Adam Roberts on the Clarke Shortlist

I always enjoy Adam Roberts' reviews of the Arthur C Clarke award shortlist, and the most recent is now up at Infinity Plus. As a reminder, that shortlist in full:

River of Gods by Ian McDonald
Iron Council by China Mieville
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Market Forces by Richard Morgan
The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The System of the World by Neal Stephenson

I've read three (McDonald, Mitchell, Niffenegger), so this isn't the most well-grounded of predictions, but if you asked me to predict a winner I'd go with Cloud Atlas--though I'd be thinking of River of Gods. Roberts also thinks McDonald's book should get it, but thinks calling what will win is a harder task. Most of the books come in for criticism as well as praise. On Iron Council:

For weirdness to register, there needs to be a normality against which it can be measured. When everything in a text is weird nothing is. Particularly in the first 120 pages of Iron Council this becomes something of a problem. Bizarreness after bizarreness harries the hardy band of travellers, all of them rendered with Miéville's impressive ingenuity and inventiveness. But there's so much of it, and it's rendered so densely, that the effect is one only of sluggishness, an effortful slog through oddity piled on oddity.

Cloud Atlas:

And, despite the fact that the novel ends in a genuinely affecting way (and despite the fact that it wears its undeniable technical accomplishment on its sleeve throughout), this is the problem with Cloud Atlas. What is the novel saying? It is saying that Racism is Bad; that we ought to take Care of The Environment; that People Can Sometimes Oppress Others and Be Nasty To Them and that this, like Racism, is A Bad Thing. And above all it is saying that, although it may not appear so to a superficial analysis, in fact We Are All Connected In This, Like, Cosmic Oneness That Transcends Time and Space Or Something.

The Time-Traveler's Wife:

In other words I'm suggesting that there is, in the final analysis, a triviality to The Time Traveler's Wife: not because love is a trivial subject (obviously it is not) but because Niffenegger's treatment is fundamentally and irrevocably sentimental, and the time travel premise is used only to magnify that sentimentality.

Interestingly I didn't find that it was overly sentimental myself; I liked it a lot, though I also think it's overlong.

System of the World (his least favourite):

It is not that the book entirely lacks interest. The reader cannot trawl through these many fact-swarming pages without snagging all manner of trivia in his/her net. And if lots of factoids and a broad sense of the historical circumstance of England in 1714 is what you are after, then this is the ... no, wait, what am I saying? If that's what's you're after, log on to Wikipedia and spend an hour or so browsing. If what you're after is a book that hangs about you like a ball-and-chain, a reading experience that seems to trudge on forever, a narrative whose ending seems to fade for ever and for ever as you move gaspingly towards it, then this is the book for you.

To me, though, the most interesting aspect of the review is how he characterises the differences between the Clarke list and this year's BSFA list:

The Clarke panel this year seem, consciously or unconsciously, to have elected for Populism. Now, Populism is a Good Thing. Few of the titles on the BSFA list have sold more than respectably (the exceptions are Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and, to a lesser degree, Century Rain). On the other hand, three of the Clarke list titles (Mitchell, Niffenegger and Morgan) have been bestsellers, and two (Miéville and Stephenson) have sold very well indeed. These are books that people, in large numbers, actually want to read; and they have become popular because they manifest manifold virtues.

This is one of the things that interested me about the Clarke list. I mean, good lord, the Niffenegger and Mitchell books are in the Richard and Judy book club, of all things, and being sold three-for-two in promotions in supermarkets (and judging by the number of people I've seen reading it on the Tube recently, the Niffenegger at least is doing quite well out of it; I have allowed myself to feel ever-so-slightly smug about having read it over a year ago) and for all Roberts' criticisms they are indeed both novels with numerous virtues.

But he also says:

Each of these books -- even the sluggish Robinson title -- is trying to do something new in the genre. This isn't the case for the majority of titles chosen by the Clarke panel.

I'm not sure I agree with him here. I'm reluctant to say it, but to me the BSFA list looks a little bit like the usual suspects. This is not to say that they're bad books--I've read five of the six on that list, and enjoyed them all, more or less--but I'm not sure any of them are radical departures for the writers involved, whereas the Clarke list seems that bit more diverse, that bit fresher. The science fiction in Cloud Atlas, for instance, is thoroughly traditional, but I think the way it's handled in the context of the rest of the book makes it new; whereas I think that in Alastair Reynolds' Century Rain, the mixing of subgenres isn't as fruitful as it perhaps might be. On the other hand, maybe Roberts is right; maybe my sense of freshness in the Clarke list comes more from the fact that there are authors there I haven't seen up for awards before than any particular boldness in the books themselves. It's something to consider. In the meantime, I recommend you go and read the whole article, because even if you disagree with what Roberts is saying he's likely to make you think.

(I also wish someone would do an equivalent review of the BSFA list--possibly for Vector, although I suspect the combination of production and award deadlines would make that tricky. Maybe if I read Stamping Butterflies in time I'll try to do something here).