Chilling Effect

"Yes. Valdes is a Cuban-American author. A debut author, too, of course. This is an exciting, fun book. We love serious, literary books— The Handmaid’s Tale was our first ever winner—but not all books that we like must be set in patriarchal, oppressive, near-future dystopias . We like fun books! And, actually, one of the biggest conversations between our judges this year was around a number of different titles that were just great fun and whether this was important to reflect in an award like the Clarke. It’s not like we don’t have form here. It reminds me of our 1991 winner, Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland which was also a hugely fun spare opera romp, and Neil Gaiman was one of our judges that year, so you can’t get a higher endorsement for the value of fun in science fiction than that. So yes, Chilling Effect is delightfully pulpy. You know, it’s got psychic cats. It’s got a mismatched crew on a spaceship. People will say ‘we’ve seen that before,’ but as with all our shortlisted books there’s something that makes this distinct and original. We’ve got near-future noir, time travel, solar system colonisation, dystopic pandemic-based stuff… these tropes do have a lot of life in them when they are found by new writers. And seeing something familiar in a new way is going to be exciting for the judges. “There’s a big movement in science fiction towards books that are fun” This is really good, fun, brilliantly well written, and the characters stay with you. One of our judges said that they went back and immediately started reading this one again—this, out of hundreds of books. So that’s praise. If we’re looking at trends, I think there’s a big movement in science fiction towards books that are fun. We ran a survey on people’s reading habits in 2020 and asked ‘has Covid affected your reading?’56 percent of respondents said ‘yes, absolutely.’ Many are looking for comfort reads, lots of people are reading more. Although of course, everyone’s experience of Covid has been very different. So I do want to thank all our judges who have been reading all the submissions under those same conditions. But I also think this is part of a bigger trend, which we have seen for several years now. We’ve seen writers like Becky Chambers winning the Hugo Award— —so I think there is a strong upswelling of fun books. Another key issue that people are looking at is how science fiction is engaging with issues of, for example, diversity. And here we have a very diverse ship crew. In science fiction, there might be alien ethnicities… all these kinds of things that can be a mechanism for exploration against an interstellar backdrop. Back on Earth we are arguing about LGBTQI+ issues, and then suddenly in sci fi we have a protagonist that changes sex. There are a lot of precedents. So what writers like Valerie are doing is taking these great big issues and having fun with it, not feeling the pressure of science fiction as a predictive literature. Which it isn’t anyway—as so many scifi writers will tell you, we’re not trying to literally guess the future, we’re talking about now . Books like Chilling Effect are very much about the now. I like books that satisfy on multiple levels, but they are not always dark and gritty. So this is one for people who want quality, but also need to relax. It’s called Chilling Effect for a reason!"