Six Books About What Gets Remembered

On the twelfth of August, in a room in London, the Arthur C. Clarke Award gave its fortieth prize to E.J. Swift, for When There Are Wolves Again. The award is £2,026—the prize has been pegged to the year since 2001, which is the sort of detail that tells you what kind of institution this is—plus an engraved bookend.

Swift’s novel follows two women across roughly fifty years. Lucy is five when it opens and becomes an environmental activist. Hester is a filmmaker who has been recording the decline since Chernobyl. And in the Britain they move through, the animals come back: wolves, lynx, bears, beavers. The single most audacious invention in the book is that the King rewilds the royal estate.

The judges’ chair praised it, precisely, for managing ”to find room for optimism.” He also mentioned, in passing, that the submissions pile this year was heavy with depressing books, and that what kept coming up in the judges’ discussions was joy. Hold on to that; it turns out to be the shape of the whole list.

What the Judges Noticed

When the shortlist was announced in June, the Award’s own notice made an observation about it that I have not seen picked up anywhere else. There is, they wrote, a strong thread of memory running through the shortlist.

It is the kind of remark that prize administrators make and nobody checks. I checked it. It holds, and it holds so completely that it is worth laying out before anything else.

One book is about ideas that erase themselves from memory. One is about a robot child who is the only thing two estranged siblings still remember their brother by. One is about a girl who pulls information out of dead electronic communications, which is to say out of the memory of a drowned internet. One is about a state that records your dreams and uses them as evidence. One is about a woman who has spent five decades filming what is disappearing. And one—the odd one, the one that caused the fight—is about people forced into a game where dying means starting the level again with everything you learned intact.

Six writers who did not consult each other, all writing about what gets kept. That is not a theme a jury imposes. That is a jury noticing what a year of submissions was actually about.

The Winner

When There Are Wolves Again—E.J. Swift (Arcadia, October 2025).

Swift’s own account of what she was doing is the best summary anyone has offered: she wanted to imagine one possible way forward through challenges we already know are locked in, and to ask what might be gained as well as lost if action were actually taken. That is a much harder novel to write than a collapse novel, and it is why so few people write it. Catastrophe has a plot built in. Recovery has to be constructed a decade at a time, and Swift gives herself fifty years to do it, alternating between a woman who grows up inside the crisis and one who has been documenting it since before the younger one was born.

It carries a cover blurb from Kim Stanley Robinson, which is almost too apt—he has spent thirty years arguing that the useful science-fictional act is not to depict the disaster but to work out, in tedious and specific detail, what the alternative would require. Swift had already taken the BSFA Award for the same novel earlier this year. Taking both in one season is a genuine double.

“showing us that no one future has to be inevitable”Tom Hunter, Clarke Award Director, on the 2026 winner

The Other Five

Luminous—Silvia Park (Magpie, March 2025). A debut, set in a reunified Korea where humanoid robots have been absorbed into ordinary life—as housekeepers, police, teachers, nannies, lovers. Jun and Morgan Cho are estranged siblings: he a detective in the Robot Crimes Unit, a war veteran and a trans man; she a programmer at a neurobiology company. Both are still grieving their brother Yoyo, an early prototype built by their celebrated roboticist father, who resurfaces in a junkyard where a disabled girl called Ruijie finds him. The judges’ chair credited it with ”the density of William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” and said Park had braided in enough ideas for several novels. It won the Otherwise Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and several critics thought it the strongest thing on the list that did not win.

The Dream Hotel—Laila Lalami (Bloomsbury Circus, 2025). Algorithmic pre-crime, and the most straightforwardly frightening book here. Citizens are scored for their likelihood of committing a future offence; Sara Hussein is detained on the strength of a risk score, and her detention extends indefinitely each time she breaks a rule inside it. Her dreams are recorded and admitted as evidence. The judges’ chair made a point I think is exactly right: the novel’s real subject is not artificial intelligence in the usual sense but the black-box character of algorithmic decisions—the fact of being sorted by a process nobody can open. Lalami came to this from literary fiction, having been a Pulitzer finalist, and it shows in the patience of it.

There Is No Antimemetics Division—qntm (Del Rey, November 2025). An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties: something that by its nature resists being transmitted or retained. A meme spreads; an antimeme slides out of your head. Marie Quinn runs the division of a secretive organisation charged with containing them—a division that has itself been forgotten, including by the organisation employing it. Her staff take experimental memory drugs simply in order to perceive the threats at all, and the drugs destroy them. The chair called it ”bonkers” and advised readers to roll with it, which is good advice. It is cosmic horror conducted entirely in the register of institutional paperwork, and the central antagonist is best described as something you cannot safely think about, because thinking about it is how it finds you.

The Salt Oracle—Lorraine Wilson (Solaris, November 2025). Seventeen years after the internet crashed, Auli lives aboard the Bellwether, a floating college in the Baltic, insulated from the fighting on the mainland. She studies the Oracle: a girl who channels ghosts and, through them, extracts information from dead electronic communications—weather data, mostly, in a world where the compasses no longer work properly. Then Auli’s mentor is found dead, and the hints accumulate that he was not what he seemed. The critic Cheryl Morgan read it directly against Le Guin’s *The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas*, and once you see that you cannot unsee it: an institution’s continued functioning rests on the use of one child, everyone aboard knows, and the book is about what each of them does with knowing. Wilson has a doctorate in behavioural ecology and spent years as a conservation scientist, which is visible in how the sea behaves.

