Currently Reading (11)

'I still wasn't sure whether England was in Europe or not; I had the impression that the English would have quite liked to be in Europe so long as they were running it, but weren't particularly bothered otherwise.'

In the bad-tempered run-up to the vote on whether or not the United Kingdom should quit the European Union, this, the second novel in Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe sequence, is especially topical. It isn't a direct sequel to its predecessor, Europe in Autumn, but does extend and deepen that novel's revelation of the existence of alternate territories underlying a near future Europe devastated by the Xian flu and shattered into hundreds of micro-states. But it begins elsewhere, in the isolated bubble world of the Campus, a wintery and impoverished pocket world where, in the aftermath of a revolution that violently deposed the Old Board, the new Professor of Intelligence, who goes by the name Rupert of Hentzau, begins to uncover a conspiracy involving the Campus's Science City. In a second narrative thread, a random stabbing in Camden entangles a British intelligence officer in the search for a county west of London imagined into being by the Whitton-Whytes, a family of landowners, and Hutchinson neatly tangles the two threads in a mission to infiltrate the Community, the quaint yet sinister English Ruritania that underlies the shattered map of Europe.

Wainscot societies, hidden in the margins of the world we know, are a commonplace in fantasy -- the most famous example is, of course, Harry Potter's wizarding world. While the Community is armed not with magic but nuclear weapons, it is, like many wainscots, intent on secretly manipulating the real world, a powerful and hidden player in the realpolitik of fractured Europe. Like Alan Furst (is the title of his novel an homage to Furst's Europe In Midnight?), Hutchinson's subject is the growing shadow of war or disruption in the heart of Europe; like John Le Carre, he deploys considerable lore about tradecraft and procedure, and foregrounds the human stories at the heart of conspiracies; like Eric Ambler and John Buchan, he isolates the heroic impulse in seemingly ordinary men.

The novel's middle section, involving infiltration of the sewers under a micro-state created by kleptocrats in the middle of Dresden, doesn't quite escape the spy-novel cliches Hutchinson knowingly and nicely inverts or undercuts elsewhere, but the settings and complex intrigue in the Community and the post-revolutionary Campus, and Rupert's dazed perspective of our world when he escapes his own, are vividly imagined, and the narrative that leads Hutchinson's characters deeper and deeper into various rabbit holes is informed by a wry cynicism and no little irony, and requires close and careful reading. Vital information is withheld; like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, characters exhibit a kind of dogged bafflement as they try to understand events they only partially witness. In less certain hands this reticence and misdirection could have created muddle and confusion. But Hutchinson expertly carpenters his two narratives into a satisfying whole, spinning threads that may be picked up in future novels in the sequence, and via exploration of the Community's stifling utopia, interrogating and satirising the Matter of England and the nature of Englishness with a trenchant and mordant wit.

Currently Reading (10)

Riffing off Ekow Eshun's memoir, Black Gold of the Sun, Ellah Wakatama Allrey notes that 'African children of the diaspora have a unique affinity with superheroes. It is a sense of belonging elsewhere, a longing for a special power that will both set them apart from the society that they live in and ensure them admiration and acceptance.' Nnedi Okorafor's The Book of Phoenix is a fierce inversion of that observation, the story of the birth and radicalisation of a self-styled supervillain framed by the story of the discovery of her autobiographical memoir in a distant post-apocalyptic future.

Although it acts as a prequel to Okorafor's award-winning novel Who Fears Death, The Book of Phoenix works as a standalone novel: the confession of Phoenix Akore, a speciMen genetically engineered by the shadowy organisation Big Eye and caged with other experimental speciMen in a tower in partially-flooded near-future Manhattan. A prodigy aged just three whose accelerated growth gives her the appearance of a forty-year-old woman, Phoenix has educated herself by absorbing knowledge in thousands of books, has a titanium-alloy skeleton, can stimulate the growth of plants, raise her body temperature to searing heat, and regenerate after self-immolation. After the apparent suicide of her boyfriend, Phoenix destroys the tower by encouraging the tree at its heart to grow to enormous size, regenerates from ashes and develops wings, and heads for Africa with a seed discovered amongst the roots of the giant tree. But the Africans she meets are as exploited as the speciMen, Big Eye operatives track her down, and she returns to America under her own terms, where she reunites with her boyfriend and a third survivor of the fall of her tower, and embarks on a campaign to destroy Big Eye.

There's an immense amount of collateral damage, as in all proper superhero stories, but there's no real opposition. Although another speciMen is a black version of Superman, he's Phoenix's mentor rather than her opponent, teaching her how to slip through space and time, and Big Eye proves to be a mostly impotent enemy. But the core of the novel is not the usual conflict between superheroes and shadowy organisations; it's Phoenix's education, and her anger at colonial exploitation of Africa and her peoples. There are explicit references to slave ships, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and the immortal cell line of Henrietta Lacks, kleptocratic governments in former African colonies, and much more, and parts of the narrative can be, rightly, uncomfortable reading for those of us who've benefited, however tangentially, from various forms of exploitation.

The fast-moving narrative is crammed with ideas which aren't always given as much depth as they deserve, but as with Okorafor's equally crammed Lagoon, it gives off a glow of vital exuberance, Phoenix's Biblical wrath is tempered by passages both tender and reflective, and the story of its discovery in a desert cave which bookends it reframes it with profoundly dark irony. Despite the fierce, violent velocity of its narrative, this short novel lingers and continues to grow in the mind long after its telling.

From Austral

We were ragged and sunburnt and lean. We lived on what we could forage and catch. We avoided other people, made long detours around villages and settlements. I swam several times in the sea, once in churning surf, once amongst greasy slicks of bull kelp, once among penguins that shot past me like torpedoes, trailing long wakes of silvery bubbles. Mama swam too, but never for very long – the water was too cold for her. We saw fish eagles play fighting above a fjord, locking claws and plunging towards the water and breaking apart at the last minute, over and again, and on our traverse of the Forbidden Plateau we descended into a crevasse and clambered over blocks fallen from the ice bridges that curved overhead and found at its far end a solemn cathedral vault and a tumble of ice descending into depths we did not dare to investigate, everything lit by a glow as holy and blue as radioactivity.

The days and days of walking blur together and it’s hard, now, to tell dreams from actual memories. I remember climbing to Mapple Valley’s high southern crest and seeing a panorama of parallel razorback ridges of black rock bare as the moon stretching away under the sky’s cloudless blue. I remember a circle of upright stones in a mossy chapel in the forest below the Forbidden Plateau, lit by a beam of sunlight slanting between the trees. The glass and concrete slab of some plutocrat’s back-country house cantilevered out from cliffs overlooking Wilhelminia Bay. The broken castle of an orphaned iceberg grounded on a rocky shore, with freshets of sparkling meltwater cascading down its fluted sides and a thick band of green algae tinting its wave-washed base. But did we really see, in the pass between Starbuck and Stubb Fjords, an albino reindeer poised near the thin spire of an elfstone named The Endless Song of the Air? Did we glimpse a pyramid set on a remote bastion of bare rock in the ice and snow of the Bruce Plateau? I’ve looked long and hard, but I’ve never been able to find it on maps or in satellite images. And did we really see people dancing naked in a circle around a huge bonfire in a forest glade near Tashtego Point? I can’t be certain that it wasn’t one of my dreams, but whether it was real or imaginary the memory of it still wakes the pulse of their drums in my blood.

Currently Reading (9)

Best known for his ten-volume Shadow of the Apt fantasy series, Adrian Tchaikovsky deploys old-school tropes -- terraforming, uplifting intelligence, a decaying starship -- to good effect in his first science-fiction novel. Its narrative, spanning some seventy centuries, is split between a rising civilisation of a species of spider accidentally gifted with intelligence during a terraforming experiment botched by sabotage, and a deterioriating human society aboard a starship, Gilgamesh, that centuries after the terraforming experiment has fled a dying Earth in search of a new home.

Continuity in the human strand of the narrative is given by the viewpoints of the formidable architect of the terraforming project, whose consciousness has been uploaded into an AI orbiting the planet, and Gilgamesh's chief engineer and a historian with special knowledge of Earth's collapsed civilisation. The lives of the latter are lengthened by long episodes of hibernation when Gilgamesh embarks on a futile round trip to another star after a near-fatal encounter with the formidable AI and an expedition to the planet's surface and first contact with the spiders go horribly wrong.

As for the spiders, the story of the rise of their civilisation and their struggle to understand their relationship with their AI guardian is told through a series of vignettes, an episodic history whose backbone is provided by lineages which perpetuate the names, characters and skills of their founders. Three are female, led by Portia, who is determined to save her species by any means necessary; one is male, striving to assert the value of his sex in a matriarchal society.

