Book Review: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

 A core theme worth exploring, obscured by lacklustre storytelling and the inability to trust the audience even one tiny bit

Before I get into the meat of this review, I want to talk a little about localisation of books, specifically for the US market. It's not a new topic - authors like Sascha Stronach and Emily Tesh have both publically discussed their experiences of this impacting their own works - but it is a persistent one, and one that absolutely plagues R. F. Kuang's new novel Katabasis.

The novel is set in a university in the UK - Cambridge, specifically - and the main character is a PhD student at the very same. And yet, within the first two paragraphs, I counted six errors in terminology/process for something in such a setting. US and UK academic terminology are bogglingly different, and so I'm used to ignoring the odd few in reading US published books set in non-US settings. It just comes with the territory. But as the first chapter of Katabasis went on, the sheer volume of them was kind of impressive. Nearly every bit of terminology that applies to the academic setting either of the UK or of Cambridge specifically was got wrong*. And it was this consistency that brings me to an assumption - that this is an editorial decision, rather than a set of authorial snafus, especially as I know Kuang has studied in the UK, and her previous academia-centred novel Babel is much, much better on the terminological accuracy front.

If it is editorial localisation... I then have to wonder why? Is there a belief that using non-US terminology will make the book inaccessible to its US market? If so... I would like to hope that's untrue. Coming from the not-US as I do, I know first hand how easily we as a set of reading cultures have adapted to US-specific references. Baffling and nonsensical** as they are, you learn to remember what a sophomore is, what "Greek" means in a university - sorry, college - context, and an array of other tidbits of cultural richness that don't exist elsewhere. Clearly, readers of all sorts are fully willing and capable of adapting to this kind of vocabulary shift (even leaving aside that we're SFF readers who pick up a whole new set of neologisms half the time we read a book). And yet, this kind of USification persists. I assume that publishers know what they're doing and want to make money, so I have to believe based on those priors that there is a benefit to doing all of this, but even so... it frustrates me to no end.

And you might say, what's a bit of terminology among friends? Why does it matter if the person in charge of her PhD is an advisor, not a supervisor, or that she's doing a dissertation instead of a thesis? On the face of it, I would agree, it is a kind of silliness to get all het up about it when the core concepts are still being transmitted and understood, and perhaps even that localising this way means those concepts are better understood by their majority market. But to this I would say - the terminology is just the tip of the iceberg. It's an easy thing to spot. But it signals deeper, more fundamental problems, all of which build to an overarching attitude issue - the need for curiosity and willingness to understand things on their own terms, to see the world as the varied and multiple thing it is, rather than needing it to be condensed into the narrowness of a single understanding.

It says: the world can only be understood through the lens of the USA, and the dominant culture there. Where I might be spotting it in terminology, who's to say there isn't more and deeper in how the work views that world? It certainly comes up in enough works that deal with race outside of the US, because there is a wide gulf in how that topic is tackled in different cultures. Or where works centralise a Christian view of the world. As a process, it stakes a claim to a default from which other things deviate, and that should be a pernicious and discomforting thing to read, no matter where you're from.

And, yes, very simply as someone from outside that default... it rankles. I'm being shown an uncanny valley version of a thing I know so very well, and that's just unpleasant. Not only is it signalling that the things I know about are only worth including when adapted to US understanding (as an aesthetic that can be tweaked, rather than a real place out in the world), but also just that I, as an audience member for this work, am less worthy of consideration than the market it's being adapted to.

Which is a lot to pile onto a bunch of terminological inaccuracies in one book, but it isn't just one book. This is part of a pattern. And when it's a book like this, which has been released with a heap of anticipation and fanfare, it matters all the more. R. F. Kuang's work is the sort of thing the publishers are expecting to rake in the cash, getting the big marketing push all in the run up to release, and so what we see here, I think, very clearly signals what publishing thinks matters, and what will make them money. If that's "make sure a US audience never has to think about things in terms other than the ones they already know"... god help us all.

With that all being said - and inseparable from the work, because the text is not purely a story an author has come up with, but the product of all the decisions that went into creating the final version I get into my hands and brain - let's get onto this as a story object.

Katabasis follows Alice Law, who is (at some point in the late eighties to early nineties***) midway through her PhD in Analytic Magick at the University of Cambridge, under the... direction... of Professor Jacob Grimes, one of the brightest and most controversial lights in the field. Grimes is notable for the excellence of his work, especially the work he did during WW2, but also for the high failure rate of his students, and the intensity of his expectations and approach with them. He is a tyrant, and known for it, but a name that can open doors and make or break careers. More importantly, however, is the fact that he is currently dead. In order to have him open those doors and make that career that Alice so desperately wants, she has to head down to Hell and try to fetch him back. Unfortunately, her fellow student (and academic rival) Peter has had exactly the same idea.

Together, they head into an Underworld not trodden by magicians in the recent past, armed with research of a swathe of texts going back through the academic highlights of centuries all the way past the Ancient Greeks into the Hittites and Egyptians. They must use their knowledge and intelligence to try to navigate the Hell they think they know to find Grimes and bring him back, no matter the cost to them.

Through those reminisces, and their interactions, Kuang attempts to critique the idea of the genius, as well as to undercut the allure of academia by highlighting the physical and mental costs suffered by those trying to enter it, using the magic of the story (which is powered by paradoxes) to highlight the flawed thinking and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance needed to struggle through everything academia, and Grimes as its avatar, throw at them. I say "attempts", because I'm not at all sure the book succeeds either at this, or, perhaps more so, in the necessary twin aim of telling a story that engages you as a narrative object.

To tackle the thematic issues first, there are two complementary issues at work in this book. The first - Kuang seems unable to have any thematic feature of the story that she does not explain in plain, straight up text. There is very little show, no imply, no suggest. Instead, everything is laid out in clear, unambiguous language for the reader. In small doses, this can be fine, and even welcome. It's a tactic that was there plentifully in her previous novel Babel (which I enjoyed). But where in Babel it tended to be relegated to footnotes, here she just whacks it straight into the middle of the text. That alone would shift how it feels, and certainly curtail the stalling effect on the flow of the prose, but where in Babel it overshadowed the earlier part of the text and then receded, here it is omnipresent and obstructively lingering.

Which links in nicely to the second issue - Kuang dwells. On everything. Features of geography, vignettes from a character's past, little nuggets of maths or logic or literature (we'll come back to this) that turn up all over and, indeed, on those thematic explanations. The cumulative effect is of a book that cannot, on any level, let the reader get it themself, whatever "it" might be, which ultimately builds into something patronising and condescending. I found myself muttering "just get on with it" no end of times, because I wasn't getting anything from the lingering. In another book, I might not be so impatient, but that straight up, uncomplicated language for every single thing being spelled out means there's no value in the dwelling; it exists to convey a point, and once the point is conveyed there's nothing of joy to extract. I don't revel in any of the descriptions. The vignettes don't give me a deeper sense of the person. They serve, each, their single purpose and overstay their welcome, continuing on and on through the whole, not particularly short, book.

It feels, on the whole, rather more like a lecture than a story, and a lecture pitched fairly low at that.

While predominantly the reviews of Katabasis and Babel I've seen have been glowing, there is one thread that occurs in common in the negative ones, and it is one I will pick up on too: it feels like Kuang simply does not trust the reader, at any point. We can talk about how justified this may or may not be (and invoke some of the clanger discussions people had about Babel in which they demonstrated that they absolutely did not get it), but I almost think that doesn't matter. This is dark academia - intended to be in the original sense, a book that looks at what academia is and highlights the darkness inherent in it by playing it up. Satire. Caricature. And the problem with both of those approaches to themes is that there will always be someone who misses it. That is just inherent in satire, because of the way it plays with ideas. So if you try to write to avoid that, to make your point so abundantly, simplistically clear that no one could possibly ever miss what you were trying to say... it stops being satirical, because the satire needs the playfulness between ideas, rather than overt explanation. The inability to trust in the reader has cost Kuang the very essence of what she's trying to do.

Which is also a problem that comes up in another of her approaches.

To step back slightly, in the run up to its publication, I saw a number of early readers (predominantly but not exclusively on TikTok) providing reading lists of books one might read to better understand Katabasis. Those lists unsurprisingly contained a fair chunk of Renaissance and Classical literature that touched on the Underworld and journeys there (your Dantes and your Virgils, your primers of Greek mythology), alongside a grab bag of philosophy from Socrates all the way up to the 20th century. I had the slightly unkind thought that some of these readers were doing a speed run recreation of the traditional "western canon". But for all my amusement at the approach, it did make me interested in what Kuang was going to be doing - if those early readers thought reading those texts would bring greater insights into Katabasis, I wondered, how thoughtfully, how interestingly is Kuang engaging with the ideas those texts present.

She's not. I could talk around it, and phrase it more nicely, but she's not. Oh she namedrops them, don't get me wrong. And she cherry picks concepts or motifs from a goodly number. But every single goddamn time, she will explain why that thing matters in plain prose immediately afterwards, to the extent that the text reference itself no longer really serves a purpose except to say "I have read this".

Now, obviously, most of these moments happen in character. It is Alice (and Peter) who are dropping names. Surely, these two characters are doing it because this is the shibboleth they both have, the language they both speak, as people immersed in the study of all these tracts of magic and philosophy and logic and mathematics? These are PhD students! But they don't sound like any PhD student I've ever met. The way they talk about the texts, even the ones that become a little more plot crucial at various points, is horribly surface level, if it even goes that far. They came across to me, more than anything, as insecure first year undergraduates dropping names as a desperate bid to peacock their intellect, and undercut every time one of them - or the narrative - makes everybody pause to check in with the class that they understood what was being discussed and were there any follow up questions?

The whole premise that Kuang is trying to attack rests on - as Alice says, in plain text a number of times - the idea that these students are running a horrible gauntlet for the promise of a prize at the end. That prize might be prestige, or it might be the time and funds to pursue the study that they so desperately crave (Alice falls more into this bucket, though not entirely). As PhD students, Alice and Peter have already run a fair chunk of that gauntlet. They are already immersed in this world, its languages and its pitfalls. They may be more familiar with the darker side of things (oh they are), but they are also the ones who wanted or believed or craved hard enough the allure of the thing at the end. The balance, and the crux of the story, is whether the cost is worth it for that final prize, and indeed whether the prize even exists, or is a rotten, poisoned facsimile of the shining apple it appears to be. But for that to work, you need to sell the dream that these two have bought into. We need to understand what it was they were striving for, why it sold itself to them. At the start of the story, and long before, they both thought the prize was good and worth it, and that they would, in this horrible process, become the knowledgeable, clever, incisive people who could get to it.

By failing to present them as that, by failing to create even a whiff of the alluring intellectual bubble that is the overt sheen of academia that hides the rot underneath that forms the "dark" half of the equation, Kuang fails at the first hurdle. By then cramming her book full of those references, by creating all these lists of names and works, all these famous texts from the traditional (and much critiqued) canon, she's falling into the trap of the very thing she's trying to undercut. Those creators with their reading lists show us that. Read these works, they say, and know the code to Kuang. Except there is nothing to decode. None of it is necessary. You could take out those names, the sassing of Heraclitus**** and the grumbling about Dante, and the text would be the same, because she doesn't effectively use them to craft this semblance of academic glamour in the first place. The thought that kept occurring to me as I read was that this was all surface, and no substance. There are facts and names and works, but none of the connecting tissue necessary to make them all feel valuable as a coherent unit, or to sell us on the very critical idea that Alice and Peter are really very very clever.

Before I seem to be suggesting that this is a failure on every possible point, a pause. There is, under all the not particularly good writing, the core of something... if not quite good then perhaps promising. There are moments when Alice is introspecting, when Alice is examining how much she wants academia and everything she's willing to give up to get it, that approach what dark academia can do well (even if the thing she aims for is never really sold to the reader). There's one moment around half way through, where she describes drunk, giddy, silly grad students being playful with their topic, and that feels right and true, like a moment that could have happened, and would have had the effect it does in the story... but the infrequency of those moments just underscores how flat and un-right the rest of the book feels.There's an essence. But it is no more than that wisp, ephemeral, and lost under the drudge of the story apparatus.

It suggests that, underneath it all, she does get it. Her Alice and that drive for academia. Or perhaps just a very particular sort of person (given how Alice does seem to rhyme quite well with some of the characters in Babel). But getting it isn't enough. You have to make a story out of it, something that works on a sentence by sentence level, on a plot and theme level, that coheres from the granular up to the macro, rather than trading on glamour and the wisps of ideas, and these brief moments of having looked at the world and caught something real as a butterfly in your fingers. It needs to be a story, and it's there it truly fails, far more than any inaccuracy or overexplanation.

Some of that is the plain and overburdened writing I've already mentioned. But there are other key flaws. Despite that core of something true, neither of her primary characters manage to feel interesting and worth following for the majority of the time with them. Alice is introspective, but when that introspection doesn't yield substantial character depth, it just begins to feel self-important rather than worthwhile. And, more to the point, she's just not all that interesting to spend time with. Peter, whom we only see through her eyes, begins as the caricature man from seemingly all of dark academia, who comes from privilege and is easily both attractive and intelligent, and who sails through the academic world with ease in contrast to the heroine's grit and struggle. There are glimmers that he might have something more to him, but those don't resolve until fairly late in the story, and then, because of the way the narrative turns out, his development just gets dropped for a whole section, and only resolved in part by the end. Their chemistry is nearly non-existant. Even their rivalry - which is absolutely critical to the resolution of the story - feels flat and empty.

And when it comes to plotting... it's not so much that Kuang loves a bit of foreshadowing as that she signals with effusive clarity what's coming, unfailingly. There's no tension and no twists. Another victim of that plain and over-explaining style. If it evokes anything, it might be horrible inevitability, but even that implies a management of the story direction that I think might be undeserved. It's just... a sequence of events, with heavy telegraphing of the following steps, such that you must, like her characters, trudge through the wide expanse of grey sand to get to where you want to go (the ending).

Which is... a let down. If you're going to skewer academia, I think you need to do a better job of it than "the power of love" with a bit of vengeance sprinkled on for spicy seasoning.

But maybe the magic system will save it? The translation magic was one of Babel's most interesting points, no? Well... not really. There's actually a lot of similarities in how magic is described in both books. Where for Babel there's a spark that comes in the frisson between words that can't easily be translated, that cognitive texture, in Katabasis, Kuang is playing with the idea of paradox, and has her magicians need to be able to hold conflicting ideas in their head at the same time to essentially put one over on physics. The two ideas aren't the same, but they feel like they approach similar theoretical ground from slightly different angles, and so some of the sheen is worn off the paradox magic. I'll admit, I also just have less time for being walked through formal logic problems than I do for discussions of linguistics. But there's just much less time given over to exploring it as a potentially fascinating idea than perhaps it could have merited. Instead, there's much more lingering on the practicalities, the chalk and the blood and research. Which makes sense in a Watsonian sense, but from a Doylist perspective makes for much drier reading. Once again, there's a possible core of something fascinating here being let down by the connective tissue of storytelling.

And that's my main takes on this book - I just think it's a story told badly, in a number of the key ways in which a story can be told. The prose styling is weak, the plotting unexciting, the tension nonexistent and the characters insufficient to carry the load left for them. All of which then fails to present in a coherent and persuasive way that thematic core. Yes, by the end, she has absolutely conveyed the "academia can really suck and many of the ways in which it sucks are baked into the structures of it". But she's conveyed it by just straight up telling us that. It may work as an idea being passed from author to reader, but it fails at every step on an intuitive level, because she cannot for a moment let it be free of that urge to explain. To tell this story in an emotively effective way, it needed freedom, and showing, and a trust that we could follow into the (frankly not particularly intellectually difficult) territory she was leading us to. A book does not need to be able to be for everyone perfectly and without friction. In removing the friction, she has removed what might have made it a story at all.

Between this, and the fact that none of it was ever allowed to be itself in the first place, but instead translated to be more easily consumable by a specific audience, what's left is something hollow and insubstantial. Both the author and the editorial direction needed to have faith that a reader could do even a tiny amount of work for the story that this was trying to be to work. They both needed to assume anything but the worst and least of their audience. Neither of them did. And so it all falls flat, perpetuating some of the very problems that it theoretically seeks to condemn, and telling the audience in distressingly plain language how little it thinks of them.

--

* The vast majority are indeed switching Cambridge/UK terms for US ones, but a small few are actually switching Cambridge specific ones for Oxford specific ones. Those... I struggle to account for, given the author did a year at both universities. Maybe Oxford just sticks harder in her memory.
**I say this tongue in cheek, but child me did take ages to internalise the freshman/sophomore/junior/senior thing.
*** This isn't specified, but can be dated via events referenced in the text. I suspect the events of the story are taking place in 1991, but it could go a year or two either way.
**** She is very briefly very dismissive of him, because like many of the pre-Socratic philosophers he presents some ideas which, now, look absolutely batshit. But what she fails to mention in her mockery of him is that he, and the other pre-Socratics, were working from first principles to try to understand the universe, and they paved the way for the more accessible later works like Aristotle. Shoulders of giants and all that. No Heraclitus sass here.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10

Reference: R. F. Kuang, Katabasis [HarperVoyager, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle (tr. Barbara Haveland)

 A lingering, thoughtful take on the human experience of living through a time loop

Published in 2024 in the US but 2025 in the UK, the first installation of Solvej Balle's series, translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland, is a strange old book. The protagonist, Tara Selter, is trapped in a time loop. She relives the 18th of November over and over again, recording in her notes - which appear to be the text we are reading - the events of the many iterations that only she remembers, over the course of a full year of experiential time.

It is not a particularly unusual day. Tara works - with her husband - in the antique books trade, and in the first iteration of the day, before anything unusual happens, she spends the day in Paris buying books, chatting to other buyers and sellers, and meeting up with an old friend and his new girlfriend. It is a good day, but not a strange one, with no precipitating incident or obvious inception point. We only read about this unextraordinary day after knowing about the premise - Tara is up front with her situation in her notes before looping back to what led to her predicament, because why wouldn't she be? These are her notes, and she already knows what she experienced. But even when looking back at the original 18th of November, with the benefit of hindsight, there is no foreshadowing, no suggestion of some malevolent force that has brought about this unthinkable intrusion of unreality into Tara's world.

And that is, in many ways, the core of the story I want to linger on. This is not a book about an easily solvable problem. It doesn't follow Tara as she pulls together the clues and the science to reverse this and make her way back to the normal flow of time. She tries - of course she tries - to figure out a pattern to the events. But she's no scientist, and there is no pattern she can see. Her attempts to understand the problem slowly turn into - very human - irrational pattern seeking and superstitious belief by the end of the volume. This is not a story about a grand adventure against the odds. Instead, it's a story about her experience of this inexplicable event.

On the face of it, that experience is a whole lot of not very much. It's the day to day of surviving. It's the progression of the decision of whether she tells her husband every day what's happened, and pulls him into trying to solve it or not. It's the slow decrease in available food in the house and nearby supermarket as she continues through her year. It's looking up at the vastness of the sky at night and feeling like your smallness in the world means that all this - whatever it is - can't be permanent in unsolvable. It's bird song and peeing in the garden and walking and just the very granular daily experience of her life in this situation. And, as such, it is full of her feelings and musings, more than anything else. No, however much you're thinking, more than that. This is a phenomenally insular, introspective book.

Luckily, Tara is an interesting character in whose mind to sit, and more critically, Balle and Haveland have a really good line in prose that makes those mundane moments sing. I've already mentioned the stars, but I think that scene really does epitomise what this book is truly good at. Tara has been feeling very concerned about her impact on the world around her, and about how utterly unsolvable this problem seems. She worries, as she realises her repeated trips to the supermarket are depleting the food stocks despite the recurrence of the day, that over time she is just going to deplete a wider and wider field of resources, becoming some awful monster - her word - that impacts the world around her without its knowledge. Then one night she goes out into the garden in the dark, wrapped in her duvet, and looks up at the night sky. In her musing on the vastness of it all, she finds some measure of peace in her insignificance, and a quiet belief that it can't all be irreparable, if she is so small.

As it happens, that feeling doesn't last, but that doesn't even really matter. Its significance is in the experience of it, the zooming into a small moment of time and sitting with a person and their very real feelings about an impossible thing they're living through.

I find this is an under-represented approach in SFF - at least in the mainstream modern SFF I mostly consume - to its detriment. We are rich in stories about solving problems, action and plot driven explorations of what if. But there have been a few stories I've come across recently that take those what ifs and those ideas, and ask instead - what would it really be like to live through them? It comes through in Julia Armfield's Private Rites, it is a strong aspect of Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time and it is deeply embedded here. The core idea at their heart may not be new - climate change, time travel and time loops are all established SFF tropes - but what makes them feel fresh is their approach from the experiential end. As someone very interested in people, and in seeing human experience at a granular level in fiction, this is so refreshing. Because it would be absolutely boggling to live through any of the events in any of those books. How would one cope? Asking that question is, to me, just as critical as asking about the science, the ideas, the solution to the puzzle, and if anything more so for its relative absence in the field.

The answer, here at least, is that Tara increasingly doesn't cope. She initially is pulled towards her husband, wanting to work with him to face this, but over the passage of her experiential time, finds the gap between them widening too far for her to cross day after day. She hides from him but stays close, at first, and then widens the gap between them as she feels their psychological gap widening. Fewer and fewer other people make themselves known in the narrative as the number of days of the time loop rack up, and as she pulls in tighter and tighter to herself, losing her sense of the normal rhythms of the world. And all of this, she notices and narrates; she is nothing if not a self-aware protagonist. But this too feels a reflex of the situation she finds herself in - she has no one to talk to about this but herself, in her notes, and so all of that ruminative approach is her act of trying to deal with the inexplicable bearing down on her.

There's a lot in here about isolation, and how that would affect a person, done with realism and sensitivity. It is impossible not to feel for her, not to pause in those cold, empty rooms, in those quiet days, and feel the very mundane but real melancholy of it. The great tragedy of this temporal incident is how much it cuts her off from the people closest to her, quite literally. For a day whose first iteration is full of warmth and friendship, it becomes incredibly stark and bleak.

This isolation also plays into something that feels a little underexplored in SF texts - at least in my experience - the realities of how much someone would or would not believe the fantastical when it happens to them in their life. Often, a character will accept easily because it is simply expedient to the story that they do so - if it's a plot and action driven narrative, you need to get the character past the blocker that impedes the narrative from happening. Or perhaps it's a story that wants to subvert that, and has a character refusing to believe what's in front of them while it continues to unfold. Tara is neither of these. She believes relatively easily, and based off the smallest of details. The first time the repetition unfolded, the thing that caught her attention was a fellow traveller at her Paris hotel dropping a croissant at breakfast in just precisely the same way as the previous day. Alone, it wasn't enough for her to fully understand and believe, but it sparked the thought that leads her to finally understanding. Does that seem too easy? Maybe... except when you are so embedded in the narration of her experience. It turns out, the speed of her acceptance isn't the thing, it's instead being able to fully grasp the little emotional pieces that go into it. Because the narrative is so concerned with her interiority, with narrating her thoughts in detail, it becomes very easy to see why she accepts it when she does, because we effectively experience that thought process with her.

By not just blurring but removing - as much as possible - the boundary between the reader and the character, Balle has created an incredibly moving and rich text that addresses key emotional questions about the experience of the impossible. If your calculus works that way, yes it comes at the cost of plot (and indeed, resolution - this is the first volume of a planned seven, the first sequel of which is already available in English) - this is not a story in which a great deal of significant events happen - but I believe that what it offers instead is not only worth that sacrifice, but sidesteps the idea of it as a sacrifice entirely. It is a wholly different text, with different concerns, approaching an SFnal problem from an unusual angle, and enriching the genre as a whole by so doing. If you are interested in human experience, in character, and in the quiet melancholy of a single person's thought, this is a book that will absolutely deliver that, along with a thoughtful approach to an SFnal problem. 

Balle sings an ode to the intimate quiet of personal reflection in the hardest of times, and to the pain of isolation. I would definitely encourage you to listen.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose and translation, interesting approach to the human aspect of the SFnal, granular and poignant interiority

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume [Faber & Faber, 2025]. Translated by Barbara Haveland. 

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

Another go around at cosy, witchy romance, but this one doesn't quite hit the mark.

Back in 2022, I read, enjoyed and reviewed Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. It was cosy and heartwarming, but with just enough depth to keep it the right side of the line of schmaltz, and with a well-developed cast of characters and some genuinely excellent chemistry between the main character and love interest, as well as a decent character arc for that MC outside of just her romance. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, but it was intensely enjoyable fluff and just the right sort of thing for a certain sort of mood.

Thus, when another book in a similar vein was announced, I was delighted enough to pre-order immediately. Publishing is publishing and delays are delays, but A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping came out this July, and I immediately devoured it seeking the same sort of comforting warmth I got from her previous novel.

And I did get that. And that might, slightly, be the problem.

While the details of the plots differ, the two books share a hell of a lot in common, especially in their characters, themes and vibes. Both feature love interests from the UK but not England who seem spiky and unwelcoming to the MC at first but upon further investigation have soft, mushy centres, and are devoted to one or several little girls who aren’t their daughter(s) but whom they care about fiercely nonetheless. They are also very bookish and knowledgeable, and very particular about their books. And hot. But it’s a romance novel so that goes without saying. They are also both slightly outsiders in some way. The main character is likewise slightly an outsider (because racial background, class, upbringing) and has her hangups, especially about her self-worth, but having persevered through many trials and loneliness has a core of determination. Magic sits in the hands of a small and conservative group whose beliefs/strictures the main character chafes against. A lot of people’s biological parents are absolutely terrible. Or dead. Or both. The plot predominantly takes place in a household that offers a supportive sanctuary away from the hardships imposed by the world and those conservative magic users, and which is, at some point, under threat from an external force. The main character ends up in a quasi-family, quasi-teacher role to a younger person with magic that she is not fully prepared for.

