Tag: science fiction

Sunday Story Society: ‘Meet the President!’ by Zadie Smith

1st September 2013 / / 3 Comments

sundaystorysmall

It’s time for the first installment of the new monthly Sunday Story Society, for which I’ve chosen to look at Zadie Smith’s story ‘Meet the President!‘ in the New Yorker (you can read it by clicking on the link). The way it works is, I start off with a review of the story, then you can join in talking about the story in the comments here, and we’ll just see how it goes. So…

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Zadie Smith has reportedly said that she’s working on a science fictional novel, which is an intriguing prospect to me. I’m not sure whether ‘Meet the President!; is an extract (it stands well enough on its own. And seems to make all the point that it needs to make), but it is a taster of how Smith may approach science-fictional material.

We begin on the edge of what is presumably still Suffolk, in a future sketched fairly conventionally, but efficiently: there was flooding a hundred years previously; Felixstowe has moved inland; a woman of forty-nine qualifies as ‘very old’ (on reflection, this may simply be reflecting the viewpoint of the protagonist as a teenage boy, but it still strikes me as fitting with the harsh nature of life in this place). Then comes the key technological innovation around which the story revolves: a personal augmented-reality device which allows users to place pretty much any situation or setting over the world they see.

‘Meet the President!’ is about dramatising contrasts. On the one hand, we have Bill Peek, the rich boy with the Augmentor, whose task (perhaps a futuristic analogue of the Grand Tour) is to travel around and use the augmentation technology to deepen his understanding of the world and its inhabitants. If that ends up looking like play, or ticking the boxes without really learning anything, so be it: Bill has the privilege to get ahead; to be safe; to move away from here (‘If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere,’ he says).

On the other hand, we have Melinda Durham and Aggie Hanwell, the local woman and girl who disturb Bill as the story begins. They have none of Bill’s advantages, and quite a few disadvantages if you go by what the Augmentor tells Bill about their likelihood of falling ill. But that kind of itemisation doesn’t give Bill the true measure of people – and the lacks the ability to deal with the real place in which he finds himself, as we see in the contrast between the rural community and the game Bill creates through the Augmentor.

I suppose that contrast could be seen as somewhat heavy-handed – Smith clearly has her thumb on the scales – but I think it ultimately works because there is such a sharp difference between the augmented and physical worlds that Bill experiences. I’d stop short of saying ‘Meet the President!’ is a great story (I don’t think it has quite enough depth for that); but it does make me look forward to that novel.

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And now, over to you…

“This is how hard you should have fought for my son when you brought him into the world”

12th June 2013 / / 4 Comments

Adam Marek, The Stone Thrower (2012)

Who is the Stone Thrower? In the title story of this, Adam Marek’s second collection, he is a boy killing the chickens  of the lakeside house that Hal’s family is renting. Hal pulls out all the stops to save his birds, demonstrating an action hero’s dexterity – but he is unprepared for just how determined the boy is to achieve his goal. In the collection as a whole, the figure of the Stone Thrower may the extraordinary forces at work in Marek’s stories, forces that may inspire extraordinary (to us, at least) responses in the adult characters seeking to protect their charges (chickens in Hal’s case, but more often children).

Marek’s tales typically begin with what appears to be a fairly unremarkable situation, but as they develop we may discover that not all is as it seems. In ‘The Stormchasers’, a father heads out with his son Jakey to go looking for a tornado. At story’s end, however, we find that the true purpose of that journey was to protect Jakey from a different kind of storm which has been going on at home. ‘Remember the Bride Who Got Stung?’ sees Victor out on a picnic with his family, when his allergic son Nate is stung by a bee; having left behind Nate’s shots , Victor determines to get the child’s adrenaline flowing – by any means necessary.

That latter story in particular illustrates one of Marek’s common techniques: to show how particular circumstances have shaped a character’s psychology in ways that appear reasonable to them, but may not to an outside observer like the reader. But – like many of The Stone Thrower’s tale’s – ‘Remember the Bride’ is understatedly and elegantly fantasticated. The appearance of a bee is a rare occurrence in the world of this story; and that’s the only hint we receive that we may be reading about a near future.

When Marek writes about the future (or an alternative present), there’s usually a greater degree of difference than that; but he’s always primarily concerned with the characters and their relationships. ‘Tamagotchi’ sees a new, more sophisticated, generation of those virtual pets on the market. Young Luke has a Tamagotchi which is sick, and spreading that sickness to other children’s pets; one parent asks that he keep away from the other children at a birthday party. But Luke is also epileptic, and his parents talk about him having a “design fault”: the stigma of having a sick Tamagotchi shades into how Luke is treated because of his condition, and affects the way his parents think about him. Sometimes this kind of mirroring extends further outwards: in ‘A Thousand Seams’, a mother clutches her ill son in the midst of a protest and tells him, ‘”WI’m going to make everything okay”. It’s an open question whether the boy or society is more threatened by having too much pressure placed on their respective weak points.

The collection ends with ‘Earthquakes’, which tells of a boy named Toby who has a rare condition that induces seizures which have external effects. The effect is different in each case (Toby’s seizures cause earth tremors), but no children with the syndrome have yet lived into their teens. The format of this story gives it a slightly different tone from most of the others in The Stone Thrower: it’s written as a generic fundraising letter – the details of the case are specific, but there’s just a placeholder for the recipient. So we have a curious mix of the personal and impersonal: there’s enough of a story about the text that it carries emotional weight; but there is also a sense that it may all be fake, a marketing document generated to drum up sympathy and cash. Even if we accept ‘Earthquakes’ as genuine, it feels like a lonely cry in the dark, because the mother writing this letter doesn’t know if anyone will ever read it. But, as ever in Marek’s stories, the adult characters will go to any length for their children if the circumstances demand it.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Click here to read my other posts on the shortlist.

Clarke Award 2013: And the winner is…

4th May 2013 / / 0 Comments

Quite a belated announcement at this point, but this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Dark Eden by Chris Beckett. Not the result I had predicted, but that’s the Clarke for you.

All congratulations to Chris Beckett, who’s a writer I think deserves to be much more widely read. I didn’t get around to reviewing Dark Eden properly, so instead let me point you to some of my previous reviews of Beckett’s work: I’ve written about his Edge Hill Prize-winning collection The Turing Test (and did a guest post for Gav Pugh’s blog on the title story); and I considered his novel The Holy Machine (in a double review with Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys).

Clarke Award 2013: in review

28th April 2013 / / 2 Comments

I find the Clarke Award difficult to call this year, in terms of both what I think might win, and the order of personal preference in which I’d place the place the books. I think there are a number of books on the shortlist which are very close in quality, and they’re so different that they become hard to separate. But that’s no reason not to have a go, so let’s line the books up and whittle them down…

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First out of the balloon this year is Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars – which is actually not as harsh a judgment on the book as it might seem. In the few years that I’ve been reading the whole Clarke shortlist, the titles I’ve thought weakest have ranged from OK to downright awful – but The Dog Stars is pretty decent. It has issues with plotting, and its treatment of female characters, but it’s also wonderfully written. My greatest problem with Heller’s novel as a Clarke contender, though, is that I can’t help feeling it would be stronger without its speculative content.

With reluctance, I’ve reached the conclusion that Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 just isn’t my type. I enjoyed Galileo’s Dream a few years back (admittedly some aspects more than others); but 2312’s panoramic view of a terraformed and colonised solar system didn’t engage me to nearly the same extent. I found Robinson’s prose beautiful at times (some of the best scientific writing I’ve come across in a work of fiction for a long time), but other parts of the book left me feeling indifferent. I must acknowledge that I’m not ina position to be able to form a proper view on 2312; but, on the basis that I enjoyed the remaining books on the shortlist more, it’s my second title to go.

Chris Beckett is one of my favourite contemporary science fiction writers, someone I always feel is serious about using sf to explore particular issues. Dark Eden is not quite Beckett at his best, but it’s an interesting piece of work nonetheless. It tells the tale of an abandoned colonists on a distant world, who have made rituals out of the wait for three of their number to return from Earth with help. Beckett is efficient and effective at showing how the colonists’ language, thoughts and behaviours have been altered by their isolation. I also appreciate the way he examines not only the desire for change (the novel centres on a teenage colonist who wants to break away from the others’ ritualistic existence), but also the need to keep going once a great change has been made. I like Dark Eden, but I don’t think it reaches as far as the remaining books on the shortlist, so I’m discarding it next.

If I were to rank these six novels purely by my enjoyment of the reading experience, Nod by Adrian Barnes would top the list – but is that enough to make me think it should win the Clarke? I like Nod’s nervy energy; I think it does interesting things with the form of apocalyptic fiction; and it shares with Dark Eden an interest in how mythologies may develop. But Nod also has its shortcomings: its portrayal of female characters is problematic (to say the least); it puts all its eggs in one basket, and gleefully throws the basket at the reader’s window. When I look at the two other novels left, I see fewer flaws and broader achievements, and I think those qualities make them more worthy of the Clarke than Nod.

There is no doubt in my mind that Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker is a showstopper, probably the most theatrical book on the shortlist. It has linguistic fireworks, grand imagination, and an underlying vein of seriousness to balance out its more playful aspects. Angelmaker has broad ambitions, and pretty much achieves them, even when they might seem contradictory. There’s a lot to recommend about Harkaway’s novel, and I think it would be a worthy Clarke winner – but for me it is just edged out by the last contender…

Intrusion by Ken MacLeod works on a smaller canvas than Angelmaker, and is a much quieter book. But it has a concentrated vision of a society stifled by prohibitions, ruled by a government afraid of anything it can’t label; and it uses very well the idea of seemingly innocuous details coming together in unexpected ways. It’s the completeness of vision – and the sharpness of observation and exploration of vision – that brings Intrusion to the top of the Clarke shortlist for me.

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How about a guess at which novel will actually win? I don’t think my ordering here is going to be the same as the judges’ – I doubt that Nod will survive as long in their process, and I’m certain that 2312 will end up higher on their list than I placed it. But I do suspect that The Dog Stars will be shown the door early on, and that Dark Eden will be overshadowed by some of the other books. I’d expect the final tussle for the winner’s mantle to be between two of Angelmaker, 2312 and Intrusion  – and my instinct is to plump for Angelmaker as the likely winner. But maybe I’m barking entirely up the wrong tree; whatever, the winning title will be announced on Wednesday.

“Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day”

21st April 2013 / / 3 Comments

Peter Heller, The Dog Stars (2012)

Why write about the end of the world? I suppose one of the attractions, for some writers at least, must be the capacity to strip the world back to its bare bones, and focus all on the subjects one wants to explore. These thoughts crossed my mind on reading Peter Heller’s first novel, because The Dog Stars leans so far towards certain issues that the book as a whole gets pushed out of shape.

It is the near future, after a vaguely defined pandemic  that did away with most of the people, and a side-order of climate change that (it seems) did away with much of the wildlife (Heller is sketchy on exactly what happened, but the point is that it was the end of the world). Our narrator, Hig, is one of the small number of humans who were immune to the sickness and are now eking out a living as best they can. Hig’s sole companions are Jasper, his ageing dog; a little Cessna aircraft that he nicknames the Beast; and Bruce Bangley, the only other human for miles around. There’s not much to be done beyond surviving, as other people invariably tend to be hostile, and hence need to be dealt with before they deal with HIg and Bangley. But the loneliness gets to Hig, and eventually he is driven to jump in the Beast to see what, or who, may be out there.

Hig’s narrative voice is what keeps The Dog Stars together: the spare, weary voice of someone resigned to the possibility that there may be nothing left worth saying, but who feels compelled to carry on speaking as it keeps the silence at bay. Hig feels guilty because he survived when his wife Melissa did not – and because he was the one who helped her through death’s door when she asked. In contrast with the much more hard-headed survivalist Bangley, Hig would be happiest just spending time fishing and flying; but Bangley’s disdain for such “Recreating” is hard to ignore. The gulf between the two men is underlined by a sequence where Hig attacks a drinks truck for its bounty and thinks he’s done well – until Bangley tears his pride to shreds by pointing out all his careless mistakes.

If the novel were just Hig, Bangley, and Hig’s introspection, I suspect that The Dog Stars would be a perfectly decent read. But there’s a world beyond them, and I’m with Nina Allan in thinking that Heller falters whenever he turns his focus towards that outer world. I’m willing to overlook the sketchy background, because the foreground interests me more (though it seems odd for hostility to be the norm amongst the survivors when there appears to be enough food and other natural resources to go round). But I can’t ignore the issues with plotting (the closing encounter is far too silly); or the way that Cima, the only living female character, is objectified and generally exists only to serve as an adjunct to Hig.

But perhaps my most nagging doubt over Heller’s book is the thought that it doesn’t really need its post-apocalyptic setting, and might even be better off without it. Hig remarks on the first page:

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water. (p. 3)

This is the sticking point: Hig pines for his wife and his trout. He’s not so completely self-absorbed that he dismisses the wider world; but his personal losses are far more important to him than any broader ones. As a result, the novel doesn’t feel nearly as emotionally invested in its end-of-the-world elements as it is in Hig’s personal reflections. Despite its flaws, The Dog Stars is not a bad portrait of someone coming to terms with loss and finding a way to move on. But add in everything else, and the book just unbalances.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts on this year’s Award.

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2013: The Shortlist

4th April 2013 / / 5 Comments

You can’t predict the Clarke Award, though you can try. Whatever anyone may have predicted, it almost certainly won’t have been the actual shortlist, which was announced this morning:

  • Nod by Adrian Barnes (Bluemoose)
  • Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)
  • Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
  • The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Headline)
  • Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
  • 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)

(Links above go to my reviews.)

In the end, I guessed four correctly – though, as Nina Allan points out, the two books I missed have given the actual shortlist a rather different shape. I have also read four of these novels already; so I can say with some certainty that, on its own terms, this is a good shortlist featuring some strong works.

Still, there is no getting away from the fact that this an all-male shortlist, the Clarke’s first since 1988. As Niall Harrison says, this is something that was probably bound to happen sooner or later. There’s been a chronic lack of science fiction by women published by UK genre imprints these last few years; if you look at this year’s Clarke submissions, the titles by women tend to be borderline fantasy (such as G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen), YA (such as Juliana Baggott’s Pure) or mainstream-published (such as Juli Zeh’s The Method) – all categories which are far more hit-and-miss in terms of their shortlisting chances than (say) a Tricia Sullivan or a Gwyneth Jones (neither of whom, I believe, has a UK publishing contract at the moment). When we look for genre sf among this year’s submissions, we’re looking at something like Madeline Ashby’s vN, which is simply not a good book – and, if you don’t have strong core-genre candidate titles, there’s more likelihood that the fringe titles with more hit-and-miss chances will – well, miss.

This situation should change next year, as there’s a substantially larger amount of genre sf by women being published in the UK in 2013 (Niall has a good list in his post). So, what of the books actually shortlisted this year?

For me, the shortlist falls interestingly into two halves. First, there are three genre titles – the Beckett, MacLeod and Robinson. It is notable that these books also featured on the shortlist for the (popular-vote) BSFA Award; and notable in turn that the Clarke omits the other two BSFA nominees – no M. John Harrison, no Adam Roberts. So there is a sense in which this side of the shortlist is playing it safe to an extent; Robinson, Beckett and MacLeod are all good writers who are serious about their work and the possibilities of science fiction (and I think two nominees of theirs that I’ve read deserve their places on the shortlist) – but all write firmly within the core of genre.

