Arthur C Clarke Award 2022: Shortlist Roundup

 

The shortlist for the 2022 Arthur C Clarke Award has been revealed. The winner will be announced on the 26th October at a gala Science Museum event in Kensington. Back in the day (remember the day? Ah, what gay old quotidian times we had!) I used to do a round-up review of the Clarke Award shortlist. But it’s been a long time since anyone has commissioned such a piece from me, for I’m sure highly valid reasons, and this post is less a proper review of the shortlist and more a set of links to other places, mostly blogposts, where I happen to have reviewed the individual titles.

Harry Josephine Giles, A Deep Wheel Called Orcadia

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Klara Called Sun

Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

Courttia Newland A River Called Time

Mercurio D Rivera, Wergen: an Alien Called Love War

Aliya Whiteley, An Inn Called Skyward.

As you'll see, if you have the patience to click-through those links, and going from worst to best: I thought the Newland, for all its energy and engagement, sloppily made and often bizarrely, even badly, written (re-reading it now, that review is rather more forgiving than might be the case if I wrote it today).  Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun is hard to judge: in one sense, it's classic Ishiguro touching on his perennial themes and as carefully rendered as anything he has done; in another sense it's just really quite bad, incoherent, patchy, miss-more-than-hit, cheesy, askew. Riviera's Wergen is an OK, middle-of-the-space-road fix-up about aliens and humans interacting, neither a very bad nor especially a good book. Martine's Desolation Called Peace is again OK, though a step-down from the previous volume in her series. Giles's Deep Wheel Orcadia is rather better, a poem written in synthetic Scots (I don't say ‘synthetic’ dismissively) with a Joycean ‘English’ translation running underneath, about a space station. The verse achieves some nice effects, though not in an altogether sustained way, and the story itself is a touch pat. But it's good. Still, far and away the best title on this list is Whiteley's powerful, unsettling and penetrating Skyward Inn, a very remarkable piece of writing.

It’s not, overall, a very strong shortlist, especially set against the wealth of books published last year—only one of these titles (the Whiteley) really deserves to be here, I think. But part of the function of a list like this is to provoke discussion and debate, to get people reading SF widely and talking about it and all that. We might argue that a contentious shortlist is more provoking and therefore better at this task than an actual list of the six best SF novels published in a given year. In which case: hats off to the judges. This is a contentious list, contending against value, assessment and in some cases common sense. It manifests a narrow set of repeating fascinations—fully half these titles are about blandly complacent creatures (aliens, robots) under the careless or cruel treatment of humanity. Most construe the relationship between their story-location, a peripheral or parochial space, and some imperial or quasi-imperial ‘centre’. I’m not suggesting these things aren’t important, but there are other things SF can be about, and the narrowness of thematic focus in this list feels a bit pinching, a reflection of the judges' personal crotchets rather than a reflection of where genre is more broadly, at the moment.

Of course, me saying so may merely reflect my own personal crotchets. We all have them. I didn’t find much to love in last year’s Clarke Shortlist, I’ll be honest (are any of those books still a lively part of today's genre conversations? Were they really the best books published in 2020?):—and this year I was surprised at the number of big hitters (Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, Tade Thompson’s From the Light of Heaven, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shards of Earth, Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control, Ada Palmer’s Perhaps The Stars and Richard Powers’s Bewilderment to name only the most obvious half dozen) overlooked ... less surprised by the absence of titles like Alice Albina’s Cwen, Qiouyi Lu’s In The Watchful City or J O Morgan’s The Appliance (though all three are better than most of what has been shortlisted here).

But railing against the judgment of the Clarke award, though a pastime with honourable and indeed Priestian heritage, is not my purpose here. Rather I’m jotting a few more overview-y thoughts. How does the prize stand up on longer timescales? What’s its hit rate, looking back across its three and a half decades of life? What has it got right and, more importantly, what has it missed? On the latter point I should say, incidentally, I’m not here to argue that it has missed me. I’ve never won the Clarke, and don’t now expect to, but I have been shortlisted three times (the last time in 2010), which is probably more than I deserve, and it would be both wrongheaded and otiose to suggest the award needs to reward more straight white US/UK blokes. On the contrary, it has pretty much tracked the larger current of SF across the 21st century, in which the genre-primacy of straight white US/UK blokes has given way to a much more diverse and exciting spread of women writers, writers of colour, queer writers, international writers, iterations of the expressive and eloquent encounter with difference that defines the genre as such. The last all-male shortlist was 2013, the last all-white shortlist 2015, and I don’t expect either eventuality to reoccur again as the prize moves forward. Or at least I would hope not.

That said, looking back over the award’s various shortlists, it’s hard not to notice blindspots in the judge’s judgments. For instance: how can it be that the Clarke has never shortlisted a tie-in franchise novel, a Star Trek-, Star Wars- or Alien-universe title? Many such books are rubbish, of course, but many are good and some are very good, which is what we should expect given that some extremely talented writers—Una McCormack, Pat Cadigan, Diane Duane, Ian Watson—have written them. Hard to shake the sense that the mode is considered infra dig by many, a dalit-style untouchability that strikes an unpleasantly ironic note within our prickly ‘why won’t the literary establishment take our beloved SF seriously?’ self-defensive culture. Writing a good tie-in franchise novel is a very exacting technical challenge, balancing prodigies of backstory and lore, with very specific and tight franchise parameters, and yet telling an exciting, well-characterised, imaginative story of your own. I really don’t see why the best examples of the mode aren’t ever noticed by the Clarke.

Similarly YA: This is a strange omission indeed: YA is not only huge, varied and full of wonderful writing; it has been arguably the key cultural idiom of the early decades of the 21st-century. The last (and, I think, only) time the Clarke listed a YA title was Steve Baxter’s The H-Bomb Girl, all the way back in 2008 [update/correction: over on twitter it is pointed out to me that Patrick Ness's Monsters of Men was shortlisted in 2011, James Smythe's Way Down Dark in 2016, and Patience Agbabi's The Infinite last year, and are all YA or more precisely two are YAs and one a middle-grade title. This considerably dilutes my point, I have to concede; although I don't know if it entirely demolishes it]. YA fantasy, YA dystopia and on occasion YA science fiction have provided some of the key works of the last twenty years, and it just looks odd that the Clarke tends, broadly, to overlook the mode. I could say the same thing about the Booker, but there my expectations are lower.

Arkady Martine, ‘A Memory Called Empire’ (2019), ‘A Desolation Called Peace’ (2021)

 

The first volume in Martine's Teixcalaan dyad, A Memory Called Empire (2019), was one of the hits of its season: winning the Hugo, nominated for the Nebula and the Clarke, widely praised (as you can see from its cover blurbs). It’s a cleverly-written, intricate space opera that is ‘about’, in the broadest sense, empire: in this case the Tleixcalaan empire, which combines (a) a high degree of filigree social formality and hierarchy, ritual, poetry, culture and architecture with (b) a high-powered spacefleet militarism that sweeps through the galaxy crushing all before it. We come at this vast, rather-Roman, just-a-little-Japanese, quasi-Byzantine space empire (Martine is a scholar of Byzantine and medieval Armenian history) from the outside. The story opens on an onion-layered space habitat called Lsel, its 30,000 inhabitants making a living via, I think it is, space mining. Lsel sort-of is and sort-of isn’t in the Tleixcalaanli imperial ambit, and it is a major plot-driver of the novel whether the emperor will allow their semi-independence to continue, or will actually annex them into the empire (Darth Vader replying to Lando Calrissian’s outraged ‘that was never a part of our agreement’ with: ‘it would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison here.’)

Lsel’s previous ambassador to the Tleixcalaanli homeworld, Yskandr, has died after a twenty year stint of ambassadoring. His replacement is the novel’s protagonist: Mahit Dzmare, who gets the job despite being young and inexperienced, embassy-wise. She at least has the advantage of an implant called an ‘imago’. What's that, you ask? Well Lsellians use implanted devices called imagos to benefit from the life-experience and wisdom of older, wiser individuals, whose consciousness is uploaded thereunto. Over time the simulated personality of the imago merges with the actual personality of the bearer. But there are some problems with Mahit's imago. One is that the last time Yskander visited his home-habitat was fifteen years previously, so the imago-Yskander Mahit carries to Tleixcalaan is fifteen years out of date. Another is that it turns out that actual Yskander, having gotten embroiled in imperial politics, was murdered, and the murder is being covered up. A third is that Mahit’s imago malfunctions soon after she arrives in the imperial centre. Then there’s the briar-patch complexity and danger of imperial court politics to navigate, Mahit nearly gets blown up in a bomb attack, the elderly emperor is dying and doesn’t have an heir, and so on. There’s also, waiting in the wings, a menacing alien civilisation that might be readying to attack. It’s all nicely done; Martine manages to convey a lot of worldbuilding data, or more precisely society-building data, without clogging a very serviceable throughline story and mystery. There’s the hint of romance between Mahit and her imperial liaison Three Seagrass (Tleixcalaanli names are all number + object; such that in this world Ronnie Barker would be called ‘Four Candle’) and Mahit comes perilously close to falling under the spell of Tleixcalaanli charm, as—we discover—Yskandr did before her. But the real emotional heart of the story is Mahit’s growing relationship with first fifteen-years-out-of-date Yskandr and later, in a slightly awkward interior menage-a-trois, with just-before-he-was-murdered Yskandr as well. The novel ends with Mahit and her two internal Yskandrs (Yskandrae? Yskandrim?) repudiating the empire and its alluring but toxic beauties, and returning home.

Nicely done but hardly, I thought at the time, earth-shattering: there are plenty of imperial space-operatic works in the SF backlist after all, and this one doesn’t have the deftness and charm of (say) Banks’s Culture, or the economic thought-through complexity of a Charles Stross composition, or the scope of a Lois McMaster Bujold, or the thrilling oddness of Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit. But it’s perfectly fine.

Several critics—and the author herself, as evidenced in the book’s dedication—noted that A Memory Called Empire is a novel about the dangerous appeal of imperial cultures. Martine would not be the first scholar simultaneously to deplore the rapacious violence inherent to an imperial project like the Byzantine and to fall in love with Byzantine art and culture. The novel repeatedly tells us, although it doesn’t deign actually to show us, that Tleixcalaanli art and culture are simply superb—there is a reference to a rather unenticing-sounding ‘seventeen-thousand-line poem which described the city’s architecture’ for instance—but nobody is going to say that the Aeneid justifies the Roman empire, any more than they’d say that Dickens and Jane Austen justify the British. Reading A Memory Called Empire I had a different thought, bothered as I was that the Tleixcalaan empire as portrayed didn’t seem to me to square the circle of archaic social mores and heirarchies and super-advanced space-tech and in-effect beyond-scarcity galactic sweep. I came to the epigraph to chapter 7 (Martine supplies each chapter with a Frank Herbertian set of epigraphs from notional in-imperial texts):

[…] whilst Tleixcalaanli literature and media remain a mainstay of the 15-24 age group’s entertainment preferences, this survey also reports large numbers of Lsel youth whose primary reading material is by Lsel or Stationer authors. Particular emphasis should be placed on short fiction, both prose and graphic, distributed in pamphlets or perfect-bound codexes, both of which are easily constructed by every tier’s plastifilm printer. These pamphlets and codexes are often composed by the same people who consume them as entertainment (i.e. the 15-24 age group) without the approval of intervention of the Heritage Board for Literature. —report on “Trends in Media Consumption,” commissioned by the Aknel Amnardbat for Heritage excerpt.

It only goes to show: you can build starships that traverse the galaxy and implants that contain whole deceased consciousnesses, but you can’t get the plural of codex (‘codices’) right. The point of this is not the strange in-world archaism of its samizdat productions (pamphlets, plastifilm books and so on) but the fact of them at all. Which is to say, this is fanwriting, and Martine is gesturing towards a future that includes AO3. The first sentence of the chapter that follows, which begins ‘the fan-vaulted roof of the Palace-Earth ballroom …’, seems to me a sly reference to the fact. Nothing wrong with fanwriting of course, but it in turn made me wonder if this novel is less a meditation and dramatization of actual empires, like the Byzantine or British, so much as it refracts SF’s fascination with galactic empire, in a metafictional move that acknowledges how appealing so many of us find these star-spanning imperiums. We love them, though we know empire as such to be a violent and oppressive geopolitical idiom.

At any rate, now we have the follow-up volume: A Desolation Called Peace, recently shortlisted for this year’s Arthur C Clarke award.

It’s not a terrible novel, but it’s not nearly as good as A Memory Called Empire. Adding a further 500 pages does not very much amplify the world-building richness to the initial conceit. Instead we get a conventional space-opera/alien threat storyline, revisiting our favourite characters from the first novel and ranging a little further outside Tleixcalaan itself.

A Desolation Called Peace follows straight on from the earlier volume. Ambassador Mahit has persuaded the new empress—who comes over as a thoroughly decent sort, actually—not to invade her homeworld but instead turn the attention of her hideously beweaponed space fleet towards the encroachment of the Scary Space Aliens. These turn out to be a hive mind entity that vermiciously knids its way through its human opponents, scattering corpses left right and centre. And, it being space, up and down as well. Mahit is still ambassador, it seems, but she has retired back to Lsel. Three Seagrass hitch-hikes across space on a series of cargo spaceships to visit Mahit there, which struck me as improbable (try going down to Felixstowe and thumbing a lift from a container ship, see how far it gets you) but also irresponsible, since we discover the fate of the galaxy hinges on her mission, which suggests a more secure and formal approach might be called for.

Then there's Nine Hibiscus, who is the newly appointed supreme commander of the space navy, the so-called yaotlek, charged with winning the war against the alien incursion. And here the novel faltered, I felt. The aliens themselves are effective, if generic, antagonists—they winkle-out and eat pilots from their spacecraft like oysters from a shell, and communicate not with words but a hideous phoneme-less shriek that I imagined sounds something like an old dial-up modem. But where in Memory Martine conveys a convincing sense of office politics—imperial court politics, which the novel renders as a higher-stakes version of the same thing—she really doesn’t capture a convincing sense of the practicalities of military command in Desolation. Early on we get this detail:

She leaned her elbows on the strategy table. There’d be elbowprints later: the soft pillowing of her arms leaving its oils on the matte surface, and she’d have to get out a screen-cleaner cloth to wipe them away. But Nine Hibiscus liked to touch her ship. [13]

Picture General George S Patton leaving an oily mark on a polished table: do you really think he would hurry away, fetch a damp cloth and wipe it away himself? Of course not. He had subalterns to clear up after him, in every single aspect of his day-to-day. He would march off barking an order. Having subalterns to clear up after you is a large part of the point of being a five-star general.

This is not, I think, an incidental observarion. We might, if we were so minded, imagine a non-hierarchical army ... but all armies hitherto have been intensely hierarchical organisations, and the army of an extremely socially-hierarchical top-down authoritarian empire like Tleixcalaan would be so a fortiori. But this isn’t what Martine gives us. We are told (not shown) that Nine Hibiscus commands the fanatical loyalty of her troops, and some space battles are described, swarms of interlinked ‘shard’ fighter-craft sweeping hither and yon like a video game, but the military scenes lack the fictional heft of viability. Sure: this is a space-war and not the Byzantine army marching against the Abassids, but nothing about Nine Hibiscus convinces as not a but the imperial military commander. She’s too nice. She spends her time pondering, agonizing, hosting dinner parties (‘she had planned this meal—a strategy dinner’) and, as we have seen, fetching damp cloths to wipe away the marks she herself had left on the polished surface of her flagship’s polished surfaces. There’s no sense here of what a senior military commander actually spends their time doing: logistics, say. Processing intel and issuing orders. Delegating. Shouting: for as the Duke of Wellington himself so famously said, ‘there’s only one way to win a war—shout, shout and shout again!’ 

But then, everybody is nice in this novel. There’s no coldness and cruelty, nothing of the unnerving sadism that strictly hierarchical societies, especially militaristic ones, inculcate and encourage, nothing of that Lawrentian Prussian Officer grasp of the way having power over another human being gratifies itself via the performance of the humiliation and tormenting of the subaltern. Even the empress is nice. Indeed, the empress in this novel is especially nice, which, I have to say, isn’t how emperor/esses have generally manifested in this Justinian, Caligulan, Stalinesque, Pol-Potian, Trumpian world of ours. There is, it’s true, a certain amount of gross-out and violence, especially in the latter portions of the story, but that’s all focused on the hideous alien threat, which isn’t the point I’m making.

Martine has a habit of italicising words, for no very pressing reason: it’s a species of nerd emphasis (‘Lsel station was little’ [115]; ‘Her hands hurt so badly … “you are fascinating, Mahit … also you’re really pretty naked’ [345]), a mannerism that is all over this book, like a rash. The cliffhanger chapter-endings that were handled well in Memory—unexpected explosions, riots, revelations—are watered-down affairs in this novel, often relying on alarms going off, or I should say alarms going off (‘the proximity alarms on the pilots’ deck of the Station went off at once’ [103]: ‘the entire spaceport seemed to explode with noise … the shrill, incessant scream of an evacuation alarm’ [354]).

The command of language is often off. From a sex scene: ‘Mahit was viciously, delightedly sure that when she got her hand between her legs she’d find her dripping wet’—but vicious means pertaining to vice: wickedness, immorality or depravity, and that’s not what Martine means here (savagely, I suppose). And the plotting just wasn’t as clever as the first novel, a fact I think Martine knows, which is why she occasionally felt the over-compensatory need to prod her readers: ‘that was fucking clever’ [277]—it’s not, on this occasion, actually. (Later: ‘“Oh clever,” said Five Agate’). The aliens turn out to be a fungally-infected hive-mind, not malign (not, we might say, vicious) so much as incapable of comprehending human individuality, and the compromise that is reached to end the war is thin and unconvincing, both on its own terms and as a dramatic pay-off to such a lengthy novel. More interesting aspects of the worldbuilding were left unexplored. In particular, there’s huge potential in exploring the way the ‘imagos’ work. There is a passing reference to ‘people who ended up with incompatible imagos’ [102]—the novel specifically makes the gender dysmorphia connection (‘[people] whose gender identity was stronger than they had thought it was and found a cross-gender memory match unbearable’)—but that’s all we get, and Mahit’s three-ply subjectivity becomes less, not more, pronounced as the novel goes on. And the fan-flattery felt less organic in this novel, and so more egregious: at one point Mahit goes to an actual kiosk and buys a literal pulp SF magazine (printed, we're told, ‘on paper, made from flattened pulp rag’): ‘The Perilous Frontier, starring Captain Cameron’. Right. Or I should say, right.

All this doesn’t altogether sink the novel: the story moves along, driven by this exterior threat narrative, and by the carried-over momentum of ‘I wonder what the characters from that first novel are up to now?’ But it’s a markedly less-well-achieved novel than Memory, and I was a little surprised to see it shortlisted for the Clarke. But second guessing the Clarke judges' rationales is a mug's game in which I shall not partake. 

Aliya Whiteley, ‘Skyward Inn’ (2021)

 

Skyward Inn is, amongst other things, a reworking of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (1936), which was in turn (amongst other things) a reworking of Wuthering Heights (1847). But the Gothicism and gnashing intensity of the latter gets watered-down in the du Maurier, and in Aliya Whiteley’s Clarke-shortlisted title it gets swapped-out for something else entirely: a somatic-dissolution more pataphysical than surreal, a planetary romance uncanniness, a dreamy weirdness not incompatible with sharper affects of cruelty and violence. As a version of Gothic this swampy and ultimately liquefying fable is a very striking thing, and as a novel it is highly accomplished: clearly written, expertly paced to suck the reader down as into quicksand, well-characterised, an effective mystery and punctuated with many dream-haunting moments and images.

