2016-2017 Canopus Award Nominees

Press Release

The 2016-2017 Canopus Award Nominees have been announced.

2016-2017 Canopus Award Nominees

HOUSTON, April 11, 2017 — 100 Year Starship (100YSS) today named the finalists in the 2016-17 Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing.  The Canopus Award is a writing prize recognizing the finest fiction and non-fiction works that engage broad audiences and enhance the understanding excitement, and knowledge of interstellar space exploration and travel.

Winners will be announced and honored at the 100YSS Nexus on Saturday, August 12 in Los Angeles.

Award category finalists are as listed below.


“Previously Published Long-Form Fiction” (40,000 words or more):

• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager)
• Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Tor)
• Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (HarperCollins)
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Translated by Ken Liu (Tor)
• Arkwright by Allen Steele (Tor)

“Previously Published Short-Form Fiction” (between 1,000 and 40,000 words):

• “Slow Bullets” by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon Publications)
• “The Long Vigil” by Rhett C. Bruno (Perihelion)
• “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s Science Fiction)
• “Wavefronts of History and Memory” by David D. Levine (Analog Science Fiction and Fact)
• “The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred” by Greg Egan (Asimov’s Science Fiction / Subterranean Press)
• “Whom He May Devour” by Alex Shvartsman (Nautilus)
• “Love and Relativity” by Stewart C. Baker (Flash Fiction Online)

“Previously Published Nonfiction” (between 1,000 and 40,000 words):

• “A Terrestrial Planet Candidate in a Temperate Orbit Around Proxima” by Guillem Anglada-Escude, et al. (Nature)
• “A Science Critique of Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson” by Stephen Baxter, James Benford, and Joseph Miller (Centauri Dreams)
• Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet by Buzz Aldrin and Marianne Dyson (National Geographic)
• “Let’s All Go to Mars” by John Lanchester (London Review of Books)
• “Our Worldship Broke!” by Jim Beall (Baen Books)

“Original Fiction” (1,000-5,000 words):

• “The Quest for New Cydonia” by Russell Hemmell
• “Luminosity” by Adeene Denton
• “Mission” by Yoshifumi Kakiuchi
• “Envoy” by K. G. Jewell
• “Sleeping Westward” by Lorraine Schein

“Original Non-Fiction” (1,000-5,000 words):

• “Motivatingly Plausible Ways to Reach the Stars” by James Blodgett
• “Microbots—The Seeds of Interstellar Civilization” by Robert Buckalew
• “An Anthropic Program for the Long-Term Survival of Humankind” by Roberto Paura
• “Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering Earth” by James Fleming

“Original College Writing” (1,000-5,000 words):

• “A Kingdom of Ends” by Ryan Burgess
• “Ethics in Space” by Greg Becker