2024, my works in progress, Happy Holidays

Orbital, Five Books that Made Me, the genre literary thing

The short 2024 summary.

A half-apology. This is later than intended because I’ve been working to finish something I was really enjoying writing. It’s also long.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

The publishing sea is wracked with whirlpools, shifting sands, mysterious fogs and vanishing coastlines. There are more unseen currents than treasure islands. You can often be caught in the Typhoon of Bad News or be becalmed in the Doldrums of Submission. Worse still, you could be snared on the Reef of Over-Extended Metaphor.

Agents are cautious, and publishers are edgy, wavering to no, cancelling later books in a series. Plus, the churn of staff means one editor’s pet project becomes the next editor’s unwelcome Christmas leftovers. Yet the book world hears of wild six figure advances for Romantasy, or a celebrity author, or something that sparks a particular interest.

Should writers try to write what agents might think a publisher might think traditional retail and the supermarkets might buy? Is that what readers long for? How does anyone in that chain know?

I don’t know whether my latest project will sell but I’ve enjoyed writing it, and you can’t beat that.

Finally, so called genAI. The government is trying to throw creatives under the bus. Faced with authors, voice actors, visual artists, and many others protesting the historic and ongoing theft of their copyright material to train genAI, the government proposes to legalise theft. You will be able to opt out, and I assure you, across the twenty plus platforms I would have to look at, every one hides that opt out somewhere different. I’ll post about this more but there is a extremely biased consultation to respond to. More next week.

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I am still querying DEAR HEART the spooky Victorian murder mystery which I know totally works – I have a publisher and an agent saying it is great - just not one for their own small number of slots. Largely, to get an agent, you need a novel length work or a massive body of work. The emphasis is now publishers. I’ve had really mixed advice about trying American agents. I’ve some sequel thinking on DEAR HEART #2 - THE HEARTENING now – I need to be contracted to write it.

Dark Deeds (Novella 1) has been ‘one final look’ for ages. I’m at first wonky draft with Name TBC (Novella 2). I wrote the latter in an two month blitz, pulling together a twenty-year-old idea, a short story published in 2015, another done last year, and a lot of thinking about a novel some years back. The novella is a glorious form, and if there were more markets, I might adopt it wholesale.

Amazing to be reminded how writing something you truly want to write can feel. I read a chapter of Name TBC to my writers’ group and it landed really well. If you think Cory’s purple tentacles were controversial…

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Christmas/New Year can be difficult and I normally feel at least three things at once. My partner had her father die at Christmas, and recently we have had a run of dramas. My loving Dad died between the holidays in 2022, in Christmas 2023 we were only a few months after the death of my generous mother-in-law. We had a quiet, lovely, calm Christmas in 2024 with my wonderful mum. How things pan out for my mum is occupying our thoughts. I’m grateful that we three brothers and our partners work together as a team. It is always good when my grown up kids are home, seeing them forge their own lives. Both had big steps forward in 2024.

I wish you a happy, peaceful season and a creative and positive New Year.

The Five Books that Made Me (and two recent recommends)

Ericka Weller asked me to pick the Five Books That Made Me. It was a hard task, 25 would have been easier. She says “what might be one of the most eclectic and wide-ranging selections yet.”

I chose five from the first half of my life. The books are A Wizard of Earthsea, The Persian Boy, Easter, Guns Germs and Steel, and the poetry of Sharon Olds (to stand in for poetry generally).

The book I am raving about is The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. The British government discovers time travel and rescues five people from history just before their deaths. The narrator is the minder-mentor of a Victorian arctic explorer. It’s a hot romance, a time travel story, a satire on bureaucracy, and ‘there’s a mole in the Circus’. And add a dash of BBC hit Ghosts. You can’t have a massive success with odd genres, eh?

Talking of a mole in the Circus, I read the acclaimed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time. Seedy, treacherous and gray, it lives up to its reputation.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

There is great interest in this novella which won the Booker – my local bookshop struggled to get supply, the demand was so high.

Set largely on the International Space Station, but at times peeking on Earth, it has periods of sweeping majesty as it contemplates hurricanes, the range of places seeing dawn at the same time, and the vastness of space. And it also homes in on tiny details of the astronauts’ constrained and deeply peculiar lives. Like religious figures following arcane rites, in some dangerous rocky tower, they put their health and sanity on the line for the common good.

One controversy followed a few awkward responses Harvey made when asked if Orbital was science fiction or not - and somewhere the term ‘space pastoral’ was used. Lots of SF writers got cross about that.

Orbital is a literary or poetic work, interested in working with language and metaphor. The characterisation is no better than adequate, it is often in omniscient viewpoint, there is not much peril on the station, and many people will say ‘Nothing really happens’. Which is a little unfair given the hurricane. As a work, it carries you forward to finish it. However, writing movingly about space and the whole earth is nothing new - people have been doing it for decades.

Is it science fiction? In the odd page, someone imagines something – for example a brief flight of fancy as to what it might be like if some alien civilisation finds the Voyager spacecraft and tries to read their golden records of Earth. One brief episode, irrelevant to the plot, isn’t enough to make something science fiction. If have a putative novel where a teenager spends a page imagines being a NYPD detective, the novel wouldn’t be made a police procedural…

Orbital is a space pastoral but to my mind, not SF. And I am confident, not the best or most memorable book published in the relevant year.

But all genres are fuzzy. Space pastoral is a good description of say, the works of Simak where a grizzled farmer guards a portal to another planet, and that’s definitely SF.

I feel very differently about Orbital – doing what it sets out to do - than I do about someone writing about AI and claiming they are thinking about it differently and deeper than anyone has in the time it has been a serious topic of discussion. Which is well over a century. ‘Robots have feelings’ and ‘robots demand their rights’ is the damn plot of Rossums Universal Robots, the Czech play which invented the word robot, in the 1920s.

What is literary anyway?

Literary fiction was on the agenda at Bristolcon. I got to moderate a firework display of a discussion.

Grimdark heroine Anna Stephens Spark defended her work as both literary and fantasy – indeed as high literary and high fantasy, using language to its limits and drawing on literary modernism. Joanna Harris made a plea for imagination and fable, and asserted ‘being grown-up is over-rated’. She said that the only difference between her literary books and her fantasies was that she consistently made far more money from the literary ones. No reason not to write her fantasies. Naomi Scott expounded a widely held view in genre circles that ‘literary fiction’ is a meaningless term, from a self-defining clique of gatekeepers and snobs.

My own thinking is that there’s a sense in which books are on a spectrum of literariness, in terms of language and emphasis. You can have a meaningful discussion as to whether this book is ‘more literary’ than that, just as you can whether this book is ‘better paced’ than that. A book can be very **effectively** written without being seen as literary.

It’s a truth insufficiently realized that many literary gatekeepers accept speculative books from the literary world but disdain them from other people. It’s not an attractive trait.

As ever comments, questions and shares are welcome. In a time of churn in the media world, I value being able to talk to you direct to your inbox. I’m on Bluesky most at the moment but other links here. X-Twitter is utterly ineffective now, and I’m weaning myself off it. I refuse to pay Josef Goebbels to reach a few more people.