Briardene Books

ON BRIARDENE

  • Four Reviews in One Day

    A sudden flurry of words by me making their way into the world. Sadly not freely available words, but I can give you some excerpts. First up, in the August Locus, a (timely!) review of In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (full text now online here):

    The novel as a whole embodies the principle that it isn’t just our personal history that locks us into spiral- ling feedback loops: our planetary history does too, and awareness of this is part of what makes daily living in the Anthropocene feel, you might say, so very strange. “It’s perhaps difficult,” one character says to Leigh at one point, “to really face this [embedded strangeness]; certainly it’s difficult to do the idea justice.” I agree with them. But the steely unity of In Ascension, as it traverses from the hadalpelagic zone to the heliopause, makes it a compelling attempt.

    Also in Locus (and also now online), All The Hollow of the Sky by Kit Whitfield:

    All the Hollow of the Skytells the story of one family of fairy-smiths in Gyrford, a fictional Midlands village […] The beautifully composed omniscient narration – along with two important interludes of equally well-controlled first-person – is itself an absorbing and authoritative creation. It is precise in its deployment of local dialect and archaisms, flexible enough to accommodate both digression and directness, and attentive to both light and shade without flinching. It repays trust.

    Meanwhile, in the BSFA Review #21 (members only), I wrestle a bit, perhaps not entirely satisfactorily, with two books by Han Song, in particular his recently translated novel:

    So what meaning can be mined from [Hospital] must come from the journey it depicts; but the journey is restless, indirect and full of switchbacks. A new chapter generally indicates not a new event or location, but a new intellectual riff. […] The sheer number of elaborations is dazzling. Many are entertaining, such as the “medical punks” who pop up in a variety of contexts, advocating for radical innovation and transformation, not just of healthcare but of humanity itself. But at times, if taken in anything more than small doses, the execution can make the novel a rebarbative read.

    And also in the BSFA Review, Life Beyond Us, a promising but unsatisfying anthology:

    But drawing on a broad network is only one part of the editorial arts, and in other areas the construction of Life Beyond Us feels weak. The stories are, for instance, all very similar in length, with only a couple falling outside a tight 4,000-8,000 word range. Their topics vary, but their rhythms become familiar; a couple of meaty longer stories would have helped to manage the anthology’s pacing. The sequencing also seemed a little haphazard to me. Every so often an obvious thematic pair appear back-to-back, but in most cases the progression from one story to the next seems arbitrary. Organising the stories into subsections – even ones as broad as, say, the Earth, the solar system, and beyond – would I think have helped the book to feel more purposeful. 

    In short: two books you should definitely look for, and two that didn’t quite work for me.

  • SH: Depth of Field II, Fund Drive

    This week’s Strange Horizons has my second “Depth of Field” column, this time taking a meander through several deep-time and far-future books. Inevitably, there is some faffing about definitions:

    What counts as deep time? When does the far future start?

    Stapledon uses the latter term, and, perhaps following him, so does The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, whose entry focuses on stories set in what might be paraphrased as evening times, either of the Earth or the universe. Perhaps if you can pin a date more precise than the nearest million years on it, it’s not the far future. Meanwhile, “deep time”, as Noah Heringman discusses in Deep Time: A Literary History (2023), may have been popularised in the 1980s by writers such as John McPhee in narrative overviews of geology such as Basin and Range (1981), but the concept is obviously older. Heringman dates it back, via novels such as Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), not only to early geology (although the contemporary phrase used about Hutton’s work was “abyss of time”), but to Hindu, and other, cosmologies that situate recorded history within a vaster frame. His interest in “the qualitative dimensions of deep time as an imaginative experience” (p. 3) feels relevant to my exploration here, albeit in the opposite temporal direction. Perhaps any duration that makes a human life feel infinitesimally small is deep time.

