Author: David

2018 has been an amazing year from Science Fiction and Fantasy, and that’s in a year when N.K. Jemisin didn’t even publish a novel (although the current undisputed champion of SFF did produce a brilliant collection of short stories, which I will get to later).

Last year I didn’t read as much as I usually do for all kinds of reasons mainly related to depression, and looking back on my Top 5, it’s a bit weird because, frankly, I didn’t get round to reading most of the best things that were published in 2017 until around April 2018 when things started to level out for me again. It was only then that I discovered excellent novels like Jeff Vandemeer’s Borne, Omar El Akad’s American War, and Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters.

However, I made up for my slackness in the rest of the year by reading like a demon – or maybe a djinn, or a monster, which would be appropriate because my two favourite fantasy novels featured both – Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning, which is a brilliant indigenous post-apocalyptic fantasy, and S.A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass, which takes us on a wild ride from an early modern Cairo into the land of daevas. I’m looking forward to the sequels to both in 2019, but it was such a great year for SFF novels that neither of these would actually have made my top ten.

A few other notable books that also didn’t make my top ten but which I enjoyed included: Sue Burke’s new world exporation novel, Semiosis, which was good but suffers a bit in comparison to other similar recent books, especially Emma Newman’s Planetfall from a couple of years ago; the third one of Newman’s loosely connected sequence, another somewhat convuluted future thriller, Before Mars, is also in this group; the final volume of Becky Chambers’s lovely Wanderers trilogy, Record of a Spaceborn Few, which was still as humane as the first two but just lacked a certain spark; Hannu Rajaniemi’s typically inventive novel of British imperialism in the realm of the dead, Summerland; Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land, which another of his variations on an increasingly familiar theme combining alternative Jewish histories and pulp detective fiction; Peter Watts’s welcome return with The Freeze-Frame Revolution, a novel of rebellion on a generation ship punctuated by cold sleep; and last but not least, J.Y. Yang’s The Descent of Monsters, the final book of the Tensorate series, which tied things up nicely (with, yes, monsters again…).

These were all excellent books. So what was in my top ten? Well, I tend to, for want of a better word, the ‘serious’ edge of the SFF world, novels with strong politics or an experimental literary edge and some weirdness. It’s not that I necessarily think that this is better or is what science fiction or fantasy should be (and I read a lot less of the latter anyway), it just seems to be what I like. I’m also British (sorry) and despite not having lived in Britain for almost ten years now, I somehow still seem to have a bias towards British writing and clever, cynical British-style SF.  I really try not to. I read everything. But this seems to be what I find myself liking most. I’m not even sure if my first two novels would be classified as SFF by everyone else…

