Semiosis

"Yes. This is a ‘first contact’ novel. An absolute classic of the science fiction genre: it’s humanity encountering a sentient life-form, one that kind of contacts back , basically. It’s also Burke’s first novel. That’s always a very exciting thing for us to have on the shortlist. Something fresh and new, a new voice. Our winner a couple of years ago, Ancillary Justice – which was much more of a space opera – was also a first novel. And in terms of the buzz that I heard about Ancillary Justice , I was hearing the phrase from lots of different corners of the science fiction community, which tells you that something is ticking a lot of different boxes with different kinds of readers. So, it wasn’t really a surprise that it went on to be very successful, because it was resonating. And with Semiosis , I’m picking up those sort of antenna signals, if you like. Absolutely. I tweeted a response , actually. Very, very politely. I basically said, ‘We hope that his book is submitted, and we look forward to considering it as science fiction.’ And we would be delighted if he was shortlisted; that would be a great way to introduce him to lots of other fantastic work that’s already answering the point he made. There was a lot of outrage. This kind of thing comes up from time to time, and it kind of goes back to that issue of literary snobbery. It also speaks to the divide, in terms of how people view science fiction literature; it is crumbling, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t hold-outs who will see the whole of science fiction as something to be very carefully avoided if you are a writer of ‘proper’ books. “Some people see the whole of science fiction as something to be carefully avoided if you are a writer of ‘proper’ books” Similarly, Margaret Atwood, she won the first ever Clarke Award. She’s been criticised in the past for making the distinction that her work was ‘speculative’ rather than science fictional. That was viewed by many people as an attempt not to be smeared with the genre. But I’ve chatted to Margaret about it, and she is a huge science fiction fan, which makes a difference, I think. And she’s mellowed on the opinion that she was trying to make. Whereas I think Ian McEwan is new to an argument that’s been raging for years. Well done, Ian. You’ve invented robots, alternate history. Good on you. But, quite genuinely, I want his book to be submitted. We’ll see what the judges make of it. It’s had mixed reviews."

"In some ways this is a classic ‘first contact’ novel. Human colonists have come to an alien planet, they discover an intelligent alien, and they try to get to know it. The twist here is that the alien is a sentient plant. That almost sounds like a gimmick, but the book is so robustly researched and imagined, and Burke works really hard to figure out how a plant might develop intelligence—working from the starting point that plants on Earth already have a lot of intelligence. They sense their environments, transmit information… They are not inert. She’s just extrapolating from what we know. The idea is that the planet in Semiosis is a billion years older than Earth. So all of life has had a billion more years to evolve. “Our attempts to understand and imagine our way into the experience of other life on Earth does tell us a lot about what alien contact might be like” The alien is called Stevland. The human colonists named it after the first colonist that died—their idea had been that they would name the most important life form that they found on the planet after that first death. And Stevland the plant ends up being incredibly important to them. Stevland is functionally immortal; he could be killed, but he doesn’t die or age, he doesn’t exist in generations. He clones himself and spreads. Every human baby is born at the same starting point, setting each generation back to the same place. But Stevland just learns and grows. He’s extremely alien—he has a different worldview, a very different experience of life. But he’s much more familiar than the ocean in Solaris, or even the aliens in Arrival . Early on in the book there’s section from his point-of-view. So he has an ‘I’. You’re able to experience how he experiences things differently—what it feels like to be a plant, but from that familiar first-person perspective. When I interviewed scientists for my book, I often tacked on a question about their favourite sci-fi alien, and Arrival and ‘Story of Your Life’ were the most often mentioned, because they are really alien-seeming aliens. Especially in the short story. In the movie, we find out why the aliens have come. In the short story we don’t: they’re there for a while, the main character learns there language, and then one day they leave and we never know why. There’s a lot more mystery. I interviewed Chiang and asked him about writing these very alien aliens. I asked if they had interiority to him—if he knew about their motivations. He said, no, absolutely not. In order to write alien aliens, they had to be opaque to him too. I thought that was really interesting. It was almost strategic—he had to keep them alien to himself, so that they might be alien to the reader as well."