Briardene Books

As has become tradition — and a good tradition it is too, one that I’d be delighted to see other awards adopt — the Arthur C. Clarke Award administrator has released the list of books submitted for consideration for this year’s award. It’s useful as a snapshot of the science fiction that’s being published in the UK; and, of course, it encourages us to start thinking about what should (or at least might) make the shortlist.

To the former point: we have 97 books submitted, and by my counts, which are almost certainly imperfect and err on the side of being conservative in categorising people, half of them (49%) are by writers who don’t identify as men, while a fifth (19%) are by writers who are not white. I don’t have the data for every past year to hand, but compared to a decade ago, the proportion of non-men has more or less doubled, and the proportion of non-white writers has roughly tripled. There are a couple of things to consider behind that headline, however. I subdivided the list into 60 books from genre publishers (62%; and almost half are accounted for by just three imprints, Titan [n=10], Angry Robot [n=10], and Gollancz [n=9]), plus 22 from “mainstream” publishers (23%; yes, an unhelpful term for some specific authors, but helpful for this), and 15 from small presses (15%, although almost all of these would probably be considered “genre small presses”). The proportions of each category not by men were 42%, 73% and 47%, and by non-white writers, 17%, 36% and 0%: so we’re still making progress, but it’s also true to say that the genre is still lagging the mainstream in both areas.

Similarly, sorting the list according to the resident country of their author (and here attaching a further health warning about my tagging), the UK accounts for 49% of submissions, the USA 36%, and other countries (13 countries, I think) the remaining 15%; and then the proportions not by men are 34%, 60% and 73% for UK, USA and RoW, and the proportions by non-white writers are a pitiful 4% for the UK, compared to 23% from the USA and 53% from RoW. I also only spotted four translations, of which only one was from a genre publisher: Emmi Itaranta’s The Moonday Letters, which I believe was self-translated from a Finnish 2020 original (although my copy doesn’t explicitly state this). The other three are Herve le Tellier’s The Anomaly, Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, and Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night (which I think the judges would struggle to count as science fiction). I realise some of this would be easier to digest with graphs, but I think the summary is that in the UK we are, to a non-trivial extent, importing the diversity of our science fiction; good in some ways (I suspect having a total of 15 countries represented among Clarke Award submissions is at the upper end of that metric, historically), troubling in others.

What sort of shortlist does this benchmarking indicate? Well, a representative shortlist would include three Brits, two Americans, and one writer from another country; three of them would be men; four or five of them would be white; and there would be four titles published by genre publishers, and one each by a mainstream publisher and a small press. There are I think only eight previous shortlistees in the mix (another interesting comment on the market), so we should probably expect quite a few first-time nominees. I’ve read fifteen of the submitted works, so going purely on averages I might only have read one of the shortlistees — although among those fifteen novels, there are several I’m very fond of, so I’m going to hope for more.

And of course, in the end, although it will be interesting to see how the shortlist aligns with or diverges from this statistical picture, the shortlisted books aren’t going to be picked to fill representative slots. To bring it down to individual works, there are two that I’m sad to see were not submitted: Zoe Gilbert’s knotty, generically fluid Mischief Acts (reviewed in the last section here), and Georgi Gospodinov’s engrossing, slipstream-y Time Shelter (reviewed at the start of this column). Of the remainder, based on personal reading or on their general reception there are about a third that I’d expect to be in serious contention (albeit one of them is a book that, going by the publisher’s website, may not be eligible: Lavie Tidhar’s Neom was released by Tachyon in the US last year, but according to PS Publishing’s website, was a January 2023 release for them in the UK). Picking purely from titles that I’ve read, I’d offer up this shortlist, alphabetically by author surname:

• Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman: a venomously black extrapolation of the worst trends in ecosystem management
• The Moonday Letters by Emmi Itaranta: a meditative travelogue through a near-future solar system, reviewed here
• Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley: shortlisted for the Kitschies, and longlisted for the Locus Awards, this is a thoughtful, subtle after-the-anthropocene extrapolation
• The Coral Bones by EJ Swift: already shortlisted for the BSFA Award and the Kitschies, this is a beautifully searching braided climate fiction
• Oval by Elvia Wilk: housing, environment and pharmaceuticals in day-after-tomorrow Berlin
• To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihira: infuriating in several ways, but I read it over a year ago and can’t deny that it’s stayed with me

This will, of course, not be the shortlist. The judges almost certainly will not share my enthusiasm for environmental themes — although I think it was a particularly strong year on that front, and as I’ve already indicated, if none of the above show up, I will be grumpy.

What else might actually be in the mix? Nicholas Whyte (who is also a judge) has collated and averaged Goodreads and LibraryThing ratings for the entire submissions list; I don’t expect this to be particularly predictive, however. He’s highlighted the books in the top quintile, and from those, I think the only ones I could see featuring on the shortlist, going by my nebulous sense of “what the Clarke likes”, are Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility (in fact, Station Eleven was the winner last time Nicholas was a judge), potentially an Adrian Tchaikovsky (although both the SF submissions are series volumes, which tends to be a disadvantage), The Coral Bones (see above), Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest, The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard, and Pod by Laline Paull. There are certainly other titles with lower ratings that I could see appealing to the judges, however: again going mostly by repute, I’d pick out Adam Roberts’ The This, Hiron Ennes’ Leech, J. O. Morgan’s Appliance (which I had not heard of, but based on this Stuart Kelly review will probably now seek out), Lidia Yuknavitch’s Thrust, Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion, and Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth (all three of which I own and have not yet read). David Musgrave’s unsettling Lambda and Ever Dundas’ visceral HellSans both play with the idea of non-human assistive lifeforms (among other things) to good effect, so perhaps one of them will crop up. And Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark also seems like a plausible, even likely, pick, but I bounced off it so am hoping not.

Nailing my colours to the mast about which of the 988,172,368 possible shortlists I think the judges will pick, then, I’ll go for:

• The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard
• HellSans by Ever Dundas
• Appliance by J. O. Morgan
• How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
• Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
• The Coral Bones by EJ Swift

The submission list announcement doesn’t say when the shortlist will be announced; but hopefully not too long.