“What are the most award-winning Science Fiction & Fantasy books of 1986?” We looked at all the large SFF book awards given, aggregating and ranking the books that appeared so we could answer that very question!
A note on our grading system: We give 5 points for every nomination a book received and an additional 5 points for each win. These values are purely arbitrary, easy to add up, numbers. For more info on our super scientific grading system visit our Info page. For a full list of the awards and award winners can be found below our rankings at the bottom of the page.
Before we take a look at the top Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 1986, let’s set the scene for those awards by taking a look at what else was happening that year:
Spain and Portugal enter the European Community. The first PC virus starts to spread. Voyager 2 makes the first encounter with Uranus. Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster killing 7 Astronauts. Pixar Studios opened in California. Halley’s Comet visible. The Soviet Union launches Mir space station. Nintendo releases first Zelda game. First Child born to a non-related surrogate mother is born. Chernobyl disaster. Hands Across America. Argentina Defeats West Germany in FIFA World Cup in Mexico City. Deaths – L. Ron Hubbard, Frank Herbert, Georgia O’Keeffe, James Cagney, Cary Grant, etc. The Soviet Union Launches permanent Spacestation, Quantum loop theory founded. Additional Entertainment released – Stand By Me, Aliens, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Top Hug, Platoon, Labyrinth, Blue Velvet, Highlander, Big Trouble In Little China, Howard The Duck, The Fly, Little Shop of Horrors, ALF, etc. Non SFF Books – Redwall, It, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Blind Watchmaker, etc.
And now, on to the list…
| Award | Points |
| Nebula | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
O Brave New World . . . When man roamed freely among the planets and away to the stars, spacecraft had to carry the best advisers with them, for outside help was usually too far off to do any good in emergencies. And so the android simulacrum was born – a conveniently storable but believably human package which duplicated all the strengths of the Master after whom each was modeled. For centuries a Sigmund Freud was standard equipment on long voyages, but put to little useThen Man met his first etees, and Freud’s career entered a new phase – one which would change history forever.
| Award | Points |
| Hugo | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
They named him Thorn. They told him he was of their people, although he was so different. He was ugly in their eyes, strange, sleek-skinned instead of furred, clawless, different. Yet he was of their power class: judge-warriors, the elite, the fighters, the defenders.
| Award | Points |
| The World Fantasy Awards | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
There are things worse than death. There are games so seductively evil, so wondrously vile, no gambler can resist. Amid the shadow-scarred rubble of World War II, Joseph Whitehead dared to challenge the dark champion of life’s ultimate game. Now a millionaire, locked in a terror-shrouded fortress of his own design, Joseph Whitehead has hell to pay. And no soul is safe from this ravaging fear, the resurrected fury, the unspeakable desire of…
| Award | Points |
| Mythopoeic Fantasy Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Polly Whittacker has two sets of memories. In the first, things are boringly normal; in the second, her life is entangled with the mysterious, complicated cellist Thomas Lynn. One day, the second set of memories overpowers the first, and Polly knows something is very wrong. Someone has been trying to make her forget Tom – whose life, she realizes, is at supernatural risk. Fire and Hemlock is a fantasy filled with sorcery and intrigue, magic and mystery – and a most unusual and satisfying love story.
| Award | Points |
| Prometheus | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
May 1975. St. Louis. In a snow-swept street, a cop finds the body of a man who died fifty years ago. It’s still warm. July 1866, Lidice, Bohemia: A teenage girl calmly watches her parents die as another being takes control of her body. August 2058, Prague: Three political rebels flee in to the past, taking with them a terrible secret. As past, present, and future collide, one man holds the key to the puzzle. And if he doesn’t fit it together, the world he knows will fall to pieces. It’s just A Matter of Time!
| Award | Points |
| Locus New Novel | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
The Summer Tree is the first novel of Guy Gavriel Kay’s critically acclaimed fantasy trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry. Five university students embark on a journey of self-discovery when they enter a realm of wizards and warriors, gods and mythical creatures–and good and evil…
| Award | Points |
| Locus Awards Sci-Fi | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Isaac Asmiov’s classic novel about the decline and fall of Solaria. Gladia Delmarre’s homeworld, the Spacer planet Solaria, has been abandoned – by its human population. Countless robots remain there. And when traders from Settler worlds attempt to salvage them, the robots of Solaria turn to killing…in defiance of the Three Laws of Robotics. Pax Robotica Long ago, Gladia’s robots Daneel and Giskard played a vital role in opening the worlds beyond the Solar system to Settlers from Earth. Now the conscience-stricken robots are faced with an even greater challenge. Either the sacred Three Laws of Robotics are in ruins – or a new, superior Law must be established to bring peace to the galaxy. With Madam Gladia and D.G. Baley – the captain of the Settler traders and a descendant of the robots’ friend Elijah Baley – Daneel and Giskard travel to the robot stronghold of Solaria…where they uncover a sinister Spacer plot to destroy Earth itself.
| Award | Points |
| Philip K. Dick | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
“From a remote corner of the galaxy a message is being sent. The continuous beats of a pulsar have become odd, irregular…artificial. It can only be a code.
Frantically, a research team struggles to decipher the alien communication. And what the scientists discover is destined to shake the foundations of empires around this world—from Wall Street to the Vatican…”
| Award | Points |
| Locus Awards Fantasy | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
In the second volume of the Lyonesse trilogy, new threads are woven into the epic tapestry begun in Suldrun’s Garden. While war rages across the Elder Isles, King Aillas’s true love, Glyneth, is carried off to a parallel world by an amoral magician in the pay of the wicked King Casmir. Meanwhile, a sorceress’s malice, condensed into a green pearl, passes from hand to hand bringing poignant misery to whomever it touches. Jack Vance conjures up a tale of war and politics, magic and derring-do, presented in the inimitable style that has made him one of fantasy’s acknowledged grandmasters.
| Award | Points |
| BSFA | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
This book is about Magdalen, a woman who is on her own planet, out to lunch and on her own trip. She moves through time and space, from a private mental hospital to an alien spaceship where she is interrogated about human behaviour and the function of sex. Is Magdalen mad, or have the aliens really landed? She weaves her way through the fantasies of those around her – husband Clive, psychiatrist Dr. Murgatroyd, lovers, friends and friends’ lovers – until, finally, she can reclaim her own existence.
| Award | Points |
| Philip K. Dick | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
An extraordinary collection of short stories from the award-winning author of Sarah Canary. Including “Praxis”, the story about a theater where the real and unreal collide; “The Poplar Street Study”, Fowler’s darkly comic account of an alien invasion; and “The Gates of Ghosts”, in which a child journeys to a strange and deadly world, this anthology of 13 tales also features a new foreword by the author.
| Award | Points |
| Prometheus | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Dinah Mitchell, the widow of a police detective, and an orphan, sees an obituary for an opera star with the same name as her long-lost mother. The opera star was murdered.
| Award | Points |
| John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
“The Realm of Kiteworld has survived nuclear catastrophe and is governed by a feudal and militant religious oligarchy – the Church Variant.
In the outer Badlands, real or imagined Demons are kept at bay by flying defensive structures of giant interlocking Cody kites piloted by an elite and brave Corps of Observers.”
| Award | Points |
| John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving.
| Award | Points |
| Prometheus | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
| Award | Points |
| The World Fantasy Awards | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
One strange and magical winter day in 1924, a young surrealist follows a dark-haired woman down the avenues of time to the paris riots of 1968. Together they learn the awesome power of the imagination to turn lies into truth, death into love, darkness into light..
| Award | Points |
| Mythopoeic Fantasy Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Set in medieval France and Palestine of the Crusades, Láinez’s novel is a mixture of fantasy and romance which is narrated from the perspective of the shape-changing Melusine.
| Award | Points |
| Locus New Novel | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
The devastating Food and Fuel Wars have turned once-powerful nations into isolated farming communities. Barter has replaced currency, and scientists-considered responsible for the world’s misery-are burned at the stake. Hidden in the Idaho hills, astronomer Allen Chandliss secretly monitors his radiotelescope, listening for signs of intelligent life, hoping that aliens will come and improve things on Earth. For seventeen years he has waited patiently. His patience is about to pay off. .
| Award | Points |
| Locus New Novel | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
The meltdown at Three Mile Island created the death zone known as the Drift, where the sky burned dark blue and pink, and where boneseekers destroyed bodies within. Two-headed monsters, dog-faced boys, mutated vampires and other undesirables were thrown into the Drift. Now, they’re coming out.
| Award | Points |
| Mythopoeic Fantasy Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Nothing ever goes easily for Jame, least of all this journey. As hints of the past she has forgotten—of dark and horrid years in the house of Gerridon, betrayer of her people, the Kencyrath, and her god—come to the surface, she encounters changers from the house of Gerridon, wanting to bring her back into that dark place. Arrin-ken, catlike creatures who are nevertheless a part of her own people, find and judge her. Bandits, brigands and strange remnants from the past of her people—which suggest a dim future for them, their god and their hope of defeating the great enemy, Perimal Darkling—arise to haunt her. But her determination to find her brother and to avoid falling into eternal darkness only grows stronger.
| Award | Points |
| The World Fantasy Awards | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
| Award | Points |
| The World Fantasy Awards | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey’s uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character—espcially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies.
| Award | Points |
| Prometheus | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid,Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick’s stature as our century’s greatest science fiction writer.
| Award | Points |
| Locus Awards Fantasy | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
A contemporary man, John Thornburn (a meek, nonviolent, and unpredictable artist) and woman, Derval (his tough, confrontational, strong, and warrior-like lover) time travel to ancient Ireland to avenge a Viking attack. Packed with fascinating details of historical time and place in Irish history and delicately balanced on the border between realism and fantasy, the story centers around one of the most famous and beautiful illuminated manuscripts in history, the legendary but entirely real Book of Kells. Celtic history blends with magical fantasy for a strange and immersive tale of adventure.
| Award | Points |
| Philip K. Dick | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
“In the hard years of the Depression, young Travis lives with his uncle and aunt. Upstairs lives the mysterious Anna. Anna says she’s going to be “”changing,”” and she needs Travis’s help…for purposes she won’t explain.
Robert Charles Wilson’s A Hidden Place is a science fiction tale of passion, terror, and hope, opening out to a great, dark, and unsuspected universe.”
| Award | Points |
| Locus New Novel | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
“Fifteen years ago, a young author surprised and enchanted readers with his first novel—the story of Fritti Tailchaser, a courageous tom cat in a world of whiskery heroes and villains, of feline gods and strange, furless creatures called M’an.
The book was Tailchaser’s Song, the author was Tad Williams.The legend was born.”
| Award | Points |
| Nebula | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
In the twenty-second century, the City of Angels is a tragic shell of its former self, having long ago been ruined and reshaped by nuclear disaster. Before he was in a band in Ellay, Gregorio Rivas was a redeemer, rescuing lost souls trapped in the Jaybirds cult of the powerful maniac Norton Jaybush. Rivas had hoped those days were behind him, but a desperate entreaty from a powerful official is pulling him back into the game. The rewards will be plentiful if he can wrest Urania, the official’s daughter and Gregorio’s first love, from Jaybush’s sinister clutches. To do so, the redeemer reborn must face blood-sucking hemogoblins and other monstrosities on his way to discovering the ultimate secrets of this neo-Californian civilization.
| Award | Points |
| Mythopoeic Fantasy Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America’s most respected writers of science fiction. More than five years in the making, it is a novel unlike any other. A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast.
| Award | Points |
| BSFA | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Turner, corporate mercenary, wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him for a mission more dangerous than the one he’s recovering from: Maas-Neotek’s chief of R&D is defecting. Turner is the one assigned to get him out intact, along with the biochip he’s perfected. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties–some of whom aren’t remotely human.
| Award | Points |
| Ditmar Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
“A dying woman, given a second chance to relive her life, travels back in time. Her goal: the execution of an obscure Viennese artist named Adolf Hitler. Two generations later, the assassin’s granddaughter is mystified to discover a book relating the history of World War II ― the chronicle of a conflict that never took place.
Elleander Morning spans eight decades of the twentieth century, tracing two different timelines from two very different worlds and raising thought-provoking questions along the way. Part detective story, part thriller, and part romance, this alternative history won the 1986 Ditmar Award for best international fiction and the 1987 Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis. This edition features a new Introduction by Gavriel Rosenfeld, an expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.”
| Award | Points |
| Ditmar Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
“””Free Live Free,”” said the newspaper ad, and the out-of-work detective Jim Stubb, the occultist Madame Serpentina, the salesman Ozzie Barnes, and the overweight prostitute Candy Garth are brought together to live for a time in Free’s old house, a house scheduled for demolition to make way for a highway.
Free drops mysterious hints of his exile from his homeland, and of the lost key to his return. And so when demolition occurs and Free disappears, the four make a pact to continue the search, which ultimately takes them far beyond their wildest dreams.”
| Award | Points |
| Ditmar Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Originally published in 1975, Peace is a spellbinding, brilliant tour de force of the imagination. The melancholy memoir of Alden Dennis Weer, an embittered old man living out his last days in a small midwestern town, the novel reveals a miraculous dimension as the narrative unfolds. For Weer’s imagination has the power to obliterate time and reshape reality, transcending even death itself. Powerfully moving and uncompromisingly honest, Peace ranks alongside the finest literary works of our time.
| Award | Points |
| Ditmar Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
Back in print after two decades, this fantasy tells of a young man who lives in a village deep in the forest in medieval times. Mark finds himself torn between his hero worship for charming highwayman Wat and his growing suspicion of Wat’s cold savagery. And Mother Cloot, who may have sorcerous powers, works in equally suspicious ways–perhaps for evil, perhaps for good.
| Award | Points |
| Ditmar Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 5 |
“something had gone terribly wrong with Tik-Tok’s ‘asimov circuits’, and he sets out to injure as many people as possible – preferably fatally – while maintaining the exterior of a mild-mannered artist and a sincere campaigner for robot rights. So, like any self-respecting crook and murderer, he moves into politics, becoming the first robot candidate for Vice-President of the United States.
Tik-Tok follows his maniacal progress from humble beginnings to the top of the heap – or almost. Because in his devious cunning, there was one element that Tik-Tok had forgotten…”
| Award | Points |
| Locus Awards Fantasy | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| The World Fantasy Awards | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 10 |
Lestat. The vampire hero of Anne Rice’s enthralling novel is a creature of the darkest and richest imagination. Once an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France, now a rock star in the demonic, shimmering 1980s, he rushes through the centuries in search of others like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his eternal, terrifying exsitence. His is a mesmerizing story—passionate, complex, and thrilling.
| Award | Points |
| Locus Awards Fantasy | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| Mythopoeic Fantasy Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 10 |
When the Black Dragon seized the Deep of Ylferdun, young Gareth braved the far Winterlands to find John Aversin, Dragonsbane — the only living man ever to slay a dragon. In return for the promise of the King to send help to the Winterlands, Aversin agreed to attempt the nearly impossible feat again.
| Award | Points |
| Mythopoeic Fantasy Award | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
When the children of his village were struck with a mysterious illness, Number Ten Ox found master Li Kao. Together they set out to find the Great Root of Power, the only possible cure, and together they discover adventure and legend, and the power of belief..
| Award | Points |
| BSFA | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
Land and Overland – twin worlds a few thousand miles apart. On Land, humanity faces a threat to its very survival – an airborne species, the ptertha, has declared war on humankind, and is actively hunting for victims. The only hope lies in migration. Through space to Overland. By balloon. The Ragged Astronauts – first volume in an epic adventure filled with memorable characters, intense action, engaging notions, exotic locales.
| Award | Points |
| Nebula | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| BSFA | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 10 |
“The Mechanists are ancient aristocrats, their lives prosthetically extended with advanced technology. The Shapers are genetically altered revolutionaries, their skills the result of psychotechnic training and artificial conditioning.
Both factions are fighting to control the Schismatrix of humankind.”
| Award | Points |
| Locus New Novel | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
“In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who — or what — is out there?
In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future — and our own.”
| Award | Points |
| The World Fantasy Awards | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
“Think you know true fear? You don’t.
Think you’ve read the most chilling book? Not even close.
Think you can’t be shocked? Good luck!
Maybe you’re ready for the most truly frightening reading experience of your life, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel that’s been terrifying readers for over a decade.”
| Award | Points |
| Kurd-Labwitz-Preis Foreign Book | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
A portrait of a tortured young man, arrested for a series of kidnappings and rapes, explores the world of a multiple personality, whose traumatic childhood shattered his mind into twenty-four distinct personalities.
| Award | Points |
| Philip K. Dick | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
“It is the late 19th century and a mysterious airship orbits through the foggy skies. Its terrible secrets are sought by many, including the Royal Society, a fraudulent evangelist, a fiendish vivisectionist, an evil millionaire and an assorted group led by the scientist and explorer Professor Langdon St. Ives.
Can St. Ives keep the alien homunculus out of the claws of the villainous Ignacio Narbondo?”
| Award | Points |
| Locus Awards Sci-Fi | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| Hugo | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 10 |
“They first appear as a series of dots on astronomical plates, heading from Saturn directly toward Earth. Since the ringed planet carries no life, scientists deduce the mysterious ship to be a visitor from another star.
The world’s frantic efforts to signal the aliens go unanswered. The first contact is hostile: the invaders blast a Soviet space station, seize the survivors, and then destroy every dam and installation on Earth with a hail of asteriods.
Now the conquerors are descending on the American heartland, demanding servile surrender–or death for all humans.”
| Award | Points |
| Japan Seiun Translated | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair that flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody….He is Elric, Emperor of Melnibone, cursed with a keen and cynical intelligence, schooled in the art of sorcery — the hero of Michael Moorcock’s remarkable epic of conflict and adventure at the dawn of human history…Included is a dramatic introduction read by Michael Moorcock over 10 mins in length.
| Award | Points |
| Locus Awards Fantasy | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
Merle Corey is a brilliant young computer designer in San Francisco, but, he is also Merlin, son of Corwin, vanished prince of Amber, and heir to his father’s wonderous powers. And, someone is determined to kill him. Now he will begin a desperate race through Shadow, not only to escape the mysterious force that threatens his life, but to protect the deadly secret that could destroy both his worlds.
| Award | Points |
| Prometheus | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
Deep in the fortress-like headquarters of Yoshimitsu TeleCommunications, American scientist Elizabeth O’Neill had molded the circuitry of a mammoth computer into a living, thinking, feeling being–a human soul trapped in the confines of a cybernetic body.
| Award | Points |
| Ditmar Award | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 10 |
North to Orsinia and the boundaries between reality and madness … South to discover Antarctica with nine South American women … West to find an enchanted harp and the borderland between life and death … and onward to all points on and off the compass. Twenty astonishing stories from acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin carry us to worlds of wonder and horror, desire and destiny, enchantment and doom.
| Award | Points |
| Nebula | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| Locus Awards Sci-Fi | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| SF Chronicle Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 15 |
Winner of two Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award, and named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Brian W. Aldiss has, for more than fifty years, continued to challenge readers’ minds with literate, thought provoking, and inventive fiction.After many centuries, the flowering of human civilization has begun to dwindle again and the Great Year slowly progresses while the long, deadly cold winter looms-but a break in the long, repeating cycles of growth and decay may result from the long-ago visit of the Earthman. New legends of the spring and summer have evolved and a new future may be aborning.
| Award | Points |
| Nebula | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| Hugo | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| BSFA | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 20 |
This Nebula Award finalist follows present-day events in which the fears concerning the nuclear annihilation of the world subsided after the Cold War and the fear of chemical warfare spilled over into the empty void it left behind. An amazing breakthrough in genetic engineering made by Vergil Ulam is considered too dangerous for further research, but rather than destroy his work, he injects himself with his creation and walks out of his lab, unaware of just how his actions will change the world. Author Greg Bear’s treatment of the traditional tale of scientific hubris is both suspenseful and a compelling portrait of a new intelligence emerging amongst us, irrevocably changing our world.
| Award | Points |
| Nebula | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| Hugo | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| Locus Awards Sci-Fi | 10 ( Win ) |
| John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel | 10 ( Win ) |
| SF Chronicle Award | 5 ( Nomination ) |
Total | 35 |
“This is the story of a lie that became the most powerful kind of truth. A timeless novel as urgently compelling as War Day or Alas, Babylon, David Brin’s The Postman is the dramatically moving saga of a man who rekindled the spirit of America through the power of a dream, from a modern master of science fiction.
He was a survivor–a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war. Fate touches him one chill winter’s day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery.”
| Award | Points |
| Locus Awards Sci-Fi | 5 ( Nomination ) |
| Nebula | 10 ( Win ) |
| Hugo | 10 ( Win ) |
| SF Chronicle Award | 10 ( Win ) |
Total | 35 |
“Ender’s skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers, Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.
Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender’s two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If the world survives, that is.”
(Winners Highlighted)
| Book | Author |
| Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card |
| Blood Music | Greg Bear |
| Dinner at Deviant’s Palace | Tim Powers |
| Helliconia Winter | Brian Aldiss |
| The Postman | David Brin |
| The Remaking of Sigmund Freud | Barry N. Malzberg |
| Schismatrix | Bruce Sterling |
| Book | Author |
| Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card |
| Cuckoo’s Egg | C. J. Cherryh |
| The Postman | David Brin |
| Footfall | Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle |
| Blood Music | Greg Bear |
| Book | Author |
| The Postman | David Brin |
| Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card |
| Footfall, | Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle |
| Robots and Empire | Isaac Asimov |
| Helliconia Winter | Brian W. Aldiss |
| Book | Author |
| Trumps of Doom | Roger Zelazny |
| The Book of Kells | R. A. MacAvoy |
| Dragonsbane | Barbara Hambly |
| The Vampire Lestat | Anne Rice |
| Lyonesse II: The Green Pearl | Jack Vance |
| Book | Author |
| Contact | Carl Sagan |
| Emprise | Michael P. Kube-McDowell |
| In the Drift | Michael Swanwick |
| The Summer Tree | Guy Gavriel Kay |
| Tailchaser’s Song | Tad Williams |
| Book | Author |
| The Ragged Astronauts | Bob Shaw |
| Blood Music | Greg Bear |
| Count Zero | William Gibson |
| Queen of the States | Josephine Saxton |
| Schismatrix | Bruce Sterling |
| Book | Author |
| Homunculus | James P. Blaylock |
| The Hercules Text | Jack McDevitt |
| Artificial Things | Karen Joy Fowler |
| A Hidden Place | Robert Charles Wilson |
| Book | Author |
| Song of Kali | Dan Simmons |
| The Damnation Game | Clive Barker |
| The Dream Years | Lisa Goldstein |
| Illywhacker | Peter Carey |
| The Vampire Lestat | Anne Rice |
| Winterking | Paul Hazel |
| Book | Author |
| The Cybernetic Samurai | Victor Milán |
| Elegy for a Soprano | Kay Nolte Smith |
| The Gallatin Divergence | L. Neil Smith |
| A Matter of Time | Glen Cook |
| Radio Free Albemuth | Philip K. Dick |
| Book | Author |
| The Minds of Billy Milligan | Daniel Keyes, |
| Book | Author |
| Elric saga | Michael Moorcock |
| Book | Author |
| The Postman | David Brin |
| Galápagos | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Blood Music | Greg Bear |
| Kiteworld | Keith Robert |
| Book | Author |
| Bridge of Birds | Barry Hughart |
| Dragonsbane | Barbara Hambly |
| Dark of the Moon | P.C. Hodgell |
| Fire and Hemlock | Diana Wynne Jones |
| Always Coming Home | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| The Wandering Unicorn | Manuel Mujica Lainez |
| Book | Author |
| The Compass Rose | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| Elleander Morning | Jerry Yulsman |
| Free Live Free | Gene Wolfe |
| Peace | Gene Wolfe |
| The Devil in a Forest | Gene Wolfe |
| Tik-Tok | John Sladek |
| Book | Author |
| Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card |
| The Postman | David Brin |
| Helliconia Winter | Brian W. Aldiss |
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