Poul Anderson’s Genesis (Tor) won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science fiction novel of 2000, and Ian McDonald’s “Tendeléo’s Story” (PS Publishing chapbook) won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of the year. The awards were announced Friday, July 6, by James Gunn at the Awards dinner on the University of Kansas campus. At the same occasion, Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and Ursula K. Le Guin were inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Poul Anderson could not be present to accept his award. There was an unprecedented three-way tie for second place in the Campbell Award, between Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (Gollancz), Robert Sawyer's Calculating God (Tor), and Jack McDevitt's Infinity Beach (HarperPrism). Third place was Sheri Tepper's The Fresco (Eos).
Second place in the Sturgeon competition went to Stephen Baxter’s “Sheena 5” (Analog May 2000), and third place to Lucius Shepard’s “Radiant Green Star” (Asimov's August 2000), which won the Locus Award for Best Novella of 2000 on the same evening (see story).
The Award dinner came at the end of a two-week Writers Workshop in Science Fiction held on the University campus that brought more than a dozen writers to the campus from both coasts and places in between and as the lead-in to a day and a half Campbell Conference devoted to the topic of “Science Fiction in the Electronic Era,” followed by a two-week Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction.
Other photos from the awards and conference are at Campbell Conference 2001.
