The New X -- issue 256

More Light, by Graham Sleight

I’m writing this on the night before the Arthur C Clarke Award ceremony. (It’s also the night before my deadline but that, I assure you, is pure coincidence.) The Clarke Award this year has already caused its share of controversy. When the shortlist was announced this year, more than a few eyebrows were raised. That list – comprising Stephen Baxter’s The H-Bomb Girl, Matthew de Abaitua’s The Red Men, Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, Ken Macleod’s The Execution Channel, and Richard Morgan’s Black Man – seemed, to many, more than usually detached from the field’s own sense of what was worthwhile in 2007. (Three days after the shortlist was announced, I called a friend in the US who's worked in the field for several decades. Almost his first words to me were "We think you've all gone crazy.") It was suggested that the presence of three books on the list by authors not associated with sf (Hall, Hall, and de Abaitua) was an attempt by the award to ignore the genre heartland in favour of the “literary”, whatever that means. Indeed, some felt that these three novels weren’t sf at all. And, most prominently, people were surprised by omissions from the list: in particular Ian McDonald’s coruscating Brasyl (which won the BSFA Award and is now up for the Hugo and Locus Awards), and Michael Chabon’s intricate alternate history The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (which has just won the Nebula and is also up for the Hugo and Locus.)

There’s an issue here, and a meta-issue. The issue is whether this year’s jury got the shortlist “wrong”. The meta-issue is my sense that the debate around the composition of this year’s Clarke Award shortlist has been less fruitful than before, and that this is rooted in fixable things about the way the Clarke operates. But let’s deal with the “wrongness” first. Personally, I’m happy to say that I think Brasyl was the best sf novel published in the UK last year; that it’s a welcome corrective to the first-world-focus of much sf (and, one has to say, much of this year’s Clarke list); and that its omission from the list is, to me, just not comprehensible. The omission of Chabon’s book is something I can live with, as its attempts to make isomorphic the condition of Jewishness, the game of chess, and the protocols of the detective novel wound up seeming forced to me. On the other hand, I think that the Sarah Hall book thoroughly deserved to be on the list, and that the inclusion of the Baxter – the first YA book to be shortlisted for the Clarke – was also a bold and worthwhile choice. But that begs the question: by what right do I assert that my opinion about Brasyl is “right” and that of the jury is “wrong”? The five people on the jury this year are smart and able people, and I don’t doubt for a second that they’ve worked hard and in good faith to do their job.

Let me come back to that word comprehensible, which I used in the last paragraph, and to the meta-issue. I was on the Clarke jury in the preceding two years, and one of the things that amused and puzzled me was the degree to which people who weren’t on the jury attempted to impose narratives on our choices, on the basis of no evidence. In 2006, it was said, we had included Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go because the Clarke “always has a literary novel”. Some of the same puzzlement as was directed at this year’s jury was also applied to our 2007 choices of Jan Morris’s Hav and Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. To me, inside the jury bubble, those choices were entirely comprehensible; to those outside, even when they’d read the books, they often weren’t.

So. I will find myself sitting in the Apollo Cinema tomorrow evening, and I will hear one of those six books announced as the winner. For about half the shortlist, I’ll be somewhere between happy and very happy; for about half, I’ll be somewhere between grumpy and furious. But my problem is that either way, I won’t know why the decision has been made. Let me, as Alan Partridge would say, paint you a hypothesis. Say, for instance, that the Chabon book wasn’t excluded because the jury didn’t think it was good, but because they thought that pure alternate histories shouldn’t count as sf. That’s not an unarguable position, according to certain ways of looking at sf. I think it’s wrong (as I argued in a previous column), but it’s not out of court. But if that was why the Chabon was excluded (along with other fine books like Owen Sheers’s Nazis-in-Wales Resistance), then the reading public is not being given all the tools it needs to make sense of the shortlist. Or, more precisely, it’s asking the Clarke-interested public to play a game whose rules and boundaries only the jury knows in full; and I think the Clarke should serve the interests of the readers above all.

The proposal I’m heading towards, as you may guess, is that in future Clarke Award juries should present some kind of detailed justification for their decisions in a public forum. (Obligatory disclaimer: although this proposal appears in the magazine of the BSFA, one of the Clarke’s juror-providers, and although I edit the journal of the Science Fiction Foundation, another juror-provider organisation, this is a personal view and doesn’t represent the official policy of either.) This justification could take the form of a statement signed up to by all the jurors to be read out at the ceremony; but this runs the risk of dodging issues. The Tiptree Award solution, whereby the jury makes a rather more extensive statement about their year's reading, goes a few steps further, but not quite as far as I'd like.

I’m thinking, in fact, that the Clarke should adapt the model of the World Fantasy Award: once the award is announced, the jurors should appear on a panel and talk about why they’ve done what they’ve done. Within pre-agreed bounds (civility, moderation by the chair of jurors), they should answer questions from the public. If they, as smart, good-faith people, have reasons why they didn’t think Brasyl was shortlistable, I think it enhances rather than detracts from the conversation to hear them. All I'm suggesting is that we need a forum where an issue like that can be debated transparently rather than guessed at.

There are a couple of objections to this that need dealing with. The first is the silly one that we don’t, in this country, get to ask the jurors in a criminal trial why they decided on a verdict, so why should we do the same with the Clarke jury? But the two kinds of jury just aren’t comparable – in the stakes of what they’re deciding, in the kinds of judgment they make (about proved facts in one case, about subjective judgments in the other). Indeed, I think the language of “juries” is actively misleading in the context of literary awards, and I prefer to think of them as “judging panels” The first-and-a-halfth is a bit deeper. Sometimes – whisper who dares – judging panels don’t always agree unanimously about their decisions. If, say, three jurors said that they wanted X to win, while two said they’d really have preferred Y, then a public airing of those disagreements might undermine the legitimacy of the award given to X. But that – and the Clarke doctrine that jurors sign up to “cabinet responsibility” – rests, I think, on an unhelpful premise. The cabinet has to agree not to air private grievances in public about, say, the 10% tax rate because it’d impede their ability to function as a group in future. But as soon as the Clarke jury has chosen a winner, it dissolves. The institution continues to the next year, of course, but with a cast at least partly different. The Clarke is, I'm sure, more influenced by the (Man) Booker Prize in its organisation and presentation than by any extant awards in the sf field; and the Booker, in theory, operates by the same sort of principle of collective responsibility. But in practice (because of the higher stakes and the greater media interest), the Booker's jury splits and issues tend to get leaked to the media. So we often know, even if it's not officially announced, what the "runner-up" for the Booker was, and who argued what way. Given that the Booker is pretty clearly the pre-eminent prize for fiction in the UK, you can't claim that knowing this undermines its legitimacy or profile; and how much better it would be to have this conversation, as I'm suggesting, in public and on the record.

The second major objection is that a panel discussion of shortlisted (or non-shortlisted) works would inevitably lead the jurors into negative comments about why they didn’t view certain works as highly as others, whereas the Clarke process at the moment consists only of positive statements. First, there’s “We think these are the best six sf novels of the year”, then “We think this is the best sf novel of the year”. Getting into public debate about the demerits of certain works would undermine that spirit. Well, one’s first comment is that the World Fantasy Award has managed to walk this line for a couple of decades without collapsing. The second is that the Clarke is about aesthetic judgments, some aesthetic judgments are negative, and there’s no point kidding ourselves about that. I’m sure that the judging panel can think of ways to be diplomatic but clear about how they reached their conclusions.

The last objection is that future Clarke choices, of shortlists and winners, should stand or fall on their own merits without additional gloss. But, frankly, they often don't. I'm sure that everyone in the sf community who follows the award has past results that they're baffled by: fill in your own example here, or guess mine from the title of this column. But reading the books concerned often doesn't help the bafflement. To be told that X is better than Y without substantiation is as unhelpful in an award as it would be in a review. To put it another way, I don't like the idea of Clarke judges having power without accountability.

And think of the advantages, too. The Clarke would get a great deal more publicity, especially if the panel was done in collaboration with the Award's new partner, Sci-Fi London. The guessing-games, which have generated so much entropy this year, would be torpedoed. They might be replaced by criticism of the judges' actual statements, but we would at least then have criticism based on evidence. Above all, we’d have transparency. In the nineteenth century, Walter Bagehot said, of the monarchy, “We must not let daylight in on the magic”. Which is an eloquent way of saying that non-transparency is often in the interests of the thing concealed, not those it’s supposed to serve. The constituents of the Clarke aren’t primarily the authors, the publishers, or the critics; they’re the readers. By “readers”, I mean the broadest possible set of people who read sf. I don’t want the Clarke simply to consist of tablets of stone handed down from the impossibly lofty mountain where the jury sits; I want it to be part of the conversation. We’re all here, surely, we’re all paying attention to the Clarke, because we hope it’ll generate good talk. All I’m asking is for the award itself to lead in that.