Submissions list 2020: The complete list of eligible titles for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award
It has become something of an Arthur C. Clarke Award tradition now to publish our Submissions List, the complete list of eligible titles submitted for consideration to our judging panel, alongside announcing our jury-selected shortlist and our final winning title.
[Scroll down now to see the list in full]
In past years we’ve opted to publish the submissions list in advance of the announcement of our official shortlist, but 2020 is far from a normal year, and with apologies to those in the science fiction community who enjoy the conversation and debate that our submissions list can generate, we have opted to publish this year in conjunction with the reveal of our six shortlisted books.
While shortlist speculation can be fun, our own primary purpose in publishing the full list of submissions received every year (with over a decade of data now publicly available) is that the compilation and release of these lists helps create the opportunity for a broader oversight and review of the science fiction field in the UK, especially as the data builds year-on-year.
The submissions list below covers books first published in 2019, and comprises 121 titles, a number falling just shy of last year’s record-breaking tally, and with books being submitted by 46 individual UK publishing imprints and independent authors.
In a moment, the list, but first my usual caveat:
This is not a juried shortlist or long-list of any kind, merely a list of eligible titles received by our judges for consideration and released as part of our broader mission to practice, encourage and support the positive promotion of the science fiction field.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a prize for the best science fiction novel of the year, however the award does not and has never adhered to one single definition of what science fiction is or what it can be, and each panel of judges remakes that definition anew for themselves every year. The range of submissions below reflects the award’s aim to present the judging panel with as broad a choice of possible shortlists and winners as possible.
We have asked our judges to select 6 of the titles below to form their official shortlist, and from there to select a single (and no more or less) winning novel.
We plan to announce the winner in September 2020, with a final date to be confirmed soon, and in the meantime I invite everyone to think of themselves as Clarke Award judge for a moment and ask, ‘if it were up to me, which 6 books would I choose and why?’
Tom Hunter, Award Director
THE SUBMISSIONS LIST
Sunfall — Jim Al-Khalili (Bantam Press)
The City in the Middle of the Night — Charlie Jane Anders (Titan)
Invisible Ecologies — Rachel Armstrong (NewCon Press)
The Warship — Neal Asher (Macmillan)
The Testaments — Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus)
The Redemption of Time — Baoshu (Head of Zeus)
Ninth House — Leigh Bardugo (Gollancz)
World Engines: Destroyer — Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
Ancestral Night — Elizabeth Bear (Gollancz)
Beneath the World, a Sea — Chris Beckett (Corvus)
Junction — Daniel M. Bensen (Flame Tree Press)
Five Unicorn Flush — T.J. Berry (Angry Robot)
The Cruel Stars — John Birmingham (Head of Zeus)
Dark Age — Pierce Brown (Hodder & Stoughton)
Genesis — Geoffrey Carr (Elsewhen Press)
To Be Taught, If Fortunate — Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Undoing of Arlo Knott — Heather Child (Orbit)
The Crying Machine — Greg Chivers (HarperVoyager)
The Fall of Io — Wesley Chu (Angry Robot)
The Ice House — Tim Clare (Canongate)
Beyond Kidding — Lynda Clark (Fairlight Books)
The Grid — Nick Cook (Bantam Press)
Tiamat’s Wrath — James S.A. Corey (Orbit)
The Song of the Sycamore — Edward Cox (Gollancz)
Our Child of the Stars — Stephen Cox (Jo Fletcher Books)
Recursion — Blake Crouch (Macmillan)
Last Ones Left Alive — Sarah Davis-Goff (Tinder Press)
The House of Sundering Flames — Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz)
String City — Graham Edwards (Solaris)
Ruin’s Wake — Patrick Edwards (Titan)
This is How You Lose the Time War — Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Jo Fletcher Books)
Homologue — Giles Eton (Michael Abbott)
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World — C. A. Fletcher (Orbit)
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind — Jackson Ford (Orbit)
The Record Keeper — Agnes Gomillion (Titan)
Green Valley — Louis Greenberg (Titan)
