The fortieth Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist was announced today, and I was lucky enough to be in the room for it, at King's College London as part of the Digital Futures Institute festival. The shortlist reveal followed the festival's keynote, with Samira Ahmed, who asked whether analogue technology is our storytelling saviour or merely a nostalgic retreat, and made the case for why analogue needs to survive in an increasingly digital age. Fittingly, Sir Arthur's own typewriter sat on stage throughout, a quietly eloquent prop for an argument about the things we risk leaving behind. 

There was a particular rightness to the venue, since King's was Sir Arthur's own college, where he took his first class degree in physics and mathematics in 1948, and there is something rather fitting about a science fiction award marking its fortieth year inside the institution that helped shape the man who founded it, at a conference looking ahead at what comes next. The mood was suitably celebratory.

Six books make up this year's shortlist. They are:

 

• Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (Michael Joseph)
• The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Bloomsbury Circus)
• Luminous by Silvia Park (Magpie)
• There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (Del Rey)
• When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift (Arcadia)
• The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson (Solaris).

 

I should declare an interest here, since I am serving on this year's judging panel as one of the British Science Fiction Association's two representatives, so I will leave the verdict to the reading public and simply point you towards the books themselves.

It is a list with real range, which is exactly what you want from the Clarke. Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl arrives as a genuine publishing phenomenon, a litRPG that began life online and has since conquered bestseller charts, sitting alongside Lalami's near-future surveillance dystopia and qntm's wonderfully unsettling SCP-derived tale of memories that erase themselves. Park's Luminous brings robots and Korean futures, Swift turns to ecological catastrophe and the return of the wild, and Wilson offers something stranger and more oracular.

 (If there is a thread running through it, the Chair of Judges, Dr Andrew M. Butler, put his finger on it when he noted the strong vein of memory across the six titles, and suggested this might prove a memorable year. I am inclined to agree, though I would, wouldn't I.)

The award reaching forty is no small thing. As Award Director Tom Hunter reminded us, following Sir Arthur's death the prize faced the very real prospect of closing after its twenty-fifth year, and the fact that it has not only survived but is already making plans for its fiftieth in 2036 speaks to a good deal of quiet stewardship. The winner this year receives the customary engraved bookend trophy and prize money of £2026.00, a sum that climbs by a pound a year in Sir Arthur's memory.

The winner will be announced on Wednesday 12th August 2026.