One of the issues you may have is that, if the award gets a reputation for rewarding the same sort of book each year, then publishers will only send you that type of book. The jury needs to watch for that.

That would appear to be contradicted by Chris’s post below.

As for my ‘Golden Age’, whatever that means, it appears to be 6 years before I actually discovered science fiction and nearly a decade before I got seriously engaged with the genre. So what influence is it meant to have? And if you think my tastes and judgements are in some way tied to that ‘Golden Age’, then you simply have not been reading my reviews.

In fact, books by women constituted less than 20% of those submitted for this year’s Campbell Award (and make up more than 20% of the shortlist, both by former winners of the Campbell Award). Our discussions regularly came back to the question of where were the women. But you cannot shortlist books that don’t come in.

And you hit the nail on the head about how often we end up discussing, “Is this SF?” From my perspective, the genre has spread beyond its prior confines a lot lately since so much mainstream fiction has adopted the SFnal mode, and since our understanding of science and advances in technology enable authors to really run with Clarke’s Third Law.

Chris

I’ve always enjoyed panels which are themed but have diversity of participants – that is to say, a mixture of fans/pros/writers/critics/artists rather than having one panel for fantasy novelists, one for Star Trek fans, and so on.

Hooray for panel parity!