My Name is Monster — Katie Hale (Canongate)
Horse Destroys the Universe — Cyriak Harris (Unbound)
The Ten Thousand Doors of January — Alix E. Harrow (Orbit)
The Imaginary Corpse — Tyler Hayes (Angry Robot)
The Girl in Red — Christina Henry (Titan)
Zero Bomb — M.T. Hill (Titan)
The Outside — Ada Hoffman (Angry Robot)
Shrouded Loyalties — Reese Hogan (Angry Robot)
The Light Brigade — Kameron Hurley (Angry Robot)
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man — Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)
Black Leopard, Red Wolf — Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton)
Sanctuary — V. V. James (Gollancz)
The Last — Hanna Jameson (Viking)
Always North — Vicki Jarrett (Unsung Stories)
The Widening Gyre — Michael R. Johnston (Flame Tree Press)
The Grand Dark — Richard Kadrey (HarperVoyager)
The Calculating Stars — Mary Robinette Kowal (Solaris)
The Fated Sky — Mary Robinette Kowal (Solaris)
The Quantum Garden — Derek Künsken (Solaris)
Rise — Kim Lakin-Smith (NewCon Press)
One Word Kill — Mark Lawrence (47North)
In the Slip — F.D. Lee (F. D. Lee)
Too Long in Paradise — R. Lindsey (Quodlibet Rock)
The Supernova Era — Cixin Liu (Head of Zeus)
The Disappeared — Amy Lord (Unbound)
Snakeskins — Tim Major (Titan)
The Passengers — John Marrs (Del Rey)
The Migration — Helen Marshall (Titan)
A Memory Called Empire — Arkady Martine (Tor)
Battle Beyond the Dolestars — Chris McCrudden (Farrago)
Luna: Moon Rising — Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
Ness — Robert Mcfarlane and Stanley Donwood (Hamish Hamilton)
After the Flood — Kassandra Montag (Borough)
No Way — S.J. Morden (Gollancz)
Bright Morning Star — Simon Morden (NewCon Press)
The Bayern Agenda — Dan Moren (Angry Robot)
The Starless Sea — Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
The Future of Another Timeline — Annalee Newitz (Orbit)
Atlas Alone — Emma Newman (Gollancz)
Angel Mage — Garth Nix (Gollancz)
The Gameshouse — Claire North (Orbit)
The Pursuit of William Abbey — Claire North (Orbit)
The Memory Police — Yōko Ogawa (Harvill Secker)
Do You Dream of Terra-Two? — Temi Oh (Simon & Schuster)
Velocity Weapon — Megan E. O’Keefe (Orbit)
From Divergent Suns — Sam Peters (Gollancz)
The Need — Helen Phillips (Chatto & Windus)
The Gemini Experiment — Brian Pinkerton (Flame Tree Press)
Fleet of Knives — Gareth L. Powell (Titan)
The Forbidden Stars — Tim Pratt (Angry Robot)
Waste Tide — Chen Quifan (Head of Zeus)
The Farm — Joanne Ramos (Bloomsbury)
From the Wreck — Jane Rawson (Picador)
Programmed to Breathe — Tanya Reimer (Elsewhen Press)
Shadow Captain — Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)
The Solar War — A.G. Riddle (Head of Zeus)
Winter World — A.G. Riddle (Head of Zeus)
The Taiga Syndrome — Cristina Rivera Garza (And Other Stories)
Body Tourists — Jane Rogers (Sceptre)
Howling Dark — Christopher Ruocchio (Gollancz)
Starsight — Brandon Sanderson (Gollancz)
Everything You Ever Wanted — Luiza Sauma (Penguin)
The Old Drift — Namwali Serpell (Hogarth)
Steel Frame — Andrew Skinner (Solaris)
Doggerland — Ben Smith (4th Estate)
The Bastard Legion: War Criminals — Gavin Smith (Gollancz)
Fall Or, Dodge In Hell — Neal Stephenson (Borough)
Doing Time — Jodi Taylor (Headline)
Cage of Souls — Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus)
Children of Ruin — Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)
The Dreamers — Karen Thompson Walker (Scribner)
The Rosewater Insurrection — Tade Thompson (Orbit)
The Rosewater Redemption — Tade Thompson (Orbit)
Proximity — Jem Tugwell (Serpentine Books)
Dead Astronauts — Jeff VanderMeer (4th Estate)
Quantum Exile — Martyn Rhys Vaughan (Llyfrau Cambria Books)
Shadows of the Short Days — Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson (Gollancz)
The End of the World Survivors Club — Adrian J. Walker (Del Rey)
Celebrity Werewolf — Andrew Wallace (NewCon Press)
The Last Astronaut — David Wellington (Orbit)
Wanderers — Chuck Wendig (Solaris)
Emily Eternal — M.G. Wheaton (Hodder & Stoughton)
Plume — Will Wiles (4th Estate)
A Chain Across the Dawn — Drew Williams (Simon & Schuster)
Frankissstein — Jeanette Winterson (Jonathan Cape)
HONOURABLE MENTION
Under different circumstances our submissions list would have been one closer to another record-breaker this year, and we would like to recommend Tangle’s Game by Stewart Hotston (Abaddon) to everyone. A title not put forward due to its author Stewart representing the British Science Fiction Association as a judge this year.
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