After a mammoth fifth birthday extravaganza last year, this year’s Subjective Chaos Awards are back – a little older, a little wiser, and a little more focused. Once again, a chaotic panel of readers and reviewers have read, wrangled and agonised our way into an entirely subjective selection of the best works of speculative fiction published in the previous calendar year. Let’s take a look at this year’s nominees…

Five years ago, C of The Middle Shelf floated the idea of a jury-based award given by a panel of bloggers to their pick of the best works of genre fiction each year. Fast forward to 2022 and our fifth annual Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards will be bigger and more chaotic than ever, with more categories, more nominees and more opinions. Buckle up, it’s time to say hello to our 2022 panel and subjective shortlist!

Welcome to 2021: more subjective and more chaotic (yes I mean later) than ever – but we’re still giving out some kind of awards! Our shortlists are as enticing as ever, and we have a new category added to our roster this year: along with Short Stories (returning from last year) we’ll be picking a Best Debut in addition to the usual genre, series and novellas categories.