2015 Locus Award Shortlist

The finalists for the 2015 Locus Awards have been posted at Locus Online.

What are the results of this wide-open online vote of sf readers, free of charge for anyone to participate, (although the votes of Locus subscribers count double)?

Not a single work or person on either the Sad Puppies 3 or Rabid Puppies slate is listed among the finalists. Zero.

There also is not a single work published by Baen, or any Baen editor, although that is consistent with the Locus Recommended Reading List published earlier this year.

Less predictably, it is almost impossible to find a finalist in the Magazine category that also is credited as the publisher of even one of the short fiction finalists. Asimov’s alone enjoys that distinction. A strange dichotomy.

Lastly, because File 770 has discussed both works, let it be noted that the Nonfiction finalists include Ray Bradbury Unbound, Jonathan Eller (University of Illinois Press) and Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better: 1948-1988, William H. Patterson, Jr. (Tor).

The winners will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, June 26-28, 2015.

82 thoughts on “2015 Locus Award Shortlist

  1. Locus gives out awards? Who knew?
    I thought they just published lists of books not published by Baen. Huh.

  2. Clearly the conspiracy goes further than ever imagined. It is the only possible explanation, and any lack of evidence is incontrovertible proof as to how all-encompassing the scandal is.

  3. Cue howls of a ‘librul conspiracy.’

    In seriousness though, this is an awesome list of fiction and much more thoughtful than the Hugo list this year.

  4. You guys are actually kind of funny. Does it hurt when we are proved right? Look we noticed. And at some point you are going to completely vacate the honor of the award by making it “Best Left Leaning Factionette” instead of “Best Story”.

    Unlike most of the Minions of Evil I am a bit sad about it. I’m in Brad’s camp of wishing this would resolve peaceably. Unfortunately I’m a realist and know it won’t.

  5. So none of the supposedly super popular Puppies choices were nominated after an open Internet voting process? Must be a conspiracy.

    Seriosly, this looks like an excellent list of nominations. Obviously way better than the Hugo list for this year, which admittedly isn’t much of an achievement.

  6. “Locus gives out awards? Who knew?”

    From http://www.sfadb.com/Locus_Awards:

    “The Locus Awards are presented to winners of Locus Magazine’s annual readers’ poll, which was established in the early ’70s specifically to provide recommendations and suggestions to Hugo Awards voters. Over the decades the Locus Awards have often drawn more voters than the Hugos and Nebulas combined. In recent years Locus Awards are presented at an annual banquet, and unlike any other award, explicitly honor publishers of winning works with certificates.”

  7. The Puppies are largely beholden to their cause and not to merit so of course a free, open, nominating process ignores most of the things they nominated. But that just means the conspiracy goes even deeper. Everyone who reads science fiction is involved in a plot to make the Puppies look bad. That’s the only reasonable explanation.

  8. “I thought they just published lists of books not published by Baen.” – except when they /do/ publish lists including books published by Baen of course, since that’s evidence of popularity not reflected in the Hugos.

    The thing sadly missing from the whole mess is the simple fact that no matter which venue you look at, it’s going to be at best a fraction of fandom, and a tiny fraction of SFF lovers in general. Add to this the general contraction of (active) fandom in the 80s widely bemoaned in the editorials and letters of the magazines and it seems inevitable that there’d be a distillation of active participants toward a local majority. Add to /this/ the impossibility of reading everything that gets published in any given year, the consequence of which being that relatively like-minded folks will tend to read a similar subset of the enormous volume being published.

    Work not on the majority’s reading list not being nominated or awarded? Go figure!

  9. Were the nominees asked before hand if they were OK with appearing on this list?

  10. A magazine originally created to promote a Worldcon bid has a reader poll originally intended to provide recommendations to Worldcon voters that happens to not list a bunch of aggressive Worldcon outsiders.

    Ingroups are gonna ingroup.

  11. Rek, voting in this award is literally open to anyone in the world who can connect to the web page.

    That’s hardly an in group.

  12. “The thing sadly missing from the whole mess is the simple fact that no matter which venue you look at, it’s going to be at best a fraction of fandom, and a tiny fraction of SFF lovers in general.”

    That’s exactly it. The Puppies claiming to represent “real” fans or a majority of fans simply don’t understand this. People like what they like. What the Puppies like the most isn’t going to be what most people like the most. Pretty much anyone who votes in these awards has made peace with the fact that some of the things they like will be represented and others will not. You can’t force people to like the “right” books. Trying to do that just makes people hate you and the Puppies are learning that now.

