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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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