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Clarke Award 2010: in review

26th April 2010 / / 9 Comments

The commentary I’ve encountered on this year’s Clarke Award generally agrees on two things: that it’s a five-horse race, and that Chris Wooding is the author who’s written the also-ran. Having read all the shortlisted novels, I must concur with that view. Retribution Falls is a good book on its own terms — a superior sf adventure story — but it seems lacking in the context of this shortlist. It just doesn’t have the extra depth that the others, in their different ways, all have. For that reason, Wooding’s book is first out of the running for me.

The favourite to win the Clarke this year is The City & the City. This is a fascinating, innovative novel (the first, as far as I’m aware, to engage so explicity with the crtical taxonomy of fantasy that has emerged in the last fifteeen years), possibly China Miéville’s best-written to date. I like it very much… but I don’t think it should win. The reason I don’t think it should win is that the Clarke is an award for science fiction, and The City & the City doesn’t make sense if read as sf — one is forced into an unsatisfactory psychological interpretation. However, the novel does make sense — and is much more interesting — if read as fantasy (see my review for more on this); I’d be happy for it to win any fantasy awards for which it may be nominated, but I don’t see it as a good fit for the Clarke.

I intended to review the entire shortlist, but, in the end, I’m one title down. The reason I haven’t written previously about Gwyneth Jones‘s Spirit is that I really struggled to get to grips with it. I grasped the basics of the story, but there’s so much else about which I’m not sure that I can’t see my way to giving the novel a proper review. Why I experienced this difficulty, I don’t know; maybe it was because of all the associated books I hadn’t read (Spirit is a re-interpretation of The Count of Monte Cristo, and is connected to both Jones’s earlier Aleutian Trilogy and her Bold as Love sequence), maybe something else. Whatever, though I’m not able to comment on Spirit in detail, I do gain an impression of a significant work.

Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson combines fictional historical biography with far-future sf, to what I found was mixed effect. It is an excellent work at times, but tries one’s patience at others, and its two aspects don’t integrate as well as they might. But there’s a lot about the book that I know I missed (I didn’t pick up on all the sbutext, for example), so I’m quite willing to accept that Galileo’s Dream is a stronger book than I found it to be, and hence a strong contender for the Clarke.

There’s also a lot about Adam Roberts‘s Yellow Blue Tibia that I know I missed — but, all the same, I thoroughly loved it. Of all the shortlisted title, this is the one I enjoyed the most, both for its humour and for what it does as a work of imaginative literature. I can’t judge in full how successful it is, because for that I’d need more knowledge of its historical setting, and the science fiction with which it engages — but it’s worthy of winning the Clarke as far as I’m concerned.

Finally, Marcel Theroux‘s excellent Far North, which is my other pick of the shortlist. A post-disaster novel which is less about the effect of change on the world than itseffect on humanity, this is a quiet book that makes its point subtly and with force. It works superbly as an aesthetic whole, to a greater extent than perhaps any other novel on the shortlist. A win for Far North would be thoroughly deserved.

So, I’d most like to see Roberts or Theroux be awarded the Clarke this year, but, really, it’s an open field, and I would not like to predict who will win. The winner will be announced this Wednesday, and I look forward to finding out whom it will be.

Jim Hawkins, ‘Chimbwi’ (2010)

25th April 2010 / / 1 Comment

Sometimes, I read a short story and find that, for whatever reason, I can’t put together any proper thoughts on it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the story is at fault, just that I didn’t manage to connect with it. And there’s no problem with this — unless I’ve undertaken to write something about the piece in question. That’s the situation I find myself in now.

‘Chimbwi’ is the story of Jason Johns, a physicist who has left behind a Europe devastated by environmental change, and travelled to Africa, because Zambia is the global centre of advances in physics. I don’t know what I think about this story, and I feel it would be unfair to make any kind of evaluative comment; so this post is here, for the sake of completeness, to record that I’ve read ‘Chimbwi’, and I apologise for not blogging about it properly.

This story appears in issue 227 of Interzone. Read all my blog posts about that issue here.

Interzone 227: Mar-Apr 2010

19th April 2010 / / 3 Comments

Another issue of Interzone, and six fresh stories:

Jon Ingold, ‘The History of Poly-V’

Mercurio D. Rivera, ‘Dance of the Kawkawroons’

Jim Hawkins, ‘Chimbwi’

Nina Allan, ‘Flying in the Face of God’

Chris Beckett, ‘Johnny’s New Job’

Steve Rasnic Tem, ‘The Glare and the Glow’

UPDATE, 14th May: Nina Allan’s story edges into first place as my favourite in this issue, with Chris Beckett’s contribution a very close second — but both are excellent.

