1999 World Fantasy Award Nominees

Location: World Fantasy Convention, Providence, Rhode Island.

Comments: In 1999 the World Fantasy awards handed a Lifetime Achievement Award to Hugh B. Cave. This award was well-deserved, as Cave had a long and distinguished career writing fantasy fiction, but giving this award now make the decision to give Cave a Special Convention Award in 1996 all the more perplexing. Why did the judges dust off an award that hadn't been awarded in over a decade to honor Cave in 1996 if his accomplishments warranted a Lifetime Achievement Award? With about 98% of his career behind him by 1996, shouldn't Cave have qualified for a Lifetime Achievement award then? Was there some tipping point that required them to wait until 1999 when 99% of Cave's career was behind him before he was a worthy recipient?

Best Novel

Winner:
The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich

Other Nominees:
The Martyring by Thomas Sullivan
Mockingbird by Sean Stewart
Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay
Someplace to Be Flying by Charles de Lint

Best Novella

Winner:
The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod

Other Nominees:
Cold by A.S. Byatt
Dragonfly by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Hedge Knight by George R.R. Martin
Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff by Peter Straub

Best Short Fiction

Winner:
The Specialist's Hat by Kelly Link

Other Nominees:
The Death of the Duke by Ellen Kushner
Every Angel Is Terrifying by John Kessel
Shoggoth's Old Peculiar by Neil Gaiman
Travels with the Snow Queen by Kelly Link

Best Anthology

Winner:

Dreaming Down-Under edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb

Other Nominees:
The Best of Crank! edited by Bryan Cholfin
Dark Terrors 4 edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton
Legends edited by Robert Silverberg
Starlight 2 edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Best Collection

Winner:

Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler

Other Nominees:
The Cleft and Other Odd Tales by Gahan Wilson
Last Summer at Mars Hill by Elizabeth Hand

Manitou Man: The Worlds of Graham Masterton by Graham Masterton, with Ray Clark and Matt Williams

The Night We Buried Road Dog by Jack Cady

Lifetime Achievement

Winner:
Hugh B. Cave

Other Nominees:
None

Best Artist

Winner:
Charles Vess

Other Nominees:
Jim Burns
Tom Canty
Alan M. Clark
Bob Eggleton

Special Award, Professional

Winner:
Jim Turner

Other Nominees:
Les Daniels
Jo Fletcher
David Pringle
Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis

Special Award, Non-Professional

Winner:
Richard T. Chizmar

Other Nominees:
David Marshall
Steve Pasechnick
Jacob Weisman

Go to previous year's nominees: 1998
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2000

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1999 Mythopoeic Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: When an award has a category for adult fiction and another for young adult or children's fiction, there is a recurring question of exactly where do the borders between these two categories lie. In 1999, Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess won in the Best Adult Literature category. To a certain extent I can see why the Mythopoeic Society saw fit to classify Stardust as a work of adult fiction, but if someone had asked me whether the book was a work of adult fiction or a piece aimed at younger readers before I had seen this list, I would have replied that it was a young adult book without any hesitation. This, to me, simply reinforces the fact that the borders between categories of fiction are blurry, indistinct, and mostly idiosyncratic preferences of the observer.

Best Adult Fantasy Literature

Winner:
Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess

Other Nominees:

The High House by James Stoddard

The History of Our World Beyond the Wave by R.E. Klein
Someplace to Be Flying by Charles de Lint
Song for the Basilisk by Patricia A. McKillip

Best Children's Fantasy Literature

Winner:
Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones

Other Nominees:
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) by J.K. Rowling

Heavenward Path by Kara Dalkey
The Squire's Tale by Gerald Morris

Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

Winner:

C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide by Walter Hooper

Other Nominees:
C.S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer & Mentor by Lionel Adey
Christian Mythmakers by Rolland Hein
Roverandom by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull

Myth and Fantasy Studies

Winner:

A Century of Welsh Myth in Children's Literature by Donna R. White

Other Nominees:

Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children by Susan Cooper

No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner
Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum by Michael O. Riley

Go to previous year's nominees: 1998
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2000

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1999 Clarke Award Nominees

Location: United Kingdom.

Comments: What can I say about the 1999 Clarke award ballot? A good work by a woman won the award, but that's not particularly noteworthy. There was a little gender imbalance in the list of nominees, but given the overall track record of the Clarke awards, that's not particularly upsetting. There is a distinct lack of minority writers on the ballot, but that's more or less par for the course for genre awards, and in any event, the Clarke Awards seem to have done a better job at being inclusive than most other awards, so I'll forgive them for this. No one seems to have been particularly shafted by these results - there was no one book that you look at and scratch your head wondering, "How did Dreaming in Smoke beat that book?", so there's no real controversy to be had there. other than remarking on how well-run the Clarke Awards seem to be, there is basically nothing to say about them here.

Winner
Dreaming in Smoke by Tricia Sullivan

Shortlist
The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod
Cavalcade by Alison Sinclair
Earth Made of Glass by John Barnes
The Extremes by Christopher Priest
Time on My Hands: A Novel with Photographs by Peter Delacorte

What Are the Arthur C. Clarke Awards?

Go to previous year's nominees: 1998
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2000

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1999 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: The most interesting thing about the 1999 Campbell Award results is not the winner, although George Zebrowski's dytopian future involving asteroid penal colonies is an excellent book. No, the most interesting thing is the nomination for Poul Anderson's book Starfarers in the twilight of the author's career. It is fairly common for an older author to receive a nomination (or even an award) late in their career for a book that is clearly not their best material more or less as a way to recognize them for their earlier, better work. But in Anderson's case, this nomination was clearly not of this sort, as Starfarers is clearly one of Anderson's better pieces of fiction, easily as good as, for example, Boat of a Million Years. Even this late in his life, Anderson was still churning out excellent fiction.

Best Novel

Winner:

Brute Orbits by George Zebrowski

Second Place:

Starfarers by Poul Anderson

Third Place:

Distraction by Bruce Sterling

Go to previous year's nominees: 1998
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2000

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1999 Prometheus Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: In 1999, once again, the sparseness of the field of libertarian science fiction seems to have once more been on display. There's nothing in particular wrong with John Varley's The Golden Globe, and a lot that is very right about it. But what is unclear is exactly how the story of an unemployed actor going on a tour of the solar system so he can return to the Earth's moon in order to clear himself of the charge that he murdered his own father reflects libertarian values. Sure, he hitches a ride in a cargo container, plays baseball with Amish farmers on the Moon, and tangles with the Charonese Mafia, but none of the story seems to really be much more than tangentially "libertarian" in nature. The implication is that the ranks of libertarian science fiction works are so thin that one can either recognize a weak book with strong libertarian themes, or a good book that only tangentially addresses the ideology, and that seems to be a problem for an award dedicated to honoring works of libertarian science fiction.

Best Novel

Winner:

The Golden Globe by John Varley

Other Nominees:

Masque by F. Paul Wilson and Matthew Costello

Moonwar by Ben Bova
Rogue Star by Michael F. Flynn
Y2K: The Millennium Bug by Don L. Tiggre

Hall of Fame

Winner:

A Planet for Texans (aka Lonestar Planet) by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

Other Nominees:
Circus World by Barry B. Longyear
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen
Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson

Go to previous year's nominees: 1998
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2000

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