“The Jonah Kit” by Ian Watson- Reading the British Science Fiction Association Awards: 1977

The British Science Fiction Awards often highlight books that don’t even make it onto awards lists dominated by American authors. I’ve been reading and reviewing winners and nominees, looking for hidden gems I might not have found otherwise.

1977: The Jonah Kit by Ian Watson

A plot description of The Jonah Kit is somewhat straightforward- a Soviet boy shows up in Tokyo, but appears to have the mind of someone else implanted imperfectly in his head. The plot follows the Americans as they try to figure out what to do even as echoes of scientific discovery suggest there’s something awful looming. The simplicity of the plot belies the complexity of the prose and interconnectedness of the story, however.

Readers experience life within the mind of a sperm whale to which has been added the mental capacities, in some disjointed way, of a man. Additionally, the Soviet boy provides some wayward musings, and the sub- or main- plot of questioning whether our universe was possibly an accidental offshoot of the “real” universe gets mixed in as well. The whole thing ultimately becomes a morass of confusion at times. Each strand has strengths of its own, and Watson’s prose makes some of the scenes quite striking. However, some of the strands read like afterthoughts, and a clunky middle section does little to shed light on the direction the plot is supposed to be going.

What are we to do with the notion that our universe is a kind of accident/unintended/destroyed already? I don’t know, because the vision of that question is only given through glimpses, and even those are largely disdainful comments by other scientists. What of the sperm whale, what lesson has it for us? Is it that humanity is something we’ve invented to make ourselves appear better than the beasts? Maybe, but it could be more or less than that as well. And what are we to make of the ending, which falls somewhat suddenly and without resolution? I don’t know.

The Jonah Kit was ultimately a cacophony of disjunctions. I struggled to piece together its plot, even as strange visions of reality were presented. I don’t know what to make of it, but it was a tantalizing read.

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SDG.

Reading the BSFA Awards: 1975 “Orbitsville” by Bob Shaw

The British Science Fiction Awards often highlight books that don’t even make it onto awards lists dominated by American authors. I’ve been reading and reviewing winners and nominees, looking for hidden gems I might not have found otherwise.

Orbitsville by Bob Shaw

I was caught off guard by Orbitsville at several points throughout the novel. I didn’t read a description of it going in, so I had no idea what to expect. My description of the plot will have spoilers in it, of course.

Vance Garamond witnesses an accidental death but believes he may be blamed for it. He rushes to collect his wife and child and flee from the potential vengeance that might be wrought against him. It’s a fantastic setup that I thought would feature Garamond fleeing across space until some kind of epic confrontation. And, to some extent, I wasn’t technically wrong about those being aspects of the plot, but my expectations for how all of it would happen were completely blown up. Shaw weaves an endlessly entertaining yarn. Garamond eventually stumbles upon a Dyson Sphere, and realizes the humanity-defining moment this is fairly quickly. Many questions about the Sphere remain, however, and he contacts those he was fleeing to tell them about the spectacular find. His discovery leads to instant fame, making him basically immune to the vengeance he feared–probably. As humans start to make their way to the sphere and spread across it, more events lead to surprising consequences and discoveries throughout the book.

Shaw also has numerous fantastic lines that stuck with me after reading the novel. At one point, humans find some aliens within the Dyson Sphere. The chapter ends with some hopeful lines about first contact and the lives they may build. Then the next chapter starts “Rumours of massacre came within a month.” It was a gut-punch of a line that was set up so perfectly by the end of the previous chapter. These moments are scattered across the novel and done fantastically well.

If I have any complaint about Orbitsville it’s that it kind of just… ends. Yes, there are some great moments towards the end, but it reads like there ought to have been a bigger and better ending point. I realize two more novels follow this one, but I still think the ending could have been done better.

Orbitsville is a phenomenal read for any fans of space opera and adventure. It’s the kind of book that makes lists worth reading for me, and it has catapulted itself into my vintage favorites. I highly recommend it.

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SDG.

Reading the BSFA Awards: 1987 “Gráinne” by Keith Roberts

The British Science Fiction Awards often highlight books that don’t even make it onto awards lists dominated by American authors. I’ve been reading and reviewing winners and nominees.

Gráinne by Keith Roberts

I truly am unsure of what to make of this baffling choice for best science fiction novel in 1987.

