Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Namwali Serpell has won SF’s prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award for her novel The Old Drift .

“The Old Drift is, to me, the great African novel of the 21st century,” Tade Thompson, last year’s winner, explained. “The scale, the characters, the polish and lyricism of the passages all conspire to tell an unforgettable tale.

“At last, a book that acknowledges that the African lives with the fantastic and mundane. At last, an African book of unarguable universality. Namwali Serpell has created something specifically Zambian and generally African at the same time. The Old Drift is everything fiction should be, and everything those of us who write should aspire to. Hats off. Well-deserved win. This is why my faith in the Clarke Award is unshakeable.”

Dr Andrew M Butler, chair of the judges, added: “Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift is, as one of our judges put it, ‘stealth sf”’, with inheritance and infection at its heart. She has created an extraordinary family saga that spans eras from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall, and beyond. It is a timely novel which interrogates colonialism from within and points to the science fictionality of everyday events. Our pandemic-ravaged world reminds us how connected our world has been for the last century or more – and this book points to the global nature of science fiction.”

Tom Hunter, Award Director, exclusively told Sci-Fi Bulletin:

“SF got it wrong. It wasn’t 2001 that we all started living in a science fictional world; it’s 2020.

“Unlike pandemics, however, awards work best when they take their time, and I want to knowledge and thank our judges for the commitment and enthusiasm they’ve shown the Clarke Award from back in the distant memory of 2019 when we first began, through to now when 121 submissions finally became one winning novel

“Avoiding a public award ceremony this year, we instead watched our news unfold on Twitter. A risky move perhaps given the platform’s tendency to doomscroll fatigue and the overdose of red pill injected culture warriors, but instead I found myself imbued with an almost old school science fictional sense of wonder and a new hope as the world welcomed our winner into the Clarke Award hall (regency bedroom?) of fame. At its heart the Clarke Award is about the positive promotion of science fiction in all its forms. Last night I was delighted to see so many fans around the world sharing in that ideal.”

The judging panel for the award comprised Sci-Fi Bulletin writers Stewart Hotston and Alasdair Stuart, both representing the British Science Fiction Association; Farah Mendlesohn and Chris Pak from the Science Fiction Foundation; and Rhian Drinkwater from the Sci-Fi London film festival.