It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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Raise the Titanic!, Clive Cussler

(Another Facebook review.)

For reasons I have yet to question, I started rereading Cussler’s novels, which I last read back in the 1980s and 1990s. And even then I thought they were bad. Raise the Titanic! (1976, USA) is probably his most famous novel – it’s certainly the one that made him a bestselling author. It was his third novel, the first two had sold poorly, and this one was expected to do the same. But an editor visiting from the UK saw the manuscript at Cussler’s US publisher, and took a copy back home with him. This kicked off a bidding war on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in Cussler pulling in a huge advance. The novel then went on to become a bestseller. (Soon after, Cussler bought back the rights to his earlier novels, and resold them to his then-current publisher for considerably more than he’d sold them originally.)

The plot of Raise the Titanic! sees Dirk Pitt, special operations director of the US National Underwater and Marine Agency, and all-round lady killer and Competent Man, tapped to head a US project to raise the RMS Titanic from its seabed grave, 3800 metres below the surface (where the pressure is around 400 atmospheres). Because there’s a presidential black project to build an anti-missile screen around the US and it needs a supply of “byzanium” in order to work. The only known quantity of byzanium was secretly mined under the noses of the Soviets on Novaya Zemlya by US miners in 1912, but was shipped home on the RMS Titanic. Oops. The USSR learns of this plan and decides to hijack the Titanic once she is on the surface.

Perhaps because of the amount spent to buy the novel, Raise the Titanic! seems to have been closely edited, and the prose is far better than in the earlier novels (although still not, well, good). The plot and setting is also much more science-fictional. The book was written before the wreck was found, and most people believed the ship had come to rest in one piece (she actually split in two). Pitt’s plan is to plug the many holes in the Titanic’s hull with “wetsteel” and then pump the ship full of air.

The novel was adapted for the screen in 1980 by UK TV production company ITC, but was a massive flop. ITC’s owner, Lew Grade, later said “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”, but he did like the film. Cussler didn’t. He refused to allow anyone to adapt his other books, and later sued the makers of Sahara, adapted from his 1992 Dirk Pitt novel of the same name. That film was a huge flop too.

Cussler died in 2020, but some time around the millennium he’d created an atelier, which has since produced a huge quantity of Dirk Pitt and NUMA novels by diverse hands (with Cussler’s name the most prominent on the cover, of course). His son, called Dirk, natch, now writes the Pitt novels.


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City of Desire, Anton Gill

Back in the 1990s, Gill wrote a trilogy of historical crime novels set in Ancient Egypt. The protagonist was a minor scribe, who discovered he had a talent for solving “puzzles”, specifically who committed a murder. The novels were set during the Eighteenth Dynasty, when Akhenaten became pharaoh and tried to make Egypt monotheistic. He was overthrown and replaced by Tutankhamun.

In 2015, he returned to the world of Huy, scribe turned occasional detective, and published a further three novels in the series. City of Desire (2015, UK) is the middle book of this second trilogy. The stories of these novels are very much predicated on the world in which they’re set. These are not English murder-mysteries in pharaonic drag.

In City of Desire, the dwarf in charge of pharaoh’s harem is murdered. A perpetrator is eventually identified and punished, but Huy remains unsatisfied. It’s mostly politics – an old friend turned rival, their career is partly dependent on events in the harem. Pharaoh is also trying to hang onto his throne, but no one is entirely sure what prompted the murder of the dwarf. Or the subsequent murders in the harem.

City of Desire is not your typical crime novel, with a, er, crime, and someone solving it. There are indeed crimes, but Huy fails to solve them, and only later works out what happened once the political dust has settled. Where the book succeeds, however, is in presenting life in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. I’ve no way of knowing how close it is to the reality, but it’s definitely convincing. Gill discusses what is known in an author’s note:

“we know a comparatively large amount about life in Ancient Egypt … since the science of Egyptology began, scarcely more than twenty-five percent of what might be known has been revealed.”

Worth reading.


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A Heritage of Stars, Clifford D Simak

Simak was one of my go-to sf authors in my early teens, and his Time and Again (1951, USA) was a very early favourite novel. But I reread it about twenty years ago, and was not impressed. A Heritage of Stars (1977, USA) I must also have read back in the late 1970s – I used to own a copy, but sold it when I moved north. I had no memory of its plot. I picked up a copy from my local secondhand sf bookshop, mistakenly thinking it was another Simak novel, one which had been nominated for the Hugo. It wasn’t. But I reread it anyway.

It’s 1 500 years after civilisation collapsed – in the US, at least, although like all American science fiction up until the late years of the twentieth century, the USA is assumed to be the whole of the world. Cushing is a young man who works at a university where knowledge is preserved in ancient books. But not knowledge about technology – all of that has been completely removed. He stumbles across some notes from the author of a “history” written some 1 000 earlier (although it’s not explained how the paper lasted so long). The notes mention a legend about the Place of Going to the Stars, so Cushing decides to go looking for it. Along the way, he picks up various strange companions: an old woman with telepathic powers, the last operating robot, an old man who can talk to plants and his weird granddaughter, some shadow-like creatures, and a pattern of lights called the Shivering Snake. They head west into Dakota, searching for Thunder Butte, which they believe is the location of the starport.

They find it, of course – but it is not a starport. They learn it’s the ground station, in effect, for centuries of robotic missions out into the galaxy. But somehow the sole remaining robot (one apparently fell “victim to a strange disease”!) in the facility, called the Ancient and Revered, can no longer access the data collected. Cushing and his companions come up with a plan to fix this – for reasons.

There’s a lot that doesn’t really add up in A Heritage of Stars. Some of it is Simak just churning out the stuff he was good at, but the plot is cobbled together from a handful of dated sf tropes thrown together with little thought. The same is true of the prose – some of the descriptive prose, especially of the landscape, is quite effective, but the rest is sloppy (to be fair, he was 73, when the book was published):

“… He talks obliquely about what he calls a phoenix rising from its ashes, an allusion that escapes us in its entirety.”

“There is no need to beat about the bushes,” said #2. (p167/168)

The aliens don’t understand the first expression but do the second? 

Simak was known for writing bucolic science fiction, and here he has his cake and eats it too: a central science-fictional idea, but he also gets to write about a USA slowly returning to nature. Except. The story is set fifteen centuries after a period when humanity had interstellar travel… yet the abandoned cities and towns Cushing travels through resemble towns and cities of the 1950s and 1970s. He mentions a collapsed water tower. If humanity can go to the stars, surely they’d have a better solution than sticking a tank of water on a high pole? Not to mention the wreckage of the water tower still being recognisable after 1 500 years of decay… by someone who had probably never come across the concept before…

Further, the tribes of barbarians which inhabit the plains and try to prevent Cushing and his companions from reaching Thunder Butte, and then refuse his plan to gain access to the data, are all based on racist depictions of Native Americans.

A Heritage of Stars is typical of a lot of science fiction produced in the US between the Second World War and the New Wave, almost exclusively by white males (although not always, and Arslan (1976, USA) by MJ Engh is a good female example). A handful of science-fictional tropes, mostly so well-known they require little scaffolding, and a complete absence of imagination in world-building. Mostly, the setting is just the US of the writers’ early adulthood with a handful of sf buzzwords, or, in this case, a few years of neglect. This is poor stuff.


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Schismatrix Plus, Bruce Sterling

(Another review from Facebook.)

I’m pretty sure I read Schismatrix (1985, USA) back in the very early 1990s… but I also have a vague memory of borrowing the novel when staying with a friend on a trip to the UK a couple of years after I’d moved to the Middle East in the mid-1990s. Schismatrix Plus (1996, USA), published a decade after the original novel, includes it and five short stories set in the same universe. I suspect I’d read a couple of the short stories first, and then read the novel when staying with that friend. Whatever the truth of the matter, I’d pretty much no memory of the novel’s actual story when coming to this recent reread.

Certainly, the one big thing I’d forgotten about Schismatrix was that it featured aliens. In the future of the novel, a couple of centuries hence, humanity has colonised the Solar system and those based off Earth have split into two factions – the Shapers, who improve themselves through genetic engineering, and the Mechanists, who use technology and cybernetics. The two factions are in an almost constant state of political and commercial rivalry slash war.

Lindsay is born in an O’Neill cylinder orbiting the moon. Despite being a Mechanist, he’s sent to the Shapers for diplomatic training (and some genetic engineering). Later, he’s exiled from his cislunar republic, and embarks on a career bouncing around the outer Solar system, growing more and more politically powerful, although typically as an eminence grise. He has a rival, Constantine, and the two are at constant, if often hidden, loggerheads. Aliens, the Investors, large dinosaur-like interstellar merchants, arrive, and there is a peace of sorts between Shapers and Mechanists. But it doesn’t last.

Sterling’s future solar system is pretty neat, if a little dated in places, such as the frequent mentions of “tape”, but Lindsay’s and Constantine’s political genius, even the reasons they’re so admired, is never explained and never really convinces. They are what they are because Sterling tells us so. The most interesting character in the book, Kitsune, who later becomes an actual space station, doesn’t appear often enough.

The aliens are dull, and not very original. Although the Swarm in the story titled, er, ‘Swarm’, originally published in F&SF in 1982, is based around a neat idea – indeed, something similar to it was used by Paul McAuley in his debut novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988, UK). Sterling went on to write much better novels than Schismatrix, although it remains popular to this day. It was ahead of its time back in 1985, but sf has moved on a great deal since then. Schismatrix Plus is worth a read, the original novel on its own not so much. 


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The Map and the Territory, Michel Houellebecq

I’m a fan of Houellebecq’s fiction, and have been ever since reading Atomised (1998, France) back in 2009. He’s a miserable writer, but I like his commitment to factuality, to the extent he often includes exposition as much as in any science fiction text. But Houellebecq is not above using other literary techniques, and in The Map and the Territory (2010, France) it’s metafiction. Of a sort – Houellebecq himself appears as a character in the novel.

Jed Martin is a struggling artist in Paris. He has the idea of taking tilt-shift photographs of Michelin maps, which brings him fame and a girlfriend, the beautiful Olga, who works for Michelin. When she is transferred to Russia (her homeland), Martin turns to painting portraits of professional people, including his father, and most famously the painting ‘Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology’. Martin approaches Houellebecq and asks him to write an accompanying text for an exhibition of the paintings – a real thing which has led to published novels, Paul Park’s All Those Vanished Engines (2014, USA) and Olga Ravn’s The Employees (2018, Denmark), come to mind. This text is not The Map and the Territory, even if the novel documents Martin’s career and works as reportage.

As payment for the text, Martin paints a portrait of Houellebecq. Martin’s career skyrockets, and his professional portraits all sell for six-figure sums. Some time later, Houellebecq is found murdered in his country cottage. More: his head has been removed and placed on a sofa, and his skin cut into strips and scattered around the living-room. The remaining parts of his body are never found. The police investigation founders. The detective in charge retires. The police learn Houellebecq’s portrait is missing, and is now worth nine million euros. The crime is eventually solved by accident.

The Map and the Territory is more than the above, of course. The plot is just an excuse for Houellebecq to pontificate on a number of different subjects. I actually read this immediately after finishing Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017, USA), and despite the differences in plot and setting, the two books are remarkably similar. They are both didactic, although Robinson discusses history and economics whereas Houellebecq writes about art and commerce. Robinson’s novel is annoyingly chatty, with overly excitable characters; The Map and the Territory’s characters are almost automatons, although extremely self-reflective ones, and Houellebecq has an irritating habit of randomly italicising phrases. Nonetheless, both are excellent books.

Houellebecq is one of those authors whose books I’ll happily read when I come across them, and while I keep up with his career, I don’t buy each new book as it appears – I’m reading The Map and the Territory 16 years after it was published, after all. He’s never less than thought-provoking, although often more in the sense of being deliberately provocative. But he’s always worth reading – whether you agree or not with the premise of the novel you’re reading.

(I should probably mention I welcome comments on my reviews. You don’t have to agree with me – in fact, I know many people don’t.)


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The People of the Wind, Poul Anderson

(Another review which originally appeared only on FB.)

Anderson was not one of those authors I read much back when I was a teenager. Perhaps half a dozen of his best-known works. There were other science fiction authors whose books and stories I much preferred. But he was a popular and well-regarded author in his day and, to be honest, his Terran Empire / Ensign Flandry / Nicholas van Rijn novels always struck me as featuring the sort of world-building I sort of liked… And yet I never made any effort to explore it.

