My favourite books of 2014

As always I will do a post looking at the statistics of my reading habits this year in early January, over at Wis[s]e Words, but for now I’d like to lift out the books that stood out the most for me in 2014, in no particular order.

Cover of The Martian

The Martian was one of the books with a lot of buzz behind it this year. Originally self published in 2011, it was picked up by a mainstream publisher (Random House) and rereleased with some alterations. It’s, with one exeception, the most heartland science fiction novel I’ve read this year, set smack in the heart of the genre. There have been other novels about astronauts losts on Mars before, other Robisonades. but the ones I’ve read tended to be dull and badly written. The Martian is the first one that had the same excitement as Robinson Crusoe offered in finding clever solutions to how to survive a hostile climate, but without devolving into wish fullfilment like the latter part of Crusoe did. Weir also doesn’t fall into the trap of making his stranded astronaut a Heinleinesque superman able to save himself entirely true his own efforts; instead it does take the full resources of NASA to save him.

Cover of Ter Ziele

In August I went to my first Worldcon, in London, which left me buzzing with excitement and a renewed interest in science fiction and fantasy fandom. It also spurred me on to get back into reading Dutch language fantastika, so I started off following various Dutch SFF people on Twitter, as you do. It was thanks to this that I got to know about Esther Scherpenisse’s Ter Ziele, a chapbook collection of two short novellas. The first story in particular hit me, dealing as it does with death, grief and letting go. It’s no surprise it won the main Dutch prize for science fiction/fantasy, the Paul Harlandprijs. I hope Esther Scherpenisse will write and publish more before long.

Cover of Ancillary Sword

Ann leckie’s Ancillary Justice was one of the best if not the best science fiction novels I’d read last year, so my expectations for the sequel, Ancillary Sword were high. Leckie didn’t disappoint me. Paradoxically it both took place on a smaller stage than the previous novel and concerned itself with bigger matters. Most of Ancillary Justice revolved around Breq’s struggle to come to grips with her own identity and her quest for vengeance, her inner turmoil, but Ancillary Sword has those struggles if not entirely resolved, so much so that she’s in full control here. And whereas the focus of the original novel, thanks to its novel use of pronouns, was mainly on gender, here it is on the impact of colonialism, something science fiction as a genre direly needs to come to grips with. Too often after all it views things from the perspective of empire, rather than its victims; Leckie firmly reverses this.

Cover of Otherbound

Corinne Duyvis is another Dutch SFF writer, but one who writes in English. Otherbound is her début novel, a young adult fantasy. What sets it apart from the hundreds of other young adult fantasies are several things. First, there’s the ingenious concept of the protagonist, Nolan, being forced to live somebody else’s life, see through a stranger’s eyes, every time he closes his. Second, Duyvis makes this into a disability more than a superpower. If every time you blink you see through somebody else’s eyes, it’s bound to distract you from the real world. And that has consequences. It’s not the only way Otherbound deals with disability; all three main characters are bound together by their disabilities, their lives interwoven because of it. Third, she has also seriously thought about the consent issues of being able to share someone’s life so intimately. And she manages to do all this and write a gripping adventure story too.

Cover of The Mirror Empire

I read Hurley’s first novel, Gods War, last year and that had been a good if flawed novel. The Mirror Empire is a cut above it. Hurley’s first venture into fantasy, it’s one of the novels, with Otherbound and Ancillary Sword that immediately made it on my Hugo shortlist for next year. In some ways it is a traditional epic fantasy, complete with a Big Bad that needs to be defeated, but what makes it special is its worldbuilding. The world of The Mirror Empire is one of the more fully realised, interesting and novel I’ve read in a long time and she manages it without “the great clomping foot of nerdism” stomping down on the story. Hurley supported The Mirror Empire with a promotional blog tour which is also worth reading to learn more about the background to which it was written and which explains some of her choices.

Cover of The Steerswoman
The Steerswoman series I knew about from other fans raving about it since the mid-nineties at the very least, but I never encountered the books in the wild, until James Nicoll linked to Rosemary Kirstein’s post offering the ebooks for sale. So inbetween walking from one panel to another at Loncon3, I bought the entire series. I was glad I did. What at a first glance looks like fantasy and starts out feeling like a standard if well written fantasy quest story, morphs gradually into the hardest science fiction series I’ve ever written. Because what you have here is a woman finding out the truth about the world she lives in through deduction and induction, through doing thought experiments and practical confirmation of them, without ever cheating, without being fed clues by better informed characters, without using magical technology or jumping to conclusions she shouldn’t be able to make. It’s a brilliant series too little known because for various reasons it took Kirstein over three decades to write the first four books of it and it’s still not finished. But don’t let that stop you: each book stands on its own and each is better than the last.

