World Fantasy Awards Recap

Looking back at the World Fantasy Award winners the thing that surprised me most was how homogeneous in broad concepts they were. I consider science fiction to be a subset of fantasy and despite that the Hugo and Nebula novels showed much more variety. With the World Fantasy Awards there are:

• Nine traditional fantasy novels (Western, pre-industrial societies with magic and quests)
• Eleven historical fantasies
• Six novels that use or explicitly mimic the nineteenth century
• Sixteen books that might be called urban fantasy
• And seven of those where novels that were essentially memoirs with an occasional odd thing happening
• Only three books looked to the horror side of fantasy
• And five novels focused on fantasy's traditional partner allegory
• And zero direct Tolkein-esque knock offs.
  

But enough about how people repeat themselves. With regard to the actual books I disliked sixteen and enjoyed twenty-four which definitely made it a set of books worth checking out.