Shadowing the Clarke

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Adam Roberts, Anne Charnock, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Christopher Brown, James Bradley, Jaroslav Kalfar, Jeff Vandermeer, John Dos Passos, John Kessel, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Kim Stanley Robinson, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mohsin Hamid, Nick Harkaway, Nick Hubble, Nicola Barker, nina allan, Omar El Akkad, Paul McAuley

This time last year, I was engaged in the struggle to compile my personal shortlist for the first Arthur C. Clarke Award Shadow Jury. It was an interesting and revealing exercise. I was glad to step down from the Shadow Jury this year only because it is a time-consuming process and time is something I don’t have right now. But in every other respect, I was sorry to go and a part of me is itching to put together a personal shortlist again this year.

So why the hell not?

Awards

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Alexandra Pierce, Anne Charnock, Iain Banks, Jim Burns, Liz Bourke, Mimi Mondal, Nat Segaloff, nina allan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Victo Ngai, Zoe Quinn

How can sitting in bed drinking champagne be so exhausting? But last night was exhausting.

It started with the announcement of the BSFA Awards. My default response when I know I’ve been shortlisted for an award is to convince myself that I cannot win. But even so there’s a rogue part of the brain that’s going: maybe, just maybe … And then I saw a tweet. I am slow and clumsy on twitter, can never really make it work for me; so it turned out that Maureen had known the result for about a minute already and was just waiting to see how long it would be before I noticed.

The upshot is, I won. Or, to be more precise, my book, Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction) published by University of Illinois Press, won. It is now, what, 12 hours since I heard the news and I am still flabbergasted, surprised, delighted.

For the record, the full list of winners was:

Best Novel: Nina Allan – The Rift (Titan Books) (I am particularly pleased about this, I have been saying how wonderful this book is ever since I read it.)

Best Shorter Fiction: Anne Charnock – The Enclave (NewCon Press)

Best Non-Fiction: Paul Kincaid – Iain M. Banks (University of Illinois Press)

Best Artwork:
Joint winners:
Jim Burns – Cover for The Ion Raider by Ian Whates (NewCon Press)
Victo Ngai – Illustration for ‘Waiting on a Bright Moon’ by JY Yang (Tor.com)

My heartiest congratulations to all.

Then, less than an hour later, came the announcement of the shortlists for the Hugo Awards, and my book was on the list in the Best Related Work category. I’ve known about this for a week or so, but it was a relief that it was now out in the open (I hate keeping secrets). And coming immediately after winning the BSFA Award it was elating in a way that just learning the news in an official email from the award administrators hadn’t been.

You can see the full list of nominees here, but the shortlist for the Best Related Work is:

Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, by Zoe Quinn (PublicAffairs)

Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), by Paul Kincaid (University of Illinois Press)

A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, by Nat Segaloff (NESFA Press)

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (Twelfth Planet Press)

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Liz Bourke (Aqueduct Press)

That is some serious opposition (and isn’t it nice to see this curiously hodgepodge category given over entirely to serious critical work). I’m proud to be in this company; let’s celebrate them all.