Shadow Clarke: The Underground Railroad

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Aliya Whiteley, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Colson Whitehead, Joanna Kavenna, Johanna Sinisalo, Jonathan McCalmont, Lavie Tidhar, Matthew de Abaitua, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, N.K. Jemisin, nina allan, Victoria Hoyle

The work of the Clarke Award Shadow Jury continues apace. The jurors are now taking turns to review the books they chose for their personal shortlists. So far you can find:

Nina Allan on The Destructives by Matthew de Abaitua and A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna

Jonathan McCalmont on The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley

Victoria Hoyle on The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Megan AM on The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Maureen Kincaid Speller on Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

And now there’s my review of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

I’m reproducing my review under the fold, but you really should head over to read the other reviews, and keep up with the Shadow Clarke hub, because that’s where the conversation is taking place.

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Reprint: Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

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A.E. Van Vogt, Adam-Troy Castro, Alexei Panshin, Allen Steele, Anna Kavan, Anthony Boucher, Arthur Sellings, Bob Shaw, Brian Aldiss, Carol Emshwiller, Charles Stross, Damon Knight, Darko Suvin, Frederik Pohl, Groff Conklin, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Jack McDevitt, Jerry Oltion, John Wyndham, Katherine MacLean, Lesley What, Megan Lindholm, Mervyn Peake, Michael Swanwick, Molly Gloss, Neil Gaiman, Peter Jackson, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Richard Chwedyk, Sharon Lee, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Willis E. McNelly, Willy Ley

I haven’t actually included any anthologies in my reprints so far, even though I have reviewed an awful lot of them. So I thought I should include one today. This review of Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 edited by Vonda N. McIntyre was, I think, written for The New York Review of Science Fiction, but I can’t find a record of it being published. So this may be its first appearance.

Reprint: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh

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Amitav Ghosh, Arthur C Clarke, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gabriele Salvatores, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, Jagdish Chandra Bose, John Wyndham, Jules Verne, Ramanujan, Ronald Ross, Stanislaw Lem, Stayajit Ray

In a sense, this isn’t a reprint. I conducted this interview with Ghosh just after he won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Calcutta Chromosome. It appeared for a while on the Arthur C. Clarke Award website, then disappeared. It has never appeared anywhere else.

A dyspeptic view of awards

It’s that season again, and we’re having awards arguments 101 for the umpteenth year in a row. Nothing changes. I am tired of the same old same old, because nothing has moved forward one iota in all the time we’ve been having these debates. I thought about a magisterial silence, but that doesn’t really work. So I thought in the end that I would write a post to round up my discontents, so that in years to come I could simply point back to this post as my contribution to each new iteration of awards arguments 101. I am, therefore, writing this as a way of staying silent on the subject.

BSFA Short Fiction Award

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al robertson, China Mieville, David Mitchell, kameron hurley, nina allan, paul cornell, Robert Holdstock

Still trying to decide how I will vote in the BSFA Awards when I go to Eastercon tomorrow. I’ve made my mind up about the novels, but the short fiction category foxes me. I didn’t read a huge amount of new short fiction in 2011, but was it really such a poor year? My choice, I think, is going to come down to a matter of the least worst, which is not how I like to make award decisions.

And the winner is

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Adam Roberts, Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard, Keith Jeffery, Martin Amis, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Richard Cobb

Shortly after reading Adam Roberts’s excellent post on awards, Maureen pointed out a passage in the current TLS. It is a review, by Keith Jeffery, of My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others edited by Tim Heald. Cobb was the chair of the Booker Prize in 1984, and, as Jeffery quotes him:

There he claimed to have done “a little NEGATIVE good” by keeping Martin Amis and Angela Carter off the shortlist, “and manoeuvred so that Ballard did not get the prize”.

My dilemma is that I am a great supporter of awards (given my history, you wouldn’t really expect much else), but I can’t help seeing problems with them.