reading, SFF

2018 recommendations

Here (in no particular order) are some of the things (this is a very incomplete list and doubtless I’ll want to add something as soon as I post it) that I read and enjoyed in 2018, and commend to you both for reading, and for considering for awards season:

Novels

  • Aliette du Bodard, In The Vanishers’ Palace. Wonderful worldbuilding of a post-colonial world in disarray and the people trying to help; lyrical writing; and a f/f romance between a dragon and a scholar.
  • T Kingfisher, Swordheart. Halla inherits a sword; which turns out to have a swordman magically trapped inside it. Shenanigans ensue. Such a fun read.
  • T Kingfisher, The Wonder Engine. Second part of the Clocktaur War duology, and just as good as the first. Clockwork, a grumpy forger, and a disgraced paladin. (Set in the same world as Swordheart.)
  • Juliet E McKenna, The Green Man’s Heir. Modern rural (as opposed to urban) fantasy/detective story.
  • Stephen Cox, Our Child Of The Stars. Thoughtful, warm story about a family, their unusual child, and their efforts to protect him.
  • Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few. Yay more Becky Chambers. Notionally part of the Wayfarers series, but standalone. It’s more like four stories woven together. It’s gentle, and thoughtful, and I loved it.
  • Yoon Ha Lee, Revenant Gun. Cracking finish to the Machineries of Empire series.

Novellas

  • Aliette du Bodard, The Tea Master and the Detective. Space opera Sherlock Holmes, with a mindship and a scholar, set in the Xuya universe.
  • Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma, Sing For The Coming Of The Longest Night. Polyamory, queerness, and magic, and a mystery revolving around the solstice. Lovely. Also it’s set in London which is always a winner for me.
  • Martha Wells, Exit Strategy. Fourth and final instalment of The Murderbot Diaries, though I admit I am hoping for more Murderbot after this. Murderbot is awesome.

Novelettes

Short stories

(Note to self: do a better job of tracking short story reading this year. I am pretty sure I have missed stuff that I loved when I read it.)

I can also recommend Liz Bourke’s Tor.com review column Sleeps With Monsters is great for adding to one’s TBR stack, should one feel the need to do that. (This year I really am going to read everything on the pile. Yes.)

reading

Tackling the TBR pile

This morning I went through my Kindle and discovered, somewhat to my horror, that I have no fewer than 78 books on there that I haven’t yet read (including the handful that I’ve started but not finished). Plus 13 hard-copy books piled up by the bed; 16 on the shelf downstairs; and 10-20 short-story magazines also on the Kindle. (We will leave aside the matter of the hundred-odd samples on the Kindle which act as a sort of ‘perhaps I would like to read this’ list.)

So. New plan for 2018 reading: get through all of those (or officially DNF them) before I buy anything else new (with exceptions for new releases of series I’m already following). Having just tidied up my Goodreads records from last year, that comes out at 175 books (which still misses a few from the library and an awful lot of fic). So 107 books plus magazines should keep me going til the summer. So far I’ve read 10 books in 2018, but several of those were novellas or shorter; also quite a few of the TBR pile have stayed as TBR for a while because I anticipate them being slightly harder going.

Recommended so far from 2018 reading: the Belladonna University novellas by Tansy Rayner Roberts (Fake Geek Girl, Unmagical Boy Story, and The Bromancers, all fluffy Australian magic college stories with a big dollop of geek-culture), and Dreadnought by April Daniels (trans superhero YA).

reading

Worldcon Recs

Here is a list of the recs I picked up from various panels I attended at Worldcon. (These are likely not complete, but they’re the ones that I wrote down.)

In Defense of the Unlikeable Heroine:

  • We Who Are About To – Joanna Russ

Non-Binary Representation In Fiction:

  • Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction – ed K M Szpara (anthology)
  • The Black Tides of Heaven / The Red Threads of Fortune – JY Yang (forthcoming in Sept)
  • Provenance – Ann Leckie (forthcoming, but read some on her website)
  • Jacob’s Ladder – Elizabeth Bear
  • River of Teeth – Sarah Gailey
  • Pantomime – Laura Lam
  • Killing Gravity – Corey J White
  • Interactive fiction Craft phone games (Choice of Deathless/City’s Thirst) – Max Gladstone (you can play an nb character)
  • “Masculinity is an Anxiety Disorder” (essay) – David J Schwartz
  • Rose Lemberg
  • Foz Meadows
  • A Merc Rustad

Beyond the Dystopia

(This one should be complete as I moderated the panel and made a point of writing them down to tweet afterwards.)

  • Two Faces of Tomorrow – James P Hogan
  • Culture series – Iain M Banks
  • Dragonlance
  • Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders – Ada Palmer
  • The Postman – David Brin
  • A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and A Closed And Common Orbit – Becky Chambers
  • Hospital Station – James White
  • Malhutan Chronicles – Tom D Wright (panelist)
  • Orbital Cloud – Taiyo Fuji (panelist)
  • The Goblin Emperor – Katherine Addison

Older Women in Genre Fiction:

  • All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye – Christopher Brookmyre
  • Blood Songs series – Anthony Ryan
  • Remnant Population – Elizabeth Moon
  • Barbara Hambly

Also, Catherine Lundoff keeps a bibliography of books with older women protagonists.

Colonialism and the Space Opera:

  • Praxis – John Williams

Moving Beyond Orientalism in SFF:

  • Black Wolves – Kate Elliot
  • Vixen and The Waves – Hoa Pham
  • Isabelle Yap
  • Ken Liu
  • Stephanie Lai
  • Zen Cho

(Plus one from Nine Worlds in which the MC has Borderline Personality Disorder: Borderline – Mishell Baker)

reading, SFF

Mancunicon 2016 — book recs

Note: these are not books that I am recommending personally, because I haven’t read any of them yet. They are instead books that other people at the con talked about sufficiently enthusiastically that I now want to read them. Some of them are on my (now much larger) to-read pile, either in dead tree form or electronically; some aren’t yet.

First up: two people I know had book launch parties at the con! David L. Clements released his collection of short stories, ‘Disturbed Universes’ (from NewCon Press); and Siobhan McVeigh has a story in the collection ‘Existence is Elsewhere’ from Elsewhen Press (scroll right down for buying options). I heard various of the authors reading extracts from their stories in this book at the launch and they all sounded great.

The rest of my recs are from the Feminist Fantasy panel:

  • Jo Walton ‘Lifelode’ (annoyingly, it seems to be out of print, and expensive second-hand)
  • The Chinese myth series Dream of Red Mansions
  • Elizabeth Gouge (note that not all of her books are fantasy)
  • Octavia Butler ‘The Wild Sea’
  • Someone mentioned the Green Knowe series of children’s books, which are sort-of historical fantasy. I read them as a child (a long time ago now) but am now minded to have a look for them the next time I’m in the library and see how they’ve held up.
  • Tanith Lee
  • Lois McMaster Bujold ‘Paladin of Souls’ — I have read this one and it is GREAT. Very strongly recommended.
  • Kate Elliott — both fiction and non-fiction. (Just looked at her post about her own books/series and am now wondering how I missed all of this for this long. Looks great!)
  • Mary Stewart — Merlin trilogy
  • Andre Norton ‘Year of the Unicorn’. (I should probably have read this already…) (but I haven’t, so.)

To enlarge your (my) reading list further, E. G. Cosh (who was on a panel with me and is v cool) has a recs post too.