Walking the Tree, Kaaron Warren
Generosity, Richard Powers
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
The Bookman, Lavie Tidhar
The Dark Commands, Richard Morgan
Death of the Author, Scarlett Thomas
A Matter of Blood, Sarah Pinborough
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, NK Jemisin
New Model Army, Adam Roberts
Zoo City, Lauren Beukes
Solo, Rana Dasgupta
One Who Disappeared, David Herter
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor
The Secret Feminist Cabal: a Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms, Helen Merrick
The Beast with Nine Billion Feet, Anil Menon
The Golden Age, Michal Ajvaz
Wolfsangel, MD Lachlan
Yukikaze, Chōhei Kambayashi
The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
Redemption in Indigo, Karen Lord
Plan for Chaos, John Wyndham
Big Machine, Victor LaValle
Things We Didn’t See Coming, Stephen Amsterdam
Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds
The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Dexter Palmer
When it Changed ed. Geoff Ryman
Seven Cities of Gold, David Moles
Escape, Manjula Padmanabhan
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
The Complete Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino
Shine, ed. Jetse de Vries
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making, Catherynne M Valente
Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay
The House of Discarded Dreams, Ekaterina Sedia
Lightborn, Tricia Sullivan
The Birth of Love, Joanna Kavenna
Chill, Elizabeth Bear
Usurper of the Sun, Housuke Nojiri
Quantum Gravity 5, Justina Robson
Zendegi, Greg Egan
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, Samuel R Delany
Filaria, Brent Hayward
C, Tom McCarthy
The Burning City, Alaya Dawn Johnson
Shipbreaker, Paolo Bacigalupi
The Hurricane Party, Klas Ostergren
Monsters of Men, Patrick Ness
Above the Snowline, Steph Swainston
The Dervish House, Ian McDonald
Stone Spring, Stephen Baxter
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Less than one a week. Easy! :D
Well, you have to leave room for things you encounter throughout the year, don’t you?
(Also, this list is just 2010 stuff or 2009 books I can’t bear to leave off. Obviously I want to read some older work as well…)
Wot, no Kraken?
Don’t tell anyone, but I really can’t get excited about Mieville-does-Cthulhu.
A lot of interesting stuff on there, a few works I was already planning to read plus a number of one’s I wasn’t, should work for suggestions and an early look at the 2011 Hugos. Much thanks.
Besides which, wasn’t The Scar Mieville does Cthulhu? Deep Ones? Ancient gods beneath the sea? Ancient remains of hyper-advanced alien civilisations treated as magic?
Reading the synopsis for the first time, I’m surprised at how literally it’s mieville-doing-lovecraft.
I have to admit that I am unexcited by the Swainston as well, but her choice to make her main protagonist a junkie basically makes the whole series of books entirely unpalatable for me.
Finally, I experienced a surge of excitement followed by sadness when I realized that the Moles work on there is a novella rather than the long-aborning novel.
There’s got to be more to it than the synopsis, but even so…
Swainston: Worked for me simply because it was different and gave her story some energy. I actually need to catch up on the series (probably should re-read the whole lot). I’m thinking of having a binge in February.
Moles novella: yes.
I’m looking forward to Erikson’s The Crippled God. I read the first four Malazan books a couple years ago and very much enjoyed them, but waited to read the rest until all ten books were out. I plan to plow through the whole thing in one go, like people watching all five seasons of the Wire in a couple weeks.
I have disliked the Swainston series from the getgo (and have given up after two). The thing that most surprises me about the praise it gets is that it is so poorly written at the prose level. I could see (even though for the most part I’d disagree) people praising the ideas or the images or even the plot — and perhaps the energy — but the prose is quite weak, and that seems to me inarguable.
I really liked the setup with the immortals, challenges, and so forth, and it seemed like Swainston was taking the whole drug-to-other-world thing in some interesting directions, but she didn’t seem like she would provide answers regarding the setting (the “mythology” as TV show fans say) until later in the series, and I have the same problem as Evan with junkie protagonists. Wasn’t fond of the actual plots either. But the prose didn’t bother me (at least not nearly so much as the other issues) so who knows.
I agree with Rich. Swainston’s writing has always struck me as massively and incomprehensibly over-rated.
And I remember the prose as being pretty good, actually. So a full catch-up is looking more and more like a good idea…
A very interesting list:
– I read Bookman (A), Jemisin (A+), Filaria(A), Big Machine(D – just did not work for me at any level), Cosmiconomics (A; I read the US edition so have no idea how it relates to this one as completion)
– I have the Palmer book (Dream) and it looks excellent, will read it soon
– I have Mitchell, Morgan, Roberts, Okorafor, Rajaniemi, Reynolds, Sedia, Swainston, McDonald and Baxter on my big Anticipated 2010 books on FBC, so all are asap novels for me
There are some other interesting books here that I intend to explore – Thomas, Pinborough, Herter, Menon, Ajvaz, Lord, de Vries anthology, Egan (both), Kavenna, McCarthy are some I had no inkling about and will take a closer look, see if I like them
Great, great list again
Not for the first time, Liviu, I find myself jealous of the rate at which you read. (And I haven’t looked into the differences between US/UK editions of Cosmicomics, but if it was published last year I imagine it’s the same basic text — the selling point is the eight or so previously untranslated stories, right?)
How about Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman. Tiny Deaths won the World Fantasy Award for best short story collection, but Love Songs is an even better collection.
You must add the book The Lost Daughter by Daralyse Lyons to this list. It is the best novel I’ve ever read!!!!!!!!!