2019 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: With the renaming of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, this award is now the only major award that is named for the late editor. One has to wonder, however, how long that will last. Naming awards after people is problematic, in large part because people often do not age well. attitudes and opinions that are fine in one era are often considered abhorrent in later ones. Actions that were understandable in the past are actions that would likely lead to widespread condemnation, if not arrest and imprisonment now. Thomas Jefferson was one of the most enlightened minds of his era. He also kept slaves. John Adams didn't keep slaves, but he was willing to compromise on the basic humanity of black people to accomplish other political goals. Figures of the past often have feet of clay. Campbell didn't keep slaves, but he certainly had a lot of attitudes about slavery that have not aged well. He supported segregation. He was an impediment to the publication of black and female writers. In short, he is not someone that many in the present would find admirable. The question is, how long will he continue to be honored by having awards named after him?

Best Novel

Winner:

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller

Finalists:
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
A Spy in Time by Imraan Coovadia
Theory of Bastards by Audrey Sculman
Time Was by Ian McDonald
Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

Go to previous year's nominees: 2018
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2019

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2018 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: As usual, the set of Campbell Award nominees heads in a different direction than most of the other major genre fiction awards, with fairly minimal overlap between this award and its various competitors. This is something that is interesting in itself, but is also something that I see as being emblematic of the healthy nature of genre fiction as a whole. Every year there are far more top quality books published than can win (or even be nominated for) awards, so having an award that marches to a slightly different beat helps highlight more of those books.

There is also some irony in this list. I've only read one of the nominees, and it strikes me as a book that John W. Campbell would have absolutely hated. I've been reliably informed that most of the other books on the list share this characteristic. I find this to be very amusing.

Best Novel

Winner:

The Genius Plague by David Walton

Finalists:
After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun
Austral by Paul McAuley
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
The Moon and the Other by John Kessel
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
The People’s Police by Norman Spinrad
The Rift by Nina Allan
The Stargazer’s Embassy by Eleanor Lerman
The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown

Go to previous year's nominees: 2017
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2019

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2017 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: The Campbell Awards are often an outlier when it comes to genre fiction awards. While the Nebulas, Hugos, and Locus Awards often have some crossover, it seems that the Campbell Award often walks to the beat of its own drummer. I guess this is the long way of me saying that when these nominations were announced, I hadn't read any of them. This is fairly typical of a Campbell ballot - I simply haven't had enough time to read as many of the books that have been nominated for this award over the years as I would like to. I should probably get to remedying that, and sooner rather than later.

Best Novel

Winner:

Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

Second Place:
Rosewater by Tade Thompson

Third Place:
(tie) Underground Airlines by Ben Winters
(tie) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Finalists:
Alien Morning by Rick Wilber
The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley
Azanian Bridges by John Nicholas Wood
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson
Everfair by Nisi Shawl
Into Everywhere by Paul J. McAuley
The Medusa Chronicles by Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter
Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan
Zero K by Don DeLillo

Go to previous year's nominees: 2016
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2018

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2016 Campbell Award Nominees

Location: MidAmeriCon II, Kansas City, Missouri.

Comments: The John W. Campbell Memorial Award always seems to go its own way when it comes to what works it honors. Radiomen, the winning novel for 2016, is a book that wasn't nominated for any other major award. Very few of the other shortlisted works were nominated for other awards either - The Water Knife and Aurora appeared on the list of Locus nominees for example, Seveneves was a Hugo finalist, and The Book of Phoenix was shortlisted for the Clarke Award. But the interesting fact remains that total volume of crossover between the Campbell Award nominees and the shortlisted finalists for other major awards is quite slight.

On the other hand, several of the finalists this year were written by authors who had previously won or been nominated for the award. Bacigalupi, McDonald, Roberts, and Robinson have all previously won this award. Robinson has been a finalist a further five times, and Roberts has been nominated three other times before. McDonald has been nominated two times before this one, and both Stephenson and Nagata have been nominated twice. James Morrow has never won the Campbell Award, but has been nominated four times. Hutchinson was nominated once before. The Campbell Award judges seem to go their own way when it comes to the type of books they prefer, and they seem to have recurring favorites as well.

Best Novel

Winner:

Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman

Second Place:
(tie) Going Dark by Linda Nagata
(tie) The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts

Third Place:
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

Finalists:
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
Galapágos Regained by James Morrow
Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Where by Kit Reed

Go to previous year's nominees: 2015
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2017

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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
Bête 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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2014 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice had already won both the Clarke and Nebula Awards, which one would think would have positioned the book as the front runner for winning the Campbell Award. But looking through the other nominees, one is struck by just how stiff the competition was in this year, as Leckie was going up against (among others) Nicola Griffith's Hild, Linda Nagata's The Red: First Light, Charles Stross' Neptune's Brood, and Paul J, McAuley's Evening's Empires. After a somewhat disappointing slate in 2013, the Campbell awards seem to have rebounded to offer a set of nominees that is both diverse and impressive.

Best Novel

Winner:

Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux

Second Place:

Evening’s Empires by Paul J. McAuley

Third Place:

The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata

Finalists:

The Adjacent by Christopher Priest

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke
The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann
Hild by Nicola Griffith
Lexicon by Max Barry
Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
On the Steel Breeze by Alastair Reynolds
Proxima by Stephen Baxter
Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Go to previous year's nominees: 2013
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2015

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2013 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: And here we are, in 2013, and the Campbell Award ballot is just as much of a pale sausage-fest as it ever was. Not a single woman was even nominated for the award. Not a single non-white author was nominated for the award. While the Hugo Awards, the Nebula Awards, and even the World Fantasy Awards have become more inclusive in their reach as time has gone by, the Campbell Award, if anything, has gotten worse in this regard.

Best Novel

Winner:

Jack Glass by Adam Roberts

Second Place:

Any Day Now by Terry Bisson

Third Place:

(tie) Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

(tie) Empty Space by M. John Harrison

Finalists:

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds
Existence by David Brin
The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks
Intrusion by Ken MacLeod
Railsea by China Miéville
The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Slow Apocalypse by John Varley

Go to previous year's nominees: 2012
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2014

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2012 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: In a field in which two books tied for first place, another was given the nod as the third place finisher, and a number were listed as finalists, I'm not entirely sure what designating Lavie Tidhar's novel Osama as an "honorable mention" was supposed to mean. Did the judges intend to recognize Osama as an implied fourth place finisher in the balloting? Did they mean to say that Osama isn't really a science fiction novel but they wanted to recognize Tidhar's accomplishment anyway? As with so many things about the Campbell Awards, the answer to these questions seems likely to remain a mystery.

Best Novel

Winner:

(tie) The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski

(tie) The Islanders by Christopher Priest

Third Place:

Embassytown China Miéville

Finalists:

Dancing with Bears by Michael Swanwick

Home Fires by Gene Wolfe
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
Seed by Rob Ziegler
Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh
This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Honorable Mention:

Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Go to previous year's nominees: 2011
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2013

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2011 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: Another year and another Campbell Award ballot that mostly ignores the contributions of female authors. Sure, two women were nominated, but two women out of a field of thirteen can't be called anything but a farce when it comes to gender equity. On the plus side, the Campbell Award judges seem to have realized that there are non-white people in the world and recognized the work of Charles Yu, giving him a second place finish for How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Even so, the list of nominees was still dominated by authors who were both white and male.

Best Novel

Winner:

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Second Place:

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Third Place:

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

Finalists:

Anthill by E.O. Wilson

Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat
Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis
C by Tom McCarthy
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
New Model Army by Adam Roberts
Veteran by Gavin Smith
The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper
Yarn by Jon Armstrong
Zero History by William Gibson

Go to previous year's nominees: 2010
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2012

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2010 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: In 2010, two women made it to the finalist list for the Campbell Awards. Nancy Kress, an author with a long and impressive career writing thought-provoking science fiction, was nominated for her novel Steal Across the Sky. And Margaret Atwood, an author with an impressive writing career but who also continues to yelp that she doesn't write science fiction even when she clearly has, was nominated for her novel The Year of the Flood. Even though the female representation on this ballot is paltry, I kind of wish that the Campbell Award judges had given Atwood her wish and not nominated her novel, perhaps replacing her book with a work by one of the many female authors who are proud to be science fiction novelists. As long as Atwood insists that she doesn't write science fiction, and as long as she looks down her nose at the genre, there is simply no reason to bother honoring her for her work with genre awards rather than honoring people who enjoy and respect science fiction.

Best Novel

Winner:

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Second Place:

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22^nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson

Third Place:

The City & the City by China Miéville

Finalists:

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
Gardens of the Sun by Paul J. McAuley
Makers by Cory Doctorow
Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress
Transition by Iain M. Banks
WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Go to previous year's nominees: 2009
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2011

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2009 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: As glad as I am that Cory Doctorow won a well-deserved Campbell Award for his novel Little Brother, the 2009 slate of nominees seems to me to have been a distinct step backwards. In the couple of years leading up to 2009 women and minority writers were distinctly underrepresented in the lists of nominees for this award, but at least they had some representation. In 2009, there was a distinct lack of books penned by female or minority authors on the ballot. In effect, the judges seem to be saying there were no books by female authors or non-white authors that were even worthy of consideration for the award, which seems to be both an amazing and completely unbelievable statement.

The other striking thing about the 2009 Campbell Award ballot is the extremely truncated list of finalists included on the ballot. Since the Campbell Awards began reporting the list of non-placing finalists, most years had a roster of nine or ten "also-rans", but for some reason the 2009 list only included three. There seems to be no reason for such a short list - just as many good science fiction novels seem to have been published in 2009 as in any other year. As with so many of the odd and inexplicable decisions made by the Campbell Award judges, this one seems to be a complete mystery.

Best Novel

Winner:

(tie) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

(tie) Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod

Third Place:

The Philosopher's Apprentice by James Morrow

Finalists:

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

City at the End of Time by Greg Bear
Valley of Day-Glo by Nick Di Chario

Go to previous year's nominees: 2008
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2010

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2008 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: In 2008, Kathleen Ann Goonan became only the third woman to ever win the Campbell Award. I know that I may sound like a broken record at times, but this track record is kind of ridiculous. Here we are, in the twenty-first century, and the list of nominees for this year only had four nominees written by female authors out of fourteen total nominees. Not only that, the slate of nominees is ridiculously white - there were only two works nominated whose author was not white. The end result is a ballot that is very male and very white. And in 2008, this is simply embarrassing.

Best Novel

Winner:

In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Second Place:

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

Third Place:

The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod

Finalists:

Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
Deadstock by Jeffrey Thomas
HARM by Brian W. Aldiss
Mainspring by Jay Lake
The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper
The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
Time's Child by Rebecca Ore
Zig Zag by Jose Carlos Somoza

Go to previous year's nominees: 2007
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2009

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2007 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: The 2007 Campbell Awards seem to be yet another case of the science fiction establishment honoring one of its long-time members not for the actual work being awarded, but rather for the author's overall body of work. This is not because Ben Bova's Titan is a particularly bad book, but rather because the book doesn't seem to be particularly notable when compared to his other books. It seems that in 2007 the Campbell Award judges said to themselves, "Hey, Bova has never won a Campbell Award, and he's written a lot of pretty good books; we should give him the award" rather than "Hey, Bova's book is really fantastic, let's choose that one." This seems to happen frequently in science fiction awards, and seems to be one of the things that perpetuates the exclusion of women from being adequately recognized for their contributions to the genre.

Best Novel

Winner:

Titan by Ben Bova

Second Place:

The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow

Third Place:

(tie) Blindsight by Peter Watts

(tie) Farthing by Jo Walton

Finalists:

Dry by Barbara Sapergia

Glasshouse by Charles Stross
Infoquake by David Louis Edelman
Living Next Door to the God of Love by Justina Robson
Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
Odyssey by Jack McDevitt
Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge
A Small and Remarkable Life by Nick DiChario
Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder

Go to previous year's nominees: 2006
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2008

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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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2005 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: In 2005, the three top finishing novels in the race for the Campbell Award probably could not have been more radically different. Richard Morgan's Market Forces is a vicious deconstruction of capitalism and imperialism. Geoff Ryman's Air is an exploration of how the internet has changed our lives, and how similar technology would change us even more. Finally, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is a romance that deals with the distance experienced by lovers, using time-travel as a metaphor for interpersonal alienation. As a genre, science fiction has splintered, diversifying wildly when compared to its early days of adolescent wish fulfillment and engineering lessons, and this has only improved the genre.

Best Novel

Winner:

Market Forces by Richard Morgan

Second Place:

Air by Geoff Ryman

Third Place:

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Finalists:

The Boy Who Would Live Forever by Frederik Pohl

The Child Goddess Louise Marley
City of Pearl by Karen Traviss
Gaudeamus by John Barnes
Newton's Wake by Ken MacLeod
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
The Rebel by Jack Dann
The Well of Stars by Robert Reed
White Devils by Paul J. McAuley

Go to previous year's nominees: 2004
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2006

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2004 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: When I first noted that Jack McDevitt won the Campbell Award this year, my first thought was that this was the second win for him. But when I went back and looked, of course, he had not won the award before, he had only been nominated for the award in previous years. Despite the serious institutional problems of the Campbell Awards, this is one area that they seem to have gotten right insofar as have avoided honoring the same handful of authors over and over again, and instead have for the most part recognized different authors every year.

Best Novel

Winner:

Omega by Jack McDevitt

Second Place:

Natural History by Justina Robson

Third Place:

The X President by Philip Baruth

Finalists:

The Braided World by Kay Kenyon

The Changeling Plague by Syne Mitchell
The Companions by Sheri S. Tepper
Darwin's Children by Greg Bear
Jennifer Government by Max Barry
Memory by Linda Nagata
Red Thunder by John Varley
Sister Alice by Robert Reed
Star Dragon by Mike Brotherton
Storyteller by Amy Thomson
Untied Kingdom by James Lovegrove
The Wreck of The River of Stars by Michael Flynn

Go to previous year's nominees: 2003
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2005

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2003 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: In 2003 Nancy Kress became only the third woman to win the Campbell Award with her novel Probability Space, a follow-on to her previously nominated novel Probability Sun. Of all of the major science fiction awards, the Campbell Award seems to be the most hostile to female authors overall, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Through the history of the award, very few women have been nominated - in 2003, out of ten finalists, only two were written by women - and even fewer have won, a result that seems problematic given the many excellent works of science fiction that have been produced by women during its existence.

Best Novel

Winner:

Probability Space by Nancy Kress

Second Place:

Kiln People by David Brin

Third Place:

Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer

Finalists:

Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

Dark Ararat by Brian Stableford
The Golden Age by John C. Wright
Lion's Blood by Steven Barnes
The Separation by Christopher Priest
The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper
Vitals by Greg Bear

Go to previous year's nominees: 2002
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2004

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2002 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: After years of wildly fluctuating formats for reporting the results of the Campbell Awards, the judges finally decided to catch up to the point that every other major award had been by the 1970s and provide a list of the winner along with all of the shortlisted finalists for the award. The Campbell Awards, unlike other major genre awards, has continued the practice of listing the second and third place finishers (although in a bout of sanity, they listed only the two books tied for first place and the third place finisher as having "placed"), but from this point forward they would also list the nominated novels that didn't place first, second, or third in the voting. And it only took the Campbell Awards until 2002 to do this, arriving at the same point that the Hugos got to in the 1950s.

Best Novel

Winner:

(tie) The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

(tie) Terraforming Earth by Jack Williamson

Third Place:

Probability Sun by Nancy Kress

Finalists:

Dark Light by Ken MacLeod

Deepsix by Jack McDevitt
Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton
Hammerfall by C.J. Cherryh
The House of Dust by Paul Johnston
The Meek by Scott Mackay
Nekropolis by Maureen F. McHugh
Pashazade: The First Arabesk by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Passage by Connie Willis

Go to previous year's nominees: 2001
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2003

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2001 Campbell Award Nominees

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

Comments: In 2001 the Campbell Award judges decided to change things up yet again, eliminating the "honorable mention" category that had been included in 2000, and turning in ballots that resulted in a three way tie for second place. Somewhat lost in the flux is the fact that Poul Anderson won the award for his novel Genesis, which was a nice send-off for the author who sadly died this year. As with many awards that are handed to authors who are in the twilight of their career, it is impossible to tell if this award was handed out for the quality of the book or as a means of honoring an author for his past works. In this case, Genesis was a good book, so it is entirely plausible that the voters were merely honoring the novel itself, although Anderson's publishing history probably didn't hurt.

Best Novel

Winner:

Genesis by Poul Anderson

Second Place:

(tie) Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle

(tie) Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
(tie) Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt

Third Place:

The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper

Go to previous year's nominees: 2000
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2002

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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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