Thoughts on the Clarke Nominees

There isn't an official online announcement yet, but the shortlist was announced yesterday and is already floating around the net:
I've only read two of the nominated books (although I'm looking forward to learning more about the other four nominees when Adam Roberts writes his yearly Clarke roundup for Infinity Plus), so feel free to discount my opinion, but Air. Air all the way. Whether or not it wins, however, I think the fact that Ryman's superb novel has made it on the Clarke, BSFA, and (in all likelihood) Nebula shortlists should be an occasion for a bit of soul-searching on the part of last year's Hugo voters. It is nothing short of embarrassing that they should have ignored this remarkable work as they did.

The nomination I'm more interested in, however, is Ishiguro's. I've expressed my dissatisfaction with the novel already and I realize that I'm in the minority for feeling so, but I had been under the impression that even among those genre reviewers who lauded Never Let Me Go, there was an understanding that as a work of science fiction, the novel failed. As Matt Cheney puts it:
If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored.
Even accepting, as I do not, that once we learn to look past its failures as a work of science fiction, Never Let Me Go is a work of genius, does it really make sense to then turn around and hand it a major science fiction award? I suppose I'm actually trying to puzzle out the purpose of the Clarke and other genre awards--are they meant to encourage excellence within the genre, or simply to glom onto successful mainstream works with tenuous genre connections?

Comments

I don't think being published as a mainstream book should make it ineligible, and I don't think that not being a rigorous scenario should make it ineligible.

I probably should have phrased that last sentence a little better, because I do agree with your first statement. It's the second one that's giving me pause - which is not to say that I completely disagree with it. My post was intended to ask the question - should we demand rigorous, or at the very least competent, SF from nominees for SF awards?

(And it's probably worth pointing out that 'not a rigorous scenario' is, in my opinion, an almost unbearably generous description of Ishiguro's failure to create a believable world. And yes, I understand that the believability of his world wasn't the point, just as I understand that he deliberately made his characters as dull as possible. The result, as far as I was concerned, was to make it impossible for me to care for these cardboard characters and their senseless existence - in much the same way that Ronald D. Moore's shoddy worldbuilding is beginning to undermine the believability of his otherwise excellent Battlestar Galactica.)

To put it another way, I had no problems with Mitchell's Cloud Atlas being nominated for last year's Clarke (well, I did actually, but they had more to do with being uncertain about whether the book could actually be defined as SF. If we're assuming that any work with the tinge of SF-nal tropes automatically becomes eligible, then my objection melts away) because it dealt so intelligently and beautifully with its SF-nal elements. I thought The Time Traveler's Wife should have been struck off the list, and not just because it's a lousy book. Niffenegger's novel was only barely science fiction, and treated its SF-nal trope in the unthinking, unsophisticated manner that I've become accustomed to seeing when mainstream writers dabble in SF.

So, to put my question in slightly less inflamatory terms, is the purpose of the Clarke (and other genre awards) to reward any good novel that happens to use SF tropes, or is it to reward good science fiction?
All of those, to one degree or another, force us to ask the exact question you're asking, about whether a book containing sf tropes is science fiction.

I'm not sure that is the question I've been asking. I also have a fairly wide personal definition of science fiction, which tends to ignore issues of style and trope. I define science fiction as literature that concerns itself with two questions: how will technology alter our lives? And how will we use technology to do the same things that human beings have been doing for millennia--love, hate, start families, and dream of the future? Which is why I had no problem with the Clarke judges' decision to define Quicksilver and Pattern Recognition as SF. Similarly, I'm not questioning the assertion that Never Let Me Go is science fiction. I just think - and I don't think I'm alone in this - that it's bad science fiction.

You're probably right when you say that the Clarke judges and I have different definitions of 'good science fiction'. I think it's possible for a book to be good literature and at the same time bad science fiction - a good recent example is Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground (although VanderMeer has said that he didn't intend the book as SF, its setting is unquestionably SF-nal and his treatment of it doesn't quite work) - and I'm wondering whether the Clarke judges aren't ignoring that aspect of the question. Never Let Me Go is a good book (well, not as far as I'm concerned, but as I said I'm in the minority). Never Let Me Go is science fiction. Therefore it belongs on an SF award list. I've been asking whether we shouldn't expect the Clarke judges to give some consideration to the fact that Never Let Me Go is bad SF. And, again, I'm asking this question - I'm not at all certain what the answer should be.

Part of the value of the Clarke, I think, is in asking people to make that choice. And I think most other genre shortlists come from people who have already made it.

Very true.
I'm afraid I've twisted us both about ridiculously (and, in the process, so thoroughly compartmentalized my feelings about this book that even I'm not entirely certain what they are). Let me try to start over:

1. I accept that Never Let Me Go is SF, although I don't think it works as a piece of science fiction because of Ishiguro's lousy worldbuilding and his carelessness with detail.

2. My reasons for disliking the book have less to do with my perception of it as bad SF - I pretty much realized what I was dealing with a few pages in and steeled myself accordingly - and more to do with my perception of it as a bad book.

3. That said, I'm not at all certain that the one didn't affect the other. As I said in an earlier comment, Ishiguro's inattention to detail was a major factor in my inability to connect with the characters - in an unbelievable setting, it's harder to find believable people. However, I'm fairly certain that I would have had trouble connecting with Kathy, Ruth, and Michael even if NLMG's premise had been handled better. It certainly didn't help that, while I was zoning out over yet another stultifying story from Kathy's tedious childhood, my mind would wander over to 'wait a minute, is it actually possible to harvest three major organs from a person and still have them wandering around?', but I think the deal-breaker was the stultification and the tedium, not the bad worldbuilding.

4. Which, as I understand it, is so wildly divergent from many (or even most) people's reaction to the book as to potentially make further discussion pointless (not that I don't want further discussion, quite the contrary). Honestly, I read reviews like yours and Matt Cheney's, or even the reactions to my first critique of NLMG, and I wonder if we're talking about the same book - people who found the main characters heartbreakingly human, who were enchanted by their bucolic existence at Hailsham and crushed by their attempts to recreate that haven of safety and security in the real world. I just didn't care.
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