As per the announcement earlier this week, I am going to be on the jury for the Tiptree Award this year. That will mean a number of things. Firstly I will get a lot of books to read. As a result of that, I won’t have time to read a lot else besides what I get sent. But most importantly from your point of view I won’t be reviewing anything that I read with the Tiptree in mind. That means that there will be very few reviews in the coming year. And indeed I have refrained from writing reviews of what I have been reading recently because I have known this was going to happen for several weeks.

Why no reviews? Well it is all part of jury collective responsibility. If I were to write reviews of the books we were discussing that could be seen as a window onto our discussions. As the jury is fairly small, people might draw conclusions about the views of other jurors from what I said and the eventual results.

I have, of course, reviewed one book that is likely to be considered. That happened well before I was asked to be a juror. I happened to like it a lot, but there are other really good books around too so that may not mean much come the end of the year.

The other important thing is that we want your recommendations. Publishers and authors can’t submit works to the Tiptree jury. The only way we get to consider books (and stories) is if you, the public, recommend them to us. You can do so, and see a list of current recommendations, here. Please bear in mind when recommending works that they need to fulfill the requirements of the award in that they should, “explore or expand our notions of gender.”