The Guardian's Blog, page 139

Do spoilers for books actually improve them?

Reviewers have been carefully eliding Karen Joy Fowler's latest plot, but she doesn't seem to care and nor, apparently, do we

The launch of the latest novel from Karen Joy Fowler caused some angst on the Guardian books desk. Given that the identity of one of two central "characters" is not revealed until page 77, how much should the reviews give away? Barbara Kingsolver gave advance notice of the problem last year, prefacing her New York Times review with an old-fashioned spoiler alert: "To experience this novel exactly as the author intended, a reader should avoid the flap copy and everything else written about it. Including this review."

She didn't mention the picture used to illustrate the review, which the spoiler-sensitive can't help but see as they consider whether or not to read on. On the books website we went both ways, using a generic photograph to illustrate Lucy Scholes's review (from the Observer) and a – ahem! spoiler ahead – differently generic picture for Liz Jensen's review (from Guardian Review). Both reviewers either hinted at or explicitly discussed the big reveal.

It was with these quandaries in mind that I turned on Radio 4's Front Row that evening – to hear Karen Joy Fowler herself not just spoiling her own plot, but setting light to it and jumping up and down on it.

In doing so, she delivered to Radio 4 listeners a novel that I would argue was substantively different to the one I had read, sight unseen, a week earlier – even if only up to page 77. But does it matter?

On Twitter, opinion was divided, with blogger @johnself tweeting: "The marketing materials, so flagrantly spoiling it, made me toss it on the charity pile," while thriller writer SophiehannahCB1 was ambivalent: "Depends how important it is as a 'ta-da' surprise in the story. Answer could be yes or no, IMHO. Not much help, I know!" @TimRelf and @TheLamplands, meanwhile, felt it was a question of proportion. "Reckon if it's less than a quarter of the way into the book it's fine to reveal," said @TimRelf.

Just as interesting is whether an author has the right to spoil his or her own work? I'd say no, in the belief that as soon as a book is published, it belongs to its readers. But @Isabelwriter felt it was an author's call, while @KirstyWark tweeted: "The publishers revealed anyway," a point taken up by @TinyCamels: "Reading is a cultural activity. A novel (&its marketing) is part of the discussion, not just its object."

There's nothing new about this discussion. Blogger EC Ambrose on Clarkesworldmagazine made an elegant case for a heroic spoiling tradition, as exemplified in the prologue to JRR Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he sets out the whole story.

"What is he [Tolkien] up to? First of all, he wants to present the narrative as an epistolary text with a historical context. He intended his Middle Earth to be an invented history or mythology for England, and this academic and contextual approach enhances that impression. You don't read history for plot, so the spoilers reinforce the notion that this is part of the historical record with which the reader may already be familiar."

"I suspect," Ambrose continued, "in part, that Tolkien wanted to reassure his readers – just as the grandfather in The Princess Bride tells his grandson that the princess 'doesn't get eaten by the eels at this time'."

A more scientific approach was taken by American researchers in 2011, as reported in an Association for Psychological Science blog. The University of California team doctored 12 short stories by a top line-up of writers, including John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver, to test whether spoilers actually made any difference.

They tested three types of stories: ironic-twist, mystery and literary. Each was presented in three different forms – as originally written, with a prefatory spoiler paragraph, and with that same spoiler paragraph incorporated into the story as though it were a part of it.

Their conclusion: though there were some differences in response, readers in all three categories preferred the spoiled versions to the unspoiled ones.

Why? "Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing," said one of the researchers, Nicholas Christenfeld. How's that for telling us?

I'll be bringing my copy of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves to our first #guardiancoffee Bookswap tomorrow. So if you're in the vicinity of London's Bethnal Green Road at 1pm, do drop in and let me know your thoughts. Bring your own book to swap. It's all free. There will be spoilers. But perhaps it doesn't matter after all.

Literary criticismFictionClaire Armitstead
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Vladimir Putin's many faces, in fiction

Authors are busy working the Russian president into novels, and were doing so well before he became leader

He may be "the Chosen One", or Stalin's ghost, or perhaps the ghost is his chief adviser. A grey wolf, a dolphin, or a lizard. A bridegroom found for Mother Russia by Father Christmas. A Zeus-like figure who can turn himself into an amorous crane. A Kremlin Clinton whom a Russian version of Monica Lewinsky attempts to seduce.

After almost 15 years ruling Russia, either as president or prime minster, Vladimir Putin has been portrayed in fiction with a striking imaginative freedom, by admirers and critics, Russian and western writers alike. While his background as an agent has intrigued spy writers, his carefully cultivated image as bare-chested action man and horse-riding, bird-rescuing nature-lover has given encouragement to others who weave him into fiction influenced by fairytales, fables or magic realism.

In British and American writing, Putin notably appears in Henry Porter's Brandenburg (as a KGB man in 1980s East Germany) and is barely disguised in Charles Cumming's The Trinity Six as president Sergei Platonov, who, in trying to prevent the identity of a "sixth man" British traitor emerging, is also desperate to protect his own secrets from his years as an agent.

Others have preferred to keep him in the background as a sinister presiding presence. In John le Carré's Our Kind of Traitor, about the defection of Russian oligarch and "No 1 money launderer" Dima, Putin is clearly responsible for the climate in which the protagonist has flourished but remains invisible. Martin Cruz Smith's recent novels have portrayed a lawless "wild east" Moscow dominated by oligarchs and mafiosi, but suggests Putin is too powerful to name, alluding to him only as "the judo master" (and implicitly as Stalin's ghost, sighted in the city's Metro system in Three Stations).

Russian treatments, in contrast, tend to be idiosyncratic, often surreal. In Dmitry Bykov's The G-spot, Putin is a husband for Russia selected by Grandfather Frost (Santa Claus), who after their marriage – ie, his winning the presidency – finds her G-spot, so she doesn't miss the freedom he's stolen. Maxim Kononenko specialises in fake online stories about Putin, aka the Chosen One, such as the idea that he takes advice from not only Stalin's ghost but also a tiny Martian in his head.

Victor Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf – about a romance between a callgirl/fox and a spy/wolf – was taken to be an allegory about Russia and Putin, or Pelevin and Putin, or both. An opera called Monica in the Kremlin posited a CIA attempt to honey-trap premier "Krutin". Only one western offering so far has been similarly facetious: Bobbie Ann Mason and Meg Pokrass's flash fiction Leda and the Crane Daddy, in which Putin comes to America on a hang-glider, with an entourage of cranes, and descends to seduce Leda, a bodybuilder.

A sense of the magical or uncanny clings to the president, starting with his remarkable foreshadowing long before he came to the Kremlin in Vladimir Voinovich's 1986 novel Moscow 2024, which conjures a future "shrunken, post-Soviet Russia run by a former KGB spy who had been stationed in Germany". Foretold, too, was the current Ukraine crisis, in Mikhail Yuriev's 2006 speculative novel Third Empire, which looks back from 2054 to the reign of "Vladimir II the Restorer", who responds to a revolution in western Ukraine, and rebellion against the new regime in the Russian-speaking east, by inviting the south and east to join Russia. A stand‑off with Nato ensues.

Those familiar with the late Tom Clancy's prophetic gifts will not be surprised to learn that he anticipated the crisis, too. In Command Authority, published posthumously in December, Russia retrieves its cold war status as No 1 villain nation in the Clancyverse under ex-KGB president Valeri Volodin. Intent on reasserting control over states formerly part of Russia's empire, Volodin provokes a crisis in first Estonia, and then (as also happens in one of Clancy's Ghost Recon computer games) a bigger one in Ukraine.

FictionJohn le CarréVladimir PutinJohn Dugdale
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The underrated books whose reputation you want raised

It's Carter Beats the Devil for me; but which are the titles you always tell people they simply must get into?

We've all got one: that one book we adore, that we force on countless friends and relatives because we can't believe more people haven't read it. For me, it's Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold. I first read it years ago – it came out in 2001 – and I totally adore this story of the magician Charles Carter, which opens on 3 August 1923, the morning after the death of President Harding, who took part in Carter's act shortly before he died.

"Because the coroner's office could not explain exactly how Harding had died, and rumours were already starting, the men from Hearst wanted quite desperately to confirm what happened in the finale, when Carter beat the Devil," Gold writes. "That afternoon, a reporter disguised himself as a delivery man and interrupted Carter's close-up practice; the magician's more sardonic tendencies, unfortunately, came out. 'At the time the president met his maker, I was in a straightjacket, upside over a steaming pit of carbonic acid. In response to your as-yet-unasked query, yes, I do have an alibi.'"

It is wonderful; Peter Preston calls it "a book – a first novel, no less – to blow you away. It seeks to stun and amaze and deceive and, always, to entertain; and it seldom misses a trick in 600 pulsating pages."

Anyway – that's my underrated book. And you all should read it, if you haven't. I'm telling you about it because Entertainment Weekly has asked a handful of authors – Stephen King, George RR Martin, etc – for their own choices of underrated titles, and I always rather like seeing what I might be missing out on.

King goes for The Double by George Pelecanos, Headhunters by Jo Nesbo (he calls it "hilarious and creepy too"), and, intriguingly, Germinal by Émile Zola, "a terrific novel of a labor strike, as fresh now as it was a hundred years ago", he says.

GRRM highlights the Accursed Kings series by Maurice Druon – "All the good stuff that's in my books, minus the fantasy … but it actually happened" – and Jack Vance's wonderful fantasy novels. I love Vance too; Martin tells us that "his Dying Earth stories are classics of the genre, and by rights should be as well-known and widely–read as Tolkien and Howard".

Indeed. How can you not be tempted by his far future Earth, "a dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In the place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth, evil distilled by time … Earth is dying and in its twilight."  

John Green, meanwhile, plumps on EW for titles including A Swift Pure Cry by the late Siobhan Dowd, Kindred by Octavia Butler and This Bloody Mary is the Last Thing I Own by Jonathan Rendall.

I've never read Butler, and I've been meaning to for ages, so I think I'm going to take his advice and go for Kindred. Unless you've got your own underrated masterpieces you want to tell us about? Please do share … and perhaps we can spread the word just a little more widely about them.

FictionGeorge RR MartinStephen KingJo NesbøEmile ZolaAlison Flood
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How true should historical fiction be?

From Hilary Mantel to Andrew Miller to Philippa Gregory, historical fiction is enjoying a boom. But novelists are storytellers, not history teachers, argues Stephanie Merritt

• Hilary Mantel on dealing with history in fiction

Does historical fiction have a duty to be factually accurate? It's a question I've found myself discussing a lot lately, most recently on BBC Radio 4's Today programme with Sarah Churchwell, who claimed that some historical novelists use "poetic licence" as an excuse for sloppy or minimal research. I had a conversation on the same theme the week before at the Independent Bath Literature festival with fellow novelist Sarah Dunant, who argued forcefully that authors have a responsibility to not present readers with deliberately false information about a historical character or period, and to make clear how much they have invented.

It's certainly true that historical fiction is enjoying a boom at the moment, from heavyweight prizewinners such as Hilary Mantel and Andrew Miller to more populist series from authors including Philippa Gregory, or historical crime by the likes of CJ Sansom, Jed Rubenfeld or my own alter ego, SJ Parris. It's also the case that for many readers, a historical novel might be their point of entry or perhaps their only real window into a particular period. Shouldn't authors therefore take care not to spread an "incorrect" version of what actually happened?

Well, no, in my view, although I do agree with Churchwell on the paramount importance of meticulous research. But novelists are not history teachers. It's not our job to educate people, and if we start using words like "duty" and "responsibility" about historical fiction – or any fiction – we're in danger of leaching all the vigour out of it with a sense of worthiness. A novelist has no real duty to anything except the story he or she is creating, the characters who inhabit it and whatever view of the world he or she is offering with the novel's ending. But if you are going to play fast and loose with historical fact for the sake of a good story, you'd better have done your research thoroughly if you want readers to take you seriously; only then will you have the authority to depart from those facts.

I have no problem with the idea of an author reinventing Abraham Lincoln as a vampire hunter, for example, as long as the fantasy is grounded in a knowledge of his biography and the book is well-written. At least it's obvious to readers that it's made up. Far more irritating to me are films such as Becoming Jane, which seemed so taken with the idea of turning Jane Austen into one of her own romantic heroines that it brushed aside even the most basic understanding of Austen's life and circumstances.

I've had a reader take me to task – rightly – over an incorrect detail of clothing worn by the hero of my books, the 16th-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, even while they seemed quite happy to accept the much more flagrant invention of turning him into a spy who solves murders. Among my favourite novels as a teenager were Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee and Hawksmoor, historical novels that shade into magic and fantasy, but do so from a solid foundation of knowledge of the period. I may not have learned "accurate" history from those books, but I acquired a love for the atmosphere of the past through the imagination of a great storyteller.

"Historical fact" is an ambiguous term. We can point to certain events taking place on certain dates – though the further back you go, the more even the dates are open to doubt – but we often don't know what was said off the record, or how the principal players behaved when the chroniclers looked away. These undocumented areas often provide the most private, human moments, away from the public stage, and the blank spaces they leave are irresistible to a novelist. Even "straight" biographers and historians are not above a bit of imaginative colouring-in if it brings the story to life.

The growing popularity of narrative non-fiction, together with the penchant for dramatising key scenes in TV history documentaries, are a further reminder that stories and characters engage our imaginations beyond dates, treaties and troop movements – though in the best history and biography, you'd hope to find both.

The words "based on" and "author's note" are essential to the historical novelist's toolkit. By making clear that you're writing fiction, you claim the freedom to speculate, to stray beyond what is known, and so breathe new life into long-dead characters. Any attempt to recreate the past requires a leap of imagination. If a bit of poetic licence in historical fiction helps to keep people's interest in the past alive, so much the better.

• Treachery by SJ Parris is published by HarperCollins

FictionHilary MantelStephanie Merritt
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Read yourself to sleep … if you dare

Literature has a long relationship with sleep, whether too much or too little, but recent novels take insomnia into the realms of terror

Sleep is the final frontier. Everyone does it, no one really understands it, and writers love to speculate about just what happens when we drift off … And what might occur if, for some reason, we suddenly couldn't.

Literature abounds with examples of sleep as a way of cheating death or extending life, from Endymion of Greek myth and Keats's poem, granted eternal sleep and deathlessness by his lover the moon goddess, to Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle, who sleeps in the Catskill Mountains for 20 years, to science fiction's suspended animation, which allows space travellers to sleep for the hundreds of years it would take to traverse vast interstellar distances.

Take, for example, AE Van Vogt's Far Centaurus, in which a spaceship crew are frozen to keep them alive across the trackless wastes of space only to find (spoilers ahead if you haven't read this 70-year-old short story) that they've been out for the count so long that humanity has developed faster-than-light technology and there's an established Earth colony waiting for them when they finally sputter up to their destination.

Once we venture beyond the wall of sleep, as HP Lovecraft would have it, technology and cosmic punchlines give way to fantasy and horror. Opening the 1919 tale "Beyond The Wall of Sleep" with an epigram from Shakespeare's great snoozer Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("I have an exposition of sleep come upon me"), Lovecraft writes: "I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong."

Neil Gaiman, of course, built a career on the exploration of the dream world with his comic magnum opus Sandman, recently resurgent, in which the pale Lord Morpheus ruled over the ever-shifting realm the Dreaming. Mortal dreamers appear briefly there during their sleeping hours in classic nightmare scenarios, running trouserless along endless corridors or serving up dishes at dinner parties thrown by Morpheus (they put their appearances in the Dreaming down to over-active imaginations). Almost a century ago, Windsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland strip began in the New York Herald: gorgeously drawn comics of a little dreamer's surreal adventures, always sharply concluded with Nemo awaking in his bed, sometimes falling from it. Nemo is surely a close cousin of Wynken, Blynken and Nod from Eugene Field's 1889 poem, three children taking to the dream-seas in a wooden shoe to fish among the stars.

Sleep isn't always a portal to a secondary fantasy world; sometimes opening the gate allows unknown entities access to the waking world. A recent example of this is FR Tallis's The Sleep Room, in which mentally ill patients are kept under, their perpetual slumber creating gateways for supernatural presences who lurk in the unknown dreamworld to pass through to reality.

Not all literary examinations of sleep are fantastical. Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep is an exploration of what happens when we have too much sleep, and not enough. Dreams dribble into reality and the long hours of insomnia tick inexorably on.

While children resist sleep, having to be ushered up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire where a pre-Gaiman Sandman waits to sprinkle dust into their eyes and hasten them to Little Nemo-esque adventures in the land of Nod, adults feel they never have enough sleep. And mass insomnia has been the subject of a clutch of recent books that really do give a new meaning to night terrors.

Mention must be made of Stephen King's 1994 novel Insomnia, an odd tale by even his standards, in which a man is suddenly struck sleepless and begins to see lab-coated gremlins in a strange plot that ties it into King's Dark Tower series. But it is mass insomnia that has caught the imagination recently, perhaps beginning with Charlie Huston's Sleepless in 2010, a noir-ish SF thriller in which a BSE-type prion causes utter sleeplessness in 10% of the population, leading to chaos and martial law in the States.

Insomnia could well be the new zombie apocalypse, certainly if the two most recent novels in this vein are to be believed. Nod by Adrian Barnes, published by small West Yorkshire imprint Bluemoose early last year, found its way on to the Arthur C Clarke shortlist. Set in Vancouver, it posits an unexplained disaster, in which the vast majority of the world's population simply stop sleeping. Writer Paul is one of the very few who can still sleep, and finds himself at risk as the sleepless descend rapidly into madness and society collapses. Barnes explores the apocalypse on a localised scale as one of Paul's acquaintances, a homeless man called Charles, creates a community of exhausted insomniacs in Vancouver. Initially the mood is almost jolly, with echoes of GK Chesterton's The Naploeon of Notting Hill, but it quickly degenerates into a dark and nightmarish cult bent on the bloody murder of children who still hold the power of sleep.

Cut so much from the same dream-cloth that you might wonder if the two authors shared the same cheeseboard before bed one night is Kenneth Calhoun's Black Moon, published in the UK by Hogarth this month. Again, a never-explained bout of mass-sleeplessness affects the world, which once more swiftly spirals into lawlessness and the breakdown of society. Calhoun adds a grim touch to his insomnia epidemic: the sleepless are driven into fits of homicidal rage by the very presence of a sleeper, and the novel is a heart-stopping quest to reach a west coast military base where a rumoured cure is being developed, all the while avoiding the shambling, violent insomniacs desperate for sleep.

It's not a new idea, of course – witness Anton Chekhov's "Sleepy", in which a young sleep-deprived nurse is driven to strangle the baby in her charge – but these two books in particular are chilling simply because they are so close to home. If you've ever suffered from insomnia or even said how "wiped out" or "zombified" you feel after not enough sleep, you'll understand just how the world depends on our nightly rituals to continue.

Early in Nod, Adrian Barnes' narrator Paul says: "In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn't that fact noted more often? When we doze off each night there's never the slightest guarantee that we'll wake the next morning."

In sleep we surrender to the blackness, while prolonged wakefulness is the road to madness and damnation. If you can get to sleep tonight … sweet dreams.

Science fictionFictionSleepDavid Barnett
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Beginning of the end of the neoliberal approach to development

A decade on, Reclaiming Development remains a key critique. In this extract, the authors argue that the economic consensus began to collapse in the east Asian financial crisis of 1997-98

We should take note of what we see as the beginning of the end of the neoliberal approach to development. The process of discrediting that development model begins in the aftermath of the east Asian financial crisis of 1997–98.

At the time there appeared to be nothing new in the nature of the east Asian crisis or in the crisis response. But, in fact, the east Asian crisis marked the gradual beginning of the end of the neoliberal consensus in the development community.

The severe constraints on policy space that followed the east Asian crisis created momentum behind a new vision – that developing countries had to put in place new strategies and institutions to prevent a repeat of the events of the late 1990s.

Policymakers in a number of Asian countries and in other successful developing countries sought to insulate themselves from the hardships and humiliations suffered by east Asian policymakers at the hands of the IMF. Indeed, as a consequence of the crisis, the IMF suffered a loss of purpose, standing and relevance.

In the early 2000s, demand for the institution's resources was at a historic low. In 2005, just six countries had standby arrangements with the fund, the lowest number since 1975. From 2003 to 2007, the fund's loan portfolio shrank dramatically: from $105bn (£63bn) to less than $10bn.

The fund's loan portfolio contracted even further after the loans associated with the east Asian crisis were repaid, as those countries that could afford to do so deliberately turned away from the institution. This trend radically curtailed the geography of the IMF's influence.

In this context, the IMF began to soften its traditional opposition to policies that regulate the international movement of capital (ie policies called "capital controls"). At the same time, the World Bank also began to show signs of grudging change in its traditional opposition to industrial policy.

In the first instance, the current crisis appears to have been good to the IMF. It has rescued the institution from the irrelevance that followed the east Asian crisis by re-establishing its central place as first responder to financial crisis.

But the restoration of the IMF was associated with important change. For the first time in IMF history, the institution issued its own bonds, and this provided the vehicle for unprecedented developing-country financial support for the institution. At the 2009 G20 meeting, several developing countries (namely, China, Brazil, Russia, South Korea and India) committed $90bn to the fund.

And as the eurozone crisis unfolded, the IMF's managing director, Christine Lagarde, called on developing countries to step forward with a second tranche of commitments. The new developing-country funding commitments were announced in June 2012 when the leaders of the Brics countries (namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) met informally on the eve of the G20 leaders' summit.

China committed $43bn; Brazil, Russia and India each committed $10bn; while South Africa pledged $2bn. These new commitments reflect the economic power and autonomy of these rapidly growing economies. Indeed, as they have begun to contribute substantial funds to the IMF, developing countries have also become more outspoken in their demands for governance reform within the institution.

So far, these demands have resulted in very modest agreements to change voting weights at the institution (and even these have not yet been ratified by the US). But we cannot help but conclude that IMF governance reform is now firmly on the agenda. Equally important, the current crisis has also marked a substantial curtailment in the geography of the institution's influence in the global south.

Those developing countries that have been able to maintain their autonomy during the crisis have used the resulting policy space to pursue a variety of counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies. These include inter alia programmes to ensure access to affordable credit to domestic firms; the pursuit of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies and capital controls.

At the same time, developing countries have expanded existing regional, sub-regional, bilateral and national financial institutions and arrangements and created new ones. It is now clear that the east Asian crisis and the current crisis have created the conditions for new patterns of resource accumulation, a growing diversity of financial architectures across the global south, and the beginnings of important shifts in power in the governance of the global economy.

It is notable that even recent reports of institutions like the World Bank have acknowledged the trend towards "economic multipolarity".

Just as the Asian crisis laid the groundwork for institutional developments that have deepened only in the current crisis, so do we expect the current crisis to catalyse further innovation along the lines already in place, and in directions not yet imagined, when the next period of instability emerges.

• This is an extract from Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel's Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual (republished by Zed Books, 2014). Ha-Joon Chang will be speaking alongside Ellie Mae O'Hagan and Duncan Green at the Free Word Centre, on Wednesday 19 March at 7pm.

The future of developmentHa-Joon Chang
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Philip K Dick's Ubik: a masterpiece of malleability

Incoherence and unease are the lifeblood of a novel that seems to squirm away the moment you think you've got a grip on it

The time for squeamishness about spoilers is over. Let's get down to the details of Philip K Dick's Ubik.

The book is largely told from the viewpoint of Joe Chip, who works for an agency of "anti-psis" that stops telepaths invading other people's privacy. This "prudence organisation" is run by a man called Runciter with the assistance of his wife, who has died physically but is kept in a state of "half-life" in a "cold-pac" specialised "moratorium" where Runciter is able to communicate with her.

Most of the Runciter agency's energy is dedicated to fighting a rival organisation of telepaths, run by Ray Hollis, that uses its powers to carry out corporate espionage and cause trouble. It looks as though they are about to have a grand showdown when Runciter takes Joe Chip and the top operatives in his organisation to the moon, where he has been offered a big, well-paying job taking on telepaths. This work has been arranged by Stanton Mick, a man with a nose like "the rubber bulb on a new Delhi taxi horn, soft and squeezable. And loud. The loudest nose, he thought, that I have ever seen." As well as looking like a sound, Stanton Mick turns out to be a trap laid by Hollis. He isn't a man at all, but a "self-destruct humanoid bomb". He blows up …

At which point, I can hand the narrative baton over to Runciter himself. Late on in the book, he states boldly:

Here's what happened. We got lured to Luna. We let Pat Conley come with us, a woman we didn't know, a talent we didn't understand – which possibly even Hollis didn't understand. An ability somehow connected with time reversion; not strictly speaking, the ability to travel through time … for instance, she can't go into the past either; what she does, as near as I can comprehend it, is start a counter-process that uncovers the prior stages inherent in configurations of matter.

This explanation about Conley shows why time has been going backwards for Chip – why he has, apparently, landed in 1939. It's all Pat. And it must be her who is causing Joe's fellow anti-psis to die suddenly, by turning incredibly old and drying up. Of course, this being a Philip K Dick novel, there's more than one possibility about this time-slippage. As Reading Group contributor Craig Hughes puts it, "the much more radical notion of previous structures existing in the sub-strata of reality and emanating forward". But I think Runciter's interpretation could accommodate that, too. It's still Pat, only operating in a different way.

Even so, Runciter hasn't explained everything. He hasn't, for instance, accounted for the fact that Joe saw Runciter die in the bomb explosion on the moon. It makes no sense that Runciter should be communicating with him in this way – and even less sense that messages from Runciter keep cropping up on TV, on signs, inside cigarette packets on store shelves.

Luckily, there is an alternative thesis. This one is provided by the novelist Stanislaw Lem. He says it was actually Chip who almost died in the explosion on the moon:

According to Ubik, people who, like Runciter's wife, have spent years in cold sleep are well aware of the fact. It is another matter with those who, like Joe Chip, have come close to meeting with a violent end and have regained consciousness imagining that they have escaped death, whereas in fact they are resting in a moratorium. In the book, it must be admitted, this is an unclear point, which is however masked by another dilemma: for, if the world of the frozen person's experiences is a purely subjective one, then any intervention in that world from outside must be for him a phenomenon which upsets the normal course of things. So if someone communicates with the frozen one, as Runciter does with Chip, this contact is accompanied in Chip's experiences by uncanny and startling phenomena.

So, it's actually Runciter who lived and is trying to communicate with Joe? Lem goes on (and on):

But, to go a step further, is not contact also possible between two frozen individuals? Might not one of these people dream that he is alive and well and that from his accustomed world he is communicating with the other one – that only the other person succumbed to the unfortunate mishap? This too is possible. And, finally, is it possible to imagine a wholly infallible technology? There can be no such thing. Hence certain perturbations may affect the subjective world of the frozen sleeper, to whom it will then seem that his environment is going mad – perhaps that in it even time is falling to pieces! Interpreting the events presented in this fashion, we come to the conclusion that all the principal characters of the story were killed by the bomb on the moon, and consequently all of them had to be placed in the moratorium and from this point on the book recounts only their visions and illusions. In a realistic novel (but this is a contradictio in adiecto) this version would correspond to a narrative which, after coming to the demise of the hero, would go on to describe his life after death. The realistic novel cannot describe this life, since the principle of realism rules out such descriptions. If, however, we assume a technology which makes possible the "half-life" of the dead, nothing prevents the author from remaining faithful to his characters and following them with his narrative – into the depths of their icy dream, which is henceforward the only form of life open to them.

I'm sorry for the length of that quote – but it's a fantastic summary of how events work in the book. Or at least, it would be, if it actually worked. As Lem himself points out, there's a major flaw in this explanation, too. If everyone died, who put them all in cold storage and brought them back from the moon?

You can see that I'm now in trouble.

I also realise that I've expended 1,000 words without even mentioning Ubik, the substance that, true to its derivation from the Latin "ubique", is found everywhere in the book. Ubik appears most often in the form of an aerosol spray; it seems to counter time-regression and save the lives of those to whom it is applied. It could be taken as a divine symbol. It could be a more straightforward phallic symbol, as theorbys points out. It could be what enables Runciter to manifest in Joe's world. It could also be some kind of anti-psychedelic, the thing that will bring Joe back to sobriety and reality.

I especially like that last idea. Remember how we learned early on that Joe had spent the night getting "pizzled on papapot"? Could it be that the entire novel is Joe's exhausted, paranoid, drugged-up delusion? Maybe he never got out of his apartment after his argument with the door. Maybe all the confusion is just inside his head?

The appeal of that last theory is that you could use it, like Ubik, to clear up nearly all the incidents in the book. It's just a shame that this house of cards is blown apart by that wonderful final chapter, which is told from Runciter's perspective, and notes his alarm when Chip's face starts appearing on his money …

At which point, I give up. If anyone has a coherent summary that wraps up all the conflict in the novel, I'd love to hear it, but I suspect the task is impossible. Not, I should stress, through any fault on the author's part. This is a book that gives real meaning to the cliche "defies explanation".

Like reality – what we see as reality, anyway – Ubik doesn't make much coherent sense. The unease, the difficulty, the contradictions are partly the point. It's all about the realisation that things aren't as they seem – that everything you thought you knew is wrong. As reading group contributor Mexican2 puts it:

That moment when the symptom emerges, the first hint that all's not well, that the individual is constructing some harmonious whole to cover up the chaos … Ubik has these moments spread throughout like gems. The individual never becomes separate from the world because the individual never comes to any negotiated relationship with what the world is: something always disrupts that, whether it's the writing on the wall, or the money in your pocket.

Mexican2 went on to say.

With Philip K Dick there isn't really a wrong that can be counterbalanced by leading to a right: you don't, at the end of Ubik, think this is how it really "is", I now know. Phil replaces a binary right and wrong altogether with a single status that is – for want of a better word – squishy.

For want of a better word, I'd say "squishy" is ideal. You can't get a firm grip on Ubik. Try and squeeze it, and it moves. The more you look at it, the more it changes shape. I'm amazed Philip K Dick managed to keep it still long enough to get it on the page at all.

Philip K DickScience fictionFiction
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When and where are George RR Martin's Game of Thrones novels set?

To the casual reader they're another cod 'olden times' yarn, but the history of high fantasy suggests other intriguing possibilities

In 2010 I got a call from an actor friend asking if I'd heard of a book called A Game of Thrones, as he was auditioning for the upcoming TV show and wanted advice "on the look". I told him that I had indeed read the novel, and that it was basically a reimagining of the Wars of the Roses in a Tolkienesque fantasy world.

"Olden times then?" James asked.

"Yes, olden times," I agreed.

James grew a beard, didn't wash his hair for a week and got the job.

But while it's true that George RR Martin was heavily influenced by the age of chivalry, the Wars of the Roses and JRR Tolkien (that's where the RR in his name comes from), the Song of Ice and Fire series also has a different, more interesting provenance, one that could suggest the Game of Thrones universe is located not in the past at all, but in the future.

