Welcome one and all to Phase 2 of the inaugural SPSFX aka The Semifinals. There are still thirty books in the running, and we’re going to whittle that down to just seven finalists. To that end, each team of judges has been allocated six morebooks to read and review. This means that each semifinalist will receive three team reviews overall, and the average of these will be used to select the finalists.
Now, here’s where the maths kicks in.
The top five mean average scores from across the ten judging teams make the finals automatically, and the sixth and seventh mean scores make it only if neither of two catching conditions are triggered. Those catching conditions are:
(1) one of the top three two-team averages lies outside the top five three-team mean scores,
(2) one of the top three deviations from their judges’ average scores falls outside the top five three-team mean scores
If that makes your head hurt, don’t worry. You’re not alone. What this basically means is that a book shouldn’t suffer too badly if it lands with a mismatched team. Hopefully this means a good book won’t get cut just because a team doesn’t like its genre.
With all that out of the way, here are the six semifinalists At Boundary’s Edge will be reviewing over the next couple of weeks.
Shadows of Mars, by I. O. Adler
The Dinosaur Four, by Geoff Jones
Resistance, by Mikhaeyla Kopievsky
All the Whys of Delilah’s Demise, by Neve Maslakovic
Duckett & Dyer, Dicks for Hire, by G. M. Nair
At Boundary's Edge 