Congratulations from Orbit to Charles Stross and Greg Bear, as they’ve both been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award!

Charles Stross’s futuristic crime novel RULE 34 was shortlisted today, as was Greg Bear’s mind-bending science fiction thriller –  HULL ZERO THREE.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a prize for the best science fiction novel published in the UK in the previous year. It’s been running for over twenty-five years now, and previous winners include Orbit author Tricia Sullivan, as well as China Miéville and Lauren Beukes.

RULE 34 is available from Orbit UK in C-format paperback and as an ebook, and the B-format paperback will be published in July.

HULL ZERO THREE is published by Orbit in the US, and by Gollancz in the UK.

We’d like to extend our heartiest congratulations to our author Robert Jackson Bennett, whose debut novel MR. SHIVERS was chosen as Best Novel at the 2010 Shirley Jackson Awards, held this past weekend at Readercon. MR. SHIVERS, compared by Publishers Weekly to “a collaboration between Stephen King and John Steinbeck” and called by the Guardian(UK) “a startling debut, a deft amalgam of thriller, cerebral horror and American gothic, written with a stark and artful simplicity.”

If you haven’t yet read MR. SHIVERS, do — and don’t miss Robert’s second novel, THE COMPANY MAN, about which Booklist notes, “Bennett does the seemingly impossible here. He’s written an alternate-history novel that measures up in every respect to Philip K. Dick’s masterful The Man In the High Castle.”

High praise indeed — and completely deserved.