I did not get very far with the longer categories in the month between the shortlist announcement on 1 March and tonight’s close of voting. I confess that I was guided by the principle of value for money – the better the ratio of pages to dollars (I get my ebooks from Amazon.com), the more likely I was to read it. The consequence was that I did not read anything like the full ballot in any of these categories.
I list them below in the order of the categories on the ballot paper, which is not the order in the voter booklet (for which many thanks).
I covered Best Audio Fiction and Best Artwork yesterday.
Best Collection
My top vote goes to Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha, a great imaginative collection of twelve mostly fantasy stories about uncertainty and weirdness. The title piece, which ends the book, is the most memorable, with the protagonist carrying around his father’s zombified skull in his backpack for occasional strategic consultations. The second paragraph of the third story (“The Mub”) is:
Somewhere between the black slopes and the longest stretch of the cratered plains, I came across a traveler who I thought might be leaving the city and headed for the nested forests. I greeted him from a distance, just as the road curved around a copse of crooked and dry-skinned pines, but he would not look at me. It was only when we came close to one another that he muttered, “Don’t,” as though throwing the word heavily at my feet, then kept on his way without offering anything else. I’d thought it unkind and almost said something in response.
I also really enjoyed Who Will You Save?, the collection of short stories by Gareth Powell. I enjoyed it more than I expected frankly – 400 pages is quite a lot for a short fiction collection, and many of the stories tie into his other writing, not all of which I am familiar with. But there is a pleasing rejection of formula, or at the vey least some new twists on old stories. Some themes come up several times (teenage love; Bristol) but
The second paragraph of the third story (“Waiting for God Knows”) is:
“It’s an outrage,” Fenrir grumbled over our common channel.
Blood in the Bricks, edited by Neil Williamson, is an anthology of short stories with urban settings heading towards the horror end of the spectrum. The second paragraph of the third story (“Hagstone”, by Tracy Fahey) is:
The yelling is louder. I sigh, fold over the page of the sports section, and get to my feet, grunting out a whoosh of air as I do. Outside, the stark new shapes of industrial units tower over me. The digger is in front of the old half-demolished factory; a rotten tooth in the slick industrial estate. A boy jumps off the digger and runs towards me. Even though the sun beats steadily down, I shiver suddenly; a quick spasm. Goose walking over my grave.
Some of these were very good, including “Hagstone”. But some editorial pruning could have made for a leaner healthier collection; there were too many stories where the protagonist ends up as a human sacrifice to the city’s demons, like The Wicker Man except indoors. You can get Blood in the Bricks here.
I’m afraid that I didn’t get around to the other three nominees, so I will look silly if one of them wins. They are:
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. Andre M. Carrington
Black Friday, by Cheryl S. Nutty
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within, ed. Allen Stroud
(Update: the winner was Blood in the Bricks.)
Best Non-Fiction (Long)
To my surprise, I find that I am voting for Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts. The second paragraph of the third chapter is long, like most of them:
Two decades later English jurist Henry Sumner Maine, deeply influenced by Carlyle’s writing, published Ancient Law; Its Connection to the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861). His thesis is that society had shifted from human identity and being-in-the-world as defined by one’s status – one’s place in the social hierarchy, the great chain of being – to our social being and interactions as governed by contracts. In some ways, since contracts (unlike status) can be engaged voluntarily, Sumner sees this as an improvement. But there are losses too, and those losses are what Past and Present is about. Carlyle argues less like a lawyer and more like an artist, and he is certain that what has been lost is reverence, something no contract can bestow: ‘at public hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well; have sham-reverence, and what also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing’. The contrast Carlyle draws between industrialized irreverential contemporaneity and the vivid life of his imagined medieval world establishes precisely the contrast that the Tolkienian and Lewisian mode of fantasy would later valorize:
Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.¹
¹Carlyle, Past and Present, 2:1.
This was a really fun and informative read, taking the history of fantasy writing from the very beginning to almost the present day. I am very familiar with the historical structure of the genre, but it was very helpful to see it laid out in such a structured way. Roberts is effusive but also analytical of the writers he admires; he takes no prisoners with the others – on Robert Jordan, for instance:
Manifestly the stylistic inadequacies of these books, their vastness, derivate repetitiveness, do not discourage millions of fans from imaginatively playing in the imaginative theme parks they represent: a wish-fulfilment world more colourful than our own, furnishing an idealized nostalgic past that does not deprive us of present-day bourgeois creature-comforts, parlayed through honest-to-goodness melodramatic emotional intensity.
Often I found myself starting his coverage of one of the series or authors that I have not read thinking “Oh, must try that sometime” and then at the end of Roberts’ analysis thinking “Mmm, maybe not”. There are some annoying typos, and there is almost no coverage of recent writers in languages other than English, but even so I got much more from Fantasy: A Short History than I expected, and it can have my vote in return. You can get it here.
I also really enjoyed Colourfields by Paul Kincaid. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
It is clear that this volume [The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint] is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.
I stand by what I wrote when I read it a few months ago:
A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves
While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.
It’s a classic collection of pieces by one of our great critics, and deserves to be celebrated.
The only other book that I got hold of in this category was That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
During this period, witchcraft in the popular imaginary was a fractured signifier. It suggested both sexual empowerment and sexual enslavement; collectivist naturalism and individualistic consumerism; science and superstition; intellectual control and hedonistic abandon. But how could this character come to be a feminist icon, a misogynist boogeyman, a harbinger of religious decline, a sex symbol, a trend, and a joke all at once? Using a number of films from a wide range of different contexts (from studio blockbusters to auteurist art films to pornography to exploitation movies), Part I will trace the history of the countercultural witch film cycle, looking at this figure across her various contexts to suggest that in a decade haunted by questions of belief—in alternative communities and more equitable futures on the one hand and conservative religious and patriotic ideals on the other—the witchʼs evolution as a symbol of mysterious and arcane power reflects these shifting landscapes, particularly in the Womenʼs Liberation Movement. As Jon Lewis put it in his book, Road Trip to Nowhere,
[t]oday the movies from the counterculture era that continue to matter were in their day aberrations, movies that got made despite industry policy, movies made elsewhere (overseas, in the B-industry, by independent contractors working on some half-baked deal with a studio)—movies nobody with money and clout at the time gave half a chance at success.³
³ Lewis, 2022, 3.
I’m afraid I did not get very far; I am just not personally very interested in witch films, and while the author promises to make the connection with wider issues of society and gender, it depended too much on the bits I didn’t care so much about. I am sure that it is a perfectly fine read for those who care more about witch films than I do. You can get That Very Witch here.
The voter booklet (for which, again, many thanks) includes extracts from the other three finalists, enough to make me feel confident in ranking them as follows:
Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Colourfields, by Paul Kincaid
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre, ed. Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Writing the Magic, eds. Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914, by Kate Holterhoff
In my earlier write-up of the shortlists, I noted that the last of these was owned by precisely zero users of Goodreads, LibraryThing or StoryGraph, and is also by some way the most expensive shortlisted book in any category. The extract provided for BSFA voters shows only the most slender of links to science fiction or fantasy literature, and I really wonder why anyone would have nominated it for a BSFA Award, let alone enough voters to get it on the shortlist.
(Update: the winner was Colourfields.)
Best Novel
My sole vote goes to When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift. the second paragraph of the third chapter (a long ‘un) is:
After the lockdowns, my parents started using my grandparents for free childcare whenever they could get away with it, and I spent a lot more weekends at the house in Herne Hill. This arrangement suited everyone very well with the exception of Gran, who clearly recognized she was being taken for a ride but felt unable to voice her dissent. Grandad and I remained great pals. I could talk to him about anything, and as I got older I talked more and more, and he’d sit and listen. Truly he had the patience of a saint, for he’d smile and ask questions back, and if I finally ran out of things to say, he would think for a while and then dig out some obscure and fascinating fact, like how the sewers worked. As if I were a jay and he were giving me acorns to stash away. My brain has always been a buzzy place, sometimes an overwhelming place. When I was with Grandad, the buzz quietened. He understood that I needed to get things out, or my thoughts might become too much. When I think of Grandad now, I remember his face, and his gentle voice, but mostly it’s the feeling that’s stayed with me. The feeling of being safe.
