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Arthur C Clarke Shortlist
The Arthur C Clarke Awards shortlist has been announced and includes
M. John Harrison's 'Light' and China Miéville's masterpiece 'The Scar'.
The award consists of an engraved bookend and a cheque for £2003 (the prize amount cleverly rises by £1 per year). The winner, as usual, will be announced in a ceremony at the Science Museum, London, on Saturday 17th May 2003. The Award Ceremony will provide the climax to a day of talks and readings related to the shortlisted works which will be hosted by the Science Museum. And this year's lucky nominees? David Brin is a multiple-award winning science fiction writer and scientist who has worked with both NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. His novel The Postman was the basis for the Kevin Costner movie of the same title (the book is far, far better than movie, by the way). He lives in California. Kil'n People tackles the controversial issue of human cloning by examining the personal, political and psychological costs involved if people were able to duplicate themselves. This is his first novel to be shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. M. John Harrison is a highly praised author of fantastic literature. His In Viriconium was nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and his autobiographical novel Climbers won the Boardman Tasker Memorial Award. MJH lives in London. His 1974 subversion of science fiction clichés in The Centauri Device is credited with changing the character of British science fiction, and in Light he once again overthrows genre expectations in a novel that moves between a serial killer in contemporary London to the farthest reaches of space.
His second novel, Perdido Street Station, won the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Scar is set in the same richly-imagined universe, which provides the backdrop for a dramatic story of conflicting loyalties and betrayal. Elizabeth Moon is a former US Marine and a former paramedic. She has previously been nominated for the Hugo Award, America's oldest SF prize. She lives in Texas. Her fiction usually makes use of her military background, but Speed of Dark marks a dramatic change. Her central character is an autistic adult at a time when autism is beginning to be controllable. The story examines the attitudes of society towards difference, and how we betray the most vulnerable members of out society. Christopher Priest was one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 1983, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Prestige, one of numerous awards for his work he has received in Britain, Australia, France and Germany. He has previously been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Prestige in 1996, and The Extremes in 1999. The Separation is a challenging novel set during the Second World War in which twin brothers find themselves involved in the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland. Their actions set Britain onto two very different historical tracks. Christopher Priest lives in Hastings. Kim Stanley Robinson has won practically all the top awards in science fiction, and has previously been shortlisted three times for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, for The Memory of Whiteness (1987), Red Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1997). Kim is famous for his concern with ecological and environmental issues, and these play a significant part in The Years of Rice and Salt, a large tome which imagines that Europe was wiped out by the Black Death. From this starting point he examines how familiar Western science, culture and politics might have developed in Hindu, Moslem, Chinese and native American societies. Kim Stanley Robinson lives in California. The Award is judged by a jury representing the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Science Museum. The judges for the 2003 Award are Tony Cullen, co-editor of the critical journal Vector, and Iain Emsley, specialist bookseller, (BSFA); Doug Millard, curator of the Space Gallery, (Science Museum); Paul McAuley, Arthur C. Clarke Award winning author of Fairyland, and Liz Sourbut, regular reviewer for New Scientist, (SFF). The Chairman of the judges and administrator of the Award is Paul Kincaid, author of A Very British Genre: A Short History of British Fantasy and Science Fiction.
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OTHER CONTENT - March 2003
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The
shortlist for the 2003 Arthur C. Clarke Award, one of Britain's
most prestigious award for science fiction, has just been announced
and it runs as follows:
China
Miéville was described as the 'sexiest man in British
politics' when he stood as a Socialist Alliance candidate in the
2001 General Election. He studied at Cambridge, the London School
of Economics and Harvard, and is completing a thesis on the philosophy
of international law. He lives in London. 
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