As usual the announcement of the Booker longlist has completely overshadowed the fact that the annual Hugo awards for speculative fiction are about to given out. Taking place on August 9 in the at the catchily titled World Science Fiction Convention, Denvention 3, the prizes are big news in the SF community, but as far as I can make out from my own reading and a hunt through google, has garnered barely a mention in the British mainstream media.
To an extent, the comparative lack of coverage is fair enough. SF is far more of a niche interest - and one that is well able to support itself with its myriad of websites and intelligent fan writers. It still strikes me as a pity though. It's a shame that so much interesting writing should be so ghettoised and a real oversight to ignore so much native British talent. Most notably, two out of the five shortlisted novels are written by British writers: Charlie Stross's Halting State and Brasyl by Ian McDonald. Both have plenty to recommend them.
Admittedly, a brief précis of Halting State won't do much to convince outsiders that SF isn't primarily the domain of nerds. It's a 350-page exploration of the economics within the virtual worlds of computer games written in the second person. This interesting narrative device is "a tip of the hat to the old infocom adventure games", according to the author, who also told me defiantly: "There are a lot of computer-literate geeks out there, and not enough fiction being written for them."
Even so, I enjoyed it. Admittedly, that's partly because I too am something of a nerd and those text-based role playing computer games blighted many rainy afternoons of my own childhood, invariably crashing just as I had helped Bilbo Baggins escape from a dark place after hours of banging in combinations of "N", "E", "NE," "S", "SW" while carrying a short sword. Perhaps, therefore, I'm in a dorkish minority in finding chapter openings like the following amusing: "You are standing in the nave of a seventeenth century church, its intricately carved stone surfaces dimly illuminated by candles" ; "By daybreak on Monday you are no longer in Amsterdam or hungover, but you are still unemployed".
But this isn't just a nerd novel. I'm pretty certain that Stross's sharp and pleasingly cheeky humour has broader appeal, while the book is as notable for its depiction of Edinburgh as for I.T. matters. That's partly thanks to a similar facility to Irvine Welsh's when it comes to emphatic swearing and ripe dialect, but also because of Stross's ability to bring to life the beauty, brooding menace, and (as he himself puts it) "downright weirdness of the city". As such Halting State could even be said to fit into the fine tradition of writers like James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ian Rankin. It helped me enjoy a recent trip to the Scottish capital, anyway.
Sadly, I wasn't able to enjoy Brasyl in situ, but this too is an effective evocation of place: namely a roughly contemporary approximation of Brasil, alongside future and 18th century versions of the country. It has its fair share of Comic Book Guy pleasing quantum mechanics and parallel universes, but its McDonald's extreme, psychotic take on reality TV and visionary writing, including most notably a Fitzcarraldo-esque floating of a cathedral down the Amazon that really makes it stand out, even if the prose occasionally gets on the wrong side of impenetrable.
Competitive as both books are, they aren't shoo-ins. They're up against Michael Chabon's hugely successful (and already multiply award-winning) The Yiddish Policeman's Union for a start, as well as Hugo veteran Robert J Sawyer's Rollback and the immensely popular blogger John Scalzi's The Last Colony. But they aren't the only British contenders in the many and various Hugo categories. Other hotly tipped contenders include Ken Macleod in the short story category, Doctor Who script-writer Paul Cornell in the Best Dramatic Presentation category and David Langford for fan writing (alongside my personal favourite Cheryl Morgan).
It will be more surprising if the Brits don't win at least one top prize - and there are few international competitions nowadays about which that can be written. Even if we're quite likely to perform dreadfully at the tainted Beijing Olympics, there's a good chance that the UK will take the honours at the admirably democratic Hugos and there's some pride to be found in that.
Staff
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