2022 Roundup

It’s been a pretty good reading year for me, by the number of books I pulled out as favourites from my 2022 reading log. My top ten feels notably topical, much more so than last year: environmentalism, colonialism, capitalism, the rise of the far right all stand out to me as common themes. I guess, like many of us, I’ve been drawn to fiction that works to make sense of our current moment, a moment when we seem to be standing vertiginously on the brink of apocalypse. Perhaps paradoxically, I don’t think this is a particularly downbeat list; there are moments of hope as well as more sombre notes, reminders of the great gift that life is, and of what we stand to lose if we carry on down this path.

So, here they are: my top ten reads of 2022.

Ventriloquism – Catherynne M. Valente (2010). Of course, having just discussed how topical this list is, I start with possibly the least topical book on it. Not that the stories collected in Ventriloquism do not often feel urgent and searching: in particular, there is a strong feminist sensibility running through them. But the best and most playful stories – “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time”, which mashes up advanced physics with creation tales from around the world; “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica”, a catalogue of maps which also explores the rivalry between two cartographers; “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”, the precursor to Valente’s Art Deco space opera novel Radiance – are more personal than political. Valente’s long been a favourite author of mine, thanks to her resonant uses of myth and fairytale and her lush, ornate prose; Ventriloquism collects some of her best work.
Notes from the Burning Age – Claire North (2021). This novel, on the other hand, is thoroughly of the moment: set in a future in which humanity has learned to live more sustainably, it tells the story of the rise of an anti-environmentalist movement whose proponents believe that humanity should have dominion over the earth. I place it so high on this list because it was so utterly unexpected: I went in expecting an SF thriller along the lines of North’s earlier Touch and got instead a novel that expresses near-perfectly my own ideas about what a sustainable society might look like and what our relationship to our planet should be. There is a thriller element, which sometimes drives the book in a pulpier direction than I’d like, but its core ideas have stayed with me and will do for a long time.
Ammonite – Nicola Griffith (1992). Setting aside the problematic nature of the novel’s central premise – it’s set on a planet where only women can survive, which indicates that there’s some rather reductionist thinking about gender going on somewhere – this is another delightfully quiet story about living in harmony with one’s environment, building community through mutual aid and complex chains of allegiance. Again, Ammonite was a book that came as a surprise to me: an ostensibly science-fictional text that reads in some respects more like fantasy.
Babel – R.F. Kuang (2022). I will be very surprised if this is not one of this year’s Hugo nominees. I’m not convinced that Kuang’s magic system, which runs off the losses and shifts of meaning involved in translating texts from one language to another, harmonises perfectly with what she has to say about colonialism and appropriation; but she captures so exactly what it feels like to be at Oxford, the heady golden days of intellectual pursuit coupled with the uneasy knowledge of the damage the institution has done and is still doing, that I can forgive her that. Her ending, too, is impeccably pitched; the kind of ending that feels, with hindsight, inevitable. Big, ambitious, exciting.
Downbelow Station – C.J. Cherryh (1981). A classic work of SF, and one I’ve been meaning to read for a while. There are things that…are not great about it (I doubt we’d see anything like the hisa in published SF today, or at least one would hope not), but for the most part it’s a satisfyingly dense and chunky novel, broad in scope and more grittily realist in approach than I was expecting. I’ll be interested to read other books in the series, if I can find them in hard copy.
In Other Lands – Sarah Rees Brennan (2017). Originally published online, this is a heartfelt coming-of-age novel that isn’t trying to be anything more than that. I’ve wept more at the utter teenage despair of its snarky, socially awkward protagonist Elliot than I have at any other work of art for a long time. Like Notes from a Burning Age and Babel, it’s a novel that just seems to get a part of me that I’ve barely been able to explain to myself.
The Past is Red – Catherynne M. Valente (2021). Again, it’s Valente’s prose that wins this one for me; that, and its heroine’s conviction, in the face of all available evidence, that she lives in the best of all possible worlds. Valente’s critique of overconsumption and the heedlessness of the super-rich feels a little too on the nose; but the book’s last page is perfection.
Market Forces – Richard Morgan (2004). I’m not a fan of Morgan’s depictions of characters who are not white men, but I always find his ideas, and the dynamic cyberpunky prose he uses to express them, invigorating. Here, he literalises capitalism’s metaphor of competition, making his City financiers and consultants fight to the death as a matter of course. It’s a compelling study of complicity and guilt that chimed in interesting ways with a lot of my reading this year.
Red Pill – Hari Kunzru (2020). The experience of reading this novel encapsulates in miniature the experience of existing as a liberal in this present moment: the sense of disorientation and confusion as what appeared to be the long arc of progress collapses into reactionary conservatism; as what seemed to be the basic facts of the world are unmoored and overturned. Its protagonist’s inability to find answers to the far-right discourse he sees erupting around him feels deeply and terrifyingly relatable.
Bewilderment – Richard Powers (2021). I’m not terribly satisfied with this novel’s treatment of the protagonist’s autistic child, who is used more as a plot device than as a character with agency of his own. But Powers is very good at describing the miracle of the world we see all about us: the complexity of something so simple as a fallen leaf, for example. And his melding of the science-fictional with the realistic is skillful and resonant.

Spreadsheet stats

I read 88 books in 2022; one fewer than last year.
The longest book I read was Donna Tartt’s sprawling The Goldfinch, at 864 pages; the shortest was Michael Bockemühl’s study of J.M.W. Turner, at just 96. In all I read 33,641 pages this year, down from last year’s 35,787. (I’ve obviously been reading shorter books.)
The oldest book I read in 2022 was Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, first published in 1848. The average age of the books I read in 2022 was 16, down from 19 last year. (I’ve obviously been reading newer books, too.)
Genre: genre distinctions are of course fuzzy and contested, but by my rather idiosyncratic rubric 36% of the books I read in 2022 were science fiction (up from 19% last year); 26% were fantasy (down from 43% last year); 22% were litfic, the same as last year. I wonder if the switchover between SF and fantasy as my favoured genre has something to do with my seeking out more topical fiction. (I should note, as well, that my “litfic” category includes several novels with speculative elements that didn’t feel solidly genre.) I’ve also read five novels that I classified as “contemporary” (mostly romances), four non-fiction books, a “classic” (the aforesaid Tenant of Wildfell Hall), a crime novel (Un-Su Kim’s The Plotters), a horror novel (Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians) and a mystery (Elizabeth Kostova’s The Shadow Land).
Just 7% of the books I read in 2022 were re-reads (down from last year’s 29%; that figure was only so high because the libraries were closed for a good proportion of 2021). Incidentally, all of those re-reads were by J.R.R. Tolkien, except for Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments, which I had forgotten I’d already read.
58% of the books I read in 2022 were by people who are not men, slightly down from last year’s 60%.
28% of the books I read in 2022 were by people of colour, up from last year’s 19%.
And 22% of the books I read in 2022 were by queer authors – up from last year’s 19%.

Review: A Marvellous Light

Freya Marske’s debut novel A Marvellous Light (2021) joins a slew of recent novels that introduce magic into historical English milieux, using it as a device to comment on the hoarding of power by aristocratic elites; which is to say, white, straight, upper-class men. Susanna Clarke’s magisterial Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004) sets this critique in the early 1800s, examining the effects that the warring ambitions of the last two English magicians have on the women, working-class folks and people of colour around them; Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown (2015)and The True Queen (2019) lean more heavily on the structures of Regency romance, bringing postcolonial and queer dimensions to her discussion of English society in this period.

Marske’s novel takes place later than Cho’s and Clarke’s, but the premise is very similar. It’s the first decade of the 20^th century and civil servant Robin Blyth is accidentally assigned a post that makes him responsible for liaising with a secret network of English magicians of which he has, hitherto, been entirely unaware (as his punning surname suggests). The appointment throws him into the path of Edwin Courcey, the magical scion of an aristocratic English family, who is investigating the disappearance of Robin’s predecessor in the post and who plans to wipe Robin’s memory of magical society as soon as that predecessor is found. Things of course don’t quite go to plan, as the pair find themselves growing increasingly attracted to one another, and as Robin begins experiencing magical visions, in the course of their uncovering a sinister magical conspiracy that threatens all England.

Class, then, is the key vector for power in Marske’s world: as in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Sorcerer to the Crown, upper-class white men are the only people in whom the pursuit of magic is considered acceptable. Marske uses the conspiracy that Robin and Edwin spend the novel chasing down as a device to critique this state of affairs, and British class structure in general: something is rotten in the state of England. That rottenness, as one of Robin’s most disturbing visions shows, threatens to bring about an apocalypse that will end the genteel vision of Englishness that Edwin’s landed relatives inhabit once and for all: on one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, Marske gestures forwards towards the spectre of the First World War.

