Locus Awards 1970s: A decade of winners

The 1970s was a transformative era for science fiction and fantasy, and the Locus Awards—voted on by the passionate readers of Locus magazine itself—captured something essential about what fans loved during this golden age. Unlike more established awards determined by judges alone, the Locus Awards represented a direct line to the genre’s heart: what ordinary readers, the truest arbiters of literary taste, actually wanted to celebrate. The decade saw the novella emerge as a particularly vital form, with Frederik Pohl’s “The Gold at the Starbow’s End,” Gene Wolfe’s densely layered “The Death of Doctor Island,” and Robert Silverberg’s haunting “Born with the Dead” all claiming recognition. These shorter works became laboratories for ambitious ideas—temporal paradoxes, metaphysical mysteries, and explorations of mortality—that proved the form could rival novels in depth and resonance.

By the late ’70s, the award’s scope had expanded to include fantasy categories, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s long-awaited The Silmarillion captured the 1978 Best Fantasy Novel award, a symbolic passing of the torch even as Tolkien entered his final years. Meanwhile, Spider Robinson and Jeanne Robinson’s “Stardance” and John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision” showed that the novella form was still thriving, capable of marrying hard science with genuine emotional depth. The breadth of winners—from Michael Bishop’s lyrical “The Samurai and the Willows” to genre newcomers and established masters—reflected a decade when science fiction was becoming increasingly sophisticated, willing to ask darker questions and embrace literary ambition without abandoning the sense of wonder that drew readers to the genre in the first place.

Below, you’ll find the complete list of Locus Awards winners from this remarkable decade, a snapshot of what readers cherished when disco was fading and the Reagan era dawned.