Where's The Plot Against America, Huh?

The Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist for the year's best science fiction novel has been announced, and it includes some titles imported from the world of literary fiction: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which was also shortlisted for the Booker and is currently up for a National Book Critics Circle award, and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. (Yes, I'm sure they know it's actually a 2003 title, but maybe it didn't come out in England until 2004, did you ever think of that?) Neal Stephenson's The System of the World is also up for the prize, further broadening the definition of science fiction to include sweeping historical sagas about Isaac Newton and the formation of the modern capitalist infrastructure. (Mark Sarvas points out a Stephenson interview in Reason--by celebrity lawyer Mike Godwin, no less--that touches upon the "is it SF?" question, among others.)

So far, the only nominee not yet published in the U.S. is River of Gods, a novel about India forty years into the future by Ian McDonald. Maybe this will light a fire under some American SF publisher's butt; I distinctly remember being blown away by McDonald's early novels, published by Bantam Spectra in the late 1980s, but they seem to have given up on him a decade ago. I may have to send my friends at Small Beer Press on a mission! (And, hey, I just realized they've got a blog-like page on their site that's not a journal...)