This is a great novel about the coming ecological catastrophe and the resilience of society in Britain (though we assume that similar stuff is happening elsewhere), told intimately through the story of two women who barely know each other, with the effect of climate change on them and their families delicately portrayed. There is despair, but there is also hope. I feel it really catches the Zeitgeist, and it gets my vote. You can get When There Are Wolves Again here.
(Update: the winner was indeed When There Are Wolves Again.)
The only other book on the shortlist that I have read is A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
I have always found reassurance in repetition, an aid to thought. Old photographs of Aberdeen docks show a diverse, rambunctious ecosystem teeming with life, a maze of lumber yards and cattle sheds, warehouses and sawmills, a complex, symbiotic machinery geared towards the transport of timber and textiles and livestock, including people. The docks are still busy. Ferries leave for Orkney and Shetland throughout the day. Container ships call at Aberdeen regularly to unload their cargoes. Service vessels bound for the rigs are still based here in the harbour. And the old names are everywhere: Hall, Hood, Duthie and Russell, the great shipbuilding dynasties of Aberdeen’s past embedded in its present, in its street names and parks, carved permanently into the granite from which the town was raised.
It’s an fascinating and well-written book, about the murder of a child in Aberdeen in 1934; Nina Allan takes us in and out of the investigation and weaves different facets of herself into the story, including several breaking-the-fourth-wall moments. I’m giving it five stars on the various book sites.
But I’m not voting for it here, because I don’t think that it qualifies as science fiction or fantasy, and I think that the BSFA Awards should celebrate works of science fiction and fantasy. I know that yesterday I admitted that I am voting for a short story which is about fans of fantasy literature, rather than actually being fantastical itself; but A Granite Silence isn’t even addressing sf or fantasy, it’s a novel about a real life crime with no sfnal subject matter. Congratulations to the author on writing an excellent book, but it does not belong on this shortlist and isn’t getting my vote. Still, you can get A Granite Silence here, and probably should.
For various different reasons I did not read the other three finalists. They are:
Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
The Salt Oracle, by Lorraine Wilson
Edge of Oblivion, by Kirk Weddell
I covered Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction (Short), Best Shorter Fiction and Best Translated Short Fiction yesterday.
Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.
Not that anyone cares other than me, but James Goss has consistently been one of the best Doctor Who prose writers for years, and has never won an award as far as I know.
Once upon a time a long way from Croydon, a child was born, the fifty-fifth child to be born that year in the North Zone in BC-ville. The Nativity Robots decanted her from the amniotic chambers and, with huge smiles upon their chests, duly proclaimed her Sasha 55.
I did not read any of the other three shortlisted books in this category. They are:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Secrets of the First School, by T. L. Huchu
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel, by Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson
I did consider reading Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, which is far ahead of all the other shortlisted books in any category in terms of public recognition, but it’s 400 more pages and I suspected that there was other stuff on the ballot in other categories that I would enjoy more.
(Update: the winner was Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution.)
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:
(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.
“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):
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!)
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)
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.
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.
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.
“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):
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Descent“, by Wole Talabi, about an expedition that goes wrong in the African-inspired Sauútiverse.
“The Apologists“, by Tade Thompson, a murder investigation that turns into existential horror for the human race.
“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:
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.
And I dream of my mother.
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.
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.
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.
The BSFA shortlists are out! And my own nominations were not particularly in tune with those of other voters; I voted for two of the shortlisted books for younger readers, one each in the artwork, long-non-fiction, and short fiction categories, and none of the successful nominees in the novel, short non-fiction and shorter fiction categories (I didn’t vote in the rest). So it goes.
As usual, I’ll look at the ranking of the shortlisted books on Goodreads, LibraryThing and (new) StoryGraph, comparing also with my similar analysis of the long lists. I do this not to predict winners, but to assess the extent to which each book (of those which have been published individually as standalone volumes) is notable, to the extent that they have penetrated the market of GR / LT / SG readers.
(I have done this every year for a number of years; since the BSFA Award categories were increased in number, see 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
I’m taking this in descending order of the popularity of the top nominee in each category. None of the finalists in Best Audio Fiction, Best Artwork, Best Short Fiction or Best Non-Fiction (Short) has been logged on any of the three websites, which is not surprising. I note that the shortlist for Best Audio Fiction includes both a series and a single story from that series.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins
1,105,150
4,625
171,448
Secrets of the First School
T. L. Huchu
348
34
96
Doctor Who: Lux
James Goss
69
23
14
Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution
Una McCormack
49
23
11
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel
Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson
4
0
0
(ranks of the 17 books on the long list that I analysed: 1st, 8th, 10th, 12th, 16th)
Sunrise on the Reaping has more owners / raters / reviewers on the three websites than all of the other books in this post put together.
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel is one of several books that has made it to the shortlist despite not having a massive pickup on the ownership sites.
I am really puzzled by The Ghost Merchant, by Rick Danforth, which is also shortlisted in this category. When I did this analysis for the long-lists, I recorded that it had 72 ratings on Goodreads, 1 owner on LibraryThing and 24 reviewers on StoryGraph. Now I can’t find anyone listing it on any of the systems. It’s part of a larger publication, The Colored Lens, but it doesn’t have a lot of ratings either. It’s almost certainly my own mistake, but a strange one for me to have made.
Incidentally Rick Danforth has five short-listed works across four categories. Nobody else has more than three.
Best Shorter Fiction
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
The River Has Roots
Amal El-Mohtar
39,893
347
17,074
Cities are Forests Waiting to Happen
Cecile Cristofari
3
2
0
(ranks of the 32 long-listees that I analysed: 1st and 28th)
Only two of the five finalists have been published as standalone volumes, and only one of those has made much of an impact – but what an impact! Leaving aside Sunrise on the Reaping from the previous category, The River Has Roots has more owners / raters / reviewers on the three websites than all of the other books in this post put together.
Best Collection
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories
ed. Andre M. Carrington
84
40
54
Uncertain Sons and Other Stories
Thomas Ha
135
15
27
Who Will You Save?
Gareth . L Powell
28
6
8
Blood in the Bricks
Neil Williamson
7
16
2
Black Friday
Cheryl S. Ntumy
6
6
2
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within
ed. Allen Stroud
4
3
2
(ranks among the 41 long-listees that I analysed: 9th, 11th, 15th, 18th, 23rd, 25th)
A bit more of a spread here, with the winner on Goodreads coming in second on StoryGraph and third on LibraryThing. The top two books are in the same zone as the top two finalists for Best Novel.
Best Novel
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
When There Are Wolves Again
E. J. Swift
163
16
40
Project Hanuman
Stewart Hotston
78
23
31
A Granite Silence
Nina Allan
56
9
11
The Salt Oracle
Lorraine Wilson
36
3
19
Edge of Oblivion
Kirk Weddell
8
0
0
(ranks among the 82 novels on the long-list by my analysis: 59th, 58th, 66th, 70th, and 81st; all of the finalists were in the lowest third of the popularity rankings of the long-list.)
Again, there is a nominee on the ballot which has failed to make a mark with the users of two of the three book ownership sites.
Also I think that the Chair of the BSFA ought to recuse themselves from the awards, or perhaps even be barred by the rules. It is risky for them and for the awards. It’s not so long since the British Fantasy Award scandal. I am not in any way alleging misconduct, I am expressing an opinion about good practice. I expressed this view previously in private to the previous BSFA Chair, and now I am expressing it in public.
