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The top ten finalists in each category are:
SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, Samit Basu (Tordotcom) A Fire Born of Exile, Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz; JAB Books) Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow (Tor; Ad Astra) Furious Heaven, Kate Elliott (Ad Astra; Tor) Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK) The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK) Starter Villain, John Scalzi (Tor; Tor UK) Lords of Uncreation, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit US; Tor UK) System Collapse, Martha Wells (Tordotcom) The Road to Roswell, Connie Willis (Del Rey)
FANTASY NOVEL
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey) The Keeper’s Six, Kate Elliott (Tordotcom) Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett (Del Rey; Orbit UK) Dead Country, Max Gladstone (Tordotcom) The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang (Tordotcom; Solaris UK) Paladin’s Faith, T. Kingfisher (Argyll) He Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan (Tor; Mantle) My Brother’s Keeper, Tim Powers (Baen; Ad Astra) City of Last Chances, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Ad Astra) Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
HORROR NOVEL
Vampires of El Norte, Isabel Cañas (Berkley) The Reformatory, Tananarive Due (Saga; Titan UK) A Haunting on the Hill, Elizabeth Hand (Mulholland; Sphere) Starling House, Alix E. Harrow (Tor; Tor UK) How to Sell a Haunted House, Grady Hendrix (Berkley; Titan UK) Don’t Fear the Reaper, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga; Titan UK) A House with Good Bones, T. Kingfisher (Nightfire; Titan UK) Lone Women, Victor LaValle (One World) Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher) Black River Orchard, Chuck Wendig (Del Rey; Del Rey UK)
YOUNG ADULT NOVEL
Promises Stronger Than Darkness, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Teen; Titan UK) The Making of Yolanda la Bruja, Lorraine Avila (Levine Querido) Damned If You Do, Alex Brown (Page Street) A Song of Salvation, Alechia Dow (Inkyard) The Library of Broken Worlds, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Scholastic; Magpie UK) The Sinister Booksellers of Bath, Garth Nix (Tegen; Gollancz) Into the Light, Mark Oshiro (Tor Teen) Divine Rivals, Rebecca Ross (Wednesday; Magpie UK) The Siren, the Song, and the Spy, Maggie Tokuda-Hall (Candlewick) The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, Andrew Joseph White (Peachtree Teen)
FIRST NOVEL
Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon) The Strange, Nathan Ballingrud (Saga; Titan UK) The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom) Threads That Bind, Kika Hatzopoulou (Razorbill; Penguin UK) These Burning Stars, Bethany Jacobs (Orbit US; Orbit UK) Godkiller, Hannah Kaner (Harper Voyager UK; Harper Voyager US) The Marigold, Andrew F. Sullivan (ECW) Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi (DAW; Gollancz) Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh (Tordotcom; Orbit UK) Ink Blood Sister Scribe, Emma Törzs (Morrow; Century)
NOVELLA
The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill (Tordotcom) The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar, Indra Das (Subterranean) “Linghun”, Ai Jiang (Linghun) The Salt Grows Heavy, Cassandra Khaw (Nightfire; Titan UK) Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK) Rose/House, Arkady Martine (Subterranean) Lost in the Moment and Found, Seanan McGuire (Tor) The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older (Tordotcom) The Lies of the Ajungo, Moses Ose Utomi (Tordotcom) Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)
NOVELETTE
“What I Remember of Oresha Moon Dragon Devshrata”, P. Djèlí Clark (The Book of Witches) “John Hollowback and the Witch”, Amal El-Mohtar (The Book of Witches) I AM AI, Ai Jiang (Shortwave) “The Year Without Sunshine“, Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny 11-12/23) “Prince Hat Underground”, Kelly Link (White Cat, Black Dog) “At Every Door a Ghost”, Premee Mohamed (Communications Breakdown) “The Rainbow Bank“, Uchechukwu Nwaka (GigaNotoSaurus 8/23) “One Man’s Treasure“, Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny 1-2/23) “Six Versions of My Brother Found Under a Bridge“, Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 9-10/23) “On the Fox Roads“, Nghi Vo (Tor.com 10/31/23)
SHORT STORY
“A Soul in the World“, Charlie Jane Anders (Uncanny 3-4/23) “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub“, P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny 1-2/23) “The Mausoleum’s Children“, Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny 5-6/23) “Suppertime”, Tananarive Due (New Suns 2) “Window Boy“, Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 8/23) “Reckless Eyeballing”, N.K. Jemisin (Out There Screaming) “The Sound of Children Screaming“, Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare 10/23) “Those Hitchhiking Kids“, Darcie Little Badger (The Sunday Morning Transport 4/2/23) “Stones“, Nnedi Okorafor (Clarkesworld 9/23) “There’s a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead“, Sarah Pinsker (The Deadlands 6/23)
