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Awards season rolls around once more, and so it is time for our annual discussion of the Clarke Award shortlist.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. It’s one of the biggest UK based SFF awards but rather less prominent internationally than the likes of the Hugo, Nebula or World Fantasy. It’s a juried award whose judges are drawn from members of the various groups who support it, currently the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival. Jury members vary year on year, but over the lifetime of the award, the Clarke has tended to identify a particular vibe of SF, and often provided a shortlist which sits in noticeable contrast to the others looking at that year’s SF.
Joining me for this discussion is Dan Hartland, who is Reviews Editor at Strange Horizons, for which organ he has reviewed Clarke Award shortlists several times in the past. He’s also a columnist at Ancillary Review of Books, and has reviewed for Foundation, Vector, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the rest.
This year, the shortlist is as follows:
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Luminous by Silvia Park
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift
The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson
Roseanna: Before we get stuck into the shortlist, a question for you - what’s the appeal of the Clarke, why do you pay attention to it, discuss it, read it? What’s the draw?
Dan: Is “habit” a good enough answer? I think in some ways it’s the most honest: I read the Clarke in the same way I read the Women’s Prize or Booker shortlists every year. It’s just a thing I do.
As so many awards become, a lot of the Clarke’s attraction is simply that it’s a fixture, a regular moment to take stock, an annual local tournament where you can see a few lucky sides duke it out. If nothing else, it’s a reliable entertainment.
If I were going to be slightly less flip - only slightly! - I’d say what makes the Clarke worth noticing is that it offers a usefully (though not often transformationally) non-American view of Anglophone SF and, at least theoretically, a different view of what makes for a “good” book than we might get from awards granted via popular vote. Something about the juried nature of the Clarke - and where those jurors come from - grants it the capacity to recognise the odd or the alienating, the difficult or the path-breaking, in a way that is generative for the genre and less likely in more avowedly “crowd-sourced” shortlists. That doesn’t mean it’s a better barometer of where SF is at than, say, the Hugo Award for Best Novel; but it at least offers the potential for an alternative view - and that’s interesting.
Roseanna: There are no bad answers. Well, ok, I’m sure there are somewhere, but this isn’t one of them. Given that mine is “my partner was doing it and he made it seem interesting”, all paths to Clarke are accepted here. And it is interesting, for exactly that counter-to-the-crowd reason you cite, yes, but also because of the discussion it seems to generate every year. Not only that there usually is some, but that it’s often in-depth, critical, thoughtful in a way that I always find myself wanting to join in with.
And so, the annual Clarke discussion post.
To kick off the conversation this year, one of the books we’d both already got to before the shortlist was announced: When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift. The novel follows two women’s lives in the UK, starting a few years in our past and heading decades into the future. Through their work and passions - documentary film-making and activism - Swift unfolds a potential future, year by year, through climate change and political shifts, with a particular eye to nature and the human relationship with it.
I loved this. I have mostly-jokingly said more than once in the run-up to the shortlist being announced that if this didn’t make the cut I would riot. It’s not just because it’s good (though I do think it is), but also because, to me, it feels extremely engaged with what I perceive as the Clarke’s general vibe. It’s got the science fiction, obviously, but it’s also attempting something a little bit different, with a strong prose voice and maybe taking a little step towards literary pretensions (complimentary). What are your thoughts?
Dan: Yeah, it is just written extremely well. Every now and then, I open a book which immediately gives me confidence - which reminds me what it feels like to read what is possible from a honest-to-goodness novelist. Wolves gave me that feeling from page one - Swift’s style is just so well controlled, yet in a way which allows it also to feel very free and open.
This gives the book simultaneously an authority and a generosity which grants the reader an unusually rich experience - and permits the novel to achieve its own ends with a kind of open-ended totality. One is entirely convinced by the totality of this novel’s future, whilst also being made - sometimes explicitly - aware that it is a contingent one, and experientially quite different for the many individuals who populate it. This is rare stuff!
If that latter focus is what makes a novel “literary”, then certainly we have a piece of literary fiction here: dwelling on people, on subjectivity, on evocation of what it is to be. But in that other focal point we also have a book keenly interested in that which operates in much literary fiction as mere backdrop: fittingly for a work of climate fiction, the ways in which this novel’s society is constructed are approached critically, rather than accepted as the mere air its characters breathe. So what emerges, too, is a piece of political fiction, a story which - for all the very fine qualities of its design - is not an ornamental show-piece but a kind of tool for achieving something. That is, it’s a sort of very finely-wrought mallet. It’s quite a trick.
I wonder what you made of the ends to which the tool is put? This isn’t a hammer that smashes things, is it? It’s one that helps bend and fix-in-place - the novel believes we can build better things without going through what in much SF currently is very modish - a dystopian phase of collapse. While I was persuaded by Jacqui Nyathi when I spoke with her on Critical Friends that the novel isn’t entirely convincing on this front, Swift seems to want to show how the systems we already have might be redeemable. (It might be interesting in this sense, too, that she’s chosen the voice of the bourgeois literary novel.)
Roseanna: That is exactly one of the things I found myself coming back to when thinking about it - there’s a fundamental sense here that the system could work which I find far more optimistic and utopian than the ending we get. It feels simultaneously compelling and treacherous. Is it weird to say also “very libdem*”? But you’re right - we have plenty of burn-it-down novels, and plenty with someone working inside the system to bring it down less violently, but few which explore the idea that the system could work well. And as well as the voice of the bourgeois literary novel, it’s an idea that relies on the co-operation of about as in-system a thing as is possible, the monarchy, for the beneficial end result.
But I think that - surprisingly plausible - optimism about systems is also why I found it so desperately sad in a way that the burn-it-down novels never manage. Swift has created a world that is such a small sidestep away from ours that it emphasises how avoidable the horrors are, even as we experience them. The power of that proximity really works for me, especially through some of the most emotional chapters (I don’t know about you, but 2035 brought me very close to tears).
Swift is balancing the political and the emotional extremely well, having them pull together rather than as parallel paths. The personal as political, to mangle a phrase.
Dan: Yes, you’re absolutely right to raise how moving the novel can sometimes be. There’s some especially wonderful nature writing in the book which really makes the reader feel how important its characters’ rewilding projects are, and how deep the loss of habitats should be felt. As you say, that’s a very effective fusing of emotionality and politics, and that balancing happens in many ways throughout: it’s interesting you mentioned the 2035 chapter, because - although it does feature death and extinction - it also includes a hilariously slapstick encounter with a cartoon fascist. The novel can be quite broad when it wants to be; it inhabits several registers without coming across as awkward.
That said, I wonder why the jury shortlisted it. We can only really speak to our reactions to the text, of course, but responding to shortlists always involves a bit of second-guessing - and do you think it was the nature of the politics or the quality of the writing which commended this book to them? I know, I know …
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But also, I ask because something about another novel on this shortlist, Luminous by Silvia Park, prompts me to do so. Because I found this novel equally “political” but decidedly less well written … I don’t mean by this that the book is incompetent or even ineffective - it treats its central conceit of robotics in a (too?) wide variety of interesting ways. But I do mean to say the prose style is not nearly so fully developed. In this, I mostly agree with Adam Roberts in The Guardian, who praises the novel as an important work of SFF, but quibbles with it as a piece of writing: “Luminous betrays some roughness. It is too long [ … t]he pacing is uneven, the plotting a little messy. Stylistically it is vibrant, sometimes funny and memorable, although the prose can stray into oddness”.
We get a lot of hardboiled-by-numbers sentences (“It was near midnight when Jun found Eli’s kidnapper”); some nails-on-blackboard effects (“he had a gimlet gaze … that seemed to trump time”); and many attempts at winking wit which wind up only weakly winsome (“The museum turned out to be excruciatingly wheelchair friendly”). As Roberts also notes in his review, the structure and tone of the book feels a bit off, too: parts of it read like YA, other parts of it feel as if stretching towards Harrisonian pastiche, Nova Swing for the AI crowd. These don’t quite cohere, and they ramble, sometimes trying the patience of this reader, at least. Yet what the book does with its various robotic novums is often very interesting and even moving. I’m only poking at the novel’s weaker side to try and understand the jury … so maybe you should help me understand the book?
