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05
19
2014
2014 John W. Campbell Memorial Award Finalists Announced
The finalists for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, for best SF novel, have been announced:
- Lexicon by Max Barry (Penguin)
- Proxima by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
- The Circle by Dave Eggers (Knopf)
- We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood / Putnam)
- Hild by Nicola Griffith (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
- The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke (Tor, 1st English edition)
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
- The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann (Gollancz)
- Evening’s Empires by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
- The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata (Mythic Island Press)
- The Adjacent by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
- On the Steel Breeze by Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)
- Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
- Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross (Ace)
- Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux (Faber & Faber / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
The award will be presented during the Campbell Conference, to be held June 13-15, 2014 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS.
This makes the 6th major award nomination for Ancillary Justice which just took home the 2013 Nebula. What do you make of this list? Any personal favorites in there? Of the 15 books on the list 4 are by women which is an improvement over last year’s list that was only 1 out of 13.
2 Comments
An interesting and diverse set, though some are pretty far from most definitions of science fiction.
I know this award has gotten criticism for not nominating more women writers. Does anyone have examples of award-worthy science fiction novels by women from the last couple of years that didn’t get nominated? From last year, I thought of Karen Lord (I didn’t much like The Best of All Possible Worlds, but it seemed to get a fair amount of acclaim.)
Some awards are definitely more woman-friendly than others. These look to be better than the BSFA awards but not by much. Scott, I looked at some other SF awards and last year books by Nancy Kress, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Margaret Atwood were nominated, in addition to a few female authors I didn’t recognize. (While I read SF by preferences are narrow and specific.)
I did an eyeball-analysis of most of the awards catalogued on this site and the most woman-friendly is the Mythopoeic, which in which women have historically won 70%+ of years and were nominated at least 50% in the aggregate. And that’s going all the way back to the 70’s when the award began.
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