There’s blood in the water.

I didn’t notice it when I ran the tap, but as the froth settled, it appeared. A fine red skein, twisting like a capillary down the middle of the glass, staining the water’s clarity. Like always, a tightness grips my throat that I can’t quite swallow past. Mo sees my expression and snorts. He tells me I’ll get used to it, after all, pretty much everyone else has. He rubs the raw skin on his wrists, they still haven’t healed properly. He says he sometimes wonders if they ever will.

The blood started showing up in the town water supply about ten months ago. Nothing Scripture, no wine-dark floods or anything. Just a strand here and there, like a twist of DNA from some extinct creature, unearthed when we dug the town’s foundations. I raise the glass to my eye, and peer into it. One, single, strung-out drop, it would be easy to miss if it weren’t for the bitter taste of iron it leaves behind your teeth.

Like the rest of the town, the water treatment plant is only a couple of years old, but the engineers went over it inch by inch anyway, scouring the aluminium pipes for the source of the contamination. They didn’t find it, but the town Fathers couldn’t leave it there, the blood caused uproar. It was on the front page of the paper for three solid weeks. Inevitably, there was an expedition to the river’s source. I watched them go: a queue of fourteen jeeps twisting up the mountainside, dark as smoke against the snow.

Now, supposedly there were bandits in the mountains – stragglers left behind from the old tribe, with machine guns and nasty habits involving iron bed frames and car batteries – so the expedition went armed. Like a lot of the men, my Dad practised in the back yard before he left, sharpening up the old National Service training. He hissed in concentration as he squeezed off rounds from the old automatic. Chips of bark flew from the target painted on the tree. I felt a little surge of pride as I watched him, every shot hit dead centre. Dad had never got out of form. Mo watched him with me from the window. He snorted, kissed his teeth in disgust and shook his head. ‘Wood-carving with bullets’ he called it, ‘arts and crafts’, said it didn’t prove anything.  He said Dad had gone soft, and if he ran into any of the old tribe he was dead. That got under my skin like a hot needle and I snapped at Mo to get back down to the cellar before Dad came inside.

In the end though, it wasn’t no old tribe bandit did for the expedition. It was the cold. Temperatures crashed south of the red-line on the metre, fit to freeze the fuel in their tanks. Blizzards immersed them in blinding white. One of the jeeps skidded off the track and smashed through the ice into the river. I’m told it was so cold that the hearts of the men inside just stopped, their muscles locking with the shock of it. I look into the glass now, and imagine them looking back at me, panicking and drowning but oh so still, as though all the river water were still one thing, and the ice was a  broken window back onto their lives.

Mo stood with me at my bedroom window as the jeeps blundered back out of the snow. He counted to thirteen, then nodded once in satisfaction, turned and headed back down to the basement without a word still rubbing his wrists. And the blood kept twisting through the water, like the smallest, ugliest predator you ever saw.

I don’t know who had the idea to have the stuff tested, but whoever it was, we seized on it and sent vials of tap water away to a lab up state. Anticipation soured into restlessness, and as we waited for the results, our guesses spread like a cold on an air plane. Was it bear or pig blood? Or marmoset or wolf? Was it all a giant prank? We had a sweepstake on what the tests would find, with a rusted hulk of a second hand truck as a prize. I had a bit of my allowance still left for the betting, and I needed a car, so at breakfast I asked Dad what he thought. He peered at me over his whisky tumbler and didn’t smile. It was obvious, wasn’t it? He said.

The test results were inconclusive. It was human blood, that much they were sure of, and fresh-ish. But that’s all they could say. I know what Dad was thinking, but I have no idea if they can even test for the difference between Old Tribe blood and ours.

We couldn’t find the source of the contamination, and we couldn’t make it stop, so what was there left to do? Pack up the whole town? After all we did to claim it? Dad’s alone in still refusing to drink the water. He’s stuck to his whisky, there are bruise-coloured pools under his eyes and his sweat’s started to smell sour. Everyone else has gotten used to it. Turns out it doesn’t really do any harm, there are pinkish blotches appearing on the teeth and the whites of the eyes of a few unfortunate people, but they just smile with their mouths shut and we don’t look them in the eye and we all get by like that. Everyone’s gotten used to it, except me.

Every time I get a tainted glass, I manage maybe one swallow, and then I have to throw it out. The thought of drinking it makes me feel sick. My teeth ache constantly from all the lemonade I’m swigging instead. Mo rips the piss something chronic, calls me Soda Boy, like I’m some fizzy-drink’s sidekick. He says I need to grow a pair – hit the tap, or hit the bottle, like my Dad. He gets spiteful, so I get spiteful too. Do you know what Dad’ll do to you if I tell him about you? I’ll say to him, but he just smiles at me, slow and vicious. You think he doesn’t know? He’ll reply. Why do you think you’re the only two who won’t drink the water?

It’s a good question. They didn’t bring us kids to the town until the first houses were built, and that was months after the territory was cleared, but we know, everyone knows how fierce my Dad fought. The capital sent in a regiment of professionals to help with the fighting, but even they were impressed, said he fought like a soldier. I walked around school glowing when they told me that. Dad was making us a home, somewhere we belonged

He told me I had to understand what that meant, what it was worth.

So Dad led me down the basement steps, and flicked the switch. The harsh white tube lights spat and flickered on, and that was when I first saw Mo. I’d never met one of the Tribe before in the flesh. Blue nylon ropes stood out stark against the dried blood on his wrists, but he wasn’t struggling. His green uniform was ripped and filthy.  All I could make out of the serial number over his breast pocket was “#MO 279H”. He was just looking at me, looking at with eyes that seemed to stare all the way through me. Maybe to the mountains where he thought his parents had fled to. There was a click as Dad loaded the magazine into the pistol, the ceramic grip was very cold as he pressed it to my palm. He’s the last one, Dad said. He leaned forward and kissed my forehead. Whatever you decide to do I’ll understand. He smiled the kind of smile that won’t stay on your face properly, and then turned and jogged up the stairs.

I’ll understand. Those last two words twisted through me, polluting me. Staining the clarity of my thinking. Understand what? What did he want me to do? As the door closed, I looked at Mo. I remember thinking he looked very young to be in the army, to have that uniform. For a horrible moment, I wondered if Dad had made him wear it, to make him seem more grown up, like a real combatant. But the thought died quickly, because if there was one thing Dad knew, one thing he impressed on us, its that we’re all combatants. I hefted the gun. It was as cold as snow, and as heavy as an avalanche in my hand.

Now, I stare at the bloody water, my throat tight. My hand is sweating slightly against the glass, but it isn’t heavy, the way the pistol was. It gets easier. Mo’s behind me. He’s calling me a pussy, telling me to man up and drink it like everyone else does. Swallow it, he says. Maybe he’s right. After all, Dad and the others cleansed the territory. They made it clean and new so they’d have somewhere to raise their children and grandchildren. Somewhere they belonged and that belonged to them. To us. Mine will probably be the last generation that remembers what they paid for it. In a few decades, no one will know that the water here was ever any different. The blood twists through the water. The glass rattles against my teeth, but I steady it, and I drink.

So, I just finished Zoo City by Lauren Beukes.

It’s a riveting, hyperventilation-inducing mystery adventure, but more than that, it’s pure culture-shock.

Zoo City is an ice-bath immersion into two societies.  One is the fantasy alt-Johannesburg of Beukes’s imagination, whose crumbling Hillbrow ghetto is home to the animalled: people accompanied by familiars – symbols of, and companions through the guilt of their past crimes. The second society is modern South Africa itself, enmeshed in the violence, change and diversity that has shaped its namesake continent in the last two centuries.

At a talk she gave at the British Library today, I was struck by one thing Lauren said in particular. Fiction, she said, can give a face back to the faceless. At a time when so many of us have ‘issue’ fatigue, bombarded by 24-hour news that demands our sympathy for the suffering of millions, fiction can reconnect us with the individual. It brings our emotions back off the bench.

SF and Fantasy have a key role in this. They help leven the mix of the story, lighten the anger, pity or horror with wonder and excitment and so speed it’s passage into our hearts. The story makes the issue real to us precisely because it isn’t reducible to it, any more than the real world can be reduced down to the sum of its miseries, or the life and soul of anyone who has had to flee their home could be summed up purely by their refugee status.

The animalled aren’t just Lauren Beukes’s fantastical additions to South Africa, they’re  the reader’s guides through it. The voices of it in the text. They are there to show us life in South Africa’s largest city in a way we couldn’t see it in a news report.  The adventures we have in their company will keep the real Jo’burg burning longer and brighter in our imaginations than a mainstream novel ever could.

So that’s one way to  tackle an issue with SF, to take the situation of a refugee or a former child soldier, granite hard and honest and exactly as it is in real life and bind it up and shoot it through with fantastical wiring.

What’s another way?

SFF literature is the spawning ground of of secondary worlds. You can have a whole alternate universe to reframe the debate. When Mark Charan Newton shows us homophobia in Villjamur, he’s not just ‘gritting-up’ his setting, he’s ripping the prejudice free of its real world anchors, and showing it to us, stark and flimsy and unsupported, daring us to judge it for what it is.

But you can do more than reflect the world in your alternate universe, you can change it. Malinda Lo’s Ash  is a Lesbian retelling of Cinderella with nary a wisp of anti-gay prejudice in sight.

SFF excels, not just as mirror of the way our world is, but as a window onto the ways it could be.

What about you guys? What other stratagems do you see for engaging socio-political themes in SF? Do you think it’s effective, or do you feel that putting the idea in fiction blunts the edge?

There’s a theory a-brewin, that all stories get their power from existing on a spectrum between novelty and familiarity (with SF and Fantasy, ‘Alienation’ and ‘Resonance’ might be more apposite terms, but it comes down to the same thing).

LitFic for example sits  pretty hard up against the ‘familiarity’ end of the axis. Much of it tends to be judged on how accurately it portrays the intricacies of it’s character’s emotional lives as they plow through divorce, infidelity, balloon rides, bereavement, a wine holiday in Bordeaux… whatever. (I know, my prejudices are showing.)

The great high-weirdists, Lovecraft being the prime example, get their juice far more from the alienation end of the spectrum – using bizarre vocabulary and metaphors to asymptotically approach things which are supposed to be literally beyond human ken.

Obviously, while stories may have their biases towards one end of the spectrum, they will inevitably need to recruit tools from the other end in order to have their impact. A metaphor (a tentacle for example) needs to be familiar in order to communicate the unfamiliar. While the stories that hold a mirror up to nature at least try to show nature from an angle you haven’t seen, otherwise what’s the point?

One might be tempted to conclude that speculative fiction always and everywhere is a more alienating form than litfic (it’s the genre with aliens in, after all), but I’d disagree.  If Urban Fantasy trades on anything it’s resonance. Think of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Would that novel work at all, if it wasn’t for the echoes of Norse and West African myths bouncing around our skulls?

For me, this is my absolute favourite kind of fiction. I like to be alienated, but I prefer to be surprised. And its very difficult to be surprised by something really alien, because one has no expectations of it.

What about you guys? Which end of the axis do you find most compelling? The baroquely bizzare, or the twistedly familiar?

Warning: SPOILERS for ‘Dr Who: A Good Man Goes to War’

Everyone loves a twisty tale, right? Everyone loves to have their expectations of a story go up in flames, incinerated  by a brighter, shinier, more profound realization. It’s one of the greatest pleasures to be found in fiction.

Others have, and will continue, to deconstruct the plot mechanics of the Dr Who Mid-series Finale ‘A Good Man Goes to War’. Including the various twists and reversals that have become a Dr Who staple in the Moffatt era.

One of those twists, I thought was particularly well executed – The Doctor and Rory and all of their friends infiltrate and take over an asteroid base to recover Amy and her baby, only to discover that the baby is another Flesh clone.

It has everything you’d want from a twist: it’s simple, elegant, well timed and relies only on story elements we’re already familiar with. Great twist. No really. Great.

My question is simple: why didn’t I care more?

I think the reason is that stated above. Moffatt includes so many twists that it’s hard to be surprised at the surprises. It’s not that I guessed it beforehand, far from it.  But deep down I had an inkling that something was coming, after all, this is the Steven Moffatt Dr Who we’re talking about! I’ve kind of built up a tolerance to his twists. As with Alias I can’t go back to the time I naively trusted it.

This idea fits with the trend that the stories famous for having great twists (The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, The Usual Supects etc.) all seem to have one thing in common, they each only really have one. They set off the dynamite and really blow your expectations out from under you, and they do it before you realise you can’t trust them.

What do you guys think? Do you like your dramas to be a rollercoaster ride of confounded expectation? Or do you like them to save it all for one really big shock?

(warning, contains mild spoilers for both Chaos Walking, and The Hunger Games.)

Society is pinned to the dirt by a jackboot, and only our teenagers can save us.

At least, that the story told by much of the hottest YA fiction out there right now. Dystopia is on a tear, whether it’s political repression (Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games), post-apocalypse (Garth Nix’s Shade’s Children) or someone’s crazy idea of paradise, (Catherine Fisher’s Icarceron). But what is it about this sub-genre that really makes it sing?

The answer? Injustice. The three little words that are the most important in any YA novel are ‘That’s Not Fair.’ Noone has a better developed sense of (un)fairness than a teenager.

Do you remember your parents telling you ‘life isn’t fair’, by way of ordering you to shut up and get on with it? Do you remember how maddening it was? I do. YA dystopia takes this little cant of acceptance to the harshness of life, and twists it into a rallying cry.

‘Life isn’t fair? Screw that. Let’s make it fair.’

In The Hunger Games, 16-year old Katniss Everdeen becomes the living embodiment of this cry: the Mockingjay, the symbol of resistance and rebellion. THG has been phenomenally successful, and I think that this, more than the blood-soaked gladiatorial combat, the pretty dresses or the love-triangle, explains why. Millions of us have taken Katniss to our hearts so fast because, in a sense was already there, in our urge to rail against the unfairness in being subject to another’s control.

But THG is at the forefront of a skein of YA literature that does more than pander to our desire to rebel. It cuts that desire open, and sticks it under the microscope.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Patrick Ness’s fabulous Chaos Walking trilogy. At the start of volume one, The Knife of Never Letting Go, the lead character Todd Hewitt is an innocent. He’s been lied to to keep him that way, and when he learns the nightmarish secret at the heart of his small town, he runs. This first story is about realization and flight. It’s a fight for survival, rather than victory.

By the third installment. Monsters of Men. Todd has stopped running. He ought to be ready to fight injustice, to vanquish the Mayor (the main oppressor) and set the world to rights. And he would be too, if the events of the second book hadn’t destabilized the whole idea of resistance.

In The Ask and the Answer, Ness introduces a violent insurgency to fight the Mayor’s reign of terror, an insurgency that uses suicide bombs and IEDs and causes massive collateral casualties. Viola, the series’s second main protagonist, becomes a member of this insurgency, and a tool of its leader: a woman no less ruthless and manipulative than the Mayor. Collins too, gives us a flawed and brutal resistance in The Hunger Games. Mockingjay’s rebels degrade, torture, mass-murder and may even be unwittingly working to hand power to yet another dictatorial regime.

But where I think Ness’s series stands out, is in the way it treats Todd in The Ask and The Answer. The repressive regime co-opts him, and he becomes an officer in its secret police. Katniss too is co-opted in THG,  forced to fight in the bloodbath that is the titular games, but her compliance is always forced, never willing. Todd’s corrosion is more subtle. The Mayor steps into a fatherly role, praises him and crucially, emphasises his difference from those that he tortures.

I think be my favourite aspect of Chaos Walking -the most convincing and insightful piece of dystopia building -is the Mayor’s constant twisting of difference into threat. It’s always the Mayor who tries to cast the battle between his inquisitorial ‘Ask’ and the insurgent ‘Answer’ as a war between genders. At one point, he justifies ever more brutal horrors against those women left under his control by saying.

‘Even if they aren’t actually members of the Answer, they’re women and their sympathies will naturally lie with whose who are like them’.

Note, he doesn’t say that women are bad, treasonous or any more naturally inclined to blow up churches than men are. His claim is simply this: They are women, you are a man. The conflict is tribal, and they are the wrong tribe. It might not be reason enough to hate them, but it’s reason enough to hurt them.

It’s a horrifically plausible argument, and one that lies at the mouth of a metaphorical great black pit. Its not a pit that ever claims Todd fully, his love for a woman – Viola – saves him from it. But Todd does commit atrocities, and unlike Katniss, he does take an innocent life. It’s a brave decision by Ness, and one that’s used to promote a more hopeful message: no matter how far you fall, no matter how bad it gets, you can always choose to find a way back.

Dystopia fits YA fist to glove and it seems to me, the treatment is getting more sophisticated, urgent and neccessary. Courage, the supreme virtue in stories like Harry Potter, is insufficient. It’s not enough to be brave enough to fight, you need to be smart enough to to know who to fight for. And, crucially, both brave and smart enough to know when to stop.

If there’s one theme both of these wonderful series hammer home, it’s familiar but still vital one, that violence begets violence, and that a time will come whenyou have to have the guts not to throw the next punch.

So a couple of days ago I went to see Greenland at the National TheatreParts of the UK Press have panned it. I thought it was funny, well-acted and beautifully designed. So who’s right?

Well, me obviously.

But why have the critics slapped it down so hard? The Telegraph called it “shrill” with no other purpose than to “Nag, and bully us”.

This is a pretty common reaction when a certain sort of folk go to see a piece of political art. They feel hectored, and ambushed and under attack. It’s as though the theatre was the last place on earth that they might expect to encounter a political point. Hell, I feel that way sometimes too, when faced with a polemic, pretending to be a story, like I opened the door to the pizza delivery guy and found themselves on the  receiving end of a rant about saturated fats.

So we hunker down into fortified positions, and chew the ends of the pens that are our only defence and say: ‘Don’t yell at me, it’s not my fault!’

But guys, really. That’s not the point. These stories aren’t about accusing, it’s about getting us to care.

For me, Greenland didn’t hector it’s audience. It wasn’t about pointing fingers. It was about the people caught up in the global-warming frenzy, and it was pretty balanced. We were shown the costs of caring both too little and too much, as the tale of the awakening of an activist see-sawed against a young couple who’s relationship had been smashed to pieces by one half’s climate obsession.

Art works when it’s about people. Political art works because politics is about people too. Theatre should be about empathy. Getting you to give a shit about the people on stage.

And if that moves you to care about the politics of their situation, because of the impact it’s had on their lives, then that is when good art, becomes good politics.

And yes, polar bears. Greenland had one of those too. On stage. That makes everything better.

If you’re anything like me, (and by the end of this post you may be throughly grateful that you’re not) you might have have found yourself in nice, relaxing post-work shower, thinking:

“I know I like China Mieville, but what is it about his work that I like?”

Now, there is much to admire that has stemmed from that shiny head, but I’ve got it pinned down to one thing he does par-excellence, which appeal to me as a reader personally.

Surrealism. Real, Surrealisam.

Naturally, I love how beautifully, enrapturingly weird his books are, but the reason they work so well, is they aren’t just weird. They make sense.

The streets of New Crobuzon are filled not just with magic, but with a thorny, ornery logic. A logic of docks and gangsters and capital and corruption and cause and effect. The cactusmen are linked to the Giant Frog people through strands of history and economics. They owe each other money. They envy each other’s achievements and admire each other’s art.

These mundane motives familiarize us with these creatures, even as we are (shiveringly) alienated by their more exotic skin-deep features.

The brutal logic of the sliced-and-spliced remade is one of punishment. The logic of the Scarab-headed women is of ghettoization and cultural compromise.We instinctively get these logics. They are familiar and make sense. They ground the world. The glorious, bonkers fecundity of Mieville’s worlds are embedded in networks of meaning that convince.

It doesn’t stop in Bas-Lag either. The peculiarly entangled cities of Bezel and Ul Qoma display the same networked weirdness.

The language (‘Unsee’, ‘Breach’, ‘Orciny’) may be unfamiliar, but the grammar, the way in which these concepts relate to one another is familiar: This is allowed. This isn’t. If you do this, they will come for you. No-one else sees this, so why should I? The cities are immersed in a logic of bureaucracy and groupthink that we recognize.

And what’s more, by accessing our understanding of these concepts, the story can cast them in a new light, show us truths we’d never considered. It can make us see for example, that the way we fall in line with majority, the way that can blind us to the world around us, can be as much a vital component of a functioning state apparatus as police and road maintenance.

China Mieville doesn’t just use monsters to show us truths. He uses the truths we already know to show us monsters, and to make them feel real.

Well. That’s why I love it. How about you?