2005: Reading
Jan. 8th, 2006 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescent2004 was always going to be a hard act to follow: among other books, last year we got Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, River of Gods, Cloud Atlas and Air. Even taking that into account, however, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that 2005 was a thoroughly unexceptional year, even slightly disappointing, for sf. That's not to say that there wasn't a fair spread of good and interesting work published, but not very much had that special something.
Some statistics
I read 64 books in 2005, down from around 80 in 2004. Of these, 58% were novels, 31% short fiction collections, and 13% non-fiction (the numbers don't quite tally because Primo Levi's The Periodic Table is non-fiction but includes some short stories); 70% had at least one male author or editor, while 36% had at least one female author or editor; 56% were by North American writers, 33% by Brits, and 11% by Others. Not at all surprisingly, 81% of the books were speculative fiction or related to sf in some way, breaking down into 34% that were clearly science fiction, 30% clearly fantasy, and 17% that were either weird stuff that messes with your head, or critical/biographical/historical works. Over half--52%--of the books I read were published in 2005, and a further 34% were from the last decade. In raw numbers that means 33 books from 2005, the majority of which I wrote about for somewhere or other (total wordage, if you're wondering, somewhere between 35 and 40,000). Links will be scattered through this post, where possible.
Obviously there were plenty of books I missed, and had I read them it's possible I would see the year differently. The ones I most want to pick up at some point, all of which have had good notices elsewhere, are:
- Fledgling by Octavia Butler
- The House of Storms by Ian R. Macleod
- Counting Heads by David Marusek
- Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh
- Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millett
- The Accidental by Ali Smith
- Tumbling After by Paul Witcover
Other read-in-2005 overviews can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and here, with some lowlights here and here.
Older books
'Older' is perhaps a little misleading; of the 30 pre-2005 books I read, 17 were published in 2004. Some of this was catching up on award nominees and winners I'd missed. I thought Richard Morgan's Market Forces was distinctly average, and I wasn't wildly more impressed with China Mieville's Iron Council; on the other hand, I liked Life, by Gwyneth Jones, a great dea. It's a book that sometimes feels slightly too choreographed, but that mostly is a complex and compelling look at the intersection of genetics and gender, framed by an excellent depiction of science as it is done. Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle was also good, a ghost story about loss of love and how to deal with it. Pete Weston's fannish memoir With Stars in my Eyes was interesting, but served mainly to make me grateful that I live in fandom as it is now, and not as it was then. And Matt Ruff's Set This House In Order brilliantly depicts what it might be like to have multiple personality disorder, although stumbles a little in the middle, with some unconvincing plotting.
I skipped out on far too many of the longer picks made by the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
instant_fanzine book group, so I still haven't read Perdido Street Station or Stand on Zanzibar. Of the ones I did read (or reread), we already know I loved River of Gods, while Neuromancer was more of a chore than a pleasure (although that was more my fault than the novel's), and the less said about my attempt to read Persuasion the better. Mark Gatiss' The Vesuvius Club was probably the worst book I read all year--lazy and clumsy--and though I liked Camp Concentration, I think Disch gets a little muddle up about the differences between intelligence and knowledge. The 'book group' section also seems like the obvious place to mention Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, which was a Litblog Co-op pick, although I didn't really get on with it; and also Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, which was perfectly pleasant, but ultimately not as substantial as the rapturous reviews had lead me to hope.
Three of the older short story collections I read were nothing short of stunning. Of course, Margo Lanagan's Black Juice still hasn't made it to the UK yet, but there's not long to wait now (and last I heard it was coming with a bonus story). Equally inventive, albeit in different ways, was Ali Smith's The Whole Story and Other Stories, while James Tiptree Jnr's Her Smoke Rose Up Forever had inevitably dated in parts, but is still built around a core of remarkable stories that everyone should read. I also read John Crowley's Novelties and Souvenirs this year. 'Great Work of Time' more than justifies the price of admission--an incredible demonstration of how a terrible, stupid, damaging thing can arise from the very best of intentions--and there a number of other worthwhile stories ('Snow', 'In Blue', 'The Reason for the Visit'). With any luck I'll read some more Crowley in 2006. Meanwhile, Out of This World 10, from way back in 1973, takes the prize for most incongruous table of contents of the year: AE Van Vogt and Italo Calvino, together at last!
My periodic struggles with the beast called Literature advanced another couple of steps. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is not the 'makes Air redundant' book it was sold to me as, but it makes an interesting companion work for thinking about how first and third-world cultures collide, and is a powerful (if frustrating) story in its own right. The Great Gatsby, meanwhile, is beautifully written and constructed, but ultimately left me flat; Fitzgerald did a much better job of writing about Gatsby's parties than about Gatsby himself, and without that engagement the book's conclusions seemed oddly trivial. By far the best 'classic' I picked up in 2005 was Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, an extraodinary mix of biographical anecdotes and a few short stories, covering Levi's life and work as a chemist, and drawing a fine portrait of 20th century Europe besides.
In 2004, I'd enjoyed Gene Wolfe's The Knight, so I was surprised how very flat the second part of that duology, The Wizard, fell with me. By the end it was so inward-looking that it seemed like a complete evolutionary dead-end. Thankfully, shortly afterwards I read Lucius Shepard's A Handbook of American Prayer, which did a much better job of using fantasy to explore moral arguments. What else? Ah yes: a young-adult novel by Charles de Lint, a chapbook by L. Timmel Duchamp, How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ, and a vibrant but flawed novel by Jennifer Stevenson. Plus Jeffrey Ford's The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, Michael Chabon's good Holmes-as-old-man novella The Final Solution, and the first volume of Planetes, a near-future manga by Makoto Yukimura. I have the next couple of volumes lying around somewhere, and really should read them. Phew.
2005 books
Of all the new books I read in 2005, only Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners earns an unequivocal recommendation. There are other books I would be happy to recommend if you liked x, or if you're interested in y, but Link's is the one I want everyone to read. Right now. All the unconditional adoration that everyone had for her first collection, Stranger Things Happen, I have for this one; this time out the stories seem to me richer, more emotionally satisfying (without bowing to convention), and as charming, funny, eerie, and beautiful as ever. The first story in the collection, 'The Faery Handbag', deservedly won a Hugo last summer, and if there's any justice in the world the title story, which captures perfectly what it's like to be a part of the communities that shared stories create, will be voted Best Novella in 2006. But almost every story is fantastic (in every sense), from the scattershot musing of 'Some Zombie Contingency Plans' to the knotted narrative time of 'Lull'.
It was, in general, a good year for short story collections, I think. If I was going to award places on a podium, the silver would go to Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts, and the bronze to Holly Phillips' In The Palace of Repose. The Hill is a debut collection of (largely) horror stories that (largely) demonstrate how and why horror can work, and much else besides. The opening trio of stories alone--'Best New Horror', '20th Century Ghost' and 'Pop Art'--are deeply rewarding, and demonstrate the range of Hill's talent. The Phillips is also a debut, and (somewhat unusually for an sf collection) most of the stories in it are appearing for the first time. Phillips is less all-around good than Hill--there is a tendency for her stories to peter out rather than end, and her writing can sometimes be a little flat--but the best stories create a mesmerising atmosphere, focusing on protagonists who gradually realise that they have to accept the unavoidable magic of their lives.
I also liked Carol Emshwiller's I Live With You. The book's title story is one of my favourite short stories of the year, and I was already familiar with stories like 'My General', 'The Library', and 'Boys', all of which are good; but I find that Emshwiller can be hit-or-miss (sometimes, for no obvious reason, her prose just fails to engage me), and the rest of the collection bore that out. I was also a bit disappointed that the book included 'Gliders Though They Be' but not 'On Display Among The Lesser' or 'All Of Us Can Almost ...', because it seems to me that those stories should not be split up. James Alan Gardner's Gravity Wells was also a mixed bag; the title story is magnificent, but a number of the other, breezier offerings were too slender for my taste. And two collections outright disappointed me. Shalom Auslander's Beware of God received praise from a wide range of venues, from Bookslut to national newspapers, but the majority of the stories in the book felt shallow and uninventive. (The glorious exception being 'Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown', which recreates Peanuts in comic-strip form, and uses the death of Charles Schulz as its starting point to critique faith-based politics and ideology.) Gene Wolfe's Starwater Strains certainly contained some good stories--'Pulp Cover' is still wonderful, as is the novella 'Golden City Far'--but too many of them felt too artificial, too constrained, for my taste.
I didn't read any original anthologies to match up to last year's The Faery Reel. Both Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson's Nova Scotia and Pete Crowther's Constellations aspired to offer snapshots of writerly communities; in the former case, Scottish sf writers, in the latter, British sf writers more generally. Neither was fully successful; both seemed to lack conviction. The sense of 'scottishness' in Nova Scotia seemed largely perfunctory, with wide-ranging concerns and approaches on display, while all Constellations did was make me wonder where the good British short fiction writers are. Many of the contributers are known primarily for their novel-length work, and in most cases that's for good reason. There is good work in both, of course. From Constellations, Justina Robson's melancholy tale of lovers separated by universes, 'Little Bear', has stayed with me, as has Ian McDonald's 'Written in the Stars', a baroquely-written tale of a society run according to a working astrology. From Nova Scotia I liked Hannu Rajaneimi's 'Deus ex Homine', an engaging portrait of a post-post-human dysfunctional relationship, and Angus McAllister's thoughtful 'Running on at Adventures', which revolves around a classical conceptual breakthrough.
On to the novels. The best new novel I read in 2005 was Justina Robson's Living Next-Door to the God of Love, and not just for the care she takes in relating her science-fictional conceits to human situations. It is undeniable that Robson does not seem to necessarily write easily or fluently; particularly when it comes to descriptions of places and settings, her sentences can be ungainly. In a novel set in a landscape that can be remade according to dream or willpower, this is a problem. But the ambition and vibrancy of the novel and its characters are undeniable, particularly when it comes to the depiction of the romance around which the rest of the novel circles.Living Next-Door to the God of Love is, ultimately, a book of great humanity, about self-understanding and, of course, love. (It also happens to do right almost everything that one of the most disappointing novels of the year, Hal Duncan's Vellum, does wrong.) Messier, but equally exhilarating, is Charles Stross' Accelerando, a headlong rush into the 21st century (and, yes, a singularity) that compresses a future history into a few generations. Perhaps it's a cheat to pick it as one of the best novels of 2005, since I read the stories as they appeared in Asimov's over the past few years; but it's a book that is filled with wit and (deeply geeky) humour, and Stross can be extremely acute about the implications of our technological present for human interactions on all levels.
After those two, however, things get a bit more complicated. There was certainly no shortage of good novels for me to read, but none of them stand out from the pack. Certainly, as I mentioned earlier, compared to last year's confluence 2005 comes off poorly.
I'll start with the mainstream. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go was this year's Cloud Atlas, in the sense of being a widely discussed and lauded (Booker nominated, and one of Time's five fiction books of the year) book by a mainstream writer with science-fictional ideas at its core. It is a fine, moving, and beautifully written book. The sfnal idea is implausibly presented, but no more so than in any number of genre sf stories on the same topic; what eventually derails it, however, is an ending infodump that destroys much of the novel's carefully-built ambiguity, draining the book of much of its resonance. Technically much closer to Cloud Atlas, in form and content, but much less successful than either that book or Ishiguro's (and less widely discussed), was Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days. The book is built from three stories, each about 150 years apart, each featuring the same trio of (reincarnated) characters; the last of the stories is science fiction, and a textbook example of how to do sf badly. Meanwhile, a widely-lauded sf writer went in the other direction and produced a fine historical novel. Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace covers similar thematic ground to The Sparrow and Children of God--faith, redemption, suffering--by looking at the story of Jewish refugees in Northern Italy at the end of World War II. It is a big, busy and rewarding book. Ian McEwan's Saturday, on the other hand, as I half-suspected, has not weathered in my memory well; it is interesting to have read it, but ultimately it is neither thoughtful nor bold enough to recommend with any conviction. Similarly, much as I enjoyed Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, it lacks the rich texture I associate with The Name of the Rose, and ends a little closer to cliche than I'm comfortable with.
Back to the sf. I can't help feeling that Stephen Baxter's Transcendent is a great novel reduced to the merely good by hasty execution. It is, at least, a strong conclusion to the Destiny's Child sequence, marrying a detailed near future a few years down the line from that in Coalescent to the deep-future exuberance and Stapledonian poetry of Exultant; in part it also reads like a Grand Statement, a sort of summing up of many of Baxter's core concerns. It also adds a prominent one (or at least one that was only touched on in Evolution), in the form of environmental speculation; and of course that's Kim Stanley Robinson's current territory. Oddly, Baxter turns out to be the more optimistic, assuming a grand Stewardship that finally begins to tackle large-scale climate change; meanwhile Fifty Degrees Below continues the Science in the Capital trilogy with skill. It is occasionally didactic in that comforting way that we expect from Robinson, but for the most part his scientific utopianism is offset by a meticulous attention to character. The grand engineering projects are there, of course (as they are in Baxter), but they are nothing like as prominent as they were in the Mars books. Far more attention is paid to the attempts of the main character, Frank Vanderwal, to negotiate the various networks political, scientific and philosophical networks with which his life intersects.
Similarly concerned with process, although in a more abstracted form, is Ken Macleod's novel of first contact, Learning the World. I stand by my statement that it's perhaps Macleod's most satisfying novel; of his earlier books, only The Stone Canal has taken root in my thoughts as securely. It is also one of the books that gave me the most uncritical pleasure of the year--not something to be undervalued. At the other end of the same scale are the guilty pleasures, the books I know I appreciated more than they deserved. James Lovegrove's satirical bildungsroman, Provender Gleed, is one (a must for anyone who enjoys wordplay); Cory Doctorow's charmingly odd urban fantasy Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, is another. By all lights, a book in which the main character has a mountain for a father, a washing machine for a mother, and brothers who form a Russian Doll, not to mention friends intent on setting up a wireless network over downtown Toronto and a maybe-girlfriend with wings, should be a mess. And so the book is, by some lights; but somehow, the mix of shameless idealism and matter-of-fact weirdness charms, rather than discourages. Of course, if you want more weirdness you could do worse than pick up Jeffrey Ford's Cosmology of the Wider World, which cheerfully riffs on myths ancient and modern. Recently, it has perhaps been too easy to forget what a tremendously inventive fantasist Ford can be; this book, filled with a full menagerie of characters--not least the protagonist, Belius the minotaur--and set primarily in a bold and colourful world, redresses the balance. It suffers from an abrupt and strangely trivial ending, but apparently there are more installments to come.
