Vagabonds

"I think this is the first time a book in translation has been nominated for the prize, so it’s very exciting. It’s published by Head of Zeus, a publisher that is leading the field right now in terms of bringing works in translation into the mainstream. But let’s talk about the book. It’s near space—that is, our solar system—set in the future on a colonised Mars. So it couldn’t be more topical. Settlement has been achieved, and indeed Mars would like to separate from the Earth. I say that science fiction isn’t predictive, but a quick glance over our own contemporary politics and you can see that this is definitely well within the limits of plausibility. Hao Jingfang is a Chinese author, and science fiction is often discussed as a way artists and writers can use fictions as a way to write if there are issues around state censorship; the Strugatsky brothers in Russia would be another great example here. You can imagine that science fiction is a form that might even be encouraged by the state, especially if your own country seems to be doing very well in a particular imagined future, and the more subtle critiques might slide past the censor as long as they see the right flag on the right planet. “Science fiction is a way writers can write if there are issues around state censorship” All that makes the story sound very political, but the book itself is very lyrical and reflective right from its beautifully evocative opening line: Once, a group of children was born on one world and grew up on another. It’s almost a fairy tale opening… once upon a future time. It’s a thoughtful book, in the very best way. Some science fiction books spend their time talking about technology and what that means; this is more about the philosophies of that cultural change—what it means to have two planets now separated, rather than one ruled over by the other, and the tensions between two very different cultural backgrounds. The book follows characters born on Mars, sent to Earth, and then come back again. So it’s very much an ambassador-type story, or one where the cultures are literally worlds apart. We talked about the ‘literary’ book on the shortlist earlier and perhaps this is actually the literary one, in the way people often think of ‘literary’ as meaning a book that’s very focused on a character’s interiority. If your perceptions of what science fiction is comes more from popular culture, by which I guess we’re really talking about cinema and videogames, you might think that the key to a good sf story is a good mix of action and imaginary technologies I hope many readers here who are less familiar with the written part of the genre might be tempted to start with this book in which case they’ll find something fresher and more intellectually invigorating than your regular franchise fare (fun as that can be). So that brings us to the end of our shortlist of six. All of these books are imaginative and very different, but still very much within the heart of what we call science fiction, even if they are all pushing in different directions—taking tropes and reimagining them afresh. And we have entirely new voices, coming from translation. We can review our submissions data to see trends in science fiction publishing; we know that this year, our gender breakdown was 39% female, down from last year’s 40% but ten points on the median from where its been just five years prior, and feels like a small but positive change worth noting. Obviously it takes a long time to produce books—for publishers to find new voices, for writers to be commissioned. We know that among publishers there is active outreach to make their lists more diverse, partly due to demand from readers. And we’re starting to see the results of that demand being met now in our more recent submissions. We’re also seeing larger numbers of female writers coming to the fore consistently in our shortlists, and more writers of colour. We’re glad to see the raw data pointing towards larger diversity of authors and readers. But the point I want to make is that these are fantastic books that deserve to be read precisely because they are fantastic books. Firstly, I should say that it’s great when the Arthur C Clarke Award showcases new writers, but that’s not one of our mission statements. Our judges form their own opinion of what they are looking for every year. But I do think it’s brilliant when we are able to spotlight something new. We’ve done some surveys around reading habits within our fan base: active sci fi fans, rather than the general populace. So we know that they will read about 50 books a year—a book a week, basically. Not as many as our judges have to read, but much wider in terms of the range of books. For example, when we dug into the data, we found that of those 50 books, maybe only five or six of those books being read will be books published in that same year. The vast majority of books people are reading are already from past years, whether they’re considered classics or not. Think of it this way: just as the light we see in the night sky is from distant stars and thousands or millions of years old by the time it arrives on our planet, what we are looking at now with today’s shortlist and submissions is really the science fiction of several years ago. All these books have taken time to write, maybe sometimes years before they’re ready to be submitted to agents, been rejected, kept going, submitted again, found a publisher and so on… Science fiction might be the literature of the future, but it’s a genre that continues to reinvent itself by standing on the shoulders of its own heritage. Personally I’ve often found the best way to engage with the legacy of our genre is precisely by following personal line of interest back from books that inspired me back to books that inspired their authors and so on and on. For me this feels like a more natural way to trace back through the history of science fiction rather than jumping to some pre-set list of classics. Science fiction isn’t a curriculum to be completed, there’s no test at the end and reading an award shortlist should be for pleasure, not homework. Award shortlists are perhaps at their best when they serve as an encouragement to break out of a pattern of familiar reading and try something new, and perhaps at their worst when taken as a dictate that in some way replaces our own sense of what ‘best’ might mean. I’ve always said if you find one book in our shortlist of six that’s love at first sight, the chances are you’ll find one that doesn’t work for you as well because a good shortlist should be six different interpretations of ‘best,’ not the same formula repeated six times over. So, if you find one book on the shortlist that jumps out at you, I say pick it up—it might just be tomorrow’s classic in your hands today!—but pick it up because it was recommended to you in the way you might pay attention to a friend enthusing about their new favourite author or novel. With science fiction publishing in the UK thriving and over 100 increasingly diverse titles currently being published every year, a single definition of science fiction in the 2020s will always be a challenge. We’ve put forward our best answer, but it’s ultimately the readers who will decide how close we came to getting it right."