It’s unusual for a translated novel to be shortlisted for the Clarke Award, and it’s also unusual for the Prix Goncourt to go to a science fiction novel. This is a really good idea turned into a really good novel: an incoming aircraft turns out to be an exact duplicate of one that has already landed, months previously, and we get to explore the problem of dealing with people who are exactly the same but several months apart in experience, with a smattering of We Are Property. Le Tellier is a leading exponent of the Oulipo school and on this basis I will look for more from that source. Like all the finalists, recommended. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Lionel, you mean?’

Two people on an isolated island, exiled with each other for the crime of conceiving a child without a permit; and then their world changes. The build-up of tension just from the routine of isolation is well done; and the shift of perspective as the outside world reasserts itself is really superb. Not a comfortable read, nor a quick one, but very nicely executed. Recommended, like the other Clarke finalists. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Again like an old god – or perhaps an old cat – she was also irascible, capricious, and possibly the least desirable companion for an extended mission. She had also, after ten years, yet to let him forget the time he once flooded her lab as a graduate student. Lucian welcomed any other company.

This was the most Clarkean of the finalists for this year’s Clarke Award. It’s set in the near future on Pluto, where a young mute girl has discovered a deep secret and cannot tell anyone. The interpersonal relationships and science are handled very deftly; there’s a real sensawunda, grand planetary setting (even Pluto is pretty big if you are the size of a small human), isolated base under threat from its own people. A first novel, believe it or not; the author is a nuclear physicist. She assured me that she had not read Imperial Earth, which was the book it reminded me of (and I have a guilty fondness for that one). Recommended, like all the finalists. You can get it here.

I’m in China for Worldcon, so blogging for the next few days has been set up in advance to cover this year’s Clarke Award finalists. (Right now, I should be on the direct flight from Brussels to Beijing.) I’ve already posted my quick reviews of 69 of the submissions, and will hope to come back some time for the other 21…

The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift had by far the fewest owners on either Goodreads or LibraryThing, so few that I was a little suspicious that it might have come from a vanity press. But in fact the explanation is that the publisher sadly went out of business and therefore wasn’t able to do the usual promotional activities. This is a real shame, because the book is a gem. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

She checked the mirror again. The horizon was empty, not a hint of approaching storm. But the dust was always there, at her back. She saw it even on days like today, when there was nothing but the wheel and the road and the infinite red and the depleted husk of country – and yes, the infinite blue. She focussed ahead, let the sky settle in her gaze. Some things never let you go, no matter how far you drove.

It’s set in three timelines, the past, the present and the future, in and around Australia. (Apparently the author has not actually been to Australia, but I couldn’t tell.) The unifying theme is environmental apocalypse, as observed by women scientists; the three plots are each engaging on their own terms, and then the linkage at the end is very satisfying. A real warning about what we are doing to our world and ourselves. It is very much in keeping with the spirit of other recent Clarke winners, and Sir Arthur himself would have appreciated the diving scenes; personally I was especially grabbed by the nineteenth century science. Recommended (like all of the Clarke finalists). You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The rest of the day had been nothing short of torture. Nell had spent hours answering Lieutenant Cabe’s endless questions and accepting Swann’s comfort, the whole time not daring to open her bag to take out her spare granola bar, or phone, or even her lip balm, lest she draw attention to what was also inside. After Lieutenant Cabe had finally let her go, she’d had to return to Classic, where Humphrey had told her she was now on bereavement leave for the rest of the week. She’d argued that she didn’t need it, but family was family, he’d said, and refused to believe she was fine. He was from a gigantic one, several generations all crammed together in the same ancient house on Long Island.

One of the books submitted for the Clarke Award which was clearly not science fiction; a New York map specialist discovers the magical effects of a map owned by her father, also a map specialist who dies mysteriously at the start of the book. It has sold massively well, but I didn’t think it was all that special – implausibly kept family secrets don’t often convince me; maybe it appeals more to people who haven’t read much liminal fantasy before. You can get it here.

This hit the top of four of my lists simultaneously: top unread book acquired this year, top unread book by a woman; top unread book by a non-white writer; and top unread sf book. (All as measured by number of owners on LibraryThing). Next on those piles respectively are Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne; Winter, by Ali Smith; Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata; and Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

We were moved around in buses a lot. I looked out through rows of slanted windows, lined in shoddy chrome, to see sand and cactus swirling subtly in the distance as we made our way up mountain roads. I imagined being a photon, my path perturbed by desert thermals.

I think I got this for F ages ago, and it wasn’t an especially good choice by me for him; it’s by one of the evangelists of virtual reality, and his life story up to the early 1990s, so twenty-five years before the book was actually published in 2017. I have no special interest in VR; my most intense experience of it was three years ago with F in Paris, where Ubisoft, the makers of Assassin’s Creed, had set up a headset for you to experience Notre Dame as it would have been in 1789 (the real Notre Dame still being under repair then and now). And I’ve dabbled a bit in Second Life and the like, but that’s not quite the same.

Like a lot of online reviewers, I found it much more interesting to read about the author’s journey from rural Arizona to Silicon Valley, the tragic family circumstances, difficult educational and business decisions, and mostly failed romances and friendships that got him to the point of selling his startup at a huge profit that has enabled him to do what he likes for the rest of his life. His ideas are less interesting than his story, but it’s easy to skip the more technical (and visionary) chapters.

I still wouldn’t especially recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already have a deep fascination with the social and economic dynamics of innovation; it is an important topic but this is n0ot the way into it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is another autobiography, A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin.

I picked this book up from the Little Free Library beside one of the Cubes of Herne in January, and read it on the ferry coming back from Ireland (a month ago now, I have a substantial backlog in my bookblog). It consists of four essays from the Nobel Laureate; it is notable that although the first and the longest of the pieces is about Trinidad, it is Eva Perón who is given top billing in the book’s title and cover. It’s an important book and I will describe each of the four essays briefly.

The second paragraph of the third section of “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad” is:

Trinidad in 1971 was his perfect setting. Trinidad, with its oil economy, was rich, with a standard of living equalled in South America only by Venezuela and Argentina. Every consumer comfort was at hand, and Malik was soon pleasantly settled in the country town of Arima, in a newish house with a large garden. But Trinidad was far away. In London, Chicago and Toronto, fund-raising centres, Trinidad could pass as an impoverished island where a black leader, fleeing persecution, and also reacting against ‘the industrialized complex’, might settle down, in a ‘commune’, to constructive work with despairing blacks, who needed only this leadership, and little gifts of money, to get started in black agriculture, black fruit-growing. And, later, even a little black fishing: a trawler (obtainable through ‘contractual relationships with … Schichting-Werft shipyard, Travemuende’) would cost £18,000, but ‘initial feasibility studies indicate that the profits … would exceed £30,000 a month’. Remote Trinidad held this kind of possibility for its enthralled blacks; all that was needed was the leadership.

I was not familiar with this grim story: Michael X, a political activist and effectively a cult leader who had ended up back in his native Trinidad after developing his activist career in London, had two of his followers brutally killed in 1971, and was eventually arrested, convicted and executed for the crimes. Naipaul goes into the rhetoric of Michael X’s particular version of Black Power in detail, which helps us understand why his followers (and others including John Lennon) took him so seriously. Naipaul doesn’t make the connection with Charles Manson, but I must say that I also saw similarities with other homicidal cult leaders before and since.

The third section of “The Return of Eva Perón” is actually about Uruguay rather than Argentina; its second paragraph is:

Now it is a little less frenzied. The Tupamaros — there were about five thousand of them, mainly townspeople from impoverished middle-class families — have been destroyed. The army — essentially rural, lower middle-class is in control and rules by decree. Interest rates have dropped to around 42 per cent, with the taxes; and inflation this year has been kept down to 6o per cent. ‘Prices here don’t just rise every day,’ the businessman said. ‘They also rise every night.’

This is a lyrical and detailed essay about the extraordinary story of Juan and Eva Perón, and how Argentina (and Uruguay) descended into economic and political hell despite being blessed with natural resources and reasonably skilled populations. From the mid-1970s, when Naipaul was writing, it did all look pretty awful; now things look a bit better, but still fragile. He makes the point that Eva Perón would only have been in her fifties, and presumably still dominating the country’s politics, if she still been alive in 1977. He pulls in fellow writer Jorge Luis Borges for some interesting and disturbing observations.

The last two essays are both about the country then known as Zaire and now as the Democratic Republic of Congo. The first, “A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa”, is about the Mobutu regime, which had then been in power for over a decade and had another twenty years to go. The second paragraph of the third section is a report frmo a newly appointed district commissioner:

At the very entrance to the canal [according to the official report in Elima], thousands of mosquitoes cover you from head to ankles, compelling you to move about all the time … After a whole night of insomnia on the Lubengo canal, or rather the ‘calvary’ of Lubengo, where we had very often to get out in the water and make a superhuman effort to help the paddlers free the pirogue from mud or wood snags, we got to the end of the canal at nine in the morning (we had entered it at 9.3o the previous evening), and so at last we arrived at Bomongo at 12.30, in a state that would have softened the hardest hearts. If we have spoken at some length about the Lubengo canal, it isn’t because we want to discourage people from visiting Bomongo by the canal route, but rather to stress one of the main reasons why this place is isolated and seldom visited.

The Mobutu regime eventually collapsed in a war that drew in all nine of the neighbouring countries at one time or another, and in the meantime other African regimes had followed it down the path of brutality and corruption. Naipaul’s analysis of the weaponisation of the cult of personality and the meagre but sufficient resources of state power is brief and forensic.

The final essay, “Conrad’s Darkness”, looks at Conrad’s work as a whole, but at Heart of Darkness in particular. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Most imaginative writers discover themselves, and their world, through their work. Conrad, when he settled down to write, was, as he wrote to the publisher William Blackwood, a man whose character had been formed. He knew his world, and had reflected on his experience. Solitariness, passion, the abyss : the themes are constant in Conrad. There is a unity in .a writer’s work; but the Conrad who wrote Victory, though easier and more direct in style, was no more experienced and wise than the Conrad who, twenty years before, had written Almayer’s Folly. His uncertainties in the early days seem to have been mainly literary, a trying out of subjects and moods. In 18496, the year after the publication of Almayer’s Folly, he could break off from the romantic turgidities of The Rescue and write not only ‘The Lagoon’, but also begin ‘An Outpost of Progress’. These stories, which stand at the opposite ends, as it were, of my comprehension of Conrad, one story so romantic, one so brisk and tough, were written almost at the same time.

Naipaul spent a lot more time thinking about Conrad than I have, but comes out in the same place: Heart of Darkness is a masterpiece and the rest of his work is remarkably good.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer, and you can get it here. Next on that pile is The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd.