Annal:1995 World Fantasy Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the World Fantasy Award in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- World Fantasy Award for Novel
- Fantasy books
- Fantasy authors
- Speculative Fiction books
- Speculative Fiction authors.
- 1995 WFA–Novel winner
- 1995 Clarke shortlist
- 1995 Hugo-Novel nominee
- 1994 Nebula nominee
- Score: 28.45
The irreducible strangeness of the universe was first made manifest to Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday, when a despondent angel named Raphael, a being with luminous white wings and a halo that blinked on and off like a neon quoit, appeared and told him of the days to come.
What Raphael tells Van Horne is that God, for unknown reasons, has died. “Died and fell into the sea.” Soon Van Horne is charged with captaining the supertanker Carpco Valparaiso (flying the colors of the Vatican) as it tows the two-mile-long divine corpse through the Atlantic—northward, toward the Arctic, in order to preserve Him from sharks and decomposition. Van Horne must also contend with ecological guilt, a militant girlfriend, a father who won’t talk to him, sabotage both natural and spiritual, a crew on (and sometimes past) the brink of mutiny, and greedy hucksters of oil, condoms, and doubtful ideas.
- 1995 Campbell 2nd
- 1996 Mythopoeic-Adult finalist
- 1995 Hugo-Novel nominee
- 1995 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 26.45
For seventeen-year-old Danny Boles, a 5’5” shortstop out of Tenkiller, Oklahoma, the summer of 1943 would be a season to remember. The country’s at war, and professional baseball needs able-bodied men. Danny’s headed for Highbridge, Georgia—home of the Goober Pride peanut butter factory and the Highbridge Hellbenders, a Class C farm club in the Chattahoochee Valley League. He’s a scrappy player with one minor quirk: a violent encounter on the train to Georgia has rendered him mute, his vocal cords tied up in knots.
Danny’s idiosyncrasy, however, is nothing compared to that of his new Hellbender roommate, an erudite seven-foot giant by the name of Jumbo Hank Clerval. With his yellow eyes, strangely scarred face, and sausage-sized fingers, Hank seems to have been put together in a meat-packing plant. But he plays a mean first base and can hit the ball a mile. With the Hellbenders in a pennant race as hot as the relentless Georgia sun, the eloquent Clerval forms a special kinship with the speechless kid from Oklahoma. Danny soon realizes that Hank is not an ordinary man but…
- 1995 WFA–Novel nominee
- 1994 Stoker–Novel nominee
- Score: 12.45
Jonathan Carroll is no longer just a cult author. His previous novel, After Silence, placed this gifted and award-winning writer squarely in the mainstream. The San Francisco Chronicle raved, “After Silence is filled with people who feel as real as one’s closest friends, observed with a penetrating, and sometimes brutally chilling, clarity…a taut, original work whose excellence fulfills the promises made by this remarkable author over the last dozen years.” In From the Teeth of Angels, Jonathan Carroll returns to that unique literary landscape that he paves with magic and wonder.
While vacationing in Sardinia, Ian McGann meets Death in a dream. Death promises to answer any of McGann’s questions, but if he fails to understand the answers, he will have to pay with his life. In Los Angeles, successful film actress Arlen Ford is no longer happy living in the Hollywood fast lane. She gives up everything—her career, her house, her glamorous lifestyle—and moves to Austria, where she meets a passionate war correspondent. From the start, their relationship is all-consuming. Arlen…
- 1995 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.45
Love & Sleep continues the tale of Ægypt, a magical country displaced from the physical world. Historian Pierce Moffett’s route toward Ægypt had been charted from his youth in the coal hills of Kentucky, where he was introduced to Catholic doctrine and country mysticism, to an urchin girl with ancestral ties to werewolves, and to an elemental creature that may have abetted the forest fire he accidentally started. In the current day, Pierce and Boney Rasmussen, his patron, search the work of historical novelist Fellowes Kraft for clues to a fabulous treasure—an endeavor that parallels the adventures of Giordano Bruno and Dr. John Dee, centuries before, to sort out a cosmology on the edge of profound change. Stately, gorgeously rendered, both wide and deep, this second volume in the Ægypt quartet will reward those searching for an absorbing literary fantasy.
- 1996 Mythopoeic-Adult winner
- 1995 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 16.46
It begins in a strange place in the heart of Washington, D.C.—the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine, with its brooding shrines, its gleaming towers, and its imposing halls guarded by androgynous stone angels. Until Katherine Sweeney makes the wrong discovery. One evening, opening a door in one of the Divine’s ancient towers, Sweeney learns what she was never supposed to know—that the university is controlled by a clandestine order, the Benandanti, which secretly manipulates every government, every church, every institution in the world, and has done so since long before the Fall of Rome.
The Circus of the Earth and the Air
- 1995 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.45
During their summer vacation on an island off the coast of New England, Alex Barton watches his wife, Iris, swim in the calm, blue-green sea: “Looking out at the water, staring at the reflection of blue that his wife had become, he thought of how much he loved her and how strange and lucky it was that they were together.” Later, beyond the dunes, they come across a circus tent, where as price of admission Iris, an actress, volunteers for a disappearing act. After she steps into a box and the box is set on fire, she vanishes, and by the next morning the circus itself has disappeared without a trace.
To find her, Alex sets out on a mesmerizing journey to a fantastical island—owned by one of the great circus masters of Europe—where he believes the woman he loves is held hostage. In this existential realm of performers and soldiers, strong men and contortionists, trapeze artists and clowns, dreams and nightmares, Alex—tortured, tempted, analyzed—sheds his identity and gains a new one, as a tightrope walker whose strength is his vulnerability. The haunting, elusive world of the…
