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Locus recommended reading 2008

Published on February 2, 2009

The Locus Magazine 2008 recommended reading list is up, a decided on by their editors, reviewers and friends. I’ll excerpt the sf novels list:

Matter, Iain M. Banks (Orbit UK)
Flood, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz, Roc ’09)
Weaver, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz, Ace)
City at the End of Time, Greg Bear (Gollancz, Del Rey)
Incandescence, Greg Egan (Gollancz, Night Shade)
January Dancer, Michael Flynn (Tor)
Marsbound, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
Spirit, Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz)
Escapement, Jay Lake (Tor)
Song of Time, Ian R. MacLeod (PS Publishing)
The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
The Quiet War, Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
The Company, K. J. Parker (Orbit)
House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz, Ace ’09)
Pirate Sun, Karl Schroeder (Tor)
Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross (Orbit, Ace)
Rolling Thunder, John Varley (Ace)
Half a Crown, Jo Walton (Tor)
Implied Spaces, Walter Jon Williams (Night Shade Books)

Of the list, I’ve already read Matter, Anathem and Saturn’s Children and will definately read The Night Sessions, Half a Crown, House of Suns, Implied Spaces and The Quiet War. The Company, Escapement and Song of Time are also possibilities; the rest not so much and I already know I won’t read the Baxter novels. In all, a good list and as far as I can judge a good overview of the more important novels of last year.

There are remarkable few women on this list, just Gwyneth Jones, Jo Walton and K. J. Parker. The fantasy list has a better gender divide: six out of eighteen novels are by female authors. Is science fiction really such a male preserve?

The H-Bomb Girl — Stephen Baxter

Published on November 17, 2008

Cover of The H-Bomb Girl

The H-Bomb Girl
Stephen Baxter
265 pages
published in 2007

This is a book that’s going to give me nightmares, I can tell. Because I grew up as a kid in the Second Cold War, the last kids to grow up in the shadow of Nuclear Holocaust, when one side was ruled by a succesion of doddering paranoid old men who had gotten their job training under Uncle Stalin and the other was governed by a cowboy actor who half the time seem to believed he had been the war hero his b-movie career had portrayed him, I’ve always been fascinated and horrified by nuclear war. I remember having h-bomb nightmares almost every night when I was eight or ten. Even now, just reading the Wikipedia description of Threads is enough to give me bad dreams, let alone reading a novel the centrepiece of which is an all too realistic description of what could’ve happened to Britain if the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been defused in time. I can only imagine what the intended young adult audience for The H-Bomb Girl will think of it, having grown up with very different nightmares.

So far Stephen Baxter had never impressed me with his writing. I’ve read and enjoyed several of his short stories scattered through various anthologies, but bounced hard of his awful Mammoth novels while the other work of his I’ve come across never appealed to me. The only reason I picked up The H-Bomb Girl in the library was because it got talked about over at Torque Control during the runup to the Clarke Awards. Reading the first few pages intrigued me enough to take it home. Once I started reading it in earnest today I got sucked in and didn’t stop until it was finished. There’s not many books that I do that with these days. Score one for Baxter.

Driftglass – Samuel R. Delany

Published on November 16, 2008

Cover of Driftglass

Driftglass
Samuel R. Delany
318 pages
published in 1971

Samuel Delany is one of my favourite science fiction writers and in my opinion one of the best science fiction writers ever. Considering the cover blurb on this collection of short stories, I’m not alone in that opinion. According to Frederick Pohl, not a bad writer himself, “Delany may be the only authentic genius among us”. High praise indeed, but Delany deserves it. Everything I’ve read of his, including his earliest novels, displayed a mastery of both language and story, a lively imagination and ability to create novel but believable world and most importantly a grasp of the importance of culture that’s rare in science fiction, especially when he first started writing.

He is however more of a novelist than a short story writer, having written not nearly as many short stories as his contemporaries. in fact, Delany debuted with a novel at a time when science fiction was still largely a magazine driven field. It was only after he had establishred himself as a writer that he started publishing some of his short stories. Driftglass was his first collection, containing work written between ’65 and ’68 and published between 1967 and 1970. It’s a great collection, with two absolute classics in it: the Nebula winning “Aye, and Gomorrah…” as well as “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Not to mention several other excellent stories.

Tales — H. P. Lovecraft

Published on October 21, 2008

Cover of Tales

Tales
H. P. Lovecraft
838 pages
published in 2005

This deceptively slim volume, much slimmer than the similarly titled 1997 Jocye Carol Oates edited collection of Lovecraft stories, turned out to be printed on the kind of paper they use to print those teeny tiny complete bibles with. So what I thought would be a week’s worth of reading actually needed two long train journeys to finish, by the time I was somewhat bored with Lovecraft’s eldritch obsessions. After a while all the lurking horrors and dwellers in the darkness start to blur into each other and the descriptions turn from atmospheric into mildly ridiculous. Lovecraft is not a writer you should over indulge in; it’s better to read him sparingly story by story.

As a collection this is an impressive book, part of the prestigious Library of America series set up to safeguard America’s literary heritage. That H. P. Lovecraft, as first science fiction, horror or fantasy writer is allowed in these hallowed pages as a genre writer, not ust an established literary figure dabbling in these genres, is a good sign of how far these genres have penetrated literary consciousness. You may quibble about Lovecraft as a first choice, but he has slowly evolved from a cult writer into one appreciated as much for his literary qualities as his ability to scare his readers so he’s certainly not an undefensible choice.

A Plague of Demons — Keith Laumer

Published on September 15, 2008

Cover of A Plague of Demons

A Plague of Demons
Keith Laumer
159 pages
published in 1965

The advantage of reading a Keith Laumer novel is that they’re so short you can read two of them in the time it takes to get through even half a modern novel. So after Worlds of the Imperium I decided I would indulge myself with another Laumer novel I hadn’t read in over a decade. Reading them back to back it was interesting to see the simularities between the two novels. Both are partially set in Northern Africa, both star tough, grizzled loners whose name start with a B, and in both the hero gets involved in an operation way over his head and discovers the true reality of his world. Though really, that last bit is true of almost every straight science fiction novel Laumer ever wrote.

Not that Laumer wrote to a formula, but he knew what his strenghts were, what he liked to write about and what his readers liked to read. Certainly he always manages to hit my buttons. A Plague of Demons is no exception. It’s as fast-paced as the best of his work, with a nice dash of understated humour, in a writing style that owes a lot to the great American hardboiled tradition, as well as some of Ian Fleming’s work.