The non-fiction shortlist for this year’s BSFA Awards is easily the most diverse of the shortlists, at least in terms of media. There’s a podcast, lots of blog posts, and a controversial nomination which may not even be non-fiction, depending on who is doing the nominating. What counts as non-fiction for the BSFA awards is up to the nominators, not the award administrator.

This year, every person who nominated in the non-fiction category had far more influence than anyone who only nominated in other categories. That’s because a total of eighteen people nominated a total of only sixteen candidates for the non-fiction shortlist. 3% of the BSFA’s membership nominated in this category.

Fewer people nominated in this category than the others – over twice as many people nominated for the best novel and for the best short story shortlists. The proportions, however, are not necessarily typical of the category. Last year, twenty-nine people nominated a total of forty-three works! Even the year before that, twenty-nine different works were nominated for the shortlist.

This is the only category for which there were fewer nominations than nominators which, superficially, may suggest a greater initial consensus on appropriate works than in other categories. There weren’t a whole lot of eligible non-fiction books published compared to some recent years, but there were plenty of other ways in which eligible non-fiction is produced, as is clear from the diversity of this year’s ballot.

To simplify a more complicated situation: Novels have publishers, bookstores, and reviewers to raise awareness of them. Short stories have magazines, online and off, to promote them. Artwork is promoted via novel covers, and thus bookstores, and magazines (which, although it’s a fraction of genre artwork being produced, at least gives it venues for publicity). Non-fiction doesn’t have so many built-in mechanisms for advertising. Collectively, I think, we consume a fair amount of it, but it requires a bit more effort to step back from reading and consider a work’s longer-term importance, and to track casually-read essays, reviews, and criticism for their nomination potential.

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.

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.

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.

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!)