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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BSFA Awards Best Novel Shortlist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Priest, Airside (Gollancz, 297pp.)

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

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

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

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

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

Naomi Mitchison’s The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) as SFF Text

My battered (after three reads) 1983 Virago paperback edition of Naomi Mitchison’s The Corn King and the Spring Queen

(Update: This is an expanded version of the original post that I’m including in my series on Scottish SFF, under the title ‘Road to Glasgow 2024’, in the run-up to the WorldCon in Glasgow in August)

This is the fourth instalment – and again it is very much work in progress rather than finished argument – in an occasional series about novels from the interwar period (I will be adding an overall rationale and index to the individual posts in due course). So far this series has included Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as SF Text, Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm as SF Text, and Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year as SF Text. As of now, I’m changing the scope from SF to SFF, which is an abbreviation signifying science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction, with the implication that these are inherently related forms of literature that are best thought about both collectively and individually at the same time (i.e. we don’t need to restrict ourselves to linear or binary modes of thinking). Given that the main protagonist of The Corn King and the Spring Queen turns herself into a snake at one point, describing the novel as fantasy is not controversial in any way even though it was probably conceived of as historical fiction at the time of publication. Mitchison had established herself in this field during the 1920s through her distinctive blending of modern idiom with the settings of classical antiquity. At five years in the writing, The Corn King and the Spring Queen may be seen as the culmination of Mitchison’s early work and the first of her three major novels of the 1930s – I’m intending to write series entries for the other two, We Have Been Warned (1935) and The Blood of the Martyrs (1939), in the future. It should also be noted that Mitchison went on to write the beautiful fantasy Travel Light (1952), which is lovingly referenced in Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s multiple-award-winning This is How you Lose the Time War (2019), and the SF classic Memoirs of a Spacewoman in 1962, as well as other SFF works.   

Her early fiction had a fantasy element: set in the classical Greek or Roman periods but incorporating socialist and feminist politics alongside magic and characters transforming into animals. As Janet Montefiore observes, ‘Because the ancient world knew a sexual freedom unparalleled even in the relatively emancipated Britain of the 1920s and 1930s, and was also remote enough to demand a great deal of imaginative invention, her pioneering historical novels could use their classical settings to explore sexuality in society in ways that sometimes resemble utopian science fiction’ (Montefiore 163). We can explicitly link this speculative impulse to Marie Stopes – whose own SFF novel Love’s Creation was, as I discuss in the blog linked above, an influence on Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own – through Mitchison’s crusading support of birth control, which had a personal and political dimension as expressed in her 1930 pamphlet, Comments on Birth Control:

Intelligent and truly feminist women want two things: they want to live as women, to have masses of children by the men they love and leisure to be tender and aware of both lovers and children; and they want to do their own work, whatever it might be […] they insist – as I think they should – on having both worlds, not specializing like bees or machines. (qtd Calder 95)

The fictional expression of this position of wanting to have both worlds, or, rather, the work of autobiografiction in which she worked through the contradictions that enabled her to come to this position, was The Corn King and the Spring Queen. This was written over the five years between 1925 and 1930, in which Mitchison ‘bore two children, lost one, had a passionate love affair, travelled widely alone and with companions and was generally exposed to challenging ideas and encounters’ (Calder 97). Politically, this period included the General Strike of 1926 and the global financial crash of 1929. By the time the novel was published, Mitchison had become a member of the Labour Party. The point is not to read the novel biographically but as imaginative autobiografiction in which Mitchison reveals to herself the mechanisms and thought processes by which she was able to move beyond the cultural limitations of her rather grand and privileged upbringing. For example, during the course of the novel, Mitchison’s alter-ego Erif Der finds herself unexpectedly ‘bitterly and deeply ashamed’ (270) after one of her sister-in-law’s retainers, Murr, kills himself because he was afraid of what she might do to him. In particular, she is ashamed because she refused to sleep with him when he wanted it. The point being not that women should always sleep with men when they want it, but that she feels ashamed for simply dismissing the idea out of hand because of his class position relative to hers. It is the experience of this shame which opens Erif Der’s understanding of the need for new patterns of living in relationship to the people and ultimately leads to her establishing a tradition of the oppressed at the end of the novel, so that there is a model for social revolution available to common people. Having worked out her feelings in this fictional form, her perspective was liberated from contextual continuity with the upper-class outlook of her family and she consequently wrote and campaigned from what might be termed a ‘transcultural’ outlook, geared towards the values of a future yet to be realised rather than trapped in the gradual decay of the Victorian social order (which cast its shadows very deep into the twentieth century).

