The Panoptican & The Sunlight Pilgrims - Jenni Fagan

The narrator of Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon is Anais. She is 15, working class and she is TROUBLE. She takes drugs and starts riots, she fights and skives off school, she is disrespectful, she steals, she joyrides. She hates the police and any other authority figures. She is wildly out of control and it’s hard to know if you or I would be able to cope if we had a real Anais in our life.

 

   But she is honest too and hates bullies. She is fierce, charismatic and electric. I can remember a girl a bit like her at school—quite clever and funny when she wanted to be but always clashing with teachers, getting in fights, skiving, seemingly high on something or other a lot of the time. But she had a kind of integrity too—there was a hint of kindness behind the angry public façade and she never tormented people. Of course we’ve all come across disruptive people who ARE bullies and seem to have few redeeming features and it’s then much harder to sympathise with the reasons that might influence their poor behaviour.

   As the novel begins Anais is in the back seat of a police car being taken to a young offenders’ home called the Panoptican. For those of you who don’t know, a panoptican is “a circular prison with cells so constructed that the prisoners can be observed at all times”. In a world where we are increasingly observed in every aspect of our lives - think security cameras and social media for instance - it would seem to be quite a potent symbol for our consideration and Fagan makes good on it. Indeed the novel makes you think about the things that people watch for and, crucially, all the things we fail to see or don't want to see.

   In the course of the novel you discover a lot about Anais’s past and about the lives of other teenagers at the home. On one level this might not sound too unusual but there are several reasons to recommend Fagan’s brilliant first novel. First is Anais’s voice - funny, irreverent, shocking, thoughtful, defiant, tormented, sad, sincere. She has a punk heart and she is a rebel and a fighter. You’d want her on your side and you’d want to be on hers. Secondly it is worth asking how many novels concentrate on working class lives? Not that many is the answer. And next how many do so without coming off as too worthy or didactic or idealistic? Hardly any. Instead Fagan gives us a novel charged with electricity and righteous anger. It rages at injustice, inequality and stupidity as it makes you laugh and cry. Thirdly, if you choose to examine them there are weird and uncanny moments in the text and philosophical ideas to contemplate too. When I'm recommending to our students I have to warn them there is a LOT of swearing, some sex and some very upsetting bits. Sometimes you see straight away that the wisdom of a book has been hard won and that the electrifying writing is a mixture of hard graft and a singular sort of thinking and insight. The Panoptican is one of those novels. 

  

    I should point out that Fagan’s treatment of sex, sexuality and gender in The Panoptican is pitch perfect. In her new novel The Sunlight Pilgrims she puts gender firmly at the centre of the novel. It concentrates on three characters: after the death of his mum Dylan finds himself unexpectedly moving to a caravan park in a remote part of Scotland. There he meets 12 year old Stella and her mum Constance. Stella has, thirteen months previously, made the transition from boy to girl and is facing bullying, incomprehension and distaste from her peers and others in the community. There’s more. The novel is set in 2020. With climate change accelerating, all the cold water pouring into the sea from the Arctic is causing the North Atlantic Drift to cool precipitating a dramatic fall in temperatures throughout northern Europe. When the novel begins in November it is already minus 6 degrees and getting colder and colder all the time.

   There are lots of reasons to recommend The Sunlight Pilgrims as it has many of the qualities of The Panoptican and I could read Fagan’s prose all day (she is also a poet) but what struck me most is this. At one point Stella ponders her situation:

“Before it was just poverty, pestilence, terrorists, paedophiles, drugs, eating disorders, online grooming, meteors skimming a bit too close for comfort. Now every single person in this hall looks like they are terrified they’re all about to become frozen corpses”

 

   So in a world going (gone?) mad, the novel is asking: How do you find ways to live and still appreciate the moments of wonder in our existence? Perhaps even with bravery, integrity and kindness in spite of all our pain and bafflement? It would be SO easy to offer answers that are banal or nihilistic. Fagan just about manages to get the tone of her novel right by giving us hope, determination and wonder instead. The structure, symbolism and the mode of storytelling is striking - stream of consciousness flights of fancy mixed with beautiful descriptions of nature wrapped around a core of fable and fairy tale. Fagan concentrates on fairly short moments in time so that you witness the thoueght processes of Stella and Dylan, their sensations, their trails of thought, their observations, their worries and emotions: their yearning and desire for simple pleasures. The chapter breaks are fascinating too (and worthy I suspect of further investigation). There are passages that will live with me for some time: Dylan's walk in Chapter's 9 & 10, Stella's bike ride with the deer, are evoked lyrically and precisely; with great emotion and a touch of the surreal. I love the fierce and tender love of Constance and Stella and the voices and ways of thinking Fagan gives her characters. 

 

   Few novels have made have provoked and prodded me quite as much as this one all year even though Fagan's novel is essentially a kind and hopeful one. The reasons I suspect, are personal. I'm having a hard time knowing how to live at the moment. It feels like the world is going to fuck - with the Tories and Trump, and climate change, and refugees being treated like dirt and so on and on and on. And on top of that I'm lonely and dissatisfied; unmoored with no idea what to do with my life or how to make a difference. And it feels like I'll never get to love or be loved again. I try to tell myself to just do it day by day. To have small goals, be kind, drink less, go to the gym. The usual stuff. And yh, I know - first world problems and all, but its not easy at the moment. But Fagan's novel has a belief in people that I can't quite connect to at the moment. It's not that I can't have pleasant and kind exchanges with people - it's that I feel no connection. Fagan's text takes connection for granted. Obvious of course that texts will hit you in different ways at different times of life but this feels like a falsehood at the moment. Most obviously it's the way the relationship between Dylan and Constance is figured that doesn't feel quite right - there's a bit of whimsy and romanticism that doesn't fit. I suspect other readers will feel differently.

    I waded through The Panoptican feverishly, all in one day. I didn't want to read The Sunlight Pilgrims as fast. Maybe because there are more weird and uncanny sections and more description but mainly I think there's more to ponder and reflect on. Both novels feel urgent and necessary.

   I can think of no greater compliment than to say whilst reading the novels I kept contrasting and comparing with some of my favourite British contemporary novelists: Ali Smith, Sarah Hall, MJ Hyland, Liz Jensen, Jeanette Winterson: yes, Fagan really is that good. I urge you to get reading.

Easter reading and a Clarke shortlist

Easter reading

It's been a good couple of weeks of reading as I've sought to catch up on all the speculative fiction from 2015 that I hadn't already tackled for the Kitschies and the BSFA. In addition to many of the books below I also reread Jackie Kay's Trumpet and finally got round to Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. Both are glorious and highly recommended.

Clarke Shortlist

113 novels were submitted for the Clarke but I've only managed a handful (17) even though it feels like I've been reading nonstop for most of the year! I tend to go for the ones that have good reviews at Strange Horizons or by people like Adam Roberts and Nina Allan. The 17 are by: Atwood, Charnock, de Abaitua, de Bodard, Hutchinson, McDonald, Ness, North, Pinborough, Roberts, Robinson, Robson, Smythe, Taylor, van den Berg, Walton, Wright.

Then there are excellent novels that I've read and aren't on the Clarke list at all: Clade, Elysium, Dark Orbit, The Fifth Season, Making Wolf and of course A God In Ruins. This is a great shame as there seem to me to be some important novels here. Why isn't everyone talking about Jennifer Marie Brissett for example? If any of those were in contention I'd have to seriously reconsider my list!

Anyway my shortlist would be:

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts

The Shore by Sara Taylor

The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

If Then by Matthew De Abaitua

Glorious Angels by Justina Robson

Three of the books are relatively easy and pleasurable to read despite all their challenges. Otherwise Robson requires patience in the first half whilst De Abaitua requires patience in its second half. Wright is extraordinarily pleasurable throughout but perhaps, not easy. All of them are accomplished and ambitious, full of ideas and great writing. I don't believe for a minute that either Taylor or Wright will get on the shortlist unfortunately - too close to literary fiction - but I'd love to be proven wrong. I read Roberts and Taylor at the start of the year and I still find myself thinking about them. I would have reread them already if I had the time.

However I wish they'd go totes crazy this year and have a shortlist of eight as it would be good to see two other novels get some limelight. I'm not sure they have the same kind of complexity as those six above but they are perfectly formed. Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock made me feel a little like I do when I've read an Ali Smith novel (or story) - like I've had a conversation with a very clever, very imaginative, very kind human being and I feel better about the world and more open to its mysteries. That's a rare and lovely thing. I'm not sure whether Sarah Pinborough's The Death House is a YA novel or not but it really doesn't matter. I've seen comparisons made with Never Let Me Go, The Fault in Our Stars and The Girl with all the Gifts - novels I like and recommend to our students all the time - and seen criticisms too, mainly that it is too predictable. I think it's own thing though: the characterisation of its young protagonists is brilliant and throughout it feels as compelling as a Shakespearean tragedy. [sorry if you think that's hyperbole, but I don't care!] It doesn't matter that you guess what will happen because it's really not the point. Pinborough's novel is pitch perfect and I loved it. I'll be ordering copies of this (plus James Smythe's Way Down Dark and Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown; we already have The Rest of Us Just Live Here obviously) for the school library immediately.

Either way that's an extraordinarily entertaining and intellectually challenging - not giving in to any kind of populism - shortlist. They are excellent novels and I'd happily read them all again immediately and discuss them. If I had to choose a winner? Aurora - it blew my mind in many, many ways. If not I'd like to see it go to Wright or Roberts.

I'm missing out some good novels of course. I admire those by Dave Hutchinson, Laura Van den Berg, Ian McDonald, and Margaret Atwood especially. 

And still on my list of the novels I really want to read soon: Speak, The Galaxy Game, The Three Body Problem AND Ancillary Mercy. I'm sure there are others I'd enjoy. Alas never enough time.  

More thoughts on individual books to come.

Glorious Angels - Justina Robson

Part 1: The Plot (kinda).

A plot précis is always the most tedious bit of a 'review' though I'm not sure I'd call anything I write here a review anyway. But I'll try. A bit. So, on an unnamed planet, in a city called Glimshard there is an awful lot of shenanigans goin on. And, on a different part of the continent a strange artefact has been found. The rulers of Glimshard are so eager for the information, technology or riches that it holds that they have gone to war to protect it. So there is war and plunder in Glorious Angels, colonialism and national rivalry, blackmail and deceit, spying and seduction, lust and longing, growing up and growing wise(r), plus lots of manoeuvring amongst a ruling class and it's bureaucracy. Also, this society is a matriarchy so there's all kinds of interesting things going on with sexual politics and gender that is fascinating - so it's in a conversation with say, recent novels by Ann Leckie and N K Jemisin (and many more before it). Add to that a genuine strangeness - and I don't say that lightly, because it's seemingly rare in any kind of literature - especially in the depiction of the Karoo, a race of shapeshifters who think differently and experience differently. So a novel of ideas then, political and philosophical? Yup, it is, but it's also a novel of great characters. Tralane Huntingore is an engineer, eager to understand the pieces of ancient technology that she comes across. Her two daughters, Isabeau and Minnabar, similar but different to their mother are trying to find their own way. Zharazin Mazhd is a spy, an agent for the Infomancy, a complex group that gather and assimilate information for their Empress. There are more great characters but you should discover them for yourself.

I hope that sounds tantalising and interesting because Glorious Angels is a novel that needs to be read and debated. It's great. If you find it a bit difficult to begin with, I did too; it's full of conversations and discussion....and maybe too much telling. That can be a put off but you'll be rewarded for persevering and it speeds up considerably around halfway. 

Part 2: What IS it about?

About 200 pages in I decided to try to map out what I was thinking and feeling but found that the text was resisting anything like simple answers or pathways - it felt pleasingly complex and weird. It continued in this vain. Part of me wants to say that in part at least it's a novel about 'Otherness' but that's probably a little lazy. Glorious Angels certainly is asking how well we can know and understand others and if not then what gets in the way. Characters' modes of thought and their ways of being can feel very singular and different and their attempts to understand each other are hard won. It also wants us to think about the way different kinds of power - political and ideological, sexual and physical - work, giving freedom and control for some while it restricts and inhibits others. How might different societal rules and norms impinge on sexuality, relationships, duty, authority, etc,? And what does that say about our own societal norms, rules and laws? It also contains a lot of complicated thinking about feelings, attitudes and motives. The text is full of all kinds of speculation too and it can feel quite abstract and cerebral: in need of mediation and negotiation. That said, looked at another way Glorious Angels is a romance of sorts about a clever woman admired by an interesting man. It's erotic too and full of ridiculously beautiful people. And it's full of colours and smells, sights and sensations. On the level of sentences and paragraphs, the writing is very fine indeed.

If I have issues it's some of the ones I usually have - that it's a text about the powerful, the beautiful and the talented. When I read these great speculative novels I wish they might try harder to escape how liberal and middle class they feel. Maybe I shouldn't be so frustrated, it's not like I don't love, say, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Taylor. I do. I just want more I guess.

Part 3: How VERY personal.

I read Keeping it Real some time ago but didn't really understand why I should be reading it. It left little impression and I felt no desire to carry on with the sequence. That sounds a little too utilitarian of me I guess but I'll have to go back and figure out what I missed because Robson goes straight into my list of speculative must-read authors along with Mike Harrison, Nalo Hopkinson, China Mieville, Kelly Link and Adam Roberts: people who produce texts that are so darned clever that I'm usually too wimpy to write about them! I can remember rereading Light and Nova Swing in preparation for Empty Space but being so mentally drained and wiped out that I couldn't read anything for a week, let alone Empty Space. Robson's text hasn't quite had that effect thankfully but it has somehow tapped into feelings to do with loneliness, dissatisfaction and intimacy in ways that I find hard to explain.  

And again this might put people off!

Don't be. 

It really is a brilliant novel. 

I hope it wins the BSFA and should be a definite, along with Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora on the Clarke shortlist.

Aurora - Kim Stanley Robinson

So, as readers of this blog will know, I didn't discover literary fiction and the classics until quite late. But when I did, at 19, I read a lot. One of the things I did was go to a Reading Group. My memories are a little hazy but I'm sure it was held at my old secondary school. There were maybe five or six women there, all well over 50. They were open and friendly and the book under discussion was The Return of the Native: my first Hardy and I suspect my first classic after Austen and the Brontes. Despite my nerves I was effusive in my delight - I had loved it.

All good then? Well yes, but what I remember most is the response I got. Those women were happy for me but seemed to think I was SO impressed because I was so new to it all. I wish I could remember phrases or words they used. Did they really call me callow? I doubt it. Proud thing that I was (am!?) I felt a little patronised. I didn't go again. Silly fool.

I remember all this now because Aurora is my first Kim Stanley Robinson novel. (And to be fair I don't read that much 'core' science-fiction either)

And.....

Fuck me, it's SO good. Are they ALL this good?

It's clever in ALL kinds of admirable, amazing ways. And FULL of wonder and ideas. And it's political and incredibly and ridiculously relevant to everything that's going on in our fucked up, crazy world. And the science is BRILLIANT, never in the least bit boring, at all: it just made me think and ponder and gasp with understanding and more questions. And though there's lots of information and a limited amount of story I didn't care because it was FASCINATING!

Is it a little didactic? Maybe, but it's discursive too and it OPENED up the world to me in all kinds of ways so I don't mind at all. 

AND please do not compare it with The Martian. Don't go there. Ever. (Though I know people have) I managed 50 pages of that and just wanted him to die. No not Andy Weir! The Watney fella.

So anyway. Go ahead, patronise me. I don't care. But read the book. I loved it.

And Clark judges, if this isn't on the shortlist you are WRONG. Just sayin.

For a thorough review of Aurora  - rather than the excessive amount of CAPITAL letters and exclamation marks on show here - check out Adam Roberts in the Guardian.

Also, what is essential Robinson - I'm assuming the Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt.

Anything else that I HAVE to read? 

Making Wolf - Tade Thompson

I still read far more 'literary' fiction than speculative fiction and by following various prize shortlists and taking note of Guardian reviews, etc I read plenty of literature from around the world. Nonetheless I doubt whether I would have read Tade Thompson's Making Wolf unless The Kitschies judges had put it on one of their shortlists.

Result.

Weston is a supermarket security guard living in London but returns to the city of his birth, Ede in Alcacia - think south-west Nigeria, now an independent state, after the civil war had turned out differently in this slightly alternate world - for his Aunt's funeral. After bragging that he is a homicide detective at the funeral he is kidnapped by a paramilitary organisation and told to investigate the death of a national hero who was trying to bring a modicum of peace to the war torn nation. What follows is a fantastic noir as Weston becomes embroiled in all manner of difficult political, moral and social dilemmas.

Tone is difficult to get right in any novel but really difficult in a novel like this. Dry laconic humour, bursts of horrific violence, sex and longing, moral decay, the ironies of a corrupt yet fascinating social order. Add to that the long term legacy of colonialism and the ongoing effects of imperialism and racism, and lots of detail that a European audience might not be familiar with (including me!). This is a novel that will challenge your ideas and expand your horizons as it entertains.

Thompson almost gets it all right - sexual politics in Making Wolf is tricky because we see through the eyes of Weston and you have to increasingly question everything that Weston sees and thinks as the novel progresses - but I still think we get an unnecessary and uncomfortable preponderance of the male gaze at certain points despite the fact that the novel's femme fatales get their righteous anger, their good reasons and strong character arcs. Decide for yourselves. 

Otherwise, in what is a fast paced, always compelling, often exciting narrative, Thompson gets it right again and again and forces us to figure out what we'd be doing in similar circumstances. I don't mean to suggest that it becomes a 'what would I do' kind of narrative. Thompson's text is far too political and nuanced for that. Weston's problems aren't just moral, but practical and quotidian too. The text gives you a tremendous sense of how damaged and compromised we can become when faced with situations beyond our control, our experience and our imagination.

It delivers what all the best noirs do: corruption, violence, temptation and hypocrisy, the sense of being on the edges of society, at risk of your life and deep in the hidden and foul mire of excess and depravity that remains hidden at the 'top' of society.

It's a text that will provoke you to make judgements and judge even as you wonder if there are any right answers: maybe he is on the right side; maybe she does the wrong things for the right reasons; Weston does or doesn't end up on the side of the Angels; and so on. And again, a novel that wants us to make up our own minds and manages to provide that platform is still fairly unique.

Finally, for me Making Wolf has proved to be a tremendous follow up read to N K Jemisin's The Fifth Season. When you're reading shortlists you get a much better sense of ambition and scope - or, at least, different kinds of ambition and scope - and the different ways texts can deal with the same kinds of ideas and the challenges writers face. I think I appreciate both novels even more because of the debates and comparisons going on in my head.

There's a good discussion with Tade, Aliette de Bodard, Zen Cho, Kate Elliott and Cindy Pon at The Book Smugglers on "Culture, history and novels" here.

The Fifth Season - N K Jemisin

A review in two parts.

PART 1 (read the book!!!!!)

First if you haven't read The Fifth Season you should. I do like fantasy - China Mieville's Bas Lag trilogy, Joe Abercrombie, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Holdstock and Mervyn Peake but don't read it often. I've tried the odd bit of commercial stuff - Martin, Canavan, etc. but always found it tedious. 

But Jemisin's novel is being praised for all the right reasons. Look for instance at Ana's review over at the Book Smugglers and, though somewhat critical, Kate Schapira on Strange Horizons is essential reading. Jemisin's novel is political, sophisticated and gripping - a very well written novel indeed. It has three narrative strands, one in the second person, that focus on three, intriguing female characters, Damaya, Syenite and Essun. It's set in a world where severe seismic disturbances can cause massive damage to the planet, and in the aftermath smoke clouds and gases stop anything growing. This causes long 'seasons' where humans must hunker down in their walled cities and communities to last years or decades. It's full of drama, great worldbuilding and great set pieces - there's a moment about a third of the way in when Hoa, one of Essun's companions fights a fierce creature and her reaction is "Wow" and that's what I kept thinking throughout. Wow. This is like being 11 again and watching the BEST Sword and Sorcery film ever. It's the most fun I've had reading a book in ages. If that sounds like faint (or patronising) praise it's not meant to be at all. That eleven year old LOVED those films and watched them again and again - and to reproduce that feeling in ye olde Gareth requires an amazing imagination plus an understanding of colonialism and oppression, history and climate change. If the second volume in this Broken Earth Trilogy were already out I'd already have started it. And that's coming from someone who is generally really, really grumpy about trilogies - why can't you fit your story in ONE book ffs!

