The first Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel went to A Handmaid鈥檚 Tale in 1987. It is a book that many commenters still refuse to call听 鈥渟cience fiction鈥� because it grapples not with the shiny stuff we might get in the future, or the galaxy in which that stuff might explode, but with how lines of power and identity might be radically redrawn and society restructured along the lines of a nightmare. The novel鈥檚 power comes from its plausibility: women gained the right to own property in England barely 100 years before Atwood wrote about them losing it. Its recent TV adaptation and return to the top of the bestseller lists reflects a growing appetite for science fiction which is also economic and political fiction.
Reflecting the UK鈥檚 own fractured, unstable identity, all of this year鈥檚 nominees share an interest in the relationship between person, system and machine. There are no solo heroes tearing through the galaxy on a mission here. These characters, mostly women, mostly not white and often not straight, are all deeply entangled in worlds rife with injustice, responsibility and love, and are profoundly changed, controlled or extended by the technologies they use. Four of the six short-listed novels revolve around characters who are owned as property or built as tools. Across warring galaxies, dimensional rifts, plantations, space stations, a Devonshire hotel, and the backrooms of alien-populated hacker emporiums, this year鈥檚 nominees return again and again to the questions of how society and relationships shape us, and how people build identities, purpose and family out of the whole tangled mess.
by Yoon Ha Lee is an epic space opera folded rather too tightly into a few hundred pages. The details of warring sects and military operations will appeal most to dedicated fans of the genre, but ideas flow thick and fast too. Here faith and culture are explicitly designed to warp reality, and soldiers are programmed to obey. A religious calendar reshapes physics and permits epic, uncanny fights involving fast-paced battle mathematics and startlingly original forms of carnage.
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Colson Whitehead鈥檚 is a masterpiece of historical fiction which sneaked into this short list on the back of choosing to make the metaphor of its title a real, dark, hand-dug network of tunnels. The reader reels at Cora鈥檚 relentless will to survive amid atrocities and uncomfortably believable monsters; at enslaved people dancing in firelight 鈥渕aking a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without鈥�. A stark, beautiful depiction of what we have done and what we can be; it should be taught in schools.
Tricia Sullivan鈥檚 follows an angel on a hunt unfolding across higher dimensions and geological ages. Between dinosaur battles, memories of lost gods and sometimes jarring pop culture references, there emerges a meditation on how hopelessly entangled we are in one another. Occupy Me is uncanny and ambitious, if uneven in tone. It鈥檚 impossible not to like its hero, as she falls ever more in love with everything.
by Becky Chambers reflects its central character鈥檚 earnest sweetness in light, joke-filled prose, even while alternating the stories of an enslaved clone and an AI struggling to adjust to a new body and a society that considers her an object. We watch them build escape vessels from scrap and risk their lives to remake their own programming. Flashbacks serve as reminders of the cost this family pays, in suffering and work, to emerge laughing and triumphant from an unjust universe.
A fractured set of interwoven stories groggy with author Lavie Tidhar鈥檚 love for a future Tel Aviv; is a place of data vampires and rusting soldiers, of uncanny artificial intelligences, of welcoming illicit bars serving up arak and conversation. Threads are unashamedly left loose, vibrant set pieces and characters arise and vanish in a flash; the book reflects its crowded, chaotic setting. But through the chaos runs a hunger for faith and connection, as characters suck data or down pills in an attempt to achieve a consensus reality.
Emma Newman鈥檚 sets a hardboiled detective story in a gov-corp run world thick with cults and conspiracies. But our investigator is no hard-living swaggerer in a trench coat; Carlos is an indentured servant whose every word and movement is monitored by the owners of his contract. Newman depicts his traumas and precious small triumphs 鈥� a good meal, a smile of kindness 鈥� with as much care as the unveiling of a plot that reaches from a bloodied hotel bedroom to the stars, weaving in faith, family and brutal betrayals.
If individually the novels cover a thrilling range of horrors and monsters, as a collection they offer grounds for hope. In these worlds of chips, nodes, or artificial assistants, people still reach out to loved ones. Even owned and tortured, characters find fragments of joy, and the will to fight for more. Living under injustice some characters are literally programmed, some struggle with inherited prejudice, some become monsters and some heroes. These stories turn mirrors from the past onto the future and ask urgently, in a time of change, what will we make of ourselves?
The winner of the for science fiction will be announced at a ceremony at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London on 27 July
听Lydia Nicholas is a researcher in data and culture
