The Telegraph on the Arthur C Clarke awards

The Telegraph compares the Arthur C. Clarke award and the Man Booker Prize:

One obvious distinction between the Arthur C Clarke Award, for the best science fiction novel published in Britain the previous year, and the Man Booker is that a lot of people care, a lot.

...and then goes on to discuss why mainstream readers don't read SF:

None of this is to pretend that there is not an awful lot of tosh produced under the label science fiction. But if you will not read a novel because it is set on another planet, or has a robot in it, you are cutting yourself off from some of the most exciting and urgent writing now being produced.

As Geoff Ryman reminded me at last week's bash, opponents of science fiction always use the worst examples of it as evidence of its worthlessness as a form. But then look at what an awful lot of very bad fiction of other sorts there is, too. This response is known as Sturgeon's Law (devised by the SF writer Theodore Sturgeon): "90 per cent of science fiction is crud, but then 90 per cent of everything is crud."

You needn't become a Jedi or read Star Wars novelisations, but if you are interested in fiction at all, you should embrace a little geekiness. We are living, after all, in the world the geeks made, and you will find no better guide to understanding it and changing it than in science fiction.