Author: Shana

BSFA Award Nominations: Short Story Percentages

I dissembled slightly when I wrote that more people nominated for the best novel category than any other. It’s true – but it’s not true by very many.

This year, 40 BSFA members nominated a total of 97 short stories for the BSFA Award for Short Story, or a little less than 7% of the BSFA’s members. This is the category with the greatest number of nominations per nominator on average. In no other category did nominators average over two nominations per person.

In a fit of impressive serendipity, the same number of short stories were nominated this year as last, 97 both times. The attentive may notice I said the same thing about the novel category, 60 and 60 nominated novels. Lest you think I am mixing my list of statistics, I swear there is major divergence in the non-fiction category coming up. The year before last, 88 short stories were nominated.

The number of short stories being nominated certainly shows great health – if lack of an initial consensus – in the field. The number of people reading those short stories, however, or at least the number of short story readers bothering to nominate, is down from last year, more so than the few by which the novel category was down. Last year, 47 people nominated short stories for the award ballot; this year, only 40 of them did.

On the bright side, as far as the authors of the four short stories which made the shortlist are concerned, those stories did so under by far the most competitive circumstances. A mere 4.1% of the nominated short stories made it onto the ballot!

Those four short stories are all available online. In addition, they will be sent to BSFA members in the next mailing, so there are multiple ways to read them – including in their original publications – and consider voting on them. Both BSFA members and Illustrious (Eastercon 2011) members are eligible to vote for the BSFA awards.

BSFA Award Nominations: Novel Percentages

I don’t think you would be wholly surprised to learn that more BSFA members nominate novels for the BSFA award than any other category. For most multi-category awards, novels are the attention-getting category. They’re the units (other than film) in which the most socially-visible science fiction is advertised and sold.

This year, 43 BSFA members nominated a total of 60 books for the award shortlist. This is a smidgin down from last year when 47 members nominated for the category, but despite the four additional people last year, they nominated exactly the same number of books, 60, for the previous year’s shortlist! Both years were up from the awards given out in 2009, when only 26 different novels were nominated.

The BSFA currently has about 600 members, which means that about 7% of all members nominated one or more novels for the award. A gratuitously higher statistic is to say that one novel was nominated for every ten members, on average. Clearly, there’s room for growth – but equally, there are plenty of reasons to join the BSFA which have nothing to do with being able to nominate for the award. Keep in mind too that this is just the nomination phase I’m discussing here: plenty more people will be voting on the final ballot!

One advantage of Easter – and thus Eastercon – being later than usual is that, if you haven’t already, you have a little more time in which to read the five novels shortlisted from that list of sixty nominations before the ballot is due.

BSFA Award Short Story Booklet

So the really good news is that, if all goes according to current plan then, in addition to all the other good things which Niall lined up for Vector issue 265, BSFA members will also be receiving the BSFA Award Short Story booklet in the next mailing! It should be arriving a whole issue earlier than planned, a result of both the issue being delayed, and the short story authors all coming through wonderfully promptly with permissions.

The not-so-good news is that it’s just as well the booklet is done, as one of the nominees, Peter Watts, is now offline in the hospital for several weeks with a disturbingly science-fictional disease.

Vector 265 update

You probably already know the bad news: Vector 265, the Winter 2011 issue, is running late. There were crossed communication lines which led to this, and the issue is now back on track.

On the bright side, there is a major advantage to its lateness. It was due to go out in January, around the time the BSFA awards shortlists were announced. Since it’s going out in the next few weeks instead, there’s been time to include the BSFA awards shortlists and ballot. This means that subscribers who rely on the mailings to find out what’s going on with the awards will learn much sooner than they would have just which novels, short stories, works of non-fiction, and artworks are on the shortlist.

So some things are late, but they’ve made other things early.

(And – shhh – I’m 90% sure you’ll be getting still more extra material with this BSFA mailing than originally planned, making it even more worth the wait. I should be able to tell you more about it next week!)

The BSFA’s history in numbers

I was intending to tell you some interesting tidbits about this year’s BSFA Awards – but you’ll have to wait until I have one last piece of information: the approximate current number of BSFA members. I emailed away for the details earlier today, but here I was, sitting in front of a web browser with access to a search engine… which is how I came to be reading the eleventh issue of Peter Weston’s Prolapse fanzine, dated May 2008.

