cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/1402506

His winning book is set in the 2030s and follows the search for a surviving colony of a hyper-intelligent species of fish. Beauman was announced as the winner of the prestigious prize – which celebrates the best science fiction novel published in the UK last year – at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.

Beauman’s novel is a “biting satire, twisted, dark and radical, but remarkably accessible, endlessly inventive and hilarious,” said judging chair Andrew M Butler.

His latest novel “takes science fiction’s knack for future extrapolation and aggressively applies it to humanity’s shortsighted self-interest and consumptive urges in the face of planetary eco-crisis,” said the award’s director Tom Hunter. “The result is a bleakly funny novel where the only hope for our species is working out the final punchline before it’s delivered.”

In a Guardian review of Beauman’s novel, Kevin Power described it as a “jaunty, cerebral eco-thriller”, a “novel about grief” and an “ironically pristine container for the toxic waste of our self-knowledge”.

Other titles shortlisted for the award were The Coral Bones by E J Swift; Metronome by Tom Watson; The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter; The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard; and Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick.

  • ren (a they/them)@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Anyone wondering what the name of the book is without clicking through?

    Venomous Lumpsucker

    Not sure why it’s not in this summary, but hey, saved you a click!

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OPA
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      1 year ago

      It’s not in my quote as it’s part of the automatic summary Lemmy brings through for the top of the post (in The Guardian’s case it’s usually the snappy sentence summary before the main article):

      The prize for the year’s best science fiction novel was given to Venomous Lumpsucker, a satire which addresses ‘humanity’s shortsighted self-interest’

  • Tatters
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    1 year ago

    Just bought the ebook at a discount from Google Play.