Building on the work of George Macdonald, William Morris and Edward Plunkett, what became known as high fantasy was more or less invented by JRR Tolkien. Tolkien's Middle-earth is a reimagined prehistoric Europe with languages based on old Norse, old Welsh and old Irish, but that's about the only similarity to the real old Europe. Tolkien's version of Europe (or Eurasia) exists on a planet in a parallel universe where (according to The Silmarillion) the sun went around the Earth and the world was originally flat. This is not the history of our planet Earth, but an alternative mythological history of a planet with a passing resemblance to our own.

High fantasy as a genre exploded in the United States in the 1960s after the paperback publication of Lord of the Rings, but followers in Tolkien's tradition were not remotely consistent (thank goodness) as to where and when their books were actually taking place. Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth; sometimes a parallel Earth; or quite often they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location. A neat trick by Julian May in her Saga of the Pliocene Exiles was to use time travel, setting her series before humans (or even great apes) had evolved. The Conan books of Robert E Howard also took place in a rather less carefully reimagined prehistoric Europe. My favourite device of all is Stephen R Donaldson's in the Thomas Covenant series, where the reader (and protagonist) can't be sure whether the strange magical universe exists only inside the hero's own head.

The vast majority of these novels had swords, horses, kings, blacksmiths and inhabitants speaking "the common tongue", but where was it all happening? Apart from the extraordinary cartography in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, the early maps of these fantasy realms weren't exactly brilliant: West Land cropped up quite often, as did the Great South Forest, the Long Road, the Wide Sea …

But a different approach to fantasy writing had already been developed by the prolific science fiction author Jack Vance. Vance had no time for faux-medievalism and suggested instead that dragons, swords, magic, different races of men and so on would all actually be possible on an Earth millions of years hence, when the continents had changed shape, technology had failed and human and animal evolution had continued along its merry way.

The apocalyptic future has, of course, been a trope in Western literature since biblical times, but it was the vision of a far future in HG Wells's The Time Machine that inspired Vance. Vance set many stories on his forbidding Dying Earth, and a host of other science fiction and fantasy writers followed suit. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, set in an entropic, bleak, run-down, used-up future where the sun itself is about to sputter out, is probably the best exemplar of this genre. On Wolfe's wonderfully grim Earth, a professional torturer walks the land seeking what we're all seeking: meaning, redemption, somewhere to put our oversized broadsword and a bed for the night.

I am an admirer, too, of the almost entirely forgotten Road to Corlay series by Richard Cowper, set in a post-apocalyptic, drowned, pastoral England thousands of years from now. This gentle little series was slammed at the time as boring, but has influenced the likes of Isobelle Carmody and Colin Meloy.

The Dungeons and Dragons universe also largely takes place on a future Dying Earth (my favourite module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, being the giveaway here). Of course, many of the fantasy novelists who began writing in the 1980s and 90s were childhood D&D players – George RR Martin among them. Martin was also a friend of Gene Wolfe, and such a fan of the late Jack Vance that he edited a tribute volume of stories explicitly set in Vance's world.

It seems to me, then, that it makes more sense to regard Game of Thrones as taking place not in some canned version of our medieval past but in the far future when the continents have shifted and some humans have evolved extraordinary physical and mental abilities which, to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, are indistinguishable from magic.

All but the most basic technology has been forgotten (A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jnr is the book to read here), so battles are fought between humans with swords and shields. Dragons have evolved or been genetically engineered from lizards and the more useful animals such as cows and horses are still around. As the sun expands, Earth's orbit becomes more eccentric and massive variations in climate are to be expected, resulting in stretched-out summers and long, deadly winters.

Michael Moorcock has famously criticised the Tolkien school of fantasy writing as depoliticised, war-glorifying, silly, illogical "Epic Pooh". While this accusation won't bother the casual reader, who can still happily regard A Song of Ice and Fire as a cod "olden times" fantasy, more thoughtful readers could argue that the books' provenance is a lot richer and deeper than that.

George RR MartinJRR TolkienFantasyFictionTelevisionGame of ThronesAdrian McKinty
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Guardian readers

#Twitterfiction festival 2014: what you are and are not missing

The second Twitter fiction festival is in full swing, but does the social media website's limit of 140 characters inspire good writing?

Alexander McCall-Smith, Anne Boleyn's dog and God himself are taking part in this year's Twitter Fiction Festival, which is running over four days until March 16.

Authors, poets, humorists and novices have been selected to write 140-character stories and tweet them out with the hashtag #twitterfiction. Regular Twitter users are encouraged to join in with their own stories.

The entries for the second Twitter festival have included a wider range of storytelling than the first, held in 2012, with photography and videos, crowd-sourced ideas and multiple characters enriching the mix. But fewer big-name authors are involved in this year's event, which is sponsored by the Association of American Publishers, Penguin Random House and Twitter itself, and the festival has skewed noticeably towards the US since 2012.

Scottish novelist Alexander McCall Smith, Australian Graeme Simsion and American Anthony Marra were among those selected to take part by a panel of judges from the publishing industry. The relative lack of celebrity tweeters has opened up room for the tweeting punters (twunters?) to leave their own mark on the Festival.

