Alan at the Arthurs

People often assume that I write science fiction, which I don’t. If I did, they would probably get quite excited to hear that I was nominated for an Arthur Clarke award, because the Arthur C. Clarke awards are as prestigious as it gets for sci-fi authors.

In fact, however, the Arthur C. Clarke award for the best science fiction novel of the year should not be confused with the Sir Arthur Clarke Awards for achievement in the space sector. Commonly known as “The Arthurs”, the latter are also backed by the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation but instead of fiction they deal with science fact. There are ten categories, for most of which anyone can nominate anyone else. Sixty judges from across the space sector draw up a shortlist of three finalists in each category and then choose the winners, with the prizes awarded at a gala dinner.

This year the awards ceremony was hosted by the Reinventing Space conference in Belfast. Hence the photo of the Titanic museum, which like everything else in the very jolly city of Belfast is just a short walk away.

I was crossing the Red Desert of Uzbekistan in a high speed train when I received the notification that I’d been nominated for the Lifetime Achievement Award and it came as a complete and lovely surprise. By the time I got to Bukhara I’d been chosen as a finalist: and that was even more flattering when I discovered that the competition consisted of Professor Ken Pounds of Leicester University and James Burke of the BBC, whose lifetimes have been considerably longer than mine (I mean, come on, James Burke was presenting Tomorrow’s World when I was about nine).

In the end it went to Ken Pounds, which is probably right. And it was only at the awards dinner, after about six glasses of wine, that I remembered my own special connection with Arthur Clarke. Back in 1996 I was leading the project to define Inmarsat’s 4th generation satellite communications system. One of my team was Phil Macridis, a keen fan of Sir Arthur, who persuaded me to send him to Sri Lanka to get a video endorsement of our project from the great man himself. I agreed, which is usually the smart thing to do when your team are smarter than you are. That video clip helped to clinch the deal on what became the world’s biggest ever civil satellite programme.

So, what have I learned from this little brush with celebrity? That it’s nice to be acknowledged even if we don’t win any awards. That Belfast is a fine, fair city which should be visited often. And that I do in fact have an interesting idea for a science fiction novel. More than that, I even think it’s an idea of which the master would have approved. So now I have no choice but to explore this universe of thought, where science fiction has something new to say about mankind’s relationship with God. In the process I will find out just how far short my talent and understanding fall from what Arthur C. Clarke would have made of it. Nothing like setting the bar high, is there?