His winning book is set in the 2030s and follows the search for a surviving colony of a hyper-intelligent species of fish. Beauman was announced as the winner of the prestigious prize – which celebrates the best science fiction novel published in the UK last year – at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.
Beauman’s novel is a “biting satire, twisted, dark and radical, but remarkably accessible, endlessly inventive and hilarious,” said judging chair Andrew M Butler.
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His latest novel “takes science fiction’s knack for future extrapolation and aggressively applies it to humanity’s shortsighted self-interest and consumptive urges in the face of planetary eco-crisis,” said the award’s director Tom Hunter. “The result is a bleakly funny novel where the only hope for our species is working out the final punchline before it’s delivered.”
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In a Guardian review of Beauman’s novel, Kevin Power described it as a “jaunty, cerebral eco-thriller”, a “novel about grief” and an “ironically pristine container for the toxic waste of our self-knowledge”.
Other titles shortlisted for the award were The Coral Bones by E J Swift; Metronome by Tom Watson; The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter; The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard; and Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick.