My BSFA votes, part 1: the shorter stuff

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Just to record my own BSFA votes this year (and must remember to actually cast my vote in time this time, I foolishly missed the deadline last year). I will do the shorter categories here, the ones where I have considered all of the shortlist works, and then will cover the actual books in another post tomorrow.

I’m not voting in the Best Audio Fiction category. I’m not sufficiently in the habit of listening to audiobooks (other than Doctor Who) to get in the zone for this. One of the finalists is over six hours long.

For Best Art, I nominated just one of the finalists, Nick Wells’ magnificent tesselated covers for the twelve-book Fractal series of novels by Allen Stroud, and I am standing by that as my top preference. It doesn’t come across well in the awards booklet, unfortunately, so I hope that voters take the time to look at the original. None of the others is at all bad, I just happen to really like this work by Nick Wells. I rank the others as follows:

  1. “Highway Above the Clouds”, by Tiziano Zhou
  2. Cover of Dark Crescent, by Jenni Coutts
  3. “Mushroom Lady”, also by Jenni Coutts
  4. Cover of The Salt Oracle, by Sam Gretton
  5. Cover of The River Has Roots, by Spencer Fuller

(Update: I am glad to say that the Fractal covers won.)

Best Collection, Best Non-Fiction (Long) and Best Novel can wait until tomorrow, though once again I register my confusion at the ordering of the award categories.

Just one of my nominees for Best Short Fiction made it to the ballot, “The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends“, by Eugenia Trantafyllou. I don’t think I had read any of the other four nominees during the long-listing phase, but I still rate this one higher. In tomorrow’s post I am going to be complaining about finalists which are insufficiently sfnal; this story is not perhaps sfnal per se, but it’s about the enjoyment of reading in the genre, and fannishness and friendship. It gets my top vote.

  1. “Of Seagrass Fins and Slippery Fingers” by A.J. Van Belle, is a lyrically told story of loss, though I was not sure that I understood the ending.
  2. “25 Peppercorns“, by Emma Burnett, is a vividly told parable of eating disorders down the generations.
  3. “Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike“, by E.M. Faulds, is a parable of body dysphoria in Scotland.
  4. “One Step at a Time“, by Rick Danforth, annoyed me with untidy punctuation and an untidy ending.

(Update: the winner was “Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike”.)

Also, second paragraphs of third sections (or third paragraphs if there didn’t seem to be sections):

  1. Man, this was a bit of a drag. It feels like very little progress was made. The book starts with a flashback where we left off. Alavira and Melitini find out they are not only sisters but also royals! They have to fight each other to the death for the Kingdom of Serenopol somehow? Their parents, the King and the Queen, follow the VERY ancient tradition of the land which says that the only worthy heir to the throne is the one who survives its siblings. It goes all the way back to the creation of Serenopol by a Dog King who survived his other siblings and ascended to the throne. Overall, pretty awesome world-stuff. (Also Dog King? Like an actual dog? I hope we get the lore eventually!)
  2. The bear eyes me askance with its piece of bottle. I think the bear stands for wisdom. I think that’s why I made it. I imagine it telling me to go back to the water and try again. (Third para, doesn’t appear to have sections)
  3. The smells were rich and full, and her mother took long breaths in through her nose, inhaling it all, then gulping seltzer from a tall glass near the sink. Miriam could barely wait for her birthday meal to be served. She hopped around the kitchen, getting in the way and sneaking bits from this or that whenever her mother took a drink.
  4. Me. It was my idea. I worked on the HR systems as part of my support duties. I’d Slack-messaged Jen, who’d mentioned it to Nestor, who’d told Matt to go get a cake and a card from the supermarket while you were out.
  5. Electric had long ago replaced the diesel behemoths of her childhood, but percussive maintenance had stood the test of time. (Third para, doesn’t appear to have sections)

None of the four works I nominated for Best Non-Fiction (Short) made it to the ballot, but I also mentioned three others that had impressed me and two of them did make it. My only reason then for not nominating Paul March-Russell’s review of E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again was that I had not yet read the book. I have now read the book (more on that tomorrow) and the essay really adds to my enjoyment of one of the classic novels of 2025, so it’s getting my top vote.

  1. My second preference goes to another Strange Horizons piece, “Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self in Other“, by Eugen Bacon, looking at self-perception as informed by sfnal literature.
  2. “When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident“, by Grigory Lukin, is about an important event which I have also written about at length, but I am uncomfortable about rewarding last year’s controversies with this year’s prizes.
  3. “Comparing Colonialisms in Dan Simmons’ The Terror and its AMC Adaptation“, by Fiona Moore, depended somewhat on the reader being familiar with the Simmons book and the TV series, and I am not.
  4. “The Legacy of Discworld” by Rick Danforth is enthusiastic but doesn’t say anything especially new.

