All the awards are weird but some awards are weirder than others, and there was always a particular oddity to the Arthur C. Clarke Awards that, in the beginning, made people talk about them and, later, made the same people respect them.

I was, for two years, an Arthur C. Clarke Award judge, and I learned then just how odd they were. For a start, as Clarke Award judges, we were sent all the SF published in the UK that year. Everything. And we did our best to read them all, because you never know where the undiscovered gem is hiding.

(I don’t say yes to judging awards any more. I read every SF book published in the UK for two years, thirteen years ago, whether I felt like it or not, and have comparatively recently, found myself able to read science fiction for pleasure once again.)

The way that the awards worked at the time, the judges came from three different bodies: The British SF Association, The SF Foundation and the Science Policy Foundation. Now, judging an award is difficult if you’re all agreed on what you are judging (imagine the judges at an Olympic Figure Skating event, all watching the same things), but here you had at least a couple of different criteria for excellence – imagine that one set of figure skating judges didn’t much care for the moves but would be awarding marks based on costume, or smiles, or choice of music, and then imagine that the judging of the gold needed to be unanimous.

The Clarke Award was contentious: that was, frankly, part of the fun of it (the other part was the Arthur C. Clarke donated cheque that accompanied the award), not to mention one of the reasons it was discussed in pubs and fanzines and in the proto-online communities of the time: it had been given, in its first two years, to Margaret Atwood and to George Turner, and just as the pundits had concluded that it seemed to be an award that was given to mainstream authors who had written SF, the award went to Rachel Pollack for her Unquenchable Fire, an uncompromising piece of magical realism, and the pundits scratched their heads and continued to argue.

It was about this point that I noticed that the Arthur C. Clarke Award was being taken seriously – or as seriously as SF awards are taken. It occupied its own unique niche, and now, after almost twenty years, it is still in its own niche.

My own Clarke Award judging experiences, over two years, were about as different as they could possibly have been. In one of the years blood was spilled, horses were traded, and six judges faced off and fought for their books, each judge having a completely different idea of what the awards were, what kind of book they should be given to, what kind of shortlist they wanted to see, what kind of book should ultimately win. In the other year an IRA bomb threat made it impossible for half the judges to get to the shortlist judging, and made for a very easy and quiet judging process for those who were there. Looking back at the books that won, I’m satisfied with both of them, not least because neither of them was like any book that had won.

And then my judging time was done and the awards spun on with, for a few more years, the Science Policy Foundation, and then after that with the Science Museum, and now without either. I hope it gets another ‘science’ leg of the tripod again soon – the awards for the last couple of years have been much harder to argue about, and honestly, I think its probably a good thing to have at least a couple of judges looking at the figure skaters quite differently to their fellows, because the Clarke Awards are, I suspect, ultimately about bridge-building, which may be one reason why they are, although a British award, recognised and respected internationally. The Arthur C. Clarke Award is the award that the world of SF offers, each year, to the world outside as an example both of what SF is and what it can be.

The perfect Arthur C. Clarke Award winner has little in common with any of the other winners except, perhaps, that in the places where people gather together to argue, a Clarke shortlist and a Clarke winner will give them plenty to talk about.

Neil Gaiman