So, that symposium, then. I thought it was, on balance, quite fun. (For a take from someone better read in sf criticism than me, see this post; and for photos, see here.) At times it struggled a little to address both of its audiences (the Gresham symposium regulars, who seemed to account for about a third of the audience, and the knowledgeable sf fans and critics, who must have been another third) equally, and the Chair was perhaps more enthusiastic than knowledgeable; but there was good stuff in there. These are brief notes, since eventually the full transcripts and possibly even audio will be available on the Gresham college website; I trust that there were enough people now reading this in attendance that we can go into more detail in the comments.

The conceit of Neal Stephenson’s keynote address was to imagine what a xeno-ethnologist would make of our culture, and his conclusion was: it no longer makes sense to talk about “mainstream” versus “genre”. He described this split, between acceptable culture and a number of debased genres, as the “standard model”, and argued that it may have been accurate half a century or more ago, but was no longer relevant. However, he also defined his terms very carefully: not only did he specify that he was talking about speculative fiction rather than science fiction, he made it clear that he was using the widest possible definition of speculative fiction, to include, for example, “new historical fiction” like 300 (and presumably also The Baroque Cycle). He used “mundane” to describe all non-sf.

Sf, he argued, is unique among genres in that it has grown but remained separate. Westerns largely died (contemporary examples are all exceptional in some way, not part of a living genre; romance has become ubiquitous in film; crime has become a dominant narrative form on tv. Sf has become too common and too successful to be realistically described as a genre — hence his very broad definition of the term — but has not been absorbed in the way that romance and crime have. It remains a separate stream in our culture.

A xeno-ethnologist, he suggested, would see a “bifurcated culture”, with speculative on one side and mundane on the other. Evidence for this bifurcation: the redefinition of bestseller lists in, eg, the New York Times, to include only the types of books that the compilers of bestseller lists think should be on there (eg relegating Potter to YA); and the careers of actors such as Sigourney Weaver and Hugo Weaving, who have respectable success as actors but disproportionate fame among speculative audience relative to mundane audiences. He proposed that the unifying factor among actors achieving this sort of success was their ability to “project intelligence”; that intelligence (practical or intellectual or some other kind) was the key to identifying these characters. At this point it became clear that better terms for the split he was trying to describe would be between geeky and not, rather than speculative than not. His attempt to explain that split was, I thought, actually quite sophisticated. He argued that, in the everyday world, intelligence is not exceptional — though it comes in many forms — but that a lot of mundane fiction does not actually reflect this. In a complex world, the split is between art that encourages vegging out and that which encourages geeking out, and the latter is the stuff that has become the speculative stream of our culture. (Remember how broad his definition of speculative is: I strongly suspect he would attempt to claim, say, HBO shows, and certainly something like The West Wing.) The satisfaction of sf, he argued, was that its characters are not dumb, ie they act like we think real people would. (I leave you to decide how much “real people” is being defined as “people like Neal Stephenson”, although he was at pains, as I said, to point out that there are many kinds of intelligence.) He wrapped up with some rather strawman and largely unproductive attacks on academia as a factor behind this split, suggesting that the post-structuralist, post-modern principles of English teaching breed a sort of lack of confidence in writing about anything other than subjective personal experience.

There’s further discussion of Stephenson’s talk here and (second-hand) here.

Andy Sawyer’s presentation on the overlap between science fiction and other genres was, I hope he will not be offended by me saying, more aimed at the Gresham regulars than at the fans. It was a galloping survey of the various attempts to define sf, from Aldiss to Suvin and others, with the underlying argument that sf is never a pure genre, that it is always part something else. (Citing Paul Kincaid’s family-resemblance approach from “On the Origins of Science Fiction” as part support.) Useful points made: classification is always a form of ideological argument; and “science fiction” can sometimes be considered as a verb, something that happens in texts when certain elements are introduced. He also proposed a starting point for genre of 1827 (ie a century before Gernsback) on the grounds of a novel by Jane Webb called The Mummy! which responded directly to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. He also pointed out that magazines for most other kinds of category fiction existed before Amazing, and suggested that perhaps this was a mark of the limitations of sf as a category, and that it might more usefully be thought of as a way of thinking.

