Pixel Scroll 10/24/22 Labyrinth of Chaos

(1) EU TURN. BBC Future explores the meaning of “Eucatastrophe: Tolkien’s word for the ‘anti-doomsday’”.

…In particular, Tolkien wrote about what makes a happy ending so powerful in stories. And to do so, he came up with an intriguing coinage: fairy stories, he suggested, often feature a “eucatastrophe” – this was, he suggested, a “good” catastrophe. So, what exactly did he mean? And could such events happen in real life too?

In the present day, Tolkien’s idea of the “good catastrophe” has attracted the attention of scholars who study existential risk and humanity’s future prospects. It turns out that eucatastrophes may matter beyond fairy stories – and identifying the conditions that lead to them could be necessary if we want to thrive as a species.

According to Tolkien, a eucatastrophe in a story often happens at the darkest moment. When all seems lost – when the enemy seems to have won – a sudden “joyous turn” for the better can emerge. It delivers a deep emotional reaction in readers: “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart”, he wrote….

(2) CLOSE LOOK AT THE CLARKE FINALISTS. The winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award will be announced on Wednesday. Andrew Butler, chair of judges, discusses the finalists in detail in “The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Clarke Award Shortlist” at Five Books.

Let’s talk about Deep Wheel Orcadia by the Scottish writer Harry Josephine Giles. It’s a novel-in-verse, which takes a very interesting literary approach. Can you tell us more?

Novels-in-two-verses, you might argue. One in Orcadian, one in English. Orcadian is a dialect of Scots—as opposed to Gaelic—and there’s a history of Scots feeding into science fiction and horror, especially Gothic horror. In 1919, someone came up with the idea of the Caledonian antisyzygy—the Scots think in one language, but feel in another, say. There’s a sort of divided consciousness at the centre of Scottish books, poetry and art—and we can trace this division in authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Iain M. Banks and many others.

I think I can relate to that.

The action of Deep Wheel Orcadia is mostly set on or close to an isolated space station, at a crisis point in the solar system, and focuses on the working and private lives of the characters on board. You could decide to read the Orcadian version and then the English, or vice versa, or just one—but you’d miss so much if you only read half. I think you can pick up the Orcadian, as you might the Riddleyspeak in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker….

(3) SCORING SFF. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I listened to this 2017 podcast Leonard and Jessie Maltin had with composer Michael Giacchino. You knew this would be a great interview because Giacchino begins the interview by saying that when he’s in the car, he listens to old-time radio and his favorite show is the sf show X Minus One. Leonard Maltin wrote a very good book about old time radio and he and Giacchino geek out about radio for many minutes.  Most of the rest of the interview was how Giacchino got his start; he graduated from the School of Visual Arts with postgraduate work at Julliard. He ended up scoring video games and got a big break from Steven Spielberg that led to his scoring “The Lost World” video game. Another big break led to Giacchino writing the score for The Incredibles after John Barry, who originally was offered the job, declined.

I think Giacchino is the best active film composer and he also gets credit for hiring veteran musicians who have all their skills but may need help with technology or disabilities. Between 85-90 percent of Giacchino’s work is for sf or fantasy films, so this should be of interest. Maltin on Movies: “Michael Giacchino”.

(4) KEN BURNS TURNS THE PAGE. In the New York Times: “Ken Burns Wishes More People Would Call Willa Cather a Great American Novelist”, however, he also reads sff.

What books are on your night stand?

I have a pretty big night stand. … and then I have Kim Stanley Robinson’s “New York 2140,” which is a really wonderful book, imagining a less dystopian future. It does have disasters and climate change, but it also has sort of human adaptability, and it’s really spectacular. 

Do you have favorite genres and genres that you avoid?

I don’t like horror. I had a big science fiction thing in high school and college and I haven’t read science fiction in ages and ages. I used to read religiously Roger Zelazny and now I can’t even find his books on a bookshelf at a reputable bookstore. But everything else is kind of open. I like good writing. One writer I love is Willa Cather. People say, Was it Melville or Hemingway or Twain who wrote the great American novel, meaning “Moby-Dick” or “A Farewell to Arms” or obviously “Huckleberry Finn,” where, as Hemingway rightly said, American literature begins. But what about “O Pioneers!” or “My Ántonia”? For that matter, what about Gabriel García Márquez? We do not have a copyright on the word “American.”

(5) BUSCH COMMEMORATED. First Fandom President John L. Coker III announced a tribute to the late Justin E. A. Busch who died October 21.

Last week, after I learned about his grave condition, I had an award plaque made.  It is the seldom-given First Fandom Merit Award, “Presented to Justin E. A. Busch for attaining excellence in his work.”  He didn’t live long enough to see it but I would like for it to be at least a small part of his legacy.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

1984 [By Cat Eldridge.] Ray Bradbury’s A Memory of Murder

Ray Bradbury’s A Memory of Murder is a collection of fifteen of his mystery short stories published thirty-eight years ago by Dell. They first appeared from 1944 to 1948 in pulp magazines owned by Popular Publications, Inc. that specialized in detective and crime fiction.

Bradbury wasn’t that happy with these stories as he thought he hadn’t developed yet as a writer and made that well known more than once later on. As he said in an interview with Crime Time, “When my first detective mystery stories began to appear in Dime DetectiveDime Mystery MagazineDetective Tales, and Black Mask in the early ’40s, there was no immediate trepidation over in the Hammett-Chandler-Cain camp. The fact is, it didn’t develop later either. I was never a threat. I couldn’t, in the immortal words of Marlon Brando, have been a contender.”

The stories themselves numbered fifteen in total with titles such as “A Careful Man Dies” from New Detective Magazine in November 1946). The cover blurb was “For a hemophiliac, no object is innocent, and even a kiss can kill!” It was one of Bradbury’s stories that filmed in 2005, this time by Italian backers and producers. 

Another one, “It Burns Me Up!” from Dime Mystery Magazine in November 1944 carried the wonderfully chilling first line of “I am lying here in the very centre of the room and I am not mad, I am not angry, I am not perturbed” it serves as a great reminder that some of his stories got turned comics, see Ray Bradbury Comics, Number 3, published in 1993.

I’ll let Ed Gorman have the last word as he reviewed this collection over on his blog in his column Forgotten Books. He said of his favorite story, “The most interesting story is ‘The Long Night.’ I remember the editor who bought it writing a piece years later about what a find it was. And it is. A story set in the Hispanic area of Los Angeles during the war, it deals with race and race riots, with the juvenile delinquency that was a major problem for this country in the war years (remember The Amboy Dukes?) and the paternal bonds that teenage boys need and reject at the same time. A haunting, powerful story that hints at the greatness that was only a few years away from Bradbury.” 

It went of print immediately but the paperback is fairly easy to find at the usual sellers.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 24, 1893 Merian Cooper. Aviator, Writer, Director and Producer. After spending WWI in the Air Force, Cooper became a writer and researcher for The New York Times and later the American Geographic Society, traveling the world, and writing stories and giving lectures about his travels. He then turned some of his writing into documentary films. He had helped David Selznick get a job at RKO Pictures, and later Selznick hired him to make movies. He developed one of his story ideas into a movie featuring a giant gorilla which is terrorizing New York City. King Kong was released in 1933, and the story has been sequeled, remade, comicbooked, and rebooted innumerable times in the last 85 years. (Died 1973.) (JJ) 
  • Born October 24, 1915 Bob Kane. Writer and Artist who co-created, along with Bill Finger, the DC character Batman. Multiple sources report that “Kane said his influences for the character included actor Douglas Fairbanks’ movie portrayal of the swashbuckler Zorro, Leonardo da Vinci’s diagram of the ornithopter, a flying machine with huge bat-like wings; and the 1930 film The Bat Whispers, based on Mary Roberts Rinehart’s mystery novel The Circular Staircase.” He was inducted into Jack Kirby Hall of Fame and the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. The character he created has been featured in countless comic books, stories, movies, TV series, animated features, videogames, and action figures in the last eight decades. The 1989 movie based on his creation, featuring Michael Keaton in the title role, was a finalist for both Hugo and British Science Fiction Association Awards. (Died 1998.)
  • Born October 24, 1948 Margaret “Peggy” Ranson. Artist, Illustrator, and Fan, who became involved with fandom when she co-edited the program book for the 1988 Worldcon in New Orleans. She went on to provide art for many fanzines and conventions, and was a finalist for the Best Fan Artist Hugo every one of the eight years from 1991 to 1998, winning once. She was Guest of Honor at several conventions, including a DeepSouthCon. Sadly, she died of cancer in 2016; Mike Glyer’s lovely tribute to her can be read here. (Died 2016.)
  • Born October 24, 1952 Jane Fancher, 70. Writer and Artist. In the early 80s, she was an art assistant on Elfquest, providing inking assistance on the black and white comics and coloring of the original graphic novel reprints. She adapted portions of C.J. Cherryh’s first Morgaine novel into a black and white comic book, which prompted her to begin writing novels herself. Her first novel, Groundties, was a finalist for the Compton Crook Award, and she has been Guest of Honor and Toastmaster at several conventions.
  • Born October 24, 1956 Katie Waitman, 66. Her best known work to date was the Compton Crook Award winning The Merro Tree in which a galaxy-spanning performance artist must defy a ban imposed on him. Her second novel, The Divided, appears to be bog standard military SF but really isn’t. Highly recommended.  
  • Born October 24, 1956 Dr. Jordin Kare. Physicist, Filker, and Fan who was known for his scientific research on laser propulsion. A graduate of MIT and Berkeley, he said that he chose MIT because of the hero in Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. He was a regular attendee and science and filk program participant at conventions, from 1975 until his untimely death. He met his wife, Mary Kay Kare, at the 1981 Worldcon. He should be remembered and honored as being an editor of The Westerfilk Collection: Songs of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a crucial filksong collection, and later as a partner in Off Centaur Publications, the very first commercial publisher specializing in filk songbooks and recordings. Shortly after the shuttle Columbia tragedy, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, on live TV, attempted to read the lyrics to Jordin’s Pegasus Award-winning song “Fire in the Sky”, which celebrates manned space exploration. He was Guest of Honor at numerous conventions, and was named to the Filk Hall of Fame. Mike Glyer’s tribute to him can be read here. (Died 2017.) (JJ)
  • Born October 24, 1960 BD Wong, 62.  His first genre role was in Jurassic Park as Dr. Henry Wu (a role reprised in Jurassic World, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic Park Dominion). He was the voice of Captain Li Shang on Mulan, and Whiterose, head of the hacker collective Dark Army on Mr. Robot.
  • Born October 24, 1974 Liesel Schwarz, 48. She’s been dubbed, by whom I know not I admit, “The High Priestess of British Steampunk”. She has written the Chronicles of Light and Shadow trilogy, a sequence set in a Steampunk version of Europe in which the three novels are Chronicles of Light and ShadowA Clockwork Heart and Sky Pirates.
  • Born October 24, 1971 Sofia Samatar, 51. Teacher, Writer, and Poet who speaks several languages and started out as a language instructor, a job which took her to Egypt for nine years. She won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and is the author of two wonderful novels to date, both of which I highly recommend: Stranger in Olondria (which won World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards and was nominated for a Nebula) and The Winged Histories. Her short story “Selkie Stories are for Losers” was nominated for Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, and BFA Awards. She has written enough short fiction in just six years that Small Beer Press put out Tender, a collection which is a twenty-six stories strong. And she has a most splendid website. (Standback)

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Six Chix may be a comic but these characters are not overdrawn.
  • Tom Gauld on the perfect book cover. Almost.

(9) BULLPEN MEMORIES. “An iconic Daredevil writer and X-Men editor joins the pod to talk about taking translating stories from The Daily News into the Daily Bugle.” “The Girl From Marvel’s Boy-Club Bullpen Tells All About Old Times Square” in the FAQ NYC podcast.

Ann Nocenti, the writer, journalist and filmmaker who wrote and edited some of the most iconic Marvel comics of the late 1980s and early 1990s joins the podcast to discuss her early years in New York as “the girl who lived behind the fish tank,” quite literally, how her work in asylums influenced her stories about superheroes, creating Marvel’s first openly transgender character, the role of “fake news” in the comics she’s working on now, and much more. 

(10) NOT A ONE NIGHT STAND. Deadline lists the film adaptations of Howard Waldrop stories that George R.R. Martin is producing. “’House of the Dragon’ Creator George R.R. Martin On Short Film Anthology Including One With Felicia Day”.

Days before a Targaryen civil war erupts between Rhaenyra and Alicent on the Season 1 finale of HBO’s House of the Dragon, you’ll find series creator George R.R. Martin staying mum on fire-breathing animals and talking up his latest rotoscope animated short, Night of the Cootersin his Santa Fe, NM stomping ground.

The Vincent D’Onofrio-directed cowboys vs. aliens film based on the Howard Waldrop short story is one of four short movies Martin is producing in what is shaping up to be an anthology either for the big screen (a la Creepshow) or TV (a la Love, Death and Robots)…

In addition to Night of the Cooters, Martin recently finished production on the second title he owns from sci-fi author Waldrop. Currently titled Friends Forever, the short was directed by Justin Duval, a producer and DP on Night of the Cooters, and is currently in post.

Another short currently shooting in Santa Fe under the helm of Steven Paul Judd is Mary Margaret Road-Grader, which Martin billed as a “Native American Mad Max story about tractor pulls and feminism.”

Then there’s Waldrop’s most notable work, The Ugly Chickensabout the extinction of the dodo, which is about to shoot in Toronto with Kodachrome‘s Mark Raso directing….

(11) HOMES OF HORROR. Kelsey Ford lists “Haunted House Books That Will Keep You Up At Night” for readers of the PowellsBooks.Blog.

…In honor of spooky season (the best season), I’ve pulled together a by-no-means-exhaustive list of my favorite haunted house books, books with houses that exemplify the Shirley’s Jackson quote: “It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope.”…

(12) MIDDLE EASTERN ANIMATION HIT. “Bidaya Blasts Back to the Future with Sci-Fi Show, ‘The Adventures of Mansour: Age of A.I.’”Animation Magazine has the story.

The Adventures of Mansour, a sci-fi cartoon phenomenon from the Middle East that’s racked up an astounding two billion YouTube hits, is returning with an all-new sequel series, The Adventures of Mansour: Age of A.I.  

Funded by Mubadala Investment Company and Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority (ECA), the dynamic adventure show is aimed at kids aged 6-12. This Mansour relaunch from Bidaya Media, recently announced at MIPCOM 2022, will be the first Arab cartoon first created in English and Arabic then realigned for a worldwide audience presenting topical themes of artificial intelligence, technology, climate change, and space exploration.

…Here’s the official description:

Set in the near future, in the technologically advanced Salam City, ‘The Adventures of Mansour: Age of AI’ is a sci-fi action adventure series that revolves around Mansour, a 12-year-old tech whiz, who unintentionally creates a mischievous sentient artificial intelligence known as Blink. With the support of his closest friends, Mansour must deal with all manner of pranks, challenges and dangers posed by Blink, who for his own amusement, is determined to cause as much chaos as possible for Mansour and the people of Salam City.  

(13) LAND(ED)SHARK. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Tom Scott explores the controversy over the British house with a shark in its roof (a story I think is fandom-adjacent). “The government approves of this shark now.”

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian, for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH.]

Namwali Serpell Wins
34th Clarke Award

The winner of the 34th Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature was announced on September 23.

  • The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth/Vintage)

Announcing this year’s prize, author and 2019 winner Tade Thompson (Rosewater) said:

The Old Drift is, to me, the great African novel of the twenty-first century. The scale, the characters, the polish and lyricism of the passages all conspire to tell an unforgettable tale. At last, a book that acknowledges that the African lives with the fantastic and mundane.

“At last, an African book of unarguable universality. Namwali Serpell has created something specifically Zambian and generally African at the same time. The Old Drift is everything fiction should be, and everything those of us who write should aspire to. Hats off. Well-deserved win. This is why my faith in the Clarke Award is unshakable.”

Speaking on behalf of the judging panel, Chair of Judges Dr Andrew M. Butler added:

“Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift is, as one of our judges put it, ‘stealth sf’, with inheritance and infection at its heart. She has created an extraordinary family saga which spans eras from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall, and beyond.

“It is a timely novel which interrogates colonialism from within and points to the science fictionality of everyday events. Our pandemic-ravaged world reminds us how connected our world has been for the last century or more – and this book points to the global nature of science fiction.”

The annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is presented for the best science fiction novel of the year, and selected from a list of novels whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year.

Namwali Serpell receives a trophy in the form of a commemorative engraved bookend and prize money of £2020.00. Serpell tweeted thanks for the award:

The members of the judging panel were:

  • Stewart Hotston, British Science Fiction Association
  • Alasdair Stuart, British Science Fiction Association
  • Farah Mendlesohn, Science Fiction Foundation
  • Chris Pak, Science Fiction Foundation
  • Rhian Drinkwater, SCI-FI-LONDON film festival

Andrew M. Butler represented the Arthur C. Clarke Award in a non-voting role as the Chair of the Judges. Before the winner was announced, he posted his “Chair of Judges Speech” to Medium.

…I’m not entirely sure if this has been a cosy catastrophe — I don’t remember Wyndham predicting the Toilet Paper Dearth or the flour shortage — but then his novels are much darker than we thought they were fifty years ago.

The judging this year mostly took place from our individual bunkers via the media of Zoom rather than face to face.

We’ve seen Alien, we know the quarantine procedure.

Any joking aside, I’d like to thank the judges — Farah Mendlesohn and Chris Pak for the Science Fiction Foundation, Alasdair Stuart and Stewart Hotston for the BSFA and Rhian Drinkwater for Sci Fi London — for keeping the award discussion going in very difficult circumstances. I was rather relieved that at the final, lengthy, meeting we were able to choose a winner for the Clarke Award — winner, not two, and we certainly weren’t going to decide that the prize should be split six ways. As always, none of us was clear which book that winner would be even after a couple of hours of discussion….

2019 Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist

The finalists for the 33rd Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature were released on May 7.

Tom Hunter, Award Director, commented:

Our 6 shortlisted titles were selected from a record-breaking 124 eligible submissions, and as the imaginative breadth of SF publishing in the UK has grown so too has the challenge for our judges. With this shortlist they have successfully melded multiple definitions of the genre into a celebratory whole that both upholds the best traditions of science fiction literature and beckons us towards exhilarating new futures.

The finalists are:

  • Semiosis Sue Burke (HarperVoyager)
  •  Revenant Gun – Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
  • Frankenstein in Baghdad Ahmed Saadawi (Oneworld)
  • The Electric State – Simon Stålenhag (Simon and Schuster)
  • Rosewater – Tade Thompson (Orbit)
  • The Loosening Skin – Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories)

Andrew M. Butler, Chair of Judges, thanked the panel:

As always, the jury have given us a snapshot of the best sf: cyberpunk, military space opera, first contact, dystopian America, fantastical Britain and war-torn Iraq. The judges have really done us proud, but I can see it’s going to be a tough final decision.

The members of the judging panel were:

  • Kris Black, British Science Fiction Association
  • Andrew Wallace, British Science Fiction Association
  • Dr Kari Maund, Science Fiction Foundation
  • Chris Pak, Science Fiction Foundation
  • Rhian Drinkwater, SCI-FI-LONDON film festival

The winner will be announced at a public award ceremony, held in partnership with Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, on Wednesday, July 17. Tickets on sale soon.

[Thanks to Mark Hepworth for the story.]

Leading Critics Form Clarke Award “Shadow” Jury

Nina Allan has announced a “shadow” jury will critique the Clarke Award this year, composed of Megan AM (“The AM stands for Anti-Matter”), Vajra Chandrasekera, David Hebblethwaite, Victoria Hoyle, Nick Hubble, Paul Kincaid, Maureen Kincaid Speller, and Jonathan McCalmont.

Allan explains in her introduction:

The idea is not to ‘challenge’ the official jury in any way, but to bring more to the party: more readers, more critics, more books, more discussion. And the beauty of a shadow jury is that everything can be out in the open. Over the following weeks and months, you’ll be able to read along with us, find out which books we love and which we’re not so wild about – and more to the point, why. I’d bet there isn’t a single Clarke-watcher out there who hasn’t at some point found themselves completely at a loss over some jury decision or other.

THROWING SHADE. Will fans feel a thrill of controversy because the group is taking the form of a jury, and reminding people about occasions when they were “completely at a loss” at a Clarke jury decision? (No one will soon forget Christopher Priest’s rant about the 2012 shortlist.) Will the prestigious critics on the shadow jury – some of them among the best-known working today – end up overshadowing the official jury? Is there any reason to mind if they do?

STATEMENTS AND MANIFESTOS. The Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, hosting the jury online, has launched its activities with lengthy justifications. And as an added resource, they have posted Paul Kincaid’s introduction to a 2006 essay collection about the award-winners.

ANNOUNCING THE SHADOW CLARKE 2017: a note from the Centre by Helen Marshall

The Arthur C. Clarke awards are different from the Hugos in that shortlist and eventual winner are determined solely by a juror, thus, in many respects, bypassing the contentious process of lobbying and promotion that has accompanied voted awards. And yet the award has been no less controversial. Paul Kincaid, in his introduction to The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology, writes that the original organisers at no point set out firm criteria for what was meant by “best”, by “science fiction”, or even by “novel” (12). In consequence, the earnest debates—of individual juries as well was the broader community of reviewers and critics—have both through their agreement and their opposition sketched out a fascinating survey of what science fiction might have meant in any given year.

After the Clarke award celebration in 2016, when Nina Allan first approached me about arranging a shadow jury of the Clarke Awards, I could see the value of the suggestion. Similar experiments have been illuminating in respect to mainstreams awards such as the prestigious Man Booker Prize, but no such experiment, to my knowledge, has been undertaken for a science fiction award. 2017 seems a particularly auspicious year to begin particularly because it is a time in which many in the community feel the need for an outlet for reasoned debate and discussion. Of course it isn’t our intention that the shadow jury will challenge the decision of the conventional jury; rather the value of the experiment comes, I think, in expanding the commentary. Questions about the state of the field and the underlying definitions of “best” and “science fiction” continue to be meaningful, particularly in an industry that is increasingly dominated by marketing categories and sales figures rather than criticism. What science fiction is and what it ought to be doing should continue to be debated if the field is going to evolve beyond the commercial pressures that inevitably influence the decision to publish.

ANNOUNCING THE SHADOW CLARKE 2017: an introduction and a manifesto by Nina Allan

It goes without saying that the overall health of a literary award is determined by the quality of the debate surrounding it. No matter how lucrative the prize or how glossy the promotion, no award can remain relevant or even survive unless people – readers, critics and fans alike – are actively talking about the books in contention. For readers, fans and critics to remain engaged, an award must aspire to foster an intellectual climate in which rigorous and impassioned debate is seen as an important and significant aspect of the award itself. Such a climate will by definition ensure that an award can not only survive, but flourish.

Inspired by the shadow juries that have worked wonders in enlivening the climate of debate around mainstream literary awards over the past few years, we thought it would be a fantastic idea to harness some of the considerable critical talent that exists within the SFF community in similarly enlivening the climate of debate and critical engagement around the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

The normal process by which shadow juries operate involves a panel of shadow jurors – usually drawn from those readers, critics and book bloggers who habitually follow the award – reading the official longlist of their chosen award when it is released, reviewing the books individually and then coming together as a jury to decide on a shadow shortlist: that is, the shortlist they would have chosen had they been the official jury. When the official shortlist for the prize is announced, the shadow jury would then critique that shortlist, before once again convening to vote on their shadow winner. In the case of the shadow juries for awards such as the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (now the Man Booker International) and the Baileys Prize, the shadow winner has normally been unveiled on the evening before the announcement of the official prize. One need only cast a casual glance around the literary blogosphere to see how the presence of shadow juries within the literary landscape has increased the feeling of excitement and personal involvement on the part of readers, armchair critics and students of literature.

Because the Arthur C. Clarke Award does not at present implement a longlist stage, the formula we have agreed upon is a little different, but will hopefully prove at least as effective in fostering debate, if not more so.

Our panel of shadow jurors will convene when the submissions list for the Arthur C. Clarke Award is made public. From the list of these submissions, each shadow juror will then select their own personal, preferred shortlist of six books – these could be books they have already read, books they are keen to read, or a mixture of the two. Having chosen their shortlist, each juror will commit to reading and reviewing their six books before eventually declaring the ‘winner’ they would have chosen, had their shortlist been the official one. We believe that by giving each shadow juror the opportunity to select and discuss what they believe was ‘best’ in ‘science fiction’ in 2016, the Shadow Clarke will be able to showcase a wider variety of books, writers and styles of science fiction, thus generating a sense of involvement and inclusion across the entire length and breadth of science fiction fandom. It goes without saying that we would encourage fans and readers beyond the shadow jury to read along with us, to posit their own guesses and above all to disagree with our choices! That is what critical engagement is all about.

INTRODUCTION from The Arthur C. Clarke Award: a critical anthology by Paul Kincaid

[[Paul Kincaid has been on over a dozen Clarke Award juries, many times serving as the chair. He co-edited The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology (2006) with Andrew Butler, another frequent juror and chair. This is an excerpt from his introduction.]]

…Since Clarke wanted to use the award to encourage British science fiction, our second topic for debate was whether the award should be limited to British writers. In the end we all felt that there were just too few British writers to make that sustainable, so we decided that the award would be for the best science fiction novel receiving its first British publication in the year.

…It is what was left to the jury that has made the Arthur C Clarke Award both idiosyncratic and controversial, often at the same time. At no point did we decide what was meant by ‘best’, by ‘science fiction’, or even by ‘novel’. Consequently, the jury meetings I’ve taken part in have featured some very lively debates on each of these topics – and no two juries have ever arrived at precisely the same definitions.

It is, however, the very nature of those debates, the fact that what is considered ‘best’ or ‘science fiction’ is going to be different every year, that has made the Arthur C Clarke Award such a lively and essential survey of the year in science fiction. As The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls and founding judge John Clute is at pains to point out, the award was controversial from its very first year. When Margaret Atwood received the first Arthur C Clarke Award for The Handmaid’s Tale, it seemed that the Award was deliberately turning its back on the core of the genre (particularly given that the runner-up that year was Bob Shaw’s The Ragged Astronauts – not, as Edward James has suggested, Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand). In fact what I think that first jury was doing, after what I recall as very close debate, is something that has been a surprisingly recurrent practice of juries since then: they were not looking in towards the heart of the genre, but outwards from the genre. As Nicholas Ruddick points out, The Handmaid’s Tale has had such resonance, both within and outwith the genre, that it is hard to think why it might ever have been considered a controversial choice.

Of course, that was far from the only time that the Award has skirted controversy. If stimulating debate, not to say heated argument, is one way of raising awareness of science fiction, then we have to admit that the Award has been a rousing success since the start. Tempers have tended to fray most when the Award is imagined to be flirting with the mainstream. There was even jeering at the presentation of the Award to Marge Piercy for Body of Glass (again, I suspect, this was at least in part because the runner up was another popular genre favourite, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson). But, as Maureen Kincaid Speller shows, you don’t need a rocket ship on the cover to raise exactly the problematic issues of who we are and what we might become which are supposedly central to everything we understand about science fiction.

… Of course the job of the Award is to raise awareness of science fiction, not just inside the genre but more generally, but that is not achieved by saying science fiction and the mainstream are the same. Rather, the Award points out how many interesting, exciting, challenging and innovative things there are to be done with genre materials, some of those things speak to the core of the genre and some bring a freshness and vitality to mainstream, and some do both….

[Thanks to Mark-kitteh for the story.]

2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky

[Catching up on another major news story…]

Adrian Tchaikovsky won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award for his space opera The Children of Time. The award, announced August 24, is presented for the best science fiction novel whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year.

children-of-time-graphic

The BBC carried remarks by the judges and award director:

In awarding the prize, the judges said the novel shared much in common with the works of Sir Arthur himself.

Tchaikovsky’s victory was announced at a ceremony on Wednesday, attended by Sir Arthur’s niece Angie Edwards, at Foyles bookshop in central London….

“Children of Time has a universal scale and sense of wonder reminiscent of the novels of Sir Arthur C Clarke himself,” said award director Tom Hunter.

He described the novel as “one of the best science fictional extrapolations of a not-so-alien species and their evolving society I’ve ever read”.

Andrew M Butler, chair of judges, added: “Children of Time tells two parallel stories of the last survivors of Earth and the inhabitants of a terraformed planet – it takes the reader’s sympathies and phobias, and plays with them masterfully on an epic and yet human scale.”

The evening began with a toast to the memory of Sir Arthur C. Clarke led by Angie Edwards, Sir Arthur’s niece, and the winner, Adrian Tchaikovsky, was presented with a trophy in the form of a commemorative engraved bookend cheque as well as prize cheque for £2016.00.

The judging panel for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2013 were:

  • Ian Whates, British Science Fiction Association
  • David Gullen, British Science Fiction Association
  • Andrew McKie, Science Fiction Foundation
  • Liz Bourke, Science Fiction Foundation
  • Leila Abu El Hawa, SCI-FI-LONDON film festival

Andrew M. Butler, Chair of Judges, gave a speech about the difficulty of choosing one winner:

Novels with spaceships and novels with spiders,
near future Europe with parallels beside her,
a modified woman?—?flying with wings,
these are a few of my favourite things.

You’d think after thirty years it’d be easy to choose the Clarke winner?—?we’d turn up and all know that that novel is the one.

But this year we had a tough time getting to a short list and a tough time agreeing on a winner.

All of the books play with and reinvigorate the sandbox of science fiction?—?generation starships, ill-matched crews, AIs, parallel universes, mutants and have one or more moments of conceptual breakthrough, when you realise that the fictional universe is more complicated than you think….

Clarke Award director Tom Hunter told The Bookseller why, in the future, the award will be open to self-published novels, and he explained how that will work.

Last night saw British author Adrian Tchaikovsky win the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction for his novel Children of Time. It also saw director Tom Hunter announce that the award – now thirty years old – is finally open to self-published works for the first time.

Here, Hunter explains why, and the impact his decision will have for publishers, authors and the judges of the award.

[Tom Hunter] …Fast forward to this year and our own shortlist included the fabulous The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, a novel published in the UK and submitted to us by Hodder but also well known as a fan-favourite title originally launched via a popular Kickstarter campaign.

Tipping point reached, and we’re now running the risk of missing books our judges really ought to have the chance to read, and so we change the rules: The Arthur C. Clarke Award is now open to self-published titles.

Beyond the announcement though, what are the practicalities? How will the judges cope with the potential extra titles when submissions in recent years have already increased from around 50 books a year to over one hundred.

First, the Clarke Award is the kind of award that charges a submission fee for entry. It’s not there as a barrier, it’s there as part of our core fundraising to keep the award running, but it is a consideration independent authors will need to consider as part of their own business planning.

Second, we are launching this change by expanding an existing rule whereby judges can ask to call in works they want to have the chance to consider. Previously this has usually involved us going to a publisher, most often a more mainstream imprint, and asking for a title that might not otherwise automatically have been submitted to us. We will be operating a similar principle here.

Hunter also issued a press release about other Award initiatives that will begin in 2017 and the coming decade.

Speaking as part of the 30th presentation of the annual Arthur C. Clarke Award on Wednesday 24th August, award director Tom Hunter used the occasion to reveal a bold new plan for the next decade of the UK’s premier prize for science fiction literature.

Key initiatives include:

A new partnership with the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day, the international day celebration day of women’s achievements in STEM, as part of an ongoing collaboration exploring the positive benefits of female role models across both science and science fiction.

A range of activities to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday in 2017, including a conference to be held at Canterbury Christchurch University and a charitable fundraising drive working with the charity Rebuilding Sri Lanka to provide educational facilities and resources for children living in Sir Arthur’s adopted home country.

Ken MacLeod’s New Gig

Ken MacLeod

Ken McLeod has been appointed Writer in Residence at Edinburgh Napier University.

A three-time winner of the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award, the British sf writer has thirteen published novels that range from hard sf space operas like The Star Fraction (1995) to his dystopian novel, Intrusion (2012).

MacLeod’s work also has attracted scholarly attention in works like The Science Fiction Foundation’s The True Knowledge Of Ken MacLeod, edited by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn.

Former literary agent Sam Kelly – who runs the MA course alongside acclaimed screenwriter and author David Bishop – said MacLeod’s appointment was a “perfect fit.”

The course embraces genre writing, especially science fiction, fantasy, horror and crime writing – and was the first in Britain to offer a specialist module in writing for graphic fiction.

“Ken has tackled many of the biggest ethical and political dilemmas of our age, through artistically ambitious speculative fiction,” she said. “His work closely reflects our commitment to intellectual radicalism and genre writing. The role of the writer-in-residence is to challenge and inspire the teachers as well as the students and it’s a great privilege to be able to house our chosen influences on campus.”

Edinburgh Napier created the year-long writer in residence role in 2010. MacLeod will spend an average of two days a week at the university mentoring students.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]