Dungeon Crawler Carl—Matt Dinniman (Michael Joseph, 2025). Aliens demolish the surface of the Earth and force the survivors into a vast game-like dungeon, broadcast across the galaxy as entertainment. A former Coast Guardsman and a cat descend through its levels. The chair’s stated reason for shortlisting it was, disarmingly, that ”it’s fun”—and that of everything on the list it produced the most passion among the judges. That is putting it gently, and the next section is about why.

The Argument

The Clarke has a particular reputation. It was founded in 1987 on a grant from Arthur C. Clarke himself, who funded it personally for two decades, and its first winner was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—a book many people were not willing to call science fiction, given the prize by judges who did not care. That set the tone. The Clarke rewards the literary and the formally strange. In 2022 it went to a verse novel set on a space station, written in Orkney dialect.

So: a LitRPG—a genre built on the conventions of role-playing games, with levels and stats and loot—on the Clarke shortlist. And not merely a LitRPG, but one that began as a free serial on Royal Road, was self-published in 2020, and only reached a Penguin imprint in 2025, which is what made it eligible at all.

The reaction was ferocious. One reviewer ranked it last and called it lacking in basic craft, character and plot, said it managed to be sexist, racist and ableist, complained that its tropes were ones the genre had abandoned fifteen years ago, and finished: ”I loathe this book with a fiery passion.” Another described it as among the most unpleasant reading experiences available, faulting turgid prose and glacial pacing in something ostensibly a comedy. Recurring specific objections were the treatment of women and the repeated use of fatness as shorthand for the unpleasant. Its defenders point to a genuine anticapitalist anger at the corporation running the dungeon.

I have no stake in that fight and I have not read it. What interests me is the structural fact underneath, which nobody arguing about the prose seems to have noticed: two of these six books arrived by a route that did not exist as an option a decade ago. *Dungeon Crawler Carl* came up through Royal Road and self-publishing. And qntm’s novel began life as web serials contributed to a collaborative online horror wiki between 2015 and 2020, was self-published as a fix-up, and was substantially rewritten for its trade edition—the organisation renamed, the anomalies renamed, the protagonist renamed.

The Award made self-published books eligible in 2016. It took ten years for that decision to produce a shortlisting anybody shouted about. That is roughly how long it takes for work written outside the industry to accumulate an audience large enough that a trade imprint buys it—and the interesting question is not whether *Dungeon Crawler Carl* is good but how many more are coming, because the pipeline that produced it is now full and was not built by publishers.

The Numbers, Briefly

This year set a record: 132 books submitted from 52 UK imprints and independent authors, against a previous high of 124 from 46 in 2019. Worth knowing that the submissions list is not a longlist—the Award is explicit that it is simply what was received, with no juried selection until the six.

Five of the six shortlisted authors had never been nominated before; Swift was the exception, shortlisted in 2023. So whoever won was going to be a first-time winner. And the chair noted something worth recording plainly: an all-male Clarke shortlist happened less than a decade ago, and he reads this year’s list as evidence that British publishers have got better at publishing women.

What the List Is Actually Saying

Return to the thread. Six books about memory, and look at how differently they treat it.

In *The Dream Hotel*, memory is evidence used against you—the state reaches into your sleep and holds what it finds there. In *There Is No Antimemetics Division*, memory is the thing being eaten, and the horror is that you cannot notice the loss, because noticing is what was taken. In *The Salt Oracle*, memory is a resource being strip-mined from the wreckage of a collapsed network, through a child. In *Luminous*, memory is what a robot child is for: the only remaining form of a dead brother. In *Dungeon Crawler Carl*, memory is what survives death and makes the next attempt possible—which is, whatever else you think of the book, a real idea about persistence.

And in the winner, memory is a woman with a camera, recording decline for fifty years—so that when the wolves come back, somebody can testify that they were gone. That is the difference. Five of these books are about memory as loss or as extraction. Swift’s is about memory as the thing that makes recovery legible: you only know something has been restored if somebody kept a record of its absence.

You only know something has been restored if somebody kept a record of its absence. That is what the winner is for.

I think that is why it won, and I think the judges’ remark about joy is the same observation from the other side. In a year whose submissions were, by the chair’s account, relentlessly bleak, the book that took the fortieth Clarke is the one that spent five hundred pages doing the difficult, unglamorous work of imagining that an intervention might succeed.

That is not optimism in the soft sense. Nothing in Swift’s Britain is easy and much is already lost. It is optimism in the sense the Award Director reached for when he described what science fiction at its most powerful actually does—which is not to predict, but to establish that the future currently on offer is not the only one available. Forty years on from a prize founded to support British science fiction, that remains a strikingly useful thing for a novel to be able to do.

Swift’s own response, posted the morning after: ”Utterly stunned, extraordinarily grateful, deliriously happy.” The award directors, meanwhile, announced that they are already making plans for the fiftieth, in 2036—which is either institutional confidence or a very small act of the same kind of optimism the prize has just rewarded.