Second paragraph of third chapter:
She arrived at my quarters still unsettled. The collar of her jacket was slightly askew—none of her Bos were awake to see to her, and she had dressed in nervous haste, dropping things, fumbling at fastenings that should have been simple. I met her standing, and I didn’t dismiss Kalr Five, who lingered, ostensibly busy but hoping to see or hear something interesting.
I wasn’t originally planning to re-read this, but then I thought since I was re-reading the Tiptree and Clarke winners from 2015 I should go and look again at the BSFA winner. I actually voted for it for both the BSFA and the Hugos, and wrote then:
I actually liked it more than the first book in the series; it’s self-contained and fuelled by righteous anger, forensically directed at planetary and sexual politics. It’s several months since I read it as one of the Clarke submissions, but I think I still like it best of the three. [The other two non-Puppy novels being The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison [Sarah Monette], and The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu, which of course won.]
Re-reading it this time, I found the first 20-30% slightly hard going with the density of description of a human society from a slightly non-human perspective; and then the book suddenly catches fire after an act of violence, and the narrator, an artificial intelligence incarnated into a human body, must navigate entrenched societal structures to reach something resembling justice without causing complete disintegration. It’s tremendously tightly done, and took my breath away once again while I was reading it. You can get it here.
There were eight novels on the BSFA Best Novel ballot that year, more than any other year except 2020. The others were Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North, both of which we shortlisted for the Clarke Award; Cuckoo Song, by Frances Hardinge; Lagoon, by Nnedi Okorafor; The Moon King, by Neil Williamson; The Race, by Nina Allan; and Wolves, by Simon Ings. I stand by the decisions we made as the Clarke jury, but there were some very good novels out that year.
On to the Clarke winner, Station Eleven.
