Here’s the first draft of my Hugos preview. Comments much appreciated.

Thanks to all who contributed. You can see the final product in Friday’s Fin (Review section

In the next few days, the winners of the Hugo awards will be announced at the World Science Fiction Convention. While this event does not attract the kind of attention associated with, say the Booker prize, the genres of SF (science fiction or speculative fiction, as you prefer) and fantasy, have a massive presence in our culture. The occasion of the awards provides an opportunity to consider the state of SF.

What’s immediately striking is the quality of the candidates for the main award, that for best novel. Looking at the SF shelf in your local bookshelf, groaning under the weight of multi-volume sword-and-sorcery epics, and tiresome Star Wars derivatives, it would be easy to conclude that the genre is in terminal decline. Yet all the contenders for this year’s Hugo award would stand comparison, not only with the Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s, but with most contemporary literary fiction. In fact, with the rise of literary modes like magical realism, the whole concept of genre has become more a matter of the subculture to which writers belong than of fundamental difference in content or expression.

The big problem for speculative fiction has been the loss of the future,as a focus of imagination. The sense of inevitable, and transformative, technological progress that drove classic science fiction has come to an end. In many respects, the way we live now is quite similar to that of fifty years ago: we drive petrol-engined cars to work in office buildings, return to houses much like those we grew up in, and turn on the TV for a night’s entertainment.

In particular, human space travel, the central technology of classic science fiction, has gone nowhere. Nearly forty years after the moon landings, we have a half-built space station in low earth orbit, serviced by an increasingly decrepit fleet of shuttles. Even these limited ventures seem doomed in the long run. In this context, stories about Martian colonies, or the exploration of Jupiter seem rather pointless.

In social terms, too, the utopian and dystopian visions that drove classic SF are distinctly out of fashion. Fukuyama’s claims about ‘end of history’ may look a bit dubious in the light of the various wars and terrorist outbreaks that have occurred since he wrote. But even if we are not at the end of history, there seems to be little in our present times or the foreseeable future to provide a basis for radical speculation.

The one area where technology still exhibits rapid progress is that of computing and the Internet. The startling rate of progress is embodied in the various versions of Moore’s Law, stating that computing power, storage capacity and so on, double every eighteen months or so.

Picking any plausible finite estimate for the computing capacity of the human brain, Moore’s Law implies that computers will surpass it sometime this century. Most people, noting the string of failed promises that makes up the history of artificial intelligence research conclude that this estimate must be wrong, either because Moore’s Law will fail sooner or later, or because quantitative increases in computing power don’t translate into real intelligence.

But if you take the idea seriously, it’s easy to go beyond it. Once computers reach human levels of intelligence and consciousness, the networking capacity of the Internet implies that they will rapidly transcend it, with unimaginable consequences. This idea is commonly referred to as the Singularity, a term apparently arising in discussions between the mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann. The idea of the Singularity was popularised in the 1980s and 1990s by mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and later by technological innovator Ray Kurzweil.

Regardless of its validity or otherwise, the idea of the Singularity has obvious appeal as a technical device for SF, since it reopens the door to the limitless possibilities that characterized mid-20th century thinking about the future. On the other hand, since the computer minds resulting from the Singularity are, by hypothesis, unimaginable, it is necessary to postulate their continued coexistence with humanity on some basis or another.

Two of the contenders for this year’s Hugo [Ian MacDonald’s River of Gods and Charles Stross Iron Sunrise] are based directly on the idea of the Singularity, and something like it is central to the work of Iain M. Banks, whose latest novel The Algebraist is also on the ballot.

River of Gods is set in India in 2047, as it approaches the centenary of independence, having broken up, in the meantime into half a dozen separate states, feuding and bickering, with access to water being the bitterest subject of contention in an era of global warming. In an effort to stave off the rise of superhuman AI, research on a range of topics has been banned globally, but is still being carried on in a clandestine fashion in some of the Indian states, with the result that, unknown to any of the characters, the Singularity is rapidly approaching.

This emerges as the central story, but the novel switches viewpoints among a dozen main characters, with subplots centred on politics and gender (the former continuing much as it always has, the latter subject to radical technological modification). The kaleidoscopic effect is sometimes confusing, but it is effective, at least for Western readers whose knowledge of India is already of this kind: a refracted mixture of partial, colourful and contradictory images, ranging from sacred cows and saris to call centres and software mills.

