James Clammer has worked at many kinds of jobs, including plumbing. He now lives in Sussex, where he writes in a shed at the bottom of a cliff. His first novel, Why I Went Back — a work of YA fiction compared with Susan Cooper and Alan Garner — was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and longlisted for the Branford Boase Award.
Insignificance is Clammer’s first novel for adults.
At the Guardian Clammer tagged ten novels that, like Insignificance, take place in a single day. One title on the list:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K DickRead about the other entries on the list.
From ghosts to androids. “In one sense I’m now the greatest bounty hunter who ever lived,” Rick Deckard muses towards the end of this science-fiction classic. “No one ever retired six Nexus-6 types in one twenty-four hour span and no one probably ever will again.” His reward, at the end of an almost impossibly long day? A toad. This is a future Earth where real animals are status symbols. Unfortunately, the toad itself turns out to be a robot. Not
that Deckard cares – by then he desires only to sleep. Well, you see his point. Imagine six back-to-back Zoom meetings, and at the end of each you have to terminate one participant. Wouldn’t you fancy a bit of a snooze?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also appears on Kinks guitarist Dave Davies's six best books list, Abhimanyu Das and Gordon Jackson's list of eleven science fiction books that are often taught in college, Robert Kroese's list of five science fiction novels about sheep, Ceridwen Christensen's list of eleven stories of love and robots, Ryan Britt's list of six of the best detectives from science fiction literature, Weston Williams's list of fifteen classic science fiction books, Allegra Frazier's list of four great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, Ryan Menezes's list of five movies that improved the book, Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders's list of the twelve most unfaithful movie versions of science fiction and fantasy books, Katharine Trendacosta and Charlie Jane Anders's list of the ten greatest personality tests in sci-fi & fantasy, John Mullan's list of ten of the best titles in the form of questions, Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs's list of ten classic sci-fi books that were originally considered failures and Robert Collins's top ten list of dystopian novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
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