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Posts tagged ‘Kim Stanley Robinson’

Dec 21

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Best Books 2020

When I sat down to select my favourite books of 2019, the east coast of Australia was ablaze, and Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne had been swathed in smoke for weeks on end. Twelve months later Sydney’s Northern Beaches are in lockdown, restrictions are being reimposed across the rest of the city, and the other states have closed their borders to New South Wales again.

Perhaps unsurprisingly therefore, a number of the best books I’ve read over the past year engaged with this sense of accelerating and multiplying catastrophe. Some of them do it by tracing the crosscurrents of dissonance and denial that inflect our culture in the way Jenny Offill’s Weather or Madeleine Watts’ The Inland Sea do. Others, like Anne Charnock’s terrific Bridge 108, explore the effects of displacement and social breakdown. And some explore the processes of resistance, violence and dispossession that underpin the larger crisis as Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem does.

But the most significant was undoubtedly Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. The final book in the dazzling cycle of novels that began with 2312, and it simultaneously draws together and transcends many of the questions that are explored in those previous books, illustrating not just the scale of the crisis we inhabit, but mapping out a path toward a sustainable post-capitalist future. Like all Robinson’s novels it’s exhilaratingly dense with information and ideas, but it’s also deeply affecting. That’s partly because so much of what it depicts is so horrifying, but it’s also because while it insists on the imperative of hope, it doesn’t shy away from rage and despair. It’s an extraordinary achievement, and a book I wish everybody would read (I also highly recommend Ezra Klein’s interview with Robinson, which is one of the most consistently intelligent 90 minutes of media I consumed over the past twelve months).

One of the other highlights of my reading year was The Mirror and the Light, the final instalment in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy. The consensus seems to be that the final quarter is the best bit, but I have to say I thought the depiction of the aftermath of Anne’s execution in the first 100 or 150 pages was simply astonishing, and captures the mute trauma and terror of a community that is suddenly inescapably aware that none of them are safe with great power. But part of what I found so compelling about those sections was the way they also expose the uncanny terror of state power. Mantel has explored the connections between violence and terror and death and undeath before, perhaps most notably in Beyond Black, but in The Mirror and the Light they take on a whole new set of resonances. And those opening sections are only one element of a genuinely remarkable creation.

Despite a lot of will-she won’t-she angst in the British media about the prospects of Mantel pulling off a Booker hat trick, The Mirror and the Light didn’t make the shortlist for this year’s prize, which instead went to Douglas Stuart’s terrific Shuggie Bain. As I said in my roundup of the Booker shortlist in The Weekend Australian, Stuart’s novel is notable not just for its refusal to sentimentalise Shuggie’s mother’s alcoholism, but for the astuteness of its portrait of the effects of addiction on children and, perhaps most remarkably of all, its immense capacity for forgiveness. I found it an enormously affecting and quietly devastating novel, and it’s been wonderful to see it finding such a wide readership.

Other novels I loved included the final instalment in Ali Smith’s remarkable Seasons Quartet, Summer, Andrew O’Hagan’s wonderful Mayflies (a book that felt micro-targeted at me and my interests), Anne Enright’s Actress, Deb Olin Unferth’s wonderfully off-kilter novel about chickens and activism, Barn 8, Emily St John Mandel’s brilliantly structured The Glass Hotel, Daisy Johnson’s splendidly unsettling Sisters, Lily King’s lovely, warm, wise Writers and Lovers, Vigdis Hjorth’s merciless Will and Testament (make the time), Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, and Sigrid Nunez’s follow-up to The Friend, What Are You Going Through. The two story collections I most enjoyed were Emma Cline’s Daddy and Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ fabulously compressed Sleepovers (seek it out: I promise it will be worth it).

At the more speculative end of the spectrum, I was blown away by M. John Harrison’s compellingly strange The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, a book that elides boundaries of all kinds, so reading it makes the world around you feel uncertain in all sorts of ways. It’s also a novel that invites all kinds of readings, but the one I kept coming back to was the way its emphasis on the watery, floods and transformation echoes Amitav Ghosh’s description of the “insistent, inescapable continuities of the Anthropocene”. I also loved Garth Nix’s delightfully playful and effortlessly entertaining The Left-handed Booksellers of London, a book that might well be my favourite of Nix’s novels, Paul McAuley’s emotionally expansive and affecting reworking of the Samurai and Western in the far future, War of the Maps, and William Gibson’s terrific follow-up to The Peripheral, Agency, a book that plays with our assumptions about the future and contingency with sly wit and deadly seriousness. Wit is also available in abundance in Natalie Zina Walschots’ hugely entertaining reworking of the superhero genre and the modern workplace, Hench, and Lev Grossman’s delightful excursion into children’s fantasy, The Silver Arrow, whereas Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a strange conjuring trick that draws upon many of the tropes and preoccupations of classic fantasy while also taking them somewhere that feels startlingly new. And I hugely enjoyed both Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians and Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild.

Although there are a host of things I still haven’t got to (Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron! Nardi Simpson’s Song of the Crocodile! Andrew Pippos’ Lucky’s! Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People!) I read a lot of Australian fiction I hugely admired, perhaps most notably Laura Jean McKay’s gloriously weird and feral The Animals In That Country, Chris Flynn’s delightfully deadpan deep time comedy, Mammoth, Lauren Chater’s beautifully constructed and expansive reworking of the silences in Swift, Gulliver’s Wife, Kate Mildenhall’s gripping The Mother Fault, the next instalment in the historical sequence Jock Serong began in Preservation, The Burning Island, Kristen Krauth’s terrific Almost a Mirror and Luke Horton’s terrific debut, The Fogging (if you’re interested, you can hear me and Luke chatting on The Book Show).

Of the non-fiction I read, I loved Julia Baird’s elegant and wise Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder And Things That Sustain You When The World Goes Dark, a book I read at just the right moment, David Farrier’s marvellous and intellectually peripatetic investigation of deep time, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, Stephanie Convery’s heartfelt and unsparing dissection of violence in sport, After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne, Tegan Bennett Daylight’s elegant and moving The Details: On Love, Death and Reading, Danielle Clode’s study of the remarkable life of Jeanne Barret, In Search Of The Woman Who Sailed The World, Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms: The World in the Whale, and David Attenborough’s A Life On Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future, and Craig Brown’s often hilarious One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time. I also very much admired two shorter books of essays: Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Rebecca Tamás’ Strangers.

And finally, two more books of poetry: Felicity Plunkett’s A Kinder Sea and Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems, both of which offered reminders of the power of language to console and reveal, something I suspect we’re all going to need more of in the months to come.

Dec 18

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Best Books 2018

xthe-overstory.jpg.pagespeed.ic.9cGSJd7DGBAs promised the other day, I thought I’d do a quick roundup of some of the books I enjoyed most this year. Right at the top of my list are two books I loved quite immoderately, Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. The former is just astonishing – a seamless synthesis of science and fiction that manages to make the ecological crisis surrounding us viscerally real – the latter is a book that ranks with Ondaatje’s best work.

I also loved a number of other novels, in particular the final volume in Rachel Cusk’s astonishing Outline Trilogy, Kudos, Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, Tommy Orange’s There There, Leila Slimani’s brutal portrait of class and isolation, Lullaby, Lisa Halliday’s brilliant Asymmetry, Julian Barnes’ marvellously controlled dissection of love and the things we cannot let ourselves know, The Only Story, Patrick DeWitt’s French Exit, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under, Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks, Ottessa Moshfegh’s reworking of the 9/11 novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, Tana French’s consuming The Witch Elm, Ling Ma’s Severance, Anna Burns’ Man Booker-winning Milkman and Robin Robertson’s noir verse novel, The Long Take. Alongside the novels there were a number of story collections I very much enjoyed, perhaps most notably Denis Johnson and William Trevor’s posthumous volumes, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden and Last Stories, Lauren Groff’s Florida, Jon McGregor’s companion to Reservoir 13, The Reservoir Tapes, Ben Marcus’ Notes from the Fog, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black. And although it wasn’t published in 2018, I also loved Andrew Sean Greer’s delightful Less (which took me back to his sad but beautiful 2008 novel, The Story of a Marriage).

