Tag: Sarah Hall

Coming up: The Carhullan Army / Daughters of the North

The next book on the Future Classics list we’ll be reading is Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, published in the US as Daughters of the North.

We’re moving steadily towards the present now. The Carhullan Army was published in 2007 and did extremely well for itself. It won the Tiptree Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award (which was won by Richard Morgan’s Black Man). The book was her third novel, the previous one having been shortlisted for the Man Booker award.

2007 was the year that Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU. The book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published. The Writers Guild of America began the strike which would go on to give us, the following year, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog. The Hugo shortlist for best novel included Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, the only work by a female author to be nominated in that category since 2005 or until 2010. Madeleine L’Engle and Ingmar Berman died.The Science Fiction Foundation held its first-ever Science Fiction Criticism Masterclass. It was also, apparently, the Year of the Dolphin.

Tony will be leading discussion of The Carhullan Army / Daughter of the North.

(I leave it up to Niall and Tony whether we’ll be looking at Farthing or The Carhullan Army first.)

Cat Women of the Moon, Part 2: Bibliography

Here are the books mentioned in the second and final part of the BBC Radio 4 documentary, Cat Women of the Moon, hosted by Sarah Hall. Some of the duplication from last time is because their authors featured on the both programmes.

  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  • HG Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
  • China Mieville, Embassytown
  • China Mieville, Perdido Street Station
  • Ian M Banks, the Culture novels
  • Urusula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
  • Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
  • Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
  • Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
  • Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
  • Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
  • Nicola Griffith, Slow River
  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Plus Star Trek and the titular Cat Women of the Moon.

Edited: It’s now available, for at least the  next week, on Listen Again.

Cat Women of the Moon, Part 1 – Bibliography

Cat Women of the Moon, the two-part documentary of science fiction and sex hosted by Sarah Hall, was on BBC Radio 4 just now. (Part 2 will be next Tuesday at 11:30 BST).

Part way through the episode, I realized that this was a prime opportunity for book recommendations, and to consider just what the show has collectively mentioned. Here, then, for your contemplation, are the books mentioned in the program for whatever reason.

The programme is now available on Listen Again.

  • Nicola Griffith, Slow River
  • Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
  • Mike Ashley, Out of this World: Science Fiction but Not as You Know It
  • Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  • Jane Webb Loudon, The Mummy, or A Tale of the Twenty-second Century
  • Joanna Russ, The Female Man
  • Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army
  • Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
  • George Orwell, 1984
  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
  • Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
  • Iain M Banks, The Player of Games
  • China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
  • Isaac Asimov, Robot series
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula (Mentioned in such a way it could be a film reference instead)
  • John Christopher, Death of Grass

Also, in other media, Bladerunner, the titular movie, Cat Women of the Moon,and Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco of the Creation of Man.

The Flowers of War

The Carhullan Army coverNick Hubble’s essay about The Carhullan Army first appeared in Vector 258. Many thanks to him for allowing it to be reprinted here.

‘My name is Sister’

Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) begins and ends with the same note of defiance: ‘My name is Sister’ (pp.5, 207). The combination of nameless heroine and resistance to patriarchal authority has inevitably led to comparisons with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), but the similarities are superficial. Where Atwood criticises radical feminism for its complicity with the sexual repression which underlies the Republic of Gilead and implies that separatism is not a challenge but merely a means of accommodation to traditional hierarchy, Hall deliberately reinstates both tendencies at the core of her novel in order to recover the utopian impulses within them as forces for active intervention in the twenty-first century. Neither is The Carhullan Army a “literary dystopia” in the manner of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) because unlike those works its driving force and moral intensity stem from an unwavering belief in human society, explicitly acknowledged by Sister towards the end of the novel: ‘ … we had a duty to liberate society, to recreate it’ (p.196). As such, the novel eschews the playful satire of Atwood and the easy narrative pleasures of McCarthy (who, in best Tolkien style, ensures every ordeal is followed by a reassuring meal) in favour of direct engagement with the horrors it reveals, which are thus demystified and rendered subject to human agency.

Central to this project is Jackie Nixon, the enigmatic leader at Carhullan, the community which Sister joins. It is Jackie who singlehandedly transforms the women of Carhullan into ‘inviolable creatures’ immune to the horrors of civilisation. Sister says of Jackie that

She broke down the walls that had kept us contained. There was a fresh red field on the other side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history had never let us gather. It was beautiful to walk in. As beautiful as the fells that autumn. (p.187)

Although communicated in a different style and tone, the valedictory outlook expressed here is reminiscent of the death speech of Blade Runner’s Roy Batty: ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those … moments will be lost … in time’ [1]. Both passages acknowledge a strange beauty that is nothing to do with sanitising war and everything to do with getting beyond the limits of normal existence. Such desires appear psychopathic because they are not manifestations of the familiar death drive, but the product of a much rarer life force. It is a rejection of what Fredric Jameson identifies in Archaeologies of the Future as the ‘literary “reality principle”’ which triggers high-cultural ‘generic revulsion’ [2] and it clearly distinguishes Hall from those mainstream writers who deploy isolated genre tropes to spice up otherwise conventional narratives.

