Clarke Award Shortlist Review Part Two

Part One of this shortlist round-up review can be found here.

Lucy Kissick, Plutoshine (Gollancz, 416pp)

Pluto, discovered in 1930, was for a while the ninth planet in the Solar System but since 2006 it has been excluded, along with other dwarf planets, from planetary status by the International Astronomical Union. Like others of around my age or older, I retain a default sense of the Earth being one of nine planets and therefore I was happy to read the following passage about a third of the way into the novel: ‘Historically, the Solar System’s ninth planet, and now its ninth inhabited world. Because whether formally designated as a planet or not, there could be no doubt about it: Pluto was a world’. And, indeed, there can also be no doubt about it that Kissick is successful in building this world for us, drawing on the findings of the New Horizons space probe, which, launched in 2006, slungshot itself around Jupiter in 2007 and went on to fly over Pluto eight years ago in July 2015 (the dates giving some idea of the sheer vastness of the distances involved). It is a seriously weird ice world, which she had to go and ‘see’ for herself by writing the novel as she explains here on her youtube channel. Engagingly, Plutoshine does have this sense of immediacy as though Kissick is writing from first-hand experience.

Plutoshine is a debut novel that was written in Kissick’s spare time (!) while she was completing a PhD in planetary chemistry at the University of Oxford. As explained on her website, she ‘recreated Martian lakes in the lab to see what happened to the planet’s carbon supply — and whether its ancient atmosphere is now buried deep below ground’ (I’m hoping for a Mars-set novel in the future). However, if Plutoshine is at one level a novel about planetary chemistry, it is also very much a novel about scientists and engineers. One of the main viewpoint protagonists is the angelic Lucian, who wears his heart on his sleeve, thinks continuously of his mother and sisters, and cares for everyone from children – such as co-protagonist Nou – to the station cat. He also seems to have more hobbies – everything from baking and cross-stitching to bass playing and micro-brewing – than you would think possible for someone with a leading role in a mission to terraform Pluto. On the other hand, maybe being multi-talented is what distinguishes top scientists from other people. There’s certainly enough musical proficiency around to set up a band:

Kip had already set up the stage and was rolling out his drum kit. Vasily, the Russian of few words, was tuning up his guitar in short twangs that echoed round the empty room. Their other electric guitarist was hanging up disco lights from atop an enormous ladder. Parker’s saxophone already lay polished at the stage’s side.

Later in the novel, the revelation of one character’s virtuosity on the piano is perhaps our first indication that they are about to undergo a redemptive arc. However, this is all quite fitting because it is the emotional trajectory of the main characters which structures the plot rather than the terraforming project, the acts of sabotage, and the alien first contact which also feature. At one point, we are told that Lucian had never really read mystery thrillers, he was more of a romcom guy. And in a way – extremely dark though some of the plotlines are – Plutoshine is a kind of romcom, complete with misdirection and a surprise (potential) romantic resolution.

This structure is interesting because it embodies what otherwise might appear to be a series of contradictions when considering Plutoshine as a cultural artifact. On the one hand, as we discussed at the ‘Not the Clarke Award’ back in June, it is published by Gollancz, who are still the central British SF publisher, and it is endorsed by leading Gollancz writers such as Paul McAuley and Alastair Reynolds (both of whom also wrote very good books in 2022), but, despite its hard science, it is not like the space opera (broadly speaking) that they write. Many of the themes in Plutoshine – concerning generational shifts, patriarchy, abuse, environmentalism, difference – correspond to those motivating US writing in the genre over the last decade but they are addressed in a very different style to that of recent American Hugo winners such as Mary Robinette Kowal or Arkady Martine. In many ways, Plutoshine is more old-fashioned in its telling and might be considered less sophisticated in its undifferentiated combination of plot elements. However, what I found in practice, was that while I was troubled by some of these thoughts while reading the first half of the novel, in the end Kissick’s boundless enthusiasm for her characters and story simply swept me away and I read the second half in one sitting. So, while some genre readers might bounce off this book, I think there will be others who love it precisely because it is different.

In summation, I wouldn’t pick Plutoshine as my winner, but I am pleased that it was on the list because it is a book that I enjoyed reading. The boundaries of human experience are shifting again, re-expanding following the post-1970s contraction. I think we can expect to see a surge of Solar-System-set SF over the coming years, informed by the perspective of our increased scientific knowledge, and I further think we can expect to see it written in a variety of styles because it won’t be SF as we knew it but simply contemporary fiction. In particular, as I mentioned above, I’m looking forward to Kissick writing some of this fiction.

Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker (Sceptre, 304pp) *

The novel begins with Karin Resaint on a ship in the Baltic concluding her investigations of whether a particular species of fish, the titular venomous lumpsucker, exceeds a certain threshold of intelligence and thereby would require additional protections for its breeding grounds. Her qualification for this role is not a qualification in animal cognition – indeed we learn that a former boyfriend described her as sociopathic for her lack of interest in animals – but a masters thesis on ‘Unlimited associative learning as a sufficient condition for minimal consciousness in artificial systems’.  Unfortunately, it transpires that the breeding grounds have already been destroyed, which leads her into a desperate search to find surviving lumpsuckers alongside Mark Halyard, the Environmental Impact Coordinator (Northern Europe) at Brahmasamudram Mining.

Halyard has found himself in a bit of a hole. A worldwide system of ‘extinction credits’ has come into being to offset the loss of species, with thirteen such credits being required for an intelligent species. At the beginning of the novel, the price of an extinction credit, which has been falling, stands at just €38,432 meaning that even the complete obliteration of the venomous lumpsuckers would only incur a cost of €499,616. As part of his job, Halyard had been supposed to buy the thirteen extinction credits to indemnify his company against accidental obliteration of the lumpsuckers, but in fact after doing so he sold them off and stashed the cash in a crypto account, while waiting for the price to fall further so that he could replenish them later and make a huge profit. However, due to a series of overnight attacks on biobanks, the price of extinction credits instead rises precipitously to €287,057 and suddenly Halyard needs the lumpsuckers either not to be extinct or at least not intelligent if he is going to be able to cover the tracks of his fraudulent dealings. Hence, his need to get Resaint on his side. This sets the context for a very dark satire involving two protagonists, neither of whom quite align with Western social norms for human behaviour.  

In a ‘Book of the Day’ piece on Venomous Lumpsucker in the Guardian, Kevin Power writes that ‘in the 2020s, the vast majority of literary fiction is, as we are frequently reminded, bought (and, increasingly, written) by women; and there is something fundamentally boyish about Beauman’s novels that puts him, I suspect, out of step with prevailing tastes’. I would say that was nonsense but then Beauman, although still being eligible, was not included in the mostly female 2023 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list despite his claim being stronger, one would have thought, than back in 2013 when he was on the list. The problem here seems to be not that what Powers writes is correct but that a worrying (ideological) narrative is springing up along these lines that is taking on a life of its own. I haven’t read Beauman’s other books (yet) and so I can’t objectively judge the merits of Power’s comment that ‘It’s easy to imagine the four precision-engineered, shaggy-dog thriller-comedies that he published between 2010 and 2017 going down a treat in, say, the 60s or 70s’. But I’m inclined to think that Beauman is not a hangover from that period because what he is writing seems very twenty-first century to me. Yes, Halyard does vaguely resemble in a self-serving way the somewhat hapless, quasi-liberal-humanist-values-embodying comic male protagonists of postwar British fiction dating back to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) but he is more recognisably a 21C character capable of realising the inadequacy of that kind of outlook in the world as it is today but unable to see what the alternative might be. In this respect, the match up with systems and intelligence expert Resaint is beautifully weighted and enables more than one way to read the novel.

For example, we can enjoy Halyard, who anchors much of the humour in the novel, without needing to treat him as our point of entry into the action. Indeed, the novel begins and ends with Resaint. Moreover, the key explanatory passage in the novel, which takes place in an Estonian hotel bar, which isn’t even a proper bar, is when Resaint explains her anti-humanist philosophy with regards to extinction by describing how the parasitical wasp Adelognathus marginatum paralyses and then lays an egg in the small strip spider Metapanamomops bohemicus, which will recover only to have its subsequent movements controlled hormonally by the wasp larva until the point at which it is tricked into building a web that will serve as the cradle for the larva’s cocoon to metamorphose into an adult wasp. These are fictional species but the text references Darwin’s reaction to similar behaviour by parasitic Ichneumon wasps in terms of the classic argument against creationism. Resaint is aware that ‘marginatum was basically a mechanical process, like a virus or weed’ yet the more she thought about it, she realised that this ‘brilliant, intricate’ thing must have value: ‘any conception of value that did not include Adelognathous marginatum seemed nonsensical’. For Resaint, the fact that thousands of such extinctions can be happening a year while nobody really does anything about it doesn’t make logical sense. It is this realisation that brings about her fascination with the venomous lumpsucker, as possibly the only animal with the consciousness and disposition to understand humans and punish them for what they are doing; an action with the potential to restore meaning to the world. Interestingly, while she views management executives driving the destructive processes not as evil but ‘more like fungal colonies of AI subroutines, mechanical components of a self-perpetuating super-organism, with no real subjectivity of their own’, she doesn’t accord them the same intricate value as the self-perpetuating marginatum, noting that ‘she would have happily watched any of them die’. One wonders if Halyard himself might have at least slightly more value (perhaps comic) as part of a self-perpetuating system of redundant mostly-useless blokes who aren’t quite at the management executive level. But probably not, if the menu of options we are left with at the end of the novel is anything to go by. Rather, the invitation seems to be to read the novel from Resaint’s anti-humanist perspective

This makes for an interesting ending. The novel as a whole is satirical – in particular, the description and scenes concerning the post-Brexit fate of the UK are priceless – but it can also be read as serious, and even programmatic in some ways, in its prescription for how to offset ten thousand years of mindless human self-perpetuation.

E. J. Swift, The Coral Bones (Unsung Stories, 401pp)

I have already written about The Coral Bones earlier in the year as part of my post, BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2022 Shortlist Part Two. Here, I shall simply repeat most of the review (which in any case was originally published in ParSec). However, there is an important difference in context, which is that while Swift was the only author in contention who hadn’t won the BSFA award before (a disadvantage for a voted award in which author recognition is undoubtedly a factor), none of the authors on this Clarke shortlist have won before which makes it a more level playing field. As I also mentioned in that earlier post, The Coral Bones is a particular example of a green overshoot novel, employing a temporally-braided [P]AZ[P]AZ[P]AZ[P]AZ[P] structure to address the climate crisis, where [P] is the present (more or less) and A is set in the historical past and Z is set in the future. Here is the review I wrote of the novel for ParSec #6 (Winter 2023)

***

The Coral Bones is a substantial and satisfying novel with engaging protagonists that we care about and passages of outstanding writing, especially the descriptions of coral reefs. Swift weaves a temporal braid of past, present, and future as the stories of her three protagonists are told in repeating sequence across the five sections of the novel. In a nice touch, these sections are named after the five ocean zones, so we begin with the epipelagic (from 0-200m) and gradually work ever deeper, metaphorically speaking, until we finally reach the hadalpelagic (below 6,000m).

The novel begins in the present day with marine biologist Hana Ishikawa describing to her estranged partner, Tess, the discovery of a body in an orange inflatable off the south coast of Lizard Island, which is off the Northeast coast of Australia on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The body has been painted white, and black letters on the surrounding lip of plastic spell out: ‘This is what it looks like when coral dies’. The man turns out to be Jake Kelly, a secondary school teacher who liked to volunteer for local environmental projects. On impulse, Hana tracks down and meets Jake’s widow, Donna, who persuades her to take away his heavy trunk full of books and papers on coral reefs. While this sounds like the setup for a thriller, what Hana finds, when she finally persuades herself months later to go through the trunk’s contents, is not the evidence of a conspiracy or cover-up but a means of rethinking her own relationship to nature and the world.