9781925355970A number of the Australian books I read this year were from last year as well; I particularly admired Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers and Jennifer Down’s wonderful story collection, Pulse Points. Of those published in 2018 I loved Jock Serong’s historical thriller, Preservation, Jennifer Mill’s marvellous Dyschronia and Mark Smith’s sequel to his standout YA debut, The Road to Winter, Wilder Country.

Of the science fiction and fantasy I read I adored Adam Roberts’ wildly brilliant sequel to last year’s The Real Town Murders, By the Pricking of her Thumb, the conclusion to Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe Quartet, Europe at Dawn, Tade Thompson’s terrific Rosewater, James Smythe’s I Still Dream, Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, John Schoffstall’s extremely engaging YA fantasy, Half-Witch, Emma Newman’s Before Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon, Christopher Priest’s queasily powerful An American Story, Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, and Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards. And although it was published last year, Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon is an astonishing book: dense and furious and ferociously engaged with the contemporary world.

Most of the comics I read were in series format, but I’ve been loving Al Ewing’s joyously creepy 1950s horror comics-inflected The Immortal Hulk, and I hugely admired Nick Drasno’s Man Booker-longlisted Sabrina.

9781783781355.jpgAnd finally, my non-fiction reading was a bit spotty, but a lot of what I did read was terrific, and of that, the absolute highlights were Caspar Henderson’s prismatic A New Map of Wonders, Joy McCann’s wonderfully rich and expansive history of the Southern Ocean, Wild Sea, Nancy Campbell’s The Library of Ice, Phillipa McGuinness’ 2001: The Year That Changed Everything, and two books about sea level rise, Elizabeth Rush’s beautiful Rising and Jeff Goodell’s deeply confronting The Water Will Come.

Obviously there’s still a couple of weeks of the year to go (a chunk of which I’ll be spending on Knausgaard’s mammoth The End), and I’m sure there are things I’ve forgotten, but hopefully not too many. In the meantime I wish all of you the very best for the holiday season and the year ahead. Go well.

 

Dec 19

Best Books 2017

sparsholt-affairIt’s nearly the holidays, so I thought I’d brush the cobwebs off the website and pull together a list of some of the books I’ve loved this year.

Two of the novels I enjoyed most – George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West – turned up on the Man Booker shortlist, and while if it had been up to me I might have ended up handing the gong to Hamid instead of Saunders they’re both very fine novels. Interestingly though, I felt the Booker longlist was stronger than the shortlist, and while I was also very impressed by Ali Smith’s Autumn (and I loved the second part of her seasons quartet, Winter, which was published a couple of weeks ago) and Fiona Mozley’s visionary and charged Elmet, the book I wish had won, Jon McGregor’s thrillingly strange portrait of the unsettled landscape of an English town Reservoir 13, didn’t make the cut. Nor was it the only baffling omission: certainly I would have rated any of Sebastian Barry’s beautiful Days Without End, Kamila Shamsie’s deeply engaging reworking of Antigone, Home Fire, Elizabeth Strout’s quietly brilliant Anything Is Possible and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (both of which I mentioned in my 2016 round-up) over a couple of the shortlisted titles.

87146a_d6b6ad6e767249fa804d1bd126b757e6~mv2_d_3070_4653_s_4_2.jpgI also loved Alan Hollinghurst’s glorious The Sparsholt Affair, a book that is so gorgeously and wittily constructed sentence by sentence and so wonderfully well-observed I spent the whole final third being sorry it was going to end. I was also hugely impressed by Megan Hunter’s slim but beautiful story of a flooded England, The End We Start From, Philip Pullman’s triumphant return to the world of Northern Lights, La Belle Sauvage (a book that also, not coincidentally, I suspect, features an epochal flood), Jennifer Egan’s sleekly oblique Manhattan Beach and Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning Sing, Unburied, Sing. And while we’re on the subject of floods, I very much enjoyed Daisy Hildyard’s elegant exploration of the infinite unboundedness of the Anthropocene, The Second Body.

33673959._UY585_SS585_.jpgI’m not sure it makes much dividing science fiction and fantasy publishing from literary publishing any more, especially not when the concerns so many of the best novels on both sides of the divide are exploring are so similar (and indeed, when so many writers move so fluidly back and forth), a point that’s underlined by the fact stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s hugely impressive Her Body and Other Parties were published in Strange Horizons (read it: it’s fabulous) and Tin House, while Sarah Hall’s gorgeous and deeply uncanny Madame Zero deliberately reject the notion they need to be one or the other (it’s probably not coincidental another of the books I admired most, Ottessa Moshfegh’s viscerally unsettling Homesick for Another World, features a photo of a flying saucer on its cover, but despite often having an affect that owes a little to the weird and horror fiction, has almost no fantastical elements). But it still seems a pity that a book like Jeff Vandermeer’s riotously inventive Borne (which I loved, and reviewed for Sydney Review of Books) is so much more visible to mainstream readers than books such as Adam Roberts’ joyously inventive mash-up of Agatha Christie, Hitchcock and Black Mirror, The Real-Town Murders, Paul McAuley’s deeply sad and tender Austral, Nina Allan’s brilliantly off-kilter exploration of the unresolvable nature of grief, The Rift, Kim Stanley Robinson’s sprawling and intellectually dazzling New York 2140, or even Ann Leckie’s sort-of sequel to her Ancillary Trilogy, Provenance. The other science fiction and fantasy title I loved, Garth Nix’s playfully subversive fairy-tale mash-up, Frogkisser, is YA, and so less troubled by these sorts of questions.)

From-the-Wreck_cover.jpgMy favourite Australian novel was Jane Rawson’s fabulously weird remaking of the historical novel, From the Wreck, but I also loved Krissy Kneen’s science fictional exploration of post-humanity and desire and intimacy, An Uncertain Grace, Ashley Hay’s delicate exploration of post-natal depression and the complex entanglements of place and love, A Hundred Small Lessons and Kathryn Heyman’s brutal but necessary Storm and Grace. I also enjoyed Shaun Prescott’s unsettling excursion into the haunted spaces of central west NSW, The Town, Sally Abbott’s powerful and deeply unsettling exploration of climate change and similar questions about Australia’s inland communities, Closing Down, and Jock Serong’s incredibly powerful excursion into the charged territory of Australia’s refugee policy, On The Java Ridge (a book that has one of the most viscerally intense central sections I’ve read in a long, long time). And while it wasn’t strictly a 2017 book, I also really enjoyed Mark Smith’s post-apocalyptic young adult novel, The Road to Winter, and I’m very much looking forward to the sequel, Wilder Country (which did come out in 2017).

MonsterCover_FINAL.pngOn the comics front I was hugely impressed by Emil Ferris’ extraordinarily dense and marvellously idiosyncratic My Favourite Thing is Monsters, and while there were fewer moments of excitement on the mainstream comic front, I’m completely in love with Jeff Lemire’s Black Hammer (and its new offshoot, Sherlock Frankenstein) and I continue to be surprised by how much I’m engaged by Ed Brubaker’s reworking of the trope of the lone vigilante, Kill Or Be Killed. But the comic I loved most this year was one I should have read a decade ago but never quite got around to, Alison Bechdel’s astonishing Fun House (and which I’m going to mention here simply because it’s so good I think everybody should read it).

And finally, two non-fiction books. the first, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s exploration of the inner world of cephalopod consciousness, Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, is a fascinating illustration of the ways in which philosophy can illuminate science in just the same way science can illuminate philosophy. The second, The Museum of Words, is the book my friend Georgia Blain wrote in the months before her death, and which was subsequently edited by her husband, Andrew Taylor, and while its range is circumscribed by the conditions of its composition, it is a wonderfully eloquent reminder of the clarity of thought, empathy and humour that made Georgia’s writing so special.

Jan 29

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Ghost Species

shell-219665_960_720It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting on the beach beside the steel gantries and fuel tanks of Botany Bay’s container terminal watching my kids build a sandcastle by the water’s edge, a structure that keeps collapsing because the waves keep hitting it. But what I can’t get out of my head is the section of Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, New York 2140, I read this morning, in which an unnamed narrator offers an imaginary account of the first sudden sea level rise in the 2040s. It’s a possibility I’ve also imagined in Ghost Species, the adult novel I’m writing (although mine is done from a more personal, experiential perspective), but simultaneously it’s a scenario that no matter how difficult it is for us to comprehend is now pretty much assured even if we do get emissions under control (as Elizabeth Kolbert wrote recently, “once feedbacks take over, the climate can change quickly, and it can change radically … It’s likely that the “floodgates” are already open, and that large sections of Greenland and Antarctica are fated to melt. It’s just the ice in front of us that’s still frozen”). All of which means this beach, a lot of this city, most coastal habitats, mangroves and reefs and, I suspect, much of our world, are all already lost, swept away by the ocean, like the bathetically symbolic sandcastle my kids are trying to build against the backdrop of the engine of global trade. Is there a word for his prospective grief, this knowledge nothing here will remain? For all the species and ecosystems that still linger, although they are already lost? For the way I feel when I watch my kids, and know that however safe the world they inhabit seems the future holds dislocation and disaster, or for my own uncertainty about what I should be teaching them? In his book Orison for a Curlew the writer Horatio Clare talks about Greece’s economic ruin being a cenotaph for our society, I wonder whether this moment might be another.

Feb 3

Locus Recommended Reading List

LocusJust a quick post to say how delighted I am to discover Clade is one of the titles selected for Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List for 2015. You can check out the full list over at Locus, but needless to say I’m completely thrilled to be on a list that features books by Ann Leckie, Kim Stanley Robinson, Adam Roberts and Dave Hutchinson, and by the incredibly generous comments about the book in the issue itself. My sincere thanks to all concerned.

And just a reminder that if you’re in Australia Clade is available from any good bookstore, your favourite online retailer or as a ebook, and worldwide through Book Depository.

 

 

Dec 30

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The End of Nature and Post-Naturalism: Fiction and the Anthropocene

One of the most interesting things about watching a novel go into the world is discovering what other people think it’s about. Sometimes that can be illuminating, sometimes it’s frustrating, but it’s always fascinating, not least because the book people seem to read is never quite the book you thought you were writing.

In Clade’s case this process was complicated by the fact a lot of people didn’t seem to know quite how to categorise it. For my part I tended to say it was science fiction, simply because that’s easy and relatively uncontroversial. A number of reviewers, especially in literary outlets, called it dystopian, which it isn’t, or not quite, while a couple of reviewers with an interest in science fiction described it a slow apocalypse or breakdown novel, which I suspect it is, at least in one sense. Others have called it cli fi, or climate fiction, a term that has some utility as a marketing category but seems to occlude more than it reveals when deployed as a critical tool; elsewhere some people have called it Anthropocene fiction.

Interestingly though, several reviewers registered the inadequacies of the terminology, and went on to ask about how exactly we should be describing the growing number of books engaged directly or indirectly with climate change and environmental transformation.

The most substantial of these discussions was in Niall Harrison’s characteristically thoughtful and perceptive review at Strange Horizons, a review that ended with what he described as “a coda about categories”. Noting first that Clade was only one of a number of recent novels “that to varying degrees explore the personal and social effects of environmental crisis”, he went on to note that while many such novels are “kinds of science fiction … there is a sound political logic for discussing them as a group unto themselves”.

Like others, Harrison thinks it’s possible to distinguish such novels from other kinds of science fiction because “climate change is already happening, which means it is in a different class of speculation and social relevance to, say, a pandemic: writing about it is a question of degree and perspective, not whether or not it will happen at all, and the degrees and perspectives that writers choose can be usefully compared” (a point Dan Bloom has also made). But he also – rightly – points out that acknowledging this distinction then demands we recognise the existence of novels such as Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, which are engaged with these questions but are not science fiction in any meaningful sense.

Like me Harrison is unconvinced of the utility of the notion of “cli fi” in this context (as I have also done he notes its troubling tendency to elide the long history of environmental science fiction), and similarly sceptical of trying to group such books together as dystopias or post-apocalyptic stories, even though many books in this area deploy tropes and strategies associated with these traditions, before acknowledging that while he doesn’t have a solution to the question he believes it deserves further attention, if only because “this is a vital literary area, and … we need to get better at describing and discussing it”.

For what it’s worth I agree with Harrison that this is an area in which our conventional terminology fails us, and that none of the options on offer seem to be able to make sense of the work that is being produced, its relationship to traditional genre categories like science fiction (and indeed non-fictional and essayistic forms such as nature writing), or the various strategies it deploys to open up the realist novel in ways that let it embrace and engage with environmental questions.

That’s partly because of the sheer diversity of such books, and their tendency to elide traditional genre boundaries: certainly there’s almost no meaningful family resemblance between a book like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, the affinities between the two means they can (and should) be usefully discussed together.

At one level this diversity reflects the many and complex ways in which writers and artists are engaging with these questions, and more deeply their ongoing attempts to map out an imaginative language with which to make sense of what’s happening to our world (and indeed ourselves) in the 21st century, a point I’ve made elsewhere in the context of what might be best described as the new nature writing. Certainly it’s not accidental so many writers fall back on stories about lost parents and missing children when they seek to articulate their feelings about climate change, devices that capture something of the rupture and grief which suffuses the contemporary condition (something that has prompted the writer M. John Harrison to talk about “loss lit”, and which is also present in articles like this, or this). Nor is it a coincidence that so many of these books employ fractured structures, and borrow devices from science fiction and elsewhere to talk about time and deep time (I suspect all the lost parents and children are another way of getting at these questions as well), or that questions of landscape, and our solastalgic sense of loss about its erasure intrude over and over again (in an excellent piece earlier this year Robert MacFarlane made a similar point about the rise of the eerie in contemporary British culture).

More importantly though, this diversity suggests why thinking of these books in terms of genres or categories is to miss the wood for the trees. Because these books aren’t a genre, they’re expressions of the deeper and more pervasive transformation of the world and ourselves we have taken to calling the Anthropocene in exactly the same way novels like Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses reflected and embodied the transformative effects of modernity upon our culture and our selves. As Mckenzie Wark quipped on Facebook earlier this year, all fiction is anthropocene fiction, some of it just doesn’t realise it yet.

To my mind the benefits of thinking about the question in this way are considerable. Not only does it allow us to step away from fruitless arguments about generic definition, but it allows us to see climate change as simply one (if still a very considerable) part of a larger process of transformation, one that embraces, amongst other things, genetic engineering, virtuality, over-population, species loss, habitat destruction and the broader disruption of natural and social systems by environmental change and capitalism.

And, perhaps more deeply, it recognises that we inhabit a world in which we ourselves are being altered, not just by technology and social transformation, but by the shifting terms of our engagement with what we would once have called the natural world. If one wanted to define when this change became apparent perhaps you might point to the floods and fires that tore through Australia over the summer of 2010/11, or the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, or the droughts in the Middle East in 2008, or any one of the flooding events or hurricanes or droughts or heatwaves that have struck countries around the world in recent years, but perhaps the really significant moment was earlier this year, when average CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere passed 400ppm for the first time since the Pliocene. As Virginia Woolf might have put it, on or about March 2015, human character changed.

What we call the literary expressions of this condition is an open question. The obvious choice is Anthropocene fiction, although I’m resistant to that term, both because like cli fi it suggests a set of generic boundaries, instead of emphasising the degree to which this transformation leaches into everything, and because it emphasises human agency when, to my mind at least, what many of the books and stories we wish to discuss are attempting to find ways to talk about the non-human in fictional terms (I also think it’s worth making the point that while the idea of the Anthropocene is usually assumed to embrace the effect upon the natural world by human activity, but it also – and importantly – embraces a different and more interstitial kind of ecological awareness, one that recognises the presence of wildness and the natural world within the fabric of the human world).

Yet still, given that this idea of the transformation of the natural world, and of the end of a particular idea of nature is central, I wonder whether it mightn’t be simplest to begin to speak of the post-natural, or post-naturalism, and to begin to think of it not as a fad or a fashion or a genre, but as a tangible condition, something shaped and defined by the transformation of the natural world by human agency that is going on around us, and which helps determine the nature of the way we see the world, the questions we ask, and perhaps most importantly, the stories we tell.

 

Dec 29

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Best Books 2015

Brief History of Seven KillingsI’m aware this is a little late in the piece, but I thought I might take a few minutes to pull together a section of the books I’ve enjoyed the most over the past twelve months.

These sorts of lists always make me uncomfortably aware not just of how little I’ve read over the past twelve months, but how incoherent that reading feels, a feeling that, for various reasons, is even more pronounced this year than usual.
Yet despite all that I read a number of books this year that I admired enormously. And while I’m mostly going to try and avoid ranking books, one book that would sit near the top of any list I might make is Marlon James’ astonishing, virtuosic A Brief History of Seven Killings, a book that is as impressive technically as it is as a portrait of the complex ways violence and reverberates through both individual lives and history.

Similarly impressive was Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, a series I’m still working my way through, but which is as remarkable as everybody says, astonishing not just for their ferocious moral intelligence and psychological penetration, but for their almost eidetic recall of the textures of the world they depict.

Buried GiantIt seems to have slipped off many people’s radar already, but I loved Kazuo Ishiguro’s deeply strange excursion into post-Arthurian Britain, The Buried Giant, Kevin Barry’s similarly strange and stylistically pyrotechnic portrait of John Lennon lost in rural Ireland in 1978, Beatlebone, and Anne Enright’s marvellous The Green Road (the second chapter of which is worth the price of admission alone). Likewise I very much enjoyed the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Dancing in the Dark, not just because it’s so funny, but because it’s the book where the series’ fictional and autobiographical elements begin to enfold each other in fascinating ways, and in so doing begin to bring the complexity of Knausgaard’s larger design into focus. And although I’ve come to it late, John Williams’ Stoner is exactly as brilliant as everybody says it is.

I also very much admired Max Porter’s wonderfully odd and richly poetic exploration of grief, Ted Hughes and Emily Dickinson, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Tom McCarthy’s archly brilliant Satin Island and Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-Shortlisted The Year of the Runaways. And while it was perhaps slightly less brilliant than Life After Life, I loved Kate Atkinson’s wonderfully inventive exploration of historical contingency and the immensities a simple life can contain, A God in Ruins. And while I’m not sure whether it quite came off overall, I’m not sure I read a book over the past twelve months that was smarter, funnier or stylistically exciting at a line by line level than Nell Zink’s Mislaid.

Thing ItselfOver on the genre side I adored Dave Hutchinson’s smart, politically savvy near-future political thriller, Europe at Midnight, Kelly Link’s brilliant Get In Trouble and Paul McAuley’s wonderfully accomplished Something Coming Through, and very much enjoyed China Miéville’s dazzling Three Moments From An Explosion, Jane Rawson’s Formaldehyde and Naomi Novik’s magical Uprooted. I also loved Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, a book that brought her fabulous Ancillary series to a wonderfully satisfying, emotionally resonant and fascinatingly subversive conclusion, and although I’m not quite sure whether it’s technically a 2015 or a 2016 book, Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself is a triumph: a deeply strange, extremely funny and metaphysically thrilling riff on John Carpenter’s The Thing and Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics (trust me – it’s great). And finally, while it’s a bit over a year old, I adored Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (don’t be put off by the title: it’s wonderful).

Six BedroomsI read fewer Australian books than I should have, but of those I did I very much admired Mireille Juchau’s portrait of an ecologically fraying landscape, The World Without Us, and Tegan Bennett Daylight’s brilliantly observed and exquisitely painful Six Bedrooms, Charlotte Wood’s ferocious The Natural Way of Things and (although it’s a couple of years old), Ashley Hay’s The Railwayman’s Wife.

I also read less non-fiction than I should have, and a lot of what I did read was things I’ve read before (Tim Dee’s wonderfully expansive Four Fields, Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure), but I found time to knock over Robert Macfarlane’s magisterial Landmarks, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read of Hal Whitehead’s The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins and I loved Thomas Farber’s wise, witty and delightfully sideways Here and Gone. And while neither are 2015 books I also very much enjoyed Helen MacDonald’s 2006 contribution to Reaktion’s Animal series, Falcon, which is a rather drier affair than H is for Hawk, but fascinating nonetheless (I also recommend her closing address to the Sydney Writers’ Festival earlier this year) and Rebecca Solnit’s marvellously spiralling The Faraway Nearby.

Unfaithful MusicOn the more technical side I very much enjoyed Mckenzie Wark’s notes toward a theory for the Anthropocene, Molecular Red (his unpacking of the politics and architectonics of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is a must-read for anybody interested in Robinson). And while it needed a much firmer editorial hand (and, I suspect, to be broken up into two different books), Elvis Costello’s memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink is as funny, savage and fascinating about songwriting as you’d expect, and while too long and oddly unreflective in some regards, often surprisingly moving, especially when it comes to Costello’s relationship with his father.

On the graphic side of things I hugely enjoyed Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer, and I continued to love every panel of G. Willow Wilson’s Ms Marvel, Charles Soule and Javier Polio’s She-Hulk, Al Ewing and Lee Garbett’s wicked and wise Loki: Agent of Asgard, Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s joyous Daredevil and the endlessly delayed conclusion to Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye.

Ms Marvel

 

As I said in The Weekend Australian a couple of weeks ago though, the two books I loved most this year are a pair of novels that at first blush seem to have almost nothing to do with each other. The first, Sarah Hall’s exultant, lyrical The Wolf Border, focuses on a plan to reintroduce wolves to the north of England, the second, Kim Stanley Robinson’s dazzlingly expansive Aurora, follows the struggles of a group of colonists sent to Tau Ceti half a millennium from now, but look a little closer and it becomes apparent both are books deeply engaged with a series of questions about the ethical and imaginative dimensions of a world whose systems have been fundamentally and irrevocably altered by human activity, yet which simultaneously try to look beyond the reality of the present day in order to reclaim the imaginative possibilities of the future,  quality that, as 2015 draws to a close, seems not just important but necessary.

 

 

 

Sep 11

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Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (and some other reviewy stuff)

Some of you may have noticed I had a review of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Sweet Tooth in Saturday’s Weekend Australian.

I’ve reproduced the review over the fold in case you’d like to read it, but before you do I thought I might point you toward my reviews of Karen Walker’s vastly overhyped The Age of Miracles and Lauren Groff’s wonderful Arcadia, both of which appeard a few weeks ago, and both of which are books I want to fold into a longer piece I’m working on about the current fashion for dystopia, and what it tells us about the state of science fiction and our imagining of the future more generally.

And while you’re there you might want to check out my reviews of G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, both of which I’ve now posted on the site.

Aug 12

And … you’re back in the room

So, I’ve been away for a while. It wasn’t really intentional, but I’ve been completely overwhelmed by work and family commitments since about March, and this site is one of the many, many things that have fallen by the wayside. Things have eased off a little lately, but since I’m now working hard on a new book I’m not going to make any rash promises about how much I can manage on top of that.

I’m hoping I’ll get a few things up in the next week or two, but in the meantime I thought I’d link to my reviews Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, a book that seems to be getting fairly polarised reactions from readers and critics (for what it’s worth I thought it had extraordinary bits but was less good than I wanted it to be overall) and of G. Willow Wilson’s Arabian Nights/Arab Spring/tech thriller Alif the Unseen, a book that’s generating a huge amount of buzz overseas.

And I’ve plugged the Alabama Shakes before, but if you haven’t heard them, you might want to take a moment to check out this live recording of the title track from their new album, Boys and Girls. It’s a great song, and Britanny Howard’s voice is even more jaw-dropping live than in the studio.