Soon to be announced: The Arthur C. Clarke Award for 2024

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy

THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR the Best SCIENCE FICTION BOOK published in the U. K. in 2024

and voted on by volunteers from the award’s sponsoring organizations: the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival.

To recap: Here is the list

Click on each to see my reviews on this blog.

Here’s my own quick take. If you’ve read these books, you may have a very different opinion.

If any of these three were to win the award, I’d feel perfectly happy and satisfied: Chain-Gang All-Stars, In Ascension, The Mountain in the Sea. If I were one of the judges, I’d find it really difficult to pick one among those three. I might be especially partial to Chain-Gang All-Stars, because the dystopian society it describes is based on a very real U.S. problem, and I’m a citizen of the U.S. Both In Ascension and The Mountain in the Sea have backgrounds in the deep ocean, and both address towering concerns for life on the planet. What is communication? What constitutes a person? Is “a person” the same thing as “a human being”? What is an “alien”? Macinnes’s novel seems more personal to me, building a character from childhood into maturity, and it takes a more lyrical tone. Naylor’s novel tackles a number of important issues head-on, yet the characters are compelling as well. The octopus characters are wonderfully developed, and the character named Evrim is hugely affecting.

I also Iiked Emily Tesh’s novel, Some Desperate Glory, and I don’t usually like novels with tricky, tricky little plots. (The gush of such novels throughout the publishing world suggests I’m in the minority there, what a curmudgeon.). But Tesh’s novel is no fool-the-reader cheap trick. She makes a serious point in an ingenious way.

I was hugely intrigued by Isabel Waidner’s Cory Fah Does Social Media. It is innovative, crazy, and published by my favorite home-town press, Graywolf Press here in Minneapolis. It’s a real literary tour-de-force. I’m thinking I’m probably too old to appreciate it fully–it seems written for an emerging generation of readers, and more power to them.

Unfortunately, Lavanya Laksminarayan’s The Ten Percent Thief left me cold. It seems all concept. I know some SF readers like that, but for me, a successful novel has to have more than that: some combination of great characters, voice, maybe a really great plot although not always, absolutely amazing world-building, and above all–because any good novel has to have this–great writing.

So now we’ll see what the judges have to say tomorrow!

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