In the air

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Chris Marker, Christopher Priest, Guy Murchie, Jacques Tati, M. John Harrison, nina allan, Steven Spielberg

Two books, published on almost the same day, by two writers of roughly the same age who are both regarded as among the best and most important writers of the fantastic working in Britain over the last half century. Yet neither of these books could be called science fiction or fantasy, and both play (perhaps perverse) games with autobiography. I’ll come to M. John Harrison’s “anti-memoir” next, but for now I want to look at Christopher Priest’s latest novel, Airside.

The novel is structured like a mystery, a reading of the book that is encouraged by the blurb: “In 1949, Hollywood star Jeanette Marchand landed in London. No one ever saw her leave the airport. No one ever saw her again.” That, pretty efficiently, sums up the first chapter; but that is not what the book is about. As far as the mystery goes, the attentive reader will have the vital clue before they are half way through the book. But the strange disappearance of Jeanette Marchand, a Hollywood star whose fame is already in decline, is the catalyst for the novel, it is not the subject of the novel.

The subject of the novel is the unreal heterotopia that is an airport, a place that exists at a tangent to the world outside it, that is at the same moment both within and apart from the nation that enfolds it. A place where the traveller, often weary always disoriented, finds their sense of self disrupted as they await barely heard announcements and follow barely understood instructions on where they must and cannot go. It is the sort of artificially disturbed setting that lends itself to the unsettling ontologies of Priest’s best fiction. Within an airport one can get turned around so readily that it is easy to imagine oneself emerging into the Dream Archipelago or crossing into the parallel reality of The Separation. Here, however, one emerges blinking into the same reality, just not entirely sure how one got there. (And no, before anyone starts to speculate, Jeanette Marchand does not step from her Douglas DC4 into another reality. Well, not in that sense.)

And the central character (given the movie references throughout the novel, it would be tempting but inappropriate to call him the star of the show) is Justin Farmer, a film critic. Farmer is the most Priest-like character to have appeared in any of Priest’s novels. He was born only a year or two after Priest; he was raised in the same part of Cheshire where Priest grew up; and his family moved to London at the beginning of the 1960s just when Priest’s own family made the same move. There are differences, of course: Farmer went to university which Priest did not; and Farmer fell into writing for a living (in his case film reviews) far more easily than I think Priest did. But the psychological similarities are notable, and significant for the plot. Both are entranced by film (when, in 1964, Priest reviewed the magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy, both under new editors, he coined the term “New Wave” by analogy to the French nouvelle vague films he loved). And both are fascinated by planes and flight and the associated apparatus of airports (Priest’s early reading of books like Song of the Sky by Guy Murchie fed into the frequency with which planes and airports feature in his work, for instance in The Separation, The Dream Archipelago, The Islanders, The Adjacent, An American Story and others).

Farmer’s interest in film was inspired by seeing Jeanette Marchand in some of her early films, and though he is naturally intrigued by her disappearance he is not obsessed by it. Often years seem to pass during which he barely thinks of her. But whenever an opportunity rises to investigate the case further, he is always ready, for instance when he gets to meet a German director who turns out to have been the mysterious other passenger in the first class compartment on Marchand’s last flight, though all the reports agree that he left the flight at Shannon.

Nevertheless, airports bulk large in his imagination. In a device that echoes a similar one used by Priest’s partner, Nina Allan, in her latest novel, Conquest (published only a couple of weeks before Airside), Priest intersperses his novel with a selection of Farmer’s reviews – Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, among others – which tend to revolve around the alienating atmosphere of an airport. Late in the novel there is a moment in which Priest suddenly seems to remember that he is a science fiction writer, and writes passages in which airports become scenes of dislocation, a disturbance in the sense of self. The setting is Seoul, where signs in a language Farmer doesn’t know add to the sense of being lost. There is a haunting intrusion of the fantastic when Farmer, having wandered in increasing desperation along featureless corridors that seem to transport him effortlessly from landside to airside and back again, falls asleep in the corridor only to wake and find that his flight is landing at his destination. It is tempting to read this dislocation as entirely psychological, an effect of tiredness and desperation; but it is one with the increasingly disturbing presentation of airport terminals in Farmer’s reviews. Indeed at one point he seems to find himself on the open observation platform that featured in La Jetée.

It may be no more than a suggestion of the fantastic, but though it is very well done, reminiscent of the very best of his novels, I still found it perhaps the least satisfying part of the novel, mostly because I was enjoying the remorseless realism of the book to this point. It is essentially an historical novel (the most recent scenes barely bring us into this century), and Priest’s style, the simple declarative sentences that don’t strive for effect, make the past seem clear and present. (The only significant error I spotted was a reference to the Los Angeles Dodgers seven or eight years before the team actually moved from Brooklyn.) It is a startling change of pace for Priest, but it works extremely well. And the overwhelming effect of the novel is the uneasy sense that in an airport one is so attenuated that it is easy to simply disappear.

Is there a point to science fiction?

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A.J. Ayer, Anne Charnock, Arnold Toynbee, Beatrice Webb, Bertrand Russell, Carlo Rovelli, Christopher Priest, Colin Murray, Garry Charnock, Gary Westfahl, J.D. Bernal, James Joyce, John W. Campbell, Karl Popper, Ken MacLeod, Lisa Tuttle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, M. John Harrison, Niall Harrison, Niels Bohr, nina allan, Richard Overy, Vandana Singh, Virginia Woolf, Werner Heisenberg

I didn’t intend to write this. Hell, I didn’t intend to start thinking along these lines. It’s just the pernicious effect of coincidence.

The trigger was reading a review of a Vandana Singh collection in Niall Harrison’s All These Worlds. But that just seemed to connect odd thoughts that had accumulated from very disparate sources over the last couple of weeks. For a start there was The Morbid Age by Richard Overy, a social history of Britain between the wars. In those 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people across Britain would regularly attend lecture series, summer schools, Workers’ Education Authority events, conferences, and more. There was a seemingly inexhaustible hunger for knowledge on everything from eugenics to the origins of the Spanish Civil War. You get the impression that people needed to learn because they were desperately trying to make sense of a world that increasingly seemed senseless, terrifyingly senseless in fact.

What also feeds into this picture is something that is not mentioned in Overy’s book, but which is the focus of the very next book I started reading after the Overy: Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli. This is the story of the development of quantum mechanics, a direct result of ideas formulated by Werner Heisenberg on the remote island of Helgoland in 1925. Quantum physics grows out of a whole string of scientific and philosophical ideas that were being formulated during the early years of the century. Most of these ideas would not filter through to the general population, at least not in detail, but broad notions would seep through (think of all those educational organisations, along with regular lectures on the BBC and popular books on science by people like J.D. Bernal which were reliable best sellers). What was known about these mysterious scientific developments was identified by the broad terms that were being applied to them: Relativity, Indeterminacy, Uncertainty. Contemporary philosophy didn’t help either. Even if most people knew no more about Ludwig Wittgenstein than they did about Niels Bohr, the ideas were filtering through in accessible and best selling books by Bertrand Russell, in A.J. Ayer’s (mis)interpretations of the Vienna Circle, in Karl Popper’s notions of Falsifiability. And while most people had probably never read Freud or Jung, their ideas were constantly being expounded in talks on the BBC, and were known to be behind the works of well known writers like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, with their unreliable narrators and their sense of the unknowability of the world. Everywhere you turned, therefore, from fiction to philosophy, from science to psychology, the general impression was the same: the more you knew about the world the more unknowable it was. And that tied in with the sense that the social and economic and political world in which people found
themselves was similarly unknowable and unreliable and mad. There was a frightening uncertainty where people were desperate to find a reassuring certainty.

The other part of this equation came while I was on Bute. During my holiday there I had long, fascinating conversations with Chris Priest, Nina Allan and Anne and Garry Charnock, and briefer but still enjoyable encounters with Lisa Tuttle, Colin Murray and Ken MacLeod. With Chris and Nina in particular the conversation often came around to Chris’s forthcoming novel, Airside, Nina’s forthcoming novel, Conquest, and Mike Harrison’s anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here. (For the record, I haven’t read any of these books. Conquest is on my desk waiting for me to review it after the Niall Harrison; Airside and Wish I Was Here are both on order but haven’t arrived yet.) Without using the words, these discussions tended to turn on questions of generic identity: could the novels actually be considered science fiction; is an anti-memoir also a memoir? Niall’s review reminded me of this because throughout his book he uses the novels and stories he considers as a springboard to discuss broader questions of identity in relation to science fiction. What it is? What it does? Why?

These questions of genre identity resonated with my readings of Overy and Rovelli. It suddenly occurred to me that although what we now term science fiction has a history that stretches back centuries, its generic identity was actually forged in the inter-war years. This, I suspect, lies behind Gary Westfahl’s otherwise lunatic argument that science fiction began in 1926. Between the launch of Amazing in 1926 and John W. Campbell’s assumption of the editorship of Astounding in 1937, what we think of
as the inherent characteristics of science fiction, from space opera to hard sf, were established. They became further set in stone during the 1940s and 1950s, and it was only with the emergence of what became known as the New Wave in the early 1960s that these assumptions began to be challenged. Since then there have been intermittent attempts to re-establish the centrality of those
characteristics – the new Space Opera, the new Hard SF, the puppies – but on the whole the hold of those generic characteristics on our imaginations has been steadily weakened. Looking at science fiction today, and at the spread of what, in Clutean terms, we might call fantastika across what were once seen as genre boundaries, I think questions of generic identity are now largely irrelevant.

But what occurred to me, as I started putting these disparate bits and pieces together, is that I don’t think it is a coincidence that the generic identity of science fiction was fixed during those interwar years. In some ways, the establishment of the familiar tricks and tropes of science fiction in those years was a response to the doubts and hesitations and uncertainties of that unstable time.

In saying this I am not trying to make any great claims for science fiction, and particularly not for the generic sf of the 1920s and 30s. The people who wrote these sf stories, in the main, knew no more about the outer reaches of contemporary science than the average person in the street. They weren’t in a position to explain the workings of quantum leaps or logical positivism to their readers any more than they could explain those things to themselves. That wasn’t what science fiction was for, or at least it wasn’t what they were doing with science fiction. But they bandied about scientific terms with a confidence that suggested these terms weren’t frighteningly uncertain but rather straightforwardly explicable. They sketched futures in a way that suggested that all the terrors of the moment would come to naught and there might actually be a future. Campbell’s insistence on the figure of the “competent man” suggested that the complex issues facing the world might be dealt with by any handyman with basic technical skills. Moreover, the competent man was, of course, a reliable narrator, saving the world was a task for a no-nonsense type with none of that Freudian nonsense. Everything that science fiction was doing in these genre-shaping years ran counter to the hesitations and uncertainties that contemporary science and politics and literature implied.

I’m not sure how conscious any of this was, probably not at all. But somehow science fiction was touching on all those things encountered in the real world, in newspaper reports from Germany and Spain, in BBC talks by Bertrand Russell or Arnold Toynbee or Beatrice Webb, in best-selling books from Gollancz’s Left Book Club, and in weekend schools with the Workers’ Educational Association, and defusing them. Relativity wasn’t some disturbing vision of the unreality of the real world, it was just a strange effect you might encounter if you were to travel in a spaceship.

The generic identity thus forged was made concrete in the post-war years. After all, the mysteries of quantum mechanics had been replaced by the devastating horrors of the atomic bomb, and the headlong rush to war that everyone remembered from the 1930s had been replaced by the Cold War, a conflict that never quite went away and kept flaring up in unexpected places like Korea and Cuba and Vietnam. None of the terrors of the interwar years had gone away, they had just become actual. And science fiction responded much the way it had before. There might be a little bit more literary sophistication about it, but it was still the same old story about competence and confidence. The readership was still relatively small and relatively specialised, but they were still reaching for the same reassurances and certainties, the same story that the world, however far away in space or time, is still knowable.

And I suspect, by the same token, that it is also no coincidence that the first challenges to the generic identity of science fiction came in the wake of the Cuba Missile Crisis. After all, the old reassurances were no longer reassuring.

A Web of Absence

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nina allan

When I read Nina Allan’s latest novel recently, I noted that her work occupies two worlds, one is our everyday reality and the other is somewhere or somewhen else. We doubt this other world, but not sufficiently to dismiss it out of hand. There is an ambivalence which leaves the reader uncertain what to trust.

