Tag: science fiction

Clarke Award 2012: in review

29th April 2012 / / 7 Comments

The Guardian’s Robert McCrum recently expressed concern that literary awards were becoming more about gossip than about actual books. Whether or not he’s right about that, McCrum is certainly correct to highlight the value of awards in creating focal points for discussion. As I know first-hand, talking about and comparing a given set of books can be a tremendously stimulating and rewarding experience – but it helps if the books are worth discussing in the first place.

And, on that note, let’s turn to the shortlist for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. This is the third year I’ve read the full Clarke list and, I have to say, it’s a dispiritingly bland selection this time around. Anyone looking for the cutting edge of UK science fiction publishing – or even just literary excellence – is not going to find it on this list. It frustrates me when I think of the eligible novels I’ve read which are better than any of the shortlisted titles; and the gems I haven’t read which must be out there.

***

There’s usually one obviously weak candidate to be struck off the shortlist first; but this year I’m spoilt for choice, which is not a pleasant situation to be in. After due consideration, I think I’m going to hand the wooden spoon to The End Specialist by Drew Magary. This is a novel which fails on just about every level, right down to being a thriller that doesn’t thrill; it’s pedestrianly written, parochial when it purports not to be, ineffective as both a character study and an exploration of a world without ageing… I could go on, but the book really doesn’t deserve more words.

I could do with two wooden spoons, really, because there’s barely a difference in quality between the Magary and The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper. This is the book which has been most comprehensively disliked by just about everyone I know who’s been reading the shortlist (see Maureen Kincaid Speller’s review, for instance). Leaving aside issues of its genre, the Tepper shares many of The End Specialist’s faults – weak writing, poor plotting, questionable morality – but I think its ideas are marginally more interesting. That’s the only reason The Waters Rising isn’t out of the balloon first.

Now on to Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three, which, unlike the previous two novels, at least achieves a baseline level of competence. Bear’s mystery-thriller-space-opera is decently written, reasonably diverting – and, as far as I can see, has nothing to distinguish it from the many other competent-but-unremarkable science fiction novels out there. We’re now halfway through the shortlist, and we still haven’t come to a book which, in my eyes, has any claim to be on it.

I don’t really want Embassytown to win the Clarke; it’s nowhere near China Miéville’s best work, and – well, frankly, it’s the closest I have ever come to being bored by a Miéville book. I have to acknowledge that, compared to the three novels I’ve already covered, Embassytown is a much better written, constructed, and more ambitious work – indeed, it’s probably the most conceptually ambitious novel on the shortlist – but I think it’s ultimately too dry and abstract to be successful. Better Miéville than one of the previous three, yes – but, better still, one of the remaining two.

Rule 34 by Charles Stross has its flaws – its exposition is at times overdone; its police-procedural plot doesn’t quite cohere – but, of all the books on the shortlist, it is the one which feels most engaged with the present and the near future. The world it depicts is intriguing and compelling; the issues it raises demand serious consideration; and the prose, at its best, is snappy and sharp. This novel does the sorts of things that good science fiction should be doing.

That leaves The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, which I think is a very well-realised study of its teenage protagonist and, in its own way, one of the more challenging shortlisted works. This may be the most successfully achieved of the novels on the list, but it’s also rather narrow in its focus. So it’s quite a fine line between this and the Stross, which trades a little polish for a broader scope; I’d be happy enough for either The Testament or Rule 34 to win. But the thing is that books like these two should really be the bread and butter of the Clarke shortlist, not its centrepiece.

***

That’s what I’d like to win, but what may actually take the Clarke? Having been through the Fantasy Clarke panel at Eastercon, I have a better idea of the kinds of discussions which might have taken place between the judges, and I’m fairly sure that the Bear and Tepper are too generic to survive the judging process. The Magary may do (though I hope is doesn’t): there’s an energy to its telling that may – along with whatever the judges must perforce have seen in the novel that I don’t – carry it through. The Rogers may not last long in the judging (though I hope it does) – its narrow focus may prove the book’s undoing, depending on how the judges weight that against its craft. The Miéville will almost certainly be a contender, and is enough of an all-rounder that it might even win. The Stross is difficult to call, though I suspect it will survive in the judging process for quite some time, possibly to the very end. We’ll find out when the winner is announced on Wednesday.

