I know I’m a couple days late with this, as the winners of the 2010 Locus Awards were announced over the weekend, but I needed a bit of time to sort through BSC’s predictor statistics and figure out whether we can become the Phil Steele’s of college football for some of the industry awards. Short answer: no. At least, not for the Locus. All four of the best novel winners (best science fiction novel, best fantasy novel, best first novel, best young adult novel) did make it into our Best of 2009 tournament starting bracket of 64, and all of them did make it through at least the first round, but none of them made it to the finals. So let’s see how close our predictions came, shall we?
Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, which won the Locus for Best SF Novel, fell in the third round (of 5) to our tournament winner.
China Mieville’s The City and the City, their Best Fantasy Novel, fell in the second round to one of our semifinalists.
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, their BEST YA novel, fell in round three of our lists.
The Windup Girl, which won Paul Bacigalupi Best First Novel, fell in round three to the same semifinalist who took out Mieville.
Which just goes to show that different groups of readers who vote for such awards come up with different results. But one thing we can all agree on is that each of these authors produced a great book that was worth talking about at the end of the year across all venues.
The other categories and their winners:
- Best novella to Kage Baker for The Women of Nell Gwynne’s
- Best novelette to Peter Beagle for “By Moonlight” (from We Never Talk about My Brother)
- Best short story to Neil Gaimon for “An Invocation of Incuriosity” (from Songs of the Dying Earth)
- Best anthology to Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, The New Space Opera 2
- The Best of Gene Wolfe took best collection (also as The Very Best of Gene Wolfe)
- Ursula Le Guin took best non-fiction book/art book for Cheek by Jowl
- Best artist Michael Whelan
- Best editor Ellen Datlow
- Best magazine The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
- Best book publisher Tor
You can check out the official Locus Magazine announcement at their website. Congratulations from all of us here at the BSC empire to all the winners and nominees!
