The Clarke Award Submission List was published here earlier today (and shortly thereafter on 7 June, the shortlist was announced on twitter with full details on the Science Museum blog). There were 97 books submitted (which is slightly less than in either year that that I was a judge). Nicholas Whyte, who is one of this year’s judges, has compiled a list of the Good Reads and Library Thing ratings for all the titles. As I’ve discussed in a postscript to my BSFA shortlist reviews, these ratings are a useful indicator when thinking about voted awards because they do suggest the popularity and familiarity levels of a novel, which are liable to influence the vote. That won’t be a factor in the judges’ decisions because they will all be familiar with the books in contention. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at these figures when thinking about the state of the field as a whole and the relationship between readers and awards.
In terms of comparison with other awards this year, I’ve written about the Locus and Nebula Award shortlists. Unsurprisingly, nothing from the Nebula shortlist for Best Novel (which was predominantly fantasy this year) has been submitted. Nine of the ten books on the shortlist for the Locus Award for Best SF Novel are on the submission list (all except for Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath, which I don’t think is eligible); as is How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, which is on the shortlist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel. All five of the novels that were on the BSFA Best Novel shortlist (which I reviewed across two posts here and here) have been submitted to the Clarke. But only 28 of the books on the submission list were among the 68 on the BSFA Longlist (i.e., the list of those works nominated for that award by members of the BSFA), which I wrote about (and listed in full) here. I had anticipated that at least over half of the BSFA longlist would be submitted for the Clarke but I don’t think the difference is especially significant. For a start, only books published in the UK in 2022 are eligible for the Clarke so that accounts for some difference because readers don’t stick to national borders. On a pragmatic level, a publisher which pays the Clarke fee is going to submit all the books it has which are eligible and probably some which are borderline eligible (for example, in terms of maybe being rather more fantasy than SF); whereas a publisher which doesn’t pay the fee isn’t going to submit anything. Neither do I think it will be especially significant how many, if any, of these 28 make the final Clarke shortlist. But I would guess that at least half of the shortlist will come from this 28 (indeed, four of these 28 have been shortlisted). I suspect (correctly, as it transpired) we’ll find out in the not-too-distant future. I’m planning to read the shortlist and so I’m probably going to wait for that before reading anything specifically related to the Clarke this year, but I do want to read Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House regardless of whether it is included, and so that is now added to the running TBR list I’m compiling in relation to this year’s award cycles.
I posted this before Niall Harrison’s more detailed discussion of the submission list.
Here is the shortlist, of which I have read and reviewed the two which were also on the BSFA shortlist (Swift and de Bodard). The winner is due to be announced in August, so I will be aiming to provide a review round-up before then.
Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker
Aliette de Bodard, The Red Scholar’s WakeLucy Kissick, Plutoshine
Hervé le Tellier, The Anomaly
EJ Swift, The Coral Bones
Tom Watson, Metronome
Here (largely for my own reference) is a list of the 28 books common to both the BSFA longlist and the Clarke submission list:
Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker
Aliette de Bodard, The Red Scholar’s Wake
Blake Crouch, Upgrade
Ever Dundas, HellSans
Hiron Ennes, Leech
Taran Hunt, The Immortality Thief
Emma Itaranta, The Moonday Letters
Terry Jackman, Harpan’s Worlds
Lucy Kissick, Plutoshine
Oliver K. Langmead, Glitterati
Paul McAuley, Beyond the Burn Line
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility
Simon Morden, Flight of the Aphrodite
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark
Sandra Newman, The Men
Adam Oyebanji, Braking Day
Gareth Powell, Stars and Bones
Christopher Priest, Expect Me Tomorrow
Alistair Reynolds, Eversion
Adam Roberts, The This
Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers
EJ Swift, The Coral Bones
Nathan Tavares, A Fractured Infinity
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory
Adrian Tchaikovsky, City of Last Chances
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Eyes of the Void
Khan Wong, The Circus Infinite
Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise
Prospective Cultures 