    I knew from the start I wanted Stapledon to be the keystone of this one, but when I was deciding what other books to look at, I found myself sometimes thinking there were too many to choose from (because just going by timelines, there are a lot of stories set a long way into the future), and sometimes thinking there were hardly any (because almost nobody, even Clarke and Baxter, has really done what Stapledon set out to do). So the above paragraph, plus borrowing the concept of “timefulness” from the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, represents an attempt to build me some sort of framework through which to read the books I did pick — by Annalee Newitz, Paul McAuley, CJ Cherryh, Ryu Mitsuse, and CM Kosemen. Hopefully leading into a few interesting observations along the way.

    This is also a good time for me to mention that this year’s fund drive for Strange Horizons has (at the time of writing) twelve days left to run — I encourage you to head over to the Kickstarter page and take a look. Stretch goals include a special issues on Japanese SF and on SF and neurodiversity, and also raising the pay rate for reviewers. The special fund drive issue is, I think, already all unlocked, and includes a fascinating piece by Kai Ashante Wilson, “Whither Queer?: The Genre At Midlife And A Rec-list“, fiction by Aimee Ogden and Christi Nogle, reviews and poetry, and a round-table discussion of Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath that I’m saving up because I haven’t read the novel yet. If any of that, or indeed my column, appeals, and if you’re in a position to do so, then do consider chipping in.

  • BSFA Review: Death by Landscape

    The BSFA have posted my review of Eliva Wilk’s essay collection Death by Landscape on their website; the review first appeared in BSFA Review 19.

    It’s an interesting collection; reading it made me want to re-read her novel Oval, which I also enjoyed (enough to pick it for my mock Clarke shortlist) but never wrote about. Anyway, here’s an excerpt from the review:

    What the collection is actually about is environmental and ecosystems fiction, particularly its weird and uncanny variants, and as such it can be shelved honourably alongside books like Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) or Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021) as an attempt to understand how culture is responding to the climate crisis. Wilk is more wide-ranging than Ghosh and more incisive than Bould, and ultimately, also more informal (and indeed more fannish) than either, as in the latter stages the essays become somewhat more personal, and consider Wilk’s processes for her own fiction, notably her near-future novel Oval (2019, but published for the first time in the UK this year by Peninsula Press), as well as her situation during lockdown. But I was most struck by how the way Wilk thinks and writes about the environment cuts across the literary landscape as we currently understand it and starts to generate its own sense of community. It’s a commonplace experience, these days, to find an individual trope, like time travel or the multiverse, becoming part of our general culture, but this is something more: the way Wilk groups the works she discusses is simply a different way of organising information, like choosing to divide the spectrum of visible light into different slices than the rainbow we typically use.

  • About A Shortlist

    Well, that didn’t take long: we have a Clarke shortlist.

    • Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)
    • The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz)
    • Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick (Gollancz)
    • The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter (Michael Joseph)
    • The Coral Bones by E. J. Swift (Unsung Stories)
    • Metronome by Tom Watson (Bloomsbury)

    First question: how does it stack up against the analysis of the submissions list and my associated guesses? Four Brits (against three “expected”), one French-American, and one French (against two Americans and one RoW expected); an even gender split and one non-white writer is representative of the submissions list; six first-time nominees, which Chair of Judges Andrew M. Butler highlights in the article linked above, but which isn’t really a surprise given the lack of previous shortlistees submitted, which may point to a structural issue about the longevity of current publishing careers, or may just be a quirk of 2022. Two of the novels (Kissick and Watson) are first novels, but the rest of the nominees have careers of at least a decade behind them; ordered by length of career, we have Le Tellier, de Bodard, Beauman, Swift, Kissick/Watson. We have an overlap of two with the BSFA list (de Bodard and Swift), one with the Locus (de Bodard), one with the Kitschies (Swift), and none with any other awards so far this year.

