Thursday, December 31, 1998

1998 World Fantasy Award Nominees

Location: World Fantasy Convention, Monterey, California.

Comments: The 1998 World Fantasy awards had some minor controversy when it was discovered that Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel The Club Dumas was not actually eligible for the award, as it had been first translated and published in English in 1996. The novel was withdrawn from the ballot and replaced by Eric S. Nylund's Dry Water, so all ended up more or less as it should have been. But this raises a couple of questions, the first of which is don't the World Fantasy Awards have people who are supposed to check on these sorts of issues before they announce the final slate of nominees? This problem was caused by an apparent inability to check dates, which seems like a reasonably easy thing to do. The second question that is raised is how would anyone think that a replacement entry on the ballot would have a chance of winning? I'm sure Dry Water is a fine book, but the judges were essentially being told "this book wasn't good enough to get on the same slate as the four other remaining nominees, but now that we need a replacement for a withdrawn nominee, try to give it a fair shake even though you know we originally considered it to be inferior to them all". Obviously, it didn't win, but the fact that it was on the ballot at all seems to have been supremely unfair to Nylund given the circumstances of its placement there.

Best Novel

Winner:
The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford

Other Nominees:
American Goliath by Harvey Jacobs
Dry Water by Eric S. Nylund
The Gift by Patrick O'Leary
Trader by Charles de Lint
The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte [nomination withdrawn]

Best Novella

Winner:
Streetcar Dreams by Richard Bowes

Other Nominees:
Coppola's Dracula by Kim Newman
The Dripping of Sundered Wineskins by Brian Hodge
The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
The Zombies of Madison County by Douglas E. Winter

Best Short Fiction

Winner:
Dust Motes by P.D. Cacek

Other Nominees:
Audience by Jack Womack
Fortune and Misfortune by Lisa Goldstein
Get a Grip by Paul Park
The Inner Inner City by Robert Charles Wilson

Best Anthology

Winner:
Bending the Landscape: Fantasy edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel

Other Nominees:
Dark Terrors 3 edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton
Modern Classics of Fantasy edited by Gardner Dozois
Northern Frights 4 edited by Don Hutchison
Revelations (U.K. title: Millennium) edited by Douglas E. Winter

Best Collection

Winner:
The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

Other Nominees:
Driving Blind by Ray Bradbury
Fractal Paisleys by Paul Di Filippo
A Geography of Unknown Lands by Michael Swanwick
Giant Bones by Peter S. Beagle

Lifetime Achievement

Winner:
Edward L. Ferman
Andre Norton

Other Nominees:
None

Best Artist

Winner:
Alan Lee

Other Nominees:
Rick Berry
Jim Burns
Don Maitz
Dave McKean

Special Award, Professional

Winner:
John Clute and John Grant

Other Nominees:
Ellen Datlow
Gardner Dozois
Stephen Jones
Gordon van Gelder

Special Award, Non-Professional

Winner:
Fedogan & Bremer

Other Nominees:
Richard Chizmar
Chris Logan Edwards
Barry Hoffman
Jeff VanderMeer and Tom Winstead

Go to previous year's nominees: 1997
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1999

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