Corey Fah Does Social Mobility: A Novel

"This is perhaps this year’s wild card and I think it may have been one the judges called in. Waidner won the Goldsmiths prize for Sterling Karat Gold , their third novel, but theirs was a new name to me and I want to work my way through their back catalogue. The eponymous protagonist has won a prize in a city that seems to be a surreal version of Prague, but there’s a complication when they try to collect it. They enlist the help of a chat show host to track it down, but they seem as busy dealing with an eight-legged version of Bambi… There are nods to a real murdered playwright, to Franz Kafka , to Disney and to the American artist Nicole Eisenman , alongside time travel and paradoxes. In the meantime, the novel raises questions about gender, sexuality, class, intersectionality and creativity, in a short but densely constructed narrative. Of course, if they win, we need to send them to Hyde Park so they can fail to pick up the trophy! We have a shortlist with six authors new to the award, although only a couple are debuts. Which is not to say that there weren’t great books by previous winners or shortlistees – but none of them cut through. One of the jobs of the award is to promote writers that not everyone has heard of, and each of these novels stand alone, rather than being parts of long series. I like series fiction, but it’s sometimes hard to find the entry point. There are a lot of publishers that are still committed to print fiction, including some ambitious small presses and some people who have chosen the self-publication route. I’m optimistic because publishers are taking chances. I haven’t crunched the numbers on demographics on the submissions list, but I don’t think we were in danger of an all-male shortlist. On the other hand, I think writers of colour are still underrepresented by British publishers. I hasten to say, there’s nothing inherently wrong with novels by cis, straight, white men – and the judges definitely don’t pick books to meet any kind of quotas – but it’s great to get perspectives that are different from the majority of the last century of science fiction writers."