It is a delicate balancing act, but one that Nina Allan treads with remarkable aplomb. And it invariably leaves me wondering whether I am in fact reading mainstream fiction or genre fiction. No, that’s not quite right, better to say: it leaves me wondering whether I should read the work as mainstream fiction or as genre fiction. What matters in her work is not what the fiction is doing, but the perspective from which the reader approaches the fiction.

And now I have read The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories, which is, frankly, the best collection of short fiction I have read in years. There isn’t a dud here, but I remain uncertain what I have actually read. Turn to the back of the book and read the details of where these stories first appeared: Interzone and Clarkesworld and tor.com and so on. From the credits these are without exception science fiction or horror or fantasy or some such permutation of the fantastic. Yet I don’t believe I can read any of these stories as science fiction or fantasy or what have you. Oh the genre elements are there, but as a decorative detail hung in the background; what is in the foreground, what makes these stories what they are, is a strong sense of the psychological cost of living in quotidian reality. The genre doesn’t matter, we may be reading of a post-apocalyptic future or a landscape with fairies, but that is never what the story is about; what matters is the sense of reality.

The two worlds I talked about in relation to the novel are here, in practically every one of these stories. And what makes the story genre (if we are to approach it from that perspective) is invariably part of that second world, the world of doubt and uncertainty.

One of the things about stories is that they necessarily condense things that might otherwise be dissipated across the greater length and scope of a novel. You can see the shapes more clearly. So as I was reading these stories I became aware that my suggestion of two worlds was really too simple a reading of the work. The extra thing I noticed was that there is always an absence: somebody or something is missing from the protagonist’s picture of the world. More often that not that absence is family: there are missing parents through this book, but also siblings, friends, lovers. And the second world, the thing that promises to take the protagonist out of mundane reality, is connected with this absence, a way of coping with it. It is where the absent person has gone, or how they might be remembered. It is a place of doubt but also of hope, but it is a place that can never be reached, often because it is symbolically the place of death. Or perhaps it would be better to say it is the place where death would be if there were any certainty in this life. In “The Gift of Angels: An Introduction”, for example, the protagonist is a 50-odd-year-old science fiction writer, but the absence is his mother. When the protagonist was a child, she was part of what was meant to be the first manned expedition to Mars, but all communication with the ship was lost shortly before they were due to land on Mars. It is assumed she is dead, it is assumed they all died, but we don’t know; they may be there, still, just silent. And she is not the only character in this collection who is assumed to have died, but without anyone knowing for sure.

“The Gift of Angels: An Introduction” is a sequel of sorts (there are several stories in this collection that share characters and references without specifically continuing the same story) to the title story, which is, to my mind, perhaps the best story here. “The Art of Space Travel” is a perfect example of the generic ambiguity of these stories, and of the role that absence plays in the psychological reality we explore. At first blush, this seems perfectly science fictional (the story first appeared at tor.com): we are some way in the future. Years ago, the first manned flight to Mars was destroyed, perhaps by terrorist action; now, years later, a second expedition is being planned. Except that all of that is largely irrelevant to the story. The setting is a Heathrow hotel where two members of the Mars crew will be staying for just one night on their way to the launch facilities. The two crew members are celebrities, and so the hotel is besieged by cameramen and journalists. But none of this is centre stage, our attention is on Emily, the young woman who is in charge of the housekeeping staff at the hotel. There are two absences in her life. One is her mother, Moolie, who has dementia, which is a great demand on Emily’s life, as Moolie gradually withdraws from this reality. The second is the father Emily has never known. When younger, Moolie was a scientist peripherally involved with the first Mars mission, and there is a suggestion that the father might have been one of the astronauts who died, or at least one of her colleagues. The Mars mission, encapsulated in a book Emily has had since infancy called The Art of Space Travel, becomes the second parallel reality that helps her cope with the absences in this reality. The truth, of course, turns out to be rather more mundane than Emily might like, but that is often the way in Allan’s fiction as the non-mundane fades from view.

Much the same can be said for the other story that vies for my attention here, “The Science of Chance”. The setting is Moscow in an alternate reality in which an atomic bomb was dropped on the city during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, many years later, the city is pretty much back to normal when a child is discovered standing outside a subway station that miraculously escaped destruction in the bomb blast. The child cannot or will not speak, and the only clue to her identity is a purse she clutches ferociously, and which contains nothing but an old newspaper clipping. The clipping dates from just before the bomb, and by following up on it the investigator begins to sense that the child has actually slipped through time from the moment of the explosion. The absence in this story is, of course, the loss of an entire world that might have been had the bomb not fallen, and the child as a revenant from that world-changing moment is the secondary reality. Of course the truth is much more mundane, but we sense that giving up on this dream of a secondary reality is harder than facing up to the absence in quotidian reality.

Tempting as it might be to go on about how much I love each of the other stories in turn (I was particularly struck by “Heroes”, Microcosmos”, and “A Princess of Mars: Svetlana Belkina and Tarkovsky’s lost movie Aelita“), I will resist that temptation. But there is one last thing: what’s with all the spiders? They play a significant role in at least two of the stories here, “A Thread of Truth” and “Four Abstracts”, and I remember quite a few years ago when I was asked to blurb Allan’s novella, Spin, which also has an arachnid fascination. Someday I must find out what’s going on here.

In the neighbourhood

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nina allan

Yes, I’ve been reading. Not as much as I’d like, but steadily. I’ve just not been keeping up with this blog because, well, I’ve been writing dammit! I finished the first draft of the book on Mythago Wood late on the last day of February, which just about squeezes in to my schedule. Surprisingly. I mean, the draft is just over 31,000 words, which is pretty well bang on my word limit, and that’s not much. It’s well under half the length of what was previously my shortest book, yet at times it was more of a struggle to get those words down on the page than any of my other books. But anyway, mustn’t grumble, the draft is done and I’ve now given myself a couple of weeks to catch up on other things before I return to do a second draft.

Which means I have a chance to get back to writing up the books I’ve been reading. And the first is The Good Neighbours by Nina Allan which is … well, I’m not sure if it is my favourite of her novels because I still have immense affection for The Rift, but it is certainly challenging for the number one position.

And yet I once again had that moment that I seem to get with every one of her novels, the moment when I put the book down and ask myself: “What the fuck am I reading?” This is, I should point out, exactly the reason I value her work so highly.

Nina Allan’s work occupies two worlds. One is our quotidian reality. This is privileged: it is where the novel opens and closes, it is unquestioned. This is the world we see around us, the one we take for granted as real. But at some point another world opens. We may spend some time there, but it remains little more than a glimpse, allowing us not quite enough to judge its nature. This world is questioned within the text, we are told to doubt it, but generally in a way that leaves us insecure in our doubt. This may be a realm as real as our own, it may be the fictional creation of one of the characters, or it may be a delusion arising from some sort of psychological damage. We do not know, we cannot be sure. But it profoundly affects the behaviour of at least one of the characters, so it is real to them.

In a way this is the trick that Christopher Priest pulled off in The Affirmation, but Allan does not collapse the two worlds into one at the end. This necessarily leaves everything ambivalent.

The novel is primarily set on Bute, where Allen now lives, which perhaps adds to the solidity of the scenes of everyday reality. But this isn’t quite real, because there is the sort of mass murder that happens more in fiction than in reality. Shirley, the best friend of Cath, our viewpoint character, is murdered, along with her mother and her younger brother. It is assumed that the father is the killer, but he himself dies in a car accident while driving across the island. And this is where we start to question the assumed reality of all this, because the father, John Craigie, is not driving to the ferry to get off the island; in fact he is driving in the opposite direction. This seems perverse, no one can say why he is driving that way, but then, no one asks. Also, the gun that was used is missing. Where did it go, and where did someone like John Craigie get a gun in the first place? Nobody asks: the police have identified the killer to their own satisfaction, he’s safely dead, why bother with fiddly details. This reality is a world of assumptions, and it is not altogether clear how valid those assumptions are.

Years later, Cath returns to the island. She is now a photographer working on a series featuring murder houses, ordinary everyday homes that were also the scenes of notorious murders. The Craigie murders is an obvious part of this series. But again with Cath there is a sense that reality is not so solid as it should be. Oh the external reality is almost hypersolid: I’ve not been there, but I suspect you could walk the streets of Rothesay and point out the house, the fish and chip shop, the café, and all the other places mentioned in the book. But is Cath that solid, that real? Because Cath still engages in conversations with Shirl. Supposedly this is all in Cath’s mind, her memory of Shirl’s colourful turn of phrase, yet these dialogues (some of which can be really quite long) have a real-world effect on Cath’s opinions and actions. Already we are being schooled to think in terms of a parallel reality that touches and interacts with our own.

