The problem with collecting everybody else's reviews is the lingering sense that it's all been said. Perhaps it has, and perhaps a consensus is forming. Opinions as to the merits of four of the shortlisted novel certainly range quite widely, but at the top and bottom of the list the community-gestalt's preferences seem unusually clear. Out first should be Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, which elicits at most a hearty meh; last standing, as picked by Abigail Nussbaum, Dan Hartland, David Hebblethwaite, Farah Mendlesohn, and Liz Batty's poll, should be Ken MacLeod's Intrusion, winning its author a first Clarke at his sixth time at the party. I'm about to dissent (if I can finish this post before the award is announced), but only mildly; if things go that way I won't be displeased.

Still, first out of the balloon for me is not Heller, but Adrian Barnes' Nod, in which I found very little to love. One day, almost everyone in the world can no longer go to sleep; narrator Paul is one of the few who can, and we spend 200 pages watching him negotiate a collapsing world, as for most people tiredness gives way to delusions gives way to total mental and physical breakdown. Barnes is, however, less interested in this premise as a literal apocalypse, or even as a reflection on our world, and more interested in it as a sub-Ballardian externalisation of his narrator's psychology. Paul is elected prophet by one roving band of insomniacs who have decided his book-in-progress about the "old, unnamed realities" left behind when language and culture evolve has the ring of deep truth about it. Much of Nod is therefore an exercise in sickening validation of Paul's self-declared misanthropy: "Better things go into us than ever come out." The human animal proves itself more than capable of living down to Paul's low expectations -- redeeming features are few and far between, with the worst degradation reserved, as Abigail and Dan have outlined in their reviews, for the female characters, and in particular for Paul's partner, Tanya. Nor is there much in the way of purely aesthetic pleasure to be had from Barnes' prose. Throughout, the writing is rough around the edges, the occasional striking phrases overshadowed by agonisingly over-extended metaphors: "Where the previous morning she'd looked pregnant with unwanted knowledge, she now looked as though she'd given birth, misplaced the baby, and been up all night trying frantically to remember where she'd left it. Was it in the fridge? The laundry hamper? The microwave?" With better execution, the politics of Nod wouldn't exactly be forgivable, but might at least have a certain force; as it is, the reading experience is just limply unpleasant.

So now I come to Heller. The Dog Stars is straightforwardly an heir to books like The Road or Far North, a mainstream literary-fiction individualist post-catastrophe tale. The putative selling point is encapsulated in a truly awful strapline on the cover of the UK edition: "A novel about the end of the world which makes you glad to be alive." Traditionally, end-of-the-world novels make you glad that the world has not, in fact, ended; but this clearly means something more, that Heller is going to try to walk the terribly fine line between admirably allowing his protagonist to find some personal peace, and reprehensibly giving them a life that contemporary readers might envy. To Heller's credit, for about the first two-thirds of The Dog Stars I actually think he pulls it off. Protagonist Hig is torn between a deep and honest love of being-in-the-world, and grieving for everyone and everything lost. "There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right," he writes, owning up to the freedom he feels while flying, aware of precisely what has enabled that freedom. Meanwhile the novel's rugged survivalism is problematised through Hig's gung-ho companion Bangley, the sort of man who shoots first and asks questions later, and whose need for companionship is at least partly, Hig thinks, "so he can show someone how well he is surviving." So although it's light on event, and although Heller's style never quite stopped feeling a little strained, I found a good portion of The Dog Stars quite engrossing. Unfortunately in the last eighty pages or so, it all rather falls to pieces, as Hig encounters an old man with a conveniently available daughter -- who of course partners up with Hig before you can blink -- and proceeds to a roundly gung-ho Hollywood finale (complete with shoot-outs and explosions) that provides a much more simplistic feel-good conclusion than the quiet epiphany we had seemed to be heading for.

