2007

Vernor Vinge . Rainbows End

An Alzheimer's patient recovers his faculties through a cure developed during his decline. He discovers, however, that the world and his place in it have changed. He must now learn to cope with the digital world as well as the real while combating a vast conspiracy of world domination through technology.

2006

Robert Charles Wilson. Spin

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

2005

Susanna Clarke. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that it leaves readers longing for more.

2004

Lois McMaster Bujold. Paladin of Souls

Three years have passed since the widowed Dowager Royina Ista found release from the curse of madness that kept her imprisoned in her family's castle of Valenda. Her newfound freedom is costly, bittersweet with memories, regrets, and guilty secrets - for she knows the truth of what brought her land to the brink of destruction. And now the road - escape - beckons.... A simple pilgrimage, perhaps. Quite fitting for the Dowager Royina of all Chalion.

2003

Robert J. Sawyer. Hominids

The first book of the Neanderthal Parallax, is a story of parallel worlds: this one, and another in which Neanderthals become the dominant intelligent species.

2002

Neil Gaiman. American Gods

Shadow is a man with a past and wants nothing more now than to live a quiet life with his wife. When his wife is killed in a terrible accident, Shadow flies home for the funeral. As a raging storm rocks the plane, the strange man in the seat next to Shadow introduces himself as Mr. Wednesday. He knows more about Shadow than is possible--and he warns Shadow an even bigger storm is coming.

2001

J K Rowling. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter, a fourth-year student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, longs to escape his hateful relatives, the Dursleys, and live as a normal fourteen-year-old wizard, but what Harry does not yet realize is that he is not a normal wizard, and in his case, different can be deadly.

2000

Vernon Vinge. A Deepness in the Sky

Qeng Ho awaits planet Arachna's awakening into a Golden Age of technology while other traders lurk nearby.

1999

Connie Willis. To Say Nothing of the Dog, or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last

In the grand tradition of her bestselling "Doomsday Book", Connie Willis once again takes on the subject of time travel, this time to Victorian England, with a sweeping tale of romance, history and misadventure that combines everything Willis's readers have come to know and love.

1998

Joe Haldeman. Forever Peace

2043 A.D.: The Ngumi War rages. A burned-out soldier and his scientist lover discover a secret that could put the universe back to square one--not a terrifying prospect, but a tempting one.

1997

Kim Stanley Robinson. Blue Mars

On the brink of completing the terraforming effort on Mars, colonists find their work complicated by a crisis on Earth, new colonization projects on Jupiter and Saturn, and the onset of a Martian ice age.

1996

Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age

The story of an engineer who creates a device to raise a girl capable of thinking for herself reveals what happens when a young girl of the poor underclass obtains the device.

1995

Lois McMaster Bujold. Mirror Dance: a Vorkosigan adventure

Injured in his mother's womb, Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, born a dwarf with brittle bones, faces off against his brother, a cloned stranger created to murder Miles and replace him.

1994

Kim Stanley Robinson. Green Mars

One generation after the first pioneers begin to transform Mars into an Earthlike planet, the first grown children born on Mars, led by Peter Clayborne, rebel against colonization in an effort to preserve Mars's natural state.

1993

Vernor Vinge. A Fire Upon the Deep

Fleeing a menace of galactic proportions, a spaceship crashes on an unfamiliar world, leaving the survivors, a pair of children, to the not-so-tender mercies of a medieval, lupine race. Responding to the crippled ship's distress signal, a rescue mission races against time to retrieve the children and recover the weapon they need to prevent the universe from being forever changed.

1993

Connie Willis. Doomsday Book

A time-traveling history student is trapped in the Middle Ages, dangerously close to the onset of the Black Plague. Her rescuers in 21st-century Oxford battle their own deadly epidemic to reach her in time.

1992

Lois McMaster Bujold. Barrayar

Believing her warship days are over after she defeats the Barrayaran militarists and marries their leader, former commander Cordelia Naismith is astounded by the role her unborn son will play in a world on the brink of civil war.

1991

Lois McMaster Bujold. The Vor Game

Sent to the other side of the galaxy when he angers the High Command on his home planet, mercenary leader Miles becomes the only hope for betrayed childhood friend Emperor Gregor and will become emperor himself if he fails.

1990

Dan Simmons. Hyperion

Hyperion is the tale of seven people who make a pilgrimmage to a terrifying creature called the Shrike in an attempt to save mankind. Stunningly written and beautifully crafted, Simmons's Hyperion resonates with technical achievement and the excitement and wonder found only in the best SF.

1989

C.J. Cherryh. Cyteen

In a futuristic world of cybernetics, two young friends become trapped in an endless nightmare of suspicion, surveillance, programmable servants, a centuries-old ruling class, and an enigmatic woman who rules them all.

1988

David Brin. The Uplift War

As galactic armadas clash in quest of the ancient fleet of the Progenitors, a brutal alien race seizes the dying planet of Garth. The various uplifted inhabitants of Garth must battle their overlords or face ultimate extinction. At stake is the existence of Terran society and Earth, and the fate of the entire Five Galaxies.

1987

Orson Scott Card. Speaker for the Dead

Years after the terrible war, only the Speaker for the Dead has the courage to confront the truth when a second alien race is discovered.

1986

Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game

Ender's Game is the story of Ender Wiggin, a boy genetically engineered to be a superior military mind, and bred to win Earth's long war with an alien insectoid race by completely destroying their homeworld.

1985

William Gibson. Neuromancer

Case was the best interface cowboy who ever ran in earth's computer matrix. Then he doublecrossed the wrong people...

1984

David Brin. Startide Rising

The Terran exploration vessel Streaker has crashed on the uncharted water world of Kithrup, bearing one of the most important discoveries in galactic history. Below, a handful of her human and dolphin crew battles a hostile planet to safeguard her secret--the fate of the Progenitors.

1983

Isaac Asimov. Foundation’s Edge

Tells the futuristic story of galactic history in the time between the two empires.

1982

C.J. Cherryh. Downbelow Station

A blockbuster space opera of the rebellion between Earth and its far-flung colonies.

1981

Joan D. Vinge. The Snow Queen

The tale of the ageless, corrupt Snow Queen and her wish to control Tiamat forever. But her rule is quickly coming to an end unless she can find a young mystic named Moon--the Snow Queen's clone.

1980

Arthur C. Clarke. The Fountains of Paradise

Vannemar Morgan's dream of linking Earth with the stars requires a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems while allaying the wrath of God.

1979

Vonda McIntyre. Dreamsnake

An award-winning novel set in the post-apocalyptic future follows a young woman who travels the earth healing the sick with the help of her alien companion, the dreamsnake, pursued by two implacable followers.

1978

Frederik Pohl. Gateway

The first book of the Heechee saga. Gateway opens on all the wealth of the Universe--and on reaches of unimaginable horror. The humans who rode the alien Heechee spacecraft stored on the planetoid couldn't know whether the trip would make them millionaires or corpses!

1977

Kate Wilhelm. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

The story of an isolated post-holocaust community of clones who are determined to preserve civilization.

1976

Joe Haldeman. The Forever War

Private William Mandella is a hero in spite of himself -- a reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, and propelled through space and time to fight in a distant thousand-year conflict.  Although he never wanted to go to war, he performs his duties without rancor.  The true test will come when he returns to Earth.  While he's been aging months, centuries have passed on Earth.

1975

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed

Unwilling to accept that his anarchist world must be separated from the rest of the civilized universe, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, risks his life by traveling to the utopian mother planet of Urras.

1974

Arthur C. Clarke. Rendezvous with Rama

When a space probe confirms that the celestial object, that astronomers dubbed Rama, is an interstellar space craft, Earth prepares for it's first encounter with alien intelligence.

1973

Isaac Asimov. The Gods Themselves

In the twenty-second century, Earth obtains limitless, free energy from an alien source. But the process will eventually lead to the destruction of Earth.

1972

Philip Jose Farmer. To Your Scattered Bodies Go

Over the course of this landmark five-book series, a remarkable cross-section of compatriots, including Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain, and Jack London, sets out to confront humankind's mysterious benefactors and learn the truth, innocent or evil, about the astonishing and legendary Riverworld.

1971

Larry Niven. Ringworld

A new place is being built, a world of huge dimensions, encompassing millions of miles, stronger than any planet before it. There is gravity, and with high walls and its proximity to the sun, a livable new planet that is three million times the area of the Earth can be formed. We can start again!

1970

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness

The story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender.

1969

John Brunner. Stand on Zanzibar

1968

Roger Zelazny. Lord of Light

Long after the death of Earth, a band of men on a colony planet has gained control of technology and has given itself immortality. There is only one who dares oppose them: Mahasamatman, Binder of Demons and Lord of Light.

1967

Robert A. Heinlein. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

The tale of a Lunar revolution in 2076. Led by a one-armed computer technician, a radical blonde bombshell, an aging academic, and a sentient, all-knowing computer, the revolution's proclamation--"TANSTAAFL" (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)--remains a slogan of the libertarian movement today.

1966

Roger Zelazny. ...And Call Me Conrad (also called This Immortal)

1966

Frank Herbert. Dune

Set on the desert planet Arrakis begins the story of a great family's plan to bring to fruition an unattainable dream.

1965

Fritz Leiber. The Wanderer

1964

Clifford D. Simak. Way Station

A novel of a simple farmer who bridged the gap between humanity and the stars.

1963

Philip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castle

It's America in 1962--where slavery is legal and the few surviving Jews hide anxiously under assumed names. All because some twenty years earlier America lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

1962

Robert A. Heinlein. Stranger in a Strange Land

A Mars-born earthling arrives on this planet for the first time as an adult, and the sensation he creates teaches Earth some unforgettable lessons.

1961

Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz

In the Utah desert, Brother Francis of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: the relics of the martyr Isaac Leibowitz himself, including the blessed blueprint and the sacred shopping list. They may provide a bright ray of hope in a terrifying age of darkness, a time of ignorance and genetic monsters that are the unholy aftermath of the Flame Deluge. But as the spellbinding mystery at the core of this extraordinary novel unfolds, it is the search itself--for meaning, for truth, for love--that offers hope to a humanity teetering on the edge of an abyss.

1960

Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers

A recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the universe--and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.

1959

James Blish. A Case of Conscience

Father Ruiz-Sanchez was a dedicated man--a priest who was also a scientist, and a scientist who was also a human being. He found no insoluble conflicts in his beliefs or his ethics until he was sent to Lithia. Father Ruiz-Sanchez was then torn in a struggle between the teachings of his faith, the teachings of his science, and the inner promptings of his humanity. There was only one solution. He had to accept an ancient and unforgivable heresy--and in accepting that heresy, he risked the futures of both worlds!

1958

Fritz Leiber. The Big Time

Doctors, entertainers, and wounded soldiers find themselves treacherously trapped with an activated atomic bomb inside the Place, a room existing outside of space-time.

1956

Robert A. Heinlein. Double Star

One minute, down and out actor Lorenzo Smythe was -- as usual -- in a bar, drinking away his troubles as he watched his career go down the tubes. Then a space pilot bought him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knew, he was shanghaied to Mars.

1955

Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. They’d Rather Be Right

1954

No awards given

1953

Alfred Bester. The Demolished Man

1951 (Awarded in 2001)

Robert Heinlein. Farmer in the Sky

1946 (Awarded in 1996)

Isaac Asimov. The Mule