6 Books with Helen Marshall

Helen Marshall is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of two short story collections, two poetry chapbooks and her first novel, The Migration. Her stories and poetry have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Abyss & Apex, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Tor.com. She is the author of the forthcoming The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death.

Today she tells us about her Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. I'm on a big speculative detective kick after working my way through Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir series. I love how science fiction melds with detective stories—they’re both fundamentally about investigating the way the world works, peeling back layers to reveal hidden truths. There’s something so satisfying about that combination of mystery and speculation, where the detective isn’t just solving a crime but uncovering how reality itself functions. Detective stories often end with “and this is how the world is—we’ve just uncovered the truth of it,” while SF stories end with “and here are the possibilities.” I find it fascinating to see which way an author is going to leap when they're combining both genres.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Kathleen Jennings’ Honeyeater. Kathleen is one of the most interesting, curious, and creative people I’ve ever met. She has a poet’s attention to language, an artist’s attention to detail, and a novelist’s attention to world-building. Everything she touches becomes something extraordinary—her illustrations, her short fiction, her academic work. We’re actually working on a non-fiction book about writing speculative short stories together, and I snuck a peek at the first page of Honeyeater and immediately wanted to slip the book into my bag and abscond with it. I have a feeling this book is going to be something genuinely special and surprising.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to read again?

Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta. I read it during the pandemic and it was absolutely perfect—that rare kind of fantasy that completely transports you to another world that’s strange, wonderful, and utterly immersive. It’s about two girls living in a whale made of dreams, which sounds impossible to pull off, but Tashan makes it feel inevitable. The book has this incredible sense of wonder mixed with deep emotional truth. I genuinely think this represents the future of fantasy writing—bold, inventive, unafraid to take risks that pay off beautifully.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. It’s a book I reread every couple of years, but each time I discover more to appreciate—more depth arising from apparent simplicity, more emotional resonance hidden in what seems like a straightforward fairy tale. It reminds me again and again of the beauty of the form of the fairy tale, how it speaks to our longing and honours the craving we have for mystery and meaning—something fantasy is deeply interested in. Increasingly I have been thinking about how becoming a mother has changed me as a writer. Like, it rewrote the emotional landscape of my world and charged it in new ways, some of which have been quite confronting and difficult to manage. For example, I am so sensitized, so raw, that I find horror writing much more difficult than I have in the past. But this book brings me a sense of comfort and joy. My husband read it to me while I was pregnant to help me sleep, so it holds a very special place in my heart now.

5. What’s one book you read as a child or young adult that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Impro by Keith Johnstone. As a university student, I was terrified of public speaking, so I took an improv course out of what I can only describe as a mixture of self-hatred and self-improvement. But this book taught me so much about creating narrative on the fly—how to understand the shifting balance between characters, how to build toward satisfying endings, how to say “yes, and...” to unexpected possibilities. The principles of improvisation—accepting offers, building on what others give you, finding the story in the moment—have become central to how I approach both writing and life. It’s not technically a writing book, but it’s one of the most useful books about storytelling I’ve ever read.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death follows two women across generations: Sara, a circus master’s daughter seeking revenge, and her granddaughter Irenda, who becomes entangled in a web of state-sponsored illusions decades later. It’s a story about how grief and love echo across time, set in a world where the line between political spectacle and magical performance has completely dissolved. At its heart, it asks whether stories liberate us or trap us—and whether we can tell the difference. But what makes it truly awesome is that it’s also narrated by a godlike talking tiger who may or may not be trustworthy. The tiger represents something wild that we think we might tame—which becomes this perfect unreliable guide through a world where nothing is quite what it seems. It felt like the ideal narrator for a story about the power and danger of storytelling itself.

Thank you, Helen!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E8

In "Who are you?", the best episode of season two—and a top-tier moment in television generally—, we bear witness to the Ghorman Massacre. 

Content Warning: Discussion of domestic violence, violence against protesters.

As Cassian is preparing for his assassination of Dedra Meero, the plaza is opened and the Ghorman Front immediately starts to rally people. In a surprising moment of clarity, the leader of the Ghorman Front, Carro Rylanz, points out the danger of gathering, but his rebels refuse to listen to him. Meanwhile, Dedra speaks to her supervisor, Major Partagaz about the plan. “The only story that matters is Ghorman aggression,” he says. “The threats, the inexplicable resistance to imperial norms.” He points the success of their propaganda and media, revealed in the board meeting during episode one: “Our struggles with Ghorman are well documented at this point.” 

In a great piece of cinematic storytelling, a few minutes later as Syril walks through the memorial plaza, a news reporter repeats Partagaz’s lines about resistance to imperial norms. The propaganda plans have fully taken over the media, demonstrating there is no help for the Ghor from the story being recorded by traditional media sources. They are fully part of the Imperial machine.

As Syril makes his way to ask Dedra what’s going on, he’s confronted by Carro Rylanz as people file by, chanting: “We are the Ghor! The galaxy is watching.” Rylanz tells Syril about the mining equipment that’s been witnessed on different parts of the plant, which Syril still tries to deny, but at this point, Rylanz knows Syril must have been helping the Empire and says: “What kind of being are you?” Syril has no response, and Rylanz demands to know: “What’s in our ground? What is it you’ve been sent to steal from us?” Like Rylanz, though, Syril has no knowledge of the mining as Dedra has kept it from him. 

He tries to see Dedra, but he’s blocked by other Imperial officers as things become more volatile during the protest. When he is finally brought in to see her, she reveals the plan he has already guessed. In this moment, Syril finally finds his agency, even though it’s through an exertion of power via domestic violence. In true fascist fashion, he can’t express himself except through domination (as opposed to being dominated by the other women in his life who dictated his agency, such as his mother or Dedra). He chokes her while asking about the mining. His shock seems to have two layers—the destruction of the planet and people he’s come to admire to some degree and the fact his girlfriend kept the information from him. He rushes out to join the crowd.

While Syril’s capability of violence has been demonstrated in season one when he tried to find Cassian, this intimate partner violence demonstrates a shift in his character. Throughout season two, Syril has received much of what he’s wanted. His partner is an officer in ISB, his mother is finally respecting him, and he’s on a special mission for the Empire. Importantly, much of these “successes” haven’t happened due to his choices. In a brilliantly acted scene early in the season, Dedra tells his mother, Eedy (Kathryn Hunter), that she will control how much Syril sees his mother and that contact will be dictated by if Eedy can behave. Syril trades one domineering relationship for another. While it does seem like Dedra cares for him in her own way—both of their abilities to care dictated by their lack of empathy—Syril is also controllable, which is why he’s the perfect person to infiltrate the Ghor, because Dedra knows she can control him. 

As Syril realizes he’s been used by his partner, he watches the breakdown of the protest in the plaza as the new recruits from the previous episode are sent out to clear a path to the memorial. While their commanding officer says that’s a bad idea, the officer in charge of the operation sends them out anyway.  

In an intensely powerful moment, Lezine starts singing the Ghorman national anthem. The crowd picks it up, and soon the whole plaza is singing, united in this moment of oppositional nationalism. As they sing, the green recruits go out to clear a path to the memorial, and the crowd grows angry, harassing them while stormtroopers blocking off the plaza observe the situation. Above the plaza, a sniper watches while TIE fighters fly over. 

Partagaz orders Dedra to continue the plan: a sniper takes out one of the young recruits, which prompts the imperial forces to open fire, including the stormtroopers. What had been a crowd singing the Ghorman national anthem becomes stormtroopers and imperial officers shooting into a plaza. A few of the Ghorman Front have blasters, but most of them are unarmed civilians. The sniper continues to take out people from the rooftop.

In the panic, Syril watches the stormtroopers kill people he had been working with, murder the citizens he’d walked past every day, and destroy the plaza his office had overlooked. In a series of slow moments, the camera focuses on Syril standing still in all this violence. 

Several commentators have suggested that Syril might have had some sort of awakening in these moments, and Disney’s official episode guide seems to support that reading as the episode summary states: “[Syril] comes to the realization that he’s been a pawn for the Empire’s machinations.” It’s easy to want to look for redemption for Syril. While he’s not a sympathetic character, we do come to know him intimately over the course of two seasons, from seeing the inside of his bedroom and how his mother treats him to the manipulation from his partner, Dedra. But, he’s always been an active part of the Empire. He wasn’t swept up into it out of necessity or drafted into the stormtroopers or even just passively involved. One of the first introductions to Syril is while he attempts to create an even more stringent sense of law and order on Ferrix. It’s his dream to be recruited by Dedra to be a spy, even if the reason for his spying is at first a lie. To me, what makes Syril such a compelling and well-written character is not this moment where he perhaps regrets his actions but because he is as dedicated to the cause as Cassian or Luthen. Cassian also has moments where he questions their tactics, but he still has resolve. So does Syril as his opposite.

Meanwhile, as Syril is having these confrontations, Cassian is quick to recognize the gathering in the plaza is a bad idea and will end in violence. As he hurries to check out of the hotel, the bellhop, Thela, tells Cassian, “Don’t worry, you were never here. Didn’t log you in.” This moment demonstrates some of the brilliance of the storytelling in Andor—and I want to point out a similar moment in the next episode. Gilroy and his team take careful pains to show how one resists. The tools are documented, and this moment is one of them. Thela breaks a small rule in order to make sure Cassian remains undetected. When Cassian responds that he hopes everything works out, Thela says: “Rebellions are built on hope.” By giving this key line to Thela, it emphasizes even more that it’s not the great leaders like Cassian, Bix, Vel, and Luthen who make the rebellion work, it’s the small acts of resistance that create great opportunities. As Nemik from season one says in his manifesto: “Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”

Cassian joins the Ghorman protest outside, trying to find Wilmon, as they both realize the stormtroopers are prepared to “kettle” the Ghorman, cutting off their escape in a great visualization of tactics currently being used against protestors in L.A. these past few weeks. Much like Thela’s small act of resistance, Gilroy and his team also show the tactics of empire to disrupt protest. The stormtroopers contain the protestors, fly intimidating TIE fighters over the crowds, and, most importantly, they start the violence by killing one of their own people to then pin on the protestors. K2 units are released on the crowd, and their efficient violence and nearly impenetrable armor makes them horrific enemies as they are able to crush people to death. 

In the violent chaos, Cassian still tries to complete his mission of assassinating Dedra, and as he is about to take the shot, Syril finally sees him in the crowd. Syril reacts with an intensity of violence that we nearly saw when he threatened to kill his partner. Now, he turns all that anger onto Cassian, the man he’d hunted and had caused him to lose his job. It’s a brutal fight as they both go for the soft parts—the eyes, mouths—and use whatever weapons are at hand as the Imperial forces continue to massacre the Ghorman. 

Syril is relentless, dragging himself upright after an explosion that Cassian thinks has taken him out. He finds a gun and has Cassian in his sights. With desperation in his voice, Cassian asks: “Who are you?” Cassian’s lack of awareness of Syril’s existence makes Syril hesitate. It’s easy to imagine what might be going through his mind, that the only reason Syril is standing in that plaza, a contributor to a massacre, is because of Cassian, the man he became obsessed with. In that moment of hesitation, Syril is shot through the head by Rylanz.

In interviews, Gilroy and Diego Luna have talked about how they had to fight to keep the line “Who are you?” in the episode, which seems wild. The moment provides so much clarity for Syril’s character—all that hatred for a person who doesn’t even know him. As a piece of anti-fascist media, this moment feels important to the broader message. A necessary tool of fascism is an “other” that can be blamed for the ills of the world. On an interpersonal level, Cassian represents that “other” for Syril (and from a casting perspective, Diego Luna and Kyle Soller replicate the current fascist othering happening in the U.S. right now). This question from Cassian dramatizes how all that hate from Syril is a one-way street and not representative of reality. Rather, Syril was trying to turn something he'd imagined into reality.

After Syril’s death, Cassian and Wilmon escape the plaza. Wilmon chooses to stay on Ghorman to help his girlfriend, a member of the Ghorman Front. In the final shots, Wilmon’s girlfriend Dreena (Ella Pellegrini), attempts to broadcast what happened during the massacre. Wilmon also charges Cassian to spread the story. 

A long shot shows Cassian’s face as he escapes and Dreena's message plays as narration: “We are under siege. We are being slaughtered…” This message contrasts with the news media, which shares the Imperial narrative that the Ghor started the violence and that the dead imperial officers are martyrs (including Syril). 

What makes this episode, and the following episode “Welcome to the Rebellion,” so important is the familiarity of it all. Videos on TikTok juxtapose shots from these episodes with protests actively happening across the country as I write. Someone graffitied an ad for Andor, adding a speech bubble to Luthen’s mouth condemning ICE. Like the best revolutionary media, Andor has captured our current moment. While Gilroy has stated in interviews that this season wasn’t meant to be predictive, the prescience is still uncanny and speaks to Gilroy and his team’s understanding of fascism.

In a recent video post, resistance scholar Dr. Tad Stoermer points out that Andor is “practically an instruction manual” and sums up what he sees as the takeaway: “Resistance, to have any hope of success, requires regular people…to risk, to sacrifice, to lose with no force on their side other than their own will. […] What are you …willing to risk…for a better world you might never live to see?”

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POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award 2025: A Shortlist Discussion

Right in the heart of brimming awards season, we come to the Clarke Award shortlist, whose winner is due to be announced on the 25th of June. While we wait to find out the winner, myself and a very exciting guest decided to read the shortlist, and see what we think of the nominees as individual books, a group together, and as part of the wider fiction conversation of 2024 and 2025.

Joining me for this discussion is 2024 Clarke Award nominee, Hugo winner, Astounding Award Winner, World Fantasy Award winner and excellent-opinion-haver, Emily Tesh!

Per their website blurb, the Arthur C. Clarke Award is given to the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. As a juried award whose judges come from a variety of UK groups - the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival - one of the key features is its ability to pull up gems that might not have made it onto popular voted awards, placing them alongside more well known authors and works, and giving a different slant on the year’s SF - as evidenced by this year’s shortlist, some of whom have (at least so far) not been honoured elsewhere, and sit here alongside Hugo Award nominees.

This year, the shortlist is as follows:

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Extremophile by Ian Green

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf

Emily and Roseanna got stuck into the shortlist and come here to share their opinions on the novels, the shortlist as a whole, and what the Clarke is covering that other awards may be missing, as well as their thoughts on who they might want to win.

Roseanna: Shall we start by going right in there, rather than a gentle introduction? I want to kick off with Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, because it’s one we both had a lot of opinions about, and that we kept on coming back to to think about more for days after we’d finished it.

The story follows the titular Annie, a robot girlfriend owned by a man named Doug, who has been slowly developing in her complexity since she was put into “autodidactic mode” two years previously. We spend time immersed in her perspective, as she struggles with what Doug wants from her, how to please him, as it runs up against her own growing and individual desires. A meeting with one of Doug’s friends - and a secret, somewhat coercive sexual encounter with him - kickstart a lot of painful, traumatic and dramatic events for Annie, changing her life immeasurably and leading her to think outside the rigid confines of the existence she’s always known.

For me, it didn’t fully work. There are a lot of ideas thrown up across the book, a lot of side-threads into different angles on the central metaphor of Annie’s robot nature, but overall, it feels like an abusive relationship novel that is being undermined by all these different pieces that aren’t necessarily pulling in the same direction as the central ideas. I’m not sure how the AI parts work with that premise, rather than muddling it.

