BSFA Awards Best Non-Fiction of 2019 Shortlists

As with my discussion of the Best Novel shortlist (parts One and Two) and Best Shorter Fiction shortlist (here), I’m not ranking these but I will reveal the one I put in first place in the ballot. Although having said that, I found it difficult to make a decision because the shortlisted works are all quite different in form (even the two 400+ page author studies significantly vary in their approach) and on another day I may well have chosen otherwise. As discussed in my ‘Thoughts’ on the Shorter Fiction shortlist, the BSFA has limited resources and is not in a position to run multiple Non-Fiction awards for works in different categories (indeed, given that this award was nearly dropped a few years ago, we should be grateful that it exists at all). However, even if the variety makes it difficult to choose between them, I think we should see it as a positive thing because the range here – an online essay, a book-length creative-writing guide, an author study written outside the academic literary-critical apparatus, an author study written within the academic literary critical apparatus, and an edited collection of academic essays – is broadly representative of the range of the SFF non-fiction field today. I apologise in advance for the disparity in length of these reviews. I have already written a 4000-word review of Sideways in Time and I could easily write as much again for both the Heinlein and Wells books and therefore struggled to rein myself in. I further apologise for the second paragraph of the Wells review which perhaps veers a little off topic for the purposes of the BSFA Awards but I am, for my sins, an academic working in the field of English Literature.

Jo Lindsay Walton, ‘Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit’ (Big Echo)

 This essay is available online here. Walton begins by suggesting that the Star Trek franchise might be considered as a critical utopia which is to say that it doesn’t present an ideal social system but shows contradictory glimpses of different, impulses and articulations which we can think about and play around with (for example, by writing essays about). Walton examines Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek (2016) by focusing on the concept of work which we might think of as a source of meaning but which is also inherently problematic just in the different senses that we use the word. Viewed through the lens of Star Trek these meanings congregate around the idea of ‘techno-meritocracy’. This sounds good and is based on the idea of technology being able to perform the task that markets have historically failed at, by being accurate, removing perverse incentives and promoting social justice and the common good. Or as Walton puts it, ‘could some kind of Artificial Intelligence replace and improve on money?’ The discussion of this point leads to the observation of how emerging paradigms often turn out to be ‘retrospectively applicable’: what if money has always been a form of AI? The market-based societies we live in are just another ‘subset of unsuccessful techno-meritocracies’. Quite! Somehow I feel we are shortly going to experience that realisation on a more material level than through watching Star Trek. In fact, we already are. At this point, Walton does indeed move beyond Star Trek. I won’t try and summarise the entire argument but I love the way that ‘a utopia of merit’ becomes increasingly problematised: ‘Meritocracy is quite obviously an ideological instrument of the worst kinds of capitalism, and to attempt to make a space to think through a radical and redeemed version might just be totally naïve’. The essay ends enigmatically but also productively with Walton transcribing responses from Adam King’s neural network Talk to Transformer. This feels like a ?? question, problem, project?? that has to be advanced collectively – in the way that SF criticism and discussion does. My response is not therefore a critical evaluation but to view this as an invitation. Or, perhaps, a gift requiring reciprocity?

Gareth L Powell, About Writing (Luna Press, kindle edition)

‘Writing is not a career for those who crave instant gratification!’ Ain’t that the truth! This is a book of tips and tricks to get you writing even if you lack the motivation to get out of bed. I’m not going to summarise them because people who are interested should buy the book. Although I can tell you that one of the chapters is very aptly titled ‘How to keep being creative in a crisis’. Neither am I going to assess this book because its proof is in its working. Either it gets someone to put pen to paper and complete a manuscript or it doesn’t. If it does succeed in this, it will have done its job and will most likely then be put aside. In an uncertain juncture like the present it might be enough to get people going and that will be an achievement in itself. To really do this justice, I’d have to try its techniques out for myself and keep a record of the results. Watch this space . . .

Glyn Morgan & C Palmer-Patel (Eds), Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 203pp.)

This is an extract from the conclusion to my full-length review (available here): This is a fine collection which is extremely well-edited: a number of useful comparisons are made between chapters allowing readers to make connections and think about the wider issues entailed. There is also a foreword from Stephen Baxter which, far from the typical enthusiastic-but-brief note, is a substantive contribution in its own right, discussing a range of alternate histories by writers such as Harry Turtledove and Harry Harrison. All in all, Sideways in Time is a significant addition to science fiction scholarship in general and alternate history in particular. It also raises fundamental and pressing questions about agency that we need to consider in the context of a twenty-first century which is turning out to be very different from its predecessor. While this reviewer, the editors and contributors, and probably most of the readers of this volume, will broadly agree that history is a more complex matter than the actions of great (straight, white) men, the problem is that a belief in abstract historical process very readily slips into a Panglossian acceptance of things as they are and very slowly getting better, which tends to favour the status quo and entail straight white men remaining in positions of power for the meantime until some notional point in the future when infinitesimal incremental change results in a ‘diverse and inclusive’ utopia. To recast the difference between these two historical approaches once again in terms of British politics, this is akin to saying we’re doomed forever to have to choose between Boris Johnson and Tony Blair.

This apparent paradox by which the Carlylian and Structuralist models of history turn out to make practically no difference may be examined by returning again to Adam Roberts’s chapter at the beginning of the book, which includes a riff on nineteenth-century America in which he points out it possesses history in contradictory ways: too little as a new nation, too much in terms of the old world associations of its settlers, and a third history of its aboriginal inhabitants. The competing alternate history timelines of Murray Leinster’s ‘Sidewise in Time’ (1934), which provides the name for this collection, complies with this logic of an America of contradictory histories. Roberts implies that the genres of alternate history and science fiction, as predominantly American genres, are inflected by these American histories, which hold out the illusion of a ‘paradigmatically sciencefictional model of history’ (41) in which a push and a shove take us into the promised land. Against this, he argues that ‘anticipations of a specific future will inevitably, eventually, be overtaken by actual historical process’. The Tolstoyan ‘flow of supraindividual forces’ will overtake ‘the Geoffroyan fantasy of a point of stoppage to history as such’ (44). Science fiction, Roberts concludes, is a history of branching paths deviating from baseline history that have been left beached by the receding tide of historical process and is therefore apochryphal by nature. However, the traditional response to multiplying branches of apocrypha, has been insistence on a canon; a phenomenon that is as prevalent in commercial SFF as it is in great religions. It seems to me that we need to try and get away from models of history as process that legitimate the status quo by default. The way to do this is not simply to challenge the portrayal of great (straight white) men as historical agents but actively to show women, queer people and people of colour as historical agents in contexts in which hierarchical, patriarchal systems of power are rejected and dismantled. The tendency of some recent science fiction which does this – such as N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-17), Simon Ings’s The Smoke (2017) and Tade Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy (2016-9) – to also explicitly remove (sometimes by outright destruction) America from their historical frameworks points towards a twenty-first century science fiction which has moved beyond the conflicts of a specifically American-inflected history. In this future the question of ‘what if’ would literally open the floodgates to a range of possible alternatives and not enmesh us within paradigms predicated on the supremacy of straight white males. My hopes for the direction of further scholarship in the field of alternate history would be to build on the strengths of this volume and proceed to explore new paradigms that do not always float tantalisingly just in front of us but can be fought for in the here and now.

Adam Roberts, H. G. Wells: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 452pp.)

Literary Lives is a long-running academic series from Palgrave and it’s fair to say that some (though by no means all) of the volumes that have appeared over the years are fairly bland and insipid introductory texts that have achieved little more than to serve the needs of undergraduate essay writing. In sharp contrast, Roberts’s book on Wells is a full-on major work of, at-times brilliantly argued, literary criticism that thoroughly supports his contention that ‘Wells was a literary artist of immense, underappreciated talent, a writer whose literary genius, whilst it must of course be central to a literary biography, deserves to be resurrected in a much broader context too’ (430). Although Roberts deploys the theoretical toolkit (readers should prepare themselves for lots of Freud, some Lacan, and various resonances of Western Marxism and Poststructuralism) that has been hegemonic from the 1990s until recently, he is above all an extremely gifted close reader. I forgive his characteristic tendency to playfully irritate and annoy because through these means he does provoke us to think about Wells’s texts in new and different ways (and doesn’t just end up irritating and annoying us as less-able exponents of this approach are wont to do). So, despite some quibbles, I thoroughly endorse this book for its comprehensive readings of Wells’s fictional texts, which often run to several pages or more. Roberts’s achievements in this respect can be summarised in three ways: he made me think again about the early sf classics such as The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898); he gave me greater insight into my favourite Wells novels such as Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910); and he made me realise (much to my surprise) that I do in fact not only want but really need to read novels such as The World of William Clissold (1926), The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930) and Apropos of Dolores (1938). My first step in this direction will be to follow Robert’s recent suggestion in the Guardian and read Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916).

I’m not sure if the book is so successful in conveying Wells the person as it is in writing about his fiction (Roberts also deserves a medal for reading all of Wells’s non-fiction so that we don’t have to). Roberts displays some odd tics by describing the 46-year-old Wells as being of ‘advanced age’ (261) and the 66-year-old Wells as ‘an old man’ (364). We never really get to the bottom of Well’s relationship to his wife Catherine/‘Jane’ because despite occasional provisos to the effect that ‘we just don’t know how Catherine felt about H.G’s sexual incontinence’ (362), Roberts’s repeated use of terms such as ‘unfaithful’ and ‘cheating’ makes it clear where he stands on this issue and this clouds objective discussion. It is normally assumed that Wells and ‘Jane’ had some sort of arrangement and it seems weird to make marital fidelity such a sticking point in a twenty-first century which considers consent to be the key ethical consideration. Roberts also quotes Adam Phillips to the effect that monogamy is the only possible form of relationship, which quite simply feels wrong. While discussing Well’s account of his visit to the Soviet Union, Russia in the Shadows (1921) – which is a non-fiction book that I now want to read – Roberts comments that after meeting Wells, ‘Lenin told Trotsky he was “an unreconstructed bourgeois”, a judgement with which it is hard to disagree’ (292). Yet the whole point about Wells is that as the son of a domestic servant he was anything but bourgeois. His career was impossible in terms of the social rigidities of the Victorian England he was born into and although that society underwent rapid change from the economic depression of the 1870s onwards, the fact that Wells not only understood the significance of those changes but was able to establish himself as a writer before the end of the century is one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of English literature. He served as an example for the working-class and lower-middle-class writers who followed him, such as D.H. Lawrence and the proletarian writers of the 1930s. Roberts is on stronger ground when he suggests that ‘a fruitful way of reading late Wells’ is to see his preoccupation with the end of history as ‘the collapse of bourgeois individualism’ (423). There is a lot more I could write about this (and hopefully I will do at some point) but there is not really space here to do more than suggest that the significance of Wells – a writer who, as Roberts shows, was capable at his best of representing female agency and self-actualisation (see the brilliant reading of Ann Veronica [1909]) – is that he charts the parameters of patriarchal bourgeois individualism and reacts differently to the hollowness or horror that sits at its heart than his modernist peers and contemporaries: Ford Madox Ford, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. In this respect, Wells is still significant for English Literature today. The ‘postmodern’ paradigm which seemed dominant in the 1990s has almost completely evaporated since the 2008 financial crisis leaving literary intellectuals floundering around looking for an explanatory model (and clutching at straws such as ‘metamodernism’) in a world that has been radically transformed. A return to Wells, the working-class writers he inspired, and the women writers he knew and (whatever his faults) genuinely liked, seems to me to provide the best chance of forming the type of coalition necessary to win the culture wars. But I have digressed! The mark of a good book is that it inspires you to engage with it, argue with it, and formulate your own positions: this is a good book and I know that I will return to its readings in the years to come.

