Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist Announced

Who'll follow 2013 winner Chris Beckett ?

The shortlist for the 2014 Arthur C Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel of the year 2014 have just been announced. The books in contention are:

• God's War by Kameron Hurley (Del Rey)
  
• The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann (Gollancz)
  
• Nexus by Ramez Naam (Angry Robot)
  
• The Adjacent by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
  
• The Machine by James Smythe (Blue Door)
  
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit)

The books were selected from 121 eligible submissions, the highest number received in the award's 28-year history. The winner will be announced on Thursday 1 May at a ceremony at the Royal Society in London, as part of SCI-FI-LONDON . They'll receive a cheque for £2014, and a commemorative engraved bookend.

“Choosing a shortlist of six books from a submissions list that went well over 100 titles for the first time in the award’s history was always going to be a challenge," says Arthur C Clarke Award director Tom Hunter. "There were tough calls to make, but from those decisions our judges have created an innovative and thoughtful shortlist that reflects both the strengths and health of contemporary science fiction.”

Making a nod to last year’s controversial all-male shortlist and the recent Hugo-gate , he adds:

“For the Clarke Award it’s the shortlist announcement that fans the flames (or flames the fans) of our community. With others it’s the choice of ceremony host. However no award seeks to generate controversy for its own sake. Debate is vital, but perhaps more important is a sense of celebration, and I hope this year to see a lot of well-deserved congratulations shared with our shortlisted authors as well as welcoming the critical response to the judge’s choice of books.

“I expect a lot of that attention will again focus on the number of books submitted by female science fiction writers, which was why we chose to emphasise this statistic in an announcement earlier this year. Where approximately one in four submitted titles were by women this year, one in three made it through to the discussion list of 30 titles from which the judges made their final selection today: A ratio which carried through into the final six shortlisted titles, two of which are by new female authors.”

The judging panel for this year's award are Duncan Lawie and Ian Whates of the British Science Fiction Association , Sarah Brown and Lesley Hall of the Science Fiction Foundation and Georgie Knight of SCI-FI-LONDON . Andrew M Butler is the Chair of the Judges.

Award director Tom Hunter has written a blog about the judging process, which you can read here.