Checking in With the SFF Awards Meta-List

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my master list of 2015 SFF Awards to see who has the most nominations and wins. A couple major awards have been announced in the past month, including the Campbell Memorial (to Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Henry August) and the Locus Awards (SF to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword and Fantasy to Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor). Leckie’s win for Ancillary Sword makes her the only two-time winner this year (she also grabbed the British Science Fiction Award).
The World Fantasy Nominees for 2015 were also recently announced. Here’s the Novel category:

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor (Tor Books)
Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs (Broadway Books/Jo Fletcher Books)
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (Random House/Sceptre UK)
Jeff VanderMeer, Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux Originals)
Jo Walton, My Real Children (Tor Books US/Corsair UK)

A strong list, even if I’m not quite sure some of these are actually fantasy. The WFA tends to tip over to the Weird fiction side of things, so that accounts for Area X and The Bone Clocks. I suspect Addison is the likely winner here, although this is a juried (not popular vote) award. If Addison wins the Hugo, they might choose to go in a different direction.

So, where does that leave us? You can see my full list here: 2015 Awards Meta-List. I’m tacking 15 major awards. Let’s focus on the Top 8, everyone who received at least 3 different award nominations:

EDIT: A couple clean ups to the list. One of the commentators caught that I’d miscounted Nina Allan’s The Race, and I had VanderMeer down for the Hugo nom instead of the Campbell nom. Thanks everyone for double-checking!

1. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu: 5 nominations, 0 wins (Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Locus SF, Prometheus)
2. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie: 4 nominations, 2 wins (Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Locus SF, with wins in the BSFA and Locus SF)
3. Annihilation/Area X, Jeff VanderMeer: 4 nominations, 1 win (Campbell, Nebula, Locus SF, World Fantasy, with a win in the Nebula)
4. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison: 4 nominations, 1 win (Hugo, Nebula, Locus Fantasy, World Fantasy, with a win in the Locus Fantasy)
5. Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta: 3 nominations, 0 wins (Clarke, Tiptree, Philip K. Dick)
5. Europe in Autumn, David Hutchinson: 3 nominations, 0 wins (Clarke, BSFA, Campbell)
5. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North: 3 nominations, 1 win (Clarke, BSFA, Campbell, with a win in the Campbell)
5. Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor: 3 nominations, 0 wins (BSFA, Tiptree, Kitschies)
5. The Peripheral, William Gibson: 3 nominations, 0 wins (Campbell, Locus SF, Kitschies)
5. The Race, Nina Allan: 3 nominations, 0 wins (British SF, Campbell, Kitschies)

For all the love lavished on Station Eleven by Emily Mandel, it managed only two nominations (for the Clarke and Campbell), although it did win the Clarke. Not a bad haul. City of Stairs has a real shot at a British Fantasy nomination, and could join the group above with 3, adding to its Locus Fantasy and World Fantasy nominations.

A couple observations: it has been a very evenly divided year. No one has really dominated the 15 awards I’m keeping track of. Last year, Ancillary Justice had 8 nominations and 5 wins; Ancillary Sword has only managed half of that. 2015 is a year without a consensus “best novel” in the field; that’s something that has been overlooked in all the furor that’s gone down over this year’s awards. It’s going to be a toss up as to whether Leckie or Addison wins the year. If Leckie wins her second Hugo, that’ll give her the edge, but Addison still has a chance to win the Hugo, and then go on to sweep the British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards.

Of the top 9, we’re seeing an increased influence of European fiction: both Europe in Autumn and Lagoon had their biggest impact and readerships outside the United States. Don’t forget Memory of Water, translated from the Finnish, which joins The Three-Body Problem as highly nominated novels in translation. Fully half this list represents world science fiction and fantasy, an intriguing change from previous years. I haven’t read Memory of Water or Europe in Autumn yet, but this list is tempting me to pick them up.

So, what do you think? Does this collated list better reflect the true state of the SFF field than any individual award?