Road to Glasgow 2024: The Execution Channel by Ken Macleod (Orbit, 2007)

Part of my series of posts on Scottish SFF in the run-up to this year’s WorldCon, focusing especially on the work of GOH Ken MacLeod.

(NB. I am discussing the plot and ending of the novel in detail here).

Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel, UK hardback edition

As with its predecessor Learning the World, The Execution Channel was shortlisted for both the BSFA and Clarke Awards. This novel marked a change of direction for MacLeod away from space opera towards near-future thrillers. I recall it was announced at the time that this would be the first of three standalone near-future novels (as turned out to be the case but then he went on to write another two standalones, making five in total). When I first read it, I really liked this novel. It was my preferred candidate for the Clarke that year (although I didn’t feel as upset by its not winning as I did about Intrusion a few years later). While I very much enjoyed rereading it, it now feels slightly different in that we have moved beyond the present depicted in the novel. I’m not saying it’s dated – in fact its vision of international relations especially with respect to Russia and China is as relevant as ever – but it is very much a product of the period in the early twenty-first century when 9/11 appeared to be the defining event. In practice, its significance was superseded not long after the publication of The Execution Channel by the 2007-08 global financial crash. The domestic ‘reality’ of today’s Britain in much more a product of that event and its consequences of austerity, populism and Brexit than of post-9/11 (and post-7/7) tensions. It’s not that the Islamophobia MacLeod touches upon has gone away but rather that, as publicly voiced by the likes of Lee Anderson, it’s become part of a wider culture war being run in the interests of imposing socially conservative authoritarian rule in Britain.

Having said all that, it also needs to be noted that The Execution Channel does directly continue the metaphysical speculations that animate Learning the World albeit within the very different context of the early twenty-first century.

The novel begins with Travis driving north through an England, seemingly under terrorist assault, in a Land Rover, stacked up with jerrycans of fuel, air pistol, bottled water, supplies, camping gear, various currencies and gold coins. He was woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from his daughter Roisin, who is part of a peace camp keeping watch on a US airbase in Scotland, to alert him that the base has been blown up, apparently by a nuclear weapon. From this point we follow not just Travis’s progress (with flashbacks to his backstory) and Roisin’s unsuccessful attempts to avoid being caught by the security services, but also a range of other characters including: Mark Dark an American blogger; Jeff Paulson, some sort of US agent; Maxine Smith, Paulson’s British counterpart; Bob Cartwright, who along with Sarah Henk, Peter Hakal and Anne-Marie Chretien, runs a propaganda and disinformation service; and Alan Gauthier, a colleague of Travis who is both a French and, it transpires, a Russian agent.

Relatively early in the novel, Travis considers both ‘the Matrix theory’ that the universe is a simulacrum and ‘the Planetarium possibility’ that anything beyond the Kuiper Belt is a colossal construction or an illusion. He rejects both but for different reasons: the latter he considers far-fetched and the former disprovable. What troubles him about both is their popularity: ‘It was as if people wanted to doubt the reality of their lives, and the solidity of things’.

The action plot of the novel is an entertaining linked sequence of events and chases which work to bring Travis, Roisin, Smith, Paulson and Gauthier all together for a climactic encounter in Norway. But there is also a related trail of information in which Cartwright and his team try to plant false information via Dark’s blog, while Dark processes this disinformation to reverse-engineer his way to what has actually happened. For example, when Dark is ‘leaked’ highly classified military documents, he concludes they are too good to be true and therefore part of an attempt to discredit him, which in turn means that some of his speculations about what happened at the Scottish airbase must be correct. Later, when Cartwright checks Dark’s blog to see if he had anything to say about the forged documents, he finds that Dark has written a long post, which begins:

We’re living through an odd moment, folks. Until we know who or what was behind the Leuchars explosion, we don’t know what world we’re in. Somebody knows. It could be a handful of people or just one. They’ve already opened the box and seen if the cat’s alive or dead. The rest of us don’t know, and until we do the wave-function hasn’t collapsed. Whoever knows the truth and exposes it – and it could be just one person – will change the world and the future for us all.

The post, which is provided in full as a text within the main text, goes on to illustrate its points by reference to the 2000 US election, which was decided by a relative handful of votes in Florida, and 9/11. The plot twist in this is that The Execution Channel is revealed to be an alternate history in which the Democrat Al Gore won in 2000 and 9/11 manifested differently to our timeline, as a consequence of Gore’s cruise missile strike killing Bin Laden. The irony is, of course, that this different 9/11 still leads to the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, although also further, more divergent consequences. There’s more than one thing going on here: a nice take on conspiracy theories, a criticism of US foreign policy (which carries on much the same regardless of which party holds power), and a reflection on the interaction between historical contingency and deeper underlying trends. However, there is also a more radical argument that ‘reality’ is not simply a product of linear causality but an oscillating range of possibilities that can only cohere into ‘stable’ being through human observation that collapses the waveform (as in the ‘Shrödinger’s cat’ thought experiment; a recurrent theme in SF – see the post I linked in the quote above, in a place where Dark’s fictional blogpost would have had a link). This type of reality corresponds with the idea expressed by Atomic Discourse Gale in Learning the World that if you do find fairies in the back garden then actually the world you are living in is different to the one you thought and you need to begin learning it afresh (and learning in this context is not value neutral; MacLeod also sees it as a moral response). In the context of The Execution Channel, the point being made by Dark – and I think by MacLeod – is that until it is known exactly what happened in the explosion at the beginning of the novel, reality is mutable because if it is something hitherto unknown – and it becomes clear very quickly that it wasn’t a conventional nuclear weapon – then we know that we are going to discover something that means the world is not the way we thought it was, and we’re going to have to relearn it.

There’s nothing unusual about this way of thinking. It is central to science, in which new discoveries continually force scientists to relearn the world. It is however more alien to ‘commonsense’, tradition and other ingrained cultural ways of viewing the world (although even religions adapt to changed circumstances). Furthermore, this kind of worldview is not entirely consistent with how we approach literature, even SF which is supposedly rooted in cognitive estrangement, or certain forms of Fantastika which are open to weirdness. However, MacLeod doesn’t foreground estrangement or weirdness in the same way that writers such as, for example, (in their different ways) Christopher Priest or China Miéville were doing across the same period. His novels – especially the five near-future standalones – are superficially fairly straightforward combinations of plot- and character-driven near-future thriller. Therefore, their general metaphysicality and context of unstable, changing ‘reality’ that has to be continually adapted to, can have the effect of making it look like he is regularly resorting to the use of an ‘unearned’ deus ex machina. This holds, to one extent or another, for all five of these standalones. The key moment in The Execution Channel is at the climax when, seemingly out of nowhere, as everyone waits for nuclear Armageddon, it transpires that, rather than a number of Russian, Chinese and North Korean cities having been obliterated by a pre-emptive US first strike, they have in fact simultaneously launched into space using a revolutionary new plasma focus-fusion technology (as recorded in a series of lovingly pastiched press releases from the three regimes that MacLeod devotes several pages to).

However, while this development does catch the characters we’re rooting for – Travis and Roisin – by surprise, it’s not untrailed and, as acknowledged by the final chapter, is actually central to the novel’s overall logic that ‘life is elsewhere’. Not necessarily because, as is teased, we might be living in a simulation but because there is no central narrative to follow. Some of the protagonists – Travis, Roisin, Mark, Anne-Marie – learn this new world and some of them don’t. In this respect, the novel, despite being a thriller, also manages to be (as most of Macleod’s work) a comedy of manners.

As a final note, the spy element of the novel, which seems to turn on the Russians having manipulated the French into taking over the CIA’s terrorist network in the UK in order to trigger havoc across motorway junctions and oil refineries, dovetails with the idea of the mutability of the world to show how such operations take on a life of their own (in the same way that historic CIA operations in Afghanistan have profoundly changed the world). In this respect, MacLeod provides a useful antidote to the stories in the media that there was Russian interference in Brexit and Trump’s election or, more recently, that the Chinese are behind the hacking of the British Army pay system. The problem with these stories is not that there might be no truth in them but rather that they simplify our conception of the world into a straightforward choice which is not even between right and wrong but between ‘our’ country and a supposedly ‘enemy’ one. At one point in the novel, Travis rationalises the fact that he is an Englishman working as a French agent by thinking: ‘The thing he liked about France was that it was French. The thing he hated about England was that it wasn’t English … At some point England had simply failed itself.’ He realises that the difference between him and Roisin is that while she was prepared to work against the government and the state (i.e. because they are right-wing and imperialist), ‘she would never have thought her enemy was England, or even Britain … She had believed that people could be persuaded to oppose the war’. He doesn’t believe that. The point being that the world changes once you no longer believe in your country. The Execution Channel shows believing in your own country to be a category mistake. I will come back to the matter of England/Britain when discussing MacLeod’s subsequent novel, the Scottish-set The Night Sessions. However, before I get to that, I’m going to be posting on The Corporation Wars trilogy at some point over the next few weeks.

Road to Glasgow 2024: Learning the World by Ken Macleod (Orbit, 2005)

Part of my series of posts on Scottish SFF in the run-up to this year’s WorldCon, focusing especially on GOH Ken MacLeod.

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Moving on from my post on MacLeod’s Newton’s Wake, here are my thoughts (including discussion of the ending and other major plot points) on its immediate successor, Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact, which was shortlisted for both the Clarke Award and the BSFA Best Novel and won the Prometheus Award (the third of MacLeod’s three victories in that award). As with Newton’s Wake, I think I enjoyed re-reading Learning the World even more than I did when it came out. I should note at the outset that it is tremendous fun: full of wit, joy and lively exchanges between a range of great characters. It is also a novel of ideas.

The novel opens with a blogpost dated 14 364:05:12 written by 14-year-old, Atomic Discourse Gale, who is one of the younger ‘ship generation’ born on the generation starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!. The dating is that of the human space age, so presumably starts from 1961 or thereabouts, meaning that the novel is set in the one-hundred-and-sixty-fourth century, which I think makes it the most future-set of all MacLeod’s fiction by some distance.

Chapters set on the ship, featuring Gale, her care-mother Synchronic Narrative Storm, the crew member Horrocks Mathematical and the enjoyably-annoyingly-Heinleinian ‘Constantine the Oldest Man’, are interspersed with chapters set on a planet, ‘Ground’, in which Darvin and Orro, who have wings and can fly, are engaged in research to develop heavier than air flight. Darvin’s main area of research is astronomy and, in his attempts to discover a new planet within his solar system, he comes across an approaching object, which first he takes for a comet, but then (with Orro’s mathematical help) realises must be a spaceship. It is of course the But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! and so the scene is set for the eventual ‘first contact’ between the humans on the generation ship and the ‘alien space bats’.

Thematically, the novel works by comparing the two societies and slowly subverting our preconceptions so that we come to realise that the people of Ground, although only at the point of inventing aeroplanes (which we realise they have achieved when they fly over Darvin’s head later in the novel), are in many ways more emotionally mature (‘more rational and kinder’) than the humans and, by implication, better scientists. As the moment of first contact gets nearer, it is the people of Ground who come together in a unified approach and the humans who split into factions. At one point, Darvin (who along with Atomic Discourse Gale is the main viewpoint protagonist) speculates on how his society might have been very different ‘if there had been no trudges’ – trudges are tractable beasts of burden that people of ground use as labour. He remembers how some ‘engineering tales’ (i.e. the space-bat equivalent of SF) posit that there would have been slavery, which would probably be superseded by some sort of payment system that enforced labour through debt (in other words, the western capitalist system on Earth).

In contrast, the humans on the generation ship, although descendants of such as Earth, seem to the products of a slightly different economic system. As Gale outlines at one point: ‘Law of association. Extended markets. Division of labour. Mutual benefit’. Indeed, a complex economic system of markets and futures not only flourishes but actually enables the operation of the ship. However, this system is not capitalist, but in some way postcapitalist. It reminds me of some of the ideas in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, but also the attempt to use algorithms and market-style operations to create a post-scarcity society in the USSR as outlined in Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty. I’d have to do some more research on economics (which I should) to write more but I think some of ideas also come out of the Scottish enlightenment – Adam Smith and David Hume et al. In this respect, Learning the World is yet another of MacLeod’s Scots-in-Space Operas. On this point, it should be noted that there is a (female) character called Amend Locke, which is MacLeod’s twitter handle, on the ship and I read this as an acknowledgment of this economic/philosophical/political which amends the arguments of Locke to set out its positions. When I originally read the novel, I found the markets aspect a bit alienating but my interests have shifted over the years. Intervening events make me more receptive to the arguments today than at the time.

So, on the one hand, the ‘space bats’ are both more rational and kinder because they have no history of slavery and there is a lightly traced-out political-economic framework that underpins why that is the case. However, there is also a metaphysical argument, which recurs throughout MacLeod’s body of work but is probably most clearly explained in this novel. It is quite often this feature of his work that sometimes cause critics to struggle with aspects of it, as has been the case with several subsequent novels, notably The Execution Channel (2007) and Intrusion (2012). The key exchange here is one that takes place between Gale and Horrocks about a third of the way through the novel:

‘You remember when the transmissions were detected, you made a joke that they might be from aliens?’

    ‘I did? I must have better foresight than I thought.’

    She looked impatient. ‘The whole point of your joke was that there are no aliens. It wouldn’t have been funny otherwise. Just like if my care-mother had said that something I’d lost in the garden had been taken by the fairies, or the hideaways. If we found fairies in the garden, or hideaways, it would tell us that the world was quite different from what we had imagined. It wouldn’t just be a world that had fairies in it, like a different kind of bird or something. It’d be a different kind of world, a world in which fairies could exist.’

(This same example is an actual plot point in Intrusion, where it forms part of an argument about the kind of world we live in and the pointlessness of micromanaged politics – à la New Labour – which fundamentally mistake the kind of world we live in). The point of Learning the World – which is not just the title of the novel but also of Gale’s blog – is that is a scientific progress, which means that if aliens suddenly turn up, it’s not just a question of treating them like another species or comet hitherto undescribed. Rather, the appearance of aliens would mean that the world does not work in the way that we thought it did and therefore we have to learn it anew. While Gale understands this, many of her fellow humans don’t get it. On the contrary, it’s almost second nature to the ‘space bats’. The second the trudges become intelligent and rational – due to Constantine and his faction ‘reverse engineering from the language module’ – Darvin and his people very quickly come to the rational acceptance of the fact that the world has changed and they let the trudges free and start treating them as fellow conscious beings. The equivalent in human society, would be realising that the existence of rapid climate change, or of nonbinary and multiple genders, indicates that we don’t live in the same world that we thought we did and setting out to relearn the world and make radical adaptions to it (and not reacting by trying to force things back to ‘normal’, which in effect entails closing one’s eyes and wishing very hard that the world hasn’t changed).

When I first read it, I was dissatisfied with the ending in which Gale finishes her blog with a final post before leaving with the ship for the next system rather than staying in the solar system of Ground as we have been expecting throughout the novel (I should note that others read the end differently to me). Now, I think this is actually a brilliant ending in what is a superbly structured and realised novel. Gale leaves us with two theories to explain what has happened and why the ‘space bats’ are ‘more rational and kinder’. The first, specific, theory is, as Darvin had speculated, that they bore the yoke and therefore had an easier ‘ascent’. The second is a metaphysical theory:

Just as the birth of universes from black holes selects over cosmic time for universes with laws of physics such that black holes can be formed, hence universes with stars and galaxies, so the birth of universes from starship engines selects for more universes in which starships can exist. And what more likely universes to have many starships in than ones in which intelligence emerges all over the place at almost the same time?

This hypothesis comes from another of the twists at the end of the novel that the space bats identify other galactic intelligences even before the climactic moment of first contact. Once you live in a world with other alien intelligences, you live in a world with lots of alien intelligences. Gale’s ponders that ‘perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least’ and perhaps doomed to always encounter wiser and kinder species. This would represent a radical decentring of the human subject but at the same time a massive expansion of our horizons. That’s why I think it makes sense that she chooses to travel on beyond the limits of the ‘world’ that she grew up in.

Road to Glasgow 2024: Newton’s Wake by Ken Macleod (Orbit, 2004)

Now that EasterCon is over (report to follow) and we’re in the run-up to this year’s WorldCon in Glasgow, I’m planning a number of posts on Scottish SFF, including some of my favourite writers such as Naomi Mitchison, Iain Banks, James Leslie Mitchell (AKA Lewis Grassic Gibbon) and, of course, Guest of Honour Ken MacLeod. (I’m aiming for 1000-1500 words to keep them relatively on point. These posts are going to include some spoilers, so, if you’re adverse to that, be warned).

To get this series underway I’m beginning with a post on MacLeod’s Newton’s Wake, which was first published 20 years ago. I’ve picked this because Ken was talking about it a bit at EasterCon in the session on the opera, Morrow’s Isle, for which he has written the libretto (music and choreography by Gary Lloyd and Bettina Carpi of Company Carpi) and which will be performed in Glasgow on the Thursday of the WorldCon. Newton’s Wake is, of course, subtitled A Space Opera and contains an opera within it, as well as the wonderful Shakespearean pastiche, The Tragedy of Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Muscovy. In retrospect, it is also perhaps the novel that most clearly links some of the themes of The Fall Revolution quartet (1995-9) and the Engines of Light trilogy (2000-2) with his current Lightspeed trilogy (2021-4).