The sections concerning the second protagonist, seventeen-year-old Judith Holliman, consist of first-person entries in her journal beginning from August 4, 1839, and chart her escape from the social boredom of Sydney by accompanying her naval captain father on a voyage north around the east coast of Australia. These chapters comprise a wonderfully vivid naval yarn, complete with everything from shark encounters to mutiny, described with relish and wit by this exceptional young witness, who proves herself the best scientist aboard. Last but not least, the post-climate-disaster future sections set round about the mid- to late-twenty-second century, feature Telma Velasco, who works for the Restoration Committee, investigating animal sightings and sometimes taking rare animals into custody from private collectors. Pets are legally classified as companions and those who keep them must pay custodian taxes, but these measures have been enacted far too late for the vast majority of species which are now extinct, except for the activities of illegal DNA resurrectionists. A vaguely plausible report of the sighting of a seadragon sends her off to Northeast Australia, where she will make several unexpected discoveries.

Even before they eventually connect, these storylines resonate gently but tellingly in ways that encourage us to think about how the past has a future and vice versa. Our present society is not the teleological end state of a history that is fully known and documented, but a fleeting moment amidst ongoing change, which is already largely in progress. There are certain tipping points when Swift’s protagonists become aware of larger paradigm shifts around them. At one point, while looking back at her relationship with Tess, Hana tries to identify when she first became aware of the fault line in her life. She considers a number of possible milestones of climate change and species extinction, before realising that the cumulative effect only came into focus as the process of intrauterine insemination that Tess was undertaking started to run into difficulties. Hana’s resultant thoughts concerning what kind of world their daughter would even inherit make painful reading: ‘By the time she was ten, every year would be an El Nino year. By the time she was twenty, the GBR would be unrecognisable from today. The wildfire season would advance each year, pursued by flash floods and mudslides as the tree line reduced and the topsoil eroded. At thirty, she would see the wetlands vanish, as the sixth mass extinction ramped up gear.’

For Judith, a different moment of realisation occurs when an encounter with the native people of Lizard Island reminds her of a conversation with her father in which he had warned of the need to guard against the possibility of colonists adopting the native way of life, as has happened in the Americas. Rather than being repulsed at the thought of such ‘primitive degeneration’, she is tempted to slip away into the trees, so that she can walk hidden trails and sleep under the stars at night. Although the illusion vanishes, leaving her herself again, she realises that she is changing, ‘and the girl who returns to Port Jackson may not be the same as the girl who left’.

All three stories are about change and the hard-won knowledge of self that allows the acceptance of it. They suggest the possibility of a new society stabilising after climate disaster, but it won’t be the same as the one that existed before.

***

In my BSFA roundup post I added to this review, which was obviously constrained by word count, that the scene that actually completely sold me on this novel, was the first section concerning Telma, in which she is heading into the interior to check on the reported sighting of a hitherto presumed-extinct lizard. I was really enjoying the novel to this point but to have the future so grounded in a convincingly realised non-utopian scenario, suddenly brought the whole structure into focus. Sometimes interwoven novels work because the switch of perspective functions to keep you engaged, and while this is obviously true of The Coral Bones, I felt that the way the stories interlinked meant that the whole was more than the just the sum of the parts.

Discussion:

With any shortlist there are two main subjects for discussion, what the list itself tells us and who should/will win. I’ll address those in that order, so you can skip down (to next subtitle in bold) if you’re desperate to find out which one I liked best.

Earlier in the year, I posted this initial response to the publication of the submission list (updated soon afterwards when the shortlist was announced). I discussed some of the overlap or not with other award submission lists or shortlists. Since then, the Hugo shortlist has appeared after some delays (I am aiming to review this later in the year). There is no overlap this year unlike three years ago when three books appeared on both Clarke and Hugo shortlists for best novel of 2020 (see my round-up review here). Three of the books on the current Hugo shortlist – Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, and John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society – were submitted for the Clarke this year. In comparison, the Clarke shortlist overlaps with this year’s BSFA shortlist, with The Coral Bones and The Red Scholar’s Wake on both, and four of the six were on the BSFA longlist. What does this tell us? Not much, I think. If we ever got to the point that there was no similarity or crossover whatsoever between the Clarke and Hugo, it might mean something (either that SF no longer exists as such or that the Clarke has become something completely different) but I can’t see that happening on current trends.

If we nevertheless do want to generalise, then the main difference between the Clarke and the Hugos, or even the BSFAs for that matter, is that it brings books from mainstream publishers into the conversation. Hence, this year’s shortlist has three books from mainstream publishers and three books from genre publishers, whereas both this year’s Hugo and BSFA shortlists only have books from genre publishers. However, just because the publishers are mainstream doesn’t mean the novels aren’t genre, or at least a particular type of genre. In the first part of this shortlist review, I noted that The Red Scholar’s Wake was the most out-and-out core genre book on the list (and I’m very glad to see it there), but the three mainstream-published novels – by the three male authors – are also genre books in that they are near-future thrillers. I don’t want to overdo this point, but there is possibly something gendered going on here. If as discussed above re Venomous Lumpsucker, literary fiction is possibly becoming a category written and read by women and, I would add, nonbinary people and if the same could also be said of core SF (especially in relation to recent Hugo shortlists and winners), then has the near-future thriller been left as a male preserve? There is not sufficient evidence here from which to make a considered judgment on this question. However, it was certainly a line of discussion which came up at the ‘Not the Clarke’ Award. But, as we noted then, we’re not suggesting the judges were taken in by this anyway. Certainly, neither Metronome nor Venomous Lumpsucker privilege a male point of view.  

There is, however, one unambiguous conclusion that can be drawn about the current state of publishing from the Clarke shortlist and that is that independent presses are in trouble in the current financial climate. At the beginning of May, the sad news came through that Unsung Stories, the publisher of The Coral Bones, was going to close this summer for reasons explained in this blogpost on their website (which will hopefully remain in place as a record for posterity). They will be sorely missed because they have helped the careers of some fantastic authors and they have produced some beautiful books, including The Coral Bones (the only one of these titles I read in a hard copy), which has an absolutely gorgeous cover. As I said, the news is sad, but I think that rather than mourn we should cherish the memory of Unsung for its achievements.

We’ll have to see how longer-term publishing trends play out. In the meantime, the various parts of the ecosystem have contributed to what I found to be a pretty good shortlist from the point of view of the reader.

And the winner? Well, I have my opinions on which is the best book, but first can we deduce anything from the shortlist make-up? Leaving aside the two debut novels, neither of which I think will win, there seem to be two vectors of similarity to me: the first is the sustained engagement with climate change and species extinction in both Venomous Lumpsucker and The Coral Bones; the second is the witty, deadpan, sardonic attitude to social change and life in Venomous Lumpsucker and The Anomaly. The Red Scholar’s Wake is therefore the outlier but not necessarily the outsider. If we imagine clusters of judges around different vectors, then maybe it is Venomous Lumpsucker which will take the win by building a majority from both camps. My feeling is that The Anomaly is the most irritating of these four novels – it is fun but, in some respects, it sacrifices depth for trite playfulness – and therefore I don’t think it will win. I love The Red Scholar’s Wake and, as when I came to vote for the BSFA, part of me wants it to win (and that part would be overjoyed if it did win), but I am not sure that that is the part which would sway fellow jury members (not that I’m sure any part of me would sway fellow jury members). Therefore, I conclude that it is between Venomous Lumpsucker and The Coral Bones. I immensely enjoyed both novels and both are also very good and timely and therefore I would be very happy with either, although I personally would choose The Coral Bones. No doubt, the actual shortlist deliberations will have proceeded on completely different lines to anything I have imagined, but I have at least a 50% chance of being satisfied with the outcome, which is in itself a testament to the judges picking a decent shortlist.