Annal:1996 John W. Campbell Award

The Time Ships

Stephen Baxter

• 1996 Campbell 1st
• 1996 Philip K Dick winner
• 1996 Clarke shortlist
• 1996 Hugo-Novel nominee
• Score: 32.46

There is a secret passage through time…and it leads all the way to the end of Eternity. But the journey has a terrible cost. It alters not only the future but he “present” in which we live.

A century after the publication of H. G. Wells’ immortal The Time Machine, Stephen Baxter, today’s most acclaimed new “hard SF” author, and the acknowledged Clarke, returns to the distant conflict between the Eloi and the Morlocks in a story that is at once an exciting expansion, and a radical departure based on the astonishing new understandings of quantum physics.

The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson

• 1996 Hugo-Novel winner
• 1996 Campbell 2nd
• 1996 Clarke shortlist
• 1996 Nebula nominee
• 1996 Prometheus finalist
• Score: 36.46

Decades into our future, a stone’s throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neoVictorians. He’s made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth’s own daughter, the Primer’s purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands.

Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes—members of the poor, tribeless class. Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-Victorian—John Percival Hackworth—in the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer.

Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement…

Chaga

Ian McDonald

• 1996 Campbell 3rd
• Score: 6.46

On the trail of the mystery of Saturn’s disappearing moons, network journalist Gaby McAslan find herself in Aftrica researching the Kilimanjaro Event: a meteor which landed in Kenya causing the striking African landscape to give way to something equally beautiful—and indescribably alien. Dubbed the Chaga, the alien flora destroys all man-made materials, and moulds human flesh, bone and spirit to its own designs. And when Gaby McAsland finds the first man to survive the Chaga’s changes, she realizes it has its own plans for humankind.