Cover of Dhalgren

Question: what are the two places man will never reach? Answer: the heart of the sun and page 100 of Dhalgren. An old joke, but one that indicates Dhalgren‘s reputation as a difficult book. Which didn’t stop it from being one of science fiction’s first runaway bestsellers. Personally I didn’t find it that difficult to read, just long, because I just let myself flow along Delany’s narrative. If you go looking for a proper, standard sf, story, you won’t find it here. But it is about cities and independence and queerness and the gloriousness of our bodies, ourselves and all sorts of weird seventies shit. This is one of those books that are hard to review or recap, require some investment of time and effort to get the most out of it, but do reward you if you do so. Delany is such a good writer that I wouldn’t mind reading his interpretation of the Manhattan phonebook, as long as he keeps off the booger sex.

Cover of Lagoon

I also read Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death this year, but Lagoon was the better book, another Hugo candidate for me. Written out of frustration with the South African sf movie District 9, this is her version of an alien invasion, set in Lagos, Nigeria. That setting already sets it apart from the ordinary run of invasion stories, usually set in the States or sometimes Europe. But there’s also Okorafor’s unapologetic use of Nigerian English rather than “standard” English. For somebody like me not used to it, this made it slightly more difficult to read at times, but no more so than when some fantasy writer has put made up Elfish words in his fantasy. Then there’s the genre breaking Okorafor cheerfully commits here as well, as one chapter frex is told from the perspective of a spider trying to cross a tarmac road, a self aware and evil tarmac road looking for new victims to devour…

Cover of Zero Sum Game

Zero Sum Game is S L Huang’s début novel, a fast paced technothriller, which I only discovered because of her post about last year’s SFWA controversies. That got me reading her blog, curious for her novel, so I bought it when it came out. What I most liked about the book was its heroine, Cas Russell, a math savant who can e.g. calculate the paths of a stream of bullets shot out by a semi-automatic in realtime quickly enough to dodge them all. If you think too much about this power it gets ridiculous, but Huang moves the action quickly enough to not give you the chance to do so. Cas is also, as becomes clear quickly, somewhat of a damaged individual, somebody with no sense of morality but not a sociopath, who has to rely on other people’s sense of what’s right and wrong, which doesn’t always end up well. Currently I’m reading the sequel, Half Life, coming out soon. Expect a review in early January.

Cover of Ascension

Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension was a book I completely discovered by accident, on the sales rack of my favourite Amsterdam bookstore. What pulled me to it was the woman on the cover, as black women don’t often feature on sf covers, not even when they are the protagonist. And it turned out this was the protagonist, a lesbian, disabled woman of colour working as a starship engineer in a dead end job in the middle of a depression caused by a new technology that makes starships almost obsolete. This is a book about sibling rivalry, love, both romantically and otherwise and the difficulties of living true to your own life when you’re poor and almost powerless. It’s also about making choices and having the courage to stand behind them. It’s a brilliant novel, one that should’ve been a contender for the Hugo and Nebula Awards together with Ancillary Justice, but which sadly didn’t get the buzz that book got.

Cover of The Blue Place

Finally, I need to mention two of the books I found the hardest to read this year, Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place and Stay, the first two novels in a crime thriller trilogy. What made it hard for me was that these books revolved around a death, a death I saw coming throughout The Blue Place and hoping Griffith would find a way to avoid it, while Stay deals with the fallout with that murder. The grief and sorrow in the latter were so real that I had to set it aside the first time I read it, in August, because it reminded me too much of my own loss, the death of my wife three years ago. But if it was hgard for me to read, it was harder for Nicola Griffith to write, twelve years after her little sister died, with her older sister dying through it. It’s no wonder it caught grief and sorrow so well.

Other books I could mention here as well: Sarah Tolmie’s The Stone Boatmen, for me another Hugo candidate. Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book so Great, an enthusiastic anthology of book reviews. Fly by Wire, William Langewiesche’s great explenation of just why captain Sullenberger could put down his Airbus 320 down safely on the Hudson after being hit by a goose. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar and Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone, both read for the John Campbell Award, both very good in their own way fantasy stories. Tobias Buckell’s Hurricane Fever a great near future technothriller romp. Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen vs the Junior Super Patriots/The Multiverse: maniac superhero fanfic that hits all the feels. Aliette de Bodard’s On a Red Station Drifting: family orientated flawed but interesting space opera. N. K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood duology: Egyptian inspired, but not derivative fantasy. Richard Penn’s The Dark Colony: a near future, non cheating hard science fiction police procedural set in the Solar System. Oh, and of course there’s all the Norton I read this year, none of which disappointed.

Otherbound — Corinne Duyvis

Cover of Otherbound


Otherbound
Corinne Duyvis
387 pages
published in 2014

It was thanks to The SKiffy and Fanty Show that I got to know about Dutch author Corinne Duyvis and her début novel Otherbound, when they had an interview with her about her book. This interview intrigued me enough to buy the ebook and start reading it immediately, because Duyvis was saying smart things about diversity and disability; it also helped that in the Dutch SF round table was raving about this book. And they were right to. This is a smart, well written fantasy novel with a clever, original idea at the heart of it that deserves to be a huge success.

