Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock

"There’s a very strong narrative which gripped them – a clone has to destroy all her previous copies and survive the attempt. If the plan was followed through, then it might get a bit tedious, but, rather like Killing Eve , there are spanners in the works. There’s also a moral dilemma of whether the clones deserve to die. Does it say something about the world we live in that this and Service Model are the most fun books on the short list? Like I say, science fiction humour is often dark. She’s very engaging and she makes us care about her characters, and there’s a subtle exploration of gender expectations – what roles do we expect women to take up and which might be inappropriate? What sacrifices are we prepared to make to succeed? Woolf builds a complex and rich world without spelling things out in exact detail, and she avoids going for the obvious. It reminded me that two people can have completely opposite views about the same book. And you can see that both of them are right, although that can make constructing a shortlist tough. As you’ve suggested, climate catastrophe is a common thread, as it has been for years, and the postapocalyptic. I don’t think that we had any novels featuring viruses this year and we didn’t shortlist any space opera , which I confess surprises me. There’s a lot of variety in what is getting published. Looking through the shortlist, we have a lot of diversity in LGBTQIA+ characters, and this is integrated into the storytelling – the assumptions we make about gender identity are tested in several of the novels. There was no danger of an all-male shortlist this year, as has happened in the past – arguably science fiction began with a woman in her teens, and it’s important to read a diversity of voices. It would be great to see more writers of colour on the shortlist, but either we are seeing the few books that are being written, or not much of it is being submitted. But we have five very different authors who are new to writing adult science fiction and one previous winner who is doing something different, which I think bodes well for the future. We received over a hundred books last year and we don’t get to see everything. I wouldn’t dare to guess which book would win – it genuinely could be any of the six."