{"id":3533,"date":"2012-02-28T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T17:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2012\/02\/28\/this-years-clarke-award\/"},"modified":"2012-02-28T12:00:56","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T17:00:56","slug":"this-years-clarke-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2012\/02\/28\/this-years-clarke-award\/","title":{"rendered":"This year’s Clarke Award"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThe 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<\/cite><\/a>; so farof the sixty entries, I’ve read exactly one of them, Charlie Stross’ Rule 34<\/cite>. Which I think is also the only sf or fantasy novel published in 2011 that I’ve actually read.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhich won’t stop me from entering Torque Control<\/cite>‘s guess the shortlist game<\/a> however. Below are the six entries I think will be on it and why:\n<\/p>\n

\nEmbassytown<\/cite>, China Mi\u00e9ville. 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Islanders<\/cite>, 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nReamde<\/cite>, 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nOsama<\/cite> 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nRule 34<\/cite>, Charles Stross. A good book, an important British sf writer, who has been nominated before.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Fallen Blade<\/cite> Jon Courtenay Grimwood. He has been shortlisted a few times before, so is a likely candidate for this year as well.\n<\/p>\n

\nAn 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}