High-pressure activity

Christopher Priest. What a guy.

This revered, veteran and award-winning author of many excellent novels (The Prestige and The Separation being just two) is the kind of man who presses his way through to a crowded bar to buy two beers, simply on the probability that he will find someone he wants to give the other one to. And that person turns out to be me.

What a gent.

The occasion was the Arthur C. Clarke Award, an annual experiment to model a strange form of matter in which particles (writers, editors, critics) are crammed into a highly pressurised container (the lobby of the Apollo Cinema, two floors below Lower Regent St) and subjected to strange radiation (blue neon) and intense heat. Strange effects may be observed in the resulting mixture, such as the only way to get across the room being quantum tunnelling through all the other people in the way.

After an hour of this, the doors to the auditorium finally open with a loud pop and the Clarkium mass is sucked into the air conditioned interior where it condenses back into human beings again. There the chairman of the awards tells you all about six novels you've not managed to read yet, you applaud each one politely, and then the winner is announced and you applaud a little louder, because even if you haven't read Nova Swing by M. John Harrison, it's going on the Christmas list so you one day probably will and anyway, you're glad for him.

The very first time I was invited to the Clarkes, I couldn't go, as in those days it was on a Saturday evening and my sister chose that day to get married. I could have gone to the ceremony and then slunk out to the event afterwards rather than go to the reception (which frankly would have been preferable to my eventual fate of being stuck on the singles table, but that's another story) but manners and family loyalty won out.

The Clarkes aren't always perfect; the judging is by jury and there are often gripes about compromise candidates and the like, though I doubt that will happen this year. But in many ways that's better than the much-higher-profile Hugos, which are by popular vote and can lead to the latest Harry Potter being declared best science fiction novel of the year, as happened in 2001.

During all this the Apollo somehow managed to be running a normal evening's programme of movies too and the award event was listed on the plasma screens out in the lobby with the shows on offer. Many people observed that we were certified U. Which is either an affront or a challenge.