It’s 2367. There’s a whole galaxy, a whole new world out there. Wormholes and starships and endless youth and resurrection…

Re-reading Newton’s Wake over the last few days has been a complete joy. I think I enjoyed it more than when it came out; partly because it serendipitously ties in with themes I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s barely a week ago on the Friday of EasterCon that I was talking about Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts (first published in English in March 2024) and saying that it was a novel that could only be written in a country that still believed in the future because of experiencing unprecedented social, economic and technical progress over the last half century. Reading Jumpnauts – with its vision of humanity (potentially at least) ascending to the next level of civilisation by learning to share information telepathically as a means of interacting with the intelligent substrate of the universe – was, I said, the nearest we could come today to the experience of reading Wells in the early twentieth century. Then, I read Newton’s Wake in which we are told towards the end that:

There are good and bad things, but no good or evil will. There’s only intelligence, and stupidity. Stupidity is what we had as humans, and intelligence is what we and everyone else now has, however they began.

In other words, the dream of the (transhuman) future is still alive in twenty-first century Scotland. Admittedly, the twenty-first century in the novel doesn’t go that smoothly with total nuclear war breaking out after an American military AI becomes self-aware triggering a pre-emptive first strike on the USA by the combined forces of Russia, France and Britain, and then the subsequent retaliatory strike (which is replayed in virtual reality about three paragraphs after the passage I have just quoted). However, various human factions survive off planet and it is these who animate the novel’s twenty-fourth-century present. These factions include America Offline, the (mainly Japanese) Knights of Enlightenment, the communist DK (‘we think it stands for Demokratische Kommunistbund or maybe Democratic Korea or Kampuchea for all I know’) and, of course, a Scottish ‘family business’, the Carlyles, who control a skein of wormholes and their gates. The novel begins with the main protagonist (of an ensemble cast), Lucinda Carlyle, running into trouble on a new planet, Eurydice, when she discovers a lost human colony, who in the intervening years have developed a technologically advanced (although unlike the other factions, they don’t have FTL spaceships) post-scarcity society.

In case it isn’t clear, I should point out that the novel is a social satire which plays out at some speed, pausing only for the dramatic and musical interludes as mentioned above. In this respect, the reading experience is not so much akin to early Wells as to the somewhat more worldly-wise social comedies of later years, such as The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930). Certainly, the ageing author of genius would enjoy the party scenes MacLeod wittily stages in the delightfully hedonistic capital of Eurydice, New Start. A wide variety of issues – such as whether New Start’s cornucopian capitalism and reputational economy is a utopia – are covered with a sure light touch. Eurydice is a colony of ‘runners’ in that is founded by those who chose to run away from the solar system rather than fight back against the accelerating AI and posthuman intelligences that are undergoing the ‘Hard Rapture’, but it has its own ‘returner’ minority, who are inclined to cut deals with the Carlyle’s in pursuance of their aim of ‘getting them all back’ – that it is recovering all the human lives digitally uploaded by the AIs on Earth shortly before everyone was incinerated.

The playwright and impresario, Benjamin Ben-Ami, resurrects the returner singing act of Winter and Calder (they were ‘big in the Asteroid Belt’) for a new opera designed to cash in (reputationally) on the tensions created by the arrival of the Carlyles (shortly followed by the Knights, the DK and AO) on Eurydice. We learn that that Winter and Calder were not downloaded from a direct upload but resurrected (by the ‘Black Sickle girls’) with a neural parser which matches neural structures with known inputs. In other words, their synthetic memories were reverse engineered from their songs, videos, sleeve notes and press releases, much to Lucinda’s disgust: ‘They had prosthetic personalities. They had false memories. Without reliable memory there could be no identity, no continuity, no humanity.’ It’s an interesting concept which made me think about the origin of the companion app, Replika, in founder Eugenia Kuyda’s creation of an AI chatbot from the texts of a dead friend in order to talk to him again. Maybe one day we will get them all back, at least those with a sufficient textual record. Anyway, Lucinda gets over her prejudices, in part due to undergoing her own death during a closed-room heist and having to be resurrected. Cyrus Lamont’s predilection for sex with his own ship avatar is also endorsed by the text in the happy ending he finds with the transhuman, and entirely metal, Morag Higgins. There’s a nod to Blade Runner, in Higgin’s desire ‘to feel solar wind in my hair. See the stars with my own naked eyes, in vacuum. See what an FTL jump really looks like. I’d hold my mouth open and catch quantum angels like midges.’ In short, Newton’s Wake is a triumphant distillation of Macleod’s body of work, encompassing, what the New Scientist described as, his wit, intelligence and political challenge.

Indeed, rereading the novel reminds me of what an interesting choice he is as a WorldCon GOH in 2024. For anyone sitting in the UK or the US looking at the world around us, we see the prospect of a dystopian future fought over by tech billionaires and out-of-control populism, while around us the Pax Americana goes horribly, horribly wrong. MacLeod’s whole body of work, in which the political arguments of the 1970s (including those of Marxism and revolutionary socialism) still continue to play out across the universe, offers us a completely alternative (Scottish) paradigm in which everything from AI to transhuman sexuality is still available to further the cause of social needs. If we can only find our way to the post-scarcity future, there won’t ever be any need to look back again.

Overall ‘Index’/’Contents’

Some items appear under more than one heading. This list will be updated (periodically) as new posts appear.

Road to Glasgow 2024 (Scottish SFF)

MacLeod, Ken. The Execution Channel (2007)

MacLeod, Ken. Learning the World (2005)

MacLeod, Ken. Newton’s Wake (2004)

Mitchison, Naomi. The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931)

Interwar Novels as SF/F

Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm (1932) as SF Text

Jameson, Storm. In the Second Year (1936) as SF Text

Macaulay, Rose. What Not (1918/2019)

Mitchison, Naomi. The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) as SFF Text

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1929) as SF Text

‘1970s Feminist & Utopian SF’

Le Guin, Ursula K.  The Left Hand of Darkness (1969/2017)

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed (1974)

McIntyre, Vonda N. The Exile Waiting (1975/2019)

McIntyre, Vonda N. Dreamsnake (1978/2016)

Russ, Joanna. ‘When it Changed’ (1972) – discussion and reflection on teaching it

Fiction Reviews

Albinia, Alice. Cwen (2021)

Allan, Nina. Ruby (2020)

Atwood, Margaret. MaddAddam (2013)

Byrne, Monica. The Girl in the Road (2014)

Charnock, Anne. Bridge 108 (2020)

Dick, Philip K. Electric Dreams (2017)

Doctorow, Cory. Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Faber, Michael. The Book of Strange New Things (2014)

Hall, Sarah. The Carhullan Army (2007)

Hurley, Kameron. The Stars are Legion (2016)

Hutchinson, Dave. Europe in Winter (2016)

Ings, Simon. The Smoke (2018)

Jones, Gwyneth. Kairos (1988/1995/2021)

Jones, Gwyneth. The Grasshopper’s Child (2014)

Lovegrove, James. Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea Devils (2018)

Macaulay, Rose. What Not (1918/2019)

McAuley, Paul. Beyond the Burn Line (2022)

MacLeod, Ken. Newton’s Wake (2004)

Muir, Tamsyn. Gideon the Ninth (2019)

Penny, Laurie. Everything Belongs to the Future (2016)

Priest, Christopher. The Adjacent (2013)

Priest, Christopher. Airside (2023)

Priest, Christopher. Expect Me Tomorrow (2022)

Priest, Christopher. The Gradual (2016)

Pulley, Natasha. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015)

Roberts, Adam. Bête (2014)

Roberts, Adam. By the Pricking of Her Thumb (2018)

Roberts, Adam. Haven (2018)

Saulter, Stephanie. Regeneration (2015)

Sullivan, Tricia. Occupy Me (2016)

Sullivan, Tricia. Sweet Dreams (2017)

Suzuki, Izumi. Terminal Boredom (2021)  

Swainston, Steph. Fair Rebel (2016)

Tuttle, Lisa. The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief (2016)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend. Kingdoms of Elfin (1977/2018)

Whiteley, Aliya. Skein Island (2015/2019)

Reviews of Short Story Collections

Mayer, So & Adam Zmith (eds). Unreal Sex: An Anthology of Queer Erotic Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror (2021)

Penner, Robert G. Big Echo Anthology (2021)

Poetry Reviews

Banks, Iain and Ken Macleod. Poems (2015)

Non-fiction Reviews

Bould, Mark, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint (eds). The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009)

Gifford, James. A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, & the Radical Fantastic (2018)

Jones, Gwyneth. Joanna Russ (2019)

Kincaid, Paul. Iain M. Banks (2017)

Lovegrove, James. Lifelines and Deadlines: Selected Non Fiction (2015)

Morgan, Glyn (ed). Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of the Imagination (2022)

Morgan, Glyn & C Palmer-Patel (eds). Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction (2019)

Roberts, Adam. Rave and Let Die: The SF & Fantasy of 2014 (2015)

Roberts, Jude and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (eds). Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fantasy (2016)

Samer, Rox. Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s (2022)

Wolfe, Gary K. Bearings (2010)

Exhibition Reviews

A Tale of Two Fantasy Exhibitions: Rome and London (2023)

GENDERS: SHAPING AND BREAKING THE BINARY (2020)

Awards & Shortlist Reviews

BSFA Awards Best Novel Shortlist (2024)

BSFA Awards: History and New Categories (2023)

Politics and Literature: Reviewing, Criticism and Awards (2023)

Talk on the Clarke Award, 8 September 2023. (2023)

‘The Clarke Award and I: A brief excursion into autobiography, motivations and plans’ (2023)

Hugo Award Best Novel Shortlist (2023)

Clarke Award Shortlist Part One (2023)

Clarke Award Shortlist Part Two (2023)

Brief Thoughts on the Clarke Award Submission List (2023)

Locus and Nebula Shortlists (2023)

BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2022 Shortlist Part One (2023)

BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2022 Shortlist Part Two (2023)

BSFA Awards Best Novel Shortlist Reviews Postscript (2023)

Some Thoughts on the Longlist for BSFA Best Novel Award (2023)

New Publication: ‘Thirty Years is Ample Time: The Clarke Award and Literary Science Fiction’ in Andrew M. Butler and Paul March-Russell, eds, Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays (2022) (posted 2023)

Looking Back on the 2022 Clarke Award (2022)

BSFA Awards Best Non-Fiction of 2021 Shortlist (2022)

BSFA Awards Best Non-Fiction of 2020 Shortlist (2021)

Hugo & Clarke Awards 2020 Best Novel Shortlists Part One (2020) – i.e. a review of the three novels on both shortlists.

Hugo Award 2020 Best Novel Shortlist Part Two (2020)

Clarke Award Shortlist 2020 Part Two  (2020)

BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2019 Shortlist Part One (2020)

BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2019 Shortlist Part Two (2020)

BSFA Awards Best Shorter Fiction of 2019 Shortlist (2020)

BSFA Awards Best Non-Fiction of 2019 Shortlists (2020)

Gender Diversity and ‘Literary SF’ in the run-up to the 30th Anniversary of the Clarke Award (2016). (updated 2020)

Essays and Conference Papers

Priest’s Repetitive Strain (on Reality): The text from my chapter in Andrew M. Butler, ed., Christopher Priest: The Interaction, 2005. (posted 2024)

Christopher Priest: A Remembrance (and a review of Airside) (2024)

BSFA Awards: History and New Categories (2023)

Politics and Literature: Reviewing, Criticism and Awards (2023)

The Generic (SFF) Formula of the Fool’s Errand (posted in 2023)

Some Thoughts on SF Handbooks (2023)

Christopher Priest, ‘Expect Me Tomorrow (2022) and Some Thoughts on Temporal Structure and Whether It is an ‘Overshoot Novel’ (2023)

Christopher Priest and (the Persistence of) the New Wave (2022; updated version of 2016 article in Foundation)

Brief Notes on Cory Doctorow’s Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003): Meritocracy and Reputational Economy (2022)

‘The Woolfian Century: Modernism as Science Fiction, 1929–2029’ (2022) – online article

There is no such thing as Science Fiction/ Modernism/ English Literature (*delete as appropriate) (2022)

The Break-Up of the English Class System as a Comfort Read (2021) – conference paper

‘“Where will it all lead?”: Gwyneth Jones’s Life’ (2021) – conference paper, academic track, DisCon III

Expanded version of my paper on Generation X for ‘Douglas Coupland and the Art of the “Extreme Present”’ (2021) – conference paper

‘The Radical Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin’ (2021) – Tribune

‘How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism’ (2020) – Tribune

‘Switching Between the Binaries’ (2020) – conference paper (including Mitchison, Banks, Justina Robson’s The Switch)

Gender Diversity and ‘Literary SF’ in the run-up to the 30th Anniversary of the Clarke Award (2016). – updated (2020) version of Foundation article from 2016

The Gradual (2016) by Christopher Priest: Thoughts on the Dream Archipelago Fictions (2020)

The Legacy of 2000AD: Review-Essay (Part One) (posted 2020; originally 2014)

The Legacy of 2000AD: Review-Essay (Part Two) (posted 2020; originally 2014)

‘Our unique isolationist Brexit cultural identity’: Thoughts about 2000AD (aka Part Three) (2020)

Proletarian Modernism (Edinburgh University Press Blog, 2017)

“The Kind of Woman Who Talked to Basilisks”: Travelling Light Through Naomi Mitchison’s Landscape of the Imaginary (The Luminary 7, 2016)

The Flowers of War (essay about Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army – originally published in Vector 258)

Five English Disaster Novels, 1951-1972 (originally 2005 in Foundation)

Con Reports, Annual Reflections Etc.

Looking Forward at 2024, Or, Should Galadriel Take the Ring? (2024)

Eastercon 2023: ‘And now the conversation has ended …’ (er, not quite just yet) (2024)

2022 Round-Up (2022)

Notes from Chicon8 (2022)

‘Where are the Workers: Class and Caste in SFF’ (2022; this was a panel I was on at Eastercon)

My 2021 in Review (2021)

‘“Where will it all lead?”: Gwyneth Jones’s Life’ (2021; conference paper, academic track, DisCon III)

ConFusion Eastercon 2021 Report (2021)

What I Did in 2020: A Brief Cultural Review (2020)

A Partial Report on Sci-Fi London and the Orcs and Replicants (2020)

Podcasts

Talking about the intertwined history of speculative fiction and socialism (especially William Morris’s News from Nowhere) on The Last Refuge of the Incompetent (2021)

Talking about my book The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question on Suite 212 (2019)

BSFA Awards Best Novel Shortlist

Here is my review of the shortlist for the BSFA Award for Best Novel published in 2023 to be awarded at Eastercon 2024. My review from last year, when I was going for complete scientific analysis, was spread over three posts: Part One, Part Two, Postscript. This year I’m keeping it simple with just the one post consisting of 3-400 word reviews of each novel and a short discussion at the end

Geoff Ryman, Him (Angry Robot, 366pp.)

I’m here drawing on a review yet to appear in the BSFA Review: What I particularly love about Angry Robot is that every novel has a backcover blurb feature (‘File Under: …) listing topics under which it can be filed. In the case of Him these are ‘The Greatest Story Never Told / Child of the Faith / Apocrypha / Herstory’. This is funny as Him is a novelisation of the life of Jesus but with the twist that Jesus, or Yeshu, is a trans man. ‘Herstory’ is still appropriate as a description because the novel is narrated from the perspective of Yeshu’s mother, Maryam. Indeed, one of the key points of the novel is that it is Maryam who records what will become the message of the Gospels by writing down what Yeshu says.

I went to Sunday School as a child and my mum was a Sunday School teacher, so I know these stories fairly well even though I’ve spent forty years outside the church. Over the years, however, the stories have become mixed in with popular-culture retellings from Jesus Christ Superstar to The Life of Brian. I suspect I’m not the only one for whom the sermon on the mount immediately conjures thoughts of blessed cheesemakers. Likewise, I’m pretty sure that henceforth I’ll forever imagine the Virgin Mary stuttering while explaining to her uncle, the Kohen Gadol, how ‘the … the pregnancy came about in an unusual way’. Discussing it with his wife afterwards, he says, ‘She’s mad. I don’t suppose you know of any man mad enough to marry her?’. ‘There’s Yosef,’ his wife replies. This is Yosef the Levite, who goes around claiming that Adam and Hawa were not a man and a woman but ‘neither or both’. Subsequently, Maryam’s parthenogenetically born (and therefore identical to her) daughter, Avigayil, grows up only to declare that she is a boy. When, following a ten-page gap, the text shifts to using male pronouns, it feels like a significant realignment of reality, as though the relationship between God and the world has changed.

This change is further demonstrated when Elazar (Lazarus) is brought back from the dead. Like Buffy, he comes out of the tomb complaining that he has been dragged against his will from heaven. The point of this demonstration, as ‘the Son’ explains, is that God has indeed changed and ‘now allows your spirit to live after death as you yourself’. By treating this old and, by now, well-worn story as genre, Ryman gives it renewed meaning as twenty-first century SFF. Only science fiction can save us now.

Gareth Powell, Descendant Machine (Titan Books, Kindle ebook edition, pp.)

This is another instalment in the Continuance series that began with Stars and Bones, which was of course on last year’s shortlist. The novels in this series can be read in any order so it is fine to start with Descendant Machine, which is a fast-paced space opera. A brief introduction frames the novel as being narrated by the V[anguard] S[cout] S[hip] Frontier Chic. The main protagonists are Nicola Mafalda, the navigator of the Chic, and Orlando Walden, a young physicist being taken by Mafalda and the Chic from the Thousand Arks of the Continuance (on which the homeless remnants of humanity are slowly traversing the universe) to Jzat in order to study the Grand Mechanism. Things start to go wrong once Mafalda begins the return journey after dropping off Walden. The Frontier Chic is attacked by a Jzatian gunboat and is only able to keep Mafalda alive and escape by taking very drastic action indeed.