    The publisher split is interesting: we have three ‘mainstream’ imprints, one small press genre imprint, and two from Gollancz. It’s not a particular shock that mainstream imprints are over-represented compared to their submissions list proportion, that’s a fairly common feature of Clarke shortlists; but the fact that Gollancz has two is notable. Ten years ago it wouldn’t have been: for the period between 2000 and 2012, Gollancz had at least one novel on the shortlist every year, had three novels on the shortlist four times, and accounted for four of ten winners — but, astonishingly, they haven’t had a novel shortlisted since 2018 (Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill), and haven’t managed two since 2014 (The Adjacent by Christopher Priest and, less compellingly, The Disestablishment of Paradise by Philip Mann). They haven’t had a winner since 2008.

    I’m not convinced that latter streak is going to break this year. Plutoshine is a type of sf that I like very much, but for me only an average example of that type; and while I haven’t read The Red Scholar’s Wake yet, and expect to enjoy it more than not, everything I’ve read about it suggests that it’s unlikely to quite be the match of the two books that were on my personal shortlist, Beauman and Swift. That leaves Metronome, which I haven’t read and am curious about — albeit slightly wary of the “there’s a big revelation that will shock and surprise you” marketing — and Le Tellier, which I enjoyed as a jeu d’esprit without being deeply moved by. Still, considering the six books in isolation from potential counterfactuals (no Moonday Letters, alas!) my initial impression is favourable; all six books seem to have some substance to them, which is in the end what you hope for in a shortlist. The winner will be announced in August, and I hope to do a final round-up of coverage of the shortlisted books, plus my own further thoughts, before then.

  • The Deconstruction of Falling Submissions Lists

    As has become tradition — and a good tradition it is too, one that I’d be delighted to see other awards adopt — the Arthur C. Clarke Award administrator has released the list of books submitted for consideration for this year’s award. It’s useful as a snapshot of the science fiction that’s being published in the UK; and, of course, it encourages us to start thinking about what should (or at least might) make the shortlist.

    To the former point: we have 97 books submitted, and by my counts, which are almost certainly imperfect and err on the side of being conservative in categorising people, half of them (49%) are by writers who don’t identify as men, while a fifth (19%) are by writers who are not white. I don’t have the data for every past year to hand, but compared to a decade ago, the proportion of non-men has more or less doubled, and the proportion of non-white writers has roughly tripled. There are a couple of things to consider behind that headline, however. I subdivided the list into 60 books from genre publishers (62%; and almost half are accounted for by just three imprints, Titan [n=10], Angry Robot [n=10], and Gollancz [n=9]), plus 22 from “mainstream” publishers (23%; yes, an unhelpful term for some specific authors, but helpful for this), and 15 from small presses (15%, although almost all of these would probably be considered “genre small presses”). The proportions of each category not by men were 42%, 73% and 47%, and by non-white writers, 17%, 36% and 0%: so we’re still making progress, but it’s also true to say that the genre is still lagging the mainstream in both areas.

    Similarly, sorting the list according to the resident country of their author (and here attaching a further health warning about my tagging), the UK accounts for 49% of submissions, the USA 36%, and other countries (13 countries, I think) the remaining 15%; and then the proportions not by men are 34%, 60% and 73% for UK, USA and RoW, and the proportions by non-white writers are a pitiful 4% for the UK, compared to 23% from the USA and 53% from RoW. I also only spotted four translations, of which only one was from a genre publisher: Emmi Itaranta’s The Moonday Letters, which I believe was self-translated from a Finnish 2020 original (although my copy doesn’t explicitly state this). The other three are Herve le Tellier’s The Anomaly, Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, and Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night (which I think the judges would struggle to count as science fiction). I realise some of this would be easier to digest with graphs, but I think the summary is that in the UK we are, to a non-trivial extent, importing the diversity of our science fiction; good in some ways (I suspect having a total of 15 countries represented among Clarke Award submissions is at the upper end of that metric, historically), troubling in others.

    What sort of shortlist does this benchmarking indicate? Well, a representative shortlist would include three Brits, two Americans, and one writer from another country; three of them would be men; four or five of them would be white; and there would be four titles published by genre publishers, and one each by a mainstream publisher and a small press. There are I think only eight previous shortlistees in the mix (another interesting comment on the market), so we should probably expect quite a few first-time nominees. I’ve read fifteen of the submitted works, so going purely on averages I might only have read one of the shortlistees — although among those fifteen novels, there are several I’m very fond of, so I’m going to hope for more.

    And of course, in the end, although it will be interesting to see how the shortlist aligns with or diverges from this statistical picture, the shortlisted books aren’t going to be picked to fill representative slots. To bring it down to individual works, there are two that I’m sad to see were not submitted: Zoe Gilbert’s knotty, generically fluid Mischief Acts (reviewed in the last section here), and Georgi Gospodinov’s engrossing, slipstream-y Time Shelter (reviewed at the start of this column). Of the remainder, based on personal reading or on their general reception there are about a third that I’d expect to be in serious contention (albeit one of them is a book that, going by the publisher’s website, may not be eligible: Lavie Tidhar’s Neom was released by Tachyon in the US last year, but according to PS Publishing’s website, was a January 2023 release for them in the UK). Picking purely from titles that I’ve read, I’d offer up this shortlist, alphabetically by author surname:

    • Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman: a venomously black extrapolation of the worst trends in ecosystem management
    • The Moonday Letters by Emmi Itaranta: a meditative travelogue through a near-future solar system, reviewed here
    • Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley: shortlisted for the Kitschies, and longlisted for the Locus Awards, this is a thoughtful, subtle after-the-anthropocene extrapolation
    • The Coral Bones by EJ Swift: already shortlisted for the BSFA Award and the Kitschies, this is a beautifully searching braided climate fiction
    • Oval by Elvia Wilk: housing, environment and pharmaceuticals in day-after-tomorrow Berlin
    • To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihira: infuriating in several ways, but I read it over a year ago and can’t deny that it’s stayed with me

    This will, of course, not be the shortlist. The judges almost certainly will not share my enthusiasm for environmental themes — although I think it was a particularly strong year on that front, and as I’ve already indicated, if none of the above show up, I will be grumpy.

    What else might actually be in the mix? Nicholas Whyte (who is also a judge) has collated and averaged Goodreads and LibraryThing ratings for the entire submissions list; I don’t expect this to be particularly predictive, however. He’s highlighted the books in the top quintile, and from those, I think the only ones I could see featuring on the shortlist, going by my nebulous sense of “what the Clarke likes”, are Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility (in fact, Station Eleven was the winner last time Nicholas was a judge), potentially an Adrian Tchaikovsky (although both the SF submissions are series volumes, which tends to be a disadvantage), The Coral Bones (see above), Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest, The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard, and Pod by Laline Paull. There are certainly other titles with lower ratings that I could see appealing to the judges, however: again going mostly by repute, I’d pick out Adam Roberts’ The This, Hiron Ennes’ Leech, J. O. Morgan’s Appliance (which I had not heard of, but based on this Stuart Kelly review will probably now seek out), Lidia Yuknavitch’s Thrust, Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion, and Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth (all three of which I own and have not yet read). David Musgrave’s unsettling Lambda and Ever Dundas’ visceral HellSans both play with the idea of non-human assistive lifeforms (among other things) to good effect, so perhaps one of them will crop up. And Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark also seems like a plausible, even likely, pick, but I bounced off it so am hoping not.

    Nailing my colours to the mast about which of the 988,172,368 possible shortlists I think the judges will pick, then, I’ll go for:

    • The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard
    • HellSans by Ever Dundas
    • Appliance by J. O. Morgan
    • How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
    • Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
    • The Coral Bones by EJ Swift

    The submission list announcement doesn’t say when the shortlist will be announced; but hopefully not too long.

  • The Difference Between Links and Time

    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.

  • Beyond the Burn Link

    Let’s start with episode 5 of the Critical Friends podcast, in which Dan Hartland and Aishwarya Subramanian have a chat with Abigail Nussbaum about the nature and currency of negative reviews. Their discussion is well worth listening to (or reading — there is a transcript at the link above), and touches on topics ranging from “at what point does a review become a negative review” to the different motivations for writing such a piece, the authority of different people to write such a piece, and how The Discourse treats them. I think that within sf (less so the literary world at large), perhaps the most important factor over the last few decades that has changed the position of negative reviews is the decline of the column and the rise of individually commissioned reviews. Review columns, in which a reviewer tackles several books each month, and may receive strong editorial encouragement to cover particular titles, are less common than they were (and particularly rare in online venues); a much more common model is individual reviews, whether at places like Strange Horizons or The Ancillary Review of Books, or — perhaps most especially — on a blog, some of which do still exist, and in either case it’s common for reviewers to have a lot of input into the titles they cover. The reasons for this are various and often noble (it drastically increases the range of who gets to participate, for instance), but I think the shift makes the negative review, when it occurs, more of an event. Anyway, it was interesting to listen to this shortly after reading Ryan Ruby’s essay “A Golden Age“ at Vinduet, which is focused on the broader world of criticism, and identifies “genres” of contemporary criticism that “typically depart from the form of the standard book review”; he tries to reclaim the Contemporary Themed Review as part of this, as well as what he calls “personal criticism”, “in which the critic narrates the experience of reading a particular literary work in the first person as a means of situating their analysis of it”. I don’t think we see much of either of those forms within sf; maybe a bit more of the latter than the former.

    Other reading:

    • Venerable BSFA journal Vector is looking for a new editorial team; full application form here. I’m going to take a moment here to acknowledge the brilliant work that Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin, and the guest editors they’ve worked with, have done over the last few years, putting out a succession of extremely strong issues. I mean, look at this graphic essay from the recent Futures issue.
    • Back to Strange Horizons, last week’s issue had a terrific essay by Shinjini Dey, “Making, Breaking and Extraction: An Exploration of Bodies and Time in SFF“. It sparked connections in my head with Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, and also the Mike Nelson retrospective “Extinction Beckons” at the Hayward Gallery in London (on for another week — if you are able to get to it, it’s well worth a visit).
    • Notable reviews: Abigail Nussbaum on A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys and Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi (“maybe the question is, which elision—of the ugliness of the now or the possibilities of the future—bothers you more?”); Ben Hooyman at LARB on two books by Vladimir Sorokin (“The first major phase of his career, from the late 1970s to the fall of the USSR, is oriented toward the Soviet past, while the second phase sees the author […] sculpting speculative visions of the future”); and a minor spate of CJ Cherryh blogging, with Adam Roberts on Gate of Ivrel and Ian Sales on the Faded Sun trilogy.
    • Laura Miller writes about Death of an Author, a novella by Stephen Marche written while making use of ChatGPT.
    • The Science Fiction Foundation have announced the creation of the Maureen Kincaid Speller travel fund, intended for independent scholars. A wonderful way of memorialising Maureen.
    • For Esquire, Jeff VanderMeer writes about how “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us“, or perhaps more accurately, the unreasonable expectations placed on authors when they are identified as writing climate fiction. (See also Tyler Harper’s essay for the BBC on “What Climate Fiction Gets Wrong“.)
    • Awards bits: SFWA have created the “oops we didn’t make them a Grand Master” Infinity Award, with Octavia E. Butler as the first recipient. A good initiative and a great first pick; I could wish the mechanism for subsequent picks was a touch more transparent, however. The Locus Award top ten finalist lists are out. The Locus news blog also pointed me to the Royal Society of Literature VS Pritchett Short Story Prize winner, “Doggerland” by Kaliane Bradley, which from the judges’ blurbs certainly sounds like it has speculative content. I haven’t read it yet, but the story is online at Prospect.
    • Neil Clarke describes the process and outcomes of Clarkesworld‘s recent call for Spanish-language submissions.
    • Head of Zeus is launching the “Apollo Africa” list, which will over the next few years reprint 100 titles previously published in the Heinemann African Writers series.

