My turn to get all excited about a bookish award! The shortlist for this year's Arthur C Clarke Award has been announced, and it looks like this:
Gwyneth Jones - Spirit
China Mieville - The City & the City
Adam Roberts - Yellow Blue Tibia
Kim Stanley Robinson - Galileo's Dream
Marcel Theroux - Far North
Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls
The general feeling seems to be that this is a solid shortlist; I agree. It's not the most adventurous list the Clarke has ever produced - but, on the plus side, there's no obvious candidate for this year's What Were They Thinking prize (see, previously: this, this, or - ack - this).
I've read three already: the Jones, the Mieville and the Theroux. All are strong contenders. I reviewed Spirit last year - a feminist The Count of Monte Cristo in space! - and longer considerations of the other two will follow in the next week or so. Post-apocalyptic loner-in-the-landscape tale Far North I liked a lot, once I got over the comparions with The Road; The City & the City, meanwhile, has a brilliant central conceit and provides much food for thought (and debate), but is let down by being hitched to an unremarkable thriller novel.
Of the rest - which, again, I'll review here once I've read them - I'm most looking forward to Yellow Blue Tibia, which has had generally excellent reviews. Galileo's Dream is a doorstep about intellectual history, although it sounds less of a slog than Anathem was last year; I've read two of Robinson's previous novels (one rather good - review in the works - and one rather annoying), and I live with a die-hard Robinson fan, so that should be interesting, one way or another! The Wooding is apparently a fun romp with more than a passing resemblence to Firefly, which sounds like a perfectly acceptable way to round out a shortlist.
Links to many other reviews of the books have been gathered by Niall (the aforementioned Robinson fan). Three of the previous shortlists were also reviewed here at Eve's Alexandria: 2009 round-up and links (the missing Al Reynolds review is here); 2008 round-up and links. There doesn't look to be a round-up post for 2007, which Vicky and I did together, but the individual reviews are all linked from the left-hand sidebar - scroll down beyond the 'Past Posts' menu.
~~Nic