The shortlist for the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award, given to the best science fiction novel first published in the U.K. of the following year, has been announced.
The winner will be announced on July 24, 2024 and will receive an engraved bookend and £2,024. The judges come from the award’s supporting organizations—the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the Sci-Fi-London film festival. For 2023, the judges were Dolly Garland and Stark Holborn for the British Science Fiction Association, Nic Clarke and Tom Dillon for the Science Fiction Foundation, and Glyn Morgan for the Sci-Fi London film festival. Andrew M. Butler served as the non-voting representative of the Clarke Award directors.
“This year’s shortlist takes us from the deepest oceans to furthest outer space—with satire, time travel, aliens, octopuses, supercomputers and a six-legged Bambi,” Butler said in a statement (per Locus). “Many thanks to returning judge Stark Holborn and to neophytes Nic Clarke, Tom Dillon, Dolly Garland and Glyn Morgan for selecting six writers new to the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I suspect the final decision will be very close indeed.”
Here are the finalists:
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner
“In addition to six new writers joining the Clarke Award’s shortlist ranks, we were delighted to receive submissions from a record-breaking fifty eligible publishing imprints this year,” Award Director Tom Hunter said in a statement. “We hope this speaks to the future health and depth of the genre across the UK’s publishing industry even as the task of defining science fiction becomes ever more challenging for our judges!”
Congratulations to all the finalists!