Then we learn that John Craigie, bully and brute though he was, believed in fairies and was afraid of them. Are there fairies? Does it matter? Even if there are no such things as fairies, can they have real world effects? That’s what underpins the novel. In various ways, small and large, we keep seeing the real and the unreal rubbing up against each other. It is not just the interplay between worlds, John Craigie looking into the realm of fairy, Shirl speaking out from the land of the dead; there are other hesitations and uncertainties that raise doubts at every turn. Is Cath’s seeming romantic relationship with the woman who has moved into the Craigie house real or imagined? Is there anything more than coincidence in the fact that the person who witnessed John Craigie’s car crash was also involved in another murder that had been the subject of Cath’s previous photographic series?

And John Craigie, whatever else he may have been, was a master craftsman who had made an exquisite dolls’ house for his daughter. But when she examines the dolls’ house, Cath realizes that he had built into it a secret room, a room to which there was no apparent entrance. Then, when she searches the Craigie house, Cath finds a hidden compartment within a bedroom cupboard, a compartment that shouldn’t exist, that seems to occupy a strange twist in reality. She reaches within that compartment and finds nothing, then she feels again and finds the gun, almost as if it came into existence the moment she reached her hand out. But of course there is no way to know whose gun it was, or who fired it.

The story ends, satisfyingly, with lots of questions but no answers. As in The Rift, the explanation the reader chooses to accept depends upon which reality they choose to believe. As a novel of ambivalence and hesitation, this is superb.

My top ten books of the last decade

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Adam Roberts, Christopher Priest, Colson Whitehead, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, M. John Harrison, nina allan

I have chosen one book from each year, with the added proviso that I have chosen no more than one title per author. That is, I admit, an artificial rule, and it did give me problems on a couple of years, but it avoids the problem that the list would otherwise be dominated by the same two or three names.

Some of these were obvious from the moment I thought of doing this list (the first and last on the list, for instance), others less so, mostly when there were years in which no title really sang out to me. I was sorely tempted to list two books from one year and none from another. But if you set yourself rules, I suppose the least you can do is stick to them. So here are ten books from the last ten years. I’d be very interested tosee what your lists are.

2011
The Islanders – Christopher Priest
When I started this exercise, this was the first book I thought of. It is among the two or three very best novels Priest has written. I have read it several times now, and each time it seems fresh, each time the complexity, the daring, the humour all combine to make the book exciting and invigorating. There is always something new to discover within its maze of distortions, uncertainties, twists in time and games with identity. I reviewed the novel for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

2012
Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel
I remember the excitement of reading Wolf Hall when it first came out. I know most commentators focussed on the way the novel connected with history, the rehabilitation of Thomas Cromwell (up to that point familiarly presented as one of the villains of the age), the sense of being fully absorbed in the politics of the age. But for me what I found most engaging was the language. I wrote at Big Other about Mantel’s use of the word “he”, and what it signifies about identity and narrative voice. So now, two years later, there comes a sequel, and any fears I might have had are quickly dispelled: the same language, the same inhabitation of the age. The two books together are simply magnificent.

2013
Life After Life – Kate Atkinson
I continue to regard this book as one of the finest works of science fiction of the last decade, although, as I said when I wrote about it here, it is a book that demands not to be read as science fiction. It is a variant on an alternate history novel, but here it is a single life, a single consciousness, that is fragmented. Ursula constantly dies and is reborn, barely if at all conscious of her previous existences, but always trying to relive her life in a way that brings her closer to achieving her goal, which is the survival of her brother who, most commonly, is killed in a bomber raid over Germany during World War II. The sequel, A God in Ruins, details the emptiness of the life that is thus saved, making for an extraordinarily powerful dyptych of novels.

2014
The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
Not, perhaps, his finest novel (that, surely, is Cloud Atlas), but still a vivid, beautifully realised, and always compelling novel that manages to turn the half-sensed interlinking background that has underlain all of his
previous books into the foreground of the story. And it does so without in any way undermining the faithfulness of Mitchell’s portrayal of ordinary life from the recent past to the near future. As I wrote here, it spells out the patternmaking that is Mitchell’sapproach to writing.