John Clute talked about Horror motifs in science fiction, via a detailed reading of the dystopian novel City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings (1919). He started from the idea that science fiction (or “the argued fantastic”) and horror are largely opposed: “rationalising horror [i.e. what sf does] is to tolerate it”. Vampires explained can be scary, but not horrific. What, then, he asked, can survive of horror in an sf setting? Another way of framing the question is to ask what genres can let us see (as long as, he said, we remember that they are tools for seeing but not the thing seen itself). Horror, he suggested, is a way of wrestling with amnesia, and in particular can be a way of wrestling with the amnesia of society: it is about forcing us to remember or to recognise. (Building on a distinction he’s talked about before.) This sort of horror can be seen in dystopias, in “Hitler Wins” stories, in apocalypse stories and — he suggested — in a lot of near-future science fiction written after 2000. Examples given: The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall; HARM by Brian Aldiss; The Luminous Depths by David Herter; Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon; The Book of Dave by Will Self; Pattern Recognition by William Gibson; The Road by Cormac McCarthy; and Super-Cannes by JG Ballard. One notable thing about this list: only two of its number have been published as genre. He also described this cluster as “cenotaph fiction” (a description, incidentally, I suspect could be applied to Mary Doria Russell’s latest novel, which I am currently reading).

Next up was Martin Willis, talking about Science fiction in the nineteenth century. I think this presentation was probably not as bad as it seemed at the time, but was not helped by the structure: the whole first half was generalities about the period and about what “the critics” say about it, which looked particularly bad coming immediately after Clute’s close reading, and such that it sounded like he was arguing against a straw man even if it wasn’t entirely. I think, actually, a lot of what he said was pushing hard at an open door. His main argument, for example, was that sf critics do not pay enough attention to nineteenth-century science fiction (it didn’t help his case that, when he did get around to talking about examples, he included Poe and Shelley; although in talking about, eg, mesmerism as a science in sf he made me think again about Scarlett Thomas’ The End of Mr Y as an heir to this tradition). Separately, he argued that critics do not pay enough attention to the way that science functions in science fiction (something I am very sympathetic to, and indeed something I liked about Joanna Russ’ reviews as collected in The Country You Have Never Seen); and he also argued that too often science in science fiction is the work of individuals, not recognised as a social enterprise, or “a vibrant set of political and social cultures” (another idea I’m sympathetic to).

Last but not least was Roger Luckhurst, talking about Modern British Science Fiction, and he very nearly got through the whole talk without mentioning a contemporary science fiction novel by a British writer. Instead he talked about three different implications of modern: modernity, meaning a philosophically and scientifically enlightened society as we have had for the past few hundred years (in theory); modernisation, meaning the technological and ecological consequences of the industrial revolution and urbanisation; and modernism, meaning the literary movement at the start of the twentieth century. Sf, he argued (and I gather here that he was paraphrasing his own book), is a literature of modernity and modernisation but has an ambivalent relationship, at best, with modernism. I have to say that I enjoy Luckhurst’s approach — he always brings in a lot of context, in the form of biographical and historical information — even when I don’t agree with it. When he did get to contemporary sf, he came back to the idea of a “post-genre fantastic” (which, weirdly, he first attributed to “a science fiction critic”, only later naming the source as Gary Wolfe), and pointed to writers such as Chabon and Lethem (not British, note) as moving between and across genres. His British exemplar text was Justina Robson’s Keeping it Real, and to be fair he made it sound wonderful, talking of the Quantum Bomb as a generic bomb, and of the way in which the story literally makes the logics of sf and fantasy and horror inseparable; if I hadn’t read the book and didn’t know that structurally it’s a complete mess, I would certainly be rushing out to buy a copy. He offered two reasons for why this increasing free-ness across genres might be happening: one, that there has been a shift in our understanding of what counts as “culture” (the very shift, in fact, that Stephenson was objecting to, although Luckhurst said he doesn’t care for the term “post-modern”); and two, our relationship to science and technology is changing; we no longer have even the illusion that science can be held separate from society.

I should also note that the symposium ended with a panel discussion, which was mostly not very edifying, although the all-male nature of the faculty was challenged (the response was to acknowledge that yes, in this day and age the panel was not a representative sample of people who research sf); and one woman asked “what it would take for there to be a strong female character in sf that men could identify with”; Farah Mendlesohn provided some data from her survey of children’s reading habits — and therefore changing audience demographics — as a partial answer, and Caroline Mullan pointed out that the answer could just be Buffy. Then there was a drinks reception, and a dinner, both of which were filled with good company and conversation; and now I have to go to work.

• The latest Reality Check podcast was recorded at the Clarke Award ceremony and includes interviews with Paul Raven, Adam Roberts, Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter and Richard Morgan, all moderated by Graham Sleight. Direct link to mp3.
• And the latest Drink Tank (pdf) is Chris Garcia’s “handicapping the Hugos” issue, with some comment from me.
• Abigail Nussbaum has posted a further in-depth look at Black Man, with some focus on gender roles; and I kept adding other peoples’ thoughts to my post here
• Other awards stuff: Nebulas surprisingly rightheaded; inaugural Shirley Jackson Award nominees are intriguing; and Locus Award nominees are solid
• Paul Kincaid’s latest science fiction skeptic column
• “The creators behind Torchwood may have some funny ideas about what constitutes “plot,” but they know their audience. The show feels like it was created expressly for fan service“
• Some interesting reviews from the Guardian: Michel Faber on Mark Evanier’s biography of Jack Kirby; and Nicholas Lezard on The World Without Us; see also Giles Foden on Pandora in the Congo
• This sounds intriguing.
• What is the feminist singularity?
• An interview with Junot Diaz at the revamped Granta site: “Díaz tells me about his new project. ‘I want to write a book where I get to blow up the planet and kill off the whole human species,’ [...] With this novel he is not trying to break out of genre – it’s a science fiction book.”
• Steven Shaviro on character and genre fiction
• This week’s YA debate. Scott Westerfeld: the most significant sf writer right now? Scalzi says yes, with some sales figures; follow-up here and here and here
• And finally: more free ebooks! Small Beer Press have released Maureen F McHugh’s marvellous collection Mothers and Other Monsters; and Cory Doctorow has released Little Brother

Hello everyone - Niall introduced me in his post below, but for anyone who doesn’t know me already, I’m Vector production editor and usually found in the Torque Control comments section, and now he’s given me the keys to the blog. You can expect more posts from me on media SF and other fannish topics, while I leave the serious book blogging to Niall. I’ll try not to lower the tone too much.

The seventh annual Sci Fi London film festival took place over the bank holiday weekend. As mentioned previously, it hosts the presentation of the Arthur C Clarke award as part of the opening night, but over the next five days they showed over twenty science fiction films. I think this was the fourth year I’ve attended the festival, and while the films are sometimes hit and miss as to quality, but for every Subject Two or Recon 2022 there’s a Primer to restore your faith in intelligent film-making.

11 Minutes Ago isn’t this year’s Primer, but it’s the obvious comparison to make to this ultra-low-budget time travel romance. Pack is our protagonist, a time-traveller from fifty years in the future, who can only travel back in time for eleven minutes before he has to return to the future. The film consists of eight of these eleven minute jumps, covering two hours of a wedding reception in our time, but two years of Pack’s life. The twist is that we’re following Pack’s visits chronologically for him, but they jump about in almost reverse order between 7 and 9pm on the day of the California Presidential Primary wedding reception.

If Pack can travel through time, why does he keep coming back to the same two hours? We see early on (for Pack and the viewers, that is, at the wedding it’s nearly 9pm) that the answer is Cynthia, a bridesmaid who seems to have fallen for Pack’s charms, and gives an enthusiastic yes to a question he hasn’t even asked yet.

The introduction to the film told us that it was shot in 24 hours. Even without knowing this, it’s clear that the film was made on a shoestring, which they try and turn into a virtue. The angle they take is that the time-travelling Pack is more interesting to the wedding videographers than the actual wedding, and we’re seeing their film, which not only gives Pack someone to explain everything to but means that any dodgy camerawork can be explained away as well. Setting it all during two hours in one location means only one set, but they shoot it well enough and from enough angles that it doesn’t get boring. What doesn’t fare so well is the sound - some lines are inaudible, and the music (which I suspect was being played in the background of the shoot) is overwhelming and almost continuous for the first half of the film.

What works really well are the interweaving plots of the people at the wedding reception, and the way they can set up mysteries for which the answers come from the beginning of the evening - explaining why the groom finishes the evening pissed as a newt when he starts off a tee-totaller, why the bride’s mother is continually making balloon animals, which of Nancy the bridesmaid’s many lovers bought her earrings. Only once do they take it too far, with a card trick from Pack which serves no purpose and feels like padding, even in an 84-minute film.

What doesn’t work as well is the actual science fiction. It seems that the time-travel is just an excuse to do an interesting and unconventional timeline, but while Memento managed to come up with a good rationale for this, 11 Minutes Ago has Pack coming back to our time to collect a sample of clean air so it can be replicated in the future and reverse the crippling lack of libido which is killing the birth rate, an idea which vies with the Doctor setting the poison gas on fire in this week’s Doctor Who for stupidest way to save the Earth.

Assuming you can get past this lack of science in your science fiction, there’s another problem, in that having set up the ending of Pack and Cynthia’s romance at the start of the film, they have to convince me that they would get so far in such a short space of time. Setting Cynthia up as extremely selective in her choice of boyfriends, and someone who is reticent to move too fast, makes their task even more difficult. Pack’s chat-up technique alternates between wannabe profound statements about the nature of time and the fleetingness of their moments together and cheesy lines about her beautiful eyes and soft skin, and if it were me I’d have run a mile after the first half-hour. Further complicating matters is that in a film filled with surprisingly fine actors, Christina Mauro can’t persuade me that Cynthia is a woman so instantly mesmerising that Pack will spend months and years of his life preparing for eleven minute visits to her when she seems like a fairly boring doormat,and that feeds back to make Pack even more of an obsessive stalker than he already is.

Even if the central romance falls short, there’s still enough interest in the supporting characters to make the film worth watching. You’ll need to pay attention, but if it’s not quite the mind-bending experience of Primer you will at least be able to follow it without resorting to diagrams, and the ending, while not unexpected, is neatly done. I don’t know if it has any chance of a release outside the festival circuit, but it’s worth catching if you get the chance.

As noted here, from the Wiscon schedule:

How Much Is Too Much?
“Unless we’re reading or writing about a utopia, the societies in our fantasy worlds are going to have problems. In fact, a culture without problems invariably comes off as shallow and unrealistic. Does this mean we need to include things like sexism and racism if we want to tell a believable story? And if so, are we, as authors, guilty of perpetuating whatever-ism in the real world?”
Monday, 8:30-9:45 A.M. (Assembly)
M: Sarah Monette, Catherynne M. Valente, Gregory Rihn, Elissa Malcohn, L. Timmel Duchamp

Alas, no Wiscon for me this year, so I’ll have to rely on panel reports from people keen enough to get up for an 8.30 am Monday panel. But it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about off and on since the question came up in the discussion of Martin’s review of Red Seas Under Red Skies last year, and thinking about it this week in particular having just finished Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains, which takes a diametrically opposite position to Lynch.

In other news, I’ve gotten around to doing something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is to give Liz the ability to post here. Other additions may follow; this was always meant to be a Vector blog rather than just my blog, after all (Liz, as I’m sure I don’t need to point out for most of you, has been production editor for the last year or so).

So. A Clarke judge no longer. More free time. What am I going to do with myself?

Well, first up, Thursday sees the “science fiction as a literary genre” symposium organised by Gresham College, at which I hope to see a fair few of the people reading this. After that comes the BSFA/SFF joint AGM event, on Saturday 7th June, and then at the end of June there’s the SFF Masterclass in SF criticism. So, no Wiscon (or Readercon) for me this year, but I won’t be short of things to do.

In blogging terms, once I’ve caught up on various other (mosty Vector-related) tasks I’d been letting slide a bit, I’m hoping to get a slightly more regular schedule going — say, links on a Monday, a review on a Friday (or possibly vice versa). The Baroque Cycle Reading Group continues (next installment due Friday 16th!), and by the end of the month I hope to be joining Karen in blogging about some of the Masterclass reading. There’ll probably also be more discussions, after the fashion of the Matter roundtable, at some point.

And speaking of reading, here’s my current TBR-imminent:

From top to bottom:

• Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos — an impulse buy from a second-hand book stall a while ago. Given that Stand on Zanzibar is on the Masterclass reading list this seems like an appropriate time to try Dos Passos.
• Speculative Japan, edited by Gene van Troyer and Grania Davis — a review copy for Strange Horizons, which I have very selfishly been sitting on because I want to read it. Now I have time.
• Hopeful Monsters by Hiromi Goto — one of the stories in this is on the Masterclass reading list; I’ve been meaning to try Goto for a while, so I’m going to take this opportunity to read the rest of the book as well.
• Intuition by Allegra Goodman — Abigail raved about this a while ago, and Nic bought it for me for Christmas. And it does sound right up my street.
• Dreamers of the Day by Maria Doria Russell — if the pile was sorted by the order in which I intend to read it, rather than by size, this one would be at the top.
• The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block — the latest sf/f-ish book from Faber, this one dealing with, as you’d expect, memory; and it’s already had a glowing review from the New York Times.
• Flood by Stephen Baxter — the big science fiction novel in this month’s reading; I’ll be reviewing it for IROSF.
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson — as noted above.

Plus, almost certainly, the mundane Interzone, when I get my hands on a copy. All of which, hopefully, should keep me out of trouble. What are you reading at the moment?

