There Is No Future, and England’s Dreaming: British Dystopia Wins Tiptree Award

By Ron Hogan on April 16, 2008 1:42 PM

Yesterday, judges for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, awarded annually to a work of science fiction or fantasy that engages the subject of gender in new and thought-provoking ways, selected Sarah Hall‘s Daughters of the North as their 2007 winner. The novel, which was published last year in the U.K. as The Carhullan Army, had already won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for literary writers under the age of 35, and is still on the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Britain’s most prominent SF prize.

When she began writing it as a short story, Hall told me last week, during the first leg of her American tour, it felt completely different—not only was she used to writing historical fiction, she had never written in the first person before. “And after about 10,000 words,” she said, “I realized it wasn’t going to turn where I thought it would; more ideas kept coming.”

The novel is set in a dystopian future in which Britain has suffered an economic collapse in the wake of environmental disaster and is reduced to accepting airlifted foodstuffs from an American government under the control of Christian fundamentalists. Registered citizens are confined to urban centers, and the women have been fitted with contraceptive devices to regulate reproduction. The novel’s protagonist (known only as “Sister”) decides to seek out a rural community of women farmers in the remote northern countryside that turns out to be fiercely radical, blurring the lines between freedom fighting and terrorism; Sister tells her story after she has been recaptured by the government.

Daughters of the North is one of several recent novels from authors regarded as “literary” to engage the science-fictional theme of an apocalyptic future; think Cormac McCarthy or Jim Crace. At least in America, such novels tend to be marketed in ways that downplay the SF aspects, although HarperPerennial does play up comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale in the blurbs. (Of course, Margaret Atwood‘s relationship to the genre was famously contentious.) Hall happily describes her novel as “speculative fiction,” though, and speaks with enthusiasm about the research that went into creating a plausible disaster-struck society.

The story began as a reaction to severe flooding in the north of England at the start of 2005; when the book came out last summer, the region was once again suffering from flash floods. “The future is arriving every day in the form of these floods,” she observed, forcing her countrymen to confront the ecological crisis head on. “People don’t worry about what’s going on at the North Pole until we can’t get any more cod for our fish and chips,” she said. “Our governments are relying on capitalist-based solutions, but we need to come up with something grander. If the world powers don’t get together and come up with something…” The thought trailed off.

OK, complete change of subject: What about the title change? “I didn’t particularly put up a fuss about it,” she confessed, and “Daughters of the North” was, in fact, the title she’d picked out back when she was just writing a short story. She was used to such discussions after the publication of her first novel, Haweswater, which she was sure would’ve been changed for the American market. “I’m very lucky that the publishers I have really respect the work,” she added, noting that the title change was strictly in the interest of accessibility. “They understand that there’s no point in marketing me as a soft-boiled writer.” (And it’s true: fuzzy cover image aside, all the cover’s promotional push is on Hall’s status as a recurring name on Britiain’s most prestigious literary prize shortlists.) “I pick my fights carefully, and generally I’ve not had that much to fight about.”