Second paragraph of third chapter:
Annie is suspended in an agony of knowing Doug is displeased. She can focus on nothing else. It eats her memory, corrosive and hot. She can still hear his voice: No, it’s a fucking party. She has identified his words as sarcasm, his tone as scathing.
This is the last in a series of posts that I began in 2012, when I determined to read all of the winners of the BSFA Award for Best Novel, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, now the Otherwise Award (and currently on hiatus). It’s been an interesting process; the awards have occasionally overlapped – Air by Geoff Ryman won all three – but more often they have charted somewhat different courses through the genre. It’s a sufficiently complex subject to deserve its own post.
Meantime since I started this series I found myself physically counting the votes for the BSFA Awards several times just before the pandemic, and served on the Arthur C. Clarke Award jury twice, in 2015 and 2023. (I have had no engagement with the administration of the Tiptree / Otherwise Award.)
As a result of my previous Clarke service I was invited to the presentation of this year’s award in June in London, despite at that point having read only one of the six shortlisted novels (The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley), and was therefore not very surprised when the award went to one of the five books I had not read, Annie Bot by ‘Sierra Greer’ (Caragh M. O’Brien). Here she is accepting the award.
So, I finally got around to reading the book. And I’m afraid it is not for me. I hate cute anthropomorphic robots; the protagonist is a sexbot, which is the extreme case of cute anthropomorphic robot. She is in an abusive relationship with Doug, and is in fact obsessed with him by design. Navigating this set-up to a satisfactory conclusion is a difficult task, and I did not feel that it was accomplished here. The Clarke judges are entitled to make their choice on the basis of their own feelings and reactions, and it’s good when they pick a book that has been overlooked by the other awards; but I think that if I had been on the jury this year, this book would probably not even have been shortlisted.
As I said, that concludes my read-through of all of the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree/Otherwise winners. So I’m starting a new project, reading a new book (or two) by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man – that’s 29 of the 121. The first will be Selma Lagerlöf, the tenth winner, and I’ll be reading both her early Jerusalem and her later The Emperor of Portugallia.
Arthur C. Clarke Award winners:
The Handmaid’s Tale | The Sea and Summer | Unquenchable Fire | The Child Garden | Take Back Plenty | Synners | Body of Glass | Vurt | Fools | Fairyland | The Calcutta Chromosome | The Sparrow | Dreaming in Smoke | Distraction | Perdido Street Station | Bold as Love | The Separation | Quicksilver | Iron Council | Air | Nova Swing | Black Man | Song of Time | The City & the City | Zoo City | The Testament of Jessie Lamb | Dark Eden | Ancillary Justice | Station Eleven | Children of Time | The Underground Railroad | Dreams Before the Start of Time | Rosewater | The Old Drift | The Animals in that Country | Deep Wheel Orcadia | Venomous Lumpsucker | In Ascension | Annie Bot