The novel marks a change from her earlier fiction, also set in classical antiquity, in that the protagonist Erif Der (red fire backwards) has an agency that previous heroines of hers don’t because she is simultaneously queen, witch and priestess. As Jill Benton notes, Mitchison read Marx and Freud while writing the novel which can be seen as a counter to the modernism of Eliot and Joyce, in which she asks ‘what there was for her, for her female hero, and for women in general in primitive king worship, in socialist revolution and in theories of the unconscious’ (Benton 64). And as a result, according to Benton, ‘The Corn King and the Spring Queen links all stages of Western history with the curve of the female Bildungsroman. Women are not absent in history; they generate it’ (65). On one level, there is an aspect of fertility rite to this as reflected in the roles and scene which gives the novel its title, in which as Spring Queen, Erif Der, has to wait passively in the centre of the field which the Corn King, Tarrik, is ploughing and which culminates in her running at the last second between the oxen and jumping over the ploughshare as the last furrow tears apart the place where she has been sitting. There is an obvious element of sacrifice and sexual submission in this scene but, in the next depiction of this kind of rite, a ceremony in which Erif Der’s father acts out the role of the Corn Year, she cuts his throat and kills him signifying a decisive break from patriarchy – the mechanisms of which are laid bare in great detail by Mitchison –  and enabling the novel to move on to a larger scale as it forces her into exile.

Fantasy is often criticised for featuring royal or imperial protagonists, as though all that is at issue in culture is the question of who is represented. However, another approach to royal protagonists in general, and to Mitchison in particular, would be to consider The Corn King and the Spring Queen in the light of the anarchist tradition of fantasy writing from Hope Mirrlees and Mervyn Peake through to Michael Moorcock and Ursula le Guin – as recently discussed in James Gifford’s excellent A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic (2018), which I reviewed here – where the power of the protogonists, symbolic or otherwise, is a means of depicting conscious human agency. It is Mitchison’s tendency to show subjectivity determining material conditions rather than the other way round (or in other words her tendency to show how moral values shape the material configuration of society) which leads Montefiore to group Mitchison with liberal feminists such as Winifred Holtby and Storm Jameson rather than Marxists of the period. However, Mitchsion’s radical potential surely lies – to paraphrase Gifford’s discussion of Le Guin – in both ‘the liberation of the subject’ and the ‘radicalisation of society’ (see Gifford 73). The Corn King and the Spring Queen is not just an amazing, huge (720 pages in my battered Virago paperback edition) novel about female agency and bodily autonomy in a utopian world of free love, but it also about art and practice, social revolution and the class struggle, and the complex relations between a peripheral and ostensibly less-civilised society such as Marob with classical Greece in general, as well as with Sparta, gripped by revolution and war, and the decadent court of Ptolemy in Alexandria. Not only do these relationships map on to Mitchison’s various contemporary concerns ranging from the influence of Lenin to the nature of the relationship between her native Scotland with its domineering neighbour, England, but they also give the novel an intersectional dimension which is contemporary to the 2020s. Tarrik, Erif and her brother Berris are always othered as barbarian Scythians because nobody ‘civilised’ has ever heard of Marob and so there always a complex interplay of class, ethnic and gender identity in the novel. In this sense, I think Mitchison is a writer who was always ahead of her time, which is finally in the process of arriving, so that we can see how genuinely significant her novels are. (This is presumably why Benton was so excited about Mitchison in the early 90s because she realised that her novels anticipated the third wave feminism that was emerging at that time).