So yeah, read it.

PART 2 (with mild spoilers - thus, read the novel already and let's have a debate - because as usual I'm just debating with myself and that gets CONFUSING and I'm often wrong)

So, you've read it? There is SO much in The Fifth Season. It's a book that wants you to see clearly and see everything - go on it says, have a proper look at the world with its child slavery and it's child prostitution, it's hypocrisy and it's cowardice, it's refugee camps and it's wars. Have a look at the consequences of slavery and imperialism. It's a novel that can be hard and cruel, usually in all the right ways. It's righteous and angry and unflinching. Maybe that makes it sound like a hard or unenjoyable read - it's not. It's easy to read, compelling and will grant you a great deal of pleasure.

Structurally it's daring too: not many authors use the second person and make it work this well. And how much do we trust the narrators? Are they unreliable in ways that are interesting or in ways that are too obviously telegraphed. I also love the snippets from historical texts that end each chapter.

And there's this.....

So you've seen the film or read the book. Usually they are rubbish. It's the one where the baddie is intent on destroying humanity. He or she is mad or an evil genius or a broken nihilist who can see no hope and when pushed, finally and inexorably, revenge is the only thing left. Sometimes it's about rebirth - Earth has another chance at getting it right. Sometimes humans have fallen too far and can't be saved: humanity is a pox on the Earth. Etc.

But what if that mad, genocidal baddie was the most human character in the whole damn book or film or seven season TV epic. And what if the main character is a mass murderer too. What then? 

Part of me loves this book SO much.

BUT. 

Part of me wonders if it falls into the traps that so many other plot driven books fall into to. Because that IS a genocidal mass murderer and that is another mass murderer and does the text gloss over all that death and destruction? And it's not that the text doesn't show you that Alabaster, Syenite and Essun are damaged and fucked up, products of a system that causes them to hate and hate themselves. That Jemisin succeeds in making them as as interesting and worthy of our empathy as she does whilst giving you the reasons in the text to reject their decisions and conclusions is fantastically well done. My problem rather is that it doesn't show the suffering that their victims have to endure and it doesn't show people resisting in different ways, thus it's more akin to action film violence. Also with all the clever thinking that Alabaster does (and the text's insistence on Syenite believing him crazy until that last sentence IS rather annoying), that he can't see different possibilities and beyond his pessimism is, well, a narrative choice that bothers me a lot. People are broken all the time but find ways of organising and fighting back. Yes the ruling class in the novel is shown to be having its internecine conflicts - excellent - but I want the whole picture.  

And furthermore it's a novel about dangerous superheroes (and supervillains), however damaged and oppressed, that can wield serious, awesome power, and though I think the whole X-men representation of oppression had its glorious day I'm not sure that's good enough any more. And its not that I want allegory or simple mapping of one thing onto another. But do these metaphors work? Not sure - not sure they get us seeing and imagining differently in The Fifth Season.

Jemisin's novel has nothing to say about resistance or revolutionary transformation through struggle. That's true of most novels of course but when something is so good and understands oppression so profoundly I guess I want it all. I feel like the novel is madly enjoyable, brave, radical, singular, praiseworthy - yes, all those things - but in the end is it still a thoroughly bourgeois novel that focuses on individuals with power and that hides or ignores important social relations? This might seem wrong - is that not asking for a different book you might ask. Maybe, and maybe I'm being too harsh - though I'd be very happy for it to win The Kitshies Red Tentacle even so. But if I am being harsh it's because there aren't too many novels that try this hard or where the stakes are so high. The story you decide to tell has consequences for the kinds of ideology that seeps through or remains hidden and thus places fetters on how we can imagine and act to find a better way of living.

I'm hoping the other books in the trilogy might address some of these questions and the ones Schapira outlines in her discussion.

Still Margaret Atwood to read for the Red Tentacle.

But first, Tade Thompson's Making Wolf.

The Kitschies and the BSFA shortlists

This is undoubtedly the best stretch of the year when it comes to prize shortlists: the Costas, the BSFA, the Kitschies, the Clarke and then the Baileys. I enjoy the Twitter coverage and the debates and love reading the shortlists so I can, in comradely fashion, and in good spirit usually, agree or disagree with the decisions made.

