Any of you following this blog know that from early May, my intention has been to read as many of the novels nominated for “best” category by the four biggest speculative fiction awards as I can. I started out with the first to hold its awards announcement, the 2024 Nebula Awards, and managed to read all the short-listed novels for “best novel.” You can read my reviews of each on this blog. The 2024 Locus Award short-list, coming so soon after the Nebulas (and, more to the point, so soon after I made my resolution), was a much, much bigger challenge. How does the saying go? Too many books, too little time? I couldn’t read all of them. But at least there was a bit of overlap with the Nebula list. I had to be content with that. Meanwhile, I am sprinting to read every one of the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award short-listed nominees before the July 24th announcement of the winner. I came to a belated realization that I needed to add this list to my other three (Nebula, Locus, Hugo) because I’m a reader in English, and even though the Arthur C. Clarke Award only goes to a writer published in the U.K, that still covers most of the English-speaking world. One of the first two writers I’m reviewing is a U.S. writer.

Awards, of course, aren’t the be-all and end-all. For whatever reason (maybe chiefly that indie writers aren’t usually included–a bit of a self-serving complaint, since I am indie-published myself), every novel that deserves a reward isn’t on these lists. That said, the short-lists for the major speculative fiction awards are an extremely helpful way to keep up with newly published novels (also other forms) in this cluster of genres.

Onward to my first two reviews of 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award short-listed best novels. They are all SF, no fantasy, because SF is the only genre this award recognizes.

They are, in the order I’ve read them:

Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (Macmillan–Tordotcom 2023)

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars (Penguin/Random House 2023)

Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory

I suppose this novel was short-listed for the Locus best new novel award–and not just for best novel– because Tesh’s World Fantasy Award-winning Silver in the Wood is actually a novella. Now, although Some Desperate Glory did not win in its Locus Awards category, it is short-listed for both the Arthur C. Clarke 2024 Awards and the Hugo 2024 Awards for best novel. Quite an achievement.

I was puzzled by this book at first. Not that I don’t enjoy a rousing space opera, but it seemed at first like an Ender’s Game sort of book, and given other nominated books this year, I didn’t think that would be enough for a major award. There are clues right away, though, that within the space opera wrapper and the space academy trope, this book offers a pretty deep experience. The first clue is the title. Do you recognize it? It’s from Wilfred Owen’s great poem about the horrors of World War I, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Please read it if you haven’t, or if you haven’t in a while. It’s a terrific poem. But here’s the last stanza. If you could see the horrors I’ve seen, the narrator of the poem tells us,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Owen’s poem quotes another poem, a famous ode by the Roman poet Horace. “Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori” translates “how sweet and appropriate it is to die for one’s country.” This is a poem every schoolboy in England at the turn of the twentieth century would have known as the highest patriotic sentiment. And that schoolboy, statistically speaking, was soon to have an excellent chance of dying a horrible death in the trench warfare of World War I, a war which killed off an entire generation of young English, French, and German men, among others–including Wilfred Owen himself in the last weeks of the war.

So–a first clue about Emily Tesh’s intent. And the book goes on to ratify the clue–it’s a novel of child soldiers inculcated by their cynical elders with the patriotic ardor that will lead them to their needless deaths.

The novel is more complicated than that. The epigraph to the novel is our second clue, a quotation from the ancient Greek playwright Euripedes’s great Medea: “I would rather stand three times in the battle line than give birth to one child.” That line tells us how dangerous it was to be a woman in a society with scant medical help for women giving birth, and that’s the type of society Emily Tesh’s characters inhabit. The quotation (revisited several times in the novel) also makes us wonder, the moment we see a good number of the novel’s teenaged soldiers are female: what’s about to happen to these female soldiers? What will they be called upon to do as their patriotic duty to an all-consuming state?

More clues: chapter titles, character names, many taken from heroic Nordic or Graeco-Roman heroes and gods of old. These titles and names reinforce the idea of a militaristic society. For example, the novel’s villain is named for the Roman conqueror of the British Isles. The main (female) character’s name evokes the word valkyrie. The training exercises for the teenaged soldiers take place in a virtual reality facility called the agoge– a Spartan name for the rigorous training undergone in perhaps one of the most militaristic societies of the classical world. How many fantasy and SF novels have been set in a kind of Spartan- or Roman-inspired militaristic environment? Again, if we really think about this kind of clue, it leads us to deeper questions. Why are most of the character names drawn from Nordic or Graeco-Roman mythology? What does this tell us about diversity in the world of Tesh’s novel?

I found all of these hints pretty fascinating. However–around the two-thirds mark, I was ready to quit reading. The book takes a very sharp turn. No spoilers, but I hate a book that plays tricks on the reader. I hate a St. Elsewhere ending (old, old tv reference!), and it looked to me like that’s where we were headed. Luckily, I didn’t stop reading. I was so wrong. Some readers like that trick-the-reader stuff and might eagerly read on, but if you’re like me and hate it, just. . .trust the book and keep reading.

I think it’s safe to say that every time a lesser novel might have settled for easy answers, this novel rises above them. It’s not just about young eager military trainees at the space academy. It’s not just about the horrors of war, either. It’s a very interesting read, and I can see why it was nominated for so many awards.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

I finished this book around an hour ago, and I don’t even know how I’m writing. I should be falling on the floor moaning in despair. This is one powerful book. It’s near-future dystopia, but it is also SF, because (unlike a book like, say, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song) it includes plausible technology and institutions extrapolated from existing ones–but they don’t exist quite yet. Hence the nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke SF award.

The novel takes as its premise the idea that some near-future America might broadcast deadly gladiatorial-type games between convicted murderers as highly monetized reality tv. The novel takes its inspiration from a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This loophole actually allows chattel servitude–slavery–in certain instances. That’s not science fiction. That’s fact. The exception in the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing U.S. slavery is for prisoners incarcerated for committing certain crimes. The U.S. has far and above the highest proportion of incarcerated people in the developed world, and the highest percentages of those people are drawn from minority populations. Not science fiction. Not exaggeration. Fact. It’s a national shame and blot, and it’s one of the foundational reasons for the national shame and blot that is the U.S. incarceration industry. Other writers of speculative fiction have tackled similar issues. I’m thinking of Margaret Atwood’s not very satisfying novel, The Heart Goes Last, for example. But I can’t think of any that are as powerful as this one.

A few things to know about this novel:

1. if you are an easily distracted reader, try to get it in hard copy. The novel is peppered with footnotes, and if you are reading it in e-book form, you may find yourself repeatedly shuttling back and forth from the text of a chapter to the end of a chapter. I’m not sure about this, but I’m imagining a hard copy will be less distracting, because the footnotes will be right there at the bottom of each page. Whatever you do, don’t skip the footnotes thinking they will give you some kind of optional bonus content. They’re an integral part of the narrative fabric. And don’t be put off by the idea. Some of the footnotes are fictional, many are real, all are heart-stopping.
2. This is a very American book about a very American problem. If you’re from another part of the world, you may not feel the horrible social consequences as much as a U.S. reader will. I’m not sure about that, being a U.S. reader myself and maybe lacking perspective. But British readers–maybe you’ve encountered Claire North’s dystopian novel 84K. Not exactly the same, but a similar kind of problem. Other parts of the world have their own horrifying social problems and will be able to empathize, I think.
3. The premise might make you think you are in for a grittier, more adult Hunger Games. Think again.

This is such a powerful novel that right now, I can’t imagine anyone NOT giving it an award. The Locus Awards for first novel overlooked it. I can forgive that, since that award went to The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera, which is also a very powerful and important novel. Chain-Gang All-Stars, though-wow. Along with a slew of other nominations for genre awards, this novel has been nominated for the National Book Award. That’s one of the main U.S.-based awards for literary fiction. As a reader of literary fiction, I’d say I trust that award’s judges more than I trust the judges for the Pulitzer Prize, at least where fiction is concerned. Speculative fiction doesn’t usually win that kind of award. I say that, and then I’m thinking again (always thinking about it a lot–a very, very powerful novel) of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, the dystopian novel that won this year’s Booker Prize.

And a personal note, so you can skip this part: the author of this novel clearly has the standing to write it. I am another person very disturbed to learn about the exception in the 13th Amendment. Another person connecting the dots between that exception and the shameful state of incarceration in the U.S. I felt compelled to write a novel about it. Because I’m white, my protagonist was white. Yet the overwhelming proportion of this exception’s victims are Black and brown people. Look up information on the controversy surrounding #Own Voices if you don’t understand why a white writer might hesitate to take on such a topic–probably should hesitate. Yet I wrote my novel anyway. Why? This is a weird thing about writers–anyway, some writers. Anyway, me. My main character insisted I write it. He hounded me until I did write it. But as soon as I did, I decided to stick it away in a drawer. All that work. Oh, well. My character has stopped haunting me.