The ceremony was as it always is: good to see lots of people there, meet old friends and put faces to a couple of internet names. Stephen Hunt reports that Sean Pertwee was there:

The actor Sean Pertwee – aka Mutant Chronicles, Doomsday, Equilibrium, Dog Soldiers, and the upcoming The 4th Reich – was sitting directly in front of me, close to China Miéville on the left of the cinema auditorium during the ceremony. I suspect he was there as part of the SCIFI London Film Festival, the kind hosts of the Clarke awards for the last three years ... As the thanks to the organisations supplying the judges were made, Tom Hunter, head awards honcho, gets through thanking the SF Foundation and the BSFA, it comes to SFcrowsnest.com’s turn and said web site’s ace judge Paul Skevington, then Sean Pertwee leans forward to his mate and I am fairly sure he whispered, ‘Who the £$%£ are SFcrowsnest?’

As it happens, I was sat next to China at this point in the proceedings, and beside Pertwee's mate (whom I did not recognise and whose name I don't know) and Pertwee himself. I suspect they were there as friends of Marcel Theroux, who was sitting in the row in front. I suspect this because, as a slide flashed on the enormous screen showing all six shortlised novels, Sean Pertwee's mate leant over to me (a man he didn't know from Adam, if you'll pardon the phrase) and whispered loudly in my ear: 'Far North's a genius novel. All those others, though, are shit.' I murmured something noncommitally agreeable, and the ceremony moved on.

What Stephen doesn't mention is that at one point John Landis, I'm almost certain it was, poked his head over the divide separating the exit from the auditorium, and that Pertwee and his mate both waved excitedly to him.

They're strange occasions, these awards. To slip into the third-person: one tries not to get too worked up about them, or to lose too much of one's cool; but inevitably things becomes increasingly exciting and jitter-provoking the closer to the actual announcement one gets. By the time you're at the fumbling-open-the-gold-envelope part, you're no longer thinking 'oo I hope I win!' You're thinking 'let's get this over with.' Those screenshots of the Oscars with five separate boxes and an anxious star in each? When the winner is announced, and the other four furiously applaud, they're not being disingenuous, you know. Perhaps they really are graceful losers, or perhaps they will, later, seethe with resentment; but in the moment they're experiencing a rush of pure relief that manifests as real happiness for the other actor.

On the upside, there have been some more reviews of all the shortlisted titles, some of them (the reviews I mean) very interesting. Niall Harrison, that tall man, links to some of these; and here's Dan Hartland's whole shortlist review at SH (and part II). He's not so keen on YBT, as it goes, though he says some interesting and perceptive things about the novel nonetheless. And I can't argue with his main point: he looks for an aesthetic unity in his fiction (he says he has 'a kink for it'); where I, although I acknowlege the tremendous gravitational appeal of that sort of unity, mistrust it, and consider it one of my jobs as a writer to go through the balanced, harmonious whole fucking it up in various, and I would hope creative, ways. That's a differend, right there.

One small niggle I have. Hartland:

There is also the Russian question. In a post on her own blog, the novelist Catherynne Valente charged Roberts with egregious cultural appropriation, marshalling several arguments in order to show that the novel's grasp on Russian and Soviet culture is tenuous and at times wholly wrong-headed. Some examples are less serious than others—that Skvorecky, when arrested by the KGB, angrily (but impotently) demands he has rights, is surely more forgivable than the suggestion that the genre and literary circles depicted in the novel might bear no relation to their counterparts in reality.

Nitpicking with statements like is really of no interest to anybody but a particular breed of pedantry-minded author (which is why I bury this at the bottom of a post few will read, rather than weighing in on Hartland's unpedantic, thoughtful piece); but this isn't right. What I mean is: I don't argue with Catherynne Valente's dislike of the novel; for maybe it is as shit as she says, and certainly her reaction is inalienably hers. And if I read her correctly, although that dislike does come in part from a sense that 'the novel's grasp on Russian and Soviet culture is tenuous and at times wholly wrong-headed', it really has more to do with a broader dislike of the book's tone and approach together with a diagnosis of deplorable fatphobia in my imagination. But I have to say: this particular bit isn't right. Though Valente and Hartland both say he does, Skvorecky, does not angrily (but impotently) demand his rights when arrested by the KGB. It's true that he does, after lengthy interrogation by several Militia (not KGB) officers, ask with what he has been charged; but that's not the same thing. Asking the police 'what are the charges?', even in a tyrannical state, isn't so unbelievable as demanding the KGB respect one's human rights, I think.

Spirit by Gwyneth Jones

The City & The City by China Miéville

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

Far North by Marcel Theroux

Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding

As I was saying to somebody else, the thing that makes me particularly chuffed about appearing on this list is the sheer excellence of the other nominees. It means that my happiness at being shortlisted in the first place is tempered by a kind of relief -- there'll be, for me, neither shame, envy nor sorrow if I lose to a book the calibre of Galileo's Dream, Spirit or The City and the City.' To quote Woody Allen's Love and Death, as I am fond of doing: 'no, it's a greater honour for me ...'

British science fiction is now in a golden age.

I say this as a happy fan and an awed colleague: the range, depth, intensity, wit and beauty of the science fiction being published in the UK these days is simply amazing. The eight wonderful writers featured here are only a representative sampling of a community of artists so strong that it is hard to explain. Add to these Brian Aldiss, Neal Asher, Iain Banks, Christopher Evans, Alasdair Gray, Colin Greenland, John Courtenay Grimwood, Peter Hamilton, Nick Harkaway, M. John Harrison, Robert Holdstock, Gwyneth Jones, Garry Kilworth, Doris Lessing, Ian R. MacLeod, China Miéville, Richard Morgan, Christopher Priest, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Jennifer Rohn, Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Lisa Tuttle - and no doubt others I have forgotten, or am unaware of (sorry) - and one has to ask, how is it that a group of such intellectual power could be working at one time, and our time at that.

I was enormously chuffed to see my name in there, part of that genuinely exalted company. Now, if somebody staged a four way hike-off between Robinson, Le Guin, Delany and Gene Wolfe for the title 'world's greatest living science fiction author' I'd put my money on Robinson; something that only made the name-check sweeter. But then I turned the page.

Oh, I know there is a Booker prize, I've heard of it even in California - supposedly given to the best fiction published in the Commonwealth every year - but there are no Woolves on those juries, and so they judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels. Sometimes these are fine historical novels, written by tremendous writers; I particularly like Roddy Doyle, John Banville, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, and my favorite was Penelope Fitzgerald. But working, like all of us, in the rain shadow of the great modernists, they tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways. A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

At which point I fell off my chair.

The book is consistently okay, and the author makes a good attempt at character development, but the problem is he attempts to tell the story of all nine characters and move the plot along, it's just too much for one book so everything feels too quick. There's more pages spent discussing the trip to their objective, or more correctly discussing the personal histories of the various characters, than there is in their training or the mission itself ... In any event, it's not a bad read, but it's not going to win any awards.

Wrong! Funny old world, ain't it, though?

Slightly less ausipcious, but cool nonetheless: Locus has picked the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (ed., Bould, Butler, Vint and y.t.) as a 'notable book'. They call it 'hefty', which I take to be praise. Many congratulations to Mark, Andy, Sheryl and me!