Voting Opens for Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF Readers’ Choice Award

Today Baen Books released The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Vol. 3, edited by David Afsharirad, and started taking votes for the third annual Year’s Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction Readers’ Choice Award. The public will pick one of the 15 short stories in the anthology as the award-winner:

  • ”Cadet Cruise” by David Drake
  • “Tethers” by William Ledbetter
  • “Unlinkage” by Eric Del Carlo
  • “Not in Vain” by Kacey Ezell
  • “Between Nine and Eleven” by Adam Roberts
  • “Sephine and the Leviathan” by Jack Schouten
  • “The Good Food” by Michael Ezell
  • “If I Could Give this Time Machine Zero Stars, I Would” by James Wesley Rogers
  • “Wise Child” by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
  • “Starhome” by Michael Z. Williamson
  • “The Art of Failure” by Robert Dawson
  • “The Last Tank Commander” by Allen Stroud
  • “One Giant Leap” by Jay Werkheiser
  • “The Immortals: Anchorage” by David Adams
  • “Backup Man” by Paul Di Filippo

Registration with Baen Ebooks is required to vote. Alternatively, people may send a postcard or letter with the name of their favorite story from this volume and its author to Baen Books Year’s Best Award, P.O. Box 1188, Wake Forest, NC 27587. Voting closes August 31, 2017.

The winning story will be announced at Dragoncon in Atlanta, held over Labor Day Weekend 2017, and at Baen.com. The author will receive an inscribed plaque and a $500 prize.

21 thoughts on “Voting Opens for Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF Readers’ Choice Award

  1. Just don’t care, even if its Baen, the editor’s previous choices have NOT interested me. Plus its got MZW, who anti-interests me these days (in fact, it would require something like the cold dead hand of Robert Heinlein rising from the grave to pat MZW on the back to convince me to ever read anything he writes).

  2. This just seems like such a silly idea for an award: pick one of the stories from this anthology and we’ll declare it the year’s best.

  3. @PhilRM: Did you miss that the collection is the Best MilSF of the year? That means the best in the collection is clearly the best of the best. And, since the award will be presented at Dragon Con, you know that it’s going to be a meaningful award.

  4. “If I Could Give this Time Machine Zero Stars, I Would” by James Wesley Rogers

    Ok this one I want to read now.

  5. I must admit it is a clever title. Not interested in the anthology though.

  6. @Matt Y:

    “If I Could Give this Time Machine Zero Stars, I Would” by James Wesley Rogers

    Ok this one I want to read now.

    I almost praised that one for the title myself. That’s a great title.

  7. @James Davis Nicoll

    The pool isn’t limited to Baen.

    Adding the award to the anthology seems like a harmless piece of puffery to me.

  8. I looked at the table of contents, and 5 were originally published by baen.com or a Baen anthology, 2 came from Crises and Conflicts (Newcon Press), one each from Analog, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons, two published in two different Beyond the Stars anthologies (Astral Press), and several were published in other magazines or anthologies, maybe online, not at Baen. Despite my sarcasm in my previous post, I compare this award to something like the Analog AnLab award.

    “If I Could Give this Time Machine Zero Stars, I Would” by James Wesley Rogers: I only read the first page, but it starts out quite funny. From the first page, though, I wouldn’t expect it to be MilSF.

  9. @Dann

    If I might hazard a guess, it’s due to MZW’s dreadful best related work Hugo nominee “Wisdom from the Internet” from two years ago and his behaviour related to that.

  10. @Peter J
    Thanks for the link to “If I Could Give this Time Machine Zero Stars, I Would.” That was a fun story! For those who were wondering, it’s definitely not MilSF; I’m guessing it’s included in the “adventure SF” category.

  11. That’s a very funny story! Lives up to the title, doesn’t take longer than need be.

    Here’s the Lee and Miller story, and I’m not going to look for any more because the Baen site is still using their pre-WWW architecture and I am OVER gopher and archie.

    http://www.baen.com/readonline/index/read/sku/9781625794987

    (And yes, MZW’s public behavior guarantees I will never buy anything that funnels money to him.)

  12. @Peter J: ROFL, thanks for the link to the time machine story. It was perfect. 🙂 Not MilSF, nor Adventure SF, methinks – it’s a humor piece – still, I loved it.

    Has anyone read the anthology it’s from – “Unidentified Funny Objects 5”? (I’m not usually into humor SF and I don’t read much short fiction.) I recognize 7 out of 18 names.

  13. I read UFO 1 and 2, maybe 3, but lost touch with the series. It was nice light reading.

  14. Chiming in to agree that the time machine story was a good one, and lived up to its title.

    Thanks to everyone providing links to the stories.

    Also, yeah, Michael Z Williamson’s behavior during the mid-era Kerpupple has soured me for good on him. You have to be a pretty durn good writer for me to read your work if you’re a blatant asshole (Lovecraft, Ellison, Asimov…)

  15. Sorry for the lag in response. Yes, as described above, it was MZW’s behavior and posts primarily but not exclusively related to the Puppies (accursed be their names). Plus he’s still being the same sort of asshole on other fora I read, so I keep getting reminded not to buy his works.

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