Estrangement in a Strange Land

"I was up in Cheltenham this weekend at the Literature festival, where I chaired several events – including one with SF legend Brian Aldiss, still going strong at 86, and calling to mind in voice and appearance a benign, left-wing John Cleese. When asked by an audience member why he'd tackled the subject of state-endorsed torture in his 2007 novel, Harm, he explained the novel's political charge on the grounds that 'I really do believe that the people in charge at the minute are - well, shits.' Amen to that.
     Anyway, my final event on Saturday was with SF-legend-in-the-making China Miéville, to discuss his latest novel, Embassytown. We talked about the novel for about half an hour (read it: it's excellent) before the conversation veered onto the evergreen territory of the Booker prize's wilful neglect of science fiction. It's a well-rehearsed argument (I went to an event at Cheltenham last year in which Miéville and John Mullan squared off entertainingly over it), but we ran down the familiar points: SF novels are generally sold not on their literary credentials but on the ideas they explore; the Booker is a genre (litfic) award itself, but just doesn't admit it; SF novels DO make it onto Booker shortlists (Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake) but once shortlisted they're not called science fiction any more (cf Kingsley Amis's oft-quoted distich: ' "SF's no good!" they bellow till we're deaf./ "But this looks good … Well, then, it's not SF!" ')."
— Sarah Crown, Guardian
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Appropriately Male

"Wrongly pigeonholed over the years as a purveyor of tear-jerking tales of bolshy northern lasses battling the odds, Carol Birch has always had a feel in her fiction for young men. [...] Now 60, Birch this year published a new novel with a young man at its heart [...]
     Jaffy Brown, or 'Jaf', is the first-person narrator of her 11th novel, Jamrach's Menagerie, which last week put her on the Booker shortlist for the first time in her 25-year career, and saw her installed as second favourite to win the £50,000 prize behind Julian Barnes.
     'Am I really?' she says with a startled look, when I mention the odds, 'I didn't know that' – but quickly plays it down. 'I have been very nervous over the past couple of weeks with the things I've had to do, and then I reached a point where I thought you might as well enjoy it, you might be dead next week. If you come across looking like a beached idiot, you just do.'
     Jamrach's Menagerie is a picaresque adventure, set at the point in the mid-19th century when the whaling industry went into decline. It tells the story, in his own words, of a fatherless boy from Bermondsey who gets a job with an importer of wild animals and joins an expedition to south-east Asia on which the sailors embark hoping to capture a dragon. The novel offers a warm and richly detailed portrait of Ratcliffe Highway (now the Highway), the road running east from the City of London, that was once renowned as a hotbed of vice and criminality. It touches on Darwinian natural history, and takes its place in a long and exalted line of maritime storytelling that runs from Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Melville's Moby-Dick to Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander. [...]
     'One of the things I said was don't put a moony girl on the cover. And they said we won't. It felt very liberating for me to get out of this whole woman thing; I did tend to write from a female perspective, it was so nice to get away from it, and have this freedom to go into something completely different.' "
— Susanna Rustin, Guardian
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