OK, to the top half of my ballot for this year's BSFA Award for Best Novel. Two of the below (Piranesi and The City We Became) are also on the Nebula ballot. In transparency, I nominated Piranesi myself; at that point in January I had read very few of this year's potential award nominees. They are all really good and it's a really tough choice

Again you have to start somewhere. (Really, can't they all win?)

5) The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Not for one moment had she considered not going. The phone line hadn’t been great, but she knew Mal’s voice. And really, what was the plausible alternative? That, four years later, parties unknown were trolling her?

Great story of missing girls, parallel worlds, alien incursions, and messing with the fundamental nature of the universe, set in contemporary England and a number of its alternate versions. Really difficult to put down.

4) Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“You look like you could use lunch.”

A lovely novel about an English garden that connects a its contemporary American owner with past generations. I really love any work of literature that displays a rooted sense of place, dinnseanchas in Irish. Rather beautiful and engaging.

3) Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was not the Other. He was thinner, and not quite so tall.

As I said before, Clarke's first novel in the fifteen years since Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a much much shorter book, in which the eponymous protagonist is one of two living inhabitants of a vast building which seems to be the entire world. Gradually the truth about the narrator's past and about the world they are in becomes clear. Intense and intricate. This was my only nomination for Best Novel.

2) The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin. Second paragraph of third chapter:

The terminal is mostly just a big, brightly lit room where a few hundred people can assemble. There’s nothing that should be scary about it. Its walls are lined with ads for movies Aislyn isn’t planning to see and makeup she probably won’t ever wear. The people standing or sitting around her are hers, her people; she feels this instinctively even though her mind resists when her gaze skates over Asian faces, or her ears pick up a language that probably isn’t Spanish but also definitely isn’t English. (Quechua, her strange newer senses whisper, but she doesn’t want to hear it.) They aren’t bothering her, though, and there are plenty of normal people around, so there’s no good reason for her to be as terrified as she is. Terror doesn’t always happen for a good reason.

I was one of the three people in fandom who bounced off the Broken Earth trilogy (I also counted the votes that gave the second volume its Hugo). However this worked a lot better for me for some reason - our protagonists discover that they have become the incarnations, the genii loci, of New York's boroughs, and also that they are under magical attack. Somewhat reminiscent of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, except that here it's the human-built settlements that have acquired personalities. Vivid and sharp.

1) Comet Weather, by Liz Williams. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Do the gig. Come back home, flying into Luton on Easyjet. Take the train to Somerset, from Paddington. It wasn’t rocket science. It would be a quick trip and when she returned from Somerset she would stay with Serena and figure out her next move. Goa or Amsterdam, perhaps: wherever Liam wasn’t. But this trip was straightforward.

My top vote is set in contemporary England (like The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, The Doors of Eden and Threading the Labyrinth), a spooky story of four sisters looking for their mysteriously vanished mother, and the West Country home that some have left and some have not. Various bits of magic occur, including the Behenian stars, a bit of astronomical lore that I had completely forgotten, if I ever knew. Extra marks for several gratuitous Doctor Who references. I really loved it.

Though, as I said before, I'd be happy enough for any of the above to win.

Whew. Those books are almost 2900 pages in total. (Though I only read 2600 pages, skipping most of one of them.) I tend to find that award nominations shape my reading rather than vice versa; this was a lot of work to get through before Sunday's voting deadline.

A couple of delayed monthly book reviews next.

This year's long list of novels for the BSFA Award was very long, comprising 56 books (I actually wrote to the award administrators to query the eligibility of two of them; they replied defending their decision; neither appears on the short list; let's leave it at that). The "short" list is also very long, with ten novels - which appears to be the longest ever for any BSFA Award category (the 2014 Best Novel and 2018 Best Art ballots both had eight nominees). Of course there are often problems with splitting ties, but I wonder how many (or how few) nominating votes there actually were?