There’s probably more that I’m missing, but already, that feels like a pretty chunky overlap. For some of it, I’m tempted to assume it’s just how the author do - especially for the love interest. How many Guy Gavriel Kay novels have I read that contain That One Woman, after all? Many authors do it. And likewise, many authors have their pet themes and ideas that resolve again and again in their work. But this… feels just a little too close.

And even then, maybe I would have rolled with it, except… it’s just not quite as good at nearly all of it as The Very Secret Society is. It’s not terrible! But when you have something that occupies quite so much of so very similar a space, it’s really hard not to feel let down when the second one just doesn’t quite tick those boxes as well as the first. And especially so, when some of those boxes are the romance and the found family, the two key things that these books need to deliver on to be what they so clearly set out to be.

I’ll tackle the found family first. This is a book with a small cast of misfits who live together in the titular inn, because its magic draws them in as someone whom the inn and its owners can help in some way. Some of them, though they don’t get a tonne of attention, feel like they have a safely closed arc (if a relatively short one), like the cousin from Iceland whom the main character, Sera, coaches through a little moment of self-doubt and upset about his relationship with his family. He has his Moment. But there are two characters in that cast whose threads feel, to me, as though they are left hanging. The first is Nicholas, a slightly odd young man who works as a knight reenactor at a local medieval fair and who… certainly seems like he’s in love with the main character. And while he gets his Emotional MomentTM, it is handled mostly off-screen with a brief conversational acknowledgment, and the way he behaves towards the MC is never really addressed. It just sort of… sits there. More significant however is a character we meet right at the very start, whose “help” causes the initial conflict of the book in the prologue, and who continues to play a role of very mixed help and problem-causing right the way through to the end. Her name is Clemmie, and she’s trapped in the body of a fox. And she is a Problem.

Upon finishing the book, it seemed pretty clear to me what her arc was shaped to be, as a mischievous and self-serving person who comes to see the value and love available in the sanctuary of the inn. And some of the beats of it are there. Certainly the ending is trying to have that arc as if it’s been completed. But there aren’t enough moments throughout the story to fully support that arc and make her actions at the narrative climax feel plausible. It just felt a little flat. And there are moments throughout that have this quality - they conform to the overall shape of the narrative but just don’t quite feel fleshed out enough for it to work emotionally or intuitively.

Which brings me to Luke, the love interest, who has exactly the same problem, but far more prominently because well… he’s the love interest in a romance. He’s load-bearing.

One of the great things about The Very Secret Society (look, it’s too long of a title to type out every time and you know what I mean) is that the beginning and end points of the romance felt totally believable, and the middle spent a lot of words getting us from A to B, ramping the chemistry up over scene after scene and making it impossible not to buy. The two characters are very different from one another, and don’t really like each other, but I totally buy how they ended up there, because I have seen it happen. And that’s what we don’t get in A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping. We skip a lot of the necessary middle work, relying a little on flashback and implied previous interaction, and mostly on the reader knowing what shape of story this is and just being willing to go along with it. The ingredients are absolutely there, but they have, to stretch a metaphor, only been given the briefest of stirs. I’d have preferred she used the blender.

But if all that is missing, in a book almost exactly the length of her previous work, what’s there in its place?

Well, a couple of things. For a start, A Witch’s Guide is much more peopled than The Very Secret Society. We get to see more of an actual world - an England - in which this story is taking place, and that England is both a great strength and a minor weakness of Mandanna’s writing. On the one hand, she has a great skill for writing an obviously diverse world that absolutely feels like the world I know in reality - it is just casually peopled by a wide range of people, noticeably but unobtrusively because why would it be obtrusive? That’s just how the world is. And if this book had been set in a city, I would never have given it another thought. But it’s not. It’s set in the rural northwest, and includes some places I was quite familiar with growing up, and which, in my experience, were rather less diverse and wholly less accommodating of difference than, for instance, I have found London to be. And while this is a book that makes a point of the racial, ableist and classist tensions of modern England - they form, in many ways, the core of the narrative conflict - those tensions are predominantly centred Elsewhere, in the magical Guild that exists off in Northumberland, with only a brief nod to racism in the local area (a pub the MC no longer frequents). My experience of the northwest is hardly universal, and I cannot speak for every single village and magical B&B in the area, but in a book where a lot of the location and culture work feels so true, this felt oddly out of place to me.

There is also a brief moment when we are first introduced to characters in that stuffy, old-fashioned magical guild where their snobbery and Englishness has the dial turned to 11 and I likewise felt it just that little… off. But we get a snippet of one of them that hints to that parodic Englishness being a performance, just a little nod, and while that thread isn’t really developed from there, it sows enough discord into the characterisation that I took it much more in stride. This is something being done with purpose. Which makes me assume the other off note is purposeful too, even if I can’t quite grasp it in the moment.

Because the thing is, Sangu Mandanna is excellent at character writing. Even when other elements are awry, she crafts instantly graspable, distinctive characters. When I met each one in this book I instantly got who I was dealing with, and wanted to spend time with them. I wanted to see how they would develop and interact, and the plot was of somewhat secondary significance, a vector through which to reach more interesting character dynamics. That’s still true here, but it feels a little like she’s sacrificed full commitment to it in her core cast to give us a slightly wider supporting one, and it’s not a bargain I think, ultimately, is worthwhile. I’d have rather had a longer novel, or one with fewer characters, but where the dedication to that core cast gave me a fully satisfying set of scenes and interactions, and where the tension was palpable, the development really sold. But that’s not what we’ve quite got here. It’s most of the way there, but it’s missing the spark it really needs, and that I know she has because I’ve seen it before in her work, and the elements needed were all right here in this book, but they just never quite resolved.

It’s still a fun read. She’s still really good at a lot of the key elements needed for this kind of cosy, heartwarming fantasy romance. The message of the core plot is a schmaltzy one, but with its heart absolutely in the right place, and the two main characters feel well-crafted and suited to one another. It’s a romance I really want to believe. But it’s not quite there. Close - so very close - but just not quite at the mark. I would still recommend it as a fun read. I still had fun. But I can’t help but compare it to The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, because that, truly, did have the spark.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• A realistically peopled England
• Places that feel absolutely real
• Genuine warmth

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping, [Hodderscape, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: No Such Thing As Duty by Lara Elena Donnelly

A blend of the historical and the speculative to linger on the concept of duty in a grim and everchanging world.

The viewpoint character of Lara Elena Donnelly's novella No Such Thing As Duty is William Somerset Maugham. You might have heard of him. An English writer who penned plays, short stories and novels, I certainly had, but knew very little about him beyond that briefest of bios. Nor did I until after I had finished writing my first draft of this review - a deliberate choice, wanting to preserve the experience of the story as a narrative-object, to linger in its tension and ambiguities, without collapsing them down with the intrusion of reality until I had at least captured the rough sense of my feelings in the amber of prose.

Because there are two No Such Thing As Dutys - the first is the one read by someone who knows Maugham's bibliography, the facts of his life and the reality, date and manner of his death. This is a version one must expect of any book which features historical facts, in any form. There is always someone who knows everything, especially when the subject is a famous author. The second is my experience.

At the start of the book, we meet Maugham arriving in a Romania in which he is certain he will die (and glad of it rather than being a Scottish sanatorium). He is suffering from tuberculosis, dizzy with fever and coughing up blood, but seemingly determined to do his duty before succumbing to the inevitable. Already, a branching point of the two experiences of the story. For me, this is tension - does he die in Romania? I don't know. He seems wearily certain of it, a spectre that looms over the story, that intrudes every time he coughs up blood into a handkerchief or a scarf conveniently dark to hide the stain. Arriving as a spy in wartime, he reports in to receive such mission as he might be needed for, following on from his promising activities with less promising outcomes in other fronts of the conflict. But he soon realises his mission, such as it is, seems more of a sop, a bone thrown to make him feel useful rather than something vitally necessary.

And thus, the central conflict of the book. The duty he's doing - to King and Country, as he says - what kind of duty is it, if it is this pity mission? He leaves behind a daughter he cares about and a wife he'd rather avoid, coming to die far away, and if it's not for duty, then what is it for? Are they not also a duty?

But he's there, and the mission is in front of him, and he's dying, so do it he does. And through the course of it, he meets two other key figures. One a man, Walter, seemingly walled off from any sense of duty - seemingly - and another a woman, Mme. Popescu, whose husband died of a duty he didn't even need to do. Three angles on the same problem, though mired firmly in Maugham's. The glimpses of the other two do however serve to colour and explore his, through the lens of his introspection.

And this - his self-critical, thoughtful, writerly narrative voice - is one of the most successful things about a roundly successful novella. I'm not familiar with Maugham's work in reality - another branch point, does his narrative voice sound like actual Maugham's - but I found myself quickly invested in the version of him that exists in Donnelly's. There's an analytical bent to the way he talks about the people around him, a distance that he himself names as he talks to other characters, and a slight rigidity to the prose that does nod back to the time at which the story is set, without overegging the historicity. But it's not just that. He is constantly dwelling on his imminent death (ironic or simply foreshadowing?), the effect that will have on his family, whether being here is the right thing to do, and if he even truly is doing his duty at all. He also dwells on two lost loves and one growing one, because all good things come in threes.

As with the three angles on duties, the three loves all inform one another, shaping how we see Maugham as much as how he sees himself. There's Sue, the woman he wishes he'd married but whom he lost to the man who got her pregnant (and married her out of - yes, there's duty again). There's Gerald, the outgoing soldier he knew in the Pacific, whose strengths shored up Maugham's weaknesses, and whose flaws could be forgiven, and critically who knew, as Maugham knows, when and how to keep hidden from society's eyes what it doesn't want to see. And then the present one, Walter - the man who walls himself off from duty, who refuses to hide himself as Maugham knows he must.

Intersections, wherever you look. Maugham - with his stutter, his orphan status and French early years already an outcast, clinging on to rigid propriety as close as his interpretation of duty. Walter flouting both but charming him in, while also being his mission, a part of his own duty and bound up in the death of Popescu's husband.

All of which leads to wondering about the reality of Maugham's duty - the clue is, indeed, in the title - but whether it's self-imposed too. All around him, people take the rules of society less seriously than he does, whether they be his British handler, the locals, Walter or Mme. Popescu. He dwells on how it was his duty to marry Syrie, the wife he's avoiding, after he got her pregnant. But was it truly? Was it a duty he could have avoided if he wanted to? Did he want to? Will he die in service to this thing that may never even really have been asked of him at all?

That tension and uncertainty about his death is why I resolved not to find out his biographical details until I had settled my thoughts. Because the poignancy of not knowing felt so delicious, and fed in so beautifully to the ethical crisis he was suffering through, that I wanted to treasure it as a lucky gift I chanced to have in reading it.

However, around half to two thirds through the novella, Donnelly introduces a speculative element which complicates things further. Obviously, there were no vampires involved in World War I. And so, however closely the narrative up to this point may (or may not) have married up to the real history and biography, here it diverges. The two experiences of the book briefly coalesce. But only briefly.

In my opinion, vampires are at their best when they are both truly dangerous and also, despite and because of the danger, sexy. In No Such Thing as Duty, the sexiness of the vampirism (and while a little understated, by god is Donnelly's vampire sexy) is corralled in by the physical - blood and bites and hands and tongues - just as the rest of the story is wedded to Maugham's own physicality, of his breath and cough and bleeding, his fever constantly waxing and waning, the scratch of fabric on skin, his enjoyment of food and drink. Donnelly revels in the sensation of drinks particularly, the haze of brandy and heat of coffee, and temperature more broadly - feverish burns and the cool touch of snow. And again, the lingering prophecy of Maugham's death informs this. We read his body in its frailty and potential failure; the vampirism marries that imminent death up with sex but also with the potentiality of death's forestalling.

And so, the two readings once again diverge and split even further. Is the intrusion of the fantastical about to change the facts, and a reader who knows whether Maugham will die about to be surprised by a change, or have their knowledge come to fruition, but its method shifted? And then, again, me, caught up only in the tension of the story itself. Vampires throw a spanner into the works of the greatest inevitability, and so add an extra layer of narrative uncertainty.

Right up to the end, Donnelly preserves that ambiguity. The story ends with implication rather than closure, a situation that made me very glad for my lack of knowledge, but one that, precisely because of the speculative elements, likewise imposes that ambiguity even on a reader who does know, because while the question of "if" might have been settled for them, there still lives a vast expanse of "how" and "why".

And so, ultimately, it doesn't matter if you know the facts or not. The story uses vampirism to crack open the vault of possibility, and ensure that the available endings are uncertain for any reader. I looked up the facts, and learnt that not only did Maugham live into his nineties, far beyond the scope of the life he sees as doomed in the story, but that even the foundation of the story rests on a branch untaken - the Scottish sanatorium the book's Maugham is glad to avoid was the path of reality. A reader who knew his biography was already wrong-footed, because it never cleaved to that reality in the first place. That break from the known path already introduced the potential for change, and the story could become one of the doomed path the real man didn't take.

No Such Thing As Duty wields its ambiguities and potentialities like a scalpel, all the while holding them in delicious contrast to the bitter realities of the physical and the flesh. By using a real historical figure and divorcing him from his reality, Donnelly ties her story to real anchors - there are hints and nods to real, biographical facts seeded throughout - without closing off the opportunities for tension, and the scope of possible endings. The fantastical element is also the most grounding one, the sections in which Maugham is being fed on being some of the most intimately real ones, where much of the rest of the story comes filtered through his particular lens of perception, held at a distance, or made hazy by illness. Only in contact with the unreal does the story fully rear up into feeling quite present. She leaves her questions open - this is not a story with an answer to its moral questions, any more than it is one to set a firm hand on the conclusion of its plot - and the work is all the better for it. It is a beautiful, brilliant book, with exquisitely understated prose and a skilfully managed viewpoint, and one that exemplifies what a good novella can do, or be, by using all its tools, figures and ideas all intersect and coalesce into a gorgeous mess of feeling and thought.

--

The Math

Highlights: Sexy but understated but sexy vampirism, triangulating around the concept of duty, well-crafted introspective viewpoint

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Lara Elena Donnelly, No Such Thing As Duty [Neon Hemlock, 2025]. 

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

The Arthur C. Clarke Award 2025: A Shortlist Discussion

Right in the heart of brimming awards season, we come to the Clarke Award shortlist, whose winner is due to be announced on the 25th of June. While we wait to find out the winner, myself and a very exciting guest decided to read the shortlist, and see what we think of the nominees as individual books, a group together, and as part of the wider fiction conversation of 2024 and 2025.

Joining me for this discussion is 2024 Clarke Award nominee, Hugo winner, Astounding Award Winner, World Fantasy Award winner and excellent-opinion-haver, Emily Tesh!

Per their website blurb, the Arthur C. Clarke Award is given to the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. As a juried award whose judges come from a variety of UK groups - the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival - one of the key features is its ability to pull up gems that might not have made it onto popular voted awards, placing them alongside more well known authors and works, and giving a different slant on the year’s SF - as evidenced by this year’s shortlist, some of whom have (at least so far) not been honoured elsewhere, and sit here alongside Hugo Award nominees.

This year, the shortlist is as follows:

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Extremophile by Ian Green

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf

Emily and Roseanna got stuck into the shortlist and come here to share their opinions on the novels, the shortlist as a whole, and what the Clarke is covering that other awards may be missing, as well as their thoughts on who they might want to win.

Roseanna: Shall we start by going right in there, rather than a gentle introduction? I want to kick off with Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, because it’s one we both had a lot of opinions about, and that we kept on coming back to to think about more for days after we’d finished it.

The story follows the titular Annie, a robot girlfriend owned by a man named Doug, who has been slowly developing in her complexity since she was put into “autodidactic mode” two years previously. We spend time immersed in her perspective, as she struggles with what Doug wants from her, how to please him, as it runs up against her own growing and individual desires. A meeting with one of Doug’s friends - and a secret, somewhat coercive sexual encounter with him - kickstart a lot of painful, traumatic and dramatic events for Annie, changing her life immeasurably and leading her to think outside the rigid confines of the existence she’s always known.

For me, it didn’t fully work. There are a lot of ideas thrown up across the book, a lot of side-threads into different angles on the central metaphor of Annie’s robot nature, but overall, it feels like an abusive relationship novel that is being undermined by all these different pieces that aren’t necessarily pulling in the same direction as the central ideas. I’m not sure how the AI parts work with that premise, rather than muddling it.

Emily: One thing that really jumped out at me from reading the whole shortlist was the primacy of metaphor in the shortlist's approach to science fiction. I don't think a single one of these novels asked the reader to take a speculative concept purely on its own terms. Whether it's artificial intelligence, cloning, time travel, or climate fiction, the reader is expected to join the dots in a kind of extended simile: this thing in the story is like this thing in real life, and this is like this, and this is like this. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the function of the speculative metaphor and the ways it can fail. Annie Bot is a book where the central metaphor did not succeed for me, and this undermined my entire reading experience. Annie is a robot, an artificial person. She was created to provide sexual satisfaction and emotional companionship for her human owner. She spends the novel struggling with what this means–what does it mean to be owned, what does it mean to be a person, what does it mean to create herself as the kind of person whom Doug wants her to be. And I spent the novel struggling with what the actual point of the metaphor was.

Is the book arguing that straight womanhood is essentially false, a performance rooted in misogyny created by and for the benefit of straight men? (There are many, many sequences of Annie lusciously self-objectifying as she tries on different outfits, wears different kinds of impractical sexy underwear, simulates orgasm for Doug's satisfaction.) Is it trying to say something about transgender identity? (At one point, Doug and Annie attend couples's therapy; Doug points out that the therapist is a trans woman, and asks Annie if she noticed; the implication is that he longs for Annie to 'pass' as a human just as the therapist 'passes' as a woman; later he assures Annie that he doesn't mind that she can't have children, they can adopt, his family will never know; I wrote, with a large question mark, TRANSMISOGYNY METAPHOR THEN?) Or are we meant to read Annie's repeated fascination with the idea of her own artificial mind placed in a male robot body as a transmasculine identity suppressed by the requirements of Doug's patriarchal ideal of what his perfect girlfriend should be? Or, no, wait, is the book actually trying to be about race? (Annie's appearance is a copy of Doug's ex, but whiter; the entire emotional arc turns on a question of how she can ever escape her enslavement by this man.) Because in each case I found myself wondering–so what are we saying about trans identity, what are we saying about race, what is the book actually saying about any of the ideas it touches on; is it really saying anything at all?

It is saying something. When I was growing up my mother had a shelf of books she called the Ain't It Hard Being A Woman shelf. Annie Bot would fit right in. It's terribly hard being a straight white woman with an abusive boyfriend. Leave the boyfriend. I'm still not sure why she had to be a robot about it.

I think this struck me particularly hard when read in contrast with another book on the shortlist that manages its central metaphor with striking deftness. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is a book about being a lone survivor of a disaster, pulled out of the familiar and into a world of terrible ease and mundanity where your past makes you a perpetual stranger; it's about being a refugee from history, a person struggling constantly with hereness and thereness, reckoning with the world created by imperialism from a position of safety, comfort, and collaboration which you'd rather not think about too hard; it's about being lost, in time and space, forever. Also, nineteenth-century Arctic explorer Graham Gore is there.

Which is to say: I thought this book was spectacular. Bradley knows the thematic work she wants her metaphor to do and she goes to work with a scalpel, unpicking every layer of 'refugee from history' with perfect sharpness. The book's conceit is that the narrator is a bureaucrat selected to keep an eye on Graham Gore when the Ministry abducts him from history at the moment of his disappearance in the Arctic, incidentally killing the rest of the mission. Then they fall in love. But the book is about the experience of living in Britain as the mixed race child of a refugee who escaped genocide in Cambodia. Why does the narrator fall in love with Graham Gore: well, how could she not? They're the two most different people imaginable (a classic of romance, which I always like to see done well) and thanks to the Ministry's decision to abduct him from history they are also fundamentally Exactly The Same.

This is a debut novel for Bradley and I can't wait to see what she does next. It's very, very good. It's extremely funny. The thematic work is beautiful. It does fall apart a little in the last fifty pages–speaking as a person who has done a time travel plot: dear god is it hard to manage all the moving pieces of a time travel plot in a satisfying way. I almost wish Bradley hadn't bothered. I would have been happy with just the romance, the jokes, the brutal thematic underlayer, and the moody descriptions of the weather.

Roseanna: If Annie Bot is a shotgun, then The Ministry of Time is a scalpel. Or possibly a hammer. In any case, I entirely agree - it knows precisely what it wants to be and then goes at it at an unapologetic full tilt. Every single piece of what feels like such a disparate set of genre-components all eventually turn towards the job of supporting that one thematic core of the exploration of “refugee” as a concept. Bradley uses different ideas extremely skilfully to triangulate on her points, and never more clearly than in the three characters whose different experiences of racism in Britain come up throughout the book. The first is the unnamed main character, for whom that racism permeates all aspects of the story, and not least her relationship with Gore, whose vocabulary and approach to race are entirely drawn from his historical context (more on that in a moment). She keeps her head down, and her path is one of survival, just getting through it with the least impact and harm on her as possible. By contrast then, are her sister, whose emotional working through of her own experiences the main character disparages in her thoughts, or Simellia, a colleague at the ministry who offers the protagonist solidarity (and is rebuffed), and has a much more resistance-minded approach to the constant impacts they both suffer throughout the story and beyond. Three ways of existing under racism, three conflicting and contrasting approaches. The narrative does not commit to a clear model of which is correct - however much the story does not always support the protagonist in her (often terrible) choices, there is always an understanding for how she got to where she got - but does always give an insight into why, and uses the triangulation of the three separate approaches to deepen our understanding of all three as characters, especially by their interactions with one another. The frustration palpable between Simellia and the protagonist as their different approaches slide past each other, the fundamental misunderstandings of this person who should get it but doesn’t, forms a critical part of us seeing each of them as the person they are.

And, because Bradley seems to love efficiency with her many tools, is an obvious thematic crossover with the frustrations faced in working with someone from the past.

This, too, I think she does amazingly. It is so hard to find books that incorporate historical characters or settings that get historicity right, and I think Bradley has done a remarkable job here of something that could have gone wildly wrong - making Gore both authentically of his time and intensely charming and likeable and interacting authentically with the modern-day context. I never lost a sense of him throughout the book as coming from a particular context - and the same is true, to a lesser extent, for the cast of supporting historical figures pulled out of different pieces of history alongside him - and having his whole self be a product of that context, for both good and ill.

It means we get a romance with someone who feels like a whole person, not with a projected retrofit of modern morality, but with their own sense of identity and self that does not always fit neatly up against the protagonist’s. That, alongside the way Bradley crafts the atmosphere in which they interact, makes it a far more successful romance for me than many others I’ve read.

And then, speaking of atmosphere, she does just as good a job of crafting the sense of place - the hereness to contrast Gore’s thereness - of this nebulously near future London baking in a heat that is familiar but intensified. Writing in Zone 3 now as the temperatures climb into uncomfortable summer, the miserable claustrophobia of some of the midsection of the book feels only just that tiny bit out of reach - a horrible prescience on what is to come that provides the contextual realism as well as the atmosphere and helps ground the more fantastical elements of the story.

Which brings us nicely along to one of the other bangers of the list - Private Rites by Julia Armfield. It’s on the other end of the weather spectrum - every single review I’ve read of this book, including my own, starts with the constant rain in the story on the first line and for good reason - but it forms an atmospheric substrate in just the same way as in The Ministry of Time. And these aren’t even the only two near-future horrible-climate Londons of the shortlist.

Where The Ministry of Time reaches out of SFF and into romance, spy thrillers and contemporary literature, Private Rites has more than half an eye on horror and literary fiction, and it’s from the interaction of the SFnal elements - climate fiction - with those two that I think its greatest strengths lie. It presents climate change not as a novum, not as a problem to be solved by daring heroes, but something akin to an act of god. It’s a prompt for psychological exploration and a backdrop for the melancholy lesbian sisterly shenanigans that take up the centre stage of the majority of the plot.

Emily: Private Rites is such a very assured, intelligent, well-crafted book that I feel a little guilty for not liking it more. This is not the only book on the shortlist I have this feeling about (more on that later) but I think this is perhaps the book you and I disagree on the most, because I know you really loved it and I just thought it was pretty good. It is absolutely leaning on literary fiction–Armfield's prose is strong. And it's another one which is doing thoughtful, complex, interesting things with a central metaphor. The conceit Armfield has borrowed from horror fiction is: what if there was a mysterious guy secretly in your house, would that be spooky or what? Sometimes the Guy is your father and the house is the emotionally horrific architectural masterpiece he built to refuse the effects of the climate crisis. Sometimes the Guy is your half-sibling and the house is the drowned and ruined and still madly functioning remains of London. (I did really enjoy the layers of sibling relationships in this book: it acknowledges, as few books do, that sometimes a much younger or older sibling is simply a person you don't know very well who was, unfortunately, also there.) Sometimes the Guy is God, maybe, and your house is the ecologically devastated planet?

Also–spoilers–sometimes there is literally just a spooky mysterious bad guy secretly in your house.

