Researcher & editor
Grace Borland Sinclair







Friday 12th February 2021



Q1) The book most influential for you as a young person

As a young person (I’m talking from childhood, although many of my older and wiser academic colleagues would view that as present day), one of my first literary experiences came in the form of the invitingly gothic and wonderfully absurd A Series of Unfortunate Events. A fiendishly unlucky series of thirteen books by Daniel Handler, written under the pen name Lemony Snicket.

These books are responsible for my development of an advanced vocabulary from an early age, which has enabled me to feign my way through the literary world ever since (I don’t know whether to be grateful or resentful). The miserable tale of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire is one utterly underappreciated (No – the Netflix series doesn’t count, although I do like the 2004 film: Billy Connolly as Uncle Monty, yes please).

These books continue to have a presence in my adult life, and I return to them often. The way in which they encourage the pursuit of intellect and creativity in a manner true to oneself whilst treating their readership with respect and an understanding of life’s often unbearable hardships, is difficult to match. You also must get your hands (or ears?) on the audiobooks read by Tim Curry, unbeatable.

Q2) The book that gets you through hard times

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I caught the Le Guin bug during the first coronavirus lockdown whilst staying with my parents in the spring and summer of 2020.

I had up until that point been a devoted Phillip K. Dick fan, but it wasn’t until I discovered Le Guin that my eyes were opened to the radical and subversive potential of speculative fiction writing:

“Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.”

The novel disguises itself with the familiar sci-fi formula, as you experience an unfamiliar alien world from the perspective of an earthly outsider. Yet nothing can prepare you for the emotionally and intellectually enriching nature of the story Le Guin masterfully discloses. The vision of Genly Ai and Estraven crossing the Gobrin Ice, hardly saying a word; preserving energy for the necessary sequence of food, sleep, packing up their belongings and moving slowly and laboriously across the glacier, will be forever etched into my memory. Le Guin’s ability to convey meaningful connection through atypical modes of communication evidences the social rewards that can come from empathetic perseverance. Her portrayal of the ambisexual Ekumen is detailed and meaningful, rich with cultural and political histories which reflect the inadequacies of our own prejudices against any form of ‘otherness’.

Q3) The book that most disappointed you

The second publication in Frank Herbert’s Dune series, Dune Messiah. I was captivated by the world of Dune after avoiding it for so long due to its (ironically) godly status in the world of speculative fiction. Although certainly filled with problematic depictions when viewed through a contemporary lens, I was drawn in by Dune’s complex layering of tangled religious, political, ecological and technological systems. Learning that Grimes’ debut album was heavily inspired by the series was my final sign to commit myself to Herbert’s journey.

The journey was cut underwhelmingly short however when I embarked Dune’s second novel. The tale of the great Emperor Paul Muad'dib’s ascension to the throne read as dull and vapid compared to the cosmic narrative entanglements of the first book. Paul’s chosen-one syndrome comes to fruition as he follows vengeance and ego, never ceasing to complain about his endless list of gifts and talents (like seeing the future) and all the while leaving his pregnant and threatened partner at home. Not to mention the insensitive exploitation and miscommunication of the ‘jihad’. If you enjoyed Dune, and are considering the sequel – I’d recommend picking up a Le Guin novel instead.

Q4) Name a book with either a brilliant opening or a brilliant ending

“The early summer sky was the colour of cat vomit” is the first line from Scott Westerfield’s young adult science fiction novel Uglies.

Certainly not the most sophisticated literary opening but that’s why I love it. From the very beginning, Westerfield’s series laughs in the face of scholarly elegance and its first line has stuck with me since my early teens. The series is an excellent literary introduction to the social ramifications of future technological developments.

Uglies is set in a post-scarcity future where the state provides welfare for its citizens in the form of advanced plastic surgery and technological cosmetic procedures. On their 16th birthday, citizens are gifted the life-changing and politically placating procedure and transported to the plastic utopia of “New Pretty Town”. The novel explores classism, marginalisation, individualism and the mechanisms of state power through the journey of its protagonist Tally Youngblood. Tally slowly but surely comes to the realisation that state-run initiatives aren’t to be trusted. A lesson as relevant to adulthood as to angsty adolescence.

Q5) Your favourite character from a novel

The figure of the professor in Elizabeth Dauphinee’s The Politics of Exile. The Politics of Exile is a unique telling of a researcher’s complex first-hand encounter with the usually detached and distant subject of her research. Dauphinee’s work pushes the boundaries of genre writing, fusing both autobiographical and narrative form.

The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed International Relations professor - Dauphinee’s avatar, about to publish her latest book on the Bosnian War. As her manuscript deadline approaches, the professor has a chance meeting with a charismatic Serbian man named Stojan Sokolović, a putative war criminal. As their complex relationship develops, we learn about the Bosnian conflict and question the parameters of objectivity inherent to disciplinarity.

Although defensive at first of her years of hard work in the pursuit of career success, as the professor learns more about Stojan she begins to recognise that the expectation of passivity in the academic world is deeply flawed. As Stojan states: “you’re building your whole career on what I lost, and you never came to even ask me what it was like”. The professor conveys her experience with complete frankness and relays the emotional and intellectual difficulty of coming face to face academic expectation versus human reality.

Her character is complex and deeply disturbed by what she learns and Dauphinee doesn’t offer an easy solution for the transmission of experience and trauma. What Dauphinee’s work does offer, is a candid account of the difficulties and subsequent human rewards that can come from the receptive pursuit of empathy.

Q6) Next on your 'to read' pile is...

Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth. I studied Fagan’s poetry collection There’s a Witch in the Word Machine alongside A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad and Janice Galloway’s Blood for my undergraduate dissertation, and was mesmerised by her writing style. Her debut novel The Panopticon is similarly masterful, and I can’t wait to be absorbed into her world once again. I think that contemporary literature is often eclipsed in the study of Scottish writing which can’t seem to escape the iron grip of Burns and Scott. I hope that in the near future Fagan’s work is given its rightful place on curriculums across the country.

Q7) Your favourite poem

‘The Coin’ is the forty-fourth in the sequence of fifty-one sonnets which make up Edwin Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland. Prior to university, I was obsessed with the question of Scottish identity. I had (foolishly) attempted to write my Advanced Higher English dissertation on Scottish identity in Lanark and The Testament of Gideon Mack, which (unsurprisingly) got me no closer to resolving my unanswerable questions. It wasn’t until I began my time in the wonderful Scottish Literature department at the University of Glasgow that my mind was opened to the immeasurable number of ways to explore and probe literary ‘Scottishness’.

During my first or second year, we covered Edwin Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland and I realised the importance of ambiguity, subjectivity, and open-endedness when exploring questions of national identity. The narrative of ‘The Coin’ tells of a group of space travellers who excavate a Pound coin from the earth of a land which used to be Scotland, a Scottish Republic to be precise.

“we turned it over, read easily One Pound,
but then the shock of Latin, like a gloss,
Respublica Scotorum, sent across
such ages as we guessed but never found
at the worn edge where once the date had been”

The poem subverts all notion of borders, temporal, national, and literary. Is this the future of a Scotland yet to come, a Scotland far in the past, or the Scotland of an alternate world? What became of the nation now reduced to dust, and what lies ahead for those who discover the metal relic? ‘The Coin’ taught me that such questions of nationality and identity don’t have to be linear, qualified, or precise.

That or Tam o’ Shanter. I know it’s a cliché but committing the poem to memory is one of my proudest literary achievements to date.

Q8) The greatest book you've ever read

I hate the idea of ‘greatest’ and the implication of hierarchy, so I’ll go with a book that I never get tired of returning to. Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. It possesses by the bucketload one of my favourite attributes of speculative writing: complexity. With each read comes a new perspective on events, characters and settings. The novel’s title comes from the Latin word ‘ubique’ which means anywhere or everywhere, a fitting description of the book’s plot. Ubik doesn’t feel like a novel. It doesn’t tell you everything about the world you need to know, and it doesn’t skip out on information which might not directly relate to the plot. It drops you in the centre of its world without apology or explanation and it’s up to you to decide what you want to infer from its rich detail and intricately incoherent worldbuilding. The novel is set in 1992 (published in 1969) and follows Joe Chip, an employee of Runciter Associates, an intelligence organisation which weaponizes the various psychic abilities of its employees in activities of corporate espionage. Joe (a technician who possesses no psychic ability), accompanies the CEO of Runciter Associates, Glen Runciter and a handful of the company’s most skilled psychic agents to the location of their biggest job yet. A trap is set, and an assassination attempt carried out on the whole party. What follows is a series of reality inversions, time reversals, and existential paradoxes which interrogate the nature of existence, the ethics of psychology, the bureaucratic hegemony, the philosophy of life – and that’s just for starters. If you’re looking for the closest you can get to a psychedelic experience in book form, I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot.●











Grace Borland Sinclair is a Postgraduate research student, currently writing her thesis in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research specialises in feminist speculative fiction across the work of marginalised Scottish writers. She is Co-Editor of the literary journal, From Glasgow to Saturn and Social Media Assistant for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language. She also has a job in retail because you have to pay to get degrees. //// t: @roboticleaf






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