Tchaikovsky skilfully orchestrates the evolution of his complicated history, but doesn't quite overcome the obvious problem of splitting the narrative between one civilisation that's dynamic and rising, and another that's failing and splintering. While the spiders' half of the story is packed with ingenious ideas and unexpected twists, the fate of the humans aboard the starship follows a more familiar path, and the final resolution is likewise a little cliched. But the whole, with its nice inversion of the usual narrative of exploration and conquest and its thoughtful, strongly wrought depictions of two civilisations alien to each other yet linked by a common history, and of their attempts to understand each other, is an exemplar of classic widescreen science fiction, and the kind of stories that the genre has made its own.

Elvis & Nixon

Back in 2001, I wrote a story, 'The Two Dicks', based on the photograph above -- the most requested photograph in the USA's National Archives -- in which bestselling author Philip K. Dick, instead of Elvis Presley, met with President Nixon in the Oval Office in December 1970. Elvis & Nixon delves into the story behind the photograph, when Elvis one night decided that he had an urgent mission to meet the President, and explain why he should become a Federal Agent at large and help to save the country from communist infiltration and a plague of drugs.

Director Liza Johnson and writers Joey and Hanala Sagal spin a goofy, sweetly eccentric comedy around the clash of cultures. Neither Michael Shannon, playing Elvis, and Kevin Spacey, as Nixon, especially look like the men they're playing, but they convince through sheer performative force. Nixon is a man bored by the minutiae of his office; Shannon's Elvis is trapped in his fame, able to use it but not to escape it, and possessed by a charming determination to complete his mission. He's helped by two friends and a couple of White House aides who at one point conspire in the kind of car park where Deep Throat spilled the beans on the Watergate break-in.

Elvis takes command of the encounter by sheer force of charisma, breaking all rules of protocol, casually saying, when Nixon points to a Moon rock, that 'Buzz sent me one too,' and the two men develop a mutual respect over M&Ms, Dr Pepper and dislike of the Beatles. It's the kind of encounter that probably can't happen now, where meetings between politicians and celebrities are more commonplace and choreographed by PR and media awareness. While the film somewhat deviates from the truth, it perfectly captures the high absurdity of this strange, unique moment.

Five A Day

I'm roughly two-thirds of the way through the new novel's third draft -- the draft which will go off to the editor before being redrafted -- and as usual at about this point the urge to zip through the rest and finish the damn thing starts to grip. The number of completed pages begins to rise above the number of pages that still need to be revised, the plot begins to knit itself up, the mind begins to turn to other stories.

But it won't do to spoil the sheep for a halfpenny of tar, as the shepherds used to say in the Cotswolds (people who are confused by the West Country accent, and don't know that in the summer tar kept in a tar pot like the one in the picture was smeared on sheep's noses to kill pestiferous flies, sometimes think that they meant ship). A good part of writing a novel is discipline. Maybe the major part. So that means sitting down at the desk at around nine in the morning every day (including weekends; including Bank Holidays, like today) and working through an average of five pages, transcribing into the electronic manuscript all the corrections made in red ink on the printed manuscript -- that is, after the previous day's work has been read through and tweaked and amended. Come to think of it, before starting to transcribe those corrections I spent two months making them, so I'm a good deal further on than two-thirds of the way through.

The novel is called Austral, and it's set on the Antarctic Peninsula, which curls north from the fist of the continent, extending beyond the Antarctic Circle. It's the warmest part of Antarctica, and the part that's warming the fastest because of climate change, an average of half a degree for every decade over the past half century. Austral is partly about the effects of global warming and partly about terraforming the Earth, it's partly about change and how we deal with change, but it's mostly the story of its narrator, also called Austral. About what happens when she makes a bad mistake while trying to escape the consequences of another, about the history of her family and how it's twined about the history of the peninsula, and why people think she's a monster. My birth, she says, right at the beginning, was a political act . . .

Currently Reading (8)

A ship crewed by a disparate crew of humans and aliens bags a prize job: tunneling a wormhole to the titular small, angry planet that's the gateway to the core of the galaxy and rich amounts of the unobtanium prized by interstellar civilisations. There's just one problem: the core is barricaded by an ongoing war between clans of a particularly bad-tempered alien species, and despite a brand-new treaty the clan which controls the gateway may not be entirely trustworthy.

