These were the joint winners of what was then the Tiptree Award in 2015, a novella and a YA novel.

Second paragraph of third section of “The New Mother”:

All of these names are attempts to capture precisely how it is that babies are being made now in a way they have never been made before. Recall the old, familiar recipe: two cells, a sperm from a man and an egg from a woman, fuse into a single cell which grows into a baby. The sperm and the egg can fuse this way because they are, at a genetic level, different from all the other cells in the body. Every cell contains our complete genetic code, split up into 23 chromosomes. Most cells have two copies of each chromosome (one from mom, the other from dad) for a total of 46. This property of having two copies of every chromosome is called “diploidy.” Almost every cell in the human body is diploid. The lone exception are the gametes, the sperm and the egg. Gametes are “haploid”–they only have one copy of each chromosome. Being haploid is what allows two gametes to fuse into a single diploid cell with a new mix of chromosomes that will develop into a genetically distinct person. This is sexual reproduction, the way human beings have made more human beings from the beginning of the species until sometime in the last six years.

A near-future story in which parthenogenesis becomes possible. I read it when preparing Hugo nominations in 2016 and really liked it, and nominated it. It made the long list in the Best Novella category that year, in 12th place, but would have needed almost three times as many votes as it actually got to qualify.

Rereading it again eight years later, it remains a classic for me – the clash between state-imposed ideological control of fertility, and the demands of humanity and of human nature, are well delineated without thumping the reader over the head with the point. The fact that the story is set in near-contemporary Texas, where some of the worst bits of this dynamic have been playing out in real time since 2016, makes it even more effective now. You can read it here.

Easy Bechdel pass: the protagonist is in a lesbian relationship and she and her partner talk about everything, sometimes but rarely including men.

Lizard Radio is a YA novel by Pat Schmatz, an author I was otherwise unfamiliar with, and jointly won the Tiptree Award with “The New Mother”. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

My fingertips hit the reassuring shape.

There are a lot of dystopian YA novels around, and frankly I’m beginning to find them a bit formulaic, but this is a different matter with a sparkling and nervous energy about it. Kivali, the genderqueer protagonist, is sent to a re-education camp in a dystopian near future, and must negotiate quasi-parental relationships, friends and potential lovers, and the ever-present threat of “vaping”, which in this case means physically spontaneously evaporating, rather than any recreational vapour consumption. The protagonist’s vocabulary is just abit off-kilter and that keeps you as a reader on your toes. I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of this before, and well done to the Tiptree / Otherwise judges for picking it out of the field. You can get it here.

As well as these too, the Tiptree Honor List included four novels, two comic books, a TV series and four short stories. The only one of these that I remember having watched / read is “The Shape of my Name” by Nino Cipri, which I also nominated for the Hugos, though it did not even make the long list.

the Clarke Award that year went to Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikowsky, and the BSFA to The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard, with Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson on both lists and no crossover with the Tiptree long list. The Hugo went to The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and the Nebula to Uprooted by Naomi Novik. I think Children of Time is still my favourite, but Lizard Radio gives it a good run.

Next in this sequence is When the Moon was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore.