The Guardian's Blog, page 240

Mars in fiction: the best books

The adventures of Curiosity on Mars have taken me back to Kim Stanley Robinson's epic trilogy. What other red planet literature can you recommend?

My fellow SF fans out there: how many of you are watching Curiosity's exploits on Mars with obsessive excitement? And is anyone else, like me, plunging back in to Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars trilogy in a bid to satisfy their suddenly insatiable appetite for all things Martian?

Mars was empty before we came. That's not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses – except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

So writes Robinson as Red Mars, the first in the trilogy, opens – and God, those books are brilliant. I particularly remember being transfixed by his description of a Martian sunrise: "And then the sky would begin to bleed behind them, high cirrus clouds turning purple, rust, crimson, lavender, and then swiftly to metal shavings, in a rosy sky; and the incredible fountain of the sun would pour over some rocky rim or scarp, and they would search anxiously as they ghosted over the pocked and shadowed landscape." And of Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system.

I want to be there! But, in the absence of that being a possibility, I suppose I'm going to have to sate my craving with Martian fiction. Anyone got any other favourites they want to share? And any particular quotes that will help bring the red planet to life?

Science fictionMarsSpaceAlison Flood
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Poster poems: August

The last month of summer has inspired topics from nature and executions to flying nuns – what can you come up with?

August, the eight month, is the second to be named after a Roman emperor, this time Augustus. He is said to have chosen this month for his own because he'd had a number of military victories in Sextus, or the sixth month, as it had previously been called before the addition of January and February. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, August is the last month of summer, with just a hint of autumn in the air. However, as some posters reminded me in July, things are different south of the equator, where this month is much like our February.

In The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's August takes the form of a poetic competition between two shepherds, Willye and Perigot, who take turns improvising alternate lines of a song, a roundelay on the theme of love unrequited, with a cowherd's boy, Cuddie, to judge who is the winner between them. This kind of competition was quite common in oral poetry, and lives on to today in the Basque tradition of the bertsolari. Cuddie calls it a draw and then rounds things off by singing a song on the same theme by Spenser's alter-ego, Colin Clout.

Matthew Arnold places the opening of his poem The Scholar-Gipsy in a distinctly Spenserian bucolic setting of shepherds and reapers, with the narrator taking shelter from "the August sun" under a tree beside which he can see the sheep grazing the recently harvested fields. However, the poem is a very 19th-century meditation on the differences between the civilised and natural man, and on the fear that prevents us from adopting a more natural approach to living. The speaker in the poem clearly envies the wandering scholar his freedom, but he realises that he could never follow the example of abandoning the soft life of academia.

Robert Burns's Song – Composed in August is equally filled with the charms of the rural, but in this case there is no tinge of sadness or regret. The Scottish summer landscape is teeming with life and forms the perfect backdrop to the poet's declaration of love for his darling Peggy. Things are, as you might expect, a touch less sunny in Christina Rossetti's Amor Mundi; the lovers may start out walking "in glowing August weather", but the easy downhill path they take is pregnant with omens of hellfire and damnation. Somehow I can't but think that Rossetti would not have approved of Burns's more easygoing attitude to physical love.

Anne Sexton found herself writing a Letter on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound "at 2 o'clock on a Tuesday/ in August of 1960". She, too, was meditating on love and sadness, and found her escape in a surreal vision of a group of nuns, her fellow passengers, spreading their habits and taking to the air with a cry of "good news, good news". The contrast between Sexton's precise description of the sea and landscape seen from the ferry and the absurdist flight of the reverend sisters is the fulcrum on which the poem rests. A similar attention to the smallest detail of vision informs William Carlos Williams's Flowers of August sequence, a celebration of the most ordinary, easily overlooked weeds and wildflowers that is in keeping with the poet's affection for the everyday.

Of course, August isn't all sunshine and flowers and flying nuns; serious stuff happens even in late summer. While Climbing Milestone Mountain, 22 August, 1937, Kenneth Rexroth found himself remembering the still controversial executions, exactly 10 years earlier, of the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. There can be no doubt where the poet's sympathies lay, and the poem cuts between the Sierras of now and the Boston of then in a way that builds inexorably to the final assertion that like the mountains, the two men's legacy would endure.

And so the challenge this month is to write poems celebrating the month of Augustus. Whether you're in the mood for a bucolic idyll or a more urban, and possibly less sun-drenched bit of late-summer surrealism, the choices are all yours. Just remember to post your August poster poems here.

PoetryBilly Mills
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Open thread: What makes a Modern Classic?

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby is to become a Modern Classic, but what makes a classic novel?

Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, his novel about being a fanatical football supporter, is to become a Penguin Modern Classic. The book published only 20 years ago, joins the likes of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Great Gatsby and Ulysses by James Joyce. Its inclusion has caused some to question what makes a modern classic and whether Hornby's novel really cuts the mustard. What do you think: what makes a Modern Classic and does Fever Pitch have the necessary qualities to be one?

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NPR's young adult novel poll: happiness and roars of rage

Beyond the Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games franchises, there are classics of today and yesterday worth rereading

Never mind that Harry Potter is, predictably, top of NPR's poll of the best young adult novels. Or that The Hunger Games is, just as predictably, second. The reason I'm feeling great warmth towards the poll of 75,200 people – 75,200! – is that it's reminded me how much I adored the novels of Tamora Pierce when I was a young teenager.

Before I get on to that, though, a few roars of rage. Diana Wynne Jones is only 36th? And with Howl's Moving Castle? Argh! That's most certainly not her best, people, try Fire and Hemlock, or The Lives of Christopher Chant. And worse – Susan Cooper is only 44th! Earthsea 47th!

If I'm fair, though, the poll is an intriguing mix of classics – The Catcher in the Rye, Flowers for Algernon, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Princess Bride, Fahrenheit 451 – and the best of more modern YA writing, from Patrick Ness to John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. And one of the points of these things is to rile people up – that's half the fun. Another is to point people in the direction of books they might have missed, or to remind them of former favourites, and so back to Pierce, who takes up four spots on the list. She was a real obsession of mine for years, from when I first discovered the Alanna books to when, as surreptitiously as possible, I used to get the latest Immortals title from my university bookshop, to settle down with when the travails of English Literature with a capital L became too much.

Remembering how much I wanted to be Alanna, the red-headed, violet-eyed girl who swaps places with her twin Thom and sets out to the court of the king to become a knight, is making me hugely nostalgic. I was in love with prince Jonathan (and how brilliantly prosaic a name is that, for a fantasy prince?) when she was, fell as hard for George, the thief who eventually wins her heart. And the romance in The Immortals series, starring Daine, the orphan who can speak to animals, was just as good. Magic, romance, and no-nonsense female heroines – what's not to like?

If nothing else, then, the list has informed me that there's now a series about Alanna's daughter, Alianne, who "is kidnapped and sold into slavery, forced to serve an exiled royal family in the remote Copper Islands, where she is immersed in a world of murder, intrigue and warring gods". It comes in 81st, and I may be sneaking off to the bookshop later to see if they have a copy.

I shall leave you, though, with another howl of fury, in which I hope you'll join me. I Capture the Castle is only 69th! Surely it's the ultimate young adult read, and while I can accept arguments that Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes might deserve to come in ahead of it (it's 60th), the Twilight books, which are, depressingly enough, 27th, do not. Are you kidding me, people? O tempora o mores, etc.

Children and teenagersFictionHarry PotterTwilightRay BradburyAlison Flood
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What's the best travel writing for summer 2012?

This year's Dolman shortlist highlights writers from Sharifa Rhodes Pitts to John Gimlette, but which travel books are you taking on holiday?

Just in time for my holiday on Sunday, the Authors' Club has released the shortlist for the Dolman travel book of the year, which ranges from Sharifa Rhodes Pitts' look at Harlem to Olivia Laing's walk along the River Ouse, from Jacek Hugo-Bader's road trip across Siberia to John Gimlette's trip through the three Guianas.

I like, when I'm on holiday, to base my reading around where I am, so Greece last summer necessitated John Fowles and Gerald Durrell, Newfoundland a while back required Annie Proulx, etc. Unfortunately, although I'm tempted by Colin Thubron's Tibetan adventures, and by Julia Blackburn's account of life in northern Italy, nothing on the Dolman list is set in the French Alps, where I'm off to, so I'll have to look elsewhere.

I may well revisit Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting, and Airs Above the Ground, because when can you ever have too much Mary Stewart (a rhetorical question). But have you any suggestions, Stewart and Heidi aside, for good Alps-based travel writing and fiction? And what are you taking away with you this summer?

Travel writingAlison Flood
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Save the Sci-Fi campaign bids to convert rare novels to ebooks

A specialist New York bookshop is aiming rescue out-of-print books and provide them for free online

A New York bookshop has launched a campaign to rescue old SF novels. The campaign by Singularity&Co, a new specialist SF bookshop in Brooklyn, comes at the perfect time. Secondhand bookshops – where most fans acquire and develop their habit – are under serious threat, and with them the back catalogue of weird and speculative fiction that they have preserved for so long.

The Save the Sci-Fi campaign aims to bring back in to print one cult SF novel each month and provide it online for free. And if anyone needed proof this is a popular idea, over $52,000 raised through crowdfunding goes some way to providing it.

Save the Sci-Fi isn't the only project attempting to preserve the heritage of science fiction. The excellent SF Gateway, founded by Gollancz books, Britain's oldest and most influential publisher of SF, brings some of the genre's classic texts back in to circulation as ebooks – the covers of which will be familiar to thousands of readers who remember the original Gollancz yellow-jackets. Ebooks and the new Kindle and Apple iBook stores have also provided an opportunity for hundreds of out-of-print authors to find an audience once again. They have also renewed old arguments around creator rights, as writers who signed away ebooks rights for as little as 15% royalties look enviously at indie authors earning 70% on sales through the Kindle platform.

But where Save the Sci-Fi has succeeded is in capturing the energy of fans, and that success gives a fascinating insight in to our new publishing paradigm. Most of us are used to a world where the major decisions in publishing – which books to publish, which writers to bring back in to print, where to spend marketing budgets and so forth – are made by publishers, distributors and booksellers. But increasingly, and more directly than ever before, these decisions are being made by fans. The story of Save the Sci-Fi reveals three pillars of the new publishing paradigm:

Creators: not so long ago the only way for the Singularity&Co team to establish a project like Save the Sci-Fi would be to risk their own money or find a major investor. Crowdfunding allows creators to put ideas directly to fans. And in crowdfunding it is the ideas with the most creativity and passion that tend to win out.

Opinion formers: Save the Sci-Fi has been helped on its way by influential opinion-formers in SF and geek culture including IO9 and Boing Boing. If a writer like Neil Gaiman decides to publicise a creative project or a new writer, it can often make the difference between success and failure.

Fans: ultimately it all comes down to the actions of millions of individual fans. The creators they choose to listen to, to engage with on platforms like Twitter, to support through crowdfunding and in other ways, are the ones who will succeed in getting their work in to the world.

The new publishing paradigm emerging from ebooks, social media and crowdfunding is having a fundamental and, I would argue, overwhelmingly positive impact. Publishers and retailers will always choose work which yields the highest likely profits – work that is cautious, predictable and mundane. Fans will always choose work that excites them – work that is creative, passionate and meaningful. Save the Sci-Fi isn't a project that many major publishers would invest in, but it's a project that fans have voted for with their wallets. And the culture of sci-fi is all the richer for it.

Science fictionFictionBooksellersPublishingEbooksDamien Walter
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Can John Banville resuscitate Philip Marlowe?

Raymond Chandler's estate have chosen John Banville to write a new Philip Marlowe novel – but can he capture the hero's loneliness and the bleak glitter of LA?

There is nothing more certain to upset a writer's fans than to suggest his greatest hero is in need of resuscitation. This, though, is exactly the risk that the Raymond Chandler estate is running with the announcement that John Banville is to write a new Philip Marlowe novel. It was inevitable really. Bond – young Bond, new Bond, now William Boyd's Bond – has set the benchmark for reinvigorating a classic brand and where Bond goes other estates are sure to follow. But if the Chandler estate has learned one thing (other writers have tackled Marlowe before to varying degrees of success), it's the importance of getting a proper writer to do the work – this is no job for a ghost or a newbie – and in John Banville they have just that. I have to confess that I'm cautiously optimistic.

Though the news was met with praise and derision on Twitter, the choice of John Banville is a clever one. He has form in this field. His Quirke novels, written under the name Benjamin Black, are very good indeed. Set in 50s Dublin, Chandler readers will recognise more than a bit of Marlowe in the lonely pathologist with a weakness of drink and a habit of being drawn into crimes that are none of his business. There is so much to enjoy, from Banville's fine turn of phrase ("Grains of mica glittered in the granite of the steps; strange, these little secret gleamings, under the fog") to his ability to render the city of Dublin in carefully wrought prose. And like Chandler he has a willingness to forgo plot in favour of character. Though ostensibly about crime, the books are more about Quirke's uneasy relationship with his daughter than they are about murder and death. Chandler might have smiled at this successful balance of the literary and noir. It was something he himself certainly strove for and it was his wish to write novels that were serious and literary that pushed him to produce the books he did. In the early 50s he started a third-person novel, without Marlowe and almost without murder but found he couldn't quite bring it off. He set about rewriting the book and it became The Long Goodbye.

Despite Banville's debt to Chandler, the thin press release that announced the deal in America, suggests that there is a niggling worry. Banville, it claims, wants to bring back Marlowe's "good friend" Bernie Ohls. Marlowe worked with Ohls at the DA's office and he appears in both The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, but to call them good friends is a step too far. In fact, to call them friends at all is probably misleading. Philip Marlowe doesn't have friends: his defining quality is loneliness. The briefest of connections – Terry Leonnox in The Long Goodbye being one – result in betrayal. Isolation is the price Philip Marlowe has to pay for being a good man in the great wrong place that is Los Angeles. Chandler always saw this as key to his character. In one of his last letters he said as much: "I think he [Marlowe] will always have a fairly shabby office, a lonely house, a number of affairs, but no permanent connection … I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated." Hopefully John Banville will understand this when he comes to write his Philip Marlowe novel.

In the end, the new book will be judged on two things. Can Banville get to grips with Chandler's Los Angeles and can he capture the voice of Marlowe? Los Angeles' unique situation in the world – the money, the beauty, the sheer darn fakery of it all – made it a great subject for a novel and Chandler was one of the first to tackle it with vigour. He watched it grow from a village to a city on the edge of greatness but he saw the dark corruption that beat at its centre. Since he died, other writers have challenged Los Angeles in their fiction with success, but what will John Banville bring to it? Will he see LA for what it is or what it wants to be? And what will he do with Marlowe? The finest of fine lines separates pastiche from parody and when imitating a writer like Chandler there is a greater risk of falling flat. We shall have to see if Banville can bring it off but I, for one, can't wait.

• Tom Williams is the author of Something Mysterious In The Light, Raymond Chandler: A Life published by Aurum Press.

John BanvilleRaymond ChandlerFictionCrime fiction
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Reading group: have you fallen under Alan Garner's spell?

Revisiting the Weirdstone of Brisingamen was a pleasure, making me feel closer to my younger self

I think I was 10 when I first read Alan Garner. Maybe nine. It was, anyway, some time before I first listened to The Queen Is Dead, read The Catcher in the Rye, watched Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and turned into someone pretty similar to the person writing this article.

I feel as if I could easily talk to that later, Morrissey-obsessed former self, even if I'd be over-keen on offering him patronising advice and telling him not to be so scared of girls. But I'd have a harder time with the person who came before and was so enchanted by Alan Garner's storytelling. I remember that boy, his brown glasses and white Gola trainers. I can still recall the things he did, and the way he felt. But I'm no longer exactly sure that I can plug into his way of thinking.

So, for instance, I clearly recall what it was like to first pick up those books, with the summer holidays stretching out before me, reclining on a floral garden chair, and disappearing, for days on end, into a land of magic, mystery and menace. I can remember thinking how much fun it would be to tramp out over Alderley Edge and take on the Morthbrood. I can remember – clearly – the cover of my Armada Lion paperback, and scouring it for clues about the contents of the book. I can remember the sadness of reaching the final page, and the happiness of knowing there was a sequel and that I had all the time in the world in which to read it.

But – sadly – I am unable to recapture or recreate those feelings. You can't go home again, after all. I feared before I started re-reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen that I might even taint those precious memories; that the wild old magic I experienced so keenly the first time around would no longer be there, and that I would feel yet more cut off from my boyhood. I worried, in fact, that I might not even like the books any more: that they might have to be relegated to the same place as model aeroplanes, Panini stickers and toffee bonbons. Something I enjoyed at the time, but can't begin to understand now. Might these old favourites now seem hopelessly childish?

But then, as has already been pointed out by one Reading Grouper, childish doesn't necessarily mean bad – or even bad for adults – when it comes to books. The joy of reading my daughter Roald Dahl and the Tiger Who Came to Tea has already taught me that much. What's more, Alan Garner occupies an interesting hinterland between childish and adult fiction. As the author himself neatly put it: "I do not think consciously of children [when writing] … I do know that children read me more intelligently than adults do." Even though you might have to be under 12 to appreciate fully the immersive power of Brisingamen, there's still plenty to latch on to as an adult.

It wasn't all plain sailing. This time around, I was taken aback by how quickly things started happening. Colin and Susan barely have time to tuck down their first meal in Cheshire before they're meeting wizards, facing off with witches and speeding into delirious adventure. Satantango it is not. Clearly, as a child, I didn't require quite so much information about motivation as I do now.

But once I was used to the pedal-to-the-metal pacing, Garner's spell began to work again. His language, for instance, and especially his choice of words, is frequently exquisite. What better name for the great spirit of darkness than Nastrond? The word makes him almost visible. Thanks to Garner's vivid descriptions, it's just as easy to imagine the old paths and hilltops on Alderley Edge. It made me as keen to visit rural Cheshire as Lawrence Durrell did Alexandria – and that's in spite of the Wags and lurking evil.

On the subject of the latter, there's something splendidly chilling and unsettling about the books. The mists on the slopes, the darkness in the caves, the exposure in open spaces, the claustrophobia of the mines: these things are beautifully rendered. Even the elves are badass, bad-tempered and ugly, while that most innocent of creatures, the mountain rambler, becomes entirely malevolent. I found the children's ally, the wizard Cadellin, a dark presence even before the surprise ending (about which I shall endeavour to say no more). Garner's young protagonists do not have an easy path, and that makes following them all the more interesting.

In short, revisiting the books has been a real pleasure, so far. I'm happy to say that I feel closer to my younger self after reading them. He was right! Or so it seems to me.

But what about you? How has re-entering Garner's alternate reality been? And perhaps more interesting still, if you are a first-time reader, free from nostalgia, how do you find them?

Alan GarnerChildren and teenagersFictionFantasySam Jordison
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Paulo Coelho's attack on Ulysses insults readers

'There is nothing there,' Coelho says of James Joyce's novel. But the real slur is his belief that we must yield to his limitations

Samuel Johnson, in one of his great aperçus, responded to some pettifogging critic with the phrase: "A fly may sting a horse, but the horse will still be a horse, and the fly no more than a fly." That sentence sprang to mind the minute I read that Paolo Coelho had decided to take James Joyce to task. In an interview in Folha de S Paolo (one wonders if he chose that outlet for any particular reason) the self-proclaimed "literature wizard" contends: "Today, writers want to impress other writers." He then names the culprit: "One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce's Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit."

Coelho is, of course, entitled to his dumb opinion, just as I am entitled to think Coelho's work is a nauseous broth of egomania and snake-oil mysticism with slightly less intellect, empathy and verbal dexterity than the week-old camembert I threw out yesterday. But the attack is, inadvertently, interesting. Coelho is not the first to attack Joyce: Roddy Doyle has, Alan Bissett has, and Dale Peck made it the central, rotten plank of his sour and sanctimonious anti-modernist criticism. Whenever there is a reactionary attack on contemporary literature, a snipe at Joyce is necessary.

What are the criticisms? Joyce, they claim, writes for writers – not, presumably, readers. His works are sustained by a cerebral clique that – whisper it – don't really like them either, but use them as a trump card in one-upmanship. Joyce is "difficult", Jonathan Franzen's catch-all term of dismissal.

Only someone who had barely glanced at Ulysses would damn it for "pure style". It is an utter come-all-ye, salmagundi, snarl and macédoine of styles (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously said he didn't have a style, he had styles, a motto many aspirant writers in search of their elusive "voice" might adopt). Coelho – let's give him the benefit of the doubt – may not be complaining about the glorious polyphony of Ulysses. The exuberant styles might conceal a lack of import. As he says: "There is nothing there." In Joyce's defence, I would say there is love, grief, anger, lust, generosity, small-mindedness, kindness and redemption as well as kidneys, dogs, claret, soap, what-the-butler-saw machines, classical statues, menstrual blood and brogues. But maybe Coelho isn't placing style against content but style against message. Maybe Ulysses can't be summarised into a sentence-long quote such as: "Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find treasure." Perhaps life is actually a bit less pat than that. Maybe Coelho was confusing Ulysses and the 1981 cartoon Ulysses 31.

Coelho gives the game away when he brags that he is "modern" because he can "make the difficult seem easy". I think it's an ethical as well as a literary proposition that anything that aspires to make the world and the people in it less complex, less paradoxical, less multifarious, is a kind of dirty little libel on reality.

The real slander is to the reader, or rather, to readers. Note how the anti-Joyceans have all read him and then tell readers he's not for them: too difficult, too abstruse, too weird – with the "for you" hanging in the background. I've been there, they say, and you wouldn't like it. It is an attitude that surreptitiously belittles the reader. There is nothing as profoundly patronising as a middlebrow, supposedly "literary" author on a soapbox. (Ian Rankin, bless him, has always taken any opportunity to enthuse about Thomas Pynchon as much as Denise Mina.)

There are high modernist books that take effort – Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru, or William Gaddis's The Recognitions or Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil – but I've never yet read one that didn't repay the effort. On the other hand, I've read plenty of unambitious fiction that didn't reward me turning the page. Coelho and his ilk create a cocoon of their own limitations, and insist everyone outside it must feel and think like them. Writers and readers of worth know the real point of literature is, as Louis MacNeice so brilliantly put it, that the "World is crazier and more of it than we think,/ Incorrigibly plural".

Paulo CoelhoJames JoyceFictionStuart Kelly
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Open thread: best speed reads

What are the best books to get through in a flash? Post your suggestions in the thread below

After all the hype, the anticipation, the millions of people trying to get trackside tickets, Usain Bolt delivered, taking the 100 metres gold medal in 9.63 seconds in his own inimitable style.

Inspired by such speed, we're looking for suggestion for the best short reads; novellas, short stories, flash fiction, poems, pamphlets – whatever you like. Post all your suggestions in the comment thread below.

Hannah Freeman
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