Central Station - Lavie Tidhar

  
   When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. But his vast, extended family continues to pull him back home.


   Boris’s ex-lover Miriam is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin Isobel is infatuated with a robotnik—a cyborg ex-Israeli soldier who might well be begging for parts. Even his old flame, Carmel—a hunted data-vampire—has followed him back to a planet where she is forbidden to return.


   Rising above all is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness— are just the beginning of irrevocable change.




   I admired Osama and The Violent Century a great deal and I loved A Man Lies Dreaming but Central Station is a novel to fall in love with. Tidhar, it goes without saying now, is a fantastic writer and his new book is a rare and glorious thing, full of sublime ideas and beautiful, evocative prose:

"Boris Chong, who had once been beautiful, when she was beautiful, in the soft nights of spring long ago as they lay on top of the old building filled with domestic workers for the rich of the North, they had made themselves a nest there, between the solar panels and the wind traps, a little haven made of old discarded sofas and an awning of colourful calico from India with political slogans on it in a language neither of them spoke. They had lain there, and gloried in their naked bodies up on the roof, in spring, when the air was warm and scented with the lilacs and the bushes of jasmine down below, late-blooming jasmine, that released its smell at night, under the stars and the lights of the space port." (P7)

   The story of Central Station "that vast space port which rises over the twin cityscapes of Arab Jaffa, Jewish Tel Aviv" and a community of characters that live and work within and outside it is full of longing and sensuality, smells and sounds, textures and tastes. It's a novel set in an extraordinary, mind blowing, far future about ordinary people trying to live their lives with dignity.

   As often with sf I'm not entirely confident of my intertextual imaginings as my sf reading is so patchy* but I couldn't help but think of various other writers. Tidhar's novel is weird and wonderful in the manner of Philip K Dick and Cordwainer Smith; it is generous, calm, intense, elegant and dreamy especially in the way Tidhar connects his short stories into an organic whole, Martian Chronicles stylee. I kept thinking of Mike Harrison's Light too - in the ease with which the novel introduces difficult and surreal concepts and ideas but also because, as Robert MacFarlane has written "His [Harrison's] books gleam with the lustre of found beauty and brief happiness: moments of being that exceed the claims of market forces. This aspect of his work is, I think, what led Michael Moorcock memorably to christen him "an anarchist aesthete". There are no candy cane epiphanies or take-home morals – just occasional light-flares from unexpected sources and surges of sensation that might make existence worth enduring." Don't misunderstand this comparison - Central Station is very different too, most surely in its hopefulness and the hues of romanticism that colour it. Finally the novel put me, happily, in 2000AD space - that space that first fully engaged me in sf - all that detail, a tone carefully and knowingly constructed, all those ideas, many of them inspired by 60s and 70s sf, and a pulp sensibility, less present than in the other novels, but still there in the ether. 

   In previous novels Tidhar has used metafictional devices to investigate and complicate history and politics. That self reflexive impulse is still present in the new novel - a central character is a bookseller fascinated by genre and storytelling, and make sure you remember the prologue - but it's less central to the structure and has a gentler purpose. Otherwise there is much in the form and structure to appreciate and linger over: the use of those evocative lists and careful juxtapositions, an intriguing narrative voice, plenty of jokes and references to ALL kinds of stuff (Star Trek Voyager and Peter Davison era Doctor Who.....well, maybe I was imagining some of them!), plus a singular pleasure and play in language and style.

