Clarke Award Shortlist Review Part One

I wrote about this year’s Clarke submission list here and updated that post when the shortlist came out soon afterwards. Niall Harrisson wrote an initial reflection on it, ‘About A Shortlist’, which analyses its composition and notes various facts including that this is the first time that Gollancz have had a book on the shortlist since 2018 (with the last time that they had two on it being back in 2014). Back in June, Niall and I discussed the shortlist and the award more generally with Sarah Brown and Paul March-Russell in an online ‘Not the Clarke’ panel, which was part of the programme of events surrounding the respective AGMs of the Science Fiction Foundation and the British Science Fiction Association. Now, with the announcement of the award due next month, seems like a good time to review the shortlist. Below I discuss three of the novels. In Part Two of this shortlist, which will follow shortly, I’ll cover the remaining three and add some concluding analysis (i.e., say which is my pick … maybe). I also will continue my ongoing reflections on the awards landscape in 2022/23.

I read all three of these novels on my kindle.

Tom Watson, Metronome (Bloomsbury, 320pp)

Metronome left me with mixed feelings. It’s a well-written taut two-hander – at least, for the first two-thirds – in which 50-something couple, Aina and Whitney, are living in exile in a remote croft on, what initially appears to be, an exposed island somewhere in the north of the North Atlantic. This constraint on the protagonists’ actions – which revolve around time-consuming activities such as peat digging, seaweed drying and subsistence agriculture – is exacerbated by the fact that due to the melting permafrost releasing poisonous spores, they need to take an antidote which is released by a pill clock at eight-hour intervals. Therefore, they are extremely limited in how far they can travel away from the croft, despite training themselves to run ten-minute miles for hours on end. It’s an elaborate set-up, which Watson wisely presents in the opening pages so that we have no choice but to accept it provisionally before getting swept along by the genuinely compelling logic that this scenario creates.

However, as I read on I found myself, much as Nina Allan noted in her review for the Guardian, having trouble suspending disbelief. One of the side-effects of the covid pandemic was that I suddenly found my tolerance for pandemic novels lowered because, having lived through one, I kept finding myself thinking ‘no, that’s not how it would be like’. Metronome is not a pandemic novel, but the backstory is set in a dystopian society. Well, given that what we are currently living under a dystopian government, I can’t help responding to Metronome by thinking ‘no, that’s not how it would be like’. It’s not so much the passivity of the professional middle-class characters, which Allan notes critically, that irritates me because quite often the middle classes are passive and helpless in the face of hierarchical societies for the simple reason that their own lifestyles are dependent on the hierarchy remaining in place. In fact, in some respects the novel captures quite well the middle-class fear that the state, which they are dependent upon, will take away their fragilely constructed individualism. However, in its specific concern with women’s reproductive rights, it is unconvincing because rather than turn on the removal of abortion rights and promotion of the white birth rate – which is the current direction of travel for the populist right in the West – it envisages the right to give birth being restricted to conformist model couples. The problem here is not that there isn’t a huge range of interesting debates and issues that might be raised by this scenario, but rather, that in the absence of any account of why and how this state of affairs has arisen, that the novel gives us no reason to consider any of these. In other words, the net effect of the thin, minimalist background story is simply to alert readers to the fact that they are in the presence of what I think of as the ‘constrained literary dystopia’.

Possibly there is better technical term for this sub-genre in existence, but I can’t think of it at the moment. Typically, such works depend on locating an intricate set-up within a geographically isolated location, such as an island, which gives the otherwise unlikely situation some plausibility. The Clarke does have a record of shortlisting these kinds of books; a recent example is Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters (2017). The problem I experience when reading such books is a nagging awareness that if I strayed any distance from the action, I’d quickly find myself on a totally blank page because the world-building simply doesn’t stretch that far. In the case of Metronome, Watson is able to redeem this aspect of the sub-genre to some extent by allowing it to support Aina’s growing realisation that there is something not quite right about the situation that she is ensnared within. Even so, when the perspective opens up in the third act, as the gothic-tinged action kicks in, it’s not that the picture which emerges is that much clearer. Ultimately, our curiosity about what has happened in the novel’s world is never satisfied.

Despite the wider plot not quite managing to convince, the characters are well-drawn and the patient layering of the relationship between Aina and Whitley, including the levels of deceit, rewards the reader with a sense of complex emotional depth – so much, that I can’t help feeling that it would have been better if the novel ended on their final scene together rather than with the unnecessary climax that follows. For me, that was the part of the book that worked despite, rather than because of, the dystopian and gothic elements which are used to flavour it. On this point, I’m inclined to agree with the otherwise generally unsympathetic Whitney, that sometimes plain oats are nourishing enough. Overall, though, this is a promising debut novel, parts of which will stay with the reader.

Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly, translated by Adriana Hunter (Penguin, 336pp)

First published in 2020 in France, The Anomaly won the Prix Goncourt and went on to sell over a million copies before being translated into (by now) over 30 languages. Le Tellier is a long-established writer and the current president of the Oulipo group (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), which experiments with constrained writing experiments as a means of triggering ideas, inspiration and new forms of expression. Perhaps the most famous example is Georges Perec’s novel La disparition (1969), translated into English by Gilbert Adair and published under the title A Void (1994), a 300-page novel written without the letter ‘e’, an example of a lipogram. A more recent example from the UK would be a novel I highly recommend, Tony White’s The Fountain in the Forest (2018), which incorporates a ‘mandated vocabulary’ – in this case, all of the solutions to the Guardian Quick Crossword from 4 March to 2 April 1985, the period over which the book is set.

According to the New York Times, Le Tellier describes the constraints in The Anomaly as ‘“exposition, explanation and confrontations,” each addressed in one of the book’s three parts’. Moreover, different chapters and sections in The Anomaly appear to correspond to completely different styles and genres, ranging from the airport thriller to the literary novel, including a lengthy description of a specific character from the novel being a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – a sequence which achieves an amazingly hyperreal effect despite effectively deconstructing itself as it proceeds. I found these particular passages moving and I’m not sure whether that means I’m a sucker for American sentimentality or just that I appreciate seeing that subjected to continental-style analysis, or, in fact, whether it was the interplay between the two which intrigued me. In many ways, I think this interaction between French and American culture, symptomatic of the Nouvelle Vague film movement, is the actual subject of the novel. It is recursively referred to throughout. Most amusingly, perhaps, in the scene that makes us aware that US National Security Protocol 42 for anomalous aircraft behaviour lifts its interview scripts for debriefing passengers word-for-word from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which the French scientist questioning the Richard Dreyfus character is played by new-wave film director, François Truffaut (and there is no possibility of missing the reference because again we are informed of this by an ongoing mildly deconstructive commentary). 

I should add at this point, that despite my references to deconstructive techniques, that the book is very much a page turner that constantly entertains and provokes thought. A summary of the plot makes it sound like a high-concept thriller: ‘An Air France flight from Paris to New York lands on March 10, 2021, after passing through a terrifying storm. One hundred and six days later, the same Boeing 787 flight with the same crew, the same passengers and the same damage from an identical storm approaches the east coast of the United States’. The mathematicians, scientists and philosophers gathered to sort out the ensuing confusion, fairly quickly come to the conclusion that we are living in a simulation (once you assume it is possible to run such simulations full of billions of independent programs and sub-routines, then it immediately becomes much more probable that you are living in one of those simulations than the original historical timeline, assuming there was one and that this isn’t just an invented scenario). However, it is the scenes in which the various doubles meet each other and work through the shock of each other’s existence and the differences resulting from the one hundred and six days that produce the most powerful parts of the novel.

I’m glad The Anomaly is on the Clarke shortlist because I really enjoyed reading it. It is definitely SFnal both in terms of the concept and its frame of reference; aside from the mention of Close Encounters, we also have comparisons with (I assume, Don Siegel’s) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and, in a very funny scene during which a group of scientists try to explain what is happening to the US President by reference to The Matrix (1999) and Star Trek. In terms of ontological rug-pulling it does recall elements of Philip K. Dick and I also felt somewhat reminded of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) in respect of the idea implicit in The Anomaly that we are taking a test which we are failing. So, it’s not that the ideas are entirely new but in some ways that is the point which the novel is making so effectively with its various recursive allusions. Therefore, I think it deserves its place on the shortlist and may even be a genuine contender for winning. On a personal level, aside from enjoying the novel, I’m also intrigued by the French context it arises from and the interaction with US culture I describe above. There’s more that could be written about this, and I expect there are people out there doing just that at the moment, so I think we will hear more about The Anomaly even after this shortlisting has receded into history.

