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!

The Long Lists for this year’s BSFA Awards are out, and provide much food for thought. We have a whole load of new categories this year, listed in a somewhat eccentric order on the official page (maybe that’s the constitutional order, I don’t know). As ever, I’ve run them through LibraryThing and Goodreads, to see how many people own each book on the former platform and have rated it on the latter; and I rank each section by the geometric average of the two ratings.

One thing I haven’t done this year is to look at the average ratings of each book on each system. This is simply because my time is limited; I’ve looked at around 200 books here, and am satisfied that the raw measure of penetration of the two systems gives a fair idea of how far they have percolated into the community and the wider public.

I didn’t look at Best Artwork, Best Short Fiction or Best Short Non-Fiction for this exercise; I assumed that none of the nominees in those categories would have been separately registered on LT or GR.

In the Best Audiobook category (strictly, Best Original Audio Fiction), there are 11 works on the longlist. Only one of them (The Downloaded, by Robert J. Sawyer) is owned by anyone of LibraryThing, and only two (The Downloaded, again, and The Dex Legacy by Emily Inkpen) have been rated by anyone on Goodreads. This is less than I would have expected; audiobook listeners are as assiduous about logging their consumption as are print or screen readers. I’m also disappointed not to see any of Big Finish’s output here; I can’t believe that I’m the only Big Finish fan who is also a BSFA voter (but I must admit that I myself did not actually get around to nominating).

The Best Fiction for Younger Readers long list has only 8 nominees, which is not very long. This is a bit surprising as that list has been reasonably well populated in the past. The 8 nominees, and the LT / GR rankings, are:

Title	Author	LT	GR
Spellbound	F.T. Lukens	177	5312
The Library of Broken Worlds	Alaya Dawn Johnson	60	134
A Song of Salvation	Alechia Dow	23	216
Mindbreaker	Kate Dylan	12	194
City of Vicious Night	Claire Winn	6	176
We Who Are Forged In Fire	Kate Murray	2	50
The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern	J Dianne Dotson	1	15
Vivi Conway and the Sword of Legend	Lizzie Huxley Jones	0	59

There’s obviously a strong leader here. Also, I am really puzzled as to how the last book on the list has managed to pick up as many as 59 Goodreads ratings, without a single LibraryThing user acquiring it. It also seems to be selling well enough on Amazon. It may be that the author has made a bit of a push on GR, but I’m not sure if it’s such a good platform for YA marketing.

There are 29 long-listees for Best Shorter Fiction (there are 30 works on the official long list itself, but one has been listed twice). Five of them have not been published in standalone format and so the comparison with LT/GR stats isn’t really fair, but I list them below for completeness.

Title	Author	LT	GR
The Scourge Between Stars	Ness Brown	130	2836
Rose/House	Arkady Martine	82	1366
And Put Away Childish Things	Adrian Tchakovsky	44	1068
Emergent Properties	Aimee Ogden	53	527
The Navigating Fox	Christopher Rowe	42	458
Hamlet – Prince of Robots	M. Darusha Wehm	18	144
The Iron Children	Rebecca Fraimow	12	79
Pluralities	Avi Silver	7	83
I am AI	Ai Jiang	3	161
The Midas Rain	Adam Roberts	5	51
A Necessary Chaos	Brent Lambert	6	34
The Book of Gaheris	Kari Sperring	15	10
To The Woman in the Pink Hat	LaToya Jordan	4	27
Europa	Allen Stroud	2	36
Miasma	Jess Hyslop	2	27
Telling the Bees	Emma Leadey	6	6
Broken Paradise	Eugen Bacon	3	5
Hero’s Choice	Merc Fenn Wolfmoor	2	6
Off Time Jive	A.Z. Louise	2	1
The Panharmonion Chronicles	Henry Chebaane	0	26
A Feast for Flies	Leigh Harlen	0	8
The Lies We Tell Ourselves	L K Kitney	0	6
Little Nothing	Dee Holloway	0	5
Where the God-Knives Tread	A.L. Goldfuss	1	0
Axiom of Dreams	Arula Ratnakar
Defective	Peter Watts
Land of The Awaiting Birth	Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & Joshua Uchenna Omenga.
The Window in the Forest	Seán Padraic Birnie
Undulation	Stephen Embleton

Again some strong leaders, one in particular, but the figures here are probably less meaningful than in the other categories because of the difference in place of publication.

There are 24 long-listees for Best Non-Fiction (Long).

