The Guardian's Blog, page 196

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 20: Skeleton Crew

Three stories in this collection of truly terrifying tales impressed me so much I stole the concepts for my own writing – and I'm not the only author to do so

Revisiting any book that means something to you is hard, especially when you're a writer. Books feed into our own narrative voices, and the stories we want to tell. It's difficult to pin down the literary influences of many writers, but I think I wear my influences on my sleeve. Greatest among these are some of the stories featured in Stephen King's Skeleton Crew. As I reread this collection, I could see how these stories did what they did to me, how they had managed to affect me for so long.

This week I'm going to do something different. I will focus on only three of Skeleton Crew's tales, talking about each in detail. In the comments thread, I urge you to post your own thoughts on your favourite stories from this book. Because The Monkey, Uncle Otto's Truck, Word Processor of the Gods, all the rest of them: they're great stories, and they should be spoken about. But I'm going to look at the three that led me towards writing one of my own novels, The Explorer. So, this is a personal reread – but then, aren't all the best readings personal?

I first read Skeleton Crew as part of my initial King binge, aged 13 and hugely impressionable. His shorts weren't what I wanted from him, so a tiny part of it felt like duty – getting through something that represented a huge amount of time and effort from somebody of whom I was in awe. But the quality of the tales (starting with The Mist, which would have been a novel for most other writers) was such that it soon became one of my favourite King books. Short stories have a way of seeping into the subconscious, I think, as the reader dwells on what was left out. Skeleton Crew is full of stories that linger – some, because they feel as though they're a part of the extended King universe, but some because they're just perfectly realised. And these three, I think, worked their way into me more than the others.

The Jaunt

A simple story: a family is going to travel to Mars; it's the future and water is the Earth's most precious commodity. They're getting there by "jaunting", a process by which you travel through time and space to arrive at your destination instantaneously. We meet the family as they relax in a departure lounge, waiting to be sedated for their trip. The father tells his kids about how the Jaunt was discovered – how a scientist who opened the portal killed mice and tested the technology on prisoners, and how one prisoner was awake during the jaunt. "It's eternity in there," the man said when he came out, his hair turned shock-white – a forerunner for a similar scene in King's later novel It.

The story is essentially exposition until the kicker, which is that the son stays awake during the jaunt, cheating the sedation so he can see what's inside. It's terrifying, because you don't see it coming. You expect mishap, sure, we've been set up for it – but that it involves a child?

King has always been excellent at fooling you into thinking things are heading one way, before veering in an even darker direction. And it was through this short story (and its notion of the jaunt) that I first heard of Alfred Bester's incredible SF novel The Stars My Destination, without which it's likely my own writing would be quite different. I also stole the notion of keeping your eyes open as you stare into a powerful light, one you shouldn't be looking into. (There's possibly an analogy for all of King's work in that concept.)

Beachworld

This one's underrated, I think; you rarely hear people talking about it. Three astronauts crash their craft on a planet that has no water, trees or people. Instead, there is only sand. The sand, it transpires, has something resembling sentience: it swarms and swallows the craft, and threatens to do the same to the astronauts. More than anything, this is a story about isolation, about being stranded, with nowhere to go. It's another concept I stole for my own work. The theme appears in other stories in Skeleton Crew, such as The Mist and The Raft, placing people in a terrifying situation that's out of their hands and picking them off one by one.

I loved this story when I was a kid, and I love it now. The central conceit is loopy – one of those distinctly King-ian turns that few authors are able to pull off. The horror is top-notch, especially in the creepy, disaffected way one of the astronauts sings the Beach Boys as he's swallowed by the sand. I always think of it when I'm brushing sand off my feet after I've been to the seaside. Most of all, there's something horrifying about the thought of being alone, of being left to rot or be consumed. I stole that, too.

Survivor Type

Speaking of being left to rot … in this story, a man is shipwrecked. Everybody else on the ship has died, and he's alone with only the boat's cargo to keep him company: a huge amount of heroin. He used to be a doctor, so he has skills – for instance, when he kills a bird and has to eat it raw; when he injures himself and has to amputate his foot (which, starving, he promptly eats); and then, later, when he has to amputate more and more of his body to ward off both infection and hunger. It's a terrifying story, with an isolated and potentially unreliable narrator (I stole that) who witnesses the degradation of his memories and sanity (stole that), and whose only recourse against loneliness is to reflect on what put him in that situation (stole that as well).

Again, King plays on common, conventional fears. Who hasn't wondered what might happen if they were shipwrecked? Who hasn't wondered how far they would go to survive? But the fact that King pushes the story as far as he does – no happy ending, no last-minute reprieve – dampens the horror. When somebody has pushed themselves this far – "Lady fingers, they taste just like lady fingers", he howls as he eats his own hand – there's no going back.

I'm aware that the things I've attributed to these stories happen in the work of other writers, in other books, but it was strange for me to read these tales now, in light of my own writing. And – spoiler alert for the next instalment – in rereading the novel It, the debt so many horror/thriller writers owe to King is more obvious than ever.

Should I feel guilty about being so influenced by another writer? I don't see it so much as theft as understanding where I learned what it was I wanted to write, and how I wanted to write it. This rereading experiment has shown me the extent of my debt to King's writing, and the impact of his stories on us as readers. The tremendous community generated by this series of articles is evidence of that. So, again, in the comments, tell us which of the Skeleton Crew stories you loved most, and why you loved them. I for one would like to know.

Next

They all float down here: it's time for one of Stephen King's most famous novels, It.

Stephen KingFictionHorrorThrillersShort storiesJames Smythe
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Midsummer Night's Dreaming: the RSC takes a smattering of Google fairy dust

An internet production of Shakespeare's classic comedy is not so much the RSC dumbing down as Google flaunting its cultural credentials – and that can only be a good thing

In last week's blog, about The Great Gatsby, several of you expressed anxiety about the liberties Baz Luhrmann's film might be taking with Fitzgerald's text. Making a movie out of a novel – even a short one such as Gatsby – is always going to involve a violation of the material, a loss of nuance and subtlety, the cutting of characters and scenes, and so on.

Luhrmann is no faithful archivist. Indeed, he made his reputation with his own interpretation of Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. So it goes. It's a characteristic of classic literature that it's bound to experience many strange, and even troubling, renewals. All we can do, as readers, is keep faith with the language, style and imagination of true literary endeavour. Sometimes, of course, that's hard.

As I write, news is coming in of a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Google, titled Midsummer Night's Dreaming. This digitally inspired event promises to take "reinterpretation" to a new level. If I've understood the publicity, people all over the world will be able to go online to join the RSC live as they and Google+ present a one-off digital theatre project riffing on Shakespeare's text. Audiences will be able to watch scenes from the play on the web on the weekend of June 21-23, with additional events taking place in Stratford-upon-Avon on the Sunday. According to the press release, "the story will also be reported as it happens, by new characters created by a group of commissioned artists, and shared through the internet".

Shorn of the usual hyperbole, this is essentially an online interactive event, linked to Shakespeare's play. Is it A Midsummer Night's Dream? Of course not. Does it make the play redundant? Impossible. Will it introduce a new audience to a classic comedy? With luck. Who's the winner here? Guess what: Shakespeare has been around for about 400 years; if Google manages 40 it will be doing pretty well. Meanwhile, scattering a bit of Californian largesse and what it calls "fairy dust" on the RSC is all to the good.

The thing I take away from the breathless announcement of this project is not the whizz-bang innovations dreamed up by the Google sponsors; that's a given (the software giant is bound to want to show off its wares, notably Google+). No, what's interesting – and faintly encouraging – is that for all the negative publicity Google attracts, it remains responsive to culture and to cultural opportunities. Faced with Midsummer Night's Dreaming, purists will denounce the dumbing down of the RSC's programme. Another way to look at it is to celebrate the dumbing up of the software nerds. More broadly, from a literary point of view, this is timely and welcome confirmation that it's the content that is king.

Royal Shakespeare CompanyTheatreWilliam ShakespeareGoogleGoogle+InternetRobert McCrum
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Music to murder to: crime writers on their killer soundtracks

You're more likely to see other crime writers at gigs than literary events, so what role does music have in the creation of crime fiction?