The fanzine features a write-up of one of the BSFA’s fiftieth anniversary events that year at Eastercon, organized by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer. What interested me most about the write-up, given what was on my mind, was the discussion of the BSFA’s membership history. I particularly appreciated Peter Weston’s graph of ’64 to ’78’s membership numbers. (p. 7) These were based on Greg Pickersgill’s work of compiling a history of membership numbers, beginning with a membership list published in Vector #2, from 69 members up to around 738 of them in 1980. By 2008, he estimated numbers were around 600.

I like having long-term data to play with, and between Greg Pickersgill’s (Unofficial) BSFA Archives and the Prolapse discussions, I’m feeling a little more orientated to the BSFA’s – and thus Vector‘s – development. If I use or abuse these numbers in the future, you’ll know where they came from.

February: Bold as Love

This month begins my chronological reading of the novels nominated as the best science fiction novels written by women in the last ten years. I invite you join me, starting with the first-published of the eleven books on the list, Gwyneth Jones‘ Bold as Love.

***

2001 was almost last week in the history of books, but a very long time ago indeed in the history of websites. That’s why I’m so impressed that the book-specific URL given in the introductory apparatus of Bold as Love is still going as a functional website.

The site has evolved along with the series, from an all-black version, to green with modulating rainbow-colored type, to animated falling leaves (lovely in concept, gawky in execution), to the more minimalist maroon with a rotating orb of leafery which the present version has retained for the last several years. That design evolution reflects the sheer distance which websites from 2001 have traveled to today.

I’m not telling you this because I’m particularly  prone to posting reviews of website design, but for two other reasons. The first is to think a bit about what the world, particularly the world of science fiction and fandom, was like in 2001. The second is to tell you that there is a copy of Bold as Love, available for free download there in PDF. The sequels are available too. You’ll miss out on the Anne Sudworth cover and the Bryan Talbot illustration of the major characters, but you’ll have the text.

***

Gwyneth Jones had been publishing fiction since at least 1973 and novels since 1977. By my counting, Bold as Love was her thirteenth novel. In 2001, she was Guest of Honour at Novacon, and won the Richard Evans Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction. She was also at A Celebration of British SF in Liverpool that year, a lively event, well-attended by authors and fans.

The cover of the 2002 edition of Bold as Love which I have proclaims it to have been “Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award”. More importantly, it went on to win the Clarke Award in 2002, showing that the reprint must have been designed in the gap between the announcement of the shortlist and the announcement of the winner! Bold as Love was one of three Clarke-shortlisted books by women published in 2001, the others being Justina Robson’s Mappa Mundi and Connie Willis’ Passage. (The Clarke Award for books published in 2000 was given out at 2001: A Space Odyssey Event, organized by Pat Cadigan at the Science Museum. At it, China Miéville won his first.)

Women authors of science fiction and fantasy did fairly well in 2001 in terms of prizes. Mary Gentle’s Ash won best novel in the BSFA Award, while Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. J.K. Rowling won the Hugo novel award for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

In other 2001 news, Dorothy Dunnett, Tove Jansson, Douglas Adams, and Poul Anderson passed away. In Britain, the food-and-mouth crisis began and the Eden Project opened. While there is all sorts to be said about the events of 9/11 and their consequences, what still strikes me most in terms of Britain in particular is that it is referred to as 9/11 on this side of the ocean – even though that would normally be the ninth of November.

***

Niall will be leading discussion of Bold as Love in the second half of February. Check back for his posts then!

P.S. You can hear the short story on which the novel was based in Dark Fiction Magazine‘s newest issue.

Reading Future Classics by Women

As I mentioned last week, one of my projects for this year is to read through the eleven books voted by Torque Control readers as the best science fiction novels written by women between 2001 and 2010. Hopefully, some of you will be joining me in this!

Each month, I will post a reminder at the beginning of the month, along with a bit of background discussion. In the second half of the month, I will host a discussion of the book here. I’ll post round-ups of reviews and discussion elsewhere of the novels too, whether recent or from previous years. Sometimes there will be contributions exploring a novel from other people, and I would certainly welcome others. (Niall has volunteered!)

