Briardene Books

Well, that didn’t take long: we have a Clarke shortlist.

• Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)
• The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz)
• Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick (Gollancz)
• The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter (Michael Joseph)
• The Coral Bones by E. J. Swift (Unsung Stories)
• Metronome by Tom Watson (Bloomsbury)

First question: how does it stack up against the analysis of the submissions list and my associated guesses? Four Brits (against three “expected”), one French-American, and one French (against two Americans and one RoW expected); an even gender split and one non-white writer is representative of the submissions list; six first-time nominees, which Chair of Judges Andrew M. Butler highlights in the article linked above, but which isn’t really a surprise given the lack of previous shortlistees submitted, which may point to a structural issue about the longevity of current publishing careers, or may just be a quirk of 2022. Two of the novels (Kissick and Watson) are first novels, but the rest of the nominees have careers of at least a decade behind them; ordered by length of career, we have Le Tellier, de Bodard, Beauman, Swift, Kissick/Watson. We have an overlap of two with the BSFA list (de Bodard and Swift), one with the Locus (de Bodard), one with the Kitschies (Swift), and none with any other awards so far this year.

The publisher split is interesting: we have three ‘mainstream’ imprints, one small press genre imprint, and two from Gollancz. It’s not a particular shock that mainstream imprints are over-represented compared to their submissions list proportion, that’s a fairly common feature of Clarke shortlists; but the fact that Gollancz has two is notable. Ten years ago it wouldn’t have been: for the period between 2000 and 2012, Gollancz had at least one novel on the shortlist every year, had three novels on the shortlist four times, and accounted for four of ten winners — but, astonishingly, they haven’t had a novel shortlisted since 2018 (Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill), and haven’t managed two since 2014 (The Adjacent by Christopher Priest and, less compellingly, The Disestablishment of Paradise by Philip Mann). They haven’t had a winner since 2008.

I’m not convinced that latter streak is going to break this year. Plutoshine is a type of sf that I like very much, but for me only an average example of that type; and while I haven’t read The Red Scholar’s Wake yet, and expect to enjoy it more than not, everything I’ve read about it suggests that it’s unlikely to quite be the match of the two books that were on my personal shortlist, Beauman and Swift. That leaves Metronome, which I haven’t read and am curious about — albeit slightly wary of the “there’s a big revelation that will shock and surprise you” marketing — and Le Tellier, which I enjoyed as a jeu d’esprit without being deeply moved by. Still, considering the six books in isolation from potential counterfactuals (no Moonday Letters, alas!) my initial impression is favourable; all six books seem to have some substance to them, which is in the end what you hope for in a shortlist. The winner will be announced in August, and I hope to do a final round-up of coverage of the shortlisted books, plus my own further thoughts, before then.