Tag: Arthur C. Clarke Awards

A Word About Awards

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

What is it about awards and the striving for prizes? We humans get a big thrill out of the drama of it all. My recent posts have covered some of the biggest speculative fiction awards. I’ve been reading the nominated novels and making my own decisions, then seeing how they measure against the judges’. It’s fun. It’s the love of the horse-race.

But is that a good way to read, and to get reading recommendations? Speaking for myself, the short-lists for these awards have given me a marvelous TBR of science fiction and fantasy. These are not, of course, the only good books. They may not even be the best books. The lists are subject to flawed systems of judgment, for one thing. For the most part, the books on the lists are so-called “trad published” books. (They’re all pretty great books.)

What about the indie-published books out there? Some of the awards lists do include them, and I tip my hat to that decision process. As an indie-published author myself, I can tell you that with a few lucky exceptions, many readers don’t even know most indie-published books exist. Indie authors may or may not be good marketers of their works, and they sure don’t have the marketing resources of a publishing company to draw upon. Increasingly, though, that kind of marketing support is hard to come by, even for the authors these companies publish. They might reserve their big marketing bucks for proven best-sellers or books by celebrities (and those may or may not be good books, may or may not actually be written by those celebrities–it’s the name recognition that sells the books). Still, one function of a publishing company is to serve as a gate-keeper, weeding out the trash from the treasure and presenting readers with only the treasure. With indie-published books, the authors are on their own to make their case to the readers, and the readers are on their own to wade through the ocean of stuff on offer to find the treasure and sift it from the trash. And then, of course, one reader’s trash is another reader’s treasure! In spite of the odds, I’m happy to see that some indie-published novels do make it onto these awards lists. In a coming post, I hope to give a guide to finding good indie-published SF and fantasy.

THE LOCUS AWARDS

Last year, I spent several posts on the Locus Awards, and I haven’t done that this year. The Locus list is just too massive. I only review books I’ve read myself. Also, some items on that list aren’t the type of work or genre I read (horror, for example). I wouldn’t be able to offer anything interesting to say about those. But this year’s Locus Awards winners and short-listed novels do offer one more wonderful resource for readers. Subscribers to Locus Magazine vote on these awards, and they are all readers who know and love SF and fantasy. Others can vote as well, although their votes aren’t weighted as heavily. Here are the winners and short-listed novels in the two categories I do read, SF and fantasy, as well as the First Novel list. I haven’t read all of these books, but I can see I need to work on that!

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

  • WINNER: The Man Who Saw Seconds, Alexander Boldizar (Clash)
  • Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom; Solaris) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula Awards short list HERE.
  • The Mercy of Gods, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor; Ad Astra UK)
  • The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Malka Older (Tordotcom)
  • Kinning, Nisi Shawl (Tor)
  • Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Hugo Awards short list HERE.
  • Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom; Tor UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Arthur C. Clarke Awards HERE, and mentioned in one of my posts about the Hugo Awards short list HERE.
  • Space Oddity, Catherynne M. Valente (Saga; Corsair UK)
  • Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer (MCD; Fourth Estate UK)

FANTASY NOVEL

  • WINNER: A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula short list HERE, and mentioned in one of my posts about the Hugo short list HERE.
  • I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, Peter S. Beagle (Saga)
  • The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Hugo Awards short list HERE. It is also short-listed for the 2025 World Fantasy Awards in the best novel category. See my upcoming post this fall.
  • The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom)
  • The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman (Viking; Del Rey UK)–I am reading this right now as I plow through all of the World Fantasy Awards nominees. Look for my post about that this fall.
  • Asunder, Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula short list HERE.
  • Somewhere Beyond the Sea, TJ Klune (Tor; Tor UK)
  • The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed (Solaris UK)
  • Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • The City in Glass, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

FIRST NOVEL

  • WINNER: Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula short list/award HERE, and HERE, and mentioned in one of my posts about the Hugo short list HERE.
  • The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader; Sceptre UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Arthur C. Clarke short list HERE, and mentioned in one of my posts about the Hugo short list HERE.
  • The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron; Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
  • Sargassa, Sophie Burnham (DAW)
  • Lady Eve’s Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow (Solaris UK)
  • The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula short list HERE.
  • The West Passage, Jared Pechaček (Tordotcom)
  • The Spice Gate, Prashanth Srivatsa (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
  • Womb City, Tlotlo Tsamaase (Erewhon)
  • Hammajang Luck, Makana Yamamoto (Gollancz; Harper Voyager US 2025)

OTHER AWARDS

I could spend my entire life reading books nominated for awards! HERE is a handy list of major awards. If you are looking for great SF and fantasy to read, the nominees for these awards are a great starting point. For example, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay got a special mention by the Philip K. Dick Awards this year. Other great reads are listed among the nominees for the British Fantasy Awards, the British SF Association Awards (Alien Clay was nominated for best novel there, too), and more–and that’s not even mentioning awards for short fiction, young adult fiction, films, and other categories I don’t often deal with in this blog.

Many Other Ways to Choose Good Reading

Getting bored with the horse-race approach? Consider these–also consider I’m recommending them via a U.S. base, so all of them may not work for you if you live elsewhere in the world:

  • Best-seller lists: New York Times, other major media.
  • Book review sections of newspapers and magazines, such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and major newspapers, as well as in specialized publications such as Locus Magazine.
  • Recommendations by bookseller platforms like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and the like–and my new favorite source for e-books, bookshop.org, which allows you to give an indie bookstore credit for each ebook you purchase (available in the U.S. and U.K.). You can also order print books through Bookshop. If you use these platforms, they may recommend other books you’ll like, based on your purchase patterns and also what their algorithms tell them about you. I distrust these algorithms myself, having seen too much of the pay-to-play inside of one of these platforms, which shall be nameless, but they may work for you.
  • Websites and blogs. (Like this one!)
  • Newsletters with curated reading lists. I publish one myself. It’s a lot about me, but I do include lists of other authors to read. If you’d like to subscribe, send a message to shrikepublications@outlook.com.
  • Clubs and societies of SF and fantasy fans, from the huge to the local.
  • Social media groups of like-minded readers. I’m partial to Bluesky, which has great conversations about books. Follow me at jmcfwiseman@bsky.social and other book-lovers you’ll find there. Search for the BookSky posts especially. There are other groups and posts at Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram, Goodreads, and on and on.
  • A fantastic resource: your public library! ASK A LIBRARIAN! Even better, check out books there for free. (I’m U.S-based, so I’m referring to the system here–yours may differ.)
  • And of course, if you’re anything like me, you and your reader friends have a lot of opinions to share. Word of mouth, baby!

Thanks for the royalty-free illustration at the top of this post: Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

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.