Although Mafalda survives and lives to ultimately sort out, after many adventures, the resultant rapidly escalating situation, her relationship with the ship, as indeed with just about everyone else, does become a bit prickly. She’s an engaging character, whom I had no hesitation in making the object of my readerly identification, but I did wonder if more mileage could have been gained by keeping her gender ambiguous for most or all of the novel (Nicola, of course, being a masculine name in Italy). Aside from the introduction which refers to her as Ms Mafalda (although I only noticed this when I went back to look at it again), there are a good 50 pages at least before a pronoun is used at all and I was enjoying the uncertainty until the feminine pronouns started appearing. Having said that, she’s still a pretty cool, gender-nonconforming character, as one might expect in the SF future. Of course, Powell is caught here in the dilemma of trying to write the future while also providing relatable content. Hence, we see Mafalda struggling against a very recognisable family upbringing (there is a great one-liner describing her mother which I won’t spoil for those who haven’t read it yet).

While, despite a complex plot, the politics of the novel are fairly straightforward, e.g. the Jzatian baddies are satisfyingly Brexity and Trumpian, Powell always demonstrates a strong sense of what is at stake. With the Arks offering fully automated space communism, you’d think humanity would be satisfied with feeling the utopian love, right? Of course not! Half of them are too preoccupied with trying to replicate the outdated economic and religious systems of long-gone Earth. Some have even left the Arks to become ‘rich’, as one cheerfully informs Mafalda. ‘But we live in a post scarcity society,’ she replies, only to be told that there are some things only money can buy. Power, authority, the right to control other people’s lives; all the usual things that sociopathic arseholes want. As Powell understands, these people do actually have to be stopped.

Wole Talabi, Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon (Gollancz, pp.)

This noirish thriller, jam packed with sex and magic, is a welcome shot to the system. Following a London-set cold open, clearly happening in the immediate aftermath of some kind of action that has gone badly wrong, the novel reverts three days, in the first of many time hops and flash backs, to a Thai resort. Retired Yoruba nightmare god, Shigidi, and succubus, Nneoma, are bickering on the beach as to whether they should invite the tall, toned and tattooed woman sitting on a pink teach towel nearby back to their chalet so that they can find out what her spirit tastes like, when they realise that her place has been taken while they weren’t looking by Olorun, elder god and chairman of the board of the Orisha Spirit Company, who offers them a special, urgent job, which will clear their debt with him and earn them an additional big bonus.

Indeed, the gods are on hard times, caught in the same web of neoliberalism as everyone else. The Orisha Spirt Company Board has not long voted to cut down the evil forest to make way for a shrine to cinema. As Shigidi reflects, ‘that was the way the spirit business was going. Evil forests are out, Nollywood is in’. Talabi gets the satire pitch perfect in the passages exploring the internal dynamics and workings of the Spirit Board, including a very entertaining depiction of a boardroom coup at the annual meeting. I particularly enjoyed the early sequence revealing the distinctly unglamourous nature of Shigidi’s job while still employed by the company, as he struggles to collect two spirits during the course of a single night. This becomes complicated when he encounters Nneoma, for the first time, in bed with the woman, whose spirit he needs to complete his quota. Once they have got over their initial reactions to this situation, they strike up a partnership and go into business on their own. Part of the pleasure of these sequences is, as Gary Wolfe noted in his review of Shigidi for Locus, the way that the language of corporate culture is deployed to comic effect: ‘a scheme that goes awry, for example, is an ‘‘unforeseen process deviation’’’.

There’s a lot more – including Aleister Crowley at large in twenty-first-century London – going on in this novel, all of it enjoyable. Shigidi is a memorable protagonist and Olorun is also great fun, but it’s Nneoma who leaves the greatest impression: ‘If you gaze long enough into the eyes of a succubus, the succubus gazes back into you’. Indeed!

Juliet McKenna, The Green Man’s Quarry (Wizard Tower Press, Kindle ebook edition: 355 pp.)

Daniel Mackmain, the son of a dryad and human agent of the Green Man, is charged with solving the mystery surrounding the deadly appearances of a mysterious giant black panther. Early on, there is a comment about such sightings always being attributed to the ‘Beast’ of whichever nearby location begins with ‘B’, such as ‘Beast of Bodmin’. Of course, living in Aberystwyth, I immediately thought of the ‘Beast of Borth’ but alas this particular Green Man novel doesn’t venture into Wales. It does go to plenty of other places, though, and brings in a number of topical themes for more rural areas, including ‘county lines’ drug dealing and the difficult economic climate for tourist destinations and guest houses. The combination of a very English pragmatic, matter-of-fact style – the practically minded Mackmain has zero tolerance for fools – with an ancillary cast of dryads, hammadryads, naiads, mermaids, sylphs, wise women, cunning men and others creates a very distinctive effect. At times, the novel reads like a functionalist anthropologist account of the weirdly symbiotic relationship between humans and non-humans in the ‘matter of Britain’. 

I’m a fan of this series, of which this is the sixth instalment: once you have adjusted to the realist style I’ve described, they work nicely as quirky no-nonsense supernatural mystery-thriller stories. Don’t worry if you haven’t read any of the others. It’s fine to start here. McKenna takes care to provide you with the information you need to know and the relevant details about the recurring characters (but without providing spoilers for the other novels). This is not to say that there is no progression: the books are getting longer, and we are gradually being introduced to a wider map of Britain, with The Green Man’s Quarry including extended excursions into Cornwall and Scotland. I get the sense that the scaffolding is being put in place for even more wide-ranging plotlines with higher stakes. So read this and then be sure to catch up on the other novels before the next one comes out.

Christopher Priest, Airside (Gollancz, 297pp.)

This is an abridged version of a review which first appeared in ParSec #8 (Autumn 2023), pp.67-8:Priest’s latest novel is according to its press release ‘a gripping speculative historical novel, grounded in the golden age of film. Perfect for fans of true crime, conspiracy theories and SF that is chillingly close to reality.’ Apart from the last part, this has the effect of making Airside sound like a James Ellroy novel. It led me to consider whether Airside, which is beautifully packaged with a stylish retro cover design, is perhaps what an Ellroy novel would be like if written by Priest from a more oblique British perspective. The protagonist, film critic Justin Farmer, who is given an age and background similar to Priest’s own, finds himself compelled to cherchez la femme, Hollywood star Jeanette Marchand, with the twist that she disappeared in 1949, never being seen again after disembarking from a cross-Atlantic flight at London Airport. While the plot unfolds in classic cinematic manner – I was reminded at several points of Hitchcockian camera angles – there is also ample opportunity for the reader to indulge themselves in an enticing mix of film history, gossip and speculation.

However, Airside is just as much concerned with air travel and airports as it is with film. In particular, the liminal experience of being airside – beyond the security and passport controls – is explored fully through Farmer’s increasingly unsettling experiences attempting to travel between a seemingly unending series of international film conferences. It is possibly not a good idea for anyone prone to anxiety at the thought of not making it to the departure gate in time to read thisnovelimmediately before travelling.

Airside is a superb achievement, in which Priest distils his accumulated writerly craft to produce a novel that charts the uncanny qualities shared by airports and cinema, which are both portals to other realities. Airside or screenside, we don’t always come out as we went in. By capturing such uncertainty before we can blink it away as a trick of the imagination, Priest holds open possibilities that are disturbing but also potentially transformative for those prepared to risk losing themselves amidst the fleeting joys of the world.

(You can read the full version of this review as part of the post I wrote in response to Priest’s passing earlier this year.)  

Discussion: This shortlist provides a nice mix of different styles and types of novel. That said, it would have been good to see at least one other book by a woman writer in contention given that 2023 saw a wide range of excellent novels from across the genre, such as Nina Allan’s Conquest, Lauren Beukes’s Bridge, Ann Leckie’s Translation State and Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory. However, there is no question that the shortlist forms an entertaining set of books to read. I’ve no idea who is going to win though. For the first time in five years – during three of which he has won – Adrian Tchaikovsky is not on the shortlist. Gareth Powell is also a very popular writer, and a former winner, but all of these novels will have their supporters. As is often the case, we’re comparing very different works with each other. I don’t feel I can predict the winner and, as is my normal practice, I’m not going to rank these books in order; they are all very special to some readers. I was tempted to give my first vote to Airside because, aside from the fact that I have always been a fan of Priest’s work, it provides an ingenious and satisfying blend of text and found-text (newspaper articles, book chapters, film reviews etc within the world of the novel but crossing directly over with our contemporary world). It is also the sad truth that this is the last opportunity that we’ll get to vote for a novel by Priest and no doubt some people will take that opportunity. However, it might also be the once and only opportunity that we’ll get to vote for the amazing non-patriarchal trans version of the biblical story that is Him. I don’t know if it will win but I gave it my first vote. Let’s see what happens at the Awards ceremony.

Priest’s Repetitive Strain (on Reality): The text from my chapter in Butler, ed., Christopher Priest: The Interaction, 2005.

In my recent post, ‘Christopher Priest: A Remembrance’, I said I would find and post the text for my chapter, ‘Priest’s Repetitive Strain’ in the collection of essays on his work that was launched at the Glasgow Worldcon in 2005, when he was Guest of Honour. This was originally published in Andrew M. Butler, ed., Christopher Priest: The Interaction, Foundation Studies in Science Fiction 6, London: The Science Fiction Foundation, 2005, pp. 35-51. I have simplified the referencing, altered some punctuation and added a couple of clearly identified editorial comments. I still like this although I’d probably write it in a less compressed, more discursive style today and enlarge on some of the points and comparisons.

Introduction: Literary Judgements and Other Political Fictions

… the book is extremely badly written. It’s too long for its subject matter. The depiction of the characters is sketchy, and only the most shallow of motives are attributed to them to explain their actions. Your storytelling ability is not strong. The text changes direction unexpectedly. You do not acquit yourself well in the writing … Your vocabulary is restricted and there are too many repetitions.

The above justification is given by Gordon Sinclair, the head of a shadowy private company delegated to handle censorship for the Home Office, as the reason for the suppression of Alice Stockton’s manuscript in The Quiet Woman, Christopher Priest’s 1990 novel of a near-future Britain. Little does it avail Alice to complain ‘But those are literary judgements! … this is nothing to do with the book being subversive’: the subtext is that such judgements are always political. It is not by accident that the verdict reads like a satirical description of one of Priest’s own novels. The capacity of his characters to fade from visibility or consciousness or even the text itself, as conventional narrative is thwarted at every turn, is matched only by his own apparent invisibility – despite winning several notable prizes – within the public sphere and to the eyes of academia in particular. One way of explaining this lack of recognition for undoubtedly one of the finest British writers over the last thirty years would be to employ terminology from his own fiction: he is simply too ‘glamorous’ to be noticed. That is to say that Priest’s public invisibility is not simply a product of the well-known perfidy of mainstream critics and cultural commentators but has also become a matter of choice concomitant with the years of diligent practice spent honing to perfection a natural talent for misdirection. The most explicit fictional acknowledgement of this interpretation can be found in The Prestige, his mesmerising story of feuding turn-of-the-century stage magicians. Consider the following tantalising passage in which one of the main protagonists, Alfred Borden, compares the act of writing with that of staging an illusion:

I have misdirected you with the talk of truth, objective records and motives. Just as it is when I show my hands to be empty I have omitted the significant information, and now you are looking in the wrong place.

   As every stage magician well knows there will be some who are baffled by this, some who will profess to a dislike of being duped, some who will claim to know the secret, and some, the happy majority, who will simply take the illusion for granted and enjoy the magic for the sake of entertainment.

   But there are always one or two who will take the secret away with them and worry at it without ever coming near to solve it.

Not surprisingly, this challenge of ‘solving’ Priest’s ‘secret’ meaning has proved irresistible to critics. For example, David Wingrove has contended that Priest’s unifying theme is ‘the idea of Man separated and at a distance from reality’ (‘Legerdemain: The Fiction of Christopher Priest’, Vector 93, 1979), only to be disputed by Paul Kincaid: ‘Priest’s theme is not to show Man separated from the real world, but to show the psychological effects of such a separation. Throughout his work … a healthy mind … is consonant only with an involvement in the real world’ (‘Only Connect: Psychology and Politics in the World of Christopher Priest’, Foundation 52, 1991). Yet what are these ‘themes’ and ‘realities’ but the ‘talk of truth, objective records and motives’ that Priest warns us against? Such judgements are also political. How then can we read Priest without falling into these traps? The approach taken here will be to consider the developments in Priest’s fictional practice across his career as attempts to avoid exactly those traps and, therefore, as providing a model that we can adapt towards a practice of active readership.

The Question of Separation

The question of ‘separation’ is explicitly addressed by Priest in his most recent novel, The Separation, in which twin brothers Joe and J.L. Sawyer ‘separate’ into alternate historical tracks during the Second World War. While the book is dedicated to Kincaid, it flatly contradicts his thesis that Priest’s theme is the necessity for involvement in the real world, by depicting history – and specifically British war and postwar history – as a constructed ‘reality’ that not only must be escaped, but also remade (see Hubble, ‘Virtual Histories and Counterfactual Myths: Christopher Priest’s The Separation’, Extrapolation 48: 3, 2007). Hence the bomber pilot, J.L., repeatedly wakes from a crash – which is fatal to him in Joe’s universe – to successively modified futures before he finds himself in the world where the allies won the war, while pacifist Joe’s repeated awakenings from his own accident – fatal in J.L’s universe – and after other events such as the bombing of Coventry, can be seen as an eventually successful attempt to wake up to the peace which emerges in his world with the signing of an armistice between Britain and Germany in May 1941. However, in the final twist, J.L. rejects even this alternate history of peace, as the book closes with him ‘dreaming of waking to a better future’, which by implication is outside ‘history’.

This process of repeatedly working through scenarios until they are mastered bears a striking resemblance to the process of ‘repeating and working-through’ that Freud regarded as central to psychoanalysis, where the challenge facing the analyst is to bring to consciousness that which has been repressed by the patient. The analyst treats repression by inducing a compulsion to repeat so that the patient ‘acts’ out what has been repressed as a ‘piece of real life’ (Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’). A cure can be achieved by having the patient continue this repetition under analysis until the point when what has been repressed no longer represents a threat to ego stability. It can be seen that Priest’s protagonists undertake something like a self-analytic process by submitting to their own compulsions to repeat.

Freud generally considered fiction to be a form of wish fulfilment falling completely within the field of the pleasure principle – the corrective mechanism which acts to keep the level of excitement and agitation resulting from external or internal stimuli to as low and stable a level as possible, exemplified by the pleasure of the sexual act which resides in the ‘momentary extinction of a highly intensified excitation’ (Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’). In the well-balanced individual, the pleasure principle is supposed to be subordinate to the reality principle, which postpones immediate satisfaction in favour of greater satisfactions in the long term. Yet it is still the pleasure principle which forms the primary defence mechanism for protecting the ego from trauma by repressing those internal excitations which would otherwise overrun it. Thus, it is the resistance of the pleasure principle that has to be circumvented by the compulsion to repeat during the psychoanalytic encounter in order to effect the cure to the trauma. Freud explained how this was possible by arguing that the compulsion to repeat was an infantile stage of ego defence mechanism that was normally superseded in maturity and only resurfaced if the pleasure principle was overwhelmed. This developmental argument can be illustrated by the classic example of the child who compensates for the mother’s absences by staging the disappearance and return of toys within his reach. The repetition of a distressing moment does not accord with the pleasure principle but rather allows the child to attain an active role in place of his normal passive position. Freud concluded that this infantile stage was a necessary precursor for the subsequent adoption of the pleasure principle and, later still, the reality principle. What he did not consider was the alternate possibility that this mastery through repetition might be preferable to the developmental stages that are supposed to succeed it. This is the radical idea that has been developed by Priest in his most recent fiction, where the goal is not just to escape from ‘history’ but from all forms of ‘reality’.

It was not always so. While the condition of separation has affected Priest’s fictional protagonists since 1970, with repeated use of the term in his first novel Indoctrinaire, it was initially depicted as a form of wish-fulfilling escapism and, as Kincaid argues, the stance of the early books (although, as we shall see, it is only strictly true of the first two novels) was implicit criticism of these characters for their lack of commitment. The key to understanding this transition, from a condemnation to a celebration of separation, is to be found in the way that the condition is associated with a specifically British experience. For instance, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction suggests that the ‘haunted lassitude’ expressed by the hero of Inverted World is characteristically British. In this vein, it is possible to read Priest’s early novels as an indictment of Britain for itself existing in a state of separation from history or as having become detached from the reality principle. His creation of alternate histories in the 1970s – especially Fugue for a Darkening Island and A Dream of Wessex – represented an acting out of what had been repressed and can be seen as an attempted analytic cure designed to jolt history back on track and re-establish the possibility of British agency. A version of this idea is still evident as late as The Quiet Woman,where the separation of biographical writer Alice from the outside world is gradually revealed as she comes to realise that she has been drawing ‘on the events of history without involving herself with the idea that history actually had to be made’. However, Alice’s attempts to regain agency are mirrored by those of the monomaniac Gordon and the novel’s parallel endings suggest that the liberal solution of ‘only connect’ – perhaps implied in the earlier novels, as Kincaid argues in ‘Only Connect’ – is no longer sufficient to resolve the British problem. It is this ongoing concern with the state of the nation that has led to the major shift in the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of Priest’s fiction so that separation is no longer a problem to be cured but a point of departure.

Priest has acknowledged this development in his fiction, albeit in typically backhanded manner: ‘Although I seek to avoid categorisation of my books, slipstream can be a useful identifier’. He has variously identified slipstream as ‘an interest or obsession with thinking the unthinkable or doing the undoable’ and ‘a different way of inquiring into the familiar’. But it might also be described as a type of fiction that does exactly what Freud thought impossible in the aesthetic field by going beyond the pleasure principle to those compulsive and repetitive ‘tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it’ (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’). Such a transition involves crossing the boundary identified by Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction as that where ‘intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes … ontological plurality’. McHale illustrates this transition by citing the poet Dick Higgins’s examples of epistemological questions – ‘How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?’ – and ontological questions – ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’. McHale’s intention is to differentiate between the respective dominant concerns of modernist and postmodernist fiction, but it is his correlative examples of popular genres that are of particular relevance to us here: ‘the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellance’, but ‘science fiction … is the ontological genre par excellance’. While McHale seeks to show the staged transition of modernist concerns into postmodern ones across the individual careers of different writers such as Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Thomas Pynchon, it is possible to demonstrate a comparable transition for Priest: firstly, from epistemologically orientated genre sf to ontologically oriented sf and then, secondly, beyond sf itself, where we find not the mainstream but the slipstream.

