Ripples in Speculative Fiction

I unexpectedly got some great news this past week: The Solid-State Shuffle squeaked through the first winnowing round in the inaugural Self-Publishing Science Fiction Contest (SPSFC)!

For those that don’t know about the contest, 300 self-published science fiction books are going to be whittled down to just one over the course of a year by a group book bloggers and judges with bragging rights and a pretty cool trophy to boot. The first round saw the 300 books divvied up to 10 teams who read the first 10-20% of the 30 books assigned to them and then voted on the top ten books to move to the next round. Those ten books will then be read in their entirety and the top 3 will move out to the semi-finalist round.

I’m super excited I made it out of the first round! Honestly, that’s as far as I dared to hope, so whatever happens after this point is all gravy. There’s a lot of great self-published fiction out there and I knew the competition was going to be fierce. I’m also aware that Isa is a polarizing character, people either love her or hate her, there doesn’t seem to be much in between. She grows and softens as the series goes on but there aren’t enough pet-the-dog moments in the first book to foreshadow that. This showed up in the comments the review team left about novel, which I’m really grateful for. It’s something they didn’t have to do.

The Solid-State Shuffle was one of the 30 books assigned to the team lead by Tar Vol, who has been blogging about the SPSFC on their Tar Vol website. The way the contest is structured, reviews at this point are not required so the fact that Tar Vol is doing this out in the open is very much appreciated and also the only way I was aware that The Solid-State Shuffle had moved on to the quarter-finalist round. Thank you for blogging all the results!

I am quite content to have made it this far and I look forward to watching the contest and discovering new books in the months to come regardless of whether The Solid-State Shuffle advances or not.