It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

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Guessing Games

Niall Harrison on Torque Control has posted the long list for this year’s Arthur C Clark Award. It’s the first time they’ve done this. I think it’s a good idea.

I’m not going to repeat the list, nor am I going to turn it into one of those “memes” – you know the sort, the titles you’ve read in bold, those on the TBR pile in italics. I will point out that, of the list, I’ve read Matter, Iain Banks (blogged about it here); Kéthani, Eric Brown; Template, Matthew Hughes (reviewed it for Interzone 218); The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod (blogged about it here); Debatable Space, Philip Palmer; and House of Suns Alastair Reynolds. Sitting on my book shelves and waiting to be read are The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness; Going Under, Justina Robson; Halting State, Charles Stross; Necropath, Eric Brown; and Omega, Christopher Evans.

What I thought might prove an interesting exercise would be to try and predict the short list. That’s six from the forty-six on the long list. And here are my guesses…

I’ve not chosen these titles because they’re the ones that would make my own personal short list. I’ve picked them because they’re the ones I think the judges will choose – based on reviews I’ve read of the books, comments on various blogs and sites, my general feeling of each book’s reception, and previous short lists for the Arthur C Clarke Award.

We’ll find out how close I was in about a month’s time…

EDIT: by “long list”, I mean the list of books submitted by the publishers for consideration. These are not novels the Award jury has chosen.


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2009 Reading Challenge #2 – Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke

There’s a fitting synchronicity to my choice of Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C Clarke as the second book of my 2009 Reading Challenge. Like Larry Niven’s Ringworld, it is a book that’s dominated by a Big Dumb Object. It also won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel, and is in the SF Masterworks series. So, another highly-regarded science fiction novel. In fact, it’s probably considered Clarke’s best novel, and he’s one of the “Big Three” of the genre, with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

The plot of Rendezvous With Rama is not complicated. In 2131 AD, an object – named Rama by Spaceguard – is detected entering the Solar system. It is determined to be artificial, and the nearest spaceship is sent to investigate. The crew of Endeavour discover that Rama is an alien artefact, a cylinder fifty kilometres long and sixteen kilometres in diameter. Its interior is hollow, and it is roatating fast enough to provide gravity on its inside surface. Endeavour‘s crew explores Rama as it travels through the inner Solar system towards the Sun. They find no clues to its makers or origin. In fact, it is deserted but for a wide variety of “biots”, or biological machines. Eventually, the explorers abandon Rama, and the artefact uses the Sun to boost itself on a path out of the Solar system. End of story.

In other words, very little actually happens in the book. There is no explanation, no resolution. Rama is presented as a puzzle, but there is no solution. It is alien.

Rendezvous With Rama is a strange book in many ways. Not just the complete lack of narrative closure, or the way it resolutely fails to answer the questions it poses. It is also a book which has aged both gracefully and badly.

The framing narrative, which introduces the world of the future and then describes the deliberations of the committee overseeing the exploration of Rama, reads as though it’s taking place in the 1950s. Even in 1972, it must have seem dated. In 2009, of course, it reads even more out-of-date: for example, “when he was able to get computer time to process the results” (page 14). In 1972, perhaps, when mainframes were prevalent, this might have seemed plausible. But the novel is set in 2131. One hundred and fifty nine years later. One hundred and twenty-two years in our future.

The main narrative details the exploration by Commander Norton, captain of Endeavour, and his crew. The emphasis is on Rama itself, which helps distance the novel from its time of writing. The characters are also so bland they could be from any age. Admittedly, it’s also very Anglophonic Americo- and Euro-centric – far more so than any vision of the future written now would be. But their concerns are immediate, direct and almost entirely related to the story, so nothing especially jars.

However, like Ringworld, Rendezvous With Rama is over-shadowed by its eponymous BDO. It’s Rama that stays with you. There’s not much in the way of plot, anyway. And the characters aren’t remotely memorable.

But.

Should a science fiction novel be remembered for its furniture or for its story? Both Ringworld and Rendezvous With Rama have been lauded, and are held in high esteem, for the invented artefacts their casts discover and/or explore. Not for their story, or their writing, or indeed any of their characters. It’s little wonder the genre is held in low regard, when the fans themselves apply such reductive appreciation to the works they deem “classics”. After all, Dickens’ Great Expectations is not notable for Miss Havisham’s ruined mansion.

Rendezvous With Rama is an odd book. There’s a timelessness to its story, but its narrative firmly dates it. Its refusal to explain itself makes it more interesting than, by rights, it actually should be. If science fiction were only about “sense of wonder”, then Rendezvous With Rama succeeds as a science fiction novel. But it has not aged as gracefully as memory might insist it has. It’s the product of an imagined world, which in turn created imaginary worlds, which never really existed. And that tells against it.

In the final analysis, Rendezvous With Rama is, I suppose, another partial success. I’m glad I reread it. I may do so again one day. While it’s certainly not a very good novel, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a good science fiction novel and if “good science fiction novel” means it doesn’t have to be a “good novel”…


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Gods and Robots – The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

According to John Clute, every science fiction novel has three dates: the date it was written, the date it is set, and the date it is about. For all that it may be set in the future millennia hence, the best time to read a science fiction novel is in its year of publication. And if the novel is set in the near-future, this is even more true. After all, the near-future is seen as an extension of the present, with the present’s issues and concerns…

All of which may well have a sell-by date.

So, a decade or two from now, will we look back at the rise of creationism as some bizarre atavistic aberration? Will we look back in relief at our narrow escape from religious domination? Or will we, as Ken MacLeod posits in The Night Sessions, go to war and in the aftermath completely secularise society?

The Night Sessions is a near-future sf novel masquerading as a crime novel, much as The Execution Channel was a near-future sf novel masquerading as a thriller. It’s set in Edinburgh a decade or two in the future. The world differs from ours – and perhaps what ours might be – in several ways. There was a war, the “Faith War”, fought in Israel with tactical nuclear weapons, and the forces of the West lost. Society has turned its back on organised religion and everywhere is now entirely secular. By law. Churches and priests are no longer officially recognised. There are also robots, and some of them have developed artificial intelligence.

The novel opens with a fundamentalist Christian from New Zealand visiting Edinburgh to meet with the members of an underground Scottish Christian sect. The fundamentalist works in a “creationist science park” in New Zealand which has become a refuge for sentient robots. He has been preaching to the robots, and the Scots intend to broadcast his sermons to their own congregation. These are the night sessions of the title.

The story proper begins with the murder of a priest by a letter bomb. Detective Inspector Ferguson is in charge of the case. Clues suggest an underground Christian group, the Third Covenant, are responsible. Then a bishop is assassinated by a shot to the head. Ferguson’s investigation soon focuses on a robot called Hardcastle, who has been masquerading as a disfigured war veteran with extensive prostheses. And from there it cascades to take in a host of other Christian denominations, various youth subcultures in Edinburgh, more robots, and the Atlantic and Pacific Space Elevators…

Unfortunately, as a crime novel The Night Sessions mostly fails. Fortunately, as a science fiction novel it mostly succeeds. The problem is that the world of the book requires explanation – it’s neither the reader’s world, nor part of the reader’s history. The story requires its background – it cannot progress, nor be resolved, without those background details MacLeod has created. Which means that the crime novel is frequently interrupted by info-dumps. And because this is a crime novel, they seem horribly out of place. The Night Sessions asks to be read as a crime novel, but it cannot be because it is as exposition-heavy as the science fiction novel it really is.

As science fiction, however… The world MacLeod has created is both clever and interesting, but the requirements of the crime plot have led to a withholding of story information – something not normally found in science fiction. Science fiction novels are open – they lay bare their workings as they progress. The reader can see the rods and gears which drive the plot. And has to in order for the resolution to make sense (not doing so can result in the sin of deus ex machina). A crime novel, however, operates with a different mechanism, and part of the reading process involves the reader’s discovery of those rods, gears and linkages. The reader must build the mechanism in their mind in order to understand the book’s resolution.

Where The Night Sessions is especially good is in its depiction of life in this near-future Edinburgh, and in the tools used by the police of the time. As a near-future novel it convinces, and there’s an impressive inevitability, given MacLeod’s invented history, to the society depicted. Which makes it seem such a shame that Ferguson’s investigation seem to be mostly driven by authorial sleight of hand. Science fiction is essentially a logical genre – all sf stories follow an underlying logic. The same is true of crime stories. There’s a similar implacability to the end of a crime novel as there is to the end of sf novel. But in the crime genre there are no shortcuts on the route there. Ferguson seems to stumble upon the conspiracy at the heart of The Night Sessions more by serendipity than by methodical police-work (he has a number of neat tools, and they do help, however). This is not helped by the Columbo-style prologue. This names the villains of the piece, and means we must watch Ferguson and his team stumble through the clues to reach a destination we already know. Except that destination is a blind – because The Night Sessions is actually more of a whydunnit than a whodunnit, and the real why remains hidden for much of the narrative.

Because The Night Sessions is a crime novel, the resolution of the plot should be the identity of the murder and their motivation. Because The Night Sessions is a science fiction novel, that is not enough. The motivation for the crimes has to be science-fictional. And it is. But again not quite enough. Like The Execution Channel, the final plot-zinger in The Night Sessions happens off-screen – it is in fact recounted by one character to another.

The Night Sessions is one of the novels shortlisted for this year’s BSFA Award. It’s certainly one of the most interesting depictions of the near-future I’ve come across in science fiction. But I don’t think the engine of its plot is geared correctly to the wheels of its story. I also suspect it appears too prophetic to read well a decade from now. Its concerns are too specific – unlike, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four – and it’s not pure enough science fiction to weather the years. Read it now and it’s very good. Read it five years from now…?

Ken MacLeod writes bloody good science fiction novels, but we’ve yet to see his best.


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Dumb Idea of the Week

Various genre magazines are suffering in these credit-crunched times – Realms of Fantasy has ceased publication, F&SF has gone bimonthly, and both Asimov’s and Analog have reduced page counts. It looks very gloomy…

There have been several calls for action, but the dumbest solution to this situation I’ve heard so far is this one:

“Maybe what’s needed is for the genre to get down to one magazine. Refocus the field of science fiction. And since the magazine publishing and distribution industry is so screwed, maybe the short story market should move to a different format. I’d suggest a trade or mass market paperback series published quarterly to start with edited by team of editors to get the very best and diverse kind of story.”

Right.

If you search for science fiction markets on Duotrope, a writers’ resource web site, you get 342 hits – ranging from the professional magazines, such as the aforementioned Analog and F&SF, to the amateur online zines which don’t pay contributors. For a reader, there’s a wide range of fiction of varying quality available there. For a writer, there’s ample opportunity to get into print.

But James Wallace Harris thinks we should chuck all that. Instead, the only outlet for science fiction short stories should be a single quarterly paperback anthology. About 100 published stories a year, then. It’ll make picking a shortlist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards easier. That’s about the only good thing I can say for the plan. But it will also make it impossible for anyone except an established name to get a story into print.

It will kill science fiction.

The genre needs a constant input of new talent. That’s how it grows and evolves. Choke off that talent, and science fiction will stagnate and die. There’ll be no books by new writers, just more tired old crap by the old guard. And when they’re gone it’ll be… reprint after reprint after reprint. The sf shelves of your local book shop will start to resemble the Penguin Classics shelves – full of multiple editions of the same canon of books by long-dead authors.

So what if a few magazines go to the wall? It’s happened before, and it’ll no doubt happen again.

And science fiction is still here, still growing and still evolving.

I have to wonder if the same can be said for some of its fans…


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And Yet Another Review…

This time from SFRevu. See here. They write,

“In ‘Thicker Than Water’, Ian Sales brings us Major Gina Priest, a tough-as-nails commander on a moon of Saturn, trying to protect it from attackers from Titan. Over the course of this exciting story, she will learn much of her foes and herself … Issue 23 of Jupiter is another little gem!”

Jupiter #23 is available from here.


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Another Jupiter #23 Review

SF Crowsnest reviews Jupiter #23, and says of my story, ‘Thicker Than Water’:

“Evocative descriptions of the environment of Tethys and Titan make this a very realistic story … This is a good story with much promise, atmospheric and exciting. However, it appears as only a brief glimpse into another universe, sufficiently tantalising for one to wish to see more.”

Jupiter #23 is available from here.


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Lies, Damn Lies and… SF Awards

Adam Roberts has posted an interesting article on Futurismic on the blog-baiting subject of “Award shortlists are all rubbish”. Big Dumb Object has responded here.

Myself, I don’t think awards shortlists are rubbish. I just think they’re dishonest. The Hugo Award, the BSFA Award, the Clarke Award, the Nebula Award… are all given to the “best” novel, etc.

Best.

But that’s not true. The voted awards are given to the shortlisted book which has the most votes. The most popular book, in other words. The juried awards are given to the book which the jury – no doubt after much argument and compromise – feels is the best of their shortlist. The same is true of the shortlists themselves. The process itself simply isn’t capable of picking the best book of the year.

If every reader of science fiction and fantasy voted for the Hugo Award, the winner would always be the latest Harry Potter book. Because so many more people read JK Rowling than Michael Chabon (whose The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – which is actually very good – won the Hugo for 2008). But then, of course, they’d have to call it the Hugo Award for Most Popular Novel.

It could be argued that shortlists provide a good reading list, a snapshot of the “state of the genre”, if you will. For juried awards such as the Clarke, that’s possibly true. Although given the Clarke’s predilection for picking non-sf novels for its shortlist, you’re not going to get much idea from it of what’s happening in the genre in any given year.

As far as I can determine, the only conceivable purpose for the various awards which are handed out is… to celebrate the genre. It’s a reminder to the general public that science fiction and fantasy still exist as a separate, functioning ecology; that there are writers, readers, artists and commentators working in the genre; that there are people who feel strongly enough about the genre to do the whole award shenanigans.

So let’s drop the word “best” from all the awards. Let’s call it the Hugo Award for Novel, the BSFA Award for Novel, and so on. Remove all references to any kind of value judgment. Let’s stop pretending the winners are better books than every other genre book published during the same year. The same for short stories, magazines, writers, editors, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest.

Let’s focus on what the awards really are: annual celebrations of the genre.


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BSFA Award shortlist

It’s that time of year again. The shortlists for the 2008 BSFA Awards have been announced. And they go something like this:

Best Novel

I’ve not read any of the four, although I do have The Night Sessions and plan to read it soon. I’m a bit behind on my Baxter reading, although eventually I would have got to Flood. The Harkaway I’ve heard good-ish things about, but not enough to make me want to shell out for a new hardback by an author I’ve never read before. Anathem…. Well, I hated the Baroque Cycle, so I’m certainly not going to buy Stephenson’s latest brick in hardback.

And yes, I know there are such things as libraries. But I already have enough unread books of my own to keep me reading for several years, so why would I join a library?

Um, it seems The Gone-Away World is available in A-format paperback already. I might well get a copy, then…

Best Short Fiction

A new Chiang. Nuff said. I hope they make it available online. The others are already available to read on the tinterweb. I don’t read enough short fiction each year to judge how the above stack up against everything else published. Annoyingly, you have to sign up for a 7-day trial for some online business information service to access the Rickert. Which requires you to enter a credit card number. Dumb move, F&SF.

Best Non-Fiction

I have Paul Kincaid’s book, and I plan to read it. I am less interested in fantasy, or superheroes. Clute’s piece, as it is online, I will read.

Best Artwork

Judge for yourself…