Comments: Fresh off of their experiment of reviving the Ray Bradbury Award in 1999 to honor Babylon 5, in 2000, the SFWA decided to pull the Best Script category out of mothballs and vote on a slate of nominees. The winner was M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, and while I might have preferred the award go to The Devil's Arithmetic or The Iron Giant, who won isn't really as important as the fact that the category was voted on at all. After decades of ignoring dramatized speculative fiction and then hemming and hawing about whether to honor it, the SFWA finally decided that refusing to acknowledge the most popular form of fictional entertainment was not in the organization's best interests.
While it is nice that the SFWA begrudgingly decided to start honoring dramatic speculative fiction, one wonders why they flailed about regarding exactly how they would do this. In 1999, the SFWA bestowed the Ray Bradbury Award to honor a work of dramatic fiction. In 2000, they switched to including the Best Script on the Nebula Award ballot, which would remain on the ballot for several years before the Ray Bradbury Award was brought back. The fact that the SFWA started honoring dramatized fiction should only be surprising to the extent that it took so long for them to get around to it. But one has to wonder why they waffled so much over exactly how to do it.
Best Novel
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Other Nominees:
The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod
A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
Mission Child by Maureen F. McHugh
Mockingbird by Sean Stewart
Best Novella
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang
Other Nominees:
The Astronaut from Wyoming by Adam-Troy Castro and Jerry Oltion
The Executioners' Guild by Andy Duncan
Living Trust by L. Timmel Duchamp
Reality Check by Michael A. Burstein
The Wedding Album by David Marusek
Best Novelette
Mars Is No Place for Children by Mary A. Turzillo
Other Nominees:
Five Days in April by Brian A. Hopkins
Good Intentions by Stanley Schmidt and Jack McDevitt
How to Make Unicorn Pie by Esther M. Friesner
The Island in the Lake by Phyllis Eisenstein
Taklamakan by Bruce Sterling
Best Short Story
The Cost of Doing Business by Leslie What
Other Nominees:
Ancient Engines by Michael Swanwick
Basil the Dog by Frances Sherwood
The Dead Boy at Your Window by Bruce Holland Rogers
Flower Kiss by Constance Ash
Radiant Doors by Michael Swanwick
Best Script
The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan
Other Nominees:
The Devil's Arithmetic by Robert J. Avrech
The Iron Giant by Brad Bird and Tim McCanlies
The Matrix by Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski
The Uranus Experiment: Part 2 by John Millerman
Go to previous year's nominees: 1999
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2001
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