The shortlist for this year's Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction was announced yesterday. (Doesn't seem like two minutes since I finished reading last year's list...). As has become my habit, I shall be reading and reviewing them.
Here, via Torque Control, it is:
- Song of Time, Ian R. MacLeod
- The Quiet War, Paul McAuley
- House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds
- Anathem, Neal Stephenson
- The Margarets, Sheri S. Tepper
- Martin Martin's on the Other Side, Mark Wernham
I've already read two of them: The Margarets, a solid but not spectacular effort from Tepper that I reviewed for Strange Horizons last year (and so won't do a separate piece on it here); and the excellent Song of Time, a review of which will be appearing here shortly. I've started a third, the intimidatingly mountainous Anathem, which (thus far at least) is managing to leaven its inherent po-facedness with some silly humour.
The other three are all from authors new to me (if not, in the case of both Reynolds and McAuley, new to my interminable TBR pile...), so I couldn't possibly prejudge, except to note an entirely unfounded suspicion that the Wernham will be this year's Red Men. I have to confess that, on first glance, none of them strike me as deeply unusual or intriguing - but I thought that about two of last year's list, before I read them, and they both turned out very well indeed.
~~Nic