Thoughts On The BSFA Award For Non-Fiction

Since my post about my draft BSFA Awards nominations, two things have happened. First, Best Fan Writer-in-waiting Nina Allan has posted her recommendations for the BSFA Non-Fiction Award. Second, I’ve signed up with Pocket, got the plug-in for Chrome and activated En2Kindle to allow me to automatically save webpages to my Kindle. Since most of my free time is spent away from a computer and my phone is a little too small to make reading articles or stories a pleasure, I’m hopeful that this will allow me to better keep abreast of things rather than bookmarking them for later and never returning. I’ve started by whacking a load of Allan’s recommendations over, including the following pieces from Jonathan McCalmont:

• Short Fiction And The Feels
• ‘Uncanny’
• ‘Terraform’
• ‘Deep Forests And Manicured Gardens: A Look At Two New Short Fiction Magazines’
• ‘A Perspective On Perspectives’

McCalmont should be another Best Fan Writer-in-waiting but I suspect he will be waiting in perpetuity. Over the course of these five posts, he makes a broad ranging assessment of the contemporary SF short fiction that mixes big, bold theorising with a close reading of individual stories. Allan notes that she “remains undecided as to how much of Jonathan’s argument I agree with – all mulchy middle ground, me – but I find much that interests me in his viewpoint, and the gutsiness of his writing always leaves me feeling liberated and inspired generally.” For me, it is not just his gutsiness but his ambition; I quite often disagree with his theories but this big picture approach, grounded but not mired in academic thought, is vanishingly rare.

In terms of the BSFA Awards, I do worry that his vote will be split. Like Allan, I think the three middle posts are essentially a single piece and the strongest individual part of the total argument. But I know Ian Sales in his nomination post went for ‘Short Fiction And The Feels’. Sales also rightly praises Allan’s own non-fiction and says nice things about ‘The State of British SF and Fantasy’, the Strange Horizons symposium both her and me contributed to. I was proud to be a part of it so I’m glad others found it worthwhile.

Speaking of Strange Horizons, I’ve just been commissioned for my first review under the new triumphivrate of editors who have taken over from Abigail Nussbaum (another Best Fan Writer-in-waiting but the one who probably won’t be waiting that long). It will be my first review in a while but hopefully this year I will be producing a bit more non-fiction as well as reading more.