Tuesday, May 12, 2015

2015 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: So another award released its list of nominees, and once again, there are no works by any of the Sad or Rabid Puppy suggested authors on it. This refrain is becoming a little bit old at this point, but this is essentially the story of the awards for 2015: The two Puppy slates put forward a collection of third- and fourth-tier works for the Hugo ballot, and the rest of the genre fiction world has simply moved on to recognizing the best works of the past year in other venues. And ultimately, this is why the Puppy campaigns are essentially nothing more than fruitless tilting at windmill while the science fiction world goes on without them.

And the science fiction world is full of top notch works of fiction ranging from Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, to Andy Weir's The Martian, to William Gibson's The Peripheral, to John Scalzi's Lock-In, to Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem, to all of the other nominees on this list. There is some melancholy in the realization that only one of the excellent novels on the Campbell nominee list also appears on the Hugo nominee list. There is such an embarrassment of riches here that the truly dismal nature of the Puppy slates is shown in stark relief by comparison.

Best Novel

Winner:
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

Finalists:
Afterparty by Daryl Gregory
Area X (The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) by Jeff VanderMeer
The Bees by Laline Paull
BĂȘte by Adam Roberts
A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias
Defenders by Will McIntosh
Echopraxia by Peter Watts
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
Lock-In by John Scalzi
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Peripheral by William Gibson
The Race by Nina Allan
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)
Wolves by Simon Ings

Go to previous year's nominees: 2014
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2016

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