First up, a warning, and a plea. What follows engages with Railsea in a fair degree of detail. As a result, even though I’ve tried to keep it free of plot spoilers per se, it inevitably includes things I would not have wanted to know before reading the book. I like to meet my favourite reads in a dark alley and have them mug me for my affections before I so much as see their faces. If you’re the same then take my word for it, Railsea’s a fantastic ride.

Caveats away, onwards. Thar she blows!

The Railsea: a vast plain of train tracks, branching and interweaving like nesting snakes, stretching beyond every horizon to the ends of the earth. Engines of many kinds rumble over the rails, merchant trains and war trains and most significantly, hunting trains, for it is on this last that our story focuses. The mole train Medes, tacking and switching across the iron of the great southern ocean searching for her captain’s obsession, a mountain-sized moldywarpe with a coat the shade of a discoloured tooth: Mocker Jack.

On one level Railsea is a straightforward-ish coming of age story. Sham Yes ap Soorap, doctor’s assistant on the Medes is listless. Like many heroes of classic children’s literature (Alice for example, or Norton Juster’s Milo), he’s curious but uncompelled. He’s most of the way to being grown up, but he doesn’t know what he wants to be when he gets there. On a planet-sized steel ocean teeming with train captains chasing assorted monstrous philosophies, Sham is set to find a philosophy of his own. An artefact found in a wrecked train leads him to seek out Railsea’s other teenaged protagonists – the  Shroake siblings. Dero and Caldera are brother and sister, exemplars of another classic YA trope – bereaved children of mysterious explorers. As these near-orphans set out to uncover the secret that two out of their three parents died for, Sham finds his purpose in helping them to fulfil theirs.

A gripping tale ensues, one that carries its three young leads to the limits of a richly imagined world and beyond. It’s moving too, which is something that for all the richness of his works, I don’t always find with Miéville. Railsea’s characters spring off the page with signal-switchers and cutlasses in hand. I found myself rooting for the Shroakes and Sham all the way, while eyeing the other stand out in the cast – the Ahab-inspired Captain Abacat Naphi, with a respectful suspicion.

Of course, this being Miéville, thar be monsters. I’ve spoken before about his teratological taxonomy. Now, added to Frankensteiny splices and chitinous Lovecraftian enigmas we have another category: really fucking big shit. Alp-sized talpas, earthworms as big as tube trains, earwigs that could decapitate you with their bumjaws (giggle, I know I’m 12, ok?), they’re all here. Also, as a special bonus, one of my favourite mythological beasts gets a remix. I won’t spoil it, but that moment of recognition was. Just. Awesome.

Up to this point I’ve been saying Railsea is about Sham finding his philosophy, now I need to qualify that a bit. What the story is closer to being about is him choosing his philosophy. And with that distinction, it’s time to change gears, switch tracks and start looking at the book on the level of metaphor.

The Railsea itself is a tangle of tracks. Each taken individually is a circumscribed, unidirectional path, but there are so many of them, and they interlink and fuse and split so intricately that, by skilful switching, a canny train captain can have all the navigational freedom of the open ocean. Each rail is a path, but you can follow them wherever you want. Obsessed skippers pilot their trains in pursuit of evasive monsters that stand for even more evasive meanings: ‘The Ferret of Unrequitedness, the too-much knowledge Mole Rat’. These semiotic quarry, erupting from the substrate beneath the iron, do more than determine the passage of the engines over the rails, they condition their captains’ reading of them.

The Railsea is one giant, tangled overarching metaphor for narrative (1), for text. The rails can be read not just as narrative strands, but for individual interpretations of those strands, which makes this story a metaphor for metaphor itself. A meta-squared-phor, or, given that it’s a ferrovia mare, a metal-phor.

You really can choose your own adventure.

Choice is a theme in Miéville’s YA. We saw it in Un Lun Dun, with the savage disembowelling of destiny, and here it rides again, writ one order of magnitude larger, undermining not merely the idea of predetermination within the narrative, but of a predetermined reading of the narrative itself. The  voice of the story works this angle, playful, teasing and ornery. It skips back and forth across time and space like a puppyish tardis.