  • The Sunken Links Begin to Rise Again

    In this week’s Strange Horizons, Nina Allan becomes the latest to enthuse about Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension: “The abstract, aesthetic joy in uniting concepts, in revealing connections, in propelling a thrilling idea as far as it will go is something we have come to expect from MacInnes and forms a defining characteristic of his literary identity. This new book is defined in addition by the simpler, more immediately accessible joy of story, of characters who speak to us personally and whose lives, exploits, and emotions we experience in the gut as well as in the mind.” See also Adam Roberts for The Guardian, Stuart Kelly for The Scotsman, Beejay Silcox for the TLS (who I think rightly pinpoints the significance of the novel’s earnestness); the only real sceptic I’ve come across is Simon Ings for The Times (“a science-fiction vehicle driven with the literary brakes jammed on”; I think the earnestness didn’t work for him). I’m with the acclaimers on this one: it struck me as a novel trying to square the circle of the Clarkean and Ballardian traditions of exploring the limits of our comprehension, and very nearly pulling it off. I say ‘very nearly’ because I’m not sure I’m completely convinced by the very end: Nina refers to it as uniting “two classic science fictional conceits in a manner that is original and blissfully satisfying”, but I think it might raise a few eyebrows. Still, one of the year’s major British sf novels, without doubt. [EDIT: I also meant to link to MacInnes’ top 10 visionary books about scientists, which is a very interesting list and speaks to the range of influences he’s drawing on. For all that it’s a novel about space travel and the possibility of alien life, for instance, it has very definitely taken on board (or perhaps it’s fairer to say, MacInnes is already sympathetic to) the arguments in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora.]

    In Ascension also got an Observer review from John Self, who offered this hostage to fortune: “His work is so unlike any other writer of literary fiction, and his outcomes so interesting, that he must be a shoo-in for Granta’s best young British novelists list this spring.” Whoops. The Granta list is out, and MacInnnes is not on it, which looks like a startling omission to me as well. Perhaps he fell foul of the judges’ cage-match approach? “Rausing refreshingly lets us know how the judges pitted authors of similar-seeming books against one another. [Sophie] Mackintosh was better at ‘speculative fiction’ than Julia Armfield, Sarvat Hasin, Missouri Williams and Alison Rumfitt.” I’ve read Mackintosh and Armfield, although not the others listed, and of the two Armstrong seems to me by far the more penetrating writer, and MacInnes is at least as good as Armfield. This does lead inevitably on to the question of who else from within sf we might put forward. I think the following meet the terms of the Granta list (under 40, resident in the UK): Zen Cho, Harry Josephine Giles, E.J. Swift, Emily Tesh. Helen Oyeyemi and Ned Beauman were on the real 2013 list, and are still somehow eligible and I’d probably want to include them as well. Who else?

    Swift’s The Coral Bones was my pick for this year’s BSFA Award for best novel, although in the event Adrian Tchaikovsky took home the prize. Nick Hubble’s thorough overview of the shortlist — part one, part two, postscript — is well worth reading. He also has a long and deliberately impressionistic eastercon report, which, since we overlapped on several panels, captures some of my experience as well. I had a very good, if slightly surreal time; I think it will take me a while to process the experience of being a guest of honour, and in particular the experience of having people talk about the impact that writing I did and projects I was involved in had on them, as Nick very generously does in his write-up and Ian Mond very generously does in this Twitter thread. But I’m very grateful to all involved, and they gave me a really nice bookmark afterwards.

