While doing the dishes in quarantine during months of pandemic, I watched “Lovecraft Country” and “Watchmen” (also, of course, “Lower Decks” and “The Mandalorian”). I’m not sure how I’d explain the content and context of that sentence to my younger self but I wish I’d not had to wait for those two excellent series to learn about the Tulsa massacre.
Growing up I loved reading science fiction. I had some favourites but I knew practically nothing. Then, aged about 10 or 11, I had a major windfall. We were visiting a recently divorced aunt and I was, as was my wont, perusing the household’s books. I came upon shelves and shelves of science fiction books that I squealed excitedly about (in an elegant, adult fashion, of course).
“Oh those?” She said.
Those belonged to [NAME REDACTED]. You can take them. In fact I’d love it if you did take them.”
So, with the aid of [NR]’s books, I moved in one fell swoop from the amusing adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat and Dr. Who into the amazing worlds of Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, A.E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. Supplemented by occasional outside funding, the public libraries of Leeds were able to fuel my voracious consumption of Aldous Huxley, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Terry Brooks, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert et al.
And, whatever I thought the distinction was, I also read a slew of what we called science fantasy. All of J.R.R. Tolkien, all the Dragonsong books, the entire Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, all the Dark is Rising series. I suppose that “science” is science and “fantasy” means magic, but on the one hand the two are harder to tell apart (especially in fiction, though not exclusively) and, on the other hand, everything seems to fit just fine into Speculative Fiction (whatever that is).
After I left high school I continued to read those genres, though more occasionally. Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Larry Niven, Kurt Vonnegut. One summer I picked up “A Canticle for Liebowitz” and was entranced (did Walter M. Miller Jr. write anything else?). One Thanksgiving I ran through Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber (spoiler: they gradually get worse and worse). I read all of Patrick Rothfuss and then, as a bona fide memebr of his readership, grew annoyed at his inability to push out a new one!
I read the Harry Potter series in the original English, the His Dark Materials series ditto. China Miéville I read in the original Chinese. Liu Cixin’s “Three Body Problem” I read in the original translation. Hugh Howey’s “Dust” I read before anyone else in my NYPL branch library. I read Neal Stephenson’s “Anathem” in the original dustjacket. Nnedi Okorafor’s “Hello Moto” I read in the tor.com Kindle original. (see formattical note)
Somewhere around grad school it was pointed out to me that I hadn’t read a lot of women writers. I was relieved to hear that Andre Norton was, actually, a point in my favour (I had been curious, but insufficiently so, about the gender of André/Andre). So, yes, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin and Susan Cooper with a touch of Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood had leavened the testosterone, but that was nevertheless a poor return on a quarter century of reading.
So, gradually, I started looking for and asking for more books by people who didn’t identify as male. That didn’t stop me from rereading the Neuromancer trilogy last year (still good, just not as good as I remembered), but it did mean I read it next to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary world trilogy. It is, apparently, a political decision to read stories by authors who are not necessarily male, not necessarily white, not necessarily heterosexual and not necessarily born and bred in England and America (see geographical note below). If that really has to be so, I’m definitely of the party that reads those stories.
Because I have a literature PhD and frank opinions, people think I’m snobby about books. And though it’s true I think many books are poorly put together — and many, indeed, a waste of time and trees — that’s certainly not intended to be aimed at genres or fun. There are many bad books that identify as “literary fiction” just as there are, among other genres, good and bad sci-fi, speculative fiction, comedy, YA, “chick lit” and non-fiction books.
I have friends who are more knowledgeable and more widely read in this area than I am, this is not intended as authoritative — just anecdotal.
Hope you enjoy — Happy New Year!
10 books for a brighter 2021
Only one book per author / In alphabetical order of author’s surname / Links to author sites if possible (otherwise Goodreads because even though it’s Amazon-owned , at least it’s the nerd part of that exploitative nexus.)
1. Clay’s Ark by Octavia Butler: Black futurist Octavia Butler writes, in 1984, a novel whose protagonist is the father of teen girls and whose context is the incipient pandemic of 2021. Don’t worry that this is nominally the third book of a series.
2. The City of Brass: A Novel (The Daevabad Trilogy) by S.A. Chakraborty: The first of a fantasy trilogy based -- loosely, I'm guessing -- on the Abbasid Caliphate, is fun, plot-based adventure. There are ways of thinking seriously about gender and power in the different cultures it features, but I was unrepentantly swept up in this trashy epic. (Also, it features the most age-inappropriate romance I've ever read.)
3. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers: When you're stuck on a tin can in the middle of nowhere for years, you get to know your companions quite well. Maybe the premise of this book was truer this year than we thought it would be, but LWtSAP really makes you at home with aliens.
4. God’s War, Kameron Hurley: This is about Nyx, who is an assassin for hire in a magical, divided society. If you wanted to read about kickass women in desert, Muslim-influenced societies you could read Apocalypse Nyx books, the Daevabad trilogy (above) and the Nnedi Okorafor series that includes "Who Fears Death," "The Book of Phoenix" and the about-to-be-released "Remote Control." That would be fun.
5. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin: Broken Earth is quite different from our Earth. And it's one of the most compelling planets I've read about. This is book one of a trilogy and, down the line, the denouement is unfulfilling but Book 1 is a great portrayal of families in a time of mass disruption.
6. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie: A ship is destroyed through galactic treachery, but a section of its AI survives in one of its "ancillaries." Can Breq escape the ice planet and find justice? This is space opera at its finest -- speculative but, actually, more politics than farce.
7. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin: A total classic, and deservedly so. What happens when a gendered individual from a gendered society lands on a planet that's ungendered? Could be trite, but isn't. At all. 1969 prescient about the 2020s.
8. Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor: What if aliens landed in Nigeria, not New York? And what if the need for change and progress and fluidity was played out through an African lens? Scientists, soldiers, road snakes, giant sea creatures and lots of beings in shifting bodies give us ways of thinking about that.
9. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon: It sounds silly to say it, but spaceships are just ships, in space. So, what happens onboard takes place, literally, on different levels. But space offers time and loneliness to develop politics and systems that even the Atlantic didn't offer.
10. All Systems Red by Martha Wells: Another excellent entry to the pantheon of deadpan androids. The Murderbot Diaries traces, in bite-size novellas, what happens to a brutal security robot when it exceeds its programming to become both smarter and more moral than it was, than other murderbots and, obviously, than the humans around it. It's surprisingly charming to have a killing machine that, generally, chooses not to kill, narrating in a slightly smug tone of innocent bewilderment.
Plus, also part of this reading stint, but I didn’t want to start with her
The Power by Naomi Alderman: full disclosure, Naomi is a friend but this is a great, thoughtful, fun book. Barack Obama likes this story of, essentially, what it would be like if women were more physically powerful than men on an individual basis.
And the next on my list, already bought and sitting ready, is
All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders: Award-winning first novel by the former editor of the excellent Gawker SF site io9. Protagonist who talks to birds gives the book its title!
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More recommendations from readers:
Not just English-language: So much good stuff from all around this world, at this Bowdoin college course from 2015.
“Autonomous” by Annalee Newitz
Everything Ray Bradbury — Fahrenheit 451, Illustrated Man and more — and not just because of this Rachel Bloom video.
(Walter M. Miller shot himself in 1996 before finishing his related novel Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. The book was completed by Terry Bisson, at Miller’s request.) Bisson comes highly recommended, especially Fire on the Mountain, "Bears Discover Fire" and "They're Made out of Meat".
More recommendations for these authors from me (in reverse alpha, for variation):
Rivers Solomon is a new writer, they’ve only written two books I think. And the other one is The Deep, which I haven’t read yet, but am excited to.
Nnedi Okorafor, “Who Fears Death,” “Book of Phoenix” and the new novella “Remote Control” are three different forays into a fascinating future world of science and magic.
Ursula K. Le Guin, there’s so much. “Lathe of Heaven” or “Dispossessed” are great books to read. “Wizard of Earthsea” and all that world I loved when I was a kid.
N. K. Jemisin, an alternative second book to read — maybe better than the rest of Broken Earth even — is the collection “How Long Til Black Future Month?”
Ann Leckie, Kameron Hurley and Becky Chambers I haven’t got good second suggestions. S.K. Chakraborty, I haven’t read beyond the Daevabad trilogy. Martha Wells I’ve only read the Murderbot series.
Octavia Butler, “Wild Seed” and “Kindred” are classics, more recently I read “Xenogenesis” which I thought was excellent too.
Naomi Alderman, she wrote the Doctor Who novel “Borrowed Time” which is fun, but I’d read her "Liars Gospel” — the life of Jesus through the eyes of his contemporaries you don’t normally hear from.
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Geographical Note:
I really don’t know about Welsh and Irish writers of speculative fiction but Scotland is definitely different. Wales and Ireland are clearly culturally distinct in certain ways, but I think Scotland too is separate from England in lots of meaningful ways to do with the fiction it produces (Irving Welsh, Gordon Legge, Alan Warner at very least). I’m not sure that anglophone Canada is, in this sense, different, maybe Atwood is necessarily Canadian, I don’t know, and I own that limitation, happy to hear thoughts. From this extremely distinguished list, I’m particularly thinking of Ken MacLeod, Iain M. Banks, and Charles Stross but would be delighted to hear of more.
Fab list. And I am so impressed that you read Mieville in the original "Chinese"!!
This is a great list! A couple of recommendations that I'd make:
- Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside and Shorefall. Excellent cyberpunkish fantasy.
- Christopher Brown's Tropic of Kansas / Rule of Capture / Failed State
- Sue Burke's Semiosis / Interference
- Max Gladstone's Craft sequence
- Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut novels
- Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire