The Clarke Award (founded by Arthur C. hisself) is given each year to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK the previous year. It’s a juried award, unlike both the Hugo and Nebula, for which any publisher can submit novels it thinks eligible. This year’s submissions longlist has just been made public at Torque Control; so farof the sixty entries, I’ve read exactly one of them, Charlie Stross’ Rule 34. Which I think is also the only sf or fantasy novel published in 2011 that I’ve actually read.
Which won’t stop me from entering Torque Control‘s guess the shortlist game however. Below are the six entries I think will be on it and why:
Embassytown, China Miéville. China is a multiple Clarke Award winner and this novel created quite a lot of buzz early last year, so I think this is a shoe-in.
The Islanders, Christopher Priest. Another easy guess, as Priest has also won the Award previously, while this novel is a return to his old Dream Archipelago series of stories.
Reamde, Neal Stephenson. The Clarke Awards in the past few years have had at least one American nominee in the shortlist and this is the obvious candidate; if we’re unlucky it will be one of the two Connie Willis novels instead.
Osama Lavie Tidhar, which I’m currently reading. This is the one I’m the least sure about, but it seems to have had a fairly large p.r. push (helped by Tidhar making the e-book edition free a while back, which is when I got it), it tackles a big, important theme and it’s somewhat on the literary side of the science fiction genre, which ticks all Clarke boxes for me.
Rule 34, Charles Stross. A good book, an important British sf writer, who has been nominated before.
The Fallen Blade Jon Courtenay Grimwood. He has been shortlisted a few times before, so is a likely candidate for this year as well.
An all male lineup, which would not be my preference so much as me looking at the list of nominees with no other information than what I already knew about the writers and books listed. We’ll see at the end of March how right I was.
Andrew Hickey
February 28, 2012 at 12:24 pmReamde probably won’t make the shortlist because it’s not actually SF/F – it’s a technothriller. That said, I’m pretty certain the Connie Willis ones won’t either, with it being a British award – I don’t know of a single British person who found those books anything other than contemptible.
I’d *hope* Greg Egan would make the shortlist, but he won’t win — The Clockwork Rocket is the ‘hardest’ SF book he’s ever written, by some way.