This is so striking to me because the other three shortlisted novels are all non-genre – an unusually high proportion for the Clarke, especially in recent years. There’s also an interesting range of flavours amongst them. It’s nice to see Harkaway getting some Clarke recognition after he missed out with The Gone-Away World; he’s a distinctive and significant new voice in contemporary fiction, I think. I’m pleased that Nod is on the list, because it hasn’t had much attention from the sf community as yet, and I think it’s an intriguing book that could have good cross-over appeal. I don’t know much about the Heller, but it looks like the most traditionally “mainstream” Clarke nominee, and I didn’t have it down as a contender.

Finally, my plans for blogging the shortlist: though I’ve read four of the titles, I have reviewed only three – I never got around to writing up Dark Eden. I’ll be concentrating on reading and reviewing the two unfamiliar titles,which are 2312 and The Dog Stars; if time allows, I will go back to Dark Eden. But I’m fully intending to have at least read all six titles by the announcement of the winner on 1 May.

Bookish travels

2nd April 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been away these last few days, and now it’s time for a catch-up. Last week was the third annual Penguin General Bloggers’ Evening, when a bunch of book bloggers and vloggers gathered together at Foyles in London to hear eight of Penguin’s authors read from their latest books.

My favourite reading of the night came from Bernardine Evaristo, who read a hilarious passage from her forthcoming novel Mr Loverman. This was one of those rare occasions when a single short reading was enough to make me want to read everything an author had written – Evaristo was that good. It was also a pleasure to hear Mohsin Hamid read from How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia; I liked the book anyway, but Hamid was an excellent reader who brought it to life for me once again.

Other highlights from the evening included James Robertson’s ominous extract from The Professor of Truth; Jonathan Coe’s amusing scene from Expo 58; and Joanna Rossiter reading the opening of The Sea Change, a book that I already wanted to read, and am now looking forward to reading even more.

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Then, at the weekend, it was off to Bradford for this year’s Eastercon. It was good to catch up with people like Kev McVeigh and Ian Sales; to have a proper chat with Nina Allan and Chris Priest; and to meet new people, such as Anne Sudworth (who paints the most wonderful pictures) and Stephanie Saulter (whose debut novel Gemsigns sounds interesting).

I was particularly pleased to take part in the “Best Books of 2012” panel, where a group of us recommended some favourite reads from last year. I went for Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo; Lucy Wood’s Diving Belles; and Adam Roberts’s Jack Glass – and I was able to sneak in a bonus mention of Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child during the audience questions. I picked up a couple of recommendations myself from the rest of the panel: I’ve read Frances Hardinge before, but her latest sounds interesting; and I’m coming to think I should try something by Chuck Wendig.

The BSFA Awards were also announced during the weekend:

  • Best Novel: Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
  • Best Short Fiction: ‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’ by Ian Sales
  • Best Non-Fiction: The World SF Blog, edited by Lavie Tidhar
  • Best Artwork: Cover of Jack Glass, by Blacksheep

That’s a fine list of winners, a real vote of confidence in people who are concerned for the vitality of science fiction.

Now Eastercon is over for another year, and it’s back to reading (for the time being – I’ll be at the World Fantasy Convention this autumn, for instance). Now my attention turns to the Clarke Award, whose shortlist is announced in a couple of days. And it goes on…

Guessing the Clarke Award shortlist

24th March 2013 / / 6 Comments

Let me point you towards a couple of excellent posts discussing this year’s potential Clarke Award nominees, by Nina Allan and Niall Harrison (the latter with a substantial comment thread, including some thoughts from me).

I’ve been struggling to come up with my own guess at the Clarke shortlist this year, because  there are many titles which seem to me equally plausible candidates (not necessarily equal in terms of quality, but in terms of whether I could instinctively imagine their being shortlisted), and I’m honestly not sure how to choose between them. For that reason (and because I don’t have as much spare time at the moment as I’d wish), I’m not going to go into detail about my thoughts.

But here is an approximation of what I think the 2013 Clarke shortlist may look like:

  • vN by Madeline Ashby
  • Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
  • Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
  • Intrusion by Ken MacLeod
  • Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
  • 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

And my preferred shortlist would look something like this:

  • Nod by Adrian Barnes
  • Empty Space by M. John Harrison
  • Intrusion by Ken MacLeod
  • Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
  • The Explorer by James Smythe
  • The Method by Juli Zeh

The shortlist will be revealed on Thursday 4 April, with the winner to be announced on Wednesday 1 May.

My Eastercon schedule

21st March 2013 / / 3 Comments

This year’s Eastercon, Eightsquaredcon (so named because it’s the 64th), takes place next weekend at the Cedar Court Hotel in Bradford. I’ll be there, and taking part in three panels. I received notification of the timings today, so I’m going to share my schedule here:

Saturday 29 March, 1pm: “SFF on SF: Criticism and Awards”

What are the relationships between critical reception and award shortlists? The panel will focus primarily on this year’s lists. With Penny Hill, David Hebblethwaite, Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James (moderator).

Saturday 29 March, 7pm: “The Best Books of 2012 “

Because of the timing, there cannot be a “Not the Clarke Awards” panel this year. Instead, our panel of reviewers will recommend and discuss their personal best books from last year. Chris Hill moderates David Hebblethwaite, Francis Knight and Sandra Unerman.

Sunday 30 March, 6pm: “The Brothers Grimm”

It’s two hundred years since the Brothers Grimm first published their folk tales. What were they doing, and what was in the stories? How have those stories been reused since, and can we get at what they were like before? Tanya Brown moderates Carolina Gomez-Lagerlöf, David Hebblethwaite and Anne Sudworth.

It should be an interesting weekend; if you’re going, do let me know in the comments.

First thoughts on Clarke Award submissions

5th March 2013 / / 6 Comments

Clarke season began today with the publication of the submissions list over on the SFX website. Here are some initial thoughts:

First of all, the length: 82 books, which is a lot for an award that normally peaks at around 60 (though there continues to be a low proportion of books by women – and it may be even lower than usual this year). This upsurge seems largely to be down to a greater number of YA titles being submitted. It’s good that the Clarke’s submissions base is broadening in this way, though of course it remains to be seen whether that will have much impact on the shortlist.

Submission of non-genre titles continues to be hit-and-miss, with some publishers (such as Granta and Random House) clearly keen to engage with the Clarke Award; but no submissions at all from, say, Simon & Schuster (publishers of Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles) or Bloomsbury (publishers of Liz Jensen’s The Uninvited). From the genre imprints, perhaps the most notable omission is Peter F. Hamilton’s Great North Road.

Turning to what actually has been submitted, I think the book that most surprises me is Kimberly’s Capital Punishment by Richard Millward, which I hadn’t had down as being sf (which is not to say that it necessarily is, because there are always borderline cases and outright fantasy amongst the submissions). It’s a pleasure to see Adrian Barnes’ Nod (one of my favourite reads of last year) in the pool; and I’m now intrigued by the sound of The Dream Killer of Paris, a book that was previously unknown to me.

The shortlist will be announced on 4 April, which will sadly be too late for there to be a Not the Clarke panel at this year’s Eastercon. We can still try to guess the shortlist, but I’m not going to do that just yet. At first blush, though, I think I could narrow the submissions list down to about a dozen likely contenders; and I expect we’ll see a shortlist that skews towards core genre. But the Clarke is rarely predictable, so I could be entirely wrong. As ever, I look forward to finding out.

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