Music and crime fiction. They go so well together that it's become something of a cliche. You know the kind of thing: the lone detective who comes into his apartment late at night, gets a beer or bourbon and stares out of the window wracked by existential angst at the horror he's seen, all the while listening to cool jazz. And it's always cool jazz – never Chris Barber doing When The Saints Go Marching In. Same with Morse and his opera. Always dark and Wagnerian – never Pirates of Penzance. I know this is shorthand to show the detective is troubled about what he (usually he) has seen and what he should have done but, really, is it an accurate picture? And is it only a boy thing?

So what role does music play in the creation of crime fiction? Is there such a thing as a killer soundtrack? And does the music crime writers write to differ from that of other writers? I should know the answers. As well as being the Theakston's Old Peculier crime writing festival's reader in residence I've also been a professional crime novelist for over 15 years and, like most men in their 40s, an amateur musicologist.

These days crime writers are more likely to be seen at gigs than literary events. As well as passing on new books they've discovered, they'll be giving other writers mix CDs of new bands. I came across Lord Huron, Caitlin Rose and Night Beds that way. I'm pretty sure crime writers are more likely to be frustrated rock stars than any other genre of writers. In fact, Jo Nesbo actually is a rock star. As bestselling, award-winning novelist Mark Billingham, creator of Tom Thorne, said to me recently, "You remember when you and I were at a Richmond Fontaine gig a few years ago? We looked around and most of the crime writers in London were in that audience!"

In an average book of mine I'll probably name check Warren Zevon, Band of Horses, Wintersleep, Tom Waits, Midlake, Gillian Welch and plenty of others. Like many other writers, I give my lead character the same tastes as me so it's easy to use songs I know to create a kind of emotional shorthand while I'm working. The tone of the music seeps into and informs the writing. It can soundtrack a scene, create an atmosphere in a few sentences where whole paragraphs would have to be used otherwise. Elmore Leonard and George Pelecanos are the undisputed masters of this, giving a scene an immediate sense of time and place just by what they've got playing on the jukebox in the background of a scene and their characters' cultural responses to it.

So what about that killer soundtrack? "The only music I can listen to while writing is instrumental; otherwise, the lyrics get in the way," said Steve Mosby, the award-nominated, Leeds-based bestselling crime author of Still Bleeding, Back Flowers and most recently, Dark Room, "I often write in pubs, and have to tune out the background noise. At home, I find I listen to tracks in between bursts of writing – either as a reward, or for a break, and often to help conjure up an atmosphere. Often it's about association – for example, the soundtrack to the film Snowtown makes me feel bleak and nervous, and is perfect for darker material. But I remember listening to Radiohead's Optimistic over and over when I was struggling with one book, as the line "You can try the best you can/ The best you can is good enough" became a sort of mantra that helped me keep on writing."

I know what he means. I once played Tom Waits' Ruby's Arms on repeat as it had just the right melancholic tone and atmosphere for the scene I was working on. I was a wreck at the end of it, but the scene was bang on.

Mark Billingham has his own take. "Country is perfect music for crime fiction, I think. These songs are bleak, black stories but told in an entertaining and melodic fashion. I think the fact that Thorne loves this stuff says a lot about him. He relishes the bigoted reaction it provokes, as do I."

So does the music ever get in the way of the words? "No," says Cathi Unsworth, the critically acclaimed author of Bad Penny Blues, The Singer (a clue to how much she likes music in the title, I think) and, most recently, Weirdo. "I started my career in the Sounds newsroom with loud music blaring out all the time. I find it galvanises me and helps me to focus. The only bands I find impossible to write to are Led Zeppelin and the Cardiacs because I just want to start headbanging."

Unsworth also likes to subvert expectations of what a crime writer should listen to when they're engaged in the act of killing: "I want the music to reflect the horror of the killing, rather than get me in the mood to join in. Of all my books, Bad Penny Blues has the spookiest soundtrack, as innocent-seeming songs like You'll Never Walk Alone, She's Not There and You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling take on a whole new context in the setting of a phantom serial killer picking off working girls, walking among them, being known by them as someone they thought it was safe to go with. The songs weren't chosen at random, they were in the charts as the Jack the Stripper murders happened in real life, which makes it even scarier."