Iron Sunrise is a sequel to Stross’ first novel Singularity Sky, which was one of the Hugo nominees in 2004. The starting point is a Singularity in which an emergent computer intelligence, referring to itself as the Eschaton, masters the capacity to control both time and space, and determines to prevent any other causality violation that would threaten its own existence. Its first action is to disperse the human population of Earth across dozens of different planets, equipping them with a variety of gifts that will eventually permit the discovery of faster-than-light travel, after several centuries of development in isolation

This is an effective device that permits free play with many of the traditional concerns of SF, allowing dozens of different civilisations derived directly from those of modern-day Earth. Singularity Sky was anarchic and playful, with 24th-century Trotskyists grappling with the problems of almost unbounded technological capacity. Iron Sunrise is much darker: the action is driven by a would-be Master Race who open the book by blowing up a star and destroying all life on the planet orbiting it.

Iain M. Banks has enjoyed huge success with a series of novels centred on the Culture, a future civilisation in which the superhuman intelligence of Machine minds has made work and economic activity essentially unnecessary for humans. Much of the plot in these novels deals with relatively traditional SF themes arising from the peaceful or violent interactions between the Culture and other civilisations with which it shares the galaxy. But the real appeal is in the depiction of the Culture itself, perhaps the most convincing evocation of a post-scarcity society that has yet been produced.

None of the Culture novels has even been nominated for a Hugo, and this year’s nomination of The Algebraist, has something of an air of compensation for past omissions. Although the book is a worthy contender, most of Banks’ fans would prefer the award to go to one of the Culture novels.

The Algebraist has been described as a Culture novel in reverse. Humans engaged in a brutal war between space empires of the traditional SF kind seek a technological secret held by a post-technological race dwelling in gas giants, and apparently travelling freely between them. As usual with Banks ,the main interest is not in the complexities of the plot, but in the interactions between society and technology. This is probably better developed in a series like the Culture novels than in a single book.

Singularities aside, SF still faces the problem that the future isn’t what it used to be. The alternative, and a time-honoured strategy in SF is to mine the past. SF has always been as much about the past as about the future: writers from Asimov onwards have replayed of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Then there are the innumerable translations of medieval romances, sea stories and Westerns into various mixtures of SF and fantasy.

The great discovery of recent years has been the fictional potential of the early modern era, from the 17th to the 19th century. The typical mode is that of alternate history, most notably in the steam cyberpunk genre inaugurated by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine.

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell takes a different tack, positing a convergence between real and alternate histories. Clarke’s Georgian England is just like the real thing, but has a history in which magic was practised right through the middle ages, and remains a topic of antiquarian interest.

The plot similarly combines an alternate history in which the rediscovery of ‘practical magic’ by the eponymous rival magicians disrupts English history and the course of the Napoleonic wars with a traditional faery story, beginning when Norrell makes the classic mistake of accepting an attractive-seeming bargain from a faery king.

The point of the book, though, is not the story but the style, complete with 18th century spellings and elaborate footnotes. This style, and the fact that the book takes over 700 pages for a story that could have been told in a fraction of the space, has repelled some readers but also attracted many.

China Miéville has taken the whole process a step further, creating a fictional world around the city of New Crobuzon, which is recognisably London of the late 19th century, but with a biological rather than technological basis to its industrial revolution. The politics is that of Continental Europe, and particularly Paris, with gendarmes and agents provocateurs, and a ferment of radical and revolutionary organisations. The first two novels in the series, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, were both nominated for Hugo Awards, and this year’s candidate Iron Council has already won the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke award.

The Iron Council is the name taken by the workers on a transcontinental railway project who have overthrown their masters and fled into the unexplored wilderness, building railtrack as they go. They are faced with the choice between continuing their flight and returning to aid a rebellion in New Crobuzon.

The setting of Iron Council provides scope for an exploration, among other things, of the themes of revolutionary politics and, implicitly, the question of whether any fundamental alternative to capitalism is feasible. Miéville would certainly give a positive answer to this question. However, the conclusion to Iron Council, in which the revolutionaries and the armoured train of the title neither succeed nor fail in their attempt to liberate New Crobuzon, is classically ambiguous, calling on mythic archetypes of sleeping knights in hollow hills.

With such a strong field, and selection on the basis of a membership vote, it’s hard to predict a winner. My personal favourite is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell but this is a book perfectly designed to appeal to middle-aged academics like myself. Of the remaining contenders, I think Iron Council is the strongest, though all would be worthy winners.