I’ve just learned that The Race has reached the finals of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. This is a wonderful surprise, all the more so because it’s a fascinating line-up all round. I’m particularly pleased to see Simon Ings’s Wolves, Adam Roberts’s Bete, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy make the finals alongside The Race, because all three are special books that have missed out on previous 2015 awards shortlistings and thoroughly deserve this recommendation. The full line-up is below, and if you follow this link to Locus Online you’ll also find a list of the finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for short fiction. A weird one, this, and there are a fair few names I’d have loved to see that aren’t there, but another fascinating selection nonetheless and some great stories.
Finalists for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award 2015:
- The Race by Nina Allan
- A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias
- The Peripheral by William Gibson
- Afterparty by Daryl Gregory
- Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
- Wolves by Simon Ings
- The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- Defenders by Will McIntosh
- The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
- The Bees by Laline Paull
- Bête by Adam Roberts
- Lock In by John Scalzi
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
- Echopraxia by Peter Watts