I've just heard from Tom Hunter, the Arthur C Clarke awards administrator, that he's about to post a response on the thread about this controversy that has arisen on the Guardian newspaper site.
As someone who counts Tom, Chris Priest, and several of this year's and recent years' judges as friends, I find the whole incident deeply regrettable... but Chris never has been one to mince his words.
This will make for a lengthy post, but I think it's worth reproducing Tom's comments here:
The first year I attended the Clarke Award ceremony was 2003, coincidently the year that Christopher Priest won the prize for his novel The Separation.
This was way before I had anything to do with the official organisation of the award, and I was just a part of the audience. I found out later that a significant part of that audience might have felt that M. John Harrison's novel Light might have been a better and more deserving winner. Note the double use of might there, I'm speculating on the judges' decision just as much as anyone else was.
I suspect though that Christopher Priest has no problem at all with the competencies of the judging panel that year. No call to arms, no handing back of the award or the prize money, and indeed why should there be just because some peers in the audience didn't agree with the decision.
I've read Light and I've read The Separation, and if I were a judge I'd have a huge challenge trying to narrow a decision to just one book, and that's just with those two, and not including the other four excellent books nominated that year, and just me alone making a decision, not a room of five judges.
Every year when the Clarke Award shortlist is discussed and challenged and ranted about, and yes all three happen every single year, there's always one group of people who's voice is missing for a reason: the Clarke Award judging panel.
The appointed task of our five judges is to read all of the books, to sift and weigh and discuss their relative merits, and to select from that complete submissions list a shortlist of six books, and then a single winner. Not four books, or eight books. No 'also recommended' or runner-up prizes.
Their other appointed task is to discuss their collective decision with each other, but not so much in public. After all the individual tastes of panelists will be different from collectively made decisions, and while it's one thing for some on the outside to disagree with that decision it's completely another to ask the judges to have to rise up and defend against every sling and arrow of outrageous accusation.
When Christopher Priest calls this a poor year for science fiction, I have to politely disagree. Sixty books submitted from twenty-five different publishing imprints in the UK is not, in my eyes, a weak showing, and in fact this is one of the highest submission rates the Clarke has ever had. I can concede that perhaps the year was, for Christopher at least, one where there was a poor showing of the kinds of books he enjoys, or perhaps more accurately that reflect back to him a vision of the way he believes science fiction should be, but a poor year for the genre as a whole it definitely was not.
The one piece of criticism I definitely don't accept though is the suggestion that our judging panel were anything less than fit for purpose.
Each year the judges are nominated by the Clarke Award’s supporting organizations, in this case the British Science Fiction Association, The Science Fiction Foundation and the SCI-Fi-LONDON film festival. Three very reputable and established organisations and entirely capable of selecting individuals with the knowledge and skill to be part of the judging panel. The comments thread above, Christopher Priest’s included, show the variety of diverse opinions that can be brought to bear on our genre. Perhaps if we had a shortlist of 10 books some of the books listed above might be included, and certainly I would happily recommend any of those writers myself, but that’s not a given, and maybe a longer shortlist would have failed to reflect Christopher’s view of the SFnal landscape even more.
When discussing awards I have often made the point that just because a favourite book doesn’t make a shortlist or claim a prize it shouldn’t stop anyone loving that book just as much. This happens to me all of the time too.
Christopher Priest is entitled to his opinion about the state of modern science fiction and what books, including his, might have made for a preferable shortlist within those criteria, but I stand by the decisions of our judging panel this year, just as I do that of the panel back in 2003, and I hope that in time Christopher will come to appreciate both the challenges and the efforts of our judging panel as much as I do.
- I'm in the mood for a talking horse book.
