Вручение 9 июля 2004 г.

Жюри:
Грегори Бенфорд (Gregory Benford) — известный писатель-фантаст, профессор кафедры физики и астрономии.
Пол Картер (Paul Allen Carter) — литературовед и писатель-фантаст, профессор истории.
Джеймс Ганн (James Gunn) — известный писатель-фантаст, экс-президент Ассоциации исследователей научной фантастики (SFRA) — председатель жюри.
Элизабет Энн Халл (Elizabeth Anne Hull) — литературовед и критик, экс-президент Ассоциации исследователей научной фантастики (SFRA), профессор английского языка.
Кристофер Маккитрик (Chris McKitterick) — писатель, директор Центра по изучению научной фантастики при Канзасском университете.
Фара Мендлесон (Farah Mendlesohn) – британская писательница и популяризатор фантастики, доктор исторических наук, профессор.
Памела Сарджент (Pamela Sargent) — писательница, редактор и исследователь фантастики, магистр философии.
Томас Шиппи (Thomas A. Shippey) — британский литературовед, специалист по древнеанглийской литературе, исследователь творчества Дж.Р.Р. Толкина.

Страна: США Место проведения: Лоуренс, Канзас Дата проведения: 9 июля 2004 г.

Мемориальная премия Джона В. Кэмпбелла

Лауреат
Омега
Джек Макдевит 3.8
Мирной планете Лукаут предстоит стать очередной жертвой странного энергетического образования, "омега-облака", перемещающегося по галактике и уничтожающего миры, которые обладают признаками цивилизации.
Земляне обязаны прийти на помощь братьям по разуму.
Однако для этого им придется нарушить Протокол, запрещающий установление прямого контакта с цивилизациями, пребывающими на низших стадиях развития.
Бездействие людей грозит гибелью миллионам разумных существ, Но правительство Земли требует, чтобы акция по спасению обитателей Лукаута прошла без нарушения Протокола...
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Natural History
Justina Robson 0.0

2-е место

A daring and original new novel from one of sci fi’s most provocative voices, Natural History is a stunning work of bold ideas, unforgettable characters, and epic adventure as one woman seeks to explore what may be the greatest mystery of all....

IMAGINE A WORLD...
Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpion–and just as dangerous. Her claim that she’d found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity who’d created and once enslaved them.

IMAGINE A FATE...
It was on behalf of the “unevolved” humans that Professor Zephyr Duquesne, cultural archaeologist and historian of Earth’s lost worlds, was chosen by the Gaiasol military authority to uncover the truth about this second “earth.” And her voyage, traveling inside the body of Isol, will take her to the center of a storm exploding across a spectrum of space and time, dimension and consciousness.

IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE...
On an abandoned planet, in a wrinkle of time, Isol and Zephyr will find a gift and a curse: a power so vast that once unlocked, it will change the universe forever. With civil war looming, Zephyr’s perilous journey will lead her to a past where one civilization mysteriously vanished...and another may soon follow.
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The X President
Philip Baruth 0.0

3-е место

A masterful blend of political satire and edgy social commentary, here is a wildly entertaining trip through recent American history and into the impending future. An incisive look at how we love and hate our political leaders, and how they love and hate us back, The X President touches the very heart of what it means to be president—and what a president means to America.

It is the year 2055 and America is entangled in a devastating world war—and losing badly. As the threat of homeland invasion grows stronger, the United States is desperate to change the tide, anyway it can.

Enter Sal Hayden, official biographer of a former president known as BC, now 109 years old and all but forgotten. Charismatic, controversial, and always willing to feel another person’s pain, BC’s political career, like his personal life, is marked by both uncanny triumphs and key blunders—some of which may have doomed the U.S. to defeat. Recording his story has not always been easy, but it has been straightforward. That is, until the day Sal is asked to rewrite it—and not just on the page. For Sal will be granted a biographer’s most fantastic dream, one that will thrust her into the greatest moral dilemma of her life—and the world’s most daring, dangerous, and spectacular spin job. . . .
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The Braided World
Kay Kenyon 0.0

Финалист

“Come find what you have lost...”

Heeding this cryptic message from deep space, the crew of the starship Restoration journeys from Earth to a distant planet, hoping to find humanity’s lost genetic diversity. But with the human race on the verge of extinction from the twin horrors of plague and a mysterious scourge of dark matter, how can an alien world harbor any remedies for Earth’s declining populations?

Worse, the Restoration arrives depleted: its captain is dead, its crew demoralized--except for an indomitable old woman whose power and wealth give her the privilege of naming the new captain. Anton Prados, a young, untested officer, will now preside over humanity’s first contact with an alien race. An alien race that, improbably, looks exactly like humans. Only, the Dassa possess highly unusual breeding habits--and a reproductive process that seems to be the nullification of all that is human. And they think much the same about humanity…
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The Changeling Plague
Syne Mitchell 0.0

Финалист

In the mid-21st century, all genetic experimentation has been outlawed. But when a desperate dying man takes an illegal gene therapy drug, he unleashes a worldwide plague that rewrites the DNA of everyone he encounters.
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The Companions
Sheri S. Tepper 0.0

Финалист

Three planets have been recently discovered in deep space, and prosaically named to reflect their respective environments. Jungle, lush and foreboding, swallowed up an eleven-member exploratory team more than a decade earlier, while hot, harsh, and dusty Stone turned out to be phenomenally rich in rare ore, the most profitable new world to be found in a century. But it is the third, Moss, that could well prove to be the most enigmatic . . . and dangerous.

Enlisted by the Planetary Protection Institute -- an organization founded to assess new worlds for potential development and profit -- famed linguist Paul Delis has come to Moss to determine whether the strange multicolored shapes of dancing light observed on the planet's surface are evidence of intelligent life. With Delis is his half sister, Jewel, the wife of one of the explorers lost on Jungle. Working together, they are to determine the true nature of the “Mossen” and decipher the strange "language" that accompanies the phenomenon.

Yet the great mysteries of this bucolic world -- three-quarters covered in wind-sculpted, ever-shifting moss -- don't end with the inexplicable illuminations; there is the puzzle of the rusting remains of a lost fleet of Earth ships, moldering on a distant plateau. Perhaps the biggest question mark is Jewel Delis herself and her mission here at the far reaches of the galaxy. Leaving an overpopulated homeworld that is rapidly becoming depleted of the raw materials needed for human survival, Jewel is a member of a radical underground group opposing a recent government edict that will eliminate all of the planet's “nonessential” living inhabitants. And it is here, at the universe's unexplored edge, where the fate of endangered creatures may ultimately be decided -- though it will mean defying ruthless and unforgiving ruling powers to repair humankind's disintegrating relationship with the beasts of the Earth.
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Darwin's Children
Greg Bear 3.0

Финалист

Eleven years have passed since SHEVA, an ancient retrovirus, was discovered in human DNA—a retrovirus that caused mutations in the human genome and heralded the arrival of a new wave of genetically enhanced humans. Now these changed children have reached adolescence . . . and face a world that is outraged about their very existence. For these special youths, possessed of remarkable, advanced traits that mark a major turning point in human development, are also ticking time bombs harboring hosts of viruses that could exterminate the “old” human race.

Fear and hatred of the virus children have made them a persecuted underclass, quarantined by the government in special “schools,” targeted by federally sanctioned bounty hunters, and demonized by hysterical segments of the population. But pockets of resistance have sprung up among those opposed to treating the children like dangerous diseases—and who fear the worst if the government’s draconian measures are carried to their extreme.

Scientists Kaye Lang and Mitch Rafelson are part of this small but determined minority. Once at the forefront of the discovery and study of the SHEVA outbreak, they now live as virtual exiles in the Virginia suburbs with their daughter, Stella—a bright, inquisitive virus child who is quickly maturing, straining to break free of the protective world her parents have built around her, and eager to seek out others of her kind.

