Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, a centuries-spanning story about strife between the remnants of humanity and a rising civilisation of spiders, is this year’s winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for best science fiction novel. Award director Tom Hunter described it as having a “universal scale and sense of wonder reminiscent of the novels of Sir Arthur C. Clarke himself”.

The novel uses and reimagines familiar science fiction conceits – terraforming, superintelligence, a decaying starship – in a story that interweaves the development of an empire of spiders accidentally gifted intelligence with the descent into barbarism of a starship crew searching for a new home.

Its thoughtful depiction of two civilisations trying to understand each other cleverly inverts the usual narrative of planetary conquest, and features startling moments of cognitive estrangement during clashes with the alien, yet sympathetically drawn, spiders.

A lawyer with a background in zoology and psychology, Tchaikovsky is best known for Shadows of the Apt, his 10-volume fantasy series. Children of Time is his first science fiction novel. After receiving his award and a cheque for £2016, Tchaikovsky said his book was not just about spiders, but also “about empathy – a theme that runs through all the shortlisted books”.

The shortlist was whittled down from 113 eligible titles, one of the highest submission levels ever received for the prestigous award – which was founded using a grant from Sir Arthur C. Clarke and celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Pat Cadigan, China Miéville and Geoff Ryman.

WHERE better to catch up with the best recent science fiction than the Arthur C. Clarke award shortlist? Selected from 100-plus novels, the six contenders burst with fresh perspectives on themes central to SF, from decaying starships to post-human superpowers. .

Win or lose, I hugely admire Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson. After the UK’s Brexit referendum, the story, set in a Balkanised near-future Europe, seems more prescient than ever. Sharing the same background (but none of the characters) as his previous novel, Europe in Autumn, it begins in a seemingly hermetic pocket world, the Campus, where, in the aftermath of a bloody revolution, the new professor of intelligence uncovers a dangerous conspiracy.

Meanwhile, an investigation into a random stabbing entangles a British intelligence officer in the search for a county imagined into being by an eccentric family of landowners. The two threads gradually merge, climaxing in a mission to infiltrate the Community, a quaint yet sinister English Ruritania underlying Europe’s shattered map.

The novel’s vivid settings and complex intrigue are enlivened by a wry cynicism, clever misdirection and a sprinkling of homages to espionage literature. Like John le Carré, Hutchinson foregrounds the human stories at the heart of conspiracies; like Eric Ambler, he uncovers the heroic impulse in ordinary men caught up in events they only partially witness or understand.

Hutchinson expertly weaves their fractured stories into a satisfying whole, interrogating and satirising English mythology and the nature of Englishness with a mordant wit.

This article appeared in print under the headline “A very English tale”

“It’s crammed with ideas which aren’t always given as much room or depth as they deserve, but it burns with a vital exuberance”