‘Back a bit’

‘Bit more’

‘Time for the Shroakes?’

‘Not yet.’

This voice breaches periodically from the soil of the story to address the reader directly, questioning, rearranging, doubling back and tripling forward, making the narrative arc feel anything but inevitable. Also, it fleshes Railsea’s world out by digressing on detail beyond the scope of the story’s confines. It’s a fun, tantalising device where the full import of the metaphor feels constantly, within finger stretch.

In this respect Railsea makes an interesting comparison with another recent YA, Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. In Monster, a series of conventional seeming fairy tales are reworked. They’re given less comforting, less patronising, thornier and ultimately truer feeling endings so that a boy, Conor, can begin to get to grips with his mum’s cancer. Monster questions our cosy assumptions about stories, but retains total conviction in itself, and it hits like a sledgehammer to the heart. Railsea by comparison (quite deliberately) calls itself into question, draws attention to its own artifice. It’s Brechtian, an attempt to have it both ways, to suspend your disbelief while pointing and shouting at the ropes which are holding it up. It’s a testament to Miéville’s skill that, for most of Railsea, he pulls it off. Very occasionally though, I found that this intentional immersion-breaking put distance between me and the characters. As a result I found Railsea a cooler, more cerebral delight than Ness’s masterpiece of affect.

One final thought: Railsea is gorgeously imagined, beautifully written, blinding fun. If it had nothing else going for it, that would be more than enough. But it’s also stonkingly ambitious. I hope it sells eleventy bajillion copies if for no other reason than, if it does, it might help lay to rest the lie that teenagers want easy answers and pat conclusions and short sentences and can’t handle complexity. We ought to have a little more faith in them. They want stories like Railsea. Stories that urge them to pursue ideas even when they aren’t quite sure they fully understand them. Stories that bid them shovel more coal to the boiler, man the switches and join the hunt.

(1)   Well, that’s one interpretation, anyway.

He. Was. ASTOUNDING.

He was witty and funny and kind. He unleashed a great wave of ‘will you be my Grandpa’ across the audience. He really, really doesn’t look 83. He read us a story, a spoonerized Cinderella (If the Foo Shits, Ear Wit.) And was just a cuddly, white bearded fountain of wordplay, wisdom and fabulous anecdotes.

Apparently, (and I’m not surprised) his dad used to pun at him all the time. Including this little gem:

‘I see you’ve been coming early, lately. You used to be behind before, but now you’re first at last.’

Seriously, how happy does that make you?

In just over 24 hours I shall descend upon Eastercon like a bald man in search of a cheesburger and geeky conversation.*

Over the weekend I’ll be sticking my oar in in the following ways:

Saturday 6pm -Room 12- I’ll be reading a scene of rail-related weirdness and derring do from The City’s Son. – It’ll be tough, but I’m firmly committed to being even more overdramatic than usual. They’ll probably be able to hear me in Gatwick.

Sunday 1pm -Room 12-’Youth in SF’ I’m moderating a chat on including such luminaries as Tricia Sullivan (Lightborn), Aliette De Bodard (Servant of the Underworld), Janet Edwards (Earth Girl) and Farah Mendelsohn (Rhetorics of Fantasy). Should be interesting.

Monday 1pm -Room 12- ‘Dystopian YA’ Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) Amanda Rutter (Strange Chemistry) Emma Newman (Ten Years Later) and me (Hi!) will be chatting about teenagers, political oppression, and almost certainly, The Hunger Games.

Otherwise you will mostly be able to find me mooching around the halls of the Radisson, looking like I’ve had too little sleep. Come say hey.

*Exactly like this, in fact.

Committed Fiction

In the (admittedly long) discussion, Miéville and Schaefer ask whether fiction and politics make good bedfellows, whether politics and propaganda must always be separate or opposed and if not then, ‘What is it we’re doing, when we write (politically) committed fiction?’

Miéville concludes that the political intervention enacted by stories is a kind of ‘flag-waving’, such that ‘you can’t read them without knowing they come from a certain place in the world,’ and that this sort of statement of intent is what’s upsetting those readers who accuse political fiction of being didactic or propagandist: people who say that art and propaganda must always be opposed.

I’d be inclined to approach the question slightly differently, rather than ask ‘what is it we’re doing when we write politically committed fiction’ I’d ask ‘What is it we’re doing when we write fiction’ simpliciter. How does it work? And once we understand that, what kind of political impact does that mode of operation lend itself to?

Max Schaefer nails this later on in the video when he starts talking about empathy, because if there’s one key mechanism that keeps stories ticking that’s it – the emotional, and imaginative identification with character. It’s one of the things stories are for, and it leads people to approach them in a very different frame of mind to that in which they approach political debate.

Readers come to stories wanting to see a different point of view, they arrive at the text open, vulnerable, willing to be persuaded.

When I hear complaints that this or that book was ‘too political’ or ‘didactic’ I think it’s that vulnerability talking, especially if the text was encountered young. The best example of this I can think of is Narnia – How many times have you met someone who’ll declare in outraged, almost betrayed tones that The Last Battle was christian propaganda dressed up as a fairy tale, a christ in lion’s clothing? A lot of readers are very suspicious of novels that they perceive as being subordinated to a political dogma, and become unwilling to trust the story enough to sink themselves into it enough for it to work as fiction, for the empathy to take effect.

But that doesn’t mean that a story can’t work as fiction and be political. Why? Because empathy itself can be, and is a political act, a crucial one. Especially when so many political problems result from a failure to empathise. How many of those who’ve spoken out against changing the law on gay marriage, for example, might take a different line if they’d read a book that made them empathise with those they’re discriminating against? If a story had made them understand how it felt to be told that your and your partner’s loving union didn’t deserve the same name as another couples, just because of your genders.

I have no idea, and I have no idea how many people slanted that way on the political spectrum would read such a book in the first place, and how many of them would open up enough for it to do any good. But here’s the point, that act of imaginative outreach, that empathy-epidemiology isn’t at odds with the story’s role as fiction, it’s integral to it. And it is, at the same time, an intensely political act

Everyone who’s still here read it? Yes? *Mr Burns voice* Eeeexcellent.

Now, prompted by my (probably irritatingly evangelical) urgings, @alittlebriton read The Gone Away World earlier this month, and when she was about two thirds of the way through she texted me to say: ‘Huh. It’s the Fight Club thing.’ Apparently this is a pretty common reaction to TGAW’s big twist, which I find really interesting because having gone away and thought about it, I’ve concluded the following:

It’s the exact opposite of the Fight Club thing.

Now, it’s possible that I’ve reached this conclusion because I’m a contrary, ornery jackass who needs to disagree with everyone all the time. But I don’t think so. I am of course, a contrary ornery jackass, but I think in this particular case. I’m on to something. And what’s more I think the way Palahniuk and Harkaway’s twists are exact negatives of one another is really quite interesting.

Let me expound:

At first look, the similarity between the two stories is obvious – they both turn on twists in which a major character turns out to have been a product of one of the other characters’ imaginations, indeed, more than that – a projection of recessive aspects of that character’s personality. Both books are written so that for most of them you think there are two people, when in fact there is only one: two sides of one mind. One body, and one name.

But that’s where the similarities end. The differences however, are far more significant.

In Fight Club (or so a conventional reading goes): Tyler Durden is an empowerment fantasy, the mental projection of a man trapped and divested of his metaphorical testicles by modern living . Tyler says to the relatable, slightly pathetic unnamed narrator dude ‘I look how you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.’ Tyler has the looks, dynamism and charisma of a superhero, but he doesn’t exist.

In The Gone Away World, it is the unnamed narrator who is the projection. Moreover, and this is the key bit, he’s the normal one: ‘a repository of dull virtues in time of trouble, someone to carry the can, speak truth and own up in class.’ The character we empathize and identify with is (or at least starts out (1) as ) a dream. Gonzo Lubitsch, with his biceps of steel, jaw of chiseled granite and combat skills of Steven-Segal-decapitating-deadliness is (in the world of the novel) entirely real. Where Fight Club puts us in world of quotidian frustration and gives us fantasy of empowerment, TGAW puts us in a world that has gone bananas and gives us a fantasy of… what? Normality? Not exactly. More like decency.

If Gonzo and TGAW’s narrator were top trump cards, the narrator would beat Gonzo in quite a few areas (those dull virtues mentioned earlier). Still, there’s only one field where the Narrator seems more superhuman than the man who dreamed him up, and that’s the field of being ‘A terribly nice chap.’ After all, Gonzo (who is kind of his brother, father and best friend rolled into one) shoots him in the chest and he lets it go with an apology.

Wow.

Now, I’m not saying this isn’t credible in the context of the book. I think it’s pretty well handled and it doesn’t feel like a cop out. But it is an act of extraordinary magnanimity, a refusal to hold a grudge and meet violence with violence, a refusal to react mechanistically in a novel which pointedly marks out the hazards of doing just that.

Harkaway gives this superhuman faculty of empathy and humanity to a character who starts out life as a projection, as ‘aphasia with legs’, which might seem almost cynical until you remember who’s projection it is. But Gonzo is James Bond on steroids. He is like totally 100% the Man (TM) and the narrator is what he fantasizes about, what he needs, what he feels he’s missing. Gonzo’s a character we’ve seen eulogized and mythologized over and over in stories, and by making ‘The Dull Virtues’ the stuff of his dreams Harkaway lends them a kind of hyperglamour. The dull virtues become super legendary, mythic squared. It’s a pretty badass way to celebrate being nice.

And why not? After all, Humbert Pestle can play Gonzo like a tin whistle. He sees how the machinery of the hero’s mind works, and applies just the right action to get the desired equal and opposite reaction. It’s the narrator, the relatable, fallable dull narrator who Pestle can’t manipulate. He is free in all the ways that Gonzo’s not. Free to be nice in even the shittiest of circumstances. To act like a human being even when the world wants you to act like an eight-ball clocked by the white at just the right angle to sink into the right middle pocket (2). That’s what heroes dream of. You want an empowerment fantasy? Try that.

(1) Actually, this is pretty interesting because in reifying his fantasy projection Harkaway could be thought to be expressing a much more radical (and given what I’ve just said the fantasy characteristics are, a more optimistic) sentiment than Palahniuk, who leaves his Superhuman as imaginary.

(2) Ooh, I just had a thought: TGAW starts with a game of pool, coincidence? Well, almost certainly, yes. But it’s fun to speculate.

There’s been a frankly disturbing lack of gender parity on panels at cons, awareness of which came to a head at this month’s SFX weekender, when out of a total of about 70 panel spots, only 15 were filled by women. Not that there were actually 15 women featured on the panels, as several occupied more than one panel chair. In fact, I think there were 9 women and more than 30 men. China Miéville stepped down from a panel that had no women in it at all.

On the back of this, Paul Cornell announced on his blog yesterday that if he showed up at a con and found himself on a panel with anything less than a 50:50 gender split, he would recuse himself, and try to find the most appropriately qualified woman in the room to replace him.

So there’s obviously a problem here. Paul, Lizzie Barrett and any number of other people have pointed out the obvious: there are more than enough smart, talented, knowledgeable women for panels at conventions to be gender balanced, so, until someone comes up with a very convincing reason otherwise, we can assume they should be.

If it were me (and it’s about to be, I’m scheduled on a couple of panels each at Eastercon and Alt Fiction). I’d take a slightly different approach. I, like Paul, intend to step back from any panels which I find aren’t 50:50 in terms of gender, but I’m going to ask about gender balance before the event.  The con organizers should be able to tell me who else is on the panel  and if need be, between us we can  approach a woman (and there are many, for almost any given topic I can yammer about) who’ll be as good or better than I will. As far as I can tell, this keeps the simplicity and gender balance achieved by Paul’s approach and helps put the best possible people behind the microphone,  while ducking the following problems: 

a) As Maureen Kincaid Speller pointed out on Twitter, the best qualified woman in the room might not want to be on the panel. Indeed she might, for any number of reasons have already refused the seat. She’ll be under pressure though, and probably embarrassed to say no on the spot (I would be) and that’ll just be awkward.

b) As China Miéville has said: even if the best qualified woman in the room does want to be on the panel, right off the bat she looks like an also ran, second choice, a sort of fastest runner up gifted her opportunity to speak by my extraordinary largess.  It doesn’t matter if the woman in question is the smartest, most erudite, biggest expert in the room.  She may well be.  It’s still going to look (and maybe feel) like I’m riding to her rescue on a stallion of my own enlightened manliness. Which, obviously, is not what we’re going for.

c) Changing the lineup mid-panel’s going to screw the panel up, and eat at least ten minutes of the hour’s running time with awkward ‘is there a woman in the house’ toing and froing. While we ought to be arguing over dialectical materialism, or Dr Who, or most likely dialectical materialism in Dr Who.

There are probably problems with the above approach too, if anyone wants to suggest a revision to it: comment. I’d be grateful.

Whatever solution we wind up with though, it looks like there’s a movement brewing over this, an honest to goodness, manifesto-toting grass-roots thing.  And I’m on board.

This morning on Twitter, during a chat prompted by this Ursula Le Guin critique of awards, I said:

@tomhpollockTom Pollock

I’ve watched and read a couple of interviews with people  recently decrying genre boundaries. ‘Why do we need to label things?’ they say, ‘Why must we mark things with the smoking brand of sci-fi, fantasy, litfic or crime? All it does is divide us and lead to squabbling, and I just want everyone to get along and CAN EVERYBODY PLEASE STOP YELLING!’

I understand this  point of view, I’m sympathetic, I really am. Sometimes I feel like the kid in the backseat of the car who’s parents are shouting, but I still think the idea of abolishing genre boundaries is tragically misguided.

People who hold this view tend to point to the huge numbers of books that don’t fit cleanly into a genre, or perhaps fall into several: Cloud Atlas, say, or IQ84 or Perdido St. Station. But so what? The fact that a heuristic doesn’t carve the world into precise segments doesn’t make it vacuous.

Genre labels, if nothing else, are a ranging shot, a beginning. A way to have a stab at describing a story in  world strapped for time. Even if that was all they were, then they’d be useful, but they also bring people together, they form communities and help people find friends (as anyone who went to the excellent Steampunk night at Blackwells on thursday will be able to attest). The correlary of this seems to be that those communities become atomized and then snipe at each other, but is this a neccessary product of the genre taxonomy? I don’t think so.

The problem isn’t the division, it’s the hierarchy. It’s the patently invalid inference that because say, litfic and SF are different, that one must therefore be better.

The problem, isn’t the division between ‘SF’ and ‘Fantasy’, or even ‘genre’ and ‘mainstream’ Those categories are fuzzy, cross-cutting and subjective, true but not nearly so much as ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

*Ushers everyone in close*

*Yells at top of voice so everyone is a little bit deafened*

The Skyscraper Throne trilogy is being published in the U.S, by Flux!

I am, in case you cannot tell, rather excited. There was an auction, and a long wait, and it was all terribly dramatic, but I was utterly blown away by Flux’s enthusiasm, their vision and taste in YA books and how much Brian Farrey-Latz, my now American editor *got* what I was trying to do.

So, readers of America, I am here for all your London-based Urban Fantasy needs.

I only read Mal Peet’s Life: An Exploded Diagram because Patrick Ness told me to, (me, and anyone else who was listening when he did his inheritance books on radio 4 extra). There’s a pleasing symmetry to the fact that, in my head at least, it’s the perfect companion to his own A Monster Calls.

Let me explain, because you probably wouldn’t get that impression from the dust jackets.

Peet’s Life is about… well, just that really. A synopsis of the plot would reveal that the book details a love affair between a working class boy and a wealthy girl in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis, but a plot synopsis is about as much use for understanding this book as a car manual is for understanding a camel.

What Life really is, at least to me, is an attempt to answer the following question. What’s the point of people? And why should we care if they’re threatened with nuclear obliteration?

Structurally the book flits back and forth between the story of three generations of a Norfolk family, (culminating with Clem Ackroyd, one of our young lovers) and an hilarious, informative and at times down right terrifying account of the build-up to the US – Soviet confrontation over the Nuclear Missiles placed in Cuba by the USSR in October 1962. The passages dealing with the family Ackroyd and their community seem almost breathlessly distractable, constantly breaking off to describe the wedding of a grandmother or the building of a school. At first this makes the novel seem scatter shot, until you flick back to it’s title, and realise these details aren’t digressions, they are absolutely key to the book as a whole.

Death (so long as it happens to other people) gets abstract fast in Human minds. People are great at thinking about it without feeling it, its a survival skill, and that goes double for the threat of death on a large scale, triple if it occurred in the past, and you can square the lot if it went down a long way away. The Cuban missile crisis ticks every one of these boxes. It was distant: temporally, geographically and it was so mind-numbingly awesome in its potential to wreak Armageddon that its nigh on impossible for those of us who didn’t live through it to know what it was like. Peet’s made it his mission to make us feel it, to shudder at the thought of the lives it almost destroyed. And he does it by showing us the value of those lives in the only currency that really matters: in grandma’s weddings, in the crippling embarrassment of teenage erections, in memories, and in details.

Clem and Frankie’s love is the emotional sun of this solar system, the story that all the other stories revolve around. Peet shows us that love through the eyes of a teenager. He describes it in ways that mythologise it, that make it burn brightly against the backdrop of all those other mundane details, but its those details that make the mythology possible. You have to know Clem’s family, in order to know what it means for him to be willing to give it up to be with Frankie.

The message (although this book isn’t defined by its message), is pretty clear: The lives we value are the ones we know well enough, or can imagine well enough tell ourselves stories about. Peet helps us imagine more of the detail around the other lives in the world, and to remember and care that they’re still in danger from the 7,000 warheads still in existence.

If Life: An Exploded Diagram is a little love song to all the reasons we should cling on to people, then A Monster Calls is, at least in part, about learning to let them go.

Patrick Ness’s short, brutally poignant book, based on an idea and some notes by Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before she could write it, is structured around stories. Conor, who’s mother is dying of a degenerative illness, is visited in the night by a vast, tree-like monster who promises to tell him three stories, in exchange for which Conor must confess a single, shattering, truth. Each of the stories told by the monster begin like conventional fairy tales before diverging towards conclusions that have far more of the ragged ring of truth about them than the fairy tales would. Each of them resounds in the mind like a warning against the platitudes kids like Conor are told: ‘She’s a fighter, she’ll pull through.’,'If you only believe..’ and of course the deadly: ‘It’ll all be all right in the end’.

Because sometimes its not all right, and we have to remember that, because otherwise the fairy tales we tell ourselves grow too powerful, we believe them too deeply, and friction between them and reality threatens to tear us apart.

But A Monster Calls isn’t a bleak book. It’s not just about letting go, it’s about it being OK to let go. It’s about a teenage boy learning to forgive himself for being human.

Peet and Ness’s books are (for me at least) both about life and stories, they cover their themes from opposite perspectives, but they compliment rather than contradict each other. Life: An Exploded Diagram is about all the reasons we need to cling to life and stories. A Monster Calls is about all the reasons we need to let them go.