Exogenous: 5 weird works that changed Exo
Two decades of weird science fiction and part of my personal Exo canon
From original idea to publication, cooking up Exo took twenty-one years. Most of the writing took place in two bursts in 2018 to 2020 and in 2022 and 2023. Otherwise, I’d pick the story up in the months between working on other writing projects. Over such a long period not only did the publishing landscape change (most sweepingly in the years since 2020) but also so did the canon of influential books. Ongoing conversations in the genre shifted as the defining texts were supplanted or enhanced by the addition of new stories. I want to talk here about five of the new canon that I feel are directly relevant to Exo. These are works that helped to shape how I thought about Exo and my own writing generally, whether it was a direction I wanted tilt towards or one I wanted to lean away from or even write against, either for fear of repeating or inadvertently rehashing another’s work, or because I wanted to strike out on my own, as far as I could manage.
Unlike my last five influences, no dead white males were exhumed. This canon is very much alive.
Nova Swing
M John Harrison had already lit up the genre with Light when a few years later came the Arthur C Clarke-Award winning Nova Swing. The second part of his trilogy of hard science fiction novels (when I say hard, I mean Harrison takes no prisoners and couldn’t give a shit if you, the reader, keeps up or not; plus, the physics isn’t so much hard as deliberately self-contradictory – take it or leave it, space jockey) about the Kefahuchi Tract – a zone of extremely weird physics. While Light and Empty Space, the book closing the trilogy, have multiple timelines and are set on Earth as well as roaming across the galaxy, Nova Swing is confined to a single unnamed planet and concerns an investigation into the denizens living by the Event Site, a place where a piece of the Tract fell, and the guides and tourists who illegally enter it. If you’ve read my previous piece, you’ll notice a considerable resemblance to the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. Harrison rips out of this book the bones that interest him and reassembles them into something still recognisable but much more fun, weird and disturbing. While the wildness of Harrison’s controlled imagination is always evident, it is grounded by the textures of twentieth and early twenty-first century life that he then stretches and twists into new patterns. He insistently deploys and tears up his motifs – cats and Cadillacs abound, noir fiction’s shape is borrowed and discarded, a detective that looks like Albert Einstein barely detects. Here, in the far future, is the litter, the detritus, of contemporary life. There is no yearning for any kind of better past nor nostalgia for a lost future. Harrison’s gaze is cold and clear-eyed and while Nova Swing might be set on another world, unlike the rest of the books here, its subject is unquestionably our beliefs about ourselves in the here and now.
The Country of Ice Cream Star
Sandra Newman’s third novel is an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, allowing the teenager and Sengles tribe-member Ice Cream Star full voice as she tells a small part of her story in a post-apocalyptic America in which all the white people have been wiped out by a virus, and everyone else dies of ‘posies’ around the age of twenty. This is a large novel telling of only a few months in her life, but this is a tumultuous time in which every certainty in this uncertain world is upended when her older brother shows symptoms of posies and, after hearing rumours of a cure from a captured thirty-year-old Roo (one of a number of Russians discovered over here on manoeuvres), she sets out to find it, encountering a religious cult in C. de las Marias (New York) and a war involving the Roos in Washington DC. The spirit of Russell Hoban’s post-nuclear-war Riddley Walker can’t help but haunt this work, while a few years’ earlier Will Self had written the more overtly satirical The Book of Dave. For all three works, the success or failure is all in the telling. The language is the story. For 600 pages Ice Cream Star’s lyrical rhythmic patter hypnotises you. Sometimes words and phrases are incomprehensible, the transformed or mangled-into-new-meanings English deployed with neither glossary or explanation, but it is always poetic, beautiful and compelling to read. You live this new world as Ice Cream Star lives it. You breathe it. Its heartbeat is your heartbeat. This is story to immerse you. Imbibe it.
Annihilation
Jeff Vandermeer’s Nebula-award winning Annihilation in 2014 was the moment when this restless, wide-ranging writer’s work suddenly reached critical mass, exploding across multiple genres like a twenty-first century literary Chernobyl (this metaphor feels at once very right and very wrong). For years he’d been seriously but playfully writing about mushrooms and squid, delighting in being formally experimental, borrowing and inventing, in a frantic genre-crossing pollination that took in fantasy, science fiction, literary and horror writing. Humour might sit comfortably alongside body horror, love stories segued into detective stories, all in service of themes of environmentalism, climate change, colonialism and our treatment of animals. With Annihilation he changed gear. The humour was dialled down (but by no means excised). No more the strange fantasy worlds. The structural experiments were less overt. Suddenly, this was our world, but not as we knew it. Telling of a group of four unnamed women who enter Area X, a weird zone of possibly alien intrusion which has mutated the plant and animal life, he tells the story of their doomed expedition as everything rapidly falls apart due to what they find in Area-X and – more fundamentally – what they have brought with them. When I first read it, I was struck by the unsettling sense that this might have been JG Ballard writing as HP Lovecraft. But that was a recondite response. Annihilation and the Southern Reach books are all Vandermeer’s own. Whether it is the brilliantly paradoxical (and to my mind deeply and amusingly Freudian) tower-as-tunnel conceit that runs through Annihilation or the way he gradually peels back the layers of deceit and conspiracy behind this expedition, Vandermeer provides probably the most unsettling and powerful portrait yet of our changing world and our place in it.
Rosewater
Tade Thompson’s Arthur C Clarke-Award-winning Rosewater is the first of a trilogy concerning another intrusion into our world. Here, in the years after an alien called Wormwood appears in London, the US goes dark and a giant dome, Rosewater, appears in Nigeria. Meanwhile, various people across the globe become infected with a fungus that gives them psychic abilities, which it turns out are related to Wormwood. When our narrator and reliably unreliable protagonist Kaaro discovers his own psychic abilities he uses them for thievery, until caught and nearly killed, and then as an unwilling agent for the Nigerian government. During the novel he learns that others with his abilities are dying of an unknown illness, and he seeks to find out why, fearing he will be next. Rosewater is weird science fiction. The alien arrival has left an infection that is slowly spreading across the world, and the human race is responding fearfully, trying to exploit, control and destroy it at the same time. Such contradictions are entwined with Kaaro’s own response to his abilities which are the source of his power, both his downfall and salvation, and what is also threatening to kill him. These clashes and paradoxes, which lie at the heart of Rosewater, are brilliantly writ large in Kaaro, who stumbles through, and seems to flee from, his own story. A man pursued by what he is and what he might yet become.
Skyward Inn
Aliya Whiteley’s Arthur C Clarke-Award-shortlisted Skyward Inn is weird. It doesn’t start out too strange, but by its end it has, as a friend said, ‘gone places.’ It is set mostly on Earth some while after a gateway suddenly appears leading to the distant planet Qita. Unable to resist an open door, we humans visit Qita and then attempt to conquer the Qitans. But it is hard to make war on aliens who willing surrender to you. The story follows two veterans of the ‘war’, a human woman and a Qitan, who together run a bar in Devon, serving Jarrowbrew, a Qitan drink that is popular with humans. Distrust between humans and Qitans remains high, and it is increasingly clear the relationship between human and Qitan, of colonist and colonised, is very different from what we initially believe it to be. This is not a story of victor and vanquished, or at least not how we might imagine it. As the novel progresses who is doing what to whom and who is having what done to them become rather blurred. What starts out seeming like a story of exploitation and division morphs and evolves into one of blending and exchange, of surrender, corruption and loss – and perhaps even gain – of self. There are no easy answers here, only difficult questions. And that is the very best kind of science fiction.
These five books, despite not existing when I started work on Exo, have been deeply influential on my thinking as I wrote the story. I cannot help but be touched by them, and in ways that I am conscious of, and no doubt unconscious of, they will have changed the book. They have become part of my personal canon for Exo.
In Exo, I certainly have not produced something even close to these books’ astonishing originality and brilliant artifice. I can only hope that, where I have trodden along parts of the trails these writers blazed while making my own writing journey, I have not got myself or my readers lost.
