The BSFA Award short lists are out, and so my reading is set for the next month until voting finishes and the results are announced on (I guess) 30 March. Congrats to all who made the cut.

There are (almost) five categories out of ten where it’s possible to report on the presence of the shortlistees on the two main book-logging sites, Goodreads and LibraryThing, so below I am listing the number of people who have rated each book on Goodreads, the number who own each book on LibraryThing, and the average rating on both (as I did with the long lists). There are a few which have not yet been rated by anyone on LibraryThing. Within each category books are listed in descending order of the (geometric) average of raters/owners, and the categories themselves are listed similarly. Very high ratings sometimes reflect only that the book has so far been rated by just one or two enthusiasts!

Best Novel		Goodreads		LibraryThing
Title	Author	raters	rating	owners	rating
Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon	Wole Talabi	417	3.76	61	3.36
Descendant Machine	Gareth L. Powell	644	4.13	33	4.25
Airside	Christopher Priest	147	3.45	26	4.00
HIM	Geoff Ryman	149	3.83	23	3.67
The Green Man’s Quarry	Juliet McKenna	190	4.51	14	3.25

Of the 65 books on the Best Novel long list, these were respectively 40th, 38th, 47th, 51st and 50th in my previous ranking – none of them was in the top half of the table (the top book on my long-list table was not actually sf). This demonstrates only that BSFA second round voters are not very aligned with Goodreads and LibraryThing users.

Best Shorter Fiction		Goodreads		LibraryThing
Title	Author	raters	rating	owners	rating
And Put Away Childish Things	Adrian Tchakovsky	1202	3.82	49	3.90
I am AI	Ai Jiang	184	4.47	4	5.00
The Book of Gaheris	Kari Sperring	10	4.50	15	3.50
Europa	Allen Stroud	47	3.77	3	–
Broken Paradise	Eugen Bacon	5	4.60	3	–

Best Shorter Fiction is the only category which has the same book top out of five on both GR and LT. These were 3rd, 9th, 12th, 14th and 17th out of the 24 long-listees that I was able to rank by GR/LT ownership.

Best Fiction for Younger Readers		Goodreads		LibraryThing
Title	Author	raters	rating	owners	rating
The Library of Broken Worlds	Alaya Dawn Johnson	154	3.19	66	4.13
A Song of Salvation	Alechia Dow	232	3.96	28	3.00
Mindbreaker	Kate Dylan	216	4.20	15	5.00
We Who Are Forged In Fire	Kate Murray	55	4.18	2	–
The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern	J Dianne Dotson	17	4.59	1	–

The long list here for Best Fiction for Younger Readers was rather short, and these were 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th out of 8.

Best Collection		Goodreads		LibraryThing
Title	Author/Editor	raters	rating	owners	rating
No One Will Come Back For Us	Premee Mohamed	297	4.06	42	4.08
Best of World SF: Volume 3	Lavie Tidhar	9	4.33	75	3.58
The Best of British Science Fiction 2022	Donna Scott	18	3.94	19	4.25
Strange Attractors	Jaine Fenn	4	4.50	10	3.83
Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology	Wole Talabi	2	5.00	4	–

These were 4th, 39th, 18th, 25th and 37th of the 51 Best Collection long listees. When I looked at the long lists five weeks ago, Best of World SF: Volume 3 had not yet been rated by anyone on Goodreads and had only nine owners on LibraryThing; it has picked up considerably in the meantime. I was concerned about the rather long tail of the long list, but it doesn’t seem to have transferred to the short list.

Best Non-Fiction (Long)		Goodreads		LibraryThing
Title	Author	raters	rating	owners	rating
Spec Fic for Newbies	Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan	11	4.36	8	5.00
A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller	Nina Allan, editor	6	4.50	5	–
All These Worlds	Niall Harrison	4	4.00	5	–
Ex Marginalia: Essays on Writing Speculative Fiction by Persons of Color	Chinelo Onwualu	8	4.13	2	–
The Female Man: Eastercon talk	Farah Mendlesohn	(lecture on YouTube)

The books here were 6th, 11th, 10th and 14th of the 23 long-listees for Best Non-Fiction (Long) on GR and LT. The same book tops both systems, but one of the nominees is a talk rather than a publication, and the numbers are anyway thin, so the comparison is incomplete.

That’s a total of 7,528 pages; and there are five other categories as well. You have four weeks!