Make It New

[coalescent]

Adam Roberts' feature review of the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist is up at Infinity Plus. I think immortalradical might enjoy this one:

Can the novel still be novel, in this age of ours? There are times when, traipsing through the marshlands of silver-age fiction and derivative slush that constitutes the mainstream novel in the early twenty-first century, a reader might be forgiven for despairing. But surely SF isn't like this. Surely Science Fiction, of all genres, is one place where not only intellectual but formal newness would be welcomed? A literature of ideas, an imaginative entry into alien-ness and unfamiliarity, a canvas that apprehends the entire continuity of space and time rather than just the emotionally fraught goings-on of middle-class people in multicultural London or Chicago -- surely we can hope, surely expect, to encounter newness in SF?

I'm being heavy-handed. Of course we all know how much of the SF backlist is worryingly conventional, unadventurous: written in functional grey prose (or worse, in Thoggish cliché); structured according to a frankly 19th-century model of set-up, linear or interleaved plotline development and climax; populated by cookie-cut 'characters' that barely deserve the name, feeble types from Joseph Campbell's cardboard supply. If a novel doesn't make new in some sense, what good is it? Why read a third-generation retread of a classic original when you can, you know, just read the original?

This year's Clarke shortlist is a good list, not least in the sense that no obviously standout SF title published in the UK in 2005 has been omitted (with the possible exceptions of Justina Robson's challenging but brilliant Living Next Door To The God Of Love and James Lovegrove's witty Provender Gleed). But I find myself wondering: how many of them are doing anything conceptually, formally, tonally new? That, in Hamlet's once-new, now hackneyed words, is the question.

All that and a rant about cats, too.

Comments

[tinimaus.livejournal.com]

You had to mention cats, didn't you.

[iainjclark.livejournal.com]

It's possible you're trapped in a Stephen King novel.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Oops. Sorry--I'd only skimmed my friendspage when I posted.