Roseanna: Is it novums or nova? Novipodes? Anyway. I loved it. The thing I find interesting here is I’ve had to pick the book up again to look at the prose because it didn’t make any impact on me enough to last, which usually means the prose was “fine”. And so I can’t find it in myself to argue with you, I’m not a passionate defender of its deathlessness, but I certainly didn’t find it getting out the ol’ mental cheese grater at all.
More critical for me were those novipodes, and how well they are handled as ideas. There are several going on, some about memory and about relationships, but one particular one about robot consciousness. And this is where I think the book shines because it felt at least to me like Park managed just the right amount of alienation of the robot perspective - they really are not human - while maintaining a lot of sympathy.
On two fronts, it feels like Luminous solves the problems of last year’s Clarke winner, Annie Bot - it juggles multiple threads but has them come together to feel like a meaningful, coherent thing rather than a mess of possibilities, and it grapples with the idea of another mind that is truly other while being truly worthy of respect, love and fellowship. So many robot stories have their protagonists just be shiny humans; Luminous doesn’t do that. In contrast to your shaggy dog feeling of it, it felt much tighter to me… but constantly in contrast with other things. I’m now not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
Dan: Ah, the Annie Bot of it all. It’s funny: I’ve not written anywhere about last year’s winner or shortlist, but I think I admire the book a bit more than most, and certainly on a craft level I think it’s more accomplished than Luminous. But I agree that on an ideas level, Park has thought through their conceits in a properly science fictional way. In that sense, it feels like we agree-while-disagreeing-a-bit on Luminous. We both sort of find its ideas compelling while sort of finding its execution workaday, albeit while placing different emphasis on different points of those scales?
But maybe this brings us to Dungeon Crawler Carl. I say this because of an exchange I had with a Strange Horizons reviewer just after this year’s shortlist was announced. Said reviewer had enthusiastically pitched me a piece about the book last year; I’d turned them down, because the idea of the book just didn’t feel sufficiently interesting. “You were right and I was wrong!” I wrote to said reviewer when the shortlist came out. Their response? “No, the book is absolutely not good enough for the Clarke shortlist.” I mean, with friends like these …
How did you find it?
Roseanna: In a word - difficult.
Since the shortlist was announced, there’s been plenty of discussion of Dungeon Crawler Carl’s inclusion because it was indeed a bit of a surprise. One of the things I’ve seen pulled out in the discussions of the people who like the book is the very evident anticapitalism, the anger the book clearly has about the corporate entity running the show. It’s a story about a guy whose world has been destroyed, billions of people killed, and he’s at the mercy of people he can’t see, forced to fight for his life. Absolutely, there’s a rage about systems, and it comes out most obviously when the narrative makes clear how even the functionaries the reader sees are trapped, many of them with just as few options as the “crawlers” like the titular Carl who have to fight for their lives. The book spends a lot of time putting Carl in difficult positions, forcing him to do horrible things he feels horrible about as part of this. It’s meant to be difficult, it’s meant to suck and highlight how systems suck.
But… I don’t think what it’s doing is worth how it’s doing it.
I’ve read books that do this kind of “behold the horrors of the system” approach, great ones even, like Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. I know what it’s like to read a book that uses horrible acts to get you on-side with the message, and can really respect it as an approach when done well. I just don’t think it’s being done as well here. It’s a combination ofthings like the edgy, transgressive-feeling humour (and how often things feel like they are trying to be humorous), the way violence is portrayed and quite how much of it you read through, how quickly some horrible things are glossed over, and many things that are dropped in unexamined, that I really think needed examining if they were going to be used like that. There are some things that need to be done carefully and purposefully to get their full heft, and I just was feeling neither the care nor the purpose in sufficient quantities to fully buy into it.
The two areas that stuck out for me particularly were gender, and the constant ease with which Dinniman turns to fatness as a way of describing unpleasant things. Neither of these tended to feel like points that served the wider anger of the book - they felt more like a reflection of some unexamined biases. And the unpleasant tinge those brought made the whole thing feel quite dated for me, which was then exacerbated by the fact the author thinks it makes sense for a 27 year old man’s culture reference points to be Knight Rider and The A-Team and MacGyver.
So… yeah. Not a fan. How about you?
Dan: I think you’re so right to land on Chain-Gang All Stars as a comparator - not least of course because it was relatively recently shortlisted for, er, the Clarke Award. There was a brutal, gory novel about systems and injustice - indeed, which couched those themes within the frame of a game - which I think most people, or at least the National Book Award, would agree slapped. What’s interesting about Dungeon Crawler Carl, though, is that some people think it slapped. And we are talking in some cases people whose opinions we usually jive with.
As I read the book, I tried to account for this. One thing some might say is that the jury is making some sort of statement about popular fiction, and through that even about class. If When There Are Wolves Again is a bit Lib Dem, maybe Dungeon Crawler Carl is a bit Blue Labour**. It is anti-corporate in a glib kind of way, pro-worker in quite a narrow fashion, bluntly aware as you say of systemic injustice. It wants to make us angry by showing us bad things.
But (and?) Dinniman’s book is also - sometimes in effect or implication or through as you note assumption rather than explicitly or self-avowedly - pretty conservative: it is robustly anti-intellectual, for one (contrast the workaday unshowiness of the largely competent prose with the failures of ambition in Luminous); its sense of humour usually involves an only occasionally responsible kind of down-punching; and its hero, of course, is a straight white male. Whatever the radicalism of this book, it is also yoked to a kind of not only popularism but populism.
Now, for all I know, later in the series Carl persuades his fellow crawlers to join with him in anarcho-syndicalist revolt against the system. But those books have not been shortlisted. The LitRPG structure of this first volume (the expression of which I found repetitive and wearying quite quickly) does not give anyone time or space in which to do much actual revolting.
Roseanna: The LitRPG structure is an important point to pick up, actually. This is the first in the subgenre I’ve read, and I do think it’s worth highlighting as a type of novel that is currently very popular, and also quite different from a lot of what I am used to reading. The thing particularly that stood out to me is how often Dinniman resorts to measurements, rather than comparisons or metaphors or similes. Things aren’t “as warm as a summer’s day”, they’re 80 degrees fahrenheit. There are a LOT of measurements, actually.
The struggle I have is that I find that specificity… unartful? So to what extent am I objecting to this particular book, and to what extent am I saying “this particular subgenre’s habits are extremely not for me”. Unclear! Probably unhelpful! But certainly noticeable.
Dan:Yep, I think this idea - this illusion - of measurability is important. The problem with games is that they approximate rather than mirror reality, their structures are much more complete than the ones in which humans actually live. At one point, Carl “grumbled that the system didn’t give me a choice” (p. 58). Despite the slight deniability that weasel-verb “grumbled” offers him, we are a long way in Dinniman from Sheldon-as-Tiptree’s “chinks in the world machine”. When Carl unlocks yet another of the dungeon’s snarky achievements (“you killed two mobs at once … on a brutality scale of Bambi to Martyrs, that is a solid seven” [p. 199]), or when he levels up a buff, what we are getting is sub-Douglas Adams satire of games, not reality.
When the bloody talking cat is allowed amoralism, Dinniman is placing some of his world’s worst excesses in the form of a cartoon character rather than a human being - and thus escaping with one bound the moral implications of a given scene or event. And when we read another slew of pages about the mechanisms of the senseless game in which Carl finds himself, we are not reading either political analysis or game theory; we are being winked at.
I don’t even think it’s usefully science fiction (it is a para-text, a riff on things that some - maybe a lot - of SF fans also like); I’m not even sure it’s really a novel , or even a complete book. I suspect the judges wanted us to consider popular fiction, and LitRPG, as a form worth rewarding, and I admire that. But is this piece of popular fiction either unusually thoughtful or especially impressive? I don’t think it is, and ultimately we need to judge - ho ho - this as a single book, not a totem for something else.
I mean, it’s not as if we don’t have an example on this very shortlist of a well-edited self-published book which inhabits a popular SFnal idiom and does it with a great deal more elegant and - I think - to more impressive effect. There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, after all, reads at a real rip - and makes a big impact with both its ideas and pace. I’ve compared parts of the printed text with the original version still online, and qntm’s publisher and editor have done fantastic here: the published book is leaner, smarter, cooler. Its origins in the SCP Foundation are still very visible - your serial numbers, sir, they are barely filed off - but particularly in this slicker form the story is also very much its own thing. The novel might be more mind-bendy and its structure - a set of linked short stories which ultimately really do cohere into a single novel - might be non-standard; but this reads like popular fiction - what if The X-Files but self-aware, what if le Carré but Cthulu, what if Southern Reach but Robert Ludlum.
Roseanna: I agree that it coheres, and there’s a definite sense of a whole being built out of the sum of its parts, one that is obviously drawing on various threads of horror and weird that exist within the genre, but alas for me, it just… fell a bit flat.
I was not creeped out at all, which is a surprise, because I am a catastrophic wuss. And it didn’t really touch me, or make me feel much in the way of anything beyond “oh, neat”. Which was fine back when I read it the first time (way before the Clarke shortlist was even a twinkle in the judges’ eyes), because there’s a very good place within the genre for books which are simply fine. But it’s not one I’d look for or put on a shortlist myself.
It’s odd, because on an ideas, craft, plot level, it is pretty neat. It has one idea it does with gusto, and while it isn’t new, it’s a bit updated, which is fun. But there’s something missing at the heart of it, I think. It felt like a triumph of idea over emotion, which is just unfortunately a mode that doesn’t land for me. And then, at the end, I think it rather went off the rails. Not to go too into spoilers, but it felt to me somewhat as though there was a relatively interesting story going on for the first three quarters, and then the author just didn’t quite know how to end things, so tacked on a fairly uninspiring dramatic crescendo that felt out of tone with the much more steadily growing tension that had been the far for the rest of the story.
Nonetheless, I had fun. I too churned through it at pace and would recommend it without qualm to people whose interests I thought it aligned with. But at the same time, it felt for me the very epitome of 3/5 stars, emblematic of “fine”, whereas something like the Southern Reach series felt like it had something… special, I suppose.
Which is a very roundabout way to say “ambivalent”, so I’d be interested to know exactly what about it really grabbed you?
Dan: I think largely it was the craft, which is why I focus on the tight editing. Its terse sentences, willingness to hold back on the reader, and sense of mostly each chapter being a satisfying piece in isolation gave the reading experience a real pace for me. And in particular there’s an interesting motif here - under-played, of which more shortly - that sees human ingenuity as itself the problem: the Division’s researchers only conjure the civilisation-threatening things by learning just enough to press their buttons.
I just gulped it down, it is - dread adjective - cinematic. In a sign of something-something-multimedia-landscape it is in fact already cinema.
But I absolutely agree that something of this frictionlessness came from the absence of contrary currents, of a countervailing human element: that final crescendo depends on you really caring about the principle characters, and … they’re not really characters, are they? There is some of the Dinnimanish omnicompetence in the Division Head Maggie Quinn which never quite lands as a depiction of a person. Partly, this might be deliberate - the antimemes are constantly stealing people of knowledge and memory, which does not allow, really, for anything like consistent characterisation. But the characters don’t really know that - at any one point, they feel themselves to be whole people. So we should be getting more from them than we do.
It might be right to say that the novel’s one (good!) idea is chased after by its heroes but never really caught. In fact, I’m starting to feel like this is a shortlist of often flashy books that don’t quite stand up to scrutiny, and that’s beginning to bother me. Because SF really does need to be - increasingly is, and in fascinating ways not reflected here - more than just the literature of gee-whizz treatments.
Roseanna: Very much agree. I want my SF(F) to be tackling bigger themes, especially when it comes to awards shortlists. Which brings us, I suppose, to the next one on this list, The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson. In a post-disaster future, a college springs up around a girl who can turn the digital ghosts of our technological age into decipherable information, helping them recreate weather forecasts, maps, bathymetric data and the like to help make this extremely turbulent world a bit safer to navigate. Only there’s a rot at the heart of the whole idea, and the protagonist has to grapple with whether the lives they save, the good they do, is worth what it takes to enable them. It’s extremely not gee-whizz.
However it might be another Omelas riff, and also more (maybe less?) importantly, I’m not certain it’s Science Fiction. I think it depends on your definition? Does it being set in the future suffice? 1800 word essay answers only.
Less jokingly, I am interested in this being specifically selected for a science fiction award when it is self-consciously - the author says so herself in the acknowledgements - grappling with dark academia, which is typically a fantasy-aligned genre. It’s doing some stuff, blurring some lines, and I like that about it, and its relentless commitment to atmosphere.
I’m not sure I love it as a whole though - I think too much gets sacrificed at the altar of atmosphere for it to fully cohere, even as it has flashes of excellence. But what do you think? Substantial enough? It certainly feels different to the rest of the shortlist so far.
Dan: In the sense that this book reminded me, in its quasi-mystical novipodes, of a previous Clarke winner, Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire, I don’t want to stomp on the question of genre too much - though I agree that this shortlist feels … not wholly rigorous … in its sense of what SF is. Here, we have as you say a very deliberate entry in dark academia fused with a half-hearted murder mystery. It is much more these things than it is anything like - as in Luminous, for example - a proper science fictional ironing-out of its ideas. The ideas here - digital ghosts, the literal internet literally haunting us - are iiiiiiinteresting, but yet again … do they make sense or go anywhere? I’m not sure they do.
Worse than this, though, is that I’m not sure it’s a very good bit of dark academia or an especially effective murder mystery (I mean, I don’t want to labour this point but more or less the butler did it, for pity’s sake). In fairness to Wilson, she says that she wanted to write dark academia “without any of the trope/vibe trappings” - and I think she manages this. But isn’t dark academia all vibes? It’s not enough to feature a troubled teacher and a corrupted institution, surely? Changing Places isn’t dark academia, right?
So if the book isn’t either of the things it’s principally trying to be, what is it? Well, its characters are a bit interchangeable and are in general insufficiently established to make much impact; its prose is often stumbling and certainly its sense of pace - in fairness to this naval novel, much like a boat becalmed on a hostile sea - comes and goes, often totally. Perhaps the book wants to remind me of a classic like Aliens or Moby Dick: everyone gets picked off one by one until the end, and then there’s an amoral lesson for the survivors, who are about to be thrown from frying pan to fire. But that absence of vigour makes those comparisons a bit sad, too.
So ultimately, I think you’re right to cite the obvious Omelas riff: the book probably rises or falls not on its ideas or its vibes or how it handles its influences but on how moved you are by the plight of its central, imprisoned, child. And I can’t say the treatment of the motif is any more novel here than it was in that one episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I know these beats; without serious invention, they don’t make me wanna dance.
Roseanna: Ok so, in broad strokes, very much agree, but I think the thing I most want to pick up on is the point about the characters - because I want to expand on it a little bit.
Some of the problem I had while reading the novel is a sort of… tonal sameness throughout. The way it skitters between scenes, that stumbling pace, at first feel like they might be intended as characterisation of meek, skittish Auli - it fits, the text being flighty and nervy like her. “Breathless”, is the word I used in my notes, because it’s perpetually stuck keyed up high. But then Wilson switches perspective to Raphaël, whose character seems to be the opposite, stern and businesslike in the face of the general disarray of the situation… but the prose hops, skips and jumps about just as much. It no longer fits as characterisation; it’s just the book. The whole thing is full of short bursts, short sections, never settling on one idea or emotion long enough for it to build up any momentum, and by the end I just found it exhausting.
And for something like dark academia, or a murder mystery (of which, indeed, this is a fairly weak entry - it’s not just whodunnit but how little the narrative makes me care about whodunnit, making the final reveal a double damp squib) - that control of tension and drama is extra critical.
I’m not normally a person to nitpick worldbuilding, but I found myself doing so while reading here, and I think it feeds into that genre problem: if it were a dark academia book, or indeed a murder mystery book, I think we’d have got more internal-to-the-college worldbuilding, a better sense of the interpersonal politicking, to be able to either glean clues or understand the web of connections. If it were a science fiction book though, I think we’d get more of the world at large, more of a sense of what the ghosts are, how they affect the world, how things got to where they are now, why the college is doing what it’s doing, how it’s actually helping… any of that. But we get neither. And so I’m not quite sure what we’re supposed to do with what’s left.
But it’s also missing the kind of payoff I’d expect for any of the genres involved either. The murderer’s discovery is a non-event by the time we get there - other concerns have overriden it. And the Omelas riff has sidestepped any moral engagement because the main character never has to deal with the consequences to the wider world of how she solves the Omelas problem. The book just sort of… chickens out of committing to its premises at the end, so that there can be the happy ending I saw coming a mile off but was fervently hoping would be forestalled by some judicious dramatic deaths instead. I wanted it to commit to something, but it stayed hovering in between.
Dan: Yes to all of that - it gets strangely stuck in all the gaps between its various formulae. In fact, the recurrence of the formulaic is a bit of a theme here: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Antimemetics, arguably Luminous and now The Salt Oracle: aren’t all these books a bit familiar, a tad jejune, a trifle beige? Like, is there anything really challenging in how these books treat their purported Difficult Questions?
Which brings us, I guess, to the novel you might expect to buck this trend - the shortlist’s traditional “literary” entry (shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, no less!). And, true to form, I suppose this is the novel on the Clarke list that is most focused on interiority and character work. Its main character, a postcolonial scholar named Sara, lives in a faintly-sketched dystopian future in which people - and much is made of which people especially, that is women of colour - are subject to a range of arbitrary impositions. Most particularly, the idea of pre-crime - familiar to SF, of course, since at least Dick’s 1956 short story, “The Minority Report” - is endemic, and even the contents of one’s dreams can be used by the shadowy Risk Assessment Administration to place people in “retention centres” for often indeterminate periods of time. This is exactly what happens to Sara, who is deemed to be an imminent risk to her husband.
Which, y’know. So far, so Orange Is The New Black meets 1984. For all that Sara emerges as a believable character - equal parts, in the face of banal fascism, complacent, collaborative, incensed and despairing - I’m not sure the novel goes much beyond its obvious touch-points: Kafka, Kushner and so on (the bit where Octavia Butler is explicitly namechecked, and Lalami archly has one character note: “I don’t like sci-fi,” was especially on the nose). There’re some good lines which really illustrate what the novel is about - “what stings the most isn’t the moment of public shame, but the silence of the people she thought would come to her defense”, or “That’s bad luck” [… “No, t]hat’s bureaucracy” - but in context I sometimes felt that these, like so much about the books on this shortlist, served mostly to blunt rather than sharpen whatever incisiveness was intended.
Am I being unfair?
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| Not an actual scene from The Dream Hotel |
Roseanna: No, I don’t think so. And I think in part because so much of what this was trying to do is something I would have really appreciated - the concept works, the characters work, it is extremely “now” in how it’s exploring extrajudicial incarceration in the US. Not that that hasn’t been going on for a long while anyway, but it has become a lot more prominently discussed, and so a novel which addresses that is a thing likely to get attention. But yes, I agree that for me it never quite manages to unite all of its ingredients into something that feels like a distinctive whole.
I’m about to say something that feels entirely wrong for me to be saying, the sort of thing I normally grumble about when I see it used in criticism of books that straddle the line between SFF and litfic or general fiction, but apparently it’s a book to make a hypocrite of me: I think the problem is it just isn’t really doing the science fiction part.
The two critical pieces that make this speculative are the near-future setting, which is so near future as to be essentially the present with the names changed, and the access to and use of dreams for this pre-emptively carceral version of the modern world. The dreams are the … not even USP, because as you say, this is riffing on existing properties, but the thing that might set it apart and give it the opportunity to really make its points in an engaging way. But there’s disappointingly little of them in the book.; I always felt like Lalami was on the cusp of digging more into that, using it more strategically to enhance the message and then it just never quite arrived. The dreams’ role in the risk scores that lead to incarceration remain vague. There’s a bit of a sense that the vagueness is part of the point Lalami wants to make, how on such small and fragile things are these atrocities built, but it never quite feels like she’s got all the way there on that either.
And so what I was left with felt mostly like a realistic portrayal of incarceration in the modern US. Which is perfectly good thing to write about, but in this instance one that felt strangely purposeless. It’s just sort of… there?
I feel like I’m being harsher on this than I intend, because I did actually read it very quickly, and had an easy time getting through it - far easier in fact than some of the other books on the shortlist. But it was a muted sort of… enjoyment is never the right word for a book that covers this sort of intersection of the horrible and the real, say instead “satisfaction” perhaps. It went down smoothly, and maybe that was part of its trouble?
Dan: I think perhaps so. One of the odd things about this book is its prose: it’s unusually frictionless, even sort of flat. I think this is deliberate - the novel ends hopefully, but with an instruction if we are to do better: “CONNECT.” The dispassion of its voice - and this extends even into those chapters which purport to be redacted emails or reports, indeed to the dialogue in which in theory we have access to viewpoints other than Sarah’s - feels like a comment on how meek this society has become, and how attenuated its individual members have become from one another. This combination of apathy and atomisation is what has done for it and them. The prose is designed, I think, to go down easily until - unless - we stop and think.
But, since the novel’s ideas or conceits never really flower into anything arresting, all we’re left with is a book that just sort of is. It’s pointing us to some important issues, yes, it’s appropriately cross about them. But a novel isn’t meant to be - or isn’t only - a call to action. It’s meant to live, to break out beyond itself somehow; and I’m not sure this book really does. Alas, I’m not sure this shortlist really does.
Roseanna: Which brings us neatly to some conclusions, favourites and predictions.
I think it’s become pretty clear that neither of us are deeply enamoured with this shortlist as a whole. I don’t want to read a shortlist and only find things I already liked on it; part of the joy is the discovery and the discussion, and all the more so when there’s disagreement too. But there are different kinds of disagreement, and I’m not sure all of the novels on this year’s shortlist felt like a conversation I desperately wanted to have.
I’m also sad there haven’t been more of the weird, genre-blurry novels that are often the USP of the Clarke in recent years, compared to other SFF awards: your Privates Rites, your Deep Wheel Orcadia, the sexy prose, the odd and the polarising, the not-quite-certain-what-it-is books that don’t really fit anywhere but have something to say and an interesting way of saying it.
Not that there are none here. I think for me, When There Are Wolves Again really fits the bill. It’s thoughtful, beautifully written, a little bit challenging, all the good stuff. And Luminous too, though less strong on the prose, still full of ideas and interlocking threads. I would happily call them both beloved, though if I had to pick a darling, it would be Wolves. Conveniently, this is also my prediction for a winner, though I am not historically successful in my haruspicy so we’ll see how that goes.
Dan: So what you’re saying is that your haruspicy is haru-spicy? (Sorrynotsorry.)
I think you’re right that in the main this shortlist feels like a missed opportunity: the Clarke has a grander history, and 2025 a better suite of books, than it manages to imply. I feel as if these six books variously, often bluntly, address (reflect, express, declaim) Key Political Questions Of Our Time, and do so in often popular forms. Perhaps that was the goal. If so, this seems limited, and even on its own terms has produced a shortlist which could surely be improved upon - as you say, the conversation might have been a lot livelier.
As it is, I think the Swift is the worthiest winner. I think the qntm might be the most swaggering expression of the shortlist’s populism. But I wonder if the Wilson might more cleanly (inoffensively?) navigate its way through the dialectical Scyllas and Charybdes of the judges’ various predilections. To be honest, I find this shortlist a bit baffling, even a tiny bit dispiriting; I don’t know that I can pretend to imagine the winner. Other than me, obvs, for having been invited to chat it all over with you - thanks, Roseanna. It’s been a lot more fun doing this in your company!
Roseanna: Thank you for joining me! This has been a blast.
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Footnotes
* Note for non-Brits - the libdems are a political party who embody a certain… mildness? They have the whiff of the CofE vicar at the cricket about them at all times, with a combo of gentle optimism and broad palatability that is absolutely encouraged by having a current party leader who delights in doing PR stunts where he falls off water skis or sings a jolly song. But despite being the party in the UK that most want voting reform, they also seem entirely Of The System.
** Another note for non-Brits - Blue Labour is a “post-liberalism” which emerged within the nominally centre-left UK Labour Party in the years following the 2008 crash. It has recently re-emerged to contend for influence in the embattled politics of the authoritarian moment (its leading thinker, Maurice Glasman, was the only Labour political to attend the 2025 US presidential inauguration). There is no publicly available information about its position on gaming, though one assumes they might be against the destruction of Earth - or at the very least the UK - by an intergalactic corporation intent on pitiless resource extraction.
References:
Matt Dinniman, Dungeon Crawler Carl, (Michael Joseph, 2025)
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel, (Bloomsbury Circus, 2025)
Silvia Park, Luminous, (Magpie, 2025)
qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division, (Del Rey, 2025)
E. J. Swift, When There Are Wolves Again, (Arcadia, 2025)
Lorraine Wilson, The Salt Oracle, (Solaris, 2025)
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
