Dartmouth College’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science has announced the book shortlist for its 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards, and that this year’s guest judge will be Sam J. Miller, author of Blackfish City, Destroy All Monsters, and the forthcoming The Blade Between.
The awards were first established in 2017, and prior winners include Juan Martinez for Best Worst American, Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, Peng Shepherd, The Book of M, and others. The winner of the award earns a $5,000 prize during a panel discussion at Dartmouth College.
The award is designed to honor speculative fiction books and plays that act “as gadfly for the good, provocateur and satirist when the sciences overreach, but also far-seeing prophets of scientific potential.” Neukom Institute director Dan Rockmore says that “it’s also an important time. The works chosen for the 2020 Neukom shortlist are insightful, provocative and may even guide our thinking as we experience the challenges that beset the world today.”
This year’s finalists are:
Debut Category
- Cold Storage, David Koepp (Ecco, 2019)
- The Crying Machine, Greg Chivers (HarperVoyager, 2019)
- The Imaginary Corpse, Tyler Hayes (Angry Robot, 2019)
- Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019)
- The Lesson, Cadwell Turnbull (Blackstone Publishing, 2019)
- Today I Am Carey, Martin L. Shoemaker (Baen Books, 2019)
- We Set the Dark on Fire, Tehlor Kay Mejia (Katherine Tegen Books, 2019)
Open Category
- A Song for a New Day, Sarah Pinsker (Berkley, 2019)
- And Go Like This, John Crowley (Small Beer Press, 2019)
- The Archive of Alternate Endings, Lindsey Drager (Dzanc Books, 2019)
- Dead Astronauts, Jeff VanderMeer (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019)
- The Divers’ Game, Jesse Ball (Ecco, 2019)
- Exhalation, Ted Chiang (Knopf, 2019)
- Naamah, Sarah Blake (Riverhead Books, 2020)
- Pigs, Johanna Stoberock (Red Hen Press, 2019)
- Tears of the Trufflepig, Fernando A. Flores (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019)
- War Girls, Tochi Onyebuchi (Razorbill, 2019)
- Zero Bomb, M. T. Hill (Titan Books, 2019)
