2015 Best SF/F

Update 1/25/20: Added reviewer πŸ‘A.C. Wise (click link to highlight).

Every month, on the 1st, we add the most recommendedπŸ‘ stories from the previous month's ratings to our Year-To-Date (YTD) list, grouped by story length and current score (must be 2 or more). This is our annual library.

After year's end, during the three-month award nomination season, the YTD list becomes the SF/F Ballots list and story scores are updated as “year’s best” anthologiesπŸ“™ and award finalistsπŸ† are announced. For some awards and the Locus Recommended Reading List, we’ll create an annotated list of the finalists sorted by latest score to help people choose stories to read.

After most nominations close in March, the SF/F Ballots list becomes the Best SF/F list and story scores continue to be updated until November when the last award winners (World Fantasy) are announced. During this time, we’ll produce themed selections of outstanding storiesπŸš€✨πŸŒˆπŸ“š with final scores from the annual library.

1. Year-To-Date



2. Hugo Awards


To make it easier to nominate things other than Best Novel, we have collected key information from all the stories in Analog, Asimov's, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Tor.com and from all the stories in nine major anthologies published in 2015. Taken together, this makes it a lot easier to pick things to read and nominate in seven categories.

Help Making Short-Fiction Nominations

If you're still looking for things to read

You can find information on this page for:
Each of these lists is grouped by number of recommendations from nine prolific short-fiction reviewers, and each entry includes links to reviews. We also provide extensive information on how to buy or borrow digital copies of back issues of the print magazines.

There are also the RSR-annotated versions of the 2015 Locus Recommended Reading List and 2015 Nebula Award Nominees and reviews of late recommendation from the Puppies.

If you've already finished your reading

It's easy to remember which novels you read last year, but it's hard to remember all the short fiction. Even a list of titles and authors doesn't always help because that's often not enough to remind you what the story was about--much less whether it was a novella, novelette, or short story.

Our page of Stories by Magazine and Category should have everything you need to make this easy. It includes short descriptions of each story, which make it easier to remember what they were about, and (especially useful for stories from anthologies) we include the word count, which makes it easy to decide what category the stories go into.

If you're trying to find new writers who're eligible for the Campbell Award

The Campbell Award goes to the best new writer based on the last two years of work. The challenge here is knowing who's eligible.  Our  Campbell-Award-Eligible Writers page contains the same information per-story as the list above, but filters out all but the new writers.

Help Making Best-Artist Nominations

Best Professional Artist

To pick candidates for Best Professional Artist, you need to be able to look through a lot of full-sized images quickly, separating out the ones worth more study. Our 2016 Professional Artists page uses a "lightbox" display to let you scroll through the cover art from the major magazines and novels of 2015, and it includes links to the original publications and the artists' online galleries (where possible). With this system, you can riffle through about 200 pieces of cool art in just a few minutes.

Best Fan Artist

Our 2016 Fan Artists page does the same thing for cover art from the major prozines and 50 fanzines (with thanks to Bill Burns from eFanzines who extracted the images and hosts them).

Help Making Best Editor (Short Form) Nominations

Finally, to help people make nominations for the Best Editor (Short Form) category, we collected together all the statistics we could think of on our 2016 Editors (Short Form) page and we offer some suggestions on how to combine them to pick candidates.

Everyone has a handle on Best Novel, but we think this makes nominating for the other categories a whole lot easier, and we hope you will too. (Rocket Stack Rank is a free service and is not monetized in any way, shape, or form.)

Registration

2016 Hugo Awards nominations have already begun and will continue until March 31. To nominate, you must have either been registered for Sasquan in 2015 or been registered for MidAmericon II (or Worldcon 75) before January 31, 2016.

MidAmeriCon II will be held in Kansas City, MO from August 17-21, 2016. Worldcon 75 will be in Helsinki, Finland in 2017.

3. Best SF/F


RSR's tables are now dynamic, meaning you can change the way the stories are ordered, and also highlight different types of stories. For example, click this link πŸŒ€Publication & Score to regroup stories from categories to magazines. Click these links to highlight stories that are πŸ“–free online, by ✍new writers (Campbell Award-eligible), and 🌐translations.

You can also flag and rate stories to track your reading progress over weeks and months and end up with a shortlist of candidates in the ⚑★My Ratings page at the end of the year to nominate for the Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and various magazine-specific awards.

When you're ready to try the new features, expand the Dynamic Table Features help box below for further details, and expand the gray Command Box pinned to the bottom of the window to access all the new functionality.

Eric Wong
Updated Friday June 21, 2019

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