It’s that time of year again. The BSFA Award nominations are out.

The full lists can be found here.

The fiction nominees are:-

Best Novel:-

Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith (Newcon Press)

Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan)

The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

Osama by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Of which I have (so far) read one.

Best Short Fiction:-

The Silver Wind by Nina Allan (Interzone 233, TTA Press)

The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)

Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley (Kameron Hurley’s own website)

Covehithe by China Miéville (The Guardian)

Of Dawn by Al Robertson (Interzone 235, TTA Press)

I have read none of these as yet but only The Copenhagen Interpretation is not available online via the BSFA page linked to above. Presumably the booklet of nominated stories that the BSFA has produced for the past two years will be repeated this time around, too.

Kraken utilises Miéville’s common setting of London, albeit a strange London. This otherness beside the familiar is a strand in his work evident from King Rat and Un Lun Dun through to THE CITY AND YTIC EHT.

This one started out as if it may have been written with a film or TV adaptation in mind – one with a potentially light-hearted take – but soon veers off down strange Miévillean byways which may be unfilmable. For these are the end times and cultists worshipping all manner of weird gods abound.

It begins with a kind of locked room mystery as a giant squid, Architeuthis, has been stolen – formalin, tank and all – from its stance in the Darwin Centre, a natural history museum where Billy Harrow is a curator. He helped to prepare the squid for show and is thought to hold the knowledge that might allow all those interested in its recovery to find it. The police fundamentalist and cult squad, the FSRC, is called in to help investigate the disappearance which becomes more involved when Billy discovers a body pickled (in too small a jar) in the museum’s basement. And these are merely the first strangenesses to be encountered in this book. We also have the consciousness of a man embedded within a tattoo, a tattoo which moves and speaks. Then there is the double act of Goss and Subby – two shapeshifting baddies from out of time (they shift other people’s shapes) – and weird sects, cults and mancers of all sorts.

Never short of incident and brimming with plot the novel is probably a bit too convoluted, with too many characters for its own good, and its one-damn-strange-thing-after-another-ness can verge on overkill. But this is an unashamed fantasy, a form to which I am antipathetic when it is taken to extremes; and Miéville is not one for restraint.

While Kraken sometimes skirts along the edge of comedy it never fully embraces it. There are too many killings and acts of violence for comedy to sit comfortably. I might have liked the novel better if it had. Its main fault is that it never manages to settle on which sort of book it is meant to be, straddling various narrative stools such as police procedural, one man against the odds, woman in search of the truth about her vanished lover, etc.

This may be a reason why it failed to make the award ballot for this year’s BSFA Awards.

Pedantic asides:- Miéville did make me think what the plural of quid pro quo might be. (To my British mind Miéville’s anglicised formulation “quids pro quo” would mean getting money for something rather than a mutual back-scratching.) Taking the phrase as meaning “this for that” then the English plural, for the phrase as a whole, would be quid pro quos. For the Latin plural you would have quae pro quibus (these for those.) There are two other semantic possibilities; quid pro quibus (this for those) and quae pro quo (these for that.) Miéville also seems to think that “law” and “lore” are homophones. Not where I come from they aren’t. And the establishment is a dry cleaner’s, not a dry cleaners.

I believe Miéville’s next is to be set in space. It’ll be interesting to see his take on that.

Pan, 1999. 421p

Saul Garamond is arrested when his father is found dead having fallen, jumped or been pushed, through a window of their house. Saul is sprung from custody by a mysterious figure who calls himself King Rat and asserts that Saul’s mother was a Rat. King Rat is able to move freely between the London which Saul knows and the unnoticed spaces which constitute a hidden Rat city. Under his tutelage Saul becomes rat-like too but King Rat, of course, is not quite what he seems. In this netherworld Saul also meets the Bird Superior, Loplop, and Anansi, head of the spiders. Meanwhile Saul’s friend Natasha, a creator/DJ of Drum and Bass, is befriended by a mysterious flute player called Pete and Police Inspector Crowley is increasingly puzzled by the spate of bizarre and bloody murders occurring on his patch.

The other city conceit seems to be one of Miéville’s running themes; it also occurs in Un Lun Dun and THE CITY & YTIC EHT though of course this would be its first appearance. (King Rat is the last in my attempt to catch up with Miéville’s oeuvre apart from his latest Kraken.) This one is very London-centric though, which annoyed me strangely.

The language of the novel is simple; even a little sketchy at times. In this it has pre-echoes of Un Lun Dun. Indeed, were it not for the violence and the expletives this could well have been a tale for young adults.

Though the plot strands do cohere and music is integral to its resolution, at times the novel appears diffuse, as if it does not know whether to be a fantasy, a musical odyssey or a police procedural – though it has embedded within it a nice retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story told from the rats’ point of view. Miéville also takes the opportunity to throw in a minor bit of political consciousness raising.

Had I read this on first publication I could certainly have foreseen an Un Lun Dun – though perhaps not a Perdido Street Station.

But… One of the characters seems to be under the impression that layered music never existed before Drum and Bass. Come off it.

Pan, 2007. 522p.

This is Miéville’s first book for younger readers. It is also copiously (and well) illustrated by the author. In it Zanna and Deeba, two of a group of normal young teenagers in London, are beset by strange occurrences. They are attacked by smoke tendrils, freaked out by an ambulatory umbrella and Zanna is addressed as Shwazzy several times during different chance encounters in one of which she is given a card naming her as such.

Soon they are both transported to a strange place where the sun is too large – and doughnut shaped – weird and colourful characters abound and telecommunications work through the medium of what can only be described as carrier wasps. Zanna is revealed as the choisi – chosen – the girl who will save the abcity of Un Lun Dun (unLondon) from the menace of the Smog. She is presumed to know the details of the Armets and their secret weapon the Klinneract which saved real London and drove the Smog to Un Lun Dun. (This parallel existence also contains other abcities such as Parisn’t, Lost Angeles, Sans Francisco and Hong Gone.)

The book which contains the Shwazzy prophecy – and which speaks morosely a la Eeyore or Marvin – turns out to be wrong, though, and Zanna is unable to help. She is incapacitated by the Smog whose attack is only driven off by using specially slit and treated unbrellas made by Mister Brokkenbroll to ward off the smog’s projectiles. With this apparent victory Deeba and the still far from well Zanna return to London. But Deeba cannot forget her experiences, realises that not all may be well in Un Lun Dun and so makes her return. On her quest to find a weapon to defeat the Smog she is accompanied by the aforementioned Book of Prophecy, Bling, a silver furred locust, Diss, a brown bear cub, a four-armed, four-legged, many-eyed man called Cauldron, a half-ghost, half-normal boy called Hemi, and Curdle, an animated milk carton Deeba adopts as a pet.

There are some nice coinages – mostly portmanteau words like smombies, Propheseers and smoglodytes. Mister Brokkenbroll – the Unbrellissimo – is a particularly redolent case. There are also glazed, wooden framed, eight legged things called Black Windows. These are just a few examples of Miéville’s playful linguistic invention.

There is more than a hint of Alice in Un Lun Dun though generally Through The Looking Glass rather than Adventures In Wonderland. This is underlined on page 296 when the Speaker of Talklands echoes Humpy Dumpty by saying, “WORDS MEAN WHATEVER I WANT.” We also have a pair of Tweedledum/Tweedledee-ish mitre-wearing clerics, in white and deep red robes respectively, who only move in zig-zags. There are parallels too with THE CITY & YTIC EHT Miéville’s recent adult novel, which I reviewed here.

Un Lun Dun is an enjoyable romp. For its target audience I would have thought it might be more than a touch too long, though its young readers may welcome a long immersion in Miéville’s skewed world.

MacMillan, 2009, 312p.

Another detective story! I thought I’d read this after The Night Sessions in case it got on the ballot for the BSFA award. (It has.) I had bought it on the strength of Miéville’s previous outings, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council but didn’t know its content.

After an event known as Cleavage which happened a considerable time in the past, the city of Besź, which is somewhere in Eastern Europe, is crosshatched with Ul Qoma. Cleavage has resulted in both cities coexisting independently of each other but in the same location, in some cases sharing the same buildings. Their inhabitants must unsee any manifestations of the other which they may notice, otherwise breach may occur. Areas within only one of the cities are known as total to its inhabitants and alter to the other’s.

This central conceit can, I suppose, be taken as a metaphor for divided cities or societies everywhere, or even a split personality, but here instances of intruding into the other city, ie breaching, whether by accident or design, will incur the attentions of Breach, a mysterious organisation which deals with such transgressions.

Aside: I wonder if Miéville ever toyed with the idea of calling his novel Split as in the Croatian city. Perhaps that would have localised things to too large a degree to the former Yugoslavia, though, or he may have considered it too obvious a pun.

In all other respects the novel’s world is ours (complete with MySpace pages.) The two are normal cities, they have hinterlands and they (or their countries) have diplomatic relations with the rest of the world; and with each other. There are rumours of a third city, Orcinny, interweaved with Besź and Ul Qoma, but no-one is supposed to talk about that.

As to the plot, the body of a murdered American woman turns up in Besź and the investigator, Tyador Borlú, swiftly comes to the conclusion the murder actually took place in Ul Qoma. However it transpires that the body was transported across the divide legally; in the only way that is possible. Breach is not invoked and Borlú has to go to Ul Qoma to aid the investigation there; where the murder victim had been part of an archæological dig. The working through of the story thereafter is pretty standard conspiracy thriller stuff and not really speculative fiction at all, though the unusual background has a minor plot function.

Regarding the speculative nature of the book, to both cities’ inhabitants the observances of demarcation – the seemingly necessary unseeing, the unhearing – are only really a convention; they are not physically prevented from straying into the other reality, which in that sense is not, therefore, another reality, and while the consequences of breaching are implied to be dire, Miéville does not explore this aspect fully.

The unseen twinned city conceit is a good one but once again Miéville doesn’t really do anything with it. In the end it is no more than the backdrop to the thriller story which, with only minor tweaks, could equally well have been set in a truly divided city.

I was swithering about the classification I would assign to this book in my categories. I was leaning towards fantasy since crosshatching, the intrusion of another reality into the normal world, belongs in that tradition but I have decided on SF even if the only thing that makes THE CITY & YTIC EHT Science Fictional is the mention of Cleavage. There is/was a mechanism for the break, it was an event with a cause even if Miéville doesn’t go into detail as to how it happened.

These are not, though, major difficulties with the narrative. Miéville is in full command of his story and the prose flows freely. THE CITY & YTIC EHT is much easier to read than, for example, Iron Council which dragged rather. Give it a whirl if you have a penchant for detective thrillers or the mildly strange environment.