Books for our age

Attending the great multicultural melting-pot that was Dublin Worldcon, and attending the Hugo Awards this year, has made me think about how books reflect the age they're written in.  

The Best Novel Award went to Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars,  an alternate history of NASA in the 1950s.  The book explores how things might have been if women had been allowed to be astronauts.  Reading the narrative, the references to the #MeToo movement, and examples of casual racism, are easy to spot.  SF has always prided itself on being a place where we could question and challenge the current culture, and it seems that were doing so with ever more relevance at present.

No-one who has followed recent developments in the genre could miss the huge shift towards recognising diverse creators.  From NK Jemisin's history-making three Hugo wins in a row by a woman of colour, to this year's acceptance speech by Jeanette Ng, calling out John W Campbell as a fascist, diversity and representation are now firmly centre-stage.  My own panels, discussing asexual characters and older characters, were packed out, and people came up to me later while waiting for the tram to thank me for the discussion, and to continue it.

In this week when the UK Parliament has so controversially prorogued, we have seen the release of Margaret Attwood's The Testaments.  Given the current political situation in both the UK and the US, this book is a timely reminder of the dangers we face if democracy dies and women's hard-won rights disappear.  

My travel read to and from Dublin was Tade Thompson's Rosewater, a story by a writer of African heritage, set in Africa.  Nnedi Okorafor, another writer of African heritage, was nominated for a Hugo for her Binti novella this year too.

The cultures which these writers come from cannot help but inform their work, bringing viewpoints and experiences to me which are unlike my own.  These writers, and the books they write, reflect back to us, and examine and challenge, the issues current in the time in which we live.

They are truly books for our age, influenced by, and influencing, the events of the real world around them.