Skyward Inn

"Again, I think the judges were responding to the platonic romance at the inn between a human, Jem, and a Qitan, Isley. It seems we invaded the Qitans’ planet when we discovered it, looking to exploit them, except they more or less willingly surrendered. The inn is in ‘the Protectorate,’ an anti-technological enclave in Devon, where Isley is the only permitted alien. It feels a little like the fundamentalist settlement in Wyndham’s The Chrysalids : a puritanical, pastoral utopia-dystopia, which wants to stop the clock. This enclave is threatened by the arrival of another Qitan and a plague. There’s no escape from pandemics! Can I? There’s certainly the thread of conquest as based on capitalism—which was typical of European imperialism, as I said earlier. A few of the reviews I’ve looked at cite H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds , with its throwaway footnote about the genocide in Tasmania . Partly Wells imagines us in the role of the colonised—then all the Martians die from flu, or something like it. In Skyward Inn, I think it gets more complicated, since there’s a cultural interaction between the species, like there was in Alien Love War. And A Desolation Called Peace, come to that. How changed were we by the people we colonised, kidnapped or enslaved? We’ve appropriated their music and their food, and yet acknowledging historical injustices is often dismissed as just another woke salvo in the culture wars. Meanwhile, the National Trust and English Heritage get attacked for acknowledging the source of the swag that financed so many of the stately piles they look after… The impact of the encounter with the alien is profound in several of these novels – it’s up to the reader to decide if these changes are to be welcomed or feared. I think so. To return to H.G. Wells , he gave us a toy box of half a dozen or so novels: time travel , alien invasion, trips to the Moon, and so on. There’s a constant fear that these devices will go stale or become useless clichés—although there’s always room for another murder or another romance in other genres. The history of genre science fiction is dominated by straight white men and, whilst there’s nothing wrong in that in itself, it’s refreshing to get an unfamiliar take on the world from other identities. We obviously owe a debt to Mary Shelley, but far too many other women have been downplayed or written out of scifi history. With a few exceptions. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s only a handful of Black, British science fiction writers. If you look at the catalogue for the exhibition I mentioned before, In the Black Fantastic, African Diasporic science fiction has been healthy for decades in music, cover art, the visual arts and so on. It’s just not necessarily been published in New Worlds or InterZone or by Gollancz or HarperCollinsVoyager, and we’ve not been paying enough attention. I’m sure Stewart Hotston will have crunched the numbers for us, about how many writers of colour were submitted and how many women, and how that compares to previous years. But the diversity of our shortlist is testimony to the strength of the books, rather than the judges filling quotas. And I genuinely don’t know which book will be chosen as the winner. I think we will have a tough and even more passionate meeting to decide. Part of our best books of 2022 series."