The first thing that needs to be said is that my reading this year has been a bit disorganised. As well as doing a lot of reviewing, I spent a big chunk of the year rereading some of the SF and Fantasy I loved as a teenager, with a particular emphasis upon New Wave writers from the 1960s and 1970s. Some of that material hasn’t travelled well (and I can report I still struggle with Delany) but a lot of it is as good as it was 30 years ago. Certainly books such as Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth and Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest have more than stood the test of time.

Of what I did read a lot was fabulous. Despite the inexplicable;e decision of the Booker Prize judges to exclude it, one of the real highlights of the first half of the year was the final part of Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose Trilogy, At Last, a book that while the least of the three was so brilliantly written and beautifully crafted it scarcely mattered.

Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child was also left off the Booker shortlist, a decision that probably reflects the way the book divides readers (Daniel Mendelsohn’s review in The New York Review of Books is certainly worth reading). I don’t think it’s perfect – certainly the satire lacks the urgency of The Line of Beauty, and it takes a while to hit its straps – but it’s complex and moving and very funny nonetheless, to say nothing of being thrillingly good line by line.

Another Booker exclusion, and no less baffling despite its subject matter was China Mieville’s Embassytown. I don’t want to get into a slanging match about literary awards and genre books, but there’s no question in my mind that Embassytown establishes Mieville as a major, major writer, or that the first half of Embassytown was the most intelligent and exciting thing I read this year.

It’s tantalising to wonder what David Foster Wallace would have made of Mieville: both grapple with similar questions, and while their styles are very different, both seek to push language into shapes it’s not accustomed to. But sadly it’s not a question we’ll ever have an answer to. What we do have is The Pale King, the book Foster Wallace was working on at the time of his death, and a work that only serves to underline the tragedy of his decision to take his own life. Even unfinished it contains everything that made Foster Wallace such a prodigy: the brilliant prose, the wit, the massive intellect, yet it also offers a lyricism that was absent in a lot of the earlier work, and stands as a monument not just to Foster Wallace but to the efforts of his editor, Michael Pietsch, who assembled the book out of its constituent parts.

Still in North America I loved both Michael Ondaatje’s almost-memoir The Cat’s Table and the one book on the Booker Prize shortlist I did unreservedly enjoy, Patrick deWitt’s hallucinogenic Western, The Sisters Brothers (if you’d like to read more about my views on it check out my review of the Booker shortlist).

Of the Australian fiction I read this year (and for whatever reason I haven’t read a lot), I loved Malcolm Knox’s brilliantly vernacular surfing novel The Life, Georgia Blain’s fascinating exploration of the fault lines of contemporary middle-class life, Too Close to Home and Kerryn Goldsworthy’s instalment in New South’s series on Australian cities, Adelaide.

Of the Science Fiction and Fantasy I read I adored Jo Walton’s Among Others, not just because it’s a great novel but because it’s so pin-point accurate about its period, and a lot of Geoff Ryman’s collection of short fiction, Paradise Tales (if you’ve never read Ryman read ‘The Filmmakers of Mars’, and you’ll see why). I was also an early adopter of Lauren Beukes’ fabulous Zoo City, a book that’s brought Beukes much-deserved fame and (one hopes) fortune, as well as winning her a swag of awards. And while I’m not sure whether it really counts as Fantasy, I loved Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls, a book that’s not only incredibly moving in its own right, but due to Jim Kay’s gorgeous illustrations and some lovely production by Walker Books is also one of the most beautiful objects I’ve seen this year.

I’ve also read several terrific things in the past fortnight, three of which deserve a mention here. The first is Maureen McHugh’s fantastic collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse. Despite recommendations on this site and Twitter I’d never quite gotten around to reading McHugh, but having now read After the Apocalypse and her 1992 novel, China Mountain Zhang off the back of it I’m mostly sorry I waited so long. If you haven’t read her you can download her 2005 collection, Mothers & Other Monsters for free from Small Beer Press, or check out one of the title story from After the Apocalypse in Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume 6 early next year. Or just buy the book: it’s brilliant.

Two other recent reads I loved were Colson Whitehead’s Zombie novel, Zone One (although since I’m reviewing it for The Sydney Morning Herald I won’t say much other than while it takes a while to get going once it does it’s incredibly moving), and Ian McDonald’s immensely entertaining YA SF novel, Planesrunner (you can also read a long piece by me about McDonald’s last novel, The Dervish House, on The Spectator’s Book Blog).

But in the end there were probably four books I loved more than any others this year. The first was my partner Mardi McConnochie’s new novel, The Voyagers, a book I’ve recommended before but am happy to recommend again. The second was Lev Grossman’s brilliant sequel to The Magicians, The Magician King, a book that exceeds the promise of its predecessor in every way and contains one of the most wickedly intelligent and magnificently entertaining 100 pages you’ll read this year (you can read my review here). And the last two were Karen Joy Fowler’s amazing (and World Fantasy Award-winning) short story collection, What I Didn’t See (you can read an excerpt here) and Dana Spiotta’s stunning meditation on celebrity, family and loss, Stone Arabia (which is being published in Australia by Text in a few weeks and I’m reviewing for The Weekend Australian early in the New Year). All of them were wonderful, and rather than explain why I’ll just say buy them: you won’t be sorry.

And in case it’s driving you crazy, that very sexy voice you can hear is Pierce Brosnan’s.

Thanks to io9 for the heads-up.

Some of you may be aware of the whole vegetable vampirism thing via Terry Pratchett, others may have come across it in reviews of Matthew Beresford’s rather delightful cultural history of the vampire, From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, but if not, it’s one of those backwaters of folklore studies that demonstrate the many shapes beliefs about vampires and the undead can assume.

The story was first recorded by the Serbian ethnographer, Tatomir Vukanović, in an article published in The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1957. The relevant section of the article reads:

“The belief in vampires of plant origin occurs among Gs. [Gypsies] who belong to the Mosl[em]. faith in KM [Kosovo-Metohija]. According to them there are only two plants which are regarded as likely to turn into vampires: pumpkins of every kind and watermelons. And the change takes place when they are ‘fighting one another.’ In Podrima and Prizrenski Podgor they consider this transformation occurs if these ground fruit have been kept for more than ten days: then the gathered pumpkins stir all by themselves and make a sound like ‘brrrl, brrrl, brrrl!’ and begin to shake themselves. It is also believed that sometimes a trace of blood can be seen on the pumpkin, and the Gs. then say it has become a vampire. These pumpkins and melons go round the houses, stables, and rooms at night, all by themselves, and do harm to people. But it is thought that they cannot do great damage to folk, so people are not very afraid of this kind of vampire.

“Among the Mosl. Gs. in the village of Pirani (also in Podrima) it is believed that if pumpkins are kept after Christmas they turn into vampires, while the Lešani Gs. think that this phenomenon occurs if a pumpkin used as a syphon, when ripe and dry, stays unopened for three years.

“Vampires of ground fruit origin are believed to have the same shape and appearance as the original plant.

“…The Gs. in KM. destroy pumpkins and melons which have become vampires … by plunging them into a pot of boiling water, which is then poured away, the ground fruit being afterwards scrubbed by a broom and then thrown away, and the broom burned.”

If you’d like to read the article in full (together with some more delightful stories about vampiric farming implements) there are scans of the relevant pages here, here, here, and here. Or you can read a piece I wrote about vampires a while back.

Somewhere in my second novel, The Deep Field, there’s a description of an alien fossil found on Mars, and the instinctual revulsion it provokes from humans. When I wrote it I was interested in evoking something of the feeling of visceral wrongness we tend to feel confronted by images of insect life enlarged.

The winners of this year’s Olympus Bioscapes Award, which celebrates the best of microscopic photography, are things of beauty, not horror, but that sense of alienness is still there, shot through this time with both wonder and something like the unnatural vividity and fleshiness of orchids. The image above, which took sixth place, is by Haris Antonopoulos, and shows stink bug eggs, but you can check out a gallery of the winners and honourable mentions, together with videos and more information on the competition website.

As usual it was the conversations that mattered, not least the chance to catch up with old friends like Garth Nix, Sean Williams and (although we don’t go back as far) Jonathan Strahan and Liza Trombi (of Locus), but also the opportunity to meet new people such as Sean E. Williams (or Evil Sean as we came to know him) and Damien Walter.

But in an odd way the real highlight was meeting the Australian contingent, which included people like Alison Goodman, Alisa Krasnostein and Deborah Biancotti.

The Convention was also the occasion for the announcement of the 2011 World Fantasy Awards, which saw the prize for Best Novel go to Nnedi Okorafor for Who Fears Death, the prize for Best Short Story Collection go to Karen Joy Fowler’s fabulous What I Didn’t See and Other Stories (which is still easily one of the best things I’ve read this year), and the prize for Best Novella go to Elizabeth Bear’s Hand’s strange, sad and entirely lovely The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon.

I’ve not read the Okorafor, but I’m interested to, not least because it edged out both Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City (a book I’ve raved about before) and Guy Gavriel Kay’s lapidary Under Heaven.

But in a way the award I was most pleased by was the Special Award Non-Professional, which went to Australia’s own Alisa Krasnostein for her work with Twelfth Planet Press. If you’d like to know more about Alisa and her work you might want to check out the profile that ran recently in Locus.

The Awards Banquet was also distinguished by a very, very funny speech by Toastmaster Connie Willis, the video of which is below. The quality’s not great, but the good stuff begins around 19:10 (or if you’d like to hear Neil Gaiman and Peter S. Beagle you can play it from the beginning).

You might also want to check my partner, Mardi McConnochie’s piece about it over at her blog, Big Red. You’ll be glad you did. And if you’d like to read more about Grossman and his books, you can visit his website.

The Magician King
Lev Grossman

A few years ago A.S. Byatt wrote a famous critique of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, dismissing them as “jokey latency fantasies”. In it Byatt argued that unlike works such as Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising or Alan Garner’s troubling and often unsettling children’s books which demand children grapple with a world larger and stranger than they had previously imagined, Rowling’s books allow children to fulfil their infantile fantasies of unrecognized importance and power.

Whatever one makes of Byatt’s argument, it’s difficult not to wonder whether her essay played a part in the formation of Lev Grossman’s exuberantly entertaining 2009 novel, The Magicians. At once loving homage and deadly accurate deconstruction, it imagined a world where magic is real, and asked, with considerable sophistication, what it might mean if that particular fantasy came true. And in the process it created something at once strikingly original and deliberately subversive, not just a story about the loss of illusions and the beginnings of adulthood that was simultaneously an exercise in re-enchantment but a exploration of the manner in which power and trauma distort our inner selves.

The Magicians centres on Quentin Coldwater. “Sarcastic and spookily smart”, Quentin is also, as his friend Julia admits to herself at one point, “basically a kind person who just needed a ton of therapy and maybe some mood-altering drugs”. Lonely and isolated at high school, Quentin’s one solace (other than his hopeless passion for Julia) is his absorption in the Narnia-like Fillory novels. Yet when an alumni interview for Princeton turns into an exam for an ultra-secret, ultra-exclusive school for magicians called Brakebills, Quentin finds himself initiated into a world where his oddness is no longer a liability, and where, amazingly, Fillory is more than just a story.

Grossman’s follow-up, The Magician King, begins two years after the events at the end of The Magicians. Quentin is now one of the kings of Fillory. It’s a good life: populated by magical creatures and impossibly beautiful, Fillory is as close to perfection as any place could be. But as Quentin is beginning to realise it’s also a little bit boring. And so, when a carelessly arranged day in pursuit of an enchanted hare ends in tragedy, Quentin decides to embark on a quest. As quests go it’s no big thing, just a trip on a refitted sailing boat to an island in the Eastern Ocean to find out why the inhabitants haven’t been paying their taxes. But for the now-restless Quentin it seems enough just to have a purpose again.

These early chapters unspool with a brisk efficiency, but the novel only really kicks into gear when Quentin stumbles on a golden key, which when used does not transport him somewhere magical, but dumps him and his childhood friend and fellow tetrarch, Julia, back on Earth. Desperate to return, the two of them must navigate a hitherto unglimpsed magical underworld populated by self-trained wizards and witches, and utterly unlike the cosy prep school world of Brakebills, a process that gives Quentin his first glimpse of the price Julia, who was rejected by Brakebills, paid to acquire her powers. But as they discover on their return to Fillory, their experiences on Earth were only the prelude to a much larger and more perilous quest to save not just Fillory, but magic itself.

If much of the pleasure of The Magicians lay in its unfeigned delight in the books from which it drew its inspiration, much of its power lay in the tension between the magical elements drawn from C.S. Lewis and Harry Potter and elsewhere and the restless, dissatisfied and painfully human dramas of its protagonists. For all its playful energy it was ultimately a surprisingly dark book about loss, and failure.

Something similar is true of The Magician King. Once again the book riffs wickedly on the tradition it inhabits, managing to seem as comfortable invoking the secret lore of 1970s role-playing games and Neal Stephenson novels as it is gesturing to Le Guin and Tolkien. And once again it manages the not-inconsiderable feat of managing to be both extremely funny and utterly believable.

Yet it is also a more ambitious book than The Magicians. Moving beneath its surface are a series of deeply disquieting questions about the corrupting nature of power and the theological underpinnings of fantasy worlds such as Narnia. The gods Quentin and his friends glimpse are not benevolent, but cold and distant, while their expressions on Earth are not just capricious but actively malevolent. Certainly it’s safe to say that you’ll never look at Aslan the same way again.

Despite the achievements of writers such as Guy Gavriel Kay and Neil Gaiman Fantasy is a genre that has long struggled to be taken seriously, often treated as faintly ridiculous or an embarrassing overhang from childhood. In The Magician King Lev Grossman demonstrates it is neither, producing a book that does not simply crackle with energy and ideas, but which manages to be at once an inquiry into the underpinnings of the tradition it occupies and a brilliantly eloquent demonstration of its possibilities. The Magician King is not a book for children, or even a book about the stories of childhood for grown-ups. It is quite simply one of the smartest, funniest, most exciting novels you’re likely to read this year.

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October 2011.