Living Canon

Arthur C. Clarke Award 1991: Complete list of winners

The Arthur C. Clarke Award has long been science fiction’s most prestigious British honor, celebrating the year’s most imaginative works of speculative fiction. The 1991 Arthur C. Clarke Award winner, Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland, represents a particularly striking moment in the award’s history—a novel that showcases the genre’s expanding ambitions in the early 1990s. Greenland’s sprawling space opera builds an intricate universe populated with colorful characters and genuine philosophical weight, qualities that clearly resonated with the Clarke Award judges that year.

What makes Greenland’s win especially noteworthy is how Take Back Plenty exemplifies a turning point in British science fiction, arriving at a moment when the field was beginning to synthesize cyberpunk’s technological sophistication with the grand-scale worldbuilding traditions of classic space opera. The novel’s success on the Clarke Award shortlist underscores how the award had positioned itself not merely as a barometer of commercial success, but as a genuine measure of literary and imaginative achievement within the science fiction canon. For readers tracking the Arthur C. Clarke Award winners through this decade, 1991 marks a particularly rich chapter in the award’s evolution.

Below, discover the full details of this year’s honoree and what made it stand out among that year’s finest speculative fiction.

Science Fiction