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June 2016 in Review

29 Jun, 2016

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This may seem like it is a day early but tomorrow is the day I set aside for the next Young People Review Old SFF post. I don’t want to dilute people’s attention so no JNR post tomorrow. 

20 books reviewed. 10 by women, 10 by men. F/T = 0.5

5 books by POC, or 25

My second least productive month this year and I am not entirely sure why, although reserving Thursday for YPROSFF is a factor. I didn’t feel like I was letting productive time slip away, like I did in February when I was dealing with the effects of incessant sabotage by FASS committee members I had thought were my friends and allies. May they have long, disappointing lives1. Anyway, doing stuff but not all of it shows up here. 

F/T is a bit low while %POC is a bit higher than usual for related reasons: I have been chewing my way through YKK, which is written by a POC who is a guy. I neglected to take into account what devoting one fifth of my reviews to one man’s series would do to F/T while being mindful of how it would affect %POC. Since I made the same oversight regarding F/T back when I was reviewing The Great Heinlein Juveniles (Plus the Other Two), I probably will make the same mistake in the future. 

Year to date

125 books read. 73 by women (0.58), 50 by men (0.4), 2 by authors who identifies as neither (0.02). 30 by POC (0.24). To put in context:

Key: WNB stands for women and non-binary genders”, while POC stands for person of colour”. R/R stands for reviews/reviewers”. Figures in brackets are percentages; for R/R the percentage represents the site’s R/R over my 2015 R/R.

Review source

Total

WNB (%)

POC (%)

Reviewers

R/R (%)

James Nicoll Reviews 2015

329

195 (59)

45 (14)

1

329 (100)

Locus

324

163 (50)

22 (7)

17

19 (5.7)

SFX

165

48 (29)

10 (6)

30

5.5 (1,5)

Romantic Times

146

84 (57)

14 (10)

23

6.3 (1.9)

Tor

141

66 (47)

18 (13)

27

5.2 (1.7)

Strange Horizons

139

66 (48)

30 (22)

80

1.7 (0.5)

James Nicoll Reviews 2016

125

75 (60)

30 (24)

1

125 (38)

Rising Shadows

83

25 (30)

1 (1)

2

41.5 (12.6)

Interzone

67

21 (31)

7 (10)

19

3.5 (1)

F&SF

59

32 (54)

5 (9)

5

11.8 (3.6)

Analog

58

10 (17)

3 (4)

1

58 (17.6)

Io9

56

17 (30)

12 (21)

10

5.6 (1.7)

Asimov’s

53

21 (23)

3 (6)

3

17.7 (5.4)

Vector

52

18 (35)

4 (8)

26

2 (0.6)

SFS

45

48 (21)

2 (4)

38

1.2 (0.3)

NYRSF

42

11 (26)

6 (13)

24

1.8 (0.5)

Foundation

38

9 (24)

1 (3)

27

1.4 (0.4)

LARB

35

11 (31)

7 (20)

28

1.3 (0.4)

Lightspeed

28

16? (57)

14 (50)

3

9.3 (2.8)

CSZ

23

19 (80)

8 (35)

17

1.4 (0.4)


As it is, it looks like I will have about 250 reviews this year. One way of looking at it is much lower than in 2015” but another way of looking at it is on a reviews per reviewer basis, roughly forty-five times as productive as the median reviewer who Strange Horizons deigns to notice. 

Once I read one more book by a POC, I will have read more books by POC than any of the sites that made Strange Horizons annual round up, which once again my site did not. Not that I keep grudges. You ask anyone who knows what’s good for them and they will tell you I am a forgiving person. 

1: There was at least the hilarity of the main ringleader and her minion being publicly compared to Hinz’s Paratwa by someone who was not me. Personally, I think the comparison is pretty harsh. The moral here is never accept seemingly complementary comparisons based on books you have not read. Or googled, apparently. 

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