   One of my complaints this year, against even the better fantasy and sf texts is that they're so caught up in ruling class intrigue. Sure it can be a useful lens through which to examine power, greed and imperialism but part of me finds it increasingly difficult to connect with those stories any more. One of the delights of Central Station is that it successfully interrogates the legacies of war and imperialism, of poverty and immigration, of belonging and identity but does so with a cast of characters who exist on the margins but are still fundamental to the fabric of life: shop keepers, children, priests, workers, refugees, forgotten soldiers, beggars, lovers, romantics. In large part the novel is a testament to family and community, steadfastness and determination:

"Oz meant “strength,” in Hebrew. But the real strength, Miriam thought, wasn’t in intimidating helpless people, who had nowhere else to turn. It was in surviving, the way her parents had, the way she had—learning Hebrew, working, making a small, quiet life as past turned to present and present to future, until one day there was only her, still living here, in Central Station." (P19)

   So yes the lives that Tidhar gives us here may still be precarious and prey to larger forces in society but there is satisfaction to be had in the shapes and stories of everyday life, in the surprise and ardour of loving, in friendship.

   Central Station is a rich, complex and satisfying work of art. It manages to be spectacularly lyrical (I was going to write 'literary' but stopped myself) and spectacularly sfnal too. I'm not sure it has ploughed down into my unconscious like a Harrison text or as novels by Robson and Fagan have this year but I realise that doesn't matter. It's more of an aesthetic pleasure - the pleasure of language and ideas, of cerebral oohs and aahs and of wonder. It is metaphorically rich in its thinking about the relationship of places and spaces to time, memory and history. It is meditative and kind. It is daring and full of grace.

   It is a novel to fall in love with.

[Hold on though, isn't there a but? There's always a but....

Well the conversation I've been having with myself, in my gloomy, 'how on earth is humanity going to last another 100 years' and 'how the hell is there ever going to be peace in the Middle East' way is about whether Central Station is just too hopeful and unrealistic. On one level it IS fascinating that my pessimism about Palestine/Israel and my rage at the increasing barbarity (and stupidity) of Zionism impacts on my ability to accept sf tropes. Anyway, thankfully I've been able to tell that part of me to shut up and stop being stupid. Perhaps of all regions on this planet the Middle East deserves a little hope. And it certainly deserves this novel. 

That winning side of me remembered too that I have a treasured CD/DVD of the West-Eastern Divan orchestra with Daniel Baranboim playing Tchaikovsky's Fifth that I haven't watched for a while. Maybe I'll watch it again tonight again, for the umpteenth time, and let that hope breath a bit longer.]

*So, after I wrote this I couldn't resist a bit of detective work. First there's this lovely article at Tor about influences, a good interview here and a small paragraph on Lavie's blog here. I shall be reading Miguel Street and C L Moore asap. 

Shortlist discussions - Clarke, Kitschies and more.

The Discussion

There’s the beginnings of a discussion about the future of the Clarke Award with excellent posts by Nina Allan here, Jonathan McCalmont here and Martin Petto here and here. [I'd definitely endorse Niall Harrison’s all-female lists and David Hebblethwaite's comment]. The posts and the comments discuss the difficulties of judging and scheduling, hopes and ideas about how to keep the award relevant, interesting and vital plus hopes and ideas about how to broaden the discussion around the Clarke and Kitchies shortlists. If you haven’t read them already I’d urge you to asap!

Nick Hubble also posted a link to Allan’s essay on FB (posted, 29^th April on Contemporary British Fiction if you want to find it) and provides a useful reminder of “the dangers inherent to valuing the ‘literary’”, aware as he is about “how literary valuation and canons are complicit with hierarchical power relations across English studies as a discipline”. He also stresses that there are different ways of being ambitious and gives as an example Dave Huchinson’s fantastic Europe at Midnight. This is obviously important in any discussion opposing ‘literary sf’ with the ‘genre heartlands’.

The Kitschies

Part of me has little to add to what has already been written. The Kitschies, for all the brilliant books it has brought to my attention over the last few years, will become irrelevant to readers if it can’t adopt a decent structure and a clear timetable and forum for debate. I hope it does because there desperately needs to be a space for critical debate about literary speculative fiction.  But I won’t support it next year unless there is sufficient time to read the books and we get some kind of platform for discussion. Otherwise, Jonathan’s assessment seems depressingly spot on:

“If you want to know the future of the Clarke Award look no further than the Kitschies as they seem to provide publishing professionals with everything they could possibly want from an award: Winners announced two weeks after the publication of the shortlists in order to maximise free PR and a drinks party serving the second or third least expensive wine on the list. Tentacle headgear is optional, no riffraff.”

