The Clarke Award and I: A brief excursion into autobiography, motivations and plans

I’ve read the shortlists, I’ve reviewed the shortlists, I’ve been a judge for two years and I also spent two years on the shadow Clarke project. So, what else is there left to do? I could try and actually write a novel and get it submitted (for example, by self-publishing and paying the fee) or I could write a book about the Clarke. Or both, it has suddenly occurred to the part of me that is best kept suppressed: the story of writing the novel and then submitting it could then become part of the book about the Clarke. Pushing that ‘idea’ firmly aside for the moment, I need to note that the problem with my long-planned book on the Clarke is that it keeps changing its parameters. The initial idea, maliciously implanted in my brain by Matthew D’Abaitua at the Clarke ceremony a few years ago, was to produce an oral history of the Clarke. That slowly morphed into the idea of writing a more conventional history, backed up by interviews, but also expanded to look at changes in the wider field of SF over the last four decades or so through the lens of the Award (and thereby from a British perspective). One concern, voiced by Award Director Tom Hunter to me, is that a book focussing entirely on the Clarke would become outdated in a year or so as new winners started to appear. There is also the point that I don’t want to make it an academic book (for reasons implicit in my long blog piece written after this year’s Eastercon), although I might want to write some academic articles concerning it on the side – as indeed I have already done for a chapter, ‘Thirty Years is Ample Time: The Clarke Award and Literary Science Fiction’ in Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays (2022), edited by Andrew M. Butler and Paul March-Russell (see my post on that here). Therefore, one solution is to make the book more personal so that it becomes a personal exploration of the wider significance of the award. On the one hand, I am a Professor of English Literature, I can determine what is on the curriculum to some extent, I can write literary history, and I have colleagues at my department who have been shortlisted for, and in one case actually won, the Booker Prize. So why am I so interested in, not to mention obsessed with, the Clarke Award to the point where it has played quite a large part in my cultural life, one way or another, over the last 20 years? On the other hand, I didn’t even used to believe in awards at all.

Just to make it clear before I go any further, I don’t think the Clarke Award is somehow the most important because it is juried or more ‘literary’ than other awards.

My starting place in thinking about the award isn’t really from any sense of cultural capital: it’s purely as someone who often felt most comfortable reading a book. As a child and teenage bookworm, I just read personally and part of my reaction to any book was bound up in the emotional response it produced in me. I got described as ‘daft’ a fair amount as a child, not unkindly, but enough that I eventually twigged it was better not to talk about certain things and, therefore, books became a place to locate certain feelings rather than talking about them. In retrospect, I was so lucky that my parents did both read books themselves (possibly in the same way I read them): the favourite authors of my mum, who used to come top of the year in English at her Secondary Modern, were Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer; my dad always claims his favourite books (by which he means as a child I assume) were The Riddle of the Sands and Swiss Family Robinson, but the books I most associated him with were C.S. Forester’s Hornblower naval series. So, in fact, their combined taste – perceptive witty fiction, romance in the broadest sense, and genre series – has been fairly influential on my own reading range (it’s not that I came to ‘popular fiction’ through an academic interest). Anyway, fast forward to university where I was studying for a degree in Zoology and, suddenly, I found myself in a friendship group in which everyone else read and talked about what they were reading and lent their books. We were in the sciences and fairly suspicious of arty English lit types – so I totally get the strand of that persuasion which exists in SF reading circles. I was always determinedly resistant to any suspicion of critical or cultural orthodoxy being imposed on me.

So, I spent two years doing a lot of reading and – people who knew me at the time will laugh at this claim – emotionally maturing, but paying very little attention to zoology. Then, degree-less, I spent several years on the dole reading more books, watching difficult-to-interpret-but-nonetheless-alluring European films on Channel 4, and reading the Guardian on Thursdays (when the review section appeared at that time in the mid-to-late 80s). It was actually a pretty good education! However, I was struggling to connect what I was culturally consuming to my life and the social circumstances surrounding it. I wanted simultaneously to find my own way but remain a ‘normal’ person and eventually I realised that wasn’t going to work unless I could also step outside the problem (which would ultimately create its own problems, but I didn’t know that at the time).

One day, I was pontificating idly to a captive audience about how maybe I should study philosophy and a girl, who was bouncing a tennis ball off the wall of the room we were in, called me out (thanks!) and said, ‘you should actually do that now!’ And I did. First, by taking A level English Literature in evening classes, which provided a tightly demarcated forum in which to discuss books and, through the preparedness of the tutor to mark as many essays as I wanted to write, taught me how to write about them. I went back to university and left with a joint degree in Philosophy and Literature. As the 90s progressed, I acquired a PGCE and a dislike for schools, followed by the notorious Sussex MA in (Love-Hate) Critical Theory. Then I wrote a very interdisciplinary PhD, on George Orwell and Mass-Observation, which was on one level (in my mind at least) about identity, queerness and performativity, but at the same time framed through a quasi-marxist/materialist contextualisation in terms of social conditions. By which point, I was mainly reading SFF for pleasure outside work and mainly reading proletarian and documentary literature for pleasure inside work. But I still wasn’t remotely interested in awards (although I did notice when Kelman won the Booker) because I now had a very intricate and elaborate critical system for controlling and compartmentalising what I was doing when reading. I don’t think I was alone in this: I’m part of a quantifiable demographic, produced by the heyday of the British education system, who went on to work in HE English Lit and cognate disciplines, many of whom were drawn to theory for broadly comparable reasons, while some of them were repelled by it for related reasons. I, of course, liked to try and have it both ways.