I saw this outcome from a long way off, which is not necessarily a problem. Horror sometimes turns on anticipation! Unfortunately, I found the reveal more comical than spooky in the execution. That's actually something this book has in common with The Ministry of Time–both succeed better as literary fiction (with their interest in language and human behaviour, and their layered, considered thematic complexity) than as genre fiction, because both of them do the genre fiction plot in the most underbaked and obvious way possible in the last fifty pages. Private Rites actually made me think a bit about 'science fiction' as a category. (Of course, people are constantly thinking about science fiction as a category; a bad habit of the entire genre.) I found myself dwelling on the 'science' part, on the suggestion that the fiction of the future is necessarily a fiction of science, which has always struck me as an oddly triumphalist understanding of how history and technology interact with one another. Private Rites is staunchly unscientific. I like the book better for it.

Roseanna: That was one of the things that really struck me as I was reading it, and I haven’t got a better way of explaining it than thinking it’s climate fiction but not science fiction (which is awkward, given what the Clarke is for). I think that is something of a contentious take, and drilling into it would be a whole “what is SF anyway”, leading me straight into that bad habit as well, but my short, high level version is pulling on that “fiction of the future” piece. Climate change is rapidly becoming the fiction of the present, not the future, and so it’s resolving into non-SFnal genres more and more often now. Especially in Private Rites, where the imagined future on display is non-specific and very proximate-feeling, I think that veneer of futurity is about as thin as it could possibly be. It’s climate as spectre of the current zeitgeist (in the way that all fiction about the future is actually concerned with the now), just with the dial turned up a little way. So I think this is a case of the future catching up with the genre - clifi may once have been a disastrous science fiction prediction, but it’s now just horrible reality.

Which is a long way of saying - I absolutely agree, it’s litfic first and foremost. Where I disagree (maybe) is that the genre it rushes into at the end is horror more than it is SF. We see the seeds of it through the latter half of the book, in the intrusions of inexplicable oceanic life into the scenes from the city’s perspective (which, incidentally, are some of my favourite parts of the book - I love weird descriptive sections, and these are brief but very atmospheric). It explodes out in the final confrontation, but I think it was an undercurrent (sorry) for a while beforehand.

I think I was a bit more into it than you, but I have been an enjoyer of Julia Armfield’s brand of melancholy lesbians encountering the uncanny for a while and was entirely primed for it.

Emily: I am tragically impatient with the sorrows of melancholy lesbians. It's probably a personal failing. And now, moving to another book which I filed under 'well this is very good and I feel bad that I'm not more into it': Extremophile by Ian Green is the story of yet another near-future ecologically-ruined London, and of the underground world of criminals, indie bands, ecoterrorists, and biohackers who survive beyond the still well-cared for Zone One. The book moves vividly and competently between the heads of its narrators–Charlie, a biohacker who plays bass in a band; the Ghost, a powerful corporate executive; Scrimshank, a brute; the Mole, the sole survivor of a horrific biohacking experiment. The character work is really, really good. I found the Ghost's chapters genuinely hard to read: there is some real stare-into-space body horror, framed coldly and painfully in the point of view of a man who thinks himself extraordinary and is constantly mentally workshopping unfunny little jokes. 

One cannot accuse Green of underbaking the plot. This is a heist book, and heists rely on tight, propulsive plotting. It's a heist book where the most attractive character is named Parker and there is a Nathan floating around in the background, which made me laugh. The book winks at you: we've all seen Leverage. In fact, referential is a word that kept coming to mind. This is a book that made me stop and DM Roseanna to make her listen to The Mountain Goats. (The song you need. You'll know when you get there.) This book enjoys both Leverage and Le Guin (the word for world is–). Maybe the referentiality is part of what made the book feel so strangely nostalgic to me. Extremophile is set in the future, but in the future London has a lively indie punk scene where young people gather to fuck and dance and plan their environmental protests. The narrative loves a thriving independent live music scene, writes from a place of affection and knowledge about it, in a way that felt so entirely real and tender that it also felt, somehow, more like the past than the future.

But this is not the only thing nostalgic about Extremophile. Unlike The Ministry of Time and Private Rites, this is near-future climate-inflected science fiction where the science is front and centre. Our protagonist and chief narrator, Charlie, is a scientist. Underneath the slick machinery of the heist plot, the book asks questions about how much it actually matters to do the science: to be a scientist, to love knowledge, to look at the natural world with care and attention–a tree, a pigeon, a marsh spreading through Hackney–to quantify, analyse, and create, as a scientist. Charlie begins the book doing shit science, exploitative nonsense–here's your zodiac reanalysed in light of your DNA–squeezing money from the gullible with a mix of fact and fiction designed to give idiots what they want. The monstrous Ghost with his custom-designed biological cruelties is only the logical conclusion of the path she's already on, and on some level Charlie knows it. It's no wonder she's a nihilist. The question is whether she's wrong to feel this way, in a world where science has already comprehensively failed to save the day.

In other words, I read this book and went 'aha, this is definitely Science Fiction'. (You know it when you see it.) And that also felt nostalgic to me! I found I was a lot more interested in the Science Fiction than the heists, and my sympathy for Charlie grew through the book. And I thought the London of the book was perhaps the most persuasive and aesthetically powerful of all the near-future Londons we read for this shortlist; the book has a really extraordinary sense of place. So why, after several paragraphs of well-earned praise, was I not actually all that into Extremophile? Well, I feel like I got handed a first-rate scotch and now I have to sheepishly admit I don't like whiskey. Heist plots don't do it for me–I have to be in exactly the right mood to watch Leverage. I find most live music an exquisitely miserable experience thanks to my loathing of crowds and lifelong hearing difficulties. Bio-horror freaks me out so much that I kept having to put the book down for a bit after the Ghost chapters. You see the problem?

Roseanna: Not to add another problem to the mix, but the thing that hit me right between the eyes while reading Extremophile was: this is cyberpunk. It’s not. It’s not about the tech in the way classic cyberpunk is. It’s bio far more than it is cyber (is biopunk a thing? Everything -punk is probably a thing if you try hard enough, much to my despair), but the atmosphere, the anti-corporate-ness, the unregulated techno future full of violence and individualism and fancy crimes? That’s cyberpunk. And that was what gave me that big nostalgic whiff, alongside all the science.

It’s just unfortunate that I don’t like cyberpunk at all. I also don’t really get a heart-squeezing burn of affection for the live music scene (I too hate crowds, but also my taste in music is simply atrocious), I don’t like heists - especially watching people plan them, I don’t like extended scenes of violence and fighting, and I generally struggle with climate fiction. It felt like a recipe for me to absolutely hate Extremophile.

And yet… and yet. You’re right. It is entirely embedded in this futuristic, muggy London that I can fully believe and feel as I’m reading. Charlie’s journey from nihilism to tentative hope is genuinely touching and emotive. The characters all have wonderful, distinctive voices when it’s their turn to be the viewpoint, and each provided something different to the narrative to make their inclusion worthwhile. One of them - Mole/Awa, a physically and genetically altered woman upon whom those changes were enacted forcibly in her childhood - gets some absolutely gorgeous writing that made me want to linger over every sentence. By the end, all of that somehow managed to charm me into liking it, against all my native inclinations. Not all the way to loving it. But a lot lot further than I ever would have expected from someone giving me a plot summary.

If it has a failing (and that failing isn’t just “me”), I might suggest that the ending could do with dialling back a little on the sentiment, but given by that point it had worked its hooks into me, I can’t complain too much. It does the legwork of grounding all of its climate work in very realistic pessimism, and doesn’t let its resolution drift into the sort of world-changing optimism that would have been at cross-purposes with its ongoing messaging. The world is still shit, it says, but maybe it’s worth fighting anyway. And, critically, maybe Charlie thinks it’s worth fighting now. It works extremely well on the level of one person’s path back to resistance and action against the injustices in the world around her. Like Private Rites, it’s a book interested in the human, and the human experience of *gestures* all this.

So I think I prefer Private Rites in the end, but it’s an aesthetic preference far more than a qualitative one. Clearly I just prefer the rain.

Actual footage of Roseanna reading Extremophile and Private Rites

But climate isn’t the only common thread in this shortlist. There’s a common line of “hellscape (possibly techno) ravaged or being ravaged by capitalism” that links back up to the remaining two, both of which also join up to Annie Bot by being personhood stories.

Starting with the more obvious overlap, Service Model is another robot servant story, though this one far more in the traditional mode of robotic servitor (Uncharles) who must obey his programmed task hierarchy, even as the situation he’s in spirals further outside of his control, and the frame of reference his programming can encompass. It’s a story of a journey - a set of connected vignettes in different, equally unexpected locations - as Uncharles the robot grapples with his existence after the death of his master, with a bit of free will and agency thrown in for good measure.

I have two problems with it. The first, the ever-tricky sense of humour. The book is very much trying to use the surreality of the scenarios Uncharles finds himself in to generate comedy. That comedy, unfortunately, did not land with me. And when most of the jokes tend to draw from a common thematic pool… they continued not to land for me the whole way through.

The second thought is that I struggled with what this book was really trying to achieve, and why it took a whole novel to do it. SF has, over the years, done the “am I a person?” story to death, whether from robots or clones or any manner of other person-adjacent consciousnesses. Personally, having been on this ride a number of times, I am primed for the inevitable answer of “yes”. When is the answer not “yes”? I’m not sure, unless you’re really pushing some boundaries (or hey, maybe drawing on the current cultural consciousness and “AI” situation), what can be added to this narrative? And I don’t think Service Model does. Instead, it’s a set of mildly comedic scenarios strung together, with a bit of a conclusion at the end about societal collapse (turns out, the free market doesn’t solve everything and capitalism may, in fact, be bad - see the aforementioned hellscape).

Emily: The trouble with being as good and as prolific as Adrian Tchaikovsky is that the person you're going to end up most compared to is yourself. Tchaikovsky released two science fiction novels in 2024. Both of them are on the Hugo shortlist, but only one made the Clarke. And I am absolutely baffled by the judges' decision to elevate Service Model over Alien Clay, because I thought that Alien Clay was a much better book–a book with more to say, and more interesting ways of saying it; a Clarkey book, as I understand the term.

I quite enjoyed the first act of Service Model. I read it thinking: aha, a light satire running on a spine of Agatha Christie but they're all robots mindlessly going through the motions of the detective novel even as the culprit in their midst confesses over and over. Charming! Funny! A sharp comment on the plot-on-rails that is also a comment on the society-on-rails! I see what you did there!

And then the book did it again. And again. And I found it less charming every time. When you got the joke the first time, it's tiresome to hear it repeated. And the book never quite expands beyond its initial conceit: here is a robot, in an absurd situation which he does not understand but which you, the reader, can smile at from your position of superior knowledge. This continues, in my very pretty hardback edition, for some four hundred pages. In the spirit of this meeting could have been an email: I do really think this novel could have been a novella. I love a novella, and Service Model could have worked really well as a very sharp, very funny, very dark example of the form, answering none of its initial questions about the failed society Uncharles comes from, making its satirical point and moving on. But as a novel, it drags. And for me, the book also suffers because I read it back to back with Alien Clay and I loved Alien Clay. Alien Clay does so many of the things Tchaikovsky is really, really good at. I loved the weird biology and the mystery of the planet and the final irresolvable moral dilemma! So why on earth would you pick Service Model for your shortlist when Alien Clay was right there?

Roseanna [lurking for the opportunity to say that Alien Clay is indeed banger]: I am boggled by exactly this same thought. I did not read them back to back, but even with a fair separation, I felt like Alien Clay was just the tighter, more controlled novel. I’d link it up to The Ministry of Time as books with a thematic hammer that know how to use them, which does feel, to me as well, inherently Clarkey. But I guess we must have something to argue with the judges about.

As something of a strange contrast, the final book also never quite expands outside of its original conceit (at least not successfully) for me, and yet my feelings on it are far more positive - and that’s Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, in which the thirteenth clone of a movie star must hunt down all her predecessors and kill them to (spoilers, supposedly) generate publicity for an upcoming film. But this description doesn’t do justice to the weirdness of that original conceit, which also contains a fair heap of musing on bodies and ownership and identity (including a scene in which the newly-woken clone looks her body over in the mirror and keeps flipping between referring to it as her own or as Lulabelle’s), some workplace comedy if the job is untrained freelance assassin, funny and sometimes startlingly real pieces of character work and, somehow, tarot. Also some self-love (but uh, not like that).

I’m not sure I could say that Lulabelle is a great book, but something about its quirky unexpectedness and ability to turn a phrase charmed me, in a way that the slightly better structured Service Model never managed. Unfortunately, I think it loses control of its threads by the time the need for an ending rolls around, but I find myself admiring the ambition, because this one does try to push some boundaries. It doesn’t succeed, but I respected the intentions a great deal.

Emily: I really liked this one! I thought it was enormous fun nearly all the way through. It did new and interesting things with the very well-trodden SFnal ground of 'who, exactly, gets to be a person?' and the structural conceit of the tarot, while silly, was silly in a grounded way: it chimed with the protagonist's own desperate need for structure, for understanding of who she was and how she could exist in the world as one of thirteen identical clones–Portraits–of a lesser celebrity. The tight structure of the book meant that it telegraphed exactly what it was going to do, well in advance. When the assassin gets a car, you know she's going to crash the car at some point. But it executed the expected beats with humour and verve. I laughed out loud at the point where the assassin finds herself face to face with two Lulabelles each insisting that she is the real one and so you have to kill that bitch, and just thinks: couldn't you two have worked this out between yourselves?

And then the penultimate twist landed beautifully. The question of who, exactly, is the real Lulabelle runs all the way through the book. Ultimately, no one is. I was genuinely moved by the way the revelation landed, and how it reframed the whole conceit of the book. The thirteen clones cease to be a vapid exercise in celebrity self-promotion and become a sadder and deeper exploration of how on earth one is supposed to manage a life well-lived, and what it means to live well.

For me the only place where this book didn't quite work was the very end, where I felt it veered into sentimentality, and a final twist that felt like a broken promise. It seems silly to say 'not enough murder' about a book where the protagonist commits so many murders, but when you have spent the whole novel signalling that there is eventually going to be a violent and cathartic reckoning with your evil creator… I felt thwarted that no such reckoning took place. Surely we could have murdered someone in the end. Of course, part of the joke of the book is that none of the murders of Lulabelle ever really seemed satisfying: as these were meaningless, unsatisfactory lives, so they ended in meaningless and unsatisfactory deaths. But I would have liked, I think, a single satisfactory death, for narrative closure. After all, our narrator's card is Death: she deserves it. I'm not picky. It didn't have to be the evil creator. We could also have murdered Lulabelle's horrid agent.

And that brings us to six books! What are your thoughts on the shortlist as a whole? Do you have a favourite? Do you have an expected winner? And are those two the same?

Roseanna: My favourite is Private Rites. I love it. I am a sucker for all the things Julia Armfield does. I went into the shortlist reading knowing this would be the one to beat, and lo, so it was. I don’t think it’s entirely my terminal optimism speaking when I think it might just win it, but I am not a reliable predictor of awards, so I’m not saying that with any great certainty.

If it doesn’t, I’d be very happy to see either Extremophile or The Ministry of Time take the win, though with a preference for the latter as I just had the absolute greatest time with it, and I would love more books in SFF to be quite this charming. How about you?

Emily: My personal favourite read of the shortlist was The Ministry of Time. I am very weak to themes and jokes and romance, and it did all of those extremely well. However, I just went back to the Clarke Award home page, which reminded me that 'the annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year.' With that in mind, my pick for a winner is Extremophile. I think it would be a well deserved win for a book which is entirely and self-consciously science fiction in theme and intention. I also think there's great value in reading, from time to time, a very good book which is absolutely not your thing. Extremophile is not my thing but I respect what it chooses to be and I think the execution is splendid. I'm glad the shortlist prompted me to it, because I would probably not have picked it up otherwise. Also, Roseanna, you really should listen to The Mountain Goats.

Roseanna: I did! I had Tallahassee playing while I was working this afternoon. It would have possibly been fun to have it playing while I was reading as subconscious thematic overlap, but I did not plan anywhere near that well. Possibly a recommendation for anyone who hasn’t picked it up yet to try (and if you don't think you recognise The Mountain Goats, try listening to the song No Children, and you may well realise you do).

I can’t disagree that Extremophile is the best at science-fictioning. And it was the biggest surprise in reading for me - to find myself persuaded into all these things I don’t enjoy, so I’d certainly be clapping along with everyone else on Wednesday for it if so. I just find myself constantly drawn back to Private Rites for the vibes, the prose, the intensely palpable atmosphere. It just grabs me.

And that’s it! Or is it… because we are doing vry srs crtcsm we did do a nice little chart as we were discussing, so have our very authoritative, totally conclusive visualisation of the shortlist as a thematic continuum.

If you have read or are planning to read the Clarkes, we hope you have as great a time with the process as we did. The winner will be announced evening UK time on Wednesday the 25th of June, so watch this space to find out if either of us were right.

Thank you so much for joining me Emily - this has been amazing!