A Really Useful Engine

John Self recently wrote a post on reading and specifically his relationship with reading at different points in his life. This includes a stage of life I’ve just reached myself:

A parent is a willing player in the project of being pushed into a corner of their own life… As it happens, I managed pretty well to keep my reading up after our first son was born. The thing about two parents and one child is that you outnumber them: you can give your partner a break, and vice versa… With two children, the first thing you realise is how easy it was with one. Now there are no hiding places, no spare hands. Once they’re both sleeping through the night (and with our second, currently 16 months old, we’re still waiting for that), you have the evening free; but you’re too tired to concentrate on anything longer than a tweet. Most of all, with two young children, you’re never really alone…

Deeds of possession for property speak of the tenant or owner having “quiet enjoyment” of the premises. Those two words placed together will have most parents scratching their heads with quizzical eyebrows. Quiet enjoyment is not part of the deal. But it is essential if you want to read, or write, or write about reading. It is essential if you want to engage with a book that can’t be fully absorbed with Octonauts playing in the background.

Whilst my short fiction reading has increased, I haven’t opened a novel for three months. And if reading is hard, writing is harder. Two years ago I published my 50th review for Strange Horizons, a figure achieved over nine years. My 52nd review,  Railhead by Philip Reeve,  has just gone live. I describe the novel as “the first New Weird children’s space opera” which probably oversells it. Reeve couldn’t write a bad book but this is not a particularly memorable one:

Does this mean that Reeve’s proud demi-gods will persist in the imagination as long as Awdry’s squabbling schoolboys? I doubt it. Though thrilling and humane, Railhead ultimately feels transitory—more style than substance.

Yes, that is a Thomas The Tank Engine reference. Not only have my reviews slowed done substantially, their frame of reference has shrunk dramatically. This is not something that can be said of other recent Strange Horizons reviews. So I’d like to write to more reviews in 2016 but I’d also like to write different reviews. I’m just not sure where I’ll find the time.

Hugo Voting – Best Short Story

After Best Fan Writer, we turn to my votes for Best Short Story:

1) No Award
2) ‘A Single Samurai’ by Steven Diamond
3) ‘Totaled’ by Kary English

4) ‘Turncoat’ by Steve Rzasa
5) ‘On A Spiritual Plain’ by Lou Antonelli
6) ‘The Parliament Of Beasts And Birds’ by John C Wright

As always, a line break indicates Double No Award and an asterisk indicates it isn’t even bloody eligible for the award. If you want to read more about my thoughts on the stories, Strange Horizons have just published my review of the shortlist:

This year, however, saw the return of organised slate voting under the banner of Sad Puppies—spearheaded by 2014 Hugo nominee, shit writer, and dumbass Brad Torgensen—and Rabid Puppies, spearheaded by 2014 Hugo nominee, shit writer, and total fucking scumbag Vox Day. In contrast to last year’s limited Sad Puppy success, this year their campaigns swept the board. There is only one non-Puppy story out of fifteen, and that story is only there because the Puppies managed to nominate an ineligible story from 2013 that was subsequently removed.

And why did they decide to wreck the Hugos in this fashion? To redress a balance. To remove all the Politically Correct crap that has clogged up the award for so long and replace it with honest, hardworking, conservative, Christian fiction. As Torgersen so memorably put it: “Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets.” They have loudly proclaimed that the 2015 Hugo shortlists represent the very best fiction that this wing of fandom has to offer, so it seemed only fair to take them at their word. What unexpected delights would I find amongst this treasure trove of under-acclaimed fiction? If you’ve read anything that any of the Puppies have ever written, I think you can see where this is heading; I intended to read all three short fiction categories but I gave up after Best Story.

That isn’t quite true, I actually managed to read one of the Best Novellettes. At 7,500 to 17,500 words, the stories in this spurious category can be less concerned about economy which is just as well as Edward M Lerner isn’t at all concerned with economy. ‘Championship B’tok’ is structured as a mini-novel with 10 chapters that hop from viewpoint to viewpoint and those annoying infodumps dressed up as documents from the future (the cringe-inducingly named Internetopedia). After a few stretches of his fingers, I’m sure Lerner could type this stuff all day without breaking a sweat. In fact, this is the eighth story in his Interstellar Net space opera series and there are constant reference to previously described events and gaps where knowledge is assumed. So instead of a premise, we have plot – or rather pieces of plot from a megatext. Doughty human spy-spy Carl Rowland must outwit the inscrutably cunning Snakes, intern aliens who don’t know their place, whilst journalist-spy Corinne Elman is investigating a galaxy-spanning conspiracy. Are the two connected!? As the title suggests, it is a load of old arse. The first chapter is entirely unconnected to the following nine, the final chapter doesn’t resolve anything, really the story is only notable for Lerner’s touchingly misplaced faith in the rule of law.

You can see why a story as strenuously undemanding and casually conservative as this appeals to Puppy voters though. Not to mention parochial; as is so often the case, the imagined future is actually a projected mid-20th Century America is which Walter Cronkite (born 1916) is a relevant journalistic benchmark and impressionism (most prominent in the late 1800s) is considered outré. The central game of B’tok, which turns out to not be very important at all, is a recreation of the Battle of Midway. I am too young, too foreign, too interested in literature to be the audience for this work. So I take my hat off to Chance Morrison who is reading them all.

Strident And Playful

As a coda to my Worldcon report, Strange Horizons have just published a new interview with Iain Banks. The interview was conducted by Jude Roberts, who was with me on that ‘Dropping The M’ panel, as part of her PhD.

This interview was made available as part of the The 2014 Strange Horizons Fund Drive. You already know they are great so why note donate? Plus: prizes!

50

My review of Burial At Sea is up now at Strange Horizons.

Astonishingly, it is my fiftieth review for them. To celebrate, I wanted to do something different so I’ve written my first ever review of a computer game. In a way, Burial At Sea is a bizarre choice: the sequel to a game I didn’t like and the prequel to a game I haven’t played. I’m glad I picked it though, both because I enjoyed writing about the game and because it partially redeemed the hours I put into completing Bioshock Infinite.

In other words, Episode 2 raises the gameplay bar considerably but only as high as a solid B. Grading the narrative proves harder because if Episode 1 is the epilogue to Bioshock Infinite then Episode 2 is the prologue to Bioshock. Given I was lost when the story was self-contained, I had no chance when the head of this mega-text looped round to swallow its own tail. So, if you have followed the series from the beginning, I imagine Episode 2 is as satisfying a coda as its creator has claimed. If, like me, you are a late arrival then it only offers a frustrating glimpse into an alternative dimension, one where Bioshock Infinite actually lived up to the praise lavished on it.

I also thought I’d take the opportunity to look back at the last nine years I’ve been writing for Strange Horizons. As I’ve said before, I was motivated to start reviewing by the poor quality of online reviews. I knew I was better at writing about books than other people being published. When I started writing for Strange Horizons, I soon realised that wasn’t enough. I needed to up my game, both for myself and for the magazine, and become a good reviewer in my own right. I’ve now achieved this so, in recent years, I’ve used Strange Horizons as a platform to keep stretching myself.

2005 – 2006: Change

At this point I had been reviewing for four years but I was still very much finding my feet as I moved away from my then preferred length of 500 words towards the greater depth and breadth of essay length-reviews. You can already see a substantial change between the first and the last of these but I’m not really sure I could recommend reading any of them.

1) Nova Scotia: New Speculative Scottish Fiction edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson (Strange Horizons: November 2005)
2) The Clock-King and the Queen of the Hourglass by Vera Nazarian (Strange Horizons: January 2006)
3) Life On Mars 1.1 – 1.3 (Strange Horizons: February 2006)
4) A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve (Strange Horizons: May 2006)

2007-2010: Consolidation

After an eight month gap, I knuckled down and turned out almost a review a month for 2007 and 2008 before slowing down and stabilising. Practice makes perfect and this is really where I learnt my trade (under the gentle whip-hand of then reviews editor Niall Harrison). Looking back, I’m pleased that there is a good mix of novels, films, short fiction, television and non-fiction here and this was definitely helpful in terms of developing as a writer. I am fond of a lot of these reviews and I’d describe some of them as very good but there are also others I’d revisit. Some particular milestones: my first multi-text review (The Nines, Southland Tales and Doomsday), (The Red Men) and what was for a long time the most commented upon review on the site (Night Of Villjamur).

5) The Fountain (2006) (Strange Horizons: February 2007)
6) Black Man by Richard Morgan (Strange Horizons: April 2007)
7) 28 Weeks Later (2007) (Strange Horizons: June 2007)
8) The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds (Strange Horizons: June 2007)
9) Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch (Strange Horizons: August 2007)
10) Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery (Strange Horizons: October 2007)
11) The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua (Strange Horizons: January 2008)
12) The SFWA European Hall of Fame, edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow (Strange Horizons: February 2008)
13) Black Sheep by Ben Peek (Strange Horizons: March 2008)
14) What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid (Strange Horizons: May 2008)
15) The Nines (2007), Southland Tales (2006) and Doomsday (2008) (Strange Horizons: June 2008)
16) Lost Boys by James Miller (Strange Horizons: July 2008)
17) Everything Is Sinister by David Llewellyn and The Heritage by Will Ashon (Strange Horizons: August 2008)
18) Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Strange Horizons: September 2008)
19) The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (Strange Horizons: November 2008)
20) Dead Set (Strange Horizons: December 2008)
21) The Chronicles Of The Black Company by Glen Cook (Strange Horizons: January 2009)
22) Subtle Edens, edited by Allen Ashley (Strange Horizons: February 2009)
23) Lost In Space by Toby Litt (Strange Horizons: March 2009)
24) A Thread of Truth by Nina Allan (Strange Horizons: May 2009)
25) Nights Of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton (Strange Horizons: June 2009)
26) God Of Clocks by Alan Campbell (Strange Horizons: July 2009)
27) Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui and Paprika (2006) (Strange Horizons: July 2009)
28) The Ask And The Answer by Patrick Ness (Strange Horizons: August 2009)
29) The Lord of the Sands of Time by Issui Ogawa and All You Need Is KILL by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (Strange Horizons: September 2009)
30) Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint (Strange Horizons: October 2009)
31) The Year Of The Flood by Margaret Atwood and The Rapture by Liz Jensen (Strange Horizons: January 2010)
32) Kick-Ass (2010) (Strange Horizons: April 2010)
33) Monsters Of Men by Patrick Ness (Strange Horizons: June 2010)
34) Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010) (Strange Horizons: September 2010)

2011-2014: Confidence

Another long gap (during which time I concentrated on reviewing older novels for this blog). When I returned to Strange Horizons, my focus was less on developing my criticism than on my style. A lot of SF novels are outright crap but an even bigger chunk are simply unambitious and make no attempt to engage with the possibilities of literature, particularly with respect to style. That goes double for reviews of SF so I wanted to practice what I preached. I’m pretty pleased with the results and I think you can particularly see this from 2012 onwards.

35) Source Code (2011) (Strange Horizons: April 2011)
36) Twilight Robbery by Frances Hardinge (Strange Horizons: June 2011)
37) In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood (Strange Horizons: October 2011)
38) Blood Red Road by Moira Young (Strange Horizons: February 2012)
39) Artemis by Philip Palmer (Strange Horizons: April 2012)
40) Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (Strange Horizons: May 2012)
41) Osiris by EJ Swift (Strange Horizons: October 2012)
42) The City’s Son by Tom Pollock (Strange Horizons: January 2013)
43) Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010 by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo (Strange Horizons: March 2013)
44) No Return by Zachary Jernigan (Strange Horizons: May 2013)
45) Sea Of Ghosts by Alan Campbell (Strange Horizons: August 2013)
46) Dark Waters Of Hagwood by Robin Jarvis (Strange Horizons: September 2013)
47) Drakenfeld by Mark Charan Newton (Strange Horizons: January 2014)
48) Wolves by Simon Ings (Strange Horizons: February 2014)
49) Astra by Naomi Foyle (Strange Horizons: March 2014)

So what next? Another nine years of writing for them, I hope. But I also want to write more away from Strange Horizons. Firstly, having spent years writing 2,000 word reviews, I find myself missing 500 word reviews. The space the internet allows to talk about texts is a huge boon but sometimes a bit of constraint can also be productive. I very much enjoyed writing 500 word reviews for Vector before I took over as reviews editor and it is a form I’m increasingly thinking of returning to. Secondly, I’ve long though a reading diet that consists solely of SF is stunting but that is exactly what has happened with my reviews. Whilst I read a wide range of literature, I only review SF so I’m going to make an effort to actually achieve the last of these resolutions.

Some Other Eden

My review of Astra by Naomi Foyle is up now at Strange Horizons. I make a big deal of it not being A Door Into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski’s radical ecofeminist, pacifist utopia from 1986:

Since reading Slonczewski’s novel, I’ve been yearning for a modern version—something unabashedly aspirational—and, at first, Astra by Naomi Foyle promised to be that book. It is tantalizingly close, but Foyle had other plans and deliberately subverts her story which, for me, makes it less subversive. Nor is it literary fiction of the type a front cover quote from the Poetry Book Society and funding logo from Arts Council England might suggest. Yet it is still an unusual and appealing novel and does perhaps point towards the emergence of a new breed of core genre British publishing.

I conclude by saying:

Since 2013, however, we have seen the launch of Jo Fletcher Books (publishing Foyle, Karen Lord, and Stephanie Saulter) and Del Rey UK (Kameron Hurley and E. J. Swift). These build on the pioneering work of Angry Robot (Madeline Ashby and Lauren Buekes) to create a cohort of medium-sized, risk-taking commercial publishers who have put the larger houses to shame. Here’s to more fascinatingly flawed mainstream science fiction novels that dare to be different.

This is perhaps slightly ironic given Quercus (of which Jo Fletcher Books is part) were acquired by Hodder today. But I’ve noticed that more and more my individual reviews are in conversation with each other, as if flailing towards a Grand Unified Theory of SF Publishing, so it might be worth reading the context of some of my other recent reviews. On which note, Astra is actually my 49th review for Strange Horizons. Bloody hell.

The Collapse Of Complex Societies

My review of Wolves by Simon Ings is up now at Strange Horizons. It is a conflicted review for a conflicted novel but it is ultimately a positive review for an exciting novel:

Wolves, then, is best understood not as a triumphant return but as a fascinating work of transition. Ings is taking bold, vigorous steps forward but this is treacherous terrain and it is no surprise that he slips backwards from time to time. Sometimes though, he is just too cavalier. I’ve mentioned several authors as reference points throughout this review, each with a strong personality; the point is not to hold Ings to another’s standards but to set out the company he is confidently keeping. These are some of the most important figures in SF and Ings is moving into this territory, he just needs to fully commit. If he currently seems stranded half way to Harrison, I don’t think it will be for long.

I try to avoid anything about a book before I write my review but once I’d emerged from my shell, I discoverd three interesting pieces that touch on issues I raise. Firstly, a lovely tribute to Iain Banks from Ings. I see a lot of both Banks and M John Harrison in Wolves so was particularly struck by his opening anecdote:

I first met Iain Banks at Lumb Bank, a writing centre near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire. The area has since become the hairdressing and financial services capital of the western world, but back then you could still find the odd lock-in. Banksie (always and forever Banksie: the other one is a parvenu) was teaching a course in writing science fiction. Mike Harrison was his guest reader, a prickly bugger who’d just finished a story called Small Heirlooms, for my money one of the great short stories of his or anyone’s career. I didn’t get how Banks and Harrison were such mates — the one bristling with psychic armour, the other ebullient, friendly, and without any apparent side to him at all.

Secondly, Toby Litt’s rave review in the Guardian. Having played the game of supposed influence myself, I probably shouldn’t throw stones whilst standing in a greenhouse but I think the connection Litt sees to JG Ballard is a bit of a red herring. I loved his suggestion that Ings was an “SF Thomas Hardy” though:

And here is where the Ballard comparisons stop short – because what is strongest in Wolves, and what gives the novel its greatest power to dominate the mind, is something it has in common with Graham Swift’s Waterland, Alan Warner’s These Demented Lands or Nicola Barker’s Wide Open. That is, an action that comes out of those scraggy edgelands where earth and water mix, where the shore is never certain.

This chimes with a wider point I make in my review:

Unnamed and unnameable; in contrast to Ings’s two globe-trotting previous novels, Wolves is ageographic. It takes place on some other island, an unnamed place linked only to Earth itself by the odd reference to things like “the Turkish quarter” and by the ghost of the British landscape. The combination of the tongue-tip familiar and the estrangingly alien is all part of the highly effective destabilising strategy Ings is deploying.

Thirdly, there are Ings’s comments on the genesis of the novel: “The deepest truth is that for over a year Wolves sat in my drawer, unsellable, malign, predicting, chapter by chapter, the worst year of my life.” This is extraordinarily candid stuff. It is also a perfect example of what a reviewer doesn’t want to read whilst they are working! Reading it after my review was complete answers some questions but poses others. So there is much more to say about Wolves – on influence and landscape and biography – and I am hoping to be able to write more about it myself later in the month. But for now, one more link: Jonathan Gibbs on Jeffrey Alan Love’s wonderful cover.

Elementary

My review of Drakenfeld by Mark Charan Newton is up now at Strange Horizons.

Perhaps Drakenfeld is meant to be a dullard; perhaps, along with the hackneyed prose that abounds, this what the audience for Samson and all those other authors with gold embossed names crave. I just can’t see how a protagonist this uninteresting is going to sustain a series of detective novels though.

The backstory is that about four years ago, I started hearing interesting things about a writer called Mark Newton. He’d already published a short novel for a small press but his full debut, Nights Of Villjamur, was coming out shortly for PanMacmillan so I asked him for a copy so I could review it for Strange Horizons. Unfortunately, I didn’t think it was very good. Firstly, the book wasn’t sure what it wanted to be whilst simultaneously trying to be too many different things. (If you will allow me some speculation, I think that Newton’s split career as bookseller, publisher and author played a role here and that some triangulation and second-guessing occurred that was ultimately unhelpful to writing the novel.) Secondly – and at a fundamental level – it wasn’t very well written.

Now, you may assume that nothing gives me more pleasure than to write a negative review of a debut novel in a field I love by a person I am well disposed to. Certainly, that was the assumption of several of the people who left comments underneath my review. It didn’t and I resolved to make sure I read Newton again in the future, although I thought it would probably be best to skip the rest of Legends Of The Red Sun series. So when his new book came through the post, it went straight to the top of the pile. As the quote above suggests, I wasn’t able to write the review I had hoped to write this time either.

Drakenfeld has definitely solved one of the problems I identified: Newton has a very clear idea of the story he wants to tell and is equally focused in delivering it. This clarity is a welcome change to the mess of Villjamur but seems to come hand-in-hand with a suggestion that the ambition he signaled but didn’t deliver on early in his career has now been completely abandoned (the triangulation has succeeded, if you will). The bigger problem, however, is that the novel still isn’t very well written.

