Tom Hunter's Reading List

"So, this is where I can start talking about trends in depth. This book is set in a near future where human-led environmental degradation and climate catastrophe are the central focus of the plot, and the eponymous lumpsucker is just one of the many critically endangered species being ruthlessly traded for extinction credits (a tradable stock-like asset companies acquire specifically in order to legally cover themselves should their resource extraction terminate a species). If that brief description sounds brutal, I can only agree. This is a dark, satirical, deeply angry book about our species. This is a book where the characters are deliciously unlikeable, the contempt for our powers-that-be is palpable, and the prospects for the future of our planet negligible; at least in terms of that narrow goldilocks zone required for sustaining the civilisations of carbon-based bipeds like ourselves. It’s also eminently readable, oddly hopeful at times, and very, very funny. I’d be tempted to compare Ned Beauman’s humour here to our sci-fi satirist grandmaster Douglas Adams, or maybe his evil twin. Science fiction is often called the literature of ideas, so yes absolutely I think we can make that claim. That said, however, I also think the conversation or clash between what is ‘literary’ and what is ‘science fiction’ is an argument that has raged as long as our genre has existed, and is perhaps one we should strive to evolve beyond wherever we can. When I first became involved with the Clarke Award, a big part of the conversation around our shortlists every year was precisely located in that tension between the literary and the core of the genre. While that conversation is likely to keep going in various human outposts until some point around the heat-death of the universe, I also genuinely think it has moved on. One sign of that is the publishing industry’s own willingness to cross-categorise books more—a decision that is doubtless as commercial as it is editorial if it means more book sales!—which is one of the reasons we’ve seen our submissions double in the past ten years or so. Put simply, more publishers are happy for their books to be considered science fiction , and you can see that in those shortlisted and winning titles from recent years proudly displaying the Clarke Award sigil on their covers and in their marketing blurbs. And coming back to trends again for a moment, I think that convergence is only going to continue and that the global challenges of human-led climate crisis, viral pandemics, resource scarcity, migration, and so forth are all topics we’re increasingly seeing explored by authors of every kind. They say write what you know, and so much of what we know now is on this—hopefully reversible—trend. And, of course, the minute you set your work even a few moments into the future, you are writing a form of science fiction!"

"So, first I wanted to go back to an earlier point I made about this being the first time all six of these authors have been shortlisted for the Clarke Award, which is true but doesn’t mean that they are new to science fiction, or indeed other awards. Aliette is a fantastic author, and one I have long expected to see shortlisted here by the Clarke Award, and the fact she hasn’t been already perhaps speaks more to how much she moves across the breadth of science fiction and fantasy in her work. This book though, as you say, is absolutely all-caps SCIENCE FICTION. It is space opera , with an emphasis on the operatic although it has a very human centre. A convenient criticism of science fiction is that it often sacrifices the human in favour of the grand sweep of ‘big events’ or long explanations of warp drives, worm holes, parallel universes, and the like. I’m not sure those criticisms are based on any science fiction actually being written or read these days, but what a book like The Red Scholar’s Wake tells us more than anything is that science fiction can be fun and thematically serious and well-crafted while easy to lose yourself in all at the same time. If there’s one book on this year’s list that really speaks to the joy of contemporary science fiction, and remind us why we first fell in love with the genre and all its most popular tropes while still being highly original and distinctly voiced, this is that book. This is a great question, and an important one as well, I think, as we consider all of the different modes that science fiction can potentially take. It’s worth noting that before the term science fiction became the popular way to define our field, a previous term was ‘science-‘ or ‘scientific romance’. It’s also worth noting that the term romance had different contextual meanings then as well, so I don’t want to overlabour this point to the err of real sci-fi historians, but no I don’t think it is unusual to see science fiction combining with romance or other genre tropes at all. Science fiction is a vigorously hybrid genre, which perhaps explains its continued success, and is very capable of having its tropes adapt and merge with other narrative approaches. Just think of how many of our classic science fiction narratives are built upon the plots of other genres— for example, detective fiction. Jumping forward to present day, I also think we are seeing something of a trend towards more science fiction books wearing their romance elements on their sleeves (and their cover jackets). For me, this connects with the ongoing diversification of voices writing science fiction and the call from readers, echoed by editors, for stories where they can see themselves represented. This goes beyond romance, of course, but I might suggest a growing interest from readers in stories that are set on the intergalactic stage but where plots are driven by interpersonal considerations and relationships rather than the machinations of evil empires or invading aliens. The message really is that good science fiction is always more than the sum of its component parts!"

"So, when we’re in the call for submissions phase of the award asking publishers for books, we pay a lot of attention to what’s out there, who’s talking about what, to make sure we get every book we possibly can for our judges. One thing I’ve learnt is that the more people from different parts of the science fiction community enthuse about a book to me, the more likely it is to also appeal to our judges. I saw this in the early days of publication for Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice , which of course went on to win not only the Clarke Award but a whole slew of other major science fiction prizes as well. I can’t guarantee that we’ll see the same for Plutoshine , of course, but I would say that the enthusiasm for Lucy’s book that I’ve seen took me right back to that moment with Ann in 2013 and 2014, and I’m already looking forward to her future books! And now we get to the ‘why’ of why this book has some great buzz about it! It’s surprising, given science fiction’s identification with space, that more of it isn’t set within our home solar system. Or maybe it isn’t as the pace of scientific discovery around those worlds most immediately beyond our own is now so advanced it’s a brave author who is going to hinge their plot on a world that might be redefined in real life before their book even hits the shelves. Either way, when a book like Plutoshine does comes out I think people automatically notice it more both because of that relative difference to so much intergalactic science fiction and also because our human curiosity about our solar system remains even if outside of the realms of fiction its more usually the robots who get to do all the actual space exploring right now! I think Pluto has also held a unique place in our planetary—or dwarf planetary—fascination precisely because of its distance from us and its unstable categorisation as a celestial body. For writers, I can only imagine how much resonance there must be with it being the namesake of the Roman god of the underworld. So, you have here a twin challenge of a world that exists and we are learning more about all the time alongside a readership who is not only keen to read solar system-based science fiction and is, in all likelihood, going to be just as up on the research as you are. What to do? Science fiction historically has often been criticised for its cardboard characters and emphasis on technical plotting—the infodump—versus other modes of fiction. Now, we might say that’s unfair, but as creators, editors and fans we also learn from that conversation, and just as with any Earth-bound literary work, the world we create and the characters we populate it with hinges on the connection a writer can make to the imagination of their readers. The spell that makes it real, as it were. Here Lucy makes her Pluto every bit as much a rich and evocative character as Dickens’ London , Atwood’s Gilead or, looking beyond our own planet once again, Herbert’s Arrakis ."

"Right, so I’ve tried to talk about all of our shortlisted books in ways that will give readers an insight into the kinds of books they are and what made them appealing to our judges without moving into spoiler territory, and I’m going to have to be extra careful with these next three books! There’s a high-concept plot trigger here which I can talk about: the ‘anomaly’ of the title relates to an inexplicable event whereby a plane and all onboard are duplicated. One plane lands as normal, the other three months later, but other than that small fact they are identical. The repercussions from this, told across a multi-viewpoint narrative, the attempts to understand what happened and to uncover if indeed such an anomaly may have occurred before, are what drives this book, and indeed its million-plus readers to find out what happened. To say more would be to say too much, but I can say this is a book that garnered a lot of discussion from our judging panel just as it has driven conversations all around the world. There is a huge global appetite for science fiction and whole scenes we are barely aware of here in the English-speaking parts of the world, although I am glad that this is another trend that is definitely shifting. Shout out to all those editors, anthologists, translators, and authors working to make that happen. Another recent work in translation from our own shortlists I would wholeheartedly recommend is Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, and I’d also encourage readers to seek out an increasing range of short fiction anthologies focusing on either works in translation or original works in English from international authors in China, the African continent and elsewhere on Planet Earth."

"This might sound strange, but I had a feeling this book might be shortlisted even before it was written or I’d ever heard of it. Let me explain: E.J. Swift is a UK author who has been on the Clarke Award radar since she first began her career, and her books have been discussed and praised by many of our previous judging panels. Now, the members of our judging panel change every year so you can never predict exactly how they might make their decisions from one year to the next, but when you’ve been doing this award thing as long as I have, you can sometimes make good on the odd prediction or two. To that end, I’ve long suspected it was only a matter of time until E.J graced our shortlists. When you combine that with this novel being such a powerful evocation of our current global climate crisis, you can see why I might have been on the money just this once. If that’s not enough of a personal recommendation for you, the multiple time periods aspect of this novel you mentioned is one that many people have spoken about in the same way they did with novels such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (itself a Clarke Award shortlist alum) and I can’t wait to see where E.J. takes us next. Small presses are a vital part of the science fiction ecosystem, and we’re always the poorer for their absence. It’s always a pleasure to see a small press title make the shortlists, and we always work hard to make sure this kind of title is submitted. Unsung Stories exemplified the best of the small press world. Utterly professional, a delight to work with and have brought us not one but two shortlisted authors in recent years: the other being Aliya Whiteley . Cheerleading for small presses is one thing, but of course what they really need is our book-buying. Our shortlists work as recommendations, not definitive statements—no matter how much we believe in them ourselves. Reading is a pleasure, so I would much rather people came to one of two of our shortlisted titles rather than read all six out of a sense of obligation. How then to square the circle of buying books to support the publishing ecosystem and boost more diverse authors, while also pursuing our own individual passions and tastes? First, I’d suggest making a point to seek out new voices as part of your reading diet is only going to lead to more enjoyment and discovery in the long term. One thing I often do is ask for new voices as gifts—I am notorious hard to buy for, so wilfully opening myself up to something new is fun and I’d also suggest that gifting works to others is a great way of spreading the love (and the cash) as part of a bigger signal boost to new writers and imprints. After all, a gift will often be more treasured than something you picked up yourself and just plopped down in your to-be-read pile for ‘later.’"

"I think it’s fair to say that, ever since Margaret Atwood won our inaugural prize for The Handmaid’s Tale , that dystopian fiction has loomed darkly over the Clarke Award—although I for one always welcome a good dystopia to our shortlists! As well as the books you’ve mentioned above, I would also point to recent Clarke titles such as Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed. That’s also set on an island. There is something distinctly dystopic about island settings I feel. I’m sure there’s a PhD thesis in there somewhere for someone, if indeed this topic hasn’t already been explored by brighter minds than mine already. I’m also hearing lots of people use Emily St. John Mandel ’s name in comparison to this book as well. Tom Watson is one of our other shortlisted debut novelists, and to find yourself in the kind of comparative company of Atwood or Mandel must be hugely inspiring for him and hopefully recommendation enough to have people adding this book to their shopping carts now. But for those craving more, here’s a little extra, spoiler-free, flavour: This is a tight, intimate, book, focusing primarily on just two characters exiled to the aforementioned island and surviving well enough, at least until we move past page one. It’s not a lockdown book, but the recent experience of that that so many of us shared will doubtless inform many a reading. We follow lead character Alina’s increasing conviction that she is trapped, not all is as it seems and that escape is the only solution—but how, and to where? You might think you know where this is heading, but it’s surprisingly difficult to second-guess. Our judges this year found themselves compelled by this novel, and inflict it on you all in turn, dear readers. Enjoy! One of the joys of being an organiser for the Clarke Award is getting to sit like a fly on the wall and listen in as our judges deliberate. What makes me optimistic more than anything is that, after reading 100 or more books, our judges are still finding new ideas and themes and authors to enthuse about. It’s always my pleasure to receive a new shortlist and have the opportunity to recommend new books to people. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I would love for everyone to go out and read all six of our shortlisted titles immediately so you can get your own sense of just how vibrant and diverse contemporary science fiction can be. I’d also like to thank all of your judges for this year, and our supporting organisations, The British Science Fiction Association , the Science Fiction Foundation , and the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival , who nominate them to us each year. These organisations are three more reasons to be optimistic about science fiction today, and I recommend them all to you as well. Whoever our winner is this year, I wanted to offer my personal congratulations once again to all of our shortlisted authors. It’s been a pleasure to welcome six new authors to the Clarke Award, and I look forward to all of their future works with monolith-sized anticipation. Part of our best books of 2023 series."

"Yes. This is a ‘first contact’ novel. An absolute classic of the science fiction genre: it’s humanity encountering a sentient life-form, one that kind of contacts back , basically. It’s also Burke’s first novel. That’s always a very exciting thing for us to have on the shortlist. Something fresh and new, a new voice. Our winner a couple of years ago, Ancillary Justice – which was much more of a space opera – was also a first novel. And in terms of the buzz that I heard about Ancillary Justice , I was hearing the phrase from lots of different corners of the science fiction community, which tells you that something is ticking a lot of different boxes with different kinds of readers. So, it wasn’t really a surprise that it went on to be very successful, because it was resonating. And with Semiosis , I’m picking up those sort of antenna signals, if you like. Absolutely. I tweeted a response , actually. Very, very politely. I basically said, ‘We hope that his book is submitted, and we look forward to considering it as science fiction.’ And we would be delighted if he was shortlisted; that would be a great way to introduce him to lots of other fantastic work that’s already answering the point he made. There was a lot of outrage. This kind of thing comes up from time to time, and it kind of goes back to that issue of literary snobbery. It also speaks to the divide, in terms of how people view science fiction literature; it is crumbling, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t hold-outs who will see the whole of science fiction as something to be very carefully avoided if you are a writer of ‘proper’ books. “Some people see the whole of science fiction as something to be carefully avoided if you are a writer of ‘proper’ books” Similarly, Margaret Atwood, she won the first ever Clarke Award. She’s been criticised in the past for making the distinction that her work was ‘speculative’ rather than science fictional. That was viewed by many people as an attempt not to be smeared with the genre. But I’ve chatted to Margaret about it, and she is a huge science fiction fan, which makes a difference, I think. And she’s mellowed on the opinion that she was trying to make. Whereas I think Ian McEwan is new to an argument that’s been raging for years. Well done, Ian. You’ve invented robots, alternate history. Good on you. But, quite genuinely, I want his book to be submitted. We’ll see what the judges make of it. It’s had mixed reviews."

"This is classic space opera, with a mathematical twist. It is hard to describe, but the premise of the entire sequence is underpinned by what’s called ‘calendrical mathematics.’ So: a universe-spanning calendar that is never really explained, but basically allows the ships to work, allows all kinds of exotic weapon effects to be put into place. It’s a universe run by different factions that are always fighting amongst each other: the military, the departments that are looking after the mathematics and the calendars, and the secret service that seems to be behind everything. And, how do I say this? It’s not a difficult read, but it throws you in at the deep end. You have to navigate your way through a very bizarre but fascinating concept that leaves a huge amount to your imagination about how it actually works. (Although Yoon is a mathematician, so you assume it might work.) He wrote a lot of short stories based in this universe, before moving to the full novel sequence. As a sequence, it’s been multi-award-nominated. It is a revelatory space opera. People think that space opera is a tired part of the genre, but it continually reinvents itself. There’s the Machineries of Empire trilogy, and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice sequence a couple of years ago. These are prime examples of just how innovative science fiction can be, even when it’s using the very familiar tools from the science fiction writer’s toolkit. Space opera for me is like rock music. It’s an attitude, a pose, a style, a set of chords, instantly recognisable yet always morphing and reinventing itself, and also entirely possible to be sneered at from both inside and outside the circle. You say ‘rock’n’roll’ and everyone knows instantly what you mean, and with luck you’ve found your tribe, but actually one rock fan might take pains to never see bands anyone else has ever heard of while another might never be happy unless they’re centre front in a stadium beneath the kind of light show that makes you think an alien mothership is touching down while a bunch of pensioners play hits from a time before they were born. Rock is dead, long live rock’n’roll, and so it goes with space opera. You should definitely start from Ninefox Gambit . It is very much the story of the central characters Cheris and Jedao, and it follows that narrative through. ‘Calendrical heresy’ is very hard to understand when you start from the beginning, so coming in at the end would be like doing it with half the equations on the blackboard."

"Yes, so, having already mentioned the Booker, this one was also actually nominated for the Booker International Prize. It is a novel in translation, which we haven’t had many of on the shortlists, and actually, it is one of three books on the shortlist this year by a writer of colour. So that’s 50% of our short list, versus 7% in the overall submissions list. Only nine authors in total were writers of colour in our submission list, and I’ve also written about that. That’s not something that we actively … we don’t use quotas or anything like that. But obviously, our judges are very aware of all of the issues around diversity in science fiction. It’s a huge ongoing conversation. The book itself is riffing off one of the progenitor novels of science fiction as a genre, Frankenstein , and some people will say that is the touchstone book, the one that launched it all. Others argue it goes back far further. But, whichever argument you pick, Frankenstein is one of the core early texts of what became science fiction, I think that’s inarguable. And it’s great to see that myth form being re-used in a setting that speaks so immediately about conflict in Baghdad. What a great way to take Shelley’s original tale of hubris and invention and to transform that and refresh it in that setting. “Our judges collectively redefine science fiction every year” It’s fantastic to see all of the shortlist in play against each other, the themes that emerge, the echoing concerns. It’s weird to compare Frankenstein of Baghdad with Revenant Gun , but actually Revenant Gun is all about conflict – a huge galactic empire that rules with its calendars, and the oppression of its entire population – similar themes to Frankenstein of Baghdad in many ways. Not galactic-spanning ones, of course. It’s also a book that’s more on the fantastical side, Frankenstein of Baghdad . So, it’s shared territory with books that have won in the past, like Zoo City , or the books by China Miéville, City & the City , or Perdido Street Station , which a lot of people view as fantasy rather than science fiction. Again, this comes back to our judges and how they collectively define science fiction every year, and what its purpose is. So, this is a book for me that actually has a special place on the list, because it enables us to look so much more broadly at the genre. Yes. Yes. I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you exactly what was said, but it is the Arthur C Clarke Award and he is a science fiction writer. It was decided to make it an award for science fiction, rather than science fiction and fantasy. Now that obviously that does get very slippery, but the view of it is not to go towards the absolutely fantastical, if you like – the high fantasy, something like Game of Thrones , as a really obvious example. But Star Wars is technically fantasy. There’s no science in Star Wars whatsoever. Well, people argue that point. Technically, people say that’s ‘science fantasy’ if you want to get really taxonomical about it. Many people do. But a lot of people don’t. If you were doing a PhD, you might say, ‘technically, that’s past historical romance, with a soupçon of alternative history, and a dash of contemporary fantasy, as seen through the lens of … blah.’ I’ve mentioned this ‘toolkit’ several times, and that is actually a well-used metaphor in the community: the idea that science fiction as a toolkit. You can take different parts of it, and build different things. So, The Underground Railroad , for example, is built with a very particular element, which is the literalising of a metaphor. So, the underground railway is a railway that goes underground. Through that one move, Colson Whitehead is then able to write a novel about slavery, one step removed. He can talk about all the horror of slavery, in a story that people will find absolutely compelling, rather than worthy, if that makes sense. A novel you’ll actually read, rather than pretend you’ve read. “ Star W ars is technically fantasy. There’s no science in Star Wars whatsoever” And it means he can make the point that he wants to make much more strongly because he controls the world, and it’s just that one side step that he’s done that enables him to write something that doesn’t lessen the message. As Neil Gaiman said, “fiction is the lie that tells the truth.” That’s one element of the toolkit. So Frankenstein in Baghdad is taking that classic science fictional story, making that move, and using it to talk about a very contemporary issue."

