‘Best SFF of 2022’: the Excellent Unincludeds

Every year The Guardian asks various people to write brief ‘Best Of’ round-up posts of different genres of book. I was asked for my top five SFF novels of 2022, and you can read what I wrote here (my five, in case you can't be bothered to click that link, being: Harry Josephine Giles's Clarke-winning Deep Wheel Orcadia; RF Kuang's Babel; Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility; Paul McAuley's Beyond the Burn Line and Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath).

Some years ago the format was different: we were allowed to choose as many ‘best of’ titles as we could fit into 800 words. Now we are asked to limit ourselves to five titles. It is, of course, an artificial exercise, restricting the production of a whole year’s SF to a number countable on one hand. Nonetheless, I do enjoy compiling the list. Of course it means that no fiction by me can ever make the Guardian's best-of-SF; but I daresay it wouldn't even if somebody else were doing it. So that's no great loss.

How do I go about assembling a list like this? In any given year I read a lot of books: some books I buy, others are sent to me—by publishers, for review, because I’m a prize judge. This last process results in a large influx, actually. A year in which I judge the Kitschies, or the World Fantasy Award, or whatever, will be a year in which I necessarily read a large amount of SFF. I did do some prize-judging in 2022, although for the Orwell Prize, which rewards political fiction. For the first half of 2022 my duties on this panel rather crowded out my other reading, and though some of the books submitted to the judges were SFnal and Fantasy, most weren’t. Still, I love SF and Fantasy and always read a lot of it, classic and contemporary. I generally read the big award shortlists each year, for instance, try to keep up with what's being reviewed, and often just buy a book because I like the sound of it, or am taken by the cover art, or at random. When the commission for the Guardian Best-Of came through in October I already had a sense of what I had liked amongst all that. I then solicited other peoples’ favourite SFF titles on Facebook and elsewhere. Folk were generous with their suggestions, some of which I had read, some not. By this stage in the year my Orwell judging had finished, so I was able to devote some time to tracking down and reading many of these suggestions.

This is not an absolutely comprehensive process, of course. I did not read, and could not have read, literally every SFF title published this year. But by the time I submitted copy (in November) I’d read a pretty good spread.

Of course, there are constraints on my selection, and that’s what I’m blogging about today. Which is to say there were a number of really good SFF novels that came out in 2022 which I could not include on the Guardian list, for reasons of partiality, or conflicts of interest. Justine, the Books' editor, is scrupulous about this, and quite rightly. It’s what Private Eye mocks, year after year: ‘best books of the year’ pieces which plug books by the writer’s friends, spouses, children etc. I can see how this happens, and it needn’t be absolutely venal: when a friend publishes a book, of course you will want to read it and if you have a lot of friends in the worlds of writing and publishing then this kind of reading can occupy a lot of your time, such that when you’re asked for your opinion on the year’s best books your mind will gravitate to these titles. More, it is possible (of course!) that a friend's or spouse’s book just is genuinely good. Still, I take seriously the requirement that I do not turn the Guardian’s ‘Best SF of the Year’ piece into an exercise in mere friend-puffing.

In one sense this is quite hard: the world of SF publishing is a narrow one, and any writer is liable to bump into people in it. If I operated an absolutist policy it would become pinching. For example: I know Paul McAuley a little, though he and I are not close friends (I bought my copy of Beyond the Burn Line with my own money, and read it on my own time; it really is excellent). Or again: I appeared on a panel—virtually, in this covidious age of Zoom—with R F Kuang (it was a session in which previous deliverers of the annual Tolkien lecture at Pembroke assembled for a round-table). But I don’t know her personally, and it would be harsh indeed to Babel, a fascinating novel, to exclude it from my list on such a flimsy acquaintance. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and this is where I draw it: if I actually am friends with an author, or if I have blurbed their book, I can’t in good conscience include it on my list.

On the one hand, it's not as bad as it might be: I am not a very sociable person, and do not have a particularly wide circle of friends; nor am I especially notable or prominent in SF circles. On the other hand this policy affected some of the best books I read in 2022. You might want to argue I’m being over-scrupulous, though I do feel that the world of publishing is already plenty sclerotic with this kind of metaphorical insider-dealing, undeclared interests and influence-, friendship- and nepo-networks, and the least I can do is not add to it.

