Annal:2003 John W. Campbell Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the John W. Campbell Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- John W. Campbell Award
- Science Fiction books
- Science Fiction authors
- Speculative Fiction books
- Speculative Fiction authors.
Probability Space: Book 3 of The Probability Trilogy
- 2003 Campbell 1st
- Score: 10.53
In Probability Space, humanity’s war with the alien Fallers continues, and it is a war we are losing. Our implacable foes ignore all attempts at communication, and they take no prisoners. Our only hope lies with an unlikely coalition: Major Lyle Kaufman, retired warrior; Marbet Grant, the Sensitive who’s involved with Kaufman; Amanda, a very confused fourteen-year-old girl; and Magdalena, one of the biggest power brokers in all of human space.
As the action moves from Earth to Mars to the farthest reaches of known space, with civil unrest back home and alien war in deep space, four humans—armed with little more than an unproven theory—try to enter the Fallers’ home star system. It’s a desperate gamble and the fate of the entire universe may hang in the balance.
- 2003 Campbell 2nd
- 2003 Clarke shortlist
- 2003 Hugo-Novel nominee
- Score: 20.53
In a perilous future where disposable duplicate bodies fulfill every legal and illicit whim of their decadent masters, life is cheap. No one knows that better than Albert Morris, a brash investigator with a knack for trouble, who has sent his own duplicates into deadly peril more times than he cares to remember.
But when Morris takes on a ring of bootleggers making illegal copies of a famous actress, he stumbles upon a secret so explosive it has incited open warfare on the streets of Dittotown.
Dr. Yosil Maharal, a brilliant researcher in artificial intelligence, has suddenly vanished, just as he is on the verge of a revolutionary scientific breakthrough. Maharal’s daughter, Ritu, believes he has been kidnapped-or worse. Aeneas Polom, a reclusive trillionaire who appears in public only through his high-priced platinum duplicates, offers Morris unlimited resources to locate Maharal before his awesome discovery falls into the wrong hands.
To uncover the truth, Morris must enter a shadowy, nightmare world of ghosts and golems where nothing -and no one-is what they seem, memory itself is suspect, and the line between life and death may no longer exist.
Hominids: Book 1 of The Neanderthal Parallax
- 2003 Hugo-Novel winner
- 2003 Campbell 3rd
- 2003 Spectrum shortlist
- Score: 22.53
Hominids is a strong, stand-alone SF novel, but it’s also the first book of The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy that will examine two unique species of people: Humans and Neanderthals.
During a risky experiment deep in a mine in Canada, Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally pierces the barrier between worlds and is transferred to our universe, where in the same mine another experiment is taking place. Hurt, but alive, he is almost immediately recognized as a Neanderthal, but only much later as a scientist. He is captured and studied, alone and bewildered, a stranger in a strange land. But Ponter is also befriended-by a doctor and a physicist who share his questing intelligence and boundless enthusiasm for the world’s strangeness, and especially by geneticist Mary Vaughan, a lonely woman with whom he develops a special rapport.
Meanwhile, Ponter’s partner, Adikor Huld, finds himself with a messy lab, a missing body, suspicious people all around, and an explosive murder trial that he can’t possibly win because he has no idea what actually happened. Talk about a scientific challenge!
