Margaret Atwood can sleep easily: the shortlist for the 2013 Arthur C Clarke award is strikingly devoid of what she called "talking squids in outer space". It might even please the self-appointed Dr Johnson of genre fiction, Christopher Priest, who fulminated so fulsomely about last year's shortlist. It seems telling that the dystopic is so much in evidence. Nod features a world where most of the population suddenly cannot sleep, giving a new twist to the zombie novel. Dark Eden rewrites Genesis from a scientifically grounded perspective, with a human population on a distant, sunless world suffering from the results of in-breeding and conservative indoctrination. Earth, in 2312, is an overheated trash-pile whose neo-neo-con rulers manage to exert political influence over the rest of the solar system. The Dog Stars is billed on Amazon as "The Road – with hope" which must surely be the least effective marketing strap-line ever. In Intrusion MacLeod presents a frighteningly possible "democratic dystopia", where the government gives you the choice you would have made had you all the facts that they have. Harkaway, here, is the wild card, with a giddy homage to the unlikely combination of Ian Fleming and John Ruskin.

The Clarke awards have always sought to include the so-called literary within genre (Atwood is a previous winner, as is Kazuo Ishiguro, while David Mitchell, Sarah Hall and Lydia Millet have all been shortlisted). Harkaway is, I suppose, the "literary" turn here, although all the titles deploy techniques from literary fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, uses bricolage to good effect; Adrian Barnes investigates how texts become holy and Dark Eden has both inventive neologism and wonderful stories-within-stories. The false dichotomy between "literary" and "genre" has never seemed so slight.

As a Man Booker judge, I'm slightly envious of the shortlist here, though not perhaps of making the final decision. But were it me, I'd be pushing for Ken MacLeod. Five times a shortlisted author, MacLeod has moved from space opera to insightful and ingenious near-future fictions. Intrusion comes after the fearfully prescient The Execution Channel, the wonderful take on the Scottish covenanter novel The Night Sessions, and the simulations-within-simulations Soviet fantasy of The Restoration Game. Intrusion is both horrific and comic and deals movingly with the consequences of genetic fixes. The ending – resilient, broken, hopeful and disillusioned – is a triumph. And it will probably be true by a week on Thursday, given his track record.