Reading recommendations round-up

Now updated to cover the end of the year

William S Burroughs - Junky
Becky Chambers - Record Of A Spaceborn Few
Martin Fitzgerald - Ruth And Martin's Album Club 
Viktor Frankl - Man's Search For Meaning
Stuart Jefferies - Grand Hotel Abyss 
T Kingfisher - Swordheart 
T Kingfisher - Minor Mage
Mary Robinette Kowal - The Calculating Stars 
Ann Leckie - Provenance
Yoon Ha Lee - Revenant Gun
Taylor Jenkins Reid - Daisy Jones And The Six
Seanan McGuire - One Salt Sea 
Seanan McGuire - A Red Rose Chain
Sylvia Patterson - I'm Not With The Band
John Scalzi - Head On

As ever, bold font of greatness indicates a five-star rating - only awarded once this year (possibly a sign of too much comfort reading?).

Genre-wise, we've got

SF - 5
Fantasy - 4
Autobiography - 3
Biography - 1
Music - 1
Contemporary fiction - 1

Reading recommendations round-up

Coming off hiatus to record another 8 months of reading recommendations. Once and future classics in bold

Ben Aaronovitch - The Furthest Station
Edgar Cantero - Meddling Kids
Ruthanna Emrys - Deep Roots
E M Forster - Two Cheers For Democracy 
Neil Gaiman - Norse Mythology
Mike Gayle - The To-Do List
Matt Haig - Reasons To Stay Alive
Dave Hutchinson - Europe At Dawn
Gail Honeyman - Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Lindsey Kelk - One In A Million 
Victor Lavalle - The Ballad Of Black Tom
Michael Lewis - The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine
Mhairi McFarlane - Don't You Forget About Me
Seanan McGuire - An Artificial Night
Simon Sebag Montefiore - The Romanovs
Robert M Pirsig - Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Elizabeth Sandifer - Neoreaction: A Basilisk
Tara Westover - Educated 
Catherynne M Valente - Space Opera
Roger Zelazny - Isle Of The Dead

plus an honourable re-read mention for Edward Said's Orientalism - still an excellent book.

By sub-category:

SFF - 8 
Romantic fiction - 2
Autobiography - 3
Mainstream fiction - 1
Experimental fiction - 1 
Economics - 1
Essays - 1 
History - 1
Mythology - 1
Politics - 1

Reading recommendations from 2018 so far

A quick round-up of the best books I've read so far this year.

At The Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails - Sarah Bakewell
The Honours - Tim Clare 
Walkaway - Cory Doctorow 
Normal - Warren Ellis
Winter's Tide - Ruthanna Emrys
Raven Stratagem - Yoon Ha Lee
The Will To Battle - Ada Palmer
Aurora - Kim Stanley Robinson (review here)
Osama - Lavie Tidhar
A Night In The Lonesome October - Roger Zelazny

All genre fiction, except for Sarah Bakewell's overview of existentialism. And all very good, although not quite great enough to merit bold type. :)

More Per Ardua than Ad Astra: Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora

A couple of years back I subtitled reviews of Andy Weir's The Martian and Neil Stephenson's Seveneves with the tagline 'space is the worst frontier.' 

For all their faith in science and human ingenuity, both books were unsparing in their treatment of the challenges of space and a welcome corrective to the tendency to handwave them away in favour of a ripping yarn.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is another book which stands under this credo. It pushes back even harder against the belief that our destiny lies in the stars, to the point of almost calling it into question entirely.

Ad astra, yeah, but very much with the emphasis on the per ardua.

It's difficult to talk about without at the very least thematic spoilers, so read below at your peril.

Aurora takes on an idea well established in science-fiction, the generation starship, where a voyage to a nearby solar system can take hundreds of years in a vessel the size of a city. Heading for Tau Ceti, its mission is to colonise the moon of one of its planets, the Aurora of the title, slowly terraforming it to make it habitable for human life.

Narrative tricks

The novel kicks in a relatively short time (20 or so years) before the ship reaches its destination. We follow Freya, daughter of engineer and general systems troubleshooter Devi and doctor Badim, as she grows up onboard the ship and explores its many biomes and communities. 

A few chapters in, we learn that the story is being told by the Ship's computer, a developing artificial intelligence, Devi's other de facto child and arguably Aurora's second protagonist. Ship does some quite awesome things and would be on my Top 10 literary computers any day of the week.  

As a narrator, though, Ship is learning on the job and its odd perspectives and occasionally jarring prose style deliberately bring out a distancing effect in the reader. In other words: science (chiefly astrophysics, engineering, ecology and microbiology) is foregrounded; character development and reader empathy somewhat backgrounded. 

Hard science-fiction often does this accidentally and occasionally ad nauseum and ad infodumpium. This could be because the author is either not that interested in the capital-I Individual or just doesn't have the chops to meet both scientific and literary criteria. 

But KSR is a much better writer than that. Taking this approach intentionally as an authorial device is a) a very clever move b) allows him to provide the story with the science it needs anyway c) sneaks the heart back into Aurora from an unexpected angle, through reader identification with Ship.

Cake: both retained and eaten.

Through interstellar space on a wing and a prayer

Aurora goes into a lot of detail about the risks of travel between the stars: problems of navigation, of acceleration and deacceleration, of the constant battle by engineers and biologists against entropy, of unrest and social collapse. Whatever you anticipate as a problem and solve before the voyage starts, KSR says, there will be two more you didn't predict that you must deal with when underway.

He cautiously concludes, however, that these issues could be solved with a lot of effort and more than a little good fortune and frontier spirit.

The far bigger challenge Aurora sets, however, is what happens when you reach your destination? Could you deal with many of the same entropic challenges as you did in transit? At the same time, could you establish a safe base for you and future generations and begin to slowly terraform your new home? How would you cope in an environment outside humanity's frame of reference in which the odds of unexpected crisis therefore increase dramatically?

To put it another way, would you risk a thousand Roanoakes for a single Plymouth Colony?

Questions for the space and freedom brigade

This is a novel deeply sceptical of the case for interstellar ventures in a way which would have rarely occured in SF from previous generations. KSR might be revisiting old ground on terraforming - he's best known for his Mars trilogy on the topic - but he's drawing more pessimistic conclusions here in a different context.

He also has a long-standing interest in climate change which he's explored in previous works such as Forty Signs Of Rain and New York 2140. Aurora touches on this in later sections of the book and in doing so offers a supplementary critique of renewed contemporary interest in returning to the Moon or colonising Mars. It basically runs: this is both cool and relevant to my interests, but maybe we should prioritise getting our own planet - our actual home - in order first. 

The novel is no polemic, but it is doing what SF does best as a literature of ideas: using our scientific heritage to examine possibilities and raise questions. The questions it raises about both the practicality and importance of space exploration are very relevant at a time when a very rich man has just sent his sports car up on a rocket in some kind of a symbolic ritual to rekindle our interest.

Those advocating for or romanticising space travel - whether in the short-term or the long-term - should then engage with the questions KSR is asking. They are perhaps still solvable on their terms rather than his, but ensuring any vision of the future passes the tests Aurora sets is for me a necessity of the first order.

Steady on, Roger!

Presented without comment, save for a link to the Doomy Dooms of Doom trope.

It was a more innocent time

Chapters include 'Thirty-nine lashes, well laid-on', Scars of honour' and 'A caning'

Found (where else?) in our holiday apartment in Hay-on-Wye.

2017 in books

My favourite first-time reads from 2017. Once and future classics in bold.

