Tag / Arthur C. Clarke Award

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Speech for the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award

(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.

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Non-voting Chair of Judge’s Speech, 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award

Watching them come and go

The judges and the submissions

They’re judging the Clarke Award

Opening trilogies

Pleasure comes and torture goes

Scribes who’d give you anything

Some bear the bird of Penguin Books

Submission for the Clarke Award

A hundred books submitted, six books shortlisted, five judges: Phoenix Alexander; Crispin Black; Nicole Devarenne; Stark Holborn; Nick Hubble.

There was laughter, there was tears, there was playing with dead mice.

And that was just the cats sneaking onto our Zoom call.

There’s a particularly pleasurable agony of getting down to six books, which contrasts with the agonising pleasure of picking the winner. Some of the names are familiar to us from earlier shortlists.

Kazuo Ishiguro has been shortlisted before, for Never Let Me Go. Klara and the Sun is set in an unspecified near future city, with the Artificial Friend Klara, who forges a relationship with a young girl who is ill. The story is following up some of Ishiguro’s earlier themes and forces us to be limited to Klara’s view of the world; nevertheless, we can guess what is going to happen and we watch with horror and fascination as we read what one judge called “one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in the last year” and another labelled an anti-Pinocchio. There is love between the Artificial Friend and the real friend, but it might not always run both ways.

Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace is the follow-up to the previously shortlisted A Memory Called Empire, which some of our judges hadn’t read and didn’t feel it made this quote “massively sprawling space opera” impossible to follow, partly because it doesn’t emphasise the technobabble.

(Their words, not mine)

Three Seagrass is brought in to establish communication with a new alien species who appear to pose a threat to the Teixcalaani Empire, and she in turn brings in Ambassador Mahit Dzmare to help. There is intrigue at court and among the military factions, as the loving relationship between the two protagonists develops and the aliens connect more deeply. The judges found it “beautifully crafted”.

And our final returnee to our shortlist is for Aliya Whiteley, last shortlisted for The Loosening Skin, and back with Skyward Inn. This is science fiction’s answer to Jamaica Inn, but I’ll have to get back to you about what the question is. This is a platonic love story of the human Jem and the alien Isley, who run a pub in an anti-technological enclave in Devon. Earth has previously encountered Isley’s species, the Qitans, who more or less surrendered at once to humanity. Now the peace is going to be shattered by a virus, and the appearance of an illegal alien. The judges said it was “a meditation on love.”

Watching them come and go

The poets and the scientists

Veterans and the debutantes

Standing on the shelf and screen

It’s great to see authors that previous judges had recognised coming back, but what of the newcomers?

Harry Josephine Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia is new territory for us, a novel in the form of a poem or a poem in the form of a novel, in fact two poems or a poem and its translation. It’s a book which the judges said transported them to elsewhere, an epic in glimpses, with a sense of fragmentary history. It has shades of Anglo-Saxon poetry and Norse sagas, where what the judges see as its representation of “the disorientation and desolation of deep space” standing in for seas and oceans. Primarily, it is written in Orkney Scots, with an underlying but complex not-quite translation into standard English.

Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time was years in the making, a contemporary dystopia in a universe where Europe has not colonised Africa. The central character, Markriss Denny, aspires to join an Ark of the privileged in what we know as London, taking with him a developing talent for astral projection which might save him and destroy this society, or might lead to something more sinister. One judge “loved the astral projection” and all declared that it was packed full of ideas.

Finally, Mercurio D. Rivera’s Wergen: The Alien Love War brings together stories published in various venues, with a deep dive into the future of humans and the alien Wergen. The Wergen are sexually attracted to humans, apparently against their will, and this makes for both uneasy relationships and abuses of trust from taking advantage of the alien. Sooner or later, the Wergen will revolt. There’s a fascinating biology on display and the judges reached for comparisons with Octavia E. Butler to think through its depictions of interspecies relationships. The arc of the overall narrative works really well and there is a complex relationship between the chapters.

You read til the break of dawn

(Believing the weirdest things, loving the alien)

And you’ll believe you’re loving the alien

(Believing the weirdest things, loving the alien)

Thank you, and thank you again to the judges. Thank you

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Speech for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, 18 July 2018

My speech as Non-voting Chair of JudgesTM at Foyles, 27 July 2017.

We come to honour the modern Prometheans.

We come to honour those who steal fire.

We come to honour those chained to rocks.

We come to honour those whose livers are plucked out by eagles.

Well, maybe not the last, but do keep drinking.

Two hundred years ago, the teenaged daughter of two radicals, who had run away to Europe, published a novel in which a scientist brings dead matter to life and then abandons his offspring. We can read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in many ways, but in part it’s about technology and reproduction, about parenting and responsibility and about what it is to be human.

Those are some good themes.

Our authors are still exploring them, two centuries on. There were four debut sf novels on the shortlist this year and the other two authors are new to the Clarke Award.

Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time is set in a near future where people can have babies by donation or redesign their babies or even have be both parents. In a series of vignettes, intersecting in subtle ways, Charnock explores some of the social implications and some of the emotions of children and parents. It’s a book that demands rereading, our judges finding it subtle and “a quiet, unshowy book” that lingers for a long time.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne is set after apocalyptic events, with the few survivors scavenging in the bad lands in fear of the dreadful Company, in fear of the awful Magician and in fear of the bearful Mord, a huge, aggressive, flying bear. One survivor is Rachel, living in an uneasy relationship with a scavenger named Wick, who find a strange object she takes at first to be a plant, but turns out to be an animal and indeed sentient. They call it – him – Borne and Rachel raises him like a child, until Borne starts having ideas of his own. Our judges called it “absolutely bonkers” with “batshit crazy technology” – but, obviously, batshit in a good way.

Children, daughters, with ideas of their own are at the heart of Jennie Melamed’s debut Gather the Daughters, a postapocalyptic island community where daughters are very definitely property of their fathers and are abused in all kinds of ways. Whilst the society’s set up brings its own crises, the thrust of the novel is the young women’s attempt to assert agency. Our judges said this is “An important book which places the experiences of the abused and their testimony at the centre” and it offers us “Unspoken stories of the unheard”. It’s clearly in the tradition of The Handmaid’s Tale, a book that seems more relevant today than thirty years ago.

Revolution features in Omar El Akkad’s American War, another debut, where we follow the actions of a child and then woman Sarat in the Second American Civil War after the death of her father. She is radicalized by a father figure and we see how she is driven to terrible acts. It is a tale of American politics told from the outside, which our judges felt “Turns sf’s power structures upside down” and marks “The end of the American century.”

Jaroslav Kalfař’s debut Spaceman of Bohemia straddles a historic revolution from the perspective of a lone astronaut on a Czech space mission to investigate a strange cloud which may threaten Earth. Not only do we get the story of his travels – and his encounter with an alien spider-like creature – but we delve into his past and the actions of his father and grandfather before the Velvet Revolution. The sins of the fathers may yet be visited on the sons. It is Swiftian and Kafka-esque, and Hasek-esque and our judges loved its “Sf exploration of recent Czech political history”

C. Robert Cargill has written in other modes and genres, but Sea of Rust is his first sf novel. It’s told from the point of a sentient robot, after an AI created apocalypse in the wake of a movement for robot rights. Humans have refused to acknowledge their artificial offspring and are usurped by their creation. Robots get finally to be human, with all their resourceful, wisdom, skills and their foibles, jealousies, politics and aggression. It has element of westerns – The Dirty Dozen, perhaps, with raids and sawbones doctors and ambushes and shootouts. Our judges found it “an unexpected pleasure” and “An effortless read”, and it, like Borne, is a whole lot of fun.

I think our judges had fun whittling down the submissions to six, and I thank them for their good humour and patience in the heart breaking process of agreeing which of the half dozen were dispensable and which we wished to choose as the latest winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The other five books will take on lives of their own and be read and I think we have a snapshot of the modern Prometheus and what science fiction can do in these dark and uncertain times. Words and stories remain important.

But one of the books had to win, as the eagles circled, eyeing our livers.

It’s time to discover the latest Titan.

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Speech for Arthur C. Clarke Award, 27 July 2017

My speech as Non-voting Chair of JudgesTM at Foyles, 27 July 2017.