"Stålenhag is fantastically well-known as an illustrator. An eight-episode series starring Rebecca Hall is in the works right now, I believe, based on one of his earlier book projects. But this a major work for him. There are over 100 illustrations in it, and he wrote the whole thing. It’s an absolute first for us: the first illustrated novel that the Clarke has nominated in all of its history. We have received a couple in the past, but we’ve not nominated them. I ought to be clear here that we spent a lot of time talking about this book from the very beginning when it arrived in an envelope. Critically: is it long enough to be a novel? Is it reliant on the imagery? Does the story stand up? The Clarke Award is the prize for the best science fiction novel, so we consider each element of that: we define ‘science fiction,’ we define ‘best’ and we define ‘novel.’ There is not a minimum word count, but we do say it has to be a substantial work. So, we tend to preclude novellas. But to take Ian McEwan, again – he has famously won literary prizes with very slim volumes. It’s a very hard one to define. So we don’t. Certainly Electric State is substantial in the sense that it’s a big. It’s a coffee table book, almost. A different size from all the other stuff that we get. It’s normally sold in the art section. But the judges have clearly felt that it’s substantial in the sense that its story has weight, and that’s why it’s been shortlisted. It’s really exciting to have it on the list. It’s a beautiful book, and I think really points to what science fiction publishing could be doing, I think. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a shame not every author can illustrate their own work. But look at the fantastic works that somewhere like The Folio Society puts out now. They’ve really gone for science fiction in a major way in the last few years. I think of The Folio Society taking very old books – out of print books – and publishing them in beautiful editions. You’ve got Homer, and Marcus Aurelius, the Shakespeare collection. I’m only naming the ones that are on my book shelf. But recently they’ve put out 2001 : A Space Odyssey , they’ve done Stephen King, they’ve done a lot of Neil Gaiman, they’ve got Game of Thrones coming out… The point I’m making is that all of those works are illustrated. Think back to the days of pulp science fiction magazines – the space man shooting the monster-looking alien whilst the girl in the not-very-there silver dress is carried … You know the image I’m talking about. That kind of connection between the art and the story. This is very much a refreshing of that, and it would be so great to see more of those kind of works just being published. Yes. It does. Certainly, there are a lot of successful Kickstarter projects out there for science fiction. Another collection of essays and short stories, called Women Destroy Science Fiction was hugely successful a few years ago. Obviously it was not putting forward the argument that women are terrible and destroy science fiction. It was an ironic title. Becky Chambers, who has been nominated for the Clarke Award a couple of times, originally launched her first novel via a crowdfunding campaign. They are great ways for a canny editor to be able to say, ‘Look what the market’s already wanting to buy.’ They’re pre-tested."

"This is a book with a huge amount of buzz around it, and it’s first in a series of three. It’s the winner of the inaugural Noma Award for the best African science fiction novel, and it’s been multi-nominated across other awards. It is a cyberpunk novel set in a near-future Africa. Cyberpunk is a very clichéd term these days, but it has that kind of flavour to it. It’s also got an alien presence, a mysterious presence that has crashed, landed, or maybe even invaded in Africa, and the town of Rosewater that has grown up around it. It’s just fantastic. There are a lot of trilogies in science fiction. We talked about Yoon Ha Lee, we talked about Ancilliary Justice . To some, the literary ones are the single ones, if that makes sense. Trilogies, ongoing sequences, are usually a different kind of beast. But this was definitely one all of our judges were convinced to shortlist quite quickly. “Fans are actively saying: ‘we want more stuff written by new voices, who sound like us and look like us’” We talked a little bit earlier about voices of colour earlier, and you know, I don’t want to talk about it in the context of that too much, because it’s diminishing, to say ‘this is a great book by a writer of colour.’ But it’s introducing us to a new world, and a new voice. The African setting it is exactly what science fiction fans are calling for at the moment. Fans are actively saying: ‘we want more stuff written by new voices, who sound like us and look like us and understand our culture and our heritage.’ Equally – no matter our ethnicity we want to be diverse in our reading Also, Tade is really worth following on Twitter. He’s not shy in his opinions, let’s say. He has said on panels before that he prefers arguing to anything else. But you almost feel he’s written this book to make a point. I recommend it to absolutely anyone who’s got any interest at all in what great science fiction looks like today. That’s quite blurby, isn’t it? But I mean it."

"Exactly, yeah. It’s so bizarre. It’s a great example of how science fiction often makes just one change in the world, and then the entire plot revolves from that. In this book, humans shed their skin, like snakes, and you shed other parts of yourself as well. How do we use that to talk about humanity? Because technically, we do shed our skins all the time. And the brains that we have now are not in fact the brains that we were born with. We are completely new. We change all the time, so, our cells are replaced. We think is ourselves as quite fixed beings, but we are impermanent continually while alive and even more obviously at the end of that. But what an amazing concept. Fantastically written as well. It’s a small press publication. I think they’ve got about 10 books out there. Aliya is one of those writers that writers recommend to each other. That’s the easiest way to put it. So, whilst she’s at a smaller press, and is maybe a name not familiar to so many people, Aliya is the word-of-mouth author on this list. Absolutely. She is the one that people who know what they’re talking about, talk about. She’s becoming more and more known to the the science fiction community, and she has been nominated for more awards, but I think this is really the breakthrough novel for her. “Aliya is one of those writers that writers recommend to each other” For me, this one, the concept, coupled with the plot dynamic – which is investigation-led. A detective story, basically. That’s always a great way of tying an amazing science fictional concept to a plot engine that keeps you reading. So many science fictional works, think Blade Runner for example, have an investigative element of them. So that sort of genre awareness of plot mechanics, coupled with an absolutely out-there concept is what’s going to make this novel a real success for everyone. It really reminds me of Vurt , a book by Jeff Noon back in the 1990s. His first novel, a very psychedelic novel, very cyberpunky, set in Manchester, rather than America. People would enter the Vurt – the virtual world –by putting a feather in their mouth. It had a really surrealistic take. I think Aria’s done something similar with the Loosening Skin concept. So, it’s always a pleasure when an award can shine a light on an author that is deserving of much wider attention, especially outside of the UK sci fi scene. Because while the Clarke is a UK award, we are watched from much further afield. Yes. So we had 124 books submitted. We conducted a survey within our base – so it’s quite biased, because it’s fans – and we found that many people were reading 50 or more books a year. But of those 50-plus books, only five or so would be read within the year of them being published. Obviously, these books all came out last year. Unless you are a judge, you’re unlikely to read 124 new science fiction books in a year. It’s impossible for anyone to really claim to be an expert in the entire field these days. Which I think is a good thing, because there’s always something new out there to be discovered, however informed you are of the genre. Yes. Aliya is a very literary voice. Her book, I think, is the book that’s doing what Ian McEwan thinks he’s doing. The winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award will be announced on 17 th July 2019, in association with Foyles Book Store. Tickets will be available at clarkeaward.com"

"This is Charlie’s first time on the Clarke Award shortlist, but she’s already very well known within the science fiction community and has had multiple other award nods for both her fiction and nonfiction, for example a Hugo Award nomination for the podcast she runs with the science fiction author Annalee Newitz . They were also both involved with the io9 website, which has been a touchstone for science fiction fandom over the years, and while they’re not connected with it now, how I first came to know Charlie was through her massively enthusiastic coverage—and sometimes provocative argument and debate—of the Clarke Award back in the day. Is she a frontrunner for this year’s prize? I think there are a lot of people who would love to see her win, for sure. “An alien world gives you the opportunity to explore both this strange new planet and, also, humanity” I said earlier that each of the books on this year’s shortlist features a classic science-fiction trope, and this book is what we might call a ‘planetary romance’ in that it’s set on a single alien planet rather than within, say, a galaxy-spanning empire. An alien world gives you the opportunity to explore both this strange new planet and, also, humanity. From that point of view, it’s absolutely harking back to the classics of science fiction. It’s also playing with a younger cast in terms of its characters, which is very important for what you were saying about the new science fiction fandoms. This is not a YA book , but YA is a category that could be applied. If you read it as a younger teenager, I suspect you could identify with it hugely, in the same way you might identify with the young central character of a classic science fiction novel like Dune , which is not YA either, but we could argue it’s much easier to identify with a protagonist closer to your own age rather than another square-jawed hero. Okay, let’s talk about literally the world of Charlie’s book: it’s a planet called January that’s tidally locked to its star. Exactly. In this way you could say it’s similar to a previous Clarke Award winner called Dark Eden , which was set on a planet that had come untethered from its sun—it still maintained atmosphere and rotated, but it was lit entirely by bioluminescence. The minute you start playing with something that’s not exactly Earth-like in that kind of big way, that’s going to have ripple effects across every single thing you write and here a big plot point is that our human protagonists are living by necessity in the thin zone between the two states, the habitable line between burning and freezing. You establish this one plot point, and immediately you have to start playing the big science fictional game of ‘what if?’ Why are humans on this planet? How might societal rules and structures change to cope with this environment? Can the planet support non-human live in the extreme areas? If so, how would it have evolved to survive? What does it look like? Similarly, Kameron Hurley’s book The Light Brigade is a take on the trope of military science fiction, and is set in a world in which armed forces can be transported instantaneously across vast distances to different intergalactic battlefields, and here the ‘what ifs?’ of world building are constructed from the rules of this instantaneous transport—the science of faster-than-light travel, time dilation and, crucially, what happens if the technology starts seeming to break down? “Immediately you have to start playing the big science fictional game of ‘what if?’ How might societal rules and structures change to cope with this environment?” Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls is what we call the ‘dying Earth’ trope. It’s set at the end of our world: the sun is dying, the Earth is dying. So in many ways it’s not so much world building as much as world dismantling. He’s playing with the idea of a society that’s forgotten more than it ever knew—it’s a technology-based world, but it’s riffing off of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And with A Memory Called Empire , we might call that an exploration of the ‘intergalactic empire’ trope; a story that encompasses the broad sweep of the universe rather than a single planet or solar system, and with those you’re not building a world, you’re building worlds, which is actually very tricky to do. The classic cliché here is the one-thing-all-planet world which Star Wars is famous for: the desert planet, the city planet, the forest planet, and so on, and so on. You could argue a book like Dune is just as guilty, except the environment of the planet is essential to the narrative of the book. It’s the entire point, not just a backdrop setting. Whereas Star Wars is just like: oh, yeah, desert planet, right! chase scene! lightsaber fight! And so on. If you’re going to build something that’s believable, you might only see bits of world, but you need to feel that the author knows what would happen if a character walked out of the city and kept going. Presumably you’d find cities with different languages, different money, different cultures. Rather than: ‘this is the planet of the engineers!’ You know what I mean. Like: ‘oh, hi, we’re all warriors on this planet!’ You know, sometimes that’s absolutely fine and even to be encouraged, depending on the kind of story you’re trying to tell, but I would stress that the construction of a convincingly science fictional world is both a definite skill and also one of the real pleasures that keeps readers coming back to the genre. Actually, that’s the first time I thought about it specifically in terms of culture shock. World building can come in for quite a bad rap sometimes—like, an author can be all world building, no plot. Even just that name ‘world building’ sounds like you spent all your time assembling and drawing the map and working out the local economy. You’ve got spreadsheets about, you know, exchange rates for continents that the characters never go to. Some people love that kind of nuance and detail, but other people are just like, ‘get to the point.’ But the idea of culture shock is perhaps more interesting. The way that, if you are going abroad you’re going to notice the familiar in new ways—you know, suddenly becoming attached to brands we recognise, because you want to go somewhere where you don’t have to figure out the menu, you know. But also, you’re looking for the new: actively stepping away from the tourist map and down a different street to find out what’s there. So maybe culture shock is an important part of world building. But, you know, as a writer you might want to throw people in at the deep end, but it probably helps if you give them at least a backpack full of supplies and some clues back to where their hotel is. As an author you need to work out whether you are taking people on a tour, or robbing them as they get off the bus and leaving them to make some kind of sense of things on their own. Whatever we call it, though, I think the whole point of why so many people find science fiction such an appealing genre is what we might as well call ‘world building’; that sense that, actually, you can really sense the place that you’re in. That’s going to be true, even in the one that’s primarily set on Earth."

"Kameron is an author that has been previously nominated for the Clarke Award. She was one of the favourites for the year she was last nominated, for her novel God’s War , but the book that ultimately won that year was Ancillary Justice , which pretty much won every award going. A lot of people have said to me that, in another year with the same book, Kameron could have won the award very easily, so I’d definitely recommend checking that title out, too. Military science fiction is a hugely popular genre trope—the war with the evil empire, the machines, the bugs, et cetera et cetera—so on the one hand this book is absolutely embedded within the heartlands of the genre but, I can tell you now, Kameron has tricks aplenty up her authorial sleeve. The central science fictional concept here isn’t a new super-weapon, spaceship, super-soldier, implacable alien race or similar, but rather the means of delivering soldiers to the battlefield near-instantaneously as light transmissions, which is a fascinating twist of the ‘damn I wish I’d thought of that’ variety. It’s a fiendishly clever concept because it opens up all kinds of plotlines simply by following the logic of the technology embedded at its centre. What does it do to your humanity to be embedded suddenly into new warzones again and again? What if you’re transported to the wrong place, or you suspect you’re being sent to places other than the one detailed in your mission? People are talking about this book in the same way they do about absolute classic works of science fiction like Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein or The Forever War by Joe Haldeman , and like both those books the freedom of science fiction proves to be a very powerful tool for talking about contemporary issues around duty, patriotism and the dehumanising effects of conflict."

"In terms of science fiction tropes, the ‘intergalactic empire’ is what we’re dealing with here. Once you’ve got a canvas as wide as the universe, anything goes—so what’s interesting about this, then, is that zero-ing in on the political detail, the protocol, and so on, rather than the intergalactic war. There’s nothing better in science fiction than that cosmic sweep with the idea that actually one person in the right place at the right time can make a difference. Harking back to what we were saying about world building: the twin conceits of a new arrival in a strange land and the mystery with the predecessor are both plot devices designed to drag you in as a reader, and help you explore the setting, especially its politics in this case, at the same time as the central protagonist. The mystery is the engine that keeps driving it forward; that investigative plot and science fiction go very well hand in hand. It’s a great way for actually being able to explore the universe that you’ve created. Plus, the idea our central protagonist is a new arrival means that, no matter how skilled or special they might in their own right, they’re starting at a disadvantage, which also helps drive plot and avoids that cliché of science fiction, the super-competent indomitable hero. Personally I like my heroes to know what they’re doing—you wouldn’t want Luke always picking up his lightsaber by the wrong end after all—but at the same time not so improbable that suspension of disbelief goes out the airlock. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As a debut, we might draw comparisons with previous winner Ancillary Justice , both because it’s another intergalactic empire type of story and also because this is another book that’s picked up a lot of advance buzz in the industry and across the spectrum of the science fiction readership. In fact one of the reasons I suspected Ancillary Justice might be our winner that year long before the judges even held their first meeting is because of the number of people who recommended the book to me from across all different spectrums of science fictional tastes and interests. I’m hearing something similar now with A Memory Called Empire , and it’s these little trends and signs you learn to look out for when you’ve been an award director for a while. There are two classic schools of writing of all kinds: some just sit down and do it—pantsters, as in ‘seat of your pants’—while at the other end of the spectrum you have immaculate planners; the people who know how every chapter interlinks before they ever start writing, and who are definitely the people with that spreadsheet on alien exchange rates or vocabulary all worked out. Personally, I love it when authors show their reasoning and behind-the-scenes workings like this, it’s like DVD extras, and everyone knows that sci fi movies have the best extra features, right? With other types of movies, you might get a ‘making of’ style feature or two if you’re lucky, whereas with science fiction the extra features can run longer than the film. Yes, it’s definitely not something that’s singular to science fiction. I think for a new writer, the idea that you need to build a world can be quite intimidating. Or, you can get so lost in it that you never get around to getting the book out. But I think it’s a good exercise to look at, because it’s the kind of space where you’re creating material that doesn’t need to be seen by anyone else; it’s a way to chip away at a project, you know? There are natural writers who will sit down and write, just find a way through to the end, and there are world builders. If you’re not too certain which one you are, I would always suggest that you should look to be a world builder first, even if only in private. You don’t need to show your working to anyone and it can be far easier to write 500 words explaining your world to yourself in the first instance than it can be to get 500 words of great plot, dialogue and description all assembled on the page first time out. That’s for anyone reading this feature who might be thinking of starting their own first science fiction novel. I think it’s a really useful exercise."

"Spoiler alert: It gets distinctly science fictional at the end. This book does raise an interesting question: how much science fiction does a book need contain to actually be considered science fiction? You know, a book can be entirely set in space and be almost entirely not science fiction if that makes sense. Take the film Alien , that could almost as easily be set in a ship in the ocean that finds a deep sea creature that sticks to your face—or whatever—or it could all be set in a galaxy far, far away, but really have no science in it whatsoever. On the other hand a book might have an almost entirely modern-day setting with just one tiny element of science fiction; alternative history, for example, is a big science fiction trope, where you change one thing and a different timeline branches off. “This book does raise an interesting question: how much science fiction does a book need contain to actually be considered science fiction?” Some people might prefer to call this type of book speculative fiction rather than science fiction. I’m not really here to have those kinds of arguments, but it’s brilliant to have this book on a science fiction list, because that means that we’re going to find a lot of new audiences for this book and we’re also pushing at the boundaries of what people (and publishers!) might consider to be science fictional. And it’s certainly a book that was being talked about within science fiction circles, even if it wasn’t necessarily branded that way. A lot of the people I saw enthusing about the book publicly before we shortlisted it were other science fiction writers! Again, if there’s one thing a good award shortlist can do, it’s point readers towards things that they might not have automatically considered their kind of thing, and encourage people to stretch the edges of their reading lists from time to time. Yes. No. Sort of. Maybe! I mean, we don’t have a particular mission, except to pick the best science fiction book of the year. We don’t predefine ‘best,’ we don’t predefine ‘science fiction,’ even, and we don’t even necessarily define ‘book,’ at least in terms of word count in the way some other awards might—usually those with multiple categories, for example, for novels, novellas, short stories, and so on. One of the reasons for not having those rules defined in that way is that Sir Arthur was always adamant that he didn’t want an award named after him that only recognised books that looked like his books. We don’t have those definitions precisely so that we can play across lots of different areas based on what the judges that year are looking for within their particular collective definition of ‘best science fiction novel of the year.’ What you’ve said about flagging up books with crossover appeal is precisely why a lot of people like the Clarke Award, and I love that that’s why they like it, but that’s different from being the central reason behind our judging decisions. Let’s not forget that the line up of judges changes every year, and those definitions of science fiction will keep changing with them. “People like me—white males—should definitely be making efforts to read outside our own cultures and comfort zones” And, you know, I’m hoping we’re going to bring The Old Drift to a lot of different readers. And in the light of conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement, people like me—white males—should definitely be making efforts to read outside our own cultures and comfort zones: to read more books by women, books by writers of colour—so you would want to start with some really good recommendations, I would hope!"

"You said he’s a very established author; I’d go further, and say he’s phenomenally prolific. He wrote a massive fantasy sequence before moving into science fiction with Children of Time , and since then he’s been almost unstoppable to the point in the last couple of years where I suspect he can write novels almost as fast as people like me can read them! Cage of Souls is a big book too, so if you like big science fiction, this one is definitely for you. It uses the ‘dying Earth’ trope that I talked about earlier: we are in the final city on Earth, during what we might term as a slow apocalypse. Everything is dying, everything is running down. There’s still a lot of technology that we would all consider hugely advanced, but he doesn’t explain how any of it works; in fact, the characters don’t know, and that sense of decline is what informs the book. Humanity is dying out. The rest of the planet, however, may not be, not just yet anyhow. Is Adrian a front runner for this year’s prize because he’s won before? Well, right now it’s a one in six chance, but I can say that this book is every bit as good as Children of Time , if not better. In many ways the book is almost fantasy, not because the science is implausible but because it’s set so far in the future and because it doesn’t try to explain everything. The book’s written in the first person so our narrator is either taking things we find amazing for granted and so not bothering to explain how things might work or, in many cases, he doesn’t know either and so can’t tell us. You’ve heard of the unreliable narrator, well this time around we get the unknowledgeable narrator. It’s refreshing to read something that feels both old—there’s something distinctly 19th century in the style of the first person telling—and far-future at the same time. From a technique point of view that juxtaposition is fascinating."

"This is a ‘first contact’ novel, and notable for being set purely within our solar system rather than having an intergalactic span. It’s actually quite rare to see a book that’s solar system-set. Charlie’s planet is a long way away, we have to have got there, and that brings certain presumptions around the mechanism for travel. A Memory Called Empire is an empire; the getting from planet to planet thing is not a major concern of the book, because it has clearly already happened. So there’s something very interesting about books that limit themselves to our own solar system. You can’t get away from the mechanics of space flight—you can’t use made up technological shortcuts to wave away the fact that there is no gravity in space, you can’t sidestep the fact that your mode of transport is very vulnerable out there, a tiny air bubble wrapped in metal that could pop very easily. This book is playing with that. “Are we seeing here the end of our love affair with space?” There’s also a definite nod to books like Sir Arthur’s own Rendezvous with Rama ( I think David would be happy to acknowledge that as a source), which again is actually quite rare on a Clarke list, as I noted earlier. But while readers might well recognise echoes of writers like Clarke, this is still a very modernised update, I would say. Even just looking at the title, ‘The Last Astronaut’… science fiction is more usually concerned with firsts—a new planet or emerging technology for example—so are we seeing here the end of our love affair with space? You know, we don’t really go to space any more, not like we thought we would be anyway, so there’s a sort of melancholy that hangs over that idea of a last astronaut rather than the sense of adventure we might have seen in past decades. It’s also hopefully not a spoiler to note that many people find this book has a distinct horror flavour to it, along with the science fictional plot. I’ve already talked about the story mechanics that can come into play when you limit yourself to a closer solar system story built upon day-after-tomorrow rather than far-future technologies, but this book also reminds us that space itself is an utterly alien environment for humans. Coming full circle, in a sense, all life on Earth is living in that thin habitable line on Charlie’s planet, January, and it’s entirely possible to view space as both the future for our race and also a source of imaginably powerful existential dread. Maybe there’s a last astronaut for very good reasons… Science fiction is not a movement, but there are movements within science fiction—if that makes sense. I often draw parallels with art movements, and there have certainly been manifestos for science fiction movements in the past. Cyberpunk, for example, was very much a kind of natural uprising of a very particular attitude within early 1980s science fiction writing, and same with what was referred to as the New Wave in the late Sixties. The word ‘punk’ now seems to be bolted onto any kind of movement: we’ve got solarpunk, ecopunk, dieselpunk… Steampunk is another obvious one that really took hold, but is steampunk a progressive movement? Quite literally not, in the sense that it’s actively looking backwards in terms of the timeframe, but it certainly has its set of ideals and rules that it plays by. People talked a lot about ‘the New Weird,’ which was a definite trend even if it wasn’t a movement, and similarly with what’s been referred to as ‘the New Space Opera.’ So there are official or unofficial movements within science fiction. And I think one of those approaches to the genre has always been about turning back on the things that have gone before and reframing them, which is the kind of progression you would see within art movements, as each step moves forward. When you look at this year’s shortlist, some people will say that our shortlist is very much centred on one thing—if we took an art parallel, people might be saying, ‘this is the year that the award is shortlisting all paintings,’ for instance. Next year might be all strange and wonderful installations, and then they’d say, ‘they’re trying to be deliberately weird now.’ So of course an award can never win. But then we are not trying to win. We’re more interested in asking questions like: What can we do with science fiction tools that are very well developed? How can those be refreshed again? How do I re-explore, as a writer, the books that I loved as a younger reader? I know this is explicit in Charlie’s writing, and similarly in The Last Astronaut , which is, perhaps, the most Clarke-y book on the shortlist that we’ve ever had. They’re taking those recognisable elements and moving them forward. It’s not a mission that science fiction has set itself in the last couple of years, but certainly all the conversations are there, and it’s a trend you can see through the lens of this shortlist very easily. People who are very familiar with science fiction as a genre are saying: how can we move it to the next level, keep it fresh, be critical when we need to be, but also acknowledge the ideas and writers of the past. For me I think that says a lot about the level of confidence in what we might call the collective science fiction project right now."

"Okay. Patience Agbabi is a debut author, and she’s very well regarded in spoken word and poetry circles. This is also one of only a few times we’ve shortlisted a novel for younger readers ; I think Stephen Baxter’s H-Bomb Girl was the first example of a YA novel to be shortlisted, in 2008. Patrick Ness , who is very well known, was also shortlisted for Monsters of Men in 2011. But both of those authors are known within the science fiction space. Patience has just leapt right to the front with her first book. And this is a great book for us to start with if we’re talking about what the award is trying to show in terms of the breadth of science fiction . We’ve got here a young heroine. She’s British-Nigerian, she’s autistic. She’s at high school, but this high school is very special in that she’s on a school trip to the future, because she is a time traveler, born on February 29, during which a certain percentage of people are gifted with time traveling powers. But things are going wrong in the future. That’s the crux of the plot. I don’t want to get into spoiler territory, but it’s worth saying that the book opens with a quote from Greta Thunberg , which will perhaps give you a nod towards the direction of travel. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Of course, there are some very recognisable tropes here: you’ve got the school. This is a great way to engage with younger readers, by setting things in environments that they’re familiar with. But while it is aimed at younger readers, that doesn’t mean the writing is any less mature. It’s an absolute page turner. And as you might imagine, it’s a very particular first person voice. You could talk about some comparable titles like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time , with the autistic protagonist. But Agbabi’s spoken word background brings a freshness. Definitely. Most science fiction readers become fans young, then seek out the stuff that interests them. You know: I liked spaceships the way some kids like football, so now I Iike real spaceships, lego spaceships… it also led to other interests in robotics, cybernetics, digital culture and the environment as well. And it’s exciting to have this book on the shortlist because I know a lot of our fans have kids of their own and are looking for good books to give them. Our award doesn’t have set criteria, as I said. But any award will naturally accrue a kind of understanding of what people think it is. If you’re named after the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey , as we are, I think people are going to think of stark interiors, homicidal AI… anything in the same kind of style. But although I don’t want to speak for Clarke, I think this is one of the books he would fight for if he were on our judging panel."

"Absolutely. So this is set in 2119, around 100 years ahead. And as you can imagine, things are not going well on the near future Earth. I don’t usually like to make these sorts of comparisons, but if you liked Blade Runner , that noir flavour of science fiction, then this is probably the one our shortlist for you. Think crumbling societies, dispossessed populations, outlawed technologies and a (very on trend) deadly plague to name just a few of the challenges our protagonists will be facing here. If The Infinite exemplified what the Clarke Award can do in terms of recognising the wealth of science fiction for younger readers, another area that’s always welcome to us is the opportunity to help promote small presses. And this book comes to us via a long and winding road. So, R. B. Kelly won the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair Competition, which is a small award specifically for first time writers. The winner has their book published by a small press, and Edge of Heaven was first published in the Republic of Ireland in 2016—so, not eligible for our award. But it was then subsequently picked up by another small press in the UK—NewCon Press, which has a very strong track record in UK science fiction having made its name publishing anthologies before moving into novels and novellas. I should quickly declare an interest here: NewCon Press worked with us directly on a collection of 2001-word long short stories to honour Sir Arthur C Clarke’s 100th birthday. But let me be clear: I as the prize director have nothing to do with the judging, so there’s no bias whatsoever. But I have been expecting to see this publisher arrive on our shortlists for a while—and it’s extra special I think that it’s this particular book. We know from past experience that we are good at finding authors at the beginning of their career; they might go on to write for twenty, thirty years. But this award can create a lot of exposure that can make all the difference for a new writer just starting out."

"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!"

"We get pandemic books every year. Station Eleven , our 2015 winner, was a pandemic book. If you add zombie pandemics… we get more than enough of those. So, the premise of The Animals in that Country is that there is a pandemic, but it’s a virus that enables humans to start to understand the speech of animals. But not in a Doctor Dolittle way, when we can just chat to them. It’s more like the Wittgenstein idea that ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.’ So the characters can hear them, but they don’t always know what they are saying. And of course you don’t want to hear everything. It will drive you mad. People look at the Clarke Award shortlist every year and try to guess what the judges were thinking. They automatically think: that’s the space one, that’s the fun one, that’s the literary one. And I don’t think it’s unfair to say that this is the literary one, at least in terms of its origins, not as a statement of relative quality versus our other contenders. It’s coming from a publisher, Scribe (part of the Penguin Random House family), which doesn’t traditionally do a lot in the speculative fiction market. This is the first time they were submitting to us, and obviously they are thrilled this book was shortlisted. “If you’re going to travel via an Einstein-Rosen bridge, it can take a chapter of explanatory text or you can just say ‘the wormhole opened…’” The book has elements of pandemic, elements of the road trip—the need to get across country to find family members, other survivors who are accommodating the breakdown of society. We kind of know how societies are supposed to breakdown in zombie apocalypses or in environmental crises. We’ve seen it a million times before. But this one stood out because it’s nothing like those at all, and all the familiar tropes are up in the air. I think it was that breath of imagination that really appealed to the judges. How would you imagine animal speech? They also talked about the joy of the writing in this book. The imaginative feat of trying to understand how an animal might communicate, and what that communication might be. It’s the literary equivalent of imagining how a hyperdrive works; if you’re going to travel via an Einstein-Rosen bridge, it can take a chapter of explanatory text or you can just say ‘the wormhole opened…’. If you can take the reader on that journey and make it believable… well, that is what this book does. If you wish that animals really would speak to us, this is the guidebook for you."

"This book’s publisher, Titan, will be very well known to a lot of readers for the excellent nonfiction work they do with big coffee table film books and similar, but over recent years have been very active in publishing their own lists of science fiction, fantasy and horror. They’ve picked up a lot of great authors, and Simon Jimenez is no exception. If the following book, Vagabonds , is near-space, our own solar system, then The Vanished Birds is very definitively space opera. Of course. Space opera is always so difficult to define, but I’ll give it a go. I would suggest that if a story allows for the possibility of intergalactic travel without the several thousand years wait it should take to get to the nearest star, you’re probably in space opera territory. It doesn’t have to be a Star Wars style evil galactic empire but we’re definitely talking about spacefaring civilisation or civilisations, where the actual collapse of the journey required has been solved by means that might be called hand waving…. Or it might be very well worked out! One of my favourite examples of solving the faster than light trick is a book called Light by M. John Harrison —which was nominated for the Clarke Award; he won it in 2007 with the sequel, Nova Swing —where basically every civilisation in the universe will evolve very different mathematics and philosophical concepts of how the universe works, and because that’s how they model the universe all the methods work even if they work on contradictory physics… It plays very cleverly with quantum uncertainty principles so civilisations ends up with something like a sort of Schrodinger’s drive; if you don’t believe it, you can’t get the engine to start. Hopefully that’s not too off the cuff a sense of what space opera is, and to get more specific this next book, The Vanished Birds , opens with an absolute classic of that intergalactic perspective—picture a very distant planet, a very low tech planet that was colonised in some distant past and is now home to generations of farmers. Every 15 years, the skies open and a fleet of ships descend upon the fields. The ships are described as being made of metal and cloth—and we don’t know whether we’re seeing this through the eyes of somebody who just doesn’t know what they’re seeing or if it’s a literal description—but it’s a very beautiful image that remind me of Sir Arthur’s famous line that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. These spaceships sail in to collect the harvests and the people on the ships are travelling at post-relativity speeds, so they are ageing at a very different speed. A character on the planet would see the same spaceship crew member as having aged perhaps a year in the time they have aged 15 themselves. The planet’s farmers might not see it, but as readers suddenly we’re exposed to this vast gulf of relative time and the number of generations that might have lived and died, cut off on their planet while working to supply an intergalactic marketplace they never see for themselves. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And it’s a beautifully written book. It doesn’t spend too much time explaining these technologies. This ‘ship of cloth’ and so on. One of the joys of space opera, of course, is that because we’re far future (or perhaps a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) the need to explain these magical technologies is lessened and you can just give yourself to the dream. It’s interesting to discuss this book and the collapsing of intergalactic space travel into something entirely non-magic, almost mundane, in the lives of a spacefaring civilisation (especially perhaps in those moments where characters don’t know they are part of this much larger world beyond their own). It references back to many other classics of science fiction as well—so for those who like to see lineage in their science fiction, you’ll definitely have fun tracing back all of the different links in this book. However, as a first time author, Simon is exploring this from a very different cultural background, even if he’s picking up on ideas that have been part of the science fiction toolkit forever, basically. When our judges come to their deliberations, they might look at a book where the fictional far future has some familiar touchpoints but be drawn in by an author’s new direction of travel. It’s a difficult trick to pull off, but that spirit of continual reinvention is what’s powered science fiction all these years."

"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."