Nayler is back on animal consciousness, but this time with a whole lot more of man's inhumanity to man to go with it.
If you've read any of Ray Nayler's previous work - like The Mountain in the Sea or The Tusks of Extinction - you'll know that animal consciousness is something that often occupies a central position in his stories. Whether it's octopodes and their inscrutable behaviour or the de-extinction of mammoths, he often writes not just about other ways of thinking than human ones, but of how the lives of those animals work in the world as it is, shaped and controlled by humans. And, naturally then, of the threat we pose to them. This does not, generally, make for cheery reading.
Unsurprisingly then, his next novel, Palaces of the Crow, set in part during WWII in war-torn Lithuania, is not exactly shifting the needle on that. I might describe it as "desperately sad".
The story follows four young people as they are caught up in the events of the war. Neriya is the Jewish daughter of a doctor who wants to become a biologist when she grows up. She has spent her life befriending the crows at the shtetl she spends her summers away from Vilnius in, and when they lead her away from home one morning, she trusts them enough to follow. It is what saves her from the destruction of the entire village. Czesław is an underage soldier, whose family remembers their history as Polish nobility even as they live as hunters in the Siberian forest. He is pulled into the Red Army underage, and when his unit encounters the destruction of war, ends up fleeing into the woods for their familiarity. Kezia and her family are Roma, and she too must flee into the woods when the Soviets come to kill them. The Boy has no name, and cannot speak, but has somehow survived alone in the wreckage of a village until Kezia finds him.
One by one, they find one another in the forest, and find with one another the community necessary to survive the forest in winter. They have different skills which they teach one another - Neriya shows Kezia how to read, Czesław shows Neriya how to hunt - and different lives and experiences that they share in the close proximity of a small shelter and harsh circumstances. Their different backgrounds have taught them all to be deeply, rightly afraid of the adults around them, and who sometimes they hear or see coming through the woods, and so it is only with each other that they can be safe and survive.
But they also have help from the crows.
There are a few parallel threads running through the story, interacting but also distinct. As a WWII story following a Jewish girl, a Roma girl, a boy with complex heritage within Russia and an orphan who cannot speak, it is necessarily one thinking about war and what it means to survive it as a marginalised person, as someone who is being actively hunted down by state, by collaborators, and by predatory people who want something and think that they can get it at another's expense while the world is so openly hostile. Nayler does a good job here, I think, in conveying the stark and horrific reality of these children's experiences - never letting us forget that they are children while also seeing how survival has robbed them of their childhood - alongside the community they find together. It is not community as heart-warming story so much as vital tool of survival. The bond between them is often portrayed as being about knowing one another intimately and totally, the proximity blurring the boundaries between their separate selves, rather than about fondness or good feeling. And it is something that changes them all, and stays with them for the rest of their lives.
The way Nayler handles the group relationship is probably one of the strongest parts of the book. Their interconnection, the way they are forced to grow up together, in this situation, walled off from the rest of the world without news or hope of rescue, is intense and, at times, heartbreaking. The narrative voice helps immensely with this, lingering on moments good and bad long enough to give them weight but without dwelling so much as to feel untrusting in the reader, providing emotionality but always at a slight remove. It very much feels like the voice of someone who is simply getting through it, surviving as well as they can. Someone who has to keep moving, even as they understand the enormity of their situation.
This story alone would be worth reading. But Nayler interweaves this with a story of a group of crows who at first seem just like any crows. They're already smart birds - there are plenty of stories online of people befriending them and being brought little gifts, like Neriya is brought at the start of the book. But as the story progresses, as the children move deeper and deeper into the forest to escape the dangers of humanity, more and more is revealed of the life and capabilities of the crows, and it begins to be something just that little bit more than in reality.
This is a little departure from my previous forays into Nayler's work. Where elsewhere it is decidedly in the realm of SF - a future what-if - this leans more towards the fantastical, but without ever really fully committing to something specific. While I chose to read some of the more ambiguous moments in a more SFF way, it would be possible, and not particularly convoluted, to find mundane arguments for them too. And this feels a very clever choice - it keeps the story bedded firmly in the perspectives of its characters, with their limited knowledge and understanding, their state of mind in this strange, hidden place, primed to perhaps believe in something more and without the tools to fully investigate it to prove either way.
But even as he departs into something a little more mysterious, he does not step away from some of his core concerns. A key part of crows' part in the narrative is about protecting them, and about the risk that humanity poses to them if their story is told to the wider world. Neriya wants to be a scientist, wants to document what she learns and write it up, but she is also very conscious of the cruelty of the world, and of what that cruelty could do if pointed at the crows who have helped her so much. There is a tension throughout the story between the benefit of learning and sharing knowledge, as often demonstrated as the skills shared between the children become the tools of their survival - and in the benefit of secrecy and silence, of locking things away forever, especially from adults, because they have demonstrated they cannot be trusted with the important things, whatever their promises.
This is, to me, an unusual perspective from an SFF author, but a welcome one. It feels critical, if one is writing stories about the validity and importance of consciousnesses other than humans, to decentre the story's understanding of the stakes from human assumptions and priorities, even about science. I wasn't expecting it at all, but it fits perfectly, especially in the context of a WWII story.
And that I think is the story's big strength - context. Nayler has pared down the scale. Rather than trying to write a story that encompasses the whole of the war, which is a subject that has been tackled before and will be again, by many hands, he chooses instead to limit it to this one place, these few people, and enrich it with a deeper understanding of exactly where they come from, and exactly the here in which the crows are. Every character feels well realised, well-situated, and just as they come to know one another in all their depth, so too do we, in these two crucial winters of their lives. This makes all the more sense when the viewpoint characters are children whose understanding of the world prior to the war is limited by their own experiences. And the thoughts about animals and their place in the world are scaled back too - the reader is left to draw their own conclusions from what they've seen, and to figure out what value they place on it, and the decisions of the characters.
Because, by the end, some of the characters do make possibly dubious decisions. How to weigh those up in the scales? An exercise for the reader. And I like it that way.
Palaces of the Crow feels like a development of Nayler's previous work and themes, with all the ingredients that made them work well, but also with an extra sophistication of writing that makes it something a little bit more. It has made me more exciting to pick up his future work, and to wonder where he might go next. He may still be thinking about animal consciousness, but this book shows there's a lot more to do with that, and plenty of options for places to take it that mean it's a well far from dry.
--
The Math
Highlights: Do you like to be sad? Hoo boy will you be sad!
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10
Reference: Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crow, [MCD, 2026].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
A book resistant to many things, among them clarity, simplicity and relatability, and mostly the better for it.
"Nothing in memory ever made itself so available"
This line, from late on in The End of Everything, the new and Booker longlisted novel from M. John Harrison, is a fair summation of the book the precedes it. But not the only one. Not by a mile.
This is the point of a review that usually contains a plot summary. It won't here. I could try to craft one, and talk about some of the things that do, probably, happen in the book. But it would be wildly unhelpful, and possibly misleading. I could, by stating only facts, give the impression of a thriller or a dystopian climate mystery or even a cosy journey through a landscape (though that one might require a few elisions). Some characters exist. Some actions and conversations are undertaken, the world has suffered a dramatic change. This isn't a novel that's about its events; it's just not what its for. To effectively talk about it, then, I have to turn to what it is, and is about... and that feels rather more slippery.