Anyway, The People of the Wind (1973, USA) was nominated for the Hugo in 1974 (but lost out to Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973, Sri Lanka)). It’s set on a world called Avalon, shared by humans and Ythrians, who are winged bird-like humanoid aliens, and which is nominally part of the Ythrian Domain. The Terran Empire decides it wants a nice and less ragged border with the Domain, which makes no sense, and so decides to launch a full-scale attack on the Domain, which makes no sense, in order to take over those Ythrian worlds it feels will make the border look neat and tidy on a map, which makes no sense. Which makes no sense.

Anyway, Avalon is happy being a mixed human/Ythrian world, and has created a culture all its own. It has no intention of being subsumed into the Terran Empire. And it has a plan to defend itself. And when that works, but not enough, it has a last-ditch plan to defeat the forces of the Terran Empire. Which also works. Oops. Spoiler.

Anyway, reading The People of the Wind I think I understand why Anderson’s novels never appealed to me. The descriptive prose is actually not bad, and its presence not all that common in sf novels of the time, but Anderson’s decision to make use of archaic, and often completely made-up English, works against him – “blent”? “fleered”? WTF? Has either been used since Chaucer’s day? It also doesn’t help that Anderson drops lumps of exposition, which read like encyclopaedia passages, into his narrative. There are many ways to deal with exposition, assuming you even believe it’s necessary, but this is surely the most inelegant. No, wait– “As you know…” dialogue is definitely less elegant.

Anyway, I think even the most cynical would agree that exposition, in whatever form, should at least advance the story. Anderson’s doesn’t. It’s thinly-disguised gazetteer information, and might possibly be of relevance should they ever produce a RPG of the universe (which was not a consideration back in 1973).

Anyway, The People of the Wind. The usual bullshit “underdog defeats vastly superior enemy” narrative – which is, when you think about it, somewhat ironic coming from a US author – written in a combination of clumsy infodumps and pseudo-archaic English, and which presents absolutely nothing interesting in terms of insight… was apparently considered notable enough to be shortlisted for the genre’s premier award in the US in 1974.

Anyway, not a reason, I would think, to start reading Poul Anderson. But perhaps a good reason not to read him.


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Who?, Algis Budrys

I think this was a reread but I couldn’t swear to it. I think I’ve seen the film adaptation (some stills from which are on the back cover of the paperback edition I read) but I couldn’t swear to it. I certainly know the basics of the story – and if I didn’t get them from the book or the film, then… who, er, knows?

The basics of Who? (1958, USA) are: an important US scientist is blown up in his laboratory in Europe, the Russians get there first and spirit away the heavily-injured scientist and rebuild him, so to speak – robotic arm, new head which is a featureless ovoid with electronic eyes and mechanical mouth. The US (or rather, the Allied Nations Government) demands him back, the Soviets oblige. But is the scientist they returned really the one who was nearly killed in the explosion? This is important because he was working on “K-Eighty-eight”, some sort of vitally important defence project which is never explained (but, to be honest, never really needs to be, and I suppose we should be grateful Budrys chose not to).

Is robot-head Martino the real Martino? The ANG needs to know before putting him back to work on K-Eighty-eight, which is annoyingly never written as K-88. They somewhat reluctantly decide they cannot confirm his identity, so they let him go home to New York and keep a careful eye on him to see if he behaves as the real Martino would have done.

It occurred to me as I read the novel that it would be relatively straightforward to confirm Martino’s identity, especially in a sf novel set in the 1990s (I think; Martino attends university in the late 1960s), even though written in the 1950s. After all, DNA had been discovered decades before Budrys wrote Who?. Surprisingly, it wasn’t known it could be used to uniquely identify an individual until 1984. It’s so ubiquitous now that feels wrong. But there you go.

So, no face. Fingerprints can be faked. (So can faces, for that matter.) Is metalhead Martino a ringer? Once loose in New York, he behaves exactly as the real Martino would do – which the reader knows thanks to alternating flashback chapters covering Martino’s life. Of course, a well-trained replacement would also behave exactly as the real Martino would do. A real puzzler.

