2000 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: After four years of "normal" (or what passes for normal for the Campbell Awards), the judges decided they were not content with just reporting the first, second, and third place finishers, but that they needed to throw yet another procedural curveball and add a category of "honorable mentions". Why? I have no idea. The two novels that appear in this reinstated category are both decent, but neither is compelling enough that it's existence would demand a change to how the award results are reported. I can only chalk this change up to the judges deciding that it is yet again time to screw with everyone's head.

Best Novel

Winner:

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

Second Place:

Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear

Third Place:

Greenhouse Summer by Norman Spinrad

Honorable Mention:

The Silicon Dagger by Jack Williamson

Starfish by Peter Watts

Go to previous year's nominees: 1999
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2001

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2000 Mythopoeic Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: In 2000 the Mythopoeic Awards reached a new height in incestuous self-referential nominations when not one, but two works by J.R.R. Tolkien were nominated in the Inklings Studies category. Granted, the Mythopoeic Society exists to honor the members of the Inklings and to award scholarship about their work and their lives, but it always seems to me like a massive conflict of interest when they nominate works that are actually written by members of the Inklings, even if they include some amount of scholarly commentary by other authors.

Best Adult Fantasy Literature

Winner:
Tamsin by Peter S. Beagle

Other Nominees:

The Book of Knights by Yves Meynard

Dark Cities Underground by Lisa Goldstein
Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice by A.S. Byatt
The Wild Swans by Peg Kerr

Best Children's Fantasy Literature

Winner:
The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley

Other Nominees:

The Circle of Magic (Sandry's Book, Tris's Book, Daja's Book, and Briar's Book) by Tamora Pierce

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

Kingdom (Jackaroo, On Fortune's Wheel, The Wings of a Falcon, and Elske) by Cynthia Voigt

Skellig by David Almond

Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

Winner:

Roverandom by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull

Other Nominees:
C.S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer & Mentor by Lionel Adey

Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull

Tolkien: Man and Myth - A Literary Life by Joseph Pearce

Myth and Fantasy Studies

Winner:

Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness by Carole G. Silver

Other Nominees:

King Arthur in America by Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack

Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum by Michael O. Riley
The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840-1920 by Christine Poulson
When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition by Jack Zipes

Go to previous year's nominees: 1999
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2001

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2000 World Fantasy Award Nominees

Location: World Fantasy Convention, Corpus Christi, Texas.

Comments: Gender equity is a slippery thing. An array of nominees can look, at first glance, to be somewhat equitable, but as we've been conditioned to see actual equality as domination by women, appearances can be deceiving. The 2000 World Fantasy Award ballot is a case in point. Twenty-nine different people were nominated for fiction awards in this year, but only eight of those people were women. Granted, Terry Windling and Ellen Datlow were nominated twice, so one might argue that the proper ratio of women nominees to total nominees is actually ten and thirty-one. Either way, this ratio should have embarrassed the World Fantasy Awards. There had certainly been improvement from the dark days of the 1970s when the entire female sex would often be represented by a single nomination, but when women only make up one-quarter to one-third of your nominees in the year 2000, you still have a way to go.

Best Novel

Winner:
Thraxas by Martin Scott

Other Nominees:
Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
The Rainy Season by James P. Blaylock
A Red Heart of Memories by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Tamsin by Peter S. Beagle
A Witness to Life by Terence M. Green

Best Novella

Winner:
(tie) Sky Eyes by Laurel Winter
(tie) The Transformation of Martin Lake by Jeff VanderMeer

Other Nominees:
Crocodile Rock by Lucius Shepard
Scarlet and Gold by Tanith Lee
The Winds of Marble Arch by Connie Willis
The Wizard Retires by Michael Meddor

Best Short Fiction

Winner:
The Chop Girl by Ian R. MacLeod

Other Nominees:
Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue by Kim Newman
The Dynasters Vol. 1: On the Downs by Howard Waldrop
The Grammarian's Five Daughters by Eleanor Arnason
Human Bay by Robert Reed
Naming the Dead by Paul J. McAuley
The Parwat Ruby by Delia Sherman

Best Anthology

Winner:

Silver Birch, Blood Moon edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Other Nominees:
999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense edited by Al Sarrantonio
Dark Detectives: Adventures of the Supernatural Sleuths edited by Stephen Jones
Northern Frights 5 edited by Don Hutchison

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Best Collection

Winner:

(tie) Moonlight and Vines by Charles de Lint

(tie) Reave the Just and Other Tales by Stephen R. Donaldson

Other Nominees:
Deep Into That Darkness Peering by Tom Piccirilli
Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

Necromancies and Netherworlds: Uncanny Stories by Darrell Schweitzer and Jason van Hollander

Lifetime Achievement

Winner:
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Michael Moorcock

Other Nominees:
None

Best Artist

Winner:
Jason van Hollander

Other Nominees:
Les Edwards
Bob Eggleton
Stephen E. Fabian

Special Award, Professional

Winner:
Gordon van Gelder

Other Nominees:
John Betancourt
Seamus Heaney
Stephen Jones
Warren Lapine
Kim Newman

Special Award, Non-Professional

Winner:
The British Fantasy Society

Other Nominees:
Ken Abner
Rosemary Pardoe
Philip J. Rahman and Dennis E. Weiler
R.B. Russell
William K. Schafer

Go to previous year's nominees: 1999
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2001

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2000 Clarke Award Nominees

Location: United Kingdom.

Comments: One interesting thing about the Clarke Awards is how much the nominees lists seem to favor hard science fiction. Stephen Baxter, one of the hardest of hard science fiction authors, holds the record for the most nominations. This year's nominee's include Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a hard science fiction story about code breakers, and Vernor Vinge's hard science fiction space opera A Deepness in the Sky. This year's winner - Bruce Sterling's Distraction - is also an example of hard science fiction. I suppose this is fitting, as much of Clarke's work can best be described as being part of this subgenre.

Winner
Distraction by Bruce Sterling

Shortlist
The Bones of Time by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
Silver Screen by Justina Robson
Time: Manifold 1 by Stephen Baxter

What Are the Arthur C. Clarke Awards?

Go to previous year's nominees: 1999
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2001

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2000 Prometheus Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: In 2000 the Libertarian Futurist Society reached further back than it ever had before and inducted the Hans Christian Andersen story The Emperor's New Clothes into its Hall of Fame. The oddity here is that, due to its longevity, Andersen's story has been subjected to so many different interpretations that asserting that it supports a libertarian view is not particularly illuminating - as the story has, for example, been cited as an example of the labor theory of value, a basic underpinning of Marxism. When a story is open to numerous different interpretations, it seems like something of a desperate stretch to try and formally claim it as supporting one's own.

Best Novel

Winner:

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

Other Nominees:

The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod

Cradle of Saturn by James P. Hogan
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
The Martian Race by Gregory Benford

Hall of Fame

Winner:

The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen

Other Nominees:
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
The Mirror Maze by James P. Hogan
Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson
The Wardove by L. Neil Smith

Go to previous year's nominees: 1999
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2001

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