The British Boom: What boom? Whose boom? Thirteen ways...

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The British Boom: What boom? Whose boom? Thirteen ways of looking at the British Boom Andrew M. Butler Andrew Butler, ‘the greatest SF critic the galaxy has ever known’ (Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City) is ‘a pipe- smoking, vaguely sarcastic academic’ who has a PhD in the works of Philip K. Dick, and has pub- lished books on Philip K. Dick, Cyberpunk, Terry Pratchett, Film Studies, and Postmodernism, co- edited books on Terry Pratchett and Ken MacLeod, and has been fea- tures editor on Vector since 1995. The following article on the British Boom, described by the leading Brit- ish SF magazine Interzone as ‘a farrago’, won the 2004 Pioneer Award (the Science Fiction Research Association Award for Excellence in Scholarship). In his spare time Andrew teaches Media Studies, Cul- tural Studies and Digital Culture at Canterbury Christ Church University College. I (BRG) ‘met’ Andrew first through Acnestis, the prestigious British amateur publishing associa- tion. He has visited Melbourne twice in recent years, and is welcome back any time. [First published in Science Fiction Studies, No 91, November 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author and Dr Arthur Evans, editor of SFS. Andrew and the SET editors have attempted to preserve the style of the original as far as possible, including the use of American spelling.] 1. ‘There certainly seems to be something of a boom. To a certain extent these things are always artefacts — there’s no objec- tive criteria by which one can judge “boom-ness” (boomitude? Boomosity?) — so the fact that everyone’s talking about it is to a certain extent definitional of the fact that something’s going on’ (China Miéville in Butler, ‘Beyond’ 7). 2. Mapping the Terrain It is asserted that there is currently a boom within British science fiction — by editors, by critics, by authors, by readers, in the pages of Science Fiction Studies and in the publicity for some events at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in Lon- don in May 2003. Let us assume that this is not a mass delusion, and there is in- deed a boom. The Boom is thought of mostly as a British Science Fiction Boom, and to limit it to this genre is clearly within the parameters of a journal named Science Fiction Studies. But there is also a parallel boom within fantasy and horror, as well as within children’s fiction — dominated by the hype surrounding the publication of the fourth and fifth Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling and the fact that the third volume of Philip Pull- man’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass (2000), won the overall Whitbread Prize, the first children’s book to do so. 1 We could no doubt make a case for other, less cognate, genres. What we also need to remember is the generic slip- page and interchange that goes on within adult and children’s science fiction, fan- tasy and horror. It is impossible to draw a clear, stable boundary around these distinct and overlapping booms, to subsume them within a single movement, but that is what, with the clarity of hindsight and the demand for narrative convenience, we do with Romanticism and Modern- ism. What this article sets out to do is to survey the terrain from a variety of per- spectives, in the hope that this will help to give some indication of the phenome- non’s scope and characteristics. The Boom contains cyberpunk, post- cyberpunk, cyberpunk-flavored fiction, steampunk, splatterpunk, space opera, hard sf, soft sf, feminist sf, utopias, dystopias, anti-utopias, apocalypses, cosy catastrophes, uncomfortable catas- trophes, Bildungsromans, New Wave- style writing, planetary romances, alternate histories, big dumb objects, comedies, tragedies, slipstream, horror, fantasy and any combination of generic hybrids and cross-breeds. Hopefully a series of micronarratives about Boom writing and writers will avoid the dan- gers of prescription in an era when the macronarrative or metanarrative is no longer achievable or desirable. It is worth first comparing the Boom with two other movements within science fiction. The British New Wave in science fiction is primarily associated with the Michael Moorcock era of New Worlds magazine from 1964 onwards, dissipating at some point in the 1970s — the experimental writings of J. G. Ballard, Moorcock, Barrington Bayley, Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, and visiting Americans Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Pamela Zoline, and Norman Spinrad. If Moorcock can be said to be its polemicist, its Ezra Pound figure, then Ballard was its resident T. S. Eliot — although arguably the New Wave had found its creed in Ballard’s 1962 guest editorial where he argued that ‘science fiction must jettison its present narrative forms and plots [. . . I]t is inner space not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth’ (117). Langdon Jones’s The New SF: An Original Anthology of Modern Speculative Fiction (1969) an- thology can stand as its archetypal collec- tion. New Worlds did continue to publish non-New Wave material, but writers Andrew M. Butler, speaking at Aussiecon Three, 1999. (Photo: Paul Billinger.) 15

Transcript of The British Boom: What boom? Whose boom? Thirteen ways...

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The British Boom:What boom? Whose boom?

Thirteen waysof looking at the British Boom

Andrew M. Butler

Andrew Butler, ‘the greatest SF criticthe galaxy has ever known’ (CherylMorgan, Emerald City) is ‘a pipe-smoking, vaguely sarcasticacademic’ who has a PhD in theworks of Philip K. Dick, and has pub-lished books on Philip K. Dick,Cyberpunk, Terry Pratchett, FilmStudies, and Postmodernism, co-edited books on Terry Pratchett andKen MacLeod, and has been fea-tures editor on Vector since 1995.The following article on the BritishBoom, described by the leading Brit-ish SF magazine Interzone as ‘afarrago’, won the 2004 PioneerAward (the Science Fiction ResearchAssociation Award for Excellence inScholarship). In his spare timeAndrew teaches Media Studies, Cul-tural Studies and Digital Culture atCanterbury Christ Church UniversityCollege. I (BRG) ‘met’ Andrew firstthrough Acnestis, the prestigiousBritish amateur publishing associa-tion. He has visited Melbourne twicein recent years, and is welcome backany time.

[First published in Science FictionStudies, No 91, November 2003.Reprinted by permission of the authorand Dr Arthur Evans, editor of SFS.Andrew and the SET editors haveattempted to preserve the style of theoriginal as far as possible, including theuse of American spelling.]

1. ‘There certainly seems to be somethingof a boom. To a certain extent these thingsare always artefacts — there’s no objec-tive criteria by which one can judge“boom-ness” (boomitude? Boomosity?)— so the fact that everyone’s talkingabout it is to a certain extent definitionalof the fact that something’s going on’(China Miéville in Butler, ‘Beyond’ 7).

2. Mapping the TerrainIt is asserted that there is currently aboom within British science fiction — byeditors, by critics, by authors, by readers,in the pages of Science Fiction Studies andin the publicity for some events at theInstitute for Contemporary Arts in Lon-don in May 2003. Let us assume that thisis not a mass delusion, and there is in-deed a boom. The Boom is thought ofmostly as a British Science Fiction Boom,and to limit it to this genre is clearlywithin the parameters of a journal namedScience Fiction Studies. But there is also aparallel boom within fantasy and horror,as well as within children’s fiction —dominated by the hype surrounding thepublication of the fourth and fifth HarryPotter novels by J. K. Rowling and thefact that the third volume of Philip Pull-man’s His Dark Materials trilogy, TheAmber Spyglass (2000), won the overallWhitbread Prize, the first children’s bookto do so.1 We could no doubt make a casefor other, less cognate, genres. What wealso need to remember is the generic slip-page and interchange that goes on withinadult and children’s science fiction, fan-tasy and horror.

It is impossible to draw a clear, stableboundary around these distinct andoverlapping booms, to subsume themwithin a single movement, but that is

what, with the clarity of hindsight andthe demand for narrative convenience,we do with Romanticism and Modern-ism. What this article sets out to do is tosurvey the terrain from a variety of per-spectives, in the hope that this will helpto give some indication of the phenome-non’s scope and characteristics. TheBoom contains cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, cyberpunk-flavored fiction,steampunk, splatterpunk, space opera,hard sf, soft sf, feminist sf, utopias,dystopias, anti-utopias, apocalypses,cosy catastrophes, uncomfortable catas-trophes, Bildungsromans, New Wave-style writing, planetary romances,alternate histories, big dumb objects,comedies, tragedies, slipstream, horror,fantasy and any combination of generichybrids and cross-breeds. Hopefully aseries of micronarratives about Boomwriting and writers will avoid the dan-gers of prescription in an era when themacronarrative or metanarrative is nolonger achievable or desirable.

It is worth first comparing the Boomwith two other movements withinscience fiction. The British New Wave inscience fiction is primarily associatedwith the Michael Moorcock era of NewWorlds magazine from 1964 onwards,dissipating at some point in the 1970s —the experimental writings of J. G. Ballard,Moorcock, Barrington Bayley, BrianAldiss, John Brunner, and visitingAmericans Thomas M. Disch, JohnSladek, Pamela Zoline, and NormanSpinrad. If Moorcock can be said to be itspolemicist, its Ezra Pound figure, thenBallard was its resident T. S. Eliot —although arguably the New Wave hadfound its creed in Ballard’s 1962 guesteditorial where he argued that ‘sciencefiction must jettison its present narrativeforms and plots [. . . I]t is inner space notouter, that needs to be explored. The onlytruly alien planet is Earth’ (117). LangdonJones’s The New SF: An Original Anthologyof Modern Speculative Fiction (1969) an-thology can stand as its archetypal collec-tion. New Worlds did continue to publishnon-New Wave material, but writers

Andrew M. Butler, speaking at AussieconThree, 1999. (Photo: Paul Billinger.)

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such as Robert Presslie, Don Malcolmand John Phillifent were more or lesssilenced. A movement can exclude aswell as include; indeed different hailersof the Boom have their own list of exclu-sions.

In the previous paragraph I specifiedBritish New Wave, because the applica-tion of the term to American writing hasled to some confusion. Certainly JudithMerril, in her Best of SF anthologies, waslooking to Britain for material, exposureto which may have led to a greaterexperimentation in form in US sciencefiction. There was a growing permissive-ness that led to a greater willingness toexplore sexual themes within sf. Oneproduct of this was Harlan Ellison’sgroundbreaking anthology DangerousVisions (1967), in which taboos (for thescience fiction market) were broken.This, along with a growing divide be-tween hard and soft science fiction, hasled to a retrospective acknowledgment ofan American New Wave, which couldinclude ‘Aldiss, Ballard, Disch, Delany,Heinlein [sic] and on’ (Brooke-Rose 99) orJoanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K.Dick, Thomas M. Disch and SamuelDelany (Pfeil).2 Broadly speaking theAmerican New Wave seems to be a newkind of content, a paradigmatic NewWave, and the British one a new kind ofstructure, a syntagmatic New Wave. Inturn it should be noted that British andAmerican perceptions of the Boom aredifferent.

The second movement is cyberpunk.It might be true that Bruce Bethke was thefirst to use the word cyberpunk — thetitle of a manuscript circulating in theearly 1980s — and that it was GardnerDozois who was the first to use the termto refer to a group of writers, but for thelarger critical community it began withWilliam Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).Meanwhile Bruce Sterling circulated afanzine, Cheap Truth (1983–86), edited asby Vincent Omniaveritas, which cri-tiqued much existing sf and set out thegrounds for cyberpunk — although itwas not until issue 12 that cyberpunk wasmentioned. In the final issue Omniaveri-tas declared cyberpunk to be dead, withMirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

(1986) as its tombstone. Indeed, many ofthe stories within the collection hardlyconform to the concept of cyberpunk asit is now understood. In the years since,many other writers have been labeled ascyberpunk, post-cyberpunk or cyber-punk-flavored, irrespective of their con-nection to the original impulse. Here wehave a model of how a movement canbegin almost as a hobbyhorse, growthrough association with a number ofwriters, and then explode beyond thecontrol of its originators — and be in-creasingly difficult to define as cyber-punk.

The Boom has no resident polemicist(although M. John Harrison, ChinaMiéville and others have found spaces totalk about it3), no key writer (althoughsome would suggest Miéville), and nodefining anthology or magazine(although Interzone could take some ofthe credit). Even such a thing as a startingpoint has yet to be agreed. Mark Bouldhas outlined a number of starting pointsbetween 1982 and 1995 (Bould, ‘Boom’308–9) and each of these starting pointswould lead to a different conceptualiza-tion of the boom. A writer like MaryGentle found success with Ash: A SecretHistory (1999), winning among others theBritish Science Fiction AssociationAward, which ought to put her smackinto the British Boom — although she’sbeen a highly regarded writer since the1980s and was first published in 1977.Perhaps we should borrow Borges’s ter-minology and speak of precursors to theBoom, even of work precursive to theBoom. There are a number of writers —Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, M. John Har-rison and Christopher Priest, amongothers — who have been successful in thepast and are now enjoying a renewedperiod of success or republication. Thereis also the problem as to whether theBritish Boom should only includeBritish-born writers, or be expanded toinclude writers from the United States(Pat Cadigan, Tricia Sullivan, MollyBrown) or Canada (John Clute, GeoffRyman) who have become long-timeresident in the UK. Whilst many of thewriters within the Boom know eachother, there are varying degrees of influ-ence and social connection. Some of themdo have lunch together on a weekly basis,but that is as much the bonds of friend-ship as the secret powerhouse of a move-ment.

3. A (Partial) CensusJoan Aiken, Brian Aldiss, David Almond,Joe Ahearne, Chris Amies, Tom Arden,Neal Asher, Steve Aylett, WilhelminaBaird, Cherith Baldry, J. G. Ballard, IainM. Banks, James Barclay, Clive Barker,Paul Barnett/John Grant, Stephen Bax-ter, Malorie Blackman, Stephen Bowkett,

Chaz Brenchley, Keith Brooke/NickGifford, Christopher Brookmyre, EricBrown, Molly Brown, Eugene Byrne, PatCadigan, Richard Calder, Mark Chad-bourn, Simon Clark, Susanna Clarke,John Clute, Michael Cobley, SteveCockayne, Storm Constantine, LouiseCooper, Paul Cornell, Gillian Cross,Peter Crowther, Russell T. Davies, JackDeighton, Peter Dickinson, Eric Evans,Jasper Fforde, Christopher Fowler,Maggie Furey, Neil Gaiman, StephenGallagher, David S. Garnett/David Fer-ring, Mary Gentle, Debi Gliori, MurielGray, Colin Greenland, Nicola Griffith,Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Peter F. Ham-ilton, M. John Harrison, Robert Hold-stock, Tom Holland, Tom Holt, LesleyHowarth, Eva Ibbotson, Simon Ings,Brian Jacques, Robin Jarvis, Ben Jeapes,Diana Wynne Jones, GwynethJones/Ann Halam, Graham Joyce, PeterKalu, Garry Kilworth, William King,David Langford, Tanith Lee, Roger Levy,James Lovegrove/J. M. S. Lovegrove,Brian Lumley, Ian R. MacLeod, KenMacLeod, Jan Mark, Graham Masterton,Paul McAuley, Geraldine McCaughrean,Ian McDonald, Juliet E. McKenna, RobinMcKinley, John Meaney, China Miéville,Martin Millar/Martin Scott, DavidMitchell, Michael Moorcock, AlanMoore, Simon Morden, Richard Morgan,Grant Morrison, Kim Newman/JackYeovil, William Nicholson, JennyNimmo, Jeff Noon, Daniel O’Mahoney,Darren O’Shaughnessy/Darren Shan,Stephen Palmer, K. J. Parker, TerryPratchett, Christopher Priest, Philip Pull-man, Robert Rankin, Philip Reeve, Alas-tair Reynolds, Chris Riddell, PhilipRidley, Adam Roberts/A. R. R. Roberts,Katherine Roberts, Justina Robson, J. K.Rowling, Nicholas Royle, Geoff Ryman,Jan Siegel, Alison Sinclair, Gus Smith,Michael Marshall Smith, Brian Stable-ford/Brian Craig/Francis Amery, PaulStewart, Charles Stross, Tricia Sulli-van/Valery Leith, Brian Talbot, SueThomas, Karen Traviss, Lisa Tuttle, JoWalton, Ian Watson, John Whitbourn,Liz Williams, John Wilson, David Win-grove, Chris Wooding.

4. The Long WaveThe history of science fiction in Britainhas been traced back to Frankenstein(Aldiss 1973), to Paradise Lost (Roberts,Science Fiction) and even to Utopia (Kin-caid, ‘More’; although Malory’s Le Mortd’Arthur [1485] is the root fantastical textin Kincaid, British 7). None of these ur-texts was consciously written as sciencefiction. The various scientific romances ofthe last thirty years or so of the nineteenthcentury were often prompted by im-pulses which we would now recognize asscience fictional; H. G. Wells’s writingscould stand as a definitive starting point

The Boom is thought ofmostly as a British

Science FictionBoom . . . but there isalso a parallel boomwithin fantasy andhorror, as well as

within children’s fiction.

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were it not that this would seem a nation-alistic move. The American dominationof the genre coalesces in Amazing Storiesin 1926, but some British writers did con-tribute to the sf pulp magazines — mostnotably John Wyndham, Eric FrankRussell, and Arthur C. Clarke — andtried to meet the demands of the US mar-ket. Only with the onset of the New Wavein the 1960s did British science fictionbegin to make an impact upon the waythat generic science fiction perceived it-self, in the writings of Moorcock, Aldiss,and Ballard. The moment did not last,however, and after a brief period of suc-cess in the early 1970s, the market forBritish sf collapsed. Brian Stableford citesthe 1978 special All-British issue of TheMagazine of Fantasy and Science Fictionwith its article by Brian Aldiss celebrat-ing the wealth of professional Britishauthors: ‘Ian Watson, Andrew Stephen-son, Robert Holdstock, Chris Morgan,Mark Adlard, Bob Shaw and Philip Dunn[. . .] Richard Cowper, Edmund Cooper,Christopher Priest, Duncan Lunan,Laurence James, Barrington Bayley,Michael Coney, D. G. Compton, AngusWells and M. John Harrison’ (21). But, asStableford notes, most of them had al-ready produced their best work or woulddisappear until the 1980s or later, havingreinvented themselves as fantasists. Ad-lard has not published a novel since The

Greenlander (1978), the first of a projectedtrilogy, Compton was only occasionallypublished after 1975 and few now willknow the names of Morgan, Dunn andLunan as writers of fiction. The Hold-stock and Priest-edited anthology Stars ofAlbion coincided with the World ScienceFiction Convention being held inBrighton in 1979, but it was the last gaspof the market. New Worlds was no more— there were four, irregular issues be-tween 1978 and 1979 — and since theonly other British science fiction maga-zine, Science Fiction Monthly, and its re-placement, SF Digest, had both closed in1976, the only outlets for written Britishscience fiction was the book and antho-logy markets and overseas sales.

In 1981 a group of fans, critics andwriters based in Leeds — David Pringle,

Simon Ounsley, Alan Dorey, and Gra-ham James — decided to take the profitsof the Yorcon II convention to set up anew magazine. Meanwhile in London,Malcolm Edwards pitched the idea for anew magazine to the BSFA (then chairedby Alan Dorey) and brought John Clute,Colin Greenland, and Roz Kaveney in asassociate editors. The BSFA plan havingcome to nothing, the eight banded to-gether to set up a quarterly magazine thatthey eventually called Interzone (seePringle and Terran for more on this).Inevitably it suffered comparisons toNew Worlds; in part it was championingformer New Wave writers such as Aldiss,Ballard, Sladek, and Disch. Many of thestories it published in the early days hadthe downbeat endings typical of much ifnot the bulk of British science fictionsince the Second World War. The Inter-zone editorial collective dwindled untilPringle became the main editor, but themagazine went from strength tostrength, going bimonthly in 1988 andmonthly in 1990. Other professionalmagazines have emerged: among othersExtro (which published three issues inNorthern Ireland in 1982), Back Brain Re-cluse (edited by Chris Reed from 1984 andlinked to the small press scene), The Gate(1989–91), SF Nexus (1993–1994, whichmerged with Interzone), Amaranth, Spec-trum (paid for by editor Paul Fraser), Od-

Only with the onset of theNew Wave in the 1960s

did British science fictionbegin to make an impactupon the way that genericscience fiction perceiveditself . . . The moment did

not last, however.

SET EDITORIAL COMMENT: The British New Wave — did it ever disappear? Compare the cover for New Worlds 178, December1967/January 1968 (by Charles Platt and Christopher Finch) with the cover for Interzone 188, April 2003 (by Judith Clute). Okay, nonudes on Interzone covers; the cutup effect is achieved digitally rather than with scissors and paste; and the names on the covers havechanged. But who could doubt that British SF is still Cool Britannia after 35 short years?

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yssey and 3SF (published in 2002–03 byBen Jeapes’s Big Engine small press).There is also TTA, also known as TheThird Alternative, which is more geared todark fantasy and horror. However, Inter-zone is the only paper-based science fic-tion magazine to keep a regular scheduleover a sustained period of time inBritain.4

Among the British writers whocarved out their science fiction writingcareers in the magazine were S. M. —later Stephen — Baxter, Keith Brooke,Eric Brown, Molly Brown, Eugene Byrne,Richard Calder, Nicola Griffith, Peter F.Hamilton, Simon Ings, Graham Joyce,Paul McAuley, Ian MacLeod, IanMcDonald, Kim Newman, AlastairReynolds, and Charles Stross, leading towhat The Encyclopedia of Science Fictioncalled ‘a second new wave of UK SF’(Clute and Nicholls 622). Their writingwas diverse in scope, yet within an iden-tifiably British mode: for example Baxterwrote hard sf within his Xeelee sequenceand has been compared to Clarke,McAuley has tried his hand over theyears at hard sf, steampunk, and tech-nothrillers, and Newman and Byrnemapped out alternate histories rooted inBritish popular culture. As if giving thisnew generation of writers a regular mar-ket was not enough, Pringle branchedout into editing role-playing game tie-inswith the Warhammer series of novelsand anthologies, giving Kim Newman,David Garnett, Brian Stableford, and IanWatson opportunities to write novels inthe late 1980s and early 1990s, and manyothers of the Interzone generation anothermarket for short stories (Baxter, ‘Free-dom’).

After this generation of short storywriters began to publish novels, theywere joined by a series of writers whohad not first appeared in Interzone,though in some cases not for the want oftrying. Iain M. Banks had begun as anenfant terrible with the publication of hiscontroversial The Wasp Factory (1984),and followed it up with the sf-tingedWalking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge(1986), before publishing his space operaConsider Phlebas (1987). Jeff Noon — pre-viously known only for winning the Mo-bil Playwriting prize at the ManchesterRoyal Exchange Theatre in 1985 with hisFalklands play Woundings — wrote anovel called Vurt (1993), which launcheda new Manchester-based publishercalled Ringpull and became a cult hit. Hefollowed this up with Pollen (1995), but itwas not enough to save the publisherfrom bankruptcy. Ken MacLeod, a friendof Iain M. Banks since childhood,launched his first novel The Star Fraction(1995) at the World Science Fiction Con-vention in Glasgow, a convention thatsaw Pringle’s Interzone finally winning a

Hugo and Noon winning the John W.Campbell Award. Since then Jon Cour-tenay Grimwood and China Miévillehave both begun having novels pub-lished without a visible track record ofshort stories.

From its nadir in 1977 and 1978, Brit-ish science fiction has spent two decadesrebuilding itself and finally is beingtaken notice of again. It is worth quotingBrian Stableford here:

The writers [. . .] felt that science fic-tion had been labouring too longunder artificial constraints, heldback by the walls of the ‘pulp ghetto’and subjected to the unreasonablecontempt of literary critics. Theywere longing to break free, to carrythe cause of science fiction forwardto a position of honour and prestigethat it had been unjustly denied.They [had . . .] the conviction thatthe tide had turned, and that thebattle — although not yet won —was theirs for the taking. [. . . It]looked as if the last barriers to theprogress of the genre had been re-moved — and the one thing no onecould imagine was that new oneswould be raised against it (21).

This passage has much of the samerhetoric of the current generation of writ-ers considered to be part of the Boom.However, Stableford is talking about the

perspective of the New Wave writers in1970, looking forward with boundlessoptimism. By 1975 that optimism wasmisplaced, and there is no guarantee thatthe current Boom will continue indefi-nitely.

5. British British vs US British BoomOne thing that has become clear to me indiscussing the state of British science fic-tion at various locations on both sides ofthe Atlantic, is that there are two differentperceptions of the Boom in terms of themarket place. At a discussion panel at theICFA in 2002 I noted that two writers hadblazed a trail for best-selling science fic-tion and fantasy prior to the contempo-rary boom, Terry Pratchett from TheColour of Magic (1983) and Iain M. Banks.But Pratchett has been through a wholeseries of different American publishers,suggesting that he has not sold consis-tently, and Banks seems to be a name thathad not broken as much in the UnitedStates as it has in the UK. It almost feelsthat the leg-up apparently given to KenMacLeod by Banks in the UK has beenreversed in the United States; MacLeod’sFall Revolution Quartet may have beenpublished in a different order but it hasnow all been published, and first US edi-tions of the Engines of Light trilogy havefollowed swiftly upon the British. In Brit-ain MacLeod has been perceived as oneof a number of Marxist or left-wing writ-ers that also includes Gwyneth Jones,Adam Roberts, and Miéville, but in theUSA it is his libertarian interests thatseem to have caught attention.

It is likely that a large number of thenames I have listed in section 3 remainunpublished in the USA, but equallymany British writers have been able tosell in New York what has not sold inLondon. Ian McDonald, Manchester-born but based in Northern Ireland andfirst published by Extro in 1982, sold hisstory collection Empire Dreams (1988) andhis first novel Desolation Road (1988) toAmerican publishers, prior to any Britishpublication. Equally Ian R. MacLeod wasable to enter the US book market wellbefore the British one. His story‘Through’ was published in the July/August 1989 issue of Interzone, but hisfirst books were the collection Voyages byStarlight (1997), mostly collecting storiesfrom Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fan-tasy and Science Fiction, and the novel TheGreat Wheel (1997). It was not until Sum-mer 2003 that The Light Ages marked hisnovel debut in Britain.

There is clearly a complex interplaybetween the British and United Statesmarkets, with either side at variouspoints appearing to the other country todominate the genre. The perception fromBritish writers and readers during the1980s and early 1990s was that they could

Among the Britishwriters who carved out

their science fictionwriting careers in

Interzone were S. M. —later Stephen — Baxter,

Keith Brooke, EricBrown, Molly Brown,

Eugene Byrne, RichardCalder, Nicola Griffith,

Peter F. Hamilton,Simon Ings, GrahamJoyce, Paul McAuley,

Ian MacLeod, IanMcDonald, Kim

Newman, AlastairReynolds, and CharlesStross, leading to what

The Encyclopedia ofScience Fiction called‘a second new wave of

UK SF’.

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not sell their work in the US because theywere perceived as being too-British; thisironically was at a time when Americansteampunks such as Blaylock and Jetercould set novels in Victorian London.Not only did Gibson’s novels includenear-future British settings, but alsoseveral of them were first published inbook form in Britain. Bruce Sterling, thecyberpunk subgenre’s best polemicist,clearly saw British writers Ballard andJohn Brunner as forebears, and wrotecolumns for Interzone. It might even beargued that the downbeat endings ofNeuromancer (1984) and other cyberpunknovels owe something to British sensi-bilities. At a panel I chaired on Britishscience fiction in the 1980s and 1990s atthe 1999 Eastercon, a member of the audi-ence argued that, ‘we, from the Americanside of the Atlantic, look on Britain asbeing a hot house of cyberpunk’ (Butler,Brown and Billinger 13; see also Cobley).

6. Cool Britannia?Perhaps American eyes were also look-ing across the water because of the fussabout Cool Britannia.

The British New Wave seemedfocused on and drew imagery fromSwinging London, although many of thesuccessful bands and musicians hademanated from Liverpool. Perhaps bycoincidence, the Boom emerged during arenewed period of optimism about thecultural significance of Britain. This timethe musical powerhouse was Manchesterand there was a cross-fertilization of psy-chedelia in the forms of acid house andrave, as well as the guitar-based ladbands such as The Happy Mondays andThe Stone Roses of the Manchester/Mad-chester indie music scene in the late 1980sand early 1990s. Rivalries emerged be-tween the music scenes of Manchester,Sheffield, Hull, and Bristol, among otherlate industrial cities, and the ultra-hipCamden, London. The Mancunian bandOasis — centered on the Gallagher broth-ers — went head to head on chart successwith the southern art school mockneyBlur and came out on top. Oasis lookedback to the chords and tunes of TheBeatles and the Liverpool scene whereasBlur drew lyrically on predecessors suchas The Kinks. Both had a sense of English-ness about them, as did Pulp, but anEnglishness that was capable of beingread ironically. Their vast audienceswere being eyed by a Labour Party tryingto pull itself together after their defeat bythe grey man John Major of the Conser-vative party who on any rational levelwas surely unelectable.5

Jeff Noon’s position in Manchestersurely helped him in the mid-1990s, in aperiod when publishing houses outsideof London appeared to be thriving. Vurtcould have been plotted on an A to Z map

of Manchester: focused on the brokenglass and dog excrement surroundingthe tenements in Hulme and the MossSide crescents which had seen riots in the1980s, and had become the province ofthe squatter, the dealer, the student andthe infirm, to a soundtrack of poundingbass. Within a few years of the publica-tion of Vurt, urban renewal came to thearea and the crescents and tenementswere demolished to make way for pret-tier low-rise flats. Whether the battleagainst glass and dog excrement will bewon remains to be seen. The novel alsofeatured the club scene that had beendominated by the Hacienda in Manches-ter. Noon in time abandoned Manchesterfor Brighton, which increasingly becamethe music capital in terms of DJ cultureand a thriving club and gay scene. Healso temporarily abandoned sf after PixelJuice: Stories from the Avant Pulp (1998),although Falling Out of Cars (2002) saw areturn to the genre.

The sense of place in Noon was dupli-cated by other novelists who lived out-side London. Before Peter Hamiltonturned to his monumental Night’s Dawntrilogy (1996–99) he had set the QuantumMurder trilogy (1993–95) in a near-futureRutland — a county that had been disap-peared in the reorganization of local gov-ernment in 1974 and reappeared in afurther reorganization in 1997. NicolaGriffith’s Slow River (1995), written in theUnited States, recreated her previoushome of Hull and the landmarks, includ-ing the Polar Bear pub, of theAvenues/Spring Bank area of the city.Stephen Palmer’s Memory Seed (1996) dis-guised Anglesey and north-east Wales asa post-apocalyptic city and landscape.

Meanwhile there was the shared ex-perience of the final defeat of the much-hated Conservative government in thelandslide Labour victory of the 1997 Gen-eral Election. For weeks the phatic wasdominated by the question: ‘Were you upfor Portillo?’ — referring to the unseatingin the early hours of the morning by theopenly gay Labour candidate StephenTwigg of arch-Conservative MP, MichaelPortillo, widely assumed to be a closetedgay. The pleasure taken in the defeat ofspecific Conservatives blinded many tothe ironic possibilities inherent inLabour’s choice of ‘Things Can Only GetBetter’ as their victory anthem. After abrief early period of radicalism in theform of the introduction of a minimumwage (compromised as it was) and otherreforms, New Labour seemed to progressto putting Conservative-type policiesinto practice. Portillo, in the meantime,read Marcel Proust and seems to havereinvented himself as a compassionateConservative, more caring than and ap-parently to the left of the Blairite Twigg.New Labour quickly became a political

party more interested in big businessthan unions, and in being tougher thantheir Conservative predecessors.

Whilst some British sf writers mayhave been carried along by the publicityof Cool Britannia, and, with some excep-tions, the default position of contempo-rary British science fiction writers is onthe left, it is difficult to think of a Britishscience fiction writer sympathetic to theBlairite cause. Blair’s love affair with ce-lebrities, including Oasis and other popstars, must in part be Gwyneth Jones’sinspiration for her near-future fantasyBold as Love (2001) and its sequels, inwhich pop stars of a more sixties vintageshare power. China Miéville stood as aSocialist Alliance candidate inKensington and Chelsea and was hailedby the London Evening Standard (notknown for its leftist tendencies) as thesexiest man in British politics (Renton25).

7. EclipseNature abhors a vacuum. It seemed clear-est in the announcement of the novelsshortlisted for the Hugo Awards in May2001: A Storm of Swords by George R. R.Martin, Calculating God by Robert J. Saw-yer, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire byJ. K. Rowling, Midnight Robber by NaloHopkinson and The Sky Road by KenMacLeod. Martin was the only Americanwriter; the rest included two Canadiansand two British writers. The eventualwinner was J. K. Rowling — the first Brit-ish recipient of the award since Arthur C.Clarke in 1980, indeed only the third Brit-ish recipient after Clarke (who had alsowon in 1974) and Brunner in 1969.Generic American science fiction ap-peared to be in some kind of trouble.

Cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk stilldominated the 1990s sf scene in America,and a series of writers were being com-

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pared to both William Gibson andQuentin Tarantino. No new movementseems to have come along to replace it,and many of the big writers of the 1980sseem to have been diverted into sequelsto books by other writers and media tie-ins. Gibson is mapping a trajectory forthe mainstream, and Neal Stephenson’soutput is slowing. The philosophizingthat underlay Kim Stanley Robinson’sRed Mars (1992) expanded through therest of the trilogy, and dominated Antarc-tica (1997); what many had first perceivedas hard sf had become much more cere-bral and politicized. For whatever reasonthe genre seemed to losing its buzz.

Pages of magazines, pages in journals,slots at conferences still had to be filled,and so editors, critics and academicswere casting around for new writers tointerview or write about. At first thesmart money was on Australian sciencefiction, boosted by the 1999 MelbourneWorldcon, the anthologies DreamingDown Under (1998) and Centaurus: TheBest of Australian Science Fiction (1999)and the non-fiction The MUP Encyclo-paedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1998)and Strange Constellations: A History ofAustralian Science Fiction (1999). JaneenWebb, co-editor of Dreaming DownUnder, wrote that: ‘Whether we havesomehow arrived in the much discussednew Golden Age or are undergoing anentirely different occurrence remains tobe seen, but we are certainly experienc-ing one of those spikes in literary outputthat occur when conditions are right’(114). Greg Egan, Sean McMullen, andStephen Dedman were the three namesto watch. Instead the eclipse of Americangenre sf allowed British talent to shinethrough, marked by Charles N. Brown’sassertion in conversation that only Brit-ish writers were being interviewed forLocus.6

8. RemixTo some extent a genre is always parodicof itself. Just as parodies and pastichesdepend on the reproduction and recogni-tion of particular codes and conventions,so does writing within a given genre. Thecodes of genre science fiction, whilst theymay look back to Shelley, Poe, Verne, andWells, were largely formulated in Ameri-can pulp fiction magazines, within theperiod of the emergence of America fromthe isolationism of the 1920s to becomingone of the world superpowers in the af-termath of the Second World War. Oneman, with his wits, and his bare hands ifnecessary, can bring down an empire,and save the world. Except in short-livedmarketplaces that have existed withinBritain and the Commonwealth, there isa sense that British writers have had toparody American formulae to make theirway in the marketplace — during theperiod in which the British lost an em-pire.

Some authors have foregrounded thisparodic intent in their writings; IanMcDonald clearly drew on Ray Brad-bury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) forDesolation Road (1988), as well as ele-ments of Gabriel García Marquez, andHearts, Hands and Voices (1992) drew onworks by Geoff Ryman, most notably TheChild Garden (1989) and The UnconqueredCountry (1986). McDonald’s NorthernIreland-set Sacrifice of Fools (1996) mixesthe police procedural with the sexualpolitics of Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutian tril-ogy (1991–97), which in itself offered aresponse to Ursula Le Guin’s The LeftHand of Darkness (1969). McDonald’s re-mix aesthetic, which draws to some ex-tent on music culture of the 1980s to date,puts little store in originality, but more inthe skilful blending of the individual ele-ments. Adam Roberts, a self-acknow-ledged fan of McDonald, is the author offour novels to date, including Salt (2000),which owes debts to Dune (1965) and LeGuin, On (2001), which echoes Christo-pher Priest’s Inverted World (1974), andPolystom (2003), which echoes BobShaw’s Ragged Astronauts trilogy (1986–89), as well as having virtues of theirown.

But perhaps where British science fic-tion has become most systematicallyparodic and revisionary is in its revivalof the subgenre of space opera, whichhad been more or less relegated to thesidelines as contaminated by media sf —Star Wars, Star Trek, and so forth. Iain M.Banks’s Consider Phlebas had the sort ofgalaxy-spanning plot that we had per-haps thought was no longer possible. AsKen MacLeod writes in his introductionto the German edition: ‘Space opera —the colourful, violent, galaxy-spanningspace opera so many of us had read whenyounger, and which Brian Aldiss has

called “widescreen baroque”, was evi-dently back with a bang. And moreover,it was up-to-date, well-written, fast, andcool’ (MacLeod, ‘Phlebas’ 2). But thenovel, which introduced the left-of-cen-ter, post-scarcity, utopian empire knownas the Culture, is deceptive. The merce-nary hero, Bora Horza Gobuchal, is actu-ally fighting for the wrong side, againstthe Culture, but is brought in from thecold by the end of the book, if only in thename of a spaceship. Having establishedthe peaceful, utopian, game-playing ten-dencies of the Culture — usually viewedfrom the outside — Banks then increas-ingly undercuts this in his portrayals ofthe processes by which other civiliza-tions join the Culture. Sure, it is a utopiathat these civilizations join, but the diceare loaded so that it seems in these civili-zations’ interests that they do join — andin later volumes the Culture’s dirty tricksare more exposed. What begins as a left-wing, anti-imperialist utopia ends up inself-critique.

By then there was also Colin Green-land’s Take Back Plenty (1990), a caper thatfeatured Tabitha Jute and her spaceship,Alice, who owes a debt to McCaffery’sship who sang as well as to Lewis Carroll.Jute is persuaded to transport a troupe ofplayers from Plenty to Titan and iscaught up in intrigue and criminal deeds,among the canals of Mars and the steam-ing jungles of Venus, which are inspiredmore by Edgar Rice Burroughs than NewScientist or Nature. As Rachel Pollackwrote in her review: ‘the writer must playwith or work against what has gone be-fore’ (Pollack 102). Having won both theArthur C. Clarke and BSFA Awards forthis novel, Greenland eventually bowedto popular pressure and brought backJute in Seasons of Plenty (1995) and Motherof Plenty (1998). Unfortunately the audi-ence were less receptive this time round— or Greenland’s grafting of a trilogystructure on to a standalone novel failed.More successful was Harm’s Way (1993),

Iain M. Banks’sConsider Phlebas had

the sort ofgalaxy-spanning plotthat we had perhaps

thought was no longerpossible . . . what Brian

Aldiss has called“widescreen baroque”,was evidently back witha bang. And moreover,

it was up-to-date,well-written, fast, andcool’ (Ken MacLeod).

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a steampunk tale where ships sail thesolar winds around the system.

Space opera is also the starting pointfor Alastair Reynolds’s novels, beginningwith Revelation Space (2000). Dan Sylvesteis a tough archaeologist and scientist,risking the lives of his team in his explo-ration of an extinct civilization on thecolony world Resurgam. It is not longbefore his past and local politics catch upwith him, but it is clear that the previousspecies died out for a reason. It might bethat he will not have time to investigatethis as both an assassin with an anony-mous client and the crew of a spaceship,Nostalgia for Infinity, with its half-deadcaptain are on his trail — always assum-ing that whatever caused the extinctionof a space-faring species will not happenagain. As Paul Billinger notes in his re-view ‘the most sympathetic character is aprofessional killer’ (30), and no one isentirely who they seem: Sylveste is amodified clone of his lost father and hasvarious other copies of his father, and haslied about his experience with the revela-tion space of the title; the triumviratedeputizing on Nostalgia for Infinity havetheir own motives; the assassin, press-ganged by one of the triumvirate, is notletting on about her true profession. Asin Banks’s space opera, it is no longerpossible to identify heroes and villainswith any certainty.

9. The ‘Can’t Do’ SpiritIf the United States has been goingthrough a period of expanding influenceover the last century, with each newproblem just a challenge to be solved,then Britain is very much a country thatis declining, that can only see the prob-lem. There is a ‘can’t do’ spirit that in-fuses much of British society, largelyfrom our experience of declining publicservices (that seem strong acrossEurope). Britain is in a unique positionwith three different international struc-tures: we are the junior power in thespecial relationship with the UnitedStates, we are the often-despised begetter

of a Commonwealth of Nations (who de-light in defeating us at cricket), and weare the odd one out in the EuropeanUnion, resisting integration and clingingon to our pounds and ounces decadesafter we agreed to go metric in the 1960sand to our decimalized pounds (whilststill mourning shillings). There is some-thing in the British character that loves aloser — Captain Scott, who did not get tothe South Pole first, Eddie the Eagle, theworld’s worst ski jumper, and numerousothers. There are also the internal divi-sions as well — the distinct countries ofEngland, Wales, Scotland, and NorthernIreland, each with their own north–south, east–west or other divides. As afractured country yet to relocate its rôle,pessimism is the only course to take.

