If DG Compton’s other novels are as good as Ascendancies
Ascendancies
The other phenomenon is “Moondrift”, which falls from… somewhere, at irregular but frequent intervals. It can be burnt as fuel, or used as plant food. As a result, the UK is prospering – so much so that people now legally work only three days a week.
Wallingford is employed by the Accident and General Insurance Company, who have insured the life of Caroline’s husband, Havelock. But they won’t pay out if Havelock has simply Disappeared. Hence Wallingford’s visit to Caroline’s house… where he discovers that a body has been substituted for the allegedly deceased. However, instead of reporting the matter, he agrees to defraud the AGIC, taking forty percent of the £100,000 policy. Which act draws the stolidly lower middle-class Wallingford and the bohemian upper middle-class Caroline together in a relationship that is not quite a relationship, and which is never entirely suitable (as Compton is fond of telling us).
Ascendancies
Partly this is because Compton’s dialogue is amazingly sharp. But it’s also there in the way he draws his characters, which is chiefly through that sharp dialogue. And also, some of his characters feel dated – especially Havelock’s circle of bohemian friends and hangers-on. As a result, the story itself seems far more 1980 than 1986. But it is beautifully-written, and those two central characters are drawn with superlative skill.
And the title? It is referenced twice in the novel. It apparently refers to a game of oneupmanship which two of the characters admit to playing. Caroline admits to playing it, although it’s hard to know exactly how it is played. Nor what playing it actually achieves. It is, like the Disappearances and Moondrift, just another part of the world of Ascendancies
The first issue of Alt Hist, the Magazine of Historical Fiction and Alternate History, is now available. It contains many excellent stories, including one by – ahem – Yours Truly. And just look at the cool cover:
The magazine is available in print at Lulu here and as an ebook at Smashwords here. It will be available in other formats in the coming weeks.
Apparently there was a discussion at the Cheltenham Literary Festival between John Mullan and China Miéville about the Man Booker, literary fiction and science fiction – as reported by Niall Harrison here and Gav here.
I’ve said before that consigning science fiction to the dustbin because much of it is written by semi-literate hacks is a foolish argument. The genre contains some very good writers indeed, and it shouldn’t be characterised by its lowest common denominators. After all, no one ignores John Le Carré because most spy fiction novels are disposable potboilers. Having said that, I suspect it’s an argument we can never win because detractors only have to point at any list of sf “favourites” or “classics”…
Another discussion, according to Niall, “strayed into what-next territory”. Which, to my mind, is related to the above. Science fiction is becoming increasingly constrained by the economic pressures of publishing. Only books which are likely to make a profit are being published, and the best yardstick is: is this new novel like an existing successful novel? It’s not that writers are not individual or producing individual works, nor that there aren’t surprise hits. But series and subgenres seem to be becoming more dominant. As a result, some of the most interesting sf of recent years has been written by non-genre writers. They’re bringing fresh eyes, and new techniques, to genre writing.
And one of those techniques – which, perversely, you’d have expected to have been in sf’s toolbox since the genre’s beginnings – is “rigour”. Literary fiction writers do not wave their hands around as much as science fiction writers. Partly, it’s the nature of the beast – to maintain the same level of rigour in a sf novel that is built into the real world is impossible. However, sf readers have also traditionally been willing to accept all manner of implausible bollocks in a story. Calling some of it “science” would be doing science a great disservice. The genre is now more rigorous than ever before, but there is still room for improvement.
And that’s where I think the Next Big Thing in sf is. I’m ignoring, of course, the hordes of adventure fiction in sf clothing which forms the bulk of the genre. That’ll continue to do what it’s doing, probably until the heat death of the universe. The potboilers are never going to go away. But the “good stuff”, that’s going to move away from the sort of science fiction where the author’s hands are a continual blur. It’s going to focus on the real things: the characters, a rigorously-applied central conceit, a universe in which we occupy an infinitesimally small place and which is not at all designed for us to exploit…
I see a more realistic slant to the best science fiction over the next few years, stories that distance themselves from the space operatics of the rest of the genre, that will in many respects resemble literary fiction as much as it resembles science fiction. It’s a form of assimilation, and the process has already begun. The lines between sf and everything else will never blur, but the area between them will become more permeable and amorphous. Because of the introduction of realism, because of cross-pollination from literary fiction.
And I think I’ve mixed up far too many metaphors there. So I shall stop now.
If you have a week or so free, there’s an excellent discussion worth reading on Torque Control here regarding women sf writers and the Clarke Award. It spilled out of its topic somewhat to cover women sf writers in the UK, and the paucity of them. Which resulted in a lot of comments.
Following on from the discussion, Niall Harrison has asked here for people to email him their “top ten sf novels by women from the last ten years (2001–2010)”. I thought I would post them here instead:
Destroyer
Alanya to Alanya, L Timmel Duchamp
Ilario: The Lion’s Eye
The Rapture
Life, Gwyneth Jones
Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant
Lavinia
Warring States
Natural History
… and that’s only nine. And even then I had to cheat a little.
Annoyingly, the specified years means Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History
Matthews has not been published since the book listed above, although according to her website (which has not been updated for two years) she had at least another two planned. A shame. I really liked her Jurisdiction universe, and would happily pay for more novels set in it.
I should point out that I have read and admire a large number of books by women sf writers. Unfortunately, most of them were published before 2001. Which is, I suppose, the whole point of the list, and the discussion which generated it. I’ve also read a few of those mentioned in the lists posted on Torque Control here, but didn’t like them enough to put them in my own list.
Today’s Mind Meld feature on SF Signal is “If you could publish a short fiction anthology containing up to 25 previously-published sf/f/h stories, which stories would it include and why?”.
You can see my answer to the question here. I could have gone for a themed table of contents for my dream anthology, but I chose to simply pick twenty-five of my favourite genre short stories (and a couple of novellas). Quite what my choices say about me I wouldn’t like to speculate…
It’s been nearly a year since I dissected one of my stories and the creative process which led to it. I’ve had several stories published since my last ‘Anatomy of Story’ back in October 2009 (see here) – six in this year alone, in fact. But I’d sooner not write about one of my stories if people can’t read it, and though I may only have sold first serial rights to the magazines which published those stories, I feel it’s better to wait a suitable period before sticking the story up here on my blog.
Unless, of course, the story was published online. In which case I can just link to it.
Which brings us to ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’, which was published in M-Brane SF #19, and is available on the website as #19 is the sample issue for the magazine.
‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ is, I think, the first story I’ve ever written to a specific market. I wrote it to submit to Catastrophia, an anthology of post-catastrophe stories edited by Allen Ashley and published by PS Publishing. Usually, I have an idea – sometimes it includes a plot, other times not even that – I work on it until it’s a story, then I submit it to whichever venue I feel it best suits… and then the next best… and then the next… and so on.
The central idea of ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ came from a couple of New Scientist articles. (I subscribe to their feed, rather than to the magazine itself. I especially like the Zoologger column – some of the creatures it describes are even more bizarre than any alien race invented by sf writers). Anyway, there were a couple of articles about creating an artificial sunshade high in the atmosphere using particulates which, it was hoped, would help alleviate global warming. Both articles were strongly against the idea, suggesting that the effects on the climate could be catastrophic. I filed the idea away for a possible story.
Around the same time, I’d read an article by Jonathan McCalmont on his blog about the fascism inherent in secondary-world fantasies, in particular George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones. McCalmont mentions specifically the public execution by Lord Eddard Stark of an “oathbreaker”. That got me thinking – not so much about public executions, but the practice of displaying the body after an execution; and of a world in which doing something like that wouldn’t be fascist.
Then there was the current recession, caused by scumbag bankers, who continue to pocket ridiculous bonuses. Plus the likes of Fred Goodwin, ex-CEO of RBS, whose criminal mismanagement – a loss of £24.1 billion – was rewarded with a £700,000 a year pension. Clearly, the ever-increasing equity gap is grossly unfair and is only going to result in yet more financial disasters.
I put all the above together with the planetary sunshade idea from New Scientist. I’d have a billionaire put up a planetary sunshade on his own initiative, and it would all go horribly wrong. Which would lead to a backlash against wealth and the hoarding of riches… But I wouldn’t actually tell that story. I’d tell a story about a young couple living in this new post-wealth ice age world, and how they fell foul of these new laws.
I’d originally planned to call the central couple Peter and Pauline – as in “robbing Peter to pay Paul” – but decided that was a bit naff. So instead I called the husband Robin (robbing? geddit?), and the wife Petra. I wanted to describe a world which was only a few years ahead of our own, so I decided to keep the technological extrapolation light. People would use their phones for pretty much everything – as I think will probably become the case anyway. Robin reads books on his phone, listens to music on it, does his banking, and uses an app to follow his route on the bus. The roads are also heated, and the bus electric-powered.
There was a fuss in the news at the time I was writing ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ about Muslim women wearing veils and the hijab (the wearing of veils in public has now been made illegal in France). Having grown up in the Arabian Gulf, and spent ten years working there after graduating from university, I’m used to the sight of women in veils, or even full abeya. Given that climate collapse could badly affect the ozone layer, greatly increasing UV to dangerous levels, it made sense to me for people in my invented post-wealth world to cover up completely when outside. Perhaps even wearing veils; which could then lead to them becoming fashion accessories. The scene in the kitchen at Robin’s work thus serves double-duty – laying out some of the story’s politics, but also commenting on the wearing of veils.
I think at one point I toyed with the idea of people wearing masks – not necessarily decorative masks, but ones that aped their actual features… or how they wanted their features to appear. But that struck me as a bit too fetishistic, so I stuck with veils.
In the event, Allen didn’t take ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’. He liked it, even described it as “beautifully written”, but he bounced it all the same. He had enough stories, he said, set in post-catastrophe worlds. He was now looking for stories set at the point of catastrophe. So I wrote another story, ‘In the Face of Disaster’, which describes the beginnings of a global epidemic of prosopagnosia, and he took that one.
‘Through the Eye of a Needle’, which is, I think, a little too literary for most sf venues, was subsequently bounced by a couple of magazines, spent several months each at a couple of literary magazines who never bothered to respond, before finding a home at M-Brane SF.
Chris Fletcher of M-Brane SF admitted when he took the story that he was a little unsure of its politics. To me, it’s quite clearly left-wing. But Chris was afraid some readers, especially US ones, might think the story was anti-socialist, that it painted a deliberately harsh portrait of a socialist society as a way of showing how “inimical” that political system is. Except, well, I don’t think ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ actually depicts a dystopia. To my mind, there’s nothing Nineteen Eighty-four about it. A well-developed public infrastructure, free public transport, free public leisure facilities, no equity gap… Okay, so no one gets to save the money they earn. But why would they? If they lived to their means, what’s the point in wealth? It only leads to conspicuous consumption, which contains a multitude of traps for the careless.
‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ was a deliberate attempt by myself to write a sf story with a more literate feel than is common in the genre. I tried to keep the world-building to a minimum and avoid info-dumps. I told a story about a marriage which disintegrates, with a cause that is specific to the world of the story – and that’s why ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ is definitely science fiction.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Apologies for the delay since the last one of these. I’ve posted a number of reviews of individual books to this blog over the past few weeks, but they haven’t been all I’ve read during that time. Here’s all of them – with the links to the aforementioned reviews where appropriate, of course. And there’s also all those DVDs I’ve watched since my last readings & watchings post…
Books
Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds (2010). I’m working on a review of this for SFF Chronicles. I promise to post it up there soon. Suffice it to say, my feelings about this novel probably echo those of most of Reynolds’ fans.
Corpsing, Toby Litt (2000), is, as you can no doubt tell from the title, Litt’s third book. (Each of his books is titled alphabetically, although they are not a series or linked in any way.) I first came across Litt’s name when his tenth book, Journey into Space, a science fiction novel set aboard a generation starship, was reviewed in Interzone. I found a copy of that book (see here), enjoyed it, and so decided to read more by the author. Corpsing is a mystery novel, of sorts. The first-person narrator, Conrad, meets his ex-girlfriend, an up-and-coming actress, for a meal in a posh restaurant. During the main course, a hitman enters, kills the ex-girlfriend and mortally wounds Conrad. When he comes out of the resulting coma, he determines to discover who ordered the hit on his ex-girlfriend, and why. The solution to the mystery is not entirely what he expected. While the resolution is a little disappointing, the journey to it is very good. Conrad is an engaging narrator, there’s some perceptive writing in the book, and it’s also funny in parts and clever in others. I shall certainly be reading more by Litt.
Thousandth Night / Minla’s Flowers, Alastair Reynolds (2009), is a signed limited back-to-back double of a pair of Reynolds’ novellas from Subterranean Press. I’d read ‘Minla’s Flowers’ in The New Space Opera, but ‘Thousandth Night’ was new to me as it first appeared in a SF Book Club anthology One Million A.D. I have, however, read House of Suns, which is a novel-length sequel-of-sorts to ‘Thousandth Night’. The title refers to a year-long reunion of the Gentian Line, immortal clones descended from a single woman, albeit engineered to be individual, who travel the galaxy alone for 10,000 years doing touristy-type things. At the reunion, each member of the line creates a dream of what they have experienced during their travels, each of which is played to the clones each night. The narrator, Campion, however, notices some discrepancies in the dream, or “threading”, of one the other clones. With the help of Purslane, a female clone, he investigates… and uncovers a dastardly plot which could impact both the Gentian Line and the entire galaxy. The central conceit is pretty cool, and there is some impressive sf imagery in the story – the flying whales surely could have been inspired by the album art from Gojiro’s From Mars to Sirius
Bold as Love (2001), Castles Made of Sand (2002), Midnight Lamp (2003), Band of Gypsys (2005) and Rainbow Bridge (2006), Gwyneth Jones. The Bold as Love Cycle was the first quintet of my summer reading project (see here). I’m working on a piece about the five books, which I’ll post here when it’s finished. I hope to have it done before the end of the month.