Title	Author	LT	GR
A City on Mars	Kelly and Zach Weinersmith	160	1116
Wish I Was Here	M John Harrison	41	117
I Am the Law	Michael Molcher	12	109
We’re Falling Through Space	J. David Reed	2	83
Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy	Tanya Kirk and Matthew Sangster	13	6
Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror	Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan	7	11
The Weird Tales Boys	Stephen Jones	8	9
Selected Nonfiction 1962-2007 J.G.. Ballard	Editor Mark Blacklock	8	5
David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure in Television	Simon Guerrier	4	5
All These Worlds	Niall Harrison	4	4
A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller	Nina Allan, editor	2	6
Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures	Cosmopolitan Concerns	3	3
Writing the Future edited	Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst	4	2
Ex Marginalia: Essays on Writing Speculative Fiction by Persons of Color	Chinelo Onwualu	1	7
An Introduction to Fantasy	Matthew Sangster	2	2
Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction	Mingwei Song	1	1
The Expanse Expanded	Jamie Woodcock	1	1
Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea	Timothy S Miller	1	1
Destination Time Travel	Steve Nallon & Dick Fiddy	0	3
The Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature	Allen Stroud	0	1
Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy and Science Fiction	Francesca T Barbini	1	0
Blake’s 7 Production Diary Series A	Jonathan Helm	0	0
Corroding the Now: Poetry + Science|SF	Francis Gene Rowe, Stephen Mooney, Richard Parker	0	0
The Female Man: Eastercon talk	Farah Mendlesohn

Once again, a very clear leader, but it’s striking how little penetration a lot of these have had. One of them is a lecture, so not surprisingly it has no owners on LT or GR. One has nobody rating it on GR, two have no owners on LT, and two more draw a blank on both. I guess that most SF fans read much more fiction rather than critique; I know I do.

I also think it would be helpful to know to what extent the administration of the awards is kept separate from the BSFA Committee; the Hugos make an explicit statement on this.

I feel the most uncomfortable about the Best Collection category, which is new this year. There are 51 nominees and 14 of them, more than a quarter, have no LibraryThing owners at all; four of those have nobody rating them on Goodreads either.

Title	Author/Editor	LT	GR
Never Whistle at Night	Shane Hawk, Theodore C Van Alst Jr	236	4591
Hit Parade of Tears	Izumi Suzuki	60	888
Ten Planets	Yuri Herrera	46	550
No One Will Come Back For Us	Premee Mohamed	38	255
Drinking From Graveyard Wells	Yvette Ndlovu	20	159
Jewel Box	E. Lily Yu	17	135
New Suns 2	Nisi Shawl	29	72
The Inconsolables	Michael Wehunt	11	139
Multiverses: An Anthology of Alternate Realities	Preston Grassman	16	86
A Taste of Darkness	Various	6	160
Gunflower	Laura Jean McKay	10	75
Jackal, Jackal	Tobi Ogundiran	9	69
You Are My Sunshine	Octavia Cade	11	51
The Dead Man and Other Stories	Gene Wolf	19	27
The Wolfe at the Door	Gene Wolfe	13	34
Worlds Long Lost	Christopher Ruocchio	6	51
Promise	Christi Nogle	7	43
Best of British Science Fiction 2022	Donna Scott	19	15
The Skin Thief	Suzan Palumbo	4	50
The Shadow Galaxy	J Dianne Dotson	3	34
Caged Ocean Dub	Dare Segun Falowo	8	11
Read, Scream, Repeat	Jennifer Killick	1	71
Between Dystopias: The Road to Afropantheology	Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Joshua Uchenna Omenga	3	23
Like Smoke Like Light	Yukimi Ogawa	4	16
Strange Attractors	Jaine Fenn	10	4
Judge Dredd: The Darkest Judge (graphic novel – collection of linked strips)	Various	1	27
Luminescent Machinations	Rhiannon Rasmussen and dave ring	3	9
Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology	Justine Norton-Kerston	2	10
Rosalind’s Siblings: Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Scientists of Marginalized Genders	Bogi Takács	3	6
Embroidered Worlds	Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Olha Brylova, and Iryna Pasko	12	1
Eclectic Dreams: A Milford Anthology	Various	2	5
Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity Culture and Speculative Conjunctions	Khadijah Queen and Kiini Ibura Salaam	2	4
Writing the Future	Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst	4	2
Where Rivers Go To Die	Dilman Dila	1	5
Michael Butterworth – Complete Poems 1965-2020	Michael Butterworth	2	2
Rhapsody of the Spheres	Juliana Rew	2	2
Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology	Edited by Wole Talabi	2	1
Have You Seen the Moon Tonight? & Other Rumors	Jonathan Louis Duckworth	0	11
Best of World SF: Volume 3	Lavie Tidhar	0	6
Extracting Humanity	Stephen Oram	0	5
Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales	Phoebe Wagner	0	5
Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022	Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Eugen Bacon, Milton Davis	0	4
Twelve All in Dread: The Twelfth Witch and Other Stories	Juliana Rew	0	4
Wolves and Girls	Maria Haskins	0	4
Languages of Water	Editor, Eugen Bacon	0	3
Indie YA Bites	Various	0	2
Guerrilla Mural of A Siren Song	Ernest Hogan	0	1
Beyond Between	David Viner	0	0
Corroding the Now	Francis Gene-Rowe, Stephen Mooney and Richard Parker	0	0
Dark Stars: Sci-Fi Horror Drabbles	Eric Fomley	0	0
Simultaneous Times Vol.3	Jean-Paul L. Garnier	0	0

I don’t really know how useful a long-list of such length can be, when it includes so many candidates who have little traction. I appreciate that awards can call attention to otherwise overlooked work, but a) I’m not convinced that an award decided by popular vote, as the BSFA and Hugo Awards are, is the best vehicle for doing that and b) this is best done with a short list, not a long list!

Also a little surprised to note a couple of crossovers with Best Collection, but maybe the shortlisting process will sort that out.

Finally, Best Novel. This long list is very long, at 65 nominees. Only two have slipped past LibraryThing users, and all of them have been rated by at least a couple of Goodreads users. So it’s relatively robust, though with a couple of crossovers with Best Shorter Fiction which again presumably the shortlisting will sort out. There’s certainly some attractive titles here, and indeed two books that I have actually read, unlike any of the other categories. 65 is shorter than last year’s 68, or the previous year’s 74; it’s still very long though.

Title	Author	LT	GR
Yellowface	R.F. Kuang	1571	306112
Starling House	Alix E Harrow	797	46020
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi	Shannon Chakraborty	969	32188
Starter Villain	John Scalzi	604	24312
Witch King	Martha Wells	786	12949
Translation State	Ann Leckie	385	7137
The Narrow Road Between Desires	Patrick Rothfuss	254	9817
Some Desperate Glory	Emily Tesh	412	5807
The Sinister Booksellers of Bath	Garth Nix	302	4476
The Future	Naomi Alderman	208	6112
Lords of Uncreation	Adrian Tchaikovsky	154	7437
Mimicking of Known Successes	Malka Older	260	4082
Bridge	Lauren Beukes	86	11231
Titanium Noir	Nick Harkaway	200	4319
Infinity Gate	M.R. Carey	184	3429
In Ascension	Martin MacInnes	155	3022
Dragonfall	L R Lam	183	2314
Sleep No More	Seanan McGuire	122	2525
The First Bright Thing	R. Dawson	151	2031
Malevolent Seven	Sebastien de Castell	102	2855
The Water Outlaws	S.L. Huang	168	1393
Julia	Sandra Newman	122	1717
Perilous Times	Thomas D Lee	142	1438
The Surviving Sky	Kritika H. Rao	111	1266
Season of Skulls	Charles Stross	101	1324
The Archive Undying	Emma Mieko Camden	126	1011
The Saint of Bright Doors	Vajra Chandrasekera	136	931
Rose/House	Arkady Martine	82	1366
Gods of the Wyrdwood	R J Barker	82	1035
The Death I Gave Him	Em X. Liu	68	1142
The Space Between Us	Doug Johnstone	40	1729
These Burning Stars	Bethany Jacobs	75	755
Orbital	Samantha Harvey	61	790
A Market of Dreams and Destiny	Trip Gailey	48	523
The Valkyrie	Kate Heartfield	41	595
Hopeland	Ian McDonald	68	319
More Perfect	Temi Oh	47	383
Descendant Machine	Gareth L. Powell	29	591
The Fractured Dark	Megan E. O’Keefe	26	644
Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon	Wole Talabi	49	329
The Circumference of the World	Lavie Tidhar	40	284
Frontier	Grace Curtis	13	835
Cahokia Jazz	Frances Spufford	46	226
The Infinite	Ada Hoffmann	20	232
The Master of Samar	Melissa Scott	23	164
Talonsister	Jen Williams	17	202
Airside	Christopher Priest	22	128
Conquest	Nina Allan	24	114
Hel’s Eight	Stark Holborn	17	148
The Green Man’s Quarry	Juliet McKenna	11	157
HIM	Geoff Ryman	18	89
A Woman of the Sword	Anna Smith Spark	14	114
Creation Node	Stephen Baxter	13	119
Warrior of the Wind	Suyi Davies Okungbowa	11	120
A Second Chance For Yesterday	R.A. Sinn	10	113
One	Eve Smith	3	212
Refractions	MV Melcer	7	89
Lamb	Matt Hill	3	73
Mother Sea	Lorraine Wilson	1	46
The Pollutant Speaks	Alex Cochran	3	11
All the Hollow of the Sky	Kit Whitfield	2	15
The Disinformation War	SJ Groenewegen	2	5
Inkbloom	E.D.E. Bell	3	2
Prompt Excursion	Lewis S Kingston	0	11
The Red Hairband	Catherine Greene	0	3

One of the two books I have read from this list is Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, which is way out in front of the field with more Goodreads ratings than the other 64 combined and a smaller but still substantial lead on LibraryThing. I really don’t think that Yellowface is SF; it’s very much rooted in the present day, with no innovations of technology or weird magical stuff (the narrator has a couple of visions of a dead friend, but puts them down to stress). It’s not even about SF; the narrator writes a fantasy novel, but it’s a less important thread of the plot. I think that the BSFA Awards have missed a trick by not nominating Kuang previously; I think that she’s a great writer; and I think that Yellowface is an excellent book. But if it does get shortlisted, I won’t be voting for it, because I think that the BSFA Award for Best Novel should go to a work of SF.

(The other book I’ve read is The Future, by Naomi Alderman, which I also enjoyed.)

Doing all of this has been displacement activity as I eagerly anticipate the release of the nomination stats from last year’s Chengdu Worldcon; however I have to go out shortly for the rest of the evening, so my usual analysis will be tomorrow at the earliest.