Arthur C Clarke Award 2022: Shortlist Roundup

 

The shortlist for the 2022 Arthur C Clarke Award has been revealed. The winner will be announced on the 26th October at a gala Science Museum event in Kensington. Back in the day (remember the day? Ah, what gay old quotidian times we had!) I used to do a round-up review of the Clarke Award shortlist. But it’s been a long time since anyone has commissioned such a piece from me, for I’m sure highly valid reasons, and this post is less a proper review of the shortlist and more a set of links to other places, mostly blogposts, where I happen to have reviewed the individual titles.

Harry Josephine Giles, A Deep Wheel Called Orcadia

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Klara Called Sun

Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

Courttia Newland A River Called Time

Mercurio D Rivera, Wergen: an Alien Called Love War

Aliya Whiteley, An Inn Called Skyward.

As you'll see, if you have the patience to click-through those links, and going from worst to best: I thought the Newland, for all its energy and engagement, sloppily made and often bizarrely, even badly, written (re-reading it now, that review is rather more forgiving than might be the case if I wrote it today).  Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun is hard to judge: in one sense, it's classic Ishiguro touching on his perennial themes and as carefully rendered as anything he has done; in another sense it's just really quite bad, incoherent, patchy, miss-more-than-hit, cheesy, askew. Riviera's Wergen is an OK, middle-of-the-space-road fix-up about aliens and humans interacting, neither a very bad nor especially a good book. Martine's Desolation Called Peace is again OK, though a step-down from the previous volume in her series. Giles's Deep Wheel Orcadia is rather better, a poem written in synthetic Scots (I don't say ‘synthetic’ dismissively) with a Joycean ‘English’ translation running underneath, about a space station. The verse achieves some nice effects, though not in an altogether sustained way, and the story itself is a touch pat. But it's good. Still, far and away the best title on this list is Whiteley's powerful, unsettling and penetrating Skyward Inn, a very remarkable piece of writing.

It’s not, overall, a very strong shortlist, especially set against the wealth of books published last year—only one of these titles (the Whiteley) really deserves to be here, I think. But part of the function of a list like this is to provoke discussion and debate, to get people reading SF widely and talking about it and all that. We might argue that a contentious shortlist is more provoking and therefore better at this task than an actual list of the six best SF novels published in a given year. In which case: hats off to the judges. This is a contentious list, contending against value, assessment and in some cases common sense. It manifests a narrow set of repeating fascinations—fully half these titles are about blandly complacent creatures (aliens, robots) under the careless or cruel treatment of humanity. Most construe the relationship between their story-location, a peripheral or parochial space, and some imperial or quasi-imperial ‘centre’. I’m not suggesting these things aren’t important, but there are other things SF can be about, and the narrowness of thematic focus in this list feels a bit pinching, a reflection of the judges' personal crotchets rather than a reflection of where genre is more broadly, at the moment.

Of course, me saying so may merely reflect my own personal crotchets. We all have them. I didn’t find much to love in last year’s Clarke Shortlist, I’ll be honest (are any of those books still a lively part of today's genre conversations? Were they really the best books published in 2020?):—and this year I was surprised at the number of big hitters (Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, Tade Thompson’s From the Light of Heaven, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shards of Earth, Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control, Ada Palmer’s Perhaps The Stars and Richard Powers’s Bewilderment to name only the most obvious half dozen) overlooked ... less surprised by the absence of titles like Alice Albina’s Cwen, Qiouyi Lu’s In The Watchful City or J O Morgan’s The Appliance (though all three are better than most of what has been shortlisted here).

But railing against the judgment of the Clarke award, though a pastime with honourable and indeed Priestian heritage, is not my purpose here. Rather I’m jotting a few more overview-y thoughts. How does the prize stand up on longer timescales? What’s its hit rate, looking back across its three and a half decades of life? What has it got right and, more importantly, what has it missed? On the latter point I should say, incidentally, I’m not here to argue that it has missed me. I’ve never won the Clarke, and don’t now expect to, but I have been shortlisted three times (the last time in 2010), which is probably more than I deserve, and it would be both wrongheaded and otiose to suggest the award needs to reward more straight white US/UK blokes. On the contrary, it has pretty much tracked the larger current of SF across the 21st century, in which the genre-primacy of straight white US/UK blokes has given way to a much more diverse and exciting spread of women writers, writers of colour, queer writers, international writers, iterations of the expressive and eloquent encounter with difference that defines the genre as such. The last all-male shortlist was 2013, the last all-white shortlist 2015, and I don’t expect either eventuality to reoccur again as the prize moves forward. Or at least I would hope not.

That said, looking back over the award’s various shortlists, it’s hard not to notice blindspots in the judge’s judgments. For instance: how can it be that the Clarke has never shortlisted a tie-in franchise novel, a Star Trek-, Star Wars- or Alien-universe title? Many such books are rubbish, of course, but many are good and some are very good, which is what we should expect given that some extremely talented writers—Una McCormack, Pat Cadigan, Diane Duane, Ian Watson—have written them. Hard to shake the sense that the mode is considered infra dig by many, a dalit-style untouchability that strikes an unpleasantly ironic note within our prickly ‘why won’t the literary establishment take our beloved SF seriously?’ self-defensive culture. Writing a good tie-in franchise novel is a very exacting technical challenge, balancing prodigies of backstory and lore, with very specific and tight franchise parameters, and yet telling an exciting, well-characterised, imaginative story of your own. I really don’t see why the best examples of the mode aren’t ever noticed by the Clarke.

Similarly YA: This is a strange omission indeed: YA is not only huge, varied and full of wonderful writing; it has been arguably the key cultural idiom of the early decades of the 21st-century. The last (and, I think, only) time the Clarke listed a YA title was Steve Baxter’s The H-Bomb Girl, all the way back in 2008 [update/correction: over on twitter it is pointed out to me that Patrick Ness's Monsters of Men was shortlisted in 2011, James Smythe's Way Down Dark in 2016, and Patience Agbabi's The Infinite last year, and are all YA or more precisely two are YAs and one a middle-grade title. This considerably dilutes my point, I have to concede; although I don't know if it entirely demolishes it]. YA fantasy, YA dystopia and on occasion YA science fiction have provided some of the key works of the last twenty years, and it just looks odd that the Clarke tends, broadly, to overlook the mode. I could say the same thing about the Booker, but there my expectations are lower.