The Weird – Town of Cats – Hagiwara Sakutarō

‘The Town of Cats’ (1935) is Hagiwara Sakutarō’s only short story. One is caught between wishing he’d written others and suspecting that he would never again have achieved such a delicate balance of oddity and normality as he does here. Sakutorō was apparently interested in ‘madness, hallucinations, obsession, and abnormal psychology’; his narrator is similarly interested in such things and discusses them in what one might call a rational and logical way, while also candidly admitting to having experimented with drugs such as morphine and cocaine.

Image by Annabelle Lee

Yet again we are in the company of a narrator who might be considered to be unreliable, indeed more so because of the precise way in which he lays out his argument, reiterates it through example, and then restates it in the concluding section of the story, almost like a careful drunk. Or perhaps he is indeed correct. At the same time, one might argue that his reiteration of his thesis is nothing more than a digression; his prose rambles in the same way as his walks. He is lost in his own argument and the reader is lost with him.

Then again, maybe not, for whatever else is going on, this tale is carefully structured. Its repetition is calculated, there is a sense of movement, from then to the ‘now’ of the reader, there is change and transformation. There is also a shifting, a darkening of mood, palpable but unexplained. The fact is that for all the narrator seems to be open and candid about his theory and his story, and to pass off his change of heart as ennui, there is a sense of something disturbing lurking underneath: apprehension, anxiety, fear even, which is never quite articulated. It’s particularly noticeable at the beginning of the story as he describes the transformation of his views.

‘The quality that incites the desire for travel has gradually disappeared from my fantasies’ (233), says the narrator. ‘Just to picture a train, steamboat, or town in an unfamiliar foreign land was enough to make my heart dance’ (233), he goes on. One might take this as the view of someone unable to travel, someone longing to get away, to be on the move somewhere, anywhere. ‘But experience has taught me that travel presents nothing more than “identical objects moving in identical spaces”’ (233), suggesting that disillusion has set in somewhere along the way.

Now the thought of travel projects onto my weary heart an infinitely tedious landscape like that of a paulownia tree growing in a vacant lot, and I feel a dull loathing for human life in which this sameness repeats itself everywhere. Travel no longer holds any interest or romance for me. (233)

Given the narrator’s revelation that he used morphine and cocaine to undertake ‘wondrous voyages in my own personal way’ (233), one might guess that having abandoned such a practice he is disappointed with a more conventional approach to life. Who would not be if obliged to abandon the opportunity to ‘adroitly navigate the borderline between dream and reality to play in an uninhibited world of my own making’ (233). Yet, as the narrator also notes, ‘Even after returning to normal, I would cling to those visions and relive them again and again in the world of reality’ (234).

Given this is all cast in the past tense, something seems to have gone wrong somewhere but what? We might attribute this to the narrator’s next revelation, that drug use took a toll on his health, implying that he has given it up, but why can he no longer relive the visions? Have ‘normal’ and ‘reality’ changed as a result of this? If that is the implication, ‘normal’ and ‘reality’ are clearly as fragile as his narcotic experiences rather than a place to which he can return safely. Obviously, they don’t match up to landscapes ‘filled with brilliant primary hues’ or to seas and skies that were ‘always as clear and blue as glass’ (234), but one is still left with the sense of something else being involved, though whatever it is, the narrator is not saying. At least, not directly.

Having decided to take better care of himself, we learn that the narrator has begun to take daily walks. ‘Normally, I do not deviate from my established path’ contrasts sharply with ‘the trips frequently took me wandering’ (234) and one begins to sense the narrator’s self-imposed constraints, and perhaps too his perception of how the quotidien world works. In turn, it is not difficult to understand the allure of those ‘wondrous voyages’.

Travel and drugs are so closely bound here, when the narrator announces that he has found ‘a new way to satisfy my eccentric wanderlust’ (234), one wonders for a moment if he hasn’t happened on a new drug. Instead, ‘ for some reason that day, I slipped into an unfamiliar alleyway, and going the wrong way, I lost all sense of direction’ (234). It turns out that the narrator has form, so to speak. He claims to have no innate sense of direction though one wonder how many people do. Rather, he is not very good at remembering how to get anywhere which is, I think, slightly different, and very good at getting himself accidentally turned about, in the most literal sense. Coming at familiar things from a different direction, he appears to be incapable of recognising them.

It’s how he chooses to interpret this experience that is significant.

I felt as if I was dreaming. I wondered if perhaps what I was seeing was not a real town but a reflection or silhouette of a town projected on a screen. Then, just as suddenly, my memory and common sense returned. Examining my surroundings, I realized I was seeing an ordinary, familiar block on my neighbourhood. (234) (my italics)

So how does the mechanism work? Is it simply that he hasn’t been paying attention so without the usual visual cues and anchors a familiar place becomes strange; or does his mind actually move into a different state? The narrator’s matter-of-fact use of language leaves the reader uncertain although he has a theory to offer:

The mysterious neighbourhood that I had seen a moment before existed in some universe of opposite space where the compass was reversed. (235)

This, it turns out, is an occult place more easily accessed by those with no sense of direction than those who know where they’re going. One has the impression that the narrator has been trying to lose himself for as long as he can remember, one way or another, yet is somehow secure in the knowledge that to become lost is to become found, not by going home exactly but by reaching these places that are more aesthetically satisfying. If we go back to the beginning of the story his distinction between the excitement of travel and his latter disappointment begins to take on a more sinister edge.

Yet that unnerving rationality persists. The narrator challenges the reader to either accept his story as real or regard it as the hallucination of a morphine addict. The options remain open and he continues to push his suspect reliability into the reader’s face.

The second section of the story reiterates the pattern of the first, as the author lays out his thesis, justifying and questioning it. Instead of being in a familiar neighbourhood, he is now in a spa town in the Hokuetsu region. The topography is carefully described, including the transport infrastructure between the different towns. The narrator is still pursuing his walking regime, now in the mountains. He has heard strange stories about some of the towns, including one whose inhabitants are possessed by dog-spirits, another whose inhabitants are possessed by cats. The mechanism behind this is carefully rationalised by the narrator, who describes them as superstitions but represents himself as having an interest in such anthropological matters, and thus he theorises for the reader’s benefit.

And while pondering all this, the narrator has got himself lost again. Eventually, he finds his way to a ‘beautiful, prosperous town’, feeling as if he were ‘seeing an image projected by a magic lantern onto a screen in front of me’, a familiar notion so we know that the narrator has entered into his ‘turned about’ state, or as he puts it, ‘I crossed over into the projection and became a part of the mysterious town itself’ (237). Again, there is the sense of aesthetic perfection already noted, but here very much heightened both in terms of the detail of the place and the narrator’s response to it. Is it commensurate with his other experiences or is it perhaps, as I begin to suspect, that this time we may not be dealing with an act of imagination but something different, an actual transfer to another place.

The narrator is struck by the absence of noise: ‘A refined, hushed silence reigned over the place, casting a pall that was as profound as a deep sleep’ (238). He decides that this is an artificial thing, the town’s atmosphere being created by the ‘subtle attentions of its inhabitants’ (238), reinforcing the idea of the town as a projection, the output of the inhabitants’ minds, the product of a continuous process of adjustment, perhaps even a collective act of imagination. ‘The whole town was a perilously fragile structure of thin crystal’ (238), and crystal, of course, can break.

The narrator envisages the effort to maintain the town’s harmony being stretched beyond endurance, until everything collapses, and then the cats appear.

This wasn’t the human world! Was there nothing in this world but cats? What on earth had happened? Was this world real? Something had to be wrong with me. Either I was seeing an illusion or I had gone mad! My senses had lost their balance. The universe was collapsing around me. (239)

And suddenly the town has changed. ‘An entirely separate world had appeared, almost as if a playing card had been turned over to reveal its other side. It was nothing but an ordinary, commonplace country town’ (239), and in fact the place the narrator had been heading to all along; needless to say, he had entered the town from a different angle and had got himself turned around. It’s all very straightforward except that in the very next sentence the narrator is telling us that he was also ‘looking at a separate universe of another dimension, at the back side of the landscape’ (239).

Whatever it is the narrator experienced it is the presence of the cats that seems to disturb him most, that prompt him to ‘relive the terror of that day just by thinking about it’, at variance with those early visions of drug-induced journeys to which he would cling afterwards. It is, though, difficult to determine quite what it is about the cats that so disturbs the narrator other, perhaps, than that they signal the fact that he is not in control of his world in the way he thought he was. Or that worlds might intersect in ways he had not considered. How, for example, might the cats understand his presence in their world? Do they suppose they have imagined him? For that matter, how can we assert that the narrator is wrong in claiming to have found this place? True, we have only his word for it, but then again, we do have his word for it; just because no one else has yet seen it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

This is a clever, subtle story that resists being taken apart and ‘explained’ even as it seems to invite the reader to do just that, which is perhaps why I like it so much. It teases me, the critic, encouraging me to write about it but at the same time gently suggesting that I might not have the authority I think I have, because how can I be sure. It is a challenge, to be sure, to write about this story. Its weirdness is both overt and occult; the challenge comes in trying to tease out one from the other, acknowledging the narrator’s smokescreen storytelling techniques while looking beyond them to see what he might really be talking about. It is so very satisfactory in the way it dissatisfies the reader while loading her down with possibility.

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As the VanderMeers note in their introduction to the story, it presages the work of Haruki Murakami. In fact, while I was searching for a suitable image to accompany this story, I came across Murikami’s own story entitled ‘Town of Cats’, which forms a section of his most recent novel, IQ84. There is a bonus interview with Murikami in the New Yorker which suggests he has no idea where he got the story from. Oddly enough, Murikami’s story reminds me of Bruno Schluz’s ‘Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass’, which I’ll be writing about shortly.

I also came across a series of striking images by Annabelle Lee, inspired by the Murikami version of ‘Town of Cats’, one of which appears at the head of this article. However, I would urge you to take a look at all the drawings in her project as they are outstanding.

The Weird – Genius Loci – Clark Ashton Smith

After a break of a couple of months, just to get some perspective again, it’s back to blogging the stories in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird. We now turn to Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘Genius Loci’.

by Mark Berthelmy

In classical times, the genius loci was the protective spirit of a place; more recently, the term has come to mean the atmosphere of a particular place – ‘the body of associations connected with, or inspirations that may be derived from it’, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. There is, I think, an ancillary assumption to this, that the body of associations will be in some way pleasant or spiritually elevating. Clark Ashton Smith, it seems, has other ideas.

 

‘It will all sound so simple and ordinary’, says Amberville as he describes the place he has found to the narrator (223). He goes on to describe a ‘dreary little stream’, ‘boggy ground’, a ‘stagnant pool’, all very enticing. The trees are worse: ‘several sickly-looking alders seem to fling themselves backward, as if unwilling to approach it. A dead willow leans above the pool, tangling its wan, skeleton-like reflection with the green scum that mottles the water’ (223). This is a place so unhealthy that even the flora and fauna don’t actually want to engage with it. Amberville insists the spot is evil: ‘it is unholy in a way that I simply can’t describe’ (223), and yet he also feels compelled to draw the place, although it is not the kind of landscape he usually portrays.

 

Murray, the narrator, when he looks at the sketches, echoes Amberville’s suggestion that it is ‘simple and ordinary’, in very similar terms. The willow leans at a ‘prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters’ (224). And ‘the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots in eternal effort’ (224). Dreariness and gloominess also pervade in the narrator’s description yet he echoes Amberville’s contention that this was ordinary enough.

 

Murray goes on to claim that he can see ‘a profound horror that lurked in these simple elements and was expressed by them as if by the balefully contoured features of some demoniac face’ (224). He concludes that ‘The evil conveyed was something wholly outside of humanity – more ancient than man’ (224). Murray describe the meadow as having the air of a vampire, perhaps appropriately given he seems to be a writer of weird stories; Amberville seems more circumspect in giving a shape to whatever it is, eventually calling the presence a ‘genius loci’ while remaining uncertain as to what it actually looks like.

 

Something odd is going on here. Amberville, the visual artist, can’t give the thing a shape, although he has experienced its effects at first hand, while Murray piles on the words and determines the nature of the presence without ever having visited the place. One might ascribe this to the power of Amberville’s sketches, of course, but I find myself unpersuaded by this argument, for a number of reasons.

 

Murray, as a first-person narrator, is almost by definition untrustworthy, insofar as the reader has no way of testing his responses against those of anyone else, because Murray is also the story’s mediator. But we have a narrator, a writer, who informs us that ‘I […] was wont to apply myself assiduously to an antique Remington typewriter’ (223), and who can talk about the ‘pictorial potentialities of landscape’. These are ugly phrases, suggesting that the narrator’s writing skills are less than they might be. He’s reaching for a certain effect, naturally, but always overdoing it. His response, without even having been to the haunted meadow, seems to be overheated. One begins to have a sense of a man who is performing the role of a writer rather than someone who genuinely is. It is perhaps revealing that he says ‘I had purchased an uncultivated ranch and had retired for the privacy so essential to prolonged literary effort’ (223). He is clearly keen to present himself as a Writer.

 

Given all this, just how reliable is his artistic judgement generally? Murray  describes Amberville as ‘one of the foremost landscape painters of his generation’, and notes that since his visit began, he ‘had already found the theme of more than one lovely painting’. From Murray, one has the sense that Amberville’s work, with its ‘grace and vigor’, represents landscape in a particular way, one that is not threatening, certainly not ‘outré’. A later reference to the artist Sorolla and to Amberville’s predilection for ‘scenic brilliance and gayety [sic]’ seem to confirm this sense of Amberville as being talented but maybe a little bourgeois in his tastes?

 

There is another hint of this later when Murray, concerned for the changes in his friend brought about by his work in the meadow, invites Amberville’s fiancée, Avis Olcott, to stay. ‘She was young, lissome, ultra-feminine, and was altogether devoted to Amberville. In fact, I think she was a little in awe of him’ (229). The implication is that theirs is a very traditional relationship of dominance and submission, not the bohemian equality that Murray seems to wish for: ‘[a] stronger woman might have saved him’ (229).

 

It is difficult to avoid the impression that Murray is casting this story in a very particular light, indeed that he is making it into one of his own stories and simultaneously criticising those aspects of the story that don’t comply with his vision of how it ought to be; neither Avis nor Amberville seem to do what is expected of them in fictional terms, and one senses a … disappointment in Murray that the story isn’t unfolding as it should. Which in turn suggests that Murray is something of a traditionalist.

 

What of Murray himself? His concern for his friend is balanced by his own curious lack of engagement. When Amberville returns from his earliest excursions and describes his experience, Murray says ‘I’ll have to come and look at the place myself, before long. It should really be more in my line than yours. There ought to be a weird story in it somewhere, if it lives up to your drawings and description’ (225), yet delays visiting the place, even though he can see his friend has been transformed by it. When he finally goes there, his own experiences seem to be a mixture of the genuinely hair-raising and the descriptively overblown.

 

First, the meadow seems to be merely ‘dreary and dismal’, as noted previously. Only after seeing Amberville’s painting, ‘an almost photographic rendering’ (227) does he begin to see again the evil that Amberville has referred to. There is the same sense of layering of experience that Murray described when he looked at the original sketches, as though he’s seeing through the surface of the place, like seeing through the scum on the pond. More than that, he sees something else; ‘Just beyond the focus of my vision, a figure seemed to stand in a furtive attitude, as if watching us both. I whirled about – and there was no one’ (227). Murray’s action is then immediately repeated by Amberville, who has caught sight of Murray and thought that he was the old man he had seen there before, previously identified as Chapman, the former owner of the place, dead in peculiar circumstances.

 

Indeed, the whole story, once one looks at it, is about forms of doubling, and immediately after this layering of sightings it happens again, when Murray decides that Amberville and the meadow are somehow in rapport with one another. ‘In a flash of horrible definitude, I saw the place as an actual vampire, and Amberville as its willing victim’ (228), which would be more of a revelation if Murray hadn’t already identified the place as having an air of the vampiric from Amberville’s sketches. Before he flees, Murray thinks he sees an aura about the place ‘reaching toward Amberville like ghostly arms’ (228). It may have been an illusion, he says, and in fact I suspect it is an illusion insofar as we can distinguish between what Murray actually experiences – that glimpse of a figure – and the literary embellishment of the ghostly arms of mist.

 

Murray deals with the problem by writing to Amberville’s fiancée and then deciding not to visit the meadow again for himself. His reasons for distancing himself are unclear. Possibly it is easier for him not to confront the oddity of an actual haunting as opposed to the tidiness of a fictional haunting. It is noticeable that Murray constantly resorts to the conventional image to describe what is going on while denying the reality of what is happening. ‘How it would end, I could not imagine’(230). One finds this hard to believe. Is Murray really saying that he, the writer, cannot honestly see what will happen? Perhaps not if he is expecting some sort of rescue to come from without, and his reaction to Avis suggests that this is what he is hoping for, again enabling him to escape responsibility.

 

It’s notable, for example, that he is only finally galvanised into action when Amberville and Avis go missing. At the same time, it is notable that he does not attempt to imagine what might have happened to them. When he finds the bodies, there is a moment when clarity finally asserts itself in his prose, with the simple statement: ‘It seemed that there had been a struggle; but both were quiet now, and had yielded supinely to their doom’ (231). Only that last word takes us back to Murray’s fictional world, and subsequent paragraphs lead us more deeply into his imaginings, with the appearance of the ghostly faces of Avis, Amberville and Chapman.

 

*Slowly, inexpressibly, they merged into one, becoming an androgynous face, neither young nor old, that melted finally into the lengthening phantom boughs of the willow – the hands of the arboreal death, that were reaching out to enfold me. Then, unable to bear the spectacle any longer, I started to run. (231)

 

What are we to believe? This much is certain; there is something strange about the meadow, something which exerts an influence over those who spend a significant amount of time in the area. Its nature is unclear, as is its purpose. It is inexplicable. None of its victims – Amberville, Avis and Chapman – was able to explain what they experienced. Amberville perhaps came closest with his paintings and sketches. Murray, though, is aware of its presence and still alive. However, while he may be eager to represent himself as being threatened, one wonders whether Murray is truly so. He seems to be too embroiled in the business of constructing a weird tale to address the actual weirdness of Chapman’s meadow. And that in itself is weird.

 

Clarke Award 2012 – the winner

Always trust your first instinct should be my motto as it turns out that this year I did in fact call the winner. 


Congratulations to Jane Rogers on winning the 2012 Arthur C Clarke Award for her novel, The Testament of Jessie Lamb.


Commiserations to the other shortlisted authors. 

The Shortlist Project

Introduction

Regular readers have probably already guessed that my recent flurry of posts on Paper Knife had a purpose behind it. In the last fortnight I’ve posted reviews of all the books on the Clarke Award and BSFA Novel shortlists and a handful of others which have been connected with the Clarke. The Ings and McLeod were mentioned by Christopher Priest in his blog post as having been overlooked, along with the Tidhar and the Roberts, both of which were shortlisted for the BSFA Novel Award. The Oyeyemi and the Hurley were mentioned at the Not the Clarke Award panel at Eastercon this year, along with the Roberts and the Priest, as novels panellists would have liked to have seen on the Clarke Award shortlist.

Like many others I raised an eyebrow when I first saw the 2012 Clarke Award shortlist. The inclusion of the Stross and Miéville didn’t really come as a surprise; both writers have been shortlisted before and Miéville has of course won three times already, although Stross never has. However, I had not expected to see either Tepper or Bear shortlisted (although both of them have also been previously shortlisted a number of times), judging from what I had read about their novels. And while it had been clear from the Booker coverage that the Rogers might be of interest to a genre readership I’d not had a sense that it was Clarke material. Meanwhile, the Magary had not even crossed my radar before it was shortlisted. But my curiosity was piqued as much by the omissions as the inclusions, Roberts, Tidhar and Priest being the most immediately notable by their absence. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before people were joking that the BSFA Novel Award shortlist was more like the Clarke Award than the Clarke shortlist. This, and indeed my own comment about ‘Clarke material’, raises an interesting point I’ll come back to a little later.

However, when the shortlist appeared I couldn’t venture an informed opinion as, unlike last year, I’d not yet read any of the shortlisted books. As it was, I’d been caught on the hop in 2011 by predicting that Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House would win when the award went to Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City. I’d been surprised because, much as I’d liked its premise and its energy, I felt Zoo City had structural problems that couldn’t simply be ignored. Nonetheless, Zoo City was clearly a popular win, hailed for its freshness and invention, which made me wonder if my personal definition of sf was just getting a bit old and tired, and whether I set too much store by wanting to see good ideas and literary quality.