As it happens, a couple of weeks after I wrote my review, I bumped into Newton in a pub basement in Brighton. We had a chat and he predictably was a lovely bloke. So why am I publishing something that damns his work and threatens his livelihood? Surely, if you can’t say anything nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all? The answer is that the author and the work are two separate things and the only way to be a book reviewer is to successfully compartmentalise them. I can like Newton as a person and dislike his work and there needn’t – shouldn’t – be any connection between the two. Much online book blogging has been rendered pointless by the failure to grasp this distinction.

Of course, human nature is messier than that; intellect and emotion can’t be so easily divided. Creating art is a hugely personal endeavour and what is being criticised is the product of blood, sweat and tears so it is natural to feel wounded. On the other side of the fence, the whole reason I am writing this is because of a residual sense of sheepish hypocrisy. But the concept of manners simply doesn’t apply here and it is dangerous to import it from social situations. It goes without saying that I think negative reviews have value (to inform and entertain potential readers and to contribute to a wider discourse). It should also go without saying that criticising a professional writer’s published art is entirely different to telling someone that their shoes are ugly or the dinner they’ve just cooked you tasted of ass. Unfortunately this isn’t the case and negative reviews are often seen as direct attacks on the author – and, increasingly, their fans – unless they are couched in the politest and most equivocal terms.

My review is not polite and it is not equivocal; it baldly states that Drakenfeld is a bad book and it does so in pretty scathing fashion. This tone is not thoughtless rudeness, it is an integral part of writing a review that has value beyond merely telling a prospective customer whether they should spend their money on it. It is a public, performative piece of criticism to partner a public, performative piece of art.

Anyway, the next round is on me, Mark.

Essential Selection

Strange Horizons has published its year in review which features – as it does most years -a contribution from yours truly. Mostly I use it as an opportunity to praise the shortlists of last year’s Kitschies (whilst still managing to get a quick dig in) but I also just had space for The Water Sign by CS Samulski. As Kameron Hurley says in the comments, it isn’t a book without flaws but it is bloody exciting. In terms of other reviewers, I think the book that gets the most recommendations is Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. I enjoyed her previous fantasy work, Not The End Of The World , and, to a lesser extent Case Histories so this goes on the list.

In terms of my non-SF recommendations for the year, well, you need to have this:

Yeezus is mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime (usually within the same song), written and performed by a total arse who just happens to be a genius.

Don’t Drink The Dark Water

My review of Dark Waters Of Hagwood by Robin Jarvis is up now at Strange Horizons.

Dark Waters is the sequel of Thorn Ogres Of Hagwood and is a book I never thought I’d read. But, after twelve years of waiting, Dark Water has been published, only for me to find it a huge disappointment. As I said in my review: “What I’ve always loved about Jarvis is how much respect he has for his audience, but it seems absent here.”

I reviewed Thorn Ogres as well so you can compare one of my first review with my most recent. As we’ve discussed before, there is quite a difference. Much of this journey has taken place at Strange Horizons, the best place for speculative fiction criticism on the web. It is also free so, if you’ve enjoyed the work of me and the other reviewers – not to mention authors, poets, columnists and many other contributors – then you might want to consider supporting their annual fund drive. There are prizes!

Alan Campbell – King Of Adventure

My review of Sea Of Ghosts by Alan Campbell is up now at Strange Horizons.

The book was selected for review by Brian O’Leary as a donor reward for contributing to last year’s Strange Horizon fund drive. I volunteered as I had been a fan of Campbell’s previous work. I’m very happy with the outcome – the pull quote for the review is “Alan Campbell might well be the best writer of adventure fiction in the UK at the moment” – and I hope Brian is too.

You might notice that the review is a little shorter than normal. This is because between reading and reviewing the novel, my son was born. This is awesome but it does mean my free time is a little squeezed. My reading rate has gone down to a book a month and my writing rate has dropped even further. I am planning to finish The Space Opera Renaissance this year though, honest.