Saturday, February 4, 2023

Annotated 2022 Locus Reading List for Short Fiction

Update 9/18/24: Tagged 31 stories from 📙Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year (click link to highlight).
Update 10/31/23: Tagged 2 🏆World Fantasy Award winners for short fiction (click link to highlight).
Update 10/22/23: Tagged 3 🏆Hugo Award winners for short fiction (click link to highlight).
Update 9/6/23: Tagged 1 🏆Eugie Award winner (click link to highlight).
Update 8/25/23: Tagged 1 🏆Sturgeon Award winner (click link to highlight).
(More)
Here is the annotated 2022 Locus Recommended Reading List for short fiction, merged with RSR's 2022 Best SF/F list (aka our aggregated list of "outstanding" stories from 2022 that score 2 or more based on 👍reviewers, 🏆awards, and year's best 📙anthologies). All the stories are grouped by length and score, with stories from the Locus list highlighted in red.

The merge lets us analyze the Locus list to see which stories that were broadly recognized as outstanding were left out, which publications stood out, which authors did particularly well (or not), how many were eligible for the Astounding Award, and how RSR's own recommendations stack up with Locus reviewers in general.

As with every RSR annotated list, there are links galore to the stories, their authors, the magazines, any award nominations/wins or "year's best" anthology inclusions, and search-links to find other reviews.

Anyone can vote for the Locus Awards at this link. Due date is Thursday April 15, 2023.

If you want to skip the analysis and just start reading, click here (free stories highlighted).

Observations

(These observations are based on story scores as of February 4, 2023. The scores will automatically update and new stories enter RSR's Best SF/F list as 🏆award finalists, winners, and year's best 📙anthologies are released through November 2023.)

For the most part, we're going to focus on ways in which we differ with the Locus List. This should not overshadow the fact that we think they've produced an excellent list that reflects the hard work we know they put into it.

In the section below, the links support the claims in the text by jumping to a view of the table that shows the stories and data being discussed.

1. Overlooked 💬Stories

The Locus List contained many of the stories we expected to see there, but there were a few omissions that surprised us, given how broadly popular some of these stories were.
  • 6 of the top 27 short stories in RSR's list were in the Locus list.
    • This is a smaller overlap than in previous years. It probably doesn't help that there are 27(!) short stories with the top scores of 4 and 3 at the moment. The bunch will spread out as award nominations and year's best anthologies are announced over the next few months.
  • 6 of the top 11 novelettes in RSR's list were in the Locus list.
    • The overlap of half is good. The non-Locus list stories happen to be from the print magazines (Analog, Asimov's, F&SF), which were surprisingly under-represented in previous years, though that's gotten better recently.
  • 4 of the top 5 novellas in RSR's list were in the Locus list.
    • These are all Tor novellas. It's a little surprising that Seanan McGuire's "Where the Drowned Girls Go" was not on the Locus list, though maybe it's reviewer fatigue for book 7 of the Wayward Children series. :-)
  • Conversely, here's a view that shows the 70 stories in the Locus list from publications not reviewed by RSR. Thirty-six of them have non-zero scores because they were recommended by one or more of the prolific reviewers we follow. Over the course of 2023, more will gain scores as award finalists, winners and year's best anthologies are announced.

2. Notable 📚Publications

A publication stands out if it has much more (or less) than an average percentage of its original stories included in the Locus list. Here, we'll define "average" to mean about 10% to 20%, which is roughly the typical percentage of a publication's stories recommended by RSR each year.
  • Publications getting an average share of its stories in the Locus list include free-online magazines Apex (5/37, 14%), Strange Horizons (7/46; 15%), Tor.com (5/32; 16%).
  • Publications with a below average share include Analog (3/116; 3%), Asimov's (4/71, 6%),  BCS (5/60; 8%), Clarkesworld (4/86, 5%), F&SF (7/79, 9%), Fantasy (3/48; 6%),  and Lightspeed (4/70, 6%).
  • Publications with an above average share include paid-only books from Tor novellas (15/19; 79%) and free-online magazine Uncanny (9/44; 20%). These two publications also had above-average representation the last three years (2021, 2020, 2019).
  • Fans of magazines not reviewed by RSR are welcome to provide the % (and #) of stories included in the Locus list for those magazines in the comments below.

3. Notable ✒️Authors

The merged RSR & Locus list, grouped by author, shows 247 stories by 202 authors. Of authors with 3+ stories in the RSR and/or Locus lists, here are the ones that stood out.

4. ✍New Writers

The Locus list includes 20 stories from Astounding Award-eligible writers, 11 in year 1 and 9 in year 2 of eligibility, versus the 12 in year 1 and 7 in year 2 stories from RSR's 2022 Best SF/F list. Eligibility is based on ISFDB, which can be wrong or incomplete, so please feel free to note corrections in the comments.
Posted by at 2/04/2023 05:28:00 PM
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