ANTHOLOGY
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 7, Neil Clarke, ed. (Night Shade) Christmas and Other Horrors, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Titan UK) The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2022), Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & Eugen Bacon & Milton Davis, eds. (Caezic) Never Whistle at Night, Shane Hawk & Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., eds. (Vintage) The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023, R.F. Kuang & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Mariner) Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Random House; Picador) New Suns 2, Nisi Shawl, ed. (Solaris UK) The Book of Witches, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK) Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology, Wole Talabi, ed. (Android) The Best of World SF: Volume 3, Lavie Tidhar, ed. (Ad Astra)
COLLECTION
The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volumes 1 & 2, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon) Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and Other Stories, Tobias S. Buckell (Apex) The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, Tananarive Due (Akashic) White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra) No One Will Come Back For Us, Premee Mohamed (Undertow) Jackal, Jackal, Tobi Ogundiran (Undertow) Skin Thief, Suzan Palumbo (Neon Hemlock) Lost Places, Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer) The Best of Michael Swanwick, Volume Two, Michael Swanwick (Subterranean) The Best of Catherynne M. Valente, Volume One, Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean)
MAGAZINE
Analog Asimov’s Beneath Ceaseless Skies Clarkesworld F&SF FIYAH khōréō Strange Horizons Tor.com Uncanny
PUBLISHER
Angry Robot DAW Gollancz Neon Hemlock Orbit Small Beer Subterranean Tachyon Tor Tordotcom
EDITOR
Neil Clarke Ellen Datlow Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki Arley Sorg & Christie Yant Jonathan Strahan Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas Sheree Renée Thomas E. Catherine Tobler Ann VanderMeer Sheila Williams
ARTIST
Brom Rovina Cai Kinuko Y. Craft Julie Dillon Bob Eggleton Abigail Larson John Picacio Charles Vess Michael Whelan Alyssa Winans
NON-FICTION
The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History, Jack Dann (Bloomsbury Academic) 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, Kevin Jon Davies, ed. (Unbound UK) Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir, M. John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail; Saga 2024) All These Worlds, Niall Harrison (Briardene) 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, Sadie Hartmann (Page Street Publishing) Space Crone, Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver) Ex Marginalia: Essays on Writing Speculative Fiction by Persons of Color, Chinelo Onwualu, ed. (Hydra House) A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, Maureen Kincaid Speller (Luna Press Publishing) Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God, Robert Charles Wilson (Pitchstone) Being Michael Swanwick, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Fairwood)
ILLUSTRATED AND ART BOOK
The Culture: The Drawings, Iain M. Banks (Orbit US; Orbit UK) Home to Stay! The Complete Ray Bradbury EC Stories, Ray Bradbury, adapted by Al Feldstein, art by Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Wallace Wood, et al. (Fantagraphics) The Pen & Ink Drawings of Tony DiTerlizzi, Tony DiTerlizzi (self-published) Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly, Volume Three, Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Spectrum Fantastic Art) The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta, Dian Hanson, ed., art by Frank Frazetta (Taschen) The Last Count of Monte Cristo, Ayize Jama-Everett, art by Tristan Roach (Megascope) Voyaging, Volume One: The Plague Star, George R.R. Martin, art and adaptation by Raya Golden (Ten Speed Graphic) Thalamus, Volumes 1 & 2: The Art of Dave McKean, Dave McKean (Dark Horse) Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s, Adam Rowe (Abrams) Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures, Kevin M. Strait & Kinshasha Holman Conwill, eds. (Smithsonian)
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While I'm genre skeptical in general and just like a good gestures at the speculative world book, I do really appreciate the number of categories the Locus breaks things down into and how that lets them really highlight a bunch of books that might fly under the radar of consolidated awards like the Nebula/Hugo.
First Novel is stacked as hell. Saint of Bright Doors and, pending the last 30% not totally fumbling it, Chain Gang All-Stars are the clear standouts here to me. But Some Desperate Glory, Shigidi, and These Burning Stars are also all very strong novels that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to the right person.
Fantasy Novels: Dead Country and City of Last Chances are both fantastic, and both have fantastic sequels already out with beautiful covers. Witch King and Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries are both good, but not standout to me. ( I apparently disagree with a lot of award slates on that first one)
SF: Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is probably my favorite here. The others I've read are the Terraformers and Translation State. The former made me think a bit more, the latter seems like a slightly more well polished package.
Horror: Only read Lone Women, very good, but I can't speak at all to its strength relative the field.
I am sorry I couldn't find 'pending the last 30% not totally fumbling it' book anywhere.
I knew I should’ve bolded titles lol
Anyways, any good fantasy recommendations from what you have read this year?
I like more of character driven stuff like lies of locke lamora then mistborn.
First Novel category seems stacked
Nothing Kingfisher put out this year was that special. How the hell does she have 3 nominations? A House with Good Bones isn’t even horror.
I hope Rose/House gets fixed. Right now you can’t buy this novella in English, except as an audiobook.
T. Kingfisher, sort of like John Scalzi and Martha Wells, kinda always gets nominated in these fan voted awards.
It’s a mass voting award, so an author’s popularity will get them a long way. Especially when you have a lot of categories and 10 books per category. It’s a limited number of books published each year that get a lot of readers from the types of people that vote on these things.
That said, while it’s definitely a fan list, I do like the lists overall fairly well. A good overview of stuff that came out last year, generally popular stuff that if you’re plugged in you’ll have heard of, but a good spread for people who are less plugged in. And some good books I’m glad to see getting recognition.
Pretty interesting list with a wide range of works. I have heard of most of the novels, will look into the short fiction.
I am far more interested in these vs. the Hugo's, tbh. I wish the Locus awards was a readlong on the sub instead of the Hugo's.
Still quite a lot of stories on this list that I want to read / missed reading with bookclubs, so maybe I'll do my own mini read-a-long consisting of me, myself, and I.
Well it just needs someone to start doing them lol. In all seriousness though, this list kinda has too many works to hold readalongs for.
Yeah I realize that. The Hugo readalong is already a massive endeavor.
I am happy that The Keeper's Six is nominated but I thought it was a novella, not a novel.
Oh, Furious Heaven is nominated too? Nice.
And I realized I have read no other nominees other than He Who Drowned the World which I am reading now.
Yeah I said the same about Keeper’s Six with a prior nomination and someone pointed out the word count technically puts it in the novel category. Not by a lot though. Elliott has certainly talked about it as a novella to my recollection.
In any case I liked it a fair bit and am glad to see the recognition. A great choice for anyone interested in reading about badass grandmas.
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Some Desperate Glory is also a Hugo Finalist.
I'm so happy to see Tananarive Due racking up more nominations. The Reformatory deserves the attention and I really hope it takes home the Stoker. Really surprised to see Starling House in the Horror category because that was marketed and sold as a fantasy novel?
I actually didn't realize the Locus awards are fan-nominated, and I'll have to keep an eye on when voting opens for them in the future!
Starling House is pretty Gothic, which is almost like horror, I guess?
I am really really not ever going to get how that is going to a finalist for so many awards this year. Me and a lot of r/fantasy which made me feel less alone at least.
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This is a fan voted award.
But yes, the greater percentage of modern day readers(of anything, as women tend to read significantly more on average, but SFF in particular as well) and new traditionally published writers are women.
Ah I did not realize thanks for letting me know.
Ironically, the First Novel category is the only one split evenly between male and female authors. So maybe things will be more even in the future.
I think women are that dominant in book buying right now and women tend to get better what other women want to read.
SF and Fantasy is probably the field where that is more equalitarian but if you look at the books which are selling hundreds of thousand or millions, it's mostly women authors and books bought by women.
Do you know what is the print run for the upcoming new Fourth Wing book? Hardcover price, US print run nevermind the rest of the world or english language? 4 million plus over a 1million in paralell TPB print run. I think a lot of sf/fantasy readers got no idea how much romantasy, and YA actually sells, and what sells percolates to readers who read both kinds of things. Do not overlook also the effect of fanfiction (a lot of nominees come from fanfiction writing backgrounds, a lot of recent bestsellers also).
Right now I think book buying in general is becoming more and more female-centric, because women are spending more money in things they want to read. Not sure what the men are doing, gaming? Reading less?
My impression is that a lot of the general male readers of fantasy tend to stick to familiar authors (Sanderson, Martin, Rothfuss, Butcher, etc.) and don't tend to read the kinds of authors that get nominated for awards more often (because they aren't actively releasing books and/or their books tend not to be on the literary side of things). At least, this is the impression I tend to get from male vs female run BookTube channels.
There's also at least two male nominees in each category, so things aren't completely biased. For example:
First Novel: 50% M, 50% F
Sci Fi novel: 40% M, 50% F, 10% NB
Horror: 40% M, 60% F
Collection: 40% M, 60% F
Fantasy books: 30% M, 50% F, 20% NB
YA novels: 20% M, 70% F, 10% NB
Novella: 20% M, 70% F, 10% NB
Novelette: 20% M, 80% F
Short story: 20% M, 80% F
Anthology I'm not bothering with.
We can see that shorter works tend to be more heavily dominated by women, and YA (unsurprisingly) is as well. It's interesting to note that the novel categories are less biased than they might appear at first glance, especially when you consider that some authors are nonbinary.
Posters of r/fantasy. There is a lot more to fantasy than those names, and there is a dissonance between say people posting in r/fantasy, people reading and tagging fantasy books on say goodreads (and their choice awards) and then in-genre awards. R/fantasy tends towards the dude-bro fantasy story, those names, and epic fantasy and some like the OP I was replying to and who blocked me clutching their pearls or wondering that yes women buy more books, and write more books.
Actually that is not unsurprising to me, I agree it is a trend, I just do not quite understand why. I read a lot of short fiction by men and some of my favorite authors (at any length) are men.
To be clear, I was basing my impression more on Booktube channels than r/fantasy (mostly because the gender identities of most posters in r/fantasy isn't immediately obvious, and the reading tastes of posters that come by casually vs ones that regularly participate in the weekly review threads/bingo/daily question threads tend to be quite different). Obviously, there's still some generalization going on here though, so lots of people don't fit this profile exactly.
The unsurprising bit was referring to YA being dominated by women, I'm less knowledgable about short fiction, so I don't strong notions about that.
Oh yeah I knew those other fields were totally dominated by female authors and that made sense.
I just hadn’t realized there’d been such a shift in sci fi and fantasy which typically have been more male dominated.
I couldn’t care less by the way who writes what as long as it’s good.
Probably not this century. But it's getting more extreme, not because any hidden agendas, or fingers in the scales, not year after year, but because men seem to read less.
An article from 2019, but I think numbers now are more extreme
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/07/why-women-love-literature-read-fiction-helen-taylor
Perhaps for a long time, if your feeling is sf/fantasy was predominantly male (I can take a guess on your gender), perhaps that was bias? Because it has not been for a while, maybe this century. There is still plenty of men who read only men, or only take seriously things written by men. On printsf for example that is really common, there was a guy (I am sure he was male) posting asking for recommendations and listing 40 or so authors he liked, and not one of them was a woman.
More articles
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/04/1164109676/women-now-dominate-the-book-business-why-there-and-not-other-creative-industries
edit - OP u/TalentedStriker replied to me with some rather chauvinistic comments "Yeah tbh I can’t think of anything I’ve enjoyed in the space that’s been written by a woman" and "Perhaps that’s why less men are reading. The quality has pretty noticeably dropped in recent years" after writing a little bit upthread "I couldn’t care less by the way who writes what as long as it’s good."
and then blocked me (but only after replying to me, I guess to make sure they got the last word and no embarrassment was risked?)
This is so fucking immature.
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Interesting. Thanks for putting it in a very readable format =)
Have read maybe 4 or 5 of these, none of which I would really strongly recommend, maybe Silver Nitrate, but honestly you can even skip that one. Chain Gang All Stars is on my tbr. All in all not a strong year for the genre tbf.