Annal:2002 Arthur C. Clarke Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Arthur C. Clarke Award
- Science Fiction books
- Science Fiction authors
- Speculative Fiction books
- Speculative Fiction authors.
- 2002 Clarke winner
- Score: 10.52
Bold As Love is technically a science fiction novel, set as it is in a near future of political collapse and technological development, and yet it sprawls over the border between SF and fantasy. Ax is a rock musician conscripted by the government of post-Union England to consider the future and co-opt the counter-culture. He stays on to run things when the disgusting character, Pigsty, massacres his way to power, and Ax gradually becomes the much-loved centre of power and policy. Part of what keeps him ahead of events is a brain implant with all the…
- 2002 Clarke shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Part mystery, part speculative fiction, and wholly unforgettable, Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s celebrated Arabesk series portrays the dark, hard-boiled story of a man out to prove his innocence in an alternate world where the facts aren’t always the same as the truth…and murder isn’t the worst that can happen.
It’s a twenty-first century hauntingly familiar—and yet startlingly different from our own. Here the United States brokered a deal that ended World War I, and the Ottoman Empire never collapsed. And lording it over all sits the complex, seductive, and bloodthirsty North African metropolis of El Iskandryia. Almost nothing is what it seems to be in El Isk, and Ashraf Bey is no exception.
Neither the rich Ottoman aristocrat everyone thinks he is, nor the minor street criminal once shipped off to prison when he fell foul of his Chinese Triad employers—the fact is that Raf has as little idea who he is as anyone else.
With few clues and no money, all Raf has is a surname hinting at noble heritage and an arranged marriage to a woman who hates him. But nothing Ashraf al…
- 2002 Clarke shortlist
- Score: 6.52
By the twenty-fifth century, the brilliant notion of a star-trading civilization linking Earth to its interstellar colonies has petered out - the victim of stock market manipulation and cost-benefit analysis. Trade has been replaced by a business-friendly policy of “asset realization”…which some might call piracy.
Corporate starships of the Zantiu-Braun 3rd Fleet deploy to colonies, disgorging hordes of invulnerable soldiers called Skins. Enforcing their dictates with both orbital weapons and civilian hostages, the Skins loot whole planets, leaving only poverty, misery, and an industrial infrastructure—so that a few years later, Z-B can harvest again.
But on the bucolic world of Thallspring, Z-B’s plans are about to go badly awry, all because of:
Sgt. Lawrence Newton: In his teens, Lawrence abandoned a life of privilege and love to pursue a dream of seeing the stars. Twenty years of violence as a Skin have destroyed all his hopes and desires, except for one…
Denise Ebourn: An energetic, dedicated young schoolteacher with a penchant for spinning fables of wondrous lost…
- 2002 Clarke shortlist
- Score: 6.52
2026: A strange fungus-like organism is growing in the Pacific Ocean, threatening Earth’s entire food chain. Christened “the slick,” this bizarre lifeform contains alien DNA that may have come from the planet Mars. Dr. Mariella Anders is recruited by NASA to join an urgent mission to the Red Planet to search for life beneath Mars’ polar icecap—and perhaps uncover the secret of the slick. But whom can she trust to safeguard one of the greatest scientific discoveries in human history?
- 2002 Clarke shortlist
- Score: 6.52
An novel of hard SF exploring the nature of identity both inherited and engineered.
In the near future, when medical nanotechnology has made it possible to map a model of the living human brain, radical psychologist Natalie Armstrong sees her work suddenly become crucial to a cutting-edge military project for creating comprehensive mind-control. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Jude Westhorpe, FBI specialist, is tracking a cold war defector long involved in everything from gene sequencing to mind-mapping. But his investigation has begun to affect matters of national security—throwing Jude and Natalie together as partners in trouble. Deep trouble from every direction.
This fascinating novel explores the nature of humanity in the near future, and how technologies can develop whose power and potential demand that we adapt ourselves to their existence—whatever the price.
- 2002 Clarke shortlist
- 2002 Hugo-Novel nominee
- Score: 12.52
Passage is the electrifying story of a psychologist who has devoted her life to tracking death. But when she volunteers for a research project that simulates the near-death experience, she will either solve life’s greatest mystery—or fall victim to its greatest terror.
At Mercy General Hospital, Dr. Joanna Lander will soon be paged—not to save a life, but to interview a patient just back from the dead. A psychologist specializing in near-death experiences, Joanna has spent two years recording the experiences of those who have been declared clinically dead and lived to tell about it.
It’s research on the fringes of ordinary science, but Joanna is about to get a boost from an unexpected quarter. A new doctor has arrived at Mercy General, one with the power to give Joanna the chance to get as close to death as anyone can.
A brilliant young neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright has come up with a way to manufacture the near-death experience using a psychoactive drug. Dr. Wright is convinced that the NDE is a survival mechanism and that if only doctors understood how it worked, they…
