Spufford, Francis
Entry updated 16 October 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1964- ) UK academic and author, relatively little of whose work is explicitly sf, though his nonfiction is deeply conversant with science-fictional modes of thought. Though it takes the form of a memoir, The Child That Books Built (2002) is in fact constructed around readings of various writers including Ursula K Le Guin, C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and others. Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (2003) encompasses in its historical narrative an understanding of the imaginative uses made of boffins (see Scientists) over the course of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on British attempts to create an advanced space programme (see Rockets). Red Plenty (2010) combines two levels of presentation: a nonfiction analysis of early 1960s Soviet society, a time when it seemed that the Communist government might pull off its claims to be creating a just society; and a fictionalized (but factual) narrative conducted as a kind of Thought Experiment. The end effect is curiously and legitimately moving: a rhapsody in honour of the dream of Utopia that simultaneously demolishes that asserted society. True Stories & Other Essays (coll 2017) includes commentaries on figures of interest including Charles Babbage, Iain M Banks, William Gibson, Rudyard Kipling, Kim Stanley Robinson and Bruce Sterling.
If Red Plenty can be understood as a special case, Spufford's first novel is Golden Hill (2016), ostensibly told by an eighteen-century narrator; it is essentially nonfantastic though the intensity of some of its characters' sly but manifest abhorrence of Slavery might be seen as anachronistic on the verge of alterity. In ways atmospherically evocative of Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days (2012) or Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (2013), his second novel Light Perpetual (2021) parlays the world-melodrama of World War Two into aspirations of something like Alternate History: in this case, five young people in this-world London are killed by a German rocket but, in an instantaneously instantiated other world, they survive till now. Music references are constantly applied, as though they were themselves music, embraced in the song of London. Cahokia Jazz (2023) is a full-fledged Alternate History set in 1922 in the city (and state) of Cahokia (in our reality analogous to St Louis and Missouri). The Jonbar Point of Cahokia Jazz– a much less fatal sixteenth century flu Pandemic – results in a "Columbian exchange" that did not, in this alternate world, as Spufford states, "create the depopulated, post-apocalyptic landscape discovered by later European settlers". Given the survival of a pre-existing civilization, the imperial conquest of western America takes a different course. The State of Cahokia is influential. The Mormons have not yet joined the Union. The western coast of Canada remains unstrangled by any Alaska Purchase. The transcontinental railroad is a Cahokian enterprise. The story itself – conducted as a guided-tour investigation of a serious crime by a detective new to Cahokia – makes it clear that Utopia has not been achieved: but may not be impossible in a later volume (some sort of sequel is, perhaps spoofishly, signalled by a Perils-of-Pauline Slingshot Ending).
Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (anth 1996) with Jenny Uglow, honours Charles Babbage, though the various original essays included move rather far afield. [JC]
Francis Spufford
born Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: 22 April 1964
works (selected)
- Red Plenty (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) [fiction/nonfiction: hb/Travis Coburn/Dutch Uncle]
- Golden Hill (London: Faber and Faber, 2016) [hb/Eleanor Crow]
- Light Perpetual (London: Faber and Faber, 2021) [hb/Faber]
- Cahokia Jazz (London: Faber and Faber, 2023) [hb/Faber]
nonfiction
- The Child That Books Built (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) [nonfiction: hb/from Arcimboldo, "The Librarian"]
- Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (London: Faber and Faber, 2003) [nonfiction: hb/Andy Bridge]
- True Stories & Other Essays (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2017) [nonfiction: coll: hb/Eleanor Crow]
works as editor
- The Chatto Book of the Dead (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992) [anth: hb/]
- The Vintage Book of the Dead (London: Vintage, 1997) [anth: vt of the above: pb/]
- Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) with Jenny Uglow [nonfiction: anth: Charles Babbage: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry