Author: chris

I returned from Israel nearly two weeks ago. The period that follows a trip abroad is for me invariably marked by twin evils: firstly, a backlog of stuff to catch up with (in this case, more than 150 emails, plus the need to get my tax accounts done soon), and secondly, a state of lethargy. These two combine with deadly effect. However, here is the news.

It appears The Adjacent has been accepted by Gollancz – Simon Spanton was reassuringly enthusiastic about it, the delivery advance has been paid and the book is scheduled for August next year. Always a relief  to get things done and dusted. Writers do have a pathetic wish to be accepted.

Now I seek, through Gollancz, an American publisher for The Adjacent. No edition of The Islanders ever appeared in the USA, although some copies of the British edition were belatedly distributed. I cannot afford that to happen again, if only for financial reasons. As things stand, just about the only book of mine most people in America have heard of is The Prestige – when I was in Israel someone gave me a copy of the Tor paperback edition to sign, and I discovered that it was in its eleventh reprinting. I like people knowing about The Prestige, but I wrote it two decades ago and I’ve written a lot of stuff since.

Speaking of The Prestige, the two stage versions are both moving forward slowly. I wrote a straight dramatic adaptation in 2011, and that is being produced in Britain. Scheduled, I believe, for an opening next year. Meanwhile, a musical stage version is in preparation in Russia. I wrote the ‘book’ for that a couple of years ago. The straight play and the musical are completely different from each other, incidentally – I regard them as separate works. They are also both different from the film. Christopher Nolan’s film changed the ending and omitted several of the best scenes, so there was a lot left to work with. The straight play is a dark take on the main story, while the musical is a more open and entertaining version. Both are to include live magic performed onstage – the play deals with magic as psychological illusion, the musical treats it as entertainment.

Gollancz have just contracted for reprints of four of my older novels: Indoctrinaire, The Space Machine, A Dream of Wessex and The Quiet Woman. All four of these have been out of print for some time, so I’m glad to think they’ll be available again.

Incidentally, the Gollancz paperback editions of The Glamour and The Extremes usually show as unavailable from internet sellers, but they are in fact, as Nielsens’ database confirms, still available in PoD editions through bookshops. Fugue for a Darkening Island, The Dream Archipelago, Inverted World, The Affirmation and The Prestige are all still in paperback, and should be in stock.

Next week, as lethargy finally fades, I will be starting work on my next novel.

I have spent the last 9 days in Israel, guest of ICON: The Tel-Aviv International Festival for Science Fiction Imagination and the Future. I spent most of the time in Tel Aviv itself, but was taken to Jerusalem for one eye-opening day. In fact, the whole trip was something of an eye-opener, as I had little idea in advance of what life in Israel would be like. A handful of photographs (four shots out of about four hundred in all) are below.

This is just to say a million thanks to my many new friends in Tel Aviv, notably Uri Aviv, who is the  driving force behind ICON, as well as the team around him: Ayelet Cohen, Shahar Golan and Eliyahu Zigdon. Especial thanks and greetings to Tom Shapira and Izhar Izhaki, my personal ‘minders’, who gave up hours of their own lives to take me sightseeing and other places, walk with me, share meals with me, watch movies with me, and on one notable occasion to catch me with a swift rescuing lurch, as I toppled on a flight of shiny marble stairs in the darkness. Thanks Izhar! Other friends too: notably Ziv Kitaro, his wife Galya, and his prestigious brother Nir. Many more — I think of you all. Here’s to the next time …

This is the sculpture in the plaza next to the Habima Theatre in the centre of Tel Aviv. The theatre itself is outside the picture to the left — the building in the background is the cultural centre, currently being refurbished. The sculptor is Menashe Kadishman:

This is Ibn Gvirol Street, a main road in the centre of town, which runs between the Cinematheque (where ICON took place), and the hotel I was staying in. Crossing this street several times a day was a life-challenging experience, but on this one occasion it was briefly free of traffic:

This is a view of the Arab area of Jerusalem, which we did not enter. In the top left of the picture is a glimpse of the Israeli West Bank Barrier:

Finally, this picture was taken at approximately midday, when the temperature was at least 90º in the shade, with no shade. This was in the compound of the Western Wall:

 

This is a photograph of the Devonshire Inn, in Skipton Yorkshire, currently a branch of the JD Wetherspoon group:

In 1893, though, the hotel was known as the Devonshire Arms, and set the scene for the opening pages of my novel The Space Machine, which is doubtless fondly remembered by all who read this journal. In the late nineteenth century the Devonshire Arms operated as a commercial hotel, catering in the main for travelling salesmen. My character in the book was one of them. I learned of the place in a book I was researching from (a portrait of the lives of commercial travellers in the 19th century — literary research leads one down many unexpected avenues), but in the late 1970s I discovered that the place still existed and I paid it a visit. It had by then become the plain Devonshire, and was being run as a pub. Here is the picture I took of it then:

Earlier this month Nina and I were on holiday in Lancs/Yorks, and one evening ate dinner in the present Devonshire Inn. It was all OK. Being away from the desk (and the internet, and the long silences of others) provided a welcome break, and the break was on the whole rather OK. Although the Pennines and the Yorkshire Dales are a rainy part of the world we had several sunny days, but towards the end of the week the rain began to fall. There was a beck running in a steep-sided rocky gill at the back of our rented cottage, a shallow babbling brook of no harm or interest to anyone, but with the onset of the rains it deepened rapidly and on the day we left it was about three-quarters of the way to the top. As the north of England has subsequently suffered many hours of torrential rain, I don’t like to think what the harmless little brook must look like at the moment.

One day we drove across the glorious scenery of the Dales to the town of Harrogate, a dull place in which I have only a single interest and hold but one vivid memory.

In 1969 I was on a train heading towards Harrogate in the company of the science fiction writer Norman Spinrad, a striptease dancer called Terri and the author William Burroughs. Mr Burroughs spent most of the journey in the bar, knocking back one glass of whisky after another and telling me and the others that he was on something called the ‘drinking man’s diet’ — as he was of cadaverous and skeletal appearance I think it’s safe to say that it was a diet that worked. We were greeted on arrival in Harrogate by the publisher John Calder, who fussed and fawned over Mr Burroughs, dancing attentively on his needs, carrying his suitcase, etc. Spinrad, Terri and I followed on humbly behind. We were ushered into Mr Calder’s shining and splendid Jaguar, waiting at the station entrance: Mr Burroughs was helped into the front passenger seat and the rest of us crammed in behind. We drove away from the station portal, heading across the broad concourse. Mr Calder was in a sort of rapture: talking nineteen to the dozen to the great man in the front seat, sloshing the praise out unstoppably, regarding the famous author with loving eyes. However, in the back seat the three of us could hardly fail to notice that the Jaguar was heading towards a long flight of pedestrian steps. Our cries of warning went unheeded as Mr Calder blithely accelerated on. Within moments we were rattling and clattering down the steps, with loud and expensive-sounding scrapes and bangs coming from beneath the car. Halfway down the flight, the steps levelled out briefly before resuming. Here the beautiful Jaguar at last came to a halt, rocking to and fro on its chassis, balanced on the lip of the topmost step, just like the bus at the end of The Italian Job. We continued our journey to the hotel on foot.

My sole interest in Harrogate, a mere 43 years later, was to return to the station and: (a) try to find out if the car was still stuck there, (b) if not, to try to find the gouges and scrapes caused by the incident if they were still visible, and (c) if not even that, at least to find the flight of steps and take a souvenir photograph of them. However, Railtrack station refurbishment has put paid to this fragment of literary history, and there was no sign or trace of the Staircase of Beat Generation Chagrin. Slightly disappointed, I contented myself with other shots of the old spa town, including this one of a quiet, rain-wet passage that runs beside the Harrogate Baths:

From the other side of the island, here are some rocks. These are at Jenny Brown Point, in Lancashire:

Low hills are visible on the horizon of the picture from Jenny Brown. This is the area of upland that lies just behind Morecambe Bay: the Forest of Bowland. Bowland is a huge tract of countryside, largely unknown by many people south of Watford. It is a varied landscape of unspoiled and undeveloped hills and valleys, much moorland, many small rivers and streams, hardly accessible by road and therefore a walkers’ paradise. The M6 motorway runs alongside it, but the road is mostly undetectable from more than about 100 yards away. It was amazing and reassuring to find such a large and beautiful area of undamaged landscape in modern Britain. In the wildest of bleak moorland we saw a sign to the local town: LANCASTER 6-> it said.

Here is a row of chairs, inside a pub, on the edge of Bowland:

Here now are two trees on Pendle Hill:

I was going to claim that we saw these windswept trees after we had reached the very summit of Pendle Hill (alt. 1,827 feet), but the truth is they were only halfway up. Well, part of the way up. Um, maybe not that far from the car park …

It was a bleak and windy day and the ground was sodden — in fact most of the path had water running along it. The day before I had twisted an ankle while walking in Skipton and it was still painful. I was distinctly nervous of this terrain of broken stones, muddy shallows and half-buried rocks. However, we went quite a long way up the hill, which dominates the landscape for miles around, and the views were breathtaking. On the way back down we passed a deep gully where an old house was hiding. Although it is not in fact typical of the Pendle scenery, there is to me something essentially English about the scale, the colours and the inescapable dampness of this simple cleft in the countryside:

 

Just to note a date, more to allow for my own faulty memory than any other reason, and knowing that one day I will need this to remind me: today I finished and delivered The Adjacent. Looking back at diary notes (again kept as a precaution against fading brain cells) I discover that I began work on it at the beginning of June 2009, when it was briefly entitled The Retreat. This was itself a change of title: Gollancz had it in their database (perhaps they still do) as a novel imaginatively called Untitled. Anyway, The Retreat ground to a halt within three weeks, but I began again on 1st July, and by then it had become, and remains, The Adjacent.

I worked on it fairly consistently after that, but there were several interruptions I could not avoid. Firstly, I wrote a short story called “Widow’s Weeds”, then the novel The Islanders (for many weeks I was writing The Adjacent and The Islanders in tandem), and finally the stage-play version of The Prestige. Throughout all these distractions, The Adjacent remained alive and interesting, and I went back to it whenever I could, but I have been working on it exclusively for most of 2011 and 2012.

It’s the longest, most complicated book I have written. Nothing whatever I can say about it now would make sense, to me or to anyone else. This is the usual unsubtle hint to rush out and panic-buy a copy whenever you can.

One minor fact. Under contract I was supposed to deliver this novel by 31st August 2012. I should like everyone to know that I am more than three weeks ahead of the deadline. This a first for me, and at a guess a first in the entire history of authorship. I should like to dedicate this achievement to my old pal Douglas Adams, who had an admirably escapist way of dealing with deadlines.

It was one of those phone calls that can change your life – or in this case that might even end it. One morning in September 1973 Brian Aldiss telephoned me to say that he had met one of the RAF people who were in charge of the Red Arrows aerobatic team. He had offered Brian a flight in the rear seat of one of the jets. Brian was up for it – he wanted to know if I would like to be up for it too.

While I suddenly sat down on the floor with a bump, Brian elaborated. He had this idea we could get Faber in on it (we were both published by Faber at the time), and make some kind of publicity stunt. He warmed to his theme: during every Red Arrows display two of the jets fly at low level on a high-speed collision course. They flip to avoid each other at the last moment. ‘I’ll be in one of them,’ Brian said, ‘and you can be in the other. Think of the publicity!’

I said, ‘Yes, and think of the publicity if we fail to avoid each other.’ But in the end I said in a faint voice, ‘OK, I’m in.’

In the days that followed I was obsessed. While Brian went away, presumably to make arrangements, I had a bit of thinking to do. Not complex or subtle thinking. Straightforward in fact, but quite big: there was no question that I was going to do it – who would miss a chance like that? On the other hand, well, you can imagine the dilemma. Life goes on in its safe old way … or you grab the possibility of a glorious death. Thoughts don’t get much bigger than that.

The following week, because of political turmoil in the Middle East, the Arab countries that supply the West with oil embargoed all sales. This had a drastic effect on life in Britain: fuel shortages, power cuts, the 3-day week and much else. One of the less publicized effects was the grounding of the Red Arrows. The publicity stunt for Brian and me was off. Six months later, when fuel supplies were back to normal and the Red Arrows were flying again, the idea was forgotten. Life, it seemed, was to go on in its safe old way. To this day I feel sad when I think of it, but since then I have taken an extra interest in the what the team does. My blog entry of 16th June, immediately below this, describes a visit to the Red Arrows base at RAF Scampton, in Lincolnshire, where I was able to watch the Red Arrows practising – in effect a full display above their own airfield.

They came to Hastings last weekend, on 22nd July. That was the annual ‘Pirate Day’ in Hastings, when a vast number of otherwise apparently sane Hastings residents dress up like Johnny Depp, and wander the streets with cutlasses, striped T-shirts and three-cornered hats. I walked along to the vantage point of East Hill to watch the Red Arrows. It was the first real day of summer weather, so the conditions were perfect for an air display. The Red Arrows provide a curiously uplifting experience: both beautiful and frightening, artistic and disciplined. Their formation flying is so exact that when they bank the sun flashes off the wings simultaneously. Yet there are idiosyncratic touches too – in this display, apparently in an off-the-cuff moment, the formation of jets sky-wrote an unmistakable pirate’s hook across the blue.

I filmed the event, in the video above. The film has the many of the usual shortcomings of amateur footage, so you know what you are in for, but the whole display is there. The colours are lovely, and it’s not too jerky – promise! It was the first time I had tried to film anything, and because of the bright sunlight it was difficult to see the viewfinder. Those are my excuses. The film opens suddenly because in the nature of things the Red Arrows tend to appear without warning and at 500 m.p.h. In fact they arrived in Hastings on the dot of 5:30, as arranged, and flew exactly across the Old Town harbour, as expected. The display began immediately. I looked hard, but couldn’t spot Brian Aldiss.

More information about the Red Arrows from their website.

I’m clearly not the most committed of bloggers – I can’t help noticing that I have not been here since the middle of April. It’s not because I have been assassinated by Charlie Stross’s fans, nor cast into outer darkness by China’s, nor indeed anything at all. The simple truth is that I have been doing what I am paid to do: which is (with a few ‘structured’ exceptions) stay at home every day and concentrate on what I’m writing.

I completed the first draft of The Adjacent in the first week of April, just before Eastercon, took that weekend off, then went straight back to the second draft. A second draft for me involves a complete rewrite from beginning to end, and is likely to take at least a few weeks more. My target for completion of The Adjacent is the end of July (just as everyone in publishing vanishes on vacation for weeks on end), and I still believe that’s a likely date. I am already more than 200 pages into it.

I rather enjoyed Olympus 2012 (the official name for Eastercon this year) – since the event a video has emerged: me on the platform. You may view it here. I appear after about 12 minutes, if you sensibly wish to skip the boring and irrelevant stuff that comes first.

In the first week in May, the Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Jane Rogers and her novel The Testament of Jessie Lamb, as exclusively pundited here, and a good thing too. The judges had a sudden outbreak of previously undetected literary taste and good sense, and against all expectations came up with the right book. Good for them – no need for them to resign, then. All is forgiven, chaps. Until Next Year.

The first of my structured breaks from the second draft came during the second week in May, with a short but unhurried visit to the Lincolnshire Wolds – a research trip for The Adjacent. I had never before visited Lincolnshire, and was pleasantly surprised. Amongst other places, I went to RAF Scampton (you have to book ahead, as it is an operational RAF station), where there are still the original hangars where 617 Squadron’s Lancasters were stored and repaired, and where Guy Gibson’s office is situated. (Not open on the day we visited, as the building is being refurbished.) Outside the office is the well-tended grave of a certain Black Labrador, whose real name has become a matter of fear and loathing, but which is well known to everyone who takes an interest in these things. (For the record: I totally disagree with modern PC attempts to rename the dog – I understand that the Stephen Fry rewrite of the screenplay of The Dam Busters – produced by, of all people, David Frost, and which has been optioned by Peter Jackson – calls the dog ‘Nipper’.)

While at Scampton I was able to watch the Red Arrows practising. I might one day write about this, as it had a remarkable effect on me. For now, here is a photograph of the Red Arrows’ car park, with a glimpse of the aircraft in the background. There are ten such parking spaces, and the Red Arrows practise twice a day. I have seen the Red Arrows perform before, so what they do was not a novelty, but I must say that watching these amazing manoeuvres, behind the scenes, so to speak, thrilled me to the core.