Epistemologically Orientated SF: Anxiety Fantasies

In Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss coined the term ‘cosy catastrophe’ to refer to the British postwar disaster novel epitomised by John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. The problem with the term is that too many of the books it is supposed to refer to, including Wyndham’s, are far too ambiguous to warrant the generalisation. Even Aldiss uses the term as a kind of imaginary benchmark from which the magnitude of deviation can be measured. Thus, he describes John Christopher as ‘semi-cosy’ and (in Trillion Year Spree) Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island as ‘far from being a cosy catastrophe’. This was Priest’s second novel, in which a suburban family disintegrates amidst the savage civil war triggered by the arrival of two million African boat people in England (see Hubble, ‘Five English Disaster Novels, 1951-1972’, Foundation 95, 2005). However, its predecessor Indoctrinaire had also incorporated elements of the disaster genre. Specifically, the Third World War breaks out in July 1979, with England being destroyed by nuclear weapons on 22 August 1979 – a fate which the hero, Allan Wentik, deliberately chooses to share.

The distance travelled across the genre from the imaginary Wyndhamesque template can be illustrated by examining some different representations of the stock moment of the hero awakening in a hospital bed: Wyndham’s Bill Mason peels off his bandages to find himself sighted and sane in a blind and insane world, before venturing out manfully; J.G. Ballard’s Donald Maitland, in The Winds from Nowhere (1962), hallucinates himself as blind and in hospital and then realises that he is in fact sighted and sane and not in hospital; Priest’s Wentik comes round to find himself two hundred years in the future in Brazil and has sex with the nurse. Of course, it is this wish-fulfilment fantasy that Wentik ultimately rejects by deciding to go back and die with England. The logic behind this is that to live in the cosy future would be to accept the destruction of his family and the ‘whole set of memories and impressions and images’ which made up his identity and, therefore, it would be ‘to condone the removal of a part of himself’: exactly that condition of separation which haunts Priest’s oeuvre. But this is ‘just one half of a two part problem’ – the other being whether Wentik can choose to believe that his world is still going on regardless of the fact that he has been told otherwise: ‘To have a belief indoctrinated externally is one thing, but can a person indoctrinate himself by simply wishing to believe something?’ This is the central question of the book – hence the title – and it also one that runs throughout Priest’s subsequent work. Here, the answer is firmly in the negative and a position which we know is endorsed, albeit in a modified form, in his later fiction is identified squarely with Jexon, the principle character of the future society: ‘the man was a meritocrat-advocate, interpreter and delineator of a society he had abstracted himself’. Against this, Wentik’s ‘main preoccupation was to get back to what he knew as a normal life’. The qualification ‘what he knew as’ merely serves to indicate the limits of an epistemological framework which is still determined in the last instance by rationality. Within the confines of such a framework, the only means of avoiding the alienated condition of separation is through death (Edit: in other words, Indoctrinaire illustrates the Freudian death drive – also a factor in Ballard’s novels of the 1960s, which were influences for Priest). This uncosy resolution to the epistemological impasse necessitated by the rejection of wish-fulfilment characterises Priest’s early fiction.

While this confirms our dissatisfaction with the ‘cosy catastrophe’ paradigm, it does fit with Aldiss’s alternative and less well-known designation of the disaster sub-genre as ‘anxiety fantasies’ (also in Billion Year Spree). This phrase contains a very fruitful ambiguity. If we think of fantasies as being analogous to dreams, it is possible to take anxiety fantasies as either fantasies that fulfil wishes (such as the cosier kind of catastrophe) or fantasies that master the unconscious to a different end by drawing on psychical resources preceding the establishment of the pleasure principle (see Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’). While both strands are often in evidence, it is clear that the sub-genre as a whole follows the Freudian model of ‘repeating and working through’: with the breakdown of the reality principle, compulsion resurfaces and eventually sufficiently masters chaos to the point that a new reality principle forms, as in The Day of the Triffids for example.

In Priest’s work, this compulsion is perhaps most clearly present in the symbolically named Helward Mann, the hero of Inverted World, in which a city has to be kept moving relentlessly across hostile terrain by a continuous process of laying down and taking up huge rails, supervised by ‘guilds’. This starts like a classic coming-of-age story in which the young apprentice masters a number of setbacks through sheer doggedness and thus proves himself to his guild superiors as sufficiently driven and determined to be accepted as an equal. However, confounding our expectations, he remains true to this code even when it becomes obvious to everyone else in the city that there is no need for it to keep on moving, which has in any case become no longer possible. Ironically – considering this subversion of a classic plotline – the novel has been described as ‘pure’ (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, third edition), or even ‘first-rate hard’ (Trillion Year Spree), sf. This is to miss the point that although the counter-intuitive physics, in which an infinite world resides within a finite universe, is brilliantly realised, the sf is neither predominantly pure nor hard but distinctively metaphorical and psychological. The subtext of the physical inversion of planet Earth – the origin of the expeditionary forces from which the inhabitants of Inverted World are apparently descended – is a political inversion of colonialism. Whereas on Earth, civilisation depended on a system of economic inequality which allowed the rich and powerful to monopolise commodities, in the novel it is a surplus of food, fuel and raw materials which allows the civilised mobile city to exploit ‘native’ manpower: ‘the process was inverted, but the product was the same’. The apparent physics of the world, in which the city must keep moving because otherwise a perpetual southward drift will move it so far from ‘the optimum’ that it will be subject to spatial and temporal distortion, naturalises the compulsive drive behind civilisation and colonialism. This analogy is particularly cleverly brought out through the final initiation rite undertaken by aspiring guildsmen: they must escort ‘native’ women back ‘down past’ to their home villages after the spells they have spent in the city for breeding purposes. The unspoken element of the initiation rite – and therefore of becoming a man – is the sexual exploitation of the women, which is portrayed as a natural outcome of the physical distortions encountered as they spontaneously burst from their clothes: ‘Rosario split the seat of her trousers. One of Lucia’s buttons popped off … and Caterina tore the fabric of her shirt down both seams below her armpits’. More specifically, the book can be read as a metaphorical portrayal of postwar Britain. The guilds are the public-school establishment, driven by their ideal of service; the armed attacks on the city carried out by the native ‘tooks’ represent the various independence movements across the Empire (edit: although I’m now wondering if this should be read as a playful Tolkien reference), filtered through the imagery of Vietnam; and the internal dissident movement of ‘terminators’, who want to stop the city, are the 1968 generation.

What Mann resents most is the way that the combination of external and internal attacks lead to a loss of self-belief: ‘Now the tracks were being built in spite of the situation with the tooks, rather than in the way I now understand the motivation of the city to be derived, from an internal need to survive in strange environment’. Therefore, Mann’s position can be seen as one that privileges inner compulsion over the external demands of ‘reality’. The famous twist in the novel serves to make this clear. It transpires that the city is in fact on Earth, having been founded by a British particle physicist and set on a course starting in China some two hundred years previously, following a ‘natural window of potential energy’ across the surface of the Earth which serves to power an artificial energy field around the city. However, we also learn that this ‘translateration generator’ has the side-effects of altering perception and creating genetic defects. When these facts become known, the people of the city turn off the generator and allow their perceptions to revert back to the reality principle. Ontological uncertainty seems to be resolved back into an epistemological framework with only one problem: Helward Mann. He alone refuses this alternative and instead dives off the unfinished bridge, which the city guilds have been trying to build across the Atlantic. As with the ending of Indoctrinaire, the logic is that destruction is preferable to the state of separation (from all previous impressions, memories and identity) which would follow from having to accept a different ‘reality’. However, there is one final twist in the last sentence: ‘As darkness fell I swam back through the surf to the beach’. Although ambiguous, this is a more upbeat ending than those of the previous two novels and suggests that the choice confronting Mann is not simply that of old and new realities. Indeed, there is an alternative: the time Mann spends ‘up future’ where the temporal distortion means that ‘a day spent lazily on the bank of a river wasted only a few minute’s of the city’s time’. The attainment of this ‘terrain where time could almost standstill’ is only achieved by the partial separation of being distanced from the ‘reality’ of the city, without switching to the alternative ‘reality’ of 22nd Century Earth, which would entail an irrevocable separation. This rather fragile possibility suggests a future beyond the ‘better an end in horror than horror without end’ closing of Indoctrinaire.

The narrative device of the time loop, which features in various forms in all of Priest’s early novels, is the great contribution of genre sf to the problem of how the complex potentiality of utopia can be represented. Priest’s greatest success with this approach is A Dream of Wessex. Julia Stretton’s desperation to escape the terrorism, police road blocks and traffic congestion which characterise the disintegrating Britain of the 1970s, motivates her participation in a collective projection of a future soviet Wessex. Here, she is caught between the fascinations of two compulsively driven males, David Harkman and Paul Mason, who represent alternative rejections of the reality principle. The complex resolution to the novel is achieved by a sophisticated time loop in which the participants of the future projection are talked into projecting themselves further into the future by Paul. Most of them return to the 1977 starting point, but Paul disappears into some future reality of his own while David remains in the projection, where Julia manages to rejoin him in an undeniably happy ending. The closing descriptions of David surfing through the drowned valleys of England are quite explicit in their demonstration of his achievement as a psychological one, as he experiences a sudden lapse:

Beneath him, the wave, the cliffs and the sea had vanished. He was floating above countryside … There was a road down there, and he could see a line of traffic moving along it …. He felt he was about to fall, and he thrashed his arms and legs as if this would save him …. At once his motion ceased, and he was suspended again in the air, although noticeably lower than before. Now he could hear the traffic on the road … Harkman wished himself higher … and at once he felt the pressure of the wind on his back, and he soared upwards. When he had attained his former height, he made himself turn around again […]

   What he saw had no meaning for him: it was the product of some unconscious wish that he could not control …. It was something that had excluded him, something that he had in turn rejected …. Because it was from the unconscious past, unremembered, it was at once wholly intimate and voluntarily relinquished. It was the landscape of his dreams, a world that was not real, could not ever become real.

   As once before, when he had unconsciously rejected this phantasm from his life, Harkman exercised a conscious option, and expelled the dream.

Therefore, rather than David and Julia’s escape being a wish-fulfilment fantasy, it is ‘reality’ that is shown to be the wish-fulfilment fantasy, as the limits of the epistemological are transcended in a fully ontological world and the stable projection of a utopian future becomes possible for the first time in Priest’s fiction.

Ontologically Orientated SF: Writing Against ‘Reality’

Despite its utopianism, A Dream of Wessex remains ambiguous in one crucial respect: the narrative ends with Paul remaining in some future ‘reality’ of his own. While the novel rejects this future on moral grounds as being characterised by monomania and insecurity, it cannot deny it the same ontological possibilities as the preferred alternative. The net effect was a prescient demonstration that postwar Britain could break down in two ways. History dictated that rather than utopianism, it was to be the ontological possibilities represented by Paul that prevailed as the basis for the Thatcherite ‘reality’ of the 1980s – the background of Priest’s next three novels. In the third of these, The Quiet Woman, the surveillance cameraman Gordon Sinclair’s self-serving narration works brilliantly to map out the social-psychological history of the 60s, 70s and 80s in terms of its ontological underpinnings:

I found in advertising the medium I had been seeking: the kind of campaigns I was best at created a fantasy world from elements of reality, heightened the fantasy to induce uncertainty and discontent in the audience, then satisfied those negative feelings with the advertised product.

   Advertising used all the techniques I had discovered … It narrowed the frame, it filtered out the confusions of context, it selected clear targets, it emphasized its message with telling images, it rearranged reality to heighten reality.

   But advertising turned out to be yet another transition. I did not find an outlet for my real skills until, in the early seventies, I formed my own small information management company. With this I finally discovered what I had been aiming towards all my life, and as the company grew and our influence spread, I receded to the heart of it, absorbed in what I was doing, narrowing the frame, removing from context, heightening the fantasy, and in doing so fabricating a new reality.

Thus, the anxiety fantasies of postwar Britain were first heightened and altered by consumerism and advertising during the 1960s, before undergoing the ontological transition into the postmodern world of ‘reality’ fabrication. However, there was nothing neutral about the transition. While Sinclair’s account displays the Thatcherite mentality, the extract ultimately serves to acknowledge the uncanny horror of the 1980s: that they were enabled by those 1960s left and libertarian movements – including new wave sf – which broke with the ‘reality principle’. The problem left at the end of Wessex was the need to square the circle: to break free from the wish-fulfilment of the ‘reality principle’ without opening up the possibility of horror scenarios. What was needed was a negation that was also an affirmation, as suggested by Priest’s brilliant short story, ‘The Negation’, in which there exists a book called The Affirmation. This became inverted in the subsequent novel The Affirmation, in which there exists a book called Renunciation. This paradox is contained within a time loop, which is now truly coterminous with the entire text – a fact recognised by Ian Watson’s perceptive review claim that The Affirmation was its own sequel (in Foundation 23, 1981). The enabling background for this loop is no longer constructed from the stock components of genre sf as in Priest’s earlier fiction but represented as a consequence of the practice of writing, itself. In the words of the main protagonist, Peter Sinclair:

I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. To choose too carefully is to become pedantic, closing the imagination to wider visions, yet to err the other way is to invite anarchy into one’s mind.

This balance is at best delicate in The Affirmation as the dichotomy between ‘inner life’ and ‘external reality’ becomes equated with the manuscript written by Peter in England about ‘The Dream Archipelago’ and the manuscript written by Peter in the Dream Archipelago about ‘England’. The apparent revelation that the manuscript written by Peter in England consists only of blank pages would seem to confirm the novel as critical of the effects of separation. However, the situation is more complex than this would allow, as can be seen from Peter’s own realization that his manuscripts can be read on three levels: the words written; the pencilled traces left by ‘Seri’; and the unwritten assumptions and omissions:

   In my words was the life I had lived before the treatment on Collago. In Seri’s amendments was the life I had assumed, existing in quotes and faint pencil markings. In my omissions was the life I would return to.

   Where the manuscript was blank, I had defined my future.

These blank pages are at once the affirmation and the negation. They are the future, the way out of the oscillation between ‘end in horror and horror without end’, which is at best only thwarted by a time loop; and, yet, at the same time, these blank pages are as difficult to look upon for the writer as the bottomless abyss. The Affirmation is Priest’s breakthrough book, in which he escapes the circular limits of genre sf. This came at a cost, however, as he was later to acknowledge: ‘The Affirmation was to haunt me for years, and my writing was virtually immobilized for a half a decade afterwards’ (‘Author’s Note’, 1996 edition).

The eventual successor was The Glamour, which has probably succeeded in achieving a cult status and word-of-mouth reputation in excess of all his other work to date (edit: these days, following the film version, The Prestige is better known). As previously mentioned, the ‘glamour’ itself is a form of invisibility and the main protagonist, Niall, is so glamorous that it is only in retrospect that we realize that he was in fact the main protagonist. This has led to one critic labelling Niall as the villain and the direct link between Paul Mason and Gordon Sinclair (Kincaid, ‘Only Connect’) but it is the documentary cameraman, Richard Grey, who more clearly fits this criteria. By framing reality through his viewfinder, he clearly anticipates Gordon. The relationship between Richard and Niall explores the divergent possibilities of ontological freedom. Richard objectifies and makes real 1980s ‘reality’, while Niall attempts to escape. As the introductory pages, which we subsequently realize to be written by Niall, admit, he is an infantile character but it his refusal to grow up which frees him from the reality principle. He has the double-edged freedom of Peter Sinclair, but, unlike Peter, he not only becomes conscious of this through the practice of writing but also gains control over the process, enabling him to conclude to Richard: ‘We both threaten each other, you with your blundering ability to cause pain, I with my freedom to manipulate you. But now I am in control and you can stay as you are’.

This assumption of control is not sinister but an acceptance of responsibility. This reading becomes much clearer in the revised edition of 1996, where Niall’s ‘I am back in control, if only for a while’ is less harsh sounding and his reference to Richard’s ‘disconcerting, cameraman’s gaze’ is more specific than the merely ‘disconcerting gaze’ of the original publication. Furthermore, the distracting idea of Richard’s independent reality sits awkwardly in the original – in Niall’s phrases such as ‘Your real life does not concern me’ and ‘You are real enough in your own life, but when you impinged on mine I took you and used you’ – implying a sense of authenticity lingering in the ‘objective reality’ with which Richard as a documentary cameraman is associated. When these phrases are removed – as they are in the revised edition – Niall’s conclusion gains a fruitful ambiguity: ‘The urge to rewrite ourselves as real-seeming fictions is present in us all. In the glamour of our wishes we hope that our real selves will not be visible’. This is a recognition of the ‘reality principle’ as a fiction supported by a complimentary process of wish-fulfilment and repression. The great irony of the book is that the only character prepared to let his full self be visible is Niall, the most outwardly invisible. Alone among the glams, Niall relishes his identity and is fit, handsome, clean and well-groomed. By not hiding his drives, he does not need to construct a false reality, far less drag others into it. Paradoxically, of course, he is forced to write a counter-reality in order to negate Grey’s reality and affirm himself. Thus, the book can be seen as a reworking of the themes of The Affirmation, but one in which Niall leaps the abyss of the blank page by writing his future. He is even generous enough to allow Richard a form of closure by returning him to the reality principle rather than leaving him in ontological limbo: ‘You will forget, induce a negative hallucination. You are no stranger to doing that, because for you forgetting is a way of failing to see’. There is an edge to this of course in that it can also be seen as an address to the reader – those who simply demand wish-fulfilling entertainment are being treated with contempt: like Niall, Priest is ‘glamorous’.

