There’s a interesting post over on Christopher Priest’s blog about Ian McEwan‘s writing.

Reading between the lines it seems that the acclaim McEwan received at the start of his career is related to the fact that he seemed to be a promise of a wonderful future – and that among not many candidates – and that few have troubled to revise their opinion since.

What is more problematic are the inspirations for his published pieces. Originality may be difficult to achieve and all sorts of things – conscious and unconscious – bleed into any work of fiction but there certainly seem to be question marks over the decisions that go into McEwan’s writing.

Now, I’ve not read much McEwan (and what I have read did not enthuse me much.) Though I have one of his books on the tbr pile – it’s been there ten years or more – I’m now not too minded to alter that fact.

Earthlight, 1999, 264 p.

This is the first collection of Priest’s stories set in the Dream Archipelago, preceding The Islanders by 12 or so years, though apart from the introductory The Equatorial Moment – describing the strange vortex which affects the planet and presumably written especially for this book – the stories herein are considerably older.

The Negation features an author, Moylita Kaine, who has written a book called The Affirmation. (Priest later reused this title for a novel of his own and Kaine reappears in The Islanders.) Kaine’s book fascinates a border guard, Dik, who visits her in her position as writer in residence in the town where he is on leave.

Whores is a strange tale of another (unnamed) soldier whose visit to one of the whores of the title – forced into that profession by the enemy’s prior occupation of the island – has unexpected consequences.

The Cremation has Graian Sheeld travel to a funeral on an island where the customs are strange to him. His faux-pas lead him to a mistake. In parts this reminded me of the work of Michael G Coney. There is an enigmatic woman, a particularly nasty indigenous lifeform known as a thryme and its unusual life cycle.

The Miraculous Cairn is a tale of narrator Lenden’s sexual awakening combined with an unusual – possibly hallucinatory – encounter, and its ramifications resounding in later life.

The Watched has another of Priest’s confused protagonists. Ordier is fascinated by the mysterious Qataari who have been decanted from their ancestral peninsular home as a result of the war but who are notoriously secretive. A folly on the land he has bought allows him to spy on them.

As a collection this is fine but it doesn’t add up to a whole in the same way The Islanders did. But then it probably wasn’t supposed to.

There are some USian usages presumably because of where some of the stories were first published (though a twice mentioned casket is also once referred to as a coffin.)

Then there was the strange sentence, “You did not make rape my wife?” which badly needed editing and (twice) the common misuse of aureole for areola.

Last year it was Chris Priest who incited controversy over the Clarke Award, this year it seems to be the judges themselves – for not including a book by a woman on their shortlist.

The contending books are:-

Nod by Adrian Barnes (Bluemoose)
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)*
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Headline)
Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)*
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)*

I’ve read the last two of these and Dark Eden is on the TBR pile.

The overlap with this year’s BSFA Awards novel short list is strong (asterisked titles) but only 2312 is also up for the Hugo.

I’m a bit surprised that M John Harrison’s Empty Space didn’t make the list, it’s the sort of book that Clarke Award juries tend to like.

Gollancz, 2011, 339p

This one is odd. Normally a novel unfolds by the interactions of various characters and the intertwinings of their stories – however separate their narratives may seem to be from the outset – all set out in a standard narrative format, albeit with digressions or flashbacks or indeed flashes forward. This book strays far from such conventionality. It is set out as a gazetteer. Each “chapter”€ title is that of an island in the Dream Archipelago – a place of indeterminable geography due to “€œtemporal gradients”€ and a “vortex”€ which distorts perception – which Priest has visited before. Different “€œchapters”€ take different forms: some are exactly like entries in a gazetteer (including tourist information relating to local laws, currencies used etc) others are more conventional first person narratives, there is even a police (Priest uses the description policier) interview transcript; but all drip information either about the world of the Dream Archipelago or its inhabitants. Indeed were I to be hypercritical I could describe the book as a giant info dump interspersed with (relatively few) short stories.

However, SF likes to think of itself as innovative. Where better to find altered ways to tell stories, to redefine what constitutes a novel? And this is on the BSFA Award short list (but not the Clarke, to whose choices this year Priest has objected.) I somehow doubt, though, that writing novels as if they were gazetteers is going to catch on.

Nevertheless in The Islanders a picture of the world and its complexities builds up over time. Early on, a confession to a murder in a theatre leads to an execution – later episodes cast doubt on whether the death was a murder at all, and if so who was really responsible. The narrative sections are mostly concerned with creative types, mainly writers and artists. Events are experienced through various eyes and are seen to be as mutable -€“ or incapable of full comprehension -€“ as the Archipelago’€™s geography.

Yet – to be hypercritical again – none of the stories really requires the off-Earth setting, each could take place in our here and now. Much of the discourse is familiar, we have cars, computers, the internet, email; the flora and fauna are unexceptional, we even have bananas. The world, set between two warring powers – one from each of the two polar continents which are separated by the ocean in which the Archipelago (more or less protected by the neutrality pact which is supposed to safeguard the islands’ sovereignties) sits, is almost humdrum in its similarities to our own. The islands’€™ polities appear akin to our own Channel Islands, being feudal and overseen by Seigniors some of whom are more benevolent than others. And warring powers behave as they will in any time or place.

The Islanders is novel, I would agree. But a novel? It’€™s ingenious and an impressive achievement; but in the end the structure does not fully satisfy; there are too many interconnections between the “chapters” for the book to convince as a gazetteer, and too few for a rounded novel. Nevertheless between the three candidates for the BSFA Award which I have read so far it is, I would say, the strongest contender.

It seems Christopher Priest, whose BSFA Award listed novel The Islanders I am reading as we speak (or read, or converse, or whatever-the-hell-it-is-we-do-on-the-internet,) has attacked this year’s Clarke Award shortlist.

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.

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.