The Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature revealed its 30th annual shortlist at the opening ceremony of the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival.
The annual award is presented for the best science fiction novel of the year, and selected by judges from a list of novels whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year.
- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet – Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton)
- Europe at Midnight – Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)
- The Book of Phoenix – Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder & Stoughton)
- Arcadia – Iain Pears (Faber & Faber)
- Way Down Dark – J.P. Smythe (Hodder & Stoughton)
- Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)
The 6 shortlisted titles were selected from a list of 113 individual eligible submissions, the second highest recorded number in the awards history.
The winner will be announced August 24, and be presented with a cheque for £2016.00 and the award itself, a commemorative engraved bookend.
The judges for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2016 are:
- David Gullen, British Science Fiction Association
- Ian Whates, British Science Fiction Association
- Liz Bourke, Science Fiction Foundation
- Andrew McKie, Science Fiction Foundation
- Leila Abu El Hawa, SCI-FI-LONDON film festival
Andrew M. Butler represents the Arthur C. Clarke Award in a non-voting role as the Chair of the Judges.
The award was originally established by a generous grant from Sir Arthur C. Clarke with the aim of promoting science fiction in Britain, and is currently administered by the Serendip Foundation, a voluntary organisation created to oversee the on-going running and development of the award.
Members of the judging panel are nominated by supporting organizations, currently the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival.
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Looks like a good reading recs list!
When posting this link to Facebook the description and photos come up as Lee Falk’s Phantom of Happy Memory post.
So I’m guessing links might still be affected by the prior problems?
Some very fine choices there. I’m glad to see Becky Chambers among the nominees, especially as she is very likely one of the Campbell eligible authors who missed out due to the puppies.
An interesting list, indeed. Very great kudos to the judges for such hard work.
GaryD: Hm. And I reproduced the same problem with that link on Facebook.
The old Google cache file of the Phantom post shows it had the URL now assigned to the Arthur C Clarke post, so that part makes a perverse kind of sense.
But the old Phantom post doesn’t exist here anymore.
And when I enter that URL into my browser, it takes me to the Clarke post, like it should.
We seem to have learned something about Facebook, though I’m not sure what that is…. Doesn’t seem to be a problem on this end.
Unless — we have learned something about WordPress.
Because I just saw the same thing at Twitter — where a robot tweets new posts as they appear.
Somewhere, something is returning the earlier post’s short identifying data — the Phantom title and associated artwork. However, the link takes a person to the Clarke post, which is correctr for that URL.
I suppose that the inclusion of Pear’s Arcadia on the Clarke list will give it significant momentum for the 2016 US-centric awards.
Hey, I guessed one right!
I’m a big fan of Iain Pears’ “art history mystery” series, in which he did about half a dozen novels. Delightful books. I tried a couple of his mainstream novels but bounced off them. I look forward to trying this one, hoping for a better connection.
I wonder which of these books attracted which of the judges’ comments mentioned in an earlier post? Reading about Arcadia and its app makes me think it might be the “I’m not sure if it’s a book” one.
I’m looking forward to checking out the Adrian Tchaikovsky. I read his stand-alone magic-and-muskets novel Guns Of The Dawn recently and enjoyed it immensely – the military action and the character-driven aspects both worked really well for me. Children of Time seems like another interesting departure for him.
Congrats to the nominees!
Looks like an intriguing list – I’ve not read any of these, and some weren’t on my radar at all.
Tower of TBR, thou shalt vex me unto eternity!
I’m looking forward to giving Arcadia a try. Unfortunately, the app is only available for iPhone/iPad and not Android or Windows, so unless that changes, I won’t be able to try it out. 🙁
Well, here’s a turnup. For the last couple of years I’ve been intending to use the Clarke shortlist to boost my reading of brand-new SF (and failing dismally, for a variety of reasons). This year’s shortlist comes out, and I find I’ve already read one (The Book of Phoenix), and have four of the others sitting on my Kindle waiting to be read …
* goes to Amazon *
… and one being downloaded now.
@JJ: I know nothing about Arcadia, so your comment confused me till I Google’d. Now I’m confused because the book appears to have a regular ebook version and a print book (I get the impression neither has a “choose your own adventure” style???). So now, I’m doubly or triply confused. Anyone know if it’s actually readable/useful/worth bothering with as a regular book? Is the choose-your-path stuff in the app just a gimmick?
Also: Did the judges put it on the shortlist based on the ebook or print edition, or do they all have iDevices and did they all use the app version? I wonders.
P.S. @JJ you could get an iDevice. 😉 #KiddingNotKiddingButMostlyKidding #OwStopItOkayI’mKidding
/Clarke-stalk