Then we have Chris Beckett's Dark Eden, a novel that a number of people have tipped as a dark horse and that has, in the main, been extremely well-received. As a long-time admirer of Beckett's work, it gives me no pleasure to say that I don't think Dark Eden deserves its award nominations; or that I find Abigail's critique overdue and necessary. For me the problem lies in the multiple levels of story being enacted. To recap: as science fiction, what we have is a planetary romance lost-colony tale. Then, structuring the narrative, are reworkings of core Western mythology: Stuart Kelly identifies Dark Eden's protagonist, John Redlantern, as "part Moses and part Cain; a Promethean rebel and a restless new Gilgamesh", which about sums it up. Finally, as humans move out from their initial dark eden, there is for me at least an increasing sense that Beckett is echoing aspects of the stories (some discredited, I understand) told about hominid "prehistory": a shift from female to male power; a shift from living with the land to imposing will on the land, represented by the domestication of local wildlife; a move from a repetitive dreamtime to a world with notions of history and progress. "We'd forgotten that there was any possibility that things could be different to what they already were", muses John. The problem is that while the science fiction says (convincingly) that this is how it could be, in this place, at this time, from these starting conditions, the myth and prehistory say (troublingly) that this is how it was, is, and will ever be between humans. For all Beckett's problematisation of John Redlantern himself, casting him as the only character capable of thinking differently, and linking that primarily to his maleness, establishes a context in which women are passive and nurturing, while men are aggressive and innovating; which in the context of all the novel's resonances argues that patriarchy will always and inevitably reassert itself, whatever society's existing story may be. There are indications that Beckett will challenge this in the forthcoming sequel, Gela's Ring, set hundreds of years later; in an extract posted at Aethernet Magazine, one of the first things the female viewpoint character does is explicitly appropriate John's mantle of change and progress to herself. But on its own, Dark Eden is a problematically essentialist novel that left me feeling deeply uncomfortable.

(I should perhaps pause at this point and acknowledge that it's not entirely unproblematic for a male critic to dismiss large chunks of a shortlist selected by a majority-female panel [four women, one man] in part for disappointing gender politics. In each of the cases above I think the portrayal of women is symptomatic of a systemic failure -- for Nod, a juvenile desire to shock; for The Dog Stars, a reluctance to fully address the complexities of the established premise; for Dark Eden, a lack of consideration for how the literal and symbolic levels of the story interact. But I think it's still worth making two points explicit. First, I'm trying to report my experience, not take offence on anyone else's behalf; I found that these three novels endorsed ideas and narratives of gender that made me uncomfortable, that is all. Second, as with many matters of literary interpretation, we're in a land of competing subjectivities and priorities. Others can and do disagree with my readings (each of the books above has been picked as a favourite by at least one person who's read the entire shortlist); or they may agree, but when evaluating the novels in the round find that other strengths compensate. My aim is not to be right, but to encourage others to think about why I might be, or not.)

(It would be nice to be able to say, having cast Barnes, Beckett and Heller aside, that I would include at least one novel by a woman in their stead. And, actually, there is a science fiction novel published in the UK last year by a woman that I'd include without hesitation: Arcadia by Lauren Groff, which is the life story of Ridley "Bit" Stone, raised in a utopian commune in the 1970s and carried through recent history into a near-future debilitated by ecological and political fracture. Whether anyone else would agree that an episodic and sometimes sentimental story set three-quarters in the past qualifies as one of the best science fiction novels of 2012, however, is open to debate; and more pertinently, it wasn't submitted, and so could not be considered by the judges. Of the books that were available, the strongest contender is clearly Juli Zeh's The Method, which appeared on the Kitschies shortlist and tackles similar themes as Intrusion, but in radically different style: a spiky, provocative thought-experiment if you like it, or a stagey, ideologically schematic and scientifically simplistic lecture if you don't. I vacillate between the two positions on a daily basis. Otherwise you're looking at books like Madeline Ashby's vN [a fine short story with a disappointing 300-page novel tacked on the back], Juliana Baggott's Pure [an evocative, strange apocalypse yoked to a familiar YA narrative], or G Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen [distinctive but lacks nerve, and is nearly as sexist as the trio I've just excluded]: and while I'd have certainly preferred any of them to Nod, I can't honestly say they'd have been in my top six for the year.)

Back to the shortlist. Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker is one of those that got away, a novel I enjoyed tremendously when I read it, but never found the time to write about properly. It's a book whose style is as distinctive as you've heard: loquacious and rambunctious are words that both describe Angelmaker and almost certainly appear somewhere within it. It's not always the most disciplined voice in the world, but it's very engaging, and capable of greater emotional range than you first expect. At least, it was for me, and here things turn a little confessional, because Angelmaker's protagonist, Joe Spork, is one of the very few characters I've found myself identifying with and projecting onto in the last year, to the point that when he's described as an everyman I feel a little protective. I recognise of course that his journey is highly formulaic, that the narrative is structured to endorse and reward his choices -- to the point of unceremoniously sidelining almost all of the female characters, as I am doing by not talking about them, but you can read Abigail's review for why that hurts so much -- but he embodies a particular and specifically English learned haplessness with painful familiarity. Perhaps that makes me more susceptible than other readers to the serious undercurrents in the novel, the sense that the world's evils and abuses of power have become more insidious, harder to rally against; the apocalyptic Angelmaker itself destroys the world by revealing too much of it, denying the truism of most government conspiracy thrillers that sunlight is the ultimate disinfectant. In its place is only the good fight: "We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with." All the flaws identified in other reviews are present and are flaws, which is why I wouldn't give Angelmaker the prize; but it chimes with me at a personal level that the rest of the shortlist doesn't equal.

So that leaves Ken MacLeod's Intrusion and Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, and I think Abigail pretty much has the measure of the choice in her closing summary:

One is small and intimate; the other is wide-ranging. One achieves its SFnal effect by slightly skewing the familiar. The other, through good old fashioned sensawunda. One is set in close interiors, dominated by claustrophobia and the feeling of being trapped. The other revels in a sense of possibility and of endless new frontiers. One is an angry denunciation of wishy-washy leftism; the other tries to argue that there is still hope for it.

We've talked about 2312 before. It, too, has its problems, politically, but -- without excusing those problems -- it's doing so many things at the same time that it would be truly astonishing if it succeeded at all of them; and it does succeed at a great deal. It's the most formally ambitious novel on the shortlist (every time I read someone criticising it for not having a strong enough central plot, I die a little inside), and it still feels to me the most open to disagreement, the most ready to acknowledge that it is, like all art, a work in progress, merely the best that could be done at the time. It's expansive and inspiring: the prologue alone is probably my favourite five pages of fiction from the last year. I would, I must admit, probably give it the prize.

So in a perverse way I'm glad that I'm not a judge this year, because I can easily see Intrusion winning, and it might be a more deserving winner. It would certainly be a good novel for MacLeod to win with: a democratic dystopia that is one of his best explorations of his core themes, told in a cool and less jokily referential voice than some of his recent books; a voice whose very restraint draws you into the argument, and dares you to define and defend your own line on civil liberties. I like the way that "the Fix", the pill Hope Morrison refuses to take to pre-emptively correct potential genetic defects in her unborn baby, is an improbably clean magical drug, sitting at the centre of a grounded political narrative like a tiny flaw in reality. I like the down-to-earthness of the characters and the milieu, I admire how cleverly both are constructed. I think there's a case to be made that the novel as a whole feels just a little belated -- a response to the UK under New Labour, rather than the UK of today; strange as it sounds, I think Angelmaker may be the novel on the shortlist that feels most contemporary -- and I'd want to read the novel a second time before declaring the mysterious visions of Hugh Morrison a success. But it is, as a whole, impressive. I read it first of any of these six novels, over fifteen months ago, and it's stuck with me.

The other reason part of me wants Intrusion to beat out 2312 is because I think it would feel a bit like a capstone on an era of British sf, the era of writers who started writing as I came into the field in the 90s. Not that MacLeod, or most of the other members of that generation, are running out of things to say, and I look forward to many more novels from them; but they suddenly have serious competition. I mentioned in my first post about this shortlist that this year sees a notable increase in the number of sf novels by women being published -- EJ Swift's Osiris, Stephanie Saulter's Gemsigns, Karen Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds, and Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls are out now; Kameron Hurley's incendiary God's War, which will be on this shortlist next year or I'll have a thing or two to say about it, is out tomorrow; and Madeline Ashby's iD is out in a couple of months. The 2013 pool is more international as well, with Lord and Beukes, Lavie Tidhar's The Violent Century, Manil Suri's The City of Devi, Ioanna Bourazopoulou's What Lot's Wife Saw, and others. There are even a couple of books by white British men to throw into the mix, in the shape of James Smythe's The Machine and Peter Higgins' Wolfhound Century! Any of these would be first-time Clarke nominees. I'm still excited, of course, for the next books by names I know well: the new Kim Stanley Robinson, Christopher Priest, Adam Roberts. But this year feels like a tipping point, and it's about time.