At any rate I want to use this end-of-year blogpost to mention some of 2022’s very best SF and Fantasy novels, and apologise to their authors for not including them in the Grauniad’s list. To my friends I say: there is plenty of time to shun me in 2023, break-off all contact, bad-mouth me on social media, cancel me etc, and then (assuming the paper ask me again next year) I’ll be able to recommend your new work with a clear conscience. But for now, here, in no particular order, are books that I didn’t feel, despite their excellence, I could include in my roundup. I’m choosing six, to go one-beyond the limit of five under which I previously laboured.

Will Wiles, The Last Blade Priest (Angry Robot 2022)

An extraordinary Fantasy novel, by one of the UK’s best contemporary writers. It manages to provide all the satisfactions of a ‘conventional’ or genre Fantasy book whilst also estranging and engaging the mode in wonderful new ways. But Will is a friend, I read the book in MS (and blurbed it) and I couldn’t include it. Here’s an interview I hosted on my Notebook/blog with Will about the novel.

E J Swift, The Coral Bones (Unsung Stories 2022)

This is a beautiful, richly written and superbly alive novel about climate collapse, human love and human endurance, layering three stories past present and future in and around the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve met Swift several times, and whilst she and I are not friends I was lucky enough to be sent this novel in MS, and I blurbed it (you can see what I wrote on the publisher’s website). I expect to see this book widely represented in the coming awards season: it's a stunner.

James Smythe, The Ends (HarperVoyager 2022)

This is the fourth and final volume in Smythe’s Anomaly quartet, and it is extraordinary. I liked but couldn’t altogether love the first volume in this series, but as it has gone on, telling specific stories in each volume that also connect and resonate across all four, the Quartet has grown in my esteem—if it didn’t sound too pretentious, I’d call it a SFnal version of Eliot’s Four Quartets, working-through similar fascinations: memory, belonging, exploring and homecoming. And this final volume, in which the Anomaly finally reaches Earth, is the best of the lot, a marvellous cope-stone to the series. Smythe contrives a gripping story that also brings the themes of the whole into superb constellation. Way to stick the landing, James.

M D Lachlan, Celestial (Gollancz 2022)

A smartly constructed alt-historical moon adventure: in this novel’s 1977 both the Soviets and the Americans are exploring the moon, and the story starts with a mysterious hatch being discovered on the lunar surface. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and read it in one go: propulsive, ingenious, in places period-appropriate pyschedelic, a very good SF novel. But Mark Barrowcliffe (the man behind the pseudonym) is a friend, and I blurbed it. 

Lavie Tidhar, Neom (Tachyon 2022) 

‘Neom’ is in the news at the moment (obviously it’ll never happen; though it makes a brilliant setting for imaginative writing)—and this gorgeous novel, set in Tidhar’s ‘Central Station’ future, is as good as anything he has written: richly imaginative, pin-sharp, a brilliantly deft piece of worldbuilding and storytelling. Tidhar is a powerhouse of contemporary SFF, a major voice; but he’s also a friend of mine. You can see my blurb for the book in the above image, although the publisher has, wisely, replaced it with one by a more famous figure than I for later editions.

Tori Bovalino, Not Good For Maidens (Titan 2022)

The elevator pitch for this book might be: a dark YA fantasy, based on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. The book itself is exactly as rich, atmospheric, Gothily queer and wonderful as that suggests. Rossetti’s poem is one for which I have a particular fondness, which perhaps predisposed me to like this novel; but I am also (or was also: she has now passed her viva) on the supervisory team for Tori’s creative writing PhD at RHUL. She is a brilliant writer of YA, and is going to be huge.

‘Pinocchio’ (2022: directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson)

 

The buzz on del Toro’s Pinocchio (Netflix 2022) was very promising (Mark Kermode thought it a near flawless five-star masterpiece) so I sat down to watch with high hopes. Those hopes, however, were not fulfilled. Disappointment!

Hi diddle dee-dee, this movie’s not for me. I thought it dreary, plodding, ponderous, draggingly slow. The animation is painstaking and very detailed but lacks any sprightliness or pep. The characters move and interact as if pushing through transparent treacle, every last gesture and twist and flick over-telegraphed. The design has moments of striking Del-Toroesque Goth-appeal, but a movie cannot exist purely on its design. What about everything else? The voice acting is underpar: David Bradley plays Geppetto with an unlikeable querulousness; Christoph Waltz delivers a haphazard, overwrought performance as the villainous Volpe; and whenever Ewan McGregor’s Sebastian J. Cricket was on screen I found myself thinking back to Toast of London, in the recording booth, with Clem Fandango on the other side of the glass: ‘that’s great Ewan, really great: could you do it again, make it a little more likeable? Great—and again please? One more time please. OK we'll go again.’ Fire the nuculire weapons!

The attempts at humour, without exception, misfire: a problem both with the conception of the comic moments themselves (the cricket is squashed! again! and again!) and with the timing of them. The timing is out for most of the story beats, actually. Also the plot makes little sense. Do I apply a hobgoblin-of-little-minds criterion of pedantic consistency to a fairy tale, though? Is that really what I'm doing? Say it’s not so! But a story needs to have a coherence, a logic, even if it’s not the logic of verisimilitude. My sense with this film is that the story is never quite sure how Pinoccho is supposed to figure.

So: at first the pious Catholic 1930s Italian villagers are convinced that Pinocchio is possessed by the devil. Then, instantly, he is integrated into the local school system so much that the local fascist podestà comes round to Gepetto’s house in person to rebuke him for the lad’s truancy—after missing just one day! So why didn’t Pinocchio get to school? It was because, on his way there, he was tempted away by evil circus-svengali Count Volpe—it seems Pinocchio is at one and the same time both an unremarkable ligneous boy in his hometown and a startling freak-show marvel whom people will pay top dollar just to watch. Odd, that. When Gepetto and the podestà both try to retrieve the boy from this new life of circus performing Volpe shows-off the signed contract. Except that Pinocchio (who hasn’t ever been to school, remember) can’t write, so has instead drawn a smiley face at the bottom of the document. This is treated as legally binding, with Volpe angrily threatening to bring his lawyers down on everyone, although one wonders under what provision of contract law such a document, doodled upon by an illiterate minor, would be binding. It hardly matters, anyway, because the plot then guilliotines this entire development by having Pinocchio abruptly run over and killed by a lorry. He spends a little time in an archly-conceived, plum-coloured afterlife, all dark purple sand, coffin-clad cliff-faces and skeletal rabbits playing cards, ruled over by a mauve sphinx (this character is another iteration of the blue fairy: the movie’s one and only female character). It turns out that Pinny is immortal and so back to Italy he goes.

Discovering that the boy cannot die, the podestà gets very excited: put him in the army, he cries, to fight for the patria fascista! Does he go to Gepetto and say: “old man, make me an army of such unkillable soldati”? He does not! Instead he recruits Pinocchio into youth camp, alongside his own son, trains him for a bit and then, randomly, instructs his son (who has befriended the puppet) to shoot him with a pistol and kill him. Seems a waste. I suppose his idea is to, I don’t know, toughen-up his boy. But the lad refuses, the podestà is killed by an allied bomb whistling down directly onto his head and the movie lurches into its final act.

Gepetto and Sebastian Cricket have gone in search of Pinocchio and on the way been swallowed by a giant dogfish—a whale in Disney’s version of course, though it’s a huge dogfish in Collodi’s original 1883 novel. In the novel, though, Pinocchio and Geppetto easily escape; this film’s denouement, in which Sebastian hatches an elaborate plan to climb out through the fish’s ‘blowhole’ (a stoma that squalus acanthias, being a species of fish rather than mammals, does not possess) draws on Disney rather than Collodi.

Pinocchio blows-up the dogfish and dies, which is no biggie since he is immortal; but—oh no!—down in the mortal world Geppetto is drowning. P is told that if he wants to go straight back to life, instead of waiting the arbitrarily imposed ten minutes (or whatever) lag-time, then he must sacrifice his immortality. He gladly does this, goes back, saves his father and dies in the process. Except that then he’s brought back to life anyway. It’s a confusing zig-zag that is trying to tug your heartstrings, but which just leaves you baffled.

Then there are the songs. The songs are awful. Utterly unmemorable. Impossible to imagine any one of these smeary dollops being remembered 80 days from now, never mind 80 years—the way ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, ‘Give A Little Whistle’, ‘Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee’ and ‘I've Got No Strings’ are still universally recognised and loved.

Bringing in Disney, of course, tips my hand. It is unfair, and arguably point-missing, to compare this movie to to the peerless Disney Pinocchio (1940)—Del Toro is clearly, indeed rather clangingly, not trying to remake the beloved Disney original (unlike the dire Roger Zemeckis retread). That's fair enough. My problem is not that Del Toro’s approach is stylistically and tonally unlike Disney’s (although the animation certainly misses the sprightliness and life Disney’s team achieved), or that he has moved the story from a nonspecific 19th-C milieu to a specific, fascist-Italian 1930s/40s one. It is that his film creaks, lumbers, misses, bores, outstays its welcome. That it doesn't work.

‘But,’ you will say, ‘how can you nitpick and picknit at the plot logic of Del Torro’s movie and overlook the daftness of the original plot?’ I agree, the plot of the 1940 movie is just as illogical in its way as this 2022 one. But I would argue that the aporiae in the 1940 movie’s plotting are, actually, expressive of the movie’s key concerns, in a way that isn’t true of the 2022 film.

For example: in the 1940 movie, naughty boys, including P., are inveigled by a mysterious ‘Coachman’ to voyage to Pleasure Island. Here they are indulged with champagne, cigars, all the food they can eat, gaming tables, and an island-ful of fine things for them to vandalise—to smash, wreck and ruin. The Mona Lisa is there! And those naughty boys have defaced it! 

But it’s all a ruse: there is some magic on the island that means, the more the boys misbehave, the quicker they turn into jackasses: literal donkeys, which the Coachman then ships off and sells, to hard labour in salt mines and suchlike.

But think about this for a moment, under rubric of a business proposition. How much does it cost the Coachman to fit-out Pleasure Island? Never mind the endless booze and cigars, food, sundry costs of portage, the labour required to herd and ship-out the finished-product donkeys. What about the paintings? In 1962, the Louvre insured the Mona Lisa for $100 million (about a billion dollars in 2022 cash). 

Long story short: there really has to be a cheaper way to produce jackasses, so as to sell them on at profit.

And of course there is! It’s called ‘sex’. You get a mummy donkey and a daddy donkey together and, via a special kind of donkey cuddle, a baby donkey gets born. Certainly cheaper, and therefore more profitable, than the Coachman’s method.

Of course I’m being deliberately obtuse. We are not expected to read this sequence literally. It’s a piece of fabulation, talking metaphorically rather than mimetically: it's saying ‘allow a boy to behave badly and follow his bestial instincts and he will turn into a jackass’. That’s a way of telling a moral story, in a dramatic and visually arresting way. You could make the same argument about the oddities of plotting in the Del Toro movie.

But I’d argue the 1940 Pinocchio is doing something else with the Pleasure Island sequence. It hinges on the question above. Isn’t there a cheaper, more efficient way of ‘making’ donkeys? Obviously there is. Sex. But in the world of Pinocchio sex is precisely what is missing, what is taboo or interdicted—because it’s a children’s film, because it’s a war film and the men are all away in the army separated from their wives, or for deeper reasons. Something is broken in the logic of fertility in this colourful animated land. A cool blue-coloured fairy gifts life to a puppet (because that’s what women can do) and it comes alive, sort-of. We could say: Geppetto has made a son the hard way, constructing it like Frankenstein did his monster, rather than the easy way (I say easy: when the two of us made our son, it was my wife who did all the heavy lifting of course). But Geppetto doesn’t circumvent ‘nature’ out of hubristic arrogance, the way Frankenstein does. He does it because … well, why? Because he lives in a land without women and has no alternative, perhaps? This, it seems to me, is part of the pointedness of the movie: it is, in its brilliant, colourful, vividly-sung, often hilarious way, a kind of “Waste Land”, a film about a kind of desolation: the old world having died—to quote another famous Italian—and the new world yet to be born, we find ourselves in an interregnum in which a great variety of grotesque and wonderful symptoms appear.

What’s the equivalent for the Del Torro Pinocchio? Why the clonking relocation to Fascist Italy, turning the movie into an epigone Pan’s Labyrinth? Del Toro is, in part, saying: fascism is bad. Which, I have to agree, is true, for fascism is indeed bad; although it’s a truth not very eloquently or resonantly expressed by this movie. What else? Is the point that fascism treats human beings like puppets, disposable, controllable, mere things? Is that it? Or that fascism is a kind of malign circus act, a puppet show, all outward display and inward emptiness?

I daresay I’m both overreading and under-praising this film. Lots of people I know, whose opinions I respect, really love it. Still: it’s a Pinocchi-no from me.

Annie Ernaux, ‘The Years’ (2008; translated by Alison L. Strayer 2017)

 

Following Ernaux's Nobel win I addressed my (deplorable, no doubt) ignorance of her work by reading this. It's acclaimed, the blurb tells me, as her masterpiece, and won the Prix Renadot in France and the Premio Strega in Italy.

It's ... fine? I guess? A deliberately bitty panorama of life in France from the 1940s to c.2000 made up of lots of short paragraphs, flashbulb moments from history and culture, news, lists of films seen and various moments from the protagonist's life: schooldays, life as a wife and mother in provincial France, working as a teacher, life post-divorce with a handsome young toyboy. Perfectly readable but, maybe, rather featherweight. It's like Billy Joel's ‘We Didn't Start The Fire’, but for France and with added bits of sex-life. Still: Nobel Prize!

Most of it is this kind of thing: ‘reserve soldiers continued to leave for Algeria ... the SS France, the Caravelle jetliner and the Concorde, the Common Market and, sooner or later, peace in Algeria. There were new francs, scoubidoo bracelets, flavoured yoghurt, milk in cartons, transistor radios’ [76]. A hundred pages later it's still going on, further down the cultural-historical line: ‘male voices compared PCs and Macs ... they mentioned the latest cover of Charlie Hebdo and the most recent episodes of The X-Files, advised us to see Man Bites Dog and Reservoir Dogs’ [179]. Every now and again the running commentary is interrupted by passages like this:

Once in a while she looks at herself naked in the bathroom mirror. A delicate torso, small breasts, very slender waist, slightly rounded belly. The thighs are heavy with a bulge above the knee. The sex is clearly visible, now that the hair is more sparse, the cleft small compared with the ones displayed in X-rated films. She is surprised. It is the same body she's had since she stopped growing at around the age of sixteen. [167]

A male novelist writing a passage like that would be, rightly I think, mocked. It is different coming from a woman's pen I suppose. Still: after a while the obliqueness of all this notated specificity grows wearisome. ‘Solidarność, the Restaurants du Coeur, the release of Mandela ... Hypermarkets expanded, shopping trolleys were replaced by others so big one could scarely touch the bottom. We changed television sets so that we could have a SCART plug and a VCR’ [141]. The boorishness of men is a repeated theme, and the way constant external change actually, paradoxically, construes a kind of inner changelessness is pretty well done. But I'm not sure the book puts the necessary distance between portraying banality, for satiric or social-commentary or even aesthetic reasons, and simply being banal.

On the internet all one needed do was enter a keyword and thousands of ‘sites’ would swarm on the screen. [208]

You don't say! ‘We could research the symptoms of throat cancer, recipes for moussaka, the age of Catherine Deneuve, the weather in Osaka, the growing of hydrangeas ...’ Yes, yes. Point taken.

It's a 200-page novel that feels like a novella, an exercise in literary Pointillism that isn't, or didn't strike me, as much more than this gimmick. But conceivably (I don't say this to snark) my reaction only reflects the boorishness of masculinity that the book, in part, critiques.

+++

Photo-Moderne, Cinémonde, German soldiers, Lillebonne
L'Hirondelle, Convent School, President de Gaulle;
De Beauvoir, long division, Les Muppets on television
Mireille Mathieu, Bjorn Borg and Emanuelle;
Bourgeois life, Maman/wife, Tirlipot, pastry slice,
Mitterand, Beatles song and Catcher in the Rye;
Panties, Debussy, visiting Seine-Saint-Denis
Canal+, reading Proust, sexual clichés home to roost.

We didn't start the Ernaux
Til her Nobel Prizing made it worth appraising
Didn't much enjoy the Ernaux
No, I'm just not sure if I will read much more of her.