Louisa May Alcott -  Little Women
Naomi Alderman - The Power 
Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove
Robert Jackson Bennett - City Of Miracles
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Brian Catling - The Vorrh
Jenny Colgan - The Summer Seaside Bakery
Michael Faber - Under The Skin
Eric Flint - 1632 
Andrew Michael Hurley - The Loney
Robin Lane Fox - Alexander The Great
Laura Jane Grace - Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
Chris Hadfield - An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth
Stuart Heritage - Don't Be A Dick Pete
Dave Hutchinson - Europe In Winter
J M R Higgs - KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money
Lindsey Kelk - Always The Bridesmaid
Mhairi McFarlane - Here's Looking At You; It's Not Me, It's You; Who's That Girl
David Moats - Civil War: A Battle For Gay Marriage 
David Nichols - Us
Ada Palmer - Too Like The Lightning; Seven Surrenders
Laline Paull - The Bees
Charles Stross - Glasshouse
Edmund Wilson - To The Finland Station 
Rob Young - Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

Hugo-nominated novel ranking update

1. Too Like The Lightning, Ada Palmer
2. All The Birds In The Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
3. Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
4. A Closed And Common Orbit, Becky Chambers

Gave up reading (but will retry): Death's End, Liu Cixin
Not yet read: The Obelisk Gate, N K Jemisin 

The standout book on the list, at least provisionally, is Too Like The Lightning, for which there will be a review as soon as I can get round to it. Suffice to say for now that it's like no other SF novel I've read in the last few years and that counts for a lot in my world.

2016 in books

My favourite reading from 2016. Thanks due in particular to family, friends, Mr B's Emporium in Bath with its book spa service and the Hugo Awards for passing many of these my way.

Links are to reviews on the blog. 

Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Underground, Broken Homes, Foxglove Summer and this year's The Hanging Tree 
Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys
Charlie Jane Anders - All The Birds In The Sky
Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
H G Bissinger, Friday Night Lights
Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric's Demon 
Becky Chambers, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet 
Samuel R Delany, Dhalgren
Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, The Man In The High Castle and Valis
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln
Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree
Barbara Harford, Greenham Common: Women At The Wire
Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic
Dave Hutchinson, Europe After Midnight
N K Jemisin, The Fifth Season
Ursula Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest
R K Narayan, The Bachelor Of Arts
Naomi Novik, Uprooted 
Nnedi, Okorafor, Binti
Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures Of Babbage And Lovelace
Joanna Russ, Extraordinary People  
Philip Sandifer, Guided By The Beauty Of Their Weapons
Neil Stephenson, Seveneves 
Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score
Koushun Takami, Battle Royale
James Tiptree Jr, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever 
Catherynne M Valente, Deathless
Jo Walton, The Just City
Alyssa Wong, Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers and The Fisher Queen

Cute title, sad book: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Like much of his work, Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968) is a fable of identity crisis and phenomenological breakdown. 

It might start off with a fairly straight SF premise - bounty hunter Deckard pursues runaway androids around a decaying San Francisco - but as rug after rug is pulled from under the reader, it's clear that Dick's real concerns lie elsewhere than the ostensible premise.

Front and centre lies the problem posed by the androids of the title. They might legally be property and indentured servants, with intelligence but lacking in the empathy humans claim as their USP. But if people like Deckart and his wife Iran have to resort to artificially controlling their emotions in order to function, or have to participate in religious simulations to feel a connection to others, how different are they really in any meaningful sense?

If memories can be altered and implanted, as the book points out, how do they know they are not themselves androids?

And as the droids themselves become increasingly sophisticated, harder to tell apart from humans with a battery of psychological tests, this distinction becomes finer and finer. Deckard, whose career rests on being able to confidently identify and 'retire' droids, begins to behave erratically and question the meaning of his work.

So Do Androids Dream... is a novel about what it means to be human in a technological age. But it's a lot more than that too.

For example, as members of my reading group pointed out, it responds tolerably well to a recasting of its themes in social terms - bear in mind Dick was writing at the time of the civil rights movement and a great deal of political turmoil besides. You don't have to look far to find examples of second-class citizenship and extralegal killings in the US at the time. And Iran's decision to programme herself a self-accusatory depression is a nicely done sketch of traditional femininity in crisis.

