All Quiet on the Horizon

Chaos Horizon has been dark for a while and is likely to continue to be so. The Hugos just got awarded, and several people have reached out to me to make sure everything is fine on my end. Things are absolutely great for me; I got that dreaded promotion at work, with a a huge pile of new duties and responsibilities. That’s left me with little time for the kind of intensive writing and research that Chaos Horizon took.

The Hugos have also changed; new EPH voting rules and a shifting Hugo demographic mean that data from past years is not that relevant for modelling future Best Novel awards. We need at least a few more years of EPH data for Chaos Horizon to make any interesting predictions, and we’ll need to see who will win the Hugo in a year where Jemisin hasn’t published a novel.

Long and short, expect things to be quiet over here for the foreseeable future. Chaos Horizon was a lot of fun to work on, and I hope to get back to crunching Hugo numbers someday when I’m not as busy. Thanks to everyone who supported the blog and keep on reading SFF!

2016 Locus Recommended Reading List

Locus has put up their recommended reading list:

NOVELS – SCIENCE FICTION
Company Town, Madeline Ashby (Tor)
The Medusa Chronicles, Stephen Baxter & Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz; Saga)
Take Back the Sky, Greg Bear (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Visitor, C.J. Cherryh (DAW)
Babylon’s Ashes, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Europe in Winter, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
False Hearts, Laura Lam (Tor; Macmillan)
Death’s End, Cixin Liu (Tor; Head of Zeus)
The Corporation Wars: Dissidence, Ken MacLeod (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Into Everywhere, Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
Faller, Will McIntosh (Tor)
After Atlas, Emma Newman (Roc)
The Core of the Sun, Johanna Sinisalo (Black Cat)
Occupy Me, Tricia Sullivan (Gollancz)
Rosewater, Tade Thompson (Apex)
Central Station, Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon)
Icon, Genevieve Valentine (Saga)
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (Doubleday; Fleet)
Alien Morning, Rick Wilber (Tor)
Impersonations, Walter Jon Williams (Tor.com Publishing)
Last Year, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
Barren Cove, Ariel S. Winter (Bestler)
Underground Airlines, Ben H. Winters (Mulholland; Century)

NOVELS – FANTASY
The Spider’s War, Daniel Abraham (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
Summerlong, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon)
City of Blades, Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway)
Masks and Shadows, Stephanie Burgis (Pyr)
Breath of Earth, Beth Cato (Harper Voyager US)
A Shadow All of Light, Fred Chappell (Tor)
Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?, Paul Cornell (Pan)
Four Roads Cross, Max Gladstone (Tor)
The Regional Office is Under Attack!, Manuel Gonzales (Riverhead)
Will Do Magic for Small Change, Andrea Hairston (Aqueduct)
Eterna and Omega, Leanna Renee Hieber (Tor)
Roadsouls, Betsy James (Aqueduct)
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Perdition Score, Richard Kadrey (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
Children of Earth and Sky, Guy Gavriel Kay (NAL; Viking Canada; Hodder & Stoughton)
The Wall of Storms, Ken Liu (Saga; Head of Zeus)
The Seer, Sonia Orin Lyris (Baen)
Kingfisher, Patricia McKillip (Ace)
An Accident of Stars, Foz Meadows (Angry Robot US; Angry Robot UK)
The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville (Del Rey; Picador)
Medusa’s Web, Tim Powers (Morrow; Corvus UK)
The Gradual, Christopher Priest (Titan US; Gollancz)
The Winged Histories, Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)
The Trees, Ali Shaw (Bloomsbury Circus; Bloomsbury USA)
The Last Mortal Bond, Brian Staveley (Tor; Tor UK)
The Nightmare Stacks, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
The Liberation, Ian Tregillis (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Necessity, Jo Walton (Tor)
Cloudbound, Fran Wilde (Tor)

Interesting that Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead made the SF list—outside of SFF circles, that’s the biggest “literary” novel of 2016, and it’ll be interesting to see how much of an impact it makes on the 2017 awards. Do we have a Chabon situation here, like when The Yiddish Policeman’s Union won the Hugo/Nebula?

They also have a first novel category, which is where something like Ninefox Gambit winds up.

FIRST NOVELS
The Reader, Traci Chee (Putnam)
Waypoint Kangaroo, Curtis Chen (Dunne)
The Star-Touched Queen, Roshani Chokshi (St. Martin’s)
The Girl from Everywhere, Heidi Heilig (Greenwillow; Hot Key)
Roses and Rot, Kat Howard (Saga)
Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
Arabella of Mars, David D. Levine (Tor)
A Fierce and Subtle Poison, Samantha Mabry (Algonquin)
Devil and the Bluebird, Jennifer Mason-Black (Amulet)
Infomocracy, Malka Older (Tor.com Publishing)
Everfair, Nisi Shawl (Tor)
Vigil, Angela Slatter (Jo Fletcher)
Azanian Bridges, Nick Wood (NewCon)

Most of the eventual Hugo and Nebula nominees show up on these lists. That’s not a great accomplishment, given there’s more than 50+ on the lists, but helpful to narrow things down. So the snub of Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning is notable. Note that Connie Willis’s Crosstalk nor Loius McMaster Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen didn’t make the lists either. Those books haven’t been particularly well received, and it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts the Hugo.

On a personal note, I certainly haven’t been posting much; I’ve been too busy at work, and you’ve got to do the job you get paid for first. Still, it’s going to be a very interesting year, because all the rule changes will throw out a lot of what we previously knew about the Hugos. Thinking of this more as a year for sitting back and observing—no one can really know what’ll happen in the awards, but it’ll be intriguing to watch.

First Look: 2016 Mainstream Meta-List

I don’t have many lists on my Best of 2016 meta-list yet, but some patterns are beginning to emerge. So far, I’ve collated 8 “Best Of” lists by Library Journal, NY Times, NPR, Guardian, Amazon, Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, and Goodreads. Rules are simple: I take a look at their “Best SF and F” of the year list, and if you show up on the list, you get one point. I don’t make any judgments about eligibility, publication date, or genre. Lots of comics, short story collections, older books, etc., show up on these lists. If the venue has a dedicated SFF list, I only look at that. If they only have a single Best Of list, like the NY Times, I use that. The point of this list is to get an idea of what the mainstream thinks the best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of the year are, which is always interesting and often confusing. I’ll complement this with another list of more specialty SFF websites.

You can check out the developing spreadsheet here. If you click on the 2015 tab at the bottom, you can see how things wound up last year.

Here are the early results:

4	All the Birds in the Sky	Anders, Charlie Jane
4	The Obelisk Gate	Jemisin, N.K.
4	Death’s End	Liu, Cixin
3	Every Heart a Doorway	McGuire, Seanan
2	City of Blades	Bennett, Robert Jackson
2	Morning Star	Brown, Pierce
2	Star Nomad	Buroker, Lindsay
2	A Closed and Common Orbit	Chambers, Becky
2	Dark Matter	Crouch, Blake
2	The Book of the Unnamed Midwife	Ellison, Meg
2	Ninefox Gambit	Lee, Yoon Ha
2	The Paper Menagerie	Liu, Ken
2	Too Like the Lightning	Palmer, Ada
2	Version Control	Palmer, Dexter
2	Age of Myth	Sullivan, Michael J.
2	Central Station	Tidhar, Lavie
2	Crosstalk	Willis, Connie
2	The Invisible Library	Cogman, Genvieve
2	Borderline	Baker, Mishell

I will note that if I included works from the “Best Fiction” lists many of these sites have, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad would have been the clear winner, as it’s going to appear on basically every list this Holiday season. Whitehead’s novel has only light speculative elements (an actual underground railroad), so I’m betting it won’t make an impact on the Hugo or Nebula, but your mileage may vary. Whitehead didn’t get any nominations for his more obviously speculative Zone One, a clear zombie novel.

This, of course, is the Mainstream list, put together by big newspapers and websites that may have only a passing familiarity with Science Fiction and Fantasy. These tend to be drawn to big bestsellers and big names, and they tend to prefer SF to Fantasy. The trio of works at the top, by Anders, Jemisin, and Liu, all figure to be players in the 2017 awards, particularly Jemisin. The McGuire book is pretty short and, in my opinion, more likely to compete as a Novella than a Novel. It’ll be interesting to see who from that big group of “2” votes separates themselves over the next couple weeks. My guess is the Yoon Ha Lee and the Ada Palmer, but only time will tell.

My big surprise so far is that Mieville is not showing up for Last Days of New Paris, a weird novella where Surrealist paintings come to life. Seeing any other surprises or interesting trends?

Best of 2016: Tor.com Reviewer’s Choice

Tor.com returns with it’s annual Reviewer’s Choice post. This year, they had 11 of their reviewers chose roughly 3 books each. That’s a lot of opinion crammed into one post. Historically, the tastes of Tor.com have aligned pretty well with the tastes of the Hugo voters, so expect a lot of overlap when the eventual Hugo nominations come out.

I only included the “main choices,” which Tor.com conveniently bolded for us. There was no overlap among the 11 reviewers, and not everyone chose 3 books. Here’s what was listed:

Hagseed, Margaret Atwood
The Power, Naomi Alderman
This Savage Song, Victoria Schwab
Malafrena, Ursula K. Le Guin (originally published 1979, republished as part of the Library of America Le Guin volumes, definitely not eligible for anything in 2016)
Queen of the Night, Alexander Chee
Black Panther, Ta-Nehisi Coates (comic book)
The Sunlight Pilgrims, Jenni Fagan
A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
The Bloodsworn, Erin Lindsey
Conspiracy of Ravens, Lila Bowen
Lovecraft Country, Matt Ruff
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer
The Fisherman, John Langan
An Accident of StarS, Fox Meadows
Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi (collection)
Ghostland, Colin Dickey (non-fiction)
A Tree or a Person or a Wall, Matt Bell (collection)
The Unfinished World and Other Stories, Amber Sparks
The Medusa chronicles, Stephen Baxter and Alasdair Reynolds
Central Station, Lavie Tidhar
The Race, Nina Allan (originally published 2014)
Wicked Weeds, Pedro Cabiya
Death’s End, Cixin Liu
Iraq+100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion (collection)
The Fireman, Joe Hill
The Summer Dragon, Todd Lockwood
The Queen of Blood, Sarah Beth Durst
Furnace and Other Stories, Livia Llewellyn (collection)
Mongrels, Stephen Graham Jones
The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle

A long list, but with many of this year’s likely contenders, such as Yoon Ha Lee, Ada Palmer, Charlie Jane Anders, and Cixin Liu, making an appearance. Who’s missing? N.K. Jemisin, for one, which seems an odd oversight. Maybe the Tor.com crowd thought everyone else would recommend it. Connie Willis doesn’t make it for Crosstalk, and Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Blades shows up only as an also ran. China Mieville has not been doing well on year-end lists so far, and The Last Days of New Paris, novella or not, doesn’t make it here either. There’s no real revelations or surprises, but that’s not what these lists are for: in their totality, they’ll give us a picture of the major contenders.

Best of 2016: The Guardian

Adam Roberts, a major SFF author himself, returns with his annual best Science Fiction and Fantasy books of the year in The Guardian. Check it out here. It’s not so much a list but a discussion, and this is what he mentions:

Death’s End, Cixin Liu
Central Station, Lavie Tidhar
Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho (a book from last year that Roberts points out already won the British Fantasy award; I don’t get why it is on this list)
Iraq + 100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion (story collection)
Azanian Bridges, Nick Wood
Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer
A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
The Gradual, Christopher Priest
The Race, Nina Allan (this is a 2014 book, but was recently republished)

N.K. Jemisin is mentioned in the opening paragraph as having won the Hugo this year, but there isn’t a mention of The Obelisk Gate by name. Good to see some praise for Central Station, one of my favorite books of last year, but also too literary and too strange to likely make much of an impact on the Hugo or Nebula this year. Death’s End—my favorite SF novel of 2016, if you’re keeping score at home—shows up first. I wonder if it can return to the Hugo or Nebula ranks after The Dark Forest didn’t make it last year? Will Ken Liu’s translation—he translated The Three-Body Problem and Death’s End but not The Dark Forest—make that much of a difference?

I think that Too Like the Lightning and Ninefox Gambit showing up on another list means they’re emerging as the critical favorites of 2016. If they keep this momentum up, they’ll have a good chance to make a major impact this awards season.

Best of 2016: Amazon’s Top 20 SFF Books

Amazon has their annual list up. The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis, a post-apocalyptic novel with what seems to be Western overtones, was their pick as the top SFF book of the year. Amazon always pushes in a more mainstream direction, given their massive audience Here are the books that made their top 20, in no particular order:

Death’s End, Cixin Liu
The Diabolic, S.J. Kincaid
The Hike, Drew Magary
The Wolf Road, Beth Lewis
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman
Morning Star, Pierce Brown
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
Age of Myth, Michael J. Sullivan
Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire
The Summer Dragon, Todd Lockwood
The Burning Isle, Will Panzo
Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison\
City of Blades, Robert Jackson Bennett
Company Town, Madeline Ashby
The Dark Side, Anthony O’Neill
Skinner Lyce, Patricia Ward
Star Nomad, Lindsay Buroker
Machinations, Hayley Stone

That chalks up another list for Jemisin, Yoon Ha Lee, Charlie Jane Anders, and Robert Jackson Bennett. No Lois McMaster Bujold or Connie Willis. Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville also hasn’t done well so far on year end lists—maybe too weird, both in genre and content?

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won as overall fiction book of the year. That has enough magic realist elements to be eligible in the Hugo and Nebula, so it’ll be intersting to see if it pulls a The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and has an impact in the SFF awards, or whether it just dominates the literary fiction scene.

Best of 2016: Publisher’s Weekly, Goodreads Semifinals

That time of year is upon us: year-end lists! A few are beginning to leak out. I keep track of all the Mainstream ones in this spreadsheet—these are from websites, newspapers, etc., that are not “specialty” SFF sites. These selections tend to lean either towards the mainstream and populist (Goodreads) or towards the literary (Publisher’s Weekly). These mainstreams lists aren’t a great predictor of the Hugo or Nebula, but they do at least tend to get us in the neighborhood. If your book isn’t popular enough to make some year-end lists, you’re probably not popular enough to get a Hugo nomination.

On to the lists:

Publisher’s Weekly is always an odd list, tending to emphasize more literary Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. They only do one list for all three genres:

After Atlas, Emma Newman
All Good Children, Dayna Ingram
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison
A Green and Ancient Light, Frederic S. Durbin
Kingfisher, Patricia A. McKillip
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife actually came out in June 2014, but was reprinted by a bigger press in 2016. It won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2015. Way to jump on the bandwagon, Publisher’s Weekly! McKillip is a past favorite in the World Fantasy Award, so she might show up in that award. Jemisin is obviously the big name here.

As an aside, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead made their Best Fiction category. This is a novel with enough magic realist elements (an actual underground railroad during pre-Civil War America) that it could get some play for SFF awards. Whitehead has several other genre works to his name, most notably the zombie novel Zone One. Whitehead is probably in line to win some major literary awards this year: the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, etc. Since the speculative elements are not Whitehead’s focus, I’m not expecting a Chabon style literary sweep of the Hugos and Nebulas by The Underground Railroad, but it could happen.

The Goodreads Choice awards have now announced their semifinalists, a broad list of 20 works in both the Fantasy and Science Fiction category. You can click the links to see the full list, but here’s my main contenders from the Fantasy category:

Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire (novella length at under 40,000 words)
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
City of Blades, Robert Jackson Bennett

Works from series like V.E. Schwab’s A Gathering of Shadows, Mark Lawrence’s The Wheel of Osheim, Brandon Sanderson’s The Bands of Mourning, and Brent Weeks’ The Blood Mirror also appear. While unlikely to grab Hugo or Nebula nominations based on past trends, could they show up in the new Hugo Best series category?

In the SF list, here are what I see as the main contenders:

Crosstalk, Connie Willis
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Lois McMaster Bujold
Morning Star, Pierce Brown
Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
Death’s End, Cixin Liu
A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer

The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter and A Night Without Stars by Peter F. Hamilton also appear; both are part of a series, and unlikely to get Best Hugo Novel or Nebula noms. Perhaps they’ll be competitive in the Hugo Best Series. Right now, I have Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch as populist successes that don’t fit the mold of past Hugo or Nebula nominees. If they show up on a lot of year-end lists, I’ll elevate them to contenders.

So, where are we after these first lists? Jemisin has pulled into a lead with 2 recommendations. She’s not likely to relinquish that lead any time soon. Any big snubs so far? Mieville not making it for Last Days of New Paris is a little surprise, but that’s a novella and hard to place in terms of genre (alternative history?). Last year, I tracked 24 “best of” lists, so we still have a long ways to go before clarity.

Final 2016 SFF Awards Meta-List

As I wrap up my analysis from last year, let’s look at my final 2016 SFF Awards Metalist, now with all winners marked. This covers books published in 2015 that got award nominations in 2016. For this list, which gives a good 10,000 foot view of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards, I track 14 different awards to see who got nominated and who won. Here’s the top of the list, with all the books that got more than 2 nominations:

Nominations	Title	Author	Wins
5	The Fifth Season	Jemisin, N.K.	1
5	Uprooted	Novik, Naomi	3
4	Europe at Midnight	Hutchinson, Dave
4	Seveneves	Stephenson, Neal	1
3	Ancillary Mercy	Leckie, Anne	1

Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and Novik’s Uprooted finished atop the list with 5 nominations each, although Novik grabbed 3 wins (Nebula, British Fantasy, Locus Fantasy) to Jemisin’s one (Hugo). Seveneves won the Prometheus, and Ancillary Mercy won the Locus SF. A wide range of books won SF awards this year, including lesser known works such as The Chimes by Anna Smaill (British Fantasy), Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman (Campbell), and Lizard Radio by Pat Schmaltz (Tiptree). I’ll also note that this list correlated with 4/5 of the Hugo nominees, with only Hutchinson missing out.

I think a list like this gives us a good place to start thinking about the 2017 SFF Awards season. Since the SFF voting public doesn’t change massively from year to year, they tend to duplicate picks from year to year. For 2016, Jemisin is back with The Obelisk Gate, a sequel to The Fifth Season; I expect that to be a stalwart on the 2017 awards circuits, probably matching the number of noms and wins of The Fifth Season. Novik published League of Dragons in 2016, the final book of her 9 novel Temraire sequence. Books that are #9 in a series rarely get SFF awards nomination, although she may be a possibility in the new Best Series Hugo.

Leckie and Stephenson didn’t publish books last year, which opens up some spots in the the awards. Leckie in particular has grabbed a host of nominations in these 14 awards over the past 3 years: 16 nominations and 9 wins by my count. That’s a big vacuum to fill: who’s going to step and grab these spots?

Dave Hutchinson is an interesting possibility for the Hugo this year. His third volume in his Fractured Europe series just came out November 3, Europe in Winter. Hutchinson is not particularly well known here in the United States, but he’s racked up 2 best novel  nominations on the Clarke (a British award), 3 in the British Science Fiction Award (obviously British), and 2 in the Campbell (a more literary American SF award). Could the Hugos being held in Europe this year—and presumably more British voters making the trip to Finland than Americans—result in a European bounce? London in 2014 didn’t produce much of a boon for European writers, but Glasgow in 2005 resulted in an all British/Scottish final ballot. The new Hugo voting rules will prevent a 2005 style-sweep, but they could also help push a British or maybe even Finnish author onto the ballot. Hutchinson might also be competitive in the Best Series category, although I think Charles Stross and his well-liked Laundry Files might be the better bet for the Best Series category, given the fact that he’s won the Best Hugo Novella 3 times already for works from that series.

Looking further down the list, no one from last year’s nominees really jumps out as a major contender for 2016. Amazingly, The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu didn’t get a single SFF award nomination last year despite winning the Hugo the year before, which probably speaks poorly to Death’s End‘s chances. Ken Liu only got the Nebula nomination for The Grace of Kings, so he might be a contender in that category again. Becky Chambers got only one nomination for The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but that was an indie published book that came out in several different formats over several different years; her sequel A Closed and Common Orbit has none of those publication issues and may grab some nominations.

