The six finalists for the 2014 Arthur C. Clarke Award are:

• God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Del Rey UK)
• Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit)
• The Disestablishment of Paradise, Phillip Mann (Gollancz)
• Nexus, Ramez Naam (Angry Robot)
• The Adjacent, Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
• The Machine, James Smythe (Blue Door)

The panel of judges is chaired by Andrew M. Butler and consists of Duncan Lawie and Ian Whates for the British Science Fiction Association, Sarah Brown and Lesley Hall for the Science Fiction Foundation, and Georgie Knight for SCI-FI-LONDON. Awards director is Tom Hunter.

The winner will receive £2014 of prize money and a commemorative bookend. The winner will be announced May 1 in London.

The Clarke Award has been beset by controversy for the past two years. In 2012, Christopher Priest called the shortlist “dreadful”. In 2013, the absence of women among the finalists attracted a great deal of criticism. This year with Priest and two women among the nominees, the shortlist may enjoy smoother sailing.

Last year’s kerfuffle has led the Clarke Award administrators to publicly list of works submitted for consideration and the inevitable statistical analysis was included in The Guardian’s coverage:

The books were selected from 121 submissions, which were made public by the award following controversy around last year’s all-male shortlist. This year, said director Tom Hunter, 34 books were submitted by female writers, a ratio of “approximately one in four, [of which] one in three made it through to the discussion list of 30 titles from which the judges made their final selection today”. This ratio “carried through into the final six shortlisted titles, two of which are by new female authors,” said Hunter.