Then I found people online discussing contemporary British SFF. Obviously, I found them because I was looking for them. It sometimes seems to me as though I’ve spent my entire academic career trying to segue into SF(&F) studies, but by taking the long route round the circumference of the globe. Perceptive people have regularly said to me ‘… and then you’re going to focus on SF’ and I have serially nodded ‘yes, right after I’ve completed this next project’. However, throughout these years of pursuing sometimes quite unlikely avenues of research, I have belonged to both the Science Fiction Foundation and the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) and this latter took me to Torque Control, the Vector editorial blog (as also discussed in my recent Eastercon post) and the discussions in the comments there by people who were very invested in contemporary British SF, which was I would argue one place where expansive, liberating ideas in British culture were to be found at that time. Suddenly all my personal and social interests coincided and there was a space in which this could be discussed. The people having these discussions were also interested in which of these books were shortlisted for the Clarke (and to a lesser extent for the BSFA Awards and the Hugos).

So, I became invested in a literary award, reading books on the shortlist (although it wasn’t until the 2010 award that I read all six in advance of the winner being announced), and trying to decide which one I thought was best. This latter is a struggle for me because I don’t tend to read as an objective critic. This is partly because I don’t believe that there are objective criteria by which to make this judgement and I have problems with the whole nineteenth-century bourgeois-individualist notion of the subject who is supposedly capable of making these decisions. However, it is also because I am quite partisan about my preferences. For me, the purpose of criticism is to find a way of reading certain texts generously, which in some cases means mounting a full-on assault on the frameworks of cultural reception that act to hinder such readings. In other cases, it might work better to establish a ‘counter public sphere’ separate to the mainstream, in which a book or books can be allowed to signify freely (as we say in the business). The bottom line though is that I am partisan and not objectively disinterested because if the latter was really the case, why would I care? I’d be doing something else with my time. (Being an actual judge was a bit different because it has to be a collective decision and it is not therefore possible to remain partisan).

There’s much more that could be said about all of this, but the point is I am not alone in being personally invested in reading. Possibly people once read for personal betterment or for reasons of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu labelled ‘cultural distinction’ (crudely speaking, for status), but I think many people read for reasons of a personal investment and readerly pleasure that is different to status. I would argue that this personal investment, which has grown over recent decades, is probably more reflected in interest in the Clarke Award, rather than a voted award. Sure, we want to know what the most popular book is, and we might well also want (as I do) to read the shortlists for those voted awards, but I think that, while there is a personal element to this interest, participation in these awards is also about in-group (fan) participation. In contrast, while there is an element of fan participation in the Clarke – in going to the award ceremony, for example – the interest in reading the books lies in undergoing a personal experience, or, at least, that is the expectation. In writing this, I’m conscious I might be misunderstood as implying that the Clarke’s main achievement has been to shift interest in the field away from the genre books celebrated by the voted awards. Rather, I think the Clarke has acted to break down more entrenched boundaries between literary and genre fiction. There’s much more crossover now than there was in the 1980s. The Clarke hasn’t just changed the history of the SF field, but also helped reshape literary fiction.

In other words, looking at the history of the Clarke Award over the last 35+ years provides us with a window onto not just the changes in the SF field, but also onto changes in reading practices and, ultimately, onto shifts in subjectivity itself. I don’t think it is possible to tell this story from an ‘objective’ academic/critical standpoint and hence the personal/autobiographical approach. So, that’s the background to this book project.

There won’t be a finished product just yet (apart from anything else, I need ‘to complete the current project first’). However, it would be nice to have something out before the 40^th anniversary in 2026. Work has begun and I will be issuing update posts here and possibly elsewhere, as well as hopefully speaking on the topic. For a start, I’m on a panel on award culture at the ‘What Happens Now’ Conference of the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) next Friday. While it might prove beyond my capacities to write a submittable novel, I’m certainly going to draw up an outline for a potential Clarke-winner based on in-depth analysis of recent shortlists and winners (look out for more on that over the course of the Autumn). As a legacy of the oral history idea, I still want to conduct interviews with people who have been involved with the award in different capacities and this process has commenced: I’ve already spoken to one former winner. I want to hear from a range of writers, judges, and readers and so I will be approaching people. I welcome comments below if anyone wants to post here.

Finally, I just wanted to note that I have discussed this project with Tom Hunter at some length. I’ve wavered on whether it should be an official or unofficial history. I’m currently coming down on the side of the latter, not because I have any desire to be hostile or unduly critical of the award, but because I think it will be easier for me to find a writing voice this way. The aim is to cover the controversies as well as the highpoints, but not to damage the spirit of the award in any way. I will be talking to, and updating, the Clarke team along the way and, of course, they have stories to tell too which will need to be included.

*Gulp*