Hey everyone, it’s time for the 6th (?) annual Tomcat Award! For those not in the know, this is where I read the entire Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, and pick my own winner. Then, tomorrow, we’ll see if the “official” Award guessed right or not.

Last year they did not.

Joining me, as ever, are my fellow judges: Alien, Aloy, and Cayde 6:

Plus Ollington dog:

Together we’ll pick a winner, who will get to take home…er… this goblet of plastic astronauts. Ooooooooh:

This year’s Clarke/Tomcat shortlist has to be the longest ever, coming in at just under 3000 pages! Several of the nominees are 500+ pages in length, and, let’s face it, there’s just no need for that.

Here’s the shortlist (astronaut for scale):

Before I start my book-by-book appraisals, I just want to comment that, generally, I think this is a very weak year for the Clarke, with a shortlist that doesn’t at all reflect the quality of the past year’s Science Fiction writing.

So I apologise in advance cos this year’s Tomcat Award summation may be pretty darn negative.

I’m going to go through the books, as always, in the order in which I read them.

Book 1: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. I loved this book, which riffs off older anti-war military science fiction, particularly The Forever War, and Starship Troopers.

It’s not straight homage, however, as intersectional concerns for such issues as gender, poverty, citizenship, and the othering of different cultures form the backbone of both the narrative and The Light Bridgade’s subtext.

This is all shot-through with Hurley’s characteristically idiosyncratic depiction of extreme violence, both physical violence enacted upon the body, and political violence enacted upon the book’s cast.

I was especially impressed with the way Hurley converges traditional MilSF genre concerns for the horror of war, and a boots-on-the-ground sense of utter disoriented confusion and chaos, while ALSO critiquing contemporary mores that converge politics and with capitalism.

Loved the sneering cynicism in the notion that citizenship can be “earned” by fighting in a (corporate) war for long enough.

I found some sections difficult to parse, but I really didn’t mind this: it’s an aesthetic re-creation of the utterly confusing, lived war/time travel-experience of the book’s protagonist. Really, really impressive stuff from Hurley. Loved it.

Book 2: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. I didn’t get on with this one, at all. I don’t think it goes nearly far enough in depicting the experiences of colonised peoples, which, according to most reviews I’ve read, seems to be this book’s “theme”. I dunno.

The setting is Coruscant from Star Wars, the characters too-often fall into basic stereotypes, and, stylistically, the book is full of stuff like this, which I just hate reading:

My primary objection, however, is a very, VERY pedantic one. I know not many people will share this criticism, but bear with me.

Firstly, I think that a book about a society whose entire political, social, legal, and military functioning is structured around poetry should, you know, contain some of that actual fucking poetry.

The characters talk about poetry constantly, and I think there’s one (awful) verse in the entire (nearly) 500-page novel, which, when “explained” is just a lazy and bad political cypher.

Secondly (and this is where I get pedantic): why would a far, far, far future non-english-speaking galaxy-spanning empire employ neoclassical prosody as a means to dissect the rhythms of its poetry?

So: most languages think of rhythm (especially poetic rhythm) in terms of accentual syllabics. That is to say, they look at the relative stress of any given syllable.

A Memory Called Empire is stuffed with prosodic terminology like “iamb”, “trochee”, etc etc, which comes from a school of rhythmic analysis called “neoclassical prosody”, which basically divides language into two kinds of relative beats: stressed/unstressed. Or up and down beats.

(Think what you were taught in school about Shakespeare and iambic pentameter, “to BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUEStion” (okay so that’s hypermetric by a half foot, but you get the idea))..

The problem is… this is a very old, conservative way of thinking about rhythm. Critics like Derek Attridge have long argued that there are more than two stresses in English, and that neoclassical prosody is just too simplistic a way of thinking about poetic rhythm.

Hell it barely works for ancient Greek poetry.

It just bugs me no end that a novel about far-future, non-english poetry (which contains no actual sodding poetry), would be so preoccupied with constantly name-dropping technical rhythmic terminology that belongs to a system which is specific to old, euro-centric languages.

(I told ya it was a pedantic criticism).

As someone who’s studied this stuff intensely, having the word “anapest” or whatever dropped into a novel that’s supposedly about a far-future, def not European language (and culture) so removed from our own was just jarring. Leave it out. Grah!

Book 3: The Last Astronaut by David Wellington. This is an awful book, and it’s an embarrassment to the Clarke (and Tomcat) Award that this made it onto the shortlist. This is what people who don’t read science fiction think that science fiction is.