Later to Coningsby, another operational RAF base, where we saw at close quarters the last airworthy Lancaster in the UK (there is one other in flying condition, in Canada). This is the Lanc that you glimpse doing a flypast at royal occasions, etc. In the same hangar there were several airworthy Spitfires and Hurricanes. If I had been able to make this visit when I was 14 I should probably have exploded with excitement, but now I am no longer 14 I just feel a keen interest and a warm sense of something or other which is probably a bit too naff to reveal.

In the bookshop I bought two books whose titles made me want to cheer aloud. As an inveterate book buyer I am used to feeling the uncontrollable acquisitive urge in a bookstore, but these two books were more or less emitting shrill whistles across the room, to get my attention.  Just look at their titles!

Afterwards back to work until the beginning of June, when a visit to a books festival, agreed and confirmed long ago, actually had to be gone to. This was Comédie du Livre, in Montpellier, in the south of France, and turned out to be not at all a grind (as dreaded beforehand), but a highly enjoyable visit, more like a holiday than, er, work.  Brilliantly organized, set in a beautiful medieval town, with the sort of weather you just never get in England: good coffee, good wine, great food … and several hundred writers.

Since then: back to the grind, and I shouldn’t be writing this.

If anyone says something to your face that you know is unfair or untrue or scandalous, what can you do? You can deny hotly what is being alleged, or go into long explanations of what you know is the truth. But maybe the best thing to do is to suggest mildly that the comment might be unworthy of the person making it.

I believe rather a lot of unworthy comments have been made recently, and had I the luxury of people saying them to my face that is the unaggressive answer I would have offered.

However, most of the negative criticism made of my long essay about the Clarke shortlist last month came via the internet. As we all know, a sizeable number of comments made on blogs or Facebook or Twitter are anonymous, or pseudonymous, or in some way disguised. Not all, though: other people known to me personally, and in many cases people I thought of as friends, or at least friendly or admired acquaintances, rushed to make their voices heard on the internet with comments based on unworthy assumptions.

So let’s have a look at some of these unworthy comments.

The first, and for me perhaps the most important, is the matter that was variously described as my sour grapes, or anger, or resentment, which presumably arose because The Islanders had been left off the Clarke shortlist. Naturally, I knew that this connection between the two would be instantly made – I also assumed that the sheer openness of the connection would speak for itself, that the obviousness would indicate to anyone of reasonable intelligence that something else was going on.

Well, it was. I never think of awards when I’m writing – I know this is true of just about every serious writer I’ve ever met. Awards come along and if a group of people decides you merit one then it’s neither sane nor gracious to decline it. But for most writers awards are pretty irrelevant as motivators, not least because they invariably happen long after the main event. In this case, I finished work on The Islanders more than 18 months ago, and I’ve moved on since: I’ve written two short stories, a stage play, and the first draft of a new novel called The Adjacent, some 130,000 words. I’m currently working on the second draft of that. The Islanders feels a long way behind me. Although I am still creatively close to it, that particular novel is no longer my main concern.

When the Clarke shortlist was announced, it is true I felt slightly disappointed – you want your work to be appreciated. But because I never presume that anything I write will automatically be a candidate for an award, the disappointment soon faded.

In any event, I had been making a quiet assumption in the opposite direction. The Islanders is nothing like conventional science fiction – its fantastic element works deviously and indirectly. I could easily foresee any panel of judges deciding the book wasn’t SF or simply didn’t come into their remit. I know a lot of people were tipping The Islanders as a contender for the Clarke, but I had nothing to do with that.

Then there is a wider matter that could be described (slightly grandiosely) as a freedom of speech issue. A total of 60 books were submitted to the award judges; of those, 6 were selected as the shortlist. The Islanders and I therefore joined the majority: 90% of the submissions were not chosen, and my book was among them.

Who then is free to comment on the shortlist? For obvious reasons it’s difficult for any of the 6 shortlisted authors to make their views public. But what about the other 54, the 90% majority? Are they now bound in all eternity by an expectation of silence, simply because their latest book happened to be submitted by their publisher, and happened not to be chosen by a group of judges? Silencing them doesn’t make sense to me – my instinct when I wrote the essay was the liberating one that I had nothing to gain or lose by speaking my mind.

With an award as high profile as the Clarke, where a significant sum of money is handed out, and which often makes news outside the confines of the sf world, it is axiomatic that everything that goes on must be open to examination and discussion, and critically too. There is more at stake than just the choice of one novel a few people think is the ‘best’ of a given year.

Do we not seek to improve the image of the books we write? Don’t we wish to elevate science fiction and similar forms so they won’t forever be dismissed by the unthinking majority as pulp or hack books, part of a genre where the writers can safely rely on cliché’d assumptions and where the readership is made up of adolescents and thrill-seekers? It seemed to me that in the quarter-century the Clarke Award has existed it has more often than not highlighted novels at the progressive end of the spectrum, books that make some intellectual or emotional demands on their readers, books which are adult, radical and thought-provoking – refreshingly different, in other words, from the dull complacency of the establishment of literary fiction.

That is one of the reasons I take a serious interest in all this.

Moving on: In a variety of different ways, and by a number of different people, my essay was accused of revealing a fit of the sulks because the books I ‘wanted to win’ were omitted from the shortlist, and this pique made me savage the books that were on the list.

