The Last Astronaut

"This is a ‘first contact’ novel, and notable for being set purely within our solar system rather than having an intergalactic span. It’s actually quite rare to see a book that’s solar system-set. Charlie’s planet is a long way away, we have to have got there, and that brings certain presumptions around the mechanism for travel. A Memory Called Empire is an empire; the getting from planet to planet thing is not a major concern of the book, because it has clearly already happened. So there’s something very interesting about books that limit themselves to our own solar system. You can’t get away from the mechanics of space flight—you can’t use made up technological shortcuts to wave away the fact that there is no gravity in space, you can’t sidestep the fact that your mode of transport is very vulnerable out there, a tiny air bubble wrapped in metal that could pop very easily. This book is playing with that. “Are we seeing here the end of our love affair with space?” There’s also a definite nod to books like Sir Arthur’s own Rendezvous with Rama ( I think David would be happy to acknowledge that as a source), which again is actually quite rare on a Clarke list, as I noted earlier. But while readers might well recognise echoes of writers like Clarke, this is still a very modernised update, I would say. Even just looking at the title, ‘The Last Astronaut’… science fiction is more usually concerned with firsts—a new planet or emerging technology for example—so are we seeing here the end of our love affair with space? You know, we don’t really go to space any more, not like we thought we would be anyway, so there’s a sort of melancholy that hangs over that idea of a last astronaut rather than the sense of adventure we might have seen in past decades. It’s also hopefully not a spoiler to note that many people find this book has a distinct horror flavour to it, along with the science fictional plot. I’ve already talked about the story mechanics that can come into play when you limit yourself to a closer solar system story built upon day-after-tomorrow rather than far-future technologies, but this book also reminds us that space itself is an utterly alien environment for humans. Coming full circle, in a sense, all life on Earth is living in that thin habitable line on Charlie’s planet, January, and it’s entirely possible to view space as both the future for our race and also a source of imaginably powerful existential dread. Maybe there’s a last astronaut for very good reasons… Science fiction is not a movement, but there are movements within science fiction—if that makes sense. I often draw parallels with art movements, and there have certainly been manifestos for science fiction movements in the past. Cyberpunk, for example, was very much a kind of natural uprising of a very particular attitude within early 1980s science fiction writing, and same with what was referred to as the New Wave in the late Sixties. The word ‘punk’ now seems to be bolted onto any kind of movement: we’ve got solarpunk, ecopunk, dieselpunk… Steampunk is another obvious one that really took hold, but is steampunk a progressive movement? Quite literally not, in the sense that it’s actively looking backwards in terms of the timeframe, but it certainly has its set of ideals and rules that it plays by. People talked a lot about ‘the New Weird,’ which was a definite trend even if it wasn’t a movement, and similarly with what’s been referred to as ‘the New Space Opera.’ So there are official or unofficial movements within science fiction. And I think one of those approaches to the genre has always been about turning back on the things that have gone before and reframing them, which is the kind of progression you would see within art movements, as each step moves forward. When you look at this year’s shortlist, some people will say that our shortlist is very much centred on one thing—if we took an art parallel, people might be saying, ‘this is the year that the award is shortlisting all paintings,’ for instance. Next year might be all strange and wonderful installations, and then they’d say, ‘they’re trying to be deliberately weird now.’ So of course an award can never win. But then we are not trying to win. We’re more interested in asking questions like: What can we do with science fiction tools that are very well developed? How can those be refreshed again? How do I re-explore, as a writer, the books that I loved as a younger reader? I know this is explicit in Charlie’s writing, and similarly in The Last Astronaut , which is, perhaps, the most Clarke-y book on the shortlist that we’ve ever had. They’re taking those recognisable elements and moving them forward. It’s not a mission that science fiction has set itself in the last couple of years, but certainly all the conversations are there, and it’s a trend you can see through the lens of this shortlist very easily. People who are very familiar with science fiction as a genre are saying: how can we move it to the next level, keep it fresh, be critical when we need to be, but also acknowledge the ideas and writers of the past. For me I think that says a lot about the level of confidence in what we might call the collective science fiction project right now."