China Mieville Wins Arthur C. Clarke Award
China Mieville has won this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel The City and The City. The annual award is presented for the best science fiction novel of the year, and selected from a list of novels whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year. A prize of £2010 will be awarded to the winner along with a commemorative engraved bookend.
Contacted by Amazon for his reaction, Mieville said, "One of the many reasons this means so much to me is that I tried to draw on different literary inspirations than I had previously done, to write in a different voice, to channel a different kind of 'weird'. Trying to do something different was a huge pleasure and excitement, but of course there's no guarantee that you'll do a good job. To have the effort received like this means an incredible amount."
Clarke Award Administrator Tom Hunter told Amazon, "I have to say that the positive reaction to the whole of this year’s shortlist has been fantastic, and I’ve been very encouraged by both the passion and the generosity of this year’s debate. What’s pleased me most has been the fact that every book shortlisted this year has had it’s camp of enthusiastic advocates, and I don’t think there’s been a list that’s been a tougher call than this for many a year."
The judging panel for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award consisted of Chris Hill and Jon Courtenay Grimwood for the British Science Fiction Association, Francis Spufford and Rhiannon Lassiter for the Science Fiction Foundation and Paul Skevington for the science fiction news website SF Crowsnest.com. Paul Billinger represents the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the Chair of Judges. The winner was announced this evening at an award ceremony held on the opening night of the SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival.
Qin Dynasty on April 28, 2010 at 11:32 PM
I quite like Mieville's book.
Paul A'Barge on April 29, 2010 at 12:52 PM
Why does this award discriminate against Americans, i.e. only for UK writers?
And thus, why should Americans care?
tehdude on April 29, 2010 at 01:06 PM
Um.. just because it's only for UK writers doesn't mean it discriminates against Americans. It's not like the rest of the world is allowed with the exception of Americans. It's a national award, not a world-wide one.
Patrick Carroll on April 29, 2010 at 01:39 PM
I read this book as part of the Amazon Vince program, and thoroughly enjoyed it. So, I'm happy to see it recognized as an excellent piece of work.
Jason Black on April 29, 2010 at 02:04 PM
Yay! Yay, yay yay!
I'm so happy to hear this. City and the City is such a remarkable book, for so many different reasons.
One, of course, what an amazing and innovative setting. I've never read anything even remotely like it.
Two, Mieville does a first-rate job of thinking through the implications of his setting on how the people there would actually live, act, and think. As a freelance book doctor, I see my share of books with unusual settings, but none of them ever come close to this level of thoughtful development of the setting and how the setting would affect the people in it. I can't tell you how much I appreciated that aspect of the book.
Three, his character development is incredible. Mieville is an absolute master of using tiny little moments and big choices alike to utterly convince the reader of his characters' personality traits.
Four, what an amazing case study in the RIGHT way to showcase an innovative setting. I've seen fantasy settings and Jules Verne type settings from my clients, attached to stories that are little more than an excuse to show off what the writer believes to be such a fascinating place they've created. In City and the City, Mieville not only worked up an amazing setting, but also crafted a cracking-good plot that provides completely logical reasons for exploring that setting and showing it to the reader. We're not just seeing Beszel and Ul Qoma because he wants to show them to us; we're seeing them because _the story naturally goes there_.
All around, a masterwork from China Mieville. I can tell I'll be recommending this book to my clients as a "read it and learn" title, for a lot of reasons and for a long time.
Francis Spufford on April 29, 2010 at 03:59 PM
Hi. I was one of this year's judges, so maybe I'm in a useful position to correct a misconception here. The Clarke Award isn't 'only for UK writers'. It's for books published in the UK, which is quite different. That's why we had Kim Stanley Robinson on the shortlist this year - possibly the finest American SF writer of the present day, in my opinion. That's why Neal Stephenson was on the shortlist for Anathem last year, and won a few years ago with Quicksilver. So, no, it isn't some kind of little parochial Brits-only thing we're trying to run. But what the rules do imply is that we're dealing with the universe of SF as it looks from the particular viewpoint of British SF readers, which seems to me to be a legitimate and interesting way to add to the diversity of a conversation which is always, and rightly, going to be international.
Zimriel on April 29, 2010 at 07:10 PM
He's a Communist not even ashamed of the label "Communist", and Arthur C. Clarke was a boring conventional-wisdom technocrat.
He deserves the prize, and the prize deserves him.
Shaun Bicheno on April 30, 2010 at 01:17 AM
Zimriel, you seem remarkably closed minded for a SF enthusiast.
McCarthy died a long time ago, time to change the record.
birkenstock on May 07, 2010 at 02:54 AM
I quite love Mieville's book.
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