Budrys dangles “he’s a fake!” before the reader, then sets up a plausible fake, but soon lets the cat out of the bag. According to my paperback copy, Who? is “one of the classic giants among science-fiction novels – and among spy thrillers too”, and it was nominated for the Hugo Award. But I think it fails as both. It’s no le Carré, and even when it tries for ambiguity, it bottles it. The world-building is perfunctory and unconvincing – the West has formed the Allied Nations Government (hello! the Treaty of Rome was 1957!); the Russians and Chinese and all those other countries in between are now Soviet. Technology has apparently stagnated, other than the tech required to rebuild Martino. The New York of is-it-really-Martino is pretty much the same as that of the real Martino in his twenties.

I think they call novels like this “high concept” – ie, a neat idea you can encapsulate in a handful of words, but everything else is either slapdash or badly done. Who? is neither good nor interesting- Its conceit is interesting, but nothing else between the covers of the book is.

(At one point, Martino takes his girlfriend to the cinema to see a film. They leave when they reach the point in the movie when they entered. That was how people used to go to the cinema: they’d enter the auditorium, no matter when the film had started, sit down and watch it through to the end, then stay to see the part they’d missed. It was Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960, USA) which changed that. He didn’t want to spoil the surprise of Janet Leigh’s murder, so he insisted people were only allowed to watch the film from the start, and cinemas would lock the auditorium doors to prevent people from entering after the movie had begun. It changed the way people visited the cinema.)


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The Last Song of Penelope, Claire North

The Last Song of Penelope (2024, UK) is the final book in the Songs of Penelope, preceded by Ithaca (2022) and House of Odysseus (2023). This is the story of Penelope, who was left behind to rule Ithaca – for twenty years! – after Odysseus left to fight in the Trojan War. Each book is narrated by a goddess. In The Last Song of Penelope, it is Athena.

Odysseus has finally returned, but in the guise of an old beggar. Penelope is not fooled, although she pretends to be because she understands why he is in disguise. It’s the one hundred suitors – for twenty years, they have feasted in the palace, each one hoping to marry Penelope and so become king of Ithaca. Odysseus cannot defeat them all alone, and even with his son Telemachus he still has too few warriors surviving from his long voyage home. So he murders them in the night, catching them unaware and slaughtering them. What he does not realise is that Penelope and her maids have drugged all the suitors to make it easier.

Then Odysseus, believing the lies of his old nursemaid, executes some of the maids for consorting with the suitors. (They didn’t.) There’s nothing Penelope can do. She’s aware of the importance of the story – that Odysseus is the hero, and she’s merely an adjunct to his tale.

The fathers of two of the dead suitors raise an army and attack the palace. Odysseus, his men, Penelope and her surviving maids, flee, and take up refuge in Odysseus’s father’s farm, which they fortify. The fathers’ army, bolstered by mercenaries, besieges the farm. Penelope is forced to call on her army of women.

Throughout all this, Athena is watching, and influencing events where she can. She muses on her own life, her treatment by her father and siblings, by the fact she is female but has more in common with her brothers. Like Penelope, she knows this is Odysseus’s story, and she wants that story to survive because she is part of it, and that means knowledge of her will also survive.

Retelling Greek myths seems to have been bizarrely popular these last few years. I’ve no idea why – and I don’t recall any similar novels about Roman mythology. I read North’s Song of Penelope because it was by North, not because of its story or setting. Similarly, I’m reading Pat Barker’s Women of Troy trilogy because it’s by Barker. North’s is the more fantastical of the two, but one of the things I like about these stories is how embedded in daily lives are their gods. It impacts everything the Greeks do and think. North adds an extra layer by making her cast aware of story, that their lives are merely part of what will become The Odyssey, centred on Odysseus, a man, and in which the women are merely part of the background – but knowing that, they still impact, and even direct, the narrative.

Read Ithaca, House of Odysseus and The Last Song of Penelope because they are a smart genre-adjacent trilogy about an untold part of The Odyssey, the part about the women who are mentioned only in passing. But also read it because it is by Claire North, who is currently one of the best genre writers currently writing in the UK.


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Bluebeard’s Castle, Anna Biller

(Another review originally posted on Facebook.)

I’m a fan of Biller’s films, so getting hold of her first novel, Bluebeard’s Castle (2023, USA) was a no-brainer. And it’s pretty much everything I would have expected from her, although with some strange narrative choices. It’s also the book that features the word “chiffon” more times than any other book I’ve read.

