Briardene Books

The day is upon us: after the submissions list and the shortlist, the winner of this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award will be revealed this evening. It has not been the liveliest year for public shortlist commentary. Aside from my own posts, I’m aware of only three full-shortlist overviews – by Nick Hubble on his blog (in two parts), by Gautam Bhatia in Strange Horizons, and by Tom Atherton on Instagram. There’s also the peek-behind-the-curtain commentary on the shortlist by award director Tom Hunter at Five Books. 

This post is primarily a vehicle to bring together their commentaries, and a few other individual pieces, but in an attempt to add at least a bit of additional perspective, I’m going to borrow a trick from Nicholas Whyte, who typically hangs his blogged reviews off a short quote, always taken from the equivalent point in the book. He uses the second paragraph of the third chapter; I went to random.org and asked for a number in the first 50 pages, which has got me page 44, from which I have taken the first paragraph that is more than one sentence long. We’ll go in alphabetical order by author surname, which means we start with biodiversity collapse comedy Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman:

Still less did that theory, patience running low at the office, explain the sheer agony she saw in him now. His tic with his shirt cuff had got even worse, so that by this stage it looked like he was vigorously fucking the button-hole with the button.

Immediately the perils of this approach to the books becomes apparent. I want to tell you that this is a very funny book – not many books make me repeatedly laugh out loud, but this one did – but this is not a particularly funny paragraph, even with additional build-up in its full context. You’ll just have to take my word for it. A way in which this quote is more typical, however, is that – notwithstanding that the viewpoint character here is a woman, biologist Karin Resaint, tasked with evaluating the intelligence of the titular species to establish its value in “extinction credits” – it embodies part of what I think Kevin Power is getting at when he observes that “There is something fundamentally boyish about Beauman’s novels”. Cartoonish profanity is part of its style, as is a deep nerdiness of the sort you might associate with writers such as Neal Stephenson or Charles Stross – or Kim Stanley Robinson; I think Gautam Bhatia is being ungenerous to the latter when he describes Venomous Lumpsucker as “far grimmer than Kim Stanley Robinson’s blander, more palatable take” on the near future; for me the two books are certainly part of the same conversation. As Tom Atherton notes, the novel’s power (and I think this is one of the two best books on the shortlist) comes from the way Beauman “converges farce with a sort of moral sadness at our own idiocy.” Nick Hubble elaborates on the way the characters, particualrly Resaint, are searching for “an action with the potential to restore meaning to the world.” Venomous Lumpsucker is a novel that seethes, both at and with its characters: it’s the most in-your-face book on the shortlist, and all the better for it.

Next up: The Red Scholar’s Wake, which is (I think) the first entry in Aliette de Bodard’s fifteen-year-old Xuya continuity, a timeline that diverged from our own when China discovered North America in 1411, to be published as a novel. It’s set far enough in the future to feature space colonisation, and focuses on the pirates and scavengers ground between the gears of two empires, one Chinese-descended and one Vietnamese-descended; and within that, focuses on one pirate and one scavenger at the sharp end of events that will reshape their local politics. It is also a romance:

Rice Fish was still looking at the hand on her shoulder. At length, she reached out with a hand that was trailing starlight, and held it for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.

For this one, I find myself broadly in agreement with Tom Atherton that “it’s all a bit janky”. Jenny Hamilton’s analysis of the novel runs through its effective depiction of the power dynamics within its romance – between a starship and a human woman – and Gautam Bhatia is quite right that it is a book directly about “the evolution, distortion, decay, or dissolution of … relationships under contexts of extreme pressure”. But I never felt it. Where Nick Hubble (and presumably, many BSFA voters who shortlisted it for their award) found the novel to carry an “exquisite charge” that “required … a sharp breath”, I did not. The language certainly reaches for that charge – in addition to hands trailing starlight, there are eyes the colour of the void, and other such images – but it seemed to me that the intensity came in fits and starts, when it really needed to be maintained, and built throughout the book. Moreover, as Atherton notes, there are broader power dynamics and moral issues relating to the pirates and the empires that aren’t handled with the same delicacy, and without that element, the book as a whole fell rather flat for me.

Speaking of flat, next up is Lucy Kissick’s Plutoshine:

“But that’s only the first half of Phase One.” Later, in the workshop, Lucien accepted the proffered Allen key from Nou. “Cheers. That’s just my role, and making the mirror itself is a lot easier than you’d think. Really, it’s Halley who does all the heavy lifting …”

When I say this is a paragraph that could have been lifted without alteration from many other hard, engineering-minded sf novels over many decades, I say it with both fondness and weariness. An Allen key! In 2023! There’s no technology so immediately practical and hands-on in any of the other novels, and to bring a terraforming story down to the literal nuts-and-bolts of it all is appealing. I want to see in Plutoshine, as Nick Hubble does, as a marriage of this traditional mode with contemporary themes “concerning generational shifts, patriarchy, abuse, environmentalism, difference […] addressed in a very different style to that of recent American Hugo winners”, but that very different style is too often, as Tom Atherton notes, simply clunky. I’d also like to be able to agree with Gautam Bhatia that “the manner in which [these questions] are embedded into the story, itself serves as a rebuke to more optimistic retellings of the future, where the solution to the climate crisis lies in bending other worlds to human will”, but in that regard this is another novel where Kim Stanley Robinson’s legacy looms large, and a thorough examination of terraforming in the manner of Blue Mars it is not. None of which is necessarily to say that Plutoshine, in an absolute sense, is bad. I enjoyed it, but that’s because I like and am sympathetic to this type of sf, not because it’s an example of sf that deserves to be lauded as the best of the year.

A similar conundrum is raised by Herve Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, in which an international flight is mysteriously doubled, with implications pursued at both personal and teleological levels. This is a novel that already has at least one deserved award behind it: it is at different points clever, witty, elegant, and generally thought-provoking. A lot of it also reads as generic thriller prose, like this:

“All flights on Boston Control. Due to exceptional weather conditions on the East Coast, all airports are closed except for KJFK. There have been no takeoffs on the Eastern Seaboard for thirty minutes. The situation has developed too quickly for us to warn flights any earlier. KJFK Canarsie remains open for all landings.”

There’s quite a lot of this, really, what Tom Atherton characterises as “weird parodies of genre writing”, and it’s all entirely deliberate. The Anomaly is an oulipo novel, defined by the constraints it chooses to work within, and in this case one of the constraints is the generic. How far you’re willing to accept this as a joke, and go along with the joke, will probably determine how you feel about The Anomaly. Dan Hartland frames it as a novel about “the uselessness of the generic in terms of describing the real”; I agree. Nick Hubble dissects some of the novel’s sf referentiality, noting that it is “not that the ideas are entirely new but in some ways that is the point which the novel is making so effectively.” I agree again, and here is the conundrum. The novel’s point, it seems to me, is that its science-fictional aspects are precisely not notable and not sufficient. It demonstrates this point very thoroughly. It just seems a little perverse to award it as the best science fiction of the year. Perhaps Gautam Bhatia’s reading offers a way out, however. For him, The Anomaly does become more than an intellectual exercise, ending as a novel about “our failure—or perhaps, our unwillingness—to take […] collective action, even in the teeth of a visible, tangible existential crisis”, and a companion to Don’t Look Up. I like that reading: if it wins, I think I will believe that is the reason why.

Fifth in this rundown is the novel that is perhaps most unfairly treated by the method I’ve adopted. EJ Swift’s The Coral Bones is a three-strand braid, moving between three women in and around Australia: an amateur biologist on a British research vessel in the 1800s, a marine biologist working on the Great Barrier Reef in the present, and an employee of the Restoration Committee in a climate-ruined twenty-second century. Inevitably, only one can be quoted, and it’s the first one I mentioned:

I did not impart my second thought, which was that were I be forced to marry someone, Mr Darwin would be an ideal candidate. Not that Mother would consider my wishes. That was clear from her letter. I heard Father draw a breath, and awaited his response, but he only sighed again. I felt myself to be a burden then, and wished for the thousandth time that I had been born a boy.

The strength of voice that comes across here, and the determined belief in science as a tool with which to understand the world, carries through the other two strands; but they are markedly less sparky. In the present, there is an awareness of terrible looming catastrophe: “never have we had so much knowledge about the wonders of our planet, and never have we been so close to losing it all.” In the future, that catastrophe has produced enduring grief: “the Anthropocene city was as much an apology as a celebration of survival”. As everyone who has written about the book has noted, its great strength is the way the three strands of the braid elaborate and reflect each others’ concerns. For Gautam Bhatia, the keynote is “How do you grieve for what is eradicated slowly and inexorably, over the course of a lifetime?”; for Tom Atherton, “the overall concern for human connectedness and our relationship with nature”; for Nick Hubble, the sense that “Our present society is not the teleological end state of a history that is fully known and documented, but a fleeting moment amidst ongoing change, which is already largely in progress”. The three individual stories are all compelling – for me most of all the future strand, which digs into the psychology of living in the later anthropocene in the way that I think very few writers have managed – but as a whole The Coral Bones achieves a compelling unity. 

Last, and not least but not most either, we have Metronome by Tom Watson. If The Coral Bones is the novel least fairly represented by this excerpt-method, Metronome may be the one whose flavour is most accurately captured:

She looks at the pill clock. Their leash. Restricting them to these eight-hour excursions. But she missed the pill by three minutes. No disputing. Maybe she could last even longer. Maybe she could –

The short sentences. The sense of urgency. The sense of constraint. The sense of rules, ones that need to be subverted. The whole book is like this. It reads very quicky, and has a kind of beauty to it: Tom Atherton calls it “sparse, beautiful, eloquent”, and I think at points it is indeed all three of those things. But it is also a very familiar type of novel, but not in the deliberate way of Le Tellier. In a review of a different book, Sarah Moss recently enumerated what islands offer to novelists: “the conveniences of the closed room, the small scale; politics distilled to a manageable number of characters; the distance between cause and effect, behaviour and consequences, necessarily and usefully short.” All of this applies to Metronome – Gautam Bhatia describes it as a novel of “aftermath, seen up close and granularly, through an individual lens” – but applies just as much to a lot of other recent novels, begging the question of how Metronome stands out. Nina Allan discussed some of them in her review, and found Metronome somewhat wanting in its lack of rigour, a diagnosis I would tend to agree with. It’s not a problem per se that the focus is so narrow – what power the novel has derives from that approach – but it is an issue that when we glimpse anything wider our reaction is, as Nick Hubble puts it, “no, that’s not how it would be like”.

You will have gathered from this run-down that my preference is for either The Coral Bones or Venomous Lumpsucker. I really struggle to separate them: they may be related in their concerns, but their approaches are radically different, and either would be a welcome winner. The Anomaly is also an achievement, and while I don’t necessarily think the awards it should be winning are science fiction ones, I wouldn’t begrudge it. Any of the other novels winning would be, for me, a surprise and disappointment. I think it probably will be either Swift or Beauman – Gautam Bhatia calls this “the climate change shortlist”, and while I think he stretches a little to make that description fit, it’s clearly a common thread through most of the books, and as not just the most direct but the most skillful explorations of that thread, I think Swift and Beauman have to be considered the frontrunners. And I think in the end the aching decorum of The Coral Bones may win out over the furious chaos of Venomous Lumpsucker. We’ll know soon enough.