(Update: the winner was “Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self in Other”.)

Again, second paragraphs of third sections (or third paragraphs if there didn’t seem to be sections):

  1. One other aspect of the novel [When There Are Wolves Again] also echoes The Citadel, and that is Swift’s cultural context. Of the many dystopias and apocalypses that featured in British writing of the 1930s, Gollancz published its fair share, including Francis Stuart’s Pigeon Irish (1932), Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), Andrew Marvell’s Minimum Man (1938), and R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939). In the same year Cronin’s novel appeared alone, Gollancz also published Katherine Burdekin’s fascist dystopia, Swastika Night (Burdekin wrote it under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine), as well as the first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Although such novels often presented anti-fascist, pre-apocalyptic warnings, they also amplified the gathering threats of war, genocide, dictatorship, and immiseration. Even the more optimistic works of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), portrayed war, disease, and famine as drivers for the future course of history. Although a convincing case has been made for the speculative fiction of the 1930s as a political mode that, as Terry Castle puts it in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), “dismantles the real … in a search for the not-yet-real,” the slew of such texts also contributed to a structure of melancholic feeling best summed up in Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal (1939).
  2. In my article ‘The Rise of Black Speculative Fiction’ published in Aurealis #129, I share how, as an African Australian, I grappled with matters of identity—until I fell into writing black speculative fiction, which brought me out of the closet.
  3. The cornerstone of this annual gathering is the Hugo awards ceremony. During the days leading up to the big event, the convention attendees engage in quiet discussions about the nominees. They wish their favourite authors the best of luck. They recommend the finalist books and art to all their friends.
  4. In 2018, drawing partly on the renewed interest in the Franklin Expedition in the wake of the rediscovery of its vessels and partly on contemporary interest in fiction exploring colonialism and the environment, the television company AMC produced a ten-part series based on the novel and largely following its text as outlined above, but differing from it in certain aspects of interpretation, character, and conclusions, particularly regarding the characterisation and fate of the Tuunbaq, Crozier and Silna.
  5. One well-intended curse that has followed many comedic fantasy authors has been to be christened with the moniker “The Next Terry Pratchett.” While intended to help the new author, I feel like this has been a stone around their neck due to heightened expectations.  

As with most of the other categories, I found it pretty easy to choose my top spot for Best Shorter Fiction, though I would add that all of the stories here are good. Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces. It also has more owners on Goodreads, on LibraryThing and on StoryGraph than all of the other shortlisted books in all other categories combined (apart from Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping) – massively more so on GR and SG.

  1. “Descent“, by Wole Talabi, about an expedition that goes wrong in the African-inspired Sauútiverse.
  2. “The Apologists“, by Tade Thompson, a murder investigation that turns into existential horror for the human race.
  3. Cities are Forests Waiting to Happen, by Cécile Cristofari, exploring ecological collapse in Canada before and after.
  4. “The Art of Time Travel“, by Teika Marija Smith, oddly enough about art and time travel (and loss).

(Update: the winner was “The Apologists”.)

Second paragraphs of third sections / chapters:

  1. When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance—that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it. Folk said that when they sang together, you could feel grammar in the air. If they sang a stormy sky, the day clouded over. If they sang adventure, blood rose to the boil. If they sang a sweet sadness, everything looked a little silver from the corners of the eyes.
  2. And I dream of my mother.
  3. She arrives at an office block in Central London with a shiny brass plate announcing the names of the Coroner’s List pathologists, qualified and approved by His Majesty’s Government. She spots a name, DR ROBERT TALBOT, MBBS, FRCPath.
  4. Footsteps behind her break the quiet, and her focus. She glances back. Catherine walks briskly towards her, beaming and waving a piece of paper. Rossana smiles. For the first time in a while, standing on the deck of a ship and attuning herself to a new environment, part of her feels at home; and though Catherine grew up on a different continent, she feels that the two of them share a bond that bypasses cultural distance. Ragazze della città e del mare, as they say back home; min el-bahr wa-l-medina – women of the comms centres, the two of them, grown between the worlds of humans and whales.
  5. Charles had snorted, said it sounded as if her plan had been taken straight from a B-movie.

We ordinary voters don’t get to vote on Best Translated Short Fiction (and I fully support that), but I would still call your attention to “Still Water” (original title 止水, “Zhǐ shuǐ”) by Zhang Ran (张冉), which I thought was excellent. The second paragraph of its third section is:

You gradually stretch your fingers and forearms, like a young stork spreading its wings against the wind.

(I don’t have access to the original Chinese text.)

More tomorrow, including also the final category, Best Fiction for Younger Readers.