All in all, we’re going to be looking at some new faces for 2017. I’ll start hacking away with some preliminary lists of contenders for the 2017 Hugo and Nebula later this week.

Goodreads Choice Award Voting Now Open

The annual Goodreads Choice Awards, one of the open “Best of the Year” votes on the internet, is now open. While this vote has never correlated well to the Hugos and Nebulas, it does give us some initial insight into what the most popular books of the year are, at least with regard to the Goodreads audience. Historically, the Hugo and Nebula winners have appeared on the list of the Goodreads semifinalists, but that isn’t a huge feat because there are 20 semifinalists for each category. If you can’t hit the eventual winners when you’re choosing 40 texts . . . Still, it helps to narrow down the field of contenders.

At this point (Opening Round), Goodreads selects 15 books to let people vote on; voters can also write in their own works. In the SF category, you’ve got heavy hitters like Cixin Liu’s Death’s End, Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, as well as popular texts like Pierce Brown’s Morning Star or Blake Crouch’s (of Wayward Pines fame) Dark Matter. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter show up with The Long Cosmos, the final volume of the Long Earth series—and a potential Hugo Best Series nominee, given it will be the last time readers can vote for Pratchett. Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning shows up, and that’s a book I have my eye on to see if it grabs momentum. Connie Willis is missing—did Crosstalk come out too late in the year? Remember, voters can write books in, so it has a chance to show up in the semifinals.

Fantasy is more of a genre mish-mash on Goodreads, pulling together epic fantasy, things like J.K. Rowling’s play Harry Potter and the First Child, and a bunch of paranormal romances books. Aside from Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate and Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky, I don’t see a ton of awards contenders on that list. Sanderson might be viable for a Best Hugo Series nomination—would Mistborn be tempting? Or the entire Cosmere? Also, will Harry Potter be nominated for Best Series on the backs of The First Child? The rules would seem to make that acceptable.

Goodreads gives us one of our first glimpses into the avalance of “Best of 2016” lists—we’ll get a bunch more soon. Head on over and vote and let your voices be heard!

Back in Action

I’ve been ridiculously busy over the past few months (one of those good news/bad news promotions at work), but November is upon us. Break the flannel shirts out! It’s time to begin grinding the gears for the 2017 SFF award season!

The dust is beginning to clear from the wreckage of last year, and 2017 is looking to be interesting and unusual. We’ve got the largest changes to the Hugo ruleset in . . . . well, ever. This is going to force Chaos Horizon to totally overhaul our prediction methodologies. Basically, rule changes create more unknowns, which means I’ll have to simplify my prediction systems.

Aside from N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate and Connie Willis’s Crosstalk, there aren’t a ton of obvious Hugo/Nebula books out there. Gentlemen Jole and the Red Queen by Louis McMaster Bujold feels like it was published years ago, but Bujold has always been a Hugo favorite. Will books like Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky, Ada Palmner’s Too Like the Lightning, or Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit begin to pick up momentum? Will Cixin Liu make a Hugo comeback for Death’s End after The Dark Forest missed last year? Will China Mieville’s The Last Days of New Paris or Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway be classified as novels or novellas? How will the Best Series Hugo mix up the Best Novel category?

There’ll be plenty to analyze here. One of the first things I’m going to do is update the 2016 Awards Meta-List. Just this week,  the World Fantasy Award went to the rather obscure Chimes by Anna Smaill. This is a juried award, as per the sfadb, which accounts for some of its interesting winners:

Process
Convention members nominate two entries per category; judges can add three or more nominees per category. The judges select the winners.

The World Fantasy Award marks the end of the 2016 SFF Award Season. By updating the Meta-List, we’ll see where exactly we ended last year, we should give us a nice springboard in the next year.

With that list in place, we’ll begin to take a look at some of the more interesting contenders for 2017. I’ve got my eye on some interesting potential dark horses—it should be a wide open year, and the race is currently anyone’s.