The fracturedness reflects the multi-cultural nature of Britain, with someattempt to represent the diversity of per-sonal identity. John Meaney, for exam-ple, attempts to imagine diversity withinalien species rather than seeing them allas other; there are nationalities, differentcultures, subgroups, factions, and soforth. That being said, Peter Kalu is prob-ably the only Black British science fictionwriter, and the list of Boom writers israther chappist — most of the femalewriters listed in section three are part ofthe children’s market. The male writersare at least attempting to portray femalecharacters, including a series of lesbianlead characters such as Greenland’sTabitha Jute, Malise Arnim in SimonIngs’s Hot Head (1992), and the centralcharacters of Geoff Ryman’s The ChildGarden. There is a nod towards Islam inseveral books, including Hot Head, and tothe new Europe in Ings’s Headlong (1999),Paul McAuley’s Fairyland (1995), andGwyneth Jones’s Kairos (1988/1995).

In Ings’ work there is a portrayal oflife after the cyberpunk future: after themachines have gone out of control andchips have been banned in Hot Head. InHeadlong, Christopher and Joanne Yalehave been made redundant, and theirchips have been removed. After theyboth begin to suffer from Epistemic Ap-petite Imbalance, Joanne dies and Chris-topher sets out to investigate, keepingone step ahead of European Unionagents. The novel, told in retrospect fromsomewhere in Leeds, is suffused with anostalgia for the posthuman. Technologyis not bad — you cannot live without it— but it is unlikely to make life any eas-ier.

Stephen Baxter’s alt.space storiesshow part of the tension between hopeand pessimism at work. He is clearlysorry that the Apollo moon missionsended and that human exploration didnot continue further into the solar sys-tem. In various short stories, as well asVoyage (1996) and Titan (1997), he creates

futures (and pasts) where the programcontinues, where humanity makes it toMars and even to Titan. If only for dra-matic reasons, these are hardly trium-phant missions; Baxter imagines a futurewhere more money went into space mis-sions but also where more disasters alsooccurred. His attitude seems ambivalent:‘though in some ways Voyage for me wasan exercise in wish-fulfillment, I found Icould no longer believe whole-heartedlythat throwing humans at Mars regardlesswould necessarily be a Good Thing’(Baxter, alt.space 19). From the stories asa whole a curious sense of nostalgiaemerges — for failures that never hap-pened, for lost opportunities for things togo wrong. In Titan there is an utterlyconvincing portrayal of the harshness ofspace, the dangers of exploration and pe-nultimately an almost Stapledoniansweep of a universe without humanity.Alas, for many of us, Baxter finds a happyending — which for me is more interest-ing for its failure than its success.

There’s a curious and not entirely con-vincing eucatastrophic closure to RogerLevy’s first novel, Reckless Sleep (2000),which might almost owe a debt to Brazil(Gilliam, 1985). The world is literally fall-ing apart, thanks to a series of nuclearexplosions on undersea faultlines; Lon-don is partially ruined and covered inash. There had been the hope of a colony,Dirangasept, but the colonists had beenattacked by unidentified alien inhabi-tants, and the Far Warriors who had beensent to operate remote control war robotshave been defeated. The Far Warriors,suffering from post-traumatic stress syn-drome, thanks to too much VR remotecontrol of the robots, are now more or lessblamed for the debacle. Veteran and poetJon Sciler gets a job testing a new VRenvironment at the same time that Chrye,a psych student studying the effects of

There is a ‘can’t do’spirit that infuses much

of British society . . .There is something inthe British characterthat loves a loser —

Captain Scott, who didnot get to the SouthPole first, Eddie theEagle, the world’s

worst ski jumper . . .

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using VR, starts to interview him for herproject. Sciler discovers that his fellowveterans, also VR testers, are being killedone by one.

This future is unremittingly grim, andthe outlook bleak. VR should be a greatnew hope for escape from Earth, butseems to be another chance for Armaged-don; indeed it might be infected by thetelepathic aliens unwittingly broughtback from Dirangasept by the Far Warri-ors. The novel even offers up the possi-bility that Dirangasept is itself purely asimulacrum, and that the aliens weresimply monsters from the id. VR is nosolution to real world problems. As SteveJeffery wrote in his review: ‘Levy’s debutis assured but tries perhaps too hard [. . .]to be too many things at once: sf thriller,fantasy, dystopia and romance’ (Jeffery28). However, this intergenrification istypical of the British Boom.

10. IronyThe key to British science fiction must bea sense of irony. There is something in theBritish psyche that sees things doubled,and refuses to let the addressee knowwhich version is meant. Politeness is akey sign of contempt, insults a sign thatyou have been taken into their heart.7

John Wyndham’s novels were longthought to be cosy catastrophes, but infact they are more bleak than Wynd-ham’s readers initially perceived(Wymer 1992). We simply misread himand missed the irony. Perhaps irony isparticularly prevalent in British sciencefiction: if we assume that the scope of thegenre has been shaped within a US mar-ket context, it has been influenced by awhole series of ideologies such as theAmerican Dream, life, liberty, and thepursuit of happiness, and has developeda range of narrative tropes and deviceswhich engage in, mediate with, or resistthese ideologies. Clearly a British writer

cannot unproblematicly ‘inhabit’ the USnational identity, but ends up using thetropes and devices despite the ideologi-cal mismatch. This is particularly true ofBaxter’s alt.space stories.

Paul Kincaid and Colin Greenland,talking about the other British writerswho emerged at the time of the BritishNew Wave, both identified a voice thatwas present in the works of KeithRoberts, D. G. Compton, Richard Cow-per, Michael Coney and ChristopherPriest, among others. Greenland identi-fied it as being ‘ironic [ . . .] It’s informedwith a sense of literary tradition, not sim-ply spinning out words and racking uppages. It feels the tensions and connota-tions of language, so it’s richer in history,and mood, and atmosphere, and theshades of character. Time and memoryare every bit as important as space andaction’ (Butler, Greenland and Kincaid23). That same voice seems still to be atwork in Boom writing, although the rela-tionship to the tradition has becomemore problematic. In a novel like JonCourtenay Grimwood’s neoAddix (1997)there is an acknowledgment of earliercyberpunk and its forebears with itsnaming of its protagonist Alex Gibson,and there is another (albeit pointless) tipof the hat to the closing line of Arthur C.Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’(1953).8

Boom science fiction should not betaken at face value. In the few happyendings something more sinister must betaken into account — characters mayhave achieved their desires but at a cost.In the bleak endings many ironies cometogether, including the consequences ofthe characters’ actions. But perhaps thebleakness itself needs to be ironized as apose, a nod to the depression of DouglasAdams’s Marvin the Paranoid Android,and before him Eeyore in A. A. Milne’sWinnie-the-Pooh (1926). Quite often —and this can be a problem as well as astrength — the resolutions do not resolveanything.

11. The MainstreamSince the actual readership of just sciencefiction in Britain is rather small, and newfans of science fiction seem more inter-ested in films, tv and comics than thewritten word, British science fiction isdependent on the mainstream. In a sensethere is a tradition of British mainstreamwriters being allowed their one genericdalliance — think Conrad and Ford’s TheInheritors (1902), Forster’s ‘The MachineStops’ (1909) and Orwell’s NineteenEighty-Four (1949). Sometimes it is lesshappy — E. P. Thompson’s overly longThe Sykaos Papers (1988), or P. D. James’sThe Children of the Moon (1992), whichcould not possibly be science fiction be-cause it was well written, was not about

Martians, or was about the real world.Martin Amis scores points for dealingwith the nuclear bomb in Einstein’s Mon-sters (1987) but loses them again forclaiming this is the first fiction about thebomb — and for his allegation in a docu-mentary that science fiction readers are abit like trainspotters. Ian McEwan, WillSelf, David Mitchell, and Louis deBernières have all used fantastical ele-ments in their works, to some success.This has some way to catch up on theater,where plays on quantum physics, prob-ability, chaos theory and so on by AlanAyckbourn, Tom Stoppard, and othershave been acceptable for years.

The mainstream media in Britain isbeginning to take science fiction moreseriously, although there is still a slightsneer in some presenters’ voices on BBCRadio 4. Cadigan, McAuley, Newman,Miéville, and others are increasingly be-ing called on to review films for the radio,but not as often as the mainstream writ-ers of their generation. The Independentand The Guardian both review science fic-tion frequently, even allowing the cover-age to spill over beyond the monthlyround-up of five or six novels into a five-hundred-word review. The Guardian notonly reported on Priest’s win of the Ar-thur C. Clarke Award, but gave himspace to discuss his inspiration for TheSeparation (2002). The Independent, TheGuardian, and The Times all carry obituar-ies when British science fiction writersdie.

Not all is rosy though. In 1983 theBritish Book Council compiled a list oftwenty young British writers whoseemed promising — including MartinAmis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie,and the already veteran ChristopherPriest. Two lists later and the broadsheetnewspapers wondered what had hap-pened to the 1983 generation — indeedwhere Christopher Priest was now (thisbeing symptomatic of the publicity hispublisher had lavished on his latestbook . . .). In 2003, China Miéville wasspecifically excluded from the list be-cause of his generic status (Jack 11). Thebarricades have been drawn back, butnot that far.

12. ‘[. . .] these moments are cyclical.We’re lucky enough to be in a time whensf is loud and proud and exciting. It won’tlast forever. It’s fun milking it while itlasts . . .’ (China Miéville in Butler,‘Beyond’ 7).

The key to Britishscience fiction must be

a sense of irony.

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13. An[drew]thropic PrincipleThe Boom exists because I am here toobserve it.

Perhaps I flatter myself. I do not wishto claim that I am single-handedly re-sponsible for the Boom, but I have beenin the right places a number of times, andhelped to provide a space for discourseabout the Boom, as well as adding myown voice. In 1995, the year of the Glas-gow Worldcon and various British Hugowins, I became co-features editor of Vec-tor, the critical journal of the BSFA firstpublished in 1958. Whilst Gary Dalkin,my co-editor, and I were more interestedin media than our predecessors (for me-dia, read film, tv, and some comics, notnecessarily sf),9 we both agreed that thefield was being destroyed by what MikeResnick was calling wookie books — tie-in books. We would rail against them atany opportunity — in editorials, in arti-cles, and in responses to letters of com-ment. At the same time, we took everyopportunity we could to promote inter-esting novels by British writers, in a sensewanting to put the British back into theBSFA. In the run up to the BSFA’s fortiethanniversary and the 200th issue of theirmagazine Vector in 1998, we held a pollto establish the most popular British sfnovels. The results were published in the201st issue; and at the following year’sEastercon I ran several panels on the his-tory of British science fiction to the thenpresent day discussing the results.10

A coincidence of connections ledMark Bould and myself to the launch ofChina Miéville’s Perdido Street Station(2000), Mark conducting an interview forVector with Miéville and an invitation toboth of us to hear him speak at Marxism2000 on the subject of Marxism and fan-tasy. In an editorial for Vector I com-mented on the Marxism 2000 event andadded: ‘With writers like Miéville,MacLeod, Meaney and many more, sf inBritain at the end of the century seems tobe revolutionary: clearly in a tradition,but still finding new ways to tell new(and old) stories. Could this be anotherGolden Age? Or am I being just too uto-pian?’ (Butler, ‘Revolution’ 3). By the endof June the following year critics such asGary Wolfe and John Clute and authorssuch as M. John Harrison were talking ofa Boom, leading to the guerrilla panel at2001: A Celebration of British Science Fic-tion.

Not that the feeling was unanimous.After a paper at that conference (on sci-ence in a number of British plays) Nicho-las Ruddick argued (without using theexact word) that current sf was banal andthat literary values were in decline; as Iwrote in an editorial: ‘If Miéville,MacLeod, Meaney, Grimwood and Rob-son had been in the room, let alone aslightly older generation of Baxter,

Greenland and Jones, then I would havebeen able to refute it thus’ (Butler, ‘Fore-sight’ 3).11 In noting the buzz about Brit-ish sf being at the cutting edge I stillsounded a warning, sceptical note:

[. . .] the image of Colin Welland atthe Oscars, shouting, ‘The Britishare coming!’ does loom rather largeat this point.

(And then a more science fic-tional image, of Kevin McCarthystopping cars, and screaming‘They’re coming! They’re com-ing!...’) (Butler, ‘Foresight’ 3).

By the time I wrote the following edi-torial, I had spent three weeks in Mel-bourne — where both Ash and PerdidoStreet Station were hot reads — and I hadbeen to the Hugo Awards Ceremonywhere Rowling won:

There’s a sense, which we’ve beentrumpeting for a couple of yearsnow, that we are in a boom time forBritish science fiction, in the lasteighteen months or so we’ve had acouple of novels which have beenrespected by gratifyingly largeaudiences on both sides of the At-lantic, and both seem to be makinginroads Down Under in Australia(Butler, ‘Hugos’ 3).

The Boom was off and running.In film, the British did not come, as

Goldcrest, the producers of Chariots ofFire, went belly-up after a series of poorchoices — such as editing out MarkBould’s performance from Revolution.Some British directors, actors, and writ-ers are enjoying Oscar success, butlargely in American films. Is the Boomdoomed? Entropy, after all, is a favoredmetaphor of British sf — and everythingmust pass. With so many writers active,can the market sustain them all? Howmany more will the American publisherstake on? Meanwhile Tor has set up aBritish imprint, mostly publishingAmerican authors, and this is likely tooffer the existing sf imprints — Gollancz,Headline, Earthlight, HarperCollinsVoy-ager, Penguin and Little, Brown — a runfor their money. As some of these areconnected to US companies, could theseface a US resurgence? Tor is piggy-back-ing off Pan Macmillan — home toMiéville, among others — so for howlong can the two remain distinct?Worried voices are already beginning tomutter. Paul Kincaid has noted in thepages of Science Fiction Studies that: ‘thepool of British publishers is growingsmaller, and looking at the current eco-nomic climate, I suspect that advanceswill be falling, if they haven’t fallen al-ready. [. . .] I do wonder whether we have

the infrastructure to support the renais-sance we seem to be engendering’ (Kin-caid, ‘Golden’ 531).

The first sign of this may have justarisen in July 2003. Under the watchfuleye of veteran sf editor John Jarrold (whohad published Banks, MacLeod, and oth-ers at Legend and Orbit), the Earthlightimprint of Simon and Schuster UK hadgrown to rival the position Granada/Panther/ Grafton/ HarperCollinsVoy-ager had held in the 1970s and 1980s.Earthlight republished the sf back cata-logue of Ray Bradbury among others,and new novels by Byrne, Calder,Cobley, Grimwood, Holdstock, McDon-ald, Whitbourn, and others. Jarrold de-cided to go freelance and was replaced byDarren Nash, who continued to maintainEarthlight’s prestige as HarperCollins-Voyager seemed to dwindle to myriadeditions of Tolkien and a handful of otherclassics in uniform, dark blue, editions.However, Simon and Schuster have de-cided to restructure, in the process clos-ing the Earthlight imprint and oustingNash. It might be that this marks a deathof sf as the list is to be absorbed intoSimon and Schuster’s Pocket Books im-print, and thus not necessarily distin-guished as science fiction. The mood,however, is more that the books will nolonger get the kind of specialist attentionthat Jarrold and Nash were able to give.It is too early yet to tell whether this is thebeginning of the end of the Boom.12

It is perhaps very British to expect itall to fail — but there is some part of usthat is forever Eeyore.

Notes1. The Whitbread Prize is a two-step

process, with individual awardsand juries for novel, first novel, non-fiction, poetry and children’s fiction,with the children’s fiction awardsometimes being announced at adifferent time of year. These win-ners are then judged together to gainan overall award.

2. For a critique of Pfeil’s position seeButler, ‘Modelling Sf’.

3. Among other spaces, the Boom wasdiscussed as a piece of guerrilla pro-gramming by Harrison, Miéville,and others at 2001: A Celebration ofBritish Science Fiction (28 June–1 July 2001) endorsed by the organ-izers (Farah Mendlesohn, AndySawyer, and myself), by John Clute,Brian Aldiss, Ellen Datlow, GaryWolfe, China Miéville, FarahMendlesohn, and myself at a panelat the 2002 ICFA, by Paul Kincaidand myself at The Goldfish Factor(the Science Fiction Founda-tion/British Science Fiction Asso-ciation joint AGM event) in April2003, and at the ICA in May 2003 in

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events organized by Miéville andHarrison. Gary S. Dalkin and myselfoften turned to the topic of the stateof British sf in our editorials for Vec-tor from 1995 to present. There haveno doubt been other moments. Tomany of these people — along withMark Bould and Istvan Csicsery-Ro-nay Jr., who patiently watched mescribble on the backs of envelopes —I clearly owe a debt.

4. [2004] But see section 13 and note 12.5. [2004] See Luckhurst for a longer

treatment of the context and projectof New Labour’s ‘New’ Britain.

6. This was over breakfast at ICFA2002. In 2002 there were six inter-views with British writers Miévilleand Siegel (March), Baxter (April),Joyce (May), McAuley (June), Gai-man (September), which clearlyshowed the period in Spring andSummer to be dominated by Britishwriters. However there were also sixinterviews with British writers in1995 (counting Pat Cadigan) and in1998.

7. This is not just an English phenome-non; there is also a divided con-sciousness at work in the Welsh,Northern Irish, and Scottish, eitheras writers from those countries aresubsumed into metropolitan, Lon-don life or as the apparently Englishclaim authenticity from ‘provincial’roots. For two examinations of aScottish dividedness see Middletonand Butler, ‘Strange Case’.

8. I am not making a nonsensical claimthat writers from Britain are ironicand writers from the USA are al-ways sincere — a list includingTwain, Bierce, Vonnegut, MichaelMoore, and the Coens would refutethis — but that the dominant modeof narrative voice in British sf isironic.

9. [2004] Despite this interest in media,there is a regrettable absence of anyreal consideration of comics ineither this article or the rest of theBritish Boom issue of SFS, as JohnNewsinger pointed out in the nextissue. I regret this absence and thatnone of the people we invited tocontribute (including John) coveredthe topic. I had drafted a section onmedia (predominately television),but dropped it because Mark Bouldwas covering the ground in his arti-cle (Bould, ‘Monster’). In the ab-sence of that article, let me reinstatethat deleted version of section 9:

There is a shared media back-ground to the Boom writers agedbetween thirty and fifty, whichhas informed their aesthetic. Oneof the earliest — this generation

being just too young for theQuatermas serials — are the vari-ous series for children by the ani-mators Oliver Postgate and PeterFirmin: the proto-fantasy/faux-Norse tales of Noggin the Nog andhis archenemy Nogbad the Bad,the uncanny tale of a stuffed catBagpuss (1974), but most impor-tantly the science fiction seriesThe Clangers (1969–1974), featur-ing a whole family of aliens whosounded like swannee whistlesand co-existed with a soapdragon. Despite the making ofonly a handful of episodes ofthese and other series, they re-main a strong presence in thepsyche of any British thirty tofifty something, creating a my-thology from the simplest of ani-mations.

Rather more sophisticated intechnique were the marionetteacted series of Gerry Anderson:Supercar (1961–1962) featuring acar that could fly or be a subma-rine, Fireball XL5 (1962–1963)with a space patrol, Stingray(1964–1965) in which various un-dersea menaces are met, Thun-derbirds (1965–1966) featuring aninternational rescue team andCaptain Scarlet and the Mysterons(1967–1968) in which the alienMysterons are trying to infiltrateEarth and Joe 90 (1968–1969)where a nine-year-old-boy isused as secret agent. The serieswere backed by a comic — vari-ously called TV Century 21 andTV21 — which featured bothstrips spinning off from charac-ters in the various series, and in-troducing characters from futureseries. Together it formed a sin-gle continuity for the range of theSupermarionation series.Stephen Baxter, an avid reader ofthe comic through the 1960s, haswritten: ‘it was an important andformative part of my life, and nodoubt of others’ (Baxter, ‘Adven-tures’ 8). The Anderson seriescontinue to gather viewers asthey are repeated to this day.

