Speech given by Paul Billinger, Chair of the Judging committee

The Arthur C. Clarke Award Ceremony 30th April, 2008

We had an especially large number of submissions this year – 55 in total – and I’d like to thank the publishers for their willingness to submit the books and to think widely about what may constitute eligibility. Of course, having this many books submitted makes it even more of a challenge for the judges.

2008 Judging Panel: Pat Cadigan, Francis Spufford, Niall Harrison, Claire Weaver, Pauline Morgan

Although every year people discuss what is and isn’t on the shortlist it seems to me that this year there has been even more speculation about the short list selection than usual, with some very entertaining conspiracy theories being postulated. I say entertaining as I know none of them are true: the role of the five judges can be simply summarised as them forming a collective view of what they think are the six best science fiction novels submitted. The organisers of the Award – such as Tom and I – don’t set any agenda beyond the obvious of wanting ‘the best science fiction novel published that year’. What this means is that it is up to the judges, and the judges alone, to decide what ‘best’ means and even what ‘science fiction’ means, and they can take a wide or as narrow definition as they think is appropriate. To me it is precisely this openness that gives the Award its continuing interest and vitality.

Judges for the award jury 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 SF Crowsnest, these being Niall Harrison and Claire Weaver from the BSFA, Pat Cadigan and Francis Spufford from the SFF and Pauline Morgan from SF Crowsnest. So thank you for all your efforts in reading the submitted books and in finally managing to select the shortlist of six books and, most especially, the manner in which you went about your task, both in selecting the shortlist and choosing the winner.

Before finally announcing this year’s winner I’d just like to remind you all of the shortlist, starting with Black Man by Richard Morgan, published by Gollancz. Carl Marsalis is the eponymous Black Man, a variant thirteen genetically altered to emphasis masculinity to produce a tool for fighting the escalating earth based conflicts and to survive the ongoing terraforming of Mars. Marsalis is not only hated and feared by normal humans but also despised by his fellow Thirteens as he is a bounty hunter tracking down renegade Thirteens. Recruited to find a Thirteen who has made a very bloody return from Mars, Marsalis finds out as much about the lies and corruption of the ruling elite as about the returned serial killer. As we have come to expect from Morgan we have much, much more than simply a highly effective thriller as he examines and comments on prejudice and discrimination to give a angry, passionate novel for which he uses all his skills to focus and control the complex plot, whilst still clearly making his political and personal points.

Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army published by Faber and Faber, although very different to Morgan’s Black Man does have the same passion and anger against discrimination but here firmly directed towards gender inequality. Using a classical dystopian view of the collapse of Britain from political and environmental disasters Hall focuses on Sister, desperate to escape from the hardship and oppression of her life in a small town, a life of pointless labour and forced contraception, to what she sees as the freedom of the all women community at Carhullan in the remote Cumbrian fells. Finally arriving at the isolated farm Sister finds the reality of the community to be both everything, and nothing, like her expectations. Hall’s vision of the near-future has both an emotional intensity and an exceptional sense of place as she shows the functioning of the community and how it is forced to interact with what remains of society in a brutal and violent revolt.

We also have a vision of a very near-future Britain in Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel, published by Orbit, one where the war on terror has continued to escalate, where the old and the new superpowers continue to via for global dominance and the old animosity between Britain and France has returned. James Travis is both a software engineer and a spy. When his peace activist daughter witnesses what may be a nuclear explosion at an American air force base in Scotland a chain of other atrocities follow: the bombing of an oil refinery (very topical as it’s the same one that went on strike this week) and the destruction of key motorway junctions. Travelling north through a country falling apart Travis tries to find out what lies behind these events and protect his family, whilst the horrors of the execution channel become very personal. MacLeod’s narrative skill and political astuteness makes this vision of our near future all too possible but a future with perhaps the most surprising of motives behind it.

Unlike the other novels on the shortlist The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter, published by Faber and Faber, isn’t set in the near-future but in the past and very specifically the Liverpool of 1962 with all the music and cold-war tension that would be expected. Laura’s parents are splitting up and she has moved back to Liverpool with her mother. Her father, in the air force, is still around but so is the sinister American, Mort. She slowly makes friends with the other school loners and comes to realise that those around her are strangely familiar and not what they seem. Whatever the outcome of the escalating Cuban missile crisis Laura’s world is going to change in ways she can’t possibly imagine, but ways which may already be written in her diary. Baxter’s wonderful evocation of the period coupled with some astonishingly powerful imagery gives us a clever, moving time-travel story, one which shows him continuing to excel.

Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, published by Cannongate, starts with a man waking up to find he has no memory. Fortunately, someone has helpfully left him a note telling him who he is, but when he finds out it’s from the first Eric Sanderson, and that he is the second, things start to become very odd indeed. His therapist knows more, but he, or rather the first version, has told her not to reveal any details. Despite these warnings Eric is determined to find out more, especially about what happened to his girlfriend in Greece, embarking on a journey to find the lost fragments of his past, helped, and hindered, by the enigmatic Scout, who again knows much more than she is letting on. Into the text Hall inserts found objects, typographical games, and a flipbook of the vicious word shark to give a playful, exhilarating search for the meaning of Eric’s life, travelling though literal book rooms to a final confrontation with his shark on a bizarrely constructed boat. Hall’s warped vision demonstrates a destructive power of language we would never have realised.

Finally we have The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua, published by Snow Books, again set in the near-future, a future both familiar and bizarre, populated by robotic constructs, artificial intelligences and the technology to create Red Men, uploaded versions of our personality but ones which prove impossible to control. The absurdities of the corporate marketing world are taken to further extremes when the distinctly odd Monad organisation starts hiring impoverished poets as the customer relations interface with the Red Men and starts a project to create a virtual upload of a small Northern town to use for trend analysis. Throughout these events we follow Nelson Millar, ex-radical publisher now corporate lackey, as he struggles to find out what Monad really has planed and what he can do to stop them, or even if he should. This witty satire shows us a future we most certainly don’t want to be sold.

Paul Billinger, 2008.