Stand back and watch a professional at work
Author Christopher Priest (perhaps best known for The Prestige) is not happy with the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist. He is not happy at all. In a single blog post, he declares that:

1) a Mr. Mark Billingham, author of "plodding, laddish" police procedurals, was not fit to share a panel stage with him, but unfortunately did so anyway;

2) 2011 was a terrible year for sci-fi, including the books that actually made the shortlist, but here are the three he thinks should have been on it (one "makes an eccentric choice in its plot, in casting the actor Clark Gable as a private eye," and the other features "Osama bin Laden is the central character in a string of pulp novels allegedly written by one Mike Longschott," and Priest may not be doing them any favors right now);

3) none of the five books shortlisted should have been, and he will now tell you exactly why, book by book;

4) okay, one of the finalists kinda-sorta deserved the shortlist, maybe, but BY GOD China Miéville should not be on it, and let him spend six (6) paragraphs telling you why;

5) other finalists, including Charles Stross and Sheri S. Tepper, are also bad and should feel bad;

6) "the present panel of judges should be fired, or forced to resign, immediately... These people have proved themselves incompetent as judges, and should not be allowed to have any more say about or influence on the Arthur C. Clarke Award";

7) the 2012 ceremony should be canceled;

8) this is not about the fact that his own book, The Islanders, was left off the shortlist.



NOTABLY QUOTABLE

"[Billingham] is a writer firmly embedded in that particular genre and digging deeper with every passing day, while I have spent the last forty years or so trying to understand and make sense of the orthodoxies that clearly define a genre but also dangerously undermine it."

"Miéville has already won the Clarke Award three times – which is not his fault, and one assumes not his intention. No doubt he is pleased to have done so."

"It is indefensible that a novel like Charles Stross’s Rule 34 (Orbit) should be given apparent credibility by an appearance in the Clarke shortlist. Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet."

"To think for even one moment that this appalling and incapable piece of juvenile work might actually be chosen as winner brings on a cold sweat of fear."

"For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’."

"Of Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three (Gollancz) there is little to say, except that it is capable in its own way, and hard in the way that some people want SF to be hard, and it keeps alive the great tradition of the SF of the 1940s and 1950s where people get in spaceships to go somewhere to do something. In this case, the unlikely story begins as the interstellar spaceship arrives somewhere. The paragraphs are short, to suit the expected attention-span of the reader. The important words are in italics. Have we lived and fought in vain?"


I don't know, but I plan on shaking my fists and demanding this of the heavens as often as humanly possible.

ETA: John Scalzi weighs in ("So for connoisseurs of the form, this is top-shelf stuff, much better than the usual entitled bleating of the tendentiously aggrieved"); Charles "Internet Puppy" Stross is making t-shirts.

WHAT I WANT TO SEE MORE OF: @notveryalice: um so i made a #ChristopherPriest gif.

ETA: I GUESS I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING MYSELF AROUND HERE