Sturgeon Award finalists

I somehow missed the fact that the Sturgeon Award finalists have been announced. To quote the about-the-award page, "The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of the year was established in 1987 by James Gunn [...] and the heirs of Theodore Sturgeon [...], as an appropriate memorial to one of the great short-story writers in a field distinguished by its short fiction."

The way the Sturgeon works is that a bunch of people (mostly sf reviewers, but also editors; I hadn't realized that 'til now) nominate stories; the nominees are condensed into a list of finalists, and then a jury reads the finalists and chooses a winner, who's announced in July during the Campbell Conference (which also awards the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best sf novel, which is no relation to the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award, which is awarded in conjunction with the Hugos).

This year's list of Sturgeon finalists has a remarkable degree of overlap with this year's list of Hugo-nominated short fiction: nine of the thirteen Sturgeon finalists are also Hugo nominees, and nine of the fifteen Hugo-nominated short works are also Sturgeon finalists. There's usually some overlap, but usually not quite this much.

Anyway, the main reason I'm mentioning all of this at this particular moment is a somewhat self-serving one: one of the stories that overlaps between the two lists is Ben Rosenbaum's SH story "The House Beyond Your Sky." Go, Ben!

. . . Sadly, another point of overlap is that the Sturgeon finalist list also contains only one work by a woman. Time to break out Regender again, for a look at the Theodora Sturgeon Awards finalists.

Oh, which reminds me that I've been meaning to post a Regender link to the full Helen Award nominees list, now that all the short fiction is linked to. So you can read regendered versions of any of the stories by following links from that page. Except for "Julian," where the link is to a PDF (which Regender doesn't change), so here's a separate link to "Julia: A Christmas Story," by Roberta Charlene Wilma.

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