2015
The Thing Itself – Adam Roberts
I had a struggle with myself over Roberts’s place on this list: should his place go to The Thing Itself or to The Black Prince? If I were to subvert my own rules I would do both, without hesitation. But in the end I decided to go with The Thing Itself, partly because, while I love the way The Black Prince retells a medieval story in the manner of John Dos Passos, The Thing Itself includes a whole series of chapters recapturing literary styles that vary from 18th century prose to the work of James Joyce. It’s a joy to read, and the way the title offers a mash-up of John W. Campbell and Immanuel Kant demonstrates what a wild intellectual journey this book is.

2016
The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead
Over the years, I have been in disagreement with the Arthur C. Clarke Award more often than not. I have found shortlists to be wilful and bizarre on too many occasions, but even then the right book might emerge as the winner, and this is one such. It is powerful, haunting, unforgettable, all of which I tried to compress into this piece about the book when I was on the Shadow Clarke jury.

2017
The Rift – Nina Allan
Back at the end of 2017, when I wrote my list of the year’s reading, when it came to this novel I simply put: “My book of the year.” I didn’t elaborate, I didn’t try to justify the choice, somehow it felt like I didn’t need to. This was one of those books that was just so unquestionably right that I didn’t think it needed further discussion. It still feels that way to an extent. Of course, it is a novel that ticks all my boxes, a novel of indecision, of uncertainty, a novel that could go in any direction depending upon how we choose to read it. Isn’t that what a great book is supposed to do? Well, so far as I am concerned it is.

2018
Europe at Dawn – Dave Hutchinson
Okay, I’m playing slightly fast and loose with my own rules here, in that I am using the final novel in Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence to stand in for the whole series. Europe in Autumn not winning the Clarke Award was one of the occasions on which I seriously parted company with them. What I wrote about the third book, Europe in Winter, for the Shadow Clarke jury, sums up much of my feeling about the sequence, which I see as one of the most politically relevant works of science fiction we have seen for many years. And the way I see Europe at Dawn as a fine conclusion to the series is spelled out in my review for Locus.

2019
Ivory Apples – Lisa Goldstein
I admit, I have doubts about including this novel in the list. I enjoyed it immensely, and as I said in my review
for Strange Horizons, I thought it was a major work of contemporary fantasy. Yet it somehow feels, in retrospect, slighter than some of the other titles on this list. But I wonder whether that is primarily an artefact of the way 2019 felt to me, a year in which nothing seemed to blaze particularly brightly. I’ve often found that in a year of good books it is easy to spot the great ones; but in a year of mediocre books, even the good ones seem diminished. That was 2019 for me; this is a good novel, it probably deserves its place, but it wasn’t a particularly good year.

2020
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again – M. John Harrison
Yeah, this is no surprise, is it? Only yesterday I was writing my massive survey of the year’s reading, and I said then that this was without doubt the novel of the year. Well, it is. It is the summation of everything we love about Harrison’s writing: the supple prose, the intense realism, the inescapable sense of the weird beginning to break in around the edges.

Boundaries

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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.

100 Books

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nina allan

The other week, the BBC published a list of The 100 Novels that Shaped Our World. It’s as tendentious as such lists inevitably are, though there is also, inevitably, some interest in it.

In response, Nina Allan produced her own list of The 100 Novels that Shaped Her World. This is more personal, and therefore more revealing in its way. And I find myself much more in sympathy with Nina’s list than with the BBC’s. She also suggested that “we all get naked” and produce our own lists. So I have done precisely that. Well, with qualifications.

Nina didn’t keep strictly to the remit of novels, since she included T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (understandably, of course). I have broken with the remit even more dramatically, since my list includes a fair bit of poetry and non-fiction. To be honest, novels alone would not give an accurate or a coherent picture of what has, since childhood, shaped me as both a reader and a writer. Right from the start of trying to compile this list (and drawing up a list of 100 books is far harder than I thought it would be) I found myself unable to avoid including books that were not novels, because they demanded their place on the list.