In fact, it was the other way around. This year, unusually, I took an interest in what was coming out and I had read many of the new books that were being thought of as likely candidates. When I saw the actual shortlist I was astonished by what was on it. I won’t go over the same ground as before, but of the six only two were at all radical or challenging (The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, and Embassytown by China Miéville). The other four were, to put it as neutrally as possible, reworkings of familiar SF tropes with no particular distinction of style. I had read the Rogers and the Miéville novels, and thought they were both lacking in the outstanding quality that one instinctively expects in a winner, for different reasons in each case.

So, what else was there? What had the jury passed over in favour of the final six? I suggested four alternatives (by Ian R. MacLeod, Simon Ings, Adam Roberts and Lavie Tidhar). I might have added Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi or The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood … both of them worthwhile exercises in serious slipstream or fantastic literature.

None of these books was a ‘favourite’ of mine, but I felt (and still feel) that a good case could be made out for each one: Tidhar is a fresh and emerging writer, MacLeod is a great stylist, The Godless Boys is a first novel by a young writer showing real promise, Roberts is experimenting in an interesting way with different modes of storytelling … and so on.

It’s not for me to say that any one of these (or any other novel) should be the winner. The real point here was not the individual titles, but what the function of the shortlist might be.

In some respects the Clarke shortlist is as important as the choice of the eventual winner. It represents an interim stage, the six ‘best’ books as arrived at by the jury, but it is also a sort of showcase. It receives publicity, and many booksellers set up a separate stand or table for the shortlisted titles. Because of this, we hope and expect the shortlist will be varied and excellent. The eventual winner should be primus inter pares, a well selected and defensible leader of a strong pack.

An interesting example of how not to build a shortlist came last year, in the six finalists for the Man Booker Prize. Five weak choices were in ‘competition’ with The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Although Barnes’s novel was itself a poor effort (my review of it can be found on the Recent page on this site), it was perceived to be in a different league from the others. Barnes was presented with an open goal, he took a feeble kick and the ball wobbled unconvincingly into the net. His win gave him a cash prize and best-selling status, but it did nothing at all for the cause of literature.

I don’t suppose that this year’s Clarke Award will attract the same amount of derision and hostile publicity as last year’s Booker, but it presents a similar problem. The stand-out novel on the Clarke shortlist is Embassytown by China Miéville, and Miéville has an open goal before him. It seems likely to me that if this panel of judges makes a structured decision they will opt for Embassytown as winner.

What sort of message would be sent out by that? Miéville has won three Clarkes already – does this mean he is the best the genre can offer? Is he the only writer in the English language who can consistently produce the best SF novel in a year? That reasoning alone would make his novel a poor choice, but as I argued in my earlier essay Embassytown is a problem. Miéville is gifted, imaginative and talented, and seems capable of producing some truly spectacular and ground-breaking books. Those novels must be for the future, because Embassytown is not one of them. It has too much wrong with it: genre assumptions, poor characterization, flat descriptive values. It is idea-driven from the top of the head, not wrought from the bottom of the heart.

Let’s turn to the problem of personal attacks, something I was accused of to the point where I began to wonder about the nature of reality.

There is as far as I can see only one personal remark in the whole essay. That is about China Miéville, and this is what I said: I like China as a person, and in his unsought role of media-friendly spokesperson for the SF world he has done well and has not aroused controversy. He is obviously serious about writing, believes in the weird or the speculative novel as a genuine force in literature, and aims high. He is an enterprising writer who comes up with some excellent ideas, and many of his images are memorable and effective.

Every other remark in the essay was about either books or events. I was concerned with the writing found in a book, or the type of book that was being written, or the overall performance of the panel of judges.

A couple of thoughts on this, that might explain what happened. Books are often personified. People say ‘I love Anne McCaffrey’, or ‘I can’t stand J. G. Ballard’, when what they really mean is that they love McCaffrey’s books or dislike Ballard’s work. We all fall into this. We say ‘there’s a new Aldiss out’, or ‘M. John Harrison has been attacked in a review’. We connect the work with the person of the writer – I assume that people who said my comments were ad hominem were subconsciously making this kind of connection.

I present as the only thing I am, which is a writer. If one writer criticizes another there is an assumption of what lawyers call ‘parity of arms’. In other words, I hold no ground higher than any other writer, and if I say I like or dislike any particular book (and by extension, any particular writer’s work), then the ground rules are clear. I am as vulnerable to this sort of thing as any other writer. (It might be worth noting that of all the writers whose work I ‘attacked’, not a single one has so far complained. Charlie Stross, indeed, took the whole thing in good part, and embraced the term ‘internet puppy’ with cries of happiness. The phrase was used of the way he wrote, not the person he is.) None of the writers whose books are shortlisted is to blame for the situation. To paraphrase myself from above, their latest book happened to be submitted by their publisher, and happened to be chosen by a group of judges.

The responsibility for the duff shortlist remains entirely with the judges.

My essay was variously described as a ‘rant’ (the most common word used), a ‘tantrum’, a ‘tirade’, a ‘savaging’, and more. One writer even complained on Twitter that I must have written it while drunk. (In fact I rarely touch alcohol – you see what I mean about unworthy remarks?) Those who objected to the style of the essay seemed to be saying that it was all very well commenting on the books, and the judges’ decision, but there was no need to go ranting on so hysterically.

All I can say (sincerely) is sorry if the tone offended, because offence was not intended.

Reaction certainly was. Books matter; literature matters; speculative fiction matters more than anything, because that is where I work. The Clarke Award is not a negligible thing. I wanted to provoke a response, get people to discuss these issues, talk about the books, think hard about what we want an award like the Clarke to stand for. The essay went viral soon after it appeared, so I suppose that wish was granted. I was sorry so much of that comment was focused on me and my presumed motives, but in the first place I didn’t really mind, and secondly once people got that off their chests a good number of them did get down to the issues I had raised.

