Less science, more fiction from Arthur C Clarke Award
Lindesay Irvine writing in The Guardian on Monday

The shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction, announced earlier today, suggests a broad definition of the genre. Along with tales of androids and genetic engineers, the six books nominated this year include prize-winning literary fiction, a novel for young adults, and what has been described as "a postmodern psychological mash-up".

Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army is a bleak portrait of a near-future Britain after oil reserves have been exhausted, focused on a renegade women's commune in Cumbria, which has already won last year's mainstream John Llewellyn Rhys prize.

Hall, who was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2004 for Electric Michelangelo, was
delighted to find herself in contention for the science fiction prize.
"Any collapsing of imposed literary boundaries heartens me," she said, "and the
possibility that writers might be freer to exercise imaginative versatility
is tremendously exciting."

The nomination for The Raw Shark Texts, an exuberant fantasy about a man whose memory is being eaten by a psychic shark, might surprise some readers, but pleased author Stephen
Hall.
"The book has been described as a thriller, a romance, metaphysical adventure, part of the new
horror revival, slipstream, fantasy, postmodern psychological mash-up, and
science fiction too," he said. I'm happy with all those descriptions
because I've always felt that it isn't a writer's job to tell a reader how
to read. If a reader decides my book is science fiction, then it is.

For the rest of the article & other shortlisted titles.......