The Stainless Steel Rat, Kelvin Gosnell and Carols Ezquerra (1979 – 1985). This is an omnibus edition of the comic adaptation of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat novels which first appeared in 2000AD. I may no longer be a big fan of the books (see here), but I do have fond memories of the comic strip and didn’t think it could be any worse than the novels. And, well, I’m not so sure… Ezquerra’s art is always distinctive, and mostly very good; although it does seem a bit slapdash in some of the later stories. However, important chunks of the plots seem to be missing. In the first strip, an adaptation of The Stainless Steel Rat, Jim DiGriz refers to the villain as Pepe Nero, despite him never having been named previously. The same thing happens in ‘The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World’ – there’s a leap from “someone messing about with the distant past” to “plot by Him to destroy the universe”. We know DiGriz and family, but the villains need to be introduced too. As does the plot. Ah well. Now, if 2000AD will only publish an omnibus of their take on Dan Dare…
No Man Friday, Rex Gordon (1956), is one of my British SF Masterworks, and I reviewed it here.
Empress of Eternity, LE Modesitt Jr (2010), I read for review for Interzone. I’d never read Modesitt before, although I was aware of the name. I won’t be reading him again. Ever.
A Man of Double Deed
Disgrace, JM Coetzee (1999), won the Booker Prize in 1999 and is the first book by Coetzee I’ve read. A university professor in Cape Town has an affair with a student which sours. A complaint is raised against him. Rather than defend himself, the professor stands on principle and is subsequently fired. So he goes to visit his daughter, a lesbian farmer in the East Cape region. But several weeks after his arrival, the farm is attacked by three bandits, who rape the daughter. She refuses to acknowledge this, and he finds himself helpless in the face of her refusal. It’s easy to cast the relationship as a metaphor for South Africa, but I’m not sure Coetzee’s unadorned prose works in the story’s favour – it’s good, but feels a bit too stark to really appeal. I may try more by the author, but I shan’t make a point of seeking out his books.
Seven Miles Down
Gherman Titov’s Flight into Space
The Guardians 1: The Krilov Continuum, JMH (James) Lovegrove (1998), was , the author freely admits, work-for-hire. Orbit came up with the concept, and did a cross-promotional deal with the Sci-Fi Channel. Lovegrove was interested in the topic, so was keen to work on the project. It’s alt history UFO mythology type stuff, with the Tunguska explosion caused by the crash of a craft powered by anti-gravity. It was invented by a Russian scientist, Krilov, although he unknowingly had help from an extra-dimensional race… because it seems there is a war being fought on Earth between two groups from that race, and the chief weapon is Progress. One side – the good guys – want to keep progress at a level where the human race neither destroys itself, nor attacks the extra-dimensional race – as happened in Atlantis eons before. The bad guys, however, like to mess things up by introducing alien technology here and there. A bit of a potboiler, to tell the truth. Lovegrove has written much better. The Sci-Fi Channel apparently failed to keep up their end of the deal and sales were so poor the series was cancelled after two books. I’m not sure I can be bothered to track down the sequel.
Little Birds, Anaïs Nin (1979). I suspect I came across mention of Nin through her link with Lawrence Durrell, and so when I stumbled across this thin collection of her short fiction – well, erotica – in a charity shop, I bought it. And… Sorry, not impressed. Some of the stories skated dangerously close to paedophilia and rape, and very few of them actually struck me as erotic. They were apparently written in the 1940s – although Nin did not allow them to be published until the late 1970s – so clearly they did things very differently back in those days…
The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears (2002), was another one I picked up in a charity shop. But I did so because I’d read and enjoyed Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost back in 1998. A fifth-century bishop, a fifteenth-century poet, and a WWII academic, all in Provence, each studying the earlier person, and each in some sort of relationship with a Jewish woman, in interlinked stories which are part history lesson, part discussions of philosophy and religion, and part love story. Admittedly, much of the philosophy was lost on me – the title is shared with a treatise by Cicero, and it’s referenced many times during the story. But the historical periods were handled well, the characters were interesting, and although the book was slow to start, I did like it a lot. It not as good as An Instance of the Fingerpost, but I’ll certainly be reading more by Pears.
Films
Under The Sand
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The 7th Dimension
All That Heaven Allows
Hierro
Planet 51
While the City Sleeps
Pandorum
Fish Tank
Blood Diamond
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: The Complete BBC Series
Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
Hunter Prey
The Big Clock
The Sword With No Name
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
The Hurt Locker
M-Brane SF #21 is now out, containing, among others, ‘Human Resources’, my near-future story about brain-hacking and indentured labour. See here. Only $2. You know you want it.
Jupiter magazine’s next issue, #30 Hermippe, is due to be published any day soon. It contains my Jupiter Quartet of poems… and I can’t think of a more appropriate place for them to appear.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 