I didn't read many first novels last year; the best was Judith Berman's Bear Daughter, a coming-of-age story (bear wakes up as girl, has to come to terms with girl-ness and bear-ness) set in a pleasingly nonstandard fantasy world rooted in both Western, Native American and other myth. It has problems, notably in the pacing department, but also much to enjoy; Berman's descriptions of the physical environment are often very evocative, and the bear daughter herself, Cloud, can be agonisingly stubborn, but is generally well developed and pleasingly competent. Another brilliantly unusual environment (it's a good thing I'm coming to the end, because the links are getting more tenuous) is showcased in Tricia Sullivan's Double Vision, in the form of the shifting, battle-scarred Grid. Double Vision has structural and thematic similarities with Sullivan's previous book, the Clarke-nominated Maul, but for my money investigates its subjects more thoroughly, and with better pacing. Like a number of the novels discussed about--Someone Comes to Town, Learning the World, Fifty Degrees Below--there is a strong sense in which it is about the way systems can define a life. But it is a book that rejects single, simple causes--and in that, tangled as it may be, there is truth.
Recommendations
So, out of all that mess, what do I most recommend?
- Life by Gwyneth Jones
- Black Juice by Margo Lanagan
- The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
- Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
- The Summer Isles by Ian R. Macleod
- Living Next-Door to the God of Love by Justina Robson
- A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
- The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith
- Accelerando by Charles Stross
- Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jnr
Conveniently, that comes out at ten titles, although the astute among you will have noticed that there's a book on the list I haven't talked about so far. I haven't talked about it because I only read it in the past week; but I'm going to talk about it because it is the finest novel I have read that was published in 2005. In fact, given that it had a print run of 500 copies, of which mine is number 455, I feel obliged to talk about it, before you can't get hold of it.
The Summer Isles, then, is a novel from which an earlier (and World Fantasy Award-winning) novella was extracted, and which is now available at full length for the first time. That's important: this new publication is not an expansion, it is the original text. Ian R. Macleod stories tend to be short on action and long on introspection, and so it is here, but there is no sense of thin-ness, and the structure and pacing are first-rate.
It's an alternate history, which will turn some of you off immediately, and it's an alternate 1940, which I'm sure discourages most of the rest. Ignore that instinct. In The Summer Isles it's World War I that went differently--a British defeat, with all the subsequent reparations and humiliations that went with the defeat of Germany in our history. And, as in our Germany, fascism took root and grew. The Greater Britain in which Geoffrey Brook lives and works is an oppressive and diminished one in which, in place of Churchill, we have John Arthur and his Modernist government. One of the many strengths of the novel is its portrayal of the development and practice of a distinctively British (or at least English) fascism; we are all vulnerable to comforting prejudice.
Another strength is Macleod's evocation of place. Brook is a tutor in History (of course) at Oxford and (with the exception of the consistent and irritating misnaming of Magdalen as Magdalene) the description of the city, its seasons and students and scholars, is perfect. It is not our Oxford, because it too has been diminished by the Modernist project, but the places and the details are there. Similarly convincing is an excursion that Brook makes to Scotland, a holiday-cum-research trip in search of the truth about his own past, and the country's present. More vivid, if anything, are the climactic scenes, set in a London preparing for a frenzied celebration of John Arthur's fiftieth birthday; it helps, here, that the dissonance between what we know of our own London of that time and what we see in the novel is so strong.
Alternate histories are stories that never were. This is obvious, but still worth making explicit. They make us think about the stories that could have happened, and by extension about the branching possibilities that the future offers. There is, in The Summer Isles, a detailed argument about the value of thinking about history, in this way and in many others. The damage that our longing for a past that never was or a future that can never be can do to our present. It also dramatises, brilliantly, both the sense of history as an impersonal process, as the visible outcome of the great grinding gears of the world, and the sense of history as vulnerable to change, hanging in the balance. It does this through the character of Brook, and his story; a gay man in a country inimical to homosexuality, a historian in a country with no use for the truth.
And there is Macleod's writing. Most of his stories, as I mentioned, are introspective; many, including this one, are laced with sadness, and a sense that it should not be this way or it was better then, or both. The Summer Isles is, perhaps, more controlled than a book than something like The Light Ages, which sometimes got lost in its own paragraphs (it's also a good hundred and fifty pages shorter). But that's only appropriate, and the result is a fine novel, brimming with feelings that have no outlet.
You may have noticed that I loved The Summer Isles. I didn't intend to review it, though it seems I have done; for once, I let myself luxuriate in the reading experience, rather than cataloguing my thoughts as I went along. so now I want to go away, read some other books that seem relevant, re-read some other Macleod ... then come back to The Summer Isles and talk about it some more. But I thought I should shout about it from the rooftops now, before it sells out.
And finally ...
A list of the books I'm most looking forward to in 2006.