Judith Moore is a successful writer of pseudonymous Gothic romances. At her sister’s birthday party at a hotel in Cornwall, Judith is approached by a man who claims to be a fan of her fiction. He’s handsome and charismatic, and sweeps Judith off her feet. They marry quickly. He tells her he is the son of the Baron of Hastings, and buys a castle in Sussex. But his business ventures seem to repeatedly fail, so he relies on his wife for money. She, meanwhile, finds herself in thrall to him – entirely changing her wardrobe and appearance to please him, and obeying his every whim in bed…

The plot is a straight re-working of the Bluebeard story, as Judith is gaslit and abused by her husband, attempts several times to break free, but is always drawn back to him. She begins to fear for her sanity, and then for her life. There are lots of references to 1940s and 1950s movies, especially their female stars. The story is set in the UK in the present-day, which I thought an odd choice, given how focused the story is on the aesthetics of the middle of last century. Biller handles her English setting reasonably well, although it does feel at times it owes more to Hollywood movies set in the South of England than it does to present-day Britain. There’s a lot of interiority, and awareness on Judith’s part of her situation and what her husband is doing to her…

It’s a knowing take on the story, rather than a dark post-modern version of it, as perhaps Angela Carter would have written (did she write one? Yes, she did: the title story in her collection The Bloody Chamber (1979, UK)), but seen through a soft-focus lens and tinted by Golden Age Hollywood. Not entirely successful, but an interesting read.


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Private Rites, Julia Armfield

Private Rites (2024, UK) was nominated for the Clarke Award last year, which is why I read it. I generally follow the Clarke, although recent shortlists have been mixed at best: some nominations have been actually quite bad, and this year the award has nominated a book first published six years ago. Armfield was not a name with which I was familiar, but when I looked her up, her previous novel, Our Wives Under the Sea (2022, UK), rang a dim and distant bell. Perhaps someone recommended it or something. Having now read Private Rites, I’m unlikely to seek it out.

Private Rites is, Armfield has said, basically King Lear’s three daughters in a post climate-crash UK. And, er, that’s it. There’s no plot, as such. Irene, Isla and Agnes have as little to with each other as they can, and when they do meet, they bicker. Then their father, a renowned architect dies, and they bicker some more. And argue.

Meanwhile, it rains all the time, and the unnamed English city in which the three live is completely flooded. That’s the extent of the science fiction in Private Rites. It is neither explained, nor solved – the ending might be interpreted as a solution, but if so, it’s pure fantasy, not science fiction.

Readers are going to come to this book because of the writing, not the lack of plot, poorly-grounded setting or well-drawn characters. I value good writing. But I also think less is more, when it comes to literary fiction writing. Armfield shows some nice insights and turns of phrases, but all too often it veers into creative writing degree prose. She’s not a genre writer, but I feel it’s a problem in both literary and genre fiction. Creative writing degrees and MFAs on the one hand, genre residential writers’ workshops on the other – neither claim to be prescriptive, but they’re slowly imposing a prose style on authors. It’s the singular voices which are often the most memorable, and are certainly the most innovative. That may be why translated non-Anglophone fiction is becoming increasingly popular in both mainstream and genre circles – it doesn’t follow the same “rules” as graduates of MFAs and writing workshops.

Private Rites was a slog in places, and the ending was not really worth the investment in reading it. The Clarke that year was won by Annie Bot (2024, USA), which I felt laboured its point to the extent it undercut its argument. The Ministry of Time (2024, UK; my review here) and Extremophile (2024, UK; my review here) were enjoyable enough, but I wasn’t blown away (Service Model (2024, UK) and Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock (2024, UK) I have yet to read). It felt like there were better books they could have chosen. So too this year (mostly). No Slow Gods (2025, UK; my review here)? One of the best UK writers currently writing in genre, and she’s ignored by both the BSFA and Clarke Awards. The Clarke, a juried award, is supposed to be an antidote to the popular vote BSFA, which is like all other genre awards of its type, increasingly dominated by tribalism. In recent years, however, it sometimes seems like the Clarke is nominating books based on how many copies it’s sold, and not its science-fictional or literary credentials…