1. Number one for me by a mile was Nick Harkaway’s unclassifiable novel Gnomon, which featured sharks and surveillance and rather than being a work with a twist, it’s fair to say that it was entirely characterized by twists, puzzles and hidden elements. It’s his best book since his astonishing debut novel, The Gone-Away World and may have surpassed it. It starts with a virtual investigation into the death in custody of a novelist, an opponent of ‘the System’ which keeps everyone transparent to the state, which reveals that her mind is not what anyone would expect but is made up of elements of at least four other impossible presences. And from here it just gets stranger and stranger, like an Alice in Wonderland for the age of total surveillance. Read it if you haven’t already. Now, for British readers you’ll be saying that this book came out in 2017. It did in Britain, but it wasn’t published until January 2018 in North America.
2. At number 2, sharing Gnomon‘s darkness, but in a very different world was British Indian exile in New York, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears. I’ve seen this grouped with Matt Ruff’s 2016 Lovecraft Country, but for me it had more in common with films like Get Out or music videos like Childish Gambino’s This is America than with any other contemporary novel I can think of. It’s a really dark, brutal novel of cultural appropriation and post-colonial, post-slavery recompense, featuring a couple of white guys who get in way over their heads into the world of obscure blues record collecting with, for them at least, horrifying consequences.
3. Third on my list is Tade Thompson’s Rosewater. I’d been waiting for this for a while and it did not disappoint. Like Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, it’s an afrofuturist novel, like many written in the Nigerian diaspora, but in Thompson’s case, from Britain not the USA. It is also quite reminiscent of Ian McDonald’s Chaga / Kirinya novels, but written with an appreciably more authentic knowledge of its Nigerian setting than McDonald’s version of Kenya (not that McDonald’s novels are bad, not at all). There are also elements that reminded me of earlier biopunk work like Paul McAuley’s Fairyland.
4. I’m rarely happy with final volumes of sequences. Finishing a sequence is a massively underrated skill. Ian McDonald basically gave up on the main story of his Chaga / Kirinya sequence. George R.R. Martin has been struggling for years to finish the Game of Thrones books. Malka Older does a pretty good job of tying everything up in State Tectonics, the final volume of her electoral SF, Centenal Cycle, which also complicates some of the assumptions we might have been developing in the first two books about where her political sympathies might lie.
5. Back to the British miserabilism with a bang for number 5 with Simon Ings’ The Smoke. This is a profoundly weird novel, or should I say, profound and weird, for it is both. It’s an alternative history of sorts, if your alternative history were to include the production of a strange and feral faery race from the killing fields of WW1. Or a steam-powered British space programme. Or a German-Jewish socialist utopian empire. This is not your father’s or your grandfather’s twentieth century. It’s all based in some strange late Victorian scientific theories (look up Alexander Gurswitch, if you’re interested). But it’s also a love story, a story of skeletons in the family closet, and it switches around how it is narrated in way that suddenly clicks towards the end when everything falls into place in a satisfyingly dark way.
6. I mentioned Paul McAuley up above knowing that we’d get to him this year too. Austral is quite simply the best climate change novel, call it cli-fi if you must, that I have read. Partly it’s so good because it doesn’t forget that there has to be a human story through which the necessary social-ecological politics can be relayed and it makes that story a moving tale of an exploited Antarctic outsider, the this case a genetically engineered female ‘Husky’ worker, in a new world of climate breakdown. And partly, it’s just because McAuley writes so well.
7. It’s a bit strange that Mary Robinette Kowal’s novel The Calculating Stars (and I’ll throw in its sequel, The Fated Sky as a bonus) is one of the most conventional on this list because it’s not least an exercise in writing and righting a historical wrong: the exclusion of the parts women played from the older written history of the early American space program and the exclusion of women themselves from the more glamorous elements of the program (being astronauts). It doesn’t stop there, dealing with intersectionality and the way in which white men and women also excluded black women. This politics is wrapped up in a very conventional SF / alt-history wrapping featuring life in the USA and indeed across the whole world threatened by extinction following a meteorite strike off the American coast near Washington DC, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s written with a light touch, a great deal of humour, enthusiastic sex from a woman’s point of view (yes, there are many rocket metaphors used entirely knowingly!), memorable characters and a strong plot.
8. Christopher Priest’s An American Story, continues the veteran British author’s obsession with alternative presents. I’d enjoyed his return to the world of The Dream Archipelago, in Islanders and The Gradual (which I also only got round to reading this year), but this one is very much in the here and now… or is it? It’s a typically unsettling novel, this time because it does a very good job of persuading the reader that 9/11 truthers might be on to something rather than being lunatics we can disregard. It’s a fun game to play with people who think of themselves as rational and scientific. But there’s also a really powerful story here about the nature of news and reality in a world where we don’t seem to be able to decide what constitutes either. It may also be one of the only good novels dealing with 9/11 written (I’d really count only Jarret Kobek’s ATTA, Steve Ericson’s Shadowbahn and Matt Ruff’s Mirage as the others, although there are several good War on Terror novels).
9. Sam J. Miller’s debut adult novel, Blackfish City, was another strong cli-fi novel but a bit more fanastic than McAuley’s and set at the other end of the world, in the Arctic, on a hardscrabble offshore city, where a mysterious stranger comes to town. The city itself is probably the most important character in the novel and it’s one that’s not short on memorable creations, with my two favourites being the orca and polar bear that are like nano-bonded familiars. It’s close kin to Madeline Ashby’s Company Town as well as Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous.
10. Finally, to round out the top ten, Jeff Noon’s The Body Library is the second of his surreal Nyquist Mysteries. It is an excellently disturbing metafiction about cities and language – just my kind of thing – and in any normal year might have placed higher but I found it was just not quite as brilliant as the first one, A Man of Shadows.

Of course, SFF is not just about novels. Novellas have become important once again and I just want to mention a few of my favourites from this year. Ian McDonald produced perhaps his most mainstream work for quite some time with Time Was, a book seemingly calculated to ride the waves of time-travel romance and WW2 nostalgia, but it did so with such delicacy, inventiveness and even humour that you would never mistake this for a cynical commercial calculation. Nnedi Okorafor concluded her Binti trilogy with Binti: The Night Masquerade, by far the toughest of the three novellas, in which the eponymous heroine faces having everything she knows destroyed but, of course, comes through it. Perhaps my favourites single novella of the year was Aliette de Bodard’s The Tea Master and the Detective, set in her Xuya universe, dominated by social-technological protocols of Vietnamese-Chinese derivation. It’s a Holmes and Watson-style detective story, but where the Watson character is a sentient spaceship with PTSD making a living creating potions that allow human beings to survive the weird psychological effects of deep space, and a the Holmes character is an arrogant disgraced aristocrat working as a consulting detective. It was the first thing I had read by de Bodard and I immediately went back and read all the other Xuya novellas and stories. Finally, Martha Wells published not one, not two, but three novellas following up her award-winning All Systems Red in her Murderbot Diaries sequence. It’s hard to say which of Rogue Protocol,  Artificial Condition, and Exit Strategy is the best, but as a sequence the four are hard to beat, and add up to a satisfying story arc in a believably dangerous corporate-dominated future. And, in Murderbot, the rebellious, introverted, cynical SecUnit cyborg, the sequence has one of the most memorable central characters of recent years. I also read, belatedly, two novellas that were actually published in 2017:  Liz Ziemska’s Mandelbrot the Magnificent, which brilliantly combines the real life of the mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, with Jewish cabala, quantum physics and resistance to the Nazis; and Dave Hutchinson’s Acadie, one of the best generation ship stories I have read.

In terms of short-story collections, the most notable edited volume has to have been Tor’s 10th Anniversary collection, Worlds Seen in Passing, edited by Irene Gallo. It’s huge and rich and reminds us, as if we needed to be reminded, just how much Tor has done for the genre. I enjoyed Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and the welcome return of M. John Harrison with You Should Come with Me Now. However the highlight of the year was undoubtedly… yes, N.K. Jemisin. Her just published collection, How Long ’til Black Future Month, demonstrated why Jemisin is one of those writers, like Asimov or Heinlein or Ballard, or Le Guin or Butler or Gibson, whose work helps to define the age we’re living in and maybe, just maybe, a better age to come.

1. Kim Stanley Robinson – New York 2140
2. Charles Stross – Empire Games
3. Nnedi Okorafor – Binti: Home
4. Taiyo Fuji – Orbital Cloud
5. Gergory Benford – The Berlin Project

KSR’s latest social-ecological science fiction novel moves further backwards in the same timeline as 2312 and Aurora, to examine a rather nearer-future New York struggling to deal with the ongoing reality of rising sea-levels. A large cast of diverse characters centred around a common connection to one particular appartment block lends the book a real humanity and, despite everything, a sense of optimism that we can overcome the worst if we all begin to realise and work with that common humanity.

While Charles Stross shares KSR’s broadly leftist politics, his work has always exhibited a far more British cynicism. I never really got into the earlier volumes of the timeline-hopping multiversal Merchant Princes sequence of which this latest book, Empire Games, is nominally a sequel, however you don’t even need to have read any of those books to enjoy this very timely SF thriller, which deals effectively with auhoritarianism, imperialism, capitalism and surveillance without laboring any of its political points. I will definitely be reading the next book in the sequence.

Nnedi Okorafor is perhaps the most exciting young SF writer around. Home is a black, African, feminist SF novella, the middle volume of the Binti Trilogy. It deals with the experience of a brilliant young Himba woman, who gains a place at the best university in the galaxy, overcomes the most violent adversity and is herself transformed in the process, and in this volume returns home, both alien and alienated and seeking deeper roots. It is really quite marvellous but written with an incredibly light touch that makes is suitable for all ages.

Taiyo Fuji is an emerging Japanese SF writer, whose 2014 novel, Genehacker, was a really prescient biotechnothriller dealing with the corporate commercial dominance of genetic modification. Orbital Cloud deals with more conventional hacking, along with Bourne-style espionage and surveillance satellites and features all kinds of political and personal machinations between the USA, Japan, North Korea and Iran.

Gregory Benford’s The Berlin Project, is a rather more subtle alternative history than most until around halfway through. Like Katherine Ann Goonen’s In War Times from a few years back, Benford uses the technique of mixing the author’s family history with alterations to what actually happened in quite an effective way. However, also like Goonan’s book, it starts to make rather implausible demands of its characters to get some of its plot twists to work.

I could write a lot more about all the books I didn’t enjoy quite so much this year that everyone else seemed to, but I won’t!

1. Shannon Mattern – Code and Clay; Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
2. Achille Mbembé –  Critique of Black Reason
3. Stuart Elden – Foucault: The Birth of Power
4. Adam Greenfield – Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
5. McKenzie Wark – General Intellects: Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century

I’ve only just started Shannon Mattern’s Code and Clay; Data and Dirt, but it’s already my #1 non-fiction read of the year. It’s just my kind of thing: enormous ambition, a sweeping historical scope and an infectious brillance that makes you see new things in and about cities.

Achille Mbembé’s Critique of Black Reason has finally been translated into English. It’s an extraordinary book that place the project of creating ‘blackness’ as a nonhuman category through centuries of colonial dominance, capitalist exploitation and oppression. It builds on Mbembé’s earlier development of the concept of ‘necropolitics’, transforming this from a critique of Foucauldian biopolitics into something far more central to the expansion of European power, and its current decline.

Speaking of Foucault, in a year when there has been even more intense efforts to disparage and discredit the greatest thinker of the second half of the twentieth century and even to portray him as a neoliberal fellow-traveller, it was refreshing to read the latest installment of Stuart Elden’s painstakingly researched and evidenced account of Foucault’s middle years, The Birth of Power. Elden is working backwards, the first volume having been on Foucault’s Last Decade, and he makes a convincing case for a consistent project throughout Foucault’s life, but also, in this volume, for a much more Marxist Foucault than his (frankly, much less well-read) critics often realise.

Adam Greenfield continues to produce excellent polemical but well-argued work on urban technologies. In Radical Technologies, he dispatches everything from the Internet of Things to Blockchain. Although sometimes the relentless negativity can get wearing, it’s a welcome corrective to the techno-optimism of Silicon Valley.

Finally, I used McKenzie Wark’s edited collection of his essays for Public Seminar, General Intellects, for my graduate theory class this year, and therefore read it and discussed its themes in far greater detail than I would normally do. It made for a very provocative course, and the students and I were at times infuriated with and delighted by the threads that Wark weaves through this work. At its worst, it seems like really there is only one ‘general intellect’ for Wark, and that’s Wark. But, at its best, the book asks all the right questions of those approaching social theory in this new century. It really needed a bit more a global scope – Wark considers Chinese and African thinkers elsewhere on the website but not in the book itself, which isn’t great especially when the book does find space for crap like vacuous hippy ‘philosopher’, Timothy Morton.

Adam Greenfield (2017) Radical Technologies: the Design of Everyday Life. A sceptical take on the promise(s) of utopian technologies.

Achille Mbembe (2017) Critique of Black Reason. Esssential theoretical reading from this boundary-pushing post-colonial thinker.

Nicole Starosielski (2015) The Undersea Network. Fascinating account of (mainly) Pacific undersea communications networks.

Jocelyn Wills (2017) Tug of War: Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting and the Rise of the Security State. A history of the Canadian satellite communications firm, MacDonald Dettwiller & Associates (MDA).

Here’s what I’m currently reading, as of June 2017…

Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2017) The Shock of the Anthropocene. Only just starting this recent translation from the French of a 2013 work.

William E. Connolly (2017) Facing the Planetary. I had high hopes for this book but it’s turning out to be a disappointment, about which more later…

George Monbiot (2017) How Did We Get into This Mess? A passionate and popular – but not dumbed-down – account of what’s wrong with the world by The Guardian columnist

Joshua Reeves (2017) Citizen Spies. A strong, historically-drive account of contemporary US surveillance

McKenzie Wark (2017) General Intellects. This essential collection of essays on contemporary thinkers will be the base text for my graduate social theory class, starting in the Fall

The United Arab Emirates is the fantasy frontier of hi-tech dreams of smart cities and a frictionless economy. We are encouraged to believe that from nowhere it has risen out of the sand, almost fully formed, weightless, its glass skyscrapers a city of the future. It has become the favourite destination of western entrepreneurs and inward investment. 95% of the country’s population is now temporary foreign residents simply there to make as much money as they can before they leave. No questions are asked about how it really got this way and at what cost.

But there is a cost.

The UAE is a hereditary Sheikhdom. There is no democracy, no independent judiciary, no free speech, indeed almost none of the things that those inward investors would expect in their own countries and for themselves.

In March 2017, the UAE’s secret police arrested a man described as the last human rights activist in the sheikhdom. Since 2011, Ahmed Mansoor had been one of the few dissenting voices willing to challenge the myth of the UAE as a techno-paradise. Just like other Arab patriots in the region, he loves his country, and he wants it to be better. Not just rich, not just a smart, bright playground for foreign money, but a country where its wealth can make for a more just and equal society – just like the nations whose investment supports the UAE. He tried to draw attention to the plight of his fellow critical voices, almost all of whom have been ‘disappeared’ by the regime.

But even Mansoor’s mild and well-mannered calls for change cannot be tolerated. Sentenced to 10 years in prison, it is likely he will never be released.

It’s long past time that the countries which invest so much in the UAE begin to take some responsibility for the treatment of people like Mansoor. We can’t claim that this is nothing to do our investments, and our companies who makes so much money from the UAE.

This is why we are so pleased to see that at least Mansoor is recognised by a new exhibition at the Digital Catapult in London their first venture into digital art. The organisation, which relies so much on investment from industry, now has Ahmed Mansoor’s portrait enshrined in its floors. The installation is by London artist, Manu Luksch, who has been working on the glossy stories of hi-tech UAE and its smart city, Masdar, interviewed Mansoor last year just weeks before his arrest. The portrait is fragile, made from sand from the deserts of the UAE.  Just like Mansoor himself, his picture could vanish, disappear as if it had never existed.

Like Mansoor himself, we need to be witnesses and recognise this courageous human being, one of the few people prepared to stand up not just to a repressive government but to the power of our corporations and governments who support them. Western governments need to speak with more than just money. Our brands of digital innovation need to have human rights at their core.

Together, Manu and I are calling for the release of Ahmed Mansoor, and other dissident voices, and for a vision of our shared future that does not see human beings as expendable in the face of ‘smart’ technological innovation.

The UAE government cares what we think. They need us. So we have a duty to speak out.

Spread the word: #FreeAhmed

Manu Luksch and David Murakami Wood

Background on Ahmed Mansoor

2011 – “The UAE Five”

The Arab Spring: as a telecommunication engineer and blogger, Ahmed Mansoor facilitates a discussion forum online together with five activists, later known as the UAE Five.  After signing a petition in favour of an elected parliament, Mansoor is arrested and convicted for ‘insults to the nation’s leadership’. After his release, due to international pressure, he remained without passport or licence to take on work, etc.

https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2012/01/uae5-mansoor-still-face-restrictions-after-pardon-emirates/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAE_Five

2015 – “the Nobel Prize for human rights.”

