Winner of the BSFA Awards Giveaway

After collecting all the entries and consulting the random.org oracle, I am happy to announce that the winner of the BSFA Awards Special Giveaway is juanma. The prize he has chosen is the hardback copy of The Islanders by Christopher Priest. 

Congratulations to Juanma and thanks to everybody who participated! Stay tuned for more giveaways.

Last Minute Locus Recommendations

(Disclaimer: English is my second language, so I want to apologize in advance for there may be mistakes in the text below. If you find any, please let me know so that I can correct it. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.) 

Locus Awards voting is closing this Sunday. In case you haven't voted yet, I'd like to recommend some works in addition to those that I included on my Hugo Recommendations list.

In the Best Anthology category I strongly recommend Alien Contact edited by Marty Halpern and Engineering Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan. This year, I haven't been able to read as many anthologies as I would have liked, but these two are excellent. 

In the Best First Novel, in addition to Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (which I nominated for the Hugo Awards) I recommend the wonderful God's War by Kameron Hurley. I finished this novel only two or three weeks ago, but had I read it earlier it would have made my Hugo nominations. It's an amazing mix of science fiction and fantasy, with solid characters and one the best worldbuildings I've seen in a long while.

If you haven't voted yet, consider these recommendations. They truly deserve the recognition.

2012 BSFA Awards Winners

The winners of the 2012 BSFA Awards has just been announced:

• Best Novel: The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
• Best Short Fiction: The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)
• Best Non-Fiction: The SF Encyclopedia, 3^rd Edition ed. John Clute, Peter Nicholls, David Langford and Graham Sleight (Gollancz website)
• Best Art: Cover of Ian Whates’s The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman (Solaris)

Congratulations to the truly deserved winners and nominees.

Note: This the last post of the BSFA Awards Special. The giveaway will be closed on 2012 April 12nd at 23:59 GMT+2, but you can still get an entry by commenting on this post: What do you think of this year winners? Of course, you can also get entries by commenting on the previous posts of the special.

(You can also read this post in Spanish/También puedes leer esta entrada en español)

2012 BFSA Awards: Alea Jacta Est

(Disclaimer: English is my second language, so I want to apologize in advance for there may be mistakes in the text below. If you find any, please let me know so that I can correct it. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.)

 

Only a couple of days to know the winners of the 2012 BSFA Awards. Let me remind you the shortlists:

Best Novel:

• Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith (Newcon Press)
• Embassytown by China Mieville (Macmillan)
• The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
• By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
• Osama by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Best Short Fiction:

• The Silver Wind by Nina Allan (Interzone 233, TTA Press) 
• The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)
• Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley (Kameron Hurley’s own website)
• Covehithe by China Mieville (The Guardian)
• Of Dawn by Al Robertson (Interzone 235, TTA Press)

Best Non-Fiction:

• Out of This World: Science Fiction but not as we Know it by Mike Ashley (British Library)
• The SF Encyclopedia, 3^rd Edition ed. John Clute, Peter Nicholls, David Langford and Graham Sleight (Gollancz website)
• Review of Arslan by M J Engh, Abigail Nussbaum (Asking the Wrong Questions blog)
• SF Mistressworks, ed. Ian Sales (website)
• Pornokitsch, ed. Jared Shurin and Anne Perry (website)
• The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (Foundation Studies in Science Fiction), ed. Graham Sleight, Tony Keen and Simon Bradshaw (Science Fiction Foundation)

Best Art:

• Cover of Ian Whates’s The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman (Solaris)
• Cover and illustrations of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls by Jim Kay (Walker)
• Cover of Lavie Tidhar’s Osama by Pedro Marques (PS Publishing)
• Cover of Liz Williams’s A Glass of Shadow by Anne Sudworth (Newcon Press)

As the host of this BSFA Awards Special I'll refrain from predicting the winners, but if you want to get an entry for the giveaway tell us who you favorites are on the comments of this post.

Good luck to all the nominees!

(You can also read this post in Spanish/También puedes leer esta entrada en español)

Announcing the BSFA Awards special and a giveaway

(Disclaimer: English is my second language, so I want to apologize in advance for there may be mistakes in the text below. If you find any, please let me know so that I can correct it. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.)

Here at Sense of Wonder we love genre Awards. For instance, see the recent posts on Hugo Recommendations, the speculation on the possible nominees for the Best Novel Category and the series of posts (in Spanish) on how to participate, the nomination process and the different categories of the Hugos. I also tried talking my Spanish readers into voting on the Locus Awards. And I interviewed Ken Liu when it was announced that two of his stories were nominated for the Nebula Awards.

The BSFA Awards winners will be announced soon, at the 2012 Eastercon, which takes place from the 6th of April in London. Thus, the following weeks on Sense of Wonder will be especially devoted to these awards. I will be posting some reviews and articles about the nominees. And I will be running a giveaway for the first time (and not the last, hopefully) on this blog. 

The rules of the giveaway are as follows:

• The giveaway is open internationally and to anyone (but if you live in Spain you have an additional choice of prize. See below).
• To enter the giveaway you must comment on the blog posts that are associated to the BSFA Awards Special (the posts of the special will be listed on this page). 
• Each post associated with the BSFA Awards Special in which you comment can get you an entry for the giveaway. 
• In each post, there will be one or more questions that you'll need to answer in order to get an entry.
• You can comment on each post as many times as you want, but you will get only one entry for each post on which you comment.
• The maximum number of entries per person will be 5. You can comment on more than 5 posts, of course, but commenting on 5 five will already get you the maximum number of entries. 
• You can comment on the English and Spanish versions of each post and get two entries, but you must use the same language that the post is written in.
• The last post of this special will be published after the winners of the BSFA Awards are announced and will state when the giveaway will be closed (probably 3 or 4 days afterwards).
• After the giveaway is closed I will count all the entries and I will use random.org or a similar service to choose one winner. 
• To contact the winner I will need a valid email address or twitter username so be sure to include your contact information in your comments.
• If after 7 days of contacting the winner she/he has not claimed the prize I will proceed to choose a different winner.

The prize of the giveaway is your choice of:

• A $20 amazon.com gift card 
• A $20 baenebooks.com gift card
• Up to $20 in books from bookdepository.com (provided The Book Depository delivers to your country) 
• If you live in Spain, you can choose instead a hardcover edition of The Islanders by Christopher Priest, shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA Awards, that I will send right to your home.

Of course, this post is part of the BSFA Awards Special, so you can get one entry for the giveaway by answering the following question on the comments: Which BSFA Awards winner or nominee would you buy with your gift card if you win the giveaway? 

Note: I am in no way related to the British Science Fiction Association and this special and the giveaway are not endorsed by the BSFA, Amazon, BaenEbooks or The Book Depository.

Update: The giveaway will be closed on 2012 April 12nd at 23:59 GMT+2

New Update: The giveaway is now closed 

(You can also read this post in Spanish/También puedes leer esta entrada en español)