There are a lot of speculative fiction awards out there. How good are they, over the years, at picking good books?
The Baseline Speculative Fiction Award is a small experimental speculative fiction award. It will be awarded to one speculative fiction novel per year, completely at random. It will offer a point of comparison for works selected by major awards.
"Completely" at random? Well, not exactly, because we need a list to choose from. For the first year, this will be the British Science Fiction Association's "Works Published in 2019" list, just because it is easily accessible. There are usually various crowdsourced eligibility lists floating around, so these will be used in future years, preferring bigger lists where possible.
Because it is chosen at random, it will probably not be a very prestigious or trustworthy award. Hopefully it will still feel nice if the cosmic dice favour your book. And who knows? Democratic and expert processes can produce strange results. Might the Baselines outperform major awards in the years to come?