This week it’s the 30th Arthur C. Clarke Award! On the shortlist are Becky Chambers, Dave Hutchinson, Nnedi Okorafor, JP Smythe and Adrian Tchaikovsky. Who’s going to win?

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<Update: winner announced – see below!>

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And the winner is…

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ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY with CHILDREN OF TIME!

 

Check out this and more on the brilliant shortlisted books below…

 

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	THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET
	Dec	Becky Chambers	9781473619814	PB	£8.99	Hodder
	Firefly meets Mass Effect in this thrilling self-published debut!
	When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn’t expecting much. The Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that’s seen better days, offers her everything she could possibly want: a small, quiet spot to call home for a while, adventure in far-off corners of the galaxy, and distance from her troubled past.
	But Rosemary gets more than she bargained for with the Wayfarer. The crew is a mishmash of species and personalities, from Sissix, the friendly reptillian pilot, to Kizzy and Jenks, the constantly sparring engineers who keep the ship running. Life on board is chaotic, but more or less peaceful – exactly what Rosemary wants.
	Until the crew are offered the job of a lifetime: the chance to build a hyperspace tunnel to a distant planet. They’ll earn enough money to live comfortably for years… if they survive the long trip through war-torn interstellar space without endangering any of the fragile alliances that keep the galaxy peaceful.
	But Rosemary isn’t the only person on board with secrets to hide, and the crew will soon discover that space may be vast, but spaceships are very small indeed.
	Read an extract of A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet on Carabas here!

 

	EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT
	Dave Hutchinson	9781781083987	B	£7.99	Solaris
	Europe is crumbling. The Xian Flu pandemic and ongoing economic crises have fractured the European Union, the borderless Continent of the Schengen Agreement is a distant memory, and new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight.
	For an intelligence officer like Jim, it’s a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns, a new and unknown national entity which may or may not be friendly to England’s interests; it’s hard to keep on top of it all.
	But things are about to get worse for Jim. A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has come who may hold the key to unlocking the mystery.

 

	THE BOOK OF PHOENIX
	Feb	Nnedi Okorafor	9781444762808	PB	8.99	Hodder
	They call her many things – a research project, a test-subject, a specimen. An abomination.
	But she calls herself Phoenix, an ‘accelerated woman’ – a genetic experiment grown and raised in Manhattan’s famous Tower 7, the only home she has ever known. Although she’s only two years old, Phoenix has the body and mind of an adult – and powers beyond imagining. Phoenix is an innocent, happy to live quietly in Tower 7, reading voraciously and basking in the love of Saeed, another biologically altered human.
	Until the night that Saeed witnesses something so terrible that he takes his own life. Devastated, Phoenix begins to search for answers – only to discover that everything that she has ever known is a lie.
	Tower 7 isn’t a haven. It’s a prison.
	And it’s time for Phoenix to spread her wings and rise.
	Spanning contents and centuries, The Book of Phoenix is an epic, incendiary work of magical realism featuring Nnedi Okorafor’s most incredible, unforgettable heroine yet.

 

	ARCADIA
	Jun	Iain Pears	9780571301577	£8.99	PB	Faber
	Three interlocking worlds. Four people looking for answers. April, 1960: In the cellar of a professor’s house in Oxford, fifteen-year-old Rosie goes in search of a missing cat – and instead finds herself in a different world. Anterwold is a sun-drenched land of storytellers and prophecies. But is this world real – and what happens if Rosie decides to stay? Meanwhile, a rebellious scientist is trying to prove that time does not even exist – with potentially devastating consequences. As the three worlds come together, one question arises: who controls the future – or the past…?

 

	WAY DOWN DARK
	Apr	JP Smythe	9781444796339	PB	6.99	Hodder
	There’s one truth on Australia
	You fight or you die.
	Usually both.
	Imagine a nightmare from which there is no escape.
	Seventeen-year-old Chan’s ancestors left a dying Earth hundreds of years ago, in search of a new home. They never found one.
	This is a hell where no one can hide.
	The only life that Chan’s ever known is one of violence, of fighting. Of trying to survive.
	This is a ship of death, of murderers and cults and gangs.
	But there might be a way to escape. In order to find it, Chan must head way down into the darkness – a place of buried secrets, long-forgotten lies, and the abandoned bodies of the dead.
	This is Australia.
	Seventeen-year-old Chan, fiercely independent and self-sufficient, keeps her head down and lives quietly, careful not to draw attention to herself amidst the violence and disorder. Until the day she makes an extraordinary discovery – a way to return the Australia to Earth. But doing so would bring her to the attention of the fanatics and the murderers who control life aboard the ship, putting her and everyone she loves in terrible danger.
	And a safe return to Earth is by no means certain.
	Read an extract from Way Down Dark on Carabas here!

 

	CHILDREN OF TIME
	Apr	Adrian Tchaikovsky	9781447273301	PB	£8.99	Tor
	WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?