Charles Stross, Rule 34 (2011)

29th April 2012 / / 8 Comments

Charles Stross returns to the near-future Edinburgh of his 2007 novel Halting State for this police procedural (though I’ve not read the earlier book, I don’t believe there is any substantial crossover between the two). A decade from now, DI Liz Kavanaugh’s CID career has stalled as she’s currently heading up the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit (or ‘Rule 34 Squad’), which investigates crime based on the spreading of internet memes; one of ICIU’s current cases, the bizarre murder of a known spammer, suddenly gains more prominence when similar crimes come to light. Elsewhere, Anwar Hussain, an ex-crook on probation, gets a job through a friend as Consul for a months-old breakaway republic, though he doesn’t quite appreciate what he’s getting into; and a man known to us as ‘the Toymaker’ arrives in Scotland to set up a new branch of his criminal enterprise – if only the people he’s there to recruit didn’t keep getting themselves murdered…

Perhaps the most immediately noticeable thing about Rule 34 is that (like Halting State) it is written in the second-person. Now, a childhood of adventure gamebooks and text adventures means I’m reasonably used to being addressed as ‘you’ by a text; but that kind of narration has always tended to distance me from viewpoint characters, because it focuses my attention on action rather than on interior life – and I found that to be the case again here. There are a few occasions when emotion leaps off the page; but, for the most part, the style gets in the way.

Mentioning the style brings to mind Christopher Priest’s infamous comment that ‘Stross writes like an internet puppy’. He has a point – Stross tends to include slightly more detail than will sit comfortably in the narrative, and there are times when this threatens to halt Rule 34 in its tracks (especially a long stretch of exposition towards the end) – but there’s also a restless energy to Stross’s telling; at its best, the writing works very well indeed (a passage on the war on spam, for example, captures an aspect of Stross’s imagined future in a particularly compelling way).

Stross presents an intriguing vision of a society which is substantially more technologically advanced than the present, yet still fraying at the edges; a world of fluidity and compromise. Police officers are wired into an augmented reality called ‘CopSpace’, but useful teleconferencing and face recognition remain beyond reach.Scotland has seceded from the United Kingdom, but not fully, so politics can be messily ambiguous. Policing is less about great detectives than groups of workers searching for patterns in data (‘crowdsourcing by cop,’ as Stross puts it [p. 227]). Throughout the novel, we see individuals, groups, and nations finding gaps and weak points in the system to use to their own advantage, or at least to get by.

As a procedural, I don’t think Rule 34 works quite so well: some of the connections between plot threads take too long to come into the narrative after they’ve been made apparent to the reader; the threads as a whole don’t mesh together as successfully as they might; and the foregrounding towards the end of a particular plot element (which has previously been mentioned in passing) is rather too abrupt. But the book and the world around the procedural are what make Rule 34 worth reading – and what make it one of the stronger titles on this year’s Clarke shortlist.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Elsewhere
Charles Stross’s website
Some other reviews of Rule 34: Maureen Kincaid Speller; Dan Hartland; Niall Alexander.

Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (2010)

18th April 2012 / / 3 Comments

When I think about what I want from a literary award shortlist, a selection of excellent books is of course a must; but I’d also like to see books that, once read, feel essential – selections that mean you’ll have missed out if you don’t read them. In Hull Zero Three, the Clarke judges have chosen something different: a decent-enough novel that nobody needs to read.

A man, who comes to be known as ‘Teacher’, wakes (with no memory) from his induced hibernation to discover that his dream of having travelled across the stars to a new planet has not become reality. On the contrary, Teacher finds himself aboard a cold, dark, and largely deserted spacecraft (called simply ‘Ship’)  – deserted, that is, but for the monstrous creatures which threaten to do away with him; and the handful of survivors who might help him figure out what has happened.

As a mystery-thriller-in-space, Hull Zero Three works well enough. True, its prose rarely rises above the level of straightforward functionality; but the aesthetic that creates is entirely appropriate for the stark geometry of Ship and claustrophobic focus of the novel (tellingly, I think, those scenes where the prose does move into a more poetic register tend not to be set in the fictional present). The pacing is fine, and Greg Bear is a sufficiently canny science fiction writer that his plot twists and resolution are interesting.

But the mystery is all in Hull Zero Three, and the novel can’t move beyond the limitations that creates. There’s not much room for characterisation, nor to really explore the moral issues raised by the situation. And, even though Bear’s narrative moves along at a fair old clip, three hundred pages still feels rather long for what it is.

Hull Zero Three is a novel that can sit happily on bookstore shelves and be pointed to as evidence that solid reads are still being produced in the science fiction genre. But, if you never took it down from the shelf to read it, you would be none the worse off. It’s a book that passes the time, but I can’t get at all excited about it; that’s not the kind of work I want to see on the Clarke shortlist.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Drew Magary, The End Specialist (2011)

16th April 2012 / / 6 Comments

A few years hence, an accidental scientific discovery has led to a treatment which will halt the process of ageing; barring disease or accident, immortality may be yours – provided you can afford the fee, of course. Divorce lawyer John Farrell has the ‘cure’ (as it’s known) in 2019, weeks before it is legalised in theUSA. We then follow his life at various intervals over the course of the following sixty years, during which Farrell ultimately changes career to ‘end specialisation’, facilitating (for a fee) the deaths of those who wish to end their lives, in the manner of their own choosing.

The End Specialist (aka The Postmortal) provides an interesting point of comparison with its fellow Clarke Award nominee The Testament of Jessie Lamb, in that both examine futures with game-changing medical developments, but do so firmly from the vantage-point of one individual. The key difference, I think, is that The Testament shows the outside world from within Jessie Lamb’s frame of reference – which makes for an incomplete examination, but one that nevertheless works as an aesthetic whole; whereas The End Specialist tries to show the outside world from beyond John Farrell’s frame of reference – hence the protagonist includes news reports and link round-ups in the ‘blog entries’ that make up the text of this novel – and, in doing so, reaches beyond itself.

Much of the positive commentary I’ve seen on Drew Magary’s novel – both in reviews and the Not the Clarke Panel at Eastercon – seems to emphasise the extent to which Magary delineates the consequences of the situation he sets up. There are certainly aspects of The End Specialist which ring true, such as the sense of ennui felt by Farrell when he notes that his photo doesn’t change, and wonders if maybe he hasn’t either (‘The time span is invisible. It’s as if I haven’t lived at all,’ p. 84); and I can buy, for example, the idea that some people might be pettily cruel enough to blind or scar immortals out of spite. But much of Magary’s depiction of his wider fictional world (whether within or outside theUS) feels superficial to me, because it is dependent on John Farrell’s interest; and, as a character, Farrell really has only a passing interest in the world beyond his immediate circumstances.

Even when it’s concerned with Farrell’s circumstances, though, The End Specialist falls short. As Dan Hartland notes, Farrell is a fairly anonymous presence; nothing really seems to touch or change him, no matter what he might say in his narration (that’s another way, incidentally, in which the depiction of the world feels flat; no matter how sour life has apparently becomes, the fictional society feels much the same, because the tone of Farrell’s narration doesn’t change). The depiction of the secondary characters is similarly wanting, particularly that of the female characters; it’s true that most of the minor characters, male and female alike, exist to be adjuncts to Farrell, but I gain more sense of his father and adult son as rounded individuals than I do the key women in Farrell’s life. I rolled my eyes particularly at the essentialism of a scene in which Farrell leaves his pregnant partner Sonia rather than get married, because immortality has caused him to realise (as the other men he knows have similarly concluded in their own lives) that he can’t make a lifelong commitment to her – whereas Sonia maintains a desire to fulfil traditional gender roles (and Farrell has no doubts about his ability to commit to his son for however long their lives may be).

On the level of prose, I’m still struggling to see The End Specialist as a worthwhile read. The scene I mentioned earlier, where Farrell is reflecting on his unchanging appearance, stands out to me for its writing; as did one in which an end specialism client describes his wish to become one with the sea. But the rest feels unremarkable, even when the novel takes on the shape of a thriller in its second half – and a thriller can’t do its job if it doesn’t have gripping prose.

Frankly, I’m baffled as to why this book is on the Clarke shortlist. However I look at The End Specialist, I see a novel which is mediocre at best – and sometimes considerably poorer. What I can’t see is any way in which it could be considered one of the six best science fiction novels of the year.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Eastercon: Olympus 2012

14th April 2012 / / 5 Comments

It’s been a week since I went to Eastercon (the British National Science Fiction Convention), and I must conclude that it was the best convention I’ve ever been to. Olympus 2012 was my second full Eastercon, and one I was particularly looking to – partly because I knew so many more people there than I did two years ago, and partly because I was signed up to be involved in more.

Probably the most significant event from my point of view was the panel on mainstream-published sf and fantasy, where I took the role of moderator for the first time; joining me were critics Maureen Kincaid Speller and Damien G. Walter, author Nick Harkaway, and publisher Jo Fletcher. I was too busy concentrating on managing the discussion to really judge how it went; but the feedback I had at the convention was positive, and confirmed that we’d managed (as I aimed) to avoid the defensiveness which so often seems to come along in discussions of the subject. I’m glad that people enjoyed the panel; I certainly enjoyed moderating, and am already thinking about possible topics for future panels.

My second event as participant was Niall Harrison’s Fantasy Clarke Award panel, in which I and my fellow-panellists – Nic Clarke, Erin Horáková, Edward James, and Juliet E. McKenna – debated the ‘shortlist’ of UK-published fantasy novels from 2011 that we’d previously drawn up (namely Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes; Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake; Kate Elliott’s Cold Fire; Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s The Fallen Blade; Frances Hardinge’s Twilight Robbery; and Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox). After a vigorous hour’s discussion, we had it down to The Heroes and Mr Fox, with Abercrombie’s novel ultimately winning out; which is not a bad result at all, in my view.

What this panel – and the traditional Not the Clarke panel, in which a group of former judges discuss the current Clarke Award shortlist – brought home to me was what a difficult job the Clarke jury (or the judges of any literary award, for that matter) must have in narrowing pools of books down. I might think I’ve reasoned out my opinions on the six novels in advance; but, bring them up against the equally-reasoned opinions of four other people, and it’s clear there is a whole lot more thinking to be done – and probably thinking on aspects of the books which I hadn’t even considered. Tough though it was to agree on which books we’d jettison when (and I’m sure all of us had moments of compromise), the Fantasy Clarke panel was also a rare chance to discuss a set of books face-to-face in some reasonable depth, and I could happily have continued longer. Afterwards, the consensus among the audience seemed to be that we should repeat the exercise next year, and I think it would be great if the panel became a regular occurrence.

It wasn’t all great, of course – not in a weekend which included John Meaney’s spectacularly ill-judged speech introducing the BSFA Awards. There’s nothing I can really add to what has already been said elsewhere across the internet; I was one of the people who walked out, and so missed the actual presentation of the awards. But my congratulations to Christopher Priest, Paul Cornell, Dominic Harman, and the team behind the SF Encyclopedia for their respective wins.

