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Jul. 13th, 2015 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAt Loncon I went to this panel on the state of British SF, because I figured it'd be guaranteed to be insidery and useful as an American looking for recs on up and coming British writers who haven't crossed the pond yet. Instead, it was one of my least favorite panels, lowlighted by an editor repeating the nonsense that the only reason women aren't published as frequently as men is because they don't submit as much work of sufficient quality. The panel talked broadly about 'trends', which was stupid and useless and usually ultimately ended with them conceding that the 'trend' they were talking about was inconsistent and could equally be argued the other way. They barely mentioned authors and mostly the authors they mentioned were big names who everyone knows. The one useful recommendation I got was for Chris Beckett, and it slipped out in exactly the way I'd hoped the whole panel would go- as an off-handed reference to a writer I gather is a pretty big deal in the UK.
Beckett's Dark Eden, which I read last week, won the Clarke Award from the BSFA in 2012, so clearly it wasn't slipping under any radars, but I'd never heard of Beckett before that panel. I am now grateful to the panel for at least that, because the book is spectacular.
It's a story about the descendants of a couple that was stranded on a remote and strange alien world with no way to communicate offworld and no way to get offworld. 150 years later (200 wombs: This alien planet has no sun, and thus no way to account days or years other than through human biological processes. Days have been replaced by a count of 'wakings', months by 'periods', years by 'wombs', which are of course roughly 3/4 of an Earth year long.)
In the ensuing 150 years, there is cultural and linguistic drift, which Beckett captures incredibly vividly and creatively. I particularly love his reinvented vocabulary for concepts that the Family had lost and then rediscovered. For example, they had legends that back on Earth, people rode on the back of animals named horses. When they discover that animals on Eden can be domesticated, they coin the phrase "make a horse" to describe the process of domestication.
But it's also, besides being great at being a novel of ideas, a great novel of character. Beckett's characters are wonderfully individuated as they struggle with questions of morality, leadership, love and family that are potently Biblical without seeming a bit old-fashioned or allegorical. Nobody's choices are right all the time. The novel's protagonists are achingly flawed and painfully aware of it, and painfully aware of the costs of their errors. Which has me really excited to read the just-out sequel, which apparently jumps forward another few hundred years to show us just how fucked up society got as a result of our heroes' decisions.
Beckett's Dark Eden, which I read last week, won the Clarke Award from the BSFA in 2012, so clearly it wasn't slipping under any radars, but I'd never heard of Beckett before that panel. I am now grateful to the panel for at least that, because the book is spectacular.
It's a story about the descendants of a couple that was stranded on a remote and strange alien world with no way to communicate offworld and no way to get offworld. 150 years later (200 wombs: This alien planet has no sun, and thus no way to account days or years other than through human biological processes. Days have been replaced by a count of 'wakings', months by 'periods', years by 'wombs', which are of course roughly 3/4 of an Earth year long.)
In the ensuing 150 years, there is cultural and linguistic drift, which Beckett captures incredibly vividly and creatively. I particularly love his reinvented vocabulary for concepts that the Family had lost and then rediscovered. For example, they had legends that back on Earth, people rode on the back of animals named horses. When they discover that animals on Eden can be domesticated, they coin the phrase "make a horse" to describe the process of domestication.
But it's also, besides being great at being a novel of ideas, a great novel of character. Beckett's characters are wonderfully individuated as they struggle with questions of morality, leadership, love and family that are potently Biblical without seeming a bit old-fashioned or allegorical. Nobody's choices are right all the time. The novel's protagonists are achingly flawed and painfully aware of it, and painfully aware of the costs of their errors. Which has me really excited to read the just-out sequel, which apparently jumps forward another few hundred years to show us just how fucked up society got as a result of our heroes' decisions.