2014 noticable SFF novels

UPDATES:
13 July: The Prometheus winner has been announced
08 July: World Fantasy Awards shortlist
27 June: The Locus Awards winners are out
14 June: Claire North wins the John W. Campbell Memorial Award
07 June: Jeff VanderMeer wins the Nebula Award for best novel
02 June: the Lambda Award winners have been announced. Because the winning book isn’t a novel, it doesn’t change anything in the rankings.
01 June: added the Gemmel Awards short list.
22 May: Added the Lambda LGBT sf/fantasy/horror nominees minus the two short story collections to the list of nominations.

What with most of the major SFF awards having announced their nominees, or even winners, save for the Gemmel Award for Best Fantasy and the World Fantasy Award, it’s possible to make a list of the most critically acclaimed novels published last year. The Puppy candidates for the Best Novel Hugo have of course been omitted, as they cheated to get on the list. I’ll update it once more nominations and winners are known.

Looking at the list and the large number of singular nominations, there’s a huge spread in what the various awards think is noticable science fiction and fantasy, with not much overlap between the UK and US based awards. Genderwise there are thirty men nominated and twentyfour women, with the latter so far having the upperhand six to one in actual wins. What’s interesting if slightly disappointing is that Sarah Tolmie’s The Stone Boatsmen, one of the best novels I read last year, hasn’t been nominated anywhere. At least Corinne Duyvis’ Otherbound got a honourable mention at the Tiptrees.

Award Winners (with nominations and which award won in parentheses):

• Half a King — Joe Abercrombie (2. Locus YA)
• The Goblin Emperor — Katherine Addison (4, Locus Fantasy)
• The Girl in the Road — Monica Byrne (1, Tiptree)
• The Book of the Unnamed Midwife — Meg Elison (1, PKD Award)
• Viper Wine — Hermione Eyre (1, Kitschies)
• Ancillary Sword — Ann Leckie (4, BSFA, Locus SF)
• The Memory Garden — Mary Rickert (1, Locus First Novel)
• Grasshopper Jungle — Andrew Smith (1, Kitschies)
• Station Eleven — Emily St John Mandel (2, Clarke)
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August — Claire North (3, Campbell)
• Influx — Daniel Suarez (1, Prometheus)
• Area X Trilogy — Jeff VanderMeer (4, Nebula)
• My Real Children — Jo Walton (2, Tiptree)

Multiple Award nominees – in order of number:

• The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu (5)
• Memory of Water — Emmi Itäranta (4)
• The Race — Nina Allan (3)
• Elysium — Jennifer Marie Brissett (3)
• The Peripheral — William Gibson (3)
• Europe in Autumn — Dave Hutchinson (3)
• Lagoon — Nnedi Okorafor (3)
• City of Stairs — Robert Jackson Bennett (2)
• A Darkling Sea — James L. Cambias (2)
• The Mirror Empire — Kameron Hurley (2)
• Wolves — Simon Ings (2)
• Lock In — John Scalzi (2)
• The Emperor’s Blades — Brian Staveley (2)

Singulars:

• The Doubt Factory — Paolo Bacigalupi
• Steles of the Sky — Elizabeth Bear
• The Girl with All the Gifts — M. R. Carey
• Waistcoasts & Weaponry — Gail Carriger
• Traitor’s Blade — Sebastien de Castell
• The Clockwork Dagger — Beth Cato
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet — Becky Chambers
• FutureDyke — Lea Daley
• Child of a Hidden Sea — A. M. Dellamonica
• The Bullet-Cather’s Daughter — Rod Duncan
• The Book of Strange New Things — Michel Faber
• Trial by Fire — Charles E. Gannon
• Full Fathom Five — Max Gladstone
• Afterparty — Daryl Gregory
• The Magician’s Land — Lev Grossman
• Valour — John Gwynne
• Cuckoo Song — Frances Hardinge
• Ascension — Jacqueline Koyanagi (actually a 2013 novel)
• Prince of Fools — Mark Lawrence
• Coming Home — Jack McDevitt
• Empress of the Sun — Ian McDonald
• Defenders — Will McIntosh
• The Bone Clocks — David Mitchell
• Clariel — Garth Nix
• The Bees — Laline Paul
• The Godless — Ben Peek
• Raising Steam — Terry Pratchett
• Maplecroft: The Borden Dispatches — Cherie Priest
• Bête — Adam Roberts
• A Better World — Marcus Sakey
• Words of Radiance — Brandon Sanderson
• Butcher’s Road — Lee Thomas
• The Age of Iron — by Angus Watson
• Echopraxia — Peter Watts
• The Broken Eye — Brent Weeks
• The Martian — Andy Weir
• The Way Inn — Will Wiles
• The Moon King — Neil Williamson
• The People in the Trees — Hanya Yanagihara

Below is the list of awards I’ve taken into consideration. I’ll add the results for the WFA and Gemmel once they come out. Only finalists or winners have been looked at. Because some awards have multiple novel categories (e.g. the Kitschies have two: one for best novel, one for best first novel) the number of winners will be greater than the number of awards.

• Hugo Awards (voted on by Worldcon members)
• Nebula Awards (SFWA members)
• BSFA (Eastercon members)
• Arthur C. Clarke Award (Juried)
• Locus Award(Locus readers and random passers by)
• John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel of the year (Juried, not to be confused with the Campbell Award for best new writer)
• Prometheus(for libertarian fiction, voted for by the Libertarian Futurist Society, often presented to socialist Scottish writers)
• Tiptree Award (juried, for “science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender”)
• Philip K. Dick Award (juried, for best SF paperback original book)
• the Kitschies (juried, for “progressive, intelligent & entertaining” SFF)
• Lambda LGBT sf/fantasy/horror awards (part of the Lambda Literary Awards)
• The David Gemmell Awards: for best fantasy and best debut fantasy