Last night I popped over to Bath to see Michel Faber who had an event at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. For those not in the know, Faber was born in the Netherlands, raised in Australia, and now lives in Scotland. He’s a highly respected writer of literary fiction, and would probably have been a Booker finalist by now were it not for his Dutch nationality. However, his last novel, Under the Skin, is about an alien visitor to Earth who kidnaps humans and sends them back to her planet. His latest novel, The Book of Strange New Things, is about a Christian missionary who is sent to an alien planet.

With such a record, it is inevitable that Faber gets asked whether his work is — *gasp* — science fiction. Unlike a certain Canadian author whom we might mention, he’s perfectly happy with this. He also has a pretty decent knowledge of SF history, having read a lot of it during his teenage years in Melbourne. However, he’s pretty clear that what he is writing is LitFic. The primary subject of his new book is the relationship between Peter, the missionary, and his wife, Beatrice, whom he has to leave behind on Earth. Sending Peter to another planet creates a degree of separation that isn’t possible on Earth with modern communication and air travel. Also it isn’t clear how much worldbuilding Faber has done. He noted that he hadn’t thought to create an ecosystem for his alien planet until his wife pointed out that it was daft not having one.

That said, Faber clearly has thought about a number of issues. I asked him about the theological issue posed by alien life, and he said that is in the book. He mentioned that his aliens, the Oasans, are more like a bee colony than individuals. He acknowledged the existence of colonial themes in the book. And he made a point of how the human mission to the Oasan world was very carefully selected to ensure that its members would get on well together. He felt that the fractiousness of so many space missions in SF tests his suspension of disbelief. I recommended that he read Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, which speaks to exactly that frustration.

So I am looking forward to reading the book. I can’t spend too much time on it before BristolCon, but I read the first couple of chapters on the way home last night and boy that guy can write.

I note also that Faber’s wife, Eva, died of cancer in July. He was nursing her while writing this book, so I suspect a lot of very emotional content will have seeped into the story. Towards the end of the evening Faber read a number of exceptionally moving poems about losing someone close to you. I managed to get through that without turning into a blubbering heap. I do hope that Canongate publishes them at some point.

Thanks to a lot of time spent on trains, and one seriously good book, I have made some progress on the To be Read pile. Specifically I have finished Ancillary Sword. It is a very different story to Ancillary Justice, but still a very good book.

I don’t have time to write a full review, but there is one thing I want to highlight. The Radch is an empire, and like all such things it encompasses a variety of cultures. As is common, those cultures that were more recently annexed tend to be seen as the least civilized, and are therefore the worst treated. In this book Breq has to deal with a space station administrator whose attitude towards civil unrest amongst the poorest parts of the population in depressingly familiar way. Breq spells it out for her:

“These people are citizens.” I replied, my voice as calm and even as I could make it, without reaching the dead tonelessness of an ancillary. “When they behave properly you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly you will say that they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen?”

Let no one say that science fiction is not relevant to today’s world.

And now I can get on with Resistance, the new Samit Basu novel, because how can I resist a book that begins like this?

A giant lobster rises slowly out of Tokyo Bay. It is an old-school kaiju, three hundred feet long, and stands upright, its hind limbs still under water, in defiance of biology, physics and all codes of lobster etiquette.

Well that was fun. Huge thanks to Ken MacLeod, Chris Priest and Jane Rogers for being fine panelists, and to Adam Roberts without whose kindness I would not have been there. My apologies to anyone who was hoping to see Adam and/or Brian Aldiss, neither of whom were able to attend. Also thanks to the audience. We couldn’t see you for most of the hour, but when the lights when up at the end for audience questions we were delighted to find the tent packed.

Here’s my introduction to the panel:

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The original meaning of the term “dystopia” is the opposite of “utopia”. It may have been coined by John Stuart Mill for a parliamentary speech in 1868. Utopia, of course, derives from Thomas More’s novel of that name (1516), although people have been imagining ideal societies at least as far back as the Greeks. Other early writers also tried their hand at the genre, for example Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666). Even Shakespeare, in The Tempest (1623), has Gonzalo postulate the creation of an ideal society (in a speech he cribbed from the French essayist, Montaigne).

Looking back, however, these early utopias can seem distinctly unattractive. More’s ideal society has slavery, and doubtless the likes of Jeremy Clarkson would be unhappy with the feminist aspects of Cavendish’s imagined world. The Victorians were keen on writing utopias, but pretty much since the First World War our imaginings have become much darker. We have written dystopias instead. Famous examples include 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Margaret Atwood, in her essay “Dire Cartographies”, suggests that utopia and dystopia are like yin and yang, each containing the seed of the other. This is made explicit in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which features two rival societies, one based on Libertarian Capitalist principles, and one based on Anarchist Socialist principles.

The critic Frederic Jameson has suggested that writing dystopias is a better way to address the world’s problems. Creating an ideal society from scratch is hard, but in a dystopia we can focus on one aspect of society that disturbs us and think about how to fix it .

But perhaps the word “dystopia” itself is changing. These days publishers appear keen to slap the label, “dystopia”, on almost any work of science fiction, especially if it is written for a YA or mainstream audience. I have even seen the term applied to A Game of Thrones.

There’s no question that books marketed as dystopian are hugely popular, especially amongst young people. But are they depressed about the state of the world? Do they desperately want to change it? Or are they just victims of marketing Newspeak?

We have with us today three fine exponents of science fiction literature, so I’d like to start by asking them to talk about their recent work, tell us if they think it is dystopian, and if it is why they chose to write that sort of book.

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Actually only Jane’s book (the Clarke-winning Testament of Jessie Lamb) is remotely dystopian, but Ken and Chris know their science fiction inside out and were able to talk about other books they had written, and a wide range of other books.

The obvious question we had to tackle was why dystopias are so popular in the YA market right now. We looked at a variety of possible explanations, including this one:

Have dystopias become the ultimate fantasy? The fantasy of survival and agency in a hellish world. The fantasy of it still being about you.

— Gollancz (@gollancz) October 4, 2014

Personally I think that wanting to save the world is a natural part of being a teenager, and I was struck reading Jane’s book that world saving is so much harder these days that it seemed when I was a kid. Maybe that’s just perspective, but the teens in Jane’s book seemed to understand that complexity of the world far better than I remember my generation doing. That in turn might lead to a desire to read about worlds that are more easily fixed.

Chris raised the issue that dystopias often get written in times of austerity, pointing in particular to John Wyndham and his cohort from post-WWII Britain who produced a style of SF that was more or less unknown in the much more affluent USA. Ken quoted Laurie Penny opining that kids today gravitate towards dystopias because they believe that they are living in one.

Special thanks to Jane for introducing Octavia Butler to the conversation, and for noting that People of Color writing SF are often painfully aware that they are the aliens in the standard narrative. I’ve made a point of including some books by non-white writers in the reading list.

The audience quickly picked up on the fact that much of what is marketed as dystopian fiction would be better described as post-apocalyptic. I noted that some post-apocalyptic work is better understood as “return to nature” utopian fiction (After London by Richard Jefferies being an early example). Ken defined a dystopia as a story in which, “An oppressive system takes on a heroic individual…and wins”. For more thoughts on categorization, see the SF Encyclopedia.

We were asked if dystopias were primarily aimed at capitalism, to which the answer is a very definite no. 1984 was in part inspired by We, a novel by Russian writer, Yevgeny Zamiatin. We were also asked if any books were written from the point of view of a supporter of the dystopia rather than the heroic rebel. Someone gave me a suggestion during the signing, but I’m afraid I have forgotten it. However, it did occur to me that Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country appears to advocate what many would regard as an oppressive dystopia.

There are a lot more books we could have talked about. Here’s a (very incomplete) reading list of dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature. Enjoy.

• The Begum’s Fortune – Jules Verne
• When the Sleeper Awakes – H.G. Wells
• Swastika Night – Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin)
• We – Yevgeny Zamiatin
• 1984 – George Orwell
• The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
• The Machine Stops – E M Forster
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and C M Kornbluth
• Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• Make Room! Make Room! – Harry Harrison
• Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
• The Sheep Look Up – John Brunner
• Shockwave Rider – John Brunner
• Nova Express – William S. Burroughs
• The Holdfast Chronicles series – Suzy McKee Charnas
• The Gate to Women’s Country – Sheri S. Tepper
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• The Last Man – Mary Shelley
• Earth Abides – George Stewart
• The City Not Long After – Pat Murphy
• I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
• Station 11 – Emily St. John Mandel
• The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
• The Chrysalids – John Wyndham
• The Stand – Stephen King
• The Road – Cormac McCarthy
• Riddley Walker – Russell Hoban
• After London – Richard Jefferies
• The Parable of the Sower & The Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler
• Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
• A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller
• The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
• Noughts & Crosses series – Malorie Blackman
• Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
• Chaos Walking series – Patrick Ness
• Uglies series – Scott Westerfeld
• Orleans – Sherri L. Smith
• Dust Lands series – Moira Young
• Divergent series – Veronica Roth
• Mortal Engines series – Phillip Reeve
• Oryx & Crake series – Margaret Atwood
• The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf – Ambelin Kwaymullina

Other suggestions are welcome. And please remember that we’ve already acknowledged that the category is blurry, so by no means everyone (including myself) will regard all of the above as dystopian.