So far, it's the stuff of a hundred standard space operas. But Becky Chambers is part of a new cohort of authors who are repurposing the tropes of science fiction and fantasy to explore diversity and identity, and ways of accommodating and accepting difference. Some of the tropes she deploys are a bit too hoary to be redeemed by any amount of irony, but she has a good line in snappy dialogue, the members of the starship crew are nicely drawn and pleasingly variegated, and there's deep back history to her universe and a rich variety of aliens and alien worlds.

Don't expect a conventional plot: the problem of the angry planet and its horde of angry aliens is hectically and quickly dispatched towards the end of the novel. The point of the story is the getting there, and what the crew discover about themselves along the way. 'You're trying to learn how to be good,' one of them tells the latest recruit, a young woman from Mars with an Awful Secret, and one by one the various problems of the various crew members and their back stories are resolved through kindness, understanding and, yes, goodness. Most of the resolutions are friction-free, and one turns on a fantastic coincidence -- the cost, difficulty and sacrifice of caring for others isn't much emphasised here. But it's done with wit and care, and while some may find it a bit too saccharine, it's a refreshing difference from the adolescent attitudes and kick-ass heroism of rather too much contemporary science fiction. This turns out to be the first of a trilogy about these wayfarers. A little more grit next time, perhaps?

There Are Doors (24)

On Beauty

Photo © Yutaka Kagaya

What do we mean, when we say that prose is 'beautiful'? When we say that 'beautiful prose' is one of the defining characteristics of literary fiction?

Actually, I dunno. It isn't just that 'beautiful' is dependent on cultural context, or that's it's one of those words devalued by overuse, most often by estate agents. See also 'stunning', 'spacious', 'superb', so on. It's also a descriptor that's both too precise and too inadequate for the kind of prose that rises above the mundane.

We know what bad prose is, because it's mostly, as Toby Litt points out, boring. And we more or less know what genre default prose is, too. (In science fiction, the default used to be Isaac Asimov; now it's Internet Snark.) But what kind of prose is better than default? What kind of prose is, if not beautiful, then truly great?

It isn't the kind of transparent prose that some insist is the sine qua non. The kind of prose that doesn't get in the way of the reader's experience. The kind of prose that doesn't snag her attention. The kind of so-called transparent or windowpane prose that George Orwell didn't actually write about in that essay which wasn't, in any case, about the literary use of language. In any case, how can prose pretend that it doesn't get in the way of the story when it is part of that story?

Great prose is much more than not being bad, or simply utilitarian, or merely competent. It's more than being lyrical, or poetic, or moving, although it can be all of those things. It can be precise and thrilling. It can lure you into its mazes and won't let you go. It can be witty and profound, can work on several registers at once, but it can also be stupidly banal when only stupid banality will do. It's the distinctive voice of the author, or the character, or the voices of both twined in dialogue. Most of all, maybe, as Toby Litt points out, it takes risks. It's a high-wire act. It isn't afraid of failure. It doesn't aim to please. It isn't fan-friendly. It doesn't want to be likeable or relevant. It'll be your friend and bake you a cake and take out the garbage, and it'll seduce your partner and steal your children. It laughs in the face of the grammar police and the impotent artillery of amazon reviews. It hides in your stairway and hangs in your curtain and sleeps in your hat. You know what I mean.

Currently Reading (7)

Triangulate Kafka, Camus, and the early novels of J.G. Ballard, and you'll find Kōbō Abe's The Woman in the Dunes, his first and also his best known novel, in part because of Hiroshi Teshigahara's wonderful film adaptation (Abe collaborated with Teshigahara on that and three other films, Pitfall, The Face of Another and Man Without a Map). Illustrated with line drawings by Machi Yamada, Abe's wife, its allegorical narrative is as simple, and as morally complex, as a fairy tale. Amateur entomologist Jumpei Niki visits remote dunes in search of rare beetles, becomes caught up in the scheme of a village to save itself from the advancing sand, and is trapped at the bottom of a pit with a young widow who is stronger and more capable than she at first seems. Niki's predicament and his attempts to escape, the parched heat of his claustrophobic prison and the sand which frustrates his plans and permeates everything are vividly evoked; his relationship with the woman, who is stronger and more capable than she first seems, evolves into an uneasy forced marriage. Like all great stories of survival, Abe's bleak fable strips its characters to their fundamental selves, and its bizarre situation and dark, absurdist humour frame serious questions about human relationships, sacrifice, and the nature of our lives.

What Is The Clarke Award For?

It seems quite simple. It is, according to its simple self-description, an award for ‘the best science fiction novel published in Britain in the given year’. A measure and celebration of achievement in science-fiction writing that isn't limited to novels published within the science-fiction genre. But what is meant by 'best'? and what is meant by 'science fiction'?

When I was a judge for the Clarke Awards, back in 2003, defining 'science fiction' turned out to be mostly a practical matter. We were presented with around fifty novels submitted by publishers, and as far as we were concerned, any novel that had been submitted should be considered, whether or not it had been published as science fiction. So we read everything we'd been sent, agreed that one or two were so obviously fantasy novels that they could be excluded, and then got down to the business of deciding which were the best.

And that, of course, is where the trouble starts. What do we mean be 'best'? What defines an exceptional science-fiction novel?

It's one of the topics that Nina Allan discusses in a long and interesting essay about the merits and relevance of the Clarke Award. Is the award still worthwhile? Does it stimulate critical discourse? Does it reflect the increasing diversity of the genre? Is it being given to the right kind of novels? What are the right kind of novels?

It's that last question I'd like to discuss here. Allan believes that what she calls 'core SF tropes' are only of interest if they are somehow subverted, and that 'if a work of science fiction cannot [her italics] stand next to works drawn from the mainstream and hold its own in terms of literary values, we need to be asking ourselves if it is truly great.' In other words, a good science fiction novel should not be measured in terms of whatever it is that defines the science-fiction genre, but by the standards of literary fiction.

What are those standards? Most agree that literary fiction is in part defined by fine or beautiful prose, that it gives preference to theme over plot, and explores the psychology of the individual in particular and the human condition in general. It's concerned with analysing reality, while other kinds of fiction (genre fiction, commercial fiction, paraliterary fiction) are concerned with escaping reality. Some might also say, not entirely inaccurately, that literary writers are expected to write a different novel every time, while genre writers are expected to write the same novel every time.

Science fiction, perhaps the most protean of genre fictions, is somewhat harder to define. We know it when we see it, but it includes a vast variety of different kinds of fiction; its borders are vague; it overlaps other genres, including literary fiction. But in all of those different kinds of science-fiction works, there's perhaps one unifying factor: rather than exploring reality, science fiction is interested in exploring the limits of reality. Rather than analysing and universalising individual human experience, it's interested in analysing the reality of the universe and measuring it against human values. It's about change and difference, and the consequences of change and difference.

In short, the values of science fiction are not identical to those of literary fiction (or any other genre), for otherwise we wouldn't need to distinguish it from other varieties of fiction. Sure, good writing and fine characterisation should be celebrated, and bad writing and flat characterisation shouldn't be excused because of other qualities. To paraphrase Samuel R. Delany, fleas are fleas, no matter where or how you catch them. A badly written science-fiction novel is badly written even its ideas are novel and excitingly executed. Even so, and this is where I have a problem with Allan's argument, there are good reasons why great works of science fiction, works worthy of the Clarke Award, shouldn't be judged by the same standards as literary fiction.

Allan anticipates this, saying that she is aware that her view is contentious, and that some would 'disagree with it violently, attesting that it is attitudes and tastes like mine that are destroying science fiction, stripping the field of what makes it unique and worthy of specialist discussion in the first place.' I wouldn't go that far, but I do think that claiming that the standards of literary fiction are a universal yardstick is reminiscent of the kind of snobbery that asserts that literary fiction is the good stuff, created out of noble artistic aims, and all other kinds of fiction are bad, written for baseless commercial motives. It's also an instance of a kind of cultural cringe peculiar to the science-fiction field. Judges of crime, horror, fantasy and romance novels give awards to works that epitomise the best of their genre, not to those which best approximate 'literary values.' Only in science fiction are we so uncertain of what the values of the genre are, and whether they are worthwhile, that we seek to outsource them.

One of the reasons that literary fiction champions beautiful prose is that it seeks to make the familiar fresh and new, and that's hard to do in what's somewhat disparagingly called workmanlike prose. Science fiction, on the other hand, seeks to make the unfamilar familiar, and that can sometimes be hard to do if you adhere to what Martin Amis has called the war against cliche. Instead, science fiction has developed a huge common toolkit that enables writers to anatomise the unfamiliar and make it vivid to the mind's eye, to merge human stories with things slant to ordinary human experience or processes vaster and more ancient than anything in human history. And it turns out, here in the twenty-first century, in which our common reality is fractured by the consequences, good and bad, of scientific and technological advances, that the science-fiction toolkit is becoming ever more useful in grappling with weirdness of the happening world.