But for all their precautions, Kaye, Mitch, and Stella have not slipped below the government’s radar. The agencies fanatically devoted to segregating and controlling the new-breed children monitor their every move—watching and waiting for the opportunity to strike the next blow in their escalating war to preserve “humankind” at any cost.
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Jennifer Government
Max Barry 4.0

Финалист

In the horrifying, satirical near future of Max Barry's Jennifer Government, American corporations literally rule the world. Everyone takes his employer's name as his last name; once-autonomous nations as far-flung as Australia belong to the USA; and the National Rifle Association is not just a worldwide corporation, it's a hot, publicly traded stock. Hack Nike, a hapless employee seeking advancement, signs a multipage contract and then reads it. He discovers he's agreed to assassinate kids purchasing Nike's new line of athletic shoes, a stealth marketing maneuver designed to increase sales. And the dreaded government agent Jennifer Government is after him.
Like Steve Aylett, Alexander Besher, Douglas Coupland, Paul Di Filippo, Jim Munroe, Jeff Noon, and Chuck Palahniuk, Max Barry is an author of smartass, punky satire for the late capitalist era. It's a hip and happening field; before publication, Jennifer Government (Barry's second novel) was optioned by Stephen Soderbergh and George Clooney's Section 8 Films for a major motion picture. However, the level of literary accomplishment varies wildly among practitioners, from brilliant (Di Filippo and Palahniuk) to amateurish (Besher). This field is so hot, its writers needn't be nearly as accomplished as they'd have to become to break into any other form of fiction.

That said, like many of his fellow turn-of-the-millennium satirists, Barry is uneven. He has a lively imagination and a sharp eye for the absurdities and offenses of hypercorporate capitalism. But, with its sketchy characters and slow dialogue, Jennifer Government will disappoint anyone who believes the cover copy's grandiose claim that this is "a Catch-22 for the New World Order." --Cynthia Ward
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Memory
Linda Nagata 0.0

Финалист

Acclaimed hard-SF author Linda Nagata introduces a new world: a human colony whose people have forgotten their past, on a tremendous structure that forms a great ring around the sun . . . where the sky is bisected by an arch of light and the mysterious "silver" rises from the ground each night to completely transform the landscape-and erase from existence anything it touches.
Young Jubilee is devastated when her brother Jolly is caught and taken by the silver. But when a forbidding stranger with the incredible power to control the silver comes seeking Jolly-and claiming that Jolly knows him-Jubilee first distrusts the man, then fears him and flees. For she has learned an impossible secret: Jolly may still be alive . . . and may somehow become the catalyst for the annihilation of everything she knows if she does not find him first.
Jubilee's flight will lead her to discoveries she could never have imagined, from the secret history of her civilization and her people's origins to the true nature of the silver, to the awesome forgotten memories within her. And with these she will forever alter her world's future . . . unless the dark stranger, relentless in his pursuit, achieves his goal of destroying it. One way or another, Jubilee's final confrontation will change everything . . .
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Red Thunder
John Varley 0.0

Финалист

In the highly anticipated new novel by John Varley, a manned mission to Mars becomes a personal mission for an unlikely bunch of astronauts: seven suburban misfits who have constructed a spaceship built out of old tanker cars and held together with all-American ambition. They call her Red Thunder. They plan to be the first people on the Red Planet...despite China's big head start. If it didn't sound so crazy, it would be history in the making...
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Sister Alice
Robert Reed 0.0

Финалист

"An epic tale of visionary futures and scientific speculation."--Library Journal

Millions of years from now, humanity will be on the brink of self-destruction. The world's great leaders have created an elite group who, by their superior wisdom and abilities, keep the peace, maintain progress, and otherwise safeguard humanity's future. Genetically enhanced, they are the carriers of Earth's greatest talents, a force unlike any in the history of mankind.

For ten million years, the Families dominated the galaxy. But then Alice, a brilliant scientist of the Chamberlain family, took part in an attempt to create a new galaxy. Her experiment unleashed vast forces that the family could not control, causing a catastrophe that killed untold billions of people on many worlds.

Before she was punished for her role in the debacle, Alice visited Ord, a younger Chamberlain. Only he, of all the people in the galaxy, knows what Alice tells him. Her words launch him upon a quest that will take him across the vast reaches of space. He must discover his own true nature, and somehow restore the family honor. Sister Alice is his epic story.
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Star Dragon
Mike Brotherton 0.0

Финалист

The SS Cygni probe sent back hours of video, captured by the Biolathe AI, but only a few minutes mattered--the four minutes that showed a creature made of fire, living , moving, dancing in the plasma fire of the double star's accretion disk. A dragon made of star stuff, so alien that only a human expedition to observe and perhaps capture it, could truly understand them.

It's a perilous journey into the future, however, for SS Cygni is 245 light- years from Earth, and even though only two years' subjective time will pass on board the Karamojo, the crew will return to an Earth where five hundred years have passed. Captain Lena Fang doesn't care--she has made her life on her ship, where her best friend is the ship's AI. Samuel Fisher, the contract exobiologist,doesn't care, either. He is making the voyage of a lifetime and in the small world of the Karamojo he will have to live with the consequences of his obsessive quest for knowledge. The rest of the small crew--Axel Henderson, the biosystems engineer; Sylvia Devereaux, the beautiful physical sciences expert; and Phil Stearn, the ship's jack-of-all-trades--have their own reasons for saying good-bye to everyone they have ever known. As the Biolathe AI said, uncertain five hundred- year round trips don't attract the most stable personalities, but somehow they'll have to learn to get along with each other, if they're to catch their dragon and come home again.

For at the end of the journey is the star dragon--a creature of fire with a nuclear furnace for heart. The crew of the Karamojo--human and AI alike--will risk everything to capture it, and it will take all their technology, all their skill, and more courage than they knew they had, to come home alive.
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Storyteller
Amy Thomson 0.0

Финалист

From the national bestselling author of Through Alien Eyes... A thoughtful new novel about the love between parents and their children-both human and not.

On the planet of Thalassa, history is passed on from generation to generation by Storytellers. For one woman who calls herself Teller, storytelling is her life. At her side are her harsel, the great sea-beast to whom she is telepathically bonded, and Samad, a young street boy whom she reluctantly took in as an apprentice. But eventually, Samad will discover the secret at the heart of Teller's life-a discovery that will change him profoundly...
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Untied Kingdom
James Lovegrove 0.0

Финалист

After a series of disasterous political decisions the United Kingdom has finally fallen foul of the International Coummunity. Ostracized and bombed at random, the country has fallen apart. With the infrastructure in ruins tiny communities struggle on, relying on ancient traditions and myth for their structure and identity. In the village of Downbourne, the mayor has styled himself the Green Man. But even he is powerless to stop a raid on the village by a London based gang who kidnap a number of the village's women. One of them is the schoolmaster's wife. Their marriage was an arid disaster, but the schoolmaster feels bound to do the right thing and sets off on a journey through an England at once terrifying and magical to get her back. But does this particular damsel even want to be rescued?
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The Wreck of the River of Stars
Michael Flynn 0.0

Финалист

Michael Flynn has written the best SF in the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein of the last decade. His major work was the Firestar sequence, a four-book future history. "As Robert A. Heinlein did and all too few have done since, Michael Flynn writes about the near future as if he'd been there and was bringing back reports of what he'd seen," said Harry Turtledove. Now, in this sweeping stand-alone epic of the spaceways, Flynn grows again in stature, with an SF novel worthy of the master himself. Indeed, if Heinlein's famous character, the space-faring poet Rhysling, had ever written a novel, this would be it.

This is a compelling tale of the glory that was. In the days of the great sailing ships, in the mid-twenty-first century, when magnetic sails drew cargo and passengers alike to every corner of the solar system, sailors had the highest status of all spacemen, and the crew of the luxury liner the River of Stars, the highest among all sailors.

But development of the Farnsworth fusion drive doomed the sailing ships, and now the River of Stars is the last of its kind, retrofitted with engines, her mast vestigial, her sails unraised for years. An ungainly hybrid, she operates in the late years of the century as a mere tramp freighter among the outer planets, and her crew is a motley group of misfits. Stepan Gorgas is the escapist executive officer who becomes captain. Ramakrishnan Bhatterji is the chief engineer who disdains him. Eugenie Satterwaithe, once a captain herself, is third officer and, for form's sake, sailing master.

When an unlikely and catastrophic engine failure strikes the River, Bhatterji is confident he can effect repairs with heroic engineering, but Satterwaithe and the other sailors among the crew plot to save her with a glorious last gasp for the old ways, mesmerized by a vision of arriving at Jupiter proudly under sail. The story of their doom has the power, the poetry, and the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. This is a great science fiction novel, Flynn's best yet.
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