I am beginning to perceive a pattern here, though. There is a loose group – a new New Wave, if you like – of British writers whose work might best be described as the natural successor to the ‘mundane SF’ of the early 2000s. These writers are less interested in the widescreen formats of space opera, MilSF and interstellar travel, focusing instead on stories set mainly on Earth in a recognisable near-future, with an emphasis on contemporary politics and class inequalities, the impact of new technologies on ordinary lives. I would include within this group Maughan himself, from way back, but also Simon Ings, Matt Hill, Matthew de Abaitua, Carl Neville and James Smythe (whose 2014-Clarke-shortlisted The Machine stands as a key example of this kind of writing). I have been asking myself for a while now why it is that these writers are so much less visible than they ought to be, given the contemporary relevance and literary excellence of their output. Their work is (surely) right at the cutting edge of science fiction. It is using science fiction to engage directly with social and political questions, demonstrating SF as the radical mode of literature it has always been.

For genre publishing imprints not to acquire and promote this kind of science fiction seems short-sighted and again, counter-intuitive. These writers are important and talented and they deserve recognition. You could argue that it is in this brand of politically engaged, intellectually curious stripe of SF that the future of the genre lies. Especially in our current moment, audiences who look to science fiction for inspiration, information or even a warning about where future developments could take us are hungry for novels and stories that tread that uneven, liminal path between the present as it is experienced and the future as it might be.

I agree with Nina Allan that there’s a real invisibility for some of the UK’s most enviable young* sf stylists, but I also think that the reasons she lists as an argument for their importance are also exactly the reasons for their invisibility. Put simply, sf has always been a deeply nostalgic genre, and the UK is deep in a period of nostalgic escapism more broadly—one that affects its soi-disant liberal left just as much as its Brexit-exceptionalist right, if not perhaps more so in some respects. Maughan and Hill refuse both British exceptionalist nostalgia and the comforts of technological utopianism; there is a market for that refusal, but it is probably too small for the already-struggling publishing houses of the UK market to gamble upon, when they can make more reliable returns with more traditional material. Ditto Ings, who is of course something of an old hand, and also—like de Abaitua—something of an experimental writer. (I am not familiar with Smythe’s work, and literally acquired my first book by Neville yesterday, so I can’t comment on either of them.)

It is meant as no insult to the book-buying public to observe that it seeks the comfortable escapism of familiar generic forms and nostalgic narratives of progress—indeed, this has probably always been the case, though the industry once had enough slack (and, perhaps, enough of a sense of mission in terms of artistic form and expression) that it could more readily support an avant-garde with the profits from the mid-list and the big hitters. But in terms of the genre in particular, I wonder whether the transition to what Clute has called “the new sf” (which rejects the technological utopian modality, and sometimes auto-critiques it in the process of that rejection) may never actually be a transition so much as a budding-off. If sf is what we point at when we say sf, then for the majority of sf readers these writers will never write “proper” sf; they are, if anything, actively opposed to doing so, which is what makes their work interesting (at least to Allan and myself).

Perhaps the slow self-retconning of the literary establishment into believing that it was actually always OK with speculative literatures all along will provide a space for this new form to grow… though that may of course be a vain hope, principally informed by the desire that the stuff I write might someday find someone willing to publish it.

[ * Young in writerly terms, rather than in strictly demographic ones. ]