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Friday, July 7, 2006

2006 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: Sometimes modern science fiction fans forget just what an abundance of riches they have access to. Some people hearken back to older years when a dedicated science fiction fan could basically read everything noteworthy that was published every year, and as a result, fandom had a single common language that bound them tightly together. These people mourn the fact that the genre has expanded and splintered to such an extent that this simply isn't possible now. But what such people forget is that having such a focused genre comes at the price of having a substantially constricted range of voices available to be read. What the list of nominees for the 2006 Campbell Award demonstrates is that science fiction readers now have an overflowing cup of good fiction to enjoy, and that this cup is very slowly (very, very slowly)  being expanded by including more viewpoints into its mixture.

Best Novel

Winner:
Mindscan by Robert J. Sawyer

Second Place:
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Third Place:
The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod

Finalists:
Accelerando by Charles Stross
Child of Earth by David Gerrold
Counting Heads by David Marusek
Learning the World by Ken MacLeod
The Meq by Steve Cash
Mind's Eye by Paul J. McAuley
Seeker by Jack McDevitt
Transcendent by Stephen Baxter
The World Before by Karen Traviss

Go to previous year's nominees: 2005
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2007

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