The Arthur C Clarke Award And Me
The Arthur C Clarke Award is given annually to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK in the previous year. The first recipient of the award, in 1987, was The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. At the time, I didn't pay much attention; I was six.
I'm not sure exactly when I did start conciously following the Clarke. As I was growing up and discovering SF it was just there, in the background. Sometimes I was vaguely aware that my Baxter-fandom could be justified by the Clarke nominations picked up by books like The Time Ships and Voyage. Sometimes well-meaning relatives used it as a guide: for my sixteenth birthday one of my uncles bought me a copy of The Star Fraction on the basis of the 'runner-up for the Arthur C Clarke award' tagline. At the time, when I tried to get into it I bounced straight off again, but I appreciated the thought. But still, most of the time it was just there - just One Of Those Awards, like the Nebula or the Hugo.
I think it was probably The Sparrow that finally did it.
In the autumn of 1998 I went to university and joined OUSFG, whereupon I was promptly informed that I could choose a book for the society to buy and add to the library. Mary Doria Russell's exploration of religion and morality had won the Clarke award earlier that year, and had sufficiently intrigued me to be my first choice.
The book blew me away.
At the time, I was even more narrowly-read than I am now, sticking fairly closely to a diet of authors like Baxter, Hamilton and (by that point) Macleod. The Sparrow came from a completely different branch of the genre; I'd never read anything like it. I wanted to read more.
I didn't immediately rush out and read all the previous award winners, though; nor have I read every winner since then (in fact, to my continuing shame, I still haven't gotten around to Perdido Street Station. This year, for sure!). But I think it was from that point on that the Clarke list became something to be noticed; something credible. It was a guide to good books. It was something I could trust.
Now, I find that it's the Clarke list that, for me, defines the year's best science fiction. It's more relevant to me than the Nebula, and it's more reliable than the Hugo. It's usually bolder and more interesting than either. And I think this is because, crucially, it's not an award open to voting; the shortlist, and the eventual winner, are picked by a jury.
As a result, when snowking picked up a couple of tickets to this year's award ceremony in an auction at plokta.con, I got a bit excited.
When an actual invitation addressed to me dropped through my letterbox a few days later, there may even have been slight squeeing.
And when I was on the train on the way to the ceremony last night, I was all kinds of nervous. Oh, intellectually I could argue it was just a bunch of people in a room, but deep down I knew the truth: I was going to the Clarke Award ceremony!
The venue for the award was the English Heritage Lecture Theatre. In previous years it has been at the Science Museum, but for various funding-related reasons that's no longer viable; in fact, all told the award has had a rough year, and peake and brisingamen deserve recognition and appreciation for Getting It Sorted Out. There were a couple of hundred guests, all helpfully name-badged up. I mingled some, but spent much more of my time being overawed by the company: look! There's Stephen Baxter! And Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and Christopher Priest, and Paul McAuley, and China Mieville, and Geoff Ryman...
After about an hour of this (and, for those that wanted it, free wine), we were ushered into the theatre proper for the ceremony. peake gave a short speech praising each of the nominees, then handed over to Chris Priest (last year's winner) to make the announcement. And this year's winner (instantly blogged by Andrew, of course) is:
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
...Nope. Didn't see that coming. I'm not sure that anybody else did, either. And inevitably, of course, it's one of the two shortlisted titles that I haven't actually read (it's sitting on my shelf, along with its sequel, waiting for October, when the concluding volume of the trilogy is published and I shall read all three straight through).
In some ways, I wonder whether the result was about passion. There seemed to be a lot of intellectual excitement about Pattern Recognition and Maul, and some for Coalescent [1], but curiously little in the way of emotion. They are all books - at least, this is my experience - that speak to your mind, not your heart; and I didn't hear anyone seriously arguing for Darwin's Children or Midnight Lamp.
Quicksilver, on the other hand, inspires passion. Reviewers have tended either to love it or to hate it; I haven't come across many who are ambivalent (cue people on my friends list speaking up...). You could probably also argue that it was the most ambitious novel on the short list. For those who may not know, it's a vast sprawl of a story, set against the Enlightenment: the time of Newton and Leibniz and Hook and Locke when so many of the intellectual foundations of the current world were laid. It is, I'm told, an attempt to capture that moment; to understand the history of Western science. It is so big, and so complex, that there is an ongoing online project to fully annotate the text.
I loved Stephenson's last book, Cryptonomicon. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into Quicksilver, and into the other two volumes of the Baroque Cycle. It's not the book I expected to win (I guessed either Pattern Recognition or Maul), and for those of us with that particular geek-kink, the debate about whether or not it is science fiction has the potential to run and run. But unlike Pattern Recognition, where I have a clear opinion (it's not SF, though I wouldn't object to anyone nominating it in the Best Related Book category at the Hugos), with Quicksilver I get the impression that there is a real debate to be had - and in the end, I think that's one of the reasons why I like the Clarke.
[1] A brief historical note: I chose this journal name in February 2003, months before the book was published. Yes, I chose it because I'm a Baxter fanboy and wanted a Baxter-referencing name, but more than that I chose it because I like the word itself. In point of fact I do like the book, but I don't think it's his best. Really, you should count yourselves lucky; I was almost omegatropic
I'm not sure exactly when I did start conciously following the Clarke. As I was growing up and discovering SF it was just there, in the background. Sometimes I was vaguely aware that my Baxter-fandom could be justified by the Clarke nominations picked up by books like The Time Ships and Voyage. Sometimes well-meaning relatives used it as a guide: for my sixteenth birthday one of my uncles bought me a copy of The Star Fraction on the basis of the 'runner-up for the Arthur C Clarke award' tagline. At the time, when I tried to get into it I bounced straight off again, but I appreciated the thought. But still, most of the time it was just there - just One Of Those Awards, like the Nebula or the Hugo.
I think it was probably The Sparrow that finally did it.
In the autumn of 1998 I went to university and joined OUSFG, whereupon I was promptly informed that I could choose a book for the society to buy and add to the library. Mary Doria Russell's exploration of religion and morality had won the Clarke award earlier that year, and had sufficiently intrigued me to be my first choice.
The book blew me away.
At the time, I was even more narrowly-read than I am now, sticking fairly closely to a diet of authors like Baxter, Hamilton and (by that point) Macleod. The Sparrow came from a completely different branch of the genre; I'd never read anything like it. I wanted to read more.
I didn't immediately rush out and read all the previous award winners, though; nor have I read every winner since then (in fact, to my continuing shame, I still haven't gotten around to Perdido Street Station. This year, for sure!). But I think it was from that point on that the Clarke list became something to be noticed; something credible. It was a guide to good books. It was something I could trust.
Now, I find that it's the Clarke list that, for me, defines the year's best science fiction. It's more relevant to me than the Nebula, and it's more reliable than the Hugo. It's usually bolder and more interesting than either. And I think this is because, crucially, it's not an award open to voting; the shortlist, and the eventual winner, are picked by a jury.
As a result, when snowking picked up a couple of tickets to this year's award ceremony in an auction at plokta.con, I got a bit excited.
When an actual invitation addressed to me dropped through my letterbox a few days later, there may even have been slight squeeing.
And when I was on the train on the way to the ceremony last night, I was all kinds of nervous. Oh, intellectually I could argue it was just a bunch of people in a room, but deep down I knew the truth: I was going to the Clarke Award ceremony!
The venue for the award was the English Heritage Lecture Theatre. In previous years it has been at the Science Museum, but for various funding-related reasons that's no longer viable; in fact, all told the award has had a rough year, and peake and brisingamen deserve recognition and appreciation for Getting It Sorted Out. There were a couple of hundred guests, all helpfully name-badged up. I mingled some, but spent much more of my time being overawed by the company: look! There's Stephen Baxter! And Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and Christopher Priest, and Paul McAuley, and China Mieville, and Geoff Ryman...
After about an hour of this (and, for those that wanted it, free wine), we were ushered into the theatre proper for the ceremony. peake gave a short speech praising each of the nominees, then handed over to Chris Priest (last year's winner) to make the announcement. And this year's winner (instantly blogged by Andrew, of course) is:
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
...Nope. Didn't see that coming. I'm not sure that anybody else did, either. And inevitably, of course, it's one of the two shortlisted titles that I haven't actually read (it's sitting on my shelf, along with its sequel, waiting for October, when the concluding volume of the trilogy is published and I shall read all three straight through).
In some ways, I wonder whether the result was about passion. There seemed to be a lot of intellectual excitement about Pattern Recognition and Maul, and some for Coalescent [1], but curiously little in the way of emotion. They are all books - at least, this is my experience - that speak to your mind, not your heart; and I didn't hear anyone seriously arguing for Darwin's Children or Midnight Lamp.
Quicksilver, on the other hand, inspires passion. Reviewers have tended either to love it or to hate it; I haven't come across many who are ambivalent (cue people on my friends list speaking up...). You could probably also argue that it was the most ambitious novel on the short list. For those who may not know, it's a vast sprawl of a story, set against the Enlightenment: the time of Newton and Leibniz and Hook and Locke when so many of the intellectual foundations of the current world were laid. It is, I'm told, an attempt to capture that moment; to understand the history of Western science. It is so big, and so complex, that there is an ongoing online project to fully annotate the text.
I loved Stephenson's last book, Cryptonomicon. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into Quicksilver, and into the other two volumes of the Baroque Cycle. It's not the book I expected to win (I guessed either Pattern Recognition or Maul), and for those of us with that particular geek-kink, the debate about whether or not it is science fiction has the potential to run and run. But unlike Pattern Recognition, where I have a clear opinion (it's not SF, though I wouldn't object to anyone nominating it in the Best Related Book category at the Hugos), with Quicksilver I get the impression that there is a real debate to be had - and in the end, I think that's one of the reasons why I like the Clarke.
[1] A brief historical note: I chose this journal name in February 2003, months before the book was published. Yes, I chose it because I'm a Baxter fanboy and wanted a Baxter-referencing name, but more than that I chose it because I like the word itself. In point of fact I do like the book, but I don't think it's his best. Really, you should count yourselves lucky; I was almost omegatropic