For a slightly older audiencethere were the two long-runningseries Doctor Who and BlakesSeven, the former beginning 23November 1963 in a Saturdayteatime slot on BBC1 and featur-ing an eccentric old man — ap-parently an alien — whotravelled through time and spacein a spaceship disguised as a Po-lice call box, rescuing people andsaving the day. When the initialactor in the rôle, William Hart-

nell, grew tired, the producerssimply had his ship rejuvenatehim into Patrick Troughton; intime he regenerated into a fur-ther six incarnations, most re-cently in a television movie.Whilst the character and the for-mat of the series would changefrom year to year or producer toproducer, some things remainedconstant — beyond the attractiveassistant ready to scream at thefirst sign of danger. Reason andrationality had priority overforce; the Doctor rarely fired agun and always tried to solve aproblem rather than calling forviolence. The production valueswere better than the budgetwould suggest, with gravel pitsand quarries across the southeast of England standing in foralien planets (or, in one episodewhen they did land in a quarry,for a quarry).

Blakes Seven (1978–1981) wascreated by Terry Nation who hadcreated the Daleks for DoctorWho, although some creditshould also be given to scripteditor Chris Boucher. The seriesbegan with Blake being shippedfor political reasons to a prisonplanet and his escape with a mot-ley band of prisoners. They lo-cate a ship, named the Liberator,and begin a series of attacks onthe evil Federation, personifiedby the shaven headed femaleServalan. Whereas Spock andMcCoy might banter in Star Trek,here heroic Blake, cynical Avonand cowardly Vila and the otherswould argue, fall out and evenplot against each other. It wasimpossible to tell who was a heroand who a villain, even down tothe apparent central characterBlake, written out at the end ofthe second series only to returnas a possible traitor in the blood-bath that ended the final series.Whilst Doctor Who had dabbledwith moral ambiguities, herethere was no moral certainty atall.

There are various other tele-vision series that are remem-bered with various kinds ofaffection — several incarnationsof The Tomorrow People (1974–1978), a partial adaptation of TheTripods (1984–1985), intended asa replacement for Doctor Who, aswell as occasional plays by NigelKneale, serials by Michael J. Birdand so on. Perhaps more impor-tant than any of this, though, isthe shared heritage of main-

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stream programming such asBlue Peter, Tiswas, shows featur-ing northern comedians, MontyPython’s Flying Circus, The Good-ies (especially the episodes ‘Kit-ten Kong’ and one wherechildren’s tv characters take-over the world), Fawlty Towers,and Blackadder among many oth-ers which have added to the un-conscious linguistic resources ofthe writers. In Vurt the charac-ters hallucinate a typical Satur-day night’s viewing from the1980s.

To shift from influences to the influ-enced, it is clear that the heritage ofBritish television sf and fantasy hashad a influence on recent television— a remake of Randall and Hopkirk(Deceased), the darkly surreal Leagueof Gentleman, and even in the detailsof the British Queer as Folk (one of thecentral characters’ Doctor Who fixa-tion was inspired by creator RussellT. Davies’ own taste, indeed Davieshas penned some science fiction se-rials for children [2004: and wastasked with reviving Doctor Who]).In addition, British writers have hada huge influence in other media, no-tably comics where Alan Moore andNeil Gaiman, among others, havehelped to invigorate the mode.[2004: The weekly comic 2,000 AD(1977–) has had an incalculable in-fluence upon British sf, most obvi-ously through the Judge Dreddstrip. Artists included Brian Bol-land, who went onto to work for DC,including Batman: The Killing Joke(1988) and Dave Gibbons, who alsodrew for Doctor Who Weekly anddrew Watchmen (1986–87), and wentto work for DC. Writer Alan Moore,who had collaborated with Gibbonson 2,000 AD, Doctor Who, and Watch-men went on to work for Marvel, DCand alone, producing such seminalworks as Swamp Thing, V for Ven-detta, Batman: The Killing Joke, FromHell, and The League of ExtraordinaryGentlemen. Other significant figuresinclude Grant Morrison, Bryan Tal-bot, John Wagner, and DaveMcKean. Neil Gaiman wrote TheSandman and Miracle Man, as well ascollaborating with Terry Pratchetton Good Omens (1990) and J. MichaelStraczynski on Babylon 5.] Finally,the British film industry remainsimmersed in heritage and comediespenned by Richard Curtis, althoughBond has at least one foot in the sfcamp. However recent years haveseen low budget sf and horror filmssuch as Reign of Fire, Dog Soldiers and28 Days Later. Clive Barker has long

been active in Hollywood; Neil Gai-man is likely to join him.

10. Each voter was given five voteswhich would be weighted accord-ing to their ranking. The top ten was9th Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye(1975) and Brunner, The Sheep LookUp (1972), 8th Roberts, Pavane(1968), 7th Wyndham, The MidwichCuckoos (157) and Tolkien, Lord of theRings (1954–1955), 5th Wyndham,The Day of the Triffids (1951), 4th Bax-ter, The Time Ships (1993), 3rd Brun-ner, Stand On Zanzibar (1968), 2ndClarke, Childhood’s End (1953) and1st Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949). The most popular writer wasArthur C. Clarke. See Butler, ‘Best’.

11. Contrast this statement a year laterfrom Miéville on the Boom: ‘Gener-ally, good to excellent “literary”quality’ (Butler, ‘Beyond Consola-tion’ 7).

12. [2004] A success story I neglected todiscuss was Peter Crowther’s seriesof novellas and story collections un-der the PS Publishing imprint,which included works by Baxter,Barclay, Campbell, Chadbourn,Gallagher, Gentle, Lovegrove,MacLeod, McAuley, McDonald,Miéville, Newman, Roberts, Ry-man, Smith, Tuttle, and others.Crowther has also edited the firstissue of a quarterly magazine, Post-Scripts, dated Spring 2004. Also in2004, David Pringle came to the endof his tenure as editor of Interzone.The schedule had become erratic,and it looks as if the economics offiction magazines had finally caughtup; however the baton has beenpassed to TTA, which is revampingthe magazine. Pringle’s importancewithin British science fiction, andthe emergence of the Boom, isunique – he is not the only begetterof it, but he did more than most toallow it to come forward.

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Pioneer Award Acceptance Speech

Andrew M. Butler

[The SET editors tracked down AndrewButler’s article because it won the mostrecent Pioneer Award for an essay writ-ten about science fiction. Also, Andrewis one of our favourite SF critics. Theaward was made formally at the 2004conference of the Science Fiction Re-search Association held at Skokie, Illi-nois. Andrew faced the problem oftravelling several thousand kilometresto receive an award from a committeechairman (Paul Kincaid) who lived notfar from him in Britain. Hence, hisacceptance speech was delivered byMaureen Kincaid Speller — friend ofAndrew, partner of Paul Kincaid, andfounding editor of Acnestis — at theSFRA 2004 conference.]

I’d like to begin with two apologies: firstI am not Andrew Butler. Nor for thatmatter am I Andrew M. Butler.

Secondly, I, which is to say Andrewand/or Andrew M. Butler, channelledfor now via Maureen Kincaid Speller, amsorry not to be with you at this confer-ence, because I would very much haveliked to receive this award in person – inpart because it might be the very firstthing I’ve won.

Actually, I might be lying. I have thisdim memory of a school sports day,where I led the field in the egg and spoonrace.

Then there was the occasion when Icame second in the Science Fiction Foun-dation raffle, and won a pile of signedNeil Gaiman comic books. First placewent to John Clute who, if I recall cor-rectly, won a Happy Meal at a majorburger chain. I think I got the better deal.

But I did plan to be with you today. Itappealed to my sense of humour thatevening when I received an email aboutthe award from Paul Kincaid, the chair ofthe Pioneer judges, who lives sometwenty minutes away from me, givingme news that meant we both needed tofly a few thousand miles and across sev-eral time zones to shake each other’shands. I did wonder whether it would bemore convenient for Paul and I simply toinvite all of you lot across to visit us. Asit is, you are being addressed by someoneeven closer to Paul, and that appeals evenmore.

At first, I confess, I presumed thatPaul’s email was a joke, or that he’d got

the wrong person, and I had to turn mycomputer back on to double check whatthe message had said. You see, ever sinceI’ve been writing I’ve written under thepseudonym of Andrew M. Butler, and soperhaps the judges confused me withsomebody else, such as, say, AndrewButler.

(Actually, there is an Andrew Butler,who edits or has edited one of the TolkienSociety magazines in Britain, although tothe best of my knowledge I’ve never beenconfused with him. It may, of course, bethat he’s been confused with me, whichrather suggests I should offer a thirdapology, to him.)

I am also confused with Andy Saw-yer. I have to be careful what I say here,because I have nothing against AndySawyer, but it’s just that Andy Sawyerdoes such a good job of being Andy Saw-yer, that I can’t begin to compete. I canremember a Liverpool PhD student sug-gesting a drink after work, which was apleasant idea, but inconvenient as I livedtwo hundred miles away – whereasAndy was rather closer – and then therea letter of complaint from a reviewerwhose name had been misspelt in Foun-dation and who, by the way, had enjoyedtalking to me at a conference (to which Ihadn’t actually been). I presume that wasAndy Sawyer again at that conference.

I have to say, and this is partly why Iinsist on my middle initial and partly aresult of it, that I live in constant fear ofbeing exposed as the charlatan I so clearlyam. This is not some inverted modesty onmy part or fishing for compliments, but Iam genuinely surprised by the fact thatanyone wishes to read what I write. TheM. is a comfort blanket. The shy, retiring,introverted Andrew Butler can sit at hiscomputer, drafting a script that AndrewM. Butler can read out – but AndrewButler could never say those things. Infact Andrew Butler would be reluctant tobe with you because he’d be embar-rassed. My fear is that if I lose my M., thenyou’ll never hear from me again.

(I realise, of course, that this maymean some concerted campaign to leaveout my M. from each appearance of mypseudonym in future, precisely in thehope that I disappear.)

