Rocket Stack Rank Ratings

Showing posts with label Ratings. Show all posts

Thursday, December 31, 2020

News & Highlights

🔎Finding a Science-Fiction/Fantasy Magazine to Subscribe To

Diversity in Outstanding SF/F Short Fiction
Stories with 🌈LGBT people: 2019 2018 2017 2015-2016
Stories by 📚People of Color: 2019 2018 2017 2015-2016

Monthly Ratings & Annual Outstanding Selections
📅2020: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
🏆Best SF/F: 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015
🚀Hard SF: 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015
✨High Fantasy: 2019 2018 2016-2017
😱SF/F Horror: 2019 2018 2016-2017

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

5★ & 4★ Stories: 0; Time & Words: 💬0
Recommended By Stories: → Due next month
Total Stories: 70; Time & Words: [24h] 💬439K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

Starting this month, Rocket Stack Rank will take an indefinite break from writing reviews. We'll still produce monthly lists of stories that you can flag and rate and find other reviews, and we'll continue to highlight recommendations from other sources, but we'll stop rating stories ourselves, at least for awhile.

After five years of writing reviews for Rocket Stack Rank, I'm going to take an indefinite break. This month marks five years since we started the site, and so it seemed like a good time to pause. Eric will continue to operate the site, producing monthly lists of stories for 11 magazines (with blurbs from the publisher or a few sentences from the story) and aggregating recommendations from other sources (currently 6 reviewers, 16 awards, 7 year's best anthologies), but I won't be reviewing stories myself. Not for a while, at least.

Five years ago, in September 2015, Eric and I started Rocket Stack Rank as a response to the Sad/Rabid Puppy episode that ruined the 2015 Hugo Awards. As we said at the time, we wanted "to create a website to encourage readers of science fiction and fantasy to read and nominate more short fiction."

The response was very positive, and we've enjoyed steady support from readers. We quickly ramped up to a few thousand unique monthly users, with 20-30,000 monthly page views (we recently passed 1,000,000 total page views), and we're currently the #1 Google result for "short science fiction story reviews." Best of all, we were finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine three times (2017, 2018, 2019). Thank you for supporting us!

In the past five years, I've read and reviewed 3,979 stories, totaling 32,755,701 words of fiction or about the equivalent of 328 novels. In the process, I wrote 604,515 words worth of reviews--as much text as in six novels.

What I've not done is take a break. For five years, I've read and reviewed stories on a deadline--even on vacations--and every month on the 15th, we've produced our "Monthly Ratings," showing all the new short fiction for that month together with key information like the word counts and the recommendations of other reviewers.

For a long time, that wasn't a problem; this was a labor of love, and Eric and I happily made it first priority. But over the last few months, it has become a burden, and I've had to force myself to read the stories and write the reviews. This isn't because the stories got worse--it's because we've found other things we want to spend time on. That being the case, it's time for me to stop, at least for a while.

We're still going to produce the Monthly Ratings, the Year-To-Date lists, and themed selections of outstanding speculative short fiction, but I'm going to stop reading and reviewing for the most part.

Greg Hullender

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Outstanding Hard Science Fiction of 2019

Here are 19 outstanding hard science fiction stories from 2019 that were finalists for major SF/F 🏆awards, included in "year's best" SF/F 📙anthologies, or recommended by prolific 👍reviewers in short fiction (see Q&A). That's 19 out of 300+ best SF/F stories from 2019. A story's score is the sum of the +n points in it's "Recommended By" list (click the Details link to see the awards, year's best, and reviewers and the points).

August 2020 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 7; Time & Words: [5h:47m] 💬104K
Recommended By Stories: 11; Time & Words: [6h:47m] 💬122K
Total Stories: 28; Time & Words: [12h] 💬216K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

July 2020 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 7; Time & Words: [3h:54m] 💬70K
Recommended By Stories: 26; Time & Words: [11h] 💬199K
Total Stories: 65; Time & Words: [24h] 💬450K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

June 2020 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 5; Time & Words: [3h:22m] 💬61K
Recommended By Stories: 16; Time & Words: [8h:43m] 💬157K
Total Stories: 30; Time & Words: [12h] 💬231K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

Outstanding LGBT Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2019

June is Pride Month, and here are 31 outstanding stories with LGBT characters from 2019 reviewed by RSR that were either finalists for major SF/F awards 🏆, included in "year's best" SF/F anthologies 📙, or recommended by prolific reviewers 👍 in short fiction (see Q&A). For earlier outstanding stories, click this link.

