author of The Prestige, The Separation and the story collection Episodes
John Tunnard (1900-1971) was a British abstract artist. He painted the cover for the Secker & Warburg hardcover edition of Guy Murchie’s Song of the Sky (1955). That painting is not included in this collection, but most of the rest of his best work is. A revelation.
The book is a tie-in with a TV programme, describing the small band of women flyers of the Air Transport Auxiliary, who delivered newly built aircraft from the factories to operational airfields. Of necessity, the young women were nearly all from a slice of pampered and leisured pre-war society, who had had the money and means to learn to fly. The outbreak of war brought down most of the British class system, with not the least impact on these women. They flew any and every kind of aircraft, from single-engined fighters, to seaplanes and four-engined bombers – usually without any tuition, always single-handed (without a crew, even on the big planes). They often had to navigate by dead reckoning. Treated at first with derision by the operational pilots (all male, of course), they quickly showed that they were the equal of any of them.
One of the relatively untold stories of WW2 is what happened to the ordinary German civilians who suffered under the RAF air raids on the cities, what degree of ruination was caused and what the German authorities did about it, during and after hostilities. It is only comparatively recently that German historians have started to research this.
Moorhouse is a British writer, and his subject is restricted to the story of Berlin (by no means the worst affected city).
A calm summary of and argument for the science of global warming, the author’s position being basically that although mankind is obviously responsible for some of the greenhouse gases and pollution affecting the world, most of the problem arises from natural causes. The book is eloquent and persuasive, and handy to have around if you get into an argument on the subject, but I keep an open mind. April 2011 in Britain was the hottest and driest April on record, and now in May the Kent crop of strawberries is ready, delicious and delicate – and a month early. They grow wine grapes on the hillsides around my English town. The sea level rises by about half a centimetre a year. (22 May 2011)
To the launch and private view of the new exhibition at the British Library, ingeniously titled Out of This World. The atrium at the BL building was crowded with familiar faces. The catering staff were walking around with silver make-up on theirs. Proceedings were launched by a well-constructed speech from China Miéville, in which he emphasized the diverse nature of fantastic literature: the long period of time over which it has been written, the number of important women writers who have emerged, the contribution made by writers from non-white backgrounds and countries abroad. Deservedly cheered, Miéville’s speech was immediately followed by a promotional video that emphasized the important role played by American actors, television producers, UFOs and light sabres. No women writers – in fact, no writers of any kind. “Was it all in vain?” it asked at the end. Yes, mate, it was all in vain. China himself seemed unperturbed at the way his intelligent remarks had been sabotaged by this familiar and disconnected rubbish. However, down in the basement, where the main exhibition was mounted, we noticed the number of books on display, under glass but sensitively presented in an attempt to convey the history of the literature. Pity about the large model of the UFO apparently sucking a victim into its maw, the police callbox from Doctor Who, and a half-hearted attempt at a Martian fighting machine: you can’t help groaning inwardly at the sight of this unoriginal stuff, yet again, once more, dull and obvious and irrelevant, so much on the fringe of literature. Film and television science fiction has been the secondary, derivative activity: the work of writers, the publishing of books, is where the real work goes on, and has gone on for more than a century. One doesn’t wish to bite the hand that gives you a free glass of wine and sushi, but you can’t help feeling that the major literature repository in the country should understand the difference.
General fiction, mainstream fiction, literary fiction … some of the more interesting writers around me (Mike Harrison, China Miéville) have hit on the idea of categorizing literary fiction as just another genre, intended as a kind of answer to a critic called John Mullan.
Mullan is Professor of English at University College, London. He specializes in 18th century fiction and in recent months has started turning up almost everywhere books are mentioned so that he can air his opinions. This busy man, who reminds us at every opportunity he is a Professor, gains his authority by sheer persistence. He shows a dullard’s disdain towards genre fiction, as he sees it, without betraying any apparent familiarity with the best work or the best writers in the categories he dismisses. Miéville has argued in public with Mullan about this, and today goes a stage further with the argument: he calls literary fiction “litfic” and is quoted in a profile in the Guardian Books section as saying things like this: “My issue with litfic is not that it is a genre but that (a) it doesn’t think it is and (b) it thinks it’s ipso facto better than all the ones that are genres.”
As his dislike immediately zones in on a mediocre novel by Ian McEwan called Saturday, you can’t help briefly nodding in agreement. He describes Saturday as “a paradigmatic moment in the social crisis of litfic”. That’s not exactly what I thought of McEwan’s dismal effort, but Miéville’s feelings are clear enough.
Hang on, though — what’s all this anthropomorphism?
“… it doesn’t think it is“. Who or what is this thinking entity called it? How can “litfic” have any thought at all? How can it have a social crisis?
If it is anything, litfic is a number of novels and short stories by a number of writers.
A similar number of novels and short stories makes up the genre known as science fiction. The usual objection to the term “science fiction” is about the label and the assumptions many people make when they hear the label applied. The alternatives, “sf” and “sci-fi”, are just as bad, and in the case of the latter worse and more extreme.
The objection is not to the type of fiction it allegedly describes, because the use of the fantastic as a metaphor goes back to the very beginnings of fiction, and distinguished, influential and entertaining examples of fantastic literature abound, past and present. I believe it is one of the most interesting, difficult and rewarding areas in which a contemporary writer can work. The real objection to the term is that any label induces first of all an orthodoxy (“this is or is not science fiction”) followed by laziness. Lazy writers fall back too easily and too often on genre tropes, lazy readers accept anything at all with the label in place because they assume special conditions apply, and lazy critics like John Mullan depend on a general concept based on TV series their children watch and a few poor books they happen to have read, and don’t have the energy or will to investigate further.
For China Miéville to cite or create or claim a new genre, an alleged balance against another, an argument for one genre being an argument against the other, etc., only muddies the water. It adds a new wrong to an existing wrong, and fails to make a right. It’s all very well mounting a case against an under-achieving and over-praised writer like Ian McEwan, but how would that case stand up against (e.g.) Roberto Bolaño, Graham Greene, Jerzy Kosinski, John Fowles, Chuck Palahniuk, Ivan Bunin, Anna Kavan, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens, Richard Powers …? It’s obvious nonsense even to try.
In the same way, does a generalization about Isaac Asimov apply also to the work of J. G. Ballard, Mike Harrison, myself, China Miéville, Alastair Reynolds, Lauren Beukes, Brian Aldiss, Ian McDonald …?
There are only individual books written by individual writers.
China Miéville is a young writer of great potential, with an attractive and adventurous use of language and a willingness to take intriguing risks with his work. In person, he has a pleasant manner and speaks well. He’s on the up and up. But I think he should be deeply wary of genre arguments. Genre is a trap for those who wish to be individual or bold, and in a telling way what I’ve read of China’s work is at its weakest when it strays into genre territory. He was quick to endorse the sub-genre “new weird”, and the great wall of orthodoxy is already looming around that. Other partitions are being erected around him: he should reflect on the fact that the profile I’ve quoted from appeared as a centrefold in a Guardian “Science Fiction Special”. Leave great walls to the other China, I say.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/china-mieville-life-writing-genre
I have been busy recently. As well as magically juggling two novels I wrote the stage adaptation of The Prestige, and I have completed several short stories. One of these went out on BBC Radio 4, and another was written as a special commission from a bank. It will be published in December. I’m currently working on another.
The major push has been on four or five or six novellas, which were written as chapters for The Islanders, but which also would work as standalone stories. When I say four or five or six, this is because one is quite short (so not really a novella), and one is a long continuo which probably wouldn’t work as a standalone piece. The other four are at the heart of the weird mechanism that is The Islanders’ story. I don’t intend to get them published separately, but today I went through the final version of The Islanders and extracted copies of these stories, to separate them out, just in case …
Today I read through the manuscript of The Islanders for the last time (well, last for now), and made a few fine corrections. One short paragraph contained the word “there” three times in as many lines. How do these things slip past? Found a few other infelicities. At these times I remember something John Brunner said: when a piece of fiction has been through at least two drafts (The Islanders went through three), any text corrections a writer makes after that are only for the sake of his own pride. OK, but they still needed doing.
Then tried to move the text over from my preferred word processor to the one everyone else uses. In other words, from the elegant, stable and endlessly flexible Wordperfect, to the obdurately clumsy Word. Everyone who uses Word seems to think there’s no difference between it and anything else, but there is, although it’s tedious and pointless trying to persuade them. In this case, Word made nonsense of my simply laid out page numbers in the original, and the short section of the novel I had formatted into two columns became a scramble of letters laid out perfectly, a long column, one beneath another. Took me ages to correct this.
Now the book exists in the obdurately clumsy, and everyone except me will be happy with that.
The best thing about the acceptance from Gollancz is that it releases me into the next book. This is currently called The Adjacent and is already half written, but because of its unusual approach, beyond even that of The Islanders, I felt creatively paralysed until the way ahead was cleared. I now feel free to carry on with plans.
This time last year I was writing The Islanders and The Adjacent in tandem: two fairly different novels, one during the day, one in the evenings. When both were up to somewhere beyond the 100-page mark, it became clear that I should have to concentrate on one at the temporary expense of the other. The Islanders won this virtual toss of the coin, even though at that time The Adjacent seemed like a more whole novel. It has been waiting ever since. I’ll get back to it soon.
My new novel, The Islanders, is complete, and life starts returning to what most people would call normal. The manuscript (in reality, a PDF file), was delivered at the beginning of August, attended by the usual sense of anticlimax. You hit Return, a green bar dashes across the monitor display, and there it is, gone. In a sense, it’s gone forever, because once other people start reading it, it’s difficult to claw the thing back to make changes. I’m already thinking of small details I’d like to change, but on past experience know it’s probably best not to try. If you make too many last-minute changes, somebody somewhere is going to get hold of the wrong text and send it to the printer, as Jonathan Franzen has just discovered with his new novel Freedom. I wonder how often that happens to writers who aren’t as famous as Franzen, and so we don’t hear about it? It happened, e.g., to my book The Dream Archipelago, which I had expanded with two new stories and in general revised the rest of the text. Somehow, the old text slipped through the process, the book was actually printed, and I happened to notice only when the publisher sent my presentation copies. Fortunately, unlike Franzen, I was able to stop the copies being sold, the print-run was pulped, and the book re-appeared several months later.