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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Jane Rogers' latest wins Arthur C. Clarke Award

"Jane Rogers' vision of a world crippled by biological terrorism, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, has won the UK's top prize for science fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke award.
     Published by tiny Scottish independent press Sandstone, Rogers' novel – narrated by a teenager – was longlisted for last year's Man Booker prize but missed out on a shortlist place. Now it has beaten some of the biggest names in science fiction, including China Miéville, Charles Stross, Greg Bear and Sheri S Tepper, to take the 2012 Arthur C Clarke award. Rogers has previously won the Somerset Maugham award and been a runner-up for the Guardian fiction prize, but The Testament of Jessie Lamb is her first venture into science fiction.
     'It wasn't an obvious Arthur C. Clarke winner – it's not from a science fiction publisher but from a small Scottish press. But I don't think anyone was surprised it was nominated. It really is a very good book and it has found a real audience in the science fiction readership,' said the prize's director Tom Hunter. [...]"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Three-time Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlisted for 2012

From: This Is Horror

"China Miéville joins SF heavy-hitters Charles Stross, Greg Bear and Sheri S. Tepper on the shortlist for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke award, putting him in line to win the prize an unprecedented fourth time.
     Miéville – who won the prize in 2001 with Perdido Street Station, in 2005 with Iron Council and in 2010 with The City & the City – is nominated for Embassytown, a deep-space exploration of language, truth and identity which was shortlisted for the British science fiction awards earlier this year.
     His 2002 novel The Scar was also nominated for the prize, which is awarded to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK in the previous calendar year.
     According to the chair of the judges, Andrew M. Butler, there's no reason why the prize shouldn't be awarded to Miéville again."
— Richard Lea, The Guardian
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From: Vasanth Seshadri writes

Arthur C. Clarke

1917 - 2008

"In 2007, Clarke completed 90 orbits around the sun. He was now in a wheelchair, but his mind continued to reach the farthest outposts of the universe. He marked his 90th birthday by speaking to his followers through a Youtube video. He expressed three birthday wishes: For ET to call, for mankind to quit his addiction to oil, and for lasting peace in Sri Lanka. He could not resist making more predictions. He declared this the beginning of the golden age of space travel. He predicted that thousands of space tourists will travel to the moon and beyond within the next 30 years."
— Vasanth Seshadri writes
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"China Miéville is perhaps the current generation's finest writer of science fantasy [...]" — Michael Moorcock

"[...] Míeville has become renown for the deft manner in which he uses the fantastic to explore such real world concerns as abuses of government power, international relations (not always with human beings), and the role of the subaltern in industrialized society. Míeville is no apologist for his love of genre fiction and much of the pleasure in his work comes from his engagement with familiar topoi of pulp tradition, his subversions of certain clichés, and his willingness to blur the perceived boundaries between various modes of genre fiction. The Scar weaved monsters and quantum theory into the maritime adventure story, while his Hugo award-winning The City and The City fused Hammett-style roman noir with Phildickian weirdness to explore the ways in which city dwellers can be trained to studiously ignore other communities. The recent novel Kraken is an affectionate parody of Lovecraftian apocalypse narratives. In his newest work, Embassytown, Míeville eschews the generic hybridity that has become his calling card in favor of tackling what is arguably the most traditional of science fiction subgenres: the Space Opera. Unsurprisingly, he makes it his own – crafting a narrative that is at once intellectually rigorous and intoxicatingly strange.[...]
     The Ariekei also are a truly marvelous invention, precisely because they feel so alien to the human reader. Their Language, their morphology, their conception of the world around them seems so foreign that it takes a concentrated effort for the reader to get his or her mind around it initially. To create a race of extraterrestrials that doesn’t feel like a thinly disguised caricature of an Earth culture is a significant accomplishment and, in this case, a virtuoso feat of imaginative prowess."
— Andre Shephard, The New Inquiry
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Estrangement in a Strange Land

"I was up in Cheltenham this weekend at the Literature festival, where I chaired several events – including one with SF legend Brian Aldiss, still going strong at 86, and calling to mind in voice and appearance a benign, left-wing John Cleese. When asked by an audience member why he'd tackled the subject of state-endorsed torture in his 2007 novel, Harm, he explained the novel's political charge on the grounds that 'I really do believe that the people in charge at the minute are - well, shits.' Amen to that.
     Anyway, my final event on Saturday was with SF-legend-in-the-making China Miéville, to discuss his latest novel, Embassytown. We talked about the novel for about half an hour (read it: it's excellent) before the conversation veered onto the evergreen territory of the Booker prize's wilful neglect of science fiction. It's a well-rehearsed argument (I went to an event at Cheltenham last year in which Miéville and John Mullan squared off entertainingly over it), but we ran down the familiar points: SF novels are generally sold not on their literary credentials but on the ideas they explore; the Booker is a genre (litfic) award itself, but just doesn't admit it; SF novels DO make it onto Booker shortlists (Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake) but once shortlisted they're not called science fiction any more (cf Kingsley Amis's oft-quoted distich: ' "SF's no good!" they bellow till we're deaf./ "But this looks good … Well, then, it's not SF!" ')."
— Sarah Crown, Guardian
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