Annal:2004 Prometheus Award for Best Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Prometheus Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 Prometheus winner
- Score: 10.54
Just a few hundred genes separate humans from chimpanzees. Imagine someone altering the chimp genome, splicing in human genes to increase the size of the cranium, reduce the amount of body hair, enable speech. What sort of creature would result?
Sims takes place in the very near future, when the science of genetics is fulfilling its vaunted potential. It’s a world where genetically transmitted diseases are being eliminated. A world where dangerous or boring manual labor is gradually being transferred to “sims,” genetically altered chimps who occupy a gray zone between simian and human. The chief innovator in this world is SimGen, which owns the patent on the sim genome and has begun leasing the creatures worldwide.
But SimGen is not quite what it seems. It has secrets…secrets beyond patents and proprietary processes…secrets it will go to any lengths to protect. Sims explores this brave new world as it is turned upside down and torn apart when lawyer Patrick Sullivan decides to try to unionize the sims.
Right now, as you read these words, some company somewhere in the…
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Book 5 of Harry Potter
- 2004 Anthony-Young Adult winner
- 2003 Stoker–Youth winner
- 2004 Prometheus finalist
- Score: 26.54
“I say to you all, once again—in the light of Lord Voldemort’s return, we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided. Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust.”
So spoke Albus Dumbledore at the end of Harry Potter’s fourth year at Hogwarts. But as Harry enters his fifth year at wizard school, it seems those bonds have never been more sorely tested. Lord Voldemort’s rise has opened a rift in the wizarding world between those who believe the truth about his return, and those who prefer to believe it’s all madness and lies—just more trouble from Harry Potter.
Add to this a host of other worries for Harry…
Naked Empire: Book 8 of Sword of Truth
- 2004 Prometheus finalist
- Score: 6.54
Beginning with Wizard’s First Rule and continuing with six subsequent fantasy masterpieces, Terry Goodkind has thrilled and awed millions of readers worldwide. Now Goodkind returns with a broad-canvas adventure of epic intrigue, violent conflict, and terrifying peril for the beautiful Kahlan Amnell and her husband, the heroic Richard Rahl, the Sword of Truth.
- 2004 Prometheus finalist
- Score: 6.54
The future is always shaped by the present.
New York City, the next decade: terrorism is more threatening than ever; skyscrapers are a cherished, defiant statement; underground concourses have multiplied because of the sense of security they provide; law enforcement and civil liberties groups clash over the proper boundary between public safety and personal freedom. That’s the tenor of the times when NYPD forensic detective Dr. Phil D’Amato is called in to investigate an urgent case—squirrels missing from Central Park!
It sounded like a joke, but Phil soon discovers it’s anything but. A new telecom technology can put implants into the brains of living squirrels to translate what they are seeing into computer-viewable images. But who’s behind this surveillance breakthrough? Federal agencies or terrorists?
Phil’s latest adventure pits personal loyalties against public responsibilities, privacy against freedom, security against animal rights, all against a backdrop of a near-future, post-9/11 New York City that is completely recognizable, even with its new generation of advanced…
- 2004 Prometheus finalist
- 2004 Spectrum shortlist
- 2003 Philip K Dick nominee
- Score: 18.54
From a stunning new voice in hard science fiction comes the thrilling story of one woman’s quest to wrest truth from chaos, love from violence, and reality from illusion in a post-human universe of emergent AIs, genetic constructs, and illegal wetware…
SPIN STATE
UN Peacekeeper Major Catherine Li has made thirty-seven faster-than-light jumps in her lifetime—and has probably forgotten more than most people remember. But that’s what backup hard drives are for. And Li should know; she’s been hacking her memory for fifteen years in order to pass as human. But no memory upgrade can prepare Li for what she finds on Compson’s World: a mining colony she once called home and to which she is sent after a botched raid puts her on the bad side of the powers that be. A dead physicist who just happens to be her cloned twin. A missing dataset that could change the interstellar balance of power and turn a cold war hot. And a mining “accident” that is starting to look more and more like murder…
Suddenly Li is chasing a killer in an alien world miles underground where everyone has…