First up, it's been longlisted for the Booker Prize, which, if you're familiar with their game, says a fair bit about it in some regards. There's a type of prose-forwardness, and formal play, that is far more usual in literary fiction than in SF or broader speculative fiction (not unknown! just less common), and a lack of interest in the nuts and bolts of the world that speaks to its use far more metaphorically than functionally. The prose particularly of these is worth focussing on, because it's in that interesting space of being obviously crafted and thoughtfully deployed without being particularly purple. Though certainly there are some high scoring scrabble vocab choices around, they don't feel encrusted onto the text or particularly burdensome to it (though they do, fairly quickly, form a distinctive style that comes through especially in the dialogue - more on that a little later).
More prominently though, are the themes and metaphors and general sense of idea interplay. If novels can be plot forward or character forward, I would call this one theme forward, perhaps. Or idea forward. Motif-forward? It is dense with moments and scenes that feel laden with meaning, invested with something being their direct plot function, and often divested of a direct plot function - there are meandering digressions that don't seem to relate to what anyone is doing, because well... they don't. They serve instead the text's function as a potential map of meaning and interpretation.
There are many ways to feel when you finish a book, but one of them, and one I savour very much, is the feverish excitement and urge to discuss when finishing a book that sparks not just thought but criticism. That's what all that theme is serving here: the creation of a book that wants not just to be read, but to be read into, and which provides a rich field for the harvest, a cornucopia of potential readings. With that sort of book, you always, at least to some extent, take out what you yourself bring to it, so I do not consider these an exhaustive list of potential readings, but they were the ones that came to my mind most readily as I made my way through the text, and the ones I felt best connected into one another and were best served by being laid alongside the rest.
The first, and one I will freely admit is absolutely something I'm primed to bring into a text with me, is a class reading. Specifically, a disdain for a certain kind of grasping middle class, and perhaps a glee at the downfall the cataclysmic change may have wrought on them. There are several vignettes from a before time, of the rich partying (predominantly in South London; it's strange but wonderful to read a book in which I recognised so much of the landscape), that felt drenched in contempt for their excess. I don't think at any point it turned into a wider take about capitalism more broadly; it felt too pointed, too specific and sharply observational for that. And it was, in that, desperately English too. Those South London and south coast locations all felt critical to the message being put across, to the very particular people being evoked in some of the characters, even those who only got a very brief stint on the page. Even in that brief time, many of them felt familiar without necessarily being individual: washed out photos of someone I might once have known, or a face in a crowd. There's... not anger, quite, but some emotion that felt to me underlying all this, a disgruntlement or irritation, that made it feel more powerful.
But where that reading felt to me sharply invective, there's another one more drenched in sorrow, and possibly the most obvious reading of the book: about dementia. One of the characters is described explicitly as suffering from it, and the way her actions proceed throughout the narrative, and the way the descriptions and emotions are portrayed as diffuse, blurry things, only swinging into sharp delineation at key points, seems to underscore her experiences as she describes them. But this is not just focussing on the memory loss aspect of dementia. Instead, it is quite easy to read some of the events as representative of the loss of inhibition that is also part of the condition, and so to take some of the worst events of the book as a possibly inescapable tragedy, horrible for all involved.
This reading makes particular sense to me of a moment which comes early on in the book - page 14 in my edition - that seems out of nowhere. It is horrific, particularly because it is a horrific act described with intense nonchalance. The horror has to come from the reader, because the prose isn't providing it. And it is somehow more palpable for that choice. This moment unsettles everything that comes later, and made me doubt the emotional tone being presented, and how that connected with the events and the characters' perceived reality.
There's also a more generalised reading about ageing, which goes hand in hand but distinct from the dementia one. This is more tied to the actuality of the characters' words and experiences, rather than in reading into the gaps and how different pieces interact. There are several moments of characters noticing how the world has changed around them, how it seemed to happen without any way of stopping it, and feeling detached from and alienated by the world they now live in but can neither change nor control, fondly thinking back to the better time of their youth. What is this if not a lament for the passage of time? And while the dementia thread is a great tragedy, made all the more so by what it causes, the ageing one feels to me more ambivalent, resigned to the reality but not happy about it.
There's definitely also some "politics of modern Britain" in the mix, though I admit I could not quite find a specific angle to connect throughout the story. There are sharp moments scattered throughout that felt specific and directed - like a line talking about the state of the country at the time the story is set, where the tide of small boats has turned to predominantly fleeing rather than entering. I certainly paused when I got to that part of the text. But I cannot quite figure out what it's doing or saying. Is it just broadly pessimistic about modern Britain? In what way? I am lingering over it, picking at it, wanting to figure it out and not being quite able. We'll come back to this too.
Aside from the potential for thematic readings (plentiful) there is still more to enjoy. The formal playfulness comes out not just in the crafted prose, but in occasional oddities, repetitions and deviations out of the flow of the text, used to illustrate the shape of the world but also just fun, as pieces of artistic meandering all by themselves. There's also a hint, maybe, that the text is at least in part diegetic, in a way that is pleasingly headfucky if thought about too long or in too much detail. Harrison is clearly interested in the text as specifically a text, and what texts, collections of words imbued with greater significance, can do in the hands of someone with a mind bent towards nonsense (in the most complimentary sense).
There is also, to loop back to that first delayed point, an oddity of character. I enjoy it, but it runs rather counter to the norms I'm used to both in genre and in litfic - a rejection of realism. None of the characters feels intended to convey individuals that one might meet on the street. They do not have distinctive, individual voices, and they all talk, more or less, like the text rather than like themselves or anyone I've ever met in the world. They are constantly artful, affected and approaching their topics at a weird angle, full of slightly off-kilter descriptions and philosophical musing. They aren't people, meaningfully, and that's fine, realism is only one option among many. But it's still strange to read, when it's the thing I'm quite so immersed in 99% of my reading time. And because I'm not quite sure I can articulate why Harrison has chosen to make it this way, what purpose its serving to the text. It's possible that this rejection of relatability, this intense opacity of character interiority, is meant to demonstrate quite how implausible relatablity ever was - every man truly is an island, and we can see through no window into his soul. Or is it meant to render out the individuality, in this broken down world where so much else about normality has been lost? I don't know. It could be something else entirely. It could be nothing. It could simply be an affectation. There's nothing I can quite find purchase on to really figure it out.
Which brings me back round to my second delayed point.
There's a spectre that haunts the corners of the text, and that is the iGhetti, who are, perhaps, an invading alien force from the astral plane. Maybe. Of all the things in the book resistant to explanation, they are perhaps the most opaque, the most unclear, to the extent that, at times, I doubted whether they existed at all. I think it entirely possible that Harrison is having us all on with this, and it's some sort of complex bit in service of a different narrative agenda. Or that it's just doing something I haven't quite figured out yet. There are conflicting details littered through the book, but few of them, never in enough useful explanation to make much in the way of sense. It feels like the characters try not to think about them, mostly. And so it's a book that's making you work for a lot of its content, both the thematic and the background. Getting a sense of the iGhetti requires me to be reading in a very active, brain on sort of way, and in the end all that activity merits little in the way of reward, just as the politics seem ever so slightly out of reach.
This is, I think, the novel's great strength, and also its great weakness. It is a text oblique enough to permit many readings, and it is also a text oblique enough to be unsatisfyingly impenetrable at times.
I like books that are hard work. I like sometimes not being given everything on a plate - I complain often enough about books that do that too readily and too clearly. And so it feels rather perverse to be complaining that I got what I asked for. And I'm not... not exactly. I certainly wouldn't change the book in any way. I think the thing is that, by choosing to be so resistant to reading, Harrison has closed himself off to the sort of emotional access that, for me at least, allows me to love a book. He's maxed out the "appreciate" bar, though, and I like it plenty. It's a siloing of the type of response available all into one pot, and one that runs counter to a lot of current speculative fiction's approach, and I can only salute it. I think making the book easier to access would ruin much of the magic. But it does just mean it's not quite all the way for me.
And my literary diet needs that variation. I want to read books that satisfy me intellectually as well as emotionally. And that is, more or less, what is happening here. I felt a sort of feverish rush when I finished it. I felt awake. I felt stretched, like I'd done a nice jog with the little grey cells. I felt satisfied. Books like this are a necessary complement to the ones full of character realism and emotional heft, and absolutely ones prime for critical discussion. If I stick with the food metaphor, that's broccoli, but I fucking love broccoli.
So, after all that, what is this book?
It's SF but it's also unapologetically literary fiction in how it approaches its concepts - no sense of or desire for explanation, or even necessarily experience. It's about conjunction, reaction, the interposition of idea and motif and theme and how they might bounce off each other to make the reader have some sort of response, rather than an attempt to create immersion or realistic people. It's a book asking you to criticise, not asking you to solve or relate. It's a book doing a dystopia and an alien invasion and an astral plane and maybe even some satire. It's about dementia and ageing and Britain right now - if the unspecified pessimism that runs through it all can be considered of the moment (not unreasonable). It's a fuzzy journey through a familiar yet strange landscape, a tragedy and a warning. It is intensely, indescribably itself. It's fascinating. And it's frustrating.
The thing is about the books that cause this feverish excitement, the thrill doesn't always last. Sometimes it smoulders down into the embers of a long, burning passion, it's true. But not always. I think, after my initial fascination with The End of Everything dies down, what will be left instead is something less emotional - an appreciation for the complex artistry, a fascination with the way the different layers and pieces work together across the whole. Not exactly love, but something nonetheless necessary and worthwhile.
--
The Math
Highlights: Delicious prose with the occasional line that lands with a big bang, rich text full of possible readings, lot of cleverness available to find as soon as you start looking
Nerd Coefficient: Yes.
Reference: M. John Harrison, The End of Everything, [Serpent's Tail, 2026].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
The opening volume of an extremely classic-feeling fantasy adventure
Killian is the captain of the Cutlass Hawk, a ship he may or may not have acquired entirely legally, in debt to local crime bosses, and haunted by the his past, both the crimes he's committed and the events that led him to them in the first place. He's charming, violent, clever, impulsive, and has a little bit of access to the skein, the magic of his world. Trying to pay off his debt to some local crime bosses, he's now been shackled with an entirely dubious duo from the culture who killed his mother, and who want to undertake one of the most dangerous sea voyages possible, through the domain of a mad god sea serpent with a penchant for storms and shipwrecking.
If The Deep and the Drowned sounds, from this brief synopsis, like the sort of fantasy story you've read before... well, you'd be right. There is something incredibly old school about it, an familiar too. Its expansive secondary world, its magic that underlies reality, its gods run wild and faded ruins of a once-great civilisation, its hero with a messy past and a yearning for revenge, even its pacing and twist reveals, all of it feels straight out of all the books I devoured as a teenager a couple of decades ago. And straight out of the type of books I haven't read in the last decade at the very least. This is a type of fantasy that just isn't hitting big, and I'm not picking up, these days, and so it was with a strange sense of déjà vu that I ploughed through Ian Green's forthcoming novel.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm honestly not sure.
In the abstract, I absolutely do not think stories need to be timebound to the trends of the moment: there will always be someone who doesn't like the flavour of the month and yearns for what came before, and they deserve books to read just as much as anyone else does. But... but. The problem with writing something that feels quite so familiar as this does, quite so keenly evokes a mode of fantasy I read so very much of as a teenager, is that it feels like the reiteration of the same mode needs to justify itself. When so much of a thing already exists, there's a sense that the new one has to make a statement about what it brings to the party that the pre-existing novels filling the same niche don't provide. That argument can take many forms, and "it's not new but it's phenomenally well-written" could be one of them. It doesn't have to be a twist (though twists, reworkings and reimaginations of the existing corpus are great fun and make their arguments quite plainly enough). But if there's already a plentiful crop of this one type of thing, the work has a lot of crowd to stand out from. I'm not sure "there's not been any new iterations of this one thing" for a while is quite enough, but maybe that's just me.
In any case, and sadly, I'm not sure The Deep and the Drowned succeeds in making such a case. Which isn't to say it's a bad book - the worldbuilding, plotting, prose and characterisation are all competently done, and while there are things to poke at in some of them (more on which shortly), that's true of many books still well worth reading. But when I put it down, I felt a great sense of it missing something. And I think it comes in at the level of theme, or possibly argument; I'm not sure if the book has something to say beyond having a cool story... and I think it might have needed one.
It's interesting to compare to Green's previous novel, Extremophile, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award last year. It was a novel of a type I'm not normally excited by (heists) but which managed to lure me into a heap of enjoyment through a mixture of good writing, the sense of a depth of knowledge on the author's part across several of its topics/settings, and just a strong thread, right at the base, of having something the say. It's a novel I ended up really liking, almost in spite of myself, just out of how well it was put together, at every level.
A lot of that same competence is here too, although translated away from near future climate fiction and into a secondary world. The handwriting of the same creator is visible, so to speak, just in a different font. But without the driving force of Extremophile's anger, or something equally forceful, it's not got quite the same magic to it that made the previous novel sing.
Which sounds like a lot of a downer on the novel, but it's not all that way. Some of the disappointment comes precisely because so many aspects of it are handled with the same skilled hand, that the little hole in the centre is felt that much more keenly. The possibility is visible.
One of the great decisions Green has made is to have his protagonist (and his ship full of crew and associates) be genuinely somewhat criminal. It's an unfortunately common issue in stories containing pirates, thieves and other lawbreakers that they don't... actually do any pirating or lawbreaking. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty is the easiest example that jumps to mind, but is hardly alone in this. Pirates are, to be quite frank, not very nice. They do not very nice things, often to entirely innocent people who just happen to be in possession of cargo. Or people who aren't totally innocent but still don't necessarily deserve to be pirated. If you're going to do a story with pirates in, you should probably accept that they are pirates and embrace it, moral mess and all. And if you can't swallow that... maybe don't write about pirates. Green has not fallen into this trap. His protagonist, Killian, gives plenty of examples of things he's done in his life which are... let's say not great. Certainly not lawful. Quite often not all that moral. But he remains a sympathetic character nonetheless, because people can be complex things. He has a backstory, he has context, that make his crimes make sense, but without feeling the need to constantly excuse and minimise them. It's great, and it gives the story and setting more weight for its premises to be taken seriously in this way.
There's also a sense of stories beyond the one being told, which to my mind is the mark of worldbuilding done right. This especially comes through from several of the secondary characters, with whom there are moments of understanding of their place, and their trajectory, through the world that only intersects with Killian's, rather than being subordinate to it. Whether that's the antagonists Marion and Mournchild, part of two different, temporarily aligned hierarchies, with their own goals and mores, or Silver, who disapproves of some of the plundering but needs Killian for his access to archaeological sites she has an interest in, or Kaikatsu, a member of another species called the Antian, who carries a mysterious creature called a relu in secret, and clearly has goals relating to it that have driven her far from her people. It is, in focus, Killian's story, but Green does enough work on these other threads to make them feel just real enough, just deep enough, to imply the world beyond the borders of the narrative.
It's also a book full of religion. In some ways, religion done much better than in a lot of traditional fantasy: the ones shown on page for any real time definitely give the feel of being institutions that people might actually be part of, which is rarer than it should be. These are religions that make sense as a part of daily life, with rituals and restrictions and hierarchies and internal politics, all hinted at and gestured to, if not explored in detail. It's not the superficial thing of "what if gods, but real", though there are gods walking (and swimming) about in Green's archipelago. Thought has been given to how the metaphysical shapes the societal, and that is so critical to making this kind of worldbuilding work. Religion is never quite enough in the focus to get some moments of real heft, but as a part of the construction in the background, it's pretty well done.
On a plot and pacing level, if we step aside a little from the familiarity problem, there's a lot of skill too. Without going into detail on the specifics, there's a late third act twist which, if you've read a lot of this sort of fantasy is entirely to be expected. But the way Green plots the course towards it, however visible on the horizon, is extremely competent: there's a reveal to the reader just the right amount of time before the reveal to the protagonist, and the gap between them is just right to enjoy the knowledge without getting impatient for the fallout.
But then again, there are some issues in execution too. These predominantly lie in the character of Killian, the hero. Making him have his thirst for blood and vengeance is great, he feels like a genuinely criminal criminal in the grubby mess of the world that it makes sense he'd inhabit. But, at times, he's also... a big softie. And having that genuine criminality puts these two parts of his character at further apart poles. By the end of the novel, I felt there needed to be more work to sell him uniting those contrasts for him to truly make sense to me reading him; the regret he feels for some of his bloody deeds isn't quite enough to make the link work. Likewise, he's clearly meant to be charming, impulsive but persuasive, but I'm not quite sure the writing sells that enough for me to believe in it, especially in his dialogue. He ends up being the thing he needs to be for the story at all points, and doesn't quite succeed in being a character, or not always.
And so, the world is interesting, the writing pretty good, and there's promise for a lot of intersecting lines of adventure in the future installments in what is clearly going to be a series. If you want the sort of secondary world fantasy that was going round in heaps 15-20 years ago, this is doing exactly that, and pretty well. But it's not doing a whole lot more, and after the promise of Extremophile I was hoping for something with a bit more bite to it.
--
The Math
Highlights: fantasy religions that feel like people engage with them; a big, broad world; pirates who actually do crimes
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10
Reference: Ian Green, The Deep and the Drowned, [Head of Zeus, 2026].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
Awards season rolls around once more, and so it is time for our annual discussion of the Clarke Award shortlist.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. It’s one of the biggest UK based SFF awards but rather less prominent internationally than the likes of the Hugo, Nebula or World Fantasy. It’s a juried award whose judges are drawn from members of the various groups who support it, currently the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival. Jury members vary year on year, but over the lifetime of the award, the Clarke has tended to identify a particular vibe of SF, and often provided a shortlist which sits in noticeable contrast to the others looking at that year’s SF.
Joining me for this discussion is Dan Hartland, who is Reviews Editor at Strange Horizons, for which organ he has reviewed Clarke Award shortlists several times in the past. He’s also a columnist at Ancillary Review of Books, and has reviewed for Foundation, Vector, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the rest.
This year, the shortlist is as follows:
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Luminous by Silvia Park
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift
The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson
Roseanna: Before we get stuck into the shortlist, a question for you - what’s the appeal of the Clarke, why do you pay attention to it, discuss it, read it? What’s the draw?
Dan: Is “habit” a good enough answer? I think in some ways it’s the most honest: I read the Clarke in the same way I read the Women’s Prize or Booker shortlists every year. It’s just a thing I do.
As so many awards become, a lot of the Clarke’s attraction is simply that it’s a fixture, a regular moment to take stock, an annual local tournament where you can see a few lucky sides duke it out. If nothing else, it’s a reliable entertainment.
If I were going to be slightly less flip - only slightly! - I’d say what makes the Clarke worth noticing is that it offers a usefully (though not often transformationally) non-American view of Anglophone SF and, at least theoretically, a different view of what makes for a “good” book than we might get from awards granted via popular vote. Something about the juried nature of the Clarke - and where those jurors come from - grants it the capacity to recognise the odd or the alienating, the difficult or the path-breaking, in a way that is generative for the genre and less likely in more avowedly “crowd-sourced” shortlists. That doesn’t mean it’s a better barometer of where SF is at than, say, the Hugo Award for Best Novel; but it at least offers the potential for an alternative view - and that’s interesting.
Roseanna: There are no bad answers. Well, ok, I’m sure there are somewhere, but this isn’t one of them. Given that mine is “my partner was doing it and he made it seem interesting”, all paths to Clarke are accepted here. And it is interesting, for exactly that counter-to-the-crowd reason you cite, yes, but also because of the discussion it seems to generate every year. Not only that there usually is some, but that it’s often in-depth, critical, thoughtful in a way that I always find myself wanting to join in with.
And so, the annual Clarke discussion post.
To kick off the conversation this year, one of the books we’d both already got to before the shortlist was announced: When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift. The novel follows two women’s lives in the UK, starting a few years in our past and heading decades into the future. Through their work and passions - documentary film-making and activism - Swift unfolds a potential future, year by year, through climate change and political shifts, with a particular eye to nature and the human relationship with it.
I loved this. I have mostly-jokingly said more than once in the run-up to the shortlist being announced that if this didn’t make the cut I would riot. It’s not just because it’s good (though I do think it is), but also because, to me, it feels extremely engaged with what I perceive as the Clarke’s general vibe. It’s got the science fiction, obviously, but it’s also attempting something a little bit different, with a strong prose voice and maybe taking a little step towards literary pretensions (complimentary). What are your thoughts?
Dan: Yeah, it is just written extremely well. Every now and then, I open a book which immediately gives me confidence - which reminds me what it feels like to read what is possible from a honest-to-goodness novelist. Wolves gave me that feeling from page one - Swift’s style is just so well controlled, yet in a way which allows it also to feel very free and open.
This gives the book simultaneously an authority and a generosity which grants the reader an unusually rich experience - and permits the novel to achieve its own ends with a kind of open-ended totality. One is entirely convinced by the totality of this novel’s future, whilst also being made - sometimes explicitly - aware that it is a contingent one, and experientially quite different for the many individuals who populate it. This is rare stuff!
If that latter focus is what makes a novel “literary”, then certainly we have a piece of literary fiction here: dwelling on people, on subjectivity, on evocation of what it is to be. But in that other focal point we also have a book keenly interested in that which operates in much literary fiction as mere backdrop: fittingly for a work of climate fiction, the ways in which this novel’s society is constructed are approached critically, rather than accepted as the mere air its characters breathe. So what emerges, too, is a piece of political fiction, a story which - for all the very fine qualities of its design - is not an ornamental show-piece but a kind of tool for achieving something. That is, it’s a sort of very finely-wrought mallet. It’s quite a trick.
I wonder what you made of the ends to which the tool is put? This isn’t a hammer that smashes things, is it? It’s one that helps bend and fix-in-place - the novel believes we can build better things without going through what in much SF currently is very modish - a dystopian phase of collapse. While I was persuaded by Jacqui Nyathi when I spoke with her on Critical Friends that the novel isn’t entirely convincing on this front, Swift seems to want to show how the systems we already have might be redeemable. (It might be interesting in this sense, too, that she’s chosen the voice of the bourgeois literary novel.)
Roseanna: That is exactly one of the things I found myself coming back to when thinking about it - there’s a fundamental sense here that the system could work which I find far more optimistic and utopian than the ending we get. It feels simultaneously compelling and treacherous. Is it weird to say also “very libdem*”? But you’re right - we have plenty of burn-it-down novels, and plenty with someone working inside the system to bring it down less violently, but few which explore the idea that the system could work well. And as well as the voice of the bourgeois literary novel, it’s an idea that relies on the co-operation of about as in-system a thing as is possible, the monarchy, for the beneficial end result.
But I think that - surprisingly plausible - optimism about systems is also why I found it so desperately sad in a way that the burn-it-down novels never manage. Swift has created a world that is such a small sidestep away from ours that it emphasises how avoidable the horrors are, even as we experience them. The power of that proximity really works for me, especially through some of the most emotional chapters (I don’t know about you, but 2035 brought me very close to tears).
Swift is balancing the political and the emotional extremely well, having them pull together rather than as parallel paths. The personal as political, to mangle a phrase.
Dan: Yes, you’re absolutely right to raise how moving the novel can sometimes be. There’s some especially wonderful nature writing in the book which really makes the reader feel how important its characters’ rewilding projects are, and how deep the loss of habitats should be felt. As you say, that’s a very effective fusing of emotionality and politics, and that balancing happens in many ways throughout: it’s interesting you mentioned the 2035 chapter, because - although it does feature death and extinction - it also includes a hilariously slapstick encounter with a cartoon fascist. The novel can be quite broad when it wants to be; it inhabits several registers without coming across as awkward.
That said, I wonder why the jury shortlisted it. We can only really speak to our reactions to the text, of course, but responding to shortlists always involves a bit of second-guessing - and do you think it was the nature of the politics or the quality of the writing which commended this book to them? I know, I know …
Figure 1.
But also, I ask because something about another novel on this shortlist, Luminous by Silvia Park, prompts me to do so. Because I found this novel equally “political” but decidedly less well written … I don’t mean by this that the book is incompetent or even ineffective - it treats its central conceit of robotics in a (too?) wide variety of interesting ways. But I do mean to say the prose style is not nearly so fully developed. In this, I mostly agree with Adam Roberts in The Guardian, who praises the novel as an important work of SFF, but quibbles with it as a piece of writing: “Luminous betrays some roughness. It is too long [ … t]he pacing is uneven, the plotting a little messy. Stylistically it is vibrant, sometimes funny and memorable, although the prose can stray into oddness”.
We get a lot of hardboiled-by-numbers sentences (“It was near midnight when Jun found Eli’s kidnapper”); some nails-on-blackboard effects (“he had a gimlet gaze … that seemed to trump time”); and many attempts at winking wit which wind up only weakly winsome (“The museum turned out to be excruciatingly wheelchair friendly”). As Roberts also notes in his review, the structure and tone of the book feels a bit off, too: parts of it read like YA, other parts of it feel as if stretching towards Harrisonian pastiche, Nova Swing for the AI crowd. These don’t quite cohere, and they ramble, sometimes trying the patience of this reader, at least. Yet what the book does with its various robotic novums is often very interesting and even moving. I’m only poking at the novel’s weaker side to try and understand the jury … so maybe you should help me understand the book?
Roseanna: Is it novums or nova? Novipodes? Anyway. I loved it. The thing I find interesting here is I’ve had to pick the book up again to look at the prose because it didn’t make any impact on me enough to last, which usually means the prose was “fine”. And so I can’t find it in myself to argue with you, I’m not a passionate defender of its deathlessness, but I certainly didn’t find it getting out the ol’ mental cheese grater at all.
More critical for me were those novipodes, and how well they are handled as ideas. There are several going on, some about memory and about relationships, but one particular one about robot consciousness. And this is where I think the book shines because it felt at least to me like Park managed just the right amount of alienation of the robot perspective - they really are not human - while maintaining a lot of sympathy.
On two fronts, it feels like Luminous solves the problems of last year’s Clarke winner, Annie Bot - it juggles multiple threads but has them come together to feel like a meaningful, coherent thing rather than a mess of possibilities, and it grapples with the idea of another mind that is truly other while being truly worthy of respect, love and fellowship. So many robot stories have their protagonists just be shiny humans; Luminous doesn’t do that. In contrast to your shaggy dog feeling of it, it felt much tighter to me… but constantly in contrast with other things. I’m now not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
Dan: Ah, the Annie Bot of it all. It’s funny: I’ve not written anywhere about last year’s winner or shortlist, but I think I admire the book a bit more than most, and certainly on a craft level I think it’s more accomplished than Luminous. But I agree that on an ideas level, Park has thought through their conceits in a properly science fictional way. In that sense, it feels like we agree-while-disagreeing-a-bit on Luminous. We both sort of find its ideas compelling while sort of finding its execution workaday, albeit while placing different emphasis on different points of those scales?
But maybe this brings us to Dungeon Crawler Carl. I say this because of an exchange I had with a Strange Horizons reviewer just after this year’s shortlist was announced. Said reviewer had enthusiastically pitched me a piece about the book last year; I’d turned them down, because the idea of the book just didn’t feel sufficiently interesting. “You were right and I was wrong!” I wrote to said reviewer when the shortlist came out. Their response? “No, the book is absolutely not good enough for the Clarke shortlist.” I mean, with friends like these …
How did you find it?
Roseanna: In a word - difficult.
Since the shortlist was announced, there’s been plenty of discussion of Dungeon Crawler Carl’s inclusion because it was indeed a bit of a surprise. One of the things I’ve seen pulled out in the discussions of the people who like the book is the very evident anticapitalism, the anger the book clearly has about the corporate entity running the show. It’s a story about a guy whose world has been destroyed, billions of people killed, and he’s at the mercy of people he can’t see, forced to fight for his life. Absolutely, there’s a rage about systems, and it comes out most obviously when the narrative makes clear how even the functionaries the reader sees are trapped, many of them with just as few options as the “crawlers” like the titular Carl who have to fight for their lives. The book spends a lot of time putting Carl in difficult positions, forcing him to do horrible things he feels horrible about as part of this. It’s meant to be difficult, it’s meant to suck and highlight how systems suck.
But… I don’t think what it’s doing is worth how it’s doing it.
I’ve read books that do this kind of “behold the horrors of the system” approach, great ones even, like Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. I know what it’s like to read a book that uses horrible acts to get you on-side with the message, and can really respect it as an approach when done well. I just don’t think it’s being done as well here. It’s a combination ofthings like the edgy, transgressive-feeling humour (and how often things feel like they are trying to be humorous), the way violence is portrayed and quite how much of it you read through, how quickly some horrible things are glossed over, and many things that are dropped in unexamined, that I really think needed examining if they were going to be used like that. There are some things that need to be done carefully and purposefully to get their full heft, and I just was feeling neither the care nor the purpose in sufficient quantities to fully buy into it.
The two areas that stuck out for me particularly were gender, and the constant ease with which Dinniman turns to fatness as a way of describing unpleasant things. Neither of these tended to feel like points that served the wider anger of the book - they felt more like a reflection of some unexamined biases. And the unpleasant tinge those brought made the whole thing feel quite dated for me, which was then exacerbated by the fact the author thinks it makes sense for a 27 year old man’s culture reference points to be Knight Rider and The A-Team and MacGyver.
So… yeah. Not a fan. How about you?
Dan: I think you’re so right to land on Chain-Gang All Stars as a comparator - not least of course because it was relatively recently shortlisted for, er, the Clarke Award. There was a brutal, gory novel about systems and injustice - indeed, which couched those themes within the frame of a game - which I think most people, or at least the National Book Award, would agree slapped. What’s interesting about Dungeon Crawler Carl, though, is that some people think it slapped. And we are talking in some cases people whose opinions we usually jive with.
As I read the book, I tried to account for this. One thing some might say is that the jury is making some sort of statement about popular fiction, and through that even about class. If When There Are Wolves Again is a bit Lib Dem, maybe Dungeon Crawler Carl is a bit Blue Labour**.It is anti-corporate in a glib kind of way, pro-worker in quite a narrow fashion, bluntly aware as you say of systemic injustice. It wants to make us angry by showing us bad things.
But (and?) Dinniman’s book is also - sometimes in effect or implication or through as you note assumption rather than explicitly or self-avowedly - pretty conservative: it is robustly anti-intellectual, for one (contrast the workaday unshowiness of the largely competent prose with the failures of ambition in Luminous); its sense of humour usually involves an only occasionally responsible kind of down-punching; and its hero, of course, is a straight white male. Whatever the radicalism of this book, it is also yoked to a kind of not only popularism but populism.
Now, for all I know, later in the series Carl persuades his fellow crawlers to join with him in anarcho-syndicalist revolt against the system. But those books have not been shortlisted. The LitRPG structure of this first volume (the expression of which I found repetitive and wearying quite quickly) does not give anyone time or space in which to do much actual revolting.
Roseanna: The LitRPG structure is an important point to pick up, actually. This is the first in the subgenre I’ve read, and I do think it’s worth highlighting as a type of novel that is currently very popular, and also quite different from a lot of what I am used to reading. The thing particularly that stood out to me is how often Dinniman resorts to measurements, rather than comparisons or metaphors or similes. Things aren’t “as warm as a summer’s day”, they’re 80 degrees fahrenheit. There are a LOT of measurements, actually.
The struggle I have is that I find that specificity… unartful? So to what extent am I objecting to this particular book, and to what extent am I saying “this particular subgenre’s habits are extremely not for me”. Unclear! Probably unhelpful! But certainly noticeable.
Dan:Yep, I think this idea - this illusion - of measurability is important. The problem with games is that they approximate rather than mirror reality, their structures are much more complete than the ones in which humans actually live. At one point, Carl “grumbled that the system didn’t give me a choice” (p. 58). Despite the slight deniability that weasel-verb “grumbled” offers him, we are a long way in Dinniman from Sheldon-as-Tiptree’s “chinks in the world machine”. When Carl unlocks yet another of the dungeon’s snarky achievements (“you killed two mobs at once … on a brutality scale of Bambi to Martyrs, that is a solid seven” [p. 199]), or when he levels up a buff, what we are getting is sub-Douglas Adams satire of games,not reality.
When the bloody talking cat is allowed amoralism, Dinniman is placing some of his world’s worst excesses in the form of a cartoon character rather than a human being - and thus escaping with one bound the moral implications of a given scene or event. And when we read another slew of pages about the mechanisms of the senseless game in which Carl finds himself, we are not reading either political analysis or game theory; we are being winked at.
I don’t even think it’s usefully science fiction (it is a para-text, a riff on things that some - maybe a lot - of SF fans also like); I’m not even sure it’s really a novel , or even a complete book. I suspect the judges wanted us to consider popular fiction, and LitRPG, as a form worth rewarding, and I admire that. But is this piece of popular fiction either unusually thoughtful or especially impressive? I don’t think it is, and ultimately we need to judge - ho ho - this as a single book, not a totem for something else.
I mean, it’s not as if we don’t have an example on this very shortlist of a well-edited self-published book which inhabits a popular SFnal idiom and does it with a great deal more elegance and - I think - to more impressive effect. There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, after all, reads at a real rip - and makes a big impact with both its ideas and pace. I’ve compared parts of the printed text with the original version still online, and qntm’s publisher and editor have done fantastic here: the published book is leaner, smarter, cooler. Its origins in the SCP Foundation are still very visible - your serial numbers, sir, they are barely filed off - but particularly in this slicker form the story is also very much its own thing. The novel might be more mind-bendy and its structure - a set of linked short stories which ultimately really do cohere into a single novel - might be non-standard; but this reads like popular fiction - what if The X-Files but self-aware, what if le Carré but Cthulu, what if Southern Reach but Robert Ludlum.
Roseanna: I agree that it coheres, and there’s a definite sense of a whole being built out of the sum of its parts, one that is obviously drawing on various threads of horror and weird that exist within the genre, but alas for me, it just… fell a bit flat.
I was not creeped out at all, which is a surprise, because I am a catastrophic wuss. And it didn’t really touch me, or make me feel much in the way of anything beyond “oh, neat”. Which was fine back when I read it the first time (way before the Clarke shortlist was even a twinkle in the judges’ eyes), because there’s a very good place within the genre for books which are simply fine. But it’s not one I’d look for or put on a shortlist myself.
It’s odd, because on an ideas, craft, plot level, it is pretty neat. It has one idea it does with gusto, and while it isn’t new, it’s a bit updated, which is fun. But there’s something missing at the heart of it, I think. It felt like a triumph of idea over emotion, which is just unfortunately a mode that doesn’t land for me. And then, at the end, I think it rather went off the rails. Not to go too into spoilers, but it felt to me somewhat as though there was a relatively interesting story going on for the first three quarters, and then the author just didn’t quite know how to end things, so tacked on a fairly uninspiring dramatic crescendo that felt out of tone with the much more steadily growing tension that had been the far for the rest of the story.
Nonetheless, I had fun. I too churned through it at pace and would recommend it without qualm to people whose interests I thought it aligned with. But at the same time, it felt for me the very epitome of 3/5 stars, emblematic of “fine”, whereas something like the Southern Reach series felt like it had something… special, I suppose.
Which is a very roundabout way to say “ambivalent”, so I’d be interested to know exactly what about it really grabbed you?
Dan: I think largely it was the craft, which is why I focus on the tight editing. Its terse sentences, willingness to hold back on the reader, and sense of mostly each chapter being a satisfying piece in isolation gave the reading experience a real pace for me. And in particular there’s an interesting motif here - under-played, of which more shortly - that sees human ingenuity as itself the problem: the Division’s researchers only conjure the civilisation-threatening things by learning just enough to press their buttons.
I just gulped it down, it is - dread adjective - cinematic. In a sign of something-something-multimedia-landscape it is in fact already cinema.
But I absolutely agree that something of this frictionlessness came from the absence of contrary currents, of a countervailing human element: that final crescendo depends on you really caring about the principle characters, and … they’re not really characters, are they? There is some of the Dinnimanish omnicompetence in the Division Head Maggie Quinn which never quite lands as a depiction of a person. Partly, this might be deliberate - the antimemes are constantly stealing people of knowledge and memory, which does not allow, really, for anything like consistent characterisation. But the characters don’t really know that - at any one point, they feel themselves to be whole people. So we should be getting more from them than we do.
It might be right to say that the novel’s one (good!) idea is chased after by its heroes but never really caught. In fact, I’m starting to feel like this is a shortlist of often flashy books that don’t quite stand up to scrutiny, and that’s beginning to bother me. Because SF really does need to be - increasingly is, and in fascinating ways not reflected here - more than just the literature of gee-whizz treatments.
Roseanna: Very much agree. I want my SF(F) to be tackling bigger themes, especially when it comes to awards shortlists. Which brings us, I suppose, to the next one on this list, The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson. In a post-disaster future, a college springs up around a girl who can turn the digital ghosts of our technological age into decipherable information, helping them recreate weather forecasts, maps, bathymetric data and the like to help make this extremely turbulent world a bit safer to navigate. Only there’s a rot at the heart of the whole idea, and the protagonist has to grapple with whether the lives they save, the good they do, is worth what it takes to enable them. It’s extremely not gee-whizz.
However it might be another Omelas riff, and also more (maybe less?) importantly, I’m not certain it’s Science Fiction. I think it depends on your definition? Does it being set in the future suffice? 1800 word essay answers only.
Less jokingly, I am interested in this being specifically selected for a science fiction award when it is self-consciously - the author says so herself in the acknowledgements - grappling with dark academia, which is typically a fantasy-aligned genre. It’s doing some stuff, blurring some lines, and I like that about it, and its relentless commitment to atmosphere.
I’m not sure I love it as a whole though - I think too much gets sacrificed at the altar of atmosphere for it to fully cohere, even as it has flashes of excellence. But what do you think? Substantial enough? It certainly feels different to the rest of the shortlist so far.
Dan: In the sense that this book reminded me, in its quasi-mystical novipodes, of a previous Clarke winner, Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire, I don’t want to stomp on the question of genre too much - though I agree that this shortlist feels … not wholly rigorous … in its sense of what SF is. Here, we have as you say a very deliberate entry in dark academia fused with a half-hearted murder mystery. It is much more these things than it is anything like - as in Luminous, for example - a proper science fictional ironing-out of its ideas. The ideas here - digital ghosts, the literal internet literally haunting us - are iiiiiiinteresting, but yet again … do they make sense or go anywhere? I’m not sure they do.
Worse than this, though, is that I’m not sure it’s a very good bit of dark academia or an especially effective murder mystery (I mean, I don’t want to labour this point but more or less the butler did it, for pity’s sake). In fairness to Wilson, she says that she wanted to write dark academia “without any of the trope/vibe trappings” - and I think she manages this. But isn’t dark academia all vibes? It’s not enough to feature a troubled teacher and a corrupted institution, surely? Changing Places isn’t dark academia, right?
So if the book isn’t either of the things it’s principally trying to be, what is it? Well, its characters are a bit interchangeable and are in general insufficiently established to make much impact; its prose is often stumbling and certainly its sense of pace - in fairness to this naval novel, much like a boat becalmed on a hostile sea - comes and goes, often totally. Perhaps the book wants to remind me of a classic like Aliens or Moby Dick: everyone gets picked off one by one until the end, and then there’s an amoral lesson for the survivors, who are about to be thrown from frying pan to fire. But that absence of vigour makes those comparisons a bit sad, too.
So ultimately, I think you’re right to cite the obvious Omelas riff: the book probably rises or falls not on its ideas or its vibes or how it handles its influences but on how moved you are by the plight of its central, imprisoned, child. And I can’t say the treatment of the motif is any more novel here than it was in that one episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I know these beats; without serious invention, they don’t make me wanna dance.
Roseanna: Ok so, in broad strokes, very much agree, but I think the thing I most want to pick up on is the point about the characters - because I want to expand on it a little bit.
Some of the problem I had while reading the novel is a sort of… tonal sameness throughout. The way it skitters between scenes, that stumbling pace, at first feel like they might be intended as characterisation of meek, skittish Auli - it fits, the text being flighty and nervy like her. “Breathless”, is the word I used in my notes, because it’s perpetually stuck keyed up high. But then Wilson switches perspective to Raphaël, whose character seems to be the opposite, stern and businesslike in the face of the general disarray of the situation… but the prose hops, skips and jumps about just as much. It no longer fits as characterisation; it’s just the book. The whole thing is full of short bursts, short sections, never settling on one idea or emotion long enough for it to build up any momentum, and by the end I just found it exhausting.
And for something like dark academia, or a murder mystery (of which, indeed, this is a fairly weak entry - it’s not just whodunnit but how little the narrative makes me care about whodunnit, making the final reveal a double damp squib) - that control of tension and drama is extra critical.
I’m not normally a person to nitpick worldbuilding, but I found myself doing so while reading here, and I think it feeds into that genre problem: if it were a dark academia book, or indeed a murder mystery book, I think we’d have got more internal-to-the-college worldbuilding, a better sense of the interpersonal politicking, to be able to either glean clues or understand the web of connections. If it were a science fiction book though, I think we’d get more of the world at large, more of a sense of what the ghosts are, how they affect the world, how things got to where they are now, why the college is doing what it’s doing, how it’s actually helping… any of that. But we get neither. And so I’m not quite sure what we’re supposed to do with what’s left.
But it’s also missing the kind of payoff I’d expect for any of the genres involved either. The murderer’s discovery is a non-event by the time we get there - other concerns have overriden it. And the Omelas riff has sidestepped any moral engagement because the main character never has to deal with the consequences to the wider world of how she solves the Omelas problem. The book just sort of… chickens out of committing to its premises at the end, so that there can be the happy ending I saw coming a mile off but was fervently hoping would be forestalled by some judicious dramatic deaths instead. I wanted it to commit to something, but it stayed hovering in between.
Dan: Yes to all of that - it gets strangely stuck in all the gaps between its various formulae. In fact, the recurrence of the formulaic is a bit of a theme here: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Antimemetics, arguably Luminous and now The Salt Oracle: aren’t all these books a bit familiar, a tad jejune, a trifle beige? Like, is there anything really challenging in how these books treat their purported Difficult Questions?
Which brings us, I guess, to the novel you might expect to buck this trend - the shortlist’s traditional “literary” entry (shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, no less!). And, true to form, I suppose this is the novel on the Clarke list that is most focused on interiority and character work. Its main character, a postcolonial scholar named Sara, lives in a faintly-sketched dystopian future in which people - and much is made of which people especially, that is women of colour - are subject to a range of arbitrary impositions. Most particularly, the idea of pre-crime - familiar to SF, of course, since at least Dick’s 1956 short story, “The Minority Report” - is endemic, and even the contents of one’s dreams can be used by the shadowy Risk Assessment Administration to place people in “retention centres” for often indeterminate periods of time. This is exactly what happens to Sara, who is deemed to be an imminent risk to her husband.
Which, y’know. So far, so Orange Is The New Black meets 1984. For all that Sara emerges as a believable character - equal parts, in the face of banal fascism, complacent, collaborative, incensed and despairing - I’m not sure the novel goes much beyond its obvious touch-points: Kafka, Kushner and so on (the bit where Octavia Butler is explicitly namechecked, and Lalami archly has one character note: “I don’t like sci-fi,” was especially on the nose). There’re some good lines which really illustrate what the novel is about - “what stings the most isn’t the moment of public shame, but the silence of the people she thought would come to her defense”, or “That’s bad luck” [… “No, t]hat’s bureaucracy” - but in context I sometimes felt that these, like so much about the books on this shortlist, served mostly to blunt rather than sharpen whatever incisiveness was intended.
Am I being unfair?
Not an actual scene from The Dream Hotel
Roseanna: No, I don’t think so. And I think in part because so much of what this was trying to do is something I would have really appreciated - the concept works, the characters work, it is extremely “now” in how it’s exploring extrajudicial incarceration in the US. Not that that hasn’t been going on for a long while anyway, but it has become a lot more prominently discussed, and so a novel which addresses that is a thing likely to get attention. But yes, I agree that for me it never quite manages to unite all of its ingredients into something that feels like a distinctive whole.
I’m about to say something that feels entirely wrong for me to be saying, the sort of thing I normally grumble about when I see it used in criticism of books that straddle the line between SFF and litfic or general fiction, but apparently it’s a book to make a hypocrite of me: I think the problem is it just isn’t really doing the science fiction part.
The two critical pieces that make this speculative are the near-future setting, which is so near future as to be essentially the present with the names changed, and the access to and use of dreams for this pre-emptively carceral version of the modern world. The dreams are the … not even USP, because as you say, this is riffing on existing properties, but the thing that might set it apart and give it the opportunity to really make its points in an engaging way. But there’s disappointingly little of them in the book.; I always felt like Lalami was on the cusp of digging more into that, using it more strategically to enhance the message and then it just never quite arrived. The dreams’ role in the risk scores that lead to incarceration remain vague. There’s a bit of a sense that the vagueness is part of the point Lalami wants to make, how on such small and fragile things are these atrocities built, but it never quite feels like she’s got all the way there on that either.
And so what I was left with felt mostly like a realistic portrayal of incarceration in the modern US. Which is perfectly good thing to write about, but in this instance one that felt strangely purposeless. It’s just sort of… there?
I feel like I’m being harsher on this than I intend, because I did actually read it very quickly, and had an easy time getting through it - far easier in fact than some of the other books on the shortlist. But it was a muted sort of… enjoyment is never the right word for a book that covers this sort of intersection of the horrible and the real, say instead “satisfaction” perhaps. It went down smoothly, and maybe that was part of its trouble?
Dan: I think perhaps so. One of the odd things about this book is its prose: it’s unusually frictionless, even sort of flat. I think this is deliberate - the novel ends hopefully, but with an instruction if we are to do better: “CONNECT.” The dispassion of its voice - and this extends even into those chapters which purport to be redacted emails or reports, indeed to the dialogue in which in theory we have access to viewpoints other than Sarah’s - feels like a comment on how meek this society has become, and how attenuated its individual members have become from one another. This combination of apathy and atomisation is what has done for it and them. The prose is designed, I think, to go down easily until - unless - we stop and think.
But, since the novel’s ideas or conceits never really flower into anything arresting, all we’re left with is a book that just sort of is. It’s pointing us to some important issues, yes, it’s appropriately cross about them. But a novel isn’t meant to be - or isn’t only - a call to action. It’s meant to live, to break out beyond itself somehow; and I’m not sure this book really does. Alas, I’m not sure this shortlist really does.
Roseanna: Which brings us neatly to some conclusions, favourites and predictions.
I think it’s become pretty clear that neither of us are deeply enamoured with this shortlist as a whole. I don’t want to read a shortlist and only find things I already liked on it; part of the joy is the discovery and the discussion, and all the more so when there’s disagreement too. But there are different kinds of disagreement, and I’m not sure all of the novels on this year’s shortlist felt like a conversation I desperately wanted to have.
I’m also sad there haven’t been more of the weird, genre-blurry novels that are often the USP of the Clarke in recent years, compared to other SFF awards: your Privates Rites, your Deep Wheel Orcadia, the sexy prose, the odd and the polarising, the not-quite-certain-what-it-is books that don’t really fit anywhere but have something to say and an interesting way of saying it.
Not that there are none here. I think for me, When There Are Wolves Again really fits the bill. It’s thoughtful, beautifully written, a little bit challenging, all the good stuff. And Luminous too, though less strong on the prose, still full of ideas and interlocking threads. I would happily call them both beloved, though if I had to pick a darling, it would be Wolves. Conveniently, this is also my prediction for a winner, though I am not historically successful in my haruspicy so we’ll see how that goes.
Dan: So what you’re saying is that your haruspicy is haru-spicy? (Sorrynotsorry.)
I think you’re right that in the main this shortlist feels like a missed opportunity: the Clarke has a grander history, and 2025 a better suite of books, than it manages to imply. I feel as if these six books variously, often bluntly, address (reflect, express, declaim) Key Political Questions Of Our Time, and do so in often popular forms. Perhaps that was the goal. If so, this seems limited, and even on its own terms has produced a shortlist which could surely be improved upon - as you say, the conversation might have been a lot livelier.
As it is, I think the Swift is the worthiest winner. I think the qntm might be the most swaggering expression of the shortlist’s populism. But I wonder if the Wilson might more cleanly (inoffensively?) navigate its way through the dialectical Scyllas and Charybdes of the judges’ various predilections. To be honest, I find this shortlist a bit baffling, even a tiny bit dispiriting; I don’t know that I can pretend to imagine the winner. Other than me, obvs, for having been invited to chat it all over with you - thanks, Roseanna. It’s been a lot more fun doing this in your company!
Roseanna: Thank you for joining me! This has been a blast.
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Footnotes
* Note for non-Brits - the libdems are a political party who embody a certain… mildness? They have the whiff of the CofE vicar at the cricket about them at all times, with a combo of gentle optimism and broad palatability that is absolutely encouraged by having a current party leader who delights in doing PR stunts where he falls off water skis or sings a jolly song. But despite being the party in the UK that most want voting reform, they also seem entirely Of The System.
** Another note for non-Brits - Blue Labour is a “post-liberalism” which emerged within the nominally centre-left UK Labour Party in the years following the 2008 crash. It has recently re-emerged to contend for influence in the embattled politics of the authoritarian moment (its leading thinker, Maurice Glasman, was the only Labour political to attend the 2025 US presidential inauguration). There is no publicly available information about its position on gaming, though one assumes they might be against the destruction of Earth - or at the very least the UK - by an intergalactic corporation intent on pitiless resource extraction.
References:
Matt Dinniman, Dungeon Crawler Carl, (Michael Joseph, 2025)
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel, (Bloomsbury Circus, 2025)
Silvia Park, Luminous, (Magpie, 2025)
qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division, (Del Rey, 2025)
E. J. Swift, When There Are Wolves Again, (Arcadia, 2025)
Lorraine Wilson, The Salt Oracle, (Solaris, 2025)
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
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