My essay on this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award shortlist, plus reflections on the state of awards and year’s best sorting mechanisms in general, went up at the Los Angeles Review of Books earlier this week:
Historically, the SF field has been very good, or at least very enthusiastic, about engraving early drafts of its history in real time via an array of anthologies and awards. But in the early 2020s, these mechanisms seem to be faltering.
LARB has a reasonably firm wordcount limit, so there are some angles I didn’t have room for: I would have liked to discuss some of the stories in more depth, I should have found space for a mention of Neil Clarke’s year’s best series, and perhaps should have talked more about the Locus awards and recommended reading list. And we didn’t realise the award was going to announce its winner as early as it did, so I didn’t get a chance to show off my powers of prescience. But hopefully still some points worth reading along the way; as an observer, I’m not sure of the reasons for it, but I do think the market for year’s best anthologies (perhaps short story anthologies in general) seems to be in an odd and somewhat disheartening place right now.
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