Neither of us can be with you for twofurther reasons – I am right in the middleof hitting a marking deadline and this

really couldn’t be avoided. Then there ismy health — I registered with a doctorand had a medical, which revealed myblood pressure to be so high that it waspractically off the scale. In fact they hadto send for a bigger device to measure itwith. Given the blood was so pressur-ised, it was then rather odd that they thenhad to extract any to take to test, whensurely it should spurt out at the tiniestprick. I’m now on beta-blockers and thepressure’s coming down.

There are, of course, people I shouldthank in my absence — although perhapsthey’d rather not in case they get theblame. Obviously thanks go to the peoplewho judged the award and to thosepeople who have organised this year’sSFRA conference; as a former co-organ-iser of an SFRA conference I have someidea of what you are going through rightnow.

Thank you to Istvan Csicsery-RonayJr, whose suggestion that Mark Bouldand I should do a special issue of ScienceFiction Studies on the British Boom welearnt of by reading the journal. I jotteddown my ideas about the boom on theback on an envelope and Istvan noddedsagely, before taking it away with him,presumably to ensure that I’d never writethe article.

Thanks to my old comrade, MarkBould, who generously indulged myneuroses as they developed at the insti-tution where we worked together forthree and a half years, and whose article(Mark Bould, ‘What Kind of Monster AreYou? Situating the Boom’, Science FictionStudies 30.3 (November 2003), pp. 394–417] was written in tandem with my own.I suspect we both ended up stealing fromeach others’ drafts, and it must have beenthose bits that swung the award for me.

I’ve learnt so much from so many ofyou, and I’m constantly struck by theexcellence of the science fiction academiccommunity, as scholars and as friends.Thank you all.

And now thinking back, I can remem-ber more details of that egg and spoonrace. It would have been 1975 or 1976,and it was actually my birthday. Think ofme being five or six and in short trousers.I presume I’d already demonstrated myprowess by coming a distant last in everyother race else I’d entered, but for somereason I went in for the egg and spoon

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race in which you had to balance an egg-sized ball on a spoon over fifty yards,without the aid of glue or your thumb. Iturned out to be good at this, and in factwas leading the field. The crowd werecheering me on as everyone else wasdropping their eggs all over the place. Iwas a good dozen yards ahead of who-ever was in second place, if I could only

keep my nerve and my balance . . . Fiveyards. Four yards . . . Three . . . Two . . .And then I looked back to see how farahead I was. Disaster! I dropped the egg.By the time I’d scooped it up, everyoneelse had crossed the line. Later that day Ihad to retire to bed with sun stroke orheat exhaustion.

There’s a moral there, I suspect.

So this is the first thing I’ve ever won,and I’m flattered and flabbergasted andhonoured beyond words to receive it,even in absentia. If you do find yourselfin Canterbury (especially if you pickedup a bottle of Laphroig in duty-free), dodrop in so I can thank you in person.

Thank you.

Dissenting opinion

If this goes on:Butler, Science Fiction Studies, Interzoneand the ‘British Boom’

Paul Brazier

[The following section was first pub-lished as ‘If This Goes On’, Interzone193, Spring 2004, pp. 59–60; also re-viewed were Gwyneth Jones’ MidnightLamp, Mary Gentle’s 1610 and Eliza-beth Hand’s Bibliomancy.] I don’t know much about Paul Brazier,but I do know that he has been involvedin the publication of David Pringle’sInterzone for some years, and, sinceDavid has relinquished editorship ofthe magazine, has announced his ownsubscriber site, quercus.com, whichwill feature high-quality new short sci-ence fiction.]

We don’t often review academic journalshere [in Interzone] because they ploughtheir own furrow and it is parallel andrather distant from our focus on fiction.However, Science Fiction Studies No 91($US12, SF-TH Inc. at DePauw Univer-sity) purports to be a first attempt toexamine ‘The British Boom’. I place thattitle in ironic quotation marks because Idisagree that any such thing exists andfind the essays offered here unfocused,unconvincing and extremely partial.

The issue begins with an interview byJoan Gordon of China Miéville and assuch it is an interesting piece of work.However, it quickly becomes plain thatthe editors of this magazine see Miévilleas somehow embodying or representingthe British Boom, whereas the books hehas published are no more than some ofthe more recent representatives of a solidtrend in British publishing that has beengrowing for the past 20 years.

I would expect a critical investigationsuch as this purports to be to attempt toexamine the evidence, all of it, and drawconclusions based on it. Instead of this,we get a hotch-potch of assertions thatselect their evidence and ignore largetranches of what has happened since1984.

Following the Miéville interview,there is a farrago entitled ‘Thirteen Waysof Looking at the British Boom’ whereinAndrew M. Butler, having apparentlymade notes towards an essay, then findsthat he can’t make a coherent essay out ofthose notes but doesn’t want to waste allthat work so publishes the notes un-digested.

The point apparently being made isthat, unlike the New Wave, there is noone movement that has given rise to this‘boom’; there are just an extraordinarilydiverse number of different people whohave all made it happen. This collectionof undigested nuggets concludes withButler quoting largely from his ownwork elsewhere, which only reveals howself-referential the whole process hasbeen.

Next up, Mark Bould makes a bravestab at linking the ‘Boom’ to the DoctorWho milieu and media SF in general. Thisis an interesting point of view. There iscertainly a stream of continuity that can’tbe ignored here and I would have likedto see more. However, instead, it is fol-lowed by Roger Luckhurst trying toclaim that the ‘boom’ is somehow a prod-uct of the Labour Government’s culturalgovernance. He makes an interesting

case, but the current ‘boom’ featuresmostly writers who were already activewhen Labour came to power, so whilethe government may have encouraged apre-existing trend, it seems ridiculous toclaim that they are responsible for it,however in favour of them you might be.

Matt Hills now offers an intriguinglook at counterfictions in Kim Newman’swork. Again, there is a lot to think abouthere, but precious little to do with theboom, and also precious little to do withscience fiction. I like Kim Newman and Ithink he is a fine writer, but I have readfew of his books because I often don’tunderstand the post-modern cultural ref-erences in them. I would have put himdown as a horror writer but Hills claimshis rewritings of Robert Louis Steven-son’s Jekyll and Hyde story mean he isreinventing Gothic SF as a counterfactualor, to use the more familiar term, a paral-lel world. All very interesting but not myidea of science fiction, and certainly notcentral to ‘the boom.’

Joan Gordon returns with a long essayon China Miéville. Were they really soshort of material that they had to featurethe same author examined by the samecritic twice? Perhaps so, because the nextpiece is the text of a largely autobio-graphical talk given by Stephen Baxterabout baby boomers. It is fascinating initself but adds little to the debate about‘the British Boom.’

Finally, Andy Butler and Mark Bouldoffer a selection of comments from otherleading lights in British science fiction, akind of letter column before the fact, and

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most of the penetrating comments thatappear in this publication appear here.The section closes with a long list of writ-ings that might or might not be consid-ered part of the boom.

And I threw my hands up in despair.It is mentioned several times that thedefinition of science fiction that ScienceFiction Studies uses has been revampedrecently to allow more discussion of re-lated works such as fantasy and horror.However, this reading list and the pre-vious list of authors who might bedeemed to be part of ‘the boom’ seemsdetermined to rope in every singleauthor who has published anything evenvaguely fantastic from the past twentyyears and, by excluding nothing, effec-tively fails to draw any kind of boundaryaround its subject area.

Its sins of inclusion, however, aremassively overwhelmed by its sins ofomission. To fail to examine the role ofPeter F. Hamilton in starting the snow-ball rolling is to ignore the core power-house of the current success of sciencefiction in Britain. Equally, to overlookIain M. Banks is to dismiss an extra-ordinary talent who has succeeded inbridging the gulf between mainstreamand science fiction and insisted that eachside take the other seriously. And to passover Alasdair Reynolds is miss the primeexample of what they are talking about,

not a boom, but the emergence into no-tice of a long-established steady growth,a simple resurgence in science fiction inBritain.

But their sins are more heinous eventhan that. Much is made throughout thispublication of the fragmentary nature ofwhat they are trying to discuss. Of courseit’s fragmentary: they’ve pulled in every-thing they can find that might be labelledfantastic in any way in order to justifytalking about works of fantasy as beingat the centre of their subject where theyshould have been talking about works ofscience fiction.

They got closest to understandingwhat they were doing when they dis-cussed cultural continuity. The editors,the people who buy books that then sell,they are the ones who have made thishappen and they are the products andmanifestations of that cultural continu-ity. There are far too many to name themall, but certain names spring immedi-ately to mind — Malcolm Edwards, JohnJarrold, Jane Johnson, Peter Lavery,Cathy Gale, who originally encouragedPeter F. Hamilton and, of course, ourown David Pringle — have been there,soldiering on, largely unacknowledgedoutside the trade, but doing the work thathas made modern British science fictionthe success it is.

For many, John W. Campbell editing

Astounding/Analog characterises theGolden Age of science fiction, whileMichael Moorcock and New Worlds doesthe same for the New Wave. But this newmovement, this so-called British Boom, isnot magazine-focused at all. Of course,Interzone has launched the careers ofmany novelists from Stephen Baxter,Richard Calder, and Greg Egan to, lat-terly, Liz Williams, and it is difficult toassess accurately how much influencethe fact that there was a home-grownprofessional magazine market has had —certainly, several of the new writers thatI have introduced here are now produc-ing and submitting novels to publishersand I have high hopes for them — butmost of this new resurgence is novel-based, and it is sad to have to acknow-ledge that perhaps the magazine as theguiding light of a generation of novelistshas had its day.

Nevertheless, to ignore the work ofthe editors in the trade today is quitesimply to ignore the reason there is any-thing that could be termed a boom. Thisissue of Science Fiction Studies adds no-thing to our understanding of where itcame from or where it is going. If youwant real insight, look rather to the his-torical record of Interzone to give yousome notion of what might have causedtoday’s boom. David Pringle should beproud.

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Thank you, everybodyfor raising the money through the BBB (Bring Bruce Bayside) Fund to send me (Bruce Gillespie)to Corflu in February 2005.

The Fund has been subscribed beyond the wildest dreams of me or the administrators, but westill have available copies for sale of

The Incompleat Bruce GillespieA selection of Bruce Gillespie’s fanzine writing

$10 from Bill Wright, Unit 4, 1 Park Street, St Kilda West VIC 3182or see me at Corflu or Potlatch in San Francisco in February.