Best Non-fiction (long)
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Fantasy: A Short History
Adam Roberts
17
12
3
Writing the Magic
Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
8
5
2
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction
Paul Kincaid
6
5
0
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American With Film
Payton McCarty-Simas
5
0
4
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre
Joy Sanchez-Taylor
0
1
0
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914
Kate Holterhoff
0
0
0
(ranks among the 18 books on the long-list, by my analysis: 6th, 8th, 10th, 11th, 15th and joint last)
These are low numbers, and none of those who voted for Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914 seems to have logged it on Goodreads or LibraryThing, let alone StoryGraph, whose users seem uninterested in academic literary analysis in general.
I found Kindle prices on Amazon.com for sixteen of the 23 books listed in all the tables above (I didn’t check the three that I already own). Speculation and the Darwinian Method is the most expensive by far – Amazon gives me a price of $59 for the Kindle edition, more than twice the cost of any of the others. At 203 pages, that’s 3.5 pages per dollar. Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre is the second most expensive, both in absolute price and in value for length, $27 for 187 pages, 6.8 pages to the dollar.
At the other end of the scale, the Kindle edition of A Granite Silence by Nina Allan costs $4.52 for 350 pages, 74 pages per dollar, more than twenty times better value than Speculation and the Darwinian Method and ten times better than Dispelling Fantasies. (The median is 31 pages per dollar.)
Again, I am not suggesting malfeasance in any way. I have no reason to suppose that the rules have not been applied. But I think these numbers are a problem for the BSFA Awards. Do they, or should they, reflect the wider judgement of the BSFA membership and Eastercon community, let alone British SFF readers as a whole, about notability? Several of the books listed above objectively fail the notability test of measurable visibility on three popular library sites. If it becomes too easy to get your work on the ballot, the value of the award itself is diminished.
I don’t know to what extent the solution might be a change in marketing, a change to the rules or both. But that is a secondary question; if the BSFA does not think that there is in fact a problem, no action need be taken anyway.
One more data point. I am in London at the moment, for PicoCon today and work stuff on Monday. I popped into the Waterstone’s on Trafalgar Square yesterday, and could not find a single one of the books listed above on the shelves, not even the Suzanne Collins. It’s only one shop, of course, and the SFF section is not huge, and maybe they had all been bought after the announcement last week. I hope so.
As I’ve said before, I feel that the BSFA long-lists are a bit too long. But I’ve delved into several of the categories and would like to recommend a few of the nominees for the consideration of voters. The second round deadline is closing in – it is at midnight UK time next Thursday night, so you need to get moving (and this is a process where every single vote counts).
Best Art
None of the nominated art is bad, but I loved the audacity of Nick Wells’ tesselated covers for the twelve-book Fractal series of novels by Allen Stroud. It’s a lovely image anyway, but to split it across different books is very bold. Gets my vote, but I will nominate another three as well.
I liked the confidence of Stephen Embleton’s cover for The Nga’phandileh Whisperer, by Eugen Bacon. A lot of the nominated art has memorable human figures, but this one has something special for me.
Another humanoid figure, this time clearly a struggling robot, in Tithi Luadthong’s cover for Cage of Stars, by Frasier Armitage. I liked the use of colour and scale here.
Finally, what appears to be a standalone art piece, The Dust Library by Sylvain Sarrailh. I like the detail of the architecture, and the small human figures in the foreground. It carries also this narrative: “He told me he had all the books in the world. I took him for a strange poet, but I followed him for four days and three nights in the desert, curious to know the outcome of his fable. He hadn’t lied.”
Best Short Non-Fiction
Of the 28 nominees for Best Short Non-Fiction, I was able to read 26. One of the remaining two is a paywalled academic journal article, and the other was a Zoom panel discussion. The others are all available via the BSFA ballot list. A couple of them are only marginally about science fiction – the piece on the Dublin / New York Portal, for instance, tries to argue that it should be considered as an sfnal work, but unfortunately gets tangled up in its own jargon to really understand.
There are seven that I particularly want to draw your attention to, and I know which four are getting my vote. I liked, but will probably not vote for:
When People Giggle at Your Name, Or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident, by Grigory Lukin – as I said at the time, this was a pretty poor show by those responsible for the Hugo ceremony, and this piece illuminates the problem very eloquently, but I don’t generally think that this year’s awards should perpetuate last year’s controversies.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI, by Cory Doctorow – again a great piece of writing which I have recommended to curious policy-makers inside the EU bubble, but I’m not nominating it for the BSFA Award on the technical grounds that it is about technological fact rather than fiction.
Paul March Russell’s review of When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift – Again I think this is a fine piece of writing, and my reason for not voting for it (in this round anyway) is simply that I haven’t yet read the book that is the subject of the review, so I don’t feel that I am yet in a position to make a call about the nominated piece.
I will be voting for two pieces about Tolkien and two others. The two Tolkien pieces are:
“Should Galadriel have taken the Ring?”, by Nick Hubble – a short piece in which the writer points out the roots of Galadriel as Faery Queen, and the disruption that this archetypal figure brings to the Middle Earth legendarium. “I’ve finally concluded that Galadriel actually ‘passes the test’ by not allowing herself to get caught up in the false binary choice between refusing or accepting the ring. She doesn’t have to choose between being the ‘White Lady’ or the ‘Dark Queen’ because she is already both of those and all points between.”
“What Lies and Threats? History and Nationalist Myth-Making in The Lord of the Rings“, by Abby Roberts – looks at the uncomfortable nexus between Tolkien’s national myth-making project and political nationalist extremism. In general Tolkien is not a guilty party, but he does look at myth even within The Lord of the Rings. “Ultimately, in the last two decades of his life, Tolkien became increasingly critical of the mythopoeic elements in his work, which Fimi argues contributed to his failure to complete The Silmarillion. Tolkien’s self-reflection mirrors the general soul-searching that occurred among postwar myth scholars, as they reckoned with their discipline’s role in the Holocaust and World War II.”
The other two pieces that I am voting for are quite different.
“A Path Through the Landscape: My Own Route Through Science Fiction”, by Roseanna Pendlebury – in reaction to Paul Kicaid’s Colourfields, lists ten sf books that Roseanna Pendlebury found important in her own literary journey, but also four that everyone else likes and she didn’t. “I was a relatively uncritical reader as a child (as I think many children are), and this didn’t really begin to shift until my early twenties. I like to think five years of dissecting texts in other languages did something to the ol’ brain chemistry and made my thoughts turn those newly minted critical faculties back onto the things I read for pleasure in English.”
“Neither Girls Nor Friends: the Artificial Women in American Science Fiction”, by William Shaw – takes us from Helen O’Loy to Annie Bot, a very specific topic; and although I didn’t feel the journey was that far, persuaded me that it is at least interesting. “The artificial woman, in all of these stories, is caught in a contradiction; torn between her creators’ desires both for a perfected version of an exploited underclass, and for that perfection to still, ultimately, be subservient.”
I’m skipping this category because I haven’t yet listened to any of it. Big Finish fans failed to get organised this time around to get anything on the ballot.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Two of the best Doctor Who novelisations from last year are on this list, Lux by James Goss, who I consider the best Who writer currently active, and The Robot Revolution by Una McCormack, and I’m voting for both of them. I haven’t read any of the others yet. (Links to my own reviews.)
Best Collection
I haven’t read any of the nominees, so far.
Best Short Fiction
I gritted my teeth and read about 60 of the 76 nominees here. I personally nominated Salvage by Emily Tesh (link is to my review), published as a chapbook at Novacon, but I’m not going to vote for it because I suspect that very few others will have ad the chance to read it. Instead I will vote for:
“Missing Helen”, by Tia Tashiro, a well imagined story of what happens if your ex gets off with your clone. (I voted for Tashiro for the Astounding Award last year, and I reckon she’s a talent to watch.)
The only one of these that I have read is The Well by Gareth Powell (link is to my review), another Doctor Who novelisation that I am definitely voting for.
I have listed the above, not in the order that they are on the ballot but in what seems to me to be a much more sensible order – art, non-fiction, fiction.
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.
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 Shorter Fiction Best Short 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.
