Christopher Priest has spent his entire career being close enough to the top table to smell the gravy, but has never quite been invited to sit down. His writing is extremely clever, but even in the ‘literature of ideas’ that is SF, “extremely clever” is really a way of saying rather unemotional, dry, and hard to love. It has all the qualities of someone who has spent decades studying, learning, dedicating every fraction of a considerable intellect to learning the rules and structures of fiction, but never quite managed to get his own soul on the page. Which, in the end, is the only thing we really demand of a novelist.
Walter also characterises Christopher Priest as having spent “most of his professional career not being J G Ballard”, as in driven by jealousy of his contemporaries and envy at their supposedly greater success, sublimated into this magnificent rant against the current generation of sf writers.
In other words, “he’s just jealous”, the most single predictable thing you can say about any critic ever. It’s something you learn on the playground and should stay there. We’re grownups now and we should be able to argue against criticism without subjecting our critics to amateur psychoanalysis.
The other idea, that Christopher Priest never quite made it as a science fiction writer is ridiculous as well. Walter’s portrayal of Priest as somebody who “has spent decades studying, learning, dedicating every fraction of a considerable intellect to learning the rules and structures of fiction, but never quite managed to get his own soul on the page” is a great invention, but not true of the real Priest. Let’s leave out the strange notion that what we all want from a writer is them “getting their own soul on the page” which is a) a meaningless cliche and b) no, not what we want at all; that’s the sort of thing somebody forced to study literature in middle school would think writing was all about, not at all what real writers universally do. Some writers may feast on their own neurosises and personality, others don’t.
If you look at Christopher Priest’s career, he has always existed at the literary end of the sf spectrum and has largely followed his own path. His early 1970ties works were inspired by the New Wave but not of it, he slowly meandered from science fiction into magic realism in the eighties and nineties, returning to more mainstream sfnal themes in the last decade. He’s never really been driven by commercial considerations or any burning desire to be the top dog in science fiction, as far as I can see.
So I don’t see where Walter gets the idea from that this is what drove Priest to write his rant, when he has form for sticking his oar in. Remember the Last Deadloss Visions? Why not just take him at his word rather than invent needless psychobabble theories as to why he was driven to write this?
Whether you’re annoyed or amused by Christopher Priest’s broadside against the Clarke Award shortlist depends on how you rate the writers he attacked. For me, it was a mixed bag. On the one hand I loved his description of Sheri “genocide is too a proper tool for solving ecological problem” Tepper’s The Waters Rising:
how can one describe it? For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’.
Which is nicely hateful to a deserving target. But how to take his judgement of Charlie Stross:
Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.
Charlie decided to take it as a joke and brought out a line of t-shirts to celebrate. Which is probably the best attitude to take as writer. Now you may know that I’m a bit of a Stross fan myself, but I can still see where Priest is coming from. Charlie can be quite enthusiastic about some very geeky things and if you don’t share those interests this might just be a bit wearing at novel length. But this is a question of taste more than of worth. Nobody can like every science fiction novel ever written and unless you want to argue that nobody should write novels like Rule 34, this isn’t a legitimate complaint.
His complaints about “PC Plod characters” and “och-aye dialogue” are more factual, but I find both of them unjustified. If you write a police procedural you’re bound to have coppers while Charlie has lived north of the border long enough to have a good ear for proper Scottish accents; he’s certainly no worse than a true Scotsman like Ian Rankin.
Meanwhile what Charlie Stross has tried to do with Rule 34 and in which for me at least he succeeded for the most part is to write a believable, proper near future science fiction thriller, in a future that we could actually be living in a few years from now. So for example there’s the subplot of exactly what a small time crook is creating with his illegal three-d printer/matter fab: creating highly realistic sex doll facsimiles of five year old girls for pedophiles. That is something you wouldn’t really imagine as an element of your standard near future setting, but you wouldn’t be surprised to be reading about in the newspaper in a decade or so.
So whether or not Rule 34 was the best sf novel published in Britain last year, it is a credible candidate and Priest’s irritation with Charlie’s writing style blinds him to this. Remains to argue why Priest wrote this attack in the first place, which is probably not, as Damien G. Walter wants to argue a belated jealousy of J. G. Ballard. More likely it’s just general irritation with a shortlist that ignores several worthy candidates for far weaker ones, expressed more strongly than other people might’ve done.
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)
That’s two out of six, with only one book out of the shortlist read (Rule 34) and one more on the to be read list (Embassytown). Not a very inspiring list, what with Bear and Tepper on there, both being Big Name American science fiction authors whose best work is decades in the past at this point. Coming after the nomination of a Tim Powers book last year that was a decade old, it seems “respectable but aging American novelists” is the Clarke’s version of Connie Wilis…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’m teaching a course in Weird Fiction at the University of Warwick, so this has come up a lot. Obviously it’s kind of impossible to come to anything like a final answer, so I approach this in a Beckettian way – try to define/understand it, fail, try again, fail again, fail better…I think the whole “sense of cosmic awe” thing that we hear a lot about in the Weird tradition is to do with the sense of the numinous, whether in a horrific iteration (or, more occasionally, a kind of joyous one), as being completely embedded in the everyday, rather than an intrusion. To that extent the Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird.
Sounds a lot like that old, much derided sfnal concept of sense of wonder, that moment of conceptual breakthrough you get when you’re shown what the universe is really like. In its most mundane form it’s achieved by plopping a Big Dumb Object in front of the reader (Ringworld frex), at its best it’s a literary thrill that no other genre can offer. Weird fiction is one of those genres that’s even less definable than science fiction, but it does have the same sensawunda, if in a more horrorific sense. The best example is H. P. Lovecraft with his dread and revulsion about the scale of the universe and the insignificance of mankind, the anti-science fiction writer.
Incidently, for a personal sort of horror, the opening sentence fragment, “China Miéville (1972 – )”, has it. Two years older than me and look how much more he has accomplished. Moments like that I appreciate where Michel Vuijlsteke is coming from when he talks about how much he had wanted to leave some sort of legacy behind. Work is alright but just work, at best an interesting and challenging way to make money, but not something people will remember you for or all that important in the scheme of things, while unlike Michel I also don’t see myself ever having kids and leaving my mark on the world in that way. There must be more to life than work and entertainment.
The Better Part of Valor
Tanya Huff
411 pages
published in 2002
Once I had finished Valor’s Choice, I knew I was going to have to go back to the bookstore I’d found it in and get the other two Tanya Huff books I’d saw there too. To be honest, I hadn’t even taken me as long as finishing the first two chapters to decide this. I’m always on the lookout for good, intelligent military science fiction and Valor’s Choice was just that, which meant I had to get the sequels too. What I especially liked was the absence of the sort of nasty rightwing politics souring me on so many other mil-sf writers.
The Better Part of Valor starts with staff sergeant Torin Kerr just back from her mission in Valor’s Choice. Having had words with general Morris, who was responsible for said mission, she is immediately sent out on another one by him, without her own platoon even. Whether this is punishment or reward she isn’t sure, but it turns out she will join a new marine platoon put together from scratch to protect a scientific expedition to an “unidentified alien vessel drifting dead in space”. She hopes it will be an uneventful recon mission, but after the last one she was sent on by general Morris, she isn’t hopeful.
The Clarke Award (founded by Arthur C. hisself) is given each year to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK the previous year. It’s a juried award, unlike both the Hugo and Nebula, for which any publisher can submit novels it thinks eligible. This year’s submissions longlist has just been made public at Torque Control; so farof the sixty entries, I’ve read exactly one of them, Charlie Stross’ Rule 34. Which I think is also the only sf or fantasy novel published in 2011 that I’ve actually read.
Which won’t stop me from entering Torque Control‘s guess the shortlist game however. Below are the six entries I think will be on it and why:
Embassytown, China Miéville. China is a multiple Clarke Award winner and this novel created quite a lot of buzz early last year, so I think this is a shoe-in.
The Islanders, Christopher Priest. Another easy guess, as Priest has also won the Award previously, while this novel is a return to his old Dream Archipelago series of stories.
Reamde, Neal Stephenson. The Clarke Awards in the past few years have had at least one American nominee in the shortlist and this is the obvious candidate; if we’re unlucky it will be one of the two Connie Willis novels instead.
Osama Lavie Tidhar, which I’m currently reading. This is the one I’m the least sure about, but it seems to have had a fairly large p.r. push (helped by Tidhar making the e-book edition free a while back, which is when I got it), it tackles a big, important theme and it’s somewhat on the literary side of the science fiction genre, which ticks all Clarke boxes for me.
Rule 34, Charles Stross. A good book, an important British sf writer, who has been nominated before.
The Fallen Blade Jon Courtenay Grimwood. He has been shortlisted a few times before, so is a likely candidate for this year as well.
An all male lineup, which would not be my preference so much as me looking at the list of nominees with no other information than what I already knew about the writers and books listed. We’ll see at the end of March how right I was.
