Writerly

I don't like a writerly writer, you know the kind. I've really gone orf literature and hate to read anything literary. Even with my favourite genres, I really don't like that stuff some writers try to do with language.

Take science fiction. I like a rollicking good yarn, and I read for the plot, for the ideas, for the fun of it. But I never took to cyberpunk and the like, because I simply can't stand all the messing around with language, all the "this is how people will talk/think in the future."

It's like watching an American film, set in an American city, but dubbed into French. You can follow the plot, and understand quite a lot of what people are saying, but you have to work too hard and don't enjoy the experience.

Some things have merits beyond their status in a particular genre. They have interesting things to say, and if you pay attention you can find a lot to say about them. But if you come at me from the position that I've got to work hard to start with, I start resenting you immediately. I'll work when I want to work, when I think something is worth the work.

It's like books that start with several pages of italic text. I never enjoy that.

This is making me sound lazy and stupid, and perhaps I am, but it's not as if I'm not willing to give things a chance. For example, every year I buy Gardner Dozois' anthology of the Year's Best SF. This is sometimes a mixed bag. Dozois has good taste, but he's not infallible, and some years are just better than others. But often the whole point of short SF is that you don't know what's going on until near the end. So it's not as if I never do any work on a story to get into it. But make me work just for the sake of working, just because you fancy writing in a particular Newspeak style, good-bye.

I know it means I'm missing out on a huge chunk of stuff, but I'm as sure as anything that I'm not missing anything I'd enjoy. Any SF writer who gets featured in the Guardian regularly, for example, I'm sure I'd hate.

Over the years I've come upon a number of writers who have become firm favourites, and they always seem to be relatively obscure in this country. I don't know why this would be. It's not as if I set out to be a contrarian. Reading, primarily, for the plot, as I do, you'd think my tastes would be kind of mainstream, but examples like Michael Connelly, whose books you will find in W H Smiths/Waterstones are a rarity.

For a long time, one of my favourite writers has been Kate Wilhelm, whose books are always hard to get hold of in the UK. As you can see from her bibliography, not only is she prolific, she's a genre crosser. I would have first encountered her in the legendary Luton library SF section, but she's written more thrillers and legal procedurals in recent years. As far as her SF goes, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a classic of the genre. She's particularly good at the post-apocalyptic novel, viz that, and Juniper Time among others. And she's good at combining suspense with SF ideas, as in Huysman's Pets. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is actually one of those formative novels, and I can't believe you haven't read it.

Not by coincidence, Wilhelm was married to Damon Knight, another excellent writer. Won't make the kind of headlines that Philip K Dick does, but then Dick's notoriety is more in the line of rock star/drugs than quality of writing. I find most of his famous stuff impenetrable. As for Damon Knight, The Man in the Tree is superb. It's about one of Knight's favourite themes, one that is currently quite fashionable: the idea of multiple universes (the multiverse), and having the ability to switch between them. I just read a Crichton (Timeline) based on the idea. But both Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm are always more concerned with the human impact of such ideas. So The Man in the Tree is about the tormented life of a man who discovers that, with a little mental twist, he can switch between universes, so that events which have happened, suddenly did not happen.

Finally, dear reader, I should mention the great Tim Powers, one-time winner of a Philip K Dick award, but a much better writer. Powers likes to uncannily combine fract and friction, populating fantasy plots with historical personages such as Byron and Shelley (or, more recently, Kim Philby). I have never read a bad Powers novel. It was his most recent, Declare, which set me off on my recent espionage jag. But frankly, Powers makes espionage more interesting by including elements of the supernatural. All the paranoia of the spy game, the wilderness of mirrors, and the vicious game playing of SMERSH and NKVD and OSS and the CIA makes so much more sense if they were also running scared of demons.