Socially, it was – as ever – great to catch up with familiar faces and meet unfamiliar ones for the first time (whether that’s the first time in person or in general). Those unfamiliar faces included Damien, Edward, Erin, Maureen, and Nick from the panels I mentioned above; as well as Nina Allan, Kev McVeigh, Ruth O’Reilly, Tom Pollock, Gav Pugh, Adam Roberts, and Ian Snell – apologies to anyone I’ve omitted to mention. The fluid nature of social interaction at a convention meant that I didn’t always get as much chance to speak to people as I’d have liked, but I hope that we will meet again in times to come.

My overall sense was of a convention that was great both within and beyond my personal experience of it. The event had that general atmosphere of a lot of people having a good time, whatever their particular interests in terms of programming or guests. I’ve long thought that a mainstream literary festival structured like an Eastercon would be fabulous; and Olympus only confirmed to me what a great format this can be for getting people together to share an interest in books (or what-have-you). I’m already planning to attend Eight Squared Con in Bradford next year; so let me say thank you to this year’s Eastercon committee, and good luck to next year’s!

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

4th April 2012 / / 4 Comments

Cloud Atlas is a novel that feels like a turning point. I can imagine people reading it at the time of its publication, seeing its structure – six novellas, moving forward in time from the mid-1800s to a post-collapse future, each one (bar the sixth) split in half by the next as we approach it – and thinking: where can David Mitchell go from here? What structural theatrics could follow that? From the vantage point of eight years and two more novels, we know that Mitchell turned to ostensibly more conventional narratives; so his third novel still feels like a significant moment in his career even now.

In his World Book Night programme last year, John Mullan held up Cloud Atlasas an example of an unconventional novel which has nevertheless been immensely popular. It’s not hard to see why so many people have been taken with Mitchell’s book: it’s highly entertaining. Mitchell’s control of voice and tone in all the stories – be they pulp thriller, science fiction, or period journal – is superb. The author is also adept at bringing characters to life in relatively few words; such as Robert Frobisher, the composer who flees to Holland in 1931, and whose letters to a friend form the second novella:

When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown on to a London pavement from a 1st or 2nd-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher. (pp. 43-4)

Just about the only segment of Cloud Atlas which doesn’t quite work for me is the present-day tale of Timothy Cavendish, an elderly publisher who gets inadvertently ‘checked into’ an old people’s home when he’s expecting a hotel. Whilst I’ll concede that Mitchell’s parody of contemporary literary fiction is on the button, this was the only narrative which annoyed rather than engaged me – because it’s the only one of the six to exaggerate the form it embodies.

The title of Cloud Atlas recurs in the novel several times, most literally as the name of a piece worked on by Robert Frobisher; but also in Timothy Cavendish’s wish, as he thinks back on happier times in his life and longs to find that place again, for ‘a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable’ (p. 389). From that point of view, Mitchell’s book is an aerial view of human history. It speaks to the existence of repeating patterns, reflected in the twist in each plot, and the ways in which groups and individuals prey on each other throughout the narratives.

But the structure of Cloud Atlas also speaks to the distinctiveness of times and experiences: the world of each novella is imagined so solidly that it emphasises the distance between them all, heightening the feeling of disconnection when the narrative we’ve just read is mentioned as a text in the following one. When a group of 19th-century characters discuss a future in which all peoples will know their place on the ‘ladder of civilization’ (p. 507), they have no notion of how different from that the reality will be – but we’ve seen it in the sixth novella, which returns to the same Pacific setting as the first, several centuries hence. The islanders of that latter time worship a goddess named Somni, whom we know as the artificial-human protagonist of the previous tale. Each story shapes its own world, even as we see the links between them.

One life may be a drop in the ocean, muses 19th-century notary Adam Ewing at novel’s end, ‘[y]et what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?’ (p. 529). The drops of story in Cloud Atlas coalesce into a majestic whole.

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011)

2nd April 2012 / / 11 Comments

They called it MDS – Maternal Death Syndrome. No one knew where it originated, but its effects were all too familiar: to lay waste to the brains of any women who became pregnant – with no possible exceptions, because everyone carries the disease. Jessie Lamb is a teenager living near Manchester; though her father is a fertility scientist, she has little care for the state of the world – as far as she’s concerned, this is just the way things are, and any problems are for adults to deal with.

But then, through a friend, Jessie gets involved in Youth For Independence (YOFI), a movement centred on the idea that young people must repair the damage to the world which adults have caused:

[…]maybe, if we could get enough people to join us, trying to create a different way of living on the planet, maybe that in itself would start to produce an answer to MDS. A solution we couldn’t even imagine yet. (p. 29)

There’s a touch of wishful thinking in Jessie’s thought process, here; and she soon leaves YOFI when the reality doesn’t match up to what she’d hoped. But there’s also a strong desire to do something to help; and, though none of the other protest groups which spring up in the wake of MDS is attractive to Jessie, she never loses that desire.

Jessie finally believes she has found the thing she can do when she hears about the Sleeping Beauties: girls who have volunteered to be placed into a coma so they can bring to term frozen embryos which can then receive a new vaccine against MDS (frozen embryos alone can be vaccinated because they don’t carry the disease). Jessie’s father is quite enthusiastic about the prospects of this programme initially, but soon changes his tune when his daughter declares her intention to volunteer – so much so that he holds her captive to stop her; that’s where we first meet Jessie, and where she’s writing the text we hold, which is her attempt to explain herself.

The whole world might be in the grip of an epidemic in The Testament of Jessie Lamb, but the focus is decidedly intimate. Jane Rogers seems to signal this near the near the beginning of the novel, when she has Jessie and her friend Sal imagine what would happen in a world without humans – the implication being that this playful speculation is as far as the book is going to go down that particular avenue. Likewise, though there’s social unrest in The Testament, it all takes place ‘off-stage’ or on TV news reports. This novel is about Jessie, her relationships, and the decision she wants to make.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a novel that challenges its readers to see things from its protagonist’s point of view. In the end, I can’t quite do this: I can see where Jessie is coming from – for her, it’s about having the power to do something that makes a difference, even if adults think that difference is too insignificant for the price that must be paid – and Rogers charts the course of Jessie’s thoughts clearly. But I still feel as though I’m viewing Jessie’s thought process as an outside observer, rather than truly inhabiting it. Be that as it may, The Testament is unforgiving in its treatment of hard consequences and decisions; it has the courage of its convictions and, for that, firmly deserves to be read.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Elsewhere
Jane Rogers’ website
The publisher, Sandstone Press
Booker Prize interview with Rogers
Some other reviews of The Testament of Jessie Lamb: Niall Harrison for Strange Horizons; Aishwarya Subramanian at Practically Marzipan; Richard Palmer at Solar Bridge; Sophie Playle for MouthLondon.

Paul J. McAuley, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ (1997)

31st March 2012 /

In the distant future, a ‘transcendent’ human attends a gathering of her clone descendants on an artificially-created Earth; it’s a world built for partying, but one guest seeks to spoil the fun. To an extent, McAuley’s future is so alien that one is almost inevitably emotionally distanced from it; but the juxtaposition of the galactic and human scales can be quite affecting, especially at the beautiful ending.

Rating: ***½

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Not the Only Planet.

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2012: The Shortlist

26th March 2012 / / 8 Comments

For the second year running, I’ve predicted only a third of the Clarke Award shortlist. Here are this year’s contenders:

Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (Gollancz)

Drew Magary, The End Specialist (Harper Voyager)

China Miéville, Embassytown (Macmillan)

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone)

Charles Stross, Rule 34 (Orbit)

Sheri S. Tepper, The Waters Rising (Gollancz)

(The titles above will become review links as I work my way through the shortlist.)