Emily: One thing that really jumped out at me from reading the whole shortlist was the primacy of metaphor in the shortlist's approach to science fiction. I don't think a single one of these novels asked the reader to take a speculative concept purely on its own terms. Whether it's artificial intelligence, cloning, time travel, or climate fiction, the reader is expected to join the dots in a kind of extended simile: this thing in the story is like this thing in real life, and this is like this, and this is like this. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the function of the speculative metaphor and the ways it can fail. Annie Bot is a book where the central metaphor did not succeed for me, and this undermined my entire reading experience. Annie is a robot, an artificial person. She was created to provide sexual satisfaction and emotional companionship for her human owner. She spends the novel struggling with what this means–what does it mean to be owned, what does it mean to be a person, what does it mean to create herself as the kind of person whom Doug wants her to be. And I spent the novel struggling with what the actual point of the metaphor was.

Is the book arguing that straight womanhood is essentially false, a performance rooted in misogyny created by and for the benefit of straight men? (There are many, many sequences of Annie lusciously self-objectifying as she tries on different outfits, wears different kinds of impractical sexy underwear, simulates orgasm for Doug's satisfaction.) Is it trying to say something about transgender identity? (At one point, Doug and Annie attend couples's therapy; Doug points out that the therapist is a trans woman, and asks Annie if she noticed; the implication is that he longs for Annie to 'pass' as a human just as the therapist 'passes' as a woman; later he assures Annie that he doesn't mind that she can't have children, they can adopt, his family will never know; I wrote, with a large question mark, TRANSMISOGYNY METAPHOR THEN?) Or are we meant to read Annie's repeated fascination with the idea of her own artificial mind placed in a male robot body as a transmasculine identity suppressed by the requirements of Doug's patriarchal ideal of what his perfect girlfriend should be? Or, no, wait, is the book actually trying to be about race? (Annie's appearance is a copy of Doug's ex, but whiter; the entire emotional arc turns on a question of how she can ever escape her enslavement by this man.) Because in each case I found myself wondering–so what are we saying about trans identity, what are we saying about race, what is the book actually saying about any of the ideas it touches on; is it really saying anything at all?

It is saying something. When I was growing up my mother had a shelf of books she called the Ain't It Hard Being A Woman shelf. Annie Bot would fit right in. It's terribly hard being a straight white woman with an abusive boyfriend. Leave the boyfriend. I'm still not sure why she had to be a robot about it.

I think this struck me particularly hard when read in contrast with another book on the shortlist that manages its central metaphor with striking deftness. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is a book about being a lone survivor of a disaster, pulled out of the familiar and into a world of terrible ease and mundanity where your past makes you a perpetual stranger; it's about being a refugee from history, a person struggling constantly with hereness and thereness, reckoning with the world created by imperialism from a position of safety, comfort, and collaboration which you'd rather not think about too hard; it's about being lost, in time and space, forever. Also, nineteenth-century Arctic explorer Graham Gore is there.

Which is to say: I thought this book was spectacular. Bradley knows the thematic work she wants her metaphor to do and she goes to work with a scalpel, unpicking every layer of 'refugee from history' with perfect sharpness. The book's conceit is that the narrator is a bureaucrat selected to keep an eye on Graham Gore when the Ministry abducts him from history at the moment of his disappearance in the Arctic, incidentally killing the rest of the mission. Then they fall in love. But the book is about the experience of living in Britain as the mixed race child of a refugee who escaped genocide in Cambodia. Why does the narrator fall in love with Graham Gore: well, how could she not? They're the two most different people imaginable (a classic of romance, which I always like to see done well) and thanks to the Ministry's decision to abduct him from history they are also fundamentally Exactly The Same.

This is a debut novel for Bradley and I can't wait to see what she does next. It's very, very good. It's extremely funny. The thematic work is beautiful. It does fall apart a little in the last fifty pages–speaking as a person who has done a time travel plot: dear god is it hard to manage all the moving pieces of a time travel plot in a satisfying way. I almost wish Bradley hadn't bothered. I would have been happy with just the romance, the jokes, the brutal thematic underlayer, and the moody descriptions of the weather.

Roseanna: If Annie Bot is a shotgun, then The Ministry of Time is a scalpel. Or possibly a hammer. In any case, I entirely agree - it knows precisely what it wants to be and then goes at it at an unapologetic full tilt. Every single piece of what feels like such a disparate set of genre-components all eventually turn towards the job of supporting that one thematic core of the exploration of “refugee” as a concept. Bradley uses different ideas extremely skilfully to triangulate on her points, and never more clearly than in the three characters whose different experiences of racism in Britain come up throughout the book. The first is the unnamed main character, for whom that racism permeates all aspects of the story, and not least her relationship with Gore, whose vocabulary and approach to race are entirely drawn from his historical context (more on that in a moment). She keeps her head down, and her path is one of survival, just getting through it with the least impact and harm on her as possible. By contrast then, are her sister, whose emotional working through of her own experiences the main character disparages in her thoughts, or Simellia, a colleague at the ministry who offers the protagonist solidarity (and is rebuffed), and has a much more resistance-minded approach to the constant impacts they both suffer throughout the story and beyond. Three ways of existing under racism, three conflicting and contrasting approaches. The narrative does not commit to a clear model of which is correct - however much the story does not always support the protagonist in her (often terrible) choices, there is always an understanding for how she got to where she got - but does always give an insight into why, and uses the triangulation of the three separate approaches to deepen our understanding of all three as characters, especially by their interactions with one another. The frustration palpable between Simellia and the protagonist as their different approaches slide past each other, the fundamental misunderstandings of this person who should get it but doesn’t, forms a critical part of us seeing each of them as the person they are.

And, because Bradley seems to love efficiency with her many tools, is an obvious thematic crossover with the frustrations faced in working with someone from the past.

This, too, I think she does amazingly. It is so hard to find books that incorporate historical characters or settings that get historicity right, and I think Bradley has done a remarkable job here of something that could have gone wildly wrong - making Gore both authentically of his time and intensely charming and likeable and interacting authentically with the modern-day context. I never lost a sense of him throughout the book as coming from a particular context - and the same is true, to a lesser extent, for the cast of supporting historical figures pulled out of different pieces of history alongside him - and having his whole self be a product of that context, for both good and ill.

It means we get a romance with someone who feels like a whole person, not with a projected retrofit of modern morality, but with their own sense of identity and self that does not always fit neatly up against the protagonist’s. That, alongside the way Bradley crafts the atmosphere in which they interact, makes it a far more successful romance for me than many others I’ve read.

And then, speaking of atmosphere, she does just as good a job of crafting the sense of place - the hereness to contrast Gore’s thereness - of this nebulously near future London baking in a heat that is familiar but intensified. Writing in Zone 3 now as the temperatures climb into uncomfortable summer, the miserable claustrophobia of some of the midsection of the book feels only just that tiny bit out of reach - a horrible prescience on what is to come that provides the contextual realism as well as the atmosphere and helps ground the more fantastical elements of the story.

Which brings us nicely along to one of the other bangers of the list - Private Rites by Julia Armfield. It’s on the other end of the weather spectrum - every single review I’ve read of this book, including my own, starts with the constant rain in the story on the first line and for good reason - but it forms an atmospheric substrate in just the same way as in The Ministry of Time. And these aren’t even the only two near-future horrible-climate Londons of the shortlist.

Where The Ministry of Time reaches out of SFF and into romance, spy thrillers and contemporary literature, Private Rites has more than half an eye on horror and literary fiction, and it’s from the interaction of the SFnal elements - climate fiction - with those two that I think its greatest strengths lie. It presents climate change not as a novum, not as a problem to be solved by daring heroes, but something akin to an act of god. It’s a prompt for psychological exploration and a backdrop for the melancholy lesbian sisterly shenanigans that take up the centre stage of the majority of the plot.

Emily: Private Rites is such a very assured, intelligent, well-crafted book that I feel a little guilty for not liking it more. This is not the only book on the shortlist I have this feeling about (more on that later) but I think this is perhaps the book you and I disagree on the most, because I know you really loved it and I just thought it was pretty good. It is absolutely leaning on literary fiction–Armfield's prose is strong. And it's another one which is doing thoughtful, complex, interesting things with a central metaphor. The conceit Armfield has borrowed from horror fiction is: what if there was a mysterious guy secretly in your house, would that be spooky or what? Sometimes the Guy is your father and the house is the emotionally horrific architectural masterpiece he built to refuse the effects of the climate crisis. Sometimes the Guy is your half-sibling and the house is the drowned and ruined and still madly functioning remains of London. (I did really enjoy the layers of sibling relationships in this book: it acknowledges, as few books do, that sometimes a much younger or older sibling is simply a person you don't know very well who was, unfortunately, also there.) Sometimes the Guy is God, maybe, and your house is the ecologically devastated planet?

Also–spoilers–sometimes there is literally just a spooky mysterious bad guy secretly in your house.

I saw this outcome from a long way off, which is not necessarily a problem. Horror sometimes turns on anticipation! Unfortunately, I found the reveal more comical than spooky in the execution. That's actually something this book has in common with The Ministry of Time–both succeed better as literary fiction (with their interest in language and human behaviour, and their layered, considered thematic complexity) than as genre fiction, because both of them do the genre fiction plot in the most underbaked and obvious way possible in the last fifty pages. Private Rites actually made me think a bit about 'science fiction' as a category. (Of course, people are constantly thinking about science fiction as a category; a bad habit of the entire genre.) I found myself dwelling on the 'science' part, on the suggestion that the fiction of the future is necessarily a fiction of science, which has always struck me as an oddly triumphalist understanding of how history and technology interact with one another. Private Rites is staunchly unscientific. I like the book better for it.

Roseanna: That was one of the things that really struck me as I was reading it, and I haven’t got a better way of explaining it than thinking it’s climate fiction but not science fiction (which is awkward, given what the Clarke is for). I think that is something of a contentious take, and drilling into it would be a whole “what is SF anyway”, leading me straight into that bad habit as well, but my short, high level version is pulling on that “fiction of the future” piece. Climate change is rapidly becoming the fiction of the present, not the future, and so it’s resolving into non-SFnal genres more and more often now. Especially in Private Rites, where the imagined future on display is non-specific and very proximate-feeling, I think that veneer of futurity is about as thin as it could possibly be. It’s climate as spectre of the current zeitgeist (in the way that all fiction about the future is actually concerned with the now), just with the dial turned up a little way. So I think this is a case of the future catching up with the genre - clifi may once have been a disastrous science fiction prediction, but it’s now just horrible reality.

Which is a long way of saying - I absolutely agree, it’s litfic first and foremost. Where I disagree (maybe) is that the genre it rushes into at the end is horror more than it is SF. We see the seeds of it through the latter half of the book, in the intrusions of inexplicable oceanic life into the scenes from the city’s perspective (which, incidentally, are some of my favourite parts of the book - I love weird descriptive sections, and these are brief but very atmospheric). It explodes out in the final confrontation, but I think it was an undercurrent (sorry) for a while beforehand.

I think I was a bit more into it than you, but I have been an enjoyer of Julia Armfield’s brand of melancholy lesbians encountering the uncanny for a while and was entirely primed for it.

Emily: I am tragically impatient with the sorrows of melancholy lesbians. It's probably a personal failing. And now, moving to another book which I filed under 'well this is very good and I feel bad that I'm not more into it': Extremophile by Ian Green is the story of yet another near-future ecologically-ruined London, and of the underground world of criminals, indie bands, ecoterrorists, and biohackers who survive beyond the still well-cared for Zone One. The book moves vividly and competently between the heads of its narrators–Charlie, a biohacker who plays bass in a band; the Ghost, a powerful corporate executive; Scrimshank, a brute; the Mole, the sole survivor of a horrific biohacking experiment. The character work is really, really good. I found the Ghost's chapters genuinely hard to read: there is some real stare-into-space body horror, framed coldly and painfully in the point of view of a man who thinks himself extraordinary and is constantly mentally workshopping unfunny little jokes. 

One cannot accuse Green of underbaking the plot. This is a heist book, and heists rely on tight, propulsive plotting. It's a heist book where the most attractive character is named Parker and there is a Nathan floating around in the background, which made me laugh. The book winks at you: we've all seen Leverage. In fact, referential is a word that kept coming to mind. This is a book that made me stop and DM Roseanna to make her listen to The Mountain Goats. (The song you need. You'll know when you get there.) This book enjoys both Leverage and Le Guin (the word for world is–). Maybe the referentiality is part of what made the book feel so strangely nostalgic to me. Extremophile is set in the future, but in the future London has a lively indie punk scene where young people gather to fuck and dance and plan their environmental protests. The narrative loves a thriving independent live music scene, writes from a place of affection and knowledge about it, in a way that felt so entirely real and tender that it also felt, somehow, more like the past than the future.

But this is not the only thing nostalgic about Extremophile. Unlike The Ministry of Time and Private Rites, this is near-future climate-inflected science fiction where the science is front and centre. Our protagonist and chief narrator, Charlie, is a scientist. Underneath the slick machinery of the heist plot, the book asks questions about how much it actually matters to do the science: to be a scientist, to love knowledge, to look at the natural world with care and attention–a tree, a pigeon, a marsh spreading through Hackney–to quantify, analyse, and create, as a scientist. Charlie begins the book doing shit science, exploitative nonsense–here's your zodiac reanalysed in light of your DNA–squeezing money from the gullible with a mix of fact and fiction designed to give idiots what they want. The monstrous Ghost with his custom-designed biological cruelties is only the logical conclusion of the path she's already on, and on some level Charlie knows it. It's no wonder she's a nihilist. The question is whether she's wrong to feel this way, in a world where science has already comprehensively failed to save the day.

In other words, I read this book and went 'aha, this is definitely Science Fiction'. (You know it when you see it.) And that also felt nostalgic to me! I found I was a lot more interested in the Science Fiction than the heists, and my sympathy for Charlie grew through the book. And I thought the London of the book was perhaps the most persuasive and aesthetically powerful of all the near-future Londons we read for this shortlist; the book has a really extraordinary sense of place. So why, after several paragraphs of well-earned praise, was I not actually all that into Extremophile? Well, I feel like I got handed a first-rate scotch and now I have to sheepishly admit I don't like whiskey. Heist plots don't do it for me–I have to be in exactly the right mood to watch Leverage. I find most live music an exquisitely miserable experience thanks to my loathing of crowds and lifelong hearing difficulties. Bio-horror freaks me out so much that I kept having to put the book down for a bit after the Ghost chapters. You see the problem?

Roseanna: Not to add another problem to the mix, but the thing that hit me right between the eyes while reading Extremophile was: this is cyberpunk. It’s not. It’s not about the tech in the way classic cyberpunk is. It’s bio far more than it is cyber (is biopunk a thing? Everything -punk is probably a thing if you try hard enough, much to my despair), but the atmosphere, the anti-corporate-ness, the unregulated techno future full of violence and individualism and fancy crimes? That’s cyberpunk. And that was what gave me that big nostalgic whiff, alongside all the science.

It’s just unfortunate that I don’t like cyberpunk at all. I also don’t really get a heart-squeezing burn of affection for the live music scene (I too hate crowds, but also my taste in music is simply atrocious), I don’t like heists - especially watching people plan them, I don’t like extended scenes of violence and fighting, and I generally struggle with climate fiction. It felt like a recipe for me to absolutely hate Extremophile.

And yet… and yet. You’re right. It is entirely embedded in this futuristic, muggy London that I can fully believe and feel as I’m reading. Charlie’s journey from nihilism to tentative hope is genuinely touching and emotive. The characters all have wonderful, distinctive voices when it’s their turn to be the viewpoint, and each provided something different to the narrative to make their inclusion worthwhile. One of them - Mole/Awa, a physically and genetically altered woman upon whom those changes were enacted forcibly in her childhood - gets some absolutely gorgeous writing that made me want to linger over every sentence. By the end, all of that somehow managed to charm me into liking it, against all my native inclinations. Not all the way to loving it. But a lot lot further than I ever would have expected from someone giving me a plot summary.

If it has a failing (and that failing isn’t just “me”), I might suggest that the ending could do with dialling back a little on the sentiment, but given by that point it had worked its hooks into me, I can’t complain too much. It does the legwork of grounding all of its climate work in very realistic pessimism, and doesn’t let its resolution drift into the sort of world-changing optimism that would have been at cross-purposes with its ongoing messaging. The world is still shit, it says, but maybe it’s worth fighting anyway. And, critically, maybe Charlie thinks it’s worth fighting now. It works extremely well on the level of one person’s path back to resistance and action against the injustices in the world around her. Like Private Rites, it’s a book interested in the human, and the human experience of *gestures* all this.

So I think I prefer Private Rites in the end, but it’s an aesthetic preference far more than a qualitative one. Clearly I just prefer the rain.

Actual footage of Roseanna reading Extremophile and Private Rites

But climate isn’t the only common thread in this shortlist. There’s a common line of “hellscape (possibly techno) ravaged or being ravaged by capitalism” that links back up to the remaining two, both of which also join up to Annie Bot by being personhood stories.

Starting with the more obvious overlap, Service Model is another robot servant story, though this one far more in the traditional mode of robotic servitor (Uncharles) who must obey his programmed task hierarchy, even as the situation he’s in spirals further outside of his control, and the frame of reference his programming can encompass. It’s a story of a journey - a set of connected vignettes in different, equally unexpected locations - as Uncharles the robot grapples with his existence after the death of his master, with a bit of free will and agency thrown in for good measure.

I have two problems with it. The first, the ever-tricky sense of humour. The book is very much trying to use the surreality of the scenarios Uncharles finds himself in to generate comedy. That comedy, unfortunately, did not land with me. And when most of the jokes tend to draw from a common thematic pool… they continued not to land for me the whole way through.

The second thought is that I struggled with what this book was really trying to achieve, and why it took a whole novel to do it. SF has, over the years, done the “am I a person?” story to death, whether from robots or clones or any manner of other person-adjacent consciousnesses. Personally, having been on this ride a number of times, I am primed for the inevitable answer of “yes”. When is the answer not “yes”? I’m not sure, unless you’re really pushing some boundaries (or hey, maybe drawing on the current cultural consciousness and “AI” situation), what can be added to this narrative? And I don’t think Service Model does. Instead, it’s a set of mildly comedic scenarios strung together, with a bit of a conclusion at the end about societal collapse (turns out, the free market doesn’t solve everything and capitalism may, in fact, be bad - see the aforementioned hellscape).

Emily: The trouble with being as good and as prolific as Adrian Tchaikovsky is that the person you're going to end up most compared to is yourself. Tchaikovsky released two science fiction novels in 2024. Both of them are on the Hugo shortlist, but only one made the Clarke. And I am absolutely baffled by the judges' decision to elevate Service Model over Alien Clay, because I thought that Alien Clay was a much better book–a book with more to say, and more interesting ways of saying it; a Clarkey book, as I understand the term.

I quite enjoyed the first act of Service Model. I read it thinking: aha, a light satire running on a spine of Agatha Christie but they're all robots mindlessly going through the motions of the detective novel even as the culprit in their midst confesses over and over. Charming! Funny! A sharp comment on the plot-on-rails that is also a comment on the society-on-rails! I see what you did there!

And then the book did it again. And again. And I found it less charming every time. When you got the joke the first time, it's tiresome to hear it repeated. And the book never quite expands beyond its initial conceit: here is a robot, in an absurd situation which he does not understand but which you, the reader, can smile at from your position of superior knowledge. This continues, in my very pretty hardback edition, for some four hundred pages. In the spirit of this meeting could have been an email: I do really think this novel could have been a novella. I love a novella, and Service Model could have worked really well as a very sharp, very funny, very dark example of the form, answering none of its initial questions about the failed society Uncharles comes from, making its satirical point and moving on. But as a novel, it drags. And for me, the book also suffers because I read it back to back with Alien Clay and I loved Alien Clay. Alien Clay does so many of the things Tchaikovsky is really, really good at. I loved the weird biology and the mystery of the planet and the final irresolvable moral dilemma! So why on earth would you pick Service Model for your shortlist when Alien Clay was right there?

Roseanna [lurking for the opportunity to say that Alien Clay is indeed banger]: I am boggled by exactly this same thought. I did not read them back to back, but even with a fair separation, I felt like Alien Clay was just the tighter, more controlled novel. I’d link it up to The Ministry of Time as books with a thematic hammer that know how to use them, which does feel, to me as well, inherently Clarkey. But I guess we must have something to argue with the judges about.

As something of a strange contrast, the final book also never quite expands outside of its original conceit (at least not successfully) for me, and yet my feelings on it are far more positive - and that’s Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, in which the thirteenth clone of a movie star must hunt down all her predecessors and kill them to (spoilers, supposedly) generate publicity for an upcoming film. But this description doesn’t do justice to the weirdness of that original conceit, which also contains a fair heap of musing on bodies and ownership and identity (including a scene in which the newly-woken clone looks her body over in the mirror and keeps flipping between referring to it as her own or as Lulabelle’s), some workplace comedy if the job is untrained freelance assassin, funny and sometimes startlingly real pieces of character work and, somehow, tarot. Also some self-love (but uh, not like that).

I’m not sure I could say that Lulabelle is a great book, but something about its quirky unexpectedness and ability to turn a phrase charmed me, in a way that the slightly better structured Service Model never managed. Unfortunately, I think it loses control of its threads by the time the need for an ending rolls around, but I find myself admiring the ambition, because this one does try to push some boundaries. It doesn’t succeed, but I respected the intentions a great deal.

Emily: I really liked this one! I thought it was enormous fun nearly all the way through. It did new and interesting things with the very well-trodden SFnal ground of 'who, exactly, gets to be a person?' and the structural conceit of the tarot, while silly, was silly in a grounded way: it chimed with the protagonist's own desperate need for structure, for understanding of who she was and how she could exist in the world as one of thirteen identical clones–Portraits–of a lesser celebrity. The tight structure of the book meant that it telegraphed exactly what it was going to do, well in advance. When the assassin gets a car, you know she's going to crash the car at some point. But it executed the expected beats with humour and verve. I laughed out loud at the point where the assassin finds herself face to face with two Lulabelles each insisting that she is the real one and so you have to kill that bitch, and just thinks: couldn't you two have worked this out between yourselves?

And then the penultimate twist landed beautifully. The question of who, exactly, is the real Lulabelle runs all the way through the book. Ultimately, no one is. I was genuinely moved by the way the revelation landed, and how it reframed the whole conceit of the book. The thirteen clones cease to be a vapid exercise in celebrity self-promotion and become a sadder and deeper exploration of how on earth one is supposed to manage a life well-lived, and what it means to live well.

For me the only place where this book didn't quite work was the very end, where I felt it veered into sentimentality, and a final twist that felt like a broken promise. It seems silly to say 'not enough murder' about a book where the protagonist commits so many murders, but when you have spent the whole novel signalling that there is eventually going to be a violent and cathartic reckoning with your evil creator… I felt thwarted that no such reckoning took place. Surely we could have murdered someone in the end. Of course, part of the joke of the book is that none of the murders of Lulabelle ever really seemed satisfying: as these were meaningless, unsatisfactory lives, so they ended in meaningless and unsatisfactory deaths. But I would have liked, I think, a single satisfactory death, for narrative closure. After all, our narrator's card is Death: she deserves it. I'm not picky. It didn't have to be the evil creator. We could also have murdered Lulabelle's horrid agent.

And that brings us to six books! What are your thoughts on the shortlist as a whole? Do you have a favourite? Do you have an expected winner? And are those two the same?

Roseanna: My favourite is Private Rites. I love it. I am a sucker for all the things Julia Armfield does. I went into the shortlist reading knowing this would be the one to beat, and lo, so it was. I don’t think it’s entirely my terminal optimism speaking when I think it might just win it, but I am not a reliable predictor of awards, so I’m not saying that with any great certainty.

If it doesn’t, I’d be very happy to see either Extremophile or The Ministry of Time take the win, though with a preference for the latter as I just had the absolute greatest time with it, and I would love more books in SFF to be quite this charming. How about you?

Emily: My personal favourite read of the shortlist was The Ministry of Time. I am very weak to themes and jokes and romance, and it did all of those extremely well. However, I just went back to the Clarke Award home page, which reminded me that 'the annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year.' With that in mind, my pick for a winner is Extremophile. I think it would be a well deserved win for a book which is entirely and self-consciously science fiction in theme and intention. I also think there's great value in reading, from time to time, a very good book which is absolutely not your thing. Extremophile is not my thing but I respect what it chooses to be and I think the execution is splendid. I'm glad the shortlist prompted me to it, because I would probably not have picked it up otherwise. Also, Roseanna, you really should listen to The Mountain Goats.

Roseanna: I did! I had Tallahassee playing while I was working this afternoon. It would have possibly been fun to have it playing while I was reading as subconscious thematic overlap, but I did not plan anywhere near that well. Possibly a recommendation for anyone who hasn’t picked it up yet to try (and if you don't think you recognise The Mountain Goats, try listening to the song No Children, and you may well realise you do).

I can’t disagree that Extremophile is the best at science-fictioning. And it was the biggest surprise in reading for me - to find myself persuaded into all these things I don’t enjoy, so I’d certainly be clapping along with everyone else on Wednesday for it if so. I just find myself constantly drawn back to Private Rites for the vibes, the prose, the intensely palpable atmosphere. It just grabs me.

And that’s it! Or is it… because we are doing vry srs crtcsm we did do a nice little chart as we were discussing, so have our very authoritative, totally conclusive visualisation of the shortlist as a thematic continuum.

If you have read or are planning to read the Clarkes, we hope you have as great a time with the process as we did. The winner will be announced evening UK time on Wednesday the 25th of June, so watch this space to find out if either of us were right.

Thank you so much for joining me Emily - this has been amazing!