Yes, you read it right. The second ever SPSFC has arrived at the semifinal stage. Those original 300 books have been whittled down to a chosen 30. Exciting, isn’t it?

Having selected three semifinalists of our own, At Boundary’s Edge will now be reading six more books selected by other teams. In this stage of the contest, each team’s chosen three are passed along to two other teams. The three we have already selected have been passed on to the wise and noble (at least I assume so, I’ve never met them) judges at Team Escapist and Team Galactic Beards. Hopefully they’ll enjoy them even more than we did.

At Boundary’s Edge will be reading the books chosen by Team Read Stars and Team Science Fiction News. If you haven’t been following the wider conversation, that means our semifinalist reading consists of the following books:

The Last Gifts of the Universe, by Rory August
The Peacemaker’s Code, by Deepak Malhotra
Dim Stars, by Brian P. Rubin
Heritage, by SM Warlow
Percival Gynt and the Conspiracy of Days, by Drew Melbourne
Intelligence Block, by Kit Falbo

The plan is that we will read these at a rate of two per month, starting right now and ending in late April, with our final scores being tallied at the end of April in time for the announcement of the SPSFC2 finalists.

As before, our team of judges will read each book to completion (or give it a dreaded DNF rating, and score it somewhere between 0 and 10. These scores will be added together to create a team average. The team average will then be combined with the average score given by the other two teams to have read that book. Spaces in the final are limited, and only the highest scoring books from across the competition will be granted one of the coveted spaces.

Stay tuned for more coverage from myself and others over the next few months. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do.