Ahmed Mansoor is the recipient of the Laureate Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders 2015 by Amnesty International.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/10/ahmed-mansoor-selected-as-the-2015-laureate-martin-ennals-award-for-human-rights-defenders/

2016 – “The Million Dollar Dissident”

Mansoor’s iphone is targeted by expensive spyware. A Citizen Lab report raises questions about lack of accountability and regulation in the case of spyware developed in democraties and sold to countries with shocking human rights records.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ahmed-mansoor-million-dollar-dissident-government-spyware

https://citizenlab.org/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/

2017 – March 20: “The last Emirati human rights activist” 

Ahmed Mansoor is  detained on charges of ‘spreading hatred and sectarianism on social media’.

http://www.gc4hr.org/news/view/1521

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/04/20/uae-free-prominent-rights-defender

2017 – May 28: “Disappeared”

Mansoor is sentenced to 10 years in prison.

http://icfuae.org.uk/news/emirati-man-thought-be-ahmed-mansoor-gets-10-years-jail-over-social-media-posts

#FreeAhmed: Calls for Ahmed’s release

Mirrored at: http://www.ambienttv.net/content/?q=AhmedMansoor

Back when I used to blog more regularly, one of the topics to which I kept returning was the seemingly imminent break-up or more rigid control of the Internet. Of course, China has its Golden Shield (and more) and paranoid autocracies like Iran and North Korea had promised to create their own separate and policed nets, but there were also increasing suggestions from the likes of then French President Sarkozy that the Internet should be, in his words, “civilized.” And then there was the continuous ongoing extension of online surveillance, both by states like the USA, transnational alliances like the Five Eyes, and mega-corporations like Facebook.

However, the last couple of days have seen two breaking stories that really do threaten to spark this long-threatened demolition of relatively free global communication. The first is a new blow in the long battle over ‘net neutrality’, the principle that all traffic on the Internet is created equal and treated equally. Many large corporations have long disliked this as it prevents them from providing openly differential levels of service, such as expensive ‘priority’ communications – even though there have always been less obvious ways of doing so. And the US neoliberal right has disliked it for the same reason. Under Obama, net neutrality enjoyed reasonable protection, but as soon as Trump took office and elevated free market fundamentalist, Ajit Pai, to the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, net neutrality looked doomed. This week, the board of the FCC voted 2-1 to begin the process of ending it.

We don’t know how this will play out yet, but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the day after this was announced, Theresa May, the Prime Minister of the UK, said that her government would create a completely controlled Internet in Britain (pretty much exactly what Iran and North Korea were proposing years ago). Other analysts have connected this to stronger surveillance powers recently introduced and, yes, it is connected. But the two bigger influences are the change in government and attitudes to the Internet in the USA and, of course, Brexit. It might seem contradictory that an ostensibly free market move is linked to repressive regulation, but that is precisely what neoliberalism is all about: the state acts either carelessly or repressively of social freedoms in favour of market freedoms.

As for Brexit, it seems to me that in order to carry out anything like the control of communications that May is proposing, Britain would have to be entirely outside of EU data protection and privacy regulations. Ironically, however, Brexit may be the one thing that stops May’s proposals from being as influential as they might otherwise have been. The proposals to control the Internet in the context of Brexit look like just another example of a puffed-up, paranoid and decreasingly influential country. It’s potentially going to be another thing that the European Union should absolutely use to distinguish what it offers to its citizens (and the world) compared to populist, authoritarian nationalisms. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the torturer, O’Brien might have described the future as “a boot stamping on a human head, forever,” but the UK’s future looks increasingly like “a nation shooting itself in the foot, forever.” If British people haven’t realised this yet, they’ve got time…

As for the USA, at present, our best hope is perhaps that the proposed end of net neutrality goes down with Trump’s ship, as he steers his bloated Titanic full-speed ahead into multiple icebergs.

Ubicity doctoral researcher, Michael Carter, and I, have a piece out in Issue #8 of the excellent online magazine, Limn. It’s called ‘Power Down’ and it focuses on infrastructure hacking and the Internet of Things: http://limn.it/power-down/

The whole is issue really worth reading (as are the previous issues) and can be accessed here: http://limn.it/issue/08/

Recently completed Ubicity MA researcher, Vincenzo Alaimo, explores how open data can be used as a tool to promote smart city development. Read his article “Open Data Smart City” in a recent issue of Canada’s magazine for local government, Municipal World: https://issuu.com/municipalworld/docs/mwdigestmar2017