But this critique is limited by the fact that both of Marske’s viewpoint characters are in fact upper-class white men. (Robin’s parents managed to fritter away the family wealth – hence the need for him to take employment with the government – but he is still officially Sir Robert.) Their queerness is, of course, a point of marginalisation for them both, but in fact Edwin’s connections ensure that neither of them face any real persecution or consequences for it. There are more interesting characters around the edge of the narrative: the Indian Miss Morrissey and her sister Mrs Kaur; the elderly and unexpectedly powerful Flora Sutton; but none of them get much play, and the novel is certainly not principally interested in how the concentration of magical power in men’s hands affects them structurally.

As a result, the novel suffers in comparison with its more incisive forebears. In many ways that’s a shame: taken by itself, it’s a delightful read, with a queer romance whose intensity (and explicitness) rivals that of a Sarah Waters novel, and a plot that’s satisfyingly resonant without being overwrought or overworked. This is to be the first installment in a planned trilogy; perhaps its sequels will go further in examining the corrosive power structures underlying our conceptions of Edwardian Englishness. But as it is, A Marvellous Light feels too slight.

Notes on Telegraph Avenue

A novel about fatherhood, friendship and music, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue failed to move me, despite its Pynchonesque joie de vivre. Nat and Archy, co-owners of faltering Oakland used vinyl store Brokeland Records, attempt to fend off competition from a corporate chain threatening to move in on their market; their wives, Aviva and Gwen, deal with the ignorance, racism and misogyny of doctors opposed to the home-birth midwifery business they run together; and their sons become involved in a rather one-sided romantic relationship.

I didn’t dislike the novel exactly, but it felt complacent to me. Archy, Gwen and Archy’s son Titus are Black, and one of Chabon’s aims is clearly to evoke and examine the multiculturalism of his real-life milieu; but his handling of race lacks teeth and nuance. The only racism the Black characters face comes from obvious bad actors; there’s little acknowledgement of the structural oppression that’s still very much alive in America today. (I’m not saying that every Black character in literature must face racism and oppression, but if you’re writing a novel that is in part about race in America – you do need to take account of the fact that racism goes beyond individual bigotry.) Chabon’s gestures at including queer characters feel similarly unconvincing: he never quite manages to get into the head of poor Julius, whose affection for Titus is met only by selfish curiosity, and his transgender character Kai is presented as basically a confused lesbian. (I don’t think I’ve ever read a fully-realised trans/non-binary character in a mainstream literary novel.)

Sure, Chabon’s prose is fun, and his characterisation – at least of the two men at the heart of the novel – is expansive in a Dickensian sort of way; these are flawed, larger-than-life folks that anchor a community, and there is some pleasure in that. But overall the urgency of the novel’s concerns is masked. The sense is of a best-selling author firmly in his comfort zone; coasting a little, self-indulgently. It’s fine, but not great.

Notes on The Mere Wife

Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife is an energetic, muscular update of the Beowulf story, one which articulates the original poem’s guiding tension between Beowulf and monster, civilisation and wilderness, as an issue of class. Thus our protagonist is not Beowulf but Grendel’s mother, here named Dana, the abandoned veteran of a bloody modern war in a desert country that has left her traumatised and pregnant. Her son, Gren, is raised in the wild countryside overlooking Herot Hall, a gated community built on land Dana’s family once owned whose inhabitants strictly police each other’s compliance with 21^st century middle-class American social norms. Dana naturally admonishes Gren to stay away from Herot; Gren, equally naturally, sparks up a secret friendship with one of Herot’s scions, Dylan, the son of the development’s architect, and thus a particular focus of Dana’s ire. The results are tragic, bloody and messy: misunderstandings breed violence, which begets more violence, as the people of Herot viciously seek to defend a way of life which the novel explicitly shows us to be parasitic, capitalistic and evacuated of meaning.

I don’t often enjoy fiction that’s as committed to unrelieved bleakness as The Mere Wife is – Dana, and thus by extension Gren, spends her life in the thrall of a mental illness she acquired in service to a military that later repudiated her – but here it works to evoke the brutality of the world in which Beowulf takes place, a world in which constant war, constant violence, is necessary to maintain one’s position and protect one’s people. By transplanting Beowulf into 21^st century America, in other words, Headley reveals the violence both actual and metaphorical at work in modern life, and particularly in the maintenance of contemporary class structures. It’s a savage, messy, angry novel, one to save for periods of mental fortitude; but worth a read, for anyone interested in the original poem.

Doctor Who Review: Flux

Over the last half-decade or so of Doctor Who-watching I’ve been slowly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the kinds of stories the show wants to tell are not the kinds of stories I’m necessarily interested in watching. (A case in point: I am apparently the only person in the world to have genuinely adored spin-off series Class, which was cancelled after one season.) Ever since Steven Moffat took up the reins as showrunner in 2010, the show’s tone has shifted from the monster-of-the-week, metaphor-driven storytelling of the Russell T. Davies era to something much more frenetic and self-referential: to me it often felt like each episode was stuffed with enough ideas to power a series, with none of them getting the breathing space they deserved. Some of Chris Chibnall’s early episodes for Thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker seemed to indicate that a reversal of that trend might be on the cards: with their focus on characterisation, sparing use of speculative concepts and unity of place, “The Tsuranga Condundrum” and “Demons of the Punjab” were some of my favourite Doctor Who stories of recent years. But Chibnall’s second series returned, unfortunately, to form: its opening story Spyfall was packed with competing ideas and poorly paced, and later episodes turned increasingly inward to focus on Whovian lore – at the expense of atmosphere and coherent narrative.

So, when the BBC announced that, for the first time since 1986, we’d be getting an entire Doctor Who series dedicated to a single story, I was optimistic. Perhaps now all those ideas would be given space to breathe, to generate atmosphere and resonance; perhaps, with the survival of the universe at stake, we’d get some real poetic grandeur going.

Alas, no.

The series’ premise is appropriately dramatic: a sort of cosmic storm called the Flux is sweeping across the universe, destroying everything in its path. Meanwhile, a pair of powerful beings named Swarm and Azure are attacking the Temple of Atropos on the planet Time, presumably not for philanthropic reasons; a Victorian industrialist frantically digs a network of tunnels beneath Liverpool, muttering dire prophecies; and a pair of lovers travel the universe in an attempt to find each other.

There’s some brilliant material here. Add the Doctor and her companions, wind the story’s mechanism up, and let it run: that’s all Chibnall and the writing team needed to do. But they seemingly can’t resist the urge to add extra bells and whistles in: more navel-gazing about the Doctor’s parentage and history; a Sontaran invasion; some timey-wimey shenanigans courtesy of the Weeping Angels. Once again, it’s all too overstuffed; and inevitably, with so much going on, some of the payoffs are fluffed. What happens to Peggy, the child who lies at the centre of the plot of the fourth episode, Village of the Angels, and then is never seen again? Why do the Weeping Angels need to transform the Doctor into one of them to take her to her mother? What’s the deal with the Temple of Atropos?

There are high points, of course, in which it’s possible to detect what Chibnall’s Who might feel like if it was paced a little more sedately: Vinder and Bel, the star-crossed lovers; the make-up and costuming on Swarm and Azure; the appearance of Mary Seacole in the Crimea (one of a series of marginalised people from history who have made their way into the Thirteenth Doctor’s story). But overall, it’s hard to detect much thematic coherence beyond “many apocalyptic things are happening and it is Very Bad”.

Have I learned my lesson vis-a-vis placing my faith in the hands of Doctor Who writers? Of course not. Hope springs eternal, and Russell T. Davies is taking back the reins. Perhaps we’ll see monsters of the week again yet.

Review: The Echo Wife

This review contains spoilers.

What if human beings could create life – reliably, wholesale, from scratch, none of this messy and uncontrollable futzing about with genitals and wombs and meiosis? It’s a question we’ve been asking since at least 1818, when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, that archetypal mad-scientist narrative in which a pieced-together human is brought to life through the seemingly promising new technology of galvanism. Published more than 200 years later, Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife treads similar grounds, asking us, like Shelley, to consider the nature of monstrosity and of scientific and social power. It’s a smart and urgent read which nevertheless fails to achieve the timelessness of its literary forebear.

Our protagonist is Evelyn, a genetic scientist at the height of her career who has developed a method for creating full human clones and conditioning their personalities (and their bodies) to create exact doubles of the people from whom they were cloned. Despite her professional success – as the novel opens she is in fact collecting an award for her work – her personal life is in ruins: her husband Nathan has left her for another woman. It takes a few chapters for us to discover that this other woman, Martine, is in fact Evelyn’s clone, her personality tweaked and altered to suit Nathan’s desires. Of course, the trope of the artificial woman made for the male gaze is not a new one (indeed, it has an antecedent in Frankenstein itself: that novel’s lonely creature asks his creator for a mate made in the same way as himself); but having Evelyn and Martine actually meet breathes new life into it, as Evelyn is forced to confront in the differences between herself and Martine all the ways in which Nathan clearly found her deficient.

This is not, however, a tale of female solidarity. The two women do become uneasy co-conspirators: Martine has murdered Nathan, and in order to stop her work becoming discredited (Nathan having secretly created Martine from Evelyn’s notes, and even worse given her the ability to become pregnant, which is supposed to be impossible), Evelyn helps her cover the murder up through yet more cloning. But even as Evelyn introduces Martine to freedoms she’s never known – reading about the workings of her own body, making small choices about how to spend her time, nurturing the beginnings of an intellectual life – Evelyn continues to think of her as a test subject, something that will, in the nearish future, become no more than biomedical waste when it use is finished. She is, in this respect, no better than Nathan, as the novel demonstrates.

But Nathan isn’t the only man whose violence overshadows the narrative. In fits and starts we discover that Evelyn’s father abused both her and her mother for years, until he too was murdered by his seemingly pliable wife. Evelyn’s father is thus an obvious double of Nathan’s, of course – but his legacy of abuse is continued too in Evelyn’s own objectification of those around her, and especially of Martine. This is underscored by the novel’s ending, which sees Evelyn manipulating Martine into moving into her old family home – where her father lies buried under the rose bushes – there to remain a virtual prisoner, in exchange for Martine being able to keep her baby daughter Violet with her. As the novel closes, Evelyn, Martine and Violet occupy the same positions as Evelyn’s parents and Evelyn herself once did, the cycle of misogynistic abuse repeating itself in a way that Evelyn is too damaged to recognise. Thus Evelyn becomes, like Victor Frankenstein, the very thing she fears and hates.

It’s decidedly chilling, which is exactly its intended effect. And its limited sphere of action – as Kevin Guilfoile points out here, “there are basically only four characters in this novel, two of whom are genetically identical” – lends it an intense claustrophobia that evokes the way in which abuse and misogyny restrict the agency of their victims. By the same token, though, I think it’s this very narrowness of focus that makes the novel less than wholly memorable. Shelley’s Frankenstein encompasses multitudes in its tale of rivalry, revenge and wrongdoing: it asks searching questions about the ethics of experimentation, about social ostracism, about attitudes to the body, about the reliability of our own perceptions; its capaciousness and ability to sustain multiple different readings have given it an unshakable position in the Western literary canon. The Echo Wife, on the other hand, is really only about one thing: the cyclical nature of gendered abuse. On that topic, it is evocative, insightful, propulsive; it’s a strongly-constructed, appropriately dark thriller. But – as with many thrillers – its work is done in a single read. Once its point is made, there is very little else to say. In other words (and honestly I think this is what many of my reviews here boil down to): The Echo Wife is a good book. But not a great book.

Review: The Player of Games

The second of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, The Player of Games dramatizes the clash between a post-scarcity, spacefaring anarchist utopia and an imperial power bent on domination and subjugation. Its protagonist, Jernau Morat Gurgeh, is a renowned game-player in the Culture, the aforementioned anarchist utopia; since all labour in the Culture is performed by advanced AIs, he’s had literally a lifetime to develop strategic prowess in every game known to his society. (Think an elite board gamer, perhaps, or an e-sports celebrity.) Bored by his expertise, which leaves him feeling unchallenged and unfulfilled, he risks his reputation and standing in the gaming community to cheat in order to win a game that has never been won by anyone in the Culture – and is offered the chance to redeem himself by travelling to the space empire of Azad in order to play them, literally, at their own game. The game of Azad – which shares its name with the empire itself – is said to be so complex as to approximate the complexity of life in the empire; it’s used to determine who will occupy positions within its government, and, in theory, the winner of Azad gets to become, or stay, emperor.

The story unfolds as you might expect from this starting premise: delivered to Azad, Gurgeh is aghast at the vast wealth inequality and structural oppression he finds there, and also proves, inevitably, an adept even at this unknown game, beating out the empire’s strongest players. What complicates the novel is the ambiguity – slight, but nonetheless present – about the relative moral value of Azad and the Culture. Azad is undoubtedly a shitty place, but the novel is clear that in many ways it’s extremely similar to our own: the parallel is made explicit when the novel’s AI narrator declares that its translation of the pronouns used by members of Azad’s dominant third gender is based on “whether [the reader’s] own civilisation is male or female dominated.” Their pronouns are thus represented as he/him/his, in a rhetorical move that’s undoubtedly designed to point up the parallels between the gender-based oppression cultivated in the Azadian empire and the gender-based oppression at work in our own society. We can, the novel intimates, look down upon the Azadians as unreconstructed and unenlightened; but then we have to realise that we are those things too.

But the Culture is not uncomplicatedly angelic itself, despite the total equality of its citizens and its functionally infinite resources. It becomes clear, for instance, that Special Circumstances, the organisation in the Culture’s government that has sent Gurgeh to Azad in the first place, most likely engineered the cheating incident, and have also, maybe, been manipulating what Gurgeh sees in the empire in order to have it appear to him in the worst possible light. A broader question, which the narrative only really touches on, is whether the Culture’s attempts to reform Azad from within, through having Gurgeh play its foundational game, are justified: are they simply an extension of the “benign” forms of liberal colonialism practised by Western governments today? What, in other words, are the obligations of a post-scarcity society to its neighbours?

For me these questions are the core pleasure of the novel: as a reader interested in non-capitalist ways of organising society, I’m fascinated by the Culture , and especially by its imperfections. Much Western liberal media takes as its foundational assumption the idea that capitalism is bad (which, to be clear, it absolutely is!) and that, by extension, almost any other socioeconomic system must be straightforwardly good; it’s rare and refreshing to read an SF novel that’s truly interested in interrogating our alternatives and working through the ethical and practical problems they present. I’m excited to dive further into the Culture series (having stalled out with the first, bleak novel Consider Phlebas), and hope, too, to see more work like it.

Review: The Stars, Like Dust

Around halfway through Isaac Asimov’s second novel, The Stars, Like Dust, his red-blooded male hero Biron Farrill finds himself confined to the close quarters of a spaceship with a high-ranking woman named Artemisia. When the ship stops to take on supplies at a planet, Biron requests that the locals provide clothes in appropriate styles for Artemisia, only to be warned by a local politician that:

“she won’t like that. She wouldn’t be satisfied with any clothes she didn’t pick. Not even if they were the identical items she would have picked if she had been given the chance. This isn’t a guess, now. I’ve had experience with the creatures.”

Yikes.

Asimov’s track record with women both real and fictional is not great, to say the least. He was a well-known serial harasser at conventions, and his treatment of his female characters reflects a harasser’s view of women: as frequently passive, irrational, sentimental romantic objects (“creatures”) with none of the agency that his male characters possess. (The notable exception is Susan Calvin, the hyper-competent robo-psychologist who stars in several of Asimov’s robot stories and novels.) In the absence of the high-concept plotting that characterises his more famous works – the Foundation and Robot series – this is a problem that becomes very noticeable in The Stars, Like Dust.

So: in the far, far future, protagonist Biron is attending the University of Earth when he’s subject to an assassination attempt which he quickly establishes is connected to his father’s involvement with a revolution against the Tyranni space empire. Whisked off-planet by a seeming ally, he embarks on a journey to a politically important planet named Rhodia, where he meets the aforementioned Artemisia and her uncle Gillbret, and learns of the supposed existence of a rebellion planet hidden somewhere in the Horsehead Nebula. Obviously the trio must go off in search of this planet; in the course of this quest Biron and Artemisia fall, predictably and unconvincingly, in love, every single secondary character is revealed to be operating under false pretences, and we discover that the powerful and mysterious weapon that Artemisia’s father has been hunting for throughout the novel – a weapon that, we are told, will radically alter the political landscape in the galaxy – turns out to be, wait for it, THE US CONSTITUTION.

The Stars, Like Dust is, in other words, a gaggle of egregious storytelling cliches wrapped up in Cold War mythologies of American exceptionalism and plucky resistance against tyrannical states, as well as anxieties about nuclear devastation (much of Asimov’s future Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by radiation) and espionage. It’s a weak effort from an author who has significant blind spots even in his best work – and its weakness makes those blind spots impossible to ignore.

Review: Who Fears Death

CW: rape, FGM.

Nnedi Okorafor’s 2010 novel Who Fears Death is one of those texts that casts a weighty shadow on the genre. Published around the time that work by people of colour and LGBT+ people – and particularly work that actually centred the experience of characters with these identities rather than seeking to educate white straight people about them – was moving into the SF mainstream (Racefail, a conversation about people of colour in SFF, had happened just a year before), it’s often cited as a significant work of specifically African SFF: Tade Thompson here calls it a “milestone” and Okorafor “The most significant writer in African SFF”. John Ottinger III here describes the novel as “perception altering”; Yvonne Zipp called it “wondrously magical and terribly realistic”. Reading it 12 years later, then, it’s interesting how formulaic it ultimately feels.

Set in a far-future Sudan whose inhabitants have for the most part rejected modern technology as sinful and dangerous, it follows the teenage Onyesonwu, the daughter of a woman of Okeke ethnicity who was raped by a man of another ethnic group, the Nuru, in an attempt at systematic genocide. Onye, as she’s nicknamed, overcomes the mistrust and fear of her community, not to mention institutionalised misogyny, to become an immensely powerful sorcerer in order to prevent the wholesale destruction of the Okeke, who she regards as her people thanks to her mother, by the Nuru in a campaign orchestrated by her father.

Clearly, there’s a lot going on here, and before I dive into my criticisms of the novel I want to mention something about it that I do think has stood the test of time: namely, that this is a story about systematic oppression featuring African folks that is not about white people. There’s one character who we might read as white, but whiteness as a construct, as a structural force, is absent. That still feels unusual in today’s literary landscape, although it’s becoming less so with the advent of novels like N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

For the most part, though, Who Fears Death simply reheats the Hero’s Journey: Onye passes a test to gain access to a reluctant teacher and develops incredible powers, but leaves her training early in order to confront her evil father, who is plotting genocide…I’m finding it very hard not to think of Star Wars, here. That, in itself, is not necessarily a problem. Are we not constantly being told that there are only approximately seven basic plots? But in a novel so lauded, I would have expected to see some sort of subversion of this classic structure, and it’s just not there.

Well; perhaps that’s not quite true. One of the things everyone mentions about Who Fears Death is its violence: there is rape, there is murder, there is FGM. There’s also a lot of explicit sex. I wonder if what Okorafor is attempting here isn’t a bit similar to what Marlon James is doing in Black Leopard, Red Wolf: exposing the violence inherent in traditional Western fantasy, making it explicit rather than cloaking it behind faux-medieval notions of honour and nobility. There’s also, I think, an attempt at greater honesty around teenage attitudes to sex than is typical in fantasy, and particularly the YA fantasy that Okorafor is most clearly responding to.

This explicitness doesn’t work as well as it does in James’ work primarily because we’re not actually supposed to like any of James’ characters, and because James’ commitment to the bleakness of his vision is unwavering; whereas, although Onye frequently behaves in unlikable ways, I think we are ultimately supposed to root for her and identify with her. Supposed to being the operative phrase: to me, she felt simply inconsistent, by turns manipulative, loyal, self-centred and altruistic; Okorafor seems bent on telling us that she’s admirable while showing us a reality that’s quite different. Onye is supposed, I think, to be morally ambiguous; but her characterisation ends up simply being confused. It doesn’t help that explicit depictions of sex and violence aimed at undermining the colonialist and misogynistic bases of Western SFF have become steadily more commonplace in the genre since Who Fears Death was published: Okorafor’s work here simply feels less innovative, less startling, than presumably it once did.

I think my greatest problem with the novel, though, is its affect. Magic as a literary device is, at its core, a way of talking about the numinous: the irrational or invisible forces (luck, faith, the psyche, nature, fear, love, despair, hatred) that shape our lives in often ineffable ways. Its narrative charge and resonance, generally speaking, comes from its obscurity: the most effective portrayals of magic, in my opinion, preserve some element of mystery, of inexplicability. Okorafor’s descriptions of magic and spiritual experience, though, are flat, matter-of-fact, thuddingly literal:

“Then I noticed it. Red and oval-shaped with a white oval in the center, like the giant eye of a jinni. It sizzled and hissed, the white part expanding, moving closer. It horrified me to my very core. Must get out of here! I thought. Now! It sees me! But I didn’t know how to move. Move with what? I had no body. The red was bitter venom. The white was like the sun’s worst heat. I started screaming and crying again. Then I was opening my eyes to a cup of water.”

And Onye is massively overpowered: she’s apparently capable of doing pretty much anything she sets her mind to, magically speaking, which further dilutes the significance of her abilities. Her magic, ultimately, comes to feel inconsequential and incoherent; it exerts little force in the narrative.

I think, then, that this is partly a case of a once-innovative novel ageing badly: it’s clearly attempting to coopt, and thus comment on, the structures and assumptions of contemporary fantasy, and its non-Western setting and cultural milieu are important aspects of that attempt. But there are enough newer texts doing the same work better – works with more resonant force, with greater clarity of character and theme – that this one feels out of date.

Review: The Old Drift

“Your desire to conquer, to colonise others, is both too fixed and too free. Nothing escapes your dull dialectic: either it takes a village to live or to each his own to survive. Even your debate on the best way to be falls on either side of this blade. The social contract or individual free will, the walls of a commune must keep us close or capital must run rampant. That’s how you froze your long Cold War, with this endless, mindless divide.”

Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, a work that feels thoroughly litfic in sensibility but which was nevertheless awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020, troubles boundaries and binaries in more ways than one. Set in what is now Zambia, it charts the fortunes of three families throughout the country’s history, from the colonial period of the early 20^th century to a near-authoritarian 2023.

Colonialism, racism and structural oppression in their various forms are thus key interests of the text. The novel begins – more or less – with an act of racist violence: in the European settlement of the Old Drift, on the banks of the Zambezi, Lina, the daughter of an Italian restaurant manager assaults a local boy, N’gulube, who is later shot at by the narrator of this first section, the Englishman Percy C. Clarke. As we follow the descendants of Lina, N’gulube and Percy through the novel, we see how the consequences of this violence reverberate down into Zambia’s present and near future.

One effect of the intertwining of these three families – Italian, Zambian and British – is to challenge the racial categories on which the structures of imperialism are based. As family trees spread and merge, these categories break down: Percy’s granddaughter Agnes defies the wishes of her parents to marry a Zambian man named Ronald; Lina’s grand-niece Isabella marries an Indian man called Balaji; N’gulube’s great-granddaughter Sylvia becomes the lover of Lionel, Agnes’ and Ronald’s son and thus Percy’s great-grandson. Percy’s ultimate descendant is an unnamed boy whose heritage is Italian, Zambian and British: his racist sense of superiority and separateness to the Zambians who live near the Old Drift is proved to be mistaken.

But this is no straightforwardly utopian narrative. Questions of race, colonialism and national identity turn out to be bound up in complex ways with other forms of structural oppression: particularly misogyny and classism. Thus N’gulube’s granddaughter Matha is excluded from an anti-colonial resistance movement when she becomes pregnant. At around the same time, the man for whom Agnes left her parents realises she is not the idealised woman he thought her, and begins to despise her. Later on, their middle-class son Lionel betrays his wife Thandiwe in embarking on an affair with hair stylist and sex worker Sylvia, whom he also uses, often without her consent or real understanding, for his experimental HIV research. Again, here we see definitions and boundaries shifting as our perception of who these characters are changes with time and depending on who is narrating them.

The final section of the novel depicts a future so close it is virtually the present: a future of mass surveillance, extreme wealth inequality and corporate exploitation. The tyranny of colonialism has given way to the tyranny of capital. Three teenagers, the children of Thandiwe, Lionel, Sylvia and Isabella, stage an inchoate rebellion against The Way Things Are, deploying grassroots technology to evade state control of the internet. They are, of course, unsuccessful. But, to me at least, their failure is not a bleak one, because the attempt itself bears out the possibility of change. The Old Drift is a novel about potentiality: even the worst of history’s excesses may be left behind by the sweep of time; and even the most committed idealist can turn out to be flawed. And positive change is only possible because negative change is too.

This is a text with ambition, then, and something to say. It didn’t quite grab me in the way I hoped it would, however: despite its speculative trappings and its generational scope, it still, to me, felt limited by its litfic focus on the individual psyche and on the nuclear family as a social structure. I felt, in other words, like Serpell hadn’t quite taken enough from SF to do justice to the broad sweep of her narrative, and to the dystopian future her youngest characters face. That’s very much a personal nitpick, though: The Old Drift is, ultimately, a well-crafted novel attempting to grapple with the profound uncertainties of our current historical moment, something I’ve seen relatively few works of litfic doing. It’s an intriguing choice for the Clarke, but not entirely a wrongheaded one.