Public service announcement: apparently Geoff Ryman will be talking about mundane sf on Front Row, on Radio 4, at 7.30 this evening.

The occasion (I assume) being the imminent publication of the “Mundane sf” issue of Interzone, as discussed over on the BSFA forum. It’s out next Thursday, in fact, and in the meantime here’s the fiction contents:

“How to Make Paper Airplanes” by Lavie Tidhar
“Endra” – from Memory by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
“The Hour is Getting Late” by Billie Aul
“Remote Control” by R.R. Angell
“The Invisibles” by Élisabeth Vonarburg
“Into the Night” by Anil Menon
“Talk is Cheap” by Geoff Ryman

If that’s not enough, here’s a Guardian blog piece by Damien G Walter:

The battleground for this SF smackdown would be the pages of one of the world’s most influential short fiction magazines. Where literary fiction has long since abandoned the short form in favor of the fertile intellectual territory of Waterstones 3 for 2 tables, SF has continued to value short fiction as the arena where the genre innovates and evolves. Enter Interzone, Britain’s longest-running SF magazine, at a time when British writers have come to dominate the field. Never one to shy away from a good dust-up, but smart enough not to step in front of a locomotive full of enraged SF fans, the editors of Interzone handed control to a team of guest editors representing the heartland of Mundanista territory, and the call went forth for stories that represented the Mundane manifesto.

No prizes for spotting the most ironic statement in this paragraph.

EDIT: You know, it’s almost like some mastermind is coordinating this. Here’s the first review of IZ216, which is generally positive, although it offers almost no insight into how well the issue functions as a showcase for mundane sf.

AFTER FRONT ROW: Well, that was brief, but good to hear nonetheless. Here’s the Listen Again link.

And the winner of the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award is …

Black Man by Richard Morgan

Congratulations to Richard Morgan; and of course, it’s an excellent book, which you should all go and read right now. Or, if you prefer, you could look at my photos from the award party and ceremony, over here. Paul Billinger has some here, including a good one of the judges.

I haven’t seen many reactions around yet, but Abigail Nussbaum is pleased. Jeff VanderMeer also thinks it’s a good choice, and has a short piece up at the Amazon blog. Instant Fanzine considers it “the least slapfightlicious choice.”

UPDATE: Paul Raven’s happy (but it’s the only one of the shortlist), Joe Gordon is chuffed, and Jonathan and James report they enjoyed attending the ceremony, and the Guardian implies that Richard Morgan is a genetically-modified assassin. (They also — mistakenly — give the impression that Paul Billinger was a voting judge; in fact the Chair’s role, which Paul carried out very well, is to moderate the discussion.)

Over on the Guardian blog, Sam Jordison reports on a night in the new world of SF. Two things strike me about this report: first, it’s great to hear that the passion involved in the decision was visible to an observer; second, I really regret not knowing that he was there, because I’d have liked to thank him for his continuing series of Guardian blog posts on past Hugo Award winners. I very much hope he gets a chance to post about his reaction to Black Man.

Elsewhere, Joe Abercombie is pleased the award went to an unashamedly sf novel, Philip Palmer enjoyed himself, and the post-presentation Gollancz meal seems to have gone well. (As for the tiny trousers mentioned in both posts, I can only assume that Adam Roberts has been supplying Lilliputian assistants to his fellow writers, and is now running a premium clothing-replacement business.)

Sci-Fi London have footage from the ceremony here, while the text of Paul Billinger’s speech can be found here. And io9’s take: “Shockingly, Science Fiction Book Wins SF Book Award”.

The second half of Abigail Nussbaum’s shortlist review, covering The Execution Channel, The Carhullan Army, and Black Man:

Carl is neither tormented nor a monster. He is a victim who revels in the results of his victimization. He is a person, and therefore more than the sum total of his biology or upbringing, but he is also inhuman, and therefore compelled to act in accordance with this inhuman nature, which inevitably means killing without remorse.

Morgan expertly maintains the tension between these two views of Carl, never allowing either one to gain supremacy. This allows him to interrogate the core assumptions of his own story, and taunt us with our warring desires for the character—victory and salvation. In Black Man’s final third, Morgan uses the most common trope of the lone-wolf action thriller—having the villain kill someone the hero loves, thus spurring them to bloody action. Usually, in these kinds of stories, the hero will do one of two things—kill the villain, thus satisfying the audience’s bloodlust, or recognize that vengeance is futile, thus satisfying their sense of morality. Carl does both, and the marvel of Black Man is that by the time he executes his revenge we, the readers, feel the conviction that is so often stated, but so rarely believable, in these stories—that it’s futile, that it will accomplish nothing and help no one—while simultaneously realizing, on that same visceral level, that Carl’s nature compels him to take it anyway.

