In response to Reactor’s new survey to find “The most iconic speculative fiction books of the twenty-first century“, Gautam Bhatia noted that it put him in mind of Joseph Andras’s comment, on declining the Prix Goncourt, that “competition and rivalry are notions foreign to writing and creation.” This is noble and true as far as it goes, but insofar as writing and creation take place under capitalism, competition isn’t going to leave them alone, and insofar as people like to have ways of making sense of things that have happened, neither is the urge to canonise. There are more and less mature ways to engage with canon-forming activities – I admire, for instance, ML Clark’s recent review-essay about the 2024 Le Guin Prize for its refusal to pick a winner, even as I myself am never able to resist that temptation when considering a shortlist – but refusing to engage seems to me only to cede terrain that others will happily claim. So, to the Reactor project.
For some years now, the preferred mode of engagement in this sort of activity among sceptics has been to disavow the word “best”, because of its implicit claim to authority, in favour of terms like “favourite”, or “influential”; so to my mind one of the interesting things about Reactor’s project is its use of “iconic”. For a book to be a favourite, all that matters is that I like it, without regard to its popularity; and for a book to be influential, all that matters is that it has had popular reach, regardless of whether I like it. Asking for iconic books, I think, sets a higher bar; an iconic book must be popular enough to be known, perhaps not by a mass audience, but by enough people to have had influence, and it must also be worthy of that status, to have some qualities that elevate it beyond mere popularity. Many of the suggested examples in Reactor’s initial post, based on a survey of authors and picks by the website’s staff, do seem to me to meet that bar. A few that jump out at me are The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link: not all of these are absolute favourites of mine, although several of them are, but all of them are easy to recognise as landmarks if you’re drawing a map of the last twenty-five years of sf.
Or at least a map of certain parts of the last twenty-five years of sf. The real story of any exercise of this sort is the parameters that shape it, and in this instance the result is clearly going to be a US view of the field, simply by dint of Reactor’s location and audience. The preliminary survey is as well: by my count, 70% of the authors invited to participate are American, of those with a career of at least 10 years, 76%. There are a couple each from Canada, Australia, the UK, and Singapore, and then you get into countries with just one representative: New Zealand, India, Sri Lanka, a few others. From this list I can’t claim that British writers are as marginalised as some other countries, of course, but still: I spy only four books by British writers on this preliminary list, Ishiguro and Abercrombie in addition to Mitchell and Clarke, and I’d like to think the UK has a slightly deeper bench than that. (Particularly striking that Abercrombie is the only British author published by a genre publisher to make an appearance.) I guess I’ll have to decide how parochial I want to be with my selections when I vote. Vajra Chandrasekera, breaking down his picks, noted that he chose a number of them because they are “particularly iconic from a global south perspective, most particularly a south asian one”, and describes one of them, Kuzhali Manickavel’s Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some of Them Have Wings, in terms that remind me of the infamous description of the the Velvet Underground’s first album: not that many people read it, but a disproportionate number of the ones who did were changed by it. That’s the sort of pick that’s lost in aggregation, and even if the aggregate is something I’m interested in, I hope Reactor thinks about how to highlight picks like that when they share the final results.
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