2014's finalists for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel

[james_davis_nicoll]

The finalists are:

Author                  Title                   
Max Barry 	        Lexicon 	
Stephen Baxter 	        Proxima 	
Dave Eggers 	        The Circle 	
Karen Joy Fowler 	We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves 
Nicola Griffith 	Hild 	
Wolfgang Jeschke 	The Cusanus Game 	
Ann Leckie 	        Ancillary Justice 	
Phillip Mann 	        The Disestablishment of Paradise 	
Paul McAuley 	        Evening's Empires 	
Linda Nagata 	        The Red: First Light 	
Christopher Priest 	The Adjacent 
Alastair Reynolds 	On the Steel Breeze 	
Kim Stanley Robinson 	Shaman 
Charles Stross 	        Neptune's Brood 	 
Marcel Theroux 	        Strange Bodies 


Publisher               Number of finalists

Gollancz                   5 
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2
Orbit                      2
Ace                        1                   
Penguin                    1
Knopf                      1
Marian Wood / Putnam       1
Tor (1st English edition)  1
Mythic Island Press        1



Total   F   M   Mu   F/T
 15     4   11       0.27

Comments

[jeffr23.livejournal.com]

I really don't understand why We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves keeps getting nominated for Science Fiction awards. Not because it's a bad book; it's one of the best books I read this year, but it is firmly within the Literary genre. (With exactly two throw-away lines hinting that something vaguely science-fiction might possibly be happening deep in the background that do not in any way impact the actual story in the book and could have been cut without changing the reader's experience of the work in any way. Is that really all it takes?)

This is the next step down the slippery slope after we started nominating books clearly in the Thriller genre writen by authors primarily known for their Science Fiction work, isn't it?

[aheuer.livejournal.com]

Which "Thriller" books are you referring to?

[jeffr23.livejournal.com]

Gibson's Spook Country and Stephenson's Reamde were at the top of my mind. (Cryptonomicon as well, although it had a bit more SFnal elements, especially under close reading; that book was clearly the thin entering wedge-shaped camel's nose in the tent here.)

[aheuer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with you about CRYPTONOMICON. I haven't read the other two.

By the way, this phenomenon might be said to have happened as far back as 1973, when Silverberg's THE BOOK OF SKULLS made both the Hugo and Nebula final ballots.

[connactic.livejournal.com]

REAMDE can probably slide in as SF. It features an MMORPG that both allows for transfer of real money into and out of the game, and is also widely popular across the world. Parts of the game are also used to get people to perform tedious tasks for in-game money that provide useful work to other companies (they slap a medieval skin over mechanical-turk like tasks.)

The game world is also run without shards/servers- all people who play in the game have their characters live in the same world. This is true of other current MMORPGs, but none that have a player base as large as REAMDE's T'Rain.

I would also call The Book of Skulls F/SF- there is a cult in the desert that has apparently found a way to avoid aging/disease. I realize that the cult could be a scam, but there is enough evidence in the book that would make that unlikely.

[aheuer.livejournal.com]

I think Silverberg (in THE BOOK OF SKULLS) walked a tightrope and deliberately left it (the cult's authenticity) ambiguous.

[stefan mitev (from livejournal.com)]

What about Hild? if you are generous, you can make a case for it being fantasy (though the author doesn't think so IIRC), but how the hell did it get on the list for best science fiction novel? It's an amazing novel, sure, but a historical one with (maybe) a tiny bit of fantasy in it.

At least We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is largely about science and its implications on the life of the main characters. I wouldn't call science fiction either, but it being included makes more sense to me than Hild's inclusion.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Jury: "A novel so outstanding, we have to give it an award, even though it's not science fiction!"

[(Anonymous)]

If I remember right, THE CIRCLE is neither speculative nor fiction.

[dsrtao]

Since I haven't said anything about them, and nobody has said anything here -- I quite liked Lexicon, which is fantasy-smelling-SF-maybe-it-is, maybe-it-isn't, and Red: First Light, which is an excellent book featuring early cyborgs and emergent AI.