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2024 Winner

The methodology this year was to ask ChatGPT for a list and a random number, but it struggled for some reason. So the next methodology was to scroll down rapidly on the File 770 recommendations thread and poke my finger at a random moment. I am delighted to reveal the winner is ... Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into their core programming, they murder their owner. The robot then discovers they can also do something else they never did before: run away. After fleeing the household, they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating, and a robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is finding a new purpose. Adrian Tchaikovsky has received some other awards in the past, but it is likely this will be the one he most cherishes. Those were awarded by mere humans, whereas the Baseline Awa...
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2023 Winner

We are delighted to announce the winner of the fifth annual Baseline Award. The Baseline Award is given completely at random to one science fiction or fantasy title each year. To optimize the chaos, we make every effort to ensure the process of drawing up the list and generating the random winner is inconsistent from year-to-year.  The winner is ... The Deluge by Stephen Markley! In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters--a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mou...
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2022 Winner

The Baseline Awards are picked at random. They are partly an experiment to see how other literary awards (fan-voted, juried) perform against a control. Congratulations to Jenn Lyons, who has the dubious honour of receiving this year's Baseline Award for her novel The Discord of Gods . The Discord of Gods marks the epic conclusion to Jenn Lyons's Chorus of Dragon series, closing out the saga that began with The Ruin of Kings, for fans of Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss. The end times have come. Relos Var's final plans to enslave the universe are on the cusp of fruition. He believes there's only one being in existence that might be able to stop him: the demon Xaltorath. As these two masterminds circle each other, neither is paying attention to the third player on the board, Kihrin. Unfortunately, keeping himself classified in the "pawn" category means Kihrin must pretend to be everything the prophecies threatened he'd become: the destroyer of all, the...
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2021 Winner

The Baselines are plucked completely at random from a virtual hat. Katherine Addison's The Witness for the Dead has won the third annual Baseline Speculative Fiction Award.  The Witness for the Dead is a standalone sequel to Addison’s 2014 The Goblin Emperor .   "As a Witness for the Dead, Celehar can, sometimes, speak to the recently dead: see the last thing they saw, know the last thought they had, experience the last thing they felt. It is his duty use that ability to resolve disputes, to ascertain the intent of the dead, to find the killers of the murdered ..." First runner-up: Adam Roberts, Purgatory Mount Second runner-up: Paul Braddon,  The Actuality Source: The hat was filled up this year with suggestions from the British Science Fiction Association's crowdsourced awards eligibility sheet.
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2020 Winner

 The 2020 winner of the Baseline Award for Speculative Fiction, chosen at random, is Gears of Change . Congratulations to Anthony Laken, this year the cosmic stochastic smile has fallen upon  Gears of Change .  However, it is the third in a series, so if you haven't read the first two, you may want to start with  One Cog Turning . First runner-up: Goldilocks by Laura Lam Second runner-up: Eden by Tim Lebbon
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2019 Winner

 And the winner of the inaugural Baseline Speculative Fiction Award is Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire . Winners of the Baselines are plucked at random from the chaos of the universe. You can still feel good about them, the same way you can feel about anything serendipitous (a leaf falling on your head, etc.). Rather hilariously, this turned out to be the same book that won the Hugo (probably the most major award in speculative fiction). So far, the universe concurs with fandom! First runner-up: Emma Newman, Atlas Alone Second runner-up: Even more hilariously, this was originally Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (the list is sixty books long, fwiw). However, after much internal dispute, it was determined that a book could not be runner-up to itself. The random oracle was thus consulted once more, and the second runner-up confirmed as Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers.
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