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.