- Resplendent by Stephen Baxter
- Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan DeNiro
- Past Magic by Ian R. Macleod
- Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
- The Burning Girl by Holly Phillips
- Map of Dreams by M. Rickert
- The King's Last Song by Geoff Ryman
- Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge
(And finally finally ... short fiction from magazines? That would be a whole other post.)
Some statistics
I read 64 books in 2005, down from around 80 in 2004. Of these, 58% were novels, 31% short fiction collections, and 13% non-fiction (the numbers don't quite tally because Primo Levi's The Periodic Table is non-fiction but includes some short stories); 70% had at least one male author or editor, while 36% had at least one female author or editor; 56% were by North American writers, 33% by Brits, and 11% by Others. Not at all surprisingly, 81% of the books were speculative fiction or related to sf in some way, breaking down into 34% that were clearly science fiction, 30% clearly fantasy, and 17% that were either weird stuff that messes with your head, or critical/biographical/historical works. Over half--52%--of the books I read were published in 2005, and a further 34% were from the last decade. In raw numbers that means 33 books from 2005, the majority of which I wrote about for somewhere or other (total wordage, if you're wondering, somewhere between 35 and 40,000). Links will be scattered through this post, where possible.
Obviously there were plenty of books I missed, and had I read them it's possible I would see the year differently. The ones I most want to pick up at some point, all of which have had good notices elsewhere, are:
- Fledgling by Octavia Butler
- The House of Storms by Ian R. Macleod
- Counting Heads by David Marusek
- Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh
- Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millett
- The Accidental by Ali Smith
- Tumbling After by Paul Witcover
Other read-in-2005 overviews can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and here, with some lowlights here and here.
Older books
'Older' is perhaps a little misleading; of the 30 pre-2005 books I read, 17 were published in 2004. Some of this was catching up on award nominees and winners I'd missed. I thought Richard Morgan's Market Forces was distinctly average, and I wasn't wildly more impressed with China Mieville's Iron Council; on the other hand, I liked Life, by Gwyneth Jones, a great dea. It's a book that sometimes feels slightly too choreographed, but that mostly is a complex and compelling look at the intersection of genetics and gender, framed by an excellent depiction of science as it is done. Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle was also good, a ghost story about loss of love and how to deal with it. Pete Weston's fannish memoir With Stars in my Eyes was interesting, but served mainly to make me grateful that I live in fandom as it is now, and not as it was then. And Matt Ruff's Set This House In Order brilliantly depicts what it might be like to have multiple personality disorder, although stumbles a little in the middle, with some unconvincing plotting.
I skipped out on far too many of the longer picks made by the
instant_fanzine book group, so I still haven't read Perdido Street Station or Stand on Zanzibar. Of the ones I did read (or reread), we already know I loved River of Gods, while Neuromancer was more of a chore than a pleasure (although that was more my fault than the novel's), and the less said about my attempt to read Persuasion the better. Mark Gatiss' The Vesuvius Club was probably the worst book I read all year--lazy and clumsy--and though I liked Camp Concentration, I think Disch gets a little muddle up about the differences between intelligence and knowledge. The 'book group' section also seems like the obvious place to mention Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, which was a Litblog Co-op pick, although I didn't really get on with it; and also Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, which was perfectly pleasant, but ultimately not as substantial as the rapturous reviews had lead me to hope.Three of the older short story collections I read were nothing short of stunning. Of course, Margo Lanagan's Black Juice still hasn't made it to the UK yet, but there's not long to wait now (and last I heard it was coming with a bonus story). Equally inventive, albeit in different ways, was Ali Smith's The Whole Story and Other Stories, while James Tiptree Jnr's Her Smoke Rose Up Forever had inevitably dated in parts, but is still built around a core of remarkable stories that everyone should read. I also read John Crowley's Novelties and Souvenirs this year. 'Great Work of Time' more than justifies the price of admission--an incredible demonstration of how a terrible, stupid, damaging thing can arise from the very best of intentions--and there a number of other worthwhile stories ('Snow', 'In Blue', 'The Reason for the Visit'). With any luck I'll read some more Crowley in 2006. Meanwhile, Out of This World 10, from way back in 1973, takes the prize for most incongruous table of contents of the year: AE Van Vogt and Italo Calvino, together at last!
My periodic struggles with the beast called Literature advanced another couple of steps. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is not the 'makes Air redundant' book it was sold to me as, but it makes an interesting companion work for thinking about how first and third-world cultures collide, and is a powerful (if frustrating) story in its own right. The Great Gatsby, meanwhile, is beautifully written and constructed, but ultimately left me flat; Fitzgerald did a much better job of writing about Gatsby's parties than about Gatsby himself, and without that engagement the book's conclusions seemed oddly trivial. By far the best 'classic' I picked up in 2005 was Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, an extraodinary mix of biographical anecdotes and a few short stories, covering Levi's life and work as a chemist, and drawing a fine portrait of 20th century Europe besides.
In 2004, I'd enjoyed Gene Wolfe's The Knight, so I was surprised how very flat the second part of that duology, The Wizard, fell with me. By the end it was so inward-looking that it seemed like a complete evolutionary dead-end. Thankfully, shortly afterwards I read Lucius Shepard's A Handbook of American Prayer, which did a much better job of using fantasy to explore moral arguments. What else? Ah yes: a young-adult novel by Charles de Lint, a chapbook by L. Timmel Duchamp, How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ, and a vibrant but flawed novel by Jennifer Stevenson. Plus Jeffrey Ford's The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, Michael Chabon's good Holmes-as-old-man novella The Final Solution, and the first volume of Planetes, a near-future manga by Makoto Yukimura. I have the next couple of volumes lying around somewhere, and really should read them. Phew.
2005 books
Of all the new books I read in 2005, only Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners earns an unequivocal recommendation. There are other books I would be happy to recommend if you liked x, or if you're interested in y, but Link's is the one I want everyone to read. Right now. All the unconditional adoration that everyone had for her first collection, Stranger Things Happen, I have for this one; this time out the stories seem to me richer, more emotionally satisfying (without bowing to convention), and as charming, funny, eerie, and beautiful as ever. The first story in the collection, 'The Faery Handbag', deservedly won a Hugo last summer, and if there's any justice in the world the title story, which captures perfectly what it's like to be a part of the communities that shared stories create, will be voted Best Novella in 2006. But almost every story is fantastic (in every sense), from the scattershot musing of 'Some Zombie Contingency Plans' to the knotted narrative time of 'Lull'.
It was, in general, a good year for short story collections, I think. If I was going to award places on a podium, the silver would go to Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts, and the bronze to Holly Phillips' In The Palace of Repose. The Hill is a debut collection of (largely) horror stories that (largely) demonstrate how and why horror can work, and much else besides. The opening trio of stories alone--'Best New Horror', '20th Century Ghost' and 'Pop Art'--are deeply rewarding, and demonstrate the range of Hill's talent. The Phillips is also a debut, and (somewhat unusually for an sf collection) most of the stories in it are appearing for the first time. Phillips is less all-around good than Hill--there is a tendency for her stories to peter out rather than end, and her writing can sometimes be a little flat--but the best stories create a mesmerising atmosphere, focusing on protagonists who gradually realise that they have to accept the unavoidable magic of their lives.
I also liked Carol Emshwiller's I Live With You. The book's title story is one of my favourite short stories of the year, and I was already familiar with stories like 'My General', 'The Library', and 'Boys', all of which are good; but I find that Emshwiller can be hit-or-miss (sometimes, for no obvious reason, her prose just fails to engage me), and the rest of the collection bore that out. I was also a bit disappointed that the book included 'Gliders Though They Be' but not 'On Display Among The Lesser' or 'All Of Us Can Almost ...', because it seems to me that those stories should not be split up. James Alan Gardner's Gravity Wells was also a mixed bag; the title story is magnificent, but a number of the other, breezier offerings were too slender for my taste. And two collections outright disappointed me. Shalom Auslander's Beware of God received praise from a wide range of venues, from Bookslut to national newspapers, but the majority of the stories in the book felt shallow and uninventive. (The glorious exception being 'Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown', which recreates Peanuts in comic-strip form, and uses the death of Charles Schulz as its starting point to critique faith-based politics and ideology.) Gene Wolfe's Starwater Strains certainly contained some good stories--'Pulp Cover' is still wonderful, as is the novella 'Golden City Far'--but too many of them felt too artificial, too constrained, for my taste.
I didn't read any original anthologies to match up to last year's The Faery Reel. Both Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson's Nova Scotia and Pete Crowther's Constellations aspired to offer snapshots of writerly communities; in the former case, Scottish sf writers, in the latter, British sf writers more generally. Neither was fully successful; both seemed to lack conviction. The sense of 'scottishness' in Nova Scotia seemed largely perfunctory, with wide-ranging concerns and approaches on display, while all Constellations did was make me wonder where the good British short fiction writers are. Many of the contributers are known primarily for their novel-length work, and in most cases that's for good reason. There is good work in both, of course. From Constellations, Justina Robson's melancholy tale of lovers separated by universes, 'Little Bear', has stayed with me, as has Ian McDonald's 'Written in the Stars', a baroquely-written tale of a society run according to a working astrology. From Nova Scotia I liked Hannu Rajaneimi's 'Deus ex Homine', an engaging portrait of a post-post-human dysfunctional relationship, and Angus McAllister's thoughtful 'Running on at Adventures', which revolves around a classical conceptual breakthrough.
