Awards Season is well upon us - we’ve had the results of the Nebulas, the Locus Awards and the BSFA, Hugo voting has just closed, we got an Ignyte shortlist just yesterday, and many other awards are in progress besides. But we’re not interested in those right now! Today, we’re focussing on the Clarke Award.
To partially quote some of their website’s own blurb, the annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. It’s one of the most prestigious UK based SFF awards, though not quite so well known internationally, and so not hitting the same level of impact as your Hugos, your Nebulas and so on. It’s a juried award whose judges are drawn from members of the various groups who support it, currently the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival. Jury members vary year on year, but over the years, the Clarkes have developed a distinctive flavour of SF that tends to make their awards, and oftentimes means a rather different slate of novels than other SF awards covering the same year, and a very interesting one.
This year, the shortlist is as follows:
Chain-Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The Ten Percent Thief - Lavanya Lakshminarayan
In Ascension - Martin Macinnes
The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Nayler (this was published in the US in 2022, but in the UK in 2023)
Some Desperate Glory - Emily Tesh
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility - Isabel Waidner
Clara and Roseanna decided that this year, they would get stuck into the shortlist and come back with their opinions on the novels, the shortlist as a whole, and what the Clarke is covering that other awards may be missing, as well as their thoughts on who should win.
Roseanna: Before we get into the actual novels, to start us off what is a Clarke Award vibe? What makes the Clarkes different from other awards? Why are we interested?
For me, while I’ve never set out to read the shortlist before, my partner has been reading them every year for the last few, and so we’ve chatted about them, and I feel like I’ve got a rough sense of what they tend to be like. From what I can tell, it tends to be less just the big splashy things that make all the awards, and more slightly off the beaten path, interesting, possibly more difficult or challenging ones that can do well in a juried award but not so much in a popular vote. Take Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles for instance (2022 winner). That was a collection of poetry in the Orkney dialect of Scots with facing translation done interestingly, where the poems all slowly revealed a story about people on a deep space station. Not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but the Clarke gave it a chance to shine. Last year, I think it was very clifi heavy, but drew from a pool that mostly didn’t overlap with the mainstream, including I believe a French nominee. There tends to be one book every year that fills a more mainstream or accessible slot, but that’s the general sense I get of them.
And that “drawing from a different pool” is what made me interested. The Hugos, Nebulas and Locus often overlap heavily, so I’m always keen to look at awards that make me aware of other things - the Ignytes are great for that, and a shameless plug here for the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards, for whom both Adri and I are jury this year, but whom I previously enjoyed shortlists of again for showing me something new and different. That’s what I was hoping for when I decided to read along for this Clarke shortlist.
And I think we are seeing that - we’ll get to discussing Corey Fah Does Social Mobility in a bit, but it’s the sort of book I struggle to imagine on one of the more mainstream, popular voted SFF awards. It’s just too weird.
Other than “Roseanna asked for volunteers”, what made you interested in joining me on this readalong?
Clara: I’ve struggled with Clarke himself, but many other books on Clarke shortlists were exactly the sort of imaginative works that make SFF such a perfect medium to explore big ideas. Not always successfully, to be sure: when I look at the Clarke awards, I see a lot of books that do very thoughtful things, but which I don’t always enjoy very much–as seen in this very discussion! Meanwhile, when I look at lists of Hugo and Nebula nominees, I see a lot of books that I consider pleasant, enjoyable SFF–engaging, fun, entertaining–but not necessarily thoughtful. (For what it’s worth, the books that make it to both lists–e.g., Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary books, Sue Burke’s Semiosis, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time–tend to be ones that I thought were superb.)
Roseanna: I think I would agree to some degree with that assessment (though of course sweeping generalisations always prompt “well… except…”). I definitely think this is a particularly thoughtful (and thought-provoking) shortlist as well. It’s certainly a lot of what I was hoping for in reading the Clarkes - so I think for me it’s got that essence pretty well captured.
Clara: Two books that struck me as
extremely characteristic of what I expect from the Clarke Awards are
Chain-Gang All-Stars and
The Ten Percent Thief. Both were primarily interested in using the medium of SF to point at a problem in modern society (criminal justice in
Chain-Gang All-Stars, capitalism-fueled inequality in
The Ten Percent Thief), and both did it in ways that made some interesting structural choices. In
The Ten Percent Thief, every single chapter is told from a different character perspective. Some of those stories are pretty self-contained, but others circle around the main events of the plot–such as it is. The oppressed rise up, yada yada yada. You don’t read this book for a plot. You read it for a deep dive into the dystopia of a purely capitalistic society, obsessed with productivity, in its most extreme form. Some of it worked very well–the indoctrination of school children, the fate of the elderly, the decision to reproduce. Other bits, such as an extremely silly plot point about emojis, were less convincing.
Chain Gang All-Stars was less playful, and went so far as to have footnotes, which provided details about the studies or court cases underlying the events in a particular scene–a decision that has never actually worked for me. And the brutal violence that is the core of this book is. . . effective in making its point, but so disagreeable that I felt myself backing away from the story. I was not strong enough to have the conversation that the author wanted to have with me.
Reading fiction requires a certain degree of openness and immersion, a willingness to go on a journey with the characters. But the brutality in this book is not something I can be open to in this way. I had to back away to protect myself. I can read about it in non-fiction just fine–which is interesting. It’s as if I can put up barriers between myself and the real world more effectively than between myself and fictional characters, whose inner thoughts and wishes are presented more intimately. That’s one reason why fiction can be such an effective medium to make a point about the real world. But when taken to extremes, as in Chain Gang All-Stars, it becomes so distressing that I shut down and disengage. I would not have finished this book if I hadn’t started reading it for this discussion.
Roseanna: Chain-Gang All-Stars was the last of the shortlist I finished, and it’s the one that took me the longest - I had to keep pausing to stare into space and think about industrial prison complexes and systemic oppression, which is apparently my method of coping with such a raw, unfilteredly truthful book. And you’re right, it absolutely takes it to the extreme. But for me? I think it really worked. It’s completely, brutally honest about something that is unutterably awful. Yes, it’s using the SFF, near-future elements to really turn the dial up, but I think a lot of its effectiveness for me is how not-distant it really felt. It’s horrifying in its proximity. But equally I can see how that’s going to hit so differently person to person, especially if it’s something that is closer to the reader’s life than it is to mine. I imagine a lot of people do DNF it for precisely that reason, and I wouldn’t hold it against them.
Clara: Me neither. But even if the DNF rate is higher than normal, that shouldn’t be taken as an indictment of the book. Chain-Gang All-Stars was not trying to be an easy book, and I think it was incredibly effective at accomplishing what it set out to do. The fact that I do not care for that type of thing takes nothing away from the author’s success at conveying a vision–footnote quibbles notwithstanding!
Roseanna: I think the footnotes though did actually work pretty well for me (though I am generally mixed in my appreciation of them - I found them often quite patronising in Babel, for instance). Partly because some of the time they gave me information I simply did not have. But even when it was something I already knew, they kept dragging the narrative back to the real world, back to the facts of the here and the now, so you can never escape how relevant this story is to reality. This is not escapism, and it’s not going to let you pretend otherwise - honestly, I think one of the best uses of footnotes I’ve seen in a long while.
But again, you have to be in a position where being dragged back in that way is tenable to the reader.
Going back to
The Ten Percent Thief, I think this is a really interesting one to hold in contrast to
Chain-Gang All-Stars, because you’re right, they both are very bluntly using a future SF story to point at a now-problem, without the distance of allegory, metaphor or other tools that let the reader distance themself from the problems at hand. But at the same time, I think they approach the use of the SF elements entirely differently.
I’d characterise Chain-Gang as barely SF, in a lot of ways. The technology is the barest minimum it needs to ram home its point about the current system, and at no point does it feel like the story is interested in the tech for its own sake - we dwell on the pain-administering torture system for what it does to people, but it could very much be a stand-in for any kind of torture (and indeed that connection is made explicit in the footnotes). It doesn’t, for the most part, let any of the shiny stuff distract from the core themes/message.
Whereas I think on the flip-side, Ten Percent Thief really leans in on the tech, the future dystopia, the details - we learn a lot more about what it looks and feels like to live with all of this stuff, and without it. And it’s not extraneous, because a lot of the plot is about hammering home the contrast between those who have and those who do not, but it made it feel to me a lot more obviously science fictional. From the moment you step in, you are very clearly in a world of the not-now, even if it’s commenting on the now.
I do think this is one of the weaker ones on the shortlist. Not weak, because tbh it’s a pretty strong selection for me, but a little less effective in how it does its messaging than the others, and I think the focus on the tech, on constantly drawing these very detailed and realised pictures of a world absolutely swimming in technology, is part of that. The other part I think is a structural issue - the mosaic novel keeps you circling around, dotting between perspectives, and doesn’t really let you bed into the story in the way that a smaller number of perspectives might. Obviously on the flip side, that means more viewpoints, a more bird’s eye appreciation of the broader landscape the story exists in, which can be useful (and is here) but I think it comes at a price, and that price is the emotional immediacy.
Clara: Yes, exactly. That structural decision to keep shifting perspectives was a calculated risk, and I think, unlike the decision to lean into the brutality of Chain-Gang, it didn’t quite support Lakshminarayan’s vision as effectively as a different structure might have. The benefits of the breadth of setting were not enough to offset the disconnection that comes from never getting to be inside a character’s head for more than a few pages. (And, of course, one could perhaps have a meta-conversation about the disconnection from the book reifying the disconnection of the society being portrayed here, but the fact remains that the efficacy of your work does depend on making your readers care enough to pick the book up again after setting it down to make a sandwich).
Roseanna: Let’s move on then to
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, a novel that touches on some things I know we’re both interested in, and that you at least are particularly knowledgeable about.
I liked this one but didn’t love it, I have to admit. It did a lot of things I find cool and interesting - it was very strong on the ideas side of things - but it just didn’t quite have the spark I needed to really grab me. I think some of that may have been the characters? I was interested in them a lot more than I cared about them, and some of them felt really quite distant from the narrative emotionally, for a number of reasons. But they also just never felt like what the book really wanted to focus on, which was cool octopus linguistics. And I get it! Cool octopus linguistics is a great thing to focus on… but it just never quite for me made the step up into “amazing novel” instead of “great idea, now let’s add in a story as well”.
Clara: With this book, I was also most interested in the octopus linguistics, since I’m a linguist in my day job. In many ways, that fell short—but in kind of interesting ways. For example, there’s a great amount of ink devoted to describing how octopuses express themselves with skin images. Since octopus skin patterns can read differently depending on lighting conditions, and since skin also expresses emotion and is responsible for camouflage and sensory input, octopuses have to balance this wildly complex combination of tasks assigned to one organ. This is presented as something that makes octopus speech uniquely difficult and different from human speech–except it’s not, actually. At least, not for this reason. Human vocal tracts are also responsible for breathing and eating, so there’s also overlapping tasks assigned to one organ. And speakers of sign language are relying on organs that are also responsible almost every way in which humans interact with the world. Spoken speech can also be obscured by ambient noise and distorted by someone speaking with their mouth full or speaking while laughing, just as skin colour will look different in different light conditions, so we need to be able to disentangle signal and noise. So, really, there’s nothing too special there about octopuses.
What does make octopus language persuasively different to human speech is the treatment of conceptual metaphor. In human speech, it’s based on human physical interactions with the world. Since octopuses interact with the world very differently from humans, their conceptual metaphors are going to be fundamentally different, which means that a lot of really basic core assumptions (‘up is good’) won’t apply. This was great! Deeply alien modes of thinking is great! Except for the bit where our main scientist sees an arrangement of physical objects, interprets it as an altar, and from there leaps to wild conclusions about octopus mythology and cultural attitudes towards humans.
Roseanna: I knew you’d have a lot of thoughts about this one.
As someone with a background in a field that includes archaeology/ancient history, the altar scene did scream “aha! Ritual purposes!” at me in a depressingly familiar way, I will admit.
Clara: Ah, but that’s only because you’re assuming in your humanocentric way that altar-looking things must actually have ritual purposes. But with octopuses you can assume nothing! They’re too different! Incomprehensibly alien to our embodied way of viewing the world! We’ve just spent 200 pages being told this!
(Except, yeah, it was ritual purposes.)
Roseanna: That said, there were a lot of things about it I really did like - the AI was, I think, pretty well done, both as a concept and as a character (which I think some stories fail at by doing one but not the other). I tend also not to be a huge fan of the sort of dystopian near-future stories that this was doing, for a number of reasons, but I think Nayler managed that part of it actually pretty well. Yes, it was depressing, because it was meant to be, but it felt like the way it was presenting that bleak future was actually serving purposes in the story, not just being bleak for the sake of it, or for an aesthetic.
And on the language side, I really appreciated that “this takes time and effort and isn’t an easy thing” was made pretty clear as part of the process. I have a personal bugbear of books where two people learn each other’s language super quickly - Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir sticks particularly in mind for it - and I was glad Nayler acknowledged that there would be difficulties and the process would take a long time, to the point where the lady scientist protagonist at one point references this as being something that would take years and generations after her to solve. I know it’s not fun and sexy to leave problems unsolved in stories, but “learning mutually unintelligible languages without any aid in a few days” is even more unsexy to me, so I like to see books that acknowledge that reality.
Clara: The idea of what it takes to learn a new language was actually a domain in which the AI-based storyline and the octopus-based storyline could have interwoven in some beautiful, linguistically-informed ways, but in the end didn’t. One very lively debate in linguistics is the idea of symbolic combinatorics–decomposing meaning or ideas into abstract symbols (e.g., words or phrases) that can be combined in novel ways. One of the foundational principles of Chomskyan generative linguistics is that all of language can be understood in this way: you just need to find the right abstract symbols and the right rules of combinations–e.g., a sentence has a subject and a predicate; a transitive verb phrase contains a verb and a direct object; a noun phrase contains an article plus a noun. Nayler invokes this perspective quite explicitly for the octopuses.
However, this symbolic combinatorial approach breaks in a lot of ways. For example, idioms have meanings that are not derived from the component parts (e.g., ‘cut the cheese’ doesn’t just mean ‘prepare a charcuterie board’, but can also mean ‘pass gas’). And irregularities of syntax and morphology show up everywhere: ‘I talk/I talked’ does not follow the same pattern of ‘I go/I went’ or ‘I eat/I ate’. So a big split in linguistics is the divide between so-called ‘generativists’, who want to use the symbolic approach for everything, and ‘usage-based’ linguists, who think everything is more related to statistical co-occurrences, and learned patterns.
And this is how the whole octopus linguistics storyline could have connected really deeply to the storyline about the personhood of the AI. Because in this era of ChatGPT, we all know that LLMs are able to generate incredibly human-sounding language from learning statistical cooccurences in words. But the AI in this book doesn’t do that: it explicitly denies similarities to LLMs (although rather late and kind of weakly, which makes me wonder whether that was a quick 2023-era edit after ChatGPT was released). So conceivably this AI is not based on learning statistical co-occurrences, like all our modern enshittifying stochastic parrots, but is instead somehow realizing the dreams of the Chomskyan linguists. It is using language in a symbolic combinatorial way, the same way that the octopuses are claimed to be doing (and in a completely different way from what usage-based linguists claim humans are doing). There could have been this beautiful synthesis of themes here! But that didn’t happen.
I did rather enjoy the repeated motif of distributed consciousness, though–the way the split in agency between an octopuses central brain and its arm-brains was mirrored in other human domains: corporations not knowing what their subsidiary companies are doing; or drone control mechanisms with semi-autonomous decision-making capacities. That was very elegantly done.
Roseanna: Elegant is a great word for it - I keep circling back to "neat", myself.
On the whole, I had a good time with this one, and I can see why it’s on the shortlist - it’s doing some cool ideas, it’s definitely very timely and there’s a clear hook to explain why it’s different from everything else around at the moment.
Clara: A book whose position on the shortlist I can’t really understand is
In Ascension. Well, no, that’s not fair. A book whose position on the shortlist I
resent is
In Ascension. Not so much because it’s bad, but because it seems to be doing the fluid-genre thing that got a lot of attention when Ian McEwan wrote a book about sentient AI and then
denied that it was SF. At the time, a lot of the discourse in the SFFisphere was outrage, that McEwan didn’t actually understand the genre that he was refusing to be lumped into, that SFF was more sophisticated and thoughtful than ‘travelling 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots,’ without ‘actually looking at the human dilemmas’. But somehow, I almost feel like he had a point, because
In Ascension, for all that it’s about using billions-year-old archaea discovered in mysterious ocean vents to explore space, really was focused on human dilemmas–so much so that it does not feel like an SF book. It feels like a book that uses the trappings of SF (space ships, aliens, time travel) to help the main characters come to terms with their relationships with their mothers and their history of abuse as a child. And I got increasingly grumpy as this shape of the narrative emerged: fewer and fewer pages remained to address the aliens, and still each new page brought yet another goddamn meditation on childhood and mothers. I was promised space aliens and time travel, and instead got navel gazing and interiority. Also, the ending was just
Battlestar Galactica presented as if it were a novel and ingenious idea.
This shortlist seems characterized by SF books that want to have conversations about society and culture: fascism, inequality, philosophy of language, sentience, justice, etc. I know that, traditionally, the Clarke Awards have leaned literary*, but even the most litfic-y ones have usually incorporated the speculative elements to form a core part of the book. But this book is essentially a very prosaic character journey, which fully skimps out on SF concepts to the point that the character journey is closed off while the aliens and time travel are left completely unexplained. They were a gimmicky device, rather than core part of the narrative, and that feels rude.
Roseanna: Ok I find this really interesting, because on the one hand, I also really did not like In Ascension, but on the other, I think I totally disagree? I didn’t find its engagement with SFF tropes particularly gimmicky, and in fact some of what I disliked about it was actually that it reminded me of a certain type of SF book that I already don’t like.
Time for a shameful admission here: I don’t really care about space travel. Which I know is a terrible crime and a black mark against me as a person. But I don’t, and never really have. Space is a perfectly fine medium for telling other stories, and a wonderful metaphor for the unknown, for isolation or for distance or danger, but the nuts and bolts of space travel itself, the facts of it? Bore me to tears. And I found in this - a book in which a lot of page time is devoted to the mechanics of food production and consumption in space, and of preparation for existence on a long mission in space - really really not my thing in exactly the same way the type of older school, take-the-world-as-it-is-but-change-just-one-thing SF stories are. And so it felt incredibly SFF-y to me. Just… not in a good way.
Clara: Ah, I love that stuff! It’s why I enjoy Andy Weir so much. But it does lead one to expect a pay-off, like some way in which all the details of genetically engineering algae foodstuffs will turn out to engage with the SFy bits of the tale–y’know, with the aliens and time travel and so on. But instead I got a deep dive into feelings, which is not what the book implicitly promised.
Roseanna: I have read precisely one Andy Weir book and it made me very cross, so I suspect we are coming into this with some veeeeryyyy different preferences.
Anyway, on the flip side, I found a lot of the lit-fic-ness of it very effective and affecting (they just weren’t themes I particularly tend to seek out in stories). The main character is both incredibly nostalgic and maudlin, dwelling on her past, her life, her existence in the world, while also extremely cold and detached from it all. And I found the thoughtfulness of that perspective, the horrible inevitability of the choices we watch her make, the sheer humanity of her, the way she shields herself from her own feelings, really evocative. I just also disliked her and found her quite frustrating to read about.
It’s also a very open-ended story. The way I interpreted the significant thing that happens to the main character and her crew mates right at the end is definitely not the only way that scene can be interpreted, and I have mixed feelings in general about unresolved endings or ambiguity, but here I really felt it worked. I put the book down and immediately felt the need to discuss it with someone, to find out if they interpreted it as I did, if they took the same things from it as I did. And that is ultimately what I think it does well - it’s a discussional book. I think it would be perfect for a book club.
But what it’s discussing just isn’t my thing. I have a moderate to high fear of the deep sea - oh no there’s a massive terrifying deep sea sinkhole. I don’t like the mechanics of space travel - we spend the majority of the book at a station where people are working towards space travel. And so on and so on. It cherry picked a bunch of my least favourite SF-y things and then made me appreciate how interestingly it lingered over them. Which I thought was pretty neat.
And then in a total contrast, we have
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh. It’s also very much in space, and yet I really loved this one, I have to admit. I read and reviewed it waaaay back last year as an arc, adored it, and have steadily become a more and more annoying hype-merchant for it as more people have read it. That being said… it doesn’t feel an entirely Clarkey book (where
In Ascension feels extremely one) to me? It’s by far the more conventional end of SF, which I have absolutely no objections to, but feels slightly out of step with some previous years’ shortlists, as I scan through them. But who am I to judge that?
Possibly its point of difference that merits its inclusion - and it’s definitely somewhat divisive from what I’ve seen of reviews across the year since it came out - is how it drops us in from the off with a deeply unlikeable character who is, frankly, a horrible person, and then only builds up the sympathy for her over a fairly long span. It’s doing the work to really dig into the tropes of the sort of SF that is the legacy of stories like Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game, and that requires going in hard at the start. I’ve seen a number of people DNF the book because they hate Kyr, or because they didn’t think she got enough of a “redemption arc”, which for me I think misses the point of the book. She’s not redeemed, but she does learn, and it’s a book about that learning, and about shifting the point of view of someone raised in a fascist space cult.
But it’s not a book, I think, that is gunning for that sort of easy like anyway. There’s a bit of a scourge in SFF literature at the moment of characters being discussed in terms of how “relatable” they are, and this, as a story, just thoroughly refutes that. Nearly everyone is terrible! Even the “good” characters are kind of awful! Does that invalidate their position in the narrative? Absolutely not (which brings us back to Chain-Gang All-Stars too). Even right at the start, even despite how immediately vile some of her opinions are, I feel for Kyr when she’s given the bad news about what her role in the fascist cult space base is going to be (human incubator and sex object). She does not have to be relatable or particularly sympathetic for her situation to be appalling, and I think this is something Tesh explores throughout the story.
Clara: Yes, the character work here was really strong–as was the plot! This was my favourite of the shortlist–and if it’s not characteristic of the Clarkey vibe, then possibly that reflects my opinion of Clarkeyness as a genre. I’ve remarked elsewhere that I get impatient with Arthur C Clarke’s desire to focus on ideas over story and character, and the other books on this shortlist have definitely mirrored that focus. But Some Desperate Glory was absolutely focused on taking me for a ride first, and that different balance of story and message meant I was more open to have the conversation about indoctrination into fascism and the role of upbringing and experience in building our worldviews.
And that was such a deftly handled topic! Without getting too much into developments that for me were a complete surprise (there’s something to be said for going into a book without having read reviews!), I loved seeing how different versions of Kyr can vary wildly in some areas, while still maintaining core personality traits, such as kneejerk respect for authority. I loved Kyr’s reflections on how the different versions of herself perceive and react to events. I loved how Avi was a complete wildcard, no matter the circumstances. Even the technomagical macguffin worked well, integrated into the plot in very key ways that made me believe it was important. It used its SF apparatus effectively in exactly the way that In Ascension didn’t. Overall, A+ book, would book again.
Roseanna: I too went into this completely cold (woo early arc way back when) and absolutely, it made the experience so much better. I’m not usually a big one for fussing about spoilers, because they do not usually affect my reading experiences but this one… yeah this one I think it makes a difference.
And then on yet another flip side, we come to our last book on the shortlist, and one I think would in many ways be impossible to spoil because it’s so… it’s an experience, not a story. And that’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner.
Clara: Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is a book that I think I’m not smart enough to understand. With the other books on this list, it was clear which element of society was being discussed. Sometimes so overtly explicitly that I felt like I was getting a rather tiresome lesson rather than a story. But with this, my reaction throughout and after I was done was . . . wut?
