2017 Award Winning SF/F Challenge - Rules and Sign Up

The Why Behind the Challenge

I attended my very first WorldCon in August 2016 and it got me really excited about Sci-Fi and Fantasy again. Listening to the Grand Master chat and watching the Hugos being awarded, I realized how few award winners I had actually read, and those are the awards given by the SFF Community for the best of the best! That is what inspired me to host this reading challenge. It occurred to me that while I have been a lover of SFF for as long as I can remember and have heard some of the great names for as long as I can remember, I haven't read as many of their works as I would have liked.

Now I want to broaden my horizons and share that excitement with you by challenging all of us to read more award winners!


How does this challenge work?

• The full challenge will run from January 1st to December 31st, 2017.
• Declare your intention to join through a blog post, twitter tweet, or any other way you can link to the Sign Up below. See my sign up post from 2016 as an example if you need ideas. The Sign Up will remain open through October 31st, but you must be signed up by the end of the first month of each quarter to be eligible for that quarter's prizes.
• Check out the Awards lists and decide on some books to read.  You can list them in your declaration post, or not, I won't hold you to them if you want to change your list or challenge level. Novels, novellas and short story collections/anthologies all count towards the main challenge, as long as they are award winning or nominated finalists, or written by Grand Masters.
• Read!
• Review a book, then link it up on the Reviews (link to come) page from wherever you have reviewed it (your blog, Twitter, Goodreads, anywhere you can link it up).
• Play Bingo! (or not, it's up to you!)
• Have fun and enjoy reading, maybe even win a prize at the end!

How do I find these award winners to read?

Once I started looking I found SO MANY awards.  I have listed some of the more well known below.  Each link will take you to the Wikipedia page for that award, explaining what it is for, and including a list of the winners and finalist nominees since the inception of the award to the present.

Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award

Nebula Awards

Hugo Awards

World Fantasy Awards

Andre Norton Award

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Prometheus Award

Arthur C. Clarke Award

Goodreads will also be a great source for you, if there is an author your are interested in, look them up on Goodreads and more than likely their awards will be listed in their author bio.  Take a look at Vernor Vinge as an example. It lists which of his books won what awards right in the bio! There is  also a Literary Awards section listed on each book for what it has won and been a nominated finalist for, see Uprooted as an example.

If those aren't enough for you, you can also scour through this list of awards, Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards, which includes the ones I have listed above, plus MANY more.  For the main reading challenge, I will allow any novel, novella or short story collection with an award or listed as a nominee finalist from the awards on this list if you can provide me a link to it.

Challenge Levels:

You are welcome to declare a challenge level if you like, but you don't have to, just jump in and see how far you get!  In order to earn a point towards the level, you must have posted a review and linked it up so we can all see what others are reading, even if it's just a few lines on Goodreads or a Twitter Post.  It doesn't have to be a big formal review (although that's wonderful if you do!), I'm more interested in us reading than getting bogged down with reviews, even an "It's great!", "Loved it!", "OMG that was a rough one!" will do just fine. :)

1-4 Novels: Ursa Minor (The Little Dipper, you're just dipping your toe in.)
5-8 Novels: Ursa Major (The Big Dipper, you're dipping your whole foot in by now!)
9-12 Novels: Orion (You're really grabbing this bull by the horns and going for it!)
13-16 Novels: Perseus (Bring on the Kraken!)
17-20 Novels: Pegasus (You're flying now!)
21+ Novels: The Hydra (You are the Great Book Wyrm!)


Bingo

If you'd like an extra challenge, how about some Bingo?  Download the Bingo cards (there are 3 for 2017, last year's, and 2 new ones that are all Grand Masters) from our Facebook Group (We'll talk about that next!) and see if you can fill in a row, or two, if you're really hardcore! If you fill in an entire bingo card, that counts as 5 unique bingo's. Like regular Bingo, columns, rows, and diagonal lines all count, you just need 5 in a row.  Just print or save the cards, write in the titles of the books you're using for each square (reviews need to have been posted for each square in your Bingo), and then post a picture of your Bingo in the Facebook Group when I call for them (around the beginning of the 3rd month of each quarter).  You may post more than one Bingo, but they must be completely different books, so 2 Bingo's would mean 10 different reviews. Once you have posted a Bingo, you cannot use it again. Piece of cake, right? ;)



Join the Facebook Group!

There is a Facebook Group for us to use to chat and post reviews, discuss books, ask questions, etc.  Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Challenge  When the time comes I will ask for your Bingo pictures in a thread there.


Prizes

There will be prizes! 

At the end of each quarter of the challenge (March, June, September and December), I will allow a couple days for you to finish posting reviews and Bingo's, then I will randomly draw:

• One successful Bingo (must be from bingo's posted within that quarter)
• One Challenge participant. (drawn from all reviews since the beginning of the challenge)

Winners can choose from:

• A $10 Amazon GC
• A book of value $10 or less sent from The Book Depository

You must have signed up in the sign up post by the end of the first month of a quarter to be eligible for the prizes in that quarter. Your reviews are your entries for the Challenge, so the more reviews you have each quarter, the better your chances, but even one gets you in the drawing! 


Acknowledgements

Thank you to my post testers Lori and Chris, and the wonderful hostesses at COYER from whom I've borrowed some ideas on how to set up this challenge, namely Bingo and having a facebook group! COYER is a fantastic event that you should check out! Thank you again ladies for testing and answering questions and being fabulous! ;)

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