So, the BSFA Awards Long List is out – I make it 368 nominees across 9 categories, an average of almost 41. I’ve said it before, but I do wonder to what extent a ‘Long List’ of this length is useful for readers or voters. Of course I am pleased for my friends and for the writers who I admire who are on the Long List; but how much does it really mean? Being on the Long List means that 1 (one) BSFA member nominated you; not being on the Long List means that your friends, if any, in the BSFA ignored you.

I also wonder if the BSFA needs nine award categories, and if so, if it has the right ones. (Plus the tenth, juried, Translation category.) I did think that four or five was too few, back in the old days. This is the third year since the number of categories was almost doubled; it would be interesting to see which of the new awards actually has traction with voters, but I’m not aware that the voting numbers for any stage of the process have been made public.

We do know at least how many works are on each category’s long list. There is some variation, to put it mildly.

Best Fiction for Younger Readers – 17
Best Audio Fiction – 18
Best Non Fiction (Long) – 18
Best Short Non-Fiction – 28
Best Art Work – 37
Best Collection – 41
Best Shorter Fiction – 51
Best Short Fiction – 76
Best Novel – 82

While I’m on the topic of If I Ran The BSFA Awards, I find the ordering of the categories both weird and inconsistent. This week’s long-list announcement has them roughly in alphabetical order, with “Best Non Fiction (Long)” three places away from “Best Short Non-Fiction”, and Best Fiction for Younger Readers at the end. The BSFA website, however, lists the categories roughly in the order that they were created.

Long-list announcement order:	Order on the BSFA website:
Best Audio Fiction Best Artwork Best Collection Best Non-Fiction (Long) Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Short Non Fiction Best Shorter Fiction Best Fiction for Younger Readers	Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Shorter Fiction Best Artwork Best Short Non-Fiction Best Long Non-Fiction Best Fiction for Younger Readers Best Collection Best Original Audio Fiction

I think it would be clearer and more helpful for voters and commentators to group like with like, and to adopt something like the following canonical order for the BSFA award categories, with the announcement at the ceremony going through them in reverse:

Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Shorter Fiction	Fiction (traditional categories)
Best Collection Best Fiction for Younger Readers Best Original Audio Fiction	Fiction (newer categories)
Best Long Non-Fiction Best Short Non-Fiction Best Artwork	Non-fiction and art

The sequencing of the Hugo categories has been developed and honed over the decades, most recently changed by swapping the order of “Best Related Work” and “Best Graphic Story or Comic” in order to group all the fiction categories together.

Anyway. This main point of this post is the analysis of each category, in terms of how well the nominated works score among users of the main book-tracking sites. This isn’t a measure of quality; it’s not a strong predictor of the outcome of the second round voting either; but it is an indication of the extent to which nominees reflect wider popular taste.

I’m bringing in something new – as well as Goodreads and LibraryThing, I’m adding the number of reviewers from Storygraph, which is perhaps a bit more fannish than the other two. In general the Storygraph numbers are four or five times less than the Goodreads numbers, and ten or twenty times more than the LibraryThing numbers. It’s all useful data. (If you find this analysis useful at all.)

I found 158 of the nominees on all three systems, and another 34 on at least one of them. There are six which are presented as separately published works, but don’t have anyone rating them on Goodreads, logging them as owned on LibraryThing or reviewing them on Storygraph. They can all now describe themselves as BSFA long-listees, because one person voted for them.

At the top end of the scale, the most logged book on all three systems is the Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins, in the Best Fiction for Young Readers category. Next, but a very long way behind, is Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, in Best Novel. Third on Goodreads and LibraryThing is The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones, also in Best Novel; third on Storygraph is The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar, in Best Shorter Fiction.

Full numbers below.

Having complained about the ordering of the categories above, I’m going to list them here in reverse order of how many of the works were ranked on the three systems.

Best Artwork

This is easy, as none of the 37 nominated art works is listed separately in any of the systems. It’s also easy to go and look at the art individually from the BSFA longlist announcement. Pretty pictures! Go look!

Best Short Non-Fiction

Again, none of the 51 nominees has been published separately. One (I think) is a lecture, but the others are all available online. Go and read them! (Note that nominations include both a series of essays, and five individual essays from that series.)

Best Audio Fiction

One of the eighteen nominees is on all three systems. Another, unusually, has been logged by Storygraph users but not by users of the other two. (There is only one other nominee for whom this is the case.) The numbers for those two are:

Title	Author(s)	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
The Downloaded: Ghost in the Machine	Rob Sawyer	627	9	68
Star Trek: Khan	Kirsten Beyer & David Mack	0	0	12

Best Short Fiction

Two of the 76 nominees have been separately published, one with sufficient splash to make it to all three systems, the other logged in GR and LT but not SG by a couple of enthusiasts (raising my hand: one of them is me).

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
For A Limited Time Only	Peng Shepherd	3571	30	726
Salvage	Emily Tesh	2	2	0

Best Non-fiction (long)

Precisely half of the eighteen nominees in this category have been logged on all three systems, and another seven on at least one of them. The other two are academic monographs which have been published separately but don’t seem to have scored with the users of the websites.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age	Vauhini Vara	1,090	77	404
Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age 1952-1963	Ada Palmer	460	184	139
Spring, Summer, Asteroid Bird	Henry Lien	169	28	72
Exterminate / Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who	John Higgs	272	27	6
Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era	Adam Kotsko	24	10	7
Fantasy: A Short History	Adam Roberts	13	9	2
The Outspoken and the Incendiary: Interviews with Radical Speculative Fiction Writers	Terry Bisson	6	11	1
Writing the Magic: Essays on Crafting Fantasy Fiction	Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst (eds)	4	4	2
Castrovalva	Andrew Orton	4	5	1
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction	Paul Kincaid	6	5	0
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film	Payton McCarty-Simas	5	0	4
Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmsophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness	D Harlan Wilson	4	0	0
The Gospel of Gollum	Ivano Sassanelli	1	3	0
Russell Hoban: Faithful to the Strange	Graeme Wend-Walker	0	2	0
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-Imagine a Genre	Joy Sanchez-Taylor	0	1	0
Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature	Lesley Larkin	1	0	0
Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and The Lord of the Rings	Willow Wilson DiPasquale	0	0	0
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914	Kate Holterhoff	0	0	0

Best Fiction for Younger Readers

Fifteen of the seventeen nominees have been logged on all three systems, and the other two are both on one of the three. The top book in this category seems to have the strongest reach of any of the books mentioned in this post.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
Sunrise on the Reaping	Suzanne Collins	1,055,090	4,496	163,376
The Last Bookstore on Earth	Lily Braun-Arnold	7,164	277	2,244
They Bloom at Night	Trang Thanh Tran	4,984	181	2,264
The Poisoned King	Katherine Rundell	4,357	224	856
The Moor Witch	Jessica Khoury	7,708	68	509
Mistress of Bones	Maria Z. Medina	580	71	222
An Ocean Apart	Jill Tew	403	15	170
Secrets of the First School	T. L. Huchu	255	29	63
Climate of Chaos	Cassandra Newbould	253	24	70
Doctor Who: Lux	James Goss	63	22	12
The Fib	Pedro Iniguez	92	7	17
Doctor Who – The Robot Revolution	Una Mcormack	45	23	10
Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Causing Chaos	Louie Stowell	50	3	15
The Ghost Merchant (in the Colored Lens)	Rick Danforth	72	1	24
Into the Wild Magic	Michelle Knudsen	23	9	3
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel	J. Diane Dotson	3	0	0
Gilded Gear	Emma Whitehall	0	0	1

Best Shorter Fiction

I found 22 of the 51 nominees on all three systems, and another nine on at least one. One nominee appears to have been separately published but not logged by anyone. As noted above, there is a clear leader here.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
The River Has Roots	Amal El-Mohtar	37,246	599	15,571
Murder by Memory	Olivia Waite	11,202	315	4,083
Spread Me	Sarah Gailey	4,115	147	2,146
Volatile Memory	Seth Haddon	1,244	65	753
A Palace Near the Wind	Ai Jiang	893	56	452
Fate’s Bane	C.L. Clarke	740	27	535
Aerth	Deborah Tomkins	362	27	149
Orphan Planet	Madeehah Reza	178	9	14
No Such Thing as Duty	Lara Elena Donnelly	49	11	23
Doctor Who: The Well	Gareth L. Powell	53	20	10
Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle	Renan Bernardo	71	4	31
Redundancies and Potentials	Dominique Dickey	30	4	30
The Death of Mountains	Jordan Kurella	36	6	13
What a Fish Looks Like	Syr Hayati Beker	36	2	23
We Who Hunt Alexanders	Jason Sanford	38	3	11
The Legend Liminal	Ren Hutchings	29	4	10
The Iron Below Remembers	Sharang Biswas	26	9	4
One Last Game	T. A. Chan	23	2	15
The Nga’phandileh Whisperer	Eugen Bacon	12	2	6
Novic	Eugen Bacon	11	3	2
For the Road	Stark Holborn	18	2	1
The Carrying Capacity of Paradise	Deborah L Davitt	9	2	2
Casthen Gain	Essa Hansen	37	0	12
Brain Fruit	Stephen Oram	22	0	11
The History of the World	Simon Morden	13	5	0
No One to Hold the Distant Dead	K.L. Schroede	7	0	1
The Clarity of Ice	Carmelo Rafala	5	0	1
Cities Are Forests Waiting to Happen	Cecile Cristofari	3	2	0
Opi’s World	Geoff Nelder	2	0	0
Insurgents	Allen Stroud	1	0	0
Pioneers	Allen Stroud	1	0	0
Wanderer	Adedayo Adeniyi	0	0	0

Best Collection

30 of the 41 nominees for Best Collection are on all three systems, and another 9 are on at least one of them. I’m listing the other two as well, since they appear to have been separately published.

Title	Editor(s) / Author(s)	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
An Oral History of Atlantis	Ed Park	784	59	263
Portalmania	Debbie Urbanski	416	52	229
Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity	Lee Mandello (Editor)	582	39	208
Other Worlds	Andre Alexis	315	28	77
Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids	Leyna Krow	209	21	84
Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions	John Langan	196	22	60
Jamaica Ginger	Nalo Hopkinson	101	38	67
Make a Home of Me	Vanessa Santos	172	10	87
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories	Andre M. Carrington (ed)	66	35	39
One Message Remains	Premee Mohamed	48	16	24
Uncertain Sons and Other Stories	Thomas Ha (eds)	107	8	18
Letters From An Imaginary Country	Theodora Goss	41	18	15
Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine	Kristina Ten	52	5	19
Lesbians in Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before	JS Fields, Heather Tracy, William C Tracy (Editors)	16	11	8
Who Will You Save?	Gareth Powell	24	6	7
Monsters and Other Tales of Humanity	Carla E. Dash	15	4	7
Wolf’s Path	Joyce Chng	12	2	12
Blood in the Bricks	Neil Williamson	7	15	2
How To Get Rid Of Ants	Jesutomisin Ipinmoye	14	1	11
Dark Crescent	Lyndsey Croal	24	1	4
Call And Response: Stories of the Fantastic	Christopher Caldwell	7	2	6
Cyanide Constellations and Other Stories	Sara Tantlinger	14	1	3
Black Friday	Cheryl S. Ntumy	6	5	1
Hiding under the Leaves	Donna Scott (ed)	6	2	2
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within	Allen Stroud (Editor)	3	3	2
Different Times and Other Places	Juliet E McKenna	4	2	1
A Short History of the Future	Liam Hogan	6	1	1
The Voice of Blood	Gabriela Rábago Palafox	3	2	1
SF Caledonia Anthology One	Noel Chidwick	2	1	1
Black Hole Heart and Other Stories	K.A. Teryna (Alex Shwartzman Translator)	1	1	1
Portraits of Decay	Carson Winter	28	0	0
The Church of Divine Electricity	Emily Mitchell	9	0	1
Futures to Live By	Ana Sun	2	6	0
To Wonder and Starshine	Jendia Gammon	5	1	0
Make-Believe and Artifice	Rose Biggin	2	2	0
Maybe the Birds	A J Ashworth	4	0	0
Ab Terra 2024	Yen Ooi & Dawn Ostlund (Eds)	2	1	0
Vivid Worlds	Donna Scott (ed)	2	0	0
New Philippine Speculative Fiction 1	Dean Francis Alfar, Nikki Alfar (eds)	1	0	0
An Honor and a Privilege	Lindz McLeod (ed)	0	0	0
Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air	L. Timmel Duchamp	0	0	0

Best Novel

The big one. 76 of the 82 nominees are on all three of the systems, and all but one of the others features on at least one of them. As previously noted, Katabasis, which tops this category, has the second highest visibility of all the nominees in all categories. I am surprised to see a novel by Norman Spinrad, not exactly an obscure writer, ranking very low.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
Katabasis	R F Kuang	115,678	2,604	37,965
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter	Stephen Graham Jones	41,068	969	13,432
The Dream Hotel	Laila Lalami	33,883	511	8,942
The Everlasting	Alix E. Harrow	21,802	596	8,743
Death of the Author	Nnedi Okorafor	17,360	737	6,837
The Starving Saints	Caitlin Starling	13,344	364	6,991
What We Can Know	Ian McEwan	19,478	711	2,095
The Incandescant	Emily Tesh	9,620	463	4,408
The Antidote	Karen Russell	12,936	485	2,639
Stag Dance	Torrey Peters	9,366	265	4,559
Sky Daddy	Kate Folk	13,676	147	5,298
The Library at Hellebore	Cassandra Khaw	5,380	382	2,598
Under the Eye of the Big Bird	Hiromi Kawakami. Translated by Asa Yoneda	6,239	278	1,996
The Strange Case of Jane O	Karen Thompson Walker	9,893	178	1,907
Shroud	Adrian Tchaikovsky	8,540	292	1,345
Overgrowth	Mira Grant	3,811	250	1,782
Coffin Moon	Keith Rosson	6,044	158	1,428
The Isle in the Silver Sea	Tasha Suri	2,972	212	2,066
The Keeper of Magical Things	Julie Leong	2,930	138	1,307
Where the Axe is Buried	Ray Nayler	2,739	205	918
Sour Cherry	Natalia Theodoridou	2,793	101	1,092
The Fourth Consort	Edward Ashton	3,120	122	639
A Song of Legends Lost	M. H. Ayinde	1,403	207	731
Saltcrop	Yume Kitasei	2,022	130	764
Luminous	Silvia Park	2,162	125	687
The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses	Malka Older	1,402	120	659
Dengue Boy	Michel Nieve	2,074	73	712
Archive of Unknown Universes	Ruben Reyes Jr.	2,275	69	502
Slow Gods	Clare North	1,575	111	386
Ice	Jacek Dukaj	2,840	126	169
I Know How This Ends	Holly Smale	3,413	33	421
Local Heavens	K.M. Fajardo	1,091	64	544
We Lived On The Horizon	Erika Swyler	910	92	321
Helm	Sarah Hall	855	108	283
A Conventional Boy	Charles Stross	1,163	122	125
Esperance	Adam Oyebanji	809	69	203
Notes from a Regicide	Isaac Fellman	456	66	315
Brother Brontë	Fernando A Flores	688	60	219
Future’s Edge	Gareth L. Powell	850	61	149
Love and Other Paradoxes	Catriona Silvey	637	39	203
Pagans	James Alistair Henry	500	38	171
Futility	Nuzo Onoh	420	26	257
Awakened	Laura Elliott	464	30	183
This Brutal Moon	Bethany Jacobs	413	32	177
The Place of Shells	Mai Ishizawa	359	46	133
City of All Seasons	Aliya Whiteley and Oliver K. Langmead	339	39	157
The Adventures of Mary Darling	Pat Murphy	391	36	120
An Unbreakable World	Ren Hutchings	234	42	140
Sea Now	Eva Meijer Translated by Anne Thompson Melo	649	36	45
Halcyon Years	Alastair Reynolds	467	37	49
Firstborn of the Sun	Marvellous Michael Anson	232	29	117
The Unkillable Princess	Tarun Hunt	376	20	104
Red Sword	Bora Chung	244	20	121
Down in the Sea of Angels	Khan Wong	215	20	107
Some Body Like Me	Lucy Lapinska	156	16	80
The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl who Loved Death	Helen Marshall	90	15	39
Transmentation | Transience	Darkly Lem	72	22	24
Project Hanuman	Stewart Hotston	65	20	28
When There Are Wolves Again	E J Swift	109	11	27
The Cure	Eve Smith	201	2	31
The Green Man’s Holiday	Juliet E. McKenna	110	10	9
The Immeasurable Heaven	Casper Geon	49	17	10
Ragwort	Sam K. Horton	56	4	22
Forged for Destiny	Andrew Knighton	54	6	13
Bloodtide	Sophie Burnham	42	5	19
A Granite Silence	Nina Allan	54	7	10
Opposite World	Elizabeth Anne Martins	53	10	6
The Raven’s Court	Helen Glynn Jones	80	2	19
The Shape of Monsters	L Hellisen	141	1	15
The Salt Oracle	Lorraine Wilson	27	3	15
Doomflower	Jendia Gammon	34	5	6
The Essence	Dave Hutchinson	46	11	1
The Bone River	Nkereuwem Albert	18	1	10
Atacama	Jendia Gammon	15	2	4
Animals	Geoff Ryman	6	6	1
Anderson Versus Death	Anna Smith Spark	8	1	2
We Are Not Anonymous	Stephen Oram	33	0	15
The Measurement Problem	David Whitmarsh	9	1	0
Cage of Stars	Frasier Armitage	6	3	0
Welcome to Your Dreamtime	Norman Spinrad	3	2	0
Edge of Oblivion	Kirk Weddell	3	0	0
Spire, Surge, and Sea	Stewart C Baker	0	0	0