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?

[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.

[(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.