Juxtapositioning is everything for a crime writer. There's a song I've always wanted to use in that context: Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys. It's so happy and optimistic it makes me cry every time I hear it. Obviously it would be the perfect soundtrack to a scene of total nihilistic devastation. So next time you pick up a crime novel and see music references just think: they're not just the writer showing off. They're integral to the story. They're necessary. I could talk about this all day but I've got a book to write. And more importantly, John Grant's got a new album out …

• Martyn Waites is the author of the Joe Donovan series and also writes as Tania Carver. His book, The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, a follow-up to Susan Hill's bestseller, will be published by Hammer, Random House in November 2013. Catch Martyn Waites, Mark Billingham, Steve Mosby and Cathi Unsworth at the Theakston's Old Peculier crime writing festival 2013, at The Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, from 18-21 July . Other writers at the festival include Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Kate Atkinson, Susan Hill, Ruth Rendell, Jeanette Winterson and Lee Child

Crime fictionFictionIndie
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Reader reviews roundup

Praise for Ian McEwan's latest and a survey of museum collections with room for improvement

Lakis opens his review of Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth with an admission. He "never liked" Atonement, finding it "kind of boring and too long". But after enjoying On Chesil Beach – a story told "in a masterful way and in the right amount of words" – he was tempted to taste McEwan's latest offering and confesses is "so glad" he did, hailing it as "a masterpiece".

I'm not saying that it's the best fiction book I've ever read, but it is one of the best I have read this year.

McEwan opens in the early 70s, with the cold war "going strong", when a young woman is recruited by the British secret services. At first she has "nothing much to do", but soon we are off on an adventure, an adventure where most of the actors are unhappy and "mostly ignorant".

Lakis hails McEwan's "beautiful prose" and a "final twist that takes the reader by surprise".

Things are not exactly the way they seem, and as McEwan seems to suggest, even if the whole world comes tumbling down, there's still hope to be found.

MisterBus2 was in search of secrets of a different kind on picking up Molly Oldfield's The Secret Museum.

"It's a super idea," he – or perhaps she – says, to "reveal those museum artefacts hidden behind closed doors". Moreover it's "very well researched and it's nicely written. So how did it go so badly wrong?"

According to MisterBus2, the blame lies with the publisher, "who took their eye off the ball and allowed the design of the book to dictate that no picture should be bigger than 5cm wide (I jest not)".

Here's all these wonderful objects that we can at last see for the first time – except we can't, unless we have a magnifying glass.

It may still be a "good read", but "what an opportunity missed", MisterBus2 continues. "I can only hope the second edition is re-designed to show bigger pictures – and unfortunates like me who bought the first edition are allowed to exchange them."

We're always happy to receive your verdicts on whatever you're reading – just search in our database and click on that button helpfully marked "Post your review". If I've mentioned your review here, get in touch with me at richard.lea@guardian.co.uk, and I'll send you a surprise from the cupboard.

Richard Lea
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A glimpse into Guantánamo Bay's library

From the well-thumbed – Danielle Steele – to the untouched classics, pictures posted by US journalists show the reading matter permitted in the world's most controversial prison

The Pentagon doesn't let journalists talk to prisoners in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, where more than half of the 166 detainees are currently on hunger strike, but reporters are granted access to the prison library – inspiring a blog from the New York Times reporter Charlie Savage that collects pictures of books uploaded by journalists reporting on Gitmo.

Prisoners aren't allowed to go the library, but they can put in requests for books they want to read. The books are thoroughly checked in case they are being used to exchange messages – any attempts to do so are punished with a suspension of the library facility.

The few thousand titles offer a strange mix of books ranging from the pulpy – Danielle Steele's The Kiss (in Arabic) – to the classic – six copies of David Copperfield – to the canonical – seven copies of Homer's Odyssey. The Steele book looks pretty well-thumbed but it's doubtful if anyone has borrowed Homer to pass the time, although some detainees have been there 11 years – longer than it took Odysseus to return to Ithaca via a perilous journey that included more than a spot of waterboarding at the hands of Poseidon.

Other books include seven copies of Pearl S Buck's The Good Earth, CS Lewis's Narnia series, Tolkien, Stieg Larsson's trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, a Pashto-to-English dictionary, Captain America comic books, puzzle books, a Russian edition of a National Geographic magazine, Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Khaled Hosseini's maudlin hit The Kite Runner. Watership Down and Star Wars share shelf space with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Apart from the books, the video game Angry Birds is also available.

Earlier reports have said that the most popular books are Agatha Christie's mysteries, Kahlil Gibran and the Harry Potter novels. Harry Potter has also been used an in interrogation tactic. According to Fox News, members of Congress visiting the prison in 2005 observed how one interrogator tried to break down a prisoner by reading aloud from a Harry Potter novel for hours – the detainee turned his back and covered his ears to block out the sound.

Among the spy novels is a paperback copy of The Tailor of Panama, John le Carré's hilarious but stinging indictment of fraudulent intelligence gathering – a subject that cuts close to home in a prison of this kind. The 1996 novel was seen as a prescient foretelling of the weapons of mass destruction intelligence scam that paved the way for the US invasion of Iraq. President George Bush opened Guantánamo in 2002 as a important plank of his "war on terror". The 81-year-old le Carré, who has been scathing in his criticism of "Bush and his junta", recently told the New York Times that he keeps a rubber cartoon figure of the former president in his bathroom. He also said he was disappointed in Obama for not closing Guantánamo as he promised to do when he ran for office in 2008.

Obama did sign an executive order to close the prison in 2009 – it was one of the first things he did on entering office – but Congress remains implacably opposed to doing so. With the hunger strike making international headlines, Obama has renewed his call for closure, saying that "the notion that we're going to keep 100 individuals in no man's land in perpetuity" was not "sustainable".

Miami Herald journalist Carol Rosenberg posted a picture of an Arabic translation of Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping. She said the book looked "well read". Incidentally, two years ago, this non-fiction book on how the Medellín cartel kidnapped a group of Colombians in the 1990s at the height of the drug war became a bestseller in Iran, after opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi told his compatriots that if they wanted to know what it was like for him to be under house arrest, they should read this book.

One of the most borrowed titles is the Arabic self-help book Don't Be Sad, published by the International Islamic Publishing House in Saudi Arabia. It advocates patience, hard work and keeping one's faith in Allah. In the foreword, the publisher states that the book is for everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims, though the solutions are offered from an Islamic perspective. Chapters have titles such as "Extract the honey but do not break the hive", "Isolation and its positive effects", and the quintessentially American "Convert a lemon into a sweet drink". According to Wikipedia, Christian anarchist Elbert Hubbard coined the phrase in 1915 and it was later popularised by Dale Carnegie.

The religious section – inmates are given a copy of the Qur'an to keep with them in their cells – includes Fatwas of the Pillars of Islam and the biography of the Prophet (in French) and several copies, also in French, of Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. The Hindu spiritual teacher, who helped popularise yoga in America, was a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi – the most famous hunger striker of the 20th century.

LibrariesFictionClassicsGuantánamo BayCubaIslamReligionUnited StatesNina Martyris
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Are you reading novels to make new friends?

Claire Messud's latest novel features a protagonist who rages against all she has lost – bring it on

Cries of sexism are being heard from across the Atlantic after Annasue McCleave Wilson suggested to the novelist Claire Messud she "wouldn't want to be friends" with Nora, the angry protagonist of Messud's new novel The Woman Upstairs.

"Her outlook is almost unbearably grim," said the reporter from trade magazine Publishers Weekly.

Messud was unimpressed, and fired back an enjoyably steaming response:

"For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble."

According to Messud the "relevant question" isn't whether a character is "a potential friend", but "Is this character alive?" Her protagonist isn't "unbearably grim" at all, she continues. "Nora is telling her story in the immediate wake of an enormous betrayal by a friend she has loved dearly. She is deeply upset and angry. But most of the novel is describing a time in which she felt hope, beauty, elation, joy, wonder, anticipation – these are things these friends gave to her, and this is why they mattered so much. Her rage corresponds to the immensity of what she has lost."

Would Philip Roth have been asked the same question, ponders Publishing Perspectives's Dennis Abrams, while Salon's David Daley calls it a "reductive" question "about the likability of her main character – a question that might not be posed to a male author in quite this way". At Slate, Katie Roiphe admires "Messud's spirit", but points out that Ian McEwan, for example, has been pulled up for having unlikable characters, and finds that "the tendency to blame the world for a blanket, raging sexism that only partly exists, to put off on the publishing industry, or the sexism of an interviewer, or the editors of this magazine or that one, is perhaps sometimes to oversimplify the question".

Aside from the fact that yes, actually, I would quite like to be friends with Oedipus, and Hamlet, and most definitely Oscar Wao, I think it's going a little far to dismiss the (female) interviewer's question as sexist. It seems obvious to me that she's just trying to get Messud to elaborate on why she chose to write such an angry character.

It's clearly touched a nerve with Messud, though. Maybe it was just the latest in a series of inane questions Messud has had to answer, and it tipped her over the edge – look at some of the corkers collected here for other women writers, ranging from shoes to weight to dates.

At any rate, Messud's feisty response has made me desperate to read The Woman Upstairs, and find out for myself what makes Nora such a challenging companion. I have been known in the past to take against books because I can't stand a character – I know I shouldn't – but it's usually because they're too insipid. Nora sounds brilliant. The novel is just out here in the UK, and Ron Charles's stellar writeup in the Washington Post has made sure it's going on my to-be-read pile. "Lean in – she'll singe your eyebrows off," he writes. "What a slap in the face ... to be hit by Messud's opening line: 'How angry am I? You don't want to know.' This is Nora Eldridge: 42, single, childless, a respected teacher at Appleton Elementary in Cambridge, Mass. 'Don't all women feel the same?' she insists. 'The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury ... I'll set the world on fire. I just might.' Think Medea as a third-grade teacher."

I can't wait.

FictionAlison Flood
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Message for Mars: Nasa seeks haikus

Nasa is looking for haikus in the form of a 'message for Mars' that will accompany their Maven mission in November

I have not entered a literary contest since I was 11, when I was utterly convinced my poem was going to win (it didn't). But I think I'm going to have to brush up by poetry skills after learning that guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Folio prize: a level playing field for self-published authors

At last, a major literary award is opening its doors to indie writers. But does the news fill you with horror or excitement?

All I have really wanted as a self-publisher is to have my work taken seriously for its literary merit (or otherwise). Now, thanks to the new kid on the awards block, the Folio prize, that could be about to happen.

Over the past few years I've been banging the drum for self-publishing and self-published authors, but the stigma attached to self-publishing in the eyes of the public and the media hasn't disappeared.

We often hear about the commercial success of genre-writing self-publishers such as Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking, but that doesn't remove the frustration felt by those of us who would like to see our works talked about alongside Will Self or Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson or Sharon Olds.

The best way for self-publishers to prove that we deserve our place in such discussions would be for our works to be considered alongside those writers with whom we want our work to be compared. But in order to overcome the chicken-and-egg situation in which media coverage depends on proven quality and proven quality depends on critical comparison, the only real way forward is for major books prizes to open their doors to self-publishers.

To see what a difference this would make, just look at how the media has, or hasn't, covered Kate Tempest in the past year. Last summer she self-published her extraordinary debut Everything Speaks in Its Own Way, a collection of her performance poetry produced like a limited edition album, with CD and DVD beautifully bound into the endpapers. It was pretty much invisible in the mainstream media, save for a couple of reviews here in the Guardian after I nominated it in a below-the-line comment for the first book award. A few weeks ago she won the Ted Hughes award for her poem-play Brand New Ancients. Suddenly everyone wants to know her. I hope they will discover her collection as a result – and discover how good it is. But it will be no better when they do than it was when they ignored it before.

Awards are a direct route to being taken seriously. But major book prizes, from the Women's prize through the Costa to the Booker and now the new Goldsmiths prize, haven't allowed self-publishers the chance even to be considered. Which is one reason I jumped at the opportunity to front the Alliance of Independent Authors' forthcoming Open up to Indies campaign, designed to make the case for inclusivity among prize organisers, festival coordinators, bookstores and the media.

Thank goodness, then, for the new Folio prize, originally announced in a whirl of controversy as the Literature prize, Booker's more bookish younger cousin. While the new award's eligibility criteria have always, in their lack of the standard "no self-publishing" clause, implied an openness, the prize's administrator gave me positive confirmation in a recent email that their doors were indeed open. I mentioned this in a piece for the Alliance of Independent Authors earlier this week, and the fact that it has been taken up by the Bookseller and welcomed across Twitter shows that people realise just how important this is.

It is important because it finally gives self-publishers the chance to prove that they do not deserve the lingering stigma regarding their work – the belief that it has little or no artistic merit. Now, it is up to those of us who have been asking for just this kind of level playing field to show that we can produce books worthy of a place on the shortlist. And it's up to us to do so within the prize's first couple of years. If we can, then that may well prise the doors of other awards open. If we can't, then we have to be prepared for the I-told-you-sos that come our way. It would be lovely to think that the Folio Prize Academy members will be reading and recommending self-published works, and hopefully some will be among the 60 longlisted titles they decide upon in September. But whether they do or not, at that stage self-publishers will have the chance to put their case for inclusion in the subsequent 20 titles called in for consideration based upon a supporting statement of 300 words. At this stage, small presses, large presses and self-publishers alike have the chance to get their works measured against each other, on a level playing field, at last.

I for one am starting to polish my proposal now. I very much hope that others will join me and that between us we can do justice to the opportunity we have been given. For years I have been saying "All I ask for is a chance" and for me, finally, this is the chance I wanted. So, do people feel that I am being typically Pollyanna-ish and that self-publishers need far more of a foot in the door to show their real worth? Or does the thought of a prize that was sold on the basis of its artistic seriousness opening its doors to self-publishers make you recoil in horror? And is anyone else looking forward to the opportunity as much as I am?

Self-publishingFictionAwards and prizesDan Holloway
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Porn studies is the new discipline for academics

First peer-reviewed journal invites experts to contribute in time for spring debut

Porn Studies needs your contributions. The Routledge academic periodical will debut next spring, and a call for papers appeared this week soliciting submissions for "the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic". Two dons, Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, are the editors.

The timing suggests the EL James phenomenon may have provided the impetus for the launch by making erotica ubiquitous; but literary porn is only one of the interests of the top-shelf journal, which is open to offerings from sociologists, criminologists, technologists and experts in cultural, media and gender studies.

In acknowledging that "pornography studies are still in their infancy", the editors implicitly criticise cultural studies, which clearly should have initiated scholarly investigation of porn long ago. This failure may have reflected the sometimes furious contemporary debate within second-wave feminism, between those viewing pornography as liberating (Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman) and opponents (Kate Millett, Andrea Dworkin) who saw it as epitomising and reinforcing phallocratic oppression.

Forty years on, Porn Studies (bound to be shortened by students to Porn Studs) will enter a not dissimilar cultural landscape, with renewed feminist anger coinciding with porn once again often becoming headline news; this time not as a result of censorship receding, but due to the internet making it readily available.

Its editors, though, evidently won't be inhibited by 70s ambivalence; Smith signalled their Carterian approach last week by proposing the motion "pornography is good for us" in an Intelligence Squared debate, with Germaine Greer among those opposing it. Their periodical is bound to shake up academic life from the outset, giving an automatic get-out ("I'm researching/peer-reviewing an article") to anyone caught viewing dodgy material on their laptop; and once the dedicated journal becomes established, surely a dedicated porn department somewhere must follow?

PornographySexual healthJohn Dugdale
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Clarke award: the rise of sci fi shows you can't judge a book by its genre

Evocative and strange, Chris Beckett's award-winning Dark Eden makes futuristic fantasy feel brilliantly of the moment

Last year, most of the excitement at the Clarke award had happened long before the ceremony. The great Christopher Priest (himself a past winner) had declared the shortlist "dreadful", called for the resignation of the judges and described Charlie Stross, one of the shortlisted authors, as "writing like an internet puppy: energetically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly". It was really most interesting.

