Continuing various themes from the previous post, the shortlist for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke awards was announced on Monday. Knowing STML’s fondness for a healthy dose of literate Sci-Fi, you may or may not be surprised to hear we haven’t read any of the books - with one important exception.

Accelerando, a novel by Charles Stross, despite being published by Time Warner Behemoth-owned Orbit, is available for free download from the author’s site, http://www.accelerando.org/, and is well worth it (providing you go buy a dead-tree copy after, of course). As we have noted before, the best Sci-Fi springs from a cheerful disregard for boundaries, both literary and academic, and Accelerando skips lightly from Freudian psychodrama to grand space opera, from future-comedy shtick to AI, genetics and molecular biotechnology. Read all about the quite wonderful Stross (”Regrettably, I’m monolingual in human tongues”) and the New Wave of Scottish Sci-Fi here. (New? And what, Banks is old now?)

(I might add that anyone who prefaces a novel with a quotation from Dijkstra will always get my attention. Man needs a memorial. Julian, are you listening?)

It’s also possibly significant that this is the first ever all-British shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke, confirming the UK’s long-established dominance of the weirder forms of (English-language) genre fiction (Geoff Ryman’s an honorary Britisher, despite Canadian birth). The winner will be announced at the the Sci-Fi London festival in April.