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 ( Read more... )

Other things being equal, I wold have been looking forward to Eastercon at the end of this week - a welcome return to the Birmingham Hilton where I have had various good times over the years. The last few times I attended Eastercon I got (not very reluctantly) roped into counting the votes for the BSFA Awards; the voting deadline this year has now ( Read more... )

Rounding up my votes in the other two BSFA categories (see also Best Novel and Best Art Work).

Best Short Fiction

No less than seven shortlisted works this year, five of which I liked. (Though this means there must have been at least a three-way tie for fifth place, which indicates a rather low turnout at the second stage of nominating.)

7) The ( Read more... )

This is the ninth year that I have blogged about my BSFA votes, though I haven't consistently noted my choices in this category (I did so for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2016). This year we have one monograph, two essays and two series of blog posts, leading to the usual problems of comparing apples, oranges and mangoes. I think I have to take ( Read more... )

This is the second year that the BSFA has had its two-stage vote system in effect, and for the second year in succession I think it's had a positive impact particularly in this category, where some very odd stuff was showing up in the early part of this decade (like, a novel in this non-fiction category back in 2010, and a poorly written essay in ( Read more... )

These are two short charity anthologies of short stories published last year, doing more or less exactly what their titles promise. They caught my eye in particular because of the co-editors - I've enjoyed Tidhar's alternate history treatments of Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler, and Levene has been a friend of mine since 1987 - though as it turns ( Read more... )

The authorities, returning, would find the prison empty. He couldn’t rid the place of all traces, of course; there was a lot of blood, on the walls and in the tunnel, and it would be a simple matter for the Police to DNA it and determine from whom it had come. But it was as much misdirection as Jac could manage.
I was at a conference the day that ( Read more... )

Next up in my reading of the BSFA nominees, and again I like this one more than the one I have already read; In By Light Alone, humanity has become universally able to photosynthesise enough energy to stay alive through their hair by virtue of a drug which is freely available, and has consequently collapsed into a Gatsbyesque dichotomy of the super ( Read more... )

For the last couple of years I feel I have been rather neglecting the latest sf, so I decided to start catching up by getting through the shortlist for this year's BSFA award. Yellow Blue Tibia carries the subtitle Konstantin Skvorecky's memoir of the alien invasion of 1986, and is about a Soviet science fiction writer who becomes entangled in a ( Read more... )

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