And Nic Clarke’s reviewed The Red Men:

The problem is that the crushing demands of corporate life are neither personally resonant nor remotely interesting to me, and as such I found it hard to muster much enthusiasm for plot or character, or to excuse the book’s storytelling and stylistic weaknesses. Martin Lewis, in his review over at Strange Horizons, sums up The Red Men’s concerns brilliantly: “the book is actually at least partially about trying not to be a cock”. Fair enough, and clever with it; but over 400 pages of self-centred pigs creating and then putting right a fuck up, with little apparent impact on or reference to the world at large, all the while learning to be marginally less like self-centred pigs…? I am not compelled. The portrait of the more boorish, unrepentantly-sexist blokes among Nelson’s colleagues and superiors reminded me of another recent read, Ali Smith’s Girl meets Boy (a multi-Alexandrian discussion post of which is in the works); but there the men in question were not the centre of the story world, and a relief it was too.

And with that, I’m off to help decide the winner.

Three days to go, and the Clarke Award reviews are popping up all over. I’ll update the master list this evening, but in the meantime there’s the first half of Abigail Nussbaum’s shortlist review at Strange Horizons (second half on Wednesday):

If the resulting shortlist is not exactly good, neither is it particularly bad. It is a far worse thing—unexciting. There are no howlingly awful nominees like last year’s Streaking, and at least two of the nominated novels are very fine—each, in their own way, worthy of the award—but for the most part this year’s shortlisted novels are characterized by being uninteresting. Or perhaps I should say by focusing on things which this reader was not particularly interested in. Reading through the shortlisted novels, one can’t escape the impression that the award’s judges’ definition of science fiction is a depressingly narrow one—science fiction as a Mirror for Our Times, working to combat the evils in our society and shed a light on its failings. This is certainly one aspect of the genre, but there are so many others, so many other things that science fiction can do that the books on the Clarke shortlist don’t even try to accomplish. In a backhanded way, this year’s shortlist is a perfect demonstration of just why the Clarke needs to be the award that Tom Hunter described, one that pushes the envelope and seeks to redefine the genre. Here’s hoping future juries do a better job of adhering to this mandate.

There are Nic Clarke’s reviews at Eve’s Alexandria:

• The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
• Black Man by Richard Morgan
• The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter
• The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall

There was an article by Lisa Tuttle in the Times on Saturday which gives a general overview of the Award’s history before her thoughts on this year’s shortlist:

The decisions of judges, who must reread and argue over their selections, only occasionally coincide with the popular vote. In 20 years, four Clarke winners have also won the British Science Fiction Association Award, but that won’t happen this year - the BSFA Award for Best Novel has already been won by Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, the most glaring omission from this year’s shortlist, which is otherwise a very good, and, for only the second time, completely British, selection:

Matthew De Abaitua’s The Red Men (Snow Books) is an accomplished, quirky first novel, set in London and the North, about the creation of artificial life, mingling science with the occult. A strong contender.

Stephen Baxter’s The H-Bomb Girl (Faber), set in Liverpool at the time of the Cuban Crisis in 1962, combines alternate histories, time travel and nuclear war with teen rebels and the Beatles. Fun, but written for kids.

Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (Faber) is a raw, compelling, beautifully written vision of female rebellion against an oppressive near-future society, and has more in common with Orwell’s 1984 - or The Handmaid’s Tale - than genre SF.

Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate), a first novel tipped for cult status, is an exhilarating, original excursion into story via meta-fiction, philosophy and intellectual games.

Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel (Orbit) is a gripping, astonishing techno-thriller that tackles big ideas with style and conviction. This is the fourth time that MacLeod has been up for the award, and he would be a popular choice.

Richard Morgan’s Black Man (Gollancz) is yang to Sarah Hall’s yin, being a big, action-packed adventure all about masculinity and violence. It is Morgan’s second nomination.

Finally, although it’s not up yet, rumour has it that Adam Roberts’ full shortlist review will appear at Futurismic before the day is done.

EDIT: Adam Roberts’ review, Bloglines assures me, is here, although from where I am at the moment I can’t read it myself.

FURTHER EDIT: And see Tony Keen’s roundup here.

And we’re off! Somewhat later than planned, I admit, for which I apologise, but now the avalanche has started and it is too late for the pebbles to vote. Or something. To recap: I’m reading The Baroque Cycle, and some other people said they’d be interested in reading along and/or discussing it; but to make it a less daunting prospect I’m treating it as eight 300-odd page books rather three thousand-odd page volumes. Thus, this post, being my thoughts on the first book of Quicksilver which is, in a recipe for confusion, also called “Quicksilver”.

For those of you who aren’t reading or re-reading along at home, a brief recap is in order. Quicksilver-the-book alternates between two stories. In the first-met, set in 1713 and told in the present tense, Enoch Root visits Daniel Waterhouse at his adopted home in Massachusetts, bearing a message calling Waterhouse back to London. Cut to: England at various points between 1655 and 1673, and the past-tense exploits of Waterhouse as a young man, taking him from his youth (growing up under a puritan father who believes the world will end in 1666) through his university days (at Cambridge) to his time as a spectator-member of the Royal Society. The book ends with the latter strand having reached the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, and with the ship carrying Daniel having escaped from pirates in Cape Cod Bay and begun its journey proper.

Or, more prejudicially:

Quicksilver-the-book alternates between two stories. In the first-met, but rarely-thereafter-visited, set in 1713 and told in the present tense, Enoch Root visits Daniel Waterhouse in Massachusets, discovers that Waterhouse has founded MIT a few centuries early, infodumps about all the famous people he’s met in his journeys across Europe, and delivers a message calling Waterhouse back to London. Cut to: England at various points between 1655 and 1673, and the past-tense exploits of Waterhouse as a young man, taking him from his youth (growing up under a puritan father who believes the world will end in 1666) through his university days (at Cambridge) to his time as a spectator-member of the Royal Society, during which time Daniel encounters just about every famous late-17th-century Englishman you could care to name, without ever giving us a real sense of who Daniel is. The book ends with the latter strand having reached the apparently arbitrary cut-off point of Royal Declaration of Indulgence, and with the ship carrying Daniel having escaped from pirates, after a series of increasingly thin encounters that are clearly meant to (a) give the book some semblance of narrative drive and (b) carry some thematic weight, leaving Cape Cod Bay and beginning its journey proper.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy “Quicksilver”, per se; it’s just that I spent so much time engaging with the surface of the book that I never really delved down into its depths. So I want to leave the question of The Point Of It All (including whether or not the book is science fiction, if possible) for subsequent posts, and discuss here mainly the way Stephenson approaches his story: his style, and his focus.

On the latter, a confession of ignorance is called for. I am not a historian. In fact, I haven’t studied history since I was 14, when I decided that I couldn’t imagine anything less interesting than spending two years learning about World War II in preparation for a GCSE, and did Geography instead, which was about exciting things like volcanoes and earthquakes. (And town planning — although even that’s more exciting than you’d credit.) There is a slight exception to this sweeping generalisation, which is that I did a short History of Science course while at university, which gives me just enough background to know what Hooke, Boyle, Newton et al did, without really knowing the times they were living in or who they were as men.

Perhaps you can see my problem.

When I was about a hundred pages into Quicksilver, I had an email discussion with Dan Hartland about why I thought I was having problems. I need (I said) historical fiction to have authority. If I read historical fiction, I want to feel that it is giving life to a past time in a way that is, to the best of our knowledge, accurate — because otherwise what’s the point? If it’s not giving life, then I might as well read the non-fiction version; and if it’s not accurate, then I might as well read a fantasticated version. Dan argued, as Dan so often does, that my reasoning didn’t stand up, that the very concept of being authoritative about history is flawed. Perhaps it is. But I think that historical fiction needs something like authority if it’s going to stand up.

So another way of expressing my unease is to say that I feel Stephenson is biased. He has tunnel vision. The Baroque Cycle aspires to a vast canvas, yet Stephenson approaches this time when the (Western, European, yes) world was going through radical changes — political, religious, scientific, economic — with a clear agenda, a clear argument that this is the start of something, the beginning of the world we know. And it distorts; it gives the whole book a weirdly out-of-focus quality, except that presumably the focus is exactly where Stephenson wants it. And what that means, in the end, is that I don’t trust the book. Is this event important because it was important, or because Stephenson is emphasizing it to support his argument?

