The Arthur C. Clarke Awards short list: Final words

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy2 Comments

The novels short-listed for this major speculative fiction award include:

  • Annie Bot, Sierra Greer WINNER, reviewed in this post
  • Private Rites, Julia Armfield
  • The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
  • Extremophile, Ian Green
  • Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky–reviewed in this post
  • Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, Maud Woolf

In my last post, I reviewed the novels by by Green and Woolf. The first post in this series reviewed the novels by Armfield and Bradley.

Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky(2024, Tor)

Find out more HERE.

Pay no attention to the masterful, wizardly author behind the curtain. Charles the robot, aka Uncharles, is the star of this show. Here’s the story of total societal collapse told through the point of view of a robot completely hung up on procedure. Technically, you might call the point of view “close-in third person.” We don’t see straight through Charles’s eyes, but we do see all the novel’s events through his robot take on the world. It’s a tour-de-force.

In the opening scene, Charles, a valet robot, has just murdered his master. He has no idea that’s what he has done, just that after he has shaved his master with the usual straight razor, a mysterious red stain on his master’s clothing must be dealt with. You can think here of C-3PO or Murderbot, but really, Tchaikovsky’s portrayal–while every bit as sly and satirical–goes much deeper, into the ways robots operate and how they really might approach the end of humanity and the human-built world.

In his attempt to get his obvious if puzzling robot dysfunction addressed, Charles goes on a lengthy odyssey that takes him to all the important sites of human societal dysfunction: the clogged-up bureaucratic systems, the lust for power run amuck, the misappropriation of information technology, the misunderstanding of what robots are and what they are capable of accomplishing. It’s a kind of reverse Wizard of Oz. In this world of encroaching uncontrolled AI, the problems Charles encounters are also important issues for Tchaikovsky’s human readers.

Charles’s perspective and his trajectory change when he happens upon another seeming dysfunctional robot calling herself The Wonk. Together, the two first work together simply to survive, but then they begin working on the main problem, how to salvage society. They make the perfect team: Charles’s dogged procedural robot nature and The Wonk’s creative unpredictability. She must be a very dysfunctional robot, then, mustn’t she?

This book is incredibly fun to read, and underneath the fun lurks a sly message. It was short-listed not only for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke award, which it didn’t win, but also for the upcoming Hugos.

Annie Bot, Sierra Greer (2024, HarperCollins)

This year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award WINNER for best novel

Find out more HERE.

It’s easy to see why this novel won this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. It’s the very engaging first-person account of an AI girlfriend and her struggles with her controlling boyfriend/owner, so it checks a lot of SF boxes as well as a lot of relationship boxes. I don’t pretend to know how awards committees come up with their decisions. All I know about it I learned from Percival Everett’s Erasure. But I can see why this novel would be a popular choice.

I paired my review of this book with Tchaikovsky’s because, well, robots, right? There the comparison ends. Although. . . they are both books from the robot perspective. Greer’s novel goes whole hog; it is written in first person, so everything we see, we see through Annie Bot’s eyes. This also, I imagine, makes the book fun and accessible for readers who come to their task of fictional empathizing through this increasingly common technical writing device.

In a near future, this novel postulates that lonely men can buy themselves a robot companion for sex. That is not SF. It is absolutely believable, since personal robots are already on the market and sex robots are definitely a thing (Be warned before you click on that link to a site called The Guy Shack, if you don’t want your eyeballs or your internet history to reflect such a topic, and I hope my kids understand after I’m gone that I’m just a writer doing her research!). The science fiction part comes in when the main character of this novel, Annie Bot, a robot, begins to explore her own agency. Or is that SF? Here’s the intriguing premise behind the novel. Which of your friends’ girlfriends is actually human, and which might just be pretending? The Turing Test comes to mind. But Annie’s struggle also reflects real issues of abuse and control in intimate relationships. The writing sounds sort of robotic, but I guess that fits the character. It’s an engaging novel and a fast read.

AT THIS POINT in my series of reviews for short-listed novels, I usually pick my favorite. And I never try to second-guess the judges, because as I mentioned above in this post, I have no idea what drives them. It feels funny to do that now that a decision has been made, but I can tell you that FOR ME and me alone, there was no contest. My favorite of the novels in this list was Ian Green’s Extremophile. I found almost all the others to be interesting, worthwhile, and often entertaining novels, and I’m glad I read all of them.

NEXT: on to the short-listed novels for the 2025 Hugo Awards.

The Arthur C. Clarke Awards short list, continued

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

The novels short-listed for this major speculative fiction award include:

  • Annie Bot, Sierra Greer WINNER
  • Private Rites, Julia Armfield
  • The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
  • Extremophile, Ian Green–reviewed in this post
  • Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, Maud Woolf–reviewed in this post

In my last post, I reviewed the novels by Armfield and Bradley. This post reviews the novels by Green and Woolf.

Extremophile, Ian Green (2024, Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury)

Find out more HERE. Get it HERE.

What an amazing novel. Disclaimer: I’m probably not the target audience for it–I had to look up stuff in order to read Extremophile, all the way from slang stuff like ACAB and “jilling” to science stuff like “clathrate gun.” If you know what either the slang stuff, the science stuff, or both mean without looking them up, get this book RIGHT NOW and read it. If you do have to look them up, get this book RIGHT NOW. . .etc. I started out thinking, well, if A Clockwork Orange and Snowcrash had had a baby. . . But that’s not it. That kind of pigeon-holing (talk about old slang) does this novel a huge disservice. In the end, I was thinking more about Orxy and Crake, but the book is an original.

Green has written an ingenious dystopian novel of bioterrorism, climate collapse, the punk scene of the future, and the destruction of civilization as we know it. In a London sometime after a 2038 worldwide mega-pandemic, the disaffected main character of the novel divides the world into Green, Blue, and Black. “The Greens want to save the world,” Charlie tells us, in a spectrum stretching from making your own toothpaste to the most violent acts of terrorism. The Blues don’t care about anything but profiting off the corpse of a dying world, and if that means killing or destroying or perversely toying with anyone or anything in their path, they do not flinch. The Blacks, though, have given up hope.

The three main characters are musicians with their own up-and-coming punk band, and the narrator, Charlie, is also a gifted bio-hacker much in demand for all sorts of shady projects. Charlie has a dangerous past–a mentor savagely killed by a mysterious chemical process that the novel gradually unfolds to us. Charlie’s world, inside and out, is broken, and we readers probably don’t like the chances that Charlie is going to come out of this plot intact.

Sound bleak? Not so fast. This novel is laugh-out-loud clever. In my last post, I mentioned “Chekhov’s gun,” and this novel plays in a really fun way with that concept from the title of the first chapter all the way through. It’s also an extremely violent novel, and sometimes pretty perverse, so be aware and warned if such topics put you off. The plot is a specimen of the thrill-ride heist/caper. What fascinates me about it is how much fun it is while being completely realistic about character–the way people really work inside. The supervillains have their dumb moments. So do the heroes. Charlie is a hugely engaging main character, and Parker and Zoot are admirable side-kicks. In the end, this novel is incredibly sweet-natured, with an endearing shout-out to Ursula LeGuin into the bargain. In a more cartoonish fantasy, the heroes ride to the rescue and sort everything neatly out. Instead, this novel shows us human beings with all their nuances and craziness. The world with all of its pigeons and methane bubbles and dying coral reefs. All the messiness. We are also treated to timeless words of wisdom such as: “switching lanes at the post office never got no motherfucker nothing.” So–all the messiness, plus a whole lot of fun.

The writing is superb. I always try to read a novel I’m reviewing before I read anyone else’s opinion. Then I might, especially if I don’t trust my own take on it. In the case of Extremophile, I spotted a couple of two-star reviews as I purchased the ebook. What were those readers thinking???? This novel did not win the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award. If I were handing out awards, I would absolutely give it one, and as many stars as they’d let me. Please do yourself a huge favor and read this book. (Unless you are prudish or squeamish. I suppose I need to say that.)

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, Maud Woolf (2024, Angry Robot)

Find it HERE.

In the near future, Lulabelle Rock is a B-list star with a sagging career. Cloning has given celebrities a handy way to extend their reach and public appeal. A star will clone herself, creating what are called Portraits, and send them out to perform any number of practical tasks, whether it be shopping, posing in designer clothes, attending splashy parties, whatever will save the star’s energy. But Lulabelle, under pressure to revive interest in her panned new film, decides her Portraits actually dilute her impact. She creates one last clone, the thirteenth, the novel’s main character. The assignment the real Lulabelle gives Portrait Thirteen: assassinate all the other fake Lulabelles.

Woolf’s novel is a stylish high-concept romp during which Number Thirteen encounters twelve different possible versions of herself. Portrait Thirteen, only minutes out of the cloning vat when we first meet her, gradually comes to understand herself. The novel drives to its inevitable end. What happens when the assassin–born for that task and that task only–turns sour on the assignment? What if she makes friends with some of the other Lulabelles? Which ones fight back, which ones succumb meekly to their fate, and which ones actually welcome it? What happens to the last Portrait Lulabelle–the lucky/unlucky thirteenth–once the other fakes have been destroyed? Most of all, how does our narrator Lulabelle, a fake herself, tell the fakery in the world–especially this world, a whole city designed for fakery–from the real? How does anyone?

The novel is entertaining. I enjoyed it. It is cartoonish, sure, but that’s what it sets out to be. I found it a bit predictable, although the various encounters with possible selves, the sleight-of-hand involving who is a good guy and who isn’t, and a twisty ending guarantee an interesting and fast-paced read.

NEXT UP: reviews of Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and the Arthur C. Clarke prizewinning novel, Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer.

The Arthur C. Clarke Awards: Belated Post

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy2 Comments

And don’t I feel silly! I know I said I’d turn to the Hugo Awards short-listed novels next. Meanwhile–how, I’m not sure–I completely misunderstood the Clarke Awards timeline. The decision has already been made and the winner is:


Annie Bot, Sierra Greer (Borough)


Find it HERE.

The other novels on the short list include:

  • Private Rites, Julia Armfield
  • The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
  • Extremophile, Ian Green
  • Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, Maud Woolf

As with all of these short-listed novels, I plan to post capsule reviews. Unlike the Nebula Award, Hugo Award, and other short lists, I’m writing these reviews after the judges have made their choice, so my posts won’t have as much of a horse-race vibe to them! All that drama about which book will be chosen–gone. But these awards lists are fantastic ways to explore some of the best recent speculative fiction, so I’ll just post my reviews and proceed as usual–and postpone the reviews of the Hugo short list.

Luckily, I had already started reading the novels on the Clarke list, so here are my first two reviews, of Private Rites, by Julia Armfield, and The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley.

Private Rites, Julia Armfield, 2024 (Macmillan/Flatiron)

Find it HERE.

Except for two aspects, this is simply a realistic novel about three squabbling sisters. They quarrel for several hundred pages, their disagreements made even worse by the terrible weather, and then they stop. However, the setting is in near-future London, where climate change has put the city mostly underwater, so the incessant rain isn’t simply a depressing backdrop to the depressing account of the sisters’ difficulties. Instead, I suppose the sisters’ difficulties and the rain become an intertwined emblem of the terrible times that have come upon the world.

There’s another aspect to the novel, too. The opening is extremely disturbing and gory, making me wonder if I were about to embark on a horror novel. Then that opening gets seemingly dropped. Now, we all know about Chekhov’s gun, don’t we? The great playwright Anton Chekhov famously said that if he puts a gun in the first act of his play, he’d better have that gun go off by the third act. So I waited patiently (and then, sorry, impatiently) through hundreds of pages of sniping and fussing and rain for the payoff promised by the gory opening. In retrospect, I can see that the seeds of the developing plot are there. But they are so muted that nothing much actually happens for a long, long time–or so it seemed to me as a reader. There’s not much rising tension, just the low-level grinding tension we may all feel when we are trapped with family members or other close acquaintances with whom we are having a long-standing, toxic set of disagreements and misunderstandings. I did admire the realistic characterizations of the sisters.

I’m thinking maybe it would have been good if at least one of the three siblings captured our sympathy, but I do appreciate how skillfully they were drawn–and I’m not a reader who has to identify with or even like any or all of the characters in a novel. Every book doesn’t have to have sympathetic characters. Some books don’t need them or would be ruined if they had them. A book like this, with a message like this, frequently does have at least one character who works as an explaining presence, though, and all of these characters seem equally, evenly confused and deluded. The message about climate change is of course sorely needed, and yes, I’m sure it will be as depressing as it seems in this novel. When the novel’s payoff finally comes, though, it is kind of too little too late for me as a reader, and–maybe I’m dense–but how and why the novel’s final events happen is as murky as the dystopian weather.

The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley 2025 (Simon & Shuster)

NOTE: Corrected post, with the right link to Bradley’s novel. Apologies!

Find it HERE.

I had read Bradley’s novel at the beginning of the year, but its details had faded a bit in my memory, so I recently re-read it–not just because of this list, either. The novel is on a number of lists recommending great recent speculative fiction. It is an immensely entertaining and skillful novel, and I enjoyed it just as much the second time as I did the first. It’s a time-travel novel drawing partly on a real incident, the fate of the English ships Erebus and Terror when the 1845 Franklin expedition to the high Arctic is lost with no survivors. But only one of the time travelers comes from that past event; others come from other pasts. The seaman from the Franklin expedition disaster is the most important but also a woman from the plague-ridden 16th century, another whose husband was guillotined in the French Revolution, several war-scarred combatants from different eras, and more. There’s even a really fun, really subtle cameo almost-appearance by the World War I poet Wilfred Owen. These voyagers from other times disconcertingly pop through a time portal into a near-future London. The novel’s main character, part of a secret government team helping the disoriented time-travelers assimilate into the present, begins to question herself and her employers as the details of the project grow ever more sinister.

Bradley’s plot and narration are intricate, the characters are fascinating, and the slow burn of evolving love is compelling. Underneath it all lurks a dangerous plot to use the unmoored, traumatized time-travelers in a scheme the main character only thinks she understands. Suspense mounts: will she puzzle out what is really going on underneath all the gaslighting, will she be able to avert the looming terrible damage to people she has come to admire and even love, and will she be able to do it all in time? We readers hurtle through a dizzy and skillfully managed amalgam of thriller plot, love story, search for identity, lost history, and threat of disastrous future. The twisty plot–unlike some–really earns its stripes.

I hate feeling manipulated by a plot with unexpected zigs and zags. Not here. Bradley gives us just enough breadcrumbs to begin figuring out, with the main character, the chilling direction of the novel’s events. The main character stands in for us, the readers, as the plot’s trap snaps shut. If that were not the case, I wouldn’t have enjoyed re-reading the novel. A twisty ending that springs itself on the reader with cheap tricks will not reward re-reading. This novel works as much because of the characters and the hows and whys of the plot as for the way the plot ends.

I have been thinking of this novel as a serious contender for prizes like the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It didn’t win this one, but it would have been a worthy choice. And it is also on the Hugo Awards short list!

Next up: Extremophile, by Ian Green, and Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, by Maud Woolf.