1993 Campbell Award Nominees

Location: Campbell Conference Awards Banquet at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.

Comments: Even though 1993 is reasonably recent - a mere twenty-one years ago - the result of the Campbell Awards are once again an example of how some books age better than others. At the time, I doubt if anyone would have questioned the placement of Charles Sheffield's Brother to Dragons as the first place finisher in the voting. But now, two decades later, I suspect that most people who you asked would rank these books in the reverse order from the order they appear here, with Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep taking first place, and Sheffield's book relegated to the third spot.

Best Novel

Winner:

Brother to Dragons by Charles Sheffield

Second Place:

Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper

Third Place:

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

Go to previous year's nominees: 1992
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1994

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1993 World Fantasy Award Nominees

Location: World Fantasy Convention, Bloomington, Minnesota.

Comments: In 1993, the World Fantasy Awards handed a Lifetime Achievement honor to Harlan Ellison. The only real question I have is what took them so long. Ellison's fantasy fiction is among the most imaginative and thought-provoking ever written, so the idea that it took the World Fantasy awards almost two decades to get around to honoring him is simply mystifying.

The rest of the 1993 World Fantasy Awards seem to have been fairly ordinary. James Gurney won one award and was nominated for another, Charles de Lint got three nominations, and Martin H. Greenberg got two, but neither of them won any awards, and no on else got more than one nomination. For the most part the World Fantasy Awards seem to be better at spreading the recognition around than either the Hugos or the Nebulas, where the same authors seem to get nominated time and again, and in some years the awards are dominated by a handful of names. I'm not sure why this is, but it might be that the fantasy genre has never been dominated by individual personalities the way science fiction was historically dominated by individuals like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and John W. Campbell.

Best Novel

Winner:
Last Call by Tim Powers

Other Nominees:
Anno Dracula by Kim Newman
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
Photographing Fairies by Steve Szilagyi
Was by Geoff Ryman

Best Novella

Winner:
The Ghost Village by Peter Straub

Other Nominees:
Paperjack by Charles de Lint
The Territory by Bradley Denton
Uh-Oh City by Jonathan Carroll
Unmasking by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Best Short Fiction

Winner:
(tie) Graves by Joe Haldeman
(tie) This Year's Class Picture by Dan Simmons

Other Nominees:
Alfred by Lisa Goldstein
The Arbitrary Placement of Walls by Martha Soukup
Bridges by Charles de Lint
Calcutta, Lord of Nerves by Poppy Z. Brite
The Winterberry by Nicholas A. DiChario

Best Anthology

Winner:

MetaHorror edited by Dennis Etchison

Other Nominees:
Freak Show edited by F. Paul Wilson

Grails: Quests, Visitations and Other Occurrences edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer

Narrow Houses edited by Peter Crowther
Northern Frights edited by Don Hutchison

Best Collection

Winner:
The Sons of Noah and Other Stories by Jack Cady

Other Nominees:
Bear's Fantasies by Greg Bear
Lord Kelvin's Machine by James P. Blaylock
Meeting in Infinity by John Kessel
Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales by Norman Partridge
Spiritwalk by Charles de Lint

Lifetime Achievement

Winner:
Harlan Ellison

Other Nominees:
None

Best Artist

Winner:
James Gurney

Other Nominees:
Jill Bauman
James Christensen
Alan M. Clark
Harry O. Morris

Special Award, Professional

Winner:
Jeanne Cavelos

Other Nominees:
Martin H. Greenberg
James Gurney
Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson
Terri Windling

Special Award, Non-Professional

Winner:
Doug Lewis and Tomi Lewis

Other Nominees:
John Betancourt and Kim Betancourt
Richard T. Chizmar
George Hatch
Joe Stefko and Tracy Cocoman
Stanislaus Tal

Go to previous year's nominees: 1992
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1994

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1993 Clarke Award Nominees

Location: United Kingdom.

Comments: I have not read any of the books that were nominated for the 1993 Clarke Award. I say this not because I think that there was something wrong with this slate of nominees, but rather to highlight the massive bounty that confronts a science fiction fan in the modern era. In the 1950s and 1960s (and even for most of the 1970s), the science fiction field was so small that one could reasonably expect most fans to have read the bulk of the material that was published. But in more recent years, the sheer volume of science fiction available means that no one but the most completely dedicated science fiction fan simply won't keep up, and even the most completely dedicated science fiction fan will often be unable to read everything. While some people bemoan the resulting fracturing of the science fiction fan-base, I think that the explosion of science fiction into a myriad of subgenres is a mark of the maturity of the genre.

Winner
Body of Glass by Marge Piercy

Runner-Up
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Third Place
(tie) Correspondence by Sue Thomas
(tie) Hearts, Hands, and Voices by Ian McDonald

Shortlist
Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Lost Futures by Lisa Tuttle
Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

What Are the Arthur C. Clarke Awards?

Go to previous year's nominees: 1992
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1994

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1993 Prometheus Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: In 1993, after flirting with the book for years, the Libertarian Futurist Society finally decided to induct Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed into its Hall of Fame. On the one hand, this was a good choice, because The Dispossessed is a better novel than many of the previous inductees into the Prometheus Awards Hall of Fame. On the other hand, when one read The Dispossessed, it becomes readily apparent that the tenor of the novel is decidedly not sympathetic towards libertarian position, and in fact is highly critical of the ideology. This isn't new for the Prometheus Awards - they have previously nominated and awarded works that are only related to libertarianism to the extent that they are highly critical of it. I don't know if this is because the members of the Libertarian Futurist Society are trying to be broad-minded and include criticisms of their espoused ideology among the works they honor, or if they are simply so politically tone-deaf that they don't realize their position is being skewered and just assume if libertarianism is mentioned in a book it must be friendly to it.

Best Novel

Winner:

The Multiplex Man by James P. Hogan

Other Nominees:

The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Steel Beach by John Varley
Timemaster by Robert L. Forward
A Woman's Place by Rex Denver Borough

Hall of Fame

Winner:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Other Nominees:
None

Go to previous year's nominees: 1992
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1994

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1993 Mythopoeic Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: By 1993, the Mythopoeic Awards had developed into their fully formed modern version. All four of the current categories had been established by the Mythopoeic Society. All four of the award categories listed both the winning entry and the full slate of non-winning nominees. Although the Mythopoeic Awards had long been leaps and bounds ahead of most other genre awards in terms of things like genre equity, they had lagged behind when it came to their reporting methods, so the change made in 1992 and stuck with in 1993 and thereafter was a welcome development.

Best Adult Fantasy Literature

Winner:
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

Other Nominees:

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

The Grail of Hearts by Susan Shwartz
Last Call by Tim Powers
The Paper Grail by James P. Blaylock

Best Children's Fantasy Literature

Winner:
Knight's Wyrd by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald

Other Nominees:
The Ancient One by T.A. Barron
Fish Soup by Ursula K. Le Guin
Hobkin by Peni R. Griffin
Jennifer Murdley's Toad by Bruce Coville

Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

Winner:

Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy by David C. Downing

Other Nominees:
J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Legend introduction by Judith Priestman
The Pattern in the Web: The Mythical Poetry of Charles Williams by Roma A. King, Jr.
Tolkien: A Critical Assessment by Brian Rosebury

Myth and Fantasy Studies

Winner:

Strategies of Fantasy by Brian Attebery

Other Nominees:
Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber by Bruce Byfield
Contours of the Fantastic edited by Michele K. Lanford

Go to previous year's nominees: 1992
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1994

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