The 2015 World Fantasy Awards shortlist is out, the last major SFF award to do so. In the novel category this is the ballot:
- The Goblin Emperor — Katherine Addison
- City of Stairs — Robert Jackson Bennett
- The Bone Clocks — David Mitchell
- Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy — Jeff VanderMeer
- My Real Children — Jo Walton
Updating my 2014 noticable SFF novels list I saw that there was only one new entry, David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. This had a lot of buzz last year as a literary type of fantasy that might do well with the more, ahem, broad minded SFF awards but disappoints to have only be nominated for the WFA. The same also goes for City of Stairs, now on two nominations, this one and the Locus Awards. The other three all have won one award each: a Locus Award for Addison, a Nebula for VanderMeer and a Tiptree for Walton.
With all the awards now having announced their shortlist, it’s possible to take a quick look at which novels are “winning”. Only Ann Leckie so far has won more than one award with Ancillary Sword and in total twelve novels share eight awards (with a joint Tiptree winner and both the Kitschies and the Locus award having multiple categories. Four more awards still need to report a winner (the Lambdas have announced but didn’t have a novel win their SFF category): the WFA, Gemmel, Prometheus and of course the Hugo Awards. It will be interesting to see if Cixin Liu will win either the Hugo or the Prometheus, otherwise it will be a bit disappointing to not have it win anything after all the hype.
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