  13. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the Puppy-heavy Hugo shortlist. I wonder what participation in the final votimg will be like.

  14. So like most web polls, the results are as valid as they are reinforcing of one’s own beliefs.

  15. That Fantasy section man, that’s a tough race. Goblin Emperor manages to make court politics interesting, but City of Stairs is more interesting to me thematically and has more exciting sections. Mirror Empire spent way too much time world building and explaining all the different parts to the reader and not enough moving the plot forward.

    Half A King I thought was one of Abercrombie’s better individual works. Surprised it’s classified as YA. I’ve heard great things about The Emperor’s Blades, gotta check that out sometime. Rothfus’s The Lightening Tree is what made me read his Kingkiller books. I didn’t like the books but the novella in Rogues was fun (Rogues as a whole had some great stuff in it glad to see that on Anthology).

    Good year for the SF&F genre in general, I can think of some great stuff that never even made it on that list and that’s a really good list.

  16. There are gazillions of organizations out there claiming to represent some profession or demographic group or culture, whose members constitute only a subset of the group represented. The American Chemical Society, for example, gives out a boatload of awards, yet hundreds of thousands of people with chemistry degrees do not belong to the ACS. If some non-members think the Priestely Medal went to some less-than-deserving chemist, do they take to the Internet and denounce a shadowy cliquish conspiracy of holier-than-thou chemists who do not truly represent chemicaldom?

  17. “You can’t force people to like the “right” books. ”

    To be fair, this isn’t what the Puppies are trying to do. Their objection is that work they think is excellent but not “politically aligned” (whatever that means among fen) is being systematically excluded from consideration.

    To which I say: obviously.

    No cabal is needed to observe that a small, fairly like-minded in general group of people will tend to read a selection of the same sorts of books by similar styles of author. I believe this kind of conspiracy is typically called “statistics” – you can’t judge even the sort of thing you’d ordinarily read on its merits if you don’t actually read it. If it’s not the sort of thing the local majority ordinarily reads it might just as well be on Thamber for all the chance it has of getting votes.

    That doesn’t mean they’re wrong in saying that excellent MilSF etc doesn’t get a fair shake at winning a Hugo – how could it if it’s not on most voters’ reading lists in the first place? – and in principle the idea of trying to get either more eyes reading excellent work of your favourite kind or getting more like-minded eyes voting isn’t actually a bad one. In the long term, it would probably actually be good for the Hugos to have an injection of new blood and new thinking, just to ensure a wider slice of the yearly published pie gets looked at.

    Sadly, methods and rhetoric matter, however, and the whole slate thing couldn’t have ruffled more feathers if it had been designed that way.

  18. Wow, what an awesome list of great titles. Congratulations to everyone on the finalists list!

    I am seriously looking forward to diving into some of these. They look very different from my normal reading fare and I always enjoy stretching my interests.

  19. We have known that the tiny slice of fandom that runs these awards has hated our kind for twenty years. We-and yes I say we now, because I have been convinced to vote by the absolutely idiotic response of the Null Awarders-claimed to be unfairly marked as the unwanted fan participants for years. You screeching like Donald Sutherland at us now is the final evidence of your predjudice, not the first.

    We didn’t make you hate us. You have always hated us. Your mistake was telling us we could vote. Your mistake was forgetting to tell us it was not for fans but for trufans. Your mistake was thinking Redshirts was great literature because it got the Rocket and won the popularity contest and the Rocket means great literature. Your mistake was telling us we were invited but forgetting to tell us we weren’t welcome. Your mistake is that we are just learning now how out of favor our thoughts, presence and existence is to the SMOFS and other related specials and arbiters of cultural significance.

    Well, we accept your invitation. Good luck with your slates next year. Today the Hugos, tomorrow the world!

    This is just getting fun. Really. I really do thank you for leaving the process open to wrongfans like me, monsters like me, dullards like me, illiterates and fools like me because if I’m really that bad and you invited me in…what the heck does that make you?

  20. Really. I really do thank you for leaving the process open to wrongfans like me, monsters like me, dullards like me, illiterates and fools like me because if I’m really that bad and you invited me in…what the heck does that make you?

    It makes us people who don’t divide the world into warring camps of “wrongfans” and “trufans”. You’re welcome.

  21. Thanks to all the enthusiastic and caring fans who voted, every last one of you, for giving us a diverse list of much loved and well crafted writings.

  22. “This is just getting fun. Really. I really do thank you for leaving the process open to wrongfans like me, monsters like me, dullards like me, illiterates and fools like me because if I’m really that bad and you invited me in…what the heck does that make you?”

    Honest people who want honest participation. However, that apparently isn’t what the Puppies want. They want to force people to like the same things they like. The Hugo process wasn’t good enough because it didn’t nominate the “right” works. The Locus awards, which are free anf open to everyone, aren’t good enough because they don’t either. Unfortunately, you will never win this battle because people often don’t like being told what to do. Being able to rush a poll won’t change what people actually like. I know that not being able to force people to do what you want makes you feel like a martyr but there isn’t any way around it.

  23. “what the heck does that make you?”

    Not the exclusionary cabal that you’ve staked your worldview on?

    Regardless, thank you for paying up and joining Sasquan. Hopefully you’ll let us know what you think of the nominees in the mixed fields, ie Best Novel. Would like to see what you see as the qualitative difference (if any) between the slate vs non-slate works.

  24. ‘…what the heck does that make you?’

    Ready to embrace you as a fellow fan who wants to talk shop about books we like whenever you’re ready to set down that chip you are carrying on your shoulder.

  25. “… if I’m really that bad and you invited me in…what the heck does that make you?”

    A group of people who invite everybody to participate in Hugo voting, even people like you who are actively hostile to us. So much for the notion that we’re a bunch of exclusionary elitists.

  26. Snowcrash – ‘Not the exclusionary cabal that you’ve staked your worldview on?’

    It is sort of weird to be called both exclusionary and mocked for being to open to newcomers in the same rant.

  27. Mike Glyer wrote: –“What are the results of this wide-open online vote of sf readers, free of charge for anyone to participate, (although the votes of Locus subscribers count double)?
    Not a single work or person on either the Sad Puppies 3 or Rabid Puppies slate is listed among the finalists. Zero.”–

    Are you seriously arguing that means anything? You forget that, unlike the Hugos, the Locus award is a directed vote.

    When you vote you get a ballot like this one:
    http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2013/PollAndSurvey.html
    You’ll notice that there are a number of titles written in the ballot for you to select. You are also allowed to write in your own candidates, but obviously the effect of this ballot will be to concentrate votes on the candidates already in the ballot and disperse any write-in vote. The result is that it’s almost impossible for any work not already in the ballot to get nominated for the award.

    The 2015 ballot is no longer available, but since they use the Locus recommended list as basis, I have just checked all the categories in the Locus recommended list to see whether there are any nominees not present in that list. After checking all the fiction categories (novels and short fiction), and also anthologies, collections, non fiction and art books, the result is that there is not a single nominee that was not in the recommended list.

    You can see for yourselves. Even the order the nominees are listed is exactly the same order they appear in the recommended list.
    Locus finalists:
    http://www.locusmag.com/News/2015/05/2015-locus-awards-finalists/
    Locus recommended list:
    http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2015/02/2014-locus-recommended-reading-list/

    So, yes, there’s voting, but de facto the nominees are limited to the works listed in the recommended list. Since it is well-known that the recommended list is not exactly full of Baen works (or any puppy-recommended work), the fact that it’s the same for the nominees does not add any new information.

  28. LOL. Several of us all recognized that Xdpaul walked right into that response with his question.

  29. AG: Well here’s some news for you, buddy — there’s no basis for assuming Sad Puppies supporters didn’t vote in the Locus Poll and just got beat.

  30. I see that even though Brandon’s WORDS OF RADIANCE was a #1 New York Times bestseller last year, it didn’t make the LOCUS ballot in the Best Fantasy Novel category.

    Obviously, as his editor, I’m disappointed. Not that I think everything I publish deserves an award, but this ambitious book at least deserved consideration.

    Yet, strangely enough, I am not inventing a conspiracy to explain its absence.

    Clearly, I’m not Naughty Puppy material.

  31. @Moshe Feder: Words of Radiance was not written in the ballot. Therefore the only votes it could get were write-in votes. In practice that means that it was impossible for Words of Radiance (or any other work that was not in the Locus Recommended List) to be nominated.

  32. I think Words of Radiance only suffers from being the second book in a series, I loved it and think the series has been phenomenal so far (I’ve gotta imagine it’s tough to edit and ensure consistency through such a large volume of text as well, great job!), however after a lot of text it still feels like Sanderson is setting things up for huge payoffs down the road. That’s not to say the book itself isn’t good, only that books that it’s not really self contained and hard to judge compared to solitary books. Weeks Black Prism series is the same way.

  33. That is a remarkable admission on your part, Seth and Matt Y and others who so readily fell lockstep into agreement that you have hated us long before Sad Puppies ever came to be. It isn’t like we both didn’t know this. It is just that your type is so rarely so transparent in saying so.

  34. AG: “Even the order the nominees are listed is exactly the same order they appear in the recommended list.”

    You mean alphabetical order? Good gods, is even that part of the conspiracy? IS NOTHING SACRED?!?!

  35. @snowcrash: Yes, because that way you are addressing the point I was making. Sigh. I get tired of so much intellectual dishonesty.

  36. Wow, its like watching Tyler Durden beat himself up. Seth and Matt Y and Andrew all post reasonable, “ah, we don’t hate you, we like to invite people into fandom” responses, and xdpaul re-writes them in his head as having posted “HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE”

  37. xdpaul, I freely admit to welcoming you into fandom, a glorious culture that probably began when one pale and socially maladjusted nerd glared across the cafeteria table (the cafeteria might have been in some university in Paris in the fourteenth century) at another pale and socially maladjusted nerd and said, “Your favorite book sucks.”

  38. “That is a remarkable admission on your part, Seth and Matt Y and others who so readily fell lockstep into agreement that you have hated us long before Sad Puppies ever came to be.”

    That’s a mighty fine persecution complex you got there.

  39. Oh and I’m sure noted Baen author Lois McMaster Bujold, who last I heard is trapped under her mountain of Hugo/ Locus/ Nebula nomination pins and awards, would be utterly fascinated to hear about how ignored Baen authors are at various awards.

  40. ‘It isn’t like we both didn’t know this. It is just that your type is so rarely so transparent in saying so.’

    I don’t know who ‘we’ is or why you’re trying to hard to believe I hate you or have ever hated you. At best I’m ambivalent towards you, you’re an unknown person at another screen somewhere in the world. I’m too lazy to be able to muster up an intense feeling such as hate, or even a mild one such as annoyance, at a stranger. If anything I feel pity that you have this view that you’re hated. But like I said, you ever want to talk about books give a holler. I’ve read the MHI books, Kloos, OSC and many more because I like SF&F books regardless of the authors political views so we probably liked many of the same books. If you’re a wrongfan who wronglikes wrongbooks you’ll find that many of us wronglike them as well.

  41. I thought we were all ok with wrongliking wrongbooks these days. hell, I’m planning on wrongmarrying a wrongbook, and then commiting wrongadultery on it with a wrongnovella.

  42. Seth – ‘socially maladjusted nerd glared across the cafeteria table (the cafeteria might have been in some university in Paris in the fourteenth century) at another pale and socially maladjusted nerd and said, “Your favorite book sucks.”’

    Pfft like Predator could ever beat Alien. SEGA does what Nintendon’t. Tell you what you name your favorite book and we’ll meet here tomorrow and I’ll bring a spreadsheet explaining how it’s wrong 🙂

    Fandom is just where nerds share what they love and fight with people who are better informed on the ridiculous subject more than the average person.

  43. Matt Y, don’t walk it back now.

    Either there is as you say, no cabal, and Sad Puppies are not only welcome to the party, but celebrated for boosting membership and bringing many new names to the ballot, but that is of course betrayed by the fact that Sad Puppies have in fact been despised up until this point. But, again, since there is no cabal, and the fact that Sad Puppies are the monsters you agree they are but are nonetheless invited to the prom, even though they are hated, you are left with only one other option:

    Call it the Carrie effect. As a culmination of your long-standing hatred of the people behind Sad Puppies, your fandom in-group was so irritated by the audacity of SP to actually believe it might belong, that you invited them in (through the Hugo nom process) merely to see them rightfully crowned, only to be humiliated at the crowning.

    So, by agreeing that the scenario I describe indicates that there is no secret cabal against the Puppies, you leave yourself in a worse position: that you really have always hated our kind, and you have set your heart on showing us now that we had the audacity to play by the rules and join in.

    Now, it is possible that Seth’s “two nerds hate each other’s books” scenario is true, but that too shows that your side has hated the other side’s books for a very long time, and in fact, hate them so much as to try to punish them for participating in an open election.

    It isn’t like I didn’t know this. I’m just fascinated that you were so quick to admit it. The comedy, of course, stems from the fact that you were so darn sure I left a cherry for you to pick! That’s almost as funny as Nick Mamatas’ concept of “hard numbers.”

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