Briardene Books

The most pleasing news of the last week has been Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter winning the Man Booker International Prize. The Guardian has a short interview: ‘the novel is predicated on a fear that Europe itself has no future. “It’s the feeling that I think all of us had in the last maybe 10 years: this sense of a deficit of the future. It’s like standing in an airport seeing all the flights come up cancelled, cancelled, cancelled.”’ I wrote about Time Shelter in the first instalment of my Depth of Field column at Strange Horizons (second instalment coming at the end of June); it made a perfect lead-off book for a variety of reasons, and is very much recommended.

Daniel Cohen has a review-essay in the LRB, “To Monopolise Our Ears“, covering a couple of books about Spotify and its workings. Not my usual (ahem) beat, but I mention it for two reasons: first, I actually read Nick Seaver’s Computing Taste last year, and this gives me an hook on which to hang a recommendation. It’s based on extensive interviews and research but is not a technical book: Seaver is an anthropologist, so it is instead a fascinating portrait of the programmers, product managers and data scientists designing music recommendation algorithms, what they think they’re doing, and why. The second reason for linking to Cohen’s essay is that another book discussed, The Spotify Play, is the basis for the Netflix miniseries The Playlist which came out last autumn, and here there is an sf connection. In its first five episodes, The Playlist tells the story of the founding and development of Spotify five times, from different points of view: the episodes are titled “The Vision”, “The Industry”, “The Law” and so on. The sixth and final episode, however, is set in 2024-2025: it focuses on an invented singer, Bobbi T, unable to earn a living wage from Spotify, who becomes the inciting spark for global protests against the company and the direction of the music industry in general. There’s no mention of a similar move in Cohen’s essay (in fact the series is not mentioned at all), but it seems very unlikely there’s a similar move in the book. As near-future speculation it’s inevitably rather schematic (particularly when it dramatises a Senate hearing), but I thought it elevated what had already been an enjoyably spiky series.

Other things:

• Sad publishings news: excellent indie press Unsung Stories is closing this summer. Treat yourself to a book or three in their sale. I particularly recommend E. J. Swift’s The Coral Bones, Vicki Jarrett’s Always North, and just about anything by Aliya Whiteley.
• The Ancillary Review of Books has a new column, Snap! Criticism by Dan Hartland, which is going to pair sf fiction and non-fiction to “test criticism by doing it”, which promises to be an interesting ride.
• At The Quietus, Benjamin Duvall writes about music of extreme duration and the climate crisis; the sort of thing that inspired the Music in Ian McDonald’s Hopeland, devices to help us project our imagination lifetimes into the future, some at an even grander scale: “[Jem] Finer and artist Jimmy Cauty are in the process of designing and building a field of stone wind flutes intended to sound for the next 50,000 years. The period of time has been chosen to coincide with the next appearance of the comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), which prior to January 2023 last passed this way when Neanderthals were still walking the planet.”
• Paul Graham Raven recommended Morley Musick’s story at n+1, “The GrubHub of Human Affliction“, which imagines a future for journalism even bleaker than that in, say, Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Gambler”; worth a look, although perhaps struggles to land on a satisfying ending.
• Nina Allan’s new novel Conquest received an enthusiastic review from Steven Poole in The Guardian that has me desperate to get to it; as a tie-in, you can also read Nina’s list of the top 10 strangest alien invasion novels, which includes a welcome shout-out for Rian Hughe’s perhaps somewhat barmy but nonetheless staggering novel-with-graphic-elements, XX.
• An interview with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah about his novel Chain-Gang All-Stars
• Nick Gloaming makes Vehicle by Jen Calleja sound very interesting, and perhaps a counterpart to Time Shelter: “a near-future, alternate-universe UK that has undergone a sort of hyper-Brexit called the Bordering. The country is completely closed. […] Even the past is banned, and most historians have to ply their vocation in secret […] told through short, fragmented, vignette-like chapters, which are drawn from the surviving research notes.”
• Awards round-up: the Ignyte awards are open for voting; the Kitschies have announced their shortlists, winners coming 24 June (delighted to see E. J. Swift’s The Coral Bones in the novel category); and the Nebulas have winners; the Hugos, of course, are just around the corner.