Canadian Author Adrian Barnes Shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award

"Reinforcing science fiction's image as a boys club the UK's most prestigious prize for the genre, the Arthur C Clarke award, has announced an all-male shortlist – for only the second time in its history.
     The six books in the running for the Arthur C Clarke – a mix of titles by major SF writers Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod with lesser known debuts – follow an all-male shortlist for the reader-decided British Science Fiction Association prize, which was won earlier this week by Adam Roberts for Jack Glass.
     Roberts failed to make the cut for the Clarke award, however, pushed out by Robinson's story of an inhabited solar system 300 years in the future, 2312, Scottish award-winner MacLeod's dystopian vision of a London where genetic defects can be wiped from unborn children, Intrusion, and Nick Harkaway's acclaimed Angelmaker, a whirlwind race to save the world from a 1950s doomsday machine. Canadian author Adrian Barnes, published by tiny press Bluemoose, is in the running for Nod, in which humanity's sudden inability to sleep has devastating consequences, Chris Beckett for Dark Eden, where the incestuous descendants of two stranded astronauts try to make a life for themselves on a far flung planet, and Peter Heller for the post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars, set in a world destroyed by the flu pandemic."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Books that grab you

"Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker, which manages to combine a 90-year-old super spy, a clockwork repairman and a cunning plan to destroy every living thing in the universe, has won him the Kitschies Red Tentacle award for the most intelligent, progressive and entertaining speculative novel of the year.

     Set up by the books site Pornokitsch, the Kitschies go annually to books that 'elevate the tone' of genre fiction. The Red Tentacle prize for best novel – which comes with a large, tentacular trophy, £1,000 and a bottle of Kraken rum – has been won in the past by books including Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls, Lauren Beukes's Zoo City and China Miéville's The City and the City.
     Harkaway's second novel, Angelmaker, in which gangster's son turned clockwork repairman Joe Spork tries to put a stop to monks who are plotting the universe's destruction, beat titles by Adam Roberts, Frances Hardinge, Jesse Bullington and Julie Zeh to win this year's award."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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