It’s customary, on first seeing a shortlist, to rue the absence of certain titles – I’ll name Christopher Priest’s The Islanders as the big genre name I expected to be there; Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys as the book I wanted to be shortlisted because I loved it; and Lavie Tidhar’s Osama as the talked-about genre title I was looking forward to reading – but what of the actual shortlisted books?

It’s no surprise to see China Miéville shortlisted for the Clarke when he has an eligible title, and Embassytown is his most unambiguously science-fictional work yet. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if it won (which would give Miéville his fourth Clarke win), but I found Embassytown rather dry to read, and can’t see it as a sure-fire winner.

There are no other previous winners on this year’s shortlist, but Sheri S. Tepper has been nominated for the Clarke three times previously, in 1997, 1998,and most recently in 2009 for The Margarets. I tried to read that book at the time, but didn’t get along with it; The Waters Rising, though, is sequel to a novel I’ve long wanted to read – 1993’s A Plague of Angels – so we’ll see.

Greg Bear has been shortlisted twice previously, in 1987 and 2004. Like Tepper, I think of him as a writer whose heyday was in the 1980s and ‘90s; but the premise of Hull Zero Three – the voyage of a generation starship goes badly awry, and it falls to the survivors to work out what happened – sounds intriguing enough. I’m less sure that it sounds like the premise of an award-winning science fiction novel, though.

Charles Stross has received one previous Clarke nomination, in 2006. I’ve not read him before, but Rule 34 – a near-future thriller concerning an investigation into the murders of several spammers – has been well-received, and it is probably the book on the shortlist to which I’m looking forward to reading the most.

Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb is this year’s non-genre contender. It was, of course, longlisted for the Booker last year, and has been rather well-liked in sf circles; however, I don’t know that what I’ve heard about it convinces me that it was the best mainstream-published sf novel of 2011. Still, I have been intending to read this book for ages, and now I will finally be doing so.

Which leaves Drew Magary’s The End Specialist as the least-known quantity on the shortlist for me. From my researches, I can tell you that it’s a debut novel, a thriller set in a future where a treatment has been developed to halt ageing, and there have been a range of reactions to the book. The synopsis wouldn’t move me to read The End Specialist, but if its Clarke nod means I’m introduced to an enjoyable book, that’ll be great.

I must own to being less excited about reading this year’s Clarke shortlist than I have been in the last couple of years. The Miéville is far from being its author’s best work. Bear and Tepper would not spring to my mind as authors who might be producing cutting-edge science fiction in 2012, though Stross probably would. The Magary doesn’t sound like anything special; and the Rogers, good though it may be (and strange though it seems to say about a book from such an obscure publisher), feels like the most obvious choice for a non-genre title.

My main sense at the moment is of wells untapped – I can’t help but wonder about the other debuts that were eligible, the other mainstream-published titles, the other books by established names. But I am always open to having my preconceptions overturned, and I very much hope that will happen with this year’s shortlist; there is a lot of overturning to be done.

Robert Silverberg, ‘Trips’ (1974)

25th March 2012 / / 1 Comment

Christopher Cameron travels through various iterations of the universe; but, despite the infinity of existence, his main concern is to seek out versions of his wife Elizabeth, stranger though he may be to them.

I’m ambivalent about this story. Silverberg’s prose is vivid, both in its descriptions of place, and elsewhere; such as when the author explains the differences between being a tourist, explorer, and infiltrator of other worlds:

Tourism hollows and parches you. All places become one: a hotel, a smiling swarthy sunglassed guide, a bus, a plaza, a fountain, a marketplace, a museum, a cathedral. You are transformed into a feeble shrivelled thing made out of glued-together travel folders; you are naked but for your visas; the sum of your life’s adventures is a box of left-over small change from many indistinguishable lands.

But I don’t find the characterisation of Cameron to work nearly as well. His stated motivation for travelling is the pure desire to search; but he’s drawn too sketchily to feel like a restless soul. The twist at the end is neat, but those issues of characterisation reduce its emotional heft.

Rating: ***½

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Not the Only Planet.

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