Aliette de Bodard, The Red Scholar’s Wake (Gollancz, 291pp)

I have already reviewed this novel this year as part of my post, BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2022 Shortlist Part Two. I repeat most of this review again here, but I’ve adapted it slightly to reflect that I’m discussing it in terms of the jury-voted Clarke Award as opposed to the member-voted BSFA Award. I’m not saying that the two awards are completely different. There is often an overlap – as there is this year with two books in common to both shortlists – and many people are equally interested in the outcome of both. However, they are different awards with – again as we have seen this year – significantly different submission lists, and there is a difference to the context in which they are discussed. Despite, the Clarke Award website stating that it ‘is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year’, the award is often associated with literary SF, which can be a problematic category depending on the extent to which people define it against core genre SF. As a space-pirate sapphic romance, The Red Scholar’s Wake, is the most out-and-out core genre novel on the list (which is not to say that some other shortlisted works aren’t equally genre types – more on this in the part-two analysis). Therefore, it provides an interesting contrast with some of the other books and, as I’ve said and written before, it is this bringing together of core-genre with literary SF that excites me about the Clarke because it opens up an added frisson of transgressive possibilities.

As the New York Times noted last year, ‘LGBTQ+ Romance is Booming’, more specifically, ‘Sapphic Literature Is on the Rise. Hopefully, It’s More Than Just a Trend’, and even more specifically ‘we’re in the middle of a golden age of sapphic science-fiction and fantasy’ (see, for example, this list). When at Eastercon earlier this year, I attended ‘The Final Frontier: What LGBTQ+ Stories Can Only SFF Tell?’, which I wrote about in my long con report (panel titles are in bold to aid searching). The panel members – including Aliette de Bodard – discussed a whole raft of recent LGBTQ+ fiction leading me to reflect that it’s not so long ago that such a panel ‘would have ranged across the entire history of the field’. At a time when increasingly more queer books are being banned in US schools and libraries, the demand for queer stories, and queer romances in particular, from readers and fans has driven publishers to respond. So, it is great to see The Red Scholar’s Wake on this year’s Clarke list, reflecting this context and the ongoing diversification of SF.

The novel is set in de Bodard’s far future Xuya universe, which is framed by Chinese and Vietnamese cultures. Inexplicably to me now, I haven’t actually read any of the other stories and novellas in this universe, which is a failing I will have to correct. The action begins following the capture of Xich Si in a pirate raid by the mindship Rice Fish, who is mourning the death of her wife, the Red Scholar Huan. It’s a romance, so we know that, as Gary Wolfe pointed out in Locus, ‘we can reasonably expect some of the high passions, miscommunications, betrayals, heartbreaks, sex, and reconciliations that seem to be checkboxes of that genre’. But one of the things that has occurred to me in writing this particular set of reviews [of the BSFA shortlist but it also applies to this Clarke shortlist] is that meeting our readerly expectations is just as much a skill as playing with them, perhaps even more of one. I’m not going to summarise the plot here because the honed nature of its structure is a core part of the reading experience. We are introduced to the characters we need for the novel – and what I really liked was that there is a full range of generations represented from young to old. The parent-child relationships, whether the children are young or already grown up, are nicely judged and ring true to my own experience.

However, at the emotional core of the novel is the relationship between the two women, ship and human, which we are told from both perspectives. We (we being the people likely to read this novel and be interested in this award [said of the BSFA but it should apply equally to the Clarke]) expect this relationship to invest heavily in negotiating issues of consent, but nonetheless when the question ‘Are you going to ask permission for everything?’ is asked about a third of the way into the novel, it still required me to draw a sharp breath; the exquisite charge is earned. And the pronouns and shifting modes of address are also absolutely wonderful. But, to get down to the heart of the matter, Rice Fish is simply everything you would hope for in a pirate mindship:

Rice Fish walked in; she wore peach-coloured robes with imprints of moons and banyan trees. Her long hair flowed into the floor, turning into the vast expanse of the sky halfway down her back; it looked as though she was dragging the heavens behind her, beautiful and terrible.

….

Rice Fish’s eyes were black, the colour of space without stars, of black holes without escape.

Oh my! The symptom of the universe really is written in her eyes. You’d think, from the viewpoint of Xich Si, that this can’t possibly not be unequal (and perhaps you don’t even mind anyway), but you’d be wrong. From the moment Xich Si tastes Rice Fish and finds her ‘like brine, like oil’ with a sharp tang on the palate, subject-object relations just go into a spin. And they never stop of course; you just need to roll with them and revel in the lingering sensation of crushed regolith on your skin. There aren’t many books which actually bring their readers into contact, however briefly, with Matter itself (but most of them are SFF). This is one of them. I don’t think much else needs saying.