Briardene Books

Somehow this is the first update of 2024. Best laid plans, and all that.

It is probably fitting, then, to start with the 2023-in-review piece I wrote for Locus, which appeared in their February issue, and is online here. I think year-in-review pieces are most interesting when they attempt pattern recognition; take the books read as datapoints and try to fit a line to them. The resulting sketch shouldn’t be mistaken for reality (all the essays by other contributors demonstrate that), but I think that in theory the value of a perspective on a year is the same as the value of a perspective on an individual book: that it makes you think “yes, and–” or “no, because–” or just “but–“. I hope this piece does that.

Slightly closer to reality, perhaps, in that it’s based on the aggregate views of over forty people rather than the limited view of one, is the final Recommended Reading List, to which I also contributed. An even closer approximation is to be found in the charts and tables included in the full February issue, which has some deliberate exclusions — Locus doesn’t track ebook-only publications, for instance — but is the longest-running dataset of its kind that I’m aware of. It reveals the field is currently in a period of contraction: there’s been a sharp drop from just under 2000 new books per year seen by Locus at the end of the last decade, to about 1500 per year for the last few years.

Other recent writing: a new Depth of Field column at Strange Horizons, this one looking at how and when animals in sf stories become characters. The aim with Depth of Field isn’t necessarily to provide recommendations, but if you haven’t read Lee Mandelo’s novella Feed Them Silence, or Clifford D. Simak’s City, they are well worth the time spent with them.

And just announced: the winner of this year’s William L. Crawford Award for first fantasy book is The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. I was one of the judges for the award, and commend both winner and shortlist to your attention: this was my last year as a judge, and it’s nice to finish with a strong year. The Saint of Bright Doors would certainly have been in my Locus round-up if I’d read it in time, but in the absence of that I’ll direct you to reviews by Tehnuka and Abigail Nussbaum. M’learned colleague Dan Hartland generously paired Saint with All These Worlds in a Snap! Criticism column for the Ancillary Review of Books, so I’ll direct you to that as well.

Speaking of All These Worlds: I haven’t done a good job of rounding up reviews, but there were generous mentions of it in the Locus year-in-review pieces by Gary K. Wolfe, Paul Kincaid, Ian Mond and Graham Sleight; and it appeared in the non-fiction section of the recommended reading list (on which I had no input, obviously). Even more gratifyingly, it has been shortlisted for a BSFA Award, the results of which will be announced at Eastercon. On balance, I think I’d have to call it a success, as a project. And it means there will be future Briardene books, not authored by me: but that’s for another post.