This hard-edged side of ‘the glamour’ can be seen in Niall’s relationship to Sue, which  seems overbearingly possessive until it is realised that from the perspective of Priest’s fiction, Sue’s desire to leave the world of the glams and become ‘normal’ like Richard is profoundly pathological. This association of female characters with everyday life is a running theme of Priest’s fiction. While this association is simply treated as straightforward in the early books – in what might be seen as misogynistic representations – by Wessex, Julia is able to free herself from the grimy roadside cafes and terrorism by projecting and Sue is always able to escape everydayness because she is glamorous. The Quiet Woman begins with the old association once again intact as Alice hurries in from the rain, loaded down with shopping, running to answer the phone while desperate for the loo. Here, though, this very mundane everyday existence is explicitly associated with the stalled time aspect of her existence that sees her find the Wiltshire cottage she buys ‘as a consolation prize for the mess she had made of her life, a symbol of starting again …. simply [become a] home, a symbol of neither past nor future’. Stranded in this manner, she is potentially prey to Gordon’s mastery of fabricated reality – much as Julia was potentially prey to Paul Mason – and the book, through its multi-layered narrative, shows what the consequences of her allowing herself to be ‘written’ by Gordon would be, even as it shows Gordon himself to be a reaction to having been ‘written’ by his mother. However, Alice, unlike the earlier female protagonists of Priest’s novels, is herself a writer and it is her achievement of being able to write herself – variously by reclaiming her impounded manuscript and writing an anonymous letter to the police accusing Gordon of murdering his mother – that presciently demonstrates, in a book published in 1990, the route out of the Thatcherite 80s by using the ontological possibilities that enabled that particular ‘reality’ against it.

Slipstream Fiction: Performance and Prestige

As we have seen, Priest was no longer generating these ontological possibilities structurally through the codes and conventions of genre sf, but poststructurally through the properties of language itself. Following J.L. Austin’s work on performatives – acts of speech which make things happen in the world such as marriage vows and declarations of war – it is now generally accepted that no form of narrative can be neutral, that the act of narration changes the world by making things happen that otherwise would not. This is the source of the unease poststructuralists and postmodernists have with ‘grand narratives’. Yet there are also positive contemporary responses to performativity such as Judith Butler’s liberating work on gender as a form of identity that comes into being through performance rather than having anything to do with biological sex (see Gender Trouble). Priest’s fiction should be seen as a contribution somewhere along this positive side of the spectrum as he shows the struggles of his characters to write themselves as beings in their own worlds rather than let themselves be written as things in someone else’s. His most reflective work on this, and a novel that registers a significant development from the three books of the Thatcher years, is The Prestige. Here, it is the direct comparison between writing and stage magic, as noted at the beginning of this essay, which allows him to highlight the performativity of writing. A different section of the passage quoted in the introduction to this chapter serves to bear this out: ‘Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent’. The ‘very first of these words’ are ‘I write in the year 1901’. In the context of the novel, this is a deception because Borden is one of a pair of identical twins who share the personal pronoun between themselves without distinction. Yet, in a more general sense, the personal pronoun is always a ‘grammatical fiction’: performing a unity of subject that would not exist without it.

The fact that Borden is two identical people is the secret behind his most celebrated illusion, ‘The New Transported Man’ and it is a secret which his rival Danton cannot work out. But this is simply another misdirection which lures us away from the real difference between the two, just as Danton’s obsession with the hidden workings of tricks blinds him to Borden’s understanding that ‘the wonder of magic lies not in the technical secret, but in the skill with which it is performed’. At one point in the book, Borden describes an illusion as consisting of three stages: the setup, the performance and the prestige. This latter is ‘the product of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparently did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick’. While audiences, critics, fellow magicians and, especially, Danton are focused on the first two stages of ‘The New Transported Man’, Borden simply states ‘for me, the performer, the prestige is the main preoccupation’. In other words, what is important to Borden and, by implication, to Priest as a writer are the things that happen in the world as a result of performance. It is exactly these ontological possibilities that remain hidden from Danton in his blind epistemological desire to explain the unexplainable.

Of course, it is this stance so typical of genre sf which leads to Danton making a conceptual breakthrough in alliance with the electrical experimenter Nikola Tesla, as they discover a way of first projecting matter and, then, a human being through space. Danton happily employs this discovery in his stage act, allowing him to replicate Borden’s transportation trick. The only drawback is that each time Danton performs the illusion, a prestige is produced: an unmoving, undecaying doppelgänger of Danton himself. This process suggests the Freudian notion of achieving ego development by adhering to the reality principle and rejecting the infantile narcissistic self, any reminder of which (via reflections, echoes, automata etc) will be likely to trigger an uncanny feeling in the subject. Indeed, this is what happens to Danton as every time he creates a new reality, he simultaneously confirms his state of separation. For it is Danton’s secret that he is actually Rupert Angier, The Earl of Colderdale: the aristocratic title signifying the sovereignty of the Self represented in the text by Danton.

It can be seen clearly how The Prestige displays the two qualities Priest ascribes to slipstream fiction: an obsession with thinking the unthinkable or doing the undoable and a different way of inquiring into the familiar. The Self is revealed as uncanny and reality is shown to be an illusion. Of course, slipstream would be merely another descriptive category, about as useful and satisfactory as ‘postmodernist fiction’ if it were not for its political subtexts. A clue to the political subtext of The Prestige is provided by the name of the ‘contract worker’ who initially introduces Borden to the performance of magic, ‘Robert Noonan’. This is the real name of one of Priest’s predecessors as a Hastings-based writer, Robert Tressell, author of the socialist classic The Ragged Trousered Philantrophists. In Tressell’s novel, the socialist hero, Frank Owen, demonstrates to his workmates ‘The Great Money Trick’ whereby the exchange of money enables the capitalist class to enrich themselves by extracting productive labour from the working class. Translated into more theoretical terms, Tressell illustrates how money and the exchange process in general enables the prices resulting from a system of social relations (capitalism) to appear as the attributes of the things being sold thus obscuring the unjust and oppressive nature of those social relations. Amusingly, if somewhat heretically, the fictional Noonan is shown as fleecing his fellow workers at ‘Three Card Monte’ every lunchtime, but this should not be allowed to misdirect us from the serious criticism of the capitalist exchange process provided by Priest. At one level, the Tesla machine represents exactly this exchange process, and it is significant that every time Danton goes through the machine he takes five gold sovereigns through in his pocket and thus duplicates his money as well as himself. Therefore, the text can be seen to link separation with capitalism. In this context, it is fitting that the fictional Noonan is depicted as a trickster rather than a noble hero because the type of socialist politics he is intended to introduce to us, as well as to the ‘Borden’ of the book, is not the traditional standpoint of opposing use-value to exchange-value that characterises Tressell’s work, but a mode of practice that eschews any reduction to essence and, hence, the inevitability of being reinserted into the capitalist exchange process:

One day, his painting work completed, Noonan left the yard and went out of my life. I never saw him again. He left behind him an impressionable adolescent boy with a compulsion. I intended to rest at nothing until I had mastered the art that I now knew (from a book I urgently borrowed from the lending library) was called Legerdemain.

This compulsion is none other than the compulsion to remember, repeat and work-through that allows the acting out of fantasy as ‘real life’: a practice as central to the work of the stage illusionist as to the psychoanalyst. Such a practice, despite being beset with potential pitfalls, is shown by Priest’s work to be the only means of combatting alienation in the modern world.

Conclusion: Beyond the Slipstream

As Priest has written, slipstream is about attitude. This attitude has been described by Bruce Sterling as one of ‘peculiar aggression against “reality”’ and its tendency is to ‘sarcastically tear at the structure of “everyday life”’. This attitude is seen at its clearest in The Extremes, where Priest’s repetitive strain comes fully into its own. Here, Teresa Simons takes leave from the FBI and returns to her native Britain in order to investigate a Hungerford-style shooting in the south coast town of Bulverton, which occurred on the same day as her husband – also an FBI operative – was shot in Texas. Rapidly enmeshed in a shifting web of virtual-reality scenarios run by the Extreme Experiences Corporation, she comes to suspect that a leakage between virtuality and reality has brought about the two incidents on the same day and led to her husband’s death. But by her own involvement in the scenarios she, herself, becomes fatally complicit in the process when she finds herself teaching the perpetrator of both massacres, Gerald Grove, how to shoot. This genre plot allows Priest to weave together a complex social fabric as Teresa initially tries to reconcile her American sense of featureless space with the British experience of ‘concentrated time’: ‘history reaching behind her, the future extending before her, meeting at this moment of the present’. However, her attempts meet with frustration as it becomes obvious that Bulverton, imprisoned by economic decline and benefits culture, has become stagnant: ‘it was just a dull, tired, unhappy seaside town, full of the wrong memories and with no conception of the future’. It is this stasis in which people simply drift with no sense of purpose that Priest equates with social reality. Ironically, considering Priest’s earliest fiction, this condition is depicted as analogous to that of being caught in a time loop. It is significant that when Teresa finds herself projected back into the past she rejects the explanation of time-travel and concludes that ‘linearity’, or causality, has been given ‘a third dimension, made matrical’. Thus, her response is neither passive acquiescence nor despair but the active construction of ‘the remainder of her life’. With her hard-gained knowledge from FBI training that ‘interdiction scenarios were mastered only by repeated attempts to get them right’, she repeatedly enters the scenarios again and again until Grove misses both times, allowing her to rescue her husband and transport him to an airliner soaring endlessly above Finland.

The psychological logic behind this repeating and working-through is explained by the objectionable Ken Mitchell, an executive with Extreme Experiences, who is concerned at all costs to protect the ‘linearity’ of the Bulverton massacre so that it can be turned into a perfect virtual scenario for public consumption. A scenario must always have an edge where its ‘reality’ ends because memory runs out, yet, as Mitchell warns Teresa, repeated interdiction scenarios introduce neural crossover because ‘successive experiences of the scenario alter your perception next time you go in’ so that ultimately ‘linearity fades like yesterday’. This is consistent with Freud’s idea that memory-traces are left behind by unconscious processes and that, therefore, ‘consciousness arises instead of a memory-trace’ (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’). Specifically, the possibility of dealing freely with stimuli depends on the existence of ‘freely mobile processes which press towards discharge’ (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’) and these lines of cathexis (or neural crossover) can only be generated by repetition. Of course, as already discussed, we know that Freud considered these processes as infantile and only as a developmental stage on the way to a mature adherence to the pleasure and reality principles. However, Priest’s point is that because memory is only linear while consciousness is multidirectional, it is possible for a fully conscious being to be able to transcend the linear limits of so-called social reality out of choice rather than simply as a temporary defence to trauma. For similar reasons, Walter Benjamin once wrote that ‘the production of a proper consciousness is the primary task of Marxism’ (‘An Outsider Attracts Attention: on The Salaried Masses by Siegfried Kracauer’, 1930).

In Freud’s essay ‘Observations on Transference-Love’, he argues that analysts should not sleep with their patients, because the love generated between the patient and analyst through induced repetition in the analytic process is something that must be treated as unreal because it ‘is entirely composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, including infantile ones’. This is advice that has sometimes been directed metaphorically at writers with respect to their characters and could easily be applied to readers as well. Regardless of these further crossovers, there is a case for arguing that the resolution to The Extremes is similarly unreal, not to say infantile, because Teresa and Andy are having sex across the seats of the airliner in what we know to be a virtual scenario that Teresa has earlier heard about from the porn actress ‘Shandy’: ‘I play an air hostess on an aircraft, and me and the guy get down to it in a row of seats. Not very comfortable, but we put the arm-rests up’. Yet, Freud’s position is problematic because it cannot be both that repetition is unreal with respect to love and that the analytic process allows repressions to be worked through as ‘a piece of real life’. In fact, he was forced to concede that every state of being in love reproduces infantile prototypes and that love was in fact pathological (‘Observations on Transference-Love’). This renders his attempts to distinguish between ‘normal love’ and ‘transference-love’ unconvincing and calls into question any Freudian distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ situations. The obvious conclusion from this is that the analytic method could not and cannot ever reconcile patients with reality, it can only induce them to ‘act out’, or perform, ‘realities’ for themselves in the hope that they will eventually hit upon one that will allow them to successfully reintegrate with the ‘reality principle’ governing society. It is exactly this endpoint that Priest’s fiction has consistently sought to expose and reject. As we have seen, repetition is not just a theme but a practice he has developed towards achieving this aim and it is also a practice that we as readers need to develop. Freud pointed out that ‘it is hardly possible to persuade an adult who has very much enjoyed reading a book to re-read it immediately’ (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’) and yet that is what Priest demands as it is only by repeated readings that the required neural crossovers can be developed that enable a full consciousness of his work. The postmodern celebration of virtuality and pornutopia that closes The Extremes is not a wish-fulfilment fantasy but the conclusion of that other type of anxiety fantasy in which the purpose of the repetition work is to master reality rather than seek accommodation with it and thus soar ‘out to the extremes where all memory ends and life begins anew’.

Christopher Priest: A Remembrance (and a review of Airside)

I always struggle to process sad news and emotional moments. Something bad happens and I don’t feel the reaction even though I know it is there. It’s often only days or even longer afterwards that I do feel the sorrow or the anger or whatever is the appropriate emotional response. Therefore, I have been struggling to process the sad news of the death of Christopher Priest on Friday evening. Obviously, my thoughts are with Nina and Chris’s friends and family. But, seeing other people do this, I have realised that the best way for me to express my own feelings is to write something.

I didn’t know Chris particularly well, although I have met him on a few occasions and also corresponded briefly. I have read all of his novels and stories, however, as well as various bits of non-fiction. I have over 40 physical copies of books by him. I’ve reached this number because there are differently revised versions of them in existence and, therefore, I need for professional reasons to have four different versions of The Glamour, three editions of Fugue for a Darkening Island, and at least two of each of the other early novels. I can’t say that I’ve read them all as they came out because I only ‘discovered’ his work in the 1990s, but I have read every novel from The Extremes onwards as it was published.

Following the completion of my PhD (which was nothing to do with SF), I started writing some articles about Priest’s fiction: an article about The Separation for Extrapolation, an article about ‘Five English Disaster Novels’ (which included Fugue) for Foundation, and a chapter for the Science Fiction Foundation volume of essays, The Interaction, collected in his honour as GOH of the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon. I’m not sure why Andrew M Butler, as editor of that volume, bore with me, because as I recall I submitted very late and wrote a comprehensive overview of Priest’s career, which was a bit academicky (although not the worst offender in that regard) – but he did and I’m very grateful for that.

Glasgow 2005 was my first con and it fell at a stressful time for me as we were having a traumatic year family wise. Furthermore, I was struggling with the index for my first academic book and trying to do this early and late in the hotel room, while spending the day at the con. The whole experience was accordingly weird and disconcerting. The first event I went to was a version of a Radio 4 quiz show (Just a Minute possibly?) and I must confess I loathe Radio 4. But Chris was on it, and also Ken MacLeod I think, so I went and quite enjoyed it. I didn’t enjoy my own paper on the academic track, which was alongside Paul Kincaid, who seemed intimidatingly urbane, sophisticated, and articulate to me. I also didn’t particularly enjoy the launch of The Interaction, which had Andrew, Paul (?) and Graham Sleight on a panel talking from what seemed to be a parallel universe to the one I was in. Generally, I felt myself drifting apart from the consensus reality of the con. Having tendencies to that kind of dissociation probably explains why I’m so invested in Chris’s work, but I do sometimes feel like the ‘bad’ character in his mid-period novels (… but are they actually the bad characters? If I can only read A Dream of Wessex or The Glamour through the correct theoretical framework maybe the ending will work out the way I want it to this time? *stares intently* Honestly, far from critical objectivity, I know that I am the kind of reader who should stay away from writers because inside I really am the over-identifier they have nightmares about).

However, I do have fond memories of a session in which Chris talked about stage magic and also chatting to him briefly while cheekily getting him to sign my copy of The Interaction (pictured). He obviously had read my chapter and while I think there were some points he might have disagreed with (not to mention the academicky style), he did generously compliment me on spotting the Robert Tressell references in The Prestige, which left me happy.

The next time I saw Chris was at the next con I went to, the 2010 Eastercon, where I found myself sitting next to him during Liz Williams’s GOH speech/interview. We didn’t actually talk because he and his family only took their seats after the lights had been dimmed for the start of the talk and they dashed off as soon as the applause started. But it does mean that he is indelibly linked in my mind to magic shops in Glastonbury, which wouldn’t be the case otherwise.

Subsequently, a year or two later, we had an email correspondence because I was writing the entry on him for the Literary Encyclopedia and I had to confirm a number of facts, which I had got wrong. I was pleased with the result (which you can find out there, although it’s mostly paywalled) but the editor of the piece really rubbed me up the wrong way, so I’ve never updated it or written anything else for them.

During this period, I taught a number of Chris’s novels at the universities I was working at. I taught The Prestige at Kingston to MA students on the Genre module of the MA in English Literature (but it was also an option for Creative Writing students, so there were quite a few of these in the class too). I taught this again at Brunel several times. I also taught A Dream of Wessex on ‘Contemporary British Fiction’ at Brunel and Fugue on an MA module on the fiction of the 1970s. I can remember some great essays linking Wessex to Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. I know for a fact that other academics have taught Priest’s work, which, while maybe not canonical (because we don’t have a canon anymore, at least only over my dead body), does have significant recognition outside SF critical circles. The late Mark Fisher wrote about Priest’s work in The Weird and the Eerie, as did Alex Niven in New Model Island. Also, three different volumes in Bloomsbury’s pathbreaking ‘Decades [of British Fiction] series’ – The 1970s, The 1990s, and The 2010s – include readings of, respectively, Wessex, The Prestige and The Evidence.

I taught Wessex again as part of my dream combination with Gwyneth Jones’s Kairos at the Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in 2018. Two novels which I absolutely love, which encapsulate the experience of living through the decline and fall of postwar Britain, and which sum up better than any other form of writing (fiction or non fiction, including history and sociology) the nature of the counter revolution against what might have been and what might yet be.

Over the years, I have also reviewed The Adjacent, The Gradual, The Evidence, Expect Me Tomorrow and Airside (see below). I had some indirect exchanges with Chris around the Shadow Clarke project, which he cheered on from the sidelines. And I did see him in London after an interview at Waterstones with Glyn Morgan following the release of An American Story, which I’m already thinking is the Priest novel I next want to reread. My final communication with Chris was late last August when Ian Whates told me that he’d passed on my review of Airside (for ParSec) to Chris as follows:

Incidentally, Chris Priest asked me to pass on his appreciation of your review for Airside, which I sent to him while he recovered from surgery.

To quote:

Dear Nick

Your review has come like a fragrant breeze across a sterilized plain. I haven’t been well, in fact: I have been on the distinctly bookless and sterilized plain of hospital. Following an operation. I shall be freed in two days’ time. Can’t wait to resume normal life. Anyway, thanks for a most encouraging and “different” review, which I really appreciated.

This made me incredibly happy but like a fool I didn’t actually reply to tell Chris so. At first, I thought, I’d wait a week or so to give him a chance to get over the hospital stay. But then I got involved in doing other things – the index for The 2010s mentioned above (always the index causing the problems) – and the usual stuff that takes over and the moment passed…

I did however add receiving the note to my running list of good things that happened to me in 2023, which is how I maintain morale in the face of negative thinking. It did make me feel really good about myself and I’m grateful for him reaching out.

Here is my review of Airside, which first appeared in ParSec, #8 (Autumn 2023), pp. 67-8.

Airside by Christopher Priest (Gollancz, 2023)

Reviewed byNick Hubble

Priest’s latest novel is according to its press release ‘a gripping speculative historical novel, grounded in the golden age of film. Perfect for fans of true crime, conspiracy theories and SF that is chillingly close to reality.’ Apart from the last part, this has the effect of making Airside sound like a James Ellroy novel. It led me to consider whether Airside, which is beautifully packaged with a stylish retro cover design, is perhaps what an Ellroy novel would be like if written by Priest from a more oblique British perspective. The protagonist, film critic Justin Farmer, who is given an age and background similar to Priest’s own, finds himself compelled to cherchez la femme, Hollywood star Jeanette Marchand, with the twist that she disappeared in 1949, never being seen again after disembarking from a cross-Atlantic flight at London Airport. While the plot unfolds in classic cinematic manner – I was reminded at several points of Hitchcockian camera angles – there is also ample opportunity for the reader to indulge themselves in an enticing mix of film history, gossip and speculation.  

Marchand, we learn, was born Verity Mae Kalutz, the daughter of a pool typist in Pittsburgh. In 1929, at the age of sixteen, she went to New York City to work as a dancer and hostess in nightclubs. In 1929, she moved on to Los Angeles with a friend called Ruby Stevens. Both changed their names: ‘Verity became Jeanette Marchand, and Ruby called herself Barbara Stanwyck’. At which point I got quite excited, because for me Stanwyck is probably the most iconic mid-century film star. It also sent me scurrying for Wikipedia, which has become a useful accessory for Priest’s most recent output. No doubt a true Hollywood aficionado would have already worked out at this point that Marchand bore more than a slight resemblance to Mae Clarke (especially given that Airside is part-dedicated to her memory) but I enjoyed a happy few minutes connecting the dots. Moreover, this research – don’t worry I have still left plenty for readers to look up for themselves – seems very much in keeping with the spirit of the novel, which includes various samples of found text in the form of articles, reviews and even a book chapter written by Farmer. These – covering topics ranging from Casablanca to Jacques Tati’s Playtime – are all fantastic; I’d happily read a Farmer anthology as written by Priest.

However, the novel is just as much concerned with air travel and airports as it is with film. In particular, the liminal experience of being airside – beyond the security and passport controls – is explored fully through Farmer’s increasingly unsettling experiences attempting to travel between a seemingly unending series of international film conferences. It is possibly not a good idea for anyone prone to anxiety at the thought of not making it to the departure gate in time to read Airside immediately before travelling. Passengers of such disposition would also be well advised to steer clear of Chris Marker’s 1962 photomontage film La Jetée, set at and in the vicinity of Orly Airport. This film is the topic of a retrospective feature by Farmer published in the 17 July 1967 edition of the Guardian, which is reproduced for us in full. One interesting detail in this article, which I presume is factually correct, is that it took the film three years to cross the channel. It was briefly screened in London at the end of 1965 as the support feature to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, also a science fiction film of course. Knowing of Priest’s historical role in transferring the appellation ‘New Wave’ from French cinema to the kind of science fiction appearing in New Worlds in the mid-1960s, I’m inclined to assume that he attended one of those London screenings. The time-loop structure of La Jetée, set some time before the outbreak of World War 3, has been influential on other films and texts since and, putting two and two together, I assume it was the inspiration for the structure and ending of Priest’s first novel Indoctrinaire (1970).

Priest was the subject of the author questionnaire in this year’s June issue of SFX, in which Airside was given a five-star review. When asked which of his books was the most difficult to write, he answered ‘The Prestige was a struggle. The Separation required weeks of research. None has been easy except the very first, when I didn’t know what I was doing’. Given that Airside has appeared only a matter of months after his previous novel Expect Me Tomorrow, one might assume that it was getting easier. Although, in fact, I think the publication of the latter was delayed and therefore the intervening writing period was much greater than it appears superficially. Either way, Airside is a superb achievement, in which Priest distils his accumulated writerly craft to produce a novel which is richly ambiguous. One possible way of approaching it would be to consider it as another attempt, more than half a century after Indoctrinaire, to respond to La Jetée. Rather than conduct this in plot terms as in that first novel, Priest here charts the uncanny qualities shared by airports and cinema, which are both portals to other realities. Airside or screenside, we don’t always come out as we went in. By capturing such uncertainty before we can blink it away as a trick of the imagination, Priest holds open possibilities that are disturbing but also potentially transformative for those prepared to risk losing themselves amidst the fleeting joys of the world.

*         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *

Now there never will be ‘a Farmer anthology as written by Priest’, although that probably wouldn’t have been a priority. Nor will there be more of Chris’s novels to look forward to reading and reviewing. However, I will no doubt write more about his work because that is how I interact with the books I love. (And in the first instance, I will probably post the text of my chapter in The Interaction here in a few days’ time, once I’ve found it). And maybe I should try and pick up one of those Pan paperback editions of Wessex just in case it is different and this time it is possible to expel the dream consciously and soar…

Looking Forward at 2024, Or, Should Galadriel Take the Ring?

In past years, I’ve done a round-up (2022, 2021, 2020) but this time I thought I’d vary the format and frame it as a ‘look forward at’ (rather than ‘to’) and add some bonus Tolkien provocation too (following on from my recent ‘Tale of two Fantasy Exhibitions’ post). The point of doing a recap for me is mainly for morale: reminding myself what I have achieved despite various adverse circumstances. However, 2023 was more subjectively upbeat for me than the three years preceding it. This may just have been because I managed to get my now annual bouts of Covid and extreme PEM out of the way in the first third of the year, interspersed with the news of my Leverhulme Research Fellowship coming through (see the opening paragraphs in my Eastercon report for the rollercoaster experience of those early months). Over the late spring and summer, I managed to write some academic publications (including my parts of The 2010s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, which is coming out in hardback in February), an article on ‘Sci-fi and the Future of Healthcare’ for the Spring 2023 issue of Tribune dedicated to the NHS, and also to recover fully from the disastrous start to the year, so that I went into my research leave in the autumn feeling pretty good.

Ironically, feeling good gave me the energy to deal with catching up on medical appointments. So that by the end of September, I had organised optician and dentist appointments and beaten my GP practice into submission. In terms of the latter, what happened was that, despite not being texted for covid and flu jabs, I rang them up and was told I was eligible but then was turned away when I arrived for them. Cue stiff letter to practice restating my medical history since 2020 (which mostly concerns diagnoses of their own GPs – albeit ones no longer at the practice). This resulted in a conversation with a GP who told me that postviral/’long covid’ was completely different from ME/CFS, which is ‘neurological’ and would have entitled me to the vaccinations. But in ameliorative manner, I was nonetheless invited back for the covid and flu jabs (and, of course, took them up on that straight away). I asked how I could get diagnosed with ME/CFS and the short answer was that I can’t in Wales because there are no specialist chronic fatigue services available from the Welsh NHS. I was offered a referral to the Welsh NHS rheumatology services, which I accepted in lieu of any other offer, but they in turn referred me on to the Welsh Long Covid Service and I had an online meeting with them on 27 December from Berlin, where we spent Christmas this year. I’ve never particularly wanted to be defined as having Long Covid because the EHRC were so equivocal as to whether it counts as a disability for employment reasons, but it sounds as though the Welsh Long Covid Service is in the process of becoming a more general ‘postviral service’ covering ME/CFS as well, according to what I was told. How useful this will prove to be to me is open to question (I can pace myself and manage my fatigue levels reasonably, which seems to be mainly what they concentrate on) but it might cut though to my own GP practice a bit more effectively and stop them treating me like I’m making it up. We shall see but getting this level of recognition feels, at least for the time being, like a tangible return from expending valuable effort on it this autumn.  

Therefore, going forward in 2024, I feel relatively free to concentrate on research and writing projects, which include my Leverhulme project on ‘Self-Reflexivity, Class Consciousness and Cultural Division in Britain’ (incorporating dispatches from the Culture Wars), the 1920s volume of the Decades series and my ongoing Clarke Award project, which will pick up speed later in the year. I’ve also got various other plans in the pipeline that I will discuss as and when they actually happen rather than in advance. Anyway, at the moment, if feels like a year in which it might be possible to move forwards on a work front even while I expect it to be a bad year in other respects. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight for the slaughter in Palestine. The war in Ukraine looks set to rumble on. There will be divisive elections in the US and the UK (possibly also in November). I also get the feeling that a lot of people who want to return to what they saw as 20C social norms are going to take advantage of the rightwing assault on difference and stick their heads up (well) behind the parapet in the name of … well, in the name of self-interest really but it will be presented as a call for the restatement of ‘adults in the room’ and ‘objective values’ etc. This has obviously been underway for several years, but it can be expected to intensify this year as we will be subjected to a barrage of ‘thoughtful opinion pieces’ and ‘bold editorials’ (like the appallingly transphobic leader in the Observer just before Christmas) in favour of ‘universalist values’ and against ‘identitarian politics’, which will in reality be advocating for hardline bio-essentialist and privileged positions. I also expect to see this play out more overtly in the world of literary and cultural criticism than hitherto. There are signs of ‘objective’ criticism rearing its ugly head in the service of those trying to reassert their elite privileged status. Objectivity sounds good, but in practice it normally means upholding views that are in accordance with tacitly accepted dominant values. Those touting such ‘objectivity’ are often defending their own privileged right to pronounce as they deem fit without disclosing the specificities of their viewpoint or the advantages they accrue from holding it. It is preferable, therefore, if people situate themselves in relation to what they are writing about, explain how they have come to their particular subjective position and allow readers to decide if they agree with this view or not. However, what is probably going to happen is that people doing this are going to be attacked for being unduly partisan. But if we really want to get free of all the old hierarchies, then now is exactly the time to be proudly and unashamedly partisan, while providing reasons supporting that position. Therefore, I thought I’d start the year off as I mean to go on by asking the question of whether Galadriel really should take the ring when Frodo offers it to her.

Galadriel legendary card from the Lord of the Rings Elven Council Magic the Gathering commander deck. Ring power guide from the commander deck.

This question is, as the President of a US Ivy league university might say, dependent on context. If you’re playing the LOTR– themed Magic the Gathering ‘Elven Council’ commander deck, as I was over Christmas, then you do want Galadriel to be your ring-bearer and gain the powers that go with that status. We played three games with the four LOTR commander decks and the one I won was due to Galadriel being tempted by the ring in line with the voting of participants (there was some dialogue at the time concerning the advisability of players other than myself voting for ‘domination’). If you’re reading the LOTR and regard Galadriel as a real person – which I’ve recently heard that real academic critics aren’t supposed to but nobody sent me the memo, so I’ll carry on regardless – then I think you have to respect her decision not to take the ring on the basis that she is wise and it seems right to respect her choice. On the other hand, one suspects that the (younger) Galadriel of the Amazon TV series, The Rings of Power – which was not without faults but on the whole much better than the hostile and negative criticism that it was subjected to from some quarters – would not only be tempted to take the ring but might well actually choose to wield it against Sauron. Yet weighing against such heresies there is the important – and, of course, more ‘critically respectable’ point – that thematically the LOTR is concerned with the renunciation of power. It might be argued that Galadriel, like Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir and Sam (most of the undisputedly good characters in the novel), has to refuse the ring in order to reinforce the logic of Tolkien’s position that this kind of absolute power necessarily corrupts, which is one I generally agree with (not least because I live in a state, the UK, which vests power not in its people but in an absolute concept of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’, which boils down to agreeing that whoever holds the ring gets control of all the resources and all the rules). Furthermore – the pragmatic ‘reader’ part of me insists on adding – the story wouldn’t be the same if Galadriel took the ring: it would be a different novel, possibly quite a lot shorter, and maybe now forgotten.  

So, the balance of argument seems quite overwhelming (MTG aside). And yet there is something that still makes me want to ask the question, which in turn makes me think that there is something wrong with the paradigmatic framing which makes it appear as though the question is pointless. Or, to put it another way, what would need to be different about our world and our viewpoint and our baseline assumptions in order to make the question worth asking? Furthermore, what kind of world becomes possible if we can imagine answering the question in the affirmative?

For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming that use of the ring is not necessary inherently damaging in itself (as, for example, nuclear weapons would be). We know Tolkien rejected simplistically allegorical readings of the novel. Nor am I making an ends-justify-the-means argument. We know what that kind of world is like because we live in it. The enduring attraction and importance of Tolkien’s work is that it offers an alternative to such instrumentalist nightmares, but it does so at the cost of centring a relatively static symbolic order. What I am hypothesising is that Galadriel – as distinct from Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir and even Sam to some extent (although I have made a similar case for Sam elsewhere*) – represents the possibility of a different social order outside the confines of the choice that Tolkien offers his readers.

Obviously, unlike the others listed – indeed, unlike the vast majority of characters in the novel – the ‘man-high’ Galadriel is female, ‘the greatest of Elven women’. Unlike, most other comparable powerful figures (Elrond, Sauron) her backstory in the First Age tales of The Silmarillion is retrofitted. In other words, Tolkien invented her while writing the LOTR; she was not an already established character in his mythology and it took him several goes to fit her in: for example, at first, she was the daughter of Finrod Felagund rather than his sister. Indeed, the remaining textual fragments found in Unfinished Tales and among the various volumes of The History of Middle Earth, include contradictory and intriguing details, such as her possible relationship with Celebrimbor. As Christopher Tolkien notes in his editorial introduction to ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’ in Unfinished Tales: ‘There is no part of the history of Middle-earth more full of problems than the story of Galadriel and Celeborn.’ Tolkien was still changing details of the back story during the last month of his life. Therefore, I am not going to attempt a reading of this history (at least, not today in a blogpost), but instead make some general points about her function within the LOTR and the possibilities she raises.

On one level, as Boromir suspects, she does represent a perilous temptation. One of the lampoon versions of LOTR represents this as a sexual temptation, which in some ways gets at the latent truth of the matter. It is not as sometimes suggested that there is no sexual desire in the novel, it is just buried very deep and otherwise sublimated. As it originally manifests within the writing of LOTR, Galadriel’s Lórien is a version of Fairyland: ‘a strange country’ along the banks of the Silverlode. Here it is useful to reference an earlier novel that Tolkien would have known. The interaction between Fairyland and the bourgeois (in the historical sense) titular hometown of the protagonists in Hope Mirrlees’s Lud in the Mist (1926) is replayed by LOTR in the relationship between Lórien and the Shire. Sam does bring home magic from the former to the latter (albeit via a circuitous route), where he will become mayor, and thus effect a hybrid transformation. He also becomes a sexual being, marrying Rosie, and fathering a daughter, whom we see him holding on the last page of the novel. In these respects, Galadriel offers something that is not found elsewhere in the novel, but which is essential to its resolution. This is why LOTR cannot simply be reduced to advocacy for the return of the King. But in my mind, the novel’s resolution could also be achieved without the return of the King. In fact, the function of the return of the King in the LOTR might well be read as predominantly concerned with the containment of Galadriel’s power rather than the overthrow of Sauron. This is why Aragorn’s marriage to Arwen, Galadriel’s granddaughter, is so symbolically important within the novel because it forces the power that Galadriel embodies back under male control (and Tolkien is aware enough of this to realise that Arwen will inevitably come to regret the arrangement). Another example of Tolkien understanding and representing a female alternative to the male symbolic order only to then counter it is the beautiful but sad story of ‘Aldarion and Erendis’ (also in Unfinished Tales). And other examples of a similar dynamic can be found amongst his work, which demonstrate that at some level he knew that this other conception of social order was necessary for good to prevail and yet he found it necessary to then reassert symbolic order to contain it. In 2024, I would suggest that we need this alternative conception of social order more than ever but, that this time, we should not go on to allow it to be re-constrained by the ‘return of the King’. In other words, metaphorically speaking at least, Galadriel should take the ring.