Nolan would be just a normal high school kid, where it not for his crippling epileptic seizures. Amara is a servant girl, her only job to keep the fugitive princess Cilla safe, functioning as the lightning rod for the princess’ curse. Any drop of her blood spilled will attract the world’s vengeance on her, so instead Amara has to draw the curse to her, because she has a healing power that will allow the curse to do its worst and still leave her alive. As a side effect of her “gift”, Nolan was dragged into her world, her mind, seeing and experiencing Amara’s life every time he closes his eyes, every time he blinks. So when Cilla’s protector and Amara’s overseer, Jorn, punishes Amara for her neglicence by thrusting her arms into a fire, Nolan feels the pain alongside her. It’s this what’s really behind his epilepsy, this loss of control as he’s sucked into Amara’s world and can’t pay attention to his own.

It’s a great idea and not one I’ve come across before. The closest might actually be Katherine Blake/Dorothy J. Heydt’s The Interior Life, in which an American housewife imagines/relives a life in a fantasyland whose crisises and thriumphs mirror her own. The same intertwining of a “mundane” life with one in what seems to be a fantasy world, one in which magic is real and terrifying, but here Nolan and Amara are distinct people and Nolan isn’t just a passive onlooker to Amara’s life, but attempts to actively interfere, as well as to find some way to break their connection. Because for him, life mainly consists on trying to survive around experiencing hers, leaving little to no room for school, family or anything.

As Amara and princess Cilla flee the wrath of the ministers who took control of the country in the coup that killed the rest of the royal family, Amara has to deal not just with the brutality of Jorn and her relationship with Maart, another servant, but especially with her feelings for Cilla. As a servant she’s indoctrinated, raised from when she was first made a servant, had her tongue cut out, to obey and follow. Her ordeals battling the curse, the pains she suffers in Cilla’s stead — Duyvis doesn’t flinch in describing some of them — do test that enforced loyalty to the breaking point though and yet she finds it hard to hate Cilla. Cilla herself certainly is less than comfortable with Amara’s suffering, attempting to befriend but not quite realising how impossible that is considering their respective positions. Amara knows that she both cannot reject her overtures nor accept them, as that beyond her status as a bound servant. She can’t consent to them.

Meanwhile the relationship between Nolan and Amara, in which at first seems to be the innocent bystander drawn into Amara’s mind and life unbeknownst to her, starts changing too. As Nolan increasingly is able to enter her body and mind completely, taking over and controlling it, which Amara at first experiences as blackouts, put doubt to the idea that it was her that drew him to her. Perhaps it was the other way around and was it Nolan who, for some reason, had cast his mind into hers and now, through a quirk in his anti epilepsy medication, was able to control it better and control her.

Both these plot lines of course revolve around consent, the ways in which Amara cannot give consent in her relationship with Cilla and the ways in which she can, as their relationship shifts and changes, the ways in which Nolan has to deal with his discovery that he’s now in control and what that means. For Amara, each of his intrusions is obviously a violation, an invasion of her innermost being, something that Nolan is certainly aware of and not happy with. He doesn’t want to do this any more than she wants it done to her and now that he can control it and she’s aware of his presence, he wants nothing better than to stop doing so, but unfortunately the dangers in which Amara and Cilla are caught means he and Amara do need to come to some accommodation to save all of them.

Otherbound takes consent seriously, it’s at the heart of the novel and its villains are those who violate consent in the worst way possible, while it’s heroes, Amara, Nolan and to a lesser extent Cilla are those who learn to respect or have always attempted to respect consent and other people’s boundaries, while learning to set their own. The relationship that blossoms between Cilla and Amara is all about consent, about Cilla learning to ask in such a way that Amara can genuinely give it, while Amara learns to find those ways in which she can meaningfully consent, learns to go against conditioning and free herself. The villains of the story on the other hand cheerfully abuse consent, want ultimately to force Nolan to force Amara to give in to them so they can keep on ruling unchallenged.

As important perhaps as this theme, is the disability all three protagonists suffer from: Amara’s healing gifts, Cilla’s curse and Nolan’s epilepsy, all disabilities they each have to find and have found ways to try and live with, all in some ways limiting them. These felt real to me, not just gimmicks, not some D&D like stat to give the protagonist a bit of a handicap, but something that shapes their lives and will continue to do so even if no longer present. That’s … rarer than I’d like in fantasy or science fiction.

It makes Otherbound an important book as well as an entertaining one, a young adult novel that gets across the right sort of messages about consent and disability without being preachy or issue driven, but having them arise naturally from the story itself. It’s also good on family and the relationship between sisters and brothers, as with Nolan and his sister Pat.

Otherbound is not perfect. Both Nolan’s South-Western America and Amala’s Dunelands feel a bit flat at times, more sketched than portrayed. That said, I liked the little Dutch details Duyvis has put in their fantasy land, from the Dunelands themselves to having an island called Teschel (next to one calld T’ershell’ng?) to having “sugared batter poffs”. The pacing of the story is also slightly off, with the first half of the novel taking a bit too long to get going and the second half perhaps going too fast. But these are meer quibbles. This is a great, well written YA novel and I can’t wait for Duyvis’ next one.