British SF is said to be in the middle of a golden age. How true is this? Statistics on the proportion of 'Years Best' choices and award nominations may help answer this.
More and more, British SF fans are starting to believe that the golden age of SF is now. How true is this?
Certainly critics such as Robert Kilheffer have written in the Fantasy and Science Fiction;
the most interesting, provocative, forward-looking and just plain satisfying novels have been coming from our British cousins rather than home-grown American talent.
This is certainly reflected in the number of stories selected by the various Year's Best editors over the last ten years, and that have made the final ballot for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
The first British writer to appear in one of the numerous claimant's to the Year's Best Science Fiction was William F. Temple, in only the third ever such anthology, back in 1950.
Since then, British stories have appeared every year except 1954 and 1981. For most years until the mid 1960's, only between one and five stories a year appeared, but given that until 1965 there was usually only one series running at a time, this is unsurprising. However, it is significant that with the explosion of the 'New Wave' of the 1960s with its greater experimentation on literary techniques, the numbers surged to between nine and sixteen stories between 1965 and 1967, as the more literary British SF writers prospered. For most of the next decade reprints ran at between four in 1970, and a peak of nine in 1974, before collapsing to just one selection in 1977 -- with the effective collapse of the British SF short story market in 1976 (in that year two of the four anthology series and the then only British SF magazine -- Science Fiction Monthly -- folded).
For most of the next twenty years, with occasional surges in 1988 (eight) reprints ran at between two and six a year.
The real explosion in British short SF began in 1996, when, since the year after the World Science Fiction convention came to Britain, British short SF has accounted for almost one story in every five selected for the ever increasing number of reprint anthologies; part of this is down to a need for the anthologists to differentiate their content from their competitors, but even so, there is a sense that British SF has led a revival in modernized traditional SF -- or Wide Screen Space Opera as it is also known.
Similarly, while the number of Hugo and Nebula nominations has been remarkably consistent since 1965, with one or two Hugo and/or Nebula nominations in almost every year, the numbers surged in 2001, when Brits received five Hugo nominations, and won two of the awards. The numbers have stayed high since then, peaking at seven Hugo and two Nebula nominations in 2005, when British writers again won two of the four awards.
But there is a small, slight worry that the boom may have already peaked. For the first time since 1999, in 2006 none of the Hugo and Nebula awards were won by British writers. Interzone -- a magazine that is almost talismanic to many Brits -- is no longer listed as a professional market by the SFWA, thus making it less attractive to many pro writers (IZ has such a wealth of submissions that this is unlikely to be serious in it's own right, but as part of other trends, it is noteworthy) and Hub, another magazine has had to change it's entire publishing plan and payment rates; hopefully these are just minor points, but every boom must end at some point.
It is hoped that this is just a temporary lull, before the next surge in the fortunes of British SF, and that the golden age will continue.
