"The much-garlanded science fiction writer Christopher Priest has launched an extraordinary broadside against the authors nominated for this year's Arthur C Clarke award, describing the shortlist as "dreadful" and calling for the resignation of an "incompetent" panel of judges in a post on his website.
The six titles chosen for the shortlist were announced earlier this week, ranging from China Miéville's deep-space exploration of the fall myth, Embassytown, to Jane Rogers's Booker-longlisted dystopian novel The Testament of Jessie Lamb. According to Priest, author of The Prestige, only Rogers' novel deserves to be on the shortlist, with the remaining titles all unworthy and four novels "outstandingly ignored" by judges: Ian R MacLeod's Wake Up and Dream, Simon Ings's Dead Water, Adam Roberts's By Light Alone and Lavie Tidhar's Osama.
"It is indefensible that a novel like Charles Stross's Rule 34 should be given apparent credibility by an appearance in the Clarke shortlist," writes Priest, who has won both genre and literary prizes for his novels but whose latest outing, The Islanders, failed to make the Arthur C Clarke shortlist. "Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long," he continued. "You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012...=FBCNETTXT9038
its a pretty amusing rant.