When I reached the first mention of the CABAL of Charles II, I thought at once that it must be part of the anachronistic style. No way was that word used in that way by those people, I thought. But wait! Yes way! Charles II brought together a group of five Privy Councillors who effectively acted (so says Wikipedia, and so they act in the book) as foreign policy wonks. But wait! The five men who did that job in real life have been replaced by five men of Neal Stephenson’s invention — some of whom I recognised (once it was pointed out to me) as ancestors of players in Cryptonomicon — for no very obvious reason, it seems, given the number of historical characters he shows no compunction about fictionalising, except that he felt like it. It’s obvious from pretty early on that however many details Stephenson tweaks, he has no interest in changing the large-scale outcome of his story — no interest in writing an alternate history, in other words. Unfortunately, this meant that every time I hit a detail I thought might be anachronistic it threw me out of the book. Which happened quite often — Leibniz bringing an “arithmetickal engine” to England in the 1670s? Really? A gall-stone described as being about the size of a tennis-ball — when was modern tennis invented?

Historical ignorance is my problem, not the book’s; what I think is more the book’s problem is that I’m not inspired to rectify that ignorance to understand the book better. I hold Stephenson’s style partly responsible for this, and in particular the way he deploys anachronistic language. On a sentence-to-sentence basis, the book is rarely less than readable — sometimes the images are really quite striking, such as the “streets like stuffed sausages” when London is rebuilding after the great fire — and I don’t have a problem with the use of modern vernacular as such. What I have a problem with is the lack of consistency. It’s one thing for the narrator to look at events with a modern eye, and muse about “stocking/breach interfaces”, or to suggest a character is “crypto-catholic”; it’s another thing for characters to be manipulated into tortuous puns such as “that schooner, Doctor Waterhouse, sucks”, or to talk about the “umpteenth” time of something; it’s yet another for both narrator and characters to sometimes speak in this style and sometimes speak in a more elaborate pastiche of the style of their times. It drove me nuts. If you want to look at the seventeenth century through modern eyes (which seems to be what Stephenson most wants to do) then go ahead and do that; don’t just throw in “shew” and “neeger” and “coelestial” and all possible variations based on “Phant’sy” on (so far as I can tell) a whim. They just look like half-hearted concessions to an imagined need for stylistic “appropriateness”, and they make it hard to believe in Quicksilver’s story either as something we’re watching from the long distance of now, or as something immersive, told as it happened then.

None of which is to say I didn’t enjoy the book at all: there was enough to bring me back for Book Two (about which I shall post three weeks from now, if all goes according to plan). But so far I don’t think Quicksilver particularly good, not as fiction and not even as a delivery system for interesting things that Neal Stephenson wants to talk about. It’s true that it has good bits, but they’re almost all lectures or discourses or digressions on one bit or another of 17th-century science or philosophy or something else. The philosophic language; the invention of currency; the relation of different disciplines (”If money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy …”); the start of universal time; some of the eccentric (to be kind) antics of the Royal Society; Leibniz and Daniel discussing free will and, er, artificial intelligence; Daniel’s likening of the progress of human society to a shipwreck; and so on — some of these moments give a powerful sense of a world in flux, in the thrall of change, a sense that the roots of the system or our world are indeed being put into place. But already the bits that work are much more diluted in bits that don’t than was the case for (obvious comparison) Cryptonomicon; for every discussion of interest there’s a period of utter tedium, such as when the members of the Royal Society watch a play.

And it’s equally noticeable that those bits that are good are good because of what the characters are saying or doing, not because of who the characters are; some sections are thrilling, but they tend to be so because they draw on that sense of a world in flux, a feeling that everything is available for discovering. There’s nothing character-based that could be described as emotionally intense. Even the death of Daniel’s father feels flat, not just because at the time it feels like a surrogate for the wrench Daniel should feel at living through the year he had been raised to believe the world should end, but because we’re still told it’s a pivotal moment only for Stephenson to revoke that stance 150 pages and six years later, when Daniel really realises who he is –

His role, as he could see plainly enough, was to be a leading Dissident who also happened to be a noted savant, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Until lately he would not have thought this a difficult role to play, since it was so close to the truth. But whatever illusions Daniel might have once harbored about being a man of God had died with Drake, and been cremated by Tess. He very much phant’sied being a Natural Philosopher, but that simply was not going to work if he had to compete against Isaac, Leibniz, and Hooke. And so the role that Roger Comstock had written for him was beginning to appear very challenging indeed. Perhaps, like Tess, he would come to prefer it that way. (330-1)

— or maybe he hasn’t really realised, since there are still plenty of pages to go in which Stephenson could reveal this epiphany to be as transient as its predecessor. I couldn’t really say I like Daniel Waterhouse, since there’s so little there to like or dislike; but it would be nice if he gets to stop going round in circles at some point.

(That came out longer than I expected, and indeed longer than I intended the book-group posts to be. But hopefully there’s enough comment-hooks in there for you …)