Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

Beam aboard your own Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror classroom with Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (Luna Press)! This new writing guide by myself and Tiffani Angus is ideal for students or for those who always wished they could have studied these exciting fields! Indeed, it’s ideal for anyone who wants to try their hand at writing speculative fiction!

Based on our combined 20+ years of classroom experience teaching literature and creative writing, this book offers aspiring Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror writers (as well as those wishing to teach them!) a variety of entry points into these exciting and popular subgenres.

We’ve had a fabulous first month of Spec Fic for Newbies being out in the world, with the book garnering a #1 New Release banner from Amazon US and subsequently selling out at the Luna Press table during the recent Eastercon launch event! But don’t worry, there are still plenty of copies left! Check out our linktree for purchasing options!

Spec Fic for Newbies offers “a sense of fun and exploration that you don’t always get from dusty ‘let’s teach you how to write’ books”, as Pete Sutton said in his review. And I think that sums the project up well. Because this is not a book about gatekeeping, it’s about blowing the gates wide open and encouraging new (or even more established) writers to tackle subgenres they may not have experimented with before!

Spec Fic for Newbies is broken down into bite-sized subgenres with a fun, open, and contemporary approach. Each chapter contains 10 subgenres or tropes, with a quick and nerdy history of each derived from classroom teaching practices, along with a list of potential pitfalls, a description of why it’s fun to write in these subgenres, as well as activities for new writers to try out and to get them started! The thirty subgenres include the likes of: Aliens! Big Dumb Objects! Solarpunk! Urban Fantasy! Cosmic Horror! Vampires! Zombies! Spaceships! And more! It’s the next best thing to being in class with myself (SF short story writer and past winner of Aberystwyth University Lecturer of the Year!) and Tiffani (director of Underhill Academy and fantasy novelist!).

We recently had a chance to discuss the origins of the book and our intention on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog if you want to check that out. Or maybe you want to see us in action and want to click across to one of the most fun interviews we’ve done about the book with Lauren McMenemy at Horror Tree.

And, if you want to see what all the fuss is about, don’t forget the purchasing options!

Neil Jordan: Works for the Page

Happy to report that my monograph Neil Jordan: Works for the Page is now available from Cork University Press!

Hailed in the Irish Times as a “great Irish novelist”, Neil Jordan is, in the words of Fintan O’Toole, “a peculiarly emblematic figure of cultural change”. Yet, while many people are familiar with Jordan’s filmmaking career, his most sustained interrogation of Ireland arguably occurs in his fiction. Neil Jordan: Works for the Page tackles this challenge, conducting a deep dive into Jordan’s legendary early volume of short fiction, his many novels, and several of his uncollected stories. The result is a work which enhances our understanding of contemporary Irish cultural studies while also suggesting future directions for the criticism of other artists operating in multiple creative disciplines.

A central strand of the book is examining Neil Jordan’s changing relationship to modern Irish history through novels such as The Past (1980) and Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994), as well as exploration the manner by which Jordan represents the War of Independence, the Civil War, the ‘Emergency’ (World War II), the 1960s, 1980s, and the present day. Neil Jordan: Works for the Page also offers detailed analysis of Jordan’s integration of the fantastic into his fiction, most obviously in The Dream of a Beast (1983), but also reframing the later novels such as Shade (2005) and Carnivalesque (2017) as more ambitious and speculative works than they were initially received as.

The significance of this book lies in its discussion of what kind of artist Neil Jordan really is, which is not necessarily the kind of artist that Irish Studies currently perceives him to be. He is neither just an Oscar-winning filmmaker nor a European novelist of the first rank, he is both, and the comprehensive introduction to the literary author provided by Neil Jordan: Works for the Page has been carefully structured to appeal to those familiar with only the filmmaker. This engaging study examines how, in an almost fifty-year writing career, Jordan has engaged with and expanded upon many core concerns of Irish literature: the struggle to define oneself against the weight of history, both political and artistic; the quest to understand the nation’s violent efforts to transcend and process its colonial past.

Neil Jordan: Works for the Page follows several well-received publications in the fields of twentieth century and contemporary literature. My history of the John McGahern banning was published in Irish Studies Review, while articles on Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Alastair Reynolds, Flann O’Brien, and Grant Morrison have been published in Irish University Review, Science Fiction Studies, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comic Books. Meanwhile, my own fiction has been anthologised in Year’s Best Science Fiction and Best of British Science Fiction, as well as regularly appearing in Interzone. My story ‘The Irish Astronaut’ was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, while my essay ‘Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis’ was a finalist for the British Science Fiction Association Awards. My next project is a writing guide, co-written with Tiffani Angus, titled Spec-Fic for Newbies: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing the Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (Luna Press, 2023). I have lectured in genre fiction and creative writing at Aberystwyth University in Wales for eight years during which time I received accolades including the Innovative Teaching Award and Lecturer of the Year. I am currently an Aberystwyth Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing.

Some Stories from 2020 for Your Consideration

Ahead of the close of Hugo nominations, I thought it might be nice to write up a quick reminder about the two novelettes which I published in 2020. Both are pieces I published in Interzone and both are eligible for nomination this year if you are interested in doing so!

First up is ‘Cofiwch Aberystwyth’ (Interzone #286, March-April 2020) which is a near-future post-apocalyptic tale of three young urban explorers – Mila, Sigrid, and Annabel – visiting the town of Aberystwyth (where I teach!) years after a nuclear attack on the west coast of Wales. Over on Twitter, Avila Books called it a “perfect companion story” to Manon Steffan Klopp’s Llyfr Glas Nebo.

Though one or two readers have pointed out that the piece’s deserted streets have taken on a different relevance during the pandemic lockdowns of the past twelve months, ‘Cofiwch Aberystwyth’ began life as, in many way, a post-Brexit story:

How had lively Aberystwyth, a centre of culture and literature, become this ruined shell? The simple answer was that it suffered a terrorist attack. But of course the perpetrators were not the brown-skinned mullahs or disaffected dishwashers targeted by the “Go Home” vans of the Home Office or the “Hostile Environment” policy of the government at large. Instead they were the cream of Eton and Oxford and the Royal Navy College in Dartmouth. They were skilled technicians who’d had their politics distorted pint by pint. They were mutineers. 

While politics are the backdrop to that piece, the state of the world for the past four years is much more to the forefront of my anti-fascist novelette ‘Make America Great Again’ (Interzone #287, May-June 2020), which follows a Detroit reporter named Jefferson Dodds as he travels to rural Michigan to investigate stories of a returned alien abductee against a backdrop of contemporary far-right violence. Reviewer Des Lewis called it “a heartfelt and powerful work. It needs to be read by everyone”.

I think it’s fair to say that this is an angrier story than ‘Cofiwch Aberystwyth’, one which originally began with the question ‘How the Hell do we still have Nazis?” and grew from there:

Jefferson sat in ZeeZee’s that evening scrolling through social media. He saw the usual gloating and outrange trending across all the expected hashtags and accounts. He saw Alt-Right fan-fiction masquerading as history. He saw elected representatives gaslighting their constituents. He saw women sharing stories of abuse only to be mocked or belittled. He saw people crowdfunding for insulin and surgeries. He saw tone-policing from the most spiteful and vulgar corners of the internet. He saw hate speech masquerading as free speech. He saw videos of flooded cities and photographs of storm-flattened towns. He saw ideologues becoming yes-men and yes-men becoming ideologues. He saw how violent rhetoric against critics of the government had escalated to physical assaults. He saw homegrown terrorists radicalized by the supposed leader of the free world. He saw the administration scaremongering about caravans of – Jefferson laughed darkly – ‘aliens’ as they trudged through swamps a thousand miles away. Again and again he saw lies uttered without any consequence. Again and again he saw the media denounced as traitors.

Both of these novelettes were longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association awards in 2020!

Explorations: Where No Writing Has Gone Before

I have elsewhere written about the experience of designing new academic modules (‘Teaching Irish Literature in a Time of Brexit’, Irish Times), but I think it is equally important to reflect on how academic modules evolve once they have come into contact with students. ‘Explorations: Where No Writing Has Gone Before’ is a second-year module that I developed over the past year and taught for the first time this semester. It offers students the opportunity to critically and creatively engage with a range of fictional and non-fictional material which takes as its subject the work of observing, interpreting, and articulating the exploration of the far reaches of this world and beyond. ‘Explorations’ originates in my interest in teaching about books by Apollo astronauts (a curious mixture of dry techne, memoir, travelogues, idiosyncratic treatises, and personal self-reflection, often co-written with Earthbound authors), but, while I may still do something with those texts in the future, they would, inappropriately for a university module in 2019, create an all-male reading list. So instead I took the idea at the heart of space exploration – voyages of discovery – and traced it backwards to the start of the modern scientific age, combined it with fictional representations of the same, and constructed a module around the idea of exploration in its positive and negative connotations.

Lectures and discussions were arranged in pairs of geographically themed two-week units, in each case looking at points of contact between one factual and one fictional text. In the course of the semester we examined writing about the South American Southern Cone and the Galápagos Islands (Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Patrick O’Brien’s The Far Side of the World, with an eye towards how indigenous peoples are presented in both the writing of the time and in historical fiction set during a similar period); Antarctica (contrasting the perspective of the all-male expedition recounted by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World with the all-female one imagined in Ursula Le Guin’s story ‘Sur’); the Himalayas (Jon Krakauer’s journalistic Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster and Michelle Paver’s ghost narrative Thin Air); as well as work about Earth’s Moon (comparing Jules Verne’s prescient fictional depictions of lunar exploration with the most extreme form of travel writing that there is: the aforementioned books written by Apollo astronauts, here specifically Eugene Cernan’s The Last Man on the Moon).

Framing all this was an introductory session foregrounding the problematic colonial elements of many explorations texts as I though it important for students to keep in mind from the outset how exploration, imperialism, military adventurism, and privilege so often go hand in hand. Indeed, we really got to wrestle with these questions of race, gender, and exoticisation in the weekly seminars which accompanied the lectures. For example, one class focused on how the Beagle’s Captain FitzRoy abducted native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, and the ways in which that experience harmed and traumatised the individuals in question. Another explored the history of the Sherpa people of Nepal, examining interviews and texts where they could tell their own story. Along the way we conducted exercises asking students to rewrite exploration narratives from the perspectives of the people being “explored” by the West and to (re)imagine what contemporary trips to the module’s selected locations would be like.

Luckily I had some wonderful students who rose to the challenge on all occasions. It was a joy to deliver the module, from week one’s hilarious quest to locate the obscure lecture hall (“Who would have thought that your first exploration would be finding the room?!”) to the final week’s freewheeling discussion of unmade journeys and unexplored places (“Mars next!”; “Europa’s oceans!”; “The Sun!” “France!” “Wait… France?!”). Several of the students also developed/workshopped characters and ideas that they intend to utilise on the final year Writing Projects (the creative practice equivalent of a dissertation) which is very gratifying to hear. In terms of the texts we studied, they seemed to enjoy Le Guin the most (unsurprising as A.) it’s a phenomenal story by an amazing writer; and B.) it was the shortest piece we looked at!). Maybe they weren’t quite as enthusiastic about Patrick O’Brien as I was but, on a pedagogic level, the comparison between The Far Side of the World and Darwin’s journals was fruitful and illustrative.

The module will be taking a hiatus in academic year 2019/20 as I will be on research leave next semester (which has knock-on effects for my teaching load), but when it returns for academic year 2020/21 I am planning the following changes based on this year’s experiences: swapping out Jules Verne from the Moon unit and replacing him with Mary Robinette Kowal’s alternate history of the space race in The Calculating Stars (newly crowned Best Novel 2019 at the Nebula Awards), a contrast to the real life account given by Cernan and a narrative that ought also offer students an interesting dialogue with Le Guin’s ‘Sur’. I will then eliminate the Himalayas unit entirely (participants found its snow and ice not distinctive enough from the Antarctic explorations covered) and will replace it with an investigation of writing about the deep oceans. Verne will move to this oceans unit with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and I will partner that with Hali Felt’s biography of mapmaker Marie Tharp, Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor. I will also slightly rewrite some of my Darwin material as I lately had the chance to meet some Galápagos tortoises up close and personal courtesy of London Zoo’s ‘Zookeeper for a Day’ experience (which is, for the record, tremendous!). There I was (obviously under supervision!) allowed enter their enclosure and interact with them (so inquisitive! So mobile!) and I look forward to relating that experience to the next cohort of ‘Explorations’ students.

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Other posts you may find of interest:

• Tolkien on Titan: Fantasy Fiction and Solar System Nomenclature
• Stephen Baxter’s Titan: Twenty Years Later

 

‘Cyberstar’ Published in Interzone

In addition to recent publications in Science Fiction Studies and the ‘Futures’ page of Nature, I’m very happy that my story ‘Cyberstar’ has recently appeared in the February-March issue (#280) of Interzone. It’s a creepy tale of a space monk dismembered by his fellow solar cultists and transformed into a cybernetic missionary whom they launch into the Sun to meet God. It’s been getting some great reactions (for example here and here) and is beautifully illustrated by Richard Wagner. ‘Cyberstar’ is my third publication in Interzone and takes place in the same universe as my previous story for the magazine, ‘Freedom of Navigation’. I hope you enjoy it!

‘Cyberstar’ is perhaps not the most obviously Irish of my stories, but the fingerprints are certainly there. The story’s space monastery, a pair of spinning asteroids linked by a tether and named the Skelligs, are for instance a sci-fi take on the monastic islands by that name which lie off the coast of County Kerry (you may recognise them as a filming location from Star War: The Last Jedi). Equally, the illuminated manuscript carried by the Abbot in the story draws on a long Irish history of ornate and symbolic medieval gospels, the best known example being the Book of Kells.

Interzone #280 also contains stories by Maria Haskins, Nicholas Kaufmann, Sarah Brooks, and Shauna O’Meara, along with the usual book, cinema, and DVD reviews. The issue can be purchased via TTA Press (and they, in turn, can be followed via Twitter).

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Other posts you may be interested in…

• Two new comedy stories published in Unidentified Funny Objects and The Incubator
• Speculations on Speculative Fiction: Dave Hutchinson’s Acadie – Genetic Conflict as Genre Conversation?

New Story: ‘Reach Out and Touch Someone’ on the Futures page of Nature

Illustration by Jacey

It was something of a Valentine’s Day treat last month to have my story ‘Reach Out and Touch Someone’ published on the ‘Futures’ page of the science journal Nature (my second piece here). The story follows an evolved human race as they spread throughout the Universe in the far future, transforming themselves both physically and culturally as they fly free in space. You can read it for free at this link.

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Other posts you may be interested in…

• ‘Freedom of Navigation’ published in Interzone
• ‘Chairs’, Flash Fiction published in the Irish Times

New Article in Science Fiction Studies: Hard Determinism and Hard Science in Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space Sequence

I’m delighted to have a new article about Welsh novelist Alastair Reynolds in the current issue of the academic journal Science Fiction Studies issue #137 (Vol. 46, Part 1, March 2019, pp.63-81). Here is the abstract:

This article examines Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space sequence (with a focus on the trilogy Revelation Space [2000], Redemption Ark [2002], and Absolution Gap [2003]) as an intricate working-through of philosophical questions associated with the implications of free will and current understandings of quantum mechanics, a series of experiments conducted through the medium of fiction by a talented novelist with a background in space science and astrophysics. It is argued that Reynolds’s fiction offers readers a credible compromise between the determinism described by classical physics and the “mere randomness” implied by quantum mechanics. Specifically, the Revelation space sequence is shown to function as a laboratory of sorts, a successful translation of complex processes and theories from real life physics (particularly the “Closed Timelike Curves” described by David Deutsch) into a rich fictional tapestry that is itself underpinned by a contentious metaphysical debate over the primacy either of intuitively felt freedom or material determinism. In the process, Reynolds is shown to combine hard (that is realistic) science with an interrogation of hard determinism (the belief that every event derives from initial conditions), as well as of the so-called hard problem of consciousness (simply put: where does consciousness come from?).

Do get in touch if you would like to read a copy of the article.

On  related note, I also recently contributed the entry on Alastair Reynolds to Aliens in Popular Culture (eds. Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn), a great new volume that your library should definitely get a copy of!

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Other posts you may find of interest:

• Speculations on Speculative Fiction: Is This Alastair Reynolds’s Most Political Novel?
• Journey to the Ends of the Universe Recalls a Classic Tale: My review of Poseidon’s Wake by Alastair Reynolds

Two New Comedy Stories…

I’m very pleased to have had a pair of new comedy stories published in the last month or so, one a space opera, one a piece of Brexit satire…

‘Old School: An Oral History of Captain Dick Chase’:

Published in Unidentified Funny Objects #7, ‘Old School’ is a far-future comedy about how the science fiction genre has changed over time. The story’s protagonist is (to paraphrase Wilson Tucker) the proverbial ‘hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship pilot’ of old, an insensitive Captain Kirk-ish figure who is revived from hibernation by a diverse and inclusive group of contemporary space opera characters who reflect modern readers and writers. Together they confront an existential threat to humanity and, in the process, our hero (I use the term loosely) finds a way to work with those he previously disregarded (elements of the story are inspired by contemporary debates within the SFF community). ‘Old School’ is presented as an oral history to play up the absurdity of Dick Chase’s behaviour in mockumentary fashion. It was a whole lot of fun to write. It’s got puns, it’s got SFF references galore, and it’s got a bit of commentary on the state of the field. I hope you enjoy it!

Pick up a physical or ebook copy of Unidentified Funny Objects #7 here (scroll down for volume 7!) or via Amazon.

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‘Corkxit’:

My Brexit satire ‘Corkxit’ was November’s featured story on The Incubator. It depicts the aftermath of a fictional referendum in which County Cork votes to secede from the Irish Republic. Though the vote was advisory, #CorkxitMeansCorkxit and now the real capital’s finest minds must figure out what to do about it. Beyond the obvious inspiration of contemporary politics, ‘Corkxit’ arises from discussions with my students about the use of second person narration and my realisation that I hadn’t tried that in a long time. People seem to have been enjoying it. Maybe you will too?

You can read ‘Corkxit’ online here at The Incubator.

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Other posts you may be interested in…

• ‘The Irish Astronaut’ published in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 31st Annual Collection
• Freedom of Navigation published in Interzone

Speculations on Speculative Fiction: Is This Alastair Reynolds’s Most Political Novel?

Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds is a Brexit novel. Not in the sense of, say, how Dave Hutchinson’s Europe books (2014, 2015, 2016) captured the zeitgeist of the populist, Balkanizational energies which prefigured the referendum. Or not in the way literary fiction like Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) uses the referendum aftermath as a backdrop for the relationship between characters. No, Elysium Fire is more focused than that, explicitly concerned as it is with voter manipulation in a society that prides itself on abiding by ‘the will of the people’ (158) and offering us a villain who, with shades of so many prominent Brexiters, is the scion of privilege rather than ‘the common man he makes out’ to be (15). In the process, Reynolds tackles the inherent inconsistencies of the Brexit movement specifically, as well as, in a more general sense, the manner by which voters making bad choices are the Achilles’ heel of otherwise robust democratic systems. To the author’s credit, he does not settle for any easy answers…

Please note: this post contains SPOILERS from here on out…

A superbly paced sequel to The Prefect (2007; now retitled Aurora Rising), Elysium Fire is essentially a police procedural – ‘A Prefect Dreyfus Emergency’ as the new series banner attests – set in the ‘Glitter Band’, a ring of ten thousand orbital habitats around the plant Yellowstone. Within the wider fictional history of Reynolds’s Revelation Space series, the Glitter Band is humanity’s Belle Epoque and home to about ‘one hundred million living souls’ (1). Each habitat is a world in its own right, each a place with its ‘own name and customs’ (1) yet all are united by a common belief in ‘Demarchist’ principles, in the sanctity of universal suffrage. Every Glitter Band citizen is equipped with neural implants which poll them constantly on ‘every conceivable matter’ and through which ‘the process of participation became as habitual as breathing’ (2). The integrity of this system is overseen by a limited force of ‘Prefects’ such as series protagonist Tom Dreyfus, an independent monitoring taskforce – part police, part tech-support – who might best be thought of as lightly armed returning officers.

Yet the accepted utopian conception of the Glitter Band – where ‘wealth and power were in almost limitless abundance’ (1) – has been upset. Public confidence in the Prefects and in the security of the Glitter Band has been damaged by the so-called Aurora Crisis of the preceding novel, and this has allowed for the emergence of other narratives. Specifically it has allowed room for a breakaway movement led by one Devon Garlin. As if to hammer home the Brexit comparison, our first glimpse of Garlin – ‘not the only figure associated with the breakaway movement, but he was by far the most influential and outspoken’ (14) – occurs in a kind of idealised version of rural England which could not be further removed from the realities of a high-tech and highly connected inter-orbital economy. He makes his initial bid at separatism on a habitat where ‘modest, stone-built homes dotted a gentle hillside, with smoke curling up from their chimneys. A waterwheel turned next to a mill, and off in the distance two woodcutters were at work with manual saws’ (11). ‘We surrendered our sovereignty,’ he tells the inhabitants of the Glitter Band as though reading from a UKIP manifesto (13). He maintains that separatist habitats are – stop me if you have heard this one before – ‘taking back control’ (13): ‘Control to manage their affairs in a way that suits their needs, not those of some distant, disconnected network of overseers’ (13). Thus Garlin sets himself up as ‘the voice of the people’ (15) and surrounds himself with ‘common thugs and bully-boys’ (287) as his ideas take ‘a toxic, ineradicable hold’ on the wider population (14).

I will resist the temptation to attribute aspects of Garlin’s background – the wealth, the private education, the supposed historic linage – to specific real-life figures from the Brexit movement but, suffice to say, the character emerges as a composite of the current British political rogue’s gallery. Yet Reynolds grants Garlin a far more interesting and compelling backstory than the Johnsons and Farages and Rees-Moggs of the world. Indeed, one could argue that Garlin, though despised by the Prefects as someone ‘who disseminates lies and half-truths for their own ends’ (129), is in fact Elysium Fire’s most engaging character and, rather than simple villain, is a true tragic antagonist compelled by a mix of idealism and circumstances beyond his control. This is never clearer than in the strand of the novel which follows his childhood (on a landed estate, of course) growing up with his brother Caleb in a brilliantly warped re-imagining of the Cain and Abel story (pleasantly eschewing a one-to-one match-up for a remix of elements such as each brother making sacrifices of sorts to prove themselves; one being favoured by the god-like powers guiding them; a visible mark set upon one who is exiled after a fashion, and so on). Reynolds transforms this straightforward story into a rich and multi-layered personal history for Garlin, complicated by instances of targeted amnesia and, in Brexiter fashion, a conviction that he recalls an almost mythological version of history (in this case the near legendary ‘Amerikano’ era of early interstellar colonisation). These inconstancies are eventually unsustainable for the character, who must in the end confront himself – in the most direct sense imaginable – when it is revealed that Julius is actually Caleb who has had his memories rewritten by the real Julius.

Such is the division and confusion of Garlin’s true self (echoing divided characters found elsewhere in Reynolds’s work such as the Ness sisters of 2016’s Revenger, Tanner Mirabel in 2001’s Chasm City, or the Chiku Akinya clones of 2013’s On the Steel Breeze) that, by Elysium Fire’s conclusion, even the identification of Julius and Caleb has been thrown into doubt as the separatist finds ‘an ending of sorts’ (391) in a union with his brother, their very bodies merging in a reckoning which is both as ambiguously ironic as it is ironically inevitable. For the reader, such irony has perhaps been foreshadowed by the chosen names (which are in fact his two middle names) of the novel’s separatist-in-a-time-of-Brexit: a merging of Devon, a county in southwest England, and Garlin, a commune in south-western France. The result is a character constructed, fittingly, to perform double duty. On the one hand Garlin, uncovering his true identity in the pursuit of his breakaway agenda, comes to embody the perceived dissolution of personal and national narrative certainty which some have glimpsed behind the Brexit movement. On the other hand, his very name announces the inescapability of blended European identity to the reader from the outset. In this way Garlin provides the link between the political allegory of the novel’s B-plot – the separatist movement – and its more recognisably science fictional A-plot, an investigation into a spat of citizens’ heads melting down (if ever there was a metaphor for the Brexit campaign…) as neurological implants malfunction across the Glitter Band. In both cases the crime is the tampering with flaws in the fundamental and supposedly inviolable machinery of democracy, that being in the philosophical sense – the idea that democracy can only be preserved if it chooses self-preservation – and in the actual machinery emplaced inside the brains of citizens.

Within the Glitter Band, democratic participation is conducted through a cranial implant known as the ‘Voi kernel’. The device is named after its creator Sandra Voi, the founder of Demarchist society and, not unimportantly, the ancestor of Julius Devon Garlin Voi and his brother Caleb. Aware that ‘true democracy embodies the possibility of its own dissolution’ (158), Voi granted herself and her descendants the ability to ‘guide the hand of democracy, to keep it from undoing itself’ or ‘from making choices it might come to regret’ (158). Voi intended such interventions to be ‘limited to marginal ballots, where a one or two percent shift is all that’s needed’ (184). It is this concept of ‘intervention’, along with the question of who should be allowed to intervene, which underpins the ethical quandary (of which Garlin is but a symptom) at the heart of the novel. The dishonesty within the Voi kernel, within the apparatus of democracy itself, may act, counter-intuitively, as a corrective inversion of the flaw within the righteous idea of democracy, but it is nonetheless a criminal act. Elysium Fire is clear that a ‘guiding hand’ such as Voi’s is a bad idea, offering examples of the corruption and moral bankruptcy of Julian and Caleb’s parents, as well as instances of how the brothers themselves abuse their privileged access, but nonetheless – and this is the uncomfortable but brilliantly executed slight-of-hand which Reynolds orchestrates in Elysium Fire – it is difficult for the reader not to speculate about how easily such a domestic intervention might have spared Britain from its current predicament. Certainly the figures given in the novel – again, a shift of ‘one or two percent’ – imply a certain preoccupation with the contemporaneous Brexit vote carried by a mere 1.9%. Changing such a result would, of course, have been fraud. It would have been unethical. It would in fact have been immoral. But, through the possibilities inherent in the Voi kernel’s backdoor, Elysium Fire nonetheless leaves even the most principled of readers considering if such intervention would have been correct?

That the question of Brexit should so preoccupy Reynolds in his first major work since the referendum is not surprising. After all, before he was a full-time author he spent almost fifteen years working for the European Space Agency in The Netherlands and so it is hardly a leap to wonder if the anger Prefect Dreyfus experiences towards Garlin might be a reflection of the author’s own feelings at the damage being done by Brexit’s ‘shallow populism’ (289)? Yet as a novel rather than a work of political theory or moral instruction, there is no onus on Elysium Fire to offer actionable solutions to the self-inflicted wound that is Brexit. If anything, the novel’s implication that good old-fashioned police work can temper the worst ramifications of ‘populist, rabble-rousing nonsense’ (135) is perhaps too naïve for our current reality (in Dreyfus, Reynolds offers a robust investigative response, a strategy of following the shadowy money funding the breakaway movement, but one sees in real life how ineffectual such a response can too often be). For Dreyfus may be able to resolve his latest emergency by forcing Garlin to confront the inconsistencies in his identity and hence in his philosophy, but one suspects that real life Leave voters cannot be so easily convinced. The Brexit process they have set in motion has already proven too vulnerable to ‘misjudgements… over-reaction on both sides. Regrettable acts. Provocation and counter-provocation. Wiser minds will attempt to slow the fragmentation, even turn it back. But that wheel, once started turning, will not be easy to stop’ (366).

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Other posts you may find of interest:

• Journey to the Ends of the Universe Recalls a Classic Tale: My review of Poseidon’s Wake by Alastair Reynolds
• Stephen Baxter’s Titan: Twenty Years Later

Speculations on Speculative Fiction: Dave Hutchinson’s Acadie – Genetic Conflict as Genre Conversation?

Speculative Fiction and Literary Fiction are two parts of the same organism. Go far enough back and you find that they share a common ancestry (the cornerstones of the traditional western canon – be that the gods of The Odyssey or the ghosts and witches of Shakespeare – are all dependent on elements of Fantasy). Project yourself far enough into the future and you can imagine them becoming the same thing once again (‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ might as well be ‘any sufficiently imaginative Literary Fiction is indistinguishable from Fantasy’). In the present, of course, critics differentiate between them by – if I may generalise – the way one depicts the realistic (or close to it) and the other proposes its own reality entirely, by looking at their rhetorical strategies, by considering their publication contexts, and so on. Readers in turn are guided by personal tastes, by how these books are marketed, and by a whole cultural and commercial architecture which surrounds them. Many people enjoy both Literary Fiction and Fantasy, though often readers tend towards one or the other. The resulting discussions over what a particular book is or isn’t, or about what kind of writing does or does not have merit (ugh) are a facet of not just genre mutability but of how genre itself is disputed territory. I’ve been thinking about this since I read Dave Hutchinson’s excellent Acadie (Tor, 2017) and here I’m going to propose a reading of that text (a reading I might someday expand into a conference paper or something) as a commentary on the fruitlessness of inter-genre squabbling…

Please note: this post contains SPOILERS from here on out…

Acadie centres on Duke, the ‘Mayor’ of a hidden colony in a distant solar system. Presented initially as a kind of Utopian ‘hippie paradise’, the colony was founded by a scientist who wished to explore human potential without regulation or restriction (the inhabitants call themselves ‘The Writers’ on account of their penchant for genetically rewriting themselves  into ‘elves and dwarfs and hobbits and goblins’). Hunting for this secret society is the Earth-based Bureau of Colonization. The Bureau is depicted as a conservative organisation with rules and uniforms and a philosophy based on conformance and good order and doing things by the book. Thus from a certain perspective it is as though the conflict underpinning Acadie is less about genetics than it is about genre; it is as though the author has pitted Fantasy’s impatience with Literary Fiction’s straight-laced realism against LitFic’s exasperation with what they perceive to be Fantasy’s outlandishness. Read in this fashion, Acadie becomes a most curious thing: a Science Fiction novella about the antagonism between Fantasy and Literary Fiction, a story about how disputes over the primacy of one or the other are not just irrelevant but are to the betterment of absolutely no one.

The key to reading Acadie in this way lies with the character who sets the story into motion, a woman who – with shades of JK Rowling, perhaps – provokes ferocious levels of devotion from her acolytes and encourages them to follow in her fantastical ways. The Rowling comparison might seem farfetched but the novella seems to invite the identification by pointedly naming this character ‘Professor Potter’. In Acadie, Potter’s followers become the next generation of ‘Writers’ who, as mentioned, are defined by their obsession with fantasy creatures. Yes there is an occasional Klingon in the mix, along with a Wolverine (‘There’s always one’) and some cartoon characters (their choices emphasising the youth of The Writers, it seems), but for the most part these Writers have remade themselves as creatures straight out of the Fantasy genre: ‘werewolves, orcs, vampires, ghouls, zombies’. The Writers develop technology which is repeatedly described as ‘magic’ and eventually give rise to the ‘Kids’, a further generation who endlessly discuss everything and who, in the end, are revealed to have become grotesque and deformed parodies of their creators’ intentions. Were one inclined, one might see these ‘Kids’ as a comment on fandom’s tendencies towards negativity and toxicity.

By contrast, the Bureau of Colonisation is much more in keeping with Literary Fiction (which, despite protestations form some quarters, is as much a genre as any other kind of writing). The Bureau are all about rules and propriety and cataloguing. Their technology develops slowly and methodically. They don’t do magic, they do ‘lists’ (something which creates a sense of canon). Where the ‘Writers saw the promised land’ in Fantasy Fiction, the Bureau only ‘saw junk’. Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to accuse the Bureau of being unimaginative. A better word might be (despite their mission statement) unadventurous. Their most advanced technology, in a direct literary reference, is a spaceship named Gregor Samsa which appears late in Acadie’s storyline. Here Hutchinson makes overt (by way of another novella) the connection between his story’s fictional tech and what we might think of as literary technology. The Gregor Samsa is capable of manoeuvres other Bureau craft are not. It does so by utilising not a ‘magic’ hyperdrive but something that ‘might be related’ (my emphasis). It is as though the Bureau has made advancements by experimenting – even if only in limited fashion – with aspects of the Colony’s imaginative toys in the same way that Kafka, by transforming his protagonist into a giant insect, prefigured Literary Fiction’s renewed appreciation for the power of the Fantastical.

Between the Colony and the Bureau we have Acadie’s narrator, Duke. Disillusioned with the literary Bureau and reluctantly recruited by the speculative Colony, Duke complicates this reading of the novella by displaying aspects of both in the same way that, say, commercial fiction might (his full name, John Wayne Faraday, evokes the image of electrifying mainstream entertainment for all). Acadie calls him a ‘mundane’, a term still sometimes heard in the spec-fic community to describe someone with no interest in either Science Fiction or Fantasy. When not briefing hobbits and elves about the evacuation of the Colony, Duke is partaking in the stereotypical literary activities of drowning his sorrows in a bar and having flashbacks to the fallout from quitting his job in spectacular style (Duke’s former profession as a lawyer is mentioned several times and, though it has little purpose story-wise, it would not be out of place in a mainstream novel). Nevertheless, Duke’s limitations see him trapped in an endless cycle of destroying himself, repeating himself, and destroying himself again (a comment on the repetitious nature of much commercial fiction, maybe?). Though of course a last-minute reveal (which I won’t spoil) directly rooting this mainstream character in the same imaginative soil as the speculative material around him is a sharp reminder of the novella’s central argumentative thrust: that framing different kinds of stories as being in competition with each other only diminishes all.

Stressing that point, Hutchinson appears unwilling to play favourites. Potter’s children may have broken away from the restrictions of ordinary life on Earth (the bread and butter of literary realism, say) but they have changed too quickly. Their work has become ‘painfully thin’ or ‘grey and listless’ the way subsequent generations of Harry Potter clones fail to replicate the original’s spark. The Bureau, on the other hand, has changed too slowly, and in its reluctance risks stagnation and failure despite the considerable financial support they have received from the government (one might think of the patronage afforded to Literary Fiction even as it suffers from declining readership). What’s more, the climax of Acadie is, figuratively at least, the representatives of different genres arguing that their opponents are not real. Though given that, as in reality, these genres have become muddied and overlapping in the course of the story – literary fiction having undergone a metamorphosis *cough*Kafka*cough* by taking on characteristics of the fantastic, Fantasy having acknowledged the need to recruit ‘new blood, new talent, new perspectives’ from the literary – is there really any difference worth contesting for these characters? Note the intentional similarity in names between the Colony and the Bureau of Colonisation: they might as well be the same thing. Continued discord between them accomplishes nothing even as the conflict between them has flared up ‘fifty times in the past three hundred years or so’. Should one wish to apply the same timeframe to arguments about the respective primacy of Fantasy and Literary writing, one would find this almost precisely delineates a period from the publication of Acadie back to when Daniel Defoe arguably inaugurated the era of the realistic fiction novel in English with Robinson Crusoe in 1719. A coincidence, perhaps, but this entertaining and engaging novella has too many coincidences to be able to discount them all.

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Other posts you may find of interest:

• Stephen Baxter’s Titan: Twenty Years Later
• Deleted Notes From a Coma: Additional Thoughts on Mike McCormack’s Novel