew de Abaitua and A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna

Jonathan McCalmont on The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley

Victoria Hoyle on The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Megan AM on The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Maureen Kincaid Speller on Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

And now there’s my review of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

I’m reproducing my review under the fold, but you really should head over to read the other reviews, and keep up with the Shadow Clarke hub, because that’s where the conversation is taking place.

Equivalence for the Landscape

Tags

Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Giorgio de Chirico, Henry Moore, Keith Roberts, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Paul Nash, Tristram Hillier

He discovered the Hardy novels, and in time the painter Nash; the hills and trees and standing stones, flowers that broke from their moorings to sail the sky, fossils that reared in ghostly anger from the rocks. Suns rolling their millstones of golden grain; and it seemed he heard, far off and far too late, the shock of distant armies.
Keith Roberts, The Chalk Giants, Hutchinson, 1974, p21

Coming across that passage in the mid-1970s would have been the first time I came across the name Nash. Much later, I added a forename, Paul (later still I discovered there was another Nash, John, his brother and also a painter, though I am embarrassingly unfamiliar with his work). But even with a name, I wasn’t sure which Paul Nash I knew about. There were two that seemed to appear, work occasionally glimpsed in magazines or on the television: the weird, surreal artist, and the one who did all those pictures from the First World War. It would be some time before I realised they were the same; it would be even longer before I saw that they were the same.

The Clarke Award and Me

Tags

Amitav Ghosh, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan McCalmont, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, Nick Hubble, Thomas Pynchon, Vajra Chandrasekera

This is the introductory piece I wrote for the Clarke Award Shadow Jury:

I’ve written about all of this before, how I was there when the Arthur C. Clarke Award was created, how I’ve judged it and administered it, and edited the anthology. There’s nothing new to add, except for one memory: the first time I ever saw a bookshop display devoted to the Clarke shortlist, it was in Seattle.

That is how I want to see the Clarke award continue: that international status, that sense of being central to the entire conversation about contemporary science fiction.

I believe, devoutly, that the award should be controversial, that it should engender debate. In the early years, the Award got a lot of flack for shortlisting mainstream writers rather than the familiar genre names. Giving the first award to Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid’s Tale was dismissed as pretentious, as the judges sucking up to the literary establishment; though we see now that it is a novel that has endured. At the time when Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass won the award over Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, I heard people complain that there wasn’t even a rocket ship on the cover (in fact, none of the books on that year’s shortlist had a rocket ship on the cover). After that, the proudest moment in my engagement with the Clarke Award came in the year that Amitav Ghosh won for The Calcutta Chromosome. After the announcement of the award, I had people come up to me and say: “I thought that was just the Clarke Award being pretentious again. Then I read the book and … you were right!” Not long after I finally stood down from the Clarke Award I was amused that the judges were being criticised not for including mainstream fiction, but for omitting Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.

That is what makes the Clarke Award great. The fact that it doesn’t conform to genre stereotypes, the fact that it bucks the trend, the fact that it regards science fiction as the broadest of broad churches, and will look anywhere within that spectrum for the best. And that restless, wide-ranging aspect of the award is what gets people arguing about it. And that argument is good, not just for the award itself (though it does keep the award alive in people’s minds), but for science fiction as a whole. Because the more the Clarke Award challenges our expectations, the more it opens us up to an ever wider, ever changing sense of what science fiction is and can be.

Let’s face it, the biggest debate within science fiction at the moment is the debate surrounding the Sad and Rabid Puppies, and that debate is all about narrowing science fiction. The Puppies want to enclose and limit the genre, restrict it to a narrow spectrum that resembles the science fiction they remember from the 1950s: overwhelmingly masculine, almost entirely American, distinctly technophiliac, and ignoring the literary changes that have occurred within the genre over the last half century. This is science fiction that repeats what has gone before, that depends upon its familiarity; this is science fiction that is not going anywhere new. Okay, some work that fits within this spectrum can be interesting and important, but it cannot be, it should not be, the whole of science fiction. The best way to counter the Puppies’ argument is with the sort of expansionist, innovative, challenging argument about science fiction that has traditionally been associated with the Clarke Award.

The way I see it, a lively debate is essential for the health of the Clarke Award, for science fiction in Britain, for science fiction throughout the world. I want to encourage that debate and to be a part of it. It is time to demonstrate once again that the very best science fiction, the science fiction that is worthy of a place on the Clarke Award shortlist, is the sort of science fiction that shocks us with its novelty. And if that shock doesn’t generate argument, then the Clarke Award is failing, and science fiction is failing.

We’re all written similar pieces. So far you can find pieces by Megan AM; Maureen Kincaid Speller; Jonathan McCalmont; Nick Hubble and Vajra Chandrasekera, with the rest to come over the next few days. There was no collusion in any of this, but there is an awful lot of overlap in our thinking about the award. Believe me, it is making the Shadow Jury a very interesting experience.