Go on. Read it. It’s an entertaining rant however unfortunately open to the charge of sour grapes at not himself being on the Clarke list it may be. (Priest tries to cover this angle by saying he would withdraw his novel from any consideration if the Clarke list were to be rethought as he proposes.)

I would insert the turbulent Priest joke here but someone used it decades ago in one of the BSFA’s journals and I actually think Priest has a point. Perhaps several.

My impression of the BSFA shortlist novels I have read is that last year wasn’t a particularly good one for SF novels – though my sample is admittedly small. And I agree that to have China Miéville win the Clarke Award for a fourth time would suggest that no-one else need bother writing SF (nor fantasy) as we could all then give up and go home.

I disagree, though, with his interim assessment of Adam Roberts’s By Light Alone. See my review here.

Charles Stross (whom Priest castigates in his piece) has linked to a comment thread engendered by Priest’s rant and has also seized upon the criticism as a marketing opportunity (see link to Stross’s post.)

Among other things Priest complains Stross writes “och-aye” dialogue. “Och-aye” dialogue. What’s wrong with that? People do not necessarily speak RP, or estuary, or USian, now or in the future. Get over it.

By the way, I used to receive a yearly invitation to the Clarke Award do but I could never go – it’s in London and I always had work that day and the next. Those invitations dried up some while ago now, though.

*Stushie is a Scottish word for contretemps.
stushie [ˈstʊʃɪ], stishie, stashie
n Scot
1. a commotion, rumpus, or row
2. a state of excitement or anxiety; a tizzy. Also spelled stooshie, stoushie.

This year’s shortlist – for novels published in 2011 – is here and is reproduced below:-

Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (Gollancz)
Drew Magary, The End Specialist (Harper Voyager)
China Miéville, Embassytown (Macmillan)
Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
Charles Stross, Rule 34 (Orbit)
Sheri S.Tepper, The Waters Rising (Gollancz)

Of these I have read only Chinatown. (Edited to add:- I meant Embassytown.)

Compare and contrast the BSFA Award list:-

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)

My strike rate here is higher; the Miéville, the Roberts and (currently reading) the Priest.

The Silver Wind by Nina Allan, from Interzone issue 233, is a kind of time-travel story mixed with parallel worlds. It tells of the encounter of a man from a fascistic future Britain with a genius who makes clocks (which he refers to as time machines.) To begin with there is too much info dumping and throughout a lot is told rather than shown. Perhaps the story needed more space to breathe but I felt the sureness of touch of an accomplished story teller was missing. There is a use of words that is not quite precise – eg “hoping one soldier would not see me” rather than “hoping none of the soldiers would see me” – and twice we are treated to the peculiar phrase, “It was growing dusk,” but at least Allan knows the use of “nor” as in, “not for love nor money nor any of these new-fangled gadgets.”

The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell, from Asimov’s, July2011, is set in an altered future where European monarchies strive to keep the balance of power throughout the Solar System, souls have weight that is aligned to dark matter and Newton came up with a kind of relativity theory which allows space to be folded – all amenable to a tale of espionage and derring-do admixed with betrayals of various sorts. This stretches suspension of disbelief at times but overflows with ideas and is excellently written.

Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley, from Kameron Hurley’s website, is about a woman in a backward-leaning religious society which is engaged in a never-ending war, whose rulers have deliberately cut it off from the stars – originally as an escape from whatever’s out there but now to prosecute the war better. In her forbidden astronomical observations she finds God in a torn filter laid across the night sky. Again there is a fair bit of info dumping – perhaps inevitable in stories of short length.

Covehithe by China Miéville, from The Guardian, 20/4/11, features sunken oil-rigs returning to land to drill into the earth and lay – eggs? seeds? – from which smaller rigs later emerge. Atmospheric, but again info-dumpy. The human involvement in Covehithe – a father and his daughter observing one such landing – doesn’t really overlap with the SF background. Another scenario where society has suffered extreme breakdown and the military has a strong presence.

Of Dawn by Al Robertson, from Interzone 235, has a woman whose soldier brother has been killed being inspired by his poetry, the music of a long neglected composer, an all but forgotten TV documentary and a figure from Greek myth to produce a synthesis of poetry and music by bringing all those strands together. The final part of the jigsaw is provided by a shadowy figure in a village commandeered by the army long ago, but which had inspired both poet and musician. The story contains echoes of the Green Man myth and illustrates that English fascination with the pastoral. The info dumping here is well embedded.

The futures shown by the five stories are all bleak, having in common repressive regimes of either military or religious stamp. SF is never about the future, though. These stories tell us a lot about where we are now.

As stories though, rounded works of fiction, I found most of them unsatisfying. The only truly successful one was Paul Cornell’s. If these represent the best of last year the SF short story is in a bad way.

This novel begins somewhat like a fairy tale, “Two centuries ago a Prince…” is pretty close to, “Once upon a time.” However, the characters here do not “live happily ever after” and the philosophical musings the book contains are more elevated than the admonitory morals of the usual fairy tale.

The Prince concerned is keen on designing fantasy cities, so much so that whole armies of people are employed to create on paper the perfect city, Rreinstadt – not just the infrastructure but also the doings of its inhabitants and visitors. (This being in the nature of a fairy tale, where the money for this endeavour comes from is not explained.) The first two chapters, which set the novel up, contain no dialogue but manage to intrigue nonetheless.

Our hero is Schenk, a Cartographer, poring over maps of Rreinstadt, who on an errand one day is smitten by a pretty young Biographer, Estrella. He is also curious about the partly erased entries on one of his maps, that of the hotel room of a visitor to Rreinstadt, one Count Zelneck. He interprets the names concerned as Pfitz and Spontini. To impress Estrella and give him a reason for continuing to visit the Biography section he invents a story for Pfitz and Count Zelneck and writes it for her. His Pfitz – and therefore ours as we can read Pfitz’s adventures in occasional chapters – is an inveterate story teller in a magic realist kind of way. Spontini turns out to be one of the “authors” of books in Rreinstadt’s library (no detail is too small for the chroniclers of the Prince’s city) whose oeuvre is created by a team of writers. Spontini is apparently destined for madness.

So we have tales within tales and characters coming to wonder if they themselves are creations in someone else’s fiction. All very self-referential and post-modern. And, of course, begging a very Science Fictional question as to whether our world is itself a fictional creation or not.

Where the treatment began to unravel for me was that events in the “real” world – that of the Prince’s city planners – its jealousies and murder attempts, started to mirror the “invented” one (which being cause and which effect, a moot point) This seemed to me to labour the parallels too much.

Had I not previously read Crumey’s Mobius Dick, Sputnik Caledonia and Music, in a Foreign Language I might have been more taken with PfITZ. It is still a worthwhile novel; it just doesn’t reach the heights those books did.

This is a Woody Allen film and many of his tropes are present. The lead character, Gil, is typically Allenish with his verbal mannerisms, we have the fascination with the past (Zelig; Broadway Danny Rose) and an intrusion of the fantastic (Play It Again, Sam; Broadway Danny Rose.)

Gil is a writer on a trip to Paris with his fiancee and her awful parents; a moneyed couple, snobbish and intolerant, with no redeeming features. But none of these four are really sympathetic. There is a fine cameo by Michael Sheen as a friend of the fiancee, with just the right degree of irritating know-allness.

To escape this lot, Gil walks through Paris and gets lost. At midnight he is invited into an old car cruising the streets. He is taken to a party where he encounters Cole Porter, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. On subsequent nights he meets Gertrude Stein (Alice B Toklas has a small name check,) Pablo Picasso and his mistress, Salvador Dali, Louis Buňuel and Man Ray. Gil is delighted as he is fascinated by the 1920s, his perfect time. He is also much taken with Picasso’s mistress who thinks the Belle Époque was the best era to be alive.

If at times this all seemed a bit too overloaded it is the sort of stuff with which Allen can have a bit of fun, as when Gil suggests a film scenario to Buňuel.

Stein agrees to read Gil’s novel manuscript. At one point she describes it as Science Fiction (it is set in her future.) I was dubious at this usage and checked; the term apparently wasn’t in common use until 1929.

Gil is drawn more and more into the 1920s milieu and strolling with Picasso’s mistress one night they are invited into a horse-drawn cab and end up in the Belle Époque. Cue Toulouse Lautrec, Degas and Gauguin. Here Gil realises that no-one likes their own time and the past isn’t necessarily a better place.

But he determines to stay in (present day) Paris and chucks his girlfriend.

It was the fantastic element that I found most satisfying, the going into the past aspect is the sort of thing that makes Altered History (or Alternative/Alternate History if you must) so intriguing, but the present day characters were just so crass; apart from Carla Bruni as a tour guide and a female seller of old records Gil bumps into on a shopping trip.

This was minor Allen but entertaining enough, with quite a few laughs. I enjoyed it.

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.

(Plus 4 pages of acknowledgements, 1 page “about the author” and 24 pages containing three short stories from winners of a competition to set a story in the milieu of Beukes’s previous novel Moxyland, an unnecessary addition to my mind.)

I have previously lamented the fact that the general run of fantasy novels seem to be set in a default mediævality and that no-one is trying to write fantasy in a contemporary setting. Well Zoo City is taken by some to be SF – it was on the BSFA Award shortlist for best novel last year – but to my mind fantasy would be a better description. In particular magic is an essential component of the setting and plot. Yet the novel takes place in the present day! (Albeit a present day thoroughly transmogrified.)

Zinzi December is an aposymbiont – who are derogatorily termed as animalled. Aposymbionts are individuals who, as a result of committing a serious crime, have gained an animal companion with whom they have a psychic link, in the process acquiring an attribute. This is not quite the same as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which Beukes does refer to in the text, as in his universe the animals begin attachment at birth. Zinzi’s companion is a sloth and her attribute is sensing lost objects. She can follow psychic threads to recover things. This is her apparent job but to pay her debts she moonlights as an email scammer. She is engaged by two rather unsavoury individuals (both animalled) to find a lost pop star and is drawn into a world of intrigue, backstabbing and murder.

Narrated in an urgent present tense, apart from the interpolations of cod press articles and psychological papers fleshing out the background, the novel is of a piece with the thriller feel of much near future SF. But Beukes is good at this – very good indeed – the gritty realism makes her scenario entirely believable while you’re immersed in it. That the novel takes place in South Africa may be one factor in its appeal. African phrases and words are utilised frequently but not so as to obfuscate or confuse. The acceptance of magic is a given (as it may be in “our” South Africa.)

Where the story veers away from thriller SF into fantasy is that the transformation of the world to one where animals can become “familiars” is not given much of a rational explanation.

Zinzi and her boyfriend Benoît, whose animal is a mongoose, are well drawn, nuanced characters with full backstories which mercifully emerge from the story as it is told rather than being dumped on the reader. Others are equally believable.

This was fun, sharp and (the misuse of pre-empt aside) well written stuff.

It’s not often a novel is concerned primarily with language but Embassytown is that exception. Unlike in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue series, however, Miéville does not merely dally with the idea of language and translation but instead embeds this concern in the narrative; indeed the plot’s resolution is dependent on language and communication.

On a planet named Arieka, at the edge of known space, the Bremen colony of Embassytown is a habitable enclave surrounded by the otherwise poisonous demesnes of the indigenous Ariekei who are known as Hosts. Their language (Miéville emphasise its importance to the novel by naming it Language rather than Ariekan) contains no facility for lying and also requires the simultaneous uttering of two words/thoughts in order to be understood. This leads to a typographical representation oddity which I cannot fully reproduce here and is merely one illustration within the book of Miéville’s fascination with duality, a seam mined repeatedly in his earlier novels. “Twinned” Ambassadors referred to as doppels are identicalised individuals, kept identical by regular cleansing sessions which remove the superficial blemishes picked up between these ablutions, have been tested for empathy and trained to interact with the locals by speaking simultaneously. They have names such as ArnOld, RanDolph, CalVin, MagDa, CharLott or JoaQuin and are always referred to in the plural in constructions such as “the Ambassador were” – except when their components are on their own. The first three sections of the book, up to the initial crisis, are also twinned, with succeeding chapters respectively headed as Formerly or Latterday. Here, the difficulties of communicating with the Hosts and the struggles of a few of them to adopt human modes of speech are laid out. The remainder of the book deals with the fall-out from that endeavour.

Narrator Avice Benner Cho is a former immerser – a traveller in the immer, the void between planets – who, unusually for one of her kind, has returned to Arieka. Like many Embassytowners she has been made into a simile (she is the girl who ate what she was told, rather than what she wanted.) These human similes help the Ambassadors to talk with the Hosts. Avice’s status is, of course, vital to the plot’s development.

Disappointingly in a book so concerned with language, Miéville somehow manages (twice) to use grit where gritted is surely preferable but overall Embassytown is impressive. It may well be a front runner for this year’s BSFA Award, or even the Hugo. It is not flawless, though. Too many Ambassadors are indistinguishable (not in themself, but between them – you see where this twinning thing makes comment problematic) and the characterisation and motivations can be sketchy. That the Hosts are mere plot carriers is more forgiveable as they are not human and Miéville has taken pains to underline the difficulty of cross-species understanding.

Overall, though, as an intellectual exercise, an exploration of the idea of language as a defining cultural construct, the book succeeds admirably.

After the relatively disappointing aberration of Fury this novel sees Rushdie return for his setting to the locales and interests from which he made his name. He treated with Indira Ghandi’s India in Midnight’s Children, Pakistan in Shame and Islam in The Satanic Verses, before returning to (modern) India with The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In Shalimar The Clown it is Kashmir on which he focuses. In this sense the novel’s start is misleading as it begins in California with the daughter of a former ambassador in the days leading up to his assassination by his chauffeur/factotum, the titular Shalimar the Clown.

The book ranges far and wide with many digressions. In a strange resonance with the previous book that I read the ambassador, Maximilian Ophuls, [why Rushdie chose for his character the name of a film director is somewhat obscure; to me at any rate] was a (Jewish) native of Alsace forced to flee, leaving the family printing business behind, after the Germans took over in 1940. He became a leading member of the French Resistance, was involved in US-French relations, emigrating to the US at the end of the war, and was appointed ambassador to India in the 1960s. This novel is not without incident.

The story arc of the book deals, though, with the relationship between Noman Sher Noman and Boonyi Kaul (both of whom, along with Max and his daughter are given sections of the book – I was going to say to themselves, but other characters pop up all the time all over the book, in typically Rushdiean profusion) and the two villages in Kashmir, Pachigam and Shirmal, where they grew up. It seems all of life is here; the picture of a community, a way of life, is detailed. The plot of the novel is almost buried at times – yet this is true of every section. And is the placid, comradely, nature of existence there before the tensions between India and Pakistan led to strife in the region a touch overplayed? Whatever, the growth of Islamic fundamentalist influence, the deterioration in the situation and the horror of communal conflict is well depicted. Neither the Pakistan backed Muslim terrorists nor the Indian Army are spared implicit criticism.

When Ophuls visits the villages Boonyi seizes her chance to escape, only to end up in a different kind of entrapment. Noman meanwhile burns for revenge. He is recruited as a terrorist and suppresses his character while training. In this context the use of his name (no man) as a signifier seemed perhaps a little trite.

A short review can only touch the surface of the myriad elements which go into a novel which, like this, tries to deal with a big issue. There has to be some kind of story on which to hang the subject matter but at times, here, the human dimension is lost in a surfeit of detail. Do we really, for example, need to know the history of the main characters’ parents? This is a trope which Rushdie has employed in previous books. (A similar trait annoyed me in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead where, every time the author switched to a new viewpoint, we were treated to the character’s whole life story to that point, fatally interrupting the novel’s flow.) In Shalimar The Clown moreover, many passages are told rather in the style of a historical narration than a novel. I shall not reveal the true identity of Shalimar, even though it’s not hard to guess.

While I could have done without the ascent into fantasy in the final section, Rushdie’s sympathies are always in the right place and, despite the various horrors the book describes, overall it is, as perhaps all fiction should be, life–enhancing. After Fury, it represents a return to form.

Looking on my shelves I find not only his children’s classic The Mouse and his Child nor yet just the remarkable Riddley Walker but also The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, Turtle Diary and Pilgerman.

Hoban was quite prolific (Fantastic Fiction lists 87 books) so I didn’t manage to keep up with all his output.

His work spanned a multitude of genres from the post-apocalyptic Science Fiction of Riddley Walker through Fantasy to Realism and he seemed equally at home in them all.

In the field of Science Fiction, though, and its close relation Fantasy, it will undoubtedly be for the tour de force that was Riddley Walker – a novel written in an English so far from the standard that it might at first seem totally unreadable (trust me, with a little bit of effort it isn’t, and is well worth that effort) – and The Mouse and his Child that he will be most remembered.

Russell Conwell Hoban: 4/2/1925-13/12/2011. So it goes.