This list of stories and the recommendations for each story will be updated as award finalists/winners and the table of contents for year's best anthologies are announced. As long as an LGBT story scores 2 or more (even if it was not recommended by RSR), it will be included here.

As always, our focus is on the stories, not the authors. These are stories with memorable LGBT characters—not necessarily stories by noted LGBT authors. These include stories in which a key character merely happens to be an LGBT person as well as stories where the LGBT angle is crucial to the plot.

May 2020 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 10; Time & Words: [5h:15m] 💬95K
Recommended By Stories: 29; Time & Words: [12h] 💬229K
Total Stories: 55; Time & Words: [21h] 💬389K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

April 2020 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 6; Time & Words: [3h:49m] 💬69K
Recommended By Stories: 22; Time & Words: [10h] 💬190K
Total Stories: 39; Time & Words: [15h] 💬275K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

March 2020 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 14; Time & Words: [9h:02m] 💬163K
Recommended By Stories: 33; Time & Words: [14h] 💬263K
Total Stories: 58; Time & Words: [21h] 💬388K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

February 2020 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 8; Time & Words: [6h:01m] 💬108K
Recommended By Stories: 30; Time & Words: [13h] 💬235K
Total Stories: 43; Time & Words: [20h] 💬371K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

Annotated 2019 Locus Reading List for Short Fiction

Update 9/7/20: Tagged 1 🏆Eugie Award winner (click to highlight it).
Update 8/25/20: Tagged 35 stories in 📙Rich Horton's year's best anthology (click to highlight them).
Update 8/1/20: Tagged 3 🏆Hugo Award winners (click to highlight them). (More)

Here is the annotated 2019 Locus Recommended Reading List for short fiction, merged with RSR's 2019 Best SF/F list (aka our aggregated list of "outstanding" stories from 2019 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 Monday April 15, 2020.

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

2020 YTD, New Writers and My Ratings

Now that the January 2020 Ratings have been updated with recommendations by other reviewers and the 2020 YTD and (2020) New Writers pages are no longer empty, we've refreshed the tabs at the top of the home page by replacing the 2018 Best SF/F tab with the 2019 SF/F Ballots tab (use for award nominations and catching up on reading), and updating the 2019 YTD, (2019) New Writers, and (2019) My Ratings tabs with the 2020 YTD, (2020) New Writers, and (2020) My Ratings tabs, respectively.

Note: The (2019) New Writers and (2019) My Ratings pages are accessible from the Jump To... drop-down list above the table in any 2019 Ratings page. For older stories, the Best SF/F pages for 2018 through 2015 are linked from the "News & Highlights" pinned post at the top of the home page.

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

2020 Professional Artists

To help people make nominations for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, we have set up a "lightbox" system to let fans quickly flip through over 300 works by over 100 artists listed below and to set aside the ones they particularly liked. Here's how it works:

In the artist list below, click on a thumbnail image. The lighbox should open, showing a larger image of the work.
If you like the picture, ctrl-click (or long-press) the artist's name above it. That will reopen this page in a new tab with that artist's information at the top.
Press the right-arrow key (or tap the picture) to advance to the next picture.
Once you've looked at all the pictures, go through the tabs you opened. For most artists there's a link to their website where you can find a gallery of their work.
Browse the gallery and see if the picture you liked was representative of their work as a whole.
Close the tabs of the ones you liked least.

January 2020 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 8; Time & Words: [3h:47m] 💬68K
Recommended By Stories: 27; Time & Words: [12h] 💬233K
Total Stories: 56; Time & Words: [21h] 💬382K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

SF/F Ballots For Stories From 2019

Here are links to ballots for various SF/F awards, 5 that are open to all, and 4 that are open to members of a convention or association.