The story is set a little way in the future, in three locations of which two are where most of the novel takes place. One is ‘the Protectorate’, a portion of walled-off, or self-walled-off, west-country England that has turned its back on the space-faring high-tech modernity of the rest of the country, and lives a rural idyll that is in actuality pinching, grim, worn-down, hand-to-mouth agrarianism ruled over by quasi-puritanical governance that justifies the Cromwellian name the territory has given itself. There’s a quantum of Brexit satire in this (one character ‘when he gets very drunk’ likes to ‘talk about how beautiful the Protectorate is, and how the businesses he runs now are free from so many regulations and technological nightmares’ [113]), although Whiteley, wisely, doesn’t press this pedal too hard.

Across the Severn, Protectorate citizens can see Swansea, now a space-port. The rest of the UK, you see, is a high-tech, spacefaring, and indeed space-imperialising power. A hyperspace portal called ‘the Kissing Gate’ has been discovered in the solar-system—been discovered, or has suddenly appeared—and through it earth space-ships have easy access to an alien world called Qita, a pleasant place with breathable atmosphere and many valuable resources. When Earth fleets first arrived they met the native Qitans: humanoid though blue-skinned, sometimes scaly, large-chinned (there’s quite a lot in the novel about big chins, actually) and with a history amongst themselves of warfare and aggression. But, puzzlingly, the Qitans do not fight the incursion of earthlings. On the contrary, they welcome it, roll over and permit themselves to be exploited. It’s a compellingly odd reaction, and one of the great strengths of Whiteley’s writing is how effectively she writes her Qitan characters, at once genuinely alienating and strangely familiar, simultaneously kindly companions and Vancean strangers.

We get only a few scenes in Swansea. Most of the novel is divided between the Protectorate and scenes set on Qita. There’s a trio of key human characters. One is Jem, who runs the titular pub, a popular Protectorate drinking hole in which she not only serves the usual stouts and lagers but also a Qitan ale called ‘Jarrowbrew’ which is much prized by human drinkers for its soporific and mildly hallucinogenic effects. Jem has a teenage son called Fosse who is chafeing at life in the Protectorate; early scenes see him playing truant from school, wandering around an abandoned farm, wanking, bashing up a tree-trunk with an axe and the like. Soon after having Fosse, young Jem had left the Protectorate altogether, joined the space force and travelled to Qita. Her job there, it seems, was putting up posters and distributing leaflets assuring the Qitans of Earth’s benignity (‘we offer the hand of friendship to join our great nations … we bring peace and opportunities for a brighter future’) even as Earth asset-stripped Qita and killed Qitans. In her absence Fosse was raised by his uncle, Jem’s brother Dominic, a community officer and true-believer in the Protectorate project. Jem soon returned from outer space to run the Skyward Inn, but Fosse continues living with his uncle and harbours a congeries of resentments concerning his mum’s abandonment of him. Relations are tense between sister and brother Jem and Dom too, and are made more tense by the fact that Jem has shacked-up with a Qitan called Isley—actually called some singsong harmonic soundburst uncapturable by human orthography, but known as Isley in Devon since he, or it, is a fan of the Isley Brothers music.

This relationship, between human Jem and Qitan Isley, is where the novel starts. In general the Protectorate hates and fears outsiders and won’t permit aliens in their land, but an official permission has been granted to Isley so that he can live in the Skyward Inn and concoct the Jarrowbrew so popular with human drinkers. The locals are wary of the alien presence, and baffled by Jem’s relationship, but are broadly accepting of the state of affairs since it means they can quaff their Jarrowbrew. Isley himself (itself) is a charming, gentle-mannered soul, and you see why Jem has fallen in love with him (it). There’s no sex involved, and indeed, for reasons that become clear towards the end of the novel, Isley doesn’t permit Jem even to touch him, but they are beautifully companionable with one another, and Jem finds in her alien partner a connection and belonging she does not have with her son, her brother or any of her community.

I’m making heavy weather of laying out the set-up of this novel, something Whiteley herself does deftly and involvingly. And from this point-on I’m going to start straying into spoilers, so: you know. Have a care.

A second Qitan arrives in the Skyward Inn, this time illegally (she, or it, is called Wonton, but known as Wanda) and Jem hides her (it) in the cellar. Jem then recruits her brother, against his better judgment, to try and smuggle Wanda out in secret and back to Qita. This project does not go to plan. Teenage Fosse gets involved with a newcomer to the area—the Protectorate is eager for settlers to come and work its many abandoned farms—called Cee, a man who gives off dangerous vibes. He has two adult daughters, one or other or both of whom Fosse lusts over. Scenes on Earth are intercut with Jem’s memories of exploring Qita and observing Qitan life and society.