While this is subtext, what is undeniably text in Do Androids Dream is a deconstruction of a hard-boiled, traditional, and yes, masculine way of seeing the world. The events of the novel chip away at the props of Deckard/Dick's life - his pride in his work, his belief that what he does is right. They hold out the prospect of material gain and romantic love, and then whisk them away. His manufactured religion of Mercerism is exposed as a sham. 

With deep irony, this race to internal rock bottom coincides with Deckard's greatest triumph in the eyes of the world - his successful 'retirement' of the last of the runaway androids. But such success no longer has any meaning to him.

This is Dick's signature trick: he takes you down the rabbit hole only for the Big Reveal to be a sarlaac pit.

The ending holds out at least the possibility of hope - that Deckard can choose to be content with his manufactured religion, his artificial pets and his dialled up emotions. But this is presented as a least worst response to purgatory, not an alternative, for Do Androids Dream is at its core a deeply unhappy novel, an authentic tragedy rare in science-fiction.

Mystery authors dominating Amazon bestsellers list

Out of curiosity, I checked what Amazon's 100 biggest selling fantasy and SF novels are right now. It's updated hourly, so the link above will give different information over time, but you can still draw some interesting information from it as a snapshot.

• All but one of the top ten are either by J K Rowling or George R R Martin, and I can't see that changing much for a while.
• Rowling and Martin together provide 14 of the top 100 entries.
• The only other authors to have 2 books in the top 100 are Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, jointly for their Long Earth series.
• Nearly 1 in 5 (19) are there as £1 or less deals.
• Over 1 in 4 (27) are there are £2 or less deals.
• Most of the cheap books are for authors I've never heard of, Peter Hamilton excepted. That doesn't make them bad, of course, just unknown to me.
• Authors known to me other than Rowling and Martin make up only 15 of the top 100.  And I'm reasonably widely read and have good name recognition for authors I see on the shelves.
• No, the unknown authors aren't just urban fantasy romances (although some are).
• No, they aren't other genres mistagged (with one or two honourable exceptions).
• Add in Rowling and Martin to the other known authors, compensate for imperfect knowledge and I'm still wondering who 3 in 5 of these best selling authors are.

Intriguing: is this the self-publishing revolution in action? Further analysis required.

Where did all these Games Workshop novels come from?

Here's a thing I discovered the other day in my local library - nearly a fifth of the books in the adult science-fiction and fantasy section were Warhammer (40K or Fantasy) novelisations.

That seems like a lot relative to the actual quality of the books - and yes, I have read some of them. But I guess you can explain it by the fact that the library-using demographic skews either young or old, and many a teen cuts their gaming teeth on Games Workshop.

I couldn't find any reportage on this phenomenon, so it might actually be worth looking into, if anyone's reading this.

William Gibson's Spook Country

I am one of those fickle readers who have William Gibson's early novels - that loose but seminal trilogy of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive - on my shelves but have shied away from reading anything else he's done since.

To be fair, that decision was taken in my early twenties, when Gibson's gradual move away from cyberpunk into more mature (also read - less futuristic) settings would not have found favour with me at the time.

But, since chance threw a copy of Spook Country (2007) into my path, I thought I'd give late-period Gibson a go.

Curiously - the book sold me on Gibson as a writer, but not on the novel itself. 

It reminded me that William Gibson is pretty much the only present-day science-fiction author I can think of who writes like a poet. And the window-dressing in this book - the psychogeographic observations of New York, LA and Vancouver - is beautiful.

He's also an astute observer of contemporary societal and technological trends, Spook Country essentially being science-fiction set in the contemporary world, exploring the potential of what is rather than what could be. Reading latter-day Gibson makes me feel like I'm living the future now, which is a rare and uncanny experience.

It does seem however with Spook Country that what Gibson really wanted to write was a series of vignettes or feuilleton articles, but what he was contracted to do was a novel. So while the scene-setting, the digressions into cultural review and the aphorisms about the creative industries are great, the plot itself is flimsy. 