This is one reason why writers of literary fiction are increasing producing novels that overlap with the concerns of the science-fiction genre; why, from its inception, the Clarke Award has often included literary novels on its shortlist, or awarded prizes to them. This infusion is welcome, maybe even vitally necessary. But those novels should be judged by the same measure as novels written in the so-called 'core' of the genre, not by standards outwith it. They should be judged by how well they work as science-fiction novels, within the generously wide definitions of science fiction. From Allan's preference for 'a mixture of literary postmodernism, subjective hyperrealism, advanced and/or experimental structure bound together with speculative elements' to new varieties of the old kinds of science fiction, they should engage the heart and the mind, and deliver something fresh and startling and fully rounded. And we should be alert to the possibility that something fresh and startling can as easily come from inside the field as outside it, just as literary excursions in science fiction can sometimes be as trite and unoriginal as anything written inside the field that doesn't examine its assumptions and tropes.

I'm aware that's both vague and hopelessly idealistic. As Allan points out, awards decided by a jury or panel can be weakened by a variety of all-too-human failings, from compromise and favouritism, to prejudice and stubbornness. The short list of any award usually contains at least one oddity, and omits at least one title which, according to almost everyone else, should have been included. That's why the critical discussion that Allan rightly champions is so important, even though we should remember that critics are as prone to the same all-too-human-failings are the judges. But in the end, 'best' is not a value that can be defined by measurement against some external standard. As when I was a judge, as is hopefully the case this year, it's recognisable only by comparison with its peers.

Transect: Ballardland, France

Fairyland Resurgam

Fairyland, my sixth novel, was published in 1995 and has managed to stay in print in the UK ever since. Very pleased to say that its latest incarnation, out today, is a spiffy SF Masterworks paperback with an introduction by Stephen Baxter. It's also available as an ebook, of course, and as an audiobook narrated by Max Dowler. It's an Audible editor's pick, and there's a free clip here.

I'm flying to France for a convention tomorrow, and hope to glimpse the Magic Kingdom, where the fairyland of Fairyland emerges into the world, through the window of one plane or another as I transit through Paris.

'Rats Dream Of The Future'

I have a new story, 'Rats Dream of the Future', in the new issue of Asimov's, which turns on a minor obsession with the ways in which the speed of financial trading information exchange push at the limits of physics. Or maybe it's about ethics in science journalism. Or maybe it's about rats, you know, dreaming about the future. Their future, not ours. Another post-nature story, anyway, like 'Wild Honey.' Out now, as they say.

Currently Reading (6)

On a foundation of contemporary documents and literature, Matthew Beaumont constructs an immersive cultural history of an alter London, from the curfew of the medieval city to the familiar urban nightscapes through which Dickens steadily paced on his obsessive nocturnal pilgrimages. London by night, and how the liminal spaces of its darkness altered and freed the people who inhabited it:

Nightwalking, like writing poetry or taking opium, was one of the means by which Romantics like De Quincey, and post-Romantics like Dickens, fostered a second self -- a silent, shadowy, mysterious other. It collapsed the dark recesses of the psyche into the labyrinthine spaces of the city.

Out Next Week

No Longer Novel

Into Everywhere was launched into the world a couple of weeks ago, and faint signals are beginning to return. One of which, pleased to say, is a podcast of a roundtable discussion of the book, featuring Jonathan Strahan, Gary K. Wolfe, James Bradley and Ian Mond. There are also a few reviews, mostly friendly, including a nice one in SFX that brought me up short because it mentioned my age, suggesting that I was 'shaping up to be one of those rare SF novelists -- like Christopher Priest and M John Harrison -- whose work gets better even as the bastard years go by.' Which is of course lovely, but implies that many science-fiction authors begin to burn out too early. Implies that it's an almost inevitable part of the career arc. Up like a rocket! Down like a sounding plummet!

Science fiction, ever avid for novelty, does tend to celebrate youth. Its readers often start young (famously, the Golden Age of science fiction is 12). Likewise, many authors start their careers at a relatively early age. Samuel R. Delany published his first novel when he was 19; Tanith Lee published her first novel at age 24. Michael Moorcock became the editor of Tarzan Adventures at 17 and published his debut novel five years later, by which time he was editor of New Worlds. So on.* The average age of a Hugo-winning author is 44, although the mode of the distribution (the most frequent age) is 37 (data compiled by Nicholas Whyte.) Is it all downhill from there?

