The Old Drift: A Novel

"Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift astounded me in both the monstrosity of the tome and how its fantasy and science fiction is so subtle, the book is passable as literary fiction. It’s an intelligent book that sweeps across class, colour, generations with its deception, reflection, fraud, prejudice, imbalance, balance, devotion and hope, in rebellious text that subverts the reader’s expectations with a comedic drama that’s integral to the story. I like to think of the author as an agent of change—we have a responsibility in the visibility we claim through our texts. With the writerly pen, we can be subversive activists, giving voice to the voiceless, as we scrutinise and shape our characters and their journeys in whichever themes. Namwali Serpell explores ideology, supremacy, disease, curiosity in relationships forged and lost. She casts a spotlight on the place of women in society, on the intolerable choices of mothers and their children, on the quest for identity, a search for belonging. If this is literary responsibility, I say, Amen."

"This came out in 2019, and it was a phenomenal debut – it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award . It’s set in Zambia. It’s organized as a set of multiple stories following different people, members of several families with intertwining stories, over three generations: the grandmothers, the mothers, and the daughters. That covers the recent history of Zambia from the late colonial period through independence, to the present day, and then the near future. So this is a story of stories, which is my favourite kind of story! It’s also the classic post-colonial novel format, the multigenerational family epic – many South Asian literary fiction novels have this same structure, following a family or a set of families across independence and into the upheavals of the post-colonial era. What makes it science fantasy to me – and I don’t think that phrase was used to describe it at the time very much, but I’m applying it – is that this book commits very deeply to both the fantastical and science fictional devices in these different narratives. The very first viewpoint character is Sibylla, a girl who in later chapters becomes a mother and a grandmother. Her whole body is covered in long hair that grows so fast, she has to shave it off multiple times a day. And it’s magically prehensile – she can use it to defend herself and so forth. It’s kind of like an X-Men-mutant-power-magical-hair situation. Later on in the book, I think in the second generation, we meet someone else who can’t stop crying – literally, she cannot stop. For years, she cried endlessly, so much so that she becomes this cultic figure. She has followers who are also crying, but performatively crying, whereas she actually can’t stop. At the same time, there are these other threads – for example, we follow the 1960s Zambian space program, which is a real thing; and the search for an AIDS vaccine; and eventually as the narrative moves into the present day and the future, the development of drones, a swarm of tiny drones that eventually become the chorus of mosquitoes that narrates the story. So the machinic and magical aspects coexist, in much the same way that they do in real life – especially I feel in post-colonial nation states, but frankly for everyone. How much of our politics and our history and our social crises are driven by the collision of the mythic and the technocratic, right? So this is why I picked Serpell’s book. It’s an absolutely magisterial work in whatever genre you want to place it. But I think science fantasy actually makes a lot of sense as a way to think about it, because you don’t have to reject either side of its world. Different and the same. Because the same people persist in later narratives as family members of the current protagonist. So it’s, “Oh yes, my grandmother was a magical hair lady, but I’m building drones” – or whatever. It’s the same ongoing story, and there’s no denial. People don’t necessarily take it seriously, the magical things that happened to their ancestors – but then, who does? But there’s no retroactive writing off of those things – those things actually did happen in this narrative, and they have no other explanation."

"Spoiler alert: It gets distinctly science fictional at the end. This book does raise an interesting question: how much science fiction does a book need contain to actually be considered science fiction? You know, a book can be entirely set in space and be almost entirely not science fiction if that makes sense. Take the film Alien , that could almost as easily be set in a ship in the ocean that finds a deep sea creature that sticks to your face—or whatever—or it could all be set in a galaxy far, far away, but really have no science in it whatsoever. On the other hand a book might have an almost entirely modern-day setting with just one tiny element of science fiction; alternative history, for example, is a big science fiction trope, where you change one thing and a different timeline branches off. “This book does raise an interesting question: how much science fiction does a book need contain to actually be considered science fiction?” Some people might prefer to call this type of book speculative fiction rather than science fiction. I’m not really here to have those kinds of arguments, but it’s brilliant to have this book on a science fiction list, because that means that we’re going to find a lot of new audiences for this book and we’re also pushing at the boundaries of what people (and publishers!) might consider to be science fictional. And it’s certainly a book that was being talked about within science fiction circles, even if it wasn’t necessarily branded that way. A lot of the people I saw enthusing about the book publicly before we shortlisted it were other science fiction writers! Again, if there’s one thing a good award shortlist can do, it’s point readers towards things that they might not have automatically considered their kind of thing, and encourage people to stretch the edges of their reading lists from time to time. Yes. No. Sort of. Maybe! I mean, we don’t have a particular mission, except to pick the best science fiction book of the year. We don’t predefine ‘best,’ we don’t predefine ‘science fiction,’ even, and we don’t even necessarily define ‘book,’ at least in terms of word count in the way some other awards might—usually those with multiple categories, for example, for novels, novellas, short stories, and so on. One of the reasons for not having those rules defined in that way is that Sir Arthur was always adamant that he didn’t want an award named after him that only recognised books that looked like his books. We don’t have those definitions precisely so that we can play across lots of different areas based on what the judges that year are looking for within their particular collective definition of ‘best science fiction novel of the year.’ What you’ve said about flagging up books with crossover appeal is precisely why a lot of people like the Clarke Award, and I love that that’s why they like it, but that’s different from being the central reason behind our judging decisions. Let’s not forget that the line up of judges changes every year, and those definitions of science fiction will keep changing with them. “People like me—white males—should definitely be making efforts to read outside our own cultures and comfort zones” And, you know, I’m hoping we’re going to bring The Old Drift to a lot of different readers. And in the light of conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement, people like me—white males—should definitely be making efforts to read outside our own cultures and comfort zones: to read more books by women, books by writers of colour—so you would want to start with some really good recommendations, I would hope!"