Without getting too spoileriffic, it's a slight piece of cloak and dagger action involving a GPS-tracked McGuffin and different factions in the US military-industrial complex. Gibson pulls out his usual diversionary tactic of switching between different protagonists whose storylines eventually converge, but the ending is enough of an anti-climax as to leave this reader at least rather deflated.

Spook Country, then, is a very interesting travelling companion for a while, but the destination isn't worth the journey. Like boarding the Orient Express but finding yourself unaccountably stranded at Blake Street (LOCAL REFERENCE KLAXON).

On the other hand - I am definitely going to delve deeper into Gibson's body of work. His writing has only got better and I am belatedly realising there is definitely life after cyperpunk here.

Don't tell me I have nothing to read: a compendium of 2015 SF/fantasy recommendations

One of the benefits of being in the peanut gallery and following the Hugo Awards is that you pay attention to which stories are being talked about as potential contenders for the Best Novel. 

Then it escalates - you start looking at other SF/fantasy awards and cross-reference what books make each shortlist. Bingo - what you get is a reading list of cool stuff from the last year to watch out for. And given my default tendency to delve into the past for my reading choices, this is a useful corrective.

So, while we're waiting for the Hugo nominees to be announced around the end of the month, here's what's been added to my mental to-be-read pile.

Right up my street
The House of Shattered Wings - Aliette de Boliard
Radiance - Catherynne M Valente 
The Traitor - Seth Dickinson
The Library At Mount Char - Scott Hawkins
The Just City - Jo Walton 
Sorceror To The Crown - Zen Cho 
Lagoon - Nnedi Okorafor 
Archivist Wasp - Nicole Kornher-Stace

Curious but cautious

Luna: New Moon - Ian McDonald
The Thing Itself - Adam Roberts (I love Roberts as a critic but my reaction to his novels has varied)
The Night Clock - Paul Meloy
Lament For the Afterlife - Lisa L Hannett
The Glorious Angels - Justina Roberts
Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Updraft - Fran Wilde
Karen Memory - Elizabeth Bear  
Gentleman Jole And The Red Queen - Lois McMaster Bujold
Planetfall - Emma Newman

Would need to read the previous book(s) in the series first

Dark Eden / Mother Of Eden - Chris Beckett
Europe In Autumn / Europe At Midnight - Dave Hutchinson
Nexus/Crux/Apex - Ramez Naam
The March North/A Succession Of Bad Days - Grayson Saunders

Possibly a little too dark for my taste, but I won't know unless I try

The Heart Goes Last - Margaret Atwood (I kind of feel I should try classic-period Atwood first? Is that wrong?)
The Reflection - Hugo Wilcken 
The Shore - Sara Taylor
The Gracekeepers - Kirsty Logan
  
Wild cards

Making Wolf - Tade Thompson
Barsk - The Elephants Graveyard - Lawrence M Schoen
Bryony And Roses - T Kingfisher
The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro  
  
Sources and thanks to:

Ansible - the Grand Heirophant of all e-zines and a great link library to various awards and their shortlists.
Nicholas Whyte's summary of a discussion about Hugo nominations on File 770.

No prizes for being ahead of its time: The Ophiuchi Hotline reviewed

Despite appearing in David Pringle's canon-building Science-fiction: The 100 Best Novels 1949-1984 John Varley's debut novel The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) doesn't get the same kind of reverence that other books on that list from that era still do.

That's because it's neither a fan favourite (hey there Dune) nor respectable literary SF (Oi! Ballard!). It is what it is - a good first book chock full of pulp tropes, which also manages to anticipate a lot of the genre's pre-occupations and tropes in the coming decades.

The titular Hotline is an interstellar comms channel broadcasting ideas, technologies and scientific breakthroughs at the solar system for reasons unknown, from the direction of (nearby, in galactic terms) Ophiuchi 70. 

Humanity has used these discoveries to make the rest of the solar system habitable, Earth having been returned to the Stone Age by (deep breath) 4th dimensional beings intent of preserving the planet for superior intelligences - that's whales and dolphins to you and me.* Where the remnants of human civilisation cannot bend the planets and moon to their will, they adapt themselves to them instead, using the genetic advances and cloning process shared by the Hotline.

