2014 Clarke Award Shortlist

To take away the unpleasant taste of the Hugo shortlist, I'd recommend a healthy gargle with this year's Clarke shortlist -- a much, much better selection of novels. My roundup review of the six titles is now up at Strange Horizons, in its traditional two parts.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

With this piece I commence my new policy of including at least one reference to the musical Chess in every critical essay or review I publish.

2014 Hugo Shortlist

I have occasionally blogged my reaction to previous years' Hugo shortlists. After all: it used to be the genre's blue riband award. Still, I think most folk would agree that it's been in quite serious credibility trouble for some years now. And now we have this year's shortlist, which rather puts me in mind of Tom Lehrer's stated reason for quitting writing his satirical songs: 'political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.' Some of the fan categories are strong, and there are one or two worthwhile works dotted here and there; but taken as a whole, and noting especially its leap-up-and-grab-you-by-the-lapels elements (Robert Jordan? Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles? Vox Fucking Day?) it is the SF Award Shortlist equivalent of Kissinger's Nobel. It is self-satirising. It renders any subsequent comment by the likes of me superfluous.

David Ramirez, The Forever Watch (2014)

An intriguing debut, this: part generation starship story, part urban noir policier, part wizard duel extravaganza. Earth is ruined; the last survivors departed for the stars centuries ago on a vast spaceship called ‘Noah’, a craft which is now about a third of the way along its millennial journey to a new star. Life on board is Nineteen eighty four-ish: all but the elite ‘mission critical’ senior crew living grim, functional lives, everywhere observed and regulated. Indeed, with the neural implants everyone wears surveillance reaches down to the level of individual’s thoughts and feelings. Our narrator, Hana Dempsey, is bit-part player in the ship’s ubiquitous, controlling bureaucracy, and the main story concerns her investigation of a horrible murder—so, like Al Reynold’s recent Blue Remembered Earth, this novel is in part about the commission and investigation of violent crime in a world where crime, and the avoidance of detection, really ought to be impossible. As she investigates, Dempsey uncovers layers of secrecy, conspiracy and monstrosity.

I thought this novel began poor but ended strong: after a clotted and misfiring opening quarter it settles into a more assured stride which then built to a gripping and powerful, even devastating, conclusion. That’s not (ye budding authors out there hardly need to be told this) the ideal way around, especially for a debut, but it evidently didn’t put Hodder off from acquiring the title. And it shouldn’t put you off, gentle reader: stick with it, and the pay off at the end is richly worth it.

What’s wrong with the opening? Well the first few pages (in which Hana wakes up having done her civic duty by giving birth to a baby which, according to the oppressive rules of the ship, she is not allowed even to see) is fine; but then there’s a long period in which the novel strains to get the reader up to speed with the intricate worldbuilding required for the rest of the novel to work: the nature of the ship, the implants, the psi-powers that those implants augment, the hierarchy of things, what is permitted and what not. This is something of a slog, and it includes what strikes me as the novel’s major misstep. Hana’s boyfriend is a big lug ex-army policeman (or ‘Enforcer’) type called Barrens. In an early scene Hana is horribly and gratuitously raped by a ‘senior engineer’ called Holmheim, who gloats that since he is mission critical he will suffer no consequences for his assault. Then Barrens comes along, after the rape, and beats Holmheim bloody. This in turn leads to a physically passionate (which is to say: violent) sexual relationship between Barrens and Hana predicated in part upon his innate animality ‘when he is It and primal’ (‘he has seen me at my moment of deepest shame, grimy and befouled and betrayed in an alleyway … he holds me down when he is It and primal … when It is taking me with the force and speed of an avalanche marking me with his teeth and his claws we howl together, flushed and breathless’). All this struck a false note, I thought; a failure of tact as well as taste. But things certainly improve. The relationship between Hana and Barrens is compelling enough to enable the plot twist (can she trust him?) and twist again (of course). The discovery that humans did not originally build the Noah is only the first of several well handled reveals, building to the Big Secret about the mission. The sweep of the Rebellion Against Big Brother narrative arc is well developed, and the end is no anticlimax.

Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (2014)

We’re in Lagos, the city that takes its name from the Portuguese for ‘lagoon’, hence this novel’s title. Something falls out of the sky—I like that it lands in the sea not with a BOOM! but a more maternal MOOM! Three strangers on the beach, all with names beginning with ‘A’ (a marine biologist called Adaora, more-or-less this crowded work’s protagonist; a too-truthful-for-his-own-good soldier called Agu; a famous rapper called Anthony), see a beautiful woman walk out of the sea. She’s a shape-shifting alien, and she is bringing change. So: the novel is in three parts. The first is slow moving, though it builds a believable Lagos world, the interactions of various characters as they encounter the alien, now called Ayodele, who has taken the form of an Igbo woman (Okorafor is herself a Igbo woman). To begin with the alien is benign. But in the second section ‘Awakening’ the Nigerian army open fire on her in Day The Earth Stood Still mode, and she becomes angry. Lagos descends into vividly written chaos: rioting, millennial Christian hysteria, the full works. Meanwhile all manner of alien manifestations pop up, from individuals to giant Lovecraftian structures. The third section is called ‘Symbiosis’ and loses some of the drive of section 2.

It’s a strange book, in a good and bad sense—good in the way it properly captures the strangeness of alien encounter, less good in the sometimes jumbled, skittish way it agglomerates its multiple characters into a single story. This latter I take to be a deliberate strategy on behalf of the author, for in other respects Okorafor is evidently a very accomplished writer—for instance, she very skilfully glides between the hard-sf and the magical-realist takes on her extraordinary events, and the African mythical underpinnings to events are compellingly elaborated. The deliberateness of the aesthetic jumbling (if that's what it is) didn't quite convince me, though. There are other elements in the book that also seemed to me to misfire (for instance: there’s a repeated sort-of Douglas Adams theme where the alien’s presence gift sudden intelligence to a tarantula, a bat and so on, only for the newly uplifted creatures to get run over or splatted moments later. If these were supposed to be funny, then they didn't connect with my funny bone). I liked the scene in which Ayodele manifests as Karl Marx in order to impress the Nigerian president. I liked less all the spider related stuff. But then I hate spiders. *shudders*. Overall, though, this is a notable book, and you should read it.