Briardene Books

Being a miscellany of updates:

1. Some recent and recent-ish writing: in The BSFA Review #22, currently members-only at this link, you can find my review of Kay Chronister’s Desert Creatures, a promising eco-weird debut that came out in the US last year, and in the UK this year, and in the interim had some of its imagery and dynamics slightly gazumped by the adaptation of The Last of Us. Meanwhile, the October Locus has my review of Octavia Cade’s varied and thought-provoking collection You Are My Sunshine, while in the hot-off-the-presses November issue you can find my takes on Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (wonderful), The Future by Naomi Alderman (interesting) and Nefando by Mónica Ojeda (challenging). I’m behind on my Strange Horizons column, but do hope to have another installment out before the end of the year.

2. When it was announced, I harboured grand ambitions of reading the whole of the very exciting Le Guin Prize shortlist (as someone who has just argued for the importance of shortlists as snapshots of the field). I got as far as buying all the ones I didn’t already have, but thus far have only read two: Simon Jimenez’ extraordinary The Spear Cuts Through Water, and the ultimate winner, Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality. I’m not minded to object to this: Arboreality is a wonderful short book (I can’t decide whether it’s a novella or a story-suite), grown out of Campbell’s Sturgeon-winning near-future tale from a couple of years ago, “An Important Failure“, not by expanding that core narrative, but by accreting other narratives before and after it, to sketch with an extraordinarily calm and precise hand about a century’s worth of events in a Pacific North West affected directly and indirectly by a worsening climate. An obvious reference point is Molly Gloss, who blurbed it; I thought also of Maureen McHugh and James Bradley. It’s in my wheelhouse, is what I’m saying. It’s also an interesting datapoint: not only the connection to the Sturgeon, but a vote of confidence in its publisher, Stelliform Press, who are also the publisher of the Octavia Cade collection mentioned above and a number of other interesting books, and following on from Ned Beauman’s Arthur C. Clarke Award win, the second major juried sf prize to go to a climate fiction this year. even as the popular-voted awards continue to ignore it as a subject almost entirely. So: very deserved and very welcome, to the point where it feels a tiny bit gauche to admit that I liked the Jimenez a tiny bit more.

3. Slowly, slowly something is percolating through the back of my brain that links this Coode Street discussion of my LARB piece, this Popcast discussion of music criticism in the age of streaming, and Dan Sinykin’s new book Big Fiction, about the impact of the structures of US publishing on the fiction it foregrounds, which I’ve only dipped into so far, but see for example this review by Kevin Lozano in The New Yorker. Disconnected thoughts so far include: a) relative to other areas of publishing, my sense is that sf is, at the level of the reader, atypically conscious of publishers and editors as shapers, giving them popular-voted awards and so on. Sinykin talks in his introduction about the identity of imprints as though it is some strange foreign concept, but I suspect many readers could tell you about the history of important imprints — while at the same time, sf imprints have not been immune to the impacts of conglomeration that Sinykin explores; b) the Popcast discussion circles in part around the question of how meaningful the album is as a unit of attention, and toys with the idea that critics should comment on playlists, even the auto-generated and regularly renewing Spotify ones, which struck me as intersecting with the idea of putting more focus on curated selections of fiction, like Year’s Bests or shortlists (or publishing imprints); c) Popcast also talked about how streaming — and earlier methods of distribution — shaped the types of songs that are written, which links to Sinykin’s book, but in the context of sf made me think about Amazon’s ending of its magazine subscription programme in favour of Kindle Unlimited. Is a magazine issue best distributed through KU as a single artefact, or might we see disaggregation of issues into stories — which is already how Amazon publishes its own anthologies? d) Coode Street and Popcast both agree that a substantial amount of artistic innovation is taking place outside of English-language arenas; Sinykin explicitly focuses on the US market, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find some gestures in that direction buried in his argument somewhere.

4. To finish: Nina Allan recently posted about her 10 best books from the past 10 years. Without too much deep thought, here’s a first pass at my picks: 2013, A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar; 2014, Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett; 2015, Weathering by Lucy Wood; 2016, Version Control by Dexter Palmer; 2017, Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal; 2018, Ambiguity Machines by Vandana Singh; 2019, Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker; 2020, Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson; 2021: Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer; 2022, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. Might be a different list tomorrow, obviously.