Yet now the Hotline is broadcasting a bill for services rendered - what is our protagonist Lila, genetic engineer on the lam, to do about it?

Enough about the plot, which in the fine tradition of first novels throws enough material at the wall for five hoping that it willl stick, and let's talk about what makes Hotline still interesting: the window dressing.

Varley gives us a novel set (mostly) within the constraints of the solar system, taking us back in one way to the planetary romances of the interwar generation, in another imagining what societal and biologial changes humanity would go through to make such colonisation possible. 

Or to put it another way, Hotline is a novel about 'software', where the engineering in play is mainly genetic and cultural, rather than the hardware 'n' hard science of science-fiction cliche.

Chronologically speaking, it's also the first novel about being or becoming posthuman in a modern sense I can think of, mapping out a course that writers like Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix), Charles Stross (Accelerando) and of course Iain Banks would follow at various points in the coming decades. All authors also partial to an assertive woman-of-action protagonist like Lila.

Varley also embeds the idea that alien intelligence would be - if not ineffable or incomprehensible - then at least able to think round humanity in circles. Again, this is common currency in SF nowadays, bringing back an element of wild, Lovecraftian horror to the tamed myth of the little green man.

Of course, as any pre-'76 Cleveland punk will tell you, you don't always get prizes for being ahead of your time. And while Hotline was well regarded in its day, the kind of cultural change it envisages (nudity! free love!) is very, well, 1970's. 

And the sheer daft effervescence of the plot - endearing as it is - gives it one clear foot in the old-school past in the way that, well, the above authors don't.

So it may well be that Hotline's legacy is to have been a transitional work in SF - pointing a way forward along with others to a new and broader understanding of space-going fiction. Maybe less tumultuous than the disruption of the late 60's, but radical enough that the genre is still working out some of the implications today.

*Hotline predates The Hitch-Hikers' Guide To the Galaxy and its take on cetacean intelligence by a year or so. As whales were a hot topic in the 70's I'm inclined to regard this as an example of convergent literary evolution.

Abraham Lincoln meets Thomas Covenant

Thanks to the amazing Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin I have now read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for the first time. It's interesting to reflect that something that's so much a part of American cultural memory - of their rhetorical toolkit - has passed me by as a Brit up to now.

There's some variety in the surviving texts, but this is the one on the Lincoln Memorial. Since it's short enough for students to memorise it, it's short enough to reproduce in full below.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Great, isn't it?

Now, I'm probably not the first person to have read that and then seen echoes of the Address in other writing, such is its influence. I may be the first however to have found Lincoln in US writer's Stephen Donaldson's 70's fantasy series The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Now, one of the early things I wrote on this blog was on the Covenant Chronicles - suffice to say that I find them interesting (influential, even) while at the same time deeply flawed and in certain respects repulsive. So me and these books have a degree of personal history.

But it was only when reading the Address that I recognised where some of Donaldson's linguistic tics and philosophy might well come from.

Quotes from the Chronicles such as "It is the duty of the living to give meaning to the sacrifices of the dead" and "So that beauty and truth should not pass utterly from the Earth.” are echoes of Lincoln in fantasy masquerade.

It's easy to position the Chronicles as an response to/critique of Tolkien, after the success of the Lord Of The Rings. But what I hadn't appreciated up to this point is how - just like Tolkien, ironically - inescapably American that response is in its mythology and the traditions it draws upon.

That moment when a whole new reading of a book you thought you were familiar with opens up?

That.

Oh - and if you want to read what I wrote about Covenant back in 2011, here it is in a glorious four part essay. I must have had a lot of time on my hands back then.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Science-fiction as mind bomb

I came across the term 'mind bomb'  in a documentary film last year on the early years of Greenpeace (How To Change The World - highly recommended as a slice of history and as a story in its own right) 

Coined by Greenpeace co-founder Robert Hunter, a mind bomb is an action which captures the public imagination and redefines something - how we view the world, what we think of as being possible or desirable. 