Since writing this post, my chapter, ‘“She had her hand on the plow”: Shame, Uncertainty and Transformation in The Corn King and the Spring Queen’, which provides a more detailed reading of the novel and its context, has been published in James Purdon’s edited collection Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). In this chapter, I argue that The Corn King and the Spring Queen reflects Mitchison’s desire to push on from the equal voting rights for women achieved through the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 in pursuit of a much more fundamental transformation of gender roles within society.

The title of my chapter is taken from a passage relatively early on in the novel in which Mitchison’s protagonist, Erif Der, is described as having ‘her hand on the plow’.^[i] This phrase refers to the biblical verse of Luke 9:62, featured variously in gospel songs and the culture of the US Civil Rights movement. Significantly, the verse was also cited by the American suffrage activist Alice Paul in relation to her decision, after the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920 (which gave women the vote), to keep campaigning for a further amendment to enshrine equal rights for women in the US Constitution: ‘when you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row’.^[ii] Likewise, Mitchison’s argument in The Corn King and the Spring Queen is that it is not enough for Erif to have a hand on the plow, or for women to have the vote in Britain: only by keeping control of the plow and using it to reconfigure the field, or society, can full freedom be achieved.

It was only in 2023, while teaching an MA class on fiction of the 1930s that I realised that another of the novels I have written about in this series on interwar SFF, Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) – which is the most popular individual post on this blog – also includes a sentence describing its protagonist, Flora Poste, as having her hand on the plow or plough, as it is spelt in this case: ‘However, her hand was on the plough, and she would not turn back, because, if she did, Mrs Smiling would make a particular sort of face, which in another and more old-fashioned woman would have meant: “I told you so”’ (Gibbons 1938: 50). I’m guessing the phrase, or plays on it, will also be found in other novels from the 1920s and 1930s. Returning to my chapter on Mitchison, I also discuss The Corn King and the Spring Queen in relation to her later non-fiction book, The Moral Basis of Politics (1938). As I argue, this book can be read alongside two other major books written in the same year – Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution, which I’ve blogged about here – concerned with analysing the everyday practices of patriarchy of which fascism was seen as just one, albeit the most extreme, manifestation. Taken together these three books, and their authors’ fictional output of the period, outline and start to fill in the details of a different model for anti-patriarchal politics with connections to the SFF writing of the period, which I hope to write more about in due course.

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[i] Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (London: Virago, 1983), 66

[ii] Quoted in Peter Dreier, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2012), 149

Works Cited

Jill Benton, Naomi Mitchison: A Biography, (London: Pandora, 1992).

Jenni Calder, The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison (London: Virago, 1997).

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938).

James Gifford, A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism and the Radical Fantastic (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2018).

Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (London: Virago, 1983).

Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, 1996).

Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm as SF Text

[This follows on from my previous post on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as SF Text but this is really thoughts rather than a fully fledged argument! – 2024 Update: there are some more posts in this series now – index – and I have added another paragraph with some new analysis to the end of this post]

Cold Comfort Farm is set maybe 15-20 years after its date of publication (1932). One character (Claud) has participated in the Anglo-Nicaraguan Wars of 1946 (Gibbons 2006: 160) and there is a telephone conversation in which Flora is visible to Claud via the ‘television dial’ at his home (Flora is in a public phone box and so doesn’t have the option of seeing the other end of the line; see Gibbons 2006: 128). (Compare Woolf in The Years [1937]: ‘One of these days d’you think we’ll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?’ [324]).

One way of thinking about this near-future setting would be to consider Cold Comfort Farm as a work sitting on that line of development imagined by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as stretching forward a hundred years from Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael (which is perhaps a fictional version of Marie Stopes’s Love’s Creation – A Novel [1928]) to a point when a genuine women’s writing will be the norm. Certainly, Cold Comfort Farm carries some of the markers that Woolf refers to. For example, it has conversations between women characters that don’t revolve around men. Furthermore, it specifically refers to both Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, who, according to Woolf, were the only the two women writers to have written ‘as women write, not as men write’ (Woolf 2000: 68). While Jane Austen provides a model for Gibbons to the extent that Flora puts things to rights in the manner of Fanny Price (of Mansfield Park, which is the source of the novel’s epigraph); Emily’s Wuthering Heights is both satirised (especially in the character of Adam) and used as evidence of the pressures on women writers because of Mr Mybug’s contention that ‘No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff …’ (p. 102). As Flora has predicted, Mybug is writing a book to prove that Branwell wrote his sisters’ novels.

Flora also has to cope with her cousin Seth and his attitude of not letting women eat him: ‘I eats them instead’ (p. 82). Both Seth and Mybug in rather different ways represent Woolf’s point that men’s sense of self is often dependent on their assumption of superiority over women, which means that men do not want women to write great books or tell the truth about existence:

For is she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and dinner at least twice the size he really is? [….] The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. (Woolf 2000: 32-3)

Although Gibbons deals with these topics humorously, there is still obvious criticism of men’s behaviour in the book. As Faye Hammill notes: ‘Gibbons’s objection to male intellectuals, and their undervaluing of female intelligence, was strikingly justified by some of the reviews of Cold Comfort Farm. Several reviewers expressed incredulity that a mere journalist, and a woman at that, could have produced such an accomplished work, and one even speculated that Stella Gibbons was a pen-name of Evelyn Waugh’ (Hammill 2001: 842).

Of course, Cold Comfort Farm is not a radical feminist text in the same way that A Room of One’s Own is. As Hammill points out, Flora appeals not to the committed feminist but to the ordinary woman reader and ‘the ground of her appeal is the pleasure that a woman with a degree of autonomy can gain for herself’ (846). None of her advice (e.g. to Elfine on how to perform femininity – see Gibbons 2006: 129-130) ‘betokens a politically radical woman, yet Flora’s seizing of power within the Starkadder family presents a clear image of female ascendance and defiance that exists in a curious tension with her emphasis on conventional feminine behaviour’ (Hammill 2001: 846).

So where does Cold Comfort Farm sit on that Woolfian century stretching from 1928 to 2028? It’s definitely a step forward in some respects from Mary Carmichael because it imagines a world where modern women can be an updated Jane Austen heroine and have agency (and enjoy themselves) by performing a particular kind of modernised conventional femininity, while being the wittiest person in the room.

Unsurprisingly, the novel was (and has remained) incredibly popular. It was reissued as a Penguin paperback in 1938. As the English Studies Group of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies noted in 1979, Gibbons distances herself (in the foreword) from pretensions to literary status. In this respect the novel might be seen as ‘middlebrow’ in the terminology of the period. Rather than map ‘lowbrow’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘highbrow’ onto social class, one way of thinking about these categories is how the text positions (or ‘interpellates’) the reader. So, while a ‘lowbrow’ text might position a reader ‘in such a way as to identify with one or more characters’, a ‘middlebrow’ text situates the reader ‘in the position of the author or narrative “point of view”’; and a ‘highbrow’ ‘reader [or literary studies academic or postgrad student] “sees” the text from the position of literary ideology’ (1979: 13-4). Elements of all three of these are present in Cold Comfort Farm, but readers are mainly situated in terms of the narrative point of view albeit, as the ESG point out, with a significant disruption to that process:

The text interpellates its reader, as we saw in the author’s foreword, as the ordinary person, the consciously non-literary, knowledgeable, responsible general reader. This reader and the author are one, part of the same community of common sense. [. . . .] [However] [t]here are moments, like the scene of ‘ordinary human enjoyment’ at the wedding, when the gender of the ordinary person is seen as unimportant. Everyone participates equally in the life of the community. This appeal, to an ungendered ideal of ‘citizenship’, is distinctively middlebrow. Elsewhere in the text, though, the interpellated reader is importantly female: when male sexuality is ridiculed, when Flora rescues the female victims of rural idiocy, when she wryly foresees Mybug’s claim that Wuthering Heights was written by Branwell Brontë. (1979: 16)

