BSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction

Amitav Ghosh, in his relatively brief but urgent book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, offers some possible ways to understand this silence, via excursions through the history of the modern novel, the inadequacy (as he claims) of science fiction to handle the ongoing climate crisis, and reflections on historical and political forces that have brought us to this moment in time. The essays are drawn from lectures given at the University of Chicago in 2015, and their titles—“Stories,” “History,” and “Politics”—are arranged in the Contents page at the corners of a triangle. The nonlinear placement of these topics suggests a concept map of overlapping ideas, as well as the possibility that the essays may be read in any order, which is more or less borne out when one reads the book.

The meeting was chaired by Professor John Radford of what was then the North East London Polytechnic, quondam home of the Science Fiction Foundation. We knew, of course, John Clute and Edward James, and also George Hay. The stranger was introduced as Maurice Goldsmith of the International Science Policy Foundation, a lobbying organisation on behalf of science whose function was never exactly clear to me. It was Maurice who had started this whole ball rolling.

When looking for evidence of Gatekeepers in SF&F, it is immediately apparent that women are now well represented at the highest levels of genre publishing, as commissioning editors and editorial directors in both the UK and the US. This is not to say women cannot be misogynist or subject to other prejudices but the numbers of new books from different groups being promoted for 2017 would argue against gross, systemic bias at this entry stage. Barnes & Noble’s list of 96 titles recommended by SF and Fantasy editors¹ has 48 titles by authors readily identifiable as men, compared to the rest. The Verge² website’s article on 33 SF and fantasy titles ‘that everyone will be talking about in 2017’ offers 18 titles by self-evidently male authors.

¹ 96 Books Sci-Fi & Fantasy Editors Can’t Wait for You to Read in 2017
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/96-books-sci-fi-fantasy-editors-cantwait-for-you-to-read-in-2017/
² 33 science fiction and fantasy books that everyone will be talking about in 2017
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/5/13811144/sci-fi-fantasy-book-recommendations-2017

That title, incidentally, is Text Book on the front cover, Text-Book on the title page, and Textbook in later reprints. ‘We met the demand for biological tutoring as it had never been met before and if it was a strange sort of biology we taught, that was the fault of the university examinations.’ The whole thing is available online here, and, as you might expect, it makes for dull reading. After Wells became famous the book was reprinted in 1909, as by Wells, ‘revised by J. T. Cunningham’; and it was reprinted yet again in 1932, when Wells was even more famous, with further revisions by W. H. Leigh-Sharpe. But though these present the book as still Wells's, in fact almost all of his writing, and every last one of his original drawings, have been taken out, and the whole book rewritten and re-illustrated. Which gives some sense of the scientific merit of the original edition.

Above all, by Easter 1990 every one of the seven novels that had been published to date had been both a commercial and a critical success. Even his most recent book, Canal Dreams, reckoned by Banks himself to be one of his weakest, had been respectfully received. In Vector, Kev McVeigh had called it “a hard hitting piece of fiction” and “his most effective writing yet.”³ But despite the rich variety of the Iain Banks novels, Iain M. Banks was known only as the writer of the Culture novels. It was inevitable, therefore, that he would be asked during his guest-of-honor speech about future Culture novels, and it was probably a surprise when he replied that Use of Weapons would be “the last one for a couple of books. The book after that will be non-sf and the next sf due out in two years’ time will be a non-‘Culture’ story” (Eastcon 6). Banks was preparing the ground for the fact that the next science fiction novel, and indeed the one after, would be a deliberate “digression from his main theme to see if he could in fact do without the Culture as a narrative element.”⁴ Or as Banks himself put it later: “I always enjoy writing Culture novels, I feel at home; it’s my train set, I built it, I chewed that papier mache! I love writing Culture novels—it’s almost too much of a self-indulgence. That’s why I deliberately took two books away from the Culture to reassure myself that I wasn’t so besotted with it that I couldn’t write science fiction elsewhere.”⁵ The next science fiction novel (or, to be more precise, the next novel under the name “Iain M. Banks”) would be Against a Dark Background. This was actually one of the earliest of Banks’s novels, written immediately after his first attempt to write Use of Weapons but based on an idea developed even earlier, during his first year at university. It dates, therefore, from a time when Banks was simply trying to be a science fiction writer and when the Culture was the background for one novel only rather than the basis for a long-running and highly popular series. Now, given the fan base the Culture had already acquired, abandoning that setting was probably as radical a venture as the move into science fiction in the first place.

³ McVeigh, “Canal Dreams,” 18.
⁴ MacGillivray, Iain Banks, 8.
⁵ Branscombe, “Iain M. Banks.”