If we must - a mind bomb changes the paradigm.

And it strikes me that one of the things that keep drawing me back to science-fiction after these years is precisely its potential to be a mind bomb, in a way that a lot of other genres can't or won't. That's why when I think about the genre at its best, I do mean SF as a literature of ideas, a concept baked and built-in since Isaac Asimov, since HG Wells - heck, since Mary Shelley.

Of course, storytelling and language matter - and the great books of SF usually combine the two to dazzling effect. But it's possibly the only branch of fiction where you'll find a willingness to tolerate an, ah, idiosyncratic approach to prose stylings in an author (hello, HP Lovecraft, Olaf Stapledon) if the aforementioned author has something to say. 

To pick a more modern example, while I can't speak for the original, in translation Liu Cixin's writing is no stranger to the clunk. But what mindblowing clunk it is!

But then in counterpoint to this we also have the link between intellectual and linguistic ferment. We have the 60's and 70's New Wave to thank for the suggestion that any dislocation or derangement - physical, psycholgical or topographical - any alien experience, really - can be represented in the breakdown and remixing of language itself. 

So while it might forget on occasion, SF is as much a heir to the experimental literary movements of the twentieth century as it is to the pulp tradition.

Pretty high-faluting, huh? But none of this stops SF being fun. And if I were to express a little frustration at the way the subterranean literary debate beneath the Hugo controversy had been conducted, it would with the idea that you can't have both, or that one undermines the other.

Let me put it this way - it's possible to produce perfectly enjoyable work that is just a rearrangement of established SF tropes and conventions - see The Force Awakens. A lot of genre fiction is just that. But just a sprinkling of new ideas, a little bit of forward view - for me that's often what turns good into great.

I'll wrap things up with a list of SF works that are both amazing reads and that have changed the way I think and view the world. It's certainly not a definitive list, as it's been sourced from a brief look of my bookshelves, but hopefully it illustrates my point.

Isaac Asimov - Foundation
John Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar
Octavia Butler - The Parable Of The Sower
Liu Cixin - The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest
Thomas M Disch - Camp Concentration 
Cory Doctorow - Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom
Ken Mcleod - The Star Fraction (and the rest of the Fall Revolution series)
Walter M Miller - A Canticle For Liebowitz
Olaf Stapledon - First And Last Men
Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash
Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather, Schismatrix
Charles Stross - Accelerando
James Tiptree Jr, Stories
Jeff Vandermeer - Annihilation

Please do feel free to add your mind-bombs in the comments section.

Science-fiction needs you! Join me as a Hugo Awards voter

Attention science-fiction and fantasy fans: your genre needs you!

Nominations for the Hugo Awards shortlist are now open until the end of March - open to those who registered by January 31 or voted last year.

My voting information arrived a week ago and I'm looking forward to getting my thoughts together in the coming month. But I'm also hoping you'll join me as a Hugo voter this year by becoming a Worldcon supporting member.

I wanted to offer you a few reasons why you should, like:

Fun! Voting! Power!
Free e-books (sort of)!
Supporting awesome things you like!
Improving the quality of the nominations!
Inoculating the Hugo Awards against block voting!
Enjoy talking about books you love! 

I'll get to all of this later on, along with how you register to and vote. But first, a little background.
 
What are these 'Hugo Awards' of which you speak?

The Hugo's are more or less the premier global award for science-fiction and fantasy. They span everything from novels and short stories through to films, TV, graphic novels, podcasts and fan writing. The awards are voted on by attendees of the annual Worldcon where the award ceremony takes place - that's Midamericon in Kansas City in August this year - plus non-attending supporting members. 

As a supporting member for the first time last year, the Hugo's introduced me to some excellent work. These included eventual Best Novel winner Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem - the first SF book from China to be so honoured.

'Hard science, hot mess' - Me.  
'Great, but bloody depressing' - Dad. 

And to give you a further flavour, you can see all the winners and nominations from past Hugo years listed here.

Supporting membership and free books (sort of)

Unless you have the means and desire to get to Kansas City, to vote in the Hugo's you want to be a supporting member. In exchange for your upfront payment of £35, which helps to crowdfund Worldcon, you get the right to vote for the awards (and nominate for the shortlist, if you register swifly enough).  

You also - and this is the particularly good bit - receive electronic copies of as much of the shortlisted work as can be made available.

I've included a quick explanation of how the two-stage nominating and voting process works at the end of this post, for the psephologically inclined. But let's emphasise for now that participation in both stages is equally valuable.

So, while the Hugo's are not an outright democracy, supporting memberships mean that anyone around the world who can afford it can have a vote. Last year the electorate reached nearly 6,000 people. It would be great if that increased this time around, both for its own sake and for reasons which will become apparent as we go forward.

Prestige + participation = problems

The prestige of the Hugo Awards means that they have sometimes acted as a proxy battleground for debates and disputes in SF and fantasy. And like any more-or-less participatory process, the Hugo's are also vulnerable to attempts to manipulate the system.

Both issues arose last year, when two relatively small 'Sad Puppy' and 'Rabid Puppy' factions in fandom demonstrated that the Hugo shortlisting process could - all within the rules - be gamed by block voting for slates of nominations. The motivations of the slate organisers varied, and there was certainly a literary debate in there. But it's fair to say there was a lot of personal animosity and politics as well (some of it very problematic).

The whole story has been rehashed over so many times that it's starting to look like week-old leftovers. I don't propose to go over much old ground in this post. If you're new and curious, you could do a lot worse than read Amy Wallace in Wired - Sci-Fi’s Hugo Awards and the Battle for Pop Culture’s Soul to get the gist of it all.

What you really need to know, however, is that although the Puppies' block voting choices dominated a lot of the categories on the shortlist, they were disappointing in terms of quality. At best I found them okay, with some being considerably worse. 

For example, here's my take on the short-fiction nominees. 

In spite of this, the Hugo electorate (which had increased by the voting stage - and now included me) still managed to pick a fairly decent set of eventual winners, almost entirely from non-Puppy choices. But, given the weak shortlist and a high level of online drama accompanying the whole affair, it's hard to see this as anything other than the least worst outcome. 

Participation + positivity = progress

It's not clear at this early stage how much block voting there's going to be this year. But the key issue is that the bug in the nominations exploited in 2015 cannot be fixed until 2017 at earliest, because of due process. 

In such a situation, the wise hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

That means you can help the Hugos work as intended in 2016 by buying a supporting membership and becoming a voter. The larger the electorate, the smaller the influence of any faction, the fairer the outcome. 

So, nominate work you think should be shortlisted, read and vote for what you think should win.

And if you also talk online or with friends about what you've enjoyed reading (or watching, or listening to....), then you're contributing to a sorely-needed positive discourse around the Hugo Awards. I hope you'll join me to do that on this blog, but wherever you do it and whatever your opinions, let's help to keep the Hugo's a friendly conversation about the books and art we love. 

Decisions are notoriously made by those who turn up - maybe this year it's time we did that in numbers and had ourselves a good time in the process. :)

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Informative appendix: how voting works

Voting is a two-stage process. The excellent Hugo Awards website goes into a lot more detail about this, but in general terms here's how it works.

Jan to March: shortlisting - voters nominate works they think should be on the shortlist till the end of March. The five most popular choices in each category then form the shortlist, which based on last year will probably be announced in April.

Nominators need to be members of the current Worldcon by a certain date - this year it's January 31 - or members of the previous or the next Worldcon.

From May - voting on the shortlist - voters read the nominated works and then rank them in order of preference. They can also place some or all works below 'No Award' if they feel some nominations are not worthy of a Hugo. Again, much more detail about how this actually works on the Awards website.

Unlike the nominations phase, voters actually have to be members of the current Worldcon.





August - numbers are crunched and winners announced