‘Intense’ novel about robot abused by her boyfriend/owner wins Arthur C Clarke science fiction award

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer wins £2,025 for ‘compelling tale that, like all good stories about robots, is ultimately about the human condition’

A novel told from the perspective of a robot girlfriend has been named winner of the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction.

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer is “a tightly focused first-person account of a robot designed to be the perfect companion, who struggles to become free,” said chair of judges, the academic Andrew M Butler. The speculative novel follows Annie, the narrator, programmed to cater to the needs of her boyfriend/owner Doug, who treats her in a way that would be abusive if she were human.

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NK Jemisin: ‘It’s easier to get a book set in black Africa published if you’re white’

The three-time Hugo award winner is one of the biggest names in modern scifi. She talks about overcoming racism to rewrite the future

In 2018, NK Jemisin became the first writer ever to win three consecutive Hugo best novel awards for science fiction and fantasy. Her first award had been in 2016, for her novel The Fifth Season, and its two sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won in the following years. Yet speaking on the phone from her home in coronavirus-hit Brooklyn, Jemisin says she never thought she’d be published. “I honestly didn’t think I had a chance. You just didn’t see characters like me in fiction,” she says.

Growing up in Mobile, Alabama and New York, Jemisin was an avid reader, making up her own stories from the age of eight, but the lack of black women writing science fiction and fantasy, the genre she loved, made her believe it wasn’t for her. “We were all exposed to nothing but white dude fiction, occasionally young white women fiction, and if that’s how you’ve grown up, then that is what is normal.”

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