There were whisps of interpretation in places that I could (maybe) understand: This dream sequence is a commentary on how capitalism forces the workers to be the product, chewing them up and spitting them out. That sequence is a commentary on the elitism of cultural prestige and how–even when it explicitly attempts to bring in marginalised groups–it remains exclusionary. And the fawn-spider hybrid is actually a manifestation of our narrator’s own history . . .? … ???? But I was mostly baffled and confused.
Roseanna: Possibly some useful context (or maybe not, I’m not the boss of you) - Waidner wrote this after having won the Goldsmiths literary prize for their previous novel, Sterling Karat Gold. For those who haven’t read it, the story in Corey Fah begins with an author who has won a big literary prize going to collect their trophy, at which point things go absolutely pear shaped, and they face an amount of bureaucracy and strangeness in the ensuing attempts to fix the mess-up. I couldn’t help but assume there was something in there about Waidner’s own experience, but possibly I’m being too literal.
Clara: I think I agree with you on that. When I finished the book and tried to make sense of what had just happened to me, I looked up who Waidner was, and saw the list of award nominations and the Goldsmiths win, so inferring a commentary on that seems reasonable. But even if we’re confident that this is correct, I’m not sure it really helps. Being able to accurately count the legs on a fawn-spider hybrid does not make me a zoologist.
Roseanna: Very true (and the eldritch horror Bambi is really one of the parts of the story that has stuck with me the most, for good or for ill). In any case, for me, this is fighting for my top spot. I totally agree with you that it is baffling, but I loved that. I loved just sitting with it for this surreal, wormholey, ungodly creaturey, genre-bending ride. It was a book I just chose to sit back and experience rather than really trying to pick apart, which it definitely benefitted from - I’d have driven myself to distraction trying to find definitive, unambiguous meaning in it.
But it is also absolutely impossible to explain. It’s a vibes book. It’s an experience book. I can say it’s got some sort of terrifying insectile-deer in it that possibly at one point works in a dead end fast food job, and neon beige and wormholes that may or may not exist in an ambiguously but somehow definitely concrete-ful urban landscape. None of that really gives a reader a sense of what it is as a book though. And I think it’s kind of impossible to. It’s the sort of experience you just have to have, or not, and there’s not really an in between. But I tend to love those.
So, on that slightly unhelpful note… final thoughts. Who’s your winner, if you were suddenly given the power to award it yourself?
Clara: Some Desperate Glory, hands down. I’m pretty sure it won’t win, just because the rest of the shortlist makes it clear that the Clarke Award panel are more interested in much less traditional SF stories. But my reading taste is not that spicy, it seems.
Roseanna: I think for me it would be Chain-Gang All-Stars. It’s just too… I’m waving my hands here desperately searching for a good word that encompasses what it is. Whatever that adjective is, it’s too much that a book to go unrecognised. Powerful, I suppose, is the closest I can come. And sharp. It’s perfectly clear about the message it has and how to tell it, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, at least in my view, has managed it so precisely, so flawlessly.
But honestly, I think this was just a really strong shortlist as a whole. I don’t think I’d be upset to see any of them win, even though I have my favourites, and above all, it feels interesting, which was what I was craving most, and what my previous awareness of the Clarke Award shortlist has led me to expect/hope for, so I was really glad to see it deliver.
Thank you Clara for doing this discussion with me!
The winner for 2024 will be declared in the evening (UK time) of Wednesday the 24th of July, so we'll soon find out how right (or wrong) our picks were.
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References:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars, [Harvill Secker, 2023]
Lavanya Lakshminarayan, The Ten Percent Thief, [Rebellion, 2023]
Martin MacInnes, In Ascension, [Atlantic Books, 2023]
Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea, [W&N, 2023]
Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory, [Orbit, 2023]
Isabel Waidner, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, [Hamish Hamilton, 2023]
Footnotes:
* Except for Retribution Falls, in 2010, which is quite popcorn, but also fabulous and I encourage everyone to read Chris Wooding’s delightful Tales of the Ketty Jay series (reviewed here by me!) right now.
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
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