(The E Pluribus Hugo system used for counting Hugo nominations makes ties at nominations stage vanishingly unlikely, but I do not recommend that the BSFA adopts it.)

Just to emphasise again that (as with my posts for the Best Art and Best Short Fiction categories, less so for Best Non-Fiction) these posts are generally confessions of my own quirks rather than firm recommendations - though I must admit there are two novels of the ten that I could not vote for, and I would find it incomprehensible if either won the award. The others are all OK, some OKer than others

Here goes.

10) Club Ded, by Nikhil Singh. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Of course, the magic castle is just a facade. Once viewed from the side or back, its majestic battlements reduce—to a cable-ridden sideshow. In relation to the rest of the picture (and its overinflated budget), the castle is a minor location. Demanding only a few key days out of the schedule. Shooting had commenced on time and wrapped early. Dismantling is underway. The property is owned and maintained by Oracle Inc. When Anita originally caught wind of the leasing enquiry, she positioned herself carefully. She made sure to negotiate the tenancy agreements personally. Oracle real-estate had been her division once. So, it was nothing for her to assume control of the deal. Anita went to great lengths for the production house. She cushioned the contracts, bent over backward. All with the precise intention of seducing the famous director. She was mortified when Jennifer informed her that the ‘3rd girl’ had ended up on his arm.

I bounced off this quite hard, and did not even make it 40 pages in. I found the writing style downright annoying and did not care about any of the characters. I note also that it had fewest owners on both Goodreads and LibraryThing of any of the longlisted books, never mind the short list. Clearly its few dedicated readers are all BSFA voters.

9) The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Second paragraph of third chapter:

That first global stocktake didn’t go well. Reporting was inconsistent and incomplete, and yet still it was very clear that carbon emissions were far higher than the Parties to the Agreement had promised each other they would be, despite the 2020 dip. Very few nations had hit the targets they had set for themselves, even though they had set soft targets. Aware of the shortfall even before the 2023 stocktake, 108 countries had promised to strengthen their pledges; but these were smaller countries, amounting together to about 15 percent of global total emissions.

The world narrowly avoids climate disaster thanks to eco-terrorism clandestinely funded by a UN body whose head is blissfully unaware of what it is really doing. So many annoying things about this book. Characters deliver economic and political lectures to each other by way of conversation. Totally unrealistic portrayal of how global politics works in practice. Lots of countries have lovely peaceful revolutions which bring only nice people to power and never descend into repression of counter-revolutionary forces. (Also utterly improbable that the Swiss would ever allow an international body to be set up in Zürich rather than Geneva.) Heart in the right place, of course, but just awful execution.

I should say once more that none of the other eight novels on the shortlist actually struck me as bad in the same way that those two did. However, you have to start pruning somewhere, so next up on my ballot will be:

8) The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M. John Harrison. Second paragraph of Part Three:

His contemporaries at nursery school, by contrast, were primed to act. They were already impatient to do things. Agency was their goal. But where, for instance, the end of each day brought for them the chance to fasten their own coats, Shaw encouraged his mother to fasten his, so that he could remain hypnotised by the shine and colour of someone else’s buttons. Later, this would lead him to a metamorphic theory of personal development. Age ten or eleven, watching his cohort take control of its own destiny, he could easily imagine himself grown up: but less as the agent of self-change than as an organism which – having reached some gate level he couldn’t yet be expected to recognise – would flip automatically into a thoroughly novel state. By then a voracious reader, he was still failing seven times out of ten to correctly recite the alphabet.

The shortest book on the ballot, and one that is liked a lot by several people who I respect. Like other Harrison that I have read, it didn't really work for me. There's an intricate narrative set in contemporary England, the same people turn up in your life over and over, and some green people are emerging from the rivers (the only non-white people mentioned in the book). I'm afraid it left me rather cold - obviously I am missing something, as it has already won one prize.

7) Light of Impossible Stars, by Gareth L. Powell. Second paragraph of third chapter:

I was sitting on the edge of my bunk with my baseball cap in my hands. I had been sitting there for some time, listening to the familiar creaks of the hull as the ship nosed its way through the misty curtains of the hypervoid.

Final book in the Embers of War trilogy, crunchy space opera with lots of characters and action, and a couple of cosmic ideas; maybe I was just tired when reading (I often am tired when reading, these days) but didn't quite hang together enough for me.

6) Water Must Fall, by Nick Wood. Second paragraph of third chapter:

I breathe, but it's cold and burning wet and I choke and sink, scrabbling at nothing.

These choices get more and more difficult. I really did like Water Must Fall, I just liked the other five books on the list more. Like The Ministry for the Future, it's a climate change story, set a couple of decades from now in South Africa and the USA, with political intrigues and violence and a dismally failing marriage involving two of the protagonists. I have to fault a couple of technical points where the writing unexpectedly jarred - for instance, there is a wedding scene where the author confuses the names of the bride and her daughter; and the means and motivation of the bad guys was not completely clear. But again, its heart is in the right place.

That's enough for tonight; more tomorrow.

In my two previous posts on this year's BSFA shortlists (here and here), I remarked that it was very difficult to select preferences between the various nominees. For Best Non-Fiction, unfortunately, there are a number of nominees which I feel are too insubstantial or weak, or in one case too damn expensive, to be really suitable winners, and I had no difficulty in ranking the candidates. Obviously (and rightly) who ends up on the the short-list is determined by nomination votes rather than by any quality control process, and usually we get away with that, but I feel that this is one of the times that we haven't.

I nominated three essays and a book for this category, and none of them made the cut; they were ‘At the Brink: Electronic Literature, Technology, and the Peripheral Imagination at the Atlantic Edge’ by Anne Karhio; Beachcombing: And other oddments by David Langford; Christopher Priest's introduction to The Jonbar Point: Essays from SF Horizons by Brian Aldiss; and ‘Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus’ by Rob Latham. I rate the top two shortlisted nominees (out of six) as being on a par with, or better than, the four I nominated unsuccessfully.

The nominees are:

6) Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach, by Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgmann. Third paragraph of Chapter 8 (supplied free to voters):

Norminton’s Beacons is a less high-profile gathering of voices with an at times distinctly Scottish flavour, featuring stories by Alasdair Gray, Joanne Harris, Liz Jensen, Adam Thorpe, A.L. Kennedy and, once again, Toby Litt, and guided throughout by Norminton’s introductory edict that: ‘If hope is a moral imperative, telling stories may be one way of obeying it’. In ‘A Is For Acid Rain, B Is For Bee’ Harris ponders the near-future extinction of bees through the eyes of a child stumbling upon a rare, real bee while playing football in the park. In ‘Goodbye Jimmy’, Gray uses the distinctly Scottish conceit of ‘The Head’ and ‘Jimmy’ meaning God and his son, to debate the imminent demise of the world. In ‘We’re All Gonna Have the Blues’, Rodge Glass uses flood to great literal and metaphorical effect, describing a claustrophobic conversation between a chief campaign consultant and the leader of a major European environmentalist political party in a subterranean jazz club in Krakow. The drunker they get, the more their talk turns to the slow violence of climate change. And, as they turn toward the club entrance, there is a sudden ‘force pushing against the door’.

The recommended retail price of this book is £85.00, roughly the same cost as all ten shortlisted novels combined, though you can get it for a mere £75.09 via the Big River. I am not poor, but this seems a bit too much to me. It's an important topic, but if I spend £85 on climate change, I won't do it by buying this book. I did read the sample chapter provided to voters, and found it frankly rather dense.

5) ‘Estranged Entrepreneurs’ by Jo Lindsay Walton (originally Foundation, available here). Second paragraph of third section (plus sub-paragraph):

Indeed, if we look more closely at Whuffie, we may find something altogether stranger. For example, Whuffie’s structure resembles a network of credit-debts, rather than a simple popularity leaderboard. This reflects how, in a large, complex society, an individual’s reputation may be many-sided and uneven. Moreover, although an individual can’t exactly transfer or exchange their reputation, they will tend to influence the reputations of people with whom they associate. Whuffie also captures this rich relationality of reputation, so that I could never definitively state my current Whuffie score in the same way I could state my current Uber rating, or number of Instagram followers. As Doctorow puts it Whuffie is

a score that a never-explained set of network services calculate by directly polling the minds of the people who know about you and your works, reducing their private views to a number. The number itself is idiosyncratic, though: for me, your Whuffie reflects how respected you are by the people I respect. Someone else would get a different Whuffie score when contemplating you and your worthiness. (Doctorow 2016)

This is an essay about economics, specifically money, as treated in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which I did actually read long ago, with a diversion to Pratchett's Making Money, which I have also read. It's an interesting enough topic, but not that interesting.

4) ‘Books in Which No Bad Things Happen’ by Jo Walton (Tor.com). Third paragraph:

Children’s books, suggests one friend.

I very much like Jo, both as a person and as a writer, but this is a mere 1100 words of book recommendations and not in the same league substantially as any of the other nominees. (Also, she has forgotten that one of the protagonists of The Fountains of Paradise actually dies at the end of the book, which is not really a happy ending.)

3) It’s the End of the World: But what are we afraid of? by Adam Roberts. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Seven centuries later, a real-life plague struck Athens, killing a quarter of the city’s population and setting the city state on a path to military defeat at the hands of Sparta. Greeks of the time had a simple explanation for the pandemic: Apollo. The Spartans had supplicated to the god, and he had promised them victory; soon afterwards, their enemies started dying of the plague. Hindsight suggests that Athens was under siege and its population swollen with refugees; as a result, everyone was living in unsanitary conditions and at risk of contagion in a way that the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, was not. However, this thought didn’t occur to the Ancient Greeks and they blamed the god.

Again, I like Adam both as a person and as a writer, in particular (usually) his non-fiction, but this seemed much slighter than usual to me. It's a set of lists of sff writings on various apocalypses, caused by gods, zombies, plagues, technology, cosmic disaster and climate change, with some fairly light analysis. I'll give him good marks for including games, as well as books and films - it's become clear to me that no assessment of any theme in sff as it is being written today can be complete without the ludic dimension.

However. One unfootnoted and uncaveated remark about 7th century China particularly caught my attention: "many people believed the Han prince Li Hong was the promised messiah. His mother, alarmed that he would use his popular support to seize power, had him poisoned." Reasonably thorough, if brief, research on my part failed to support any of this; Li Hong the prince - 李弘 - is not even spelt the same way as Li Hong the Taoist messiah - 李洪; it's not clear that his mother poisoned him, and if she did, it was probably because of palace politics about his marriage, not because of any messianic pretensions, for which I found no further evidence. It's disappointing; his other work is generally better.

2) Ties That Bind: Love in Fantasy and Science Fiction ed. Francesca T. Barbini. Second paragraph of third chapter (“Robot Love is Queer”, by Cheryl Morgan):

There is so much robot love in the history of science fiction that any attempt to examine it in a mere essay would end up more like a catalogue of stories. For this essay, therefore, I propose to concentrate on how science fiction writers use human-robot relations as a means of talking about forbidden love, and in particular diverse sexualities. Loving a robot is loving The Other.

Now (at last!) we are into the good stuff. Sorry to harp on the theme of cost, but this is a really good value book, £13.89 for eleven essays about aspects of love in science fiction, of which several are really outstanding: “Polyamory in Space: New Frontiers of Romantic Relationships in Science Fiction” by Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski, “Robot Love is Queer” by Cheryl Morgan, “Falling in Love with an Artificial Being: E. T. A Hoffmann’s The Sandman in relation to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Blade Runner film series” by Tatiana Fajardo and “Gormenghast and the Groans” by Barbara Stevenson (this last particularly useful as I was simultaneously struggling towards the end of the trilogy when I read it). Marked down slightly because I am not familiar with all of the works covered, but I enjoyed what I read about what I knew.

1) The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest by Paul Kincaid. Second paragraph of third chapter:

This is the first appearance of a trope that will recur throughout Christopher Priest’s career; indeed, it might almost be considered one of the defining characteristics of his work.

For the other two categories I have written up so far, I felt that almost all of the shortlisted nominees would be respectable winners and that my reported vote was more of a confession than a recommendation (and the same goes for most of the Best Novel nominees). This is different. BSFA voters must vote for this excellent, cheap (£2.99!), short book by one of the UK's best critics on one of the UK's best writers. I know and like both subject and author, but even if I didn't, I think this would stand out as a superb explanation of what Priest is trying to do with his writing and how he does it, and would also engage readers who are less familiar with his work. All I ask of my sf criticism is that it leaves me better informed about what I have read, and eager to try what I haven't, and this incisive and succinct analysis did both for me. Strongly recommended.

(Also, who knew that Christopher Priest shared an office with David Prowse, later the Green Cross Code Man and the body of Darth Vader, for a few months in 1967 when both were working for Heron Books? Small world.)

That just leaves the Best Novel shortlist. But it has ten nominees, so I'll write them up tomorrow and on Thursday, which will mean postponing my scheduled monthly book posts for October 2010 and March 2021 by a couple of days.

Continuing my posts on this year's BSFA shortlists (and again, this isn’t a set of recommendations, it’s confessing my personal quirks). Here I got two of my nominations on the ballot; the other two that I nominated unsuccessfully were “Rocket Man” by Louis Evans (Interzone, March 2020) and “A Voyage to Queensthroat” by Anya Johanna DeNiro (Strange Horizons, August 2020)

It's quite a diverse bag. One of these nominees, at 154 pages, must be nudging up against the 40,000 word limit (and was also on the Best Novel long list); another is less than 2,200 words long. I'm defensive of the Hugos' three different categories for short fiction, which I think make it easier to compare like with like, though of course I am also very familiar with the constraints under which the BSFA Awards function and which would make it impossible to operate the Hugo system. It's a diverse list in another way as well; the first writer of colour to win the BSFA award in this category was Aliette de Bodard in 2010 (she was also the fifth woman to win it, out of 32 awards to that date); in the following nine years it has gone to non-white writers twice (de Bodard for a second time, and Amal el-Mohtar last year) and to women six times. This year there is no white male writer on the short-list; a historic wrong is being righted.

I confess that my own nominations this year were guided by ease of access to the stories on the long list, and I basically read everything that I didn't have to pay for (there were over 50 nominees on a very long long-list). This meant that I missed the standalone and anthology stories which ended up on the short-list, which was definitely my mistake. My sense is that anthologies are rather losing out from the changes currently happening in the published fiction markets; yet last year's BSFA long list pointed me to two anthologies which were among the best sf books I read all year (this one and this one). So do go and get the two anthologies with stories on this year's short list, here and here (and that is a recommendation, not a confession).

These are all good stories, and ranking them was hard. But you have to start somewhere. So:

6) Dilman Dila, ‘Red_Bati’ (Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki). Third paragraph:

He could not recharge her. He had to save power, but he did not want to shut her down because he had no one else to talk to. He did not get lonely, not the way she had been: so lonely that she would hug him and her tears would drip onto his body, making him flinch at the thought of rust. She would hug him even though she complained that his body was too hard, not soft and warm like that of Akili. He did not get lonely like that, but Akili had written a code to make him want to talk to someone all the time, and he had not had a chance for a conversation since the accident, twelve hours ago.

Story of a space accident after which a canine-analogue AI is reflecting on its own existence. A little too close to cute robotry to really tick my boxes.

