Speech for Awards Ceremony 2nd May 2007

As you are all aware the Award is one selected by a jury. In January the judges selected the shortlist and this afternoon we met to select the winner. I’d like to thank the judges for their efforts in reading and assessing the books submitted, selecting the shortlist and choosing the winner. As I’m sure past judges in the audience tonight will agree, this is no easy task, given the range and diversity of the genre, and for the judges to have done this with such a positive approach, and for us to all be still talking to each other, is a remarkable achievement. So thanks to the judges for making my first year as chair such an enjoyable, if at times challenging, time.

So who are this year’s judges? Well, the Award judges are selected by various organisations involved in the science fiction field with candidates from amongst critics, authors, reviewers and readers. This year two judges were appointed by the British Science Fiction Association, two from the Science Fiction Foundation and one from the Science Museum, these being Niall Harrison and Claire Weaver from the BSFA, Pat Cadigan and Graham Sleight from SFF and Dave Palmer from the Science Museum.

We’re getting very close to announcing the winner but I’d just like to remind you all of the shortlist, a shortlist which again shows what is possibly the key strength of the Award: its inclusive nature, looking across the range of fiction published in the UK.

So, to the shortlist.

Firstly, End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, published by Gollancz. Here we follow Kit Nouveau, who, after various tragedies, partly self-inflicted, now runs an Irish bar in Tokyo. But his bar is blown-up, killing his wife, who he finds he wasn’t actually married to, and a local ganglord is paying him far too much attention. Which are complications enough without being saved from a mugging by a street kid he has befriended, a street kid who may have fifteen million dollars in cash and may really be Lady Neku part of a far future ruling family in a castle at the end of the world. Developing and refining the style and themes of his recent works Grimwood brilliantly mixes Neku’s search for her memory and her quest to find out what has happened to her family, with Kit’s search to come to terms with his past and try to make amends for his decisions.

In M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing, also published by Gollancz, we have a triumphant return to the world first seen in his earlier novel, Light. Here, we visit the noir world of Saudade city and the lives of the people who live and work around the mysterious event zone: a zone which can change and alter both those who enter and the artefacts that emerge. There is Vic, leading tours into the zone, and his unpredictable new client. There is the artefact police investigator, who looks like Albert Einstein, and his ambitious, boosted assistant. There are all the bar owners, prostitutes and gangsters that you would expect in noir fiction, each of which is given Harrison’s unique interpretation. In a vividly and richly described world we see that although the zone corrupts and destroys many lives, for some there is the hope of salvation and escape. Possibly Harrison’s most lyrical and affecting book.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet, published by William Heinemann, is the story of Ann and Ben, a perfectly ordinary couple, going through some difficult times, but nothing they can’t work out. And then Ann’s cosy world is ruined: first by the public suicide of a gunman in the library where she works and then by the arrival of three physicists from the past. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, all claim to have been transported from 1943, just after the detonation of the worlds first atomic bomb, to to Ann’s world of 2003. Millet interweaves the search of the misplaced physicists for an understanding of what has happened to them and for a meaning in their new lives, with an eloquent history of the nuclear arms race and the development of a new peace movement worshipping the resurrected physicists who are, via the stark realities of Hiroshima, driven towards a conclusion both uplifting and depressing.

In Hav by Jan Morris, published by Faber and Faber, we travel to a fictional country somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. In this brilliantly described novel Morris convincingly portrays the city and the country of Hav, before and after an unnamed intervention changes the place, the people and the politics. In the pre-intervention section we are introduced, by the narrator Jan Morris, to the characters and history and the way the past, and a number of distinguished visitors including, it is rumoured, Hitler, have shaped the present and its quietly building unrest. In the second part Jan returns some twenty years after the intervention to a very different city, a city and a culture dominated by a 2000 foot high tower as a symbol of the new ruling elite. The two sections of Hav allows two very different perspectives on the evolution and identity of a place. In the first section we see Hav as the product of slowly accreting layers of history. In the second it is the novel examines the impact of sudden and brutal change. The reader is left to complete the process of history and the observers place in it.

Adam Robert’s Gradisil, the third of the books here to be published by Gollancz, is the story of the first family of space, as humankind slowly colonises the uplands around the earth. It begins with the search of Gradisil’s mother to find a place in the new world and come to terms with the implications of the murder of her father. We then turn to the life of Gradisil herself, as seen from the opposing views of her husband and an American military leader, as she strives for political meaning and to develop a new society. Finally, in the third section, we see the consequences for Gradisil’s sons, and her newly created nation, of the actions of the preceding generations. Roberts manages to depict both the small, practical issues of living in space and the wide-scale birth of the new nation, maintaining the delicate balance between them whilst developing both character and language. The result is perhaps Robert’s strongest, and most original voice yet.

And to the final book on the shortlist. What if luck were real? What if it had a genetic basis? What if this genetic luck was different if passed through male and female ancestry? These are the questions that Stableford’s Streaking, from PS Publishing, examines. When Canny ‘lucky’ Kilcannon meets Lissa Lo over a Monte Carlo roulette table we follow the consequences of his one last gamble, in which he may just have pushed his luck too far. As Canny and Lissa circle around each other we learn more of the archaic rituals supposedly needed to maintain the good fortune. A philosophical discourse on the quantum nature of this luck is woven into the real-world consequences of that fateful bet: with murdered academics and east European kidnappers just some of the outcomes. Stableford’s fascinating examination builds to an apocalyptic consummation where the world may be entirely changed.

So to the book that has won. On behalf of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and our partner Sci-Fi- London, I’d like to ask Paul Kincaid and Angie Edwards to announce winner and present the Award.

Paul Billinger, Chair of the Judges

The Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2007