There’s no great incentive to read this list in ranked order. I suspect some of the rankings are a very close thing, and the given order of the list is no authority for subjective quality. So instead, this will be a chronological project. I’ve gone with global chronological dates instead of their publication dates in the UK in particular. Life has yet to be published here, and some of us are occasionally prone to reading books on import instead of waiting for the possibility of local publication. Further, a major proportion of the poll participants were based outside of the UK, and so this country’s publication schedule does not necessarily affect the local availability of a given novel for them.

(It’s been an interesting challenge: I had no idea how hard it was going to be to figure out the month in which some of these books were published.)

So here’s the schedule:

February Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones
March The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon
April Natural History, by Justina Robson
May The Time-Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffennegger
June Maul, by Tricia Sullivan
July City of Pearl, by Karen Traviss
August Life, by Gwyneth Jones
September Farthing, by Jo Walton
October The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North, by Sarah Hall
November Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin
December Spirit, by Gwyneth Jones

2010 BSFA Awards Shortlists

The BSFA is pleased to announce the shortlisted nominees for the 2010 BSFA Awards.

The nominees are:

Best Novel

2010 BSFA Awards Best Novel Nominees

Paolo Bacigalupi – The Windup Girl (Orbit)
Lauren Beukes – Zoo City (Angry Robot)
Ken Macleod – The Restoration Game (Orbit)
Ian McDonald – The Dervish House (Gollancz)
Tricia Sullivan – Lightborn (Orbit)

Best Short Fiction

Nina Allan – ‘Flying in the Face of God’ – Interzone 227, TTA Press.
Aliette de Bodard – ‘The Shipmaker’– Interzone 231, TTA Press.
Peter Watts – ‘The Things’ – Clarkesworld 40
Neil Williamson – ‘Arrhythmia’ – Music for Another World, Mutation Press

Best Non-Fiction

Paul Kincaid – Blogging the Hugos: Decline, Big Other
Abigail Nussbaum – Review, With Both Feet in the Clouds, Asking the Wrong Questions Blogspot
Adam Roberts – Review, Wheel of Time, Punkadiddle
Francis Spufford – Red Plenty (Faber and Faber)
Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe – the Notes from Coode Street Podcast

Best Art

Andy Bigwood – cover for Conflicts (Newcon Press)
Charlie Harbour – cover for Fun With Rainbows by Gareth Owens (Immersion Press)
Dominic Harman – cover for The Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Gollancz)
Joey Hi-Fi – cover for Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
Ben Greene – ‘A Deafened Plea for Peace’, cover for Crossed Genres 21
Adam Tredowski – cover for Finch, by Jeff Vandermeer (Corvus)

The BSFA Awards Administrator will shortly make a voting form available for members of the BSFA and this year’s Eastercon, who will be able to send advance votes based on the above shortlists. Advance votes must be received by Monday 18th April. After this date, ballot boxes will be made available at Illustrious – the Eastercon Convention taking place at the Hilton Metropole in Birmingham. The ballots will close at Midday on Saturday April 23rd and the winners will be announced at a ceremony hosted that evening at the convention.

Congratulations to all of the nominees!

P.S. Voting details are here.

Looking ahead

It’s the hush before the ballot.

The nominations are in, and the BSFA Award Administrator is working, tabulating them.

It seems as good a time as any to introduce myself. As Niall has told you, I’m Shana Worthen, and I’m taking over from him as features editor at Vector. This also means that I’m joining the group blogging here at Torque Control.

In addition to updating you with the highlights of forthcoming Vectors and the details of BSFA events, I have two projects I’m intending to pursue.

The first is my own interest in becoming better-read in science fiction criticism. I will be writing about much of what I’m reading as I go. This should be useful both for knowing the field better, but also in the hopes that when next year’s BSFA awards roll around, I will have already read more of the possible non-fiction award nominations than I had this year. If it keeps the rest of you thinking about the non-fiction award along the way (and, indeed, the BSFA awards in general), so much the better.

The second project is a followup to Niall’s fantastic survey of the best science fiction novels written by women in the last ten years. I will be reading a book a month from that list over the course of the next eleven months, and hope that many of you will join me in this. Each month, I will be posting and collating discussion about each book here on Torque Control.

Look for more details on group-reading the top eleven books from the survey, including the reading schedule, in the coming week.