Farah Mendlesohn, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein (Unbound, 463pp.)

This book was initially commissioned for the University of Illinois Modern Masters of Science Fiction series but grew too long for that format and so moved to the crowdfunding publisher, Unbound. The result is a handsome hardback (with better copyediting than Roberts’s Palgrave volume). The extra length is clearly essential and gives Mendlesohn the space to build up a sophisticated reading of Heinlein’s work which is explained mainly through plain language and illustrative quotation rather than specialist critical vocabulary. This is both effective and convincing, giving someone like myself with no great prior interest in Heinlein a real insight into his work and an understanding of why it matters. In the Preface, Mendlesohn notes that (as primarily a historian) she is ‘not strictly a literary critic’ and therefore she is not bothered about Heinlein’s style but rather with teasing ‘out what I find fascinating about Heinlein, good, bad and reprehensible, and to understand his work as a close-to-fifty-year-long argument with himself and those he admired’ (xii-xiii). This provides an interesting contrast with Roberts’s book on Wells because while he is very much bothered with Wells’s style, that might also have been presented as a man’s fifty-year-long argument with himself and those he admired. However, rather than evaluate the contrasting value of two books which I both greatly admired and hugely enjoyed, I want to think in part about the way Mendelsohn’s book complements Roberts’s and actually suggest answers for some of the questions he raises. In a discussion of a dream in Well’s The Happy Turning (1945), Roberts writes ‘Wells was a self-made man in the material and financial sense of the phrase, but his real desire (this dream suggests) is to be what nobody can be, self-made in an ontological sense’ (Roberts, 419). However, Heinlein finds a way to represent exactly such a possibility fictionally in ‘“All you Zombies–”’ (1959). Mendlesohn’s analysis of this story contextualises this self-making in terms of contemporary mid-twentieth-century values that had remained relatively unchanged since the late Victorian period discussed in Alice Dreger’s Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (2000), when (in Mendlesohn’s words) ‘medical practices became ever more concerned to defend the boundaries of masculinity and construct the walls of femininity’ (371). As Mendlesohn further notes, Jane (the intersex protagonist of the story) undergoes gender realignment without adopting the heteronormative performance that was supposed (according to sexologists of the time) to accompany it: ‘In no sense at the end of the story has Jane’s personal gender identity changed […] Gender identity in this [story] is fixed; the body is mutable’ (372). This carries various implications within the cumulative structure of Mendlesohn’s book and forms part of her concluding chapter on ‘Heinlein’s Gendered Self’, leading on to the discussion of whether Heinlein is writing himself as a woman in To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987). The point here is that Heinlein’s particular rejection of patriarchal bourgeois individualism takes the form of writing women from the inside and the validation of family understood as comprised ‘of wives and husbands, of kids and cats, and also of friends of both bed and book’ (413). In this way, he escapes the horror and hollowness of the collapse of bourgeois individualism. A reading of Wells conducted in the manner Mendelsohn employs to examine Heinlein, through thematic analysis ranging across works rather than reading book by book in chronological order, might actually paint a very different picture to one that seems to culminate in a mind at the end of its tether. Heinlein, like Wells, was ‘an amoral man who wished to work out a new sexual code’ (341) and one of the ways he did this was by writing women as sexual agents who self-actualise through sex. Mendlesohn’s achievement is to present this positively and compellingly – as opposed to viewing it as tacky and voyeuristic – by writing a book set within a worldview that isn’t heteronormative or constrained by nineteenth-century binaries.

There is much more detailed and persuasive analysis of Heinlein’s writing along the way to this conclusion and I came away with another long list of books that I now want to read. Admittedly not Farnham’s Freehold (1964) – although I found the long and absorbing analysis of it helpful – or the later novels. It is mainly the juveniles that Mendlesohn has sold me on with her obvious love and enthusiasm but also because she shows them to present an interesting lens on mid-century America: so Red Planet (1949), Between Planets (1951), The Star Beast (1954), Tunnel in the Sky (1955) and Podkayne of Mars (1963) are all very much on the TBR list now. However, my first port of call is going to have to be I Will Fear No Evil (1970), which Mendlesohn analyses extensively, including a fascinating comparison with Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), before concluding that ‘it repeats in a sense the ending of ‘“All you Zombies–”’ but where that ended in miserable isolation, this ends in a collective triumphalism’ (382). I very much want to read that now. One final contrast with Roberts’s book on Wells: instead of seeking to resurrect a writer’s literary reputation, Mendlesohn notes that is unclear if Heinlein will retain influence and states ‘For all I value Heinlein I do not require him to continue to be read or valued as contemporary fiction’ (xiii). That’s an interesting point: for all my commitment to (modern and) contemporary literature and its study, I think I will follow this example and not require Heinlein, Wells or any other writer to be read but rather I will seek to focus on showing such writers and their historical role as contributing to where we are now. Overall, then, this is another very good book and, moreover, one whose model I am seriously contemplating adapting for projects that I have in mind but wasn’t quite sure how to avoid the pitfalls of the standard academic lit crit book.

Thoughts: I was going to write a lengthy piece here but this is already overlong, so I’ll be brief. What this list tells us about our current historical juncture I would suggest is that there is a shift in critical consciousness. SFF has fully penetrated academia but academia, especially Eng Lit (under pressure from a rapid year-on-year decline in GCSE and A level students), is in retreat. The appetite for ruthless criticism and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is diminishing. The future of academic publishing is unclear. I was surveyed last year on behalf of the major university presses on whether I thought monographs were still a viable part of publishing. It might be that the future of such publications is very limited and that ultimately those of us who want to write such works need to follow the example of Mendlesohn. It is certainly clear that things need to change. In order to take the SFF public sphere forward we need more generous readings in transformative contexts. We need arguments to take place and ideas to circulate in public. We need to integrate creative approaches back into generous criticism and vice versa. In other words, we need to include all the activity covered by this varied shortlist. We need a new historical framework – I’m tempted to say we need to jump tracks on to a new timeline – and on that basis I ended up giving my first preference to Sideways in Time but I intend to take inspiration from all of this work.

[Edit:] And the winner was: Farah Mendlesohn for The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein.

Review of BSFA Awards Shortlists for 2019

The BSFA Awards for 2019 (shortlists here) are going to be presented this Sunday at 7pm on youtube. Here are my reviews of the ‘Best Novel’, ‘Best Shorter Fiction’ and ‘Best Non-Fiction’ categories:

BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2019 Shortlist Part One

BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2019 Shortlist Part Two

BSFA Awards Best Shorter Fiction of 2019 Shortlist

BSFA Awards Best Non-Fiction Shortlist

BSFA Awards Best Shorter Fiction of 2019 Shortlist

As with my discussion of the Best Novel Shortlist (parts One and Two), I’m not ranking these but I will reveal the one I put in first place on the ballot. I don’t read much shorter fiction, but perhaps I shall read more after this because as with the novel shortlist I enjoyed all of these. I haven’t compared these with previous shortlists, beyond noting that there are more novellas than the previous time I read the shortlist, a couple of years ago. Reading novellas of this length on a kindle is quite addictive, like watching a good episode of a favourite TV show. The four here provide a good idea of some of the different possibilities of the format; while the two shorter stories demonstrate an interesting convergence of theme.

Gareth L Powell, Ragged Alice (Tor.com, kindle edition)

Set in the fictional, fading seaside town of Pontyrhudd, somewhere on the Ceredigion coast between Aberystwyth and Aberaeron, this is a police procedural (although there is not too much by the way of procedure beyond frequent helpings of Jack Daniels) with an added layer of supernatural content. DCI Holly Craig returns to the town where she grew up to investigate a series of murders which it quickly becomes apparent are related to the murder of her own mother over thirty years before. I live in Aberystwyth so much of the pleasure for me was the way in which Powell weaves the fictionalised setting from a smattering of local geography (e.g. references to Cardigan Bay and driving to Carmarthen) and a range of stock features such as the lighthouse, the decommissioned RAF camp, and the pub out of town on the main road. Readers who don’t know the area should watch the Welsh crime drama Hinterland to get a sense of the landscape. Although, I should reassure potential visitors (after the current pandemic travel restrictions) that there are not generally as many bloody murders in the area as depicted in Ragged Alice or some of the episodes of Hinterland.

Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Hodder & Stoughton, kindle edition)

This is not related to Chambers’s Hugo Award winning Wayfarers series but a standalone set early in our 22^nd Century at a time when space exploration – now essentially crowdfunded for the benefit of all – has begun again following a long hiatus since the 2020s; a decade dominated by neoliberal dysfunction and climate disaster. A four-person crew are on a long term mission to complete initial scientific surveys of four different planets. There is a lot of procedure in this novella, explained in a low key, matter-of-fact manner. Chambers and her protagonist, Ariadne, take care to explain the science in a layperson’s language. Once I had acclimatised to this understated narrative, I found it very effective and ultimately moving as we experience high emotions in someone with a low emotional register. Nothing too melodramatic happens (no invasive alien lifeforms as some of this year’s Best Novel shortlist) and instead the drama is generated by the ebb and flow of the mission, which allows us to reflect upon big questions and profound ethical issues without anything being forced upon us. Sentences sharpen to beautiful and disturbing effect: ‘Launching a spacecraft is a violent act’. Ultimately, the novella works because it provides a space free of the everyday political and ideological fog surrounding readers to ask us what our attitude to science and space exploration really is? This is a genuine achievement created by intelligent writing and construction. I really liked this and what it made me think about; I am now going to help crowd fund some space exploration!

Ian Whates, ‘For Your Own Good’ (Wourism and Other Stories, Luna Press)

Fiona Moore, ‘Jolene’ (Interzone #283)

I’m discussing the two short stories together here because they both centrally feature cars/motor vehicles with AI. For anyone who hasn’t read them yet but wants to, I would recommend reading Whates’s story first, as the straightforwardly serious, although not unironic, story, and Moore’s second, as the more comic, although still serious in some respects, version. ‘For Your Own Good’ is a tight, well-written story which provides exactly the right amount of information to raise a variety of intriguing possibilities before us in the first half of the story before working a neat twist. On the surface, ‘Jolene’ revolves around ‘a country singer whose wife, dog and truck have all left him’; a premise which sets up a throwaway joke or two. However, the attempts of the narrating ‘autologist’ (a cross between a psychologist and social worker for cars) to get to the bottom of the case take us further than the gag initially promises, via another neat twist, and offer us a fresh perspective on the sometimes fine line between abuser and victim.

Tade Thompson, The Survival of Molly Southbourne (Tor.com, kindle edition)

This is the sequel to The Murders of Molly Southbourne (2017) which I haven’t read but that didn’t raise any barrier to me quickly getting absorbed into the fast-paced intriguing plot. Although, having said that, it might work even better for those who have read the first instalment because one can deduce from what we are told that it twists the initial premise. The philosophical interest in the story lies in the question of identity, which Thompson has also explored in his Wormwood trilogy. Not only does The Survival of Molly Southbourne explore the issue of original and copy in relation to Molly and the mollys but also in respect to Tamara and the tamaras in scenes which have an endearing weirdness. In fact, I wanted to know much more about the tamaras than this format allows. Overall, the action scenes work well because they fit into the intricate logic of the plot, which weaves together several strands to provide a relatively strong and satisfying ending. But somehow I feel that at least another instalment, if not more, is required to tie various ends together. As with a good episode in a TV box set, I would have been tempted to read the next one as well if there was one available.

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (Jo Fletcher Books, 198pp.)

This is a beautiful book that I ended up savouring reading over a number of days. The format of mini-narratives each ending with letters between the two competing agents, Red and Blue, is very rich, engaging and exquisitely queer. I wanted to savour every word and I definitely will read this again. I haven’t read anything by Max Gladstone before but I have read (and indeed taught to my university students) Amal El-Mohtar’s ‘Seasons of Glass and Iron’ (2016), which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2017 at the Helsinki Worldcon (and also Locus and Nebula Awards). Like that intricate story, This Is How You Lose the Time War is on one level a story about stories. Indeed, at the risk of sounding like too much of an academic (which is apparently a fault I’m known for), it’s also a novella about novellas: not only referencing but weaving into the narrative critical discussion of one of the greatest fantasy novellas of all time, Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light (1952). El-Mohtar has previously written a very good short piece, ‘Crossroads and Coins’, on Travel Light, which anyone who has enjoyed reading This Is How You Lose the Time War should read before or after they read Travel Light itself. From henceforward I shall always think of myself as possibly a candidate for major critic in ‘strand 623’. But even without the Mitchison references, I loved this. This is one people will be reading for years and decades to come.

Thoughts: The size of the BSFA and limited resources mean that it can’t run too many awards and the four it does run work pretty well. However, this year does suggest the advantage afforded by running separate categories of novella and short story. I don’t think they’re like and like and, as someone who mainly reads novels, I’m inherently inclined to favour the novellas, which are longer and have more going on, than the stories. Of course, other voters may respond differently. Most of these texts illustrate the more diverse and queer-friendly feel of SFF written at the moment. In particular, I’m happy to see To Be Taught, If Fortunate having a trans character whose transness is not a topic within the story (as also the case, for example, in Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower [2019]). Furthermore, a different kind of ethics is continuing to evolve and take shape in the genre which centres on issues of identity, agency, consent, personal relations and the grounds for taking action. Of course, this is a much bigger topic than can be illustrated by an award shortlist but the little glimpses of its existence we are afforded are grounds for at least a little hope in what are otherwise fraught times.

This Is How You Lose the Time War shaded it for me from To Be Taught, If Fortunate but it was a close run thing.

[Edit:] And the winner was Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War.

Five English Disaster Novels, 1951-1972

It seems like a suitable time to air this again. Originally a 2002 conference paper, ‘Apocalypse in Middle England: An Alternate History to Postwar British National Unity’ presented at ‘History/Fantasy’, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College (23 March 2002), this full-length version was first published as ‘Five English Disaster Novels, 1951-1972’ in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 95 (Autumn 2005), pp.89-103. I have corrected the spelling of Bill Masen’s surname, which was picked up in a letter to the editor alongside other points. It should also be noted that Christopher Priest has since revised Fugue for a Darkening Island (in 2011) and Lateef’s name was changed to Rafiq, as well as some other alterations which I might discuss at a later date. Overall, I think this has stood up to the passage of time well: there are a few trappings of the Blairite era of production but it probably speaks better to our 2016-2020 present. I had the feeling that nobody really knew how to respond to it when it was originally published.

“An Artificial Restoration of Normal Life in an Abnormal State”: Five English Disaster Novels, 1951-1972

By Nick Hubble

Introduction

John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which the hero and his socialite girlfriend escape the decimation of Middle England by giant walking carnivorous plants is the archetypal form of what Brian Aldiss dubbed the “cosy catastrophe”, in which “the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off.”[1] The frequent repetition of the formula over the next twenty years suggests that the production of such cosy catastrophes almost came to constitute an obligatory rite of passage for any would-be science fiction writer of the period. Everything above ground gets blown away in J.G. Ballard’s first book, The Winds from Nowhere (1962), but the heroes survive until the weather unexpectedly abates. In Keith Roberts’s debut, The Furies (1966), aliens in the guise of giant wasps supply the dangers to be overcome before the hero can settle down as a farmer with an ex-prostitute. Not all disaster novels were quite so cosy. In John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), while the hero does manage to survive a right-wing government’s attempts to bomb its own urban population in the face of imminent mass-starvation, and escape with his family to a hidden valley in the Lake District, it is only at the cost of killing his farmer brother. And by the politically volatile years of the 1970s, even the very possibility of narrative itself is disrupted by the fragmented form of Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) as a suburban family disintegrates amidst the savage civil war triggered by the arrival of two million African boat people.

There is now a growing recognition that these catastrophes offered a sharp political contestation of the lines along which British society was run. A recent article in the New Statesman by Mark Slattery considered how Wyndham’s “fascination with Englishness disguised a sidelong sneer at the vulnerability and incompetence of British authority.”[2] Slattery went on to comment: “Wyndham’s market was the middle class, whose old-fashioned values he lightly satirised. His depiction of the collapse of this homogeneous class was all the more shocking because he used its own idiom to emphasise its destruction.”[3] The reason why this was so attractive to a middle-class readership is because the order being overthrown by Wyndham’s triffids was not their own but that of the Welfare State and collectivised social democracy, which by 1945 had supplanted the Conservative hegemony of the 1930s. As Ross McKibbin concludes in his history of class and culture in interwar England:

More or less everyone in the interwar years agreed that England was a democracy. The question was – whose democracy? Before the outbreak of war the question seemed to have been answered … the ruling definition of democracy was individualist and its proponents chiefly a modernised middle class; in the 1940s the ruling definition was social-democratic and its proponents chiefly the organised working class. The class, therefore, which in the 1930s was the class of progress became in the 1940s the class of resistance.[4]

L.J. Hurst has pointed out that the title of chapter one of The Day of the Triffids, “The End Begins”, is an ironic reference to Churchill’s speech after victory at Alamein: “This is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”[5] That phase of the war represented the END of interwar individualism and the beginning of the postwar order. Wyndham’s escapist fantasy of reversing that wartime beginning can be seen as creating the model for a genre which was to pander shamelessly to the desires of the English middle class to overturn the postwar order. However, such a reading can hardly account for the imaginative range of the genre or its continued potency – as witnessed by Ballard’s statement in March 2002, when invited by the Guardian newspaper to comment on BBC Chair Gavyn Davies’s contention that it is only the white middle classes who believe that the BBC is “dumbing down”:

I am a great admirer of the BBC – it is the greatest form of enlightenment and information since the Roman Catholic church. But my belief is that the middle class is the new proletariat and that in due course we will have to launch a revolution to free ourselves from the abuse we are now on the receiving end of. We are the new victims, exploited by society. We believe in virtues, charity and elitist culture and it’s all-out attack on our kind. We are society’s fair game – there are beaters in the woods trying to flush out the middle classes and sooner or later we will revolt.[6]

What is unsettling about this polemical outburst is the way in which it challenges our conventional understanding of recent British history: that the progressive gains of the postwar era – health, education, social and sexual liberalisation – came as a result of the 1945 settlement and the triumph of social democracy. Unless Ballard is merely engaging in hyperbole, his argument is based on an alternative understanding: that these progressive ideals were rooted in the interwar middle class and came to flourish despite, rather than because of, the postwar order. The consequence of the “all-out attack” on the middle class is the opening of a new political axis that bypasses the traditional positions of “Left” and “Right”. The attraction of using “middle class” as a term of abuse derives from the way it enables elitist snobbery, ingrained within a genuinely reactionary opposition to progressive enlightenment, to be masked by a feigned solidarity with traditional working-class values. However, it is very difficult to expose this manoeuvre without recourse to the history of middle-class progressivism which is implied by Ballard’s outlook but remains largely unwritten in practice.

Hurst has compared the temporal dislocation within the opening sentence of The Day of the Triffids with other opening sentences used to signify a novel’s belonging to the genre of alternate history. The Day of the Triffids opens: “When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”[7] George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four opens: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”[8] As Hurst observes, both sentences establish how “the normal constructs of time broke down in postwar England”.[9] Hurst further argues that these were deliberate choices to make time “uncanny”, by suggesting that more obvious satirical devices, such as the invention of “Double British Winter Time”, were avoided.[10] However, Ballard’s The Winds from Nowhere makes a similar device uncanny by applying it in midsummer: “It was only 4 o’clock but already dusk was coming in …. which made the late June day seem more like early Autumn.”[11] Roberts’s The Furies features the alternative dislocating motif of the stopped watch. Cairns Craig has linked Orwell’s famous 1942 assertion that “History stopped in 1936”[12] to an “English Ideology”, which came into being as a direct result of the replacement of Englishness as a progressive force by Britishness in the early 1940s – the process described above in the McKibbin quote. Stripped of its historicity, England was transformed into a perfect space – a blank page – for oppositional politics. Craig suggests that there were two problems with this: firstly, that it was a space as readily available to the political Right as to the Left; and, secondly, that it served to distract the English Left from a fully committed engagement with the politics of Britain.[13] By reading these five novels intertextually as an interlocking alternative history, it is possible to recover the progressive strands of the middle-class opposition to postwar Britain, which are in danger of being swept away by the more reactionary currents of a rising Englishness

In the Country of the Blind

It is too easy to read these books as simply reflecting cold-war anxieties: the triffids are genetically developed in the Soviet Union; in Roberts’s The Furies, earthquakes are triggered by the testing of huge nuclear bombs; the cereal-killing virus which causes the mass-starvation in Christopher’s The Death of Grass originates in China – as by implication (although Ballard refuses anything so workmanlike as an explanation) do The Winds from Nowhere; while in Priest’s book, the Russians covertly arm African refugees in England. However, the key common denominator is that in all of these works the destruction of the postwar order is always overdetermined: in Wyndham there are both triffids and satellite weapons and a plague as well; in Christopher the food shortage is accompanied by an extremist government’s intention to bomb its own people; in Roberts swarms of giant extraterrestrial wasps quickly follow the bomb-triggered earthquakes; and in Priest the refugee crisis only triggers a civil war because there is already an extremely racist government in power. It seems likely that the cold war simply provided a suitably heightened context that allowed these overdetermined alternative histories to operate on more than one main axis: attacking both a specific postwar British complacency, which can be described in terms of the “Myth of the Blitz”, and the notion of civilisation itself.

Angus Calder’s The Myth of the Blitz has shown how postwar Britain’s identity was defined by its sense of standing alone during the war and of the internal solidarity within this lone stance, exemplified by the Dunkirk Spirit and the solidarity under fire during the Blitz. Britain thought of itself as unique – as outside the currents of World and European history.[14] The “Myth of the Blitz” is bitterly contested by the five books under consideration here. Ballard’s attack on the military in The Winds from Nowhere is typically dismissive: “They had the Dunkirk mentality, had already been defeated and were getting ready to make a triumph out of it, counting up the endless casualty lists, the catalogues of disaster and destruction, as if these were a measure of their courage and competence.” (p.57)

The critique of civilisation shared across these texts is summed up by the realisation, as a character in The Furies puts it, that “we’ve all got a death wish”.[15] One critic has gone so far as to suggest that there are similarities between Wyndham and the Frankfurt School’s critique of late capitalist modernity.[16] In Wyndham and Roberts, modern life is interrogated from the perspective of a social-Darwinist discourse concerning adaptability. In Priest and Ballard it is the unity of identity itself that is questioned. Christopher’s novel can be seen as a bridge between the two positions. These themes have always been available to the critics and have led to the restricted definition of The Day of the Triffids and The Furies as “Cosy Catastrophes”. Meanwhile the questioning of identity in the works of Ballard and Priest makes them seem more postmodern. Yet such categorisations miss the opportunity to explore the productive possibilities that are held in tension between the books and their particular and universal discourses concerning postwar Britain and civilisation in general. For it is precisely the utopian dream of supplanting the postwar British order that counterbalances the shared pessimism concerning the condition of civilisation and allows the genre to transcend the misanthropic tendencies of a different tradition of English post-disaster novels – ranging from Richard Jeffries’s After London (1885) to Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance (1997) – which, in effect, represents the effects of large-scale depopulation as a matter for lyrical celebration.

The distinction between these two traditions of disaster novel can be best illustrated with reference to Ballard, whose early novels such as The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964) also seem to celebrate disaster. Here, the crude plot structure of The Winds from Nowhere – written in a fortnight – serves as a useful guide to Ballard’s more ambiguous deployment of similar themes in those subsequent novels. Leaving aside the potboiler elements of the mix, such as the action sub-plot involving an American submarine commander in Italy, and taking a specifically British perspective, we can interpret the all-pervading winds as a “strong breath of fresh air” (p.49) rather than simply a global “reaping [of] the whirlwind” (p.120). Thus, on the one hand – prefiguring the later novels – a Conradian message of the need to reject human pride is heavy-handedly hammered home. Hardoon, the magnate who intends to prove mankind’s superiority by staring down the storm from a reinforced concrete pyramid, is described as “some Wagnerian super-hero in a besieged Valhalla” (p.181). Only after his defeat, proving mankind’s inferiority to the forces of nature, are the winds allowed to drop. Running parallel to this theme – and equally prefiguring subsequent Ballardian themes – are the adventures of the book’s British hero, Maitland, who undergoes a painful liberation from the tight confines of imposed (British) identity. When he tells his estranged wife, Susan, not to worry, “It’ll blow over”, during the opening passages of the book, he is not expressing complacency but a disturbing sense of relief: “As he turned the handle he realised that he had already begun to forget her, his mind withdrawing all contact with hers, erasing all memories” (p.16). Escaping from this scene through the sandbag tunnels, which provide the only form of pedestrian access in London, Maitland becomes trapped by falling masonry “like a rat in a pain corridor” (p.88) before fainting. In the traumatic rebirth which follows, the voices of two surgeons treating a victim of severe burns in an underground hospital carry through an air shaft causing the half-conscious Maitland to confuse his own identity with that of the victim. He imagines his hands to be in plaster casts and, on opening his eyes to total darkness, convinces himself that he is blind. Only after groping around his “bed” and finding first a brick and then a torch does he become capable of “assembling his mind again” (p.139). Maitland becomes the only character in the book capable of both action and perception, having finally “[shaken] himself free” (p.185) of both death wish and British lassitude.

Maitland’s temporary blindness recalls the opening of The Day of the Triffids, in which Bill Masen gingerly removes the bandages that have covered his eyes for a week to find that virtually everyone else in the world has been permanently blinded. Barry Langford suggests that Wyndham reverses “the traditional trope that physical blindness begets spiritual and moral insight”.[17] On this reading, the blinding of humanity is an allegorical comment on an all pervading lack of foresight, and Wyndham’s hero’s vision represents an opening of eyes by a few. Only through the experience of blindness, can Wyndham and Ballard’s characters learn to see properly and – as Langford points out – therefore reject their own complicity with the world’s death wish. The obvious forerunner of this reversed trope is H.G. Wells’s short story “The Country of the Blind” (1904), in which the sighted hero, far from becoming King as the famous proverb suggests, ends up dying an outcast rather than submit to having his eyes surgically removed. It is an allegory concerning the inhospitability of an ingrained and hidebound society (i.e. late Victorian and Edwardian England) to new ways of seeing (i.e. as advanced by representatives of the new science and the new politics, such as Wells himself). The development of the “scientific romance” created a brilliant device for presenting Well’s visionary ideals to a wider public in the face of this stasis and reaction. The “science” guaranteed the progressiveness of the social and cultural themes, while the “romance” provided a fictional space in which to situate this oppositional discourse against that of the restrictive ruling ideology. Stripped down to its elements, it can readily be seen how suitable the Wellsian model was for the purposes of the disgruntled middle classes in postwar Britain, who felt themselves dispossessed of their progressive destiny and abandoned within a country of the blind. Postwar Britain, unlike Edwardian England, was newly formed and therefore its mental frameworks had not yet had the chance to transform themselves into insurmountable barriers of unconscious habit. When the main characters of The Day of the Triffids, Bill Masen and Josella Playton, discuss “The Country of the Blind”, Bill is able to reassure Josella on precisely these grounds: “there’s no organized patria, no State, here – only chaos. Wells imagined a people who had adapted themselves to blindness. I don’t think that’s going to happen here …” (p.66, ch.5).

Parasites and Colonies

Much of the pleasure involved in reading The Day of the Triffids comes from its libertarian narrative, which revels in the freedom from governance and petty bureaucracy that chaos affords. This libertarianism travels the full political spectrum from Bill’s unembarrassed assessment of the relative merits of his private hospital room in comparison to a public ward (p.2, ch.1); to the wonderful evocation of “tribal communities” flowering across the former mining areas, led by the men who had been on night shift during the original disaster and so remained sighted (p.218, ch.16). While these latter communities are not linked to the book’s closing images of the progressive “colony” intent on establishing a new form of life on the Isle of Wight, they are celebrated precisely because “they’d escaped from being governed, and in spite of all their troubles they didn’t want any more of it” (ibid.). Nor is “tribal” necessarily being used to imply inferiority: one of the central ideas of the book is the need to become “more like a tribe than we ever were before” (p.104, ch.7). Ultimately these traits of independence and communality are valued in the book for their adaptability and held up against other more static forms of societal organisation. It is only by examining these rejected possibilities that we can understand how far Wyndham’s version of social Darwinism departs from stereotypical eugenicist fantasies of the “selection of the fittest”.

Throughout the book Bill and Josella retain a different sensibility from the group around Michael Beadley (with whom they eventually join).This group’s one ideological commandment, that “the race is worth preserving”, is used by a university sociologist to justify a stance of “autres temps, autres moeurs” (pp.98-100, ch.7). Bill and Josella accept these arguments on an intellectual level, even the regressive sexual politics which dictate that blind women can be saved for breeding but not blind men. However, when kidnapped by the socialist agitator, Coker, and forced to help groups of the blind to survive, neither can extricate themselves in the ruthless manner of Beadley and the others, although they are faced with the personal risk of disease. In particular, this period of enforced responsibility goes a long way to cure the prejudicial attitudes Bill had directed at women and the working class earlier in the book. Realising that he is up against the moral conditioning the sociologist had identified as the biggest obstacle to survival, doesn’t cure Bill’s sudden “damnable ability to see points on both sides” (p.111, ch.8). This virtue is enshrined in the enigmatic figure of Coker, whose accent and dialect modulate to suit his audience, leaving him equally at home quoting Marvell or cheerily enquiring, ‘“Wotcher, mates! ’Ow’s it going?”’ (p.145, ch.10). Coker is, as he freely acknowledges, a hybrid: a mixture of lower-class origins and progressive education – identical to that of Wells – representing the ideals and aspirations of a new middle class. It is, therefore, Coker who provides the challenge to Beadley’s argument that sexual essentialism is necessary for survival, through his impassioned polemic concerning the necessity of everyone being able to do everything:

The point is we’ll all have to learn not simply what we like, but as much as we can about running a community and supporting it. The men can’t just fill in a voting paper and hand the job to someone else. And it will no longer be considered that a woman has fulfilled all her social obligations when she has prevailed upon some man to support her and provide her with a niche where she can irresponsibly produce babies for someone else to educate. (p.150, ch.10)

In this assault on the “mental laziness and parasitism” (p.149, ch.10) of traditional gender roles, a new vocabulary of moral approbation is coined, which, unlike the superficially modern attitudes of the Beadley group, contains the force required to build a liberated society for the future.

A re-reading of The Day of the Triffids demonstrates how this moral framework is implied from the beginning and therefore strives to contest the conventional attitudes held by its readership (whether in 1951 or 2005) in order to open a space in which it can be received as a novel of ideas rather than merely an escapist fantasy. While Bill’s initial reluctance to smash shop windows for food is ostensibly portrayed as a lingering veneer of civilisation, the language in which he expresses it prefigures the insights he will eventually gain: “… the moment I stove-in one of those sheets of plate-glass … I should become a looter, a sacker, a low scavenger upon the dead body of the system that had nourished me” (p.41, ch.3). The problem with parasitism is its generation of political and social inertia as – in a phenomenon well known to any thinking inhabitant of postwar Britain – the sense of a great past rapidly grows into a millstone dragging everyone down by the neck: “Whole races have had that sort of inferiority complex which has sunk into lassitude on the tradition of a glorious past” (p.209, ch.15). It is this understanding which drives the novel’s total repudiation of the authoritarian Torrence and his mad dream of making the country great again by creating a feudal order based on blind serfs: the ultimate form of parasitism. If parasitism represents all that is bad, then it is the values of living in a colony that are held up as virtuous. A representative of the Beadley group pitches life on the Isle of Wight to Bill and Josella: “We aren’t out to reconstruct – we want to build something new and better” (p.220, ch.16). While the former principles of the Beadley group are still notionally in place, we know that they will be challenged both by Bill and Josella, who are taking their blind friend Dennis with them, and by the indefatigable Coker, who has already arrived there. The novel’s defiantly upbeat ending, promising the reclamation of the mainland from the triffids, holds out to its disenfranchised progressive middle-class readership the promise of “the day when we, or our children, or their children” (p.233, ch.17) will finally establish a new society.

Wyndham took care that his triffids should not be read as “a kind of sample visitation – harbingers of worse to come if the world did not mend its ways and behave its troublesome self”(p.18, ch.2). The very choice of The Furies, with its mythological implication of paying for past sins, as a title for a book about England overrun by giant wasps, suggests that Roberts was deliberately replaying Wyndham’s work with a view to inversion and, ultimately, subversion. Roberts employs a number of direct parallels and jokes, including calling his hero and heroine, Bill Sampson and Janette “Pete” Peterson (a working-class prostitute rather than a socialite), and having their safe haven turn out not to be the Isle of Wight but the Channel Islands – the location in the earlier book of those who reject, or are rejected by, the new society of the Beadley group. The net effect of these allusions is to rewrite the key concepts of parasites and colonies.

Trading on the British war experience, Roberts has his wasps capture people and put them in POW camps. The inhabitants of one hut shoot their way to freedom with a crossbow constructed in best Colditz-style underneath the antennae of their guards, before forming themselves into an active resistance group. The irony is that most prisoners prefer to stay with the wasps and enter into a productive and ecologically sound symbiotic relationship. This causes great identity problems for the freedom fighters, forced to hide in caves and referred to by Roberts as “the colony”, such that the hero comes to admit: “It seemed to me it was we who were the parasites. We were still living off the remnants of the old culture. The farmers were trying to stabilise a new ecology, a balance that included men and insects as working partners” (p.167, ch.12). In the grip of this middle-class anxiety, Roberts seems reduced to little more than a petulant romantic individualism: early on, the narrator writes “this is my book and I reckon I can start it any way I want” (p.7, ch.1). However, the inevitable doomed conclusion to this stance – so popular in late 1960s popular culture – is thwarted even as the wasps corner the hero and heroine, fleeing from the massacre of their comrades.

On a purely narrative level, the bizarre twist in the tale by which the Furies are defeated, or defeat themselves, rings false. It seems too convenient that they should suddenly go mad at this particular point in the action because, we are told, they cannot make themselves understand machines and modern weapons with the minds of the wasp form they have adopted. This unheralded deus ex machina turns on a joke: the aliens originally picked on the form of the wasp – the perfect natural killing machine – as ideal for their aim of global domination because they had arrived at Earth during the time of the Roman Emperor Vespasian before equivalent artificial machinery had been invented. However, beneath this superficial absurdity lies a serious conclusion to the book’s ongoing social-Darwinist discourse: the notion of human adaptability is inherently paradoxical. If the endpoint of evolutionary adaptation is a perfect fit such as insects have developed with respect to their environment, then humans must be judged a failure for being totally dependent on the artificial props of their own civilisation. However, the corollary of this is that humans are only human to the extent that they are imperfect in an evolutionary sense. Roberts’s claim is that we do not adapt ourselves to our natural environment, but rather to our ongoing failure to fit that environment, and thus we need to live as both parasites and colonies: “We don’t know yet what form our New World is going to take; but we know whatever we build from the wreckage of a culture, in some way its got to be better…” (p.220, ch.14).

What Do You Expect of the Suburban Man?

The precondition for Wyndham’s and Roberts’s tales of the emergence of progressive heterogeneous societies, is the unfettering of the new middle class. Only “by using the words we used to use”, can Wyndham’s Bill Masen describe both the transformation of society and imply why it was necessary: “When I was a child we lived … in a southern suburb of London. We had a small house … and a small garden … There was not a lot to distinguish us from the ten or twelve million other people who used to live in and around London in those days” (p.17, ch.2). Suburbia is the word we use to describe the fetters holding back the new middle class. It is a condition that is brutally interrogated in John Christopher’s The Death of Grass.

Placid John Custance, a civil engineer, and cynical Roger Buckley are friends who make bridge fours with their wives and rent a caravan together for south coast holidays. The artificiality of this existence is rendered explicit by the global failure of cereal crops and consequent threat of total famine. One morning Roger tracks down John at his place of work: “The Government fell yesterday. Welling has taken over, but Lucas is still in the Cabinet”.[18] He goes on to explain the full significance:

“Atom bombs for the small cities, hydrogen bombs for places like Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds – and two or three of them for London …”

  For a moment, John was silent. Then he said slowly:

  “I can’t believe that. No one could do that.”

  “Lucas couldn’t. Lucas always was the common man’s Prime Minister – suburban constraints and suburban prejudices and emotions. But Lucas will stand by as a member of Welling’s Cabinet, ostentatiously washing his hands while the plans go forward. What do you expect of the common man?” (p.50, Ch.5).

Roger apparently relishes the opportunity to escape “suburban constraints” by becoming a “murdering bastard” and hopes John will too. The irony is that it turns out to be a much easier transition for John, who is so successful that he becomes the leader, than for Roger, who finds himself hampered by a dual perspective: seeing both the logic behind John’s increasingly assertive leadership and the sense behind their wives’ moral objections to it (see p.158, ch.10). These ways of seeing are thrown into stark relief by the unflinching depiction of the refugee experience of bewildered people pushing loaded handcarts through the length and breadth of England, subject to rape and extreme violence. This is the fictional return of the wartime memory that was repressed by the collective consciousness necessary to sustain the myths of postwar Britain: trekking – the phenomenon in which tens of thousands of British people left their homes empty every night in order to shelter from air-raids in the hills.[19] As Roger comments, “the world’s grown honest” (p.119, ch.8). Accordingly, the strong class bias of the new order cannot be concealed, as witnessed by John’s mental rejection of the overtures of a man wanting to join his group: “A manual worker of some kind; the sort of man who would give a lifetime’s faithful inefficient service …. A few months ago, the pipe-dream had probably been a £75,000 win on the football pools” (p.141, ch.9).

Nonetheless, John ends up accepting the fealty of a number of regional working-class men and so – following the logic of the Hegelian dialectic – reinforces their material stolidity as the precondition of his own feudal lordship. The biblical resolution to the novel, in which John’s farmer brother David is killed – possibly by John – in the storming of the hidden valley that alone offers hope of survival, implies that this feudalism will continue to haunt the ostensibly progressive closing vision: ‘“There’s a lot to do,” [John] said. “A city to be built”’ (p.191, ch.13). Like Wyndham, Christopher also employs direct textual references to Wells’s “The Country of the Blind”, but to an intentionally opposite effect. The hidden valley in the Lake District is called Blind Gill: “Cyclops Valley would have been a better name for it for it looked out of one eye only” (p.6, “Prodrome”). When John makes the decision to storm the valley in the face of his brother’s powerlessness to let him bring in his retainers, his wife reacts bitterly to what she perceives to be his driving ambition: ‘“When you’re King of Blind Gill,” she said, “how long will it be, I wonder, before they make a crown for you?”’ (p.185, ch.12). The implication is that the ambition to become the King of the Blind reflects more on the limited vision of the holder than on any prospect of transforming society. This scepticism concerning the potential for success of such a middle-class project suggests that the book can be read as a critical commentary on The Day of the Triffids. Christopher remains truer to the ambiguity of the original proverb than to the Wellsian allegory, which serves as Wyndham’s model.

In an article, “British Science Fiction”, Priest describes The Death of Grass as “probably a better novel than anything Wyndham wrote” and particularly praises the way that Christopher concentrates “on the personality development and regression, respectively, of the two leading characters”.[20] It is not entirely clear whether Priest assumes that it is obvious which character develops and which regresses, or whether the statement is deliberately ambiguous – rather as we have seen the book to be. Perhaps Priest is suggesting that the real strength of Christopher’s book lies in its generation of a double optic which allows both of these possible dynamics to be viewed simultaneously. This is certainly the effect he employs in his own Fugue for a Darkening Island, but with the added refinement of allowing these simultaneous dynamics of development and regression to unfold in one single character.

The name of this character, Alan Whitman, foregrounds race as the crucial issue of the text. The opening sentence is “I have white skin”.[21] Whitman’s earliest childhood memory is of hiding from the bogey: “some monstrous being with black skin that was out to get me” (p.24). His unfolding story is interlaced with incidental reports on the rise to power of a right-wing neo-racist politician, John Tregarth. When nuclear war in Africa leads to the arrival of what will eventually be two million African immigrants – “Afrims” – in Britain, a vicious civil war breaks out and both the UN and “advisory” US marines become involved. While Priest’s immediate political reference points are clearly Enoch Powell and Vietnam, the situation is directly compared to “the early months of the second world war” (p.41) with the implication that racism and xenophobia are integral elements of the Myth of the Blitz and postwar Britain.[22] Whitman’s complicity in these processes is shown obliquely. As an apparently liberal lecturer and member of a pro-Afrim college society, he criticises others for joining the society not out of commitment but for their own ends: “It was people such as these who first discredited the movement, as they were unable to answer the charges in the press and other media that the pro-Afrim groups were left-wing revolutionaries” (p.41). Yet his own account reveals that far from being committed, he is pre-occupied with an affair and joins the society to cover both his absences from his wife and his general detachment from life at the college (see pp.12, 44). Ultimately, the series of evasions and vacillations – including endless deliberations over whether to join the extreme-right “Nationalists” or the liberal “Secessionists” – lead to the abandonment of reason in the disturbing climax: “In the morning I murdered a young African and stole his rifle, and by the afternoon I was again in the countryside” (p.125). The book is a masterpiece in the way it clinically exposes how both postwar Britain and the oppositional middle-class disaster genre are equally haunted by the emotional logic of Fascism: better to end in horror than to endure horror without end.

That is the trajectory of regression that Priest uses Whitman to represent. However the recurring motifs and interlinked themes of the swirling fugue structure of the book, allow him simultaneously to generate an alternative figuration of a Whitman whose skin is not white but “smudged with dirt” (p.5). If Whitman’s failings are those of the bystanding common man, these can also, following Christopher, be replayed specifically as the failings of suburban man. Priest takes the work of his predecessor a step further by intercutting the refugee experiences of Whitman and his wife and daughter with scenes from their earlier life to create one huge revolving nightmare, which demonstrates rootless drifting displacement to be the latent content of the suburban condition. Once rendered explicit, however, this displacement holds open the possibility of an unfettered existence “outside the law” (p.111). This “comparative freedom” is fleetingly experienced by Whitman as he camps out with his wife and daughter (p.46) and again when wintering with the refugee group led by the “social visionary”, Lateef (pp.109-112). The non-white Lateef is Whitman’s double, as is acknowledged in their first encounter: “for several minutes we regarded each other carefully, each seeing in the other a man who responded to a situation in the same way as himself” (p.6). Throughout the book they make parallel attempts to confront their true situation only for Whitman to finally sink into crisis at the very moment when Lateef at last finds the resolve to fight for their utopian possibilities: “The refugees can unite, defend themselves. With rifles we can take back what is ours … freedom!” (p.102). This hint of a political dimension allows the shadowy outlines of an alternative trajectory of development for Whitman to be glimpsed through the murk. Whitman’s first committed act in the book is the shooting down of a helicopter which sets up the possibility of a time loop in that, although chronologically a subsequent event, it seems to be the necessary precondition of his first meeting with Lateef beside a crashed helicopter. This time loop short-circuits the narrative concerning the abduction of Whitman’s wife and daughter, and allows the comparative freedom of their joint refugee experience to be cycled continuously. From this perspective, the racist closing act of the novel can perhaps be redeemed as a declaration of commitment to Lateef’s vision of an interracial refugee utopia.

By locating these dynamics of development and regression in the same character, Priest succeeds in grasping the essential indeterminacy of the new middle class, procrastinating rather than choosing between two destinies: nihilistic reaction or progressive utopia. This deconstruction of the suburban condition as a mode of evasion is characterised by a strange interlude on the South coast: “Within a few hundred yards of the barricade I found myself in suburban streets which, because of their façade of normality, appeared strange to me” (p.119). Whitman quickly discovers the illusoriness of this situation: a four page edition of the Daily Mail is being produced in France, while BBC television consists entirely of American light entertainment programs on a closed-circuit system, broadcast from Worthing. His subsequent verdict serves as a retrospective judgement on the experience of the new middle classes in postwar suburbia: “I could not believe it to be real, but thought of it as an artificial restoration of normal life in an abnormal state” (p.123). In the rejection of this illusion, Priest registers the end of thirty years of enchantment and the beginning of Britain’s forcible return, dragged kicking and screaming, into the world historical current.

 Conclusion

This middle-class genre is not a straightforward expression of either a reactionary hatred for, or a progressive alternative to, postwar Britain and its universalised working-class culture. The dominant trope of vision is not simply intended to contrast with a supposed British blindness, but in all these books signifies a “damnable ability to see points on both sides”. Collectively these works amount to an alternative history of the heterogeneous new middle class, which is as fully conscious of their parasitical tendencies as of their colonising potential, and not afraid to confront a terrifying indeterminacy. In calculating the value of this history to us at the present time it is only necessary to consider two points. First, until recently it was received historical opinion that this class fraction in Germany was the major basis of support for the Nazis.[23] Second, New Labour target their policies primarily at the new middle class (“Middle England”) – now counted as an actual majority of the population – who they consider to be solely concerned with being “better off”.[24] The blinkered vision evident in the latter approach renders itself wilfully blind to the haunting legacies of the former period, even as it plays the immigration card for reactionary ends. By denying anything other than a narrow socio-economic motivation to their electorate, New Labour fetter themselves with suburban constraints and suburban prejudices and emotions.

Now more than ever is it worth stating that science fiction is, and always has been since Wells, a new middle class medium in which the class has freely expressed its own aspirations to escape the fetters of not only socio-economic position (the planet’s surface, as it were), but also the rigid identities of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and class itself. The traditions of sf remain not only a utopian reservoir, but a utopian reservoir constructed in the face of reactionary pressures. So at a time when a new heightened context of war and world terrorism is developing daily, the importance of sf in general and – to those in England – of the disaster genre in particular, is that it provides a form and a vocabulary for projecting utopian trajectories over the chasms of despair and holding the otherwise inevitable descent into nihilism at bay. The suburbs of Middle England may yet burn again but the hybrids will adapt, survive and build anew.

Notes

[1] 1. Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree (London: House of Stratus, 2001), p.280.

[2] 2. Mark Slattery, ‘Down on the Triffid Farm’, New Statesman, 19 November 2001, p.39.

[3] 3. Ibid.

[4] 4. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, England 1918-1951 (Oxford: OUP, 1998), pp.531, 533.

[5] 5. L.J. Hurst, ‘“We are the Dead”: The Day of the Triffids and Nineteen Eighty-Four’, http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/l.j.hurst/weredead.htm, p.3.

[6] 6. J.G. Ballard, Guardian, 14.03.02

[7] 7. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2000), p.1.

[8] 8. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p.5.

[9] 9. Hurst, ‘Remembrance of Things to Come: Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Day of the Triffids Again’, http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/l.j.hurst/firstpar.htm, p.2.

[10] 10. Ibid.

[11] 11. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p.8.

[12] 12 Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, XIII (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), p.503.

[13] 13. See Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), pp.119-172.

[14] 14. See Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1992).

[15] 15. Keith Roberts, The Furies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p.168.

[16] 16. Barry Langford, “Introduction” to Wyndham, op. cit., pp.vii-xvii, at p.xv.

[17] 17. Ibid., p.x.

[18] 18. John Christopher, The Death of Grass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p.49 (ch.5).

[19] 19. See Tom Harrisson, ed., Living Through the Blitz (London: Collins, 1976).

[20] 20. Christopher Priest, “British Science Fiction” in Patrick Parrinder, ed., Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (London: Longman, 1979), pp.187-202, at p.195.

[21] 21. Priest, Fugue for a Darkening Island (London: Pan, 1978), p5.

[22] 22. Anyone who doubts that racial divisions were starkly visible in wartime London air raid shelters should consult Harrisson, op. cit., and also his article, “War Adjustment”, New Statesman and Nation, 28 September 1940, pp.300-301.

[23] 23. For a full discussion see Val Burris, “The Discovery of the New Middle Classes” in Arthur J Vidich, ed., The New Middle Classes: Lifestyles, Status Claims and Political Orientations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp.15-54.

[24] 24. See Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party (London: Abacus, 1999), pp.122, 212, 398-399.

 

BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2019 Shortlist Part Two

The first part of this review is here.

Gareth L. Powell, Fleet of Knives (Titan Books, 405pp.)

This is the sequel to Embers of War (2018), which won Best Novel in the BSFA Awards last year, and the middle volume in a trilogy that has just been completed by the recent publication of Light of Impossible Stars (2020). Powell has variously mentioned the influence of Iain M. Banks and also discussed how much he enjoyed Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014) and one can see resonances of these influences (and perhaps of TV shows such as Blakes 7 and Firefly) in the plot which focuses on not just one but two spaceships and their disparate small crews caught up in wide-ranging events. As a lover of space opera, and all of those listed examples in particular, I very much enjoyed Fleet of Knives. It is tightly plotted and the device of telling the narrative in turn from three (sometimes more) perspectives is expertly employed here to keep the reader turning the pages. The emphasis is very much on the fast-paced action rather than science or extensive characterisation; hence, the propensity of mutant Crayfish-parasites from the hypervoid to munch through subsidiary crew members. However, there is space for some thoughtful development by main characters such as Sal Konstanz and, in particular, from the two ships themselves, the Trouble Dog and Lucy’s Ghost (which I couldn’t help thinking of as a possible reference to Wordsworth: ‘she seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years’).

Perhaps the novel’s greatest strength is Powell’s avowed focus on ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances which when combined with the background political themes, means that its heart is always in the right place. That has always seemed to me one of the chief points of genre fiction (and why I always return to it): it shows how everyday qualities of friendship, responsibility, collaboration and self-sacrifice can combine to resist apparently overwhelming forces (in this case, the problems inherent to espousing the ideology of ‘the greater good’). Powell understands and conveys this well but there is also a slightly offbeat, quirky side to his writing which underpins his popularity. I’m looking forward to reading the recently-published third volume in the trilogy, Light of Impossible Stars.

Emma Newman, Atlas Alone (Gollancz, 308pp)

This is the fourth and possibly final novel in the Planetfall series, the third of which, Before Mars (2018), was shortlisted for the BSFA Best Novel Award last year. Although these are all fairly self-contained and may be read in any order, it probably does make most sense (as Newman has noted on her blog) to first read After Atlas (2016), which was shortlisted for the 2017 Clarke Award. The events of Atlas Alone follow on directly from that earlier novel and involve the same three key characters, Carlos, Travis and Dee – although the latter rather than the former is now the main protagonist. After Atlas was (like McKenna’s The Green Man’s Foe) a play on the country house murder but order was very much not restored and the novel ended with a crime of colossal magnitude: all out nuclear war on Earth. This crime overshadows Atlas Alone and provides the context for a very different crime novel, which boldly navigates complex ethical issues. Once it was into its stride (and it does take a while to get going because Dee has a very emotionally flat take on life – for reasons that become apparent), this was the novel from the list that made me gasp and pause in trepidation before turning the page. It is also the novel from the list which has made me think the most and I’m still not sure where I stand on the issues raised or even if it is just best read as very, very bleak Nineteen Eighty-Four style ironic humour.

The novel revolves around games (and implicitly games-based thinking) even though there is only one very intense explicitly game-set sequence. This sequence is set in a London of the 2030s which is very recognisable as a rundown version of our own society. In the sequence’s timeline, this is the threshold for the end of Western liberal democracy and the beginning of the corporate dystopia which forms the present-day setting for the novels. This simultaneously simple-but-complex temporal set-up works really well to convey our present today by merging personal concerns (Dee’s relationship with her parents) with a very contemporary sense of social justice. At the same time, the novel is deceptively clever in the way it analyses God and religion; it can be read on several different levels. It left me feeling that, like Dee, I wanted to play the game of the novel and win; but also that this desire reveals some hard truths about myself that I don’t necessarily want to confront but have now been made to.

Thoughts: For the first time (I think) all five short-listed novels are sequels (if we consider Atlas Alone to be the sequel to After Atlas rather than simply another instalment in the Planetfall series). Although some of these are more self-contained than others (in particular, The Green Man’s Foe works as a standalone), I think that most are better read after reading their respective predecessors. This means that anyone not regularly reading in the genre who wants to read the shortlist would be best advised to read nine or ten novels rather than the five shortlisted. Of course, most people nominating and voting are reading in the genre. Technically, the short-listed novels last year were also in trilogies/sequences although two (Powell’s Embers of War and Thompson’s Rosewater) were the first of their trilogies (and this will also become retrospectively true of 2015 when Justina Robson publishes the sequel to Glorious Angels which she is currently writing). I’m not sure if this prominence of sequences/trilogies is a tendency or just a product of the books on offer over the last couple of years (and even it was a tendency, it might well be coming to an end according to Powell who has recently said in an interview in the March 2020 issue of Locus that publishers are moving away from trilogies and asking for more standalone novels). Nor can we speculate on the division between sf and the mainstream growing: two years ago, the last time I made a specific effort to read the shortlist in advance of the award (for novels published in 2017), there was a different kind of range of books listed: Nina Allan’s The Rift (which won), Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time (which won the 2018 Clarke Award), Ann Leckie’s Provenance and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. A more sophisticated cultural analysis – also looking at Hugos, Clarkes and other awards – is needed to say something substantive about these trends. Well, I’m not sure how needed it is but I am planning to do something along these lines as a big project over the next 4-5 years – hence there will be more posts of this type.

While trilogies/sequences have always been important within the genre, they seem to have been particularly central to the last decade in which Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy have been perhaps the most prominent landmark, paradigm-shifting publications, over a period which has also seen Dave Hutchinson’s Europe books, Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach, Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers and Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire. There are probably several factors involved in this including some advantage to publishers if the trilogy/series gains traction and (generalising at a more fundamental social level) an ongoing shift in identity so that the bourgeois patriarchal individualism of the traditional novel is now even less relevant than it was to most of the twentieth century (you can imagine – because I have absolutely no intention of writing one at this juncture – a long, complex, historical academic essay setting this all out). However, possibly the key context for the popularity of these series at the moment (and again I do stress that these are often radically different from each other) is that they offer some sort of counter narrative to the ongoing political disorder resulting from the accelerated 21C disintegration of the postwar Western liberal democracies into dysfunctional states (currently being brought into sharp focus by the coronavirus pandemic). The novels on the current BSFA shortlist, to different extents, involve resistance of various kinds: non-normative identities, acceptance rather than rejection of the alien, social justice, the centring of perspectives other than the 20C human ‘universal’ subject. This trend – which probably holds for most recent shortlists – is set to continue because we need these stories of resistance and difference.

I’m really pleased with myself that I decided to do this because I have really enjoyed all five novels. Choosing which novel to vote for is more difficult but in the end for me it came down to a choice between The Rosewater Insurrection and Atlas Alone: and Atlas Alone just shades it because I’m still trying to play that game out in my mind for the perfect win.

[Edit:] And the winner was Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin.

BSFA Awards Best Novel of 2019 Shortlist Part One

This isn’t the first time I’ve read the BSFA Best Novel shortlist but it’s the first time I’ve written about it (as notes towards what might eventually cohere into a bigger project). The BSFA Award is determined by member’s votes (including the membership of this year’s Eastercon), so I am not going to attempt to predict the winner. Nor am I going to rank these novels; although I will indicate the one that I am going to put first on the ballot. I discuss three novels here and the other two will be discussed in Part Two, which will also include some wider thoughts on the shortlist.

Juliet E. McKenna, The Green Man’s Foe (Wizards’s Tower Press, 256pp.)

Juliet McKenna is the only author on this list whose work I have never read at all before; but I’m certainly going to read some more because I really enjoyed this. In some ways it is the odd book out here (although the other four are not all the same kind of thing either) not just because it is contemporary fantasy but also because it is set in a familiar English small-town setting with recognisable social divisions between middle-, respectable working-, estate-under-, and old servant-classes. Well, I say ‘familiar’ but as someone who divides their time between a Welsh university town and London, it’s the kind of place I would try and avoid like the plague in real life. However, it’s a mark of how much fun this was that I was able to put aside the suspicion that I wouldn’t make the grade with most of these people and just go with the flow. For example, I wouldn’t pass the ‘You’re not anti blood sports?’ test but that didn’t put me off rather fancying the gruff gamekeeper Rufus. Or to put it another way, England and its pristine culture of capitalism becomes bearable when sprinkled with dryads, naiads and a Green Man.

Joking aside, the strength of The Green Man’s Foe is good, tight storytelling and enough sharply-drawn characters to enable a satisfying rage of social interactions. The fact that the protagonist, Dan, is the son of a dryad allows him to see and be aware of things that (most of) the other humans around him cannot. However, the most endearing thing about him is his honest, straightforward character which is expressed in his everyday dealings with other folk and also in his work ethic. The pacing of the novel is structured around the working day and this gives it solidity and meaning. The fact that Dan is a skilled craftsman – a carpenter and joiner – grounds him in use values which are here affirmed over waste and decay, which is associated with a malevolent presence somewhere in the estate surrounding Brightwell House in Bourton under Ashes, where Dan has ostensibly been sent in order to project-manage its refurbishment into a hotel (but also by the Green Man to root out whatever evil lurks there). Like the country-house murder stories of golden age detective fiction, The Green Man’s Foe turns on the restoration of order but it espouses a more socially-just twenty-first-century kind of order than those predecessors.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin (Pan, 565pp.)

This is the sequel to Children of Time, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. That surprised me at the time because I wasn’t expecting a book with talking spiders to win, even though I had been as charmed and enthralled with the adventures of Portia, Fabian and company as everyone else seemed to be. The (single as opposed to multiple) iterations of Portia and Fabian in Children of Ruin don’t disappoint (although Viola has the best line in dry matriarchal wit) but here the spiders have to compete with the octopi (or octopodes or octopuses), Paul and Salome. This sounds anthropomorphic – and part of the attraction of these novels is undoubtedly the pleasure we gain from reading about talking animals – but the effect is actually rather estranging. There is a great scene in the novel in which Portia and her human friend, Helena are trying to negotiate with Paul in a bubble of water suspended in space, in which we as readers are nicely triangulated out of our normal human perspective. The octopuses’ incapacity for instrumental reason is refreshing and yet at the same time, their behaviour – including their propensity to act on their emotional belief of the rightness of their stance – nicely satirizes aspects of human society.

As one would expect, Tchaikovsky balances plot and worldbuilding expertly as we switch between the past story of a terraforming team from the Old Earth and the novel’s present in which a team of spiders and humans (collectively ‘Humans’) are led across the galaxy by radio signals to discover what has resulted from that terraforming. Aside from the unpredictable octupuses, the novel also features a particularly invasive alien species, which gives rise to some well-worked horror scenarios as well as raising similar questions to The Rosewater Insurrection about what accepting difference really entails. The novel’s 550-odd pages allow a very convincing exploration of different forms of society, difference and identity. The discovery that ‘there is no hard line where the Human ends and the alien begins’ is no liberal platitude but a conclusion earned from the philosophical arguments of the book. There’s also a very nice little play on Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ which was both funny but also indicative of Tchaikovsky’s intention to move beyond the limits of the twentieth century.

 Tade Thompson, The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, 375pp.)

Rosewater (2016), which won the inaugural Nommo Award for Best Novel in 2017 and the 2019 Clarke Award (following its first UK publication in 2018), is a sharp and arresting combination of first-person noir-style thriller with complex temporal structure which delivers a sequence of payoffs over its closing chapters. The sequel is even better. At the recent London Science Fiction Research Community discussion of Rosewater, some time was devoted to thinking about how the, in some respects, limited emotional intelligence of the protagonist, Kaaro, conditions what is disclosed in the novel and restricts how much the reader is able to access equally or potentially more interesting female characters such as Bicycle Girl or Aminat. While the former remains an enigmatic (very) occasional presence, we get plenty of the latter as Thompson switches between the point of view of several different characters; even including extracts from a Rosewater-set novel. Towards the end of the novel, the fictional novelist appears as a protagonist in several very funny but also moving sections. However, the most significant new character is Alyssa, who we first encounter waking up with a man and suddenly realising that she is in the body of this man’s wife, who is also the mother of a teenage daughter, but that she is not that person.

Who Alyssa really is and her relationship is to the alien in Rosewater becomes one of the central threads of the plot, which is entwined with the attempts of the Mayor of Rosewater to make the city independent of Nigeria. But the true attraction of The Rosewater Insurrection, aside from the mordant humour, is the variety of intriguing human relationships it explores between the engaging and distinctive characters. We do care about these people (and robots, dogs and aliens) even – as in some cases – while laughing at the misfortunes that befall them. The novel makes some telling points about human sources of division, such as gender, skin colour and the relation of mind-body duality to AI and robots: ‘Humans want to be machines: machines want to be humans’, we are told in an aside that reminded me of some of Philip K. Dick’s thinking about androids. Sometimes it is argued that these divisions that plague society would be put aside in the face of an external threat such as an alien invasion but The Rosewater Redemption convincingly demonstrates how misplaced that idea is. Rather, it suggests that the real test of openness and inclusivity lies in whether we can find it in ourselves to accept the alien and the changes that come with it. Unless, of course, the alien is like a triffid (who can resist a Wyndham reference?), in which case it is still permissible to try and obliterate it.

The Exile Waiting [1975] by Vonda N. McIntyre

This review first appeared in BSFA Review 9 (Spring 2020) – I’ve added a few additional thoughts at the end which did not appear in the published version. My review of McIntyre’s Dreamsnake can be found here.

The Exile Waiting by Vonda N. McIntyre (Handheld Press, 2019)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble

Handheld Press originally intended to bring out this edition in 2020 for the 45th anniversary of the original publication but production was brought forward when Vonda McIntyre was diagnosed with a terminal condition. Unfortunately, she never got to hold this handsome volume before passing away in April 2019. The inclusion of an excellent and detailed afterword by Una McCormack, as well as a list of McIntyre’s writings and helpful suggestions for further reading, make this an invaluable memorial. Also included is a fascinating short story, ‘Cages’, appearing in print for the first time since 1972, which details the origins of the ‘pseudosibs’, Subone and Subtwo, whose unexpected arrival from space drives the action of the novel.

The Exile Waiting, McIntyre’s first novel, is set on the same world as her better-known Dreamsnake (1978) and like that book is predicated on values of individual agency, responsibility and consent that speak directly to the intersectional politics of the twenty-first century. For example a conversation between protagonists Mischa, a streetwise ‘sneakthief’ who lives in the domed city of Center, and Jan, an offworld traveller who arrives with the pseudosibs, goes as follows:

 

‘You talk like nothing was ever anybody’s fault’

‘I don’t think it is, the way you mean it. Not when another person can make decisions too.’

 

The logic of this is essentially anarchist: that one is responsible for one’s own choices and actions and can’t indirectly blame others by saying ‘it’s not my fault’. However, while arguably this kind of 1960s counter-cultural value eventually collapsed into selfish 1980s neoliberal individualism, Jan’s point is not so much that one is entitled to ignore others in need because they’ve made their choices and they should live by them, but rather that if you decide to help someone, it’s a choice that you have made and you can’t then ascribe anything that happens as a result to the fault of the person you are helping. The overall result of following such values is a very different set of interactions and relationships than the hierarchical ones found in Western societies or Mischa’s native Center, where freedom is normally understood purely in the negative sense of people not being forced to do anything against their will. Jan’s offworld values implicitly suggest a different, more utopian form of freedom which can only be expressed positively through fully mutual interaction with the other, where both parties accept responsibility for themselves.

This sounds dry and theoretical when described in the abstract, but the subtlety of McIntyre’s writing lies in the way in which she weaves this theme into both the action of the novel and the personal relationships of her characters. Mischa, Jan and Subtwo all have to extricate themselves from unsatisfactory mutual bonds in order to try and build more positive relationships with others in the context of the hierarchical slave-owning society of Center. Their personal experiences of the power exchange involved in mutual relationships intersect with their roles in the wider power struggle for control of Center. However, McIntyre avoids the main pitfall of novels of revolution by refusing to subordinate personal development to the achievement of the desired social change. As Fredric Jameson points out in a 1987 article on The Exile Waiting, collected in his Archaeologies of the Future (2005), McIntyre not only illustrates some of the ways in which genre writing can generate characterisation as complex as any high literary novel, but she also solves SF’s structural problem with closure. The need of novels for formal resolution sits at odds with SF’s desire to boldly go beyond closed thinking and social constraints. McIntyre transcends this problem by relating personal development to spatial experience. Her reformulation of the relationship between personal subjectivity and social intersubjectivity into an interplay between inside and outside, scales up from Mischa hiding in a cave from the people of Center, to her looking down on the planet from a departing spaceship. The Exile Waiting is not a linear narrative with a beginning, middle and happy-ever-after ending, but an imaginative illustration of how an exploration of individual and social possibility without limits would proceed.

Afterthoughts: following on from Jameson’s argument that The Exile Waiting illustrates how science fiction functions as a spatial genre and so evades closure – including his point that the process of reading a book is itself a spatial operation involving taking the mind outside the physical constraints of the body, room, district, geo-political state etc. – and ignoring his argument that this distinguishes its texts from others that have come to be called ‘fantasy’, I was wondering what other texts exemplify this kind of movement in particular (as opposed to simply functioning as picaresque adventures across an endless sprawl – although these stories are also good!). One example that occurred to me when reading it recently was Justina Robson’s The Switch (2017) which also relates personal development to spatial experience in a manner that is structurally similar to The Exile Waiting (for the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that Robson’s novel is in any way derivative of McIntyre’s). I’m also thinking that Tricia Sullivan’s work (see my review of Occupy Me [2016]) operates similarly in some (not straightforward) ways and so an essay on Robson and Sullivan might be an interesting way to try and think this through.

Electric Dreams (2017) by Philip K. Dick

This review first appeared in BSFA Review 8 (Autumn 2019)

Electric Dreams by Philip K. Dick (Gollancz, 2017)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble

Given that the electorate of both the UK and the US voted (narrowly) in 2016 in favour of some form of return to the 1950s, it seems particularly apt that a selection of Philip K. Dick’s stories from the 1950s should provide the source material for one of 2017’s high-profile television series. While the series itself is beyond the remit of this review, it is worth noting, as Adam Roberts did when reviewing it for the Times Literary Supplement of 20 October 2017, that despite good points it tends to suffer the consequences of over-elaborating Dick’s short punchy tales. The advantage of this TV tie-in paperback from Gollancz is that, while it includes what are on the whole interesting short pieces from the writers who have adapted these tales for the screen, it allows Dick’s stories the space to stand or fall on their own merits some sixty years after they were originally written.