The magazine-specific awards come with a longlist link to all stories published by each magazine, with blurbs to help you remember the ones you've read and scores to guide further reading.

For the general awards, see the outstanding stories at the 2019 YTD page, grouped by length (novella, novelette, short story), by publication, by new writer (year 1, year 2), or by author.

Awards in bold are currently available for voting.

Outstanding SF/F by People of Color 2018

In the spirit of Lightspeed Magazine's famous People of Color Destroy Science Fiction series, here are 65 stories by 53 people of color that had scores of 2 or higher from RSR's 2018 Best SF/F list. That list contains the 342 most-recommended stories out of 785 covered, so the 65 stories by people of color make up around 19% of the best of 2018.

Some stories not reviewed by RSR are in the Best SF/F list because they were award finalists 🏆, included in year's best anthologies 📙, or recommended by other prolific reviewers 👍 (see Q&A for SF/F awards, year's best anthologies, and prolific reviewers followed).

Readers asked us to make it easy for them to find good stories written by authors with diverse racial backgrounds, and that’s what this list is meant to accomplish (author identity plays no role in our ratings). This is the third year we've done this list (2017, 2015-2016).

December 2019 Ratings

5★ & 4★ Stories: 4; Time & Words: [4h:35m] 💬83K
Recommended By Stories: 15; Time & Words: [9h:25m] 💬170K
Total Stories: 40; Time & Words: [19h] 💬360K
Read How to Use RSR on the sidebar or this link to use this post.

Outstanding High Fantasy of 2018

Here are 39 outstanding high fantasy stories from 2018 that were finalists for major SF/F 🏆awards, included in "year's best" SF/F 📙anthologies, or recommended by prolific 👍reviewers in short fiction (see Q&A). That's 39 out of 340+ best SF/F stories from 2018. A story's score is the sum of the +n points in it's "Recommended By" list (click the Details link to see the awards, year's best, and reviewers and the points).

For our purposes, we define "high fantasy" as a fantasy story that takes place in a secondary world. That is, something like Lord of the Rings, where Middle Earth is clearly not in the past or future of our world.

We've included portal fantasies, provided the destination is a secondary world.

How to Use RSR

Welcome! RSR in a Nutshell!

Once a month, on the 15th, this blog posts groups of rated stories. Casual SF fans with only a few hours free can (1) use our rating, time estimate and blurb to ⚑flag a few stories to read; then for each story (2) click the title if it's a link or the Issue link to access, borrow, or purchase individual back issues with the stories; (3) read the story in an app, browser, or printed form; (4) click the 🔎︎Reviews link to see what other people think; (5) click the 🚀︎Review link for RSR's mini-review; then (6) ★rate the story so it'll appear in the ⚑★My Ratings page for use when they plan award nominations.

Once a month, on the 1st, this blog updates the previous month's stories to identify the ones Recommended By other reviewers🏆📙👍. Readers can follow the links to their reviews and use them to choose additional stories to read. The 📅Year-To-Date page is updated with all of the previous month's stories that got recommendations from anyone (not just RSR), and the ✍New Writers page is updated with the stories of any Astounding Award-eligible writers (both pages are useful for catching up if you're new to the blog).

Once a year, at the start of the Hugo Awards nomination period, the Year-To-Date page becomes the SF/F Awards page with updates for stories included in "year's best" anthologies, links to annotated versions of the Locus Recommended Reading List and Nebula Award finalists, and exhibits of select professional artists. Use them as guides for further reading, and look in the My Ratings page for the stories you've read and rated over the course of the year when you do your short fiction nominations for the Hugo, Locus, and magazine-specific awards.

After Hugo nominations close, the SF/F Awards page becomes the 🏆Best SF/F page and the stories are updated as major award finalists are announced. With the final recommendations in by mid-summer, RSR can slice-and-dice the year's Best SF/F stories into selections of 🚀Science Fiction, ✨Fantasy, and 🌈LGBT stories, and stories by 📚People of Color.

Note: Authors eligible for the Astounding Award are identified with a 1 or 2 superscript for their year.