    More to read:

  • Post-Eastercon admin

    Just a few quick notes:

    • All orders for physical editions of All These Worlds received as of today have been posted, and all orders for ebooks have been emailed. Note that orders to places outside the UK may take ~2 weeks to arrive
    • There is now an easy ‘subscribe’ box in the blog sidebar, if you prefer to receive updates by email
    • I’ve added an elsewhere page to the site, with links to interesting, informative, or useful sites; I’m hoping to get into the habit of posting link round-ups at least once per month

  • About A Book

    All These Worlds, the collection of reviews and essays that this site was set up to promote, is out today! If you pre-ordered, your copy has been shipped; if you haven’t, you can order a physical copy here, or a Kindle edition here. If you’re attending this year’s Eastercon, Conversation, you will be able to acquire a copy in-person, either from the dealer’s room or at the launch event on Saturday at 13.30, where I’ll be chatting with Nina Allan about the book and all things review-related. (There will also be drinks and snacks.) The rest of my schedule for the convention is here.

    The book exists because I was invited to be one of the guests of honour for Conversation. I wanted to have something to mark the occasion; and although reviewing is not the whole of why Conversation invited me, it is part of it, which felt like a validation not unlike a publisher expressing interest; and what with collections of sf reviews not exactly being mass-market propositions (and in any case not having a huge lead-time to fit into a publisher’s schedule), I decided to do it myself. It’s been a challenging but rewarding process, and I’ve had a lot of help along the way. Thanks in particular to (in alphabetical order), John Coxon, Alex Ingram, Andrew January, Emily January, Kate Macdonald, Sally Osborn, Roger Robinson, Jared Shurin, Tom Joyes (for his brilliant cover and design work), and Marilisa Valtazanou, plus the team at Short Run Press who made it a reality. It’s quite something, it turns out, to hold a distillation of a long period of reading, writing and thinking in your hands.

    I am, of course, curious what people will make of it, if they read it. Review collections may not be a mass-market proposition, but they’ve been important to me, and as first drafts of literary history I’ve always found them fascinating. I think the first one I read cover-to-cover was probably William Atheling Jr’s The Issue at Hand (1973), a collection of columns on sf short fiction by a pseudonymous James Blish, written with vigour, wit, and seriousness. Then followed John Clute’s Scores (2003) and (out of order), Look at the Evidence (1996), which shaped my understanding of the period from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Parietal Games (2005), a combination of M. John Harrison’s reviews and some essays about Harrison’s work, inspired me at the time when I was starting to take reviewing (and review-editing) more seriously, as did The Country You Have Never Seen (2005) by Joanna Russ. Then there are Gary K. Wolfe’s collections Soundings (2005), Bearings (2010) and Sightings (2011); Paul Kincaid’s Call and Response (2014); Adam Roberts’ Sibilant Fricative (2014) and Rave and Let Die (2015); Algis Budrys’ Benchmarks (1985) and the more recent Ansible editions of other Budrys reviews; and outside SF, Zadie Smith’s collections Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free (2018).

    There are others, but those are the landmarks that stand out in my mind when I think about reviewing as a craft, and about collections of reviews that are put together with a purpose, and though I’m not putting myself in the same league, they informed how I approached All These Worlds. The book is structured as a history: it runs from roughly 2005 to 2014, with reviews of individual books arranged chronologically, followed by essays that provide different overarching views on the period. The collections I’m aware of that overlap with this period are Wolfe’s Sightings, Kincaid’s Call and Response, Roberts’ Sibilant Fricative, and two other Clute volumes, Canary Fever (2009) and Stay (2014). They all paint different portraits: this is to be expected, not least because I almost never had an editor telling me what books to cover, and wandered my own way across the landscape of sf. Many of the pieces reprinted come from the BSFA’s blog, Torque Control, which formed a nexus for discussion at the time, rather than from a traditional magazine. So as a history, it’s a very personal one, and perhaps a little narrow: because I have often written long, All These Worlds covers fewer individual books than any of the above. But there isn’t much overlap. I count fewer than five books in common with each of Kincaid, Roberts, and Wolfe, fewer than ten (across both books) with Clute. And so I think, or hope, that in that divergence is an additional perspective on the semi-recent history of sf that is worth reading.