I have also broken with her remit of only including one title by each author. I tried to do that, and in some places I was able to sneak extra titles through (Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, for instance) in ways that don’t really seem to transgress the rule. But there are two authors I have included twice: I discovered T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems and The Four Quartets at exactly the same time (I picked them up from the same shelf in the same shop on the same school outing) and it would be invidious to pick one over the other. And H.G. Wells also appears twice because the two books are exemplars of two different branches of his career, and both, in very different ways, have been very important to me. Again, I could not pick one over the other.

Other than that, I will follow Nina’s pattern and list the books without comment. Partly because a list of 100 titles is long enough anyway, and any commentary would stretch this post to breaking point. And also, you don’t really need to know which novel I ripped off for the first piece of fiction I ever wrote (when I was 10), or which book shaped my desire to be a critic, or which novel I hated on first acquaintance but came to admire on revisiting. You might guess, of course, though you might well be wrong.

I thought long and hard about how to present this list. Should it be in the order the books occurred to me? Or chronological order of publication? Or in some order that reflects when I first read them? In the end, alphabetical order of author seems the most straightforward. So here goes:

100 Books that have shaped me as a reader and as a writer:

English Music – Peter Ackroyd

Report on Probability A – Brian Aldiss

The Rift – Nina Allan

Look to the Lady – Margery Allingham

Life After Life – Kate Atkinson

The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

The Bridge – Iain Banks

Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks

The Untouchable – John Banville

The Famous Five – Enid Blyton

A Postillion Struck by Lightning – Dirk Bogarde

The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolano

Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges

The New Confessions – William Boyd

The Ascent of Man – Jacob Bronowski

Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner

Earthly Powers – Anthony Burgess

True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

Best Science Fiction of the Year 3 – Edited by Terry Carr

Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

The Poems of C.P. Cavafy

The Blazing World – Margaret Cavendish

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie

Strokes – John Clute

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe – D.G. Compton

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Just William – Richmal Crompton

Aegypt Quartet – John Crowley

House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski

Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany

Underworld – Don DeLillo

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

Loon Lake – E.L. Doctorow

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle

My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell

The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell

Selected Poems – T.S. Eliot

The Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot

Tours of the Black Clock – Steve Erickson

A Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor

Time and Again – Jack Finney

The Civil War trilogy – Shelby Foote

Sarah Canary – Karen Joy Fowler

The Magus – John Fowles

The Stone Book Quartet – Alan Garner

The Spire – William Golding

Lanark – Alasdair Gray

The Course of the Heart – M. John Harrison

Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

The Mersey Sound – Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten

Riddley Walker – Russell Hoban

Mythago Wood – Robert Holdstock

The Blazing World – Siri Hustvedt

The Turn of the Screw – Henry James

Phoenix Café – Gwyneth Jones

Report to Greco – Nikos Kazantzakis

900 Grandmothers – R.A. Lafferty

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin

Decision at Delphi – Helen MacInnes

Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Children of the New Forest – Frederick Marryat

C – Tom McCarthy

Enduring Love – Ian McEwan

Loving Little Egypt – Thomas McMahon

The Metaphysical Club – Louis Menand

Martin Dressler – Steven Millhauser

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

Utopia – Thomas More

Hav – Jan Morris

The City, Not Long After – Pat Murphy

Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov

My Name is Red – Orhan Pamuk

An Instance of the Fingerpost – Iain Pears

James Tiptree Jr – Julie Phillips

Woman on the Edge of Time – Marge Piercy

The Affirmation – Christopher Priest

An Inspector Calls – J.B. Priestley

The King Must Die – Mary Renault

The Chalk Giants – Keith Roberts

Queen of the States – Josephine Saxton

Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers

Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg

Skin and Bones – Thorne Smith

Memento Mori – Muriel Spark

Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard

Sophie’s Choice – William Styron

Waterland – Graham Swift

Warm Worlds and Otherwise – James Tiptree Jr.

The Ruby in her Navel – Barry Unsworth

Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr

The Time Machine – H.G. Wells

The History of Mr Polly – H.G. Wells

Sinai Tapestry – Edward Whittemore

Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Uncle Fred in the Springtime – P.G. Wodehouse

The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe

Shadowing the Clarke

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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?

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

How 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.

For 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.

You 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.

2017 in Review

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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.