If social media teaches us anything, it’s that neither acclaim nor ability stops scorn. You may be a best-selling author, movie options coming out of your ears, but even Joanne Harris and J. K. Rowling experience daily trolling. Paying your dues doesn’t end that. But again, I’d yet to see any of this. So, I’d just write the occasional story for my guildmates, get creative with music journalism, or devise alternative lyrics on fan forums. Just a bit of fun, I’d think, little realizing I was writing already.
See, I hadn’t twigged that inspiration wasn’t waiting ‘til I hit my 60s. There’s a reason for that – inspiration is the mind at work. The artistic process isn’t simply triggered by breaching some experience threshold. It’s the way we interpret the world around us, and process what’s happened, allowing us to move on. To build up life experience without ever digesting it is akin to spending our lives eating, carting around our swollen bellies, and taking one glorious dump at the end of it all. However literally you take that, that can’t be healthy.
And it had already begun to trickle out. All these things I’d been making, yet I hadn’t realised I was already writing. Still I held back.
In the end, what made me abandon my plan was the death of my Grandmother. One of the original kick-arse wise ones for me, our Grandmother-from-Hell passed away after a lengthy illness, mid-way through an Art History course. She was so enthusiastic about it. She’d always put off going to university.
Her death knocked me for six, not least because we kids had always expected her to live forever. It gave the lie to my idea of the endless time I’d have at the end of my life to do the things I loved. I realised I really couldn’t wait to become a kick-arse woman. There was only here and now.
So, I began to write in earnest. And once I did, things began to change. I started to think more clearly. I felt more comfortable in myself. The barrier I’d always felt between myself and the musicians I interviewed melted away – and with that, the other lies I’d held onto.
I realised I didn’t need to earn the right to write, except by hard work. And I could have fun doing that! As I gained confidence and started going to conventions, I found a welcoming community of creative people who understood how I felt, friends whose company I hope I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. To this day, I still wonder why I felt I had to wait to be this happy. I suspect I’ll be unpacking that for years to come.
I still intend to be a silver-haired kick-arse wise woman when I’m older. I just don’t want to have to wait ‘til then to be content with my life. It’s a choice that involves a lot of graft; a lot of frustration too, at times. Yet, unlike my age, the sheer luck involved in becoming successful, or the reactions of other people, that’s one thing I can control.
Ruth EJ Booth is a BSFA award-winning author and academic, studying on the MLitt in Fantasy at the University of Glasgow. Her work can be found at www.ruthbooth.com
Reviews
All the Galaxies
Philip Miller
Freight Books, 308 pages
Review: Henry Northmore
Fans already know that many of the strongest works in the genre use sci-fi as a prism to examine our own world. Taking existing concepts and extrapolating into the future, exaggerating for effect or repositioning them on strange new worlds. We live in volatile political times offering plenty of meat for writers to chew over. However Philip Miller can’t have known how timely All the Galaxies would be when published. Set after a second failed Scottish Independence Referendum (which could be as soon as 2018 if the SNP get their wish), in the following years the country descended into violence, known as ‘The Horrors’, then split into antonymous city states.
John Fallon is a disillusioned journalist at a Glasgow newspaper looking on aghast as the city he loves and the print media industry he has devoted his life too crumbles around him. Fallon’s past is a tangle of messy relationships, his teenage son has gone missing and there are strange reports of a man with stigmata prowling a derelict tower block. These ‘real world’ stories form the core of All the Galaxies but are tinged with fantasy and intercut with the cosmic adventures of a boy and his dog as they travel across the universe.
This is Miller’s second novel after 2015’s The Blue Horse. He’s a wonderful wordsmith. Some of his descriptions are beautifully evocative, filling the senses with detail. There’s an early paragraph that sums up Miller’s skill, succinctly capturing Fallon’s work environment: “The smells of the newsroom. Old paper and the coughings of dust mites. Cold coffee and perfume. Polystyrene trays of abandoned food. Lank settled farts. Unpressed three-day-old shirts and earwax. A grey cloud of desperate gloom. The clinical smell of the broken photocopier.”
The Mercury might be a fictional paper but Miller is a journalist, and works as an arts correspondent at Glasgow’s daily broadsheet The Herald. He understands this world from the inside out, making several pertinent points about the future of journalism, the rise of the internet and its effect on writers and consumers of news content.
The Glasgow sections are riveting, his cast authentic and fully fleshed out, even as they sometimes drift into the realm of the supernatural. The young boy’s interstellar journey fills far fewer pages, it’s intriguing but less gripping. The identity of the mysterious astral traveller is fairly obvious from early on and while it links directly, it doesn’t quite mesh with the more grounded central narrative. It’s an interesting aside that adds a dash of colour and pure sci-fi but can interrupt the flow of the main story.
There are several mysteries to keep you involved and Miller’s rich characters, especially Fallon, are captivating. Scottish readers will find the setting and subject matter particularly pertinent but All the Galaxies is a universal story of missed opportunities, mistakes and human relationships with added space whales and too much whisky. The focus drifts from time to time, however Miller’s mix of politics, social commentary and sci-fi is always beautifully written and engaging.
The Last Days of New Paris
China Miéville
Del Rey, 224 pages
Review: Eris Young
Set against a backdrop of crumbling streets and burned-out buildings, The Last Days of New Paris follows the parallel stories of Thibault, the last surviving member of a rebel army of artists, and Jack, arrogant acolyte of occultist Aleister Crowley. As hostilities inside New Paris reach a stalemate, dark rumours spread of a nazi weapon with the power to turn the tide of the war. In order to stop it, Thibault and his mysterious companion Sam must navigate the streets of a city marred by war and black magic, and haunted by unearthly manifestations of surrealist art – and worse.
China Miéville loves cities – London, San Francisco, and now Paris – and he’s adept at creating characters of them, embedding weirdness into the very bricks and mortar of a place with scientific precision and organic grace.
The last book of his I read was Kraken, which had a magic system as esoteric and visceral as any I’d ever encountered, and fully immersed me from the first page. The key to making a work of fantasy effective is to obscure the ordinary and elucidate the fantastic; Miéville excels at talking about objects and events that defy natural laws, making them almost banal, as if he’s not imagining but describing them as he sees them: this is what gives his work its power.
In The Last Days of New Paris, Miéville again picks apart and re-stitches the fabric of reality, rendering New Paris as a wellspring of the bizarre, as if the pavement and bricks are merely a veneer over the true city. This veil is peeled back as living collages and impossible animals clamber their way through, and the reader is given a glimpse into the blackness beyond. The rich language he uses to describe the impossible and the monstrous makes me appreciate more than ever what little knowledge I can dredge up about the surrealist movement (scraped together from a high school obsession with Max Ernst and a single unit in a third-year art class). The story weaves together a pair of timelines, starting with an impossible state of affairs and showing us how it came to be, the timelines unfolding together with a slow dawning sensation that is eminently satisfying.
But it’s apparent throughout that this book is a novella: the action, the conflicts, the fights that inevitably will punctuate any narrative of war or hostile occupation, are given in perfunctory detail and are often anticlimactic. My primary frustration with the story is that it lacks granularity and, therefore, the emotional impact that a good war story should have. There’s a contradiction between the action and the indestructibility, as it were, of the main characters, who move from conflict to minor conflict, playing one ‘ace card’ after another: the book tries to be both a war narrative and a macabre safari and is neither wholly.
The way Miéville disposes of the female character who became my favourite, for example, is downright glib. It’s as if he had created an interesting, developed female character by accident, and had now only a limited time left in which to get rid of her. In another example, he builds up a powerful sense of unease around a certain foe, ramping up the action, but we realise that things are not what they seem only a second before the characters themselves do, and so there’s none of the tension that makes that kind of revelation so thrilling.
And then, in a page or two, even that long-awaited and heavily foreshadowed climax is over. The baddie is defeated through the power of authorless collective action in a kind of last resort Hail Mary by the protagonist, who until then has largely stumbled from one fight to the next, winning each time through dei ex machina that have more affinity with luck than Thibault’s curious affinity for the surreal. This ability of Thibault’s to see manifs as they are, and to interact with them, is the most interesting part of his character to my mind and, like Jack Parsons’ magical abilities, is not explored in depth.
Which brings me to the problem of the Afterword. All the above were my impressions before reading the afterword, and in light of it my criticisms are arguably unfair. Miéville takes pains to paint himself as a hapless bystander in a story bigger than himself. He’s been entrusted with the lost gospel of a forgotten surrealist wartime Paris, and it’s his sacred duty to pass it on faithfully.
I want to take the story as it stands, regardless of any context, artificial or otherwise. If the afterword is ‘fact’, and the meat of Last Days – the manifs, the demons, the characters themselves – were given to Miéville by someone else, Miéville himself is absolved from responsibility of any aspect of the story but the cosmetic. My criticism is moot, and we can all go home. If it is all invention, though, then it is Miéville’s responsibility, and I can’t help but see the afterword as a crutch.
It’s been suggested to me that I take the afterword as a narrative tool, and appreciate it for its invention, for the way it frames the story. Whether it’s true or not is immaterial, though: it still seems like a cop-out, an ‘ah-ah, but wait—’ before I can make an objection. For want of a better expression, I feel mansplained-to.
Whatever the criticism, The Last Days of New Paris is a fascinating piece of writing. Miéville has created a work of remarkable invention in a short space of time. It’s the perfect book for someone who already likes Miéville’s work, and it’s perfect for, say, your former flatmate who did their dissertation on surrealist art. But it’s not in-depth enough to really immerse the reader in the way that, say, Kraken does and it reads more like a travel journal or a bestiary à la Serafini than a piece of fiction set in wartime Paris.
Raven Stratagem
Yoon Ha Lee
Solaris, 400 pages
Review: Iain Maloney
Criticism is a funny old thing. The critic is late to the party: the book is published, printed, often already in shops and on people’s nightstands by the time the review comes out so any criticism offered is at best parenthetical. As a novelist myself I’ve read critical reviews of my books and thought, ‘Okay, so the reviewer thinks W doesn’t work, X should’ve done Y and Z should’ve been longer. What do they think I can do about it now?’ While some writers occasionally get the chance to go back and re-edit older works, the best an author can usually do is to take relevant criticism on board and keep it in mind for the next novel.
This dichotomy was at the front of my mind while reading Raven Stratagem, the second part of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, which began with Ninefox Gambit. I am a big fan of Lee’s writing and thoroughly enjoyed Ninefox Gambit, but I never felt quite satisfied. My main beef was the complexity. Lee has created a deeply complex universe, one that in the most fundamental ways is completely alien to us. Not quite parallel, more parabolic. It reminds me, in a good way, of Iain M Banks’s Culture in its scope, its pleasing disfunction and the humorous uses Lee makes of the technological and social quirks that rise emergent from the system. But for a lot of Ninefox Gambit, it wasn’t particularly clear what was going on beyond the immediate action.
Lee, much to his credit, never info-dumps and never engages in a Telladonna (to steal a phrase from the West Wing Weekly podcast) by having one character explain everything to another. The book would’ve been immensely weakened by either of those techniques, and a writer should never give more information than is strictly necessarily, but I couldn’t help coming out of Ninefox Gambit feeling a little lost. The critic in me wanted Lee to slow down, to let his creation breathe.
Raven Stratagem, in this sense, is a huge leap forward.
In the first book 400-year-old mass murderer Shuos Jedao was grafted onto the mind of Kel Cheris, creating a deadly duo easily capable of defeating the heretics at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Raven Stratagem picks things up almost immediately. Cheris’s mind is dead and Jedao has hijacked her body, using it to take control of a Kel ship in which he goes haring across the galaxy repelling Hafn invaders and antagonising the ruling Hexarchate, all the while clearly up to something. Jedao is a wonderful fictional creation, a total psychotic bastard you can’t help but root for. The sense of pleasure Lee clearly takes in writing about Jedao’s villainy again puts me in mind of Iain M Banks. If you like your universes with a dark sense of humour and a wonky moral compass, Lee may be the best thing to happen to Space Opera since Banks’s untimely passing.
The novel opens the Hexarchate out, following multiple strands that expand and delineate our understanding while complicating the plot and adding levels that will undoubtedly be explored in later volumes. (Lee’s website says ‘trilogy’ - I hope it’s a trilogy in the Douglas Adams sense of the word).
Raven Stratagem is that rare thing – a sequel that betters the original – and is also the most frustrating thing for a reviewer: a book with a plot that cannot be discussed without massive spoilers. But like all great novels, it starts at the end of things. The ruling order that has controlled the galaxy for centuries is on its way out, and something is going to replace it. It could be freedom. It could be chaos. It could be a disaster. From Shoreline of Infinity’s base in Scotland, we ask what could be more timely?
Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth (Gods and Monsters: Rupert Wong Book 2)
Cassandra Khaw
Abaddon Books, 155 Pages
Review: Benjamin Thomas
