Annal:1999 Hugo Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Hugo Award in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1999 Hugo-Novel winner
- 1998 Nebula nominee
- Score: 16.49
On the surface, England in the summer of 1888 is possibly the most restful time in history—lazy afternoons boating on the Thames, tea parties, croquet on the lawn—and time traveler Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He’s been shuttling back and forth between the 21st century and the 1940s looking for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop’s birdstump. It’s only the latest in a long string of assignments from Lady Schrapnell, the rich dowager who has invaded Oxford University. She’s promised to endow the university’s time-travel research project in return for their help in rebuilding the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years before.
But the bargain has turned into a nightmare. Lady Schrapnell’s motto is “God is in the details,” and as the l25th anniversary of the cathedral’s destruction—and the deadline for its proposed completion—approaches, time-travel research has fallen by the wayside. Now Ned and his colleagues are frantically engaged in installing organ pipes, researching misericords, and generally risking life and…
- 2000 Clarke winner
- 1999 Campbell 3rd
- 1999 Hugo-Novel nominee
- Score: 22.5
It’s November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The federal government is broke, cities are privately owned, the military is shaking down citizens in the streets, and Wyoming is on fire. The last place anyone expects to find an answer is the nation’s capital.
Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A master political spin doctor, Oscar has been in the background for years, doing his best to put the proper spin on anything that comes up. Now he wants to do something quite unusual in politics. He wants to make a difference. But Oscar has a skeleton in his closet: a grotesque and unspeakable scandal that haunts his personal life.
He has one unexpected ally: Dr. Greta Penninger. She is a gifted neurologist at the bleeding edge of the neural revolution. Together Oscar and Greta know the human mind inside and out. And they are about to use that knowledge to spread a very powerful message: that it’s a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It’s an idea whose time has come…again. And once…
- 1999 Hugo-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.49
In 1912, history was changed by the Miracle, when the old world of Europe was replaced by Darwinia, a strange land of nightmarish jungle and antedeluvian monsters. To some, the Miracle is an act of divine retribution; to others, it is an opportunity to carve out a new empire.
Leaving American now ruled by religious fundamentalism, young Guilford Law travels to Darwinia on a mission of discovery that will take him further than he can possibly imagine…to a shattering revelation about mankind’s destiny in the universe.
- 1999 Hugo-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.49
The only member of the original mission to the planet Rakhat to return to Earth, Father Emilio Sandoz has barely begun to recover from his ordeal when the Society of Jesus calls upon him for help in preparing for another mission to Alpha Centauri. Despite his objections and fear, he cannot escape his past or the future.
Old friends, new discoveries and difficult questions await Emilio as he struggles for inner peace and understanding in a moral universe whose boundaries now extend beyond the solar system and whose future lies with children born in a faraway place.
- 1999 Hugo-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.49
In the near future, a signal is detected coming from the Alpha Centauri system. Mysterious, unintelligible data streams in for ten years. Heather Davis, a professor in the University of Toronto psychology department, has devoted her career to deciphering the message. Her estranged husband, Kyle, is working on the development of artificial intelligence systems and new computer technology utilizing quantum effects to produce a near-infinite number of calculations simultaneously.
When Heather achieves a breakthrough, the message reveals a startling new technology that rips the barriers of space and time, holding the promise of a new stage of human evolution. In concert with Kyle’s discoveries of the nature of consciousness, the key to limitless exploration—or the end of the human race—appears close at hand.
Sawyer has created a gripping thriller, a pulse-pounding tour of the farthest reaches of technology.