On to the novels. The best new novel I read in 2005 was Justina Robson's Living Next-Door to the God of Love, and not just for the care she takes in relating her science-fictional conceits to human situations. It is undeniable that Robson does not seem to necessarily write easily or fluently; particularly when it comes to descriptions of places and settings, her sentences can be ungainly. In a novel set in a landscape that can be remade according to dream or willpower, this is a problem. But the ambition and vibrancy of the novel and its characters are undeniable, particularly when it comes to the depiction of the romance around which the rest of the novel circles.Living Next-Door to the God of Love is, ultimately, a book of great humanity, about self-understanding and, of course, love. (It also happens to do right almost everything that one of the most disappointing novels of the year, Hal Duncan's Vellum, does wrong.) Messier, but equally exhilarating, is Charles Stross' Accelerando, a headlong rush into the 21st century (and, yes, a singularity) that compresses a future history into a few generations. Perhaps it's a cheat to pick it as one of the best novels of 2005, since I read the stories as they appeared in Asimov's over the past few years; but it's a book that is filled with wit and (deeply geeky) humour, and Stross can be extremely acute about the implications of our technological present for human interactions on all levels.
After those two, however, things get a bit more complicated. There was certainly no shortage of good novels for me to read, but none of them stand out from the pack. Certainly, as I mentioned earlier, compared to last year's confluence 2005 comes off poorly.
I'll start with the mainstream. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go was this year's Cloud Atlas, in the sense of being a widely discussed and lauded (Booker nominated, and one of Time's five fiction books of the year) book by a mainstream writer with science-fictional ideas at its core. It is a fine, moving, and beautifully written book. The sfnal idea is implausibly presented, but no more so than in any number of genre sf stories on the same topic; what eventually derails it, however, is an ending infodump that destroys much of the novel's carefully-built ambiguity, draining the book of much of its resonance. Technically much closer to Cloud Atlas, in form and content, but much less successful than either that book or Ishiguro's (and less widely discussed), was Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days. The book is built from three stories, each about 150 years apart, each featuring the same trio of (reincarnated) characters; the last of the stories is science fiction, and a textbook example of how to do sf badly. Meanwhile, a widely-lauded sf writer went in the other direction and produced a fine historical novel. Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace covers similar thematic ground to The Sparrow and Children of God--faith, redemption, suffering--by looking at the story of Jewish refugees in Northern Italy at the end of World War II. It is a big, busy and rewarding book. Ian McEwan's Saturday, on the other hand, as I half-suspected, has not weathered in my memory well; it is interesting to have read it, but ultimately it is neither thoughtful nor bold enough to recommend with any conviction. Similarly, much as I enjoyed Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, it lacks the rich texture I associate with The Name of the Rose, and ends a little closer to cliche than I'm comfortable with.
Back to the sf. I can't help feeling that Stephen Baxter's Transcendent is a great novel reduced to the merely good by hasty execution. It is, at least, a strong conclusion to the Destiny's Child sequence, marrying a detailed near future a few years down the line from that in Coalescent to the deep-future exuberance and Stapledonian poetry of Exultant; in part it also reads like a Grand Statement, a sort of summing up of many of Baxter's core concerns. It also adds a prominent one (or at least one that was only touched on in Evolution), in the form of environmental speculation; and of course that's Kim Stanley Robinson's current territory. Oddly, Baxter turns out to be the more optimistic, assuming a grand Stewardship that finally begins to tackle large-scale climate change; meanwhile Fifty Degrees Below continues the Science in the Capital trilogy with skill. It is occasionally didactic in that comforting way that we expect from Robinson, but for the most part his scientific utopianism is offset by a meticulous attention to character. The grand engineering projects are there, of course (as they are in Baxter), but they are nothing like as prominent as they were in the Mars books. Far more attention is paid to the attempts of the main character, Frank Vanderwal, to negotiate the various networks political, scientific and philosophical networks with which his life intersects.
Similarly concerned with process, although in a more abstracted form, is Ken Macleod's novel of first contact, Learning the World. I stand by my statement that it's perhaps Macleod's most satisfying novel; of his earlier books, only The Stone Canal has taken root in my thoughts as securely. It is also one of the books that gave me the most uncritical pleasure of the year--not something to be undervalued. At the other end of the same scale are the guilty pleasures, the books I know I appreciated more than they deserved. James Lovegrove's satirical bildungsroman, Provender Gleed, is one (a must for anyone who enjoys wordplay); Cory Doctorow's charmingly odd urban fantasy Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, is another. By all lights, a book in which the main character has a mountain for a father, a washing machine for a mother, and brothers who form a Russian Doll, not to mention friends intent on setting up a wireless network over downtown Toronto and a maybe-girlfriend with wings, should be a mess. And so the book is, by some lights; but somehow, the mix of shameless idealism and matter-of-fact weirdness charms, rather than discourages. Of course, if you want more weirdness you could do worse than pick up Jeffrey Ford's Cosmology of the Wider World, which cheerfully riffs on myths ancient and modern. Recently, it has perhaps been too easy to forget what a tremendously inventive fantasist Ford can be; this book, filled with a full menagerie of characters--not least the protagonist, Belius the minotaur--and set primarily in a bold and colourful world, redresses the balance. It suffers from an abrupt and strangely trivial ending, but apparently there are more installments to come.