There is a through-line narrative to follow, and in a manner of speaking a mystery, or secret, at the story’s heart which the novel unravels in a way any reader can follow with satisfaction. I say so to stress that readers who prize plot above all will find much to enjoy here, but I also say so in order to assert something else: that the greatness of this novel does not depend upon its plot. Whiteley has been called a surrealist writer, and I have seen Skyward Inn compared to VanderMeer’s Annihilation, but neither is right, I think. There is something quite distinctive, tonally and imaginatively, about this book, and it inheres neither in the Freudian subordination of rationality to the subconcious that marks surrealism, nor the distorting intensities of VanderMeer's New Weird-posturing Southern Reach environmentalism. Whiteley is a distinctive writer, unlike anyone else. There's something perhaps Chris Priestian about the opening chapters here, and I got a certain Ted Chiang vibe about the middle portion of the book, but it flows brilliantly into its final sections in a quite inimitable way.

Skyward Inn is a novel about loneliness and togetherness, about separation and assimilation, in which the strange life-cycle of the Qitans, and the mystery of their blithe acquiescence in their own colonisation, stand as metaphors for something profound and arresting in the human condition. It is a novel that works as a series of gorgeous, unsettling, quasi-poetic moments and images, disposed along a more conventionalised narrative line. Here's an example: local widow Mrs Satterly calls at Dom’s house, and Fosse lets her in. She has lost her dog at the graveyard, where she had been visiting her husband Bob’s grave, and wants help retrieving the pooch. Bob was there, she tells Dom. ‘“He’s buried there,” Dom said. “I know that,” she snapped. “But the ground by the tree, the soil, was different. And he was in there.”’

“Different how?”

“Softer,” she said … “It hasn’t been raining.”

“No.”

“It was like jelly, and I put my hand in, and Bob held it. Under the soil. He held it.”

“You felt something grab you?”

“Bob did.”

“Okay,” said [Dom] in that patient, unbelieving tone [Fosse] knew so well.

“He did!” Mrs Satterly said, indignant.

“How did you know it was him?”

She thought about it, and then said, “Who else would hold my hand?”

“All right,” said Dom. “All right.”

“We stayed that way for a little while,” she said. “It was fine. It was fine. I wasn’t scared. But then I realised that I couldn’t feel my own fingers any more—everything was sort of mixed-up under the soil—so I pulled free and then something snagged me. Caught my sleeve. I didn’t see what it was, but it wasn’t Bob. And then Bailey ran away. Poor Bailey. Poor Bailey.” Fosse watched her cry. It wasn’t a performance. [118]

Bailey is her dog. Fosse, sent out to retrieve the hound, visits the graveyard spooked by this (of course) spooky story, and for a while the novel flirts with the tone of its matrimonies, Brontëan, du Maurian—that is, with a Gothic uncanny and strangeness, the echt horror-story shiver. Whiteley even sets this scene at Halloween. But the novel as a whole isn’t really interested in this affect. It is doing something rather less derivative, rather more potently original. Isley is no Heathcliff (though he is a compelling stranger). The secret lurking in the moonlit alleyways and fields of the Protectorate is not, as per du Maurier, smuggling and shipwrecking (although Jem does try to smuggle Wanda out, and the legality of the Jarrowbrew is a little unclear). What Skyward Inn does with Jamaica Inn is deepen the earlier book’s portrait of the complicated, guilt-generative nature of belonging, and desire, as such. 

Du Maurier’s Mary Yellen is alarmed and frightened by the vicious world into which she arrives, the cut-throats and ship-wreckers, but drawn to them as well. She arrives at Jamaica Inn as an orphan to live with her aunt and her aunt’s husband—the towering, villainous Joss. She can see that something is awry in this world, but at the beginning is not sure what. It seems for a while as if she is being courted in the traditional sense by Joss’s younger brother Jem. He takes her in a ‘jingle’ (a light carriage) to the town of Launceston and buys her some gold earrings and a red cape. But Jem got the money for these gifts by horse-stealing. He boasts to Mary that he has many ‘wives’ in Cornwall and urges her to spend the night with him. When she refuses he abandons her to walk the long nighttime way home. Not a good sort, in other words, and Mary has to pass through peril and assault, witness violence and murder, before the story’s end. That end—spoilers for Jamaica Inn, but you really ought to have read this famous novel, or at least seen the (much inferior) Hitchock movie version—is the revelation that the local vicar is the ringleader of a local gang of ship-wreckers, centred on the titular inn. At the story's climax Bad Vicar jumps off a cliff rather than be captured by the local Squire and his posse, and Mary resolves to leave Cornwall to return again to her childhood home and make a new life there. But on her journey out she bumps into Jem, driving a cart with all his possessions in it and after a brief exchange agrees to go with him.

Skyward Inn ends on a very different note, but there is in the literal dissolution of flesh into flesh, and the surrender of individuality into the extraterrestrial gestalt, a related sense of the way desire—for sex, for partnership, for belonging—pulls against the grain of the conventional and respectable, which is to say the normal and the familiar.

About halfway through novel, teenage Fosse kills old Cess (who may or may not be his father) with an axe. It’s a curiously underdetermined, and indeed underpowered, scene, this; and I wondered if the lack of affect was a deliberate move, a dialling-down of shock. If so I’m not sure it works. Fosse flees the Protectorate, is recruited by the space navy and travels to Qita. The novel handles his guilt at this crime in a strangely patchy manner. Sometimes he remembers that he murdered an adult in this gruesome manner. Much of the time he seems to forget, distracted by a kind of Qitan pilgramage. He ends the novel a more likeable individual than he begins it, which is a strange trajectory to pass along given what he has done. But my reaction here may simply index the effectiveness with which Whiteley has wrongfooted me, and it is in this wrongfooting, or what we might call Whiteley's skill at estrangement, that the novel’s greatness inheres. The denouement is both revolting and strangely attractive, calming, desirable. 

As a commentary upon imperialism (which is I suppose one of the things this complex, intricate novel is) Skyward Inn is much more powerful and insightful than its fellow Clarke-award shortlistee, Wergen: the Alien Love War, a book that also contains weirdly complaisant colonised aliens. That also presents itself as a novel about love, but it looks thin indeed beside Whiteley's amazing, subtle account of the topic. Whiteley understands how, paradoxical though it sounds, love is both a desire to immerse oneself wholly in the other and a desire to bolster one’s seperateness, one’s hermetic individuality, to separate from the other—because, I suppose, love is the necessary ground for the self, and therefore of self-esteem and self-uniqueness. We are caught between our desires to be intimately with others and our concomitant desire, just as strong, to be free of others and entirely alone; or not caught between these twinned desires, but defined by them, construed into subjectvity by their dialectic. The novel finds a beautiful way of articulating that state of affairs. 

And the setting, the inn of the title, is important too. The pub is a place where we come to drink alone together, after all. Drinking is an individual business in that it affects individual sensoria; and yet we come together to drink.

On Qita, both Jem and later her son Fosse visit the alien equivalent of the Inn. This is ‘the market’, where Qita traders, wearing a stone slab around their neck balanced on their chest to make a ledge, walk round and round a courtyard ‘selling’ Jarrowbrew to the gathered customers. I put selling in inverted commas there because the transaction doesn’t involve the exchange of any wonga. ‘The most inexplicable part to me,’ Jem later recalls, ‘is that no money changes hands’:

Locals insisted trade is the concept that explains Langzin Square best, but this is not supply and demand: when the glasses have all been used and the container is empty, the trader must leave. It does a trader no good to offer a more or less popular product—not that they strictly offer it at all. [21]

Back on Earth, Jem learns from Isley that she doesn’t have the whole story. ‘The traders are meant to leave the market when they’re sold out,’ he confirms. ‘But here’s the thing—they have accomplices. Helpers have worked outside the walls to make very small tunnels, slanted downwards, through which Jarrowbrew can be poured. They wait outside and at a set time a trader stops by their hole, and refills their flask. Everyone knows it, and it is tolerated.’ As a result of generations of secret-but-everyone-knows-it hole drilling ‘the walls are weakened … the square is in danger of collapsing’ [23]. This is a nice image for the pub as such, the way society knows the damage alcohol and alcoholism does yet nods along at it, tolerates it within notional limits (21 units a week maximum) that everybody ignores: a rebus for the structural damage and danger of that. It’s also an eloquent expression of something else which, I think, is more interesting: it isn’t the rules of an alien society that gives you an insight into the nature of the place, but knowing which rules it is OK to break. True, that.

Whiteley is exceptionally wise and insightful on this question, the nature and scope of difference, personal, cultural, social, and how we broach these differences, the accessibilities and inaccessibilities of all our intersubjectivities. Alcohol, from real beer to fictional Jarrowbrew, disinhibits and so promotes sociability, it reveals a kind of truth (in vino veritas and all that) and yet occludes our mentation, it thrills the mind at the same time as muddling it. Anne Carson’s great poem ‘O What A Night (Alkibiades)’ juxtaposes the drunkenness of the Attic ‘symposium’ (a drinking party, of course) with the mind-reeling philosophy of Socrates, which is also about insight and connection and sex.

When Sokrates speaks, on the other hand,
I experience something uncanny,
I don’t know what

it is—a wild feeling
like a heart attack, or like dancing—
those nights you dance as if in a trance
and glance in the mirror to find you’re in tears.

I’m not drunk.
This is different.
I know it sounds
like the same old same old.

It is, and it isn’t, the same old same old. In one of his earlier novel Anthony Burgess speculates about the sacramental nature of the British, or more specifically English, centrality of the pub to social life, as the local landlord Ted permits the narrator to keep drinking after closingh hours (a 'lock-in' they used yo call this, in my day):

It is recognised in England that home drinking is no real pleasure. We pray in a church and booze in a pub: profoundly sacerdotal at heart, we need a host in both places to preside over us. In Catholic churches as in continental bars the host is there all the time. But the Church of England kicked out the Real Presence and the licensing law gave the landlord a terrible sacramental power. Ted was giving me grace of his free will, holding back closing—which is death—making a lordly grant of extra time. [Anthony Burgess, The Right To An Answer (1960), 18]

This is one of the differences between Whiteley's novel and the others I mention above, the VanderMeer and the like. There is something sacramental at the heart of her vision as a writer, something in which drink and food and divine blood and actual bodies are all versions of one another, real presences that iterate the holiness of our interconnectivity and our individuality both, even in sinfulness (evem so extreme as murder). Skyward Inn is a rare novel, brilliant and penetrating and unnerving, a book about love and belonging and alienation and fear, a work that understands that solitude and togetherness are not, actually, opposites. It is, by a long margin, the best novel on the Clarke shortlist.