‘Mainstream’

16th April 2010 / / 9 Comments

There was a discussion panel at Eastercon this year called ‘What do we mean by “mainstrean”?’, with particular reference to the works of Iain Banks – the reason behind it being that, even though it seems fairly straightforward to say that Banks publishes science fiction with a middle initial in his name, and mainstream fiction without, when you actually look at the range of what he has published under the name ‘Iain Banks’, he becomes a difficult writer to pin down (by the end of the discussion, the suggestion was that he’s often a gothic writer).

This topic is of interest to me, not because I’m particularly widely read in Banks (I’ve read only three each of the two ‘groups’ of his books), but because of how I’ve changed as a reader over the last few years. Even five years ago, I was primarily a reader of science fiction and fantasy; now those are just two aspects of what I read. What has happened is that, over the last few years, I have ‘discovered’ – grown to appreciate – mainstream fiction.

Or have I?

To explore what I mean, I’m going to refer to my list of favourite books read in 2009 (the first year when I both recorded everything I read, and made a properly considered list of favourites). Five of these twelve clearly fall within the field of the fantastic; two more are part of that field (by my definition), but were not published as such (and perhaps were not conceived as such, either); and five fall outside it. Of the five non-fantastic novels, there’s something unusual about the style or structure (or both) of four of them, and I’d suggest that even the fifth is not straightforward.

When I look at those latter five books, the term ‘mainstream’ doesn’t seem right for them to me.

(Interestingly, when I look at the sf/fantasy/horror works on my list, I find that they’re also quite unusual in their own ways, and I actually see quite a lot of commonality across the twelve. I’m clearly to drawn to that kind of book in general, a thought that’s borne out by my favourite reads so far this year.)

So, how would I define ‘mainstream fiction’? One could define it as ‘not genre fiction’, but I think that’s an artificial opposition, because it seems to me that genres overlap and merge into each other so much. One could define ‘mainstream’ in terms of popularity, but (though I haven’t any sales figures) doesn’t ‘genre fiction’ tend to be the most popular? The more I think about the term ‘mainstream’, the more elusive it seems to be.

Over to you, reader: what does ‘mainstream’ mean to you, and where does it sit in your personal reading spectrum?

Marcel Theroux, Far North (2009)

14th April 2010 / / 13 Comments

Marcel Theroux’s Far North is a tale of endurance and survival, though not necessarily in the way one might anticipate.

Our narrator is Makepeace Hatfield, the constable of a frontier town in Siberia, though she’s not really sure how many people there are to protect and/or fend off any more. Makepeace is the daughter of parents who, along with others from the US, settled in Siberia looking for a simpler life, environmental changes having put intolerable pressures on the life they knew. It didn’t work out, and now who knows what’s going on in the wider world? Not Makepeace, who has enough on her plate with day-to-day living. But when, one day, she sees a plane – a sure sign of other humanity – she decides to head out beyond her town to see what she can find. In due course, she is captured and taken to a prison-town, where she discovers that maybe not all of that old world has gone, or perhaps a new one may yet be forged.

Far North is striking both for what it is and is not. It is a clearly told tale (Theroux’s prose is expressive, but not densely poetic; the latter would be out of place in the harsh world of his book) of a woman who has to face up to a life and world of deep contradiction; for example, she doesn’t ‘share [her parents’] view of the merits of scarcity’ (50), yet efforts to rebuild the world bring their own difficulties.

But, even though Far North tells of an individual making her way through the wilderness, it’s not a tale of survival in a documentary sense; the landscapes and how people live are in there, but the details of those aren’t the main focus. Rather, I think Theroux is interested in depicting a more fundamental kind of endurance – the endurance of the human spirit.

Throughout the novel, one is constantly reminded that this is a story: the references to Makepeace writing her words down; the beats of the narrative (the knowledge that Makepeace is a woman comes twenty pages in, in a way that could wrong-foot the unwary reader). And, if we take the view that stories are a way in which humans make sense of the world, then we can say that a story is being enacted even in this harsh setting, which would seem to have no room for stories. Yet the story goes on, and so does humanity.

What I take away most from Far North is a sense of the enormous pressures (and I’m talking about psychic pressures here as much as physical ones) under which Theroux’s characters have been placed, and the price they’ve had to pay within themselves in order to survive. The novel’s title refers to a moral compass as well as a geographical one, and the idea that, if you travel far enough north, all directions start to lose meaning. Both Makepeace and other characters have done (and do) morally reprehensible things; but right and wrong become malleable concepts in the reality of this book, and that’s what Theroux captures so well.

Far North announces itself quietly, and never raises its voice – but its echoes remain after the book is closed. Like humankind in the tale, it endures.

Links
Marcel Theroux’s website
Theroux writes about the novel

This book has been nominated for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Read all my posts on the Award here.

Orange Award for New Writers 2010: The shortlist

13th April 2010 / / 2 Comments

This morning, the shortlist for this year’s Orange Award for New Writers was announced; and, since it includes one of my favourite books from last year, I thought I’d blog the nominees. The full list is:

Jane Borodale, The Book of Fires

Irene Sabatini, The Boy Next Door

Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice

I loved Evie Wyld’s book, so I’m very pleased to see it shortlisted — and I’ll be interested to discover how the other two titles compare. Congratulations to all three nominees!

The month in reading: March 2010

1st April 2010 / / 0 Comments

I didn’t get as much time to read in March as I’d hoped, and so read relatively few books last month, but the pick of the bunch was And This is True,  Emily Mackie‘s debut novel about a son trying to come to terms with his changing relationship with his father, and about the treacherousness of memory.

Other highlights from March were  Suzanne Bugler‘s fine character study, This Perfect World; Alex Preston‘s tale of the financial world, This Bleeding City; and Alastair Reynolds‘s sf adventure, Terminal World. And Simon Kurt Unsworth‘s ‘The Knitted Child’ was a simply beautiful short story.

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2010: The shortlist

31st March 2010 / / 11 Comments

The shortlist of the 2010 Clarke Award (for the best science fiction novel published in the UK in 2009) has been announced. The six nominees are:

Gwyneth Jones, Spirit

China Miéville, The City & the City

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia

Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream

Marcel Theroux, Far North

Chris Wooding, Retribution Falls

This is an interesting mix of books. I plan to read and review the entire shortlist (I’ve read three already; reviews are linked above, as will the others be), so I’ll have more to say as time goes on, but here’s an initial reaction:

The book I’m most pleased to see on there is Yellow Blue Tibia.  It has met with mixed reactions, but I found it a stunning read. The City & the City is a novel which has generated much debate, and is very much open to interpretation (perhaps more so than any of Miéville’s previous works); I like it, but I don’t think it quite works. I didn’t like Galileo’s Dream as much, but I know there’s more to it than I was able to see.

As for the three books I’ve not read: I had a feeling that Spirit might make the shortlist, as I’ve heard some very good things about it. I don’t know much about the other two titles: I’ve read one of Chris Wooding’s previous books , and thought it good (albeit not great), but I’ve not read Marcel Theroux at all.

Overall, from what I know of these six books, I would say this a nicely varied list — varied in terms of settings, types of sf, and approaches, and in the mixture of well-known and lesser-known names. I look forward to reading the complete shortlist, and finding out who will win.

UPDATE, 26th Apr: Round-up post

Second UPDATE, 29th Apr: The winner

Black Static 15: Feb-Mar 2010

5th March 2010 / / 5 Comments

I’ve been blogging Interzone, so it’s only fair to do the same for TTA Press’s horror/dark fantasy title, Black Static. There are five stories in the latest issue, which are:

James Cooper, ‘Eight Small Men’

Simon Kurt Unsworth, ‘The Knitted Child’

Alan Scott Laney, ‘Maximum Darkness’

Daniel Kaysen, ‘Babylon’s Burning’

Sarah Singleton, ‘Death by Water’

EDIT, 9th April: All complete, and my pick of the issue is the Unsworth piece, with the Singleton second.

The month in reading: February 2010

3rd March 2010 / / 2 Comments

I didn’t read quite as much in February as I did in January — but I did read a couple of books that I’m pretty sure will end up on my list of favourite reads of the year. So, my pick for ‘book of February’ is a dead heat between Liz Jensen‘s masterly character study/climate-change thriller The Rapture, and Skippy Dies, Paul Murray‘s sprawling tale of growing up (with added touches of comedy and theoretical physics).

Also on my recommended list from last month are Dan Rhodes‘ macabre Little Hands Clapping, and Amy Sackville‘s otherworldly The Still Point. And I should mention ‘Again and Again and Again’, Rachel Swirsky‘s highly enjoyable story from the most recent issue of Interzone.

All good reads, there. Check them out.

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