The BSFA look like this:

Best Novel

Dave Hutchinson: Europe at Midnight (Solaris)
Chris Beckett: Mother of Eden (Corvus)
Aliette de Bodard: The House of Shattered Wings (Gollancz)
Ian McDonald: Luna: New Moon (Gollancz)
Justina Robson: Glorious Angels (Gollancz)

Best Short Story

Aliette de Bodard: “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight” (Clarkesworld 100)
Paul Cornell: “Witches of Lychford” (Tor.com)
Jeff Noon: “No Rez” (Interzone 260)
Nnedi Okorafor, “Binti” (Tor.com)
Gareth L. Powell: “Ride the Blue Horse” (Matter)

The Kitschies look like this:

Red Tentacle (Best novel)

The Heart Goes Last: Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury)

Europe at Midnight: Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)

The Reflection: Hugo Wilcken (Melville House)

The Fifth Season: by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit)

The Thing Itself: by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

The Golden Tentacle (Debut),



The Shore: Sara Taylor (William Heinemann)
Blackass: A. Igoni Barrett (Chatto and Windus)
The Gracekeepers: Kirsty Logan (Harvill Secker)
The Night Clock: Paul Meloy (Solaris)
Making Wolf: Tade Thompson (Rosarium)

See the full lists here and here.

These are excellent, exciting lists. 2015, it seems, was another good year for speculative fiction. Surprises? Perhaps that there is no room for Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora since it featured so heavily on best-of-year lists. I also note that many of the books picked out by Nina Allan on her blog haven't featured either. I DO trust her judgement.
[Do we also need a prize that celebrates short story collections? Kelly Link and China Mieville both published great collections last year - I'm sure there were plenty of others I don't know about.]



Anyway no gripes on content whatsoever and I'm really looking forward to all the reading. That said I have a major gripe about the Kitschies. The judges spend ALL that time and effort reading, discussing and deliberating and now I/we get 2 weeks to read them all. Possibly 10 books! I don't get it.  I thought the 3 weeks last year was just an aberration. I'm sure there are various commercial pressures and considerations that I don't know about and I suspect that the whole enterprise runs more on good will than anything else. But if it wants to succeed in ITS CRUCIAL ROLE of offering us a range of diverse speculative fiction then there has to be time for reading, discussion and debate. People can legitimately say of course that it doesn't stop anyone reading the books afterwards. Fair enough, it's just not very realistic when there aren't enough hours in the day to read all the things we want to anyway. Moreover having a say in the result when you've read all the books is fucking FUN - it's a buzz. The last thing I want to do is be miserable about the Kitschies, a prize I love and have been following from the start. Nor do I want to criticise individuals, but there has to be a better way...otherwise it will lose support, credibility and goodwill.



I've already read The Thing Itself (see here), Europe at Midnight (see here) and The Shore - a really, really brilliant novel that could have easily earned a place on the Red Tentacle list. I just blasted my way through The Reflection (see below). I started The Fifth Season last night. I hope to manage the Atwood and 2 of the others if I'm lucky before the Kitschies are announced on 7th March. Then I'll get stuck into the BSFA.



A few thoughts on The Reflection.



Hugo Wilcken's novel is right up my street - it reminds me of old loves - Auster, Hitchcock, noir, Pamuk, Murikami, Kafka and Priest.

It answers to an old need too - of solving mysteries and needing answers. Life was turning out to be difficult, dissatisfying and meaningless but that teenager who had just found 'literature' wanted to understand - anything, everything - and books were a mystery to be solved. Read enough criticism and I might just unlock the key to understanding Auster or Fowles. I'm not the same anymore but there's still enough of that young man, desperate for meaning, in me now.

That said, I can't decide after one reading. It makes me me want to reread The Glamour and New York Trilogy so I can contrast and compare and work out exactly what Wilcken is up to. John Self's enthusiasm is compelling - he has read it three times and was ready for a fourth. I have doubts - is it saying anything new? Is it a little overcooked? Is it as urgent as Hutchinson or as rich as Roberts? Not sure, but Auster, Priest and then a reread does seem like a fab and compelling way to spend a week. Let's hope the Suck Fairy doesn't pay a visit if I get round to it.