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

[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.