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 mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.
First runner-up: The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis
Second runner-up: A Crown of Ivy and Glass by Claire Legrand
The initially selected winner, Redspace Rising by Brian Trent, was disqualified as it was actually published in 2022 (how did that get in there?).
Unlike most literary awards, which are very important and serious, the Baseline Award is a fleeting and ephemeral frivolity. However, just like real literary awards, you can still feel happy when you get one.