If like me, you’ve read at some point in the past pretty much all of Dick’s novels and the collected short stories, then it might seem as if this apparently random set of ten stories would have little new to offer. Indeed, following an initial look through the contents page, I was anticipating a set of dry runs for Dick’s first really great novel, Time Out of Joint (1959), which anticipates a future in which the hero Ragle Gumm is so haunted by a desire for the 1950s that we find him living in a pocket universe set in that decade. The first story in the anthology, ‘Exhibit Piece’ (1953), seems to bear out this prediction, as the curator of a mid-twentieth century ranch style Californian bungalow in a futuristic ‘History Agency’ disappears into his own exhibit. However neither his affectation of the accent ‘of an American businessman of the Eisenhower administration’ nor his penchant for colloquialisms of the period such as ‘dig me?’ equip him to deal with the essential Cold-War horror of a period lived under the shadow of the Hydrogen Bomb. What this and the other stories brought home to me was how the conformity of the 1950s – the white heterosexual married-with-kids world of suburban commuting and hire-purchase-fuelled consumption – was relentlessly driven by fear and repression.

Dick registers this hidden reality in a variety of ways; perhaps most movingly in ‘Foster, you’re dead’ (1955), the story of the teenage boy who can’t handle the fact that his family is the only one in town without a nuclear fallout shelter. His father knows that the production and marketing of these shelters is designed to maintain domestic consumption and yet ultimately he is unable to handle his son’s unhappiness and so gives in. Of course, almost immediately, changes in Soviet weapon technology render the shelter obsolete and in need of an expensive update, leading to the father complaining that the company has them over a barrel because they have to keep buying or otherwise run the risk of dying: ‘They always said the way to sell something was create anxiety in people’. What is particularly telling is the relief of their neighbours that now the Fosters also have what they have, everybody is the same. While, in this case, a father surrenders to conformity for the sake of his son, in ‘The Father-Thing’ (1954) a son has to fight the threat of conformity embodied by the alien form that has grown in the garden and taken over the place of his father.

Dick focuses on intergenerational familial conflict in these two stories, but more typically conformism was seen as a societal and ideological question of the time. The alien cocoons of ‘The Father-Thing’ are just one of a range of similar manifestations from the decade, the most famous of which being the pods in Don Siegel’s 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers – adapted from Jack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers (1954). It has never been clear to me when watching that film whether it’s a warning about McCarthyism or Communism; and maybe its strength is that it can be taken either way. The story in Electric Dreams which comes closest to expressing this kind of power is ‘The Hanging Stranger’ (1953), in which Ed Loyce can’t understand why people in his town are carrying on as normal although a dead body is hanging from the lamppost. It is another alien invasion story with a twist but as the screenwriter and director Dee Rees writes in her introduction to the story, ‘obliviousness is the real alien that destroys’. Too many people just go home after work with, in the words of the story, ‘their minds dead’. As Rees notes, the US presidential campaign was marked by exactly the same phenomenon of people not reacting to the body in the square right before their eyes.

Overall, therefore, Electric Dreams left me wondering not so much about America’s desire to return to the 1950s but whether it ever left that decade in the first place. Stories such as ‘The Commuter’ (1953) and ‘Sales Pitch’ (1954) are in their different ways fundamentally concerned with the difficulty of escaping from consumerist conformity into a warmer, brighter future. Sometimes Dick portrays his lower-middle-class protagonists – salesmen and store-keepers – as held back by the conformity of their wives and he is by no means immune to the casual sexism of the time. However, one story that has both a happy ending and a feminist twist, is ‘Human Is’ (1955), in which protagonist, Jill, finally escapes from the emotional neglect of her cold-hearted, careerist, workaholic husband, Lester, by covering up for the much nicer alien who takes over his body. Maybe there is a route out of the 1950s after all.

Kingdoms of Elfin (2018) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This review first appeared in the BSFA Review issue 7 (Summer, 2019)

Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner (Handheld Press, 2018)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble

Originally published as short stories in The New Yorker, and first collected in 1977, Kingdoms of Elfin was the last of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s books to be published in her lifetime. Although some of her books were among the first to be published as Virago modern classics in the late 1970s and her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), with its witch protagonist, is now well known, there was a period when Warner was chiefly remembered for her role in the anti-fascist generation of 1930s writers. Along with her life-partner, Valentine Acland, she joined the Communist Party and worked in support of the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. Kingdoms of Elfin, with its enchanting and enigmatic tales of fairies scattered across Europe and beyond, seems far removed from such political concerns and yet under the surface there is something inexorable which gives these stories an exquisite, but nonetheless mortally sharp, edge.

Warner’s fairies are fascinated with the short-lived humans around them but not overly bothered about their individual welfare. In the first of these stories, ‘The One and the Other’, a changeling accidentally kills the human he replaces – who has already grown old and been evicted from the fairy kingdom he was taken by – while experimenting on his blood but consoles himself with the thought that he can probably sell the body to the anatomists in Edinburgh. In ‘Elephenor and Weasel’, Elephenor finds himself working as the assistant to a travelling necromancer – involving, amongst other tasks, deploying his wings to imitate the devil – and loving every minute: ‘To have a great deal of power and no concern was the life for him’. In ‘The Occupation’, a group of fairies drive a Scottish clergyman mad by making a home in his manse and even attempting to clean it. In a rare but neat political twist, his wife leaves with the children ‘to live with her sister above a grocery shop in Glasgow, where she was much happier, just as dirty, and insisted on her standing as a Minister’s wife’.

Yet, if humans and their foibles are relentlessly subjected to dispassionate scrutiny, Warner’s fairies, themselves, are also often shown as the victims of capricious fate. Or, at least, that is how it appears when viewed from a conventional perspective but perhaps Warner’s greatest achievement is to encourage readers to dispense with their pre-existing moral frameworks, which are made to look narrowly time-bound in comparison with a more fluid fairy temporality. In ‘The Five Black Swans’, the dying Queen Tiphaine (Warner’s fairies are not immortal but have lifespans of centuries) of the Scottish elfin kingdom of Elphane, relives her relationship with the human Thomas of Ercildoune, making love outside whether in the dew-drenched grass, rain or even hail: ‘Love was in the present: in the sharp taste of the rowanberries he plucked for her, in the winter night when a gale got up and whipped them to the shelter of a farm where he kindled a fire and roasted turnips on a stick, in their midnight mushroomings, in the long summer evenings when they lay on their backs too happy to move or speak, in their March-hare cuvettings and cuffings.’ Here, the pure moment contains all of existence and thereby encompasses eternity as opposed to the insubstantiality of the conventional human present, enslaved by causality and condemned to endless unfulfilling repetition.

It’s not that fairies don’t have their problems. There is rather a lot of overly formal court procedure and an annoying class system that constrains those of the higher ranks from some of the more bodily pleasures, such as flying. However, being fairies, these boundaries are frequently transgressed. Long after they find themselves ejected at the text’s end on to the cold hillside, the memory of these tales will haunt readers with the lingering sense that we could live differently.

Regeneration (2015) by Stephanie Saulter

This review first appeared in BSFA Review 1 (Autumn 2017), pp.8-9.

Regeneration by Stephanie Saulter (Jo Fletcher Books, 2015)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble

Reading this final volume of the ®Evolution trilogy, it is difficult not to be aware of the contemporary social parallels of Saulter’s nearish-future techno not-quite-thrillers. While it is true that there are not communities of genetically-modified humans – ‘gems’, as distinct from non-genetically-modified ‘norms’ – living in trendy up-and-coming districts of London, nor has the general population yet crashed due to neural overload from digital devices, we do live in the world of social networks and competing memes that Saulter displays with sophistication and nuance. This is a tense world in which politicians representing minorities cannot afford to say anything that would ‘imply that we think we’re better than the people who think they’re our betters’ because changes have resulted in a reduction of jobs and therefore allowed people a negative way of talking about new developments ‘that they’re able to convince themselves isn’t bigoted’. In other words, we are not a million miles away from the Britain of the EU referendum and the divisive effect that it has had on society. At a time when so much – including gender, sexuality, western-centric thought, science, climate, and the nature of work – that we hitherto took for granted is in flux and prompting a reactionary nostalgia for traditional hierarchical values, it is good to be reminded that, as the opening sentence of the novel states, ‘It is a rare thing, to see change coming’. Unfortunately, we are all too aware of the truth of the second sentence: ‘Embracing it is rarer still’.

The plot of Regeneration concerns the opening of a tidal power energy station on the Thames, which is run and owned by a team of gillungs, gems who can breathe underwater. Through the innovative use of quantum batteries, ‘Thames Tidal’ promises to supply the energy needs of the city but at the cost of the existing biomass industry, which is a major employer of norms in the countryside around London and controlled by an entrenched financial elite. This same elite dominate a conservative political party, the ‘Traditional Democrats’ or ‘Trads’, attempting to wrest power from the more liberal ‘United People’s Party’, who support gem entrepreneurship and technology. Thus the scene is set for a power struggle between an inclusive, multicultural vision of the future and the determination of those with vested interests to defend them by stoking the fears of those outside the cities who feel left behind.

This archetypal conflict is intensified by the cumulative effect of the two previous volumes in the trilogy, Gemsigns (2013) and Binary (2014), which introduced us to the principal characters and established their background history. Gemsigns begins with the escape of a gem, who we only much later learn to be the enigmatically hunchbacked Aryel Morningstar, from a secret research facility. Thereafter, the novel is concerned with a special Congress in London to determine whether escaped gems should be given human rights or returned to the control of the corporations that have engineered them such as Bel’Natur, where power is wielded by the supremely cold Zavcka Klist. It is only when forced to save the telepathic gem child, Gabriel, from thugs over-zealously carrying out Zavcka’s orders, that Aryel reveals her true nature and dramatically carries him to safety. The sense of wonder engendered by this rescue, carried out in front of the eyes of the global media, connects directly with so many human desires for transformative magic that it overcomes the norms’ fear of difference and opens up a window for progressive change.

Binary, a much tighter novel, turns on Zavcka’s offer to Aryel of collaboration with gems to develop a human-binary interface for digital interaction. While the plot follows Bel’Natur’s attempts to replicate how the autistic gem Herran interfaces directly with binary code, it only becomes belatedly apparent that Zavcka’s motivation is to transfer her own unnatural longevity into immortality by finding a means of digitally transferring her consciousness into the clone she is illegally growing in the secret labs in the basement of the Bel’Natur building. Saulter’s mix of thriller elements, scientific extrapolation and character-driven drama is sometimes uneasy, especially in Gemsigns, and it is not always clear if we are reading a work of social vision or a police procedural. Indeed, the back cover blurbs of Binary and Regeneration give the erroneous impression that the norm police detective, Sharon Varsi is the main character. However, by the end of Binary, a genuinely powerful representation has been created of a dialectical struggle between progressive difference, as embodied by Aryel, and entitled power, as embodied by Zavcka.

What enables Regeneration to work as a satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy is that the opposition between Aryel and Zavcka is not simply mapped on top of the power struggles between the gem-run Thames Tidal and the Trads but provides depth by running at a tangent to the main plot of the novel. The same forces trying to sabotage the new power station are also looking for Zavcka’s clone, who is now being brought up as Gabriel’s younger sister, Eve. In this way, the traditional financial elite also hope to gain access to Zavka’s supposed immortality and thus entrench themselves in perpetuity. But what their hunger for power illustrates is a comparative lack of vision in contrast to both the gems, with their different sense of human possibilities, and Zavcka, with her different sense of time. In a nice touch, it is the latter who, while desperately trying to be the first one to get to the abducted Eve, recognises the revolutionary transformation of society taking place in the streets in which the gems and their allies have ‘become the pioneers of a new landscape’. Regeneration closes with the promise of a future for Eve as the new woman living in an age that has space for her.