Continue reading “The Flowers of War” →

Future Classics: #1

The Carhullan Army (aka Daughters of the North) by Sarah Hall (2007)

The Carhullan Army cover

And so, the top-rated novel in this poll — by a healthy margin, in the end — is Sarah Hall’s Tiptree Award-winning and Clarke Award-nominated The Carhullan Army. Victoria Hoyle’s review gets at the book’s merits very well, I think:

…the inevitable irony of Carhullan’s insurgency, and of Sister’s membership of its “army,” is that it leads her to repress others against their will, and even to kill in her turn. She becomes party to another administration of terror, and a willing subject of a dictatorial regime. Whether this terror, driven by Jackie’s autocratic paranoia, is necessary or justifiable is left unanswered; the answer being, of course yes and, of course no. It is the embodiment of an essential dilemma, perhaps the most pertinent of our time: is it more courageous to passively follow your principles unto death, or is it your duty to use the tactics of the enemy, however disgusting, to overthrow them? Is it acceptable or reasonable to use the methods of tyranny in the name of restoring or protecting civil freedoms and human rights?

Either way, Hall understands that this dilemma is not an abstraction; it is the central difficulty of Sister’s existence and lies at the very heart of life at Carhullan. In the process of exploring it she makes and destroys and remakes Sister over and over again. Like us all, she is a malleable creature, eager to be inspired, happy to be galvanized to action, begging for a role to play in the world. The novel is an incredibly tender and multi-faceted portrait of her troubled journey, concerned almost entirely with the mechanics of her reasoning and her understanding of her cause. This is why, no doubt, Hall omits to describe the novel’s main scenes of violence and conquest—Sister’s narrative tapes are “corrupted” at all these critical junctures—but instead focuses on the tension of the long road to a short and bloody aftermath.

Other reviews: Colin Greenland in The Guardian, Nic Clarke at Eve’s Alexandria, AI White at Open Letters Monthly, Rachel Hoare in The Independent, Michael Arditti in The Telegraph, Tom Gatti in The Times, Abigail Nussbaum at Strange Horizons; and more critically, Adam Roberts at Punkadidle, Karen Burnham at SF Signal, and Cheryl Morgan.

And as Adam helpfully pointed out yesterday, with impeccable timing Radio 4’s Book Club has just had The Carhullan Army as its subject; you can listen to the programme, which includes an interview with Hall, here, discussed slightly by Dan Hartland here.

All of which leaves us with the following top eleven:

1. The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall
2. Maul by Tricia Sullivan
3. Natural History by Justina Robson
4. The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
5= Spirit by Gwyneth Jones
5= The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
7. Life by Gwyneth Jones
8. Lavinia by Ursula K Le Guin
9. Farthing by Jo Walton
10= Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones
10= City of Pearl by Karen Traviss

So: Eleven novels; nine writers, four Brits, three Americans, one American-Brit, one Canadian; three novels only published in the US, three novels only published in the UK, five novels published in both; four books published in 2003, the most recent nominee published in 2008; nine novels published as “genre”, two published as “mainstream”; two novels that at least some people think are fantasy. What do you think?

Ranking calculated from 101 responses to a poll run during October, November and December 2010.

The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (2007)

The Carhullan Army cover
Arthur C Clarke Award-shortlisted and James Tiptree Jr Award-winning, the force of this entry into the discourse of feminist utopia/dystopia (published as Daughters of the North in the US) is widely acknowledged, as in Victoria Hoyle’s review:

Either way, Hall understands that this dilemma is not an abstraction; it is the central difficulty of Sister’s existence and lies at the very heart of life at Carhullan. In the process of exploring it she makes and destroys and remakes Sister over and over again. Like us all, she is a malleable creature, eager to be inspired, happy to be galvanized to action, begging for a role to play in the world. The novel is an incredibly tender and multi-faceted portrait of her troubled journey, concerned almost entirely with the mechanics of her reasoning and her understanding of her cause. This is why, no doubt, Hall omits to describe the novel’s main scenes of violence and conquest—Sister’s narrative tapes are “corrupted” at all these critical junctures—but instead focuses on the tension of the long road to a short and bloody aftermath.

Please email me with your top ten science fiction novels by women from the last ten years (2001-2010). All votes must be received by 23.59 on Sunday 5 December. Your own definition of science fiction applies.

2008 Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

It may look as if everything is normal, but actually, I’m in Switzerland, where I’ve just had an absurdly early breakfast in anticipation of a long day’s work. But I’ve found time (and some internet) to bring you the shortlist for the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award anyway. (OK, I wrote most of this post at the weekend. But the principle stands.) Am I good to you, or what?

Tom Hunter, Award Administrator, says:

Featuring visions as diverse as a dystopian Cumbria and a future Hackney, time-travel adventures in 1960’s Liverpool and an alternate world British Isles in the throes of terrorist attack, through to tech-noir thrillers and a trawl through subconscious worlds where memories fall prey to metaphysical sharks, the Clarke Award has never been so close to home and relevant to the British literary scene.

The Clarke Award has always been about pushing at the speculative edges of its genre. It’s one possible map amongst many, never the whole territory, and this year’s shortlist stands as both the perfect introduction to the state of modern science fiction writing as well as a first tantalising glimpse of possible futures to come.

And those books? Read on.

Shortlist overviews
Abigail Nussbaum at Strange Horizons
Adam Roberts at Futurismic
Lisa Tuttle in The Times
Steven Shaviro
Tony Keen

A poll

The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter

The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua

The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod

Black Man by Richard Morgan

So. Run the numbers. Six novels, five publishers. Four stories set in the future. Three first-time nominees — two debut novels, in fact. One young adult book. What else?

(When everyone in the UK’s woken up, there may well be some discussion here, here and here.)

Reactions
John Jarrold
Abigail Nussbaum
Paul Raven
The Guardian
Martin Lewis
Jeff VanderMeer