* Nick Hubble, ‘“The Choices of Master Samwise”: The Literary History of the 1950s’ in Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble, eds, The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (The Decades Series), London: Bloomsbury, 2018: pp.19-51; [ISBN: 978-1-3500-1151-9].  

A Tale of Two Fantasy Exhibitions: Rome and London

Fantasy is very much in vogue at the moment, with high-profile television series and exhibitions, such as ‘Fantasy: Realms of Imagination’ at the British Library, which I visited earlier this month with my (adult) daughter. I’m not sure if anyone has yet denounced the exhibition as reactionary or pro-fascist, which used to be the attitude to fantasy in some quarters. This would be very silly for reasons that I will enlarge upon below, but quite possible given the attitudes displayed recently to the ‘Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author’ exhibition funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture and currently on display at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. I must admit, I haven’t popped over to Rome for a look, but here rely on press reports to write about it.

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Thror’s Map from The Hobbit on display at ‘Fantasy: Realms of Imagination’ at the British Library

Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author

On 3 November 2023, Jamie Mackay asked, in the Guardian, ‘How did The Lord of the Rings become a secret weapon in Italy’s culture wars?’ and then preceded to explain:

When The Lord of the Rings first hit Italian shelves in the 1970s, the academic Elémire Zolla wrote a short introduction in which he interpreted the book as an allegory about “pure” ethnic groups defending themselves against contamination from foreign invaders. Fascist sympathisers in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) quickly jumped on the provocation. Inspired by Zolla’s words, they saw in Tolkien’s world a space where they could explore their ideology in socially acceptable terms, free from the taboos of the past. [Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia] Meloni, an MSI youth wing member, developed her political consciousness in that environment. As a teenager she even attended a “Hobbit Camp”, a summer retreat organised by the MSI in which participants dressed up in cosplay outfits, sang along to folk ballads and discussed how Tolkienian mythologies could help the post-fascist right find credibility in a new era.

Obviously, we’re talking about a fringe movement here. But it’s worth recognising that, with a little imagination, the sagas of Middle-earth do fit pretty neatly into the logic of contemporary rightwing populism. The Lord of the Rings follows the logic of a zero-sum game, rooted in Catholic metaphysics. There are “good” hobbits and elves who fight off “evil” orcs. There’s little space for nuance. While most of us probably read the “good” characters in apolitical terms, it doesn’t take much effort to bend that definition to nationalist purposes. In her book, Meloni does just that. One moment she tells us her favourite character is the peace-loving everyman Samwise Gamgee, “just a hobbit”. A few pages later she’s implicitly likening Italy to the lost kingdom of Númenor and citing the character Faramir’s call to arms in The Two Towers. Ultimately, she seems to view Tolkien’s work as a didactic anti-globalisation fable, a hyper-conservative epic that advocates a full-blown war against the modern world in the name of traditional values.

It’s tempting to disregard culture wars as superficial, campaign tactics: polarising arguments that politicians use to galvanise passions in the run-up to elections, and nothing more. Meloni’s actions remind us there’s a serious side too. Over the summer, in a move right out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook, the Italian government took the dramatic step of awarding itself direct power to appoint the management of Rome’s Experimental Cinematography Centre, one of Italy’s most important film schools. MP Igor Iezzi justified the decision on the basis of a need to “modernise” the institution, adding that the left must make an effort to “remove its claws from culture”. Interestingly, the government seems to have no such qualms with the apparently growing number of far-right publishers that are reprinting books by fascist authors such as Giovanni Gentile and Julius Evola for a new generation of readers (many of these publishers, by the way, are using The Lord of the Rings to draw in new audiences).

There is some useful context here as to the interest of Tolkien to Italian neo-fascists but the article might have pointed out more firmly that LOTR, written largely during the Second World War, doesn’t really support this construction and Sam, in particular, is particularly unsuited as a fascist role model. In contrast, Jason Horowitz’s report on the opening night of the exhibition in the New York Times, which feels obliged to point out somewhat unnecessarily that ‘most people know Tolkien’s books as bedtime stories or fantasy epics’, can’t help pandering to East Coast snootiness:

On the opening night of Rome’s most talked-about new exhibition this week, top government ministers in sharp suits hobnobbed with Roman socialites in fur coats, and eccentric art lovers rubbed shoulders with hard-right youth group members.

They all contemplated a drawing of a glam-rock Gandalf in a form-fitting wizard’s cloak, acrylic armies of orcs and other works of fan art displayed in gilded frames. On one wall, they studied a family tree of elves, men and dwarves; on another, a glossary explaining the protagonists of Middle-earth [sic](“Hobbits are a unique and distinct people known as Halflings.”) They stepped over an interactive map on the floor featuring Frodo and his companions coasting on a floating green saucer.

Some were enthusiastic, others bewildered. But if there was any question why Italy’s Culture Ministry had staged a major retrospective dedicated to the life, academic career, and literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the British author of “The Lord of the Rings,” at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, a marquee space usually dedicated to modernist masters, and why everyone seemingly just had to be there, one superfan held the answer.

“I found the exhibition very beautiful,” Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, said after her personal tour of “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author.” “As a person who knows the issue pretty well, I found many things I didn’t know.”

The article carries on in similar vein (illustrated with a lovely picture of an LOTR pinball machine) before concluding:

More than that, on Wednesday night, it appeared to be required viewing. At the end of the night, the country’s powerful economy minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti, received a personal tour from Mr. Sangiuliano, who, after Mr. Giorgetti stopped to play pinball, insisted they take a picture in front of a backlit drawing of archers.

“I’m always working with awfully real things, like money,” Mr. Giorgetti said as he left. “This is a dive into fantasy.”

But in Ms. Meloni’s Italy, the exhibit was also very real.

As the last of the ministers left, and the right-wing youth saluted one another with ancient Roman forearm handshakes, Cristiana Collu, the museum director, nervously asked a colleague how the evening went. He assured her it went fine.

Asked by a reporter what exhibit previously occupied the space, the museum worker paused.

“Picasso,” he said.

The message as to what counts as high culture and what doesn’t is made so clear that the article achieved the difficult feat of making me sympathetic to those celebrating the exhibition. The horror of Meloni’s Italy lies in the government attitudes to immigrants and LGBTQI+ people, not in running an exhibition on Tolkien, who is a major writer whatever the NYT might think.

Having said that, I must admit that there is something slightly comical about attempts by various sections of the right to harness Tolkien to their cause. For example, look at Daniel Hannan’s article, ‘What I learned about The Hobbit from reading it to my children’, published by conservativehome.com on 10 December 2014:

When the editor of ConservativeHome phones me, he often begins by wryly declaiming some line or other from Tolkien. If I can, I reply with the next line, and so on. He tends to get the better of our exchanges: his knowledge of the text is encyclopaedic.

Nor is our editor unusual among Tories. I watched the opening nights of all three Lord of the Rings films with Chris Heaton-Harris, the wittiest MP on Twitter, and Theresa Villiers, the patriotic Cabinet Minister, both at that time MEPs. The Northern Ireland Secretary, in particular, can recite the most abstruse details from the corpus, down to the family trees of the minor characters.

Perhaps this is unsurprising. Tolkien’s novels are, in the most literal sense, conservative, bathed in an almost overpowering sense of loss. A lot of Leftist intellectuals find them uncomfortable, and so mock them. Philip Pullman dismisses them as “infantile”. Richard Eyre calls Middle Earth “the kingdom of kitsch”. There are also Leftist Tolkienians, of course, but even some of these are uneasy about the fact that Númenóreansare fair-skinned and assailed by dark foes from the East and South. (In fact, anyone who doubts Tolkien’s anti-racist credentials should read his magisterial reply when the Nazis asked if he was Jewish.)

This reminds me how once playing Dungeons and Dragons back in the 1980s, a conservative-minded dungeon master tried to tell me that a ranger wouldn’t cooperate with a thief because a thief was obviously immoral. Well, The Hobbit is a story about a burglar, who not only steals from the dragon but also steals the Arkenstone of Thrain from Thorin and gives it to a besieging army of elves and men in the hope of averting war. Difficult to think of anything less conservative and I can assure you that someone behaving in this way today would instantaneously be branded ‘anti-British’ by the current government (and also, no doubt, by the leader of the opposition). In the summing up at the story’s end, Tolkien reminds us how Bilbo has lost more than his spoons (to the Sackville-Bagginses, who would both have been on the local Conservative party committee):

… he had lost his reputation. It is true for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honour of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be ‘queer’ – except by his nephews and nieces on the Took side, but even they were not encouraged in their friendship by their elders.

In other words, as the Daily Mail or the Murdoch press would say, Bilbo was dangerously ‘woke’ and not remotely Conservative (at least, in terms of current membership). Would he have voted to send the ‘elves’ back home? I think not. Yet, Conservatives tried to tell us that Brexit meant the hour of the shire-folk had come. For example, Charles Moore’s article, ‘The Lord of the Rings is our Brexit guide – people need a home to come back to’ (Daily Telegraph, 11 March 2017), rather grandiosely claims:

I now, belatedly, see The Lord of the Rings as a key Brexit text, though it was written before the European Community had even been invented. I have never noticed it lying around in the corridors of power, but it supplies an ingredient so far entirely missing in Mr Hammond’s view of the world, and not yet fully articulated in that of Mrs May. It is a grand, romantic statement about how the ordinary people of a small country can win.

It really isn’t. I sometimes think we should focus more when teaching English Literature on explaining the basic plot and narrative detail of works. The people of the Shire don’t win. In fact, they allow themselves to be taken over by a bunch of thugs and crooks led by a silver-tongued ex-wizard (and who says Tolkien didn’t write social realism). They are only saved by the younger (and queer and woke) Tookish elements who have been gadding about abroad and giving up sovereignty to form international alliances. The novel ends with its working-class hero, Sam, who overcame his own temptations in the dark places, bequeathing the future to his baby daughter.

My point is that the right have no claim to Tolkien and it is idiotic of cultural snobs to give cover to conservatives and fascists by turning their nose up at the world of hobbits, elves and fantasy. This brings us back nicely to the fantasy exhibition currently at the BL.

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination

This exhibition runs until 25 February 2024 and you can book tickets here. It is accompanied by a beautiful book, Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide World of Fantasy edited by Tanya Kirk and Matthew Sangster. Alongside the exhibits, which I’ll discuss below, the exhibition (and the book cover, frontispiece and section divides) feature a stunning original illustration by Sveta Dorosheva, who you can read an interview with (and see the picture) here.

I’m not going to review the exhibition formally because others have done that to various extents – see here, here and here. I just want to report how happy I felt to be able to walk around and look at a a series of beautiful exhibits, ranging from Charlotte Brontë’s ‘little book’, ‘The Search after Happiness’, to a page from Ursula K. Le Guin’s manuscript for A Wizard of Earthsea, and on to the manuscript of Dianna Wynne Jones’s (very funny and lovely) The Dark Lord of Derkholm; from the first edition of Hope Mirrlees’s Lud in the Mist, to those of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings, and  Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories; from screen clips of Princess Mononoke, Pan’s Labyrinth, Tara being chased by the Gentlemen in ‘Hush’ from season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena awakening Gabrielle from enchanted sleep with a kiss in Xena: Warrior Princess; from Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s epic comic series, Monstress, to the video game Skyrim and on to a display of Magic the Gathering cards. All of these things belong together and they are all wonderful things. If you wanted to show a Martian the best of our culture, this exhibition would be one of the places to go.

I’m not going to say it’s a legitimisation of fantasy because while once fantasy was looked down upon, that has been very much a residual attitude for most of this century at least. The ongoing success of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow (whose co-director, Matthew Sangster was the external curator of the exhibition and co-editor of the accompanying book), is important in this respect and it really has helped transform the landscape in universities (as well as being a useful source of potential external examiners for those of us who have supervised fantasy PhDs at other institutions). Therefore, instead of a sense of arrival, the exhibition, with its stunning presentation of a new diverse post-canon, made me feel that fantasy has come of age. Along with its twin partner in crime, Science Fiction (which has itself enjoyed a year of winning most of the major literary book awards), Fantasy has rightfully come to take its place in the 2020s at what used to be the pinnacle of culture: in the place occupied a century ago by Modernism in its various forms.

I left the BL with a copy of Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel Glass Town centring on Charlotte and set in Haworth and the childhood Brontë worlds of Angria and Gondal, which I loved despite being team Emily (who is beautifully represented in her necessarily more minor role in the book). I had already acquired the Realms of Imagination book by mail order so that I could begin reading in advance of my trip to London. This is a very good book indeed; a thing of great beauty in its own right. It has four sections corresponding to the four sections of the exhibition: ‘Fairy and Folk Tales’, ‘Epics and Quests’, ‘Weird and Uncanny’ and ‘Portals and Worlds’. The chapters include longer, more wide-ranging chapters, typically at the beginning of the section, such as Terri Windling’s ‘Folk Tales, Fairy Lore, and the Remaking of Traditions’, which starts with a lovely ‘old story told in the West Country’, and shorter more specific chapters, such as Rachel Foss’s ‘A “Perilous Realm”: J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”’. Tolkien, represented in the exhibition by a first edition of The Hobbit open to Thror’s map on the inside cover (also reproduced in Realms of Fantasy on p. 92 and incorrectly identified there as his map of Middle-earth), is the most-mentioned writer in the volume and accordingly has the biggest entry in the index. This isn’t surprising, the rise in the status of fantasy is tied to the rise in status of Tolkien and the scholarly apparatus that has developed around his work. His only real rival in this respect is Le Guin, but in many ways her work may be seen as complementing his while breaking crucial new ground. As Brian Attebury notes in ‘The Wizards and Dragons of Earthsea: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Fantasy Quest’, while Le Guin has no villainous Dark Lord, she stays closer to Tolkien’s model than many of his overt imitators by having her heroes renounce power in the manner of Gandalf, Aragon, Galadriel and Samwise the Great in Lord of the Rings. Aside from the manuscript pages of A Wizard of Earthsea  on display in the exhibition, there were also some of Le Guin’s sketches of scenes from the work in progress, including of the moment in The Tombs of Atuan – my favourite of the original three novels (which I actually first read in class at school in the 1970s) – when Arha sees the light of Ged’s staff (reproduced on p.143 of the book). As lead curator, Tanya Kirk, mentioned in the online book launch of Realms of Imagination, there has already been a huge, positive, public response to the display, for the first time in the UK, of these papers from the University of Oregon. In her superb chapter, ‘The Everyday Book’, Sofia Samatar comments that Le Guin especially stands out among fantasy writers by proving that the modern genre could be flexible when she returned to the world of Earthsea with the innovative, feminist Tehanu (1990), a book which completely blew me away when I read it soon after its publication. So, one great takeaway from the exhibition and book is that it is time to read Le Guin again.

There’s much, much more I could say about the book (for example, Laurie Penny’s chapter, ‘The Room of Requirement’, is pitch-perfect and absolutely had to be in here). Moreover, similarly to how Neil Gaiman describes his experience of reading the book in the Preface, I too noted down the titles of dozens and books and essays to follow up on and later pretend that I knew about all along. Actually, Gaiman doesn’t say that last bit; that’s just me playing the cynical old academic. Joking aside, I already have plans to reference some arguments gleaned from the chapters mentioned above, and Rob Maslen’s excellent ‘Quest Fantasy: The Adventure of Reading’, in a chapter I am writing for the 1920s volume of this series, which will include some discussion of Mirrlees and other great fantasy writers mentioned in this book, such as Lord Dunsany and the inimitable Naomi Mitchison, as well as works which people don’t also equate with fantasy but which partake in the fantastical, such as another of my all-time favourite novels, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. For the gun has been fired on the coming political fight over fantasy and its role in the culture of our times. This book and exhibition are statements. Other moves are afoot, such as Adam Roberts’s forthcoming history of fantasy, currently in the last stages of writing. Portals are opening, wheels of time are revolving, rings of power are being forged, and even fools may dream of a world transformed.

BSFA Awards: History and New Categories

Several new categories have been added to the BSFA Awards for work published or broadcast in 2023, which will be presented at next year’s Eastercon. Before I discuss that, I thought it might be an interesting idea to go back over the history of the BSFA Awards. According to Wikipedia, ‘The award originally included only a category for novels. Categories for short works and artists were added in 1980.’  I think ‘in 1980’ here refers to the date of the ceremony, implying that the new categories were introduced for Best Short Work and Artist of 1979; but even this isn’t entirely accurate according to the list of award winners provided on the same page (which would indicate these changes began happening over the course of the previous year).

The first ever BSFA Award for Best Novel went to John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) – this is listed for the 1969 award. From 1973 onwards, however, the winner is a book published in the year given as the year of the award (in this case: Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama) but presumably actually awarded in the following year (1974). Up until the award for 1977, when Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit was the winner, this was the only award made every year. However, for 1978, three awards were made: Best Novel (Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly), Best Collection (Harlan Ellison, Deathbird Stories), and Best Media (The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – the original radio series). Then, for 1979, four awards were made at the ceremony (in 1980): Best Novel (J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company), Best Short (Christopher Priest, ‘Palely Loitering’), Best Media (Hitch-Hiker’s again – it would win three years on the trot) and Best Artist (Jim Burns).

In many ways it does make sense to see 1979/1980 as the main year of change, because the number of categories increased to four in the format that has more or less (despite some experiments, some significant rule changes, and Best Media disappearing after 1991 and Best Non Fiction coming in from 2001) remained in place up until this year’s ceremony, when the awards for 2022 were made. Furthermore, 1980 was the first year when members of Eastercon (Albacon) were able to vote on the shortlists that were compiled following the nominations by BSFA members. I know this because over this summer, while trying to hunt down something completely different online, I came across a copy of Vector 95 (October 1979), which I bought for more than the cover price of 75p, where the entire process is helpfully set out in some detail on page 26, as pictured below. Rather than type a description into the alt text, I’ve copied out the entire page in the main body of text below, because it is very interesting indeed for a number of reasons (including providing an interesting contrast to the current changes to the award as well).

Page 26 from Vector 95 (October 1979)

The above page reads:

THE BSFA AWARD

Albacon, the 1980 British Easter SF convention, will be the occasion of the presentation of the 1979 BSFA Award, and now is an opportune time to reflect upon the fact that it is the only annual award of its kind in the UK. As such, it has a potentially wide-ranging affect on all those concerned with reading and writing SF, and with this in mind a major departure from the voting procedure of previous years is being introduced. Members of the BSFA will have the opportunity to nominate in the four categories of NOVEL, SHORT FICTION, MEDIA and COVER ARTIST; ballot papers will then be sent out to all members and will also be made available to all those attending Albacon. The size of the voting platform will thus be vastly increased and the value and importance of the Award consequently greatly enhanced.

As is customary, nominations must be confined to works which have seen their first British publication in 1979. Thus a paperback reprint of a hardback novel or collection is ineligible; similarly, a work that has previously appeared in an SF magazine or anthology cannot be nominated if it has since been reprinted in some other format. Imported magazines and books are only acceptable if they were distributed over here; individual imports, however, cannot be nominated. Otherwise [sic]

Nomination forms are included with this mailing; below is a list of selected works that might be included. You may nominate as many items as you like, but all nomination forms must reach Mike Dickinson at [address] by 31st December 1979. Nominated items will then be totalled up, and the final ballot, showing the top four in each category, will be sent out with the February 1980 mailing. These ballot papers should ten be returned to Mike by 29th March 1980 at the very latest, although Albacon attendees may hand them in at the convention itself up to 6.00pm on Saturday 5th April 1980.

Please vote – it’s in your interests to do so. We look forward to your flood of nominations.

NOVELS                 The Unlimited Dream Company – J. G. Ballard (Jonathan Cape)

                                  Profundis – Richard Cowper (Gollancz)

                                  On Wings of Song – Thomas M. Disch (Gollancz)

                                  The Second Trip – Robert Silverberg (Gollancz)

                                  Son of Man – Robert Silverberg (Panther)

                                  A.K.A.: A Cosmic Fable – Rob Swigart (Magnum)

SHORT FICTION  “Collaborating” – Michael Bishop (Year’s Best Horror Stories)

                                  “Camps” – Jack Dann (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May)

                                  “Mythological Beast” – Stephen R. Donaldson (F & SF, Jan)

                                  “Palely Loitering” – Chris Priest (F & SF, January)

                                  “Prose Bowl”–Bill Pronzini & Barry N. Malzberg(F&SF, Jul)

                                  “The Pot Child” – Jane Yolen (F & SF, February)

MEDIA                   Alien – dir. Ridley Scott

                                  Buck Rogers in the 25th Century – dir. Glen A. Larsen.

                                  The China Syndrome – dir. James Bridges

                                  Quintet – dir. Robert Altman

Cover Artist         Jim Burns                                Peter Lord

                                  Adrian Chesterman             Rodney Matthews

                                  Peter Elson                              Patrick Woodruff [sic]

                                  Bob Fowke

N.B. – The above are suggestions only, and should not be mistaken for any kind of “official” short list. Your choices are the ones that will count.

* * *

Having typed that out in Word, my admiration abounds for those who manually typed out this 44-page issue of Vector, and every other issue. My own first ever publication was in similarly put-together magazine – the journal of Ravensbourne CLP Labour Party – at some point in the late 1980s. At the time, I don’t think I really appreciated how much effort went into producing these things. But to get to the point… a suggestion list!?! When I opened up the magazine on to this page, I did initially think it was the actual shortlist and it took me some while to process the note beneath and then properly read the page. In some ways, I can see that the logic behind this page is to neatly illustrate how the four categories will have shortlists of this type. However, to today’s sensibility, providing this kind of list seems to be exerting undue influence on the outcome (not to mention the fact that Jane Yolen is the sole woman listed in four different categories). As we have seen, Ballard, Priest and Burns did win their categories, but Hitch-Hiker’s proved to be more popular with the voters in the Media category than any of the suggested films. Moreover, the actual shortlists for Best Novel and Best Artist did differ from the suggestions above. As the Wikipedia page for BSFA Award for Best Artwork notes, the actual shortlist was Burns, Lord, Woodroffe, Chris Foss, John Harris and Tony Roberts.  As the Wikipedia page for BSFA Award for Best Novel shows, neither of the Silverberg novels nor the Cowper was included, with Tom Reamy’s Blind Voices and Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise joining Ballard, Swigart and Disch on the five-book shortlist (rather than the ‘top four in each category’ as promised in Vector). So, I think we can assume that members understood the suggested lists in the illustrative manner that they were intended rather than as a strongly veiled hint as to which way they should lean.

Looking at this, got me wondering about novels by women SF writers were first published in Britain in 1979. So I had a look at the Hugo Best Novel shortlists (which on Wikipedia are ordered by the date of the ceremony that the years the award is made for, just to make comparison slightly more tricky than one would like). The equivalent award (made in 1980) went to Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise. However, the Hugo awarded in 1979 (at Seacon, the 37th Worldon held in the Metropole Hotel, Brighton) went to Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, one of a very select group of novels to win Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards (as discussed in my review of the novel). Dreamscape was first published in the US in 1978, but I did wonder if the first UK edition was the pan paperback published in 1979, which would have made it eligible for the 1979 BSFA as I understand it (and is advertised – as pictured below – on the back cover of the October 1979 Vector I have been discussing). However, on investigation, it does appear that Gollancz published Dreamsnake in hardback in the UK in 1978 and so it would have been eligible for the 1978 BSFA Best Novel, which I don’t have the shortlist for. If anybody out there remembers or is in a position to look it up, it would be interesting to know if it was shortlisted. As this 2012 Guardian article by Sam Jordison points out, the fact that the fairly uncompromising Dreamsnake won the Hugo (presumably with many British members’ votes, given the location) is very much to that award’s credit.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1983, when Mary Gentle was shortlisted for Golden Witchbreed and then a year later in 1984, when Angela Carter was shortlisted for Nights at the Circus, that women writers appear on the BSFA Best Novel shortlist. Since then, the BSFA Award for Best Novel has been won seven times by a woman writer (out of the 53 times it has been awarded): Mary Doria Russell (1997 for The Sparrow), Gentle (2000 for Ash), Ann Leckie (2013 for Ancillary Justice and 2014 for Ancillary Sword), Aliette de Bodard (2015 for The House of Shattered Wings), Nina Allan (2017 for The Rift) and N.K. Jemison (2020 for The City We Became). Interestingly (worryingly), as with the Clarke Award, it does seem to be especially infrequently that UK-based women writers win the award (this might reflect the number holding publishing contracts at any one time as well). Perhaps a better indicator of sustained standing in the field would be multiple occurrences on the shortlist over a period of years. Apart from Leckie, the five other writers to have appeared three times or more on the list are Gentle, Gwyneth Jones, Justina Robson, Tricia Sullivan and Liz Williams, all of whom have been active since at least the beginning of this century and for much longer in some cases.

Before moving on to the new BSFA Award categories currently being introduced, it is worth pausing to try and take the temperature of critical thinking at the time as indicated in the October 1979 Vector by Mike Dickinson’s editorial (pp.3-4) and Roz Kaveney’s article on the prospects for ‘SF in the 80s’ (pp.14-6). Dickinson complains there is just too much SF: ‘there are still far too many books written with no other aim than the provision of an acreage of verbiage at so much per word, published solely to exploit and just as mindlessly devoured’. SF is ‘vital to the balance of literature as a whole’ but ‘if this entertainment is mindless, then we are defending nothing more important than Westerns or the Confessions series’. He goes on to point out that the ‘argument about whether or not SF is a ghetto will not die down’. However, the editorial is not entirely negative, as it also acknowledges how SF was gaining increasing recognition from the media, celebrates the recently held Seacon, and calls on BSFA members to contribute reviews or articles (but not on Doctor Who or Blakes 7, thank you very much) to Vector. A few pages further on, Kaveney proclaims that the SF of the 80s is likely to be a continuation of the SF of the 70s: ‘the same old tacky vessel will carry on in the same old tacky way’:

Science Fiction has lived through its major revolutions in the past but it is a simple and worrying fact that there is little sign of the seeds of another one in the near future. No revolution ever comes out of nowhere – there are always signs of what will be done and vague indications of who will do it. Both of the great SF revolutions happened because of the coincidence of hungry and ambitious young men and publishers looking for someone cheap to take over a declining magazine. I see no hungry young potential Campbells or Moorcocks sitting around waiting to be summoned to their destiny – instead I see a lot of smooth ambitious young men and women waiting for a call from their agent about a coffeetable book on the underwear worn by famous space opera figures […]. The publishers have to a very large extent already made their decisions about SF magazines and if they are prepared to run one have their own very clear and commercial ideas on the desirable brand identity – which will almost always be more of the same with, as an alternative, more of what was the same at some point in the distant past.

Where else is there for SF to go in the future except in the direction of a few individual writers of it becoming better and better serious artists while other practitioners sit around providing handy opiates to the semiliterate? (p.14)

She follows this with some sympathetic comments on Michael Moorcock’s attempts to break out of the ghetto by evolving ‘towards a magic realism quite close to that of, say (because one always has to), Angela Carter’ and some rather less sympathetic comments on Harlan Ellison’s tantrum-like attempts to cut himself adrift. There is some nice detail on the ‘loathsome tendencies of hack commercial SF’ and then a rather interesting discussion of the limitations placed on even the best writers in the field – Moorcock, Disch, Russ – by the pulp cliches central to the genre, which culminates in a parenthetical paragraph on Russ:

‘(A writer who has concerned herself to some extent with emotion and with the cliches of the genre as a way of expressing that emotion is Joanna Russ, but the personal anger she wishes to communicate through her polemical fictions has become an almost perpetual and monotonous tone of voice. It has corroded her as a critic though it will never tarnish her superb style. The anger she wishes to communicate through the cliches has become an anger with the cliches themselves with the result that her work has been curiously cabined and crabbed and turned in on itself.) (p.16)

Kaveney’s overall conclusion is that ‘what is needed is a fiction that is warm and witty and wise and humane and realistic and fantastic; we live in what is possibly the closing stages of a great literary culture of which SF is merely a part and we should be using the whole of that tradition, genre and high art alike, to produce work which will justify that tradition to its posterity’. I think this is a beautiful statement of what we should expect from SF. Have we lived through the closing stage of literary culture? Possibly, but it’s a long closing stage and we’re still living through it (if we are talking about literary culture in the broad sense as a historical period dating from, say, the eighteenth century). Definitely, a digital revolution has taken place but that wasn’t until the current century. It is true that a political (counter) revolution took place in 1979-80: at the point this issue of Vector was published, Thatcher was the Prime Minister (and the Tories would remain in power for 18 long years) and Reagan would shortly be elected US President, ushering in what would become known as neoliberalism. However, looking back at this moment of anxiety for SF in 1979 from today’s perspective, it is difficult not to feel that things weren’t as bad as they seemed at the time and that going forward the genre became less dependent on pulp and more orientated towards the kind of warm, witty and wise fiction that Kaveney was advocating for. SF in the 1980s were not in the event characterised by cliched pulp magazine stories but by Blade Runner, Neuromancer and Cyberpunk, resurgent space opera in Iain M. Banks’s first Culture novels, novels which blurred the boundaries between mainstream and genre such as Nights at the Circus, Empire of the Sun and The Handmaid’s Tale (which won the first Clarke Award in 1987), and the emergence of major writers such as Gwyneth Jones, Ian McDonald and Lois McMaster Bujold.

Furthermore, while I think the cause for concern at the end of the 1970s is understandable, retrospect also suggests that things were not so bad at the time either. Obviously, one great advantage we have looking back is that we only see the stuff that has stood the test of time and no longer have to contend with works such as Stanley Schmidt’s Lifeboat Earth, the faults of which are enumerated by Kaveney over the course of an ‘arm’s length’ paragraph. The work of the writers that won awards at the time – Ballard, Priest, McIntyre – still holds up beautifully today, as does the work of Moorcock and Russ, which Kaveney discusses. I was fourteen when Vector 95 was published and not reading any of these writers then. I was, however, watching Doctor Who and Blakes 7 and would soon be reading (my paperback copy is from the ‘8th printing 1980’) The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all of which have also stood up pretty well and been formative influences upon people who went on to write and read good SF. (Although I didn’t read it as a teenager, 2000 AD, launched in 1977 to cash-in on the Star Wars hype, was another product of the period which not only still exists but has a significant cultural legacy that probably no one at the time anticipated).

So, jumping forward to the present, does the change in BSFA Awards for 2023 betoken an epochal shift such as happened in 1979?

In general terms, things are politically volatile to say the least. The digital revolution definitely has taken place and publishing and writers are under threat from AI to various extents. The climate crisis has become acute. Obviously, whatever the BSFA does is unlikely to have any direct bearing on any of those contexts, but I’m inclined to think that the fact that the awards are undergoing the most significant changes in number and structure since the late 1970s is in part a response to the way that the world is radically transforming around us. However, equally obviously, it is also a response to what is going on in SF. So, what are the award categories for 2023?

Best Novel

Best Shorter Fiction (10,000 – 40,000 words)

Best Short Story (up to 10,000 words)

Best Translated Shorter Fiction (10,000 – 40,000 words)

Best Fiction for Younger Readers

Best Collection (can be single-authored or an anthology)

Best Original Audio Fiction

Best Art

Best Short Non-Fiction (under 30,000 words or 30 minutes)

Best Longer Non-Fiction (over 30,000 words or 30 minutes)

Yes, that’s right: the number of categories has increased to ten! I’m very much in favour (I voted for all of these categories at the AGM earlier in the year). Most of them are self-explanatory. For example, it is pretty clear why it makes sense to have a category between Best Short Story and Best Novel, which is basically for novellas (not as tightly defined as in the Hugos). Equally, the idea of having two non-fiction categories has long been the goal in some quarters, as a means of supporting serious longer criticism in particular but also so that voters (BSFA and Eastercon members) are not put in the position of having to choose between books and articles in the same category. The separate category for collection (which I thought was going to be for either fiction or non-fiction, but seems to only have fiction on the suggestions list) obviates that problem of the work already having been published in previous years and requiring something tacked on to make them eligible. Obviously, we’ll have to see how this works. No doubt, there will be alterations and possibly additions over the years to come. However, in the meantime, I think it is going to be exciting to see the results in the shape of the shortlists and the winners, which will be announced at next year’s Eastercon, Levitation, in Telford. I’m looking forward to writing more about these awards and, hopefully, reviewing some of the shortlists in the run up to then.

However, before we get to that point, I think we can generalise a bit from the changes themselves. One conclusion is that this expansion is a consequence of the BSFA currently doing well, expanding its membership, and become more sophisticated in its presentation and operations (all observable trends latterly). The recent publication of the ‘longlists’ of nominated works in the existing categories has been geared to raising awareness of the variety of work in the field. Part of this is a response to the ongoing rise of creative writing, in which more people are writing and pursuing non-traditional routes into publishing. But there is also a rise in interest in reading a wider spread of SF across the board, including from different cultures and works in translation. There’s definitely been a rise in the number of critical and non-fiction books related to the field over the last decade, reflecting that a growing audience exists for that work. Space for a broader discussion around SF is opening up. The context is clearly very different to that in 1979/80. Then the dominant paradigm in British SF was still that of the New Wave of the 1960s, both the writers who were central to that and those who emerged from it. As we have seen, the fiction awards in 1979 went to Ballard and Priest, while Moorcock was central to Kaveney’s analysis. At that time, there was also still a genuine anxiety about the (ghetto) status of SF in relation to mainstream literature. In sharp contrast, there is not a central paradigm for British SF in the 2020s: Priest is still publishing excellent novels, many of the writers from the cohort born in the 1950s and 1960s who were to dominate British SF during the nineties and noughties are also still publishing excellent work, but there’s lots of other good stuff to read as well. Because the field is larger, it’s not as easy to predict a shortlist as it was in the early 1980s or even the early 2000s. At the same time, any literary hostility to SF that one encounters is merely residual to the extent that I find it embarrassing on behalf of someone expressing such views that are so terminally out of touch and uncool. These changes are driving the current updating and expansion of the existing SF structures (such as the BSFA, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the various cons), which are still recognisably rooted in earlier periods. There’s also a political dimension to this. As I note above, Kaveney was broadly right about the coming to a close of a great literary age, despite the fact that it has lasted longer than anticipated, and with that have also ended all sorts of paradigms that used to govern meanings in our lives (especially for those, like me, who were born in the 1960s or earlier), such as liberal humanism and the postwar consensus. To be sure, breaking free of those paradigms represents liberation from constraints on gender and sexuality and opens the possibility of moving beyond patriarchy and white power structures. However, the collapse of those paradigms and the common cultures surrounding them has also opened the door to populist and authoritarian outcomes. Therefore, I think SF has to become more political in its content and its organisation and the conversation surrounding it, including the critical conversation, has to become more political as well (a point I discussed in relation to reviewing and the Hugo awards in this recent blogpost). The expansion of the BSFA Award categories is just a small step in this direction, but a necessary one. It’s now up to people to fully support this by nominating works and reading nominated works and participating in the ongoing expansion of the field.

Front and back cover of Vector 95. (Back cover on the left, is an advert from the publisher, Pan, for paperback editions of Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams)