Collated and edited by Victoria Hoyle

[Editor’s note: this discussion, which took place over several days and is still going on, ran to some 30,000 words of text originally, What you see here is by necessity a partial and edited version of that conversation. Inevitably, during that editing process, some of the nuance of individual strands of the conversation has become lost, and whilst we believe this transcript represents an accurate record, we do not in any way wish to suggest that we, as eight highly opinionated individuals, were always in anything like unanimous agreement. It would have been useful to include more comment from Nick Hubble, for example, whose view of the shortlist and of genre culture generally presents a markedly different picture, but unfortunately he was unable to be present throughout much of our discussion, for family reasons. As with our shadow shortlist jury meeting, this transcript is an attempt to give greater transparency, to allow those reading along to gain an insight into our process of reasoning. All Sharkes are not the same! Please also note that we will be reviewing and discussing the shortlisted books in much greater detail throughout the second phase of our project, and, as in the first phase, there is every chance that we’ll find our views shifting and changing as we go along. As noted above, expansion, comment and further discussion are all very welcome.]

Since the Clarke shortlist was announced on May 3rd, the shadow Clarke panel have been debating the jury’s selection via Slack, an online discussion channel that we have used for our deliberations since January. The conversation ranged far and wide in the 48 hours following the announcement, from our initial raw responses to the shortlist to an evolving debate about genre award culture and SF criticism. Rather than write individual response posts we have decided to share an edited version of this conversation, as an insight into this discussion as it developed. It is, of course, still ongoing and by sharing it here we hope to broaden and stimulate it further.

Reactions, Predictions, Omissions

Our immediate reaction to the list was decidedly mixed. Although two of our shadow shortlist were in the mix (The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Central Station by Lavie Tidhar), some of the other choices proved less palatable. Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee and Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan had some advocates amongst us, but Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit and Emma Newman’s After Atlas were not favourites with those who had already read them. The gulf in ambition, thematic reach and literary quality between the six shortlistees seemed significant. Paul thought the list came across ‘as two completely different shortlists stuck together. How can the Tidhar and Whitehead belong in the same universe as Chambers and Newman? Chambers, Lee and Newman have been popular successes, but hardly critical successes. This is another safe and populist list.’

Jonathan agreed, adding that he suspected ‘a tension between those who want the Clarke to be like the Hugo and those who want to retain that connection to the more literary tradition. The Clarke’s slide into hyper-commerciality continues.’ Megan shared Jonathan’s perspective. ‘What we’re getting from this list is a commercially-packaged view of science fiction. And I feel the Colson Whitehead this year is last year’s Iain Pears, just a literary toss-in to shut up people like us.’

Nina also felt the list represented ‘a split in the values of criticism’, while Vajra agreed with Megan that the Whitehead was the anomaly on this list rather than vice-versa. ‘This is a “we included Whitehead because everybody would shout at us if we didn’t” kind of shortlist’. Maureen summarised this set of opinions most succinctly: ‘This really is a cut-and-shut shortlist. Something to offend everyone. The more I look at the shortlist the more it looks like something assembled to nod at various constituencies without satisfying any.’

Nick, however, felt more positive about the shortlist as a whole, finding some definite points to admire in the jury’s selection: ‘I don’t see the list as quite that bad. It includes two we picked and the Yoon Ha Lee which we considered for the sixth spot; also Occupy Me which would be on my list. I haven’t read anything by Emma Newman. The Becky Chambers I have read – in fact I had read it before I made my Sharke shortlist – but I wouldn’t include in the six best of the year or indeed in a longlist. I suppose – to paraphrase Niall’s comment on the shortlist announcement post – it is a rather too space-y perhaps. But to my mind it has four plausible winners (& no judgement by me as yet on Newman) and therefore I don’t see it as awful. I definitely think it is an improvement on last year’s list. Had the actual list included Kavenna or MacInnes or Whiteley or Priest instead of Chambers or Newman, it would feel very different.’

‘Different in a good way, I take it?’ Megan asked. ‘Do you think a list like that would be appropriate for the Clarke?’ ‘Well, I think five plausible winners (with one a bit genre-y) and a genre crowd-pleaser (the year Chris Wooding was shortlisted springs to mind – 2010?) would be liveable with.’ Nick confirmed. ‘But the old Not-the-Clarke panel would throw out the crowd-pleaser first, as happened at 2010 Eastercon.’

There was some question as to whether coherence was a necessary quality of a Clarke shortlist. ‘If a shortlist is incoherent,’ Paul began, ‘it probably indicates some discord among the jury: they are not all working towards the same definition of what the award should recognise. Which is not to say that a shortlist should be entirely coherent. But if the jury is not working towards some unified sense of what the award is about, then the result is more likely to demonstrate which judge has the stronger presence than which work is most worthy.’

Maureen concurred that she would ‘like to think that a shortlist would offer a sense that the jury had worked together in constructing it.’ She also expected ‘the individual entries to riff off one another in some way rather than jostling one another. I don’t want to look at a shortlist and have to wonder why this title or that is present. That is, I don’t mind surprises, but I do want to be able to find some sort of justification for surprises rather than be left with the feeling that a shortlist has arisen from disagreement rather than agreement.’

There was genuine surprise at the omission of two books that we had considered dead certainties in our shortlisting meeting, Naomi Alderman’s The Power and Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Winter. The former had been the Sharkes’ hot tip to win but as things now stood the contest seemed to be between Whitehead and Tidhar, with Tidhar considered the most likely contender by most of the shadow jury. Megan and Maureen disagreed, predicting Lee and Newman respectively. Megan argued: ‘I see the same conventional definition of science fiction that drove last year’s list, the same commercially-approved message, which tells me Ninefox is leading this thing. If spiders won last year, equation battles will win this year.’

Innovation or Commercial Craft?

This last comment prompted us to ask whether an award like the Clarke should favour innovation over excellent crafting of identifiable tropes. Paul was quick to question the question: ‘innovation tends to go with excellent crafting.’ But, then again, ‘all things being equal, if it comes to a choice between two works of the same quality of crafting, then my choice would go to the one which also displayed formal innovation.’ Maureen added that ‘for a juried award like the Clarke, it depends on what the award has been set up to honour or reward. I’m not sure innovation should be the be-all and end-all but I’d like to think it played some part in the decision. If one is making a choice between two novels doing pretty much the same thing and both well written, I’m always going to lean to the book that pushes the idea that little bit further. All of which serves to demonstrate how complicated a choice it can be.’

Nina admitted to a kneejerk reaction for ‘innovation, innovation, innovation’ but that ‘the problem with my answer is that I make it in accordance with personal preference. For me, a novel that pushes boundaries in some way is almost always going to be more interesting than a novel that is well executed but “just a story”. On the other hand, as a fiction writer I understand that “mere” narrative skill is actually anything but. A good story, well told, can be a beautiful thing, an artefact that may actually outlast more modishly “experimental” texts. With this in mind, what I value most in an award – or to put it more accurately in an award jury – is the sense that this matter, among others, has been properly debated, that the jury are, if not always in agreement (how dull that would be) arguing their cases from a similarly engaged, similarly knowledgeable intellectual standpoint. I don’t mind being outvoted on a novel I cherish and having another novel – to me less innovative, less essential – go through in its stead if the people who are outvoting me are able to argue their corner with ingenuity and aplomb. In short, for an award to have value for me I need to be able to see where the jury are coming from, as a group of thinkers.’

Given the panel’s preference for innovation, the debate turned to the extent to which the Clarke should represent the field as it currently stands as opposed to possible future developments in the field.

Nina’s feeling was that ‘with a good jury in place, a good shortlist will probably end up doing both. When you look back at previous Clarke shortlists, this has certainly proved to be the case, with the ‘what were they thinking?’ novels tending to reflect the prevailing trends of the field at the time, and the outliers – by no means always the winners – representing the vanguard. Looking back on old shortlists can be very instructive as even those you remember as dyed-in-the-wool excellent usually turn out to have at least one bad book on them and usually more. As before, the most important thing is that a jury is able to adequately defend its choices, at least among themselves.’

Paul put it more simply: ‘If an award reflects the field as it stands, then the field is standing still. I believe that science fiction has to continually change in order to survive, and awards should therefore reflect such change.’

Fascinatingly diverse?

As we watched the Twitter feeds and press responses, we were struck by the rhetoric being used to describe the shortlist, in particular a quote from award Director Tom Hunter in Starburst:

“Where we’ve end up this year is ultimately for the fans to decide, but speaking as a fan myself I can’t help but think this is one of our all-time best shortlists. It’s fascinatingly diverse, deeply imaginative and a great tribute to the memory of Sir Arthur himself as we celebrate the centenary year of his birth in 2017.”

Paul responded that it was ‘fascinating as in familiar, diverse as in all the same. The article is right about it being a diverse list in terms of the race and gender of the shortlisted authors. But it is not a diverse list in terms of the work itself.’

Diversity was also the main theme of the Guardian’s response to the shortlist, which focussed on representation of race and gender but without addressing the nature of the works themselves. Megan found the article’s emphasis on ethnicity and sexual identity to be problematic in that it tended to simplify the very issue of diversity, to tidy it away. Jonathan expanded to express broader discomfort with the simplistic diversity rhetoric in genre culture: ‘My problem with the discourse about diversity is that it’s untethered from form at novel or feature film length. I don’t want to watch Charles Burnett directing Iron Man, I want to watch personal films like Killer of Sheep. Similarly, I don’t want to watch Ava Duvernay directing Black Panther, I want her directing a film about *the* Black Panthers. I understand that in a commercial genre you have to earn your stripes but the way things are going, authors from more diverse backgrounds are never going to be allowed equal freedom to explore their visions and will continue to be held back by those with a vested interest in formula.’

Nina argued that this was because ‘so much of the discourse around diversity is lazy, a form of name-checking as opposed to talking about the actual books. Meanwhile works of real quality by non-white authors are being sidelined, simply because those authors are not among those names that tend to be repeated every time someone creates a new twitter hashtag to ‘encourage diversity’. It really upsets me because it is essential that we move towards a properly diverse literary culture in this country – and yet the values and the arguments are being cheapened and diluted by this bandwagon rhetoric.’

Vajra felt strongly that the problem was more complex: ‘It’s entirely true that there is a lot of structural and formal uniformity in popular science fiction and fantasy, and this is something that needs to change, but framing this within the “diversity of content as well as diversity of authors” argument comes dangerously close to the “all lives matter” strand of diversity conversations in publishing – that is, it’s a derail wrapped in a category error. It confuses the issue because there is a real criticism here – about how the ways in which stories are constructed and language is used are rendered and reinforced into a homogeneity acceptable to a dominant culture, but it has to be a criticism distinct from the issue of demographic representation in the industry, which is very visibly abysmal. That there were only two black authors, and both established names, in the long submissions list of eighty-odd books actually is a problem at several levels: I think it plays directly into some of the other issues that we’ve talked about. The disproportionate underrepresentation of black and non-white authors in SFF can’t be separated from how those stories and those books often end up being published as something else – magic realism or mainstream literature with fantastical elements.’

The value of criticism

As the public congratulations and praise for the balance and quality of the list rolled in, Paul and Maureen also noted how little critical engagement there was with the relative quality of the novels. As Paul said: ‘I’m noticing the number of responses along the lines of: I liked X, X is on the list, therefore it’s a good list. In the age of instant internet responses, liking a book is the same as it being a good, award-worthy book. That’s a distinction people no longer seem to make. I keep looking at the responses to the shortlist, and I think: how can so many people be so easily satisfied? But then I think: that’s the only way you’re allowed to respond to things these days. Part of the problem is surely the culture of squee. People have been trained to react with extravagant enthusiasm to everything; so if you don’t do that you are automatically looked on as someone outside the clan. And it’s pervasive.’

Jonathan suggested this ‘bunker mentality’ was partly a response to the Sad/Rabid Puppies and their Hugo campaigns but Paul suspected that ‘the Puppies are an outgrowth from the bunker mentality that already existed.’ Victoria observed ‘that SFF creative culture, at least at the popular end, is like a snake swallowing its own tail right now. Deeply self-referential, keen to join the in-crowd, be published by the it-publisher, self-congratulatory. Success in this system is only in reference to this closed world and so reading or thinking outside it seems unnecessary. As if the whole heritage of world literature is irrelevant because a handful of influential writers have determined the epitome of what is important.’

Jonathan added that the lack of serious critical engagement was a problem not just for the Clarke, but was becoming absent from genre spaces more generally. ‘I think the recent savagery of genre spaces has made it very difficult to object. The level of hostility with which any and all forms of critical engagement tend to be met has rather taken me by surprise though.’

Vajra also had some interesting insights on the increasing hostility of genre spaces. ‘I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who in their obituaries are described as “writer, critic, and editor” so clearly I don’t think criticism is a dying concept. It’s more that the landscape has changed around it so much that people who don’t already know how to relate to it are a bit lost. Partly a combination of late capitalism and social media, and how there is not, I think, a widespread acceptance that a book review is fundamentally different from, say, a smartphone review. Everything is a product which can have a star rating, with some words optionally attached as emphasis, the purpose of which is to assist the consumer in making a decision whether to buy or not. So people are sometimes just confused when you write some kind of essay-type thing that is clearly about a particular book in some way but does not seem to clearly signal what buying decision is being recommended.’ He then went on to address the recent tendency in some spaces to equate robust criticism with harassment or bullying. ‘There is definitely confusion here, sometimes justified, though usually not. I say “sometimes justified” because our poorly-designed social media systems do exacerbate internet pile-ons: nobody needs to even intend a bad outcome, because a thousand people casually signal-boosting a mildly negative review can feel like a mob with pitchforks shrieking at the top of their lungs. But even with that aside, I think a lot of newer authors walk on eggshells around criticism because (a) they haven’t actually been engaged in a literary culture and don’t know what that is or how it works – many of these authors don’t seem to read much, or care about books, as opposed to sales – which means (b) they seem to often confuse it with a call-out, which they probably also don’t understand except as a thing that Angry Young People do for mysterious reasons. And either way, (c) they think it’s a form of harassment because a “bad review” is one that explicitly or implicitly tells people not to buy your toaster, which is an attack on their livelihood, and possibly their personhood too if the criticism cut too deep. After the cultural appropriation wars and Racefail and whatnot, even people who do know what criticism is seem to have trouble dealing with it as a normal thing. As others have said, to a lot of people it seems that anything short of squee is seen as an attack, or a potential opening to an attack. I don’t think this should be cause for despair though. Something like the Sharke project is a great example of normalizing criticism by doing it, rather than defending it in the abstract. I think that works better.’

This hostility towards criticism was a point of particular concern for us as a shadow panel, as it goes to the heart of our ambitions for the Sharke project, which was set up specifically to try and redress this balance. Jonathan noted his earlier intention to keep his head down ‘by avoiding the stuff that everyone seems to love but which I find tedious’ but admitted that this would now be difficult in light of the shortlist decision. ‘I think the time is coming for some public discussion about what criticism is and does, what it should do, why it’s not a bad thing, and so forth,’ Maureen argued. ‘But someone needs to find a way to “sell” it as the productive thing it is, and I’m not yet sure how to do that. I’ve never not thought of criticism, or good reviewing, as anything other than a fascinating thing. I find it hard to imagine how, on the whole, people see it as a bad thing – usual bruised egos apart – but clearly we’ve reached a point where the literary ecosystem has become distorted, if not significantly damaged.’

Paul suggested that ‘the problem is that tricky word, “criticism”. I have lost count of the times that people assume that it must be entirely negative, that criticism serves no other purpose than to attack and tear down, and that critics set out to hate the books everyone else loves. That sort of attitude is behind the squee culture, the idea that the louder you say you love a book, the better that book is.’ Megan admitted that she has ‘a hard time comprehending this fear of criticism in genre culture. Criticism is what pushed me forward in my education, so I learned to embrace it even when I disagree with it. I’ve always been interested in finding out what people really think. Criticism is part of this. It’s a sharing and finding new angles in things. It’s also a political act, something we must do to avoid becoming passive receptacles for whatever drivel the corporate world wants us to ingest.’

The instantaneous feedback made possible by social media was identified as a game-changing factor in the reception of criticism. As a critic, Maureen has found herself increasingly concerned by the changing dynamics of the publishing world. With industry connections between authors, publishers and book bloggers becoming ever closer, she observed that ‘an ability for book bloggers to connect directly with authors has helped create a more difficult climate for the kind of commentary that aims to go beyond saying “isn’t it wonderful”’. She went on: ‘I guess the more people are sucked into this adulterated form of criticism, the more it encourages people to join in by also being enthusiastic. And even the slightest demurring from that becomes outright hostility. As all this piles up, it seems as though the dynamic between writer, reader, and commentator has become horribly skewed.’

Reflecting on this dynamic in the context of the British SF community Nina observed: ‘When I first became aware of the SFF community, I saw the level playing field between authors and critics as a good thing and somewhat revolutionary, with the way the two groups mixed and talked at conventions, for example, as being markedly different from the way of things within lit-fic circles. I saw it as mutually beneficial because it strengthened the conversation. But with the steady erosion of critical values, and the very idea of robust critical engagement often viewed as antagonistic, this closeness – most especially among the new generation – is becoming a disaster.’

Genre Imprint or Mainstream?

These observations led naturally to a discussion of the state of SF publishing in the UK. Nina stated: ‘I seriously think we are edging towards a situation where most of the interesting work will be published – and eventually prize-rewarded – in the mainstream, with genre imprints becoming ever more commercial and critically irrelevant.’ Victoria agreed: ‘Anything emerging outside the commercial bubble struggles for air, and so I imagine a lot is being picked up by the mainstream. I was struck by a recent review of the Granta Best Young American Novelists volume. It sounds as though fifty percent of the work in there is science fictional to a degree, with most of these authors being discussed completely outside the sphere of genre conversation.’

To some extent Paul felt this was how things should be: ‘In a sense that is what postmodernism was all about – absorbing science fiction into the mainstream. I cannot mourn for the genre imprints as long as they keep producing the Becky Chambers-type stuff, while the mainstream forges ahead with the Whiteheads and Kavennas of this world.’ Jonathan identified an alignment between genre and Young Adult publishing, saying: ‘I think genre publishing has positioned itself really close to YA and so we’ve moved to a more diverse (good) but also more commercial centre ground.’ Paul reminded us that ‘it’s not that long since the literary establishment seemed to treat all of science fiction as though it were children’s fiction’. He went on to argue that ‘now it seems as if a large part of the genre has absorbed that notion and is literally identifying YA with SF, or vice versa. So that it often seems today as if the only people who treat science fiction as a serious adult literature are those who come to it from the mainstream.’ ‘I noticed a long time ago that, for me, the most interesting new stuff was coming from the edges, the places where SF got new names – weird, slipstream, literary,’ Maureen admitted, ‘and early to middle Clarke really responded to that. I never thought of the Clarke as market-driven, and I doubt anyone else did.’

Jonathan felt that the Clarke’s recent bias towards marketable books published by genre imprints was aligning the Clarke too closely with other awards. ‘Personally, I think the current swing towards genre imprints is going to be the death of the Clarke. Putting it on similar ground to the Hugo will inevitably mean that it is swamped by the Hugo. The best way to avoid that is to put some distance between the two.’ He suggested that an award like the Clarke should be nurturing higher ambitions: events at prestigious literary venues such as the Hay Festival, the ICA and the London Review Bookshop, as well as slots on programmes like Today or Front Row on Radio 4. Even though it is a fan-voted award Paul felt that ‘the BSFA novel category has, in recent years, sometimes proved more radical and interesting than the Clarke.’

To further this point, Nina shared a conversation she had recently with her partner Christopher Priest: ‘Chris says that when he was starting out, he had a strong sense of being part of a larger group of writers who were all trying new things – and that it was this group of writers he would have described as “core SF”. The sense of core SF as a reactionary force was not true then in the same way. The idea that Chris, and writers like Mike Harrison and even Adam Roberts are now seen as fringe figures writing “difficult” stuff (it is precisely novels like The Thing Itself and de Abaitua’s If Then that should, in Chris’s view, be seen as core SF, rather than commercial genre titles like Children of Time) seems to suggest that SFF as a distinct, progressive literature is in real danger of ceasing to exist.’

This point inspired Paul to identify and develop a theory of SF as broadly divided between the impulses to adventure and philosophy. ‘For a long time philosophy reigned, the idea of SF as a literature of ideas. That approach prompts the exploration of new ideas, or new ways to express ideas, new ways to frame what the story is about. That is the sort of SF that Chris Priest and Mike Harrison and Adam Roberts do. This kind of science fiction is risky, because you’re as likely to fail as to succeed. But when you do succeed, it is that much more rewarding for both writer and reader. But the Young Adult-isation of SF has made adventure predominant. That might do radical things with the content of the story; but the structure, the framework, the ideas need to be familiar because that is how such literature works. What we are seeing, therefore, is the triumph of a literature that by its very nature cannot take risks. And that means that it cannot progress, it cannot change. The more the YA/adventure model takes over science fiction, the more SF is going to be frozen in some image of the past. When the philosophical mode predominated, then the core of the genre was inevitably about the new, the different. Now that the adventure mode predominates, then the core of the genre has to be about the old, the familiar. But such literature cannot avoid becoming, over time, tired, overly-familiar, re-runs of re-runs. And that, surely, cannot be good for the health of science fiction.’

On the question of adventure versus philosophy, Vajra felt bound to admit that he did not agree. ‘I don’t think the adventure and philosophy strands are separable. I see them both as inextricable aspects of western SFF as an imperial literature: adventure is how to code exploration/conquest, and philosophy is its ideological justification. The problem with cosy SF is not, I think, that it sacrifices ideas for adventure, but that its adventure is formulaic because its ideas are stale, and those two things have no independent existence. I don’t have a problem with the existence of cosy SF as such (I do read it sometimes and I don’t think it represents an existential threat to the genre) except that it makes no sense for it to show up in conversations about pushing the boundaries of the form, which by definition it can’t do. So the real sticking point seems to be whether “pushing the boundaries” is what the Clarke is even about. Logically, the current shortlist seems to be an argument that it isn’t.’

Megan suggested that another of the problems haunting genre culture ‘is this rigid and dated definition of “science fiction” which seems to waft off the Clarke list like a bad smell. I suspect the “is it SF?” question forms a disproportionate percentage of the shortlist discussion. What recent juries really seem to be looking for is “widget-fiction”, not science fiction, because science can be anything. I can’t wrap my mind around these debates because it’s all just made up bullshit in the end. I just happen to prefer made up bullshit that’s good and interesting and different, and maybe does more than one thing.’

Paul maintained that the Clarke award’s original definition of science fiction was not at all rigid. ‘The matter of not defining science fiction was pretty much an accident, but a very happy one, because it allowed for the idea that SF is constantly changing, constantly growing. The more prescriptive people are about what constitutes SF, the poorer SF is.’

Maureen then noted the final irony of the fact that ‘the Clarke Award originally set out to stretch the definition of SF, to the point where it often offended people with its choices. These days, it is as though it’s taken on the mantle of defending, defining and maintaining science fiction’s status quo.’