Looking Back: 2014

Now that the awards season is out of the way, time for a little reflection.

2014 was a good year for me, creatively. I appreciate that I write a certain kind of novel, and its not a kind of novel that delights all comers. That said, I would say that in Bête I achieved a greater proportion of what I was setting out to do than in any previous novel of mine. It ended up a weirdly personal novel, actually, which makes it harder than it might otherwise be for me to gauge. Nonetheless I stand by what I say in the book's afterword, that it is the best of me. I also published a bunch of short stories, including a few (I'm thinking of 'Trademark Bugs' and 'The Assassination of Isaac Newton by the Coward Robert Boyle' in particular) that are surely the best I've ever done. I was proud, too, to see the publication of Sibilant Fricative: Essays and Reviews, since that seems to me my best literary-critical engagement with genre: a judgement endorsed by the recent Vector review. I published a How To Write SF and Fantasy book that was OK; I blogged a great deal and occasionally with insight.

Naturally it's dispiriting for me on a personal level that the many awards with which SF is supplied passed over all of this is silence; but that really is only a personal, and not a community, disappointment. That would be true in any year, but this year in particular the community has reasons to be disappointed with its awards that have nothing to do with me. Decent shortlists by the Kitschies, BSFA and Clarke panels have been rather overwhelmed by the shameful hijacking of the Hugos. I find myself doubting if the Hugos can survive this year with their credibility intact in any meaningful sense, which is a shame. But there are lots of other awards, and the SFF as a whole needs to decide which methods (plural, one hopes) of indicating esteem it wishes to invest in, post-Hugos.

To revert to the personal, there's a moral to be drawn from this awards wash-out of mine: I mean, with respect to the business of working as a writer. There are so many opportunities for discouragement and despair in the writer's life that any writer needs to have if not a strategy then at least some supply of inner grit to deal with failure, or s/he will not last very long. Failure will come, after all, and often. Now, Grit is not my middle name, and failure of the sort I'm talking about in this post is inevitably a personally painful matter. But pain is not the end of the world. This is the second year, now, in which SF award shortlists (in all their multiplicity) have gone forth to the world wholly uncontaminated by anything of mine, and it is starting to look like a trend. The hard part is acknowledging that it's nothing personal, it encapsulates no moral or ideological judgement on me, my opinions, my political allegiance and so on. Awards are attempts to look at the whole scene, not just your work; if other people on the scene are producing excellent work that doesn't make your work worthless: Billy Bragg has that great truth of life down pat. The hardness, here, inheres in accepting that the only proper response to my disappointment is to write better stuff. And write better stuff is never a bad mantra for any author to pin over his/her desk. Indeed, there's a kind of weird synchronism in this, since failure, impotence, disappointment and anger are so often what I write about. I can hardly complain. Plus the 'Great Hugo Disaster of 2015' shows that awards are very far from being infallible guides to aesthetic merit. There's one other upside: failure can be freeing. If a community rewards a writer for a certain kind of writing, it imposes a tacit responsibility on the writer, this is what we like, this is what we want. If a community withholds its esteem, then the writer is perfectly unobligated. Broadly, my view is twofold: one, that any individual award slate, or any single year of awards, does not provide a statistically significant judgement upon one's work; and two that being left off the shortlist for an award that recognises merit is not the same thing as being shortlisted for a Razzies-style gong that identifies demerit. Maybe your book, story or work of criticism was almost, but not quite, good enough for the slate. Nil desperandum. Fail again, fail better. Next year in Jerusalem. And so on.

It's good to be honest about these things, and honesty is almost never the same thing as self-laceration. By the same token, if individual award slates don't constitute a statistically reliable datum, whole runs of such awards, especially spread across many different award-giving bodies, probably do. And whilst not making any given shortlist doesn't represent focussed dispraise, it is hard not to take it personally when your work is singled out for elimination from a ballot whilst equivalent works are permitted to remain and indeed make the shortlist (as happened with the Sib Fric volume). So my sense of disappointment in myself is most sharply biting where my non-fiction, reviews and essays are concerned. I've been reviewing, blogging and writing critically about SF and Fantasy since the last century. Insofar that awards are indices of community esteem, this larger body of work has been in effect judged not estimable. It's something with which I have to come to terms, and that means recognising the ways and the extent to which I have failed.

It is freeing, in one sense. Blogging and writing unpaid reviews on genre titles has been a very laborious process, especially over the last decade or so; and stopping doing so would free up time and energy for other things. When I wound-up my blog Punkadiddle I was thinking along those lines; and though it pains me to admit, it was probably a mistake to have talked-myself into giving it another go with the Sibilant Fricative blog. But admitting defeat is admitting that one is fatigable, which can be a difficult accommodation to come to with one's ego. Nor do I plan to stop writing SF criticism right away. I have a number of projects en train, as the French say, amongst them a revised version of my award-unwinning Palgrave History of Science Fiction (to mark the tenth anniversary of its publication) and a Newcon press edition of my reviews of 2014 titles. I've also got about half a book on Ian Watson written, and would like to finish that, and several essays promised to collections or proceedings of conferences. So lots to do.

Otherwise I can look forward. My next novel, or at least the manuscript currently with my editor, is a larger and more ambitious book than I have ever written before. If I have to deal with a sense of failure where my critical writing is concerned, creatively I can say without (I hope) hubris that I've never felt so confident in what I'm capable of as a writer. Next year, maybe, in Jerusalem. Perhaps.