Via Lenin’s Tomb comes the news that China Miéville has won the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke Award for his 2004 novel Iron Council. According to the Clarke Award’s administrator Paul Kincaid:
“Iron Council by China Miéville focuses sharply on political change, but note how many things feed into
that change: wealth and suffering and sexuality and hope. This is the point at which the conflict between the moral and the political which has underpinned his previous books bursts into the open. There are many wrongs in Miéville’s world, but very few rights, and politics in all its forms from simple co-operation to bloody revolution, is shown to be the frail and fallible attempt to find a way in the world. And in the last few dramatic pages, this is a novel about closing Pandora’s Box because of the necessity of preserving hope.
Iron Council is also still up for the Hugo Awards. So far however, not one Clarke Award winner has gone on to win the Hugo as well; might Iron Council be the first?