5) Tobi Ogundiran, ‘Isn’t Your Daughter Such a Doll’ (Shoreline of Infinity June 2020) - available here. Second paragraph of third section:

Her father still brought her sweets and cookies every day from work, but now that Ralia was not here to share them with her, Celine had absolutely no appetite for them. Once, as she walked down the street with her mother, she caught sight of Ralia dancing and skipping merrily to the tunes of a street saxophonist. Celine let go of her mother’s hand and raced to her friend, sweeping her up in a crushing hug.

This was one of my two nominees that made it to the short-list, but I slighty cooled on it on re-reading and in comparison with the others. It's a horror story about two young girls in Paris, a straightforward and gripping tale which gets from A to B without much distraction.

4) Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, ‘Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon’ (also Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki), also available here. Second paragraph of third section:

She whispered in his ear, “Why does a warrior like you tremble at my simple touch?”

A post-apocalyptic, African speculative fiction novella; the survivors in the tribe find that their patriarchal structures are not up to scratch in the face of the new challenges of their world.

3) Eugen Bacon, Ivory’s Story. Second paragraph of third chapter:

He lived in the land of the Great Chief Goanna who studied the white man’s language and took to wearing his hair in a bob cut. The same Chief Goanna who paid for his education by working in overalls as a cleaner in the big city infirmary of the white man, who was best renowned for returning to his people and bringing greatness to their land. There, in native land, Chief Goanna shaved his head, discarded his overalls, wore bark loin and lifted a club to go to Parliament and save his country with eloquence from the greed of a white settler who wanted to put a mall, a restaurant and a spa in the burial grounds of the forefathers inside the Valley of Dreams.

The urban fantasy police story is becoming a subgenre all of its own these days - thinking of C.E. Murphy, Ben Aaronovitch, and so on - but this one is set in Sydney, and the heroine must unpack many layers of myth and narrative before finding resolution both for the crime she is investigating and for herself. I found it a bit too dense in places, but enjoyed the ride. The longest story of the shortlist.

2) Anne Charnock, ‘All I Asked For’ (Fictions, Healthcare and Care Re-Imagined, ed. Keith Brookes) - available here. Second paragraph of third section:

We overlapped with another parent last time, and I felt uncomfortable sharing the space. I always feel self-conscious when other parents are around even though we’re all in the same boat. It’s obvious that I’m an older mother, and so it’s clear that I had little choice. But the young mother I met last time seemed eager to tell me she had no choice either—cancer treatment. Questions otherwise hang in the air, and I’m sure we’re all aware of them. Is your baby-bag strictly necessary? Did you fake a phobia about childbirth? Did you want a baby-bag to protect your career?

Extra-uterine pregnancy is a side topic in a number of sf worlds - thinking especially here of Bujold's superb Vorkosigan series - but this short story (the shortest on the shortlist) looks at it very closely and directly from the perspective of an expectant mother who is regretting not bearing her child herself. There are not always easy answers for parenting, and that starts very early in the process. This was my other nomination.

1) Ida Keogh, ‘Infinite Tea in the Demara Cafe’ (London Centric: Tales of Future London, ed. Ian Whates). Second paragraph of third section:

Finally, he saw Liara, taking an order with quick flicks of shorthand. He had to speak to her. If he could start to pin down differences between one universe and the next he might find a focus to return him to his own world, to his simple, ordered life.

I'm a sucker for time-travel romance stories, and was swept away by this story of an older man who finds himself tumbling through parallel versions of the same London cafe, looking for a reality in which his wife is still alive. Short and sweet, and gets my top vote.

However these are all good stories and I could understand any of them winning.

Easter is coming, and with it the deadline for BSFA Award voting, assisted by the lovely BSFA Award booklet So I'll be revealing my own votes over the next few days, category by category; not to be understood as recommendations, but as confessing my own quirks. (Except for one category, where I am Right and anyone who votes otherwise is Wrong.)

