Spaceships Aren’t Illiterate

Being a longtime fan of “future noir” novelist Richard Morgan, I was interested to read in The Telegraph that his Arthur C. Clarke Award win this year has kicked up some controversy, due to the fact that his victorious book, Black Man (which, under its U.S. title, Thirteen, was also nominated for a Gumshoe Award), is actually more of a science-fiction work than a literary one.

As the paper’s Andrew McKie writes:

One of the most common reactions to this year’s winner of the Clarke--Richard Morgan’s Black Man--was that it was at least a “proper science fiction book”. (The SF website io9 headlined the news with “Shockingly, science fiction book wins SF book award”.) Partly, that was because the shortlist included Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, Stephen Baxter’s young adult novel The H-Bomb Girl, about a 14-year-old growing up in Liverpool during the Cuban missile crisis, and The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall, which won last year’s (mainstream) John Llewellyn Rhys prize. These were all thought by some to be insufficiently science fictional.

This view--which I need hardly say I don’t share, though I would probably not have chosen those particular titles--was probably compounded by the fact there were (as there always are) some surprising omissions from the list, notably Ian McDonald’s brilliant Brasyl. I also liked Spook Country by William Gibson, the man who helped to invent cyberpunk in Neuromancer, but I concede that it is hardly science fiction at all. In fact, there is almost always this kind of row about the Clarke shortlist, and has been ever since the first winner (Margaret Atwood, for The Handmaid’s Tale) in 1987.

But on the whole, I’m on the side of the SF writers and readers; unlike the readers of “literary” fiction they at least understand that the fact that there is a spaceship in a book does not prevent it from being well written.

Read more here about the Clarke prize controversy. And Morgan talks here about the role fans play in defining and refining genres.