The overwhelming majority of the story is Alistair Bevan recalling his time with his lover, the eponymous Gráinne. It’s several slice-of-life vignettes tied together, many of which appear to be focused around Gráinne’s body or aspects of her beauty, voice, or something else that aroused Bevan. The rest of the plot, a term I use with great generosity, is interspersed between these scenes, telling of the rise of Gráinne as a kind of cultic leader.

The central thread appears to be an attempt to weave a new kind of mythos around Gráinne, but ultimately it reads much more like a wet dream fantasy than it does like a mythology. Gráinne herself is idolized–at times literally–by many people, but there seems to be little reason to do so other than intense lust after her stockinged form. Male gaze seems to be the point rather than an incidental detail here.

Gráinne ultimately left me utterly confused. There’s very little by way of content here. It’s uncomfortable to read it at its best.

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SDG.

Reading the BSFA Awards: 1983 “Tik-Tok” by John Sladek

The British Science Fiction Awards often highlight books that don’t even make it onto awards lists dominated by American authors. I’ve been reading and reviewing winners and nominees.

Tik-Tok by John Sladek (1983 BSFA Award Winner)

Tik-Tok is the name of the robot whose viewpoint we follow through this sinister novel. An incident in which he (using that pronoun because it’s used in the novel) is beaten by a human has undone his programming that required him to follow Asimov’s laws of robotics. He’s taken to exploring his own murderous tendencies, alongside interactions with humans who are working to try to get pay and other rights for robots.

The book is thematically interesting, though only at a surface level. Other books have explored what happens when Asimov’s Laws are taken to their logical extreme (see the excellent novel, The Humanoids by Jack Williamson- link to my review), and certainly the implications of the laws themselves are fairly thoroughly explored in various literature. Here, however, a more novel question of “What happens if something happens to disable the laws?” is asked. It’s an intriguing premise, though ultimately not enough to carry the story.

The plot itself falters occasionally, especially when flashbacks start to intervene. It’s not a bad way of telling how Tik-Tok got to the point he’s at, but the choppy nature of the flashbacks, which are frequently broken up themselves over the course of several scenes, means that readers have to be hyper-aware of exactly what time they’re in as they’re reading. Thus, for example, there might be three timelines- A (present), B (5 years ago), and C (10 years ago), and the scenes might alternate like A, B, C, B, A, C, A, B or somesuch. It may never have been quite that extreme, but there were a few times I caught myself thinking I was in a different time than I was and getting quite confused. Again, this is largely because the flashbacks themselves are broken up so that the scenes aren’t entire vignettes at once.

The murders Tik-Tok commits are occasionally fairly gruesome, so readers with qualms about that kind of content will likely want to steer clear. One poignant scene has Tik-Tok describing why he does what he does, and he explains that he basically wants to know what it’s like to sin. It’s a powerful moment in the midst of what feels like violence for the sake of violence through most of the novel. Once we finally arrive at that scene, though, I as a reader had become mostly immune to the goings-on around Tik-Tok. The scenes shifted from violence to tormenting of robots to sexual or other deviancy to further violence to covering up violence and it all starts to get kind of jumbled together.

Sladek’s nearly bland way of telling the story works quite well in character. The matter-of-fact tone lends a sense of the truly depraved to our robotic point of view, and made me as a reader struggle to put a moral compass on the novel.

Ultimately, Tik-Tok may have worked better as a novella or short story instead of a novel. The question at the core of the novel is of interest, but can’t sustain the action across a work of a novel’s length. The few reasons to relate to Tik-Tok combined with a choppy storytelling style made it a difficult read overall.

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SDG.

Reading the BSFA Awards: 1970 – “The Jagged Orbit” by John Brunner

The British Science Fiction Awards often highlight books that don’t even make it onto awards lists dominated by American authors. I hoped it would help round out my reading a bit, and haven’t been disappointed!

The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner

John Brunner is a gift. He’s written a ton of science fiction that avoids being predictive in intent while also somehow being hauntingly, disturbingly accurate in its visions of the future. The Jagged Orbit is his look at racial tensions, and it won the British Science Fiction Association Award for best novel in 1970. (It also got a Nebula nomination.)

At first, the novel is not an easy read. No, scratch that–the novel never becomes an easy read, but it’s for different reasons throughout. The format makes it somewhat difficult. There are 100 chapters, some are composed of just a fragment of a word. There is a large cast of characters who seem quite unconnected at the beginning. Later, these characters do get thrust together, but I’m still not sure I caught exactly how things got resolved–or if they were resolved. And, I’m unconvinced that that matters.

The Jagged Orbit is much more about the journey than it is about the individual plot points or resolutions. Yes, there is a plot–racial tensions in the United States have ballooned and there is a group making money off selling money to everyone based on the fear over the same. A “spoolpigeon” named Matthew is trying desperately to hold on to his job while also paying for his wife’s place at an asylum, which he is obligated to do–the debt piles up if he tries to do differently. His job is a kind of talk show/investigative journalist combo. Other characters thrust the reader in the middle of various conflicts, in questions about psychadelic drugs, about trances and meditation, and more. The novel fits nicely into the New Wave sci-fi.

But it’s at least a bit more than the sum of its parts. It’s hard to judge the comments about race and racism in a novel written more than 50 years ago. Are some of Brunner’s use of terms and language in poor taste? Maybe. But is Brunner using those in order to show the absurdity of racism? Sometimes. What the book does best, though, is hold up a mirror to the reader today. It forces the reader to ask: what are you contributing to this mess–this world we’ve all got to live in? And for that, I recommend this novel.

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SDG.

Reading the BSFA Awards: 2021- “The Animals in that Country” by Laura Jean McKay

The British Science Fiction Awards often highlight books that don’t even make it onto awards lists dominated by American authors. I hoped it would help round out my reading a bit, and haven’t been disappointed!

The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay

The Animals in that Country won the 2021 BSFA Award, but wasn’t on a shortlist for the Hugo, Nebula, or Locus for best novel. It’s another example of the BSFA Award giving a different look than the other major speculative fiction awards.

I was skeptical going in to this one, to be honest. Literary science fiction is very hit or miss for me, and often seems to suffer from the authors having a kind of disdain for “genre fiction” that shows up in weird ways in their works. The cover was kind of off-putting to me as well. The expression on the taxidermized (I learned a new word!) goat’s face is a weird mix of seriousness with maybe a hint of stern, while the young woman examining it looks confused and perhaps put off.

The contents of the novel itself doesn’t match any of these expectations. The story follows Jean, a grandma with an alcohol problem who works at an Australian zoo giving tours. She’s trying to take care of her granddaughter, Kimberly, while also navigating the expectations and hopes she has for her own life. If you told me based on the cover of this novel I’d be delighted by an extremely sardonic, liquor-downing grandma who gives wildlife tours for fun and enjoys the occasional sex on the side with another zookeeper, I’d have told you to your face that you’re a liar. But here we are.

Jean is a delightful narrative voice to read, even as she goes off on tangents about conspiracy theories she finds and immediately believes on Reddit and other sites and comments on current events like someone who’s gone deep down the rabbit hole of believing literally any conspiracy possible. I honestly still don’t know how McKay manages to make this work because all of this is a character I have a kind of aversion to on paper, but McKay makes her personable and even sympathetic. It’s probably the relentless dark humor that got to me. Jean doesn’t pull punches, and she just comments on things without a thought.

There’s a plot about a pandemic, too. I didn’t think I’d like that aspect, but the pandemic lets people understand animals, and vice versa. I saw some readers saying this made the story creepy and even “horror,” but I didn’t get that vibe at all. Maybe it’s because of Jean’s tone throughout the novel, or the interludes of biting flies attacking her and getting slaughtered by her hands before one finally gets into her ear and says something like “This is nice” because it’s warm and safe, but I never was even worried in the novel. It was just a comfort read, despite sometimes graphic awfulness.

The only complaint I have about the novel is the ending. It just felt extremely abrupt. Huge spoilers here, obviously: the government just zooms in, vaccinates everyone, and Jean can’t hear animals anymore, losing her connection to the dingo that she’d forged throughout the novel thus far. It’s so sudden and accompanied by the idea of “going back to normal.” I don’t really know what point is being made with it. It just… ends.

The Animals in that Country is a great read that once again has a very different feel from other major speculative fiction award nominees. I enjoyed it immensely, though I’m still kinda bummed about the ending.

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Science Fiction Hub– I have scores of reviews of Hugo nominees, Vintage Sci-Fi, modern sci-fi, TV series, and more! Check out my science fiction related writings here.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies/scifi/sports and more!

SDG.