In a recent interview with Don DeLillo (79), the interviewer notes that although the author eschews email, prefers to communicate by fax and writes on a typewriter, there's a scene in his latest novel where characters stab at a taxi video screen, trying and failing to turn it off its annoying infomercials -- this celebrated revenant knows about touchscreens, is still in the world. Well, we're all in the world, more or less. The trick is to stay aware of it. Especially if you're a writer of the kind of fictions that extrapolate the weirdness of the happening world into something and somewhere else. The trick, as you get older, is to stay current. And to be aware of the themes you return to, and the habits you accumulate. You can't do much about those themes, they're as much a part of your identity as your fingerprints, and losing interest in them, failing to find anything new in them, is like losing interest in yourself. But habits are a form of laziness, shortcuts, defaults, and you should try to sidestep or cut out them out, subvert them, invert them, make them into something new. Writing a novel is a little like dreaming, sometimes, It should never be like sleepwalking. And then there's the kind of damage you can only accumulate as you move through the world and time. That's an advantage you have, as you grow older: the damage. That's something you can use.



 -----------
*I started relatively late: I was 33 when Four Hundred Billion Stars was published (I did sell a story when I was 19, but before it was published the magazine folded; it wasn't a very good story anyway).

Transect: Westminster To Chelsea

Currently Reading (5)

Some Rain Must Fall is the fifth volume of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard's 3600 page six-volume novelistic memoir (heroically translated by Don Bartlett), and in some ways the most straightforward. An account of Knausgaard's struggle to become a serious writer, beginning with his induction into a prestigious writing course at the tender age of nineteen and ending with the success of his first novel, it also includes his first real love affair and his first real job, meeting and marrying his first wife, and the deaths of his grandmother and father (a distant but domineering figure, the immediate aftermath of his death was described in devastating detail in the first volume). All the landmarks of growth into adulthood, then, conveyed in prose that's sometimes flatly descriptive, sometimes banal, sometimes conversational, sometimes crackling with insight, that doesn't avoid cliche yet is precise, clear-sighted, and unflinching. Of all the real people who populate these pages Knausgaard is most acute and least sparing about himself, dissecting with unflinching candour the shame of private moments of selfishness, self-doubt, folly and reckless (and often drunken) foolishness.

This maximalism, larded with descriptions of the ordinary transactions of everyday life leave in all the things that most other writers leave out or dress up with flash and filigree, sometimes recalls the kind of naive science fiction worldbuilding that attempts to convey the future through endless invented details. But Knausgaard's impressionistic narrative, unconstrained by any particular pattern or plot, moving unforcedly from incident to incident, is also addictive and hypnotic. One of his themes is the nature and reliability of memory, which he believes to be an act on recreative imagination, purposively shaped, 'everything coloured by the mind,' yet his compound of memory and mimesis seems artless, flowing directly from mind to page with enviable directness and freedom, and it's in this volume that he gives some insight into his technique.

After two years hard work produces a few polished paragraphs of conventionally 'beautiful' writing that he can't take any further, he finally hits on the breakthrough that will allow him to write his first novel:

A girl parked her bike outside, performed all the necessary movements with consummate ease, in with the wheel, out with the lock, click it into position, straighten up, look around, head for the door and remove the hood of her rain jacket.

She greeted a girl at the table behind mine, ordered a cup of tea, sat down and started chatting. She talked about Jesus Christ, she'd had a religious experience.

I wrote down exactly what she said.

There, in the mingling of the mundane and the ecstatic, the entwining of the internal with the external, is the genesis of the voice that captures, in encounters with people and things, in feelings and struggles large and small, the essence of a single life and makes it universal.

Wizards Of The Slime Planet

An extract from the second chapter of Into Everywhere.

When the perimeter alert slammed down the pipe Tony Okoye was lying on his command couch and one of the hands was braiding his hair. He raised a finger to still the clever fingers of the man-shaped machine and said, ‘I hope this isn’t another cosmic-ray impact.’
    ‘Not this time,’ the ship’s bridle said.
    ‘Because if it is, I swear I will modify your detection filters with an axe.’
    ‘Then I’m almost glad I’m looking at an actual intruder,’ the bridle said, and opened an arc of windows in the dim warm air.
    Tony sat up, bare-chested in lime-green ‘second skin’ shorts, pushing a fall of loose hair from his face as he studied multi-spectrum images, vectors, estimates of the intruder’s capability. She was real. She was big. A G-class frigate ten times the size of his C-class clipper, bristling with weapon pods and patches. She had come through the mirror less than two minutes ago, she was already driving straight for the slime planet, and she was displaying a police flag. CPF Dauntless.
    ‘What are the police doing here? Have they said what they want?’
    ‘They haven’t said anything. And they aren’t the police,’ the bridle said. ‘The Dauntless is a G-glass frigate, but that G-class frigate is not the Dauntless. The configuration of her assets is wrong, and her flag’s certificate is a clever fake. Clever enough to fool the average freebooter, but not quite clever enough to fool me.’
    ‘Are you certain?’
    ‘I can show you my workings.’
    Tony flicked through images of the intruder. It looked a little like a weaponised jellyfish got up from shards of charred plastic: a convex shield or hood three hundred metres across, trailing three stout tentacles ornamented with random clusters of spines. No one knew what the original function of G-class Ghajar ships had been, but plating their shields with foamed fullerene and attaching weapon pods and patches around their rims turned them into formidable combat vessels.
    ‘If they aren’t police,’ he said, ‘they must be pirates. Claim jumpers.’
    ‘The possibility is not insignificant,’ the bridle said.
    ‘A ship that size, running under a fake flag? It is the only possibility. The Red Brigade has frigates, doesn’t it?’
    ‘So do a number of other fringe-world outfits. We should challenge it,’ the bridle said. ‘You can use your notorious charm to get its crew to reveal who they really are and what they want.’
    Her personality package, presenting as a bright eager capable young woman, was the front end of the AI that interfaced with the mind and nervous system of the actual ship, which like the frigate, like all ships everywhere, had been built by the Ghajar thousands of years ago. Tony’s C-class clipper was called Abalunam’s Pride, but no one knew its real name. The name its maker had given it long before it had been extracted from a sargasso orbit, refurbished and modified, and purchased by his grandmother. The secret name it might still call itself.
    Tony said, ‘I already have a pretty good idea about what they want. And it is possible that they do not know we are here. So we will maintain radio silence and continue to monitor them. And if they contact us, we will tell them that we are just a freebooter with an exploration licence and nothing to hide.’
    ‘Which we are.’
    ‘Which we are. But my family has a history with the Red Brigade. And if that really is one of their frigates . . .’
    Tony grazed the cicatrices on his cheek with his thumb as he thought things through. He was scared, yes, shocked and sort of numb, but he also felt alert and focused. Babysitting Fred Firat and his crew of wizards while they probed the ancient secrets of the slime planet had proven to be astoundingly tedious. There were no beasties to hunt, and the scattered Elder Culture ruins weren’t anything special. Junot Johnson was supervising the wizards’ work; Lancelot Askia was keeping them in line; after completing the survey of stromatolite sites and setting his little surprises, Tony had mostly stayed aboard the ship. Now, for the first time in four weeks, he was fully awake. At last he had something to do. And if that frigate really was one the Red Brigade’s ships he would have a chance to test his skill and cunning against his family’s old nemesis.
    He said, ‘How long before it gets here?’
    ‘Nineteen point three eight hours, if it maintains its current delta vee,’ the bridle said.
    ‘We will have a lot less than that if it fires off scouting drones. What about our assets at the mirror? Has our unwelcome guest pinged them, tried to spoof them, knocked any of them out?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘It could have left behind assets of its own when it came through. Have one of the drones scan the mirror and the volume around it out to five thousand kilometres, but keep the rest dark. And shoot a message to Junot, brief him on the situation and tell him that the wizards should start packing up their stuff straight away.’
    ‘Then we’re going to make a run for it,’ the bridle said.
    ‘I am not going to sit on the ground and wait to see what that frigate does next,’ Tony said. ‘Check the mirror, message Junot, and raise the ship and aim it at the wizards’ camp.’
    ‘Shall I have the hand finish braiding your hair, too?’
    The bridle had a nice line in sarcasm, but Tony took the offer at face value.
    ‘Why not?’ he said, settling back on the couch. ‘If those claim jumpers do want to talk to me face to face, I should look my best.’