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2010 Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist announced

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It’s that time of year again – the judging panel of the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction Literature have released the final shortlist for the 2010 contest. Here’s the six finalists, plus some statistical bits and bobs:

  • Spirit – Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz)
  • The City & The City – China Miéville (Macmillan)
  • Yellow Blue Tibia – Adam Roberts* (Gollancz)
  • Galileo’s Dream – Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperCollins)
  • Far North – Marcel Theroux (Faber & Faber)
  • Retribution Falls – Chris Wooding (Gollancz)

Gwyneth Jones, China Miéville, Adam Roberts and Kim Stanley Robinson have all previously been nominated for the Award and both Gwyneth Jones and China Miéville are previous winners.

Gwyneth Jones has been nominated five times, and won the Award once for her novel Bold As Love in 2002.

China Miéville has been nominated three times, and won the Award twice with Perdido Street Station in 2001 and Iron Council in 2005. If China Miéville wins in 2010 he will become the first author to win the prize three times in its twenty-four year history.

This is the first time Marcel Theroux and Chris Wooding have been nominated.

This year’s six shortlisted titles were selected from a long list of forty-one eligible submissions put forward by seventeen different publishing houses and imprints.

I’ve read one of the six (namely the Mieville, which I thought was excellent) – how about you lot? Care to cast the odds on the eventual winner?

I like the Clarke Award because it tends to highlight books I’m interested in far more reliably than the popularity contest awards (e.g. the Hugos), but to some people its selection process seems elitist – do you tend to agree more with juried awards or open-voted ones?

[* Regular readers will be aware that Adam Roberts thinks SF awards are rubbish, of course. So I kind of hope he wins, just in case the dichotomy makes him disappear in a puff of self-deprecatory puns. Not that I want the fellow to disappear; of course (unlike some aging but certainly-not-po-faced prog fans) – I just think it’d be a jolly fun way to end the ceremony. 😉 ]

Reviews and Criticism

The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist 2008 – a Round-up Review

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Wednesday 30th April sees the presentation ceremony for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in 2007. Never short on controversy, this year’s shortlist has generated plenty of discussion and debate – no less for the novels that are missing from it than for those that are present.

It’s Futurismic‘s great privilege to feature this round-up review of the Clarke Award shortlist by noted science fiction novelist, critic and academic Adam Roberts. So settle down with a good big cup of coffee, let Professor Roberts walk you through the shortlist … and then place your bets on the winner in the comments!

The Shortlist:

  • Stephen Baxter, The H-Bomb Girl (Faber 2007)
  • Matthew De Abaitua, The Red Men (Octopus 2007)
  • Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army (Faber 2007)
  • Stephen Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate 2007)
  • Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel (2007)
  • Richard Morgan, Black Man (Gollancz, 2007)

There’s been a deal of pother about this year’s Clarke shortlist, more even than this often-controversial event usually generates. Surprise at the omission of a number of highly regarded titles – we might mention, say, McDonald’s Brasyl and Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union – fuelled bloggish mutterings about hidden agendas, panderings to Evil Mainstream Lit and a desire to generate Turner Award-style notoriety rather than simply to choose last year’s best SF novel.

The muttering boiled down to a sense that the Clarke judges were liable to corrupt the nation’s youth and ought all to drink hemlock without ado. The question, though. is a simple one: do these six titles constitute a list of the best sf novels published in the UK last year? Continue reading The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist 2008 – a Round-up Review →