This Year's Reading
#36 Deathworld 1 by Harry Harrison
So slender that it is almost archaic: this would be the prologue of a modern genre novel. Bizarrely it has an approving cover quote from the Spectator of all places but this is the very definition of a minor work.
#37 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Along with dystopias, post-apocalyptic novels are the acceptable branch of science fiction. They are also one of the most boring. Nothing very much happens. Just like happy families such novels tend to resemble each other with the mundane chores of survival interspersed with memories of the time Before. McCarthy breaks with the formula by dispensing with such consolations to the reader. Instead it resembles, well, a Cormac McCarthy novel: pork and beans, taciturn conversation, thirst and ceaseless travel.
That is a slightly flippant description and "flippant" is probably the least appropriate word you could apply to this novel. It received rave reviews, almost all of which found some element of hope in the book. I did not. The nameless protagonist finds himself in a hell from which the only escape is death and yet he refuses to die. Happy, happy stuff:By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunnelled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along the sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.
That is as expansive as McCarthy's prose gets, it is usually much more tightly rationed, but it is all as powerful.
Finally, I suppose I can't get away from the Clarke issue. Should it have been on the shortlist? Well, it was eligible and it was good enough.
So slender that it is almost archaic: this would be the prologue of a modern genre novel. Bizarrely it has an approving cover quote from the Spectator of all places but this is the very definition of a minor work.
#37 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Along with dystopias, post-apocalyptic novels are the acceptable branch of science fiction. They are also one of the most boring. Nothing very much happens. Just like happy families such novels tend to resemble each other with the mundane chores of survival interspersed with memories of the time Before. McCarthy breaks with the formula by dispensing with such consolations to the reader. Instead it resembles, well, a Cormac McCarthy novel: pork and beans, taciturn conversation, thirst and ceaseless travel.
That is a slightly flippant description and "flippant" is probably the least appropriate word you could apply to this novel. It received rave reviews, almost all of which found some element of hope in the book. I did not. The nameless protagonist finds himself in a hell from which the only escape is death and yet he refuses to die. Happy, happy stuff:By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunnelled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along the sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.
That is as expansive as McCarthy's prose gets, it is usually much more tightly rationed, but it is all as powerful.
Finally, I suppose I can't get away from the Clarke issue. Should it have been on the shortlist? Well, it was eligible and it was good enough.