On the Clarkes and Sci Fi London

Richard Morgan is the worthy winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for 2008, for his blistering and complex thriller Black Man. I found it gripping and evocative, with a dangerously bad hero who at the start of the story makes a living hunting down mutants known as variant 13s...even though he himself is a variant 13.

But what happened to variants 1 through 12 I wonder? Is there a sequel about them?

Richard gave a very honest and sweet and funny acceptance speech, and walks away with a cheque for £2008, and much kudos.

The award ceremonies were held as part of the Sci Fi London season, and we were greeted by a host of Star Wars characters including a scary Darth Vader and a scantily attired Princess Leia.  I got a chance to meet all the people I only just left behind at the Alt Fiction Festival (oh Lord, it's not Palmer again), and I also had time for a longer chat with the very likeable fantasy writer Stephen Hunt.  As many of you know, he's a real multi-tasker - he writes epic fantasy novels, founded and still presides over the sf crowsnest website and has a demanding day job in the private equity sector.

I also had a chance to tell Ken Macleod how much I admire and love his Execution Channel.  For me, it's a 'stayer', one of those books that stays with you long after you've read it, as you think back on the ideas and the themes. 

After several hours of mingling and sipping (ha! sipping! who am I trying to fool?!) wine, I then rashly went on to watch one of the films in the Sci Fi Festival, Marc Caro's intriguing and allegorical Dante 01.  I found it beautifully shot, with amazing French actors, and full of great moments. But I have to confess that, after watching Battlestar Galactica with all its fabulous action scenes and varied alien planets, I do now find it hard to watch an SF yarn set on a spaceship which hardly ever gets out of the standing set. 

Still, there' s a great finale, and Caro has a magical way with the camera.

Before the big film, we had a sneak preview of the new Batman movie, with a trailer which has been scratched and defaced and mucked about with by the Joker.  This was just so cool....

On the Raw Shark Texts

On the 30th April the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best SF novel published last year will be announced, at a ceremony held in tandem with the London Science Fiction Festival. 

This year's shortlist has attracted some controversy, since, as well as works by established masters like Ken McLeod and Richard Morgan, it includes a number of book which aren't obviously SF at all.  Some in the biz have argued that the judges have passed over some excellent candidates for the shortlist in favour of more 'literary' fare. (My own agent, John Jarrold, has argued this pithily, and with his usual authority - he's read every book on the shortlist, plus every single SF novel that he feels should have been on the shortlist.

I'm not so well read, so I'm attempting to educate myself by reading some of the novels on the shortlist that might otherwise have passed me by.  I have Sarah Hall's The Carullan Army on my shelf; and I've just finished reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, which I thought was delightful and funny and often very moving.

But is it SF?  Hall himself argues, very sweetly, that he's happy for it to be called SF, because it's not for him to tell the reader how to read it.  That's a devastatingly good and wise argument. 

Being a genre nerd, however, I love to have things more firmly pigeonholed than that.   Dammit, Steven, stop being so fair-minded!

And for my money, though I loved it, I don't think of Hall's book as an SF novel.  Because I didn't, ultimately, believe a word of it, and I don't think I was meant to.

And what I mean by saying this is that for me SF is a genre that demands total suspension of disbelief. However silly the story elements may be (dilithium crystals, Barsoom, Stargazer aliens, variant 13s, um, flame beasts, etc) we, the SF readers, like to believe it might all be true.  We will forgive occasional science cheats, and plot cheats, and even moments of utter absurdity; we'll forgive almost anything really, if we're enjoying the read. But when I journey into outer space, or inner space, I want to believe I'm really going there...

Hall's novel, however, is much more postmodern than that.  It's a book which requires to believe its story; and also to disbelieve it.  It's overtly metatextual, as some literary theorists might say.  And it's very much in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges - the writer of wonderful metaphysical conceits - and Paul Auster, the postmodern crime novelists who is referenced several times, rather than the tradition of Heinlein and Asimov and Reynolds and Grimwood and Macleod and Hamilton and Macdonald, who all wrote about or write about worlds they believe in.

To explain what I mean, I have to talk about the plot of Hall's book so

BEWARE!!! PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!

The Raw Shark Texts is about a man called Eric Sanderson who wakes up and doesn't know who he is.  A psychologist explains he is suffering from amnesia, induced by pscyhic trauma after the tragic death of his girlfriend Clio. But then Eric gets a note from his former self (the First Eric Sanderson) explaining that he, Eric Two, is being stalked by an actual monster called a Ludovician Shark, which is a creature that exists in the n-dimensional realm of ideas. 

There's some science to justify this - on the basis that life is a hardy little bugger and can evolve in the strangest of places. So why can't it evolve in the realm of ideas????  As Eric 1 explains to his later self:

     The animal hunting you is a Ludovican. It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause  and effect....The Ludovician is a predator, a shark. It feeds on   human memories and the instrinsic sense of self.

 This is superb; but for me, it's also knowing, defiantly metaphorical, and not intended to be believed literally. And I like that aspect of the storytelling.  The hero travels through a tunnel made of books - well which of us hasn't, metaphorically?  And he is almost killed by a conceptual fish - as his personality is unpicked because of his deep grief at the tragic death of the woman he loved.  And again, the postmodern strings are showing, as the novel reveals itself to be 'really' about something other than what it seems to be about.

But, by contrast, a similiar but totally science fictional piece would be Eric Brown's masterful short story The Time-Lapsed Man.  I won't plot-spoil this one, but I would just say that, though the premise is utterly absurd, just as absurd as the notion of the Ludovician shark, the writer made me believe it was true for the duration of my reading.  And of course, because I believe the story is true, I care.

Having said all this, I have to quickly add that if anyone wants to argue that Hall's book genuinely is science fiction, I'd be happy to give that view credence, and shelf-room, and indeed to argue the point over a pint or two, since that's always a good way of enlivening a pint or two.  It's not for me to be the Ferryman on the River Charon, deciding who and who shouldn't get across. 

But my only anxiety is that any lover of SF who reads this book expecting to have a science fictional experience might be disappointed.  It doesn't, in my view, deliver as SF; but it does deliver as what it is, a tour de force piece of lunatic idea-spinning which is full of gags and has some of the most tender love scenes I've read in a long time.

I guess the judges' aim is to challenge our preconceptions about what is and isn't modern SF. I argued in another blog that Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods isn't, in fact, an SF novel, though some claim it is.  (On this score, I'm as one with Winterson, who witheringly refuses the SF label.)

But my point really is to passionately stress and affirm the common purpose of pretty much all the SF that I've ever enjoyed - namely, an underlying respect for rationality and of the ideas and sense of wonder which underly the scientific enterprise.

I may be wrong, however, in my opinions on this book. I may in fact be destined to become the next victim of a conceptual shark that swallows up all my ideas and memories and leaves me gibbering, and indeed, in much the state I was in on the morning after the last Eastercon.

But I would strongly recommend The Raw Shark Texts to anyone who wants a rollercoaster ride through the realm of ideas.  (And I hope my plot spoilers don't give away too much - it's no more than is explained on the back cover.)