This is an expanded version of the brief talk I gave for the online ‘Contemporary Conversations’ roundtable panel on the theme of literary prize culture at the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) What Happens Now 2023 Conference on 8 September. The other panellists were Vidisha Biswas, Stevie Marsden and Nikesh Shukla, with Caroline Wintersgill chairing.
China Miéville, a three-time Clarke Award winner has adapted Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ into a claim about science fiction: ‘any sufficiently advanced science fiction is indistinguishable from literature’. I was in St Martin’s Hall in central London a few weeks ago for the ceremony in which Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker won the 37th annual edition of the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science fiction novel published in Britain in the previous year. Beauman’s acceptance speech ran along the following lines ‘Of course, I’m a real writer. I’ve been longlisted for the Booker… I don’t write this horrid genre stuff …’ and so on for several minutes as though SF was indeed distinguishable from literature, before smiling and saying oh no of course he was delighted to win and had grown up on reading Clarke winners during the 90s and 00s. It was an interesting moment but obviously a self-satirising performance. Over the course of the last fifteen years or so, we’ve gone from the point of when the joke would have been perhaps still too close to the bone to the point at which it can now be made relatively safely. The implicit cultural hierarchy that used to exist between literary fiction and science fiction, once the most nerdish of genres, has, as Miéville suggests, pretty much dissolved.
Science fiction is now as much high culture as any other form of literature, as testified by a succession of major events. In 2011 the British Library organised a large exhibition, ‘Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it’. In August 2014, London hosted the SF World Convention (Worldcon), and it was the main story on the front page of the Guardian. The Science Museum’s major SF exhibition, Voyage to the Edge of Imagination, ended its ten-month run in this August. A run which included in October 2022, the awards ceremony for the 36th Clarke Award, in the presence of a shortlisted author who, far from having been once longlisted, is not only a Booker prize winner, but also a Nobel prize winner. This was because Kazuo Ishiguro was shortlisted for Klara and the Sun, although in the event we – that was my second year on the jury – gave the award to Josie Giles’s verse novel in Orcadian dialect, Deep Wheel Orcadia. Other recent winners include Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in that Country in 2021, which in the absence of in-person events was announced live on Radio 4’s Front Row, Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift in 2020, Tade Thompson’s Rosewater in 2019, Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time in 2018, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad in 2017. All these novels incorporate genre elements to greater or lesser degrees but more generally might be seen as representing the unstable realities of the twenty-first century. In 2016, the 30th anniversary award went to the perhaps more unambiguously science-fictional Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, which does include a generation starship and a super-evolved matriarchal spider colony. However, the spiders did have very literary names such as Portia and Bianca and everybody absolutely loved them. More seriously, of course Children of Time also reflects the shifting realities of our times, it just does it partly through spiders.
I’m not going to go through all the winners, so we’ll cut straight back to the first winner in 1987, which was a book that I’m sure most of you have read, the best work of science fiction first published in Britain in 1986, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A book that has grown in relevance since its publication and is undoubtedly a modern classic in the sense that, like works by Kafka, Orwell and Ballard, it has come to shape how we perceive and react to certain aspects of the societies surrounding us. In this respect, I think the victory of The Handmaid’s Tale in the first Clarke Award perfectly encapsulates a wider cultural and social shift that was happening within the 1980s despite the overtly reactionary political tenor of that decade.
In 1988, in a talk presented at the second ever Clarke Award ceremony,[1] Gwyneth Jones, herself a Clarke Award winner in 2002 for Bold As Love, predicted the ‘blurring of the line between mainstream fiction and sf’, arguing that one of the necessary conditions for this was the development of literary theory. For Jones, the ‘deconstructive’ possibilities of theory were anticipated by 1970s feminist SF:
For it was probably Joanna Russ, in her mid-1970s feminist sf, and especially in The Female Man, who first recognised and demonstrated the power of a specifically science fictional text to deconstruct itself, to lay itself open to radical and mutually contradictory plurality of meaning. In The Female Man, Russ takes an idea that could come from nowhere but science fiction – an exploration in story of that theory of space/time which posits an infinitely branching universe. She turns the idea back on herself, the author: becomes explicitly the divided self that this view of space/time implies. Russ’s exploration of the fluid and contingent nature of language and selfhood, expressed here in terms of probability time travel, arose out of her feminism and the social relativism feminism demands. But you don’t have to be a feminist, and maybe not even a student of science fiction, to understand that this text points, far more than any realist fiction, towards a full expression of the working of the human imagination. (6)
Jones saw a developing mutual relationship between theory and SF, by which the former would give the latter respectability, while ‘sf-infected “literature”’ would allow the relativism of both Einstein and Saussure to percolate slowly into popular consciousness.
In retrospect, Jones’s prediction seems incredibly prescient but I think really it is a reflection of how closely attuned writers often are to the pulse of the time they are writing at (and Jones has written some of the best and most prescient novels examining the condition of Britain and where it is going, such as Kairos [1988] and the Bold as Love sequence [2001-]). It has certainly come to pass that SF and Fantasy (SFF) are now probably the dominant cultural form(s) in the West, certainly in terms of visual and digital media. The important point to remember here, I think, is that the way we read written text is increasingly the same way that we ‘read’ TV/film etc and that this shift is partly down to what we did in the universities. In particular, reading itself has changed under the influence of theory in a way which I certainly didn’t anticipate at the time. Back in the 90s, it seemed, at least to people within English Literature, that literary theory was a kind of master code to all knowledge. We could unpack the ideological biases of any text just like that. Like magic, in fact. At that time, of course, I wasn’t interested in literary awards, I was too busy writing a PhD thesis that would overthrow capitalism – well, obviously not directly, but as part of a cumulative material criticism which would be triumphant in the long run… Well, to cut a long story short, it hasn’t worked out like that … at all … and as various people have been saying for at least the last decade, we – us literature academics – need to move beyond the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. At the same time, though, literature, and the authors themselves, have come back from the dead, and are now the centre of attraction in a literary culture that is no longer focused on criticism but on creative practice and personal engagement, centred on festivals, book groups etc. And these days, I’m particpating. I was this close (*holds finger and thumb up to indicate small distance*) to Jonathan Coe at the Hay Festival earlier this year. At the Clarke Award ceremony in August, I got to chat to Lauren Beukes, former Clarke winner for Zoo City in 2011 but best known probably for The Shining Girls which has recently been adapted as an Apple TV series. However, I don’t see this new literary culture as a retreat from theory (which I have always had a violent love-hate relationship with, without even getting into my recent disturbing dream/nightmare in which it was revealed to me that I had been a postmodernist all along). I think, what happened, as Roland Barthes predicted in ‘The Death of the Author’, is that theory has liberated the reader and now we are living in a new age centred on book groups, festivals, access to authors in person. Literary Prizes and Awards have become an essential part of that culture and that is why I am writing a book on the history of the Clarke Award, using it as a lens to examine the cultural shifts that have changed what literature is, and the way we read it.
[1] Reprinted as ‘Introduction: Deconstructing the Starships’ (3-7) in Gwyneth Jones, Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality (Liverpool University Press, 1999).
Prospective Cultures 