Martin MacInnes has won the 38th Arthur C. Clarke Award, given to the best science fiction novel published in the previous year, for his novel In Ascension. MacInnes receives £2024 and a trophy.
Dr. Andrew M. Butler, chair of the judging panel, said of the book:
“As always, the judging session was filled with emotion and intelligence and it took a while for Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension to emerge as the front runner. It shows us, in the words of one judge, ‘vistas between the cellular and the cosmic.’ It’s an intense trip and for once it’s a winner that is in the tradition of Clarke’s own novels.”
In Ascension, MacInnes’s third novel, was previously longlisted for the Booker Prize. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Heller McAlpin said of the book, “Few novels toggle so beautifully between the minute and the vast, the personal and the theoretical, the quotidian and the extraordinary, the knowable and the unfathomable. In Ascension raises big questions about the universe and humanity’s place in it. Even better, it evokes wonder at every turn.”
Five other novels were shortlisted for this year’s Clarke award: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah; The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan; The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler; Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh; and Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner. The judging panel consisted of 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.
