Another Glimpse into a Dystopian Future

... people kept asking me what happened two minutes after Oryx and Crake ended. I returned to this world because ... I didn’t know. So in order to find out what happened, then I had to go back and write another book.

The novel I'm most looking forward to reading this year is undoubtedly Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood which is a sister volume to the distopian Oryx and Crake with some overlapping characters. Sinclair McKay interviews the author in The Telegraph and gives us a peep into the concerns of the new book :

Here, through the eyes of two female characters, Toby and Ren, we learn of the days that lead up to a horrible pandemic that ravages humanity – forget coughs and sneezes, here people melt. There is enviro-religion, overweening science, hideous sex clubs, nightmare food, grotesque cosmetic surgery. And there are also bees. ... Behind the novel is fierce environmental concern, as well as a subtler inquiry into what it is that makes us human; central to the story is a sect called God’s Gardeners who read the Bible as a profoundly green text (for instance, convincingly reinterpreting what Genesis says about man’s relationship with the animal kingdom).

Atwood's portrayal of the near future in the earlier book, was for me, extremely chilling and thoughts go back to it all the time. I think I shall have to pre-order this, so I get it the moment it hits the shops.

Atwood will be doing staged readings around the world to promote the book and raise money for environmental charities. (But, *sigh*, she isn't coming here.) And she's started a blog to keep us up to date.

Arthur C Clarke Goes Back to the Stars

Sci-fi legend, the visionary Arthur C. Clarke has died at his home in Sri Lanka aged 90 after experiencing breathing problems. He had been battling post-polio syndrome for half a lifetime.

Clarke was the author of more than 100 books, including 33 novels, the most famous of which is 2001: A Space Odyssey; as well as short-story collections and non-fiction.

Gerald Jonas pens his obituary in the New York Times. Worth reading too on his life and work is this Wikipedia entry.

I will link to other tributes to Clarke as they come online.

Novel of Future Without Oil Wins Rhys Llewllyn

This year's John Llewellyn Rhys prize has been won by Sarah Hall for her novel The Carhullan Army, described by Richard Lea in the Guardian as:

... a tough portrait of life in a near-future Britain after the oil runs out. ... The novel presents itself as the statement of a detained woman prisoner, and follows a narrator, known only as "Sister", as she escapes her regimented life of tinned food and rationed electricity to join a separatist female commune on the Cumbrian moors.

Chair of the judges, Suzi Feay said of the book:

Sarah Hall's fierce, uncomfortable story of a radical dissident group holed up in the far north after the total breakdown of society seemed to all the judges to be the book that tackled the most urgent and alarming questions of today ... The quality of The Carhullan Army was simply unignorable. We need writers with Hall's humanity and insight.

Katy Guest interviewing the author in the Independent back in August, reckons the book :

... contains elements of The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, Lord of the Flies... But it is entirely of the moment ... If the introduction makes it sound like a satire on current government policy, it is not far wrong: this is a political book. But it is also part-thriller, part-science fiction, and a love story, of sorts.

Sounds like a real must-read!

And talking of dystopian future scenarios, well worth reading is Margaret Atwood's essay on those two classics of speculative fiction, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984, which appeared in the Guardian a week or two back.

The End of The World News

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a novel that forces us to imagine the totally unthinkable: What would it be like to be one of the last human beings in a world in which every plant, and tree and creature were long dead? An unnamed boy and his father travel through an American landscape destroyed by nuclear war, all their worldly possessions contained in a shopping cart. The journey itself generates the plot as the pair struggle to survive from one day to the next, always on the brink of starvation.

From my review of The Road in StarMag's Readsmonthly supplement. (Read the rest here.)

This book is (honestly) still haunting my dreams, and I can't get it out of my waking head either.

What scares me most is that this is an all too possible scenario particularly given the rampant stupidity of world leaders, including those of the "we-must-climb-on the-nuclear-bandwagon" persuasion so we can stick our fingers up at x, y or z. Idiots!

My fingers want to rant on and on here, but I'm deleting as fast as I'm typing because otherwise you would get a nice bit of Sharon polemic about the utter immorality of any country possessing a nuclear arsenal, and how a general yawn yawn apathy seems to grown around any public discussion of nuclear disarmament, an issue we all seemed to care much more about in the 60's and '70's. (Or is that my imagination?) But unless we pull ourselves back from this brink, this could be a picture of the future.

In The Road it's McCormac's portrait of the total deadness of everything that terrifies and that actually holds my attention more than the story of the man and his son (whom I honestly don't care about probably as much as I should).

I found I was quite affected when after reading the book for a while, I glanced up to see the world around me still exploding with life and colour. Sunshine. Birds. Trees. Flowers.

The novel is a quick read - it took me just a couple of days in odd moments. For the most part it's easy going and well written, though as I say in the review, McCormac's style did get up my nose at times, especially when he comes over all pseudo biblical. I found some of his excesses extremely annoying and just wished that the self-conscious author would get out of the way of the story he was telling!

Would I recommend it?: Yes, it's powerfully affecting and deeply thought provoking and it will change the way you see the world.

Oprah did well to pick it as her book of the month, although her interview with McCormac seems to have bombed. New York Entertainment slammed Oprah for her utterly inane questions, wasting "one of the five most culturally significant interviews she'll ever conduct" while McCormac appeared monumentally ill at ease.

If you still want to watch the recording, you can find it on the Oprah Book Club website, but will need to sign up first.