Midway through Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, the robot Uncharles and his companion, the Wonk, are trying to escape from the Central Library Archive, whose robot librarians—they have learned—intend to copy Uncharles’s data and then destroy his corporeal form. The duo succeed in their flight when Uncharles traps the librarians in an irresolvable paradox, demonstrating that their self-professed goals of preserving only one copy of every piece of data ever produced—or to be produced—is logically impossible to perform. The algorithms cannot handle the contradiction. Some of the librarians break down. Others commit a kind of robot seppuku. Uncharles and the Wonk make good their escape.
The incident calls to mind Isaac Asimov’s famous short story “Liar!” (1941). There, too, a dangerous robot is foiled from completing its designs—and indeed, triggered into self-destruction—when it is trapped in a contradiction, within which either course of action open to it will entail a breaking of the First Law of Robotics. Two and a half decades later, Star Trek would use a similar device in “I, Mudd” (1967), with Captain Kirk explicitly deploying the liar’s paradox against a hostile android. It is difficult to imagine that Service Model— a particularly genre-aware work, dotted with inter-textual references to past classics—is not intentionally engaging in a call-back here.
Yet, it is not a simple tribute act. Before Uncharles succeeds, the Wonk attempts to construct logical paradoxes of their own (including the liar’s paradox) in order to stop the robot librarians, and is stymied when the bibliotecharies, themselves aware of the game that is being played, reason right through these attempts. One can almost hear the librarians think: “we too have read ‘Liar!’ and watched ‘I, Mudd,’ we know what you’re up to.” Ultimately, despite their best efforts, they fail when confronted with a more sophisticated, more powerful logical contradiction than the straightforward paradoxes of either. These are call-backs, yes, but also buildings-upon, a signal that eighty-five years have passed since this idea was first explored in science fiction.
It is this sense of retro-renewal (the phrase is my own invention) that runs through the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist. Two of the six novels (Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock and Annie Bot) are explicitly robot novels. Three out of the remaining four (Extremophile, Private Rites, and The Ministry of Time) are novels about, or set around, the collapse and the end of the world as we know it. And then there is Service Model, which is both a robot novel and set around the collapse and the end of the world as we know it. The 2025 shortlist thus features novels that have, as their premise, two of the oldest preoccupations of the genre, the robot and the apocalypse (and even, one could say, the robot apocalypse!).
There is a retro feel to all this—not just in the choice of the premise, but in some of the more specific themes that run through these novels. Consider, first, the three robot novels on the shortlist. Service Model and Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock deal with that hoariest of questions: Can a robot seek—and find—meaning, autonomous of their programming? In Service Model, Uncharles is a robot valet who finds, one morning, that he has murdered his master with a razor—and with no knowledge of why he did it. The rest of the novel chronicles Uncharles’s attempt to find meaning through finding another human being to serve, while his companion, the Wonk, tries to persuade him that there is more to life than just that. As the two journey into the world, it becomes increasingly clear that something has broken down irreversibly, and that not just Uncharles, but all kinds of robots, are searching for purpose. “I too crave meaning” says a haulage unit to Uncharles (p. 204), unable to recollect who has set its route and why. At the novel’s climax, the question of meaning assumes existential dimensions (for a similar analysis, see the Ancillary Review of Books’ review of the novel).
In Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, a novel that aspires to the aesthetics of The Great Gatsby (1925) and the genre preoccupations of Asimov, the actress Lulabelle Rock commissions thirteen successive “portraits” or robot doubles of herself (one may perhaps think of them as the “beta” simulations in an Alastair Reynolds novel), each to live a life that she herself does not have the time—or inclination—to inhabit herself. By the thirteenth portrait—who is also the narrator of the novel—Lulabelle has ostensibly tired of the whole gag, and Portrait No. 13 is thus specifically created to murder all the other portraits. As she notes half wistfully, half angrily, “I could have been an artist in another life. Or a housewife, or a socialite, or a hermit, or a winged tiger in a dream. I could have been anything, or nothing, but Lulabelle created me to kill” (pp. 150-1).
Killing comes naturally to Portrait No. 13 in the beginning—and in turn, her victims do not resist—but it becomes progressively more difficult, and is complicated in the middle when she falls in love. As with Service Model, Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock explores the possibility of autonomy, of finding meaning—of free will, even—within the constraints of explicit, external programming. While this is indeed retro in some respects, one could argue that the ongoing debates around artificial intelligence have lent a fresh salience to this question. These novels thus serve both as throwbacks and also as attempts to address a question that is old but has also taken a renewed form.
Out of the three robot novels, it is Annie Bot that perhaps tackles the most overdetermined of issues. As William Shaw recently noted in a detailed article, the “artificial woman”—the fantasy of the “AI girlfriend”—has been one of the most enduring obsessions of American science fiction. Shaw observes “how the artificial woman has gone from being an intriguing novelty, to a collective fantasy, to a saleable commodity, to at last, perhaps, a being with her own thoughts and desires,” locating Annie Bot at the end point of this trajectory. Annie—the titular “AI girlfriend” of the novel—is an “autodidact”; that is, she can process and respond to the sexual and emotional desires of her owner, Doug, who wants her to be “attentive, kind, curious, sexy, a better listener, eager to learn, respectful” (p 76). Of course, the autonomy that comes with the autodidact programming is limited, and—most starkly—revocable. When Annie does not respond in quite the way that Doug wants, he is not above weaponizing this revocability as a form of discipline and control.
As Shaw notes, Doug and Annie are throwbacks to any number of male and female protagonists in the “AI girlfriend” sub-genre of science fiction. That is, the novel is “retro.” The difference, though, perhaps lies in this: In 2025, the fantasy of the “AI girlfriend” is still very real, but considerations of consent and autonomy in sexual and intimate relationships can no longer be treated as irrelevant. Doug is a product of his own time (a near-future close to our own present), and in that sense, there is an internal tension that runs throughout his conduct in the novel. He wants control. That’s why he has an “AI girlfriend” to start with, whom he specifies must physically resemble his ex-wife in certain ways (with a rather crucial alteration: His ex-wife is black; Annie is not). But there is a part of him that is ashamed to admit that that is what he wants, and to exercise “direct domination” over Annie in order to have it. This tension is, ultimately, unresolvable, and culminates in the novel’s ending which—again—is rather different from the “AI girlfriend” novels that have preceded it. That is, the novel undertakes “renewal.”
Let us now turn to retro-renewal of a second kind: at world’s end. The most clearly realised global breakdown is depicted in Extremophile. In the world of Extremophile, readers will recognise echoes of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl (2009). The climate catastrophe is here: “Bangladesh got wiped off the map last year for the tenth time in a decade, Eastern Europe is about fifteen different wars, Northern Europe has gone all isolationist” (p. 26). Governments have begun to crumble, leaving space for all kinds of lurid black markets (in particular, underground markets of genetic engineering and modifications, run by bio-hackers). Seeing the utter failure of law and policy, groups have begun to take matters into their own hands, from sabotage to assassination: direct action for those sympathetic, “eco-terrorism” for those antagonistic.
The novel’s protagonists—who play in a London rock band by night, and engage in a bit of bio-hacking of their own by day—are approached by the most notorious of these underground groups, with an enigmatic, yet simple, mission: “kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world” (p. 54). What follows could tick off checkboxes of cinematic genre set-pieces: a heist, a chase, a shoot-out, a comrade’s life threatened, and a dénouement involving graphic revenge. These are all tried and tested genre devices, as is the apocalyptic setting (“retro”), but at the same time an underlying focus of the novel remains the possibility of using the techniques of bio-hacking to reverse—or at least mitigate—the climate catastrophe (“renewal”). One may think of this as akin to modern fantasies of terraforming or shielding the sun, and to its credit Extremophile maintains a healthy dose of narrative scepticism towards this solution. The fact that this is a foundational premise of the story at all, however, makes Extremophile very much also a novel of retro-renewal.
The end of the world plays a more subdued, even backstage, role in the last two novels on the shortlist, Private Rites and The Ministry of Time. Indeed, Private Rites is that one novel we get every year on the Clarke Award shortlist whose connections to genre might be thought of as somewhat tenuous. The England of Private Rites lies drowning underneath incessant rain (it’s never fully revealed what the cause of this is). The landscape (seascape) has been fundamentally re-altered, and the things people did back in the day when the land was still dry are now caught between memory and nostalgia. This altered “world’s end,” though, is not at the forefront of the novel. The flood limits and sets constraints upon what the story’s protagonists can do, but the story itself is not primarily about the flood or about the world it has shaped, but about human relationships.
These are, in particular, the relationships between the three daughters of a recently deceased family patriarch, who designed much of the post-apocalyptic architecture of London, and the people within their orbits. Private Rites has been pitched and marketed as a queer retelling of King Lear in a drowned world, which would perhaps make it the most “retro” out of all the shortlist! But in the manner of contemporary retellings, the tone and idiom of the novel is entirely contemporary. It is, ultimately, a story of distorted “private” relationships, in which the distortion is conditioned by (but not necessarily a condition of) an apocalyptic, flooded world.
One novel in which connections to genre are certainly not tenuous is The Ministry of Time, which gives us a time-travel romance wrapped up in a classic, old-style time-travel paradox. A time-travel device has been discovered. The British government—acting through the Ministry of Time—decides to travel back and rescue six people (known as “the expats”), each from a moment in history where they would certainly have died otherwise: a bubonic plague, the French Revolution, the doomed Franklin polar expedition, World War I, and so on. These people are brought back to the present as part of a limited, contained experiment, where, for one year, they live in the exclusive company of a “bridge” individual, as they are acclimatised to the present.
Graham Gore, a commander of the Franklin expedition, comes to live with the novel’s unnamed narrator, who has been assigned by the Ministry as his minder or “bridge.” As the two fall into a daily pattern of explanation, acclimatisation, missteps, and corrections, they slowly soften into intimacy and then something more. All the while, the long shadow of the “experiment,” and all the things that the bridges and the expats are not being told, hangs over them—until, at last, it explodes into a spectacular act of violence, changing everything (including their relationship). As a part of the novel’s dénouement, it is also revealed that, within a few centuries of the novel’s near-future setting, the climate catastrophe has destroyed much of the world. The relevation comes in lines strikingly similar to Extremophile: “South America’s mostly gone, except Brazil and its satellites. Half of Britain’s underwater. Europe dropped bombs on any ships in the Mediterranean coming from North Africa” (p. 311).
In many ways, The Ministry of Time belongs to the tradition of the classic time travel and apocalypse novel. The debates around the possibility (or not) of changing history through time travel, and of changing the future, will be familiar to readers—although The Ministry of Time does manage to bring in some fresh insights to bear on the question. The time paradox at the end in particular is strongly reminiscent of one of the first and most canonical of time travel stories, Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941). But apart from this, The Ministry of Time utilises the device of time travel to engage with some very contemporary questions around exile, homecoming, and othering. The novel’s narrator is a biracial British-Cambodian, her mother a “refugee” from the Pol Pot regime. Her experiences—and struggles to fit in—inform her own role in the “experiment” (with crucial consequences for the ending), but more than that, the novel draws deft parallels between the manner in which Graham Gore is “out of place” (from 1847 to the present day), and how the narrator is out of place (in terms of her race and upbringing). There is only one point at which the connections are made explicit, which proves all the more powerful for that rarity: “In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique,” the narrator notes to herself. “But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. I’d seen it happen around my own life” (p. 271). The Ministry of Time is thus both a classic time travel and apocalypse novel (checkmark for “retro”), but also a novel about race relations in modern Britain (checkmark for “renewal”).
Other than this unifying thread, the novels on the Clarke shortlist have other strands of overlap. Both Service Model and The Ministry of Time approach the question of history and the past, albeit from opposite directions. In Service Model, the Central Library Archive is on a Hari Seldon-esque project of “preserving knowledge” in a world that is breaking apart, so that one day it can be of use again. Only, for the Archive’s librarians, “knowledge” means—and only means—data (dates, facts, accounts, documentation). “You can’t just break the world down into disarticulated facts,” Wonk protests in response (p. 235), invoking an E. H. Carr-style argument about the necessity of interpretation for facts to even make sense—but to no avail. On the other hand, in The Ministry of Time, Adela, the head of the “experiment,” mocks the traditional time paradox of going back to the past to change “history”: “History is not a series of causes and effects which may be changed like switching trains on a track,” she explains, “it is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening” (p .92). The task of the eponymous Ministry of Time, as she articulates even more clearly later, is to ensure that it remains in power in all timelines, so that “history happened the way we said it did.”
Many of the novels on the shortlist have an underlying critique of capitalism. This is most obvious in Extremophile, where we are explicitly told that corporations have locked up research into carbon-capturing plants, so that nobody can access it with a view to mitigating the climate catastrophe. The critique is, however, more subtly made in The Ministry of Time and in Service Model. In The Ministry of Time, it turns out that, for one prominent wing of the government, the expats are of interest only to the extent that they serve utilitarian goals (such as, for example, their ability to “vanish” before various types of identity-detecting software, which can turn them into good field soldiers). In Service Model, the collapse of the world is at least partially caused by the complete outsourcing of work to robots while retaining capitalist social relations, with the result that the reserve army of labour under capitalism is no longer just a reserve: “What if, even as you replace everyone with robots that are cheaper and quicker and less likely to join a union or complain about working conditions, you also continue to insist that individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state?” (p. 350).
Finally, to a somewhat uncommon degree, many of the novels on the shortlist use the vehicle of speculation to comment on distinctly non-speculative elements of our present reality. Private Rites is, of course, the most obvious example of this (see, also, this Guardian review that finds personal redemption its underlying theme). To a lesser extent, this is true of The Ministry of Time as well—where, as I have noted above, the time travel story enfolds a biting analysis of race relations (for a similar take, see the review of the book in Locus). I think that this is also true of Annie Bot. While at one level, Annie Bot can be read as a classic robot/AI girlfriend novel, at another level it is a novel about the male gaze. Doug embodies a very familiar male fantasy: that of exercising control beneath a façade of autonomy and a mutually constituted relationship. The novel is an exploration of how he enacts that fantasy upon a robot whom he, quite literally, owns; but Doug’s behaviour is utterly familiar, and is a blueprint for any number of abusive relationships in which a woman has been placed in a condition of economic, physical, or emotional dependency vis-à-vis a man (in an interview, the author, Sierra Greer, herself refers to the novel as an “allegory”). The difference is that Annie’s will is literally subject to Doug’s control, when he chooses to exercise it; but the writing of the novel makes it feel like this is more a difference in degree than anything more fundamental.
The 2025 Clarke Awards shortlist, then, revisits some of science fiction’s oldest themes, with works that have—and often themselves identify—a clear line of ancestry. But at the same time, it is a shortlist that frames those themes in the grammar and the idiom of the present: new-ish wine in old-ish bottles, in other words—or to repeat a phrase, retro-renewal.