1998 Prometheus Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: In 1998 the Libertarian Futurist Society reached into its bag of tricks and decided to hand out a Special Prometheus Award for the Free Space anthology edited by Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer. That the Libertarian Futurist Society would want to honor such a book is completely unsurprising, given the subject matter of the book and the stature of the writers contributing to it. But the fact that they had to go outside of the normal process and honor the book with a "Special Award" points towards the limitations of the Prometheus Awards - they only normally honor novels and "classic" works of libertarian thought in any media form (as would become apparent a few years after this in which the Society would honor the BBC television program The Prisoner). But if there is a current work of libertarian fiction that isn't a novel, there is no way to honor the work other than the ad hoc method of giving it a special award.

Best Novel

Winner:

The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod

Other Nominees:

Bretta Martyn by L. Neil Smith

Finity's End by C.J. Cherryh
The Fleet of Stars by Poul Anderson
Nanotime by Bart Kosko

Hall of Fame

Winner:

Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

Other Nominees:
The Mirror Maze by James P. Hogan
Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson
A Planet for Texans (aka Lonestar Planet) by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
Wasp by Eric Frank Russell

Special Award

Winner:

Free Space edited by Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer

Other Nominees:
None

Go to previous year's nominees: 1997
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1999

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1998 Clarke Award Nominees

Location: United Kingdom.

Comments: The most interesting thing about the 1998 Clarke Awards is not that Mary Doria Russell won for The Sparrow, her novel about first contact with aliens gone wrong, because there is no question that her work is a deserving winner. No, the interesting thing is that Stephen Baxter was nominated yet again and didn't win. Baxter seems to be nominated almost every year, and yet he has never won a Clarke Award, and must hold some sort of record for the most nominations without a victory.

Winner
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Shortlist
Days by James Lovegrove
The Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper
Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand
Nymphomation by Jeff Noon
Titan by Stephen Baxter

What Are the Arthur C. Clarke Awards?

Go to previous year's nominees: 1997
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1999

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1998 Mythopoeic Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: As quickly as they had been merged together in 1997, the Best Adult Fantasy Literature and Best Children's Fantasy Literature categories were once again split apart in 1998. Given that one of the nominees this year in the Children's Fantasy Literature category was Jane Yolen's three part Young Merlin series, which had an installment published in 1996 (and which as a result would have been eligible for nomination in 1997), the decision to merge the two categories seems all the more mystifying.

Best Adult Fantasy Literature

Winner:
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A.S. Byatt

Other Nominees:

Giant Bones by Peter S. Beagle

The Gift by Patrick O'Leary
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Trader by Charles de Lint

Best Children's Fantasy Literature

Winner:
Young Merlin (Passager, Hobby, and Merlin) by Jane Yolen

Other Nominees:
The Boggart and the Monster by Susan Cooper
A Dark Horn Blowing by Dahlov Ipcar
Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley

Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

Winner:

A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to "Faërie" by Verlyn Flieger

Other Nominees:
C.S. Lewis Index: Rumours from the Sculptor's Shop by Janine Goffar
C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide by Walter Hooper
Charles Williams: A Celebration edited by Brian Horne

Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C.S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress by Kathryn Lindskoog

Myth and Fantasy Studies

Winner:

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy edited by John Clute and John Grant

Other Nominees:

Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination by Richard Mathews

Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination by S.T. Joshi
The Supernatural and English Fiction by Glen Cavaliero

Go to previous year's nominees: 1997
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1999

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1998 Cambpell Award Nominees

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

Comments: Although Forever Peace is not his best novel, the fact that Haldeman didn't win for The Forever War couldn't be remedied in 1998 in any way other than by honoring the similarly named although not really connected current novel. It didn't hurt that the competition was not particularly stellar, although as has been the case for many of the Campbell Award ballots, it was exclusively male. I wonder if the result might have been a little tighter if the judges had considered the books written by other half of the human species.

Best Novel

Winner:

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

Second Place:

/ Slant by Greg Bear

Third Place:

Secret Passages by Paul Preuss

Go to previous year's nominees: 1997
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1999

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1998 World Fantasy Award Nominees

Location: World Fantasy Convention, Monterey, California.

Comments: The 1998 World Fantasy awards had some minor controversy when it was discovered that Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel The Club Dumas was not actually eligible for the award, as it had been first translated and published in English in 1996. The novel was withdrawn from the ballot and replaced by Eric S. Nylund's Dry Water, so all ended up more or less as it should have been. But this raises a couple of questions, the first of which is don't the World Fantasy Awards have people who are supposed to check on these sorts of issues before they announce the final slate of nominees? This problem was caused by an apparent inability to check dates, which seems like a reasonably easy thing to do. The second question that is raised is how would anyone think that a replacement entry on the ballot would have a chance of winning? I'm sure Dry Water is a fine book, but the judges were essentially being told "this book wasn't good enough to get on the same slate as the four other remaining nominees, but now that we need a replacement for a withdrawn nominee, try to give it a fair shake even though you know we originally considered it to be inferior to them all". Obviously, it didn't win, but the fact that it was on the ballot at all seems to have been supremely unfair to Nylund given the circumstances of its placement there.

Best Novel

Winner:
The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford

Other Nominees:
American Goliath by Harvey Jacobs
Dry Water by Eric S. Nylund
The Gift by Patrick O'Leary
Trader by Charles de Lint
The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte [nomination withdrawn]

Best Novella

Winner:
Streetcar Dreams by Richard Bowes

Other Nominees:
Coppola's Dracula by Kim Newman
The Dripping of Sundered Wineskins by Brian Hodge
The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
The Zombies of Madison County by Douglas E. Winter

Best Short Fiction

Winner:
Dust Motes by P.D. Cacek

Other Nominees:
Audience by Jack Womack
Fortune and Misfortune by Lisa Goldstein
Get a Grip by Paul Park
The Inner Inner City by Robert Charles Wilson

Best Anthology

Winner:

Bending the Landscape: Fantasy edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel

Other Nominees:
Dark Terrors 3 edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton
Modern Classics of Fantasy edited by Gardner Dozois
Northern Frights 4 edited by Don Hutchison
Revelations (U.K. title: Millennium) edited by Douglas E. Winter

Best Collection

Winner:

The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

Other Nominees:
Driving Blind by Ray Bradbury
Fractal Paisleys by Paul Di Filippo
A Geography of Unknown Lands by Michael Swanwick
Giant Bones by Peter S. Beagle

Lifetime Achievement

Winner:
Edward L. Ferman
Andre Norton

Other Nominees:
None

Best Artist

Winner:
Alan Lee

Other Nominees:
Rick Berry
Jim Burns
Don Maitz
Dave McKean

Special Award, Professional

Winner:
John Clute and John Grant

Other Nominees:
Ellen Datlow
Gardner Dozois
Stephen Jones
Gordon van Gelder

Special Award, Non-Professional

Winner:
Fedogan & Bremer

Other Nominees:
Richard Chizmar
Chris Logan Edwards
Barry Hoffman
Jeff VanderMeer and Tom Winstead

Go to previous year's nominees: 1997
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1999

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