It’s extremely derivative of both Rendezvous with Rama and the Alien franchise. The pacing is a mess, character decisions are unrelentingly stupid, and the prose is stuffed with jingoistic action movie clichés like this:

And just very, very, very bad writing. Like whatever the hell this is:

Or this:

Book 4: Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky (lol I keep typing “Cake of Souls”). This dying-earth epic hits some of its targets, but misses others.

I really liked its depiction of class in the last remaining city of Shadrapar: the sun is dying, but what concerns the head-in-the-sand aristocracy is dandyish high fashion.

I also really liked the unexamined and bizarre nature of the world’s monsters and technology: the way the characters struggle against the weight of their own forgotten history is one of my favourite tropes of the subgenre,

and I love that Tchaikovsky resists the urge to over-explain the setting. (especially w/r/t The Weapon).

I thought the narratorial voice was very strong, too: intellectual and educated, while simultaneously cowardly and self-aware. Stefan is definitely the most well-realised character in the shortlist.

Unfortunately, the book wears its influences far too much on its sleeve. The Book of the New Sun is everywhere in this. There’s even a that-guy-is-obviously-a-robot wink about half way through.

I also feel very uneasy about the book’s representation of women, almost all of whom are primarily described in terms of their bodies, and almost all of whom are tedious types: big burly girl; beautiful, mysterious sex doll girl; waif like ingenue girl; and the er “witch queen”

(why the hell is she called that)?

Book 5: The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. I didn’t like this book either. There are some good ideas, mostly in the form of the tidally-locked planet that forms the setting, and the haunting image of the unreachable mothership orbiting said planet,

but nothing else about the novel works.

It has a very YA feel to it: as far as I can tell it’s about a group of teenagers rebelling against a governmentally-enforced bedtime. So much of the premise is just total bollocks: it makes no sense.

So there’s a curfew imposed, presumably, to help the settlers deal with the fact that there’s no natural day/night cycle on the planet. But somehow Anders takes this idea of a curfew, and turns it into “if you control our sleep you can own our dreams […] control our lives”.

Eh? That doesn’t follow. At all. How does bedtime = “own our dreams”. It’s melodramatic teenage gibberish.

The quality of the prose is absolutely abysmal. There’s little to no interiority, the characters are all juvenile, major plot events happen off-screen, and the fact that the aliens are all named after terrestrial earth animals leads to hilarious nonsense like this:

Every descriptor is just so OTT, with repetitive phrasings and big, meaningless numbers, “X was as x a a million x’s” is a structure used ad nauseum:

And the alien creatures are like when a kid tries to invent his own superhero, “and he can fly and he’s super strong and he’s invisible and he’s metal and…”:

“I make friends even slower than I walk”, “digestive fluids”?? Ugh. A lot of reviews have focused on the big picture themes of this novel, but on a sentence-by-sentence level, it’s just dreadful.

Book 6: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. Complex and sprawling, this book’s biggest weakness is that it’s so obviously stitched together from various short stories. I’ve also seen criticisms that this is only passingly science fictional....

...but such genre taxonomy debates don’t interest me, so I’m gonna ignore them.

I loved this: the most striking elements of the book are the magical realist ones: the chorus of mosquito narrators, the character who never stops crying, the woman whose hair grows meters every day, the blind woman who seems, sometimes, to be covered in eyes…

All converged with a more traditionally lit-fic concern for social realism and birth-of-a-nation historicism. It projects into a climate-changed future which, like the best of recent cli-fi, examines this global theme through the eyes of individual human lives.

It does so much that it can be a tad overwhelming; it’s definitely the most difficult book on the shortlist, but it’s also the funniest, which almost makes up for its in-parts leaden prose. OMG you should Google the Zambian Space Project! It was a real thing a school teacher did.

This is just a twitter thread, so I can’t really do justice to all that The Old Drift achieves, but suffice it to say it’s the only book on the shortlist whose length is in anyway justified

Okay so that’s the nominees and what I thought of them…. I guess it’s time to announce the winner….

Like last year, this was a close run thing between two books, but ultimately we all agreed that one book stood out as most perfectly realising its aesthetic identity of being both deeply science fictional AND rooted in contemporary politics and anxieties.

The winner of the 2020 Tomcat Award is…. The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. Yay!

Oh, and I almost forgot my final thing, my prediction. Ahem. I reckon A Memory Called Empire is gonna win, because it’s winning everything this year and seems the most Clarkey. It shouldn’t win though.