Nonetheless, as I said at the time, and it is worth reiterating, it is always a bad idea to try to second-guess the Clarke judges because, given they write their own collective definition of sf and their deliberations are always (and properly) sub rosa, who among us has any idea of what they’re thinking? Nonetheless, looking at this year’s somewhat unexpected shortlist, particularly in the light of Chris Priest’s response to it and the furore following that, I felt I now really had to make an effort to read the shortlist.

In particular, I wanted to see if there were obvious themes and interests emerging which might offer some clues to the jury’s operational definition of sf for this year and give some sense of why this particular shortlist had come into being. Any conclusions I reach will of course be entirely speculative, based purely on my reading of the shortlist books and should not be seen as an attempt to presume to know what the judges actually intended.

Methodology

However, I didn’t just want to read the shortlist. I felt I needed some sort of ‘control group’ against which to measure it. For obvious reasons of time and expense I couldn’t just go through the entire list of submissions as the judges had done. Instead, given the comments already being made about it, the BSFA shortlist would provide a good comparison point. To those novels, I then added Priest’s recommended additional titles and the Not the Clarke Award panel suggestions to create some sort of broader context.

The order in which I published my commentaries may seem idiosyncratic but I didn’t want to simply read one shortlist, then another, then the satellite titles, because that seemed to set up an antagonism I was particularly keen to avoid. After trying various arrangements, reading and publishing the reviews alphabetically by the author’s first name seemed to achieve the most balanced spread between shortlists and addenda. I determined I would post one review a day in the run-up to the Clarke Award ceremony, finishing on 1st May with a round-up of my thoughts.

I chose not to explain what I was doing before I started publishing the reviews because a) I didn’t want to have that comparative discussion just yet, and b) the devil in me wanted to see if anyone would figure out what I was doing. If they did, they haven’t said so.

Commentary

What strikes me immediately about the Clarke shortlist is how conservative its view of science fiction seems to be, and how unadventurous it is. It is almost as though it hankers after the dear dead days of proper science fiction, with spaceships, aliens, alarming science, women in jeopardy, men coming up with all the solutions.

Bear’s generation starship story, Hull Zero Three, might have looked innovative fifty years ago, but in 2011 one somehow expects something more from a journey into space. Instead, it feels as though Bear is making a late play for a New Wave space story, evoking an hallucinatory atmosphere, the breakdown of shipboard society and the construction of strange new beings to accommodate new circumstances. It didn’t challenge our perception of science fiction so much as attempt to re-establish old and familiar tropes.

One might say the same of Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb which, as I noted in my review, seems to have certain affinities with John Wyndham’s domestic catastrophes. I was reminded most strongly of Day of the Triffids, not least because of the way that young men and women, faced with the realisation that Maternal Death Syndrome, which causes women to die in pregnancy, means the end of humanity, consider a range of possibilities for countering this. This seemed to resonate with Bill Masen’s encounters with different groups all trying to rebuild the world. Other commentators have also noted a connection with Trouble with Lichen, which focuses on the effects of increased longevity, but also on Diana Brackley’s perception that she needs to forge alliances with women in order to ensure that everyone has access to the anti-ageing drug. The empowerment and disenfranchisement of women is right at the heart of The Testament of Jessie Lamb, and indeed since I wrote my original piece on the Rogers it has further occurred to me that the advocates of the main solution to this rapid depopulation, the sacrificial Sleeping Beauties, who will willingly die in pregnancy to ensure the future of humanity, almost all come from an older generation, so there is another dynamic that needs to be more fully explored.

Stross’s Rule 34 and Magary’s The End Specialist are both very ‘contemporary’ in their presentation (incidentally reminding one at times of last year’s winner Zoo City) but once we step past the superficial glitz neither story seems to be particularly radical or innovative. Stross’s novel is little more than a conventional police procedural. Stross, I know, sees it more as a novel about future criminology than an actual police procedural, which may go some way towards explaining some very peculiar loose ends in the narrative. However, what he presumably regards as a feature – the at times crushingly tiresome detail of how they investigate crime in near-future Edinburgh – simply gets in the way of the storytelling, while the Big Idea (and it is actually a rather interesting Big Idea) is wheeled in rather too late in the affair and is literally a deus ex machina. I would argue too that the police procedural, the detective story, call it what you will, is a very conservative literary form, establishing as it does a series of clear dichotomies, between good and bad, right and wrong, problem and solution, and it is invariably driven by a need to find an explanation and re-establish equilibrium. Even a slightly doubtful ‘are you sure you’ve sorted it out’ ending nonetheless indicates that this is what, in the normal way of things might be expected.

Magary’s novel deals with the consequences of immortality, another topic that is hardly new to sf. While admiring the fluency with which he presents his narrative, through a mixture of blog posts, articles and reports (though this is hardly a radical approach these days), once one actually starts to look at the story being told, it is a rather darker version of a domestic catastrophe, with resources dwindling away as an increasing population of immortals places increasing pressure on natural and economic resources. It is perhaps interesting insofar as we see consequences but have no sense that anyone in authority is trying to deal with those consequences. Indeed, there is no sense of this world having ever been regulated by government. Suicide is the only solution for those suffering ennui, followed by state-sanctioned murder and bounty-hunting as the situation gets worse. However, Margary is working out an idea rather than telling a story; as such, the inevitability of the narrative’s ending becomes annoying. I don’t particularly object to his not offering hope. I do object, however, to the notion that this novel is doing something new and exciting. It is the work of someone attempting to write something slick and hip for a hip and slick young audience, sf-lite, if you like. As such it doesn’t do a bad job but it is by no means as innovative as its appearance on the Clarke shortlist might imply.

Miéville’s Embassytown is the kind of thing we have come to expect from Miéville, and pleasant though it is to read, there is little sense of it pushing any creative boundaries, for Miéville or for the genre. Again, it is actually a very traditional form of sf, with its far-future setting, and its frontier planet setting and sensibility. And it  is shaped by Miéville’s taste for insectoid creatures and the melding of the animate and inanimate. Miéville also tries to dig deeper into the philosophical issues surrounding the presence of humans on a planet that is not their own, and does it better than most. At the same time, is this really vintage Miéville? Probably not. On the other hand by comparison with several of the other books on the shortlist it is such a pleasure to read, its good points become unreasonably magnified. In fact, fighting one’s way past the halo effect, the plotting is remarkably uneven. A novel that starts out by pondering postcolonial issues and the philosophy of language is suddenly sidetracked into a novel about an admittedly perverse form of revolution before suddenly returning to its original concerns. And I found the ending a little weak.

And finally, there is Sheri S. Tepper’s The Waters Rising. If the other five novels between them present a conservative picture of sf as a genre, Tepper’s novel serves the twin roles of making the other five novels look so much better than they probably are while reinforcing that suspicion that so many non-sf readers have, that science fiction is utterly irrational and fanciful; in short, that it is rubbish. It’s poorly written, it’s poorly conceived, its characters are stereotyped, it contains some very worrying portrayals of women, particularly female children, as sexualised objects. I could go on and on. I honestly have no idea what it is doing on the shortlist of an award that is supposed to be honouring the best in science-fiction writing. The judges clearly find something in it that I do not, but even the inherent conservatism of the other choices cannot account for this. Possibly Tepper’s having been previously shortlisted contributed to her inclusion. One can only speculate but while I can make a case, admittedly thin at times, for the inclusion of the other candidates, I can find no explanation for this one.

On the whole, this shortlist suggests caution and a lack of adventurousness. Indeed, I’d go further and suggest that it perhaps exhibits a sense of nostalgia, a hankering for a safer, simpler time. Alternatively, and here I acknowledge comments Jonathan McCalmont and Paul Kincaid made in response to my commentary on Cyber Circus which set me thinking about this, it could be construed as an attempt to formulate a different history for science fiction, one which establishes, or even reinforces, the persistence of that older style into the present day. In doing so, however, this shortlist goes against what has become a well-established characteristic of the Clarke Award.

I indirectly raised this earlier in my reference to the Rogers’ not being ‘obvious Clarke material’. Over the years the Arthur C. Clarke Award has acquired a reputation for really pushing the boundaries when it comes to recognising well-written and innovative science fiction, wherever it is published, and almost perversely so at times, although I think in most instances hindsight demonstrates that the judges’ choice has opened out the discussion about what science fiction not only is but also can be. Certainly, it has prompted a very lively discussion about the artificiality of genre boundaries, which can only be a good thing in my view. If we look to the Clarke Award to open our eyes about science fiction what happens when the shortlist appears to suggest the genre is in retreat, or even in denial. We must inevitably query this, and that is what my reading project has turned out to be about.

As noted earlier, the BSFA Novel Award shortlist was widely seen as being in part the shortlist the Clarke Award might have been. Miéville’s novel appears in both lists, while the BSFA Novel shortlist also features Tidhar, Roberts and Priest. What particularly strikes me about Tidhar, Roberts and Priest is how all three novels challenge the traditional linear narrative model. In terms of narrative form, the most experimental of the Clarke novels is Margary’s, with its collating of blog posts, reports and so on, or possibly Stross’s with its sustained use of the multiple second-person narrative viewpoint but even so, neither of them eschew a linear model of storytelling. Really, between the six novels, the most adventurous literary device in play is the flashback, and that’s hardly innovative these days.

Unreliable narrators? It is notable that four out of six novels use a first-person narrator. Again, though, this is not radical any more, insofar as a first-person narrator is by definition unreliable, or at any rate an incomplete observer. If anything is odd, it is how hard the authors of these unreliable narrators work to make their storytellers trustworthy. As it turns out, Margary’s John Farrell is a walking documentation tool, the novel being compiled from his recordings, so unless the compiler is unreliable, there is little scope for misdirection. The shifting ‘you’ of Rule 34 is a fully immersive experience so if ‘you’ miss something … well, did you actually miss anything? Rogers’ novel is emphatically and explicitly a personal testament so we have to assume that Jessie Lamb is recording everything she can remember, and given the religious and legal overtones of ‘testament’, we are obliged to assume that at worst she may commit the sin of omission rather than concealment, and anyway, if she does, we have absolutely no way of knowing. Bear’s novel features a first-person narrator who veers between being a tabula rasa and having access to past memories, as well as a lot of information that is simply inaccessible for much of the story, but this is not an intentionally unreliable narrator so much as one with massive holes where a memory should be, relying heavily on his previous incarnations passing down written information. Only Miéville has a first-person narrator who might be considered to be genuinely unreliable, but it is not entirely clear  even at the end what Avice Benner Cho might be concealing. Tepper opts for a travelling third-person viewpoint narrative, which is probably just as well, given the state of the plot.

Let us turn instead to Priest’s The Islanders. It’s constructed as a gazetteer, a guide to the islands of the Dream Archipelago but as the reader quickly realises, it is a series of deconstructed narratives, dispersed by geography, held together by memory. The reader is obliged to piece together tiny fragments of information in order to construct the novel’s stories. The gazetteer’s deliberate fragmenting of geography through alphabetising becomes a metaphor for the elusive topography of the Dream Archipelago. Nothing fits together, and even if there was a map, it wouldn’t make sense. It is in the nature of a gazetteer to be a compiled artefact, written by anonymous authors, meaning that the narrative is stripped of many different reference points – time of composition is one, and the lack of a referent time frame is a marked characteristic. Put bluntly, this is a bloody difficult book to read but not only is it a fascinating exploration of the Dream Archipelago, a place Priest has already written about a number of times, it is performative in the way it shows us how we  put together a picture of the world. And isn’t science fiction all about understanding our own world?

Tidhar’s Osama also engages with this narrative uncertainty, though in a rather different way. It is in part an alternative history but even the nature of that alternate history is slippery, as the reader moves between worlds but also in and out of fictions. At its most simplistic level, I admire the way that the novel doesn’t start where you might suppose an alternative history would, with a conscious signalling of differences between worlds, nor even with a clear idea of which world we are talking about. Roberts also breaks down the fictional walls but by drawing attention to their artificiality and  by satirising them as well. One is reminded perhaps of Brecht’s plays, which deliberately draw attention to themselves as dramatic artefacts.

What all three novels have in common is a kind of playful acknowledgement of genre framework followed by a stepping over the fence and seeing how far they take genre ideas with them. Of the non-shortlisted novels I also read, Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox clearly exhibits similar traits. Oyeyemi takes a well-known folk tale, one which has already accreted a number of variants and thoroughly shakes it down by further retelling it but also exploring it from other fictional angles, stretching and bending it. The techniques are clearly related to those being employed by Priest, Tidhar and Roberts; only the subject matter clearly indicates that it is not science fiction. The Ings takes a different path, using scientific theory to provide deep underpinnings in Dead Water. It is difficult to get to grips with but it is a marvellous way of shaping a narrative. (Set this against something like Rebecca Goldstein’s excruciating 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, a novel about science but certainly not a science fiction novel).

All of the novels I’ve just discussed might be called difficult; certainly, they are the kind of novels I like to read with a set of post-it notes to hand, so I can tag the connections, but I enjoy reading novels that ask me to do this. Interestingly, it would seem that those members of the BSFA who nominated titles for the award feel the same way. I say ‘interestingly’, given the received wisdom that popular awards are not necessarily about literary quality but more about books and authors people happen to like, especially the latter. The Hugos serves a particular constituency, for example, one that is as much as anything driven by sentiment and personal liking. It reflects a very distinctive view of reading for pleasure, not one I personally recognise but one I can accept.

One might argue that the BSFA Awards are driven by a similar set of imperatives, and to some extent that might be true. However, it seems clear to me that we’re also dealing with a very adventurous group of readers, drawn from the BSFA and from the membership of this year’s Eastercon, and this is what they’re reading and enjoying.

Yes, Roberts and Priest are well-known writers whose work generally is much admired. Tidhar is an energetic promoter of other people’s writing as well as being a prolific writer. But one could equally point out that Charles Stross is a well-known and popular author not to mention being a prolific blogger, and that wasn’t enough to propel him onto the BSFA shortlist. Kim Lakin-Smith is of course well-known to BSFA members but while that might have  contributed in part to her being on the shortlist, it’s clear from ‘Black Sunday’ if not, in my view, Cyber Circus, that she can write, and that her place on the shortlist was earned.

What is clear from this, however, is that a novel’s ‘difficulty’ is no barrier to it being on the shortlist of a popular award. In which case, one wonders what the Tidhar, Roberts and Priest lack when it comes to being included on the Clarke Award shortlist. They are subtle and complex novels, as indeed is the Ings, and I’d argue that the best kind of science fiction is precisely this. Yet the Clarke Award shortlist seems to be sharply skewed towards a very superficial presentation of sf, novels that can be clearly identified, without much effort, as science fiction. The pay-off, however, is that they seem to be less satisfying to read.

Another thing I feel the Clarke award shortlist lacks this year is energy. It’s hard to quantify this property. Excitement, perhaps? Zoo City crackled with the stuff, so much so that I stayed up all night to finish it. Tidhar’s novel certainly possesses energy, as does the Oyeyemi, and also Kameron Hurley’s God’s War. God’s War was ineligible for the Clarke Award but a lot of people would, I know, like to have seen it there, and for all I think it is a deeply problematic novel, it was also a hard novel to put down. It didn’t invite the reader to stop and ponder in the same way that some books require but it was an intriguing read that set a lot of trains of thought going. Critically, I want to read the sequel.

One might argue that Stross’s novel possesses energy, particularly given Chris Priest’s now infamous comments about the ‘internet puppy’. I doubt I would have chosen to frame my comments quite as Priest did but I do know what he means. Stross’s novel is energetic, exhaustingly so, pointing out all the shiny stuff but while I want fiction to excite me and keep me up at night, I really don’t want it to beat me about the head with its inventiveness.

Let us look at Rule 34 compared to a novel Priest recommended, Ian R McLeod’s Wake Up and Dream. Its main character, as already noted, is a private investigator, Clarke Gable, so not only is this a detective novel, it’s an alternate history too. McLeod seems to me to do a decent job of setting up a believable alternative 1940s LA. The novel opens on the cusp of a point of divergence but it doesn’t dominate the novel by any means, so one is not admiring the author’s cleverness in his extrapolation. In the same way, McLeod carefully, unobtrusively lays out the science behind his story. The ‘feelies’ have in short order displaced the talkies as the must-have cinematic experience but what becomes clear as the story unfolds is that vested interests in feelie technology are already considering ways in which they might exploit the cinematic experience and transfer it into daily life, producing a nicely compliant population. We see, at the microcosmic scale, what it can achieve in a mental hospital. It is shocking, more so because McLeod presents it in a very understated way. Stross, as it happens, is on a not-dissimilar track, but with software that can identify those likely to commit crime; the problem here is that the software has attained self-awareness and is casting itself as a vigilante. In many respects they tackle the same subject but the McLeod is undoubtedly the more thoughtful piece, raising the same concerns as the Stross, but without leaving the reader beaten to a pulp and then tossed in a corner, crying surrender. Which then is the better novel?

It is part of the game, of course, to complain about books being missed off the shortlist. A number of people expressed surprise that Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys was left off. What about Colson Whitehead’s Zone One? Both, like the McLeod, and indeed the Oyeyemi, were submitted to the Clarke Award. What novels were missed? In fairness, it should be noted that the Award is as much subject to the vagaries of what is published in the UK in any given year as it is to the judges’ definition of sf, and also, crucially, to what publishers are willing to submit to the Award. Juries have in the past asked for books and the publishers have refused to send them. So, a title’s absence does not automatically mean that the judges overlooked it. On the other hand, this year’s submission list suggests that there was either not a lot of action beyond genre publishing, or that, putting aside recalcitrant mainstream publishers, the judges didn’t call in other texts. But again, we can never know.

Conclusion

Insofar as I can reach any conclusion, my feeling is that whatever the Clarke Award shortlist might indicate, there is still plenty of life in the genre. My reading through the BSFA Novel shortlist as well as the recommendations made by Priest and the Not the Clarke Award panel certainly suggests this is so. Other people’s ideal shortlists indicate that there is other material I should also be reading. The mystery, then, is why the Clarke Award shortlist doesn’t reflect this. It is not the celebration of science fiction in all its innovative glory that I would expect from the Clarke. Instead one is left with the sense of old and nervous tropes huddling anxiously round the campfire, feeling threatened, hoping for better times, and all the while blissfully unaware that just over the rise a vibrant literary existence awaits them.

And the winner is?

I have hummed and hawed about calling the result of the Clarke Award this year, in part because I don’t want to embarrass myself a second time, in part because I feel I’m not so much calling the best sf novel of the year as the least worst on the shortlist, and to me that is not what it should be about.

At the Not the Clarke Award panel at Eastercon, there was something of a tussle as to whether the Bear or the Tepper should be dropped first. So far as I am concerned, the Tepper goes first, as poor science fiction and as a poor novel. The Bear would go next because it’s so tired. After that, I’d drop the Magary because it is not really advancing the argument. It’s a jeu d’esprit by a clever young writer. If he does another sf novel, I’ll be keen to look at it, but he needs to dig deeper. The Stross is an amiable sort of book but tries too hard for what it is, which brings me to the Miéville and the Rogers. The Miéville is the safe choice of the two, given his position within the genre, but the novel also seems safe. Which leaves the Rogers. I am well aware that Rogers has written other novels with genre interest, and it is a well constructed novel. But what does it say about science fiction in 2012? That it is reaching into the past, revisiting old ideas, old tropes? Is that really how science fiction should present itself to the world?

Addendum 19:10 pm

Chatting with Ian Sales about this post on Twitter this morning, he pointed out that my discussion of the shortlisted books pointed towards Charles Stross's Rule 34 being most likely to win and not Jane Rogers' The Testament of Jessie Lamb. On reflection, I think he's right. I was, in the end, choosing the book I wanted to win rather than allowing the winner to emerge from the shortlist's own presentation of sf. So while I'd still prefer to see the Rogers win, or the Miéville at a pinch, I shall not be surprised if it is the Stross. But, as I have said several times, second-guessing the judges is never a wise move.

Books read

Adam Roberts – By Light Alone

Charles Stross – Rule 34

China Miéville – Embassytown

Christopher Priest – The Islanders

Drew Magary – The End Specialist

Greg Bear – Hull Zero Three

Helen Oyeyemi – Mr Fox

Ian R McLeod – Wake up and Dream

Jane Rogers – The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Kameron Hurley – God’s War

Kim Lakin-Smith – Cyber Circus

Lavie Tidhar – Osama

Sheri S Tepper – The Waters Rising

Simon Ings – Dead Water

Addendum 1st April 2013

Two books mentioned in discussions last year but not included in the original project were

Colson Whitehead – Zone One
Naomi Wood – The Godless Boys

I read both over this Easter weekend and am adding them now to bring the project to full closure.