The British Science Fiction Association is extremely pleased and proud to announce the shortlist for the 2012 BSFA Awards.

This shortlist has been drawn up from the most popular titles nominated by members of the BSFA, who will now have the opportunity todecide the winners in each category, voting along with attendees of the long-established science fiction convention, Eastercon, which this year takes place in Bradford from 29th March to 1st April.

Donna Scott, the Awards Administrator for the BSFA said, “It’s been quite exciting watching the final nominations come in. It was right down to the wire in some cases, and if this were a race that bookies were taking bets on, they’d have lost money on a few favourites, I’m sure.

“What I found really lovely, though, was reading some of the comments that came through with quite a lot of the nominations. It wasn’t obligatory, but so many fans were tremendously keen to tell the world about that great book they’d discovered last year.

“The BSFA and its awards have been going since 1958, but what I think these shortlists prove is that there is still an immense enthusiasm out there for stories which deal with the discovery of new worlds, new technologies, and different ways of being, and for books which aren’t afraid to tackle sociopolitical questions about us, here and now, within this liberating genre.”

The winners will be announced at EightSquared, the 2013 Eastercon, Cedar Court Hotel, Bradford this Easter, in a ceremony hosted by London Falling novelist, Paul Cornell.

The shortlisted nominees are:

Best Novel

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)

Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)

Intrusion by Ken Macleod (Orbit)

Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)

Best Short Story

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld #69)

“The Flight of the Ravens” by Chris Butler (Immersion Press)

“Song of the body Cartographer” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Phillipines Genre Stories)

“Limited Edition” by Tim Maughan (1.3, Arc Magazine)

“Three Moments of an Explosion” by China Mieville (Rejectamentalist Manifesto)

“Adrift on the Sea of Rains” by Ian Sales (Whippleshield Books)

Best Artwork

Ben Baldwin for the cover of Dark Currents (Newcon Press)

Blacksheep for the cover of Adam Roberts’s Jack Glass (Gollancz)

Dominic Harman for the cover of Eric Brown’s Helix Wars (Rebellion)

Joey Hi-Fi for the cover of Simon Morden’s Thy Kingdom Come (Jurassic London)

Si Scott for the cover artwork for Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden (Corvus)

Best Non-Fiction

“The Complexity of the Humble Space Suit” by Karen Burnham (Rocket Science, Mutation Press)

“The Widening Gyre” by Paul Kincaid (Los Angeles Review of Books)

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge University Press)

The Shortlist Project by Maureen Kincaid Speller

The World SF Blog, Chief Editor Lavie Tidhar