The Clarke

If the Clarke award is slowly taking a journey to the genre heartlands then it will simply become far less relevant to me. I’d like to be able to say that this is fine. I didn’t find my love of books in fantasy or sf. I found it in horror and thrillers, and later in my teen years, in ‘literary fiction’. Sf didn’t come until much later – first with Banks and Le Guin in my 20s and then, increasingly, with my discovery of Mike Harrison and China Mieville (and their lists). I’ll still be able to identify the books I want to read because I’ve built up a large store of knowledge and because I’ll continue to look to Strange Horizons, Nina Allan and various others for recommendations. And I still read more literary fiction over the course of the year even if I’m drawn most to that which messes and plays with genre boundaries.

However, a lot of that knowledge was acquired by reading the critical debate over the Clarke shortlists by Nussbaum, Roberts, Hartland and others (see Martin’s post above) over the years and by going back and reading many of the novels. Indeed many of those novels mean a lot to me. I already miss that debate somewhat but since it depends on a great deal of good will and intelligence I’m not confident it will be forthcoming. Furthermore shortlists that are fun and conservative, as opposed to difficult, provocative and challenging are likely to inspire less debate and less critical insight too.

Thus, for what it is worth, I clearly don’t want the Clarke to retreat to the genre heartlands. One look at my Clarke shortlist this year will show that I clearly favour ‘literary sf’. I can just about accept that The Shore and The Swan Book are too leftfield for the Clarkes but that Glorious Angels, The Thing Itself and Aurora aren’t on the shortlist is well, unforgivable? Preposterous? Inane? I’ll wait until I’ve finished all the novels until I give a full account. So far, Hutchinson deserves its place, the others really, really don’t.

   Of course, however objective one likes to think oneself, looking back through shortlists and their winners is highly instructive and of course should give anybody pause to question their certainties. Frances Hardinge, Adam Roberts and Claire North – 3 of my favourite authors - were judges for the 2014 Kitschies, but did I agree with their winners? Hell no, but that was fine because the shortlists were fantastic. I love the 2007 Clarke shortlist but Martin (see above) is less inspired. And then there is Naam and Mann in 2014???? And how did Richard Flannagan beat Ali Smith in the 2014 Booker (or even Fowler or Mukherjee)? I could go on and on. And this year’s Bailey’s shortlist is a stinker….

So, honestly, I don’t expect perfection, and I don’t expect to agree wholeheartedly. That would be ridiculously dull and conservative of me. Indeed I want to have my certainties challenged, my horizons stretched and my mind blown. Is that too much to ask?

Paraphrasing Jonathan’s last paragraph a little, I will continue to seek out, appreciate and praise criticism that is willing to rock the boat and ask awkward questions. Moreover I want art to push me and perplex me. I’ve never understood those people who tell me art is just for fun or consolation and here I’ll quote Jeanette Winterson:

Art cannot be tamed, although our responses to it can be, and in relation to The Canon our responses are conditioned from the moment we start school. The freshness which the everyday man or woman pride themselves upon; the untaught "I know what I like" approach, now encouraged by the media, is neither fresh nor untaught. It is the half-baked sterility of the classroom washed down with liberal doses of popular culture.                                                   

  The media ransacks the arts, in its images, in its advertisements, in its copy, in its jingles, in its little tunes and journalist's jargon, it continually offers up faint shadows of the form and invention of real music, real paintings, real words. All of us are subject to this bombardment, which both deadens our sensibilities and makes us fear what is not instant, approachable, consumable. The solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of  imagination have each been packed by the artist into the art. Is it so unreasonable to expect a percentage of that from us in return? [Art Objects]

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.