Arthur C Clarke Awards 2003 Shortlist

2nd March 2004

Coalescent
Stephen Baxter

Coalescent is the first of a trilogy of novels that does nothing less than tell the story of mankind's role in the Universe from the perspective of our impossibly distant descendents - a race who have established a utopia at the end of time and the universe but who must now try and tackle of the shadow that the suffering of the past throws over their perfection......

Stella Nova is one of the ‘virus children’, a generation of genetically enhanced babies born a dozen years before to mothers infected with the SHEVA virus.

In fact, the children represent the next great evolutionary leap and a new species of human, Homo sapiens novus, but this is officially denied. They’re gentle, charming and persuasive, possessed of remarkable traits......

Darwin's Children
Greg Bear

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson

Cayce Pollard owes her living to her pathological sensitivity to logos. In London to consult for the world's coolest ad agency, she finds herself catapulted, via her addiction to a mysterious body of fragmentary film footage uploaded to the Web by a shadowy auteur, into a global quest for this unknown 'garage Kubrick'. Cayce becomes involved with an eccentric hacker, a vengeful ad executive, a defrocked mathematician.......

Rufus O'Niall is dead and the green nazi occupation has been defeated: but at a huge cost to the three extraordinary people who saved England from the dark. Shattered and deeply changed by the sacrifices each of them had to make, Fiorinda, Axe and Sage are in hiding from their friends and fans on the Pacific coast of Mexico when they're tracked down by an emissary of Fred Eiffrich, President of the United States. He's got an offer they can't refuse. It's about a movie, allegedly ...

Midnight Lamp
Gwyneth Jones

Quicksilver
Neal Stephenson

In seventeenth century Europe, three unlikely confederates are thrown together: Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind, dwarfed only by those of his friends Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz… ‘Half-Cocked Jack’s wild exploits in search of a great fortune are becoming the stuff of legend… Cast out from the Turkish harem she has been imprisoned since childhood, Eliza is simply trying to stay alive… .......