Ned Beauman has won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction with his “twisted” and “bleakly funny” novel, Venomous Lumpsucker.
His winning book is set in the 2030s and follows the search for a surviving colony of a hyper-intelligent species of fish. Beauman was announced as the winner of the prestigious prize – which celebrates the best science fiction novel published in the UK last year – at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.
Beauman’s novel is a “biting satire, twisted, dark and radical, but remarkably accessible, endlessly inventive and hilarious,” said judging chair Andrew M Butler.
Venomous Lumpsucker is Beauman’s fifth book. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2013 the author was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists.
His latest novel “takes science fiction’s knack for future extrapolation and aggressively applies it to humanity’s shortsighted self-interest and consumptive urges in the face of planetary eco-crisis,” said the award’s director Tom Hunter. “The result is a bleakly funny novel where the only hope for our species is working out the final punchline before it’s delivered.”
The judging panel – nominated by the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi London film festival – comprised Butler alongside Dave Hutchinson, Francis Gene-Rowe, Kate Heffner, Nicholas Whyte and Georgie Knight. “The judges took several hours to choose their winner and debate was intense but always good-willed,” said Butler.
In a Guardian review of Beauman’s novel, Kevin Power described it as a “jaunty, cerebral eco-thriller”, a “novel about grief” and an “ironically pristine container for the toxic waste of our self-knowledge”.
Other titles shortlisted for the award were The Coral Bones by E J Swift; Metronome by Tom Watson; The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter; The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard; and Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick.
The prize was established in 1987 by Clarke, whose novel 2001: A Space Odyssey was published in 1968. Margaret Atwood was the first to win the award with The Handmaid’s Tale, and subsequent winners include Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
Beauman will receive £2,023, reflecting the year the prize is awarded. Since 2001, the annual prize money has risen incrementally.