This year there were no such broadsides. There was some muttering about the fact that there was an all-male shortlist for the second time in the award's history – but since women have won in the two previous years, and because four of the five judges were female, the complaints didn't grow too loud. And that was about it. Such lack of dissent was disappointing from a journalistic point of view, of course, and for fan's of Priest's merciless wit. There was, however, some advantage to the focus remaining on the event, rather than the gossip surrounding it – not least because it was that rare thing, an awards ceremony that contained plenty of interest aside from the few seconds when the magic envelope was opened.

The event was held in the Royal Society, which organiser Tom Hunter described as "a geek's dream", and began with a panel discussion about the breakthroughs that are going to influence the sci-fi writing of the not-too-distant future. This took in mathemetical models of the human heart that can be used to trial medicines, time travel, faster-than-light drives, synthetic biology and, yes, a giant natural computer for a space station that is being designed for construction 100 years from now. (Project Persephone – "It's real, not fiction," said panellist Rachel Armstrong).

And I suppose all that does sound like a geek's dream – but surely, also, of interest to anyone and everyone. One of the panellists, Adrian Hon, helped create Zombies Run, which now has more than half a million users jogging faster because they can hear zombies at their back. That's a lot of people. And these ideas are not underground. We're living in a world where everyday technologies, such as smartphones, are so advanced that they might as well be magic, for all we know about how they work. Meanwhile, millions of us watch Game of Thrones, a series based on a book that only a few years ago was regarded as niche fantasy. More and more writers such as Lauren Beukes appear in the main literary pages of most newspapers. Five years ago, when I started writing about the Clarke awards, I approached it as if I'd been invited into a strange new world. Now that just seems absurd.

It's telling that Kevin Duffy from Bluemoose books says that when he took on one of the books on last night's shortlist, Nod by Adrian Barnes, he didn't stop to consider what genre it belonged to. "When I took it on, I wasn't really thinking of it as science fiction. The only category I was thinking of was 'good fucking books'."

I'd like to think that most people probably react in a similar way when they pick up a sci-fi title in a bookshop nowadays; that they think about the idea, the story, the quality of writing, and don't wonder if it belongs to a genre they regard as somehow substandard. I'd also like to think most people are happy to accept that sci fi isn't a poor second cousin to other types of literature.

So I liked to think, anyway. But I was brought down to earth when I spoke to Chris Beckett, this year's Clarke award winner. As you might expect, he was delighted with the way things were going.

"I used to be a solitary child," he said when he picked up the award. "On sunny days, when everyone else was playing outside, I would be found in my room, flat on my back staring at the ceiling, engaging in daydreams about imaginary worlds. What might then have seemed dysfunctional or unhealthy now starts to seem like a rational career move. Sure other kids had fresh air and companionship, but have they got a Clarke award?"

More seriously, he also later told me: "I've been waiting a long time, so it's a lovely feeling. It's wonderful when all that work actually pays off – because when you commit yourself to writing fiction it's a huge gamble, especially when you get to my age."

Beckett is 57. Wikipedia currently claims he only started writing science fiction in 2005 – although he told me his first short story was published in 1990. Either way, you can understand why a Clarke award might feel vindicating. But when I aired my theory about sci fi's escape from the genre ghetto, there was a brief flash of anger.

"It irritates the hell out of me when people won't touch my book because they see it's science fiction," he said. "Of course some sci fi is crap. But it can also be so many other things. It's such a wonderful mechanism for thought experiments …"

Dark Eden, the winning book, is a case in point. Beckett describes the premise as the "hoary old sci-fi cliche of Adam and Eve in space", but his story of the incestuous offspring of two astronauts stranded on a sunless planet, written in an "addictively odd vernacular" is evocative, strange and, as Stuart Kelly's Guardian review put it, "properly alien and properly probable". As with most recent Clarke award winners, the question isn't why anyone would want to read science fiction, or even how to get people to understand it has much to offer; the question is why anyone would want to deny themselves such an interesting experience.

Science fictionFictionAwards and prizesSam Jordison
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