Yatterings

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has won the Pulitzer prize in a story from the Guardian. A dystopian novel leavened by some wonderful prose, it got Clute all hot and bothered when it didn’t appear on the Clarke award shortlist (a slight problem of it not being submitted scuppered its chances).

I wonder how much prizes like the Pulitzer are worked out on past performance and not just the winning novel, especially when it comes to fiction.

Given a previous post, I’m not going to say “yeah, sf won the Pulitzer” but it is rewarding to find a book which respects itself enough to maintain its own sense of wonder. Unlike Philip Roth’s alternate history in which a moderately good idea was destroyed by a complete mishandling.