The John W. Campbell Award Nominations
We’re delighted to announce that we have four books amongst the 13 finalists for the John W. Campbell Award. So huge congratulations to:
M. John Harrison for Empty Space
Hannu Rajaniemi for The Fractal Prince
Alastair Reynolds for Blue Remembered Earth
Whether it’s the powerful yet ambiguous visions of Empty Space, the poetic far-science of The Fractal Prince, the grand and optimistic sweep of Blue Remembered Earth or the playful inversions of the Golden Age in Jack Glass we couldn’t be happier with a selection that I think shows an awful lot of what SF is capable of when it is at its best.
We’re so proud that four of our authors have been honoured in this way; recognition of this sort from across the Atlantic is a tribute both to their individual excellence and to the global reach of British (and Finnish!) SF.
It only remains to wish all thirteen finalists the very best of luck. The award will be announced on Friday the 14th of June. Watch this space!
The full list can be seen here.
The John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year is one of the four major annual awards for science fiction (Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and Campbell). The first Campbell Award was presented at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. Since then the Award has been presented in various parts of the world: at California State University at Fullerton; at St. John’s College, Oxford; at the World SF Writers Conference in Dublin; in Stockholm; at the World SF meeting in Dublin again; the University of Kansas; and in a joint event with the SFRA Convention in Kansas City in 2007.
Since 1979, the Campbell Award has been presented during the Campbell Conference Awards Banquet at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, as the focal point of a weekend of discussions about the writing, illustration, publishing, teaching, and criticism of science fiction.
This is a juried award. The current jury consists of Greg Benford, Paul Di Filippo, Sheila Finch, James Gunn, Elizabeth Anne Hull, Paul Kincaid, Christopher McKitterick, Pamela Sargent and T.A. Shippey.