Second paragraph of third of the sections of “The Dance of the Horned Road”:
Apart from Fairly. Alone, scared.
This won the BSFA Award for Best Novel this year, beating the poem Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead, and the novel Rabbit in the Moon, by Fiona Moore; Adrian Tchaikovsky withdrew Alien Clay from consideration. Apart from Alien Clay, none of them got a lot of Hugo nominations in Best Novel, which is what I was concentrating on at the time (Calypso did make the Hugo ballot for Best Poem, and got my vote), so I was really taken by surprise; I had not heard much buzz about it.
Having bought it and got around to reading it on the 24-hour ferry from Rosslare to Dunkirk, I was really surprised by how inventive a novel it is. In my mind, fairly or unfairly, the BSFA tends to go for safer choices. This is a narrative of blocks of 381 words (I did not count, but I bet there are 381 of them), describing the heroic journey of a young woman called Fairly across a world that is very different from ours (though we’re told it’s 2024). At the same time (so to speak) starting in the year 2314, another young woman, Rowena Savalas, is reading Fairly’s story, “The Dance of the Horned Road” and adding footnotes to it over a period of decades, so that we have not so much a story-in-a-story as a short-story-slightly-outside-a-much-longer-story.
We therefore have an inventive way of exploring two different worlds. Fairly’s quest / odyssey takes her through shattered communities and even into outer space, while steadily being pursued by the Breathing Man and handling the chas, which seem to be intelligent pigs also used as currency. Rowena joins us in observing this from centuries in the future, and explaining the awkward parts of her own world’s approach to history and life.
My one point of dissatisfaction is that the long footnotes are not always rendered correctly on the Kindle reader, which in pop up view will only show the first paragraph of the note without indicating that there is more. I was about half way through before I realised that this was a problem, and had to go back and reread the previous notes. With that in mind, you can get Three Eight One here.
The only remaining novel to have won the Tiptree/Otherwise, BSFA and/or Clarke Awards is Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, this year’s Clarke winner. Once I have read it, I’m going to take up a new project: reading books by all of the Nobel laureates in literature who were not white men.
