Annal:2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Gaylactic Spectrum Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 Spectrum winner
- 2003 Nebula nominee
- Score: 16.54
Jeanne Duval, the ginger-colored entertainer, is descended from African slaves and white sailors. It is twilight, and she argues with her lover Charles Baudelaire in his Paris apartment. Ginger is hot in its roots with a beautiful, lush red flower above. And ginger has a bite as she does…
Mer, plantation slave and doctor, has healing hands though her spirit is sickened. She both hungers for and dreads liberation, and longs for the gods to take her home. My wishes can’t fly freely. They’re rooted to the ground like me, who eats salt.
Thais, a beauty from…
Hidden Warrior: Book 2 of Tamir Trilogy
- 2004 Spectrum shortlist
- Score: 6.54
As the orphaned nephew of the king, trusted companion to his cousin, and second heir to the throne of Skala, Prince Tobin’s future is clear. But not as clear as the spring in which a hill witch shows him his true face—and his secret destiny….
Now Tobin carries a burden he cannot share with even his closest friend, Ki, his squire. He is to rule—not as he is but as he was born: a woman. Given the shape of a boy by dark magic, Tobin is the last hope of the people of Illior—those who desperately seek a return to the old ways, when Skala was ruled by a line of…
Hybrids: Book 3 of The Neanderthal Parallax
- 2004 Spectrum shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Neanderthal Ponter Boddit and his Homo sapien lover, geneticist Mary Vaughan, are torn between two worlds, struggling to find a way to make their star-crossed relationship work. Aided by banned Neanderthal technology, they plan to conceive the first hybrid child, a symbol of hope for the joining of their two versions of reality.
But after an experiment shows that Mary’s religious faith—something completely absent in Neanderthals—is a quirk of the neurological wiring of Homo sapiens’ brains, Ponter and Mary must decide whether their child should be predisposed to atheism or belief. Meanwhile, as Mary’s Earth is dealing with a collapse of its planetary magnetic field, her boss, the enigmatic Jock Krieger, has turned envious eyes on the unspoiled Eden that is the Neanderthal world…
Lust: Four Letters. Infinite Possibilities.
- 2004 Spectrum shortlist
- Score: 6.54
What if you could have sex with anyone in the world?
The ultimate fantasy? Or a nightmare of self-discovery? Michael Blasco, a young scientist investigating what happens to the brain during the process of learning, suddenly finds himself on the other end of experimentation. On the way home from his lab one night he runs into Tony, a fitness instructor from his gym who he harbors a crush for, on the same platform waiting for the subway. When Michael imagines Tony naked, a pleasant fantasy to spice up a dull journey home, an extraordinary thing happens: Tony…
- 2004 Prometheus finalist
- 2004 Spectrum shortlist
- 2003 Philip K Dick nominee
- Score: 18.54
From a stunning new voice in hard science fiction comes the thrilling story of one woman’s quest to wrest truth from chaos, love from violence, and reality from illusion in a post-human universe of emergent AIs, genetic constructs, and illegal wetware…
SPIN STATE
UN Peacekeeper Major Catherine Li has made thirty-seven faster-than-light jumps in her lifetime—and has probably forgotten more than most people remember. But that’s what backup hard drives are for. And Li should know; she’s been hacking her memory for fifteen years in order to pass as human. But…
- 2004 Spectrum shortlist
- Score: 6.54
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…
- 2004 Spectrum shortlist
- Score: 6.54
The third novel in Steven Harper’s critically-acclaimed science fiction saga continues… The telepathic communications net, known as “The Dream,” has been shattered. And the majority of the Silent who used it are unable to reenter. But Kendi Weaver has more pressing concerns: finding the family that slavers tore from him more than a decade before…
Troll: A Love Story
- 2004 Spectrum shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Everyone has their rough nights, but things have clearly taken a turn for the surreal when Angel, a young photographer, finds a group of drunken teenagers in the courtyard of his apartment building, taunting a young troll. Trolls are known in Scandinavian mythology as wild beasts like the werewolf, but this troll is just a small, wounded creature. Angel decides to offer it a safe haven for the night. In the morning Angel thinks he dreamed it all. But he finds the troll alive, well, and drinking from his toilet.
What does one do with a troll in the city? Angel…