I'll start with the Best Art category. I nominated four works here, and three of them made it to the final ballot, which I think is a record for me in any BSFA award category in any year. The nomination I made what didn't make it was a concept project about a future city, sponsored by a Quebecois brewery, by Myriam Wares. It caught my eye, but obviously did not do the same for a critical mass of other voters.
Turning to the actual nominees, I'm afraid there is a clear 5th out of 5 in this category for me, and it's not so much because of the art as because of the way we are being asked to vote for it. Nani Sahra Walker produced three-dimensional images of four Black Lives Matter murals painted in the wake of George Floyd's death last year. If we were being asked to vote for the murals, and their creators, that would be one thing. But the nomination is not for the original art; it is for Walker's digitisation and presentation of them (which I guess is what makes this sf-relevant). The associated website does not even name the artists behind one of the four murals. Personally, I grew up in a place where political murals were bloody everywhere, so I don't see the art form in itself as especially exciting (frankly it does not have positive connotations for me), and I really don't understand why turning any mural, of any quality, into three-dimensional images should be considered a big nomination-worthy deal; from the technical point of view, it's a fairly old trick, I think. The murals are good works of art in themselves, and they tell a very important story, but that's not what we are being asked to vote for, so I won't.

The other four, however, are difficult to choose between. With reluctance, you have to start pruning somewhere, and my 4th preference goes to Sinjin Li’s cover of Eli Lee’s A Strange and Brilliant Light. Not that I disliked it at all - it's a great image, but all of the others have more going on.

My third preference goes to Ruby Gloom’s cover of Nikhil Singh’s Club Ded. I thoroughly bounced off the book, as will be discussed in a later post, but this is an interesting piece of art and it was one of my own nominations, as were the other two pieces below.

Chris Baker, better known as Fangorn, won last year, and has a very good work on the ballot this year, the covers of four novellas from NewCon Press with the common theme of Robot Dreams - According to Kovac by Andrew Bannister (who I shared a house with in Cambridge thirty years ago), Deep Learning by Ren Warom, Paper Hearts by Justina Robson, and The Beasts of Lake Oph by Tom Toner. I generally bounce off stories about anthropomorphic robots, but this sequence intrigued me.

My top vote goes to Iain Clark's Shipbuilding Over the Clyde, produced for the Glasgow in 2024 WorldCon bid, which (important disclosure) I am involved with. In a year when we have all been spending a lot of time indoors, when the present and immediate future have often seemed rather fraught, this image manages both to evoke a fascinating future moored in the past. I did not grow up in Glasgow, but two of the biggest shipbuilding cranes in the world are very visible in my own home city. (Though I just discovered that both were built after I was born!) Anyway, this is a really inspiring and hopeful work of art and it gets my vote.

The BSFA short-list is out! And there are no less than ten novels on it, which is not so very short...

	Goodreads		LibraryThing
	reviewers	av rating	owners	av rating
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke	35802	4.33	1174	4.26
The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin	27370	4.00	1063	4.06
The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson	2667	3.97	252	3.90
The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky	1852	3.91	93	4.38
Light of Impossible Stars, by Gareth L. Powell	896	3.95	57	3.65
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M. John Harrison	370	3.70	66	3.60
Comet Weather, by Liz Williams	95	4.40	43	4.25
Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus	52	4.00	10	5.00
Water Must Fall, by Nick Wood	8	4.25	8	1.75
Club Ded, by Nikhil Singh	4	4.75	2	-

On my similar ranking of the 56 novels on the long-list, these ten ranked 1st, 2nd, 19th. 25th, 30th, 32nd, 40th, 48th, 54th and, er, 56th. (The 55th on the list ended up in the Short Fiction category.)

I tried to do the same ranking for the Non-Fiction category, but so few of the short-listed books have been rated by users of either LibraryThing or Goodreads that it does not produce much interesting information, except that Adam Roberts' It's the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? is way ahead of the rest.

I did put in nominations from the long-list myself. Three of my nomniees for Best Art made the short-list; two of my nominees for Best Short Fiction; one for Best Novel; and none for Best Non-Fiction.

The BSFA Long List is out. Here are the 56 (!) Best Novel nominees, ranked by the product of their number of owners on Goodreads and LibraryThing.

	Goodreads		LibraryThing
	reviewers	av rating	owners	av rating
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke	27,961	4.34	1,033	4.26
The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin	24,512	4.01	990	4.08
Network Effect by Martha Wells	22,649	4.43	729	4.42
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones	15,259	3.8	486	4.06
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir	13,520	4.3	465	4.21
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini	10,990	3.9	411	4.26
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell	9,187	4.04	464	4.08
The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty	13,803	4.53	279	4.32
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow	9,894	4.15	374	4.16
Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis	9,418	3.89	271	3.6
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin	7,136	3.65	189	3.56
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook	5,260	3.8	171	3.81
Burn by Patrick Ness	4,401	3.82	196	3.98
The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey	3,744	4.11	207	4.03
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata	4,323	3.62	166	3.63
The Silence by Don DeLillo	3,824	2.8	184	2.86
The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal	3,075	4.45	187	4.49
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez	2,626	4.11	172	3.94
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson	1,725	4.02	211	4.02
Afterland by Lauren Beukes	2,208	3.31	142	3.47
The God Game by Danny Tobey	2,758	3.74	113	3.68
Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack	2,236	4.07	93	3.93
Saints of Salvation by Peter F Hamilton	2,509	4.46	63	4.32
The Last Human by Zack Jordan	1,473	3.71	99	3.54
The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky	1,581	3.92	82	4.39
Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott	932	4.03	116	4.08
88 Names by Matt Ruff	1,046	3.44	66	3.21
Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow	736	4.11	73	4.13
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang	574	3.43	83	3.5
Light of Impossible Stars by Gareth L. Powell	847	3.95	56	3.65
Beneath The Rising by Premee Mohamed	437	3.68	60	3.67
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison	308	3.75	57	3.56
Mordew by Alex Pheby	220	3.92	54	3.4
Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston	183	3.75	58	3.5
Bridge 108 by Anne Charnock	274	3.58	27	3.44
Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen	245	3.85	29	3.17
War of the Maps by Paul McAuley	194	3.8	35	3.5
Space Station Down by Ben Bova & Doug Beason	270	3.39	18	3.33
Ghost Species by James Bradley	330	3.84	11	3.75
Comet Weather by Liz Williams	81	4.46	38	4.25
Noumenon Ultra by Marina J. Lostetter	164	3.94	11	-
Chosen Spirits by Samit Basu	143	3.73	5	4.25
Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught	87	4.01	8	-
Liquid Crystal Nightingale by Eeleen Lee	39	3.56	17	4.25
The Breach by M.T. Hill	86	3.52	7	3.25
People of the Canyons by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear	71	4.13	8	-
The Evidence by Christopher Priest	49	3.37	11	5
Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus	47	4.04	10	5
Fearless by Allen Stroud	51	4.04	7	4.25
Dark Angels Rising by Ian Whates	35	3.86	9	4.33
King of the Rising by Kacen Callender	75	3.59	3	-
Greensmith by Aliya Whiteley	23	4.13	6	3.5
Analogue/Virtual by Lavanya Lakshminarayan	13	4.31	7	-
Water Must Fall by Nick Wood	8	4.25	8	1.75
Ivory’s Story by Eugen Bacon	7	4.29	6	4.67
Club Ded by Nikhil Singh	3	4.67	2	-

This is of limited predictive value, but does give a sense of how far these books have penetrated the wider market.

Three books are in the upper quartile of all four metrics - Piranesi, Network Effect and The Empire of Gold. Striking how poorly The Silence seems to have landed with readers.

Last year's winner was 5th out of 46 in the equivalent table, which is rather better than 16th out of 45 on the corresponding ranking of the 2018 long list; 27th out of 48 in 2017, and 26th out of 34 in 2016, So this table is of limited predictive value.