Asking the Wrong Questions

My latest column at The New Scientist has a relationship focus: in Maggie Shen King's debut novel An Excess Male , China's one child policy leads to a population of unmarriageable men who are encouraged to enter into polyandrous arrangements.  There's a definite whiff of The Handmaid's Tale wafting over this novel (which, along with last year's The Power , leads me to wonder if we're seeing a mini-trend of SF that recalls that classic, thirty years on), but what's most interesting about An Excess Male is that it isn't a dystopia, and remains intriguingly open-minded about the possibility of creating a good family in such an awkward situation. Somewhat less hopeful about the possibility for romance in a futuristically altered world is M.T. Anderson's Landscape With Invisible Hand , his first foray back into YA fiction since the transcendent Octavian Nothing duology.  I describe the story as The Hunger Games meets Black Mirror 's "Fift...

The second part of my review of this year's Clarke shortlist is now online at Strange Horizons , covering Arcadia by Iain Pears, Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson, and The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor.  You can find it here , and in case you haven't already read part 1, that's here .  The actual winner will be announced in London in a few hours, but as I write in the conclusion to the review, I tend to see that announcement as less of a triumph for any particular book, and more a data point that will help to clarify--at least a little--what the judges were aiming for with this year's bland and conventional shortlist.  The book that wins will tell us a great deal about how this year's judges saw the Clarke, and their task as its jury.  But I'm hopeful that next year the jury will make more interesting, more challenging choices. Martin Petto has updated his collection of links to discussion of the shortlist, including this essay by Megan of the (ne...

The Names of All the Spirits by J.R. Dunn What I Didn't See by Karen Joy Fowler (I think Gwenda Bond is wrong when she says that this story alone justifies the existence of SciFiction. I think it justifies the existence of Fowler's career) Fear of Strangers by Dave Hutchinson The Children's Crusade by Robert Reed Swiftly by Adam Roberts The Wages of Syntax by Ray Vukcevich (also check out this fascinating essay about the story by Jay Lake, over at the ED SF Project )