Martin MacInnes wins Arthur C Clarke award for ‘intense trip’ of a novel

Scottish writer Martin MacInnes has taken home this year’s Arthur C Clarke award for what judges described as an “intense trip” of a novel, moving from the depths of the ocean to outer space.

In Ascension, MacInnes’s third novel, was revealed as the winner of the award, recognising the best science fiction novel of the year, at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.

The novel follows marine biologist Leigh as she joins a team exploring a trench discovered in the Atlantic Ocean. “The whole novel is beautifully written,” wrote Adam Roberts in a Guardian review .

“Richly atmospheric, full of brilliantly evoked detail, never sacrificing the grounded verisimilitude of lived experience to its vast mysteries, but also capturing a numinous, vatic strangeness that hints at genuine profundities about life,” he added. “Nobody else writes like MacInnes, and this magnificent book is his best yet.”

MacInnes previously wrote Infinite Ground, published in 2016, and Gathering Evidence, published in 2020. In Ascension was also longlisted for the 2023 Booker prize.

“Science fiction novels have sought to capture the sublimity in the sheer scale of the universe, but I don’t know many that relate that to the human level quite so brilliantly as MacInnes does,” added Roberts.

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In Ascension was shortlisted for the prize alongside Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh and Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner.

“As always, the judging session was filled with emotion and intelligence and it took a while for In Ascension to emerge as the frontrunner,” said judging chair and writer Andrew M Butler. “It shows us, in the words of one judge, ‘vistas between the cellular and the cosmic’. It’s an intense trip and for once it’s a winner that is in the tradition of Clarke’s own novels.”

The prize was established in 1987 by Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as nearly 100 works of science fiction and nonfiction. Margaret Atwood was the first to win the award with The Handmaid’s Tale, and subsequent winners include Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Last year, Ned Beauman won the award for Venomous Lumpsucker , a novel set in the 2030s which follows the search for a surviving colony of a hyper-intelligent species of fish.

This year’s judging panel – nominated by the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival – comprised Dolly Garland, Stark Holborn, Nic Clarke, Tom Dillon and Glyn Morgan.

MacInnes will receive £2,024, reflecting the current year. Since 2001, the annual prize money has risen by a pound each year.

• In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.