Richard Powers, ‘Bewilderment’ (2021)

 
Powers’ follow-up to his extraordinary arboreal fantasia The Overstory (2018)—as wide-ranging, brilliant and beautiful a novel as you could hope to read—is a much more tightly focused though equally environmentally-engaged novel. Bewilderment is its two main characters, and their relationship. Narrator Theo Byrne is a university astrobiologist, programming simulations of life on extrasolar planets, though his job takes second place to caring for Robin, his behaviourally-challenged son. Robin is mourning the car-crash death of his mother, Alys, an environmental activist. He is intensely focussed on the environment and is prone to violent rages when thwarted or challenged. Bullied at school he narrowly avoids expulsion after breaking the cheek of another boy by hitting him with his thermos. ‘So far,’ his dad notes wryly, ‘the votes are two Aspergers, one probably OCD and one possible ADHD’. Theo loves his son intensely and refuses to permit the medication regimen urged by the authorities (‘he’s nine-years old! His brain is still developing’). But as Robin’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and rageful he has to do something.

Bewilderment is a much narrower piece of writing than the capacious, multi-strand The Overstory, even to the point of claustrophobia. The knife-edge of Robin’s moods is rendered with remarkable believability and sensitivity, and the love between son and father has an emotional truth and vividness that absolutely wrings the heart. But the focus is so tightly on these two, and the larger tragedy of a world increasingly poisoned and abused is so unremittingly pushed home, that the novel becomes rather pinching to read.

The first quarter of the novel details a wilderness trip Theo and Robin take together, exploring rivers and forests and sleeping under the stars. Powers’ nature writing here is as beautifully observed and evocative as it’s ever been, and in this world Robin is happy and adjusted. But they can’t live in nature forever. Robin must go back to school and Theo to work, and the world they return to is broken and inhospitable. We’re in a near-future which, though Powers doesn’t specify, looks very like a Trumpian second-term (‘did you see the President’s tweet?’) with environmental collapse accelerating, democracy falling apart and private armed militias patrolling for ‘unspecified foreign invaders’.

There’s not much a neurodivergent 9-year-old can do, but he does what he can, inspired by watching TV clips of Inger Alder—this novel’s Greta Thunberg (an ‘oval faced girl in tight pigtails’ who considers ‘her autism her special asset, “my microscope, telescope and laser put together”’). He paints pictures of endangered animals hoping to sell them and donate the money to environmental causes. He stands outside Congress with a sign saying HELP ME I’M DYING. He simply doesn’t understand—and neither does his father—and neither, evidently, does Richard Powers—why people can’t see how urgent our ongoing natural collapse is, why they aren’t moved to dedicating their lives to doing something about it.

The novel is science fiction, not just in its extrapolation into a dystopian future, and not just in terms of Theo’s detailed accounts of life on other planets, which intersperse the chapters, but because of the main story-device: a technology called ‘Decoded Neurofeedback’, AI-mediated neural imaging which enables people to ‘approximate’ the neural structures of other people’s brains. Robin uses this technology to get closer to his dead mother’s mind—she was an early test subject on the programme and her thoughts have been, in a slightly hand-wavey way, recorded. In many ways the story reworks Daniel Keyes classic SF novel Flowers For Algernon (1966), something Powers is perfectly upfront about, name-checking the story, and giving Robin the nickname ‘mouse’. ‘Boy learns bliss from his dead mother,’ says Theo, amazed; but if you know the Keyes story you have an inkling where Bewildered is going.

If Bewilderment is a little suffocating it’s not because Power’s sense-of-wonder at the natural world has waned: his descriptive writing is as spacious and brilliant as ever. And it’s not because the novel inhabits a tragic mode. Of itself, tragedy doesn’t need to be suffocating—indeed at its best the mode is expansive and reinvigorating. But the narrowness of dramatic focus here closes around the reader. Perhaps that’s apropos. Perhaps we ought to feel suffocated by what’s happening to our world. But activism is one thing, fiction another, and Bewilderment is unable to conceive of anyone except the wicked and the ignorant failing to join Theo and Robin in their intensity of belief. Drama needs to be more two-ply, it needs a little more of the old Antigone dialectic. The novel treats Robin’s emotionally myopic, intense and furious obsession with the harm we are doing nature as right, actually. Maybe it is. But such polemical certainty cramps the novelistic form here. Powers has extraordinary gifts as a writer, and there is much to admire in this book, even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of his previous work.