I didn't read many first novels last year; the best was Judith Berman's Bear Daughter, a coming-of-age story (bear wakes up as girl, has to come to terms with girl-ness and bear-ness) set in a pleasingly nonstandard fantasy world rooted in both Western, Native American and other myth. It has problems, notably in the pacing department, but also much to enjoy; Berman's descriptions of the physical environment are often very evocative, and the bear daughter herself, Cloud, can be agonisingly stubborn, but is generally well developed and pleasingly competent. Another brilliantly unusual environment (it's a good thing I'm coming to the end, because the links are getting more tenuous) is showcased in Tricia Sullivan's Double Vision, in the form of the shifting, battle-scarred Grid. Double Vision has structural and thematic similarities with Sullivan's previous book, the Clarke-nominated Maul, but for my money investigates its subjects more thoroughly, and with better pacing. Like a number of the novels discussed about--Someone Comes to Town, Learning the World, Fifty Degrees Below--there is a strong sense in which it is about the way systems can define a life. But it is a book that rejects single, simple causes--and in that, tangled as it may be, there is truth.
Recommendations
So, out of all that mess, what do I most recommend?
- Life by Gwyneth Jones
- Black Juice by Margo Lanagan
- The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
- Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
- The Summer Isles by Ian R. Macleod
- Living Next-Door to the God of Love by Justina Robson
- A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
- The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith
- Accelerando by Charles Stross
- Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jnr
Conveniently, that comes out at ten titles, although the astute among you will have noticed that there's a book on the list I haven't talked about so far. I haven't talked about it because I only read it in the past week; but I'm going to talk about it because it is the finest novel I have read that was published in 2005. In fact, given that it had a print run of 500 copies, of which mine is number 455, I feel obliged to talk about it, before you can't get hold of it.
The Summer Isles, then, is a novel from which an earlier (and World Fantasy Award-winning) novella was extracted, and which is now available at full length for the first time. That's important: this new publication is not an expansion, it is the original text. Ian R. Macleod stories tend to be short on action and long on introspection, and so it is here, but there is no sense of thin-ness, and the structure and pacing are first-rate.
It's an alternate history, which will turn some of you off immediately, and it's an alternate 1940, which I'm sure discourages most of the rest. Ignore that instinct. In The Summer Isles it's World War I that went differently--a British defeat, with all the subsequent reparations and humiliations that went with the defeat of Germany in our history. And, as in our Germany, fascism took root and grew. The Greater Britain in which Geoffrey Brook lives and works is an oppressive and diminished one in which, in place of Churchill, we have John Arthur and his Modernist government. One of the many strengths of the novel is its portrayal of the development and practice of a distinctively British (or at least English) fascism; we are all vulnerable to comforting prejudice.
Another strength is Macleod's evocation of place. Brook is a tutor in History (of course) at Oxford and (with the exception of the consistent and irritating misnaming of Magdalen as Magdalene) the description of the city, its seasons and students and scholars, is perfect. It is not our Oxford, because it too has been diminished by the Modernist project, but the places and the details are there. Similarly convincing is an excursion that Brook makes to Scotland, a holiday-cum-research trip in search of the truth about his own past, and the country's present. More vivid, if anything, are the climactic scenes, set in a London preparing for a frenzied celebration of John Arthur's fiftieth birthday; it helps, here, that the dissonance between what we know of our own London of that time and what we see in the novel is so strong.
Alternate histories are stories that never were. This is obvious, but still worth making explicit. They make us think about the stories that could have happened, and by extension about the branching possibilities that the future offers. There is, in The Summer Isles, a detailed argument about the value of thinking about history, in this way and in many others. The damage that our longing for a past that never was or a future that can never be can do to our present. It also dramatises, brilliantly, both the sense of history as an impersonal process, as the visible outcome of the great grinding gears of the world, and the sense of history as vulnerable to change, hanging in the balance. It does this through the character of Brook, and his story; a gay man in a country inimical to homosexuality, a historian in a country with no use for the truth.
And there is Macleod's writing. Most of his stories, as I mentioned, are introspective; many, including this one, are laced with sadness, and a sense that it should not be this way or it was better then, or both. The Summer Isles is, perhaps, more controlled than a book than something like The Light Ages, which sometimes got lost in its own paragraphs (it's also a good hundred and fifty pages shorter). But that's only appropriate, and the result is a fine novel, brimming with feelings that have no outlet.
You may have noticed that I loved The Summer Isles. I didn't intend to review it, though it seems I have done; for once, I let myself luxuriate in the reading experience, rather than cataloguing my thoughts as I went along. so now I want to go away, read some other books that seem relevant, re-read some other Macleod ... then come back to The Summer Isles and talk about it some more. But I thought I should shout about it from the rooftops now, before it sells out.
And finally ...
A list of the books I'm most looking forward to in 2006.
- Resplendent by Stephen Baxter
- Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan DeNiro
- Past Magic by Ian R. Macleod
- Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
- The Burning Girl by Holly Phillips
- Map of Dreams by M. Rickert
- The King's Last Song by Geoff Ryman
- Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge
(And finally finally ... short fiction from magazines? That would be a whole other post.)
