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!
In earlier posts, I’ve described my quest to read all the short-listed novels for the major speculative fiction awards: the Nebula, the Locus, the Arthur C. Clarke, and the Hugo. I only decided to take on this arduous task in May, though, which didn’t give me enough time to read the entire lengthy roster of Locus nominees before the award was announced. I did read all the Nebula nominees, and now I’ve read all the novels nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, to be announced in a few weeks on July 24th. Here are the novels short-listed for the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Awards, which honor the year’s best science fiction published in the U.K. On the web site, you’ll find other information about this year’s awards, as well as all the nominees in other categories.
Now I’ve read every one of the short-listed novels. Look HERE for my reviews of the first two I read, Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars. Look HERE for reviews of the next two, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s The Ten Percent Thief and Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension.
In this post, I review the final two candidates:
Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)
Isabel Waidner, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (Graywolf Press, 2024)
What a great read, a real novel for our times! And what a dilemma for the award-givers: two amazing novels with ocean and marine biology underpinnings. But just as Martin McInnes’s In Ascension wasn’t only about that, so this novel by Ray Nayler is about much more than frightening creatures of the deep: the nature of intelligence, the nature of communication, how to define “alien.” How to define “human.” It’s an impressive and important book. Among other accolades, it has also already won the Locus Award and has already been short-listed for the Nebula–except for 2023. It’s kind of a mystery to me why a book published in 2022 should be considered for “the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year”–unless, of course, the novel was published later in the U.K. than in the U.S.
Nayler works for a scientific institute at George Washington University. Previously, he joined the Peace Corps, did a stint at the State Department, and worked for NOAA. He clearly knows what he is talking about. I loved this book, absorbing and powerful–a warning about climate collapse, all-powerful soulless corporations, Machiavellian politics, the dangers of AI, and especially the qualities that make us human. And the amazing intelligence rivaling ours on this planet: the octopus.
What a contrast! Waidner’s novel–if the book really is a novel–is worlds removed from Nayler’s in just about every way. Full disclosure: I’m probably not the demographic for this book. It’s very intriguing, though. I spent the first pages feeling annoyed that it wasn’t some kind of huge novel like Nayler’s that I could dive into and stay fully immersed there (sorry for all the marine metaphors!) without coming up for air. Instead, I had to read Waidner’s book in painstaking short gasps. That, it turns out, is a very unfair way to think of the book. It’s a different animal, and it demands a different reading.
Well, then. What is this book? That’s what occupied me for the next chapter or two. Is it an example of the New Weird? Is it Bizarro? Is it slipstream? Graywolf Press is known for publishing innovative literature, and Weidner’s book is nothing if not innovative. It is arch, it is political, it is extremely meta. After all, it’s about a working-class queer writer who has won a major literary award that turns out to be more of a menace than an honor. In an interview with PEN America, Waidner discusses their award-winning novel Sterling Karat Gold by stating, “I write as a working-class, queer novelist. . ., and my perspective shapes everything in the novel.”
In the interview, Waidner notes the blending of fantasy and reality in Sterling Karat Gold–an insight that works for Corey Fah as well. Abandoning my struggles to define what I was reading, I relaxed and went with it. Among the characters in this latest of Waidner’s highly-lauded novels, I found a giant spider that is somehow connected to Bambi, the Disney fawn who loses his mother and breaks the hearts of generations of children. I found worm holes sucking the characters into a time-travel Groundhog Day loop. I found oppressive, magically proliferating fast-food restaurants. I found an extended riff on the actual murder, in 1967, of gay working-class British playwright Joe Orton by his lover.
The main character, Corey Fah, keeps all these improbable narrative balls in the air via a first-person narration communicated to us in some sort of truncated syntax that raises even more questions about the absurd universe the reader has wandered into: is this the language of the vaguely dystopian future that Corey Fah and their lover Drew inhabit? Is it the author’s stylistic tic? What is it? What is this object I am holding and reading and turning the pages of? In the end, I found myself fascinated by the reading experience. Whatever that is. However I might define it. In the end, it seemed a lot more like some experimental poetry I’ve read than any of the novels on the Arthur C. Clarke Awards or any other short-list, but since it’s about a writer given an award that eludes them repeatedly, infuriatingly (I mean physically–it zips away from the pursuing winner), I can imagine at least some of the judges feeling nudged by an irresistible surreal voice: give the award to THIS.
In my quest to read all the short-listed for the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Awards, I have devoured two more. Ugh–no, I devoured one of them, and the other I choked down. They are:
Lavanya Lakshminarayan, The Ten Percent Thief, Solaris, distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2023
Martin MacInnes, In Ascension, Grove Atlantic, 2023
Brace yourselves. Some things, however hard, have to be said.
This novel, originally titled Analog/Virtual, is an extremely broad satire presenting a mosaic of characters and situations in a dystopian Bangalore. Here, society has undergone a draconian division between the haves–people whose every thought, twitch, and impulse is governed by a digital algorithm–and the have-nots, people living in squalor without benefit of a digitally-enhanced environment. The novel touches briefly on the devastation of climate change but is mostly about the drastically different quality of life people experience on either side of the analog/virtual divide. When the downtrodden Analogs revolt, a kind of very slow-motion, leadenly-described, predictable violence ensues.
I really don’t know what to say about this novel. It’s actually a series of sketches which, taken together, do not form much of a coherent narrative, and all of them relentlessly pound the author’s point home, like a hammer to the head. I couldn’t tell the characters apart. The writing is wooden. Why was this novel nominated for a prestigious award? Sorry, I don’t want to be overly harsh here. Using satire as its main method, the novel does speak to our society’s problem with rampant shallow thinking driven by social media and over-reliance on computer technology. I think the point could have been made in a much shorter form, though. In fact, this particular piece of short-form satiric fiction has already been written: E. M. Forster’s dated but still affecting “The Machine Stops.” A hard-hitting piece of journalism might have been a better way to get the point across, too. I was very disappointed in this book.
As I explored my mostly negative reaction to The Ten Percent Thief, I thought more deeply about satire in general and dystopian novels employing satire in particular. Satire is very hard to pull off in novel form, but it has been done brilliantly. Brave New World, for example, has a biting satiric edge, and while Huxley’s characters are nowhere near as well-developed as Orwell’s in the often-compared 1984, they do function as recognizable characters. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is another example–it, like Lakshminarayan’s novel, is a bunch of fragments, and some of its satiric touches are a bit heavy-handed. Unlike Lakshminarayan’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale‘s fragments make sense as a plot device, and the moving tragedy of the main character’s situation far outweighs the satire. Her main character, a woman who doesn’t even have a name, is worlds more vivid than any of the characters in The Ten Percent Thief. The satiric novel has always had this problem, though, all the way back to the beginning. Is Gulliver’s Travels a novel? It was written at the dawn of the form and has many novelistic traits, but maybe isn’t a novel (also: not a children’s book!). I’ll leave that whole discussion for the 18th century lit experts, but this is a general problem and has been from the beginning. American Psycho, as it turns out, is satire, although the hapless reader doesn’t realize it for hundreds of pages of gut-churning nastiness. But, unfortunately, I found Lakshminarayan’s novel just pretty shallow and a slog to read.
To be fair: Here’s another thought about why The Ten Percent Thief was nominated for an Arthur C. Clarke Award, and it’s a matter of taste. I read widely–literary fiction, genre fiction of all types, everything I can get my hands on. I have four criteria for excellence in the novel, any novel of any type, and in this order: 1. quality of writing. 2. characterization and whether it fits the author’s vision. 3. world-building/setting/concept. 4. plot. Now–a lot of readers would put my no. 4, plot, in the no. 1 spot. I’m thinking of people who love “airport thrillers,” for example. And a lot of readers, especially SF readers, would put my no. 3, world-building/setting/concept in the no. 1 spot. This, right here, may explain my very negative reaction to this book, because–forget nos. 1, 2, and even 4–The Ten Percent Thief is all no. 3, all the way, all the time.
I’ve encountered this before, and I always come up with the same reaction: if that’s all you want to do, dear author, why not produce a nice quick PowerPoint instead?
But you, dear reader, may value your books very differently, and you may like this book. Its nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke Award suggests you have plenty of company even if at least one reader (me) can’t see why.
Like Chain-Gang All-Stars (previously reviewed by this blog), In Ascension has reaped accolades from readers of both literary and genre novels, with award nominations for both types of readers (often the same reader–me, for example). Chain-Gang All-Stars has been nominated not only for the Arthur C. Clarke Award but for the National Book Award, while MacInnes’s novel has been long-listed for the Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for novels written in English. And, of course–short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the fourth novel I’ve read in my quest to read every book on the list before the awards announcement on July 24th.
I didn’t believe any novel could top Chain-Gang All-Stars in my favorites category, but In Ascension is at the very least tied, if maybe my new favorite. The two novels are so different that it is really hard to choose between them, and probably unfair to try. I’m imagining that will be a big problem for the awards judges.
In Ascension is an astounding novel. It is beautifully-written, lyrical and meditative. The plot involves a young marine biologist whose discoveries and experiences on a previous and very mysterious oceanographic expedition have led to a coveted position on a team needing her expertise for a different kind of expedition entirely. Set against the backdrop of an environmentally-damaged and maybe dying earth, this novel explores deeply what it means to be human, one among countless life-forms inhabiting the planet and the universe. It’s a novel of discovery and loss, the small-scale mysteries of family relationships alongside the deepest mysteries of life. What a novel. It checks all of my boxes, 1 2 3 4, all at once, as all the best novels do. This novel cites Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Fitting that it is short-listed for the award honoring Clarke. If any novel serves as an avenue to understanding Clarke’s Third Law, this one does.
Fantastes 
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