I saw the original essay as a polemic, a pamphlet. It took an intemperate tone because I felt intemperate about the subject. Rhetorical flourishes abounded, which some found cheap. When I discovered that The Waters Rising was a long-winded quest saga with a talking horse (and later, a talking chipmunk), I said aloud, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ When I came to write my essay, no other phrase seemed capable of rising to the occasion. It’s not a measured, rational or literary response, it’s a cry of heartfelt despair, not at the author, nor even the publisher who submitted it, but at the apparently experienced and supposedly reasonable judges who singled it out of a field of 60 books and nominated it as one of the best of the year.

The conclusion I came to was that the judges this year had failed. How deep that failure really was is something they are going to have to deal with on 2nd May this year. They have made a rod for their own backs: they are going to have to select one title from their six deficient choices and declare it the winner. Which one will it be?

If they make a rational choice by discounting other books, it will probably be Embassytown by China Miéville.

If they choose the book which I like best (a strictly qualified description, as although there is much to admire in it the small scope of the book does not make it a natural winner) it will be The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers.

But if you ask me which book is really going to win, then I say Rule 34 by Charles Stross. Just because.

I had to dash away from Eastercon immediately after the end of the BSFA Awards ceremony. My son Simon was returning home from uni and had no latch key. Also, no trains were running between Battle and Hastings, and I wanted to collect him. All this meant I wasn’t able to hang around after the ceremony.

So this is the moment to say Many Thanks to anyone who voted for The Islanders. I have always enjoyed the BSFA Award events at cons: year after year they create a good feeling of unity, and a sort of warm enthusiasm for the work that has been done in the year. It’s especially pleasant to be a beneficiary of all that. I now own a ray-gun.

In its original version the long post below, about the 2012 shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, opened with a few caustic remarks about the thrillers of Mark Billingham, which I do not like. I started the post as an informal update about the Oxford Festival, but the essay quickly took a new direction and I launched into the long and now fairly notorious polemic about the Clarke shortlist. Some four hours later, the opening lines about Mark Billingham still seemed to be relevant, as he and I had been debating genre orthodoxies at the Festival. I left them in place.

However, several people have pointed out that Mr Billingham has nothing at all to do with the Clarke Award, and my acerbic comments looked like a gratuitous attack on him. It was not intended that way, but with enough time having passed I took the point. I’ve therefore removed all mention of Mark Billingham from the essay, which otherwise remains untouched. Apologies to Mark Billingham for the unintentional but clumsy crossfire.

In person Mark Billingham is articulate and pleasant, and we got along fine while we worked together. I still didn’t like his books, but that was irrelevant on the day. He was pretty upset when I published what I did, but we swiftly exchanged a few emails and peace has been restored. Ruffled feathers have been smoothed, hurt feelings alleviated. He probably won’t like my stuff.

Incidentally, Charlie Stross has acted with vast and good-humoured magnanimity after my remarks about his book, below. He probably doesn’t like my stuff either, but at least we laugh about the same things. Go Charlie!

Just back from an appearance at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, in the preternaturally warm March weather. Oxford looked ravishing, the sandstone colleges and quads glowing in the sunshine, the rivers calm and peaceful, sunbathers and walkers everywhere. The trees stood wintry and leafless above, casting stark shadows over the meadows. It was a time for reflection.

As we arrived in Oxford, the shortlist for the 2012 Clarke Award was announced, providing much material for that reflection.

This year I took an interest in the books that were being tipped for the award, and as a consequence I’m in the unusual position of having read almost everything that is either on the final shortlist as announced, or which narrowly missed being on it.

It seems to me that 2011 was a poor year for science fiction. Of the sixty books submitted by publishers, only a tiny handful were suitable for awards. The brutal reality is that there were fewer than the six needed for the Clarke shortlist. Many of the submissions were fantasy of the least ambitious type, and many of the science fiction titles were firmly embedded in genre orthodoxies, to their own huge disadvantage and discredit. Discounting all those submissions did not leave many competitors at the top.

This first impression led naturally to a question that is often asked: what is an award like the Clarke actually for? Well, obviously to reward a writer who is seen to have done well that year. But there is the less often admitted reward for the sponsor, in this case the late Arthur C. Clarke, who evidently liked the idea of a literary award named after him. But with Sir Arthur now gone to the great communications satellite in the sky, the remaining collective motive must be to make some kind of statement to the larger world about the condition of science fiction writing in the present day. We want the best writer to win every year, but we also want to have a showcase to demonstrate that he or she is the best of an exciting bunch, that the overall activity is a progressive, modern literature, with diversity and ambition and ability, and not the pool of generic rehashing that the many outside detractors of science fiction are so quick to assume it is.

In short, the winner of the award must be found within an excellent shortlist, that the win must seem to have been hard-won, and that the choice was the result of reasoned argument and intelligent debate amongst the judges.

So let’s consider the shortlist the judges have come up with in 2012. I’ll begin, briefly, with a note of what they have not included.

Three novels, perhaps four, are outstandingly ignored. In some other year, and to some other group of judges, any of these novels or perhaps all of them would have been seen as natural choices for the shortlist.

Ian R. MacLeod is a former winner of the Clarke (as well as being one of the most consistently excellent stylists in British science fiction). His novel Wake Up and Dream (PS Publishing) makes an eccentric choice in its plot, in casting the actor Clark Gable as a private eye, which some might think counts against it, but MacLeod writes witty, inventive and attractive prose, always compulsively readable, and with a flair for a surprising narrative. He is one of the writers we should be most proud of. To have omitted his new novel is inexplicable.

