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There’s no better place to catch up with the best in recent science fiction than the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Selected from more than a hundred novels, this year’s six contenders, reviewed below, are bursting with new ideas and fresh perspectives on themes central to SF, from decaying starships and accelerated evolution to post-human superpowers and time travel. The winner of the award, now in its thirtieth year, will be announced on 24 August.

Europe at Midnight Advertisement Dave Hutchinson Solaris

After the UK’s Brexit referendum result, Dave Hutchinson’s Europe At Midnight, set in a Balkanised near-future Europe, seems more prescient than ever. Sharing the same background (but none of the characters) as his previous novel, Europe in Autumn, it begins in a seemingly hermetic pocket world, the Campus, where in the aftermath of a bloody revolution the new Professor of Intelligence uncovers a dangerous conspiracy. Meanwhile, an investigation into a random stabbing entangles a British intelligence officer in the search for a county imagined into being by an eccentric family of landowners. The two narrative threads gradually merge, climaxing in a mission to infiltrate the Community, a quaint yet sinister English Ruritania underlying Europe’s shattered map.

The novel’s vividly imagined settings and satisfyingly complex intrigue are enlivened by a wry cynicism, some clever misdirection, and a sprinkling of homages to the canon of espionage literature. Like John le Carré, Hutchinson foregrounds the human stories at the heart of conspiracies; like Eric Ambler, he uncovers the heroic impulse in ordinary men caught up in events they only partially witness or understand. Hutchinson expertly carpenters their fractured stories into a satisfying whole, interrogating and satirising the Matter of England and the nature of Englishness with a mordant wit.

The Book of Phoenix Nnedi Okorafor Daw Books/Penguin

Inverting the familiar superhero origin story, Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix is the polemical memoir of a self‑styled supervillain, bookended by the story of its discovery in a post‑apocalyptic future. The teller of her own tale, Phoenix Akore, is a prodigy of African descent genetically engineered by a powerful yet shadowy company, Big Eye. Able to raise her body temperature to incandescent heat, she is caged with others like her in a tower in a partially flooded, near‑future Manhattan. The apparent suicide of her boyfriend enrages Phoenix, causing her to destroy her prison; she then vows to destroy the company after an attempt to begin a new life in her homeland is thwarted by Big Eye’s agents.

“It’s crammed with ideas which aren’t always given as much room or depth as they deserve, but it burns with a vital exuberance”

As in all superhero stories there’s plenty of scenery-destroying action, but there are also passages both tender and reflective. The heart of the novel is Phoenix’s education and radicalisation, and her righteous anger at the exploitation of Africa and its peoples, from the slave trade and colonisation to the use of the immortal cell line cultured from the tumours of Henrietta Lacks. It’s crammed with ideas which aren’t always given as much room or depth as they deserve, but as with Okorafor’s equally crammed Lagoon it burns with a vital exuberance. The framing story of how the future finds a use for her memoir reconfigures Phoenix’s revenge with profound irony.

Children of Time Adrian Tchaikovsky Tor

Established fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky deploys old‑school tropes to good effect in Children of Time, his first science‑fiction novel. Spanning 70 centuries, it tells two intertwined stories: the rise of a civilisation of spiders accidentally gifted with intelligence during a botched terraforming attempt, and the desperate search for a new home by the human crew of a starship fleeing a dying Earth. Tchaikovsky evokes considerable sympathy for his arachnid characters, and their struggle to reach out to the guardian angel of an orbiting AI is packed with ingenious ideas. The fate of the humans aboard the deteriorating starship follows a more familiar path, but the novel’s clever interrogation of the usual narrative of planetary conquest, and its thoughtful depiction of two alien civilisations attempting to understand each other, is an exemplar of classic widescreen science fiction.

Way Down Dark James P. Smythe Hodder & Stoughton

A decaying spaceship also features in Way Down Dark, the first book of James Smythe’s Australia trilogy. En route to an unclear destination for generations, the ship is threatened with destruction when nihilist Lows invade its upper levels. The casual savagery of the ship’s inhabitants and the moral dilemmas of its teenage heroine, Chan Aitch, are forcefully conveyed: in the first chapter, she kills her mother in order to inherit the reputation that has protected her people. Chan’s reluctant heroism and quest for righteousness eventually uncovers the true purpose of the ship, a revelation that aims her towards new challenges and further volumes in this bleak young-adult series.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet Becky Chambers Hodder & Stoughton

Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is an altogether more cheerful affair, in which a starship crewed by an exotic mix of humans and aliens wins the contract to tunnel a wormhole to the location of a valuable element. Although it’s a chance to make an enormous profit, there’s a significant snag: despite a newly signed treaty, the warmongering clan that controls the planet in question may not be entirely trustworthy. It’s the stuff of a hundred space operas, but given a fresh perspective by Chambers’ focus on the journey and what the ship’s crew discover about themselves along the way. Some may find the life lessons too easily won, but Chambers’s exploration of diversity and decency is refreshing and witty, with sympathetic characters, snappy dialogue, and a richly imagined variety of aliens and alien worlds.

Arcadia Iain Pears Faber

In Arcadia, best-selling author Iain Pears blends time travel and utopian fiction in a story that slips between 1960s Oxford, a dystopian future, and a pocket world created by a fugitive genius. Pears’s clear expositional style steers a sure course through the intricate relationships between the three realms and their various characters towards the climax of an end‑times plot, but above all else this is a story about the power of story: the tales we tell ourselves about our lives, and the autonomy or otherwise of their characters and their relationship with imagination and free will.