The ESG go on to discuss the struggle between Flora and Aunt Ada as ‘a conflict between two forms of female power’ (1979: 16) – the power of the older woman in the traditional extended family and the power of the newly independent woman. This is illustrated by Aunt Ada’s second-person stream of consciousness in Chapter 10 (Gibbons 2006: 113-115) which in practice works as an address to the reader, who here is unequivocally positioned as female: ‘an appeal to shared female experience: “something nasty in the woodshed”, the problem that has no name’ (1979: 18). The problem is, as Woolf pointed out in ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), that even if a woman has the benefits of modern independence and the material resources signified by ‘a room of her own’ it is still not acceptable to write ‘the truth about [her] own experiences as a body’ (Woolf 2000: 360). A message that was born out by the critical drubbing and damage to her reputation undergone by Naomi Mitchison after publishing We Have Been Warned (1935).

Finally, the ESG conclude:

Cold Comfort Farm never achieves a closed, coherent interpellation of the reader-writer as sensible ordinary person. The equivocality of the text exposes the contradictory situation of the female reader-writer, unable to read-write either highbrow, lowbrow or middlebrow fiction, because no kind can carry the assertion of her distinctive and in many ways oppositional femaleness. (1979: 19)

While, on the whole, we no longer think of texts as ideology machines in quite the same way as they did in the late 1970s this does, I think, provide a useful summing up of how the novel functions. It is one way of expressing how Cold Comfort Farm is not entirely modern, even for 1932. In terms of the Woolf SF continuum, it might be considered a transitional text because despite its understanding of the modern world (which still seems fresh today), it’s clearly written with the knowledge that it has to abide by a number of traditional conventions (specifically not directly writing about women’s experiences as bodies) in order to be considered safe for society. Therefore, it is not as radical or transgressive as contemporary fictions by other women writers such as Mitchison or Ethel Mannin and, as a consequence, it doesn’t have exactly the same kind of troubled reception history (although as Hammill pointed out in 2001, it wasn’t really written about or considered canonical in any way up until that point in time). Nevertheless, struggles are fought on many fronts and Cold Comfort Farm implicitly holds out a future for women that is different from the reality of the early 1930s and can thus be seen as part of that process Woolf identified of women working for 2028.

In this feminist context, it is worth noting that at one point in the novel, Flora is described as having her ‘hand on the plough’: ‘However, her hand was on the plough, and she would not turn back, because, if she did, Mrs Smiling would make a particular sort of face, which in another and more old-fashioned woman would have meant: “I told you so”’ (50). I only noticed this in 2023, while teaching an MA class on fiction of the 1930s, and got very excited because this is a biblical quotation (Luke 9:62) that was used in the suffragette movement. Specifically, the verse was cited by the American suffrage activist Alice Paul in relation to her decision, after the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920 (which gave women the vote), to keep campaigning for a further amendment to enshrine equal rights for women in the US Constitution: ‘when you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row’.^[i] Mitchison describes Erif Der, the protagonist of her The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) as having her ‘hand on the plow’ in order to make the point that it is not enough for Erif to have a hand on the plow, or for women to have the vote in Britain: only by keeping control of the plow and using it to reconfigure the field, or society, can full freedom be achieved. In this respect, these two novels are linked (and I’m sure there must be other examples of the phrase being used in this way). For more on The Corn King and the Spring Queen, see my post on it from this series.

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[i] Quoted in Peter Dreier, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2012), 149

Works Cited:

English Studies Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham. ‘Thinking the Thirties’. Francis Barker et al (eds), 1936: The Sociology of Literature, Volume 2 – Practices of Literature and Politics. Colchester: University of Essex, 1979: 1-20.

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006 [1932].

Faye Hammill, ‘Cold Comfort Farm, D.H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars’, Modern Fiction Studies, Winter 2001; 47, 4: 831-854.

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Virginia Woolf. The Years. Hammersmith: Grafton, 1977 [1937].