(St Martin-in-the-Fields, 16 August 2023)

The Clarke Award has been operating in what has sometimes felt like a cosy catastrophe for the past few years and, if today is a Wednesday that finally feels like a Wednesday, then I am frankly relieved. Today is Wednesday, yes? I have jet lag. And, having reread two Wyndham novels this year, I know that things aren’t always as cosy as they may at first seem. The upshot is that we were actually able to have face to face meetings again – although my comrades who work on the railways put paid to one of those. The judges – Francis Gene-Rowe, Kate Heffner, Dave Hutchinson, Georgie Knight and Nicholas Whyte – gritted their teeth for what many of us hoped would be our last ever Zoom call and finally learned how to the use the unmute button. I, meanwhile, continued to have no authority. My thanks to them all.

The shortlist was selected on a Zoom call and it was a tough process to whittle it down from a hundred books to just six. All of the authors are new to Clarke shortlists, some of them new to sf, two are debut novelists. There’s an urgent sense of the climate catastrophe behind most, arguably all, of the novels.

So, let’s begin with The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier but translated by Adriana Hunter, a title I somehow lost the ability to pronounce during the judging meeting. Incidentally, Le Tellier is the president of the Oulipo group who write using constraints on their prose and poetry. Most famously, Oulipo author Georges Perec wrote a novel without the letter e, which someone once insisted to me was The Great Gatsby. I’m not convinced they were right.

In tribute to this, I’ve written this speech minus the letter – Oh… Ah… If I tell you the letter I’ve omitted, I won’t have omitted it. So, you’ll just have to listen carefully.

The Anomaly does contain the letter e and, more relevantly, two identical aeroplanes which land months apart at JKF Airport. The question is what to do with the Doppelgängers and whether to let the rest of the world know. One judge notes that this metatextual novel “rewards care in reading” and I need to go away and read Raymond Queneau. Another judge appreciated how “the brilliant concept merges the old idea of doubles into political theatre.” Readers may appreciate the cameo appearance from President Trump.

E.J. Swift’s The Coral Bones has environmental politics at its heart and was hailed by one judge as “very, very, very, very, very … very good.” (I think they liked it.) It weaves three intersecting narrative threads – a nineteenth century scientific investigation, a twenty-first century climate catastrophe and a future post-catastrophe. Another judge noted it is “an angry novel about the survival of humanity in the face of the greatest catastrophe they’ve ever face.” It has great worldbuilding, sapphic love, substance and soul. It is a fitting swansong for Unsung Stories, whose final novel this is.

There’s an environmental disaster behind Tom Watson’s Metronome: a couple have been exiled to a remote island for initially unspecified crimes and have to take pills at eight-hour intervals to protect them from toxic spores released by the melting permafrost. But as they reach the end of the twelve-year sentence, the supply boats stop and the couple have to decide how to survive – one of them decides she will try to escape. One judge found it “genuinely disturbing” and another “read the book with a fever to find out the details of the invented world.”

Plutoshine, by Lucy Kissick, is another debut, with debts to Arthur C. Clarke, to Kim Stanley Robinson and to Heinlein’s Have Space Suit – Will Travel. A habitat is being established on Pluto and an attempt is being made to terraform the planet – is it a planet or just a dwarf planet this week – so that it is more habitable. But the process is setback by sabotage and the person who may hold the secret behind the conspiracy is a young girl traumatised by something she has witnessed. One judge said “this is a book with a heart” and another that “this is a very kind book”, yet the judges found it had a “satisfying exploration of villainous motives”. They loved its description of Pluto and the technology on display.

On the other hand, one judge described Aliette de Bodard’s The Red Scholar’s Wake as “fucking lovely.” We’re in the space opera, military sf realm of Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, with historical inspiration from pirates around the Chinese and south-east Asian coasts relocated to outer space. The sentient spaceship Rice Fish has been widowed and recruits the pirate-captured Xich Si to become her new wife. Their relationship might help an uneasy pirate alliance to hang together or may be a weak spot that will split the alliance and leave them to attack of the power structure in the system. One judge declared it “lusciously imagined, subversive and sapphic” and all were fascinated by its examination of power relations.

Finally, we have Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker, of which one judge said “It’s like somebody wrote a book just for me.” A dozen years after the death of the last panda, governments have introduced an extinction credit system where developers have to buy a credit if they are going to cause the extinction of a species. This, of course, is nothing like our carbon credit system … it’s open to abuse, marketisation, even gamification. Mark Halyard is partly responsible for the extinction credits of a mining company and sees the way to commit a kind of insider trading, knowing the rules are about to change and he is thrown into an uneasy alliance with Karin Resaint, an-AI trained scientist who calculates animal intelligence and wants to track down surviving examples of the titular Venomous Lumpsucker. This book is, as one judge said, “a radical, accessible novel” which is twisted, dark and attacks everybody, whilst locating “points of resistance that seem possible in the face of the capitalocene.” It’s also very funny.

So, we came together in the same room for the final discussion and I wish I could say it was an easy choice. Even a cosy one.

Or at least easier than doing it online.

But the five judges are so industrious and rigorous, that we spent four hours making the decision. We have several books on the shortlist which explore the climate catastrophe from a variety of angles, we have deep explorations of human nature and relationships, and we see an engagement with the history of sf as well as new voices to listen to. It was, as it almost always is, a tough choice, but we reached a shared decision in the end and skirted the catastrophe.

I think it’s time we found out what they decided.