For those daunted in the face of unbridled creativity, the instant story generator puts together phrases and sentences to make tiny stories for you to tweet out as your own. "Angelica Huston made a wish on a Mac n Cheese and the rest was history" was my first randomly generated story. I would definitely read that book. Publishers, take note.

Elsewhere, the Twitter-fest feels like a slightly messy experiment. Twitter does not seem a conducive platform for reading a story, when the narrative appears in reverse with newest tweet first.

The 140-character limit is a prison made of jelly, as Alexander McCall-Smith demonstrated - publishing one 5,000-character story in 40 tweets. But the character limit does pose its own problems, as word choice is dictated by the space left, not their effectiveness in the story. The stand-out tweets tend not to be part of the established programme, but from the twunters. Some of the most poignant stories unfurl in single tweets, which stand alone as little pockets of observation and emotion.

But after a night of scrolling through the tweets, I returned to my favourite thing: the instant story generator. "In The Fortress of Solitude, a persistent rash will only set you back a few dollars" will be the first line of my memoirs.

Highlights and lowlights so far (all times listed are UK GMT):

No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency author Alexander McCall-Smith (@McCallSmith), is creating stories in tweet chapters, entitled 'The Intern', 'Love in the Alps', 'The Sociopaths' Ball' and 'How to Sing Grand Opera'. The first of McCall-Smith's efforts, The Sociopath's Ball is an example of his usual harmless humours. But I can't help but feeling he is missing his usual audience on Twitter and that writing over 40 tweets is a cheeky bypass of Twitter's enforced succinctness.
(Began on Wednesday, continues Friday 12am and Sunday 9am)

The best tweet of the bunch:

Ben Winters' (@BenHWinters) twitter tale is about his plans to write about a fictional man called Atlee Connors who holds up a bank, only to be contacted by a real-life Altee Connors who is furious about the story. It's an intriguing blend of believability and tongue-in-cheek awareness of the blurred line of fact and fiction on social media. Judging by the official description of his story, I kind of believe it. I want to read the original story too.

Relive a climb to the top of Mount Everest called #HighAltitude with climber and journalist Adam Popescu (@adampopescu). Popsecu climbed 18,000 feet while investigating the trash problem on the mountain for the BBC and tweets photos and videos. It is very non-fiction for a fiction festival, but very interesting. One to follow. (Started on Wed 7pm, continues Friday 7pm and Sunday 7pm).

@MeghnaPant retells the The Mahabharata, India's longest epic poem at over 100,000 lines, in just 100 tweets. Somehow, Meghna Pant has managed to contain all of the dynamics of power struggle, war, love, lust and greed in her 140 character tidbits. Wonderfully descriptive and paced. (Began Thursday, continues Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 9am).

Historical fiction with bite: British historical author and columnist Elizabeth Fremantle (@lizfremantle) is tweeting the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn – from the point of view of Boleyn's dog. Tudor The Dog is a charming enough project. If Bridget Jones was a dog…. (Began Wednesday, continues Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 10pm)

What to look forward to (all times listed are UK GMT):

God adding to the Bible: the irreverent Twitter favourite @thetweetofgod brings thee The Book of Bieb, the rise and fall of Jesus' younger brother, Justin Bieber. Run by former Daily Show writer David Javerbaum, The Book of Bieb will be told in 10 chapters – or 241 tweets. (Friday 1pm and 4pm) An indication of the wrath to come:

Father-to-be Jason Lasky (@j_lasky_writer) is documenting his daughter's current experiences inside his wife's womb. With 85 tweets and 50-odd followers, I don't know how accustomed Lasky is to Twitter, but the idea has potential to be fun. (Friday – Sun, 5am)

Author of the bestseller The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion (@graemesimsion) is writing about Don and Gene friends tweeting back and forth between Australia and New York). Don is advising Gene about his marriage after Gene was caught cheating. Twitter users are advised to contribute to the conversation and Simsion will incorporate feedback into the conversation. (Began on Thursday, continues Friday and Saturday, 9am)

US crime author Megan Abbott (@meganeabbott) has invited Twitter users to submit photos or videos of their favourite locations in film noir in advance. She will then create a noir crime tale using all the locations. (Begins Saturday 1am)

Husband and wife team Tom and Chloe Avery (@teamavery) are tweeting a first person murder mystery through narration, photos and links to completely fictional news stories. (Began on Thursday, continues Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 8am)

Tom Mitchell (@tommycm) is leading a choose your own adventure story through London. Gone are the days of cheating by threading your fingers in past pages, this fictional journey will be dictated by the number of favourites versus retweets. "You offer to buy another round and Nicky suggests you choose. RT this tweet to suggest Brooklyn Lager or 'favorite' for a couple of Sambuca shots." Could be good fun. (Begins Friday, 2pm)

A funeral for a prominent journalist builds into a anti-government riot near a shopping mall. Friends Alia and Cala discover via Twitter that they are both trapped inside the mall. Unable to reach each other, the young women pass comfort and information back and forth as family members, activists and media join the Twitter discussion. Written by US political ghostwriter Lara Prescott (@laraprescott), this could be an thought-provoking combination of photos, characters and interactions. (Begins Friday, 12pm)

To see the entire schedule, visit the Twitter Fiction Festival website.FictionTwitterFestivals
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