Just as mystifying is the omission of Simon Ings’s novel Dead Water (Corvus). This is modern science fiction in full pomp: it has a multitude of ideas, a wide-ranging narrative, an almost unbelievably ambitious casting of its net, taking one narrative chance after another. It is also a beautifully written novel, full of colour and inventive image. It is a book that should be standing as a hot favourite to win the award, not one to be discarded as an also-ran.

I am a fairly well known dissident from Adam Roberts’s fiction (at least, well known as such to Mr Roberts), but that was in a negative review I wrote in 2004 of his novel Snow. The years have passed. Roberts has emerged as one of our very best critics of science fiction, arguing in an informed way, and in eloquent and readable English, for the books he discusses. Not at all discouraged by my snotty remarks in the Guardian he has gone on writing novels with energy and increasing skill. I saw a couple of negative reviews of his new novel By Light Alone (Gollancz), but what was described as the silly idea of the novel made me laugh, and I sensed an ironic intelligence at work and some sophisticated satire in the book. I have not been able to read all of it in the time available, but I read about the first 80 pages and I liked what I found. I plan to finish it soon. It is a most unusual and amusing book, with many wicked satirical moments. Adam Roberts has been shortlisted before – it is amazing that he should be ignored this time.

Finally, Lavie Tidhar’s novel Osama (PS Publishing). Mr Tidhar is exactly the kind of writer to whom the Clarke Award should be drawing attention. He is young, ambitious, skilled and original. Osama is an ingenious inversion of modern history: Osama bin Laden is the central character in a string of pulp novels allegedly written by one Mike Longschott. The terrorist crimes we normally attribute to bin Laden exist, in this novel, in a different realm. There is excellent, evocative and atmospheric description, as well as much well-written action and plotting. The book, incidentally, is a beautiful production, an edition sure to be highly collectible in the future. Whether or not Osama might actually win the award (in an alternative universe in which the present Clarke judges have no say) is not for me to guess at, but the fact that Lavie Tidhar has not been shortlisted is an outrage.

Speaking of outrages, let’s turn to the shortlist with which we have actually been presented.

Of the six shortlisted novels, I can find only one which I think is something we should be proud of. I refer to The Testament of Jessie Lamb, by Jane Rogers (Sandstone Press). Ms Rogers is a successful and intelligent writer from what the SF world calls the ‘mainstream’. Her venture into speculative fiction gave her career an unexpected setback, in that none of the trade publishers would accept it. It eventually appeared from Sandstone, a tiny indie publisher based in Dingwall, Ross-shire. It was quickly recognized by many commentators in the SF community as a work of real interest, and to the credit of the judges (the only one they deserve) it has made it to the shortlist. If this alone encourages Ms Rogers to try her hand at more speculative fiction in future then the whole business has been justified. It is not to my mind a wholly achieved novel: it is written with real style, excellent characterization and a lot of genuine emotion, but to be fully realized as a work of speculative fiction it needs a wider canvas, a sense that larger events are mounting in the background. However, it deserves its place on the Clarke shortlist, and if things go on as they are at present it ought to win.

Let me now turn to the most highly argued novel, for and against, on the list: Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan). For reasons some people might readily understand, I have not until now had anything to say about this novel, but events have freed me. I like China as a person, and in his unsought role of media-friendly spokesperson for the SF world he has done well and has not aroused controversy. He is obviously serious about writing, believes in the weird or the speculative novel as a genuine force in literature, and aims high. He is an enterprising writer who comes up with some excellent ideas, and many of his images are memorable and effective.

Miéville has already won the Clarke Award three times – which is not his fault, and one assumes not his intention. No doubt he is pleased to have done so. His current novel is the leading contender for this year’s award, and if it becomes the winner then it will be his fourth. Again, not his fault and not apparently what he necessarily seeks, but also it’s safe to assume he would not turn it down.

However, a fourth award to this writer would send out a misleading and damaging message to the world at large: it suggests that not only is Mr Miéville the best the SF world can offer at the moment, he is shown to be more or less the only writer worth reading. Worse even than this, it would send a misleading message to China Miéville himself.

Although Miéville is clearly talented, he does not work hard enough. For a novel about language, Embassytown contains many careless solecisms, which either Mr Miéville or his editor should have dealt with. This isn’t the place to go into a long textual analysis, but (for example) a writer at his level should never use ‘alright’ so often or so unembarrassedly. He also uses far too many neologisms or SF nonce-words, which drive home the fact that he is defined and limited by the expectations of a genre audience. On the first few pages, alone, he uses the words ‘shiftparents’, ‘voidcraft’, ‘yearsends’, ‘trid’, ‘vespcams’, ‘miab’, ‘plastone’, ‘hostnest’, ‘altoysterman’ … Yes, of course, it’s possible to work out what most of these might mean (or to wait until another context makes them clearer), but it is exactly this use of made-up nouns that makes many people find science fiction arcane or excluding. A better writer would find a more effective way of suggesting strangeness or an alien environment than by just ramming words together. Resorting to wordplay is lazy writing.

I also find Miéville’s lack of characterization a sign of author indifference: Embassytown is full of names, full of people, but mostly they just chat away to each other, interchangeably and indistinguishably. And for a writer who makes so much of ambience, China Miéville’s fiction lacks a sense of place: this is not the same as a lack of description, as there is a lot of that, but a way of using a physical environment as something the characters notice, respond to, feel themselves to be a part of, so that the reader can also sense and respond to it. In Embassytown there is scene after scene in which these weakly drawn characters twitter away to each other in what might be a field or an airport terminal or someone’s front room, for all the lack of evocation the author manages.

This is not to say that Embassytown is a bad novel. It is not, but neither is it a good one. It has too many common flaws that could have been eradicated by a more ruthless editorial process in the writing, or even more simply by an extra draft of the manuscript. Nor does it suggest that Miéville is a poor or failing writer: he is obviously not, but unless he is told in clear terms that he is under-achieving, that he is restricting his art by depending too heavily on genre commonplaces, he will never write the great novels that many people say he is capable of. In the short term, to imply that this is the best science fiction novel of the current year by giving it a prize, or even shortlisting it for one, is just plain wrong.

Let me deal quickly with the rest of the shortlist. It is indefensible that a novel like Charles Stross’s Rule 34 (Orbit) should be given apparent credibility by an appearance in the Clarke shortlist. Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet. Stross’s narrative depends on vernacular casualness, with humorous asides, knowing discursiveness, and the occasional appeal of big soft eyes. He has PC Plod characters and he writes och-aye dialogue! To think for even one moment that this appalling and incapable piece of juvenile work might actually be chosen as winner brings on a cold sweat of fear.

Of Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three (Gollancz) there is little to say, except that it is capable in its own way, and hard in the way that some people want SF to be hard, and it keeps alive the great tradition of the SF of the 1940s and 1950s where people get in spaceships to go somewhere to do something. In this case, the unlikely story begins as the interstellar spaceship arrives somewhere. The paragraphs are short, to suit the expected attention-span of the reader. The important words are in italics. Have we lived and fought in vain?

Another nostalgic effort is Drew Magary’s The End Specialist (Harper Voyager). This too is written in the type of fast-moving, quickly comprehensible vernacular that Charles Stross aspires to without success, but in Magary’s case it’s quite effective. It tells the story of a medical treatment that confers a form of immortality on anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare. The new future this creates unfolds inevitably. I was much reminded of past efforts in similar vein: notably Damon Knight’s A for Anything (1961), and various works by writers like Frederik Pohl, William Tenn and Poul Anderson. Not bad precedents with which to be compared, perhaps, but this is not a literature of reminders, of retreads, of slightly updated versions of existing works. Speculative fiction is for the present, on the cutting edge, looking forward, not back. But remember what these Clarke judges have already done! Magary could win with this book; brace yourself.

Sheri S. Tepper’s The Waters Rising (Gollancz) – how can one describe it? For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’.

Let’s move on to the point of all this.

We have a dreadful shortlist put together by a set of judges who were not fit for purpose. They were incompetent. Their incompetence was made more problematical because the overall quality of the fiction in the year in question was poor. They did not know how to resolve this. They played what they saw as safe.

They failed themselves, they failed the Clarke Award, and they failed anyone who takes a serious interest in speculative fiction.

You sometimes see past jury members trying to rationalize their role in the final decision. ‘Listen, I wanted BOOK A to be on the list, but I was out-voted by the others. However, I did manage to get BOOK B up there. Yes, I know BOOK C is terrible, but we argued about it for two hours, and in the end I agreed to it being on the list if we had BOOK D on the list too.’

A jury decision is a joint and collective decision. Whatever the process of discussion, whatever compromises are made en route to a decision, everyone on the panel is responsible for the outcome. There will always be minority opinion, but it becomes irrelevant at the end. If someone on the panel is in total and serious disagreement with the others, then the only course is to say so publicly, then to resign.

Of the existing Clarke shortlist, we have heard no dissent from any of the panel. Here is Andrew M. Butler, quoted on the Guardian website (26th March 2011): “[The shortlist]’s got something for everyone: alien contact, post-apocalyptic disaster, near future cyberpunkish police procedural,” he said, adding that the variety demonstrates the health of the SF scene. “It’s exciting because you can’t fit it in a box.”

Andrew Butler has thus endorsed the decision of the panel, and therefore reveals himself as incompetent as the others.

The easy way out of this problem is to do nothing. We wait for 2nd May, we troop along to the awards ceremony and we wait for the decision to be announced. In a sense, it does not matter which one of the six books is announced, because all of them are deficient in the ways I have described. (If this happens, I hope the winner is Jane Rogers, because the deficiencies in her novel are much less serious than those in the others.) The true winner of the award, the writer of the best book of last year, will never be known, because he or she is not on the shortlist.

But there is a better way forward, and here it is.
1. The present panel of judges should be fired, or forced to resign, immediately. Their names are Juliet E. McKenna, Martin Lewis, Phil Nanson, Nikkianne Moody and Rob Grant. Chairman Andrew M. Butler should also resign. These people have proved themselves incompetent as judges, and should not be allowed to have any more say about or influence on the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
2. The 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award should be suspended forthwith, and the planned awards ceremony on 2nd May should be cancelled.
3. The award fund (£2,012.00, as I understand it) should be held over until next year. Next year’s fund should be added to it, so that the prize for 2013 becomes £4,013.00.
4. The 2013 Clarke Award should be made to the best novel published in the two years ended 31st December 2012. All novels currently eligible for the 2012 award, whether or not they have been shortlisted by this year’s panel, are eligible again.
5. All the other usual rules of the Award should be applied.

And just in case this modest suggestion of mine is taken up, let me add one final thing:

If enough people seem to think that I have proposed this in my own interests, and that it is an attempt to have my own work made eligible once again, then I would withdraw my novel The Islanders from competition. If that does not satisfy such people, then the 2013 eligibility could be based simply on the books from 2012: and the doubled award be given to one of them. I have nothing published in 2012 that would be eligible.