Category: Journal

If anyone says something to your face that you know is unfair or untrue or scandalous, what can you do? You can deny hotly what is being alleged, or go into long explanations of what you know is the truth. But maybe the best thing to do is to suggest mildly that the comment might be unworthy of the person making it.

I believe rather a lot of unworthy comments have been made recently, and had I the luxury of people saying them to my face that is the unaggressive answer I would have offered.

However, most of the negative criticism made of my long essay about the Clarke shortlist last month came via the internet. As we all know, a sizeable number of comments made on blogs or Facebook or Twitter are anonymous, or pseudonymous, or in some way disguised. Not all, though: other people known to me personally, and in many cases people I thought of as friends, or at least friendly or admired acquaintances, rushed to make their voices heard on the internet with comments based on unworthy assumptions.

So let’s have a look at some of these unworthy comments.

The first, and for me perhaps the most important, is the matter that was variously described as my sour grapes, or anger, or resentment, which presumably arose because The Islanders had been left off the Clarke shortlist. Naturally, I knew that this connection between the two would be instantly made – I also assumed that the sheer openness of the connection would speak for itself, that the obviousness would indicate to anyone of reasonable intelligence that something else was going on.

Well, it was. I never think of awards when I’m writing – I know this is true of just about every serious writer I’ve ever met. Awards come along and if a group of people decides you merit one then it’s neither sane nor gracious to decline it. But for most writers awards are pretty irrelevant as motivators, not least because they invariably happen long after the main event. In this case, I finished work on The Islanders more than 18 months ago, and I’ve moved on since: I’ve written two short stories, a stage play, and the first draft of a new novel called The Adjacent, some 130,000 words. I’m currently working on the second draft of that. The Islanders feels a long way behind me. Although I am still creatively close to it, that particular novel is no longer my main concern.

When the Clarke shortlist was announced, it is true I felt slightly disappointed – you want your work to be appreciated. But because I never presume that anything I write will automatically be a candidate for an award, the disappointment soon faded.

In any event, I had been making a quiet assumption in the opposite direction. The Islanders is nothing like conventional science fiction – its fantastic element works deviously and indirectly. I could easily foresee any panel of judges deciding the book wasn’t SF or simply didn’t come into their remit. I know a lot of people were tipping The Islanders as a contender for the Clarke, but I had nothing to do with that.

Then there is a wider matter that could be described (slightly grandiosely) as a freedom of speech issue. A total of 60 books were submitted to the award judges; of those, 6 were selected as the shortlist. The Islanders and I therefore joined the majority: 90% of the submissions were not chosen, and my book was among them.

Who then is free to comment on the shortlist? For obvious reasons it’s difficult for any of the 6 shortlisted authors to make their views public. But what about the other 54, the 90% majority? Are they now bound in all eternity by an expectation of silence, simply because their latest book happened to be submitted by their publisher, and happened not to be chosen by a group of judges? Silencing them doesn’t make sense to me – my instinct when I wrote the essay was the liberating one that I had nothing to gain or lose by speaking my mind.

With an award as high profile as the Clarke, where a significant sum of money is handed out, and which often makes news outside the confines of the sf world, it is axiomatic that everything that goes on must be open to examination and discussion, and critically too. There is more at stake than just the choice of one novel a few people think is the ‘best’ of a given year.

Do we not seek to improve the image of the books we write? Don’t we wish to elevate science fiction and similar forms so they won’t forever be dismissed by the unthinking majority as pulp or hack books, part of a genre where the writers can safely rely on cliché’d assumptions and where the readership is made up of adolescents and thrill-seekers? It seemed to me that in the quarter-century the Clarke Award has existed it has more often than not highlighted novels at the progressive end of the spectrum, books that make some intellectual or emotional demands on their readers, books which are adult, radical and thought-provoking – refreshingly different, in other words, from the dull complacency of the establishment of literary fiction.

That is one of the reasons I take a serious interest in all this.

Moving on: In a variety of different ways, and by a number of different people, my essay was accused of revealing a fit of the sulks because the books I ‘wanted to win’ were omitted from the shortlist, and this pique made me savage the books that were on the list.

In fact, it was the other way around. This year, unusually, I took an interest in what was coming out and I had read many of the new books that were being thought of as likely candidates. When I saw the actual shortlist I was astonished by what was on it. I won’t go over the same ground as before, but of the six only two were at all radical or challenging (The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, and Embassytown by China Miéville). The other four were, to put it as neutrally as possible, reworkings of familiar SF tropes with no particular distinction of style. I had read the Rogers and the Miéville novels, and thought they were both lacking in the outstanding quality that one instinctively expects in a winner, for different reasons in each case.

So, what else was there? What had the jury passed over in favour of the final six? I suggested four alternatives (by Ian R. MacLeod, Simon Ings, Adam Roberts and Lavie Tidhar). I might have added Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi or The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood … both of them worthwhile exercises in serious slipstream or fantastic literature.

None of these books was a ‘favourite’ of mine, but I felt (and still feel) that a good case could be made out for each one: Tidhar is a fresh and emerging writer, MacLeod is a great stylist, The Godless Boys is a first novel by a young writer showing real promise, Roberts is experimenting in an interesting way with different modes of storytelling … and so on.

It’s not for me to say that any one of these (or any other novel) should be the winner. The real point here was not the individual titles, but what the function of the shortlist might be.

In some respects the Clarke shortlist is as important as the choice of the eventual winner. It represents an interim stage, the six ‘best’ books as arrived at by the jury, but it is also a sort of showcase. It receives publicity, and many booksellers set up a separate stand or table for the shortlisted titles. Because of this, we hope and expect the shortlist will be varied and excellent. The eventual winner should be primus inter pares, a well selected and defensible leader of a strong pack.

An interesting example of how not to build a shortlist came last year, in the six finalists for the Man Booker Prize. Five weak choices were in ‘competition’ with The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Although Barnes’s novel was itself a poor effort (my review of it can be found on the Recent page on this site), it was perceived to be in a different league from the others. Barnes was presented with an open goal, he took a feeble kick and the ball wobbled unconvincingly into the net. His win gave him a cash prize and best-selling status, but it did nothing at all for the cause of literature.

I don’t suppose that this year’s Clarke Award will attract the same amount of derision and hostile publicity as last year’s Booker, but it presents a similar problem. The stand-out novel on the Clarke shortlist is Embassytown by China Miéville, and Miéville has an open goal before him. It seems likely to me that if this panel of judges makes a structured decision they will opt for Embassytown as winner.

What sort of message would be sent out by that? Miéville has won three Clarkes already – does this mean he is the best the genre can offer? Is he the only writer in the English language who can consistently produce the best SF novel in a year? That reasoning alone would make his novel a poor choice, but as I argued in my earlier essay Embassytown is a problem. Miéville is gifted, imaginative and talented, and seems capable of producing some truly spectacular and ground-breaking books. Those novels must be for the future, because Embassytown is not one of them. It has too much wrong with it: genre assumptions, poor characterization, flat descriptive values. It is idea-driven from the top of the head, not wrought from the bottom of the heart.

Let’s turn to the problem of personal attacks, something I was accused of to the point where I began to wonder about the nature of reality.

There is as far as I can see only one personal remark in the whole essay. That is about China Miéville, and this is what I said: I like China as a person, and in his unsought role of media-friendly spokesperson for the SF world he has done well and has not aroused controversy. He is obviously serious about writing, believes in the weird or the speculative novel as a genuine force in literature, and aims high. He is an enterprising writer who comes up with some excellent ideas, and many of his images are memorable and effective.

Every other remark in the essay was about either books or events. I was concerned with the writing found in a book, or the type of book that was being written, or the overall performance of the panel of judges.

A couple of thoughts on this, that might explain what happened. Books are often personified. People say ‘I love Anne McCaffrey’, or ‘I can’t stand J. G. Ballard’, when what they really mean is that they love McCaffrey’s books or dislike Ballard’s work. We all fall into this. We say ‘there’s a new Aldiss out’, or ‘M. John Harrison has been attacked in a review’. We connect the work with the person of the writer – I assume that people who said my comments were ad hominem were subconsciously making this kind of connection.

I present as the only thing I am, which is a writer. If one writer criticizes another there is an assumption of what lawyers call ‘parity of arms’. In other words, I hold no ground higher than any other writer, and if I say I like or dislike any particular book (and by extension, any particular writer’s work), then the ground rules are clear. I am as vulnerable to this sort of thing as any other writer. (It might be worth noting that of all the writers whose work I ‘attacked’, not a single one has so far complained. Charlie Stross, indeed, took the whole thing in good part, and embraced the term ‘internet puppy’ with cries of happiness. The phrase was used of the way he wrote, not the person he is.) None of the writers whose books are shortlisted is to blame for the situation. To paraphrase myself from above, their latest book happened to be submitted by their publisher, and happened to be chosen by a group of judges.

The responsibility for the duff shortlist remains entirely with the judges.

My essay was variously described as a ‘rant’ (the most common word used), a ‘tantrum’, a ‘tirade’, a ‘savaging’, and more. One writer even complained on Twitter that I must have written it while drunk. (In fact I rarely touch alcohol – you see what I mean about unworthy remarks?) Those who objected to the style of the essay seemed to be saying that it was all very well commenting on the books, and the judges’ decision, but there was no need to go ranting on so hysterically.

All I can say (sincerely) is sorry if the tone offended, because offence was not intended.

Reaction certainly was. Books matter; literature matters; speculative fiction matters more than anything, because that is where I work. The Clarke Award is not a negligible thing. I wanted to provoke a response, get people to discuss these issues, talk about the books, think hard about what we want an award like the Clarke to stand for. The essay went viral soon after it appeared, so I suppose that wish was granted. I was sorry so much of that comment was focused on me and my presumed motives, but in the first place I didn’t really mind, and secondly once people got that off their chests a good number of them did get down to the issues I had raised.

I saw the original essay as a polemic, a pamphlet. It took an intemperate tone because I felt intemperate about the subject. Rhetorical flourishes abounded, which some found cheap. When I discovered that The Waters Rising was a long-winded quest saga with a talking horse (and later, a talking chipmunk), I said aloud, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ When I came to write my essay, no other phrase seemed capable of rising to the occasion. It’s not a measured, rational or literary response, it’s a cry of heartfelt despair, not at the author, nor even the publisher who submitted it, but at the apparently experienced and supposedly reasonable judges who singled it out of a field of 60 books and nominated it as one of the best of the year.

The conclusion I came to was that the judges this year had failed. How deep that failure really was is something they are going to have to deal with on 2nd May this year. They have made a rod for their own backs: they are going to have to select one title from their six deficient choices and declare it the winner. Which one will it be?

If they make a rational choice by discounting other books, it will probably be Embassytown by China Miéville.

If they choose the book which I like best (a strictly qualified description, as although there is much to admire in it the small scope of the book does not make it a natural winner) it will be The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers.

But if you ask me which book is really going to win, then I say Rule 34 by Charles Stross. Just because.

I had to dash away from Eastercon immediately after the end of the BSFA Awards ceremony. My son Simon was returning home from uni and had no latch key. Also, no trains were running between Battle and Hastings, and I wanted to collect him. All this meant I wasn’t able to hang around after the ceremony.

So this is the moment to say Many Thanks to anyone who voted for The Islanders. I have always enjoyed the BSFA Award events at cons: year after year they create a good feeling of unity, and a sort of warm enthusiasm for the work that has been done in the year. It’s especially pleasant to be a beneficiary of all that. I now own a ray-gun.

In its original version the long post below, about the 2012 shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, opened with a few caustic remarks about the thrillers of Mark Billingham, which I do not like. I started the post as an informal update about the Oxford Festival, but the essay quickly took a new direction and I launched into the long and now fairly notorious polemic about the Clarke shortlist. Some four hours later, the opening lines about Mark Billingham still seemed to be relevant, as he and I had been debating genre orthodoxies at the Festival. I left them in place.

However, several people have pointed out that Mr Billingham has nothing at all to do with the Clarke Award, and my acerbic comments looked like a gratuitous attack on him. It was not intended that way, but with enough time having passed I took the point. I’ve therefore removed all mention of Mark Billingham from the essay, which otherwise remains untouched. Apologies to Mark Billingham for the unintentional but clumsy crossfire.

In person Mark Billingham is articulate and pleasant, and we got along fine while we worked together. I still didn’t like his books, but that was irrelevant on the day. He was pretty upset when I published what I did, but we swiftly exchanged a few emails and peace has been restored. Ruffled feathers have been smoothed, hurt feelings alleviated. He probably won’t like my stuff.

Incidentally, Charlie Stross has acted with vast and good-humoured magnanimity after my remarks about his book, below. He probably doesn’t like my stuff either, but at least we laugh about the same things. Go Charlie!

Just back from an appearance at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, in the preternaturally warm March weather. Oxford looked ravishing, the sandstone colleges and quads glowing in the sunshine, the rivers calm and peaceful, sunbathers and walkers everywhere. The trees stood wintry and leafless above, casting stark shadows over the meadows. It was a time for reflection.

As we arrived in Oxford, the shortlist for the 2012 Clarke Award was announced, providing much material for that reflection.

This year I took an interest in the books that were being tipped for the award, and as a consequence I’m in the unusual position of having read almost everything that is either on the final shortlist as announced, or which narrowly missed being on it.

It seems to me that 2011 was a poor year for science fiction. Of the sixty books submitted by publishers, only a tiny handful were suitable for awards. The brutal reality is that there were fewer than the six needed for the Clarke shortlist. Many of the submissions were fantasy of the least ambitious type, and many of the science fiction titles were firmly embedded in genre orthodoxies, to their own huge disadvantage and discredit. Discounting all those submissions did not leave many competitors at the top.

This first impression led naturally to a question that is often asked: what is an award like the Clarke actually for? Well, obviously to reward a writer who is seen to have done well that year. But there is the less often admitted reward for the sponsor, in this case the late Arthur C. Clarke, who evidently liked the idea of a literary award named after him. But with Sir Arthur now gone to the great communications satellite in the sky, the remaining collective motive must be to make some kind of statement to the larger world about the condition of science fiction writing in the present day. We want the best writer to win every year, but we also want to have a showcase to demonstrate that he or she is the best of an exciting bunch, that the overall activity is a progressive, modern literature, with diversity and ambition and ability, and not the pool of generic rehashing that the many outside detractors of science fiction are so quick to assume it is.

In short, the winner of the award must be found within an excellent shortlist, that the win must seem to have been hard-won, and that the choice was the result of reasoned argument and intelligent debate amongst the judges.

So let’s consider the shortlist the judges have come up with in 2012. I’ll begin, briefly, with a note of what they have not included.

Three novels, perhaps four, are outstandingly ignored. In some other year, and to some other group of judges, any of these novels or perhaps all of them would have been seen as natural choices for the shortlist.

Ian R. MacLeod is a former winner of the Clarke (as well as being one of the most consistently excellent stylists in British science fiction). His novel Wake Up and Dream (PS Publishing) makes an eccentric choice in its plot, in casting the actor Clark Gable as a private eye, which some might think counts against it, but MacLeod writes witty, inventive and attractive prose, always compulsively readable, and with a flair for a surprising narrative. He is one of the writers we should be most proud of. To have omitted his new novel is inexplicable.

Just as mystifying is the omission of Simon Ings’s novel Dead Water (Corvus). This is modern science fiction in full pomp: it has a multitude of ideas, a wide-ranging narrative, an almost unbelievably ambitious casting of its net, taking one narrative chance after another. It is also a beautifully written novel, full of colour and inventive image. It is a book that should be standing as a hot favourite to win the award, not one to be discarded as an also-ran.

I am a fairly well known dissident from Adam Roberts’s fiction (at least, well known as such to Mr Roberts), but that was in a negative review I wrote in 2004 of his novel Snow. The years have passed. Roberts has emerged as one of our very best critics of science fiction, arguing in an informed way, and in eloquent and readable English, for the books he discusses. Not at all discouraged by my snotty remarks in the Guardian he has gone on writing novels with energy and increasing skill. I saw a couple of negative reviews of his new novel By Light Alone (Gollancz), but what was described as the silly idea of the novel made me laugh, and I sensed an ironic intelligence at work and some sophisticated satire in the book. I have not been able to read all of it in the time available, but I read about the first 80 pages and I liked what I found. I plan to finish it soon. It is a most unusual and amusing book, with many wicked satirical moments. Adam Roberts has been shortlisted before – it is amazing that he should be ignored this time.

Finally, Lavie Tidhar’s novel Osama (PS Publishing). Mr Tidhar is exactly the kind of writer to whom the Clarke Award should be drawing attention. He is young, ambitious, skilled and original. Osama is an ingenious inversion of modern history: Osama bin Laden is the central character in a string of pulp novels allegedly written by one Mike Longschott. The terrorist crimes we normally attribute to bin Laden exist, in this novel, in a different realm. There is excellent, evocative and atmospheric description, as well as much well-written action and plotting. The book, incidentally, is a beautiful production, an edition sure to be highly collectible in the future. Whether or not Osama might actually win the award (in an alternative universe in which the present Clarke judges have no say) is not for me to guess at, but the fact that Lavie Tidhar has not been shortlisted is an outrage.

Speaking of outrages, let’s turn to the shortlist with which we have actually been presented.

Of the six shortlisted novels, I can find only one which I think is something we should be proud of. I refer to The Testament of Jessie Lamb, by Jane Rogers (Sandstone Press). Ms Rogers is a successful and intelligent writer from what the SF world calls the ‘mainstream’. Her venture into speculative fiction gave her career an unexpected setback, in that none of the trade publishers would accept it. It eventually appeared from Sandstone, a tiny indie publisher based in Dingwall, Ross-shire. It was quickly recognized by many commentators in the SF community as a work of real interest, and to the credit of the judges (the only one they deserve) it has made it to the shortlist. If this alone encourages Ms Rogers to try her hand at more speculative fiction in future then the whole business has been justified. It is not to my mind a wholly achieved novel: it is written with real style, excellent characterization and a lot of genuine emotion, but to be fully realized as a work of speculative fiction it needs a wider canvas, a sense that larger events are mounting in the background. However, it deserves its place on the Clarke shortlist, and if things go on as they are at present it ought to win.

Let me now turn to the most highly argued novel, for and against, on the list: Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan). For reasons some people might readily understand, I have not until now had anything to say about this novel, but events have freed me. I like China as a person, and in his unsought role of media-friendly spokesperson for the SF world he has done well and has not aroused controversy. He is obviously serious about writing, believes in the weird or the speculative novel as a genuine force in literature, and aims high. He is an enterprising writer who comes up with some excellent ideas, and many of his images are memorable and effective.

Miéville has already won the Clarke Award three times – which is not his fault, and one assumes not his intention. No doubt he is pleased to have done so. His current novel is the leading contender for this year’s award, and if it becomes the winner then it will be his fourth. Again, not his fault and not apparently what he necessarily seeks, but also it’s safe to assume he would not turn it down.

However, a fourth award to this writer would send out a misleading and damaging message to the world at large: it suggests that not only is Mr Miéville the best the SF world can offer at the moment, he is shown to be more or less the only writer worth reading. Worse even than this, it would send a misleading message to China Miéville himself.

Although Miéville is clearly talented, he does not work hard enough. For a novel about language, Embassytown contains many careless solecisms, which either Mr Miéville or his editor should have dealt with. This isn’t the place to go into a long textual analysis, but (for example) a writer at his level should never use ‘alright’ so often or so unembarrassedly. He also uses far too many neologisms or SF nonce-words, which drive home the fact that he is defined and limited by the expectations of a genre audience. On the first few pages, alone, he uses the words ‘shiftparents’, ‘voidcraft’, ‘yearsends’, ‘trid’, ‘vespcams’, ‘miab’, ‘plastone’, ‘hostnest’, ‘altoysterman’ … Yes, of course, it’s possible to work out what most of these might mean (or to wait until another context makes them clearer), but it is exactly this use of made-up nouns that makes many people find science fiction arcane or excluding. A better writer would find a more effective way of suggesting strangeness or an alien environment than by just ramming words together. Resorting to wordplay is lazy writing.

I also find Miéville’s lack of characterization a sign of author indifference: Embassytown is full of names, full of people, but mostly they just chat away to each other, interchangeably and indistinguishably. And for a writer who makes so much of ambience, China Miéville’s fiction lacks a sense of place: this is not the same as a lack of description, as there is a lot of that, but a way of using a physical environment as something the characters notice, respond to, feel themselves to be a part of, so that the reader can also sense and respond to it. In Embassytown there is scene after scene in which these weakly drawn characters twitter away to each other in what might be a field or an airport terminal or someone’s front room, for all the lack of evocation the author manages.

This is not to say that Embassytown is a bad novel. It is not, but neither is it a good one. It has too many common flaws that could have been eradicated by a more ruthless editorial process in the writing, or even more simply by an extra draft of the manuscript. Nor does it suggest that Miéville is a poor or failing writer: he is obviously not, but unless he is told in clear terms that he is under-achieving, that he is restricting his art by depending too heavily on genre commonplaces, he will never write the great novels that many people say he is capable of. In the short term, to imply that this is the best science fiction novel of the current year by giving it a prize, or even shortlisting it for one, is just plain wrong.

Let me deal quickly with the rest of the shortlist. It is indefensible that a novel like Charles Stross’s Rule 34 (Orbit) should be given apparent credibility by an appearance in the Clarke shortlist. Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet. Stross’s narrative depends on vernacular casualness, with humorous asides, knowing discursiveness, and the occasional appeal of big soft eyes. He has PC Plod characters and he writes och-aye dialogue! To think for even one moment that this appalling and incapable piece of juvenile work might actually be chosen as winner brings on a cold sweat of fear.

Of Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three (Gollancz) there is little to say, except that it is capable in its own way, and hard in the way that some people want SF to be hard, and it keeps alive the great tradition of the SF of the 1940s and 1950s where people get in spaceships to go somewhere to do something. In this case, the unlikely story begins as the interstellar spaceship arrives somewhere. The paragraphs are short, to suit the expected attention-span of the reader. The important words are in italics. Have we lived and fought in vain?

Another nostalgic effort is Drew Magary’s The End Specialist (Harper Voyager). This too is written in the type of fast-moving, quickly comprehensible vernacular that Charles Stross aspires to without success, but in Magary’s case it’s quite effective. It tells the story of a medical treatment that confers a form of immortality on anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare. The new future this creates unfolds inevitably. I was much reminded of past efforts in similar vein: notably Damon Knight’s A for Anything (1961), and various works by writers like Frederik Pohl, William Tenn and Poul Anderson. Not bad precedents with which to be compared, perhaps, but this is not a literature of reminders, of retreads, of slightly updated versions of existing works. Speculative fiction is for the present, on the cutting edge, looking forward, not back. But remember what these Clarke judges have already done! Magary could win with this book; brace yourself.

Sheri S. Tepper’s The Waters Rising (Gollancz) – how can one describe it? For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’.

Let’s move on to the point of all this.

We have a dreadful shortlist put together by a set of judges who were not fit for purpose. They were incompetent. Their incompetence was made more problematical because the overall quality of the fiction in the year in question was poor. They did not know how to resolve this. They played what they saw as safe.

They failed themselves, they failed the Clarke Award, and they failed anyone who takes a serious interest in speculative fiction.

You sometimes see past jury members trying to rationalize their role in the final decision. ‘Listen, I wanted BOOK A to be on the list, but I was out-voted by the others. However, I did manage to get BOOK B up there. Yes, I know BOOK C is terrible, but we argued about it for two hours, and in the end I agreed to it being on the list if we had BOOK D on the list too.’

A jury decision is a joint and collective decision. Whatever the process of discussion, whatever compromises are made en route to a decision, everyone on the panel is responsible for the outcome. There will always be minority opinion, but it becomes irrelevant at the end. If someone on the panel is in total and serious disagreement with the others, then the only course is to say so publicly, then to resign.

Of the existing Clarke shortlist, we have heard no dissent from any of the panel. Here is Andrew M. Butler, quoted on the Guardian website (26th March 2011): “[The shortlist]’s got something for everyone: alien contact, post-apocalyptic disaster, near future cyberpunkish police procedural,” he said, adding that the variety demonstrates the health of the SF scene. “It’s exciting because you can’t fit it in a box.”

Andrew Butler has thus endorsed the decision of the panel, and therefore reveals himself as incompetent as the others.

The easy way out of this problem is to do nothing. We wait for 2nd May, we troop along to the awards ceremony and we wait for the decision to be announced. In a sense, it does not matter which one of the six books is announced, because all of them are deficient in the ways I have described. (If this happens, I hope the winner is Jane Rogers, because the deficiencies in her novel are much less serious than those in the others.) The true winner of the award, the writer of the best book of last year, will never be known, because he or she is not on the shortlist.

But there is a better way forward, and here it is.
1. The present panel of judges should be fired, or forced to resign, immediately. Their names are Juliet E. McKenna, Martin Lewis, Phil Nanson, Nikkianne Moody and Rob Grant. Chairman Andrew M. Butler should also resign. These people have proved themselves incompetent as judges, and should not be allowed to have any more say about or influence on the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
2. The 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award should be suspended forthwith, and the planned awards ceremony on 2nd May should be cancelled.
3. The award fund (£2,012.00, as I understand it) should be held over until next year. Next year’s fund should be added to it, so that the prize for 2013 becomes £4,013.00.
4. The 2013 Clarke Award should be made to the best novel published in the two years ended 31st December 2012. All novels currently eligible for the 2012 award, whether or not they have been shortlisted by this year’s panel, are eligible again.
5. All the other usual rules of the Award should be applied.

And just in case this modest suggestion of mine is taken up, let me add one final thing:

If enough people seem to think that I have proposed this in my own interests, and that it is an attempt to have my own work made eligible once again, then I would withdraw my novel The Islanders from competition. If that does not satisfy such people, then the 2013 eligibility could be based simply on the books from 2012: and the doubled award be given to one of them. I have nothing published in 2012 that would be eligible.

 

On Friday last week and without any warning, the Independent published the crossword below, no. 7919 in their excellent series, and compiled by ‘Phi’. I consider it to be an honour, in spite of 1 Down, which if I were feeling a bit paranoid I might interpret as a comment on my style. Even in the glory years of his reviewing, Rat Animism (anag. 6, 4) never quite got around to using this particular word when praising my novels, but exhausted every other synonym from that page of the thesaurus. 8 Down also has the potential for pejorative use, but that’s another one I don’t take too seriously.

The image should be more legible when enlarged, but if anyone would like a clearer copy drop me a line and I will send it as an attachment.

I’m grateful to Paul Dormer for spotting this, and to Dave Langford for passing on the news with enough time left for me to dash out and buy a copy of the paper before it became yesterday’s recycle stuff.

Answers are published here.

Rog Peyton has asked me to mention that I shall be giving a talk to Birmingham SF Group (Brum Group, as I’ve known it for nearly half a century) in a couple of weeks. Probably just as well that he reminded me, as those fifty years are starting to take their toll on memory.

DATE: Friday, 9^th March. TIME: 8:00pm. In the conference room on the first floor of The Briar Rose Hotel, Bennetts Hill, which is off New Street. All welcome, including non-members. (Admission for  non-members is £4.00. You don’t have to book — just turn up.)

 

Today’s copy of the Guardian contains my obituary of Sam Youd, ‘John Christopher’, who died at the weekend. Like many obituaries, this was written to a tight deadline: I had less than four hours in which to research and write the piece, the research side of it being complicated by the fact that because of the heavy snow I was unable to get out of the house to consult more than the reference books I have on my shelf, and the internet.

One of the more irrelevant things I wanted to say (but lacked the space, so I suppose it was fortunate) was to remark on the weather. Sam Youd was born in a white-out blizzard in 1922; one of his best books was The World in Winter, published in a Penguin paperback during a terrible freeze in the early 1960s (I well remember buying it at an icy bookstall in Liverpool Street station); he died during the coldest weekend so far of this winter.

(Further text deleted.)

 

I don’t know Adrian Hon, but he has an amazing way of thinking. His website Mssv has an analysis of The Islanders of such fierce intelligence that I gibbered in the cupboard under the stairs for half an hour afterwards. It’s an analysis, not a review, and whether he liked the book or not remains unsaid.

His chart of the islander themes is as close to a map of the Dream Archipelago as I’d allow. (I execrate the inclusion of maps in novels, as many people know.) But Hon’s chart is just that: a kind of flowchart of the psychic connections between islands and islanders. While not endorsing it entirely (I’m not certain I agree with it all) I’m happy to pass it on, partly for your pleasure of encountering an original thinker. While on his website, have a browse around. A lot of interesting stuff there.

Some remarkably pleasant people in Hollywood are about to make a film based on something I’ve written. It’s the story of two stage magicians, and it tells what happens when …

Familiar stuff, perhaps, but this one is nothing to do with a certain blockbuster movie made a few years ago by Christopher Nolan. This one is also about stage magic, but in a completely different way. It’s based on a short story I wrote last year, under fairly unusual circumstances. It was commissioned by a well-known multinational bank based in London, and was published within one of their in-house training packages. My brief was identity theft, a fact that I report now with a straight face. I called the story “The Stooge”, and it concerns the kind of identity theft that banks don’t normally worry about. (They understood the metaphor, thank goodness, and they printed the story.)

After the book was printed I took another look at the story and thought how much I should like to see it performed on film. It’s short and sharp and its metaphorical theft of identity has a pleasing amount of naughtiness in it. On spec I wrote a script based on the story. It was intended to be no more than a short film, with a running time of less than about 20 minutes, so it would almost certainly never receive a trade showing — but even so.  In past years I have served on film festival juries so I have a good working knowledge of the kind of stories that are entered in the short film competitions. I thought “The Stooge” would put up a good showing at festivals, if only I could find someone to film it.

Then I did. I suddenly found myself back in contact with an old friend in Los Angeles: Rogelio Fojo. For years Rogelio has had long-term plans to film one of my books, but has always been too busy to get around to it. Unexpectedly, on this occasion we both got our timing right. When he found out about “The Stooge”, a deal was done within a week.

Rogelio has since assembled a small team of experienced production professionals, and to my amazement they actually seem about to shoot the film. They are casting the main roles at the moment.

So here is a glimpse of what they are planning. It is a teaser pre-announcing the film called The Stooge, short and sweet (none of the naughty stuff), and is best seen at FULL SCREEN and with the volume turned up a little! Write to me c/o the Contact page on this site and let me know what you think?

Click here for Rogelio’s deft little Teaser.