China Miéville won the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Iron Council, which is also on the shortlist for the 2005 Hugo Awards. I personally thought it weaker than Miéville’s prior work (which is all far more fantasy than sf), particularly Perdido Street Station, which won the Clarke Award in 2001.
The Clarke Award was established by a grant from Arthur C. Clarke and is awarded annually to the best science fiction novel which received its first British publication during the previous calendar year. The Award bills itself as “the most prestigious award for science fiction in Britain” and claims to “becoming recognised as one of the most prestigious science fiction awards in the world, the equivalent of the Booker Prize.”
Here is this year’s shortlist (Iron Council is the only one I read) and past winners.
The term I would like to reinvigorate is “weird fiction.” There’s a radical moment in all weird fiction and that moment is the positing of the impossible as true.
China Miéville