I’m not sure that it is smart or wise to say this.

I am feeling haunted.

There are voices in my head and I’m not sure whose head it is.

There is the voice in my head of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who would have been a hundred in December. Without him, we wouldn’t be here today, and as we look at the short list for the 31st Clarke Award, I wonder what he would say.

Meanwhile we’ll find out at the conference I’m coorganising.
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Speech for Arthur C. Clarke Award, 24 August 2016

My speech as Non-voting Chair of JudgesTM at Foyles, 24 August 2016. Gratifyingly well received.
 

Novels with spaceships and novels with spiders,
near future Europe with parallels beside her,
a modified woman – flying with wings,
these are a few of my favourite things.

You’d think after thirty years it’d be easy to choose the Clarke winner – we’d turn up and all know that that novel is the one.

But this year we had a tough time getting to a short list and a tough time agreeing on a winner.

All of the books play with and reinvigorate the sandbox of science fiction – generation starships, ill-matched crews, AIs, parallel universes, mutants and have one or more moments of conceptual breakthrough, when you realise that the fictional universe is more complicated than you think.

It was suggested to me by Ian Whates, Leila Abu El Hawa, Andrew McKie, Liz Bourke and David Gullen that in a sense all the books on the short list were winners

But I pointed to the rule that There Can Be Only One.

Might it be Dave Hutchinson’s Europe at Midnight, follow-up to his Clarke shortlisted Europe in Autumn, with the Balkanised Europe now neighboured by a pocket universe consisting of a university, a pocket university, if you will? Of course, this is a very timely book, a very important book, said one of the judges, and we were deciding on a winner just over a week after the Brexit vote. This is my favourite book, said one of the judges.

There’s a pocket world in Iain Pears’s Arcadia, which laminates together a Tolkien-esque author and their fantasy world, and time travel from the near future to a parallel world. Pears nods, of course, to Tolkien and Lewis, to Sir Philip Sidney and to As You Like It, as well as many other references. Pears’s app add to the reading experience, challenges the linearity of reading and adds to the pleasure of the novel. This is my favourite book, said one of the judges.

Or might it be, Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Kitshchie award-winning, originally self-published, lazily comparable to Firefly, but it does diversity and explores identity so much better than Whedon and almost effortlessly. Great fun, this is my favourite book, said one of the judges.

Or might it be a book that has to overcome a phobia of many of its readers and at least one of our judges, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. This is an epic tale, told across generations, as the last of humanity think they have found a terraformed planet to settle, only it is defended by an AI who is protecting the dominant species of the planet, which has been uplifted (and the novel has at least one nod to David Brin). Defying disbelief, that species turns out to be able to defend itself more than adequately. This is my favourite book, said one of the judges.

Alternatively, J.P. Smythe’s Way Down Dark is also set on a ship that has a voyage which will last generations –but here the passengers are awake, but society is falling apart. Chan has tried to maintain the Arboretum against the attacks of a savage gang. When her mother dies, Chan has to become leader in her place and save the ship. But nothing is quite as it seems and we are taken on quite a journey in the first of a trilogy. This is my favourite book, said one of the judges.

Finally, Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix, a prequel to Who Fears Death, forces the reader to confront some interested moral questions in the choice of protagonist – in some ways it’s a superhero origin story, but in truth it is more complex. Phoenix Okore is a modified, accelerated woman, imprisoned in a skyscraper in New York. When she breaks out in search of the truth, it starts a bloody chain of events in Ghana and the U.S. This is my favourite book, said one of the judges.

You can see our problem. What do you mean by favourite?

Each year, for thirty years, the judges have to decide that for themselves. A different set of judges every year and a different favourite. How did they decide this year?

Novels with spaceships and novels with spiders,
near future Europe with parallels beside her,
a modified woman – flying with wings,
these are a few of my favourite things.

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Speech for Arthur C. Clarke Award, 6 May 2015

There was a moment in the final judging meeting for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award when we invoked W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

It was something about the ordinariness of suffering and disaster, its everydayness. Because we’d realised that each of the books we had chosen, in quite different ways, was about the end of the world.

I’d also been rereading one of Freud’s case studies, in which the patient – not, in fact one of Freud’s patients – imagined that he was living after the end of the world:

At the climax of his illness, […] Schreber became convinced of the imminence of a great catastrophe, of the end of the world. Voices told him that the work of the past 14,000 years had now come to nothing, and that the earth’s allotted span was only 212 years more; and […] he believed that that period had already elapsed. He himself was ‘the only real man left alive’, and the few human shapes that he still saw – the doctor, the attendants, the other patients – he explained as being ‘miracled up, cursorily improvised men’. […] He had various theories of the cause of the catastrophe. At one time he had in mind a process of glaciation owing to the withdrawal of the sun; at another it was to be destruction by an earthquake

Disasters are not new, of course; taking a middle ground definition of science fiction we can see the end of the world in Mary Shelley’s other sf novel, The Last Man, and come close to it in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. We have the so-called cosy catastrophes of Wyndham and Christopher, Ballard’s ecological psychological disasters. They are perhaps innoculations of fear of the real world ending in disaster – whether it is the ongoing fall out from the economic crash of 2008 with default always just round the corner or the latest salvo in the ongoing culture wars.

Six visions of the end of the world – three women, three men, a range of nationalities, a variety of publishers and a work – sort of – in translation. My thanks to the judges who chose the books and discussed them so passionately at four epic meetings.

Our judges found Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August to be “An unusual take on time travel with communication across generations [and] a metaphor for our lives”. Harry August lives his life over and over again, each time with his memories of the last life intact, trying to get things right. But the end of the world is coming, he is told, and the apocalypse seems to be getting closer all the time. One judge found it “Incredibly immersive” and “didn’t want it to finish”.

Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn is a “soft apocalypse”, a vision of a near-future Europe, Balkanising. Estonian chef Rudi is drawn into a shadowy organisation, whether he likes it or not, and there seems no way out. One judge called it “A novel about fragmentation – [with Europe] both becoming more localised and globalised.” We noted a minor character shared the name and some of the interests of one of our judges – coincidence we hope – and felt that it avoided “a lot of the probable pitfalls” of the near-future, international thriller.

Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things the judges found “Very Ken MacLeod but not MacLeod”, it was “Understated and unsettling and absolutely absorbing”. Christian pastor Peter Leigh is sent on a secretive mission to an alien planet where the indigenous species want to hear the gospel; he is not the first priest to do so, but no one will tell him what went wrong last time. Meanwhile, back on Earth, things are falling apart. We can’t help but read this with memories of Mary Dorian Russell’s The Sparrow, of course, and before that James Blish’s A Case of Conscience.

Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven straddles the apocalypse, both the Georgia flu that begins to wipe out 99% of humanity and the survivors twenty years later. The judges noted that it is “A feel good post apocalypse” and, while many post-apocalypse novels focus on the survival of humanity, this focuses on the survival of culture. According to Auden, “We must love one another or die.” Later he rewrote the line “We must love one another and die.” This novel for the judges, was “An elegy for the hyperglobalised present“.

M.R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts is in the early days of the postapocalypse, some kind of zombie plague where our protagonist or antagonist – the eponymous girl – is among a group of child zombies being experimented on by uninfected survivors. She might hold the answer to humanity’s plight. The judges found it “Very emotional and suspenseful, truly horrifying” and note its move “from humanity to posthumanity” and how it “Worked through its sfnal premise logically”.

And finally, Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water takes us to several generations after some kind of disaster, where water has become scarce, and the protagonist’s father is a tea master, gifted with extra water, but under the constant suspicious eyes of an occupying force. Noria Kaitio looks likely to succeed her father, despite being a woman, but secrets, both of her parents and the half-forgotten pre-apocalypse put her at risk. The judges praised the “Beautiful writing” and “The strength of the relationship” at the heart of the novel. It is “intensely focused, narrow-ranging, almost flawless on its own terms.”

My job here, of course, is to draw connections, but we do have six very different apocalypses, sometimes quite mundane apocalypses, lived apocalypses. I’ll quote Auden again. The Old Masters:

never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

And then, of course, we have something amazing – not thankfully a boy falling out of the sky, but a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.