Month: December 2010

Ancient Light

Ancient LightA few months ago, I read and reviewed Mary Gentle’s 1983 novel Golden Witchbreed and reviewed it here. This week seemed like a good time to get around to reading the sequel, in which Earth representative Lynne de Lisle Christie returns to the world of Orthe after eight years, as part of a delegation intending to negotiate access to the ancient technology that litters the world. I knew, going in, that it was a book that divided opinions; I didn’t know much else. I discussed the book — up to and including the ending — with Duncan Lawie by email in November and December.

NH: We can take it in turns with the questions, but I’ll put you on the spot first with something nice and general: how would you characterise the relationship between Golden Witchbreed and Ancient Light?

DL: It’s rather a cliché, but to my eye the pair are a diptych of innocence and experience, youth and age, certainty and doubt.

Golden Witchbreed is a First Contact book, with Lynne de Lisle Christie enthusiastically engaging with the world around her, taking chances, trusting fate, rushing in. The people of Orthe and the world they live in are there to be investigated and understood, even as they try to kill her or discredit and reject Earth’s influence altogether. As a reader, it was a chance to learn a world as Christie travels low tech through a full flow of seasons.

In Ancient Light, Christie returns, ten years older and every simple truth she thought she knew seems to be just one horn of a dilemma. She doubts her own mind, her motivation for being there. She spends much of the book caught between bad choices, accepting she can’t fight PanOceania, for whom she now works, and attempting to mitigate the disaster for Orthe of being controlled by a Company. She stands weary (at the age of 38!) before the vim and vigour of the youthful Company Representative, then uses her decade’s advantage to stare down this younger commander. With the resources of the PanOceania, the characters flit about the planet’s surface, never connecting, always controlling. The hard won knowledge from the first book is background knowledge, the people natives to be exploited or protected.

There seemed to be a lot more message in the second book, more science fiction, while the first was more of a planetary romance. But it’s a long time since I read Golden Witchbreed. Maybe they look more of a piece read closer together?

NH: I think they do. I’m not sure whether this is a function of the fact that I read them close together, or of the fact that I read Golden Witchbreed knowing there was a sequel (and a contentious sequel, at that) lurking in the background — but either way, I was aware of unanswered questions in Golden Witchbreed, issues to do with further contact deferred and not resolved. And so Ancient Light felt to me very much a natural extension of the first book, as the various tensions that the existence and nature of Orthe creates for humanity start to work themselves out.

I also felt the sense of Christie being more detached than in the first book, but I hadn’t made the literal connection that she spends the novel flying back and forth, rather than walking across the world; that’s a useful observation. It accentuates her increasingly fraught attempts to prevent the situation on Orthe degenerating into chaos. But I think you’re right to suggest that the humans move to the foreground — it’s perhaps something that starts to date the novel (I didn’t think Golden Witchbreed felt very dated at all), in that I doubt you’d get an sf novel so explicitly about colonialism nowadays without some attempt to represent the perspective of the colonised. I suppose Ancient Light offers that to an extent, through the memories of past Orthean lives that Christie has inherited, but they seem so exceptional that I don’t think they fill that role very well; of course in other ways it seems to me a very sophisticated take on colonialism.

Continue reading “Ancient Light” →

Linking It Real

The Ones That Got Away

Any cutoff point for a poll like this causes problems; ten years may be a neat round number to think with, but it does a disservice to books that lie just on the wrong side of the line. Based on the number of times they were nominated by mistake, plus the number of wistful wishes that the poll extended back just one more year, the following three books published in 2000 might have been, in a different poll, serious contenders.

Ash by Mary Gentle

Ash cover

2001 was the year of Big Genre-Crushing Books on British sf award shortlists: specifically, Ash and Perdido Street Station. Mieville took home the Clarke, of course, while Ash walked off with the BSFA — you wonder whether a reversal of those fortunes would have changed the way the decade looks now. Online commentary on the book is relatively scarce, but thanks to the internet archive we can still watch John Clute wrangle with it:

Very simply, Ash works.

There is much more to talk about: the brilliance of the conversations and debates; the astonishing clamour of combat; the roundedness of almost every character in the vast tale; the sense of continuous argument; the occasional moments when Ash and her gang act as though the world were a game, and all they needed to do was turn off the VR machine to return home, and you almost begin to think none of them is ever going to die (but you are very wrong). And there is Ash herself, whose life is genuinely hard, and who (unlike some of Gentle’s earlier heroines) pays dearly, time and again, for what she does to others. She may be something of a Temporal Adventuress, but she pays for it. She pays.

There is more, much more. (Ash is also extremely funny.) But enough for now. Buy the four volumes, or the one. Sit in a corner. Open the book. Hold on.

Wild Life by Molly Gloss

Wild Life cover

Wild Life is a book that’s lurked on the fringes of my consciousness since it won the Tiptree Award; here’s Jo Walton enthusing about it:

Wild Life is the story of Charlotte, a Victorian writer of romantic adventures and mother of five, who sets off into the wilderness in search of a lost child and finds something stranger than she could have imagined. (I don’t want to tell you what, because I don’t want to spoil it.) The way the story is written, with diary entries intercut with newspaper cuttings, fragments from Charlotte’s stories, and vignettes of the interior lives of other characters, leads you forward over an abyss you don’t know is there. It’s moving, it’s effective, and it would be a very good book even without that. Charlotte’s early feminism, her rebellious bicycle riding, her fiction deeply influenced by H. Rider Haggard, her ways of coping with her housekeeper and the neighbour who wants to marry her would be enough. I’d have enjoyed the book if that’s all there was to it, a historical perspective on the Pacific North West and logging and nineteenth century independent women. But there is more, and that lifts it from a good book into something altogether astonishing.

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

Midnight Robber cover

Nominated for just about everything going when it was published — Hugo, Nebula, Philip K Dick, Locus, Tiptree — Nalo Hopkinson’s second novel is an act of vivid and original world-creation, as Gary K Wolfe described in Locus:

Hopkinson, however, reminds us that most of the world does not speak contemporary American middle class vernacular, and never has. Instead, she adapts the convention of unchanging language to her own variety of Caribbeanized Creole, so that the characters in her indefinitely distant future — the planet Toussaint has already been colonized for two centuries when the novel begins — still say things like “It ain’t have no doux-doux here” while sprinkling their speech with references to “dimension veils” and “nanomites”. The resulting dissonance is only one of Hopkinson’s techniques for making us question the hegemony of American culture in SF worlds, but it’s the most immediately striking. And when the heroine Tan-Tan and her father Antonio are exiled to the low-tech prison planet of New Half-Way Tree after he kills a rival in what was supposed to be a non-fatal duel, we find ourselves in an even more distinctively non-Wester environment that calls to mind both aspects of West African folklore and Caribbean folklore (in the culture of its human inhabitants) and of Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest” (in the cultures of its native species).

Future Classics: #9

Farthing by Jo Walton (2006)

Farthing cover

Farthing, the start of the Small Change alternate history series, was nominated for the Nebula, John W Campbell Memorial, and Sidewise awards (among others). Adrienne Martini was typical of the book’s reviewers:

Despite the parallels to today’s current political climate (just substitute “Liberal” for “Communist”), the murder mystery is the spine from which the rest of the book moves. A Scotland Yard inspector, who has his own reasons to avoid prying eyes, is brought in and the narration alternates between his point of view and Lucy’s. It’s an effective technique and one that keeps you flipping through pages, despite the fact that the identity of the murderer is fairly well telegraphed in the first few pages. Lucy and the inspector make you want to know why it was done and, more importantly, what will be done about it.

But Farthing is also a book about fascism and the parallels between her Britain and today’s climate is never didactic and always effective. It’s also a book about husbands and wives, however, and about class and sex. It is quite an achievement, brothers and sisters. Hallelujah.

See also Paul Kincaid’s review from the New York Review of Science Fiction; Sherwood Smith at SF Site; David Soyka in the Internet Review of SF; and (with a few reservations) Dan Hartland at Strange Horizons.

Ranking calculated from 101 responses to a poll run during October, November and December 2010.

Future Classics: #10

Strictly speaking, #10 equal, since we start with one of two ties.

Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones (2001)

Bold as Love cover

Jones’ Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel, and the series it inaugurates, is probably one of the landmark generic hybrids of the past decade, being both near-future science fiction and Arthurian fantasy. As Francis Spufford put it:

The salient oddity of Bold as Love is that its achievement is rooted not in the festival scene of 2001, but in the world of 1971. It substantiates the dreams not of present-day apocalypse-minded teenagers, but of their counterparts 30 years ago, who read Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels and relished the fantasy of the Rolling Stones playing gigs in the rubble of liberated cities. Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock; Jones has an equally sexy guitar hero put the reverb into “I Vow to Thee, My Country”. This book reopens the door to a particular stylised world next to our own, where the slender-hipped male heroes of pop culture are freed from time and place to do cool, violent deeds. It’s a rock’n’roll world, but it’s English. It’s a world where the young Mick Jagger is always to be found jamming in the Hundred Acre Wood, his gun lying on the grass beside him among the forget-me-nots.

Other reviews: Chris Butler at Infinity Plus, Cheryl Morgan in Emerald City, David Soyka for SF Site and Kathleen Bartholomew in Green Man Review. See also Sheryl Vint’s take on the concluding volume, Rainbow Bridge, for a sense of how it all pans out, and a 2003 interview with Jones. Oh, and the Bold as Love website, where you can download the full text of the first four volumes of the series.

City of Pearl by Karen Traviss (2004)

City of Pearl cover

Another series-initiating book, this time the well-received six-volume Wess’Har War series. Stuart Carter reviewed it with the sequel, Crossing the Line:

Another glorious aspect of these two books is that they’re almost the antithesis of everything Trek: humans haring round the universe imposing their morality and point-of-view upon anyone who can listen, and always, eventually, turning out to be right, or at least admirable. And if we’re not even admirable then at least we have bigger guns than everyone else to console ourselves with. In Karen Traviss’s universe we’re seen as being far from admirable and even further from right, and it looks like being a very hard, possibly even fatal, lesson for us to learn. A warning to the unthinking patriots amongst you: you may find these books somewhat unpalatable.

I’ve followed quite a tortuous route to discovering Karen Traviss’s novels: she’s English, I’m English, and yet neither of these books has a UK publisher, so I’ve had to get them from the US, a fact that both perplexes and saddens me since both City Of Pearl and Crossing the Line would seem to be a very English type of SF, and English SF at its very best, too. If you want to read something that will leave you thinking, perhaps if you’re a fan of Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson or, more generally, of intricately gloomy English science fiction, then this series is one you want to read — I promise.

Other reviews: Christ Butler at Infinity Plus, Cheryl Morgan in Emerald City (hang on, I’m getting deja vu), and Russ Allbery. See also 2006 interviews with Traviss at Infinity Plus and in Strange Horizons.

Ranking calculated from 101 responses to a poll run during October, November and December 2010.

Zoo City

Zoo City coverWelcome to Zoo City:

People who would happily speed through Zoo City during the day won’t detour here at night, not even to avoid police roadblocks. They’re too scared, but that’s precisely when Zoo City is at its most sociable. From 6pm, when the day-jobbers start getting back from whatever work they’ve been able to pick up, apartment doors are flung open. Kids chase each other down the corridors. People take their animals out for fresh air or a friendly sniff of each other’s bums. The smell of cooking — mostly food, but also meth — temporarily drowns out the stench of rot, the urine in the stairwells. The crack whores emerge from their dingy apartments to chat and smoke cigarettes on the fire-escape, and catcall the commuters heading to the taxi rank on the street below. (132)

What I like about this passage is its incongruous homeliness. Despite the fact that none of the details are original — several are close to cliche — and for all that it’s clear that Zoo City is a pretty beat-up place, this isn’t a judgmental portrait. These people may be caged, but they’re not animals. Our narrator is matter of fact about the meth being cooked alongside the food; if we didn’t already know by this point, we probably wouldn’t be too surprised to learn that she lives here, that she is part of the community she sets out for our consumption.

It’s clearly a place for people short on choices, however. Zinzi Lelethu December is out of prison but far from out of debt, and has been forced to turn her journalistic tricks to 419 scams: a role she’s good at playing, but not happy about. What’s weighing her down is the novel’s fantastic conceit, so thoroughly normalised that taking the above passage in isolation you might miss it. In Zoo City‘s alternate day after tomorrow (the novel is set in March 2011), there’s a new outcast class, sufferers of a fantastical condition termed Acquired Asymbiotic Familiarism by researchers, and animalism or worse on the street. Its defining symptom is the appearance of a flesh-and-blood animal familiar (and these are animals, not talking pets), it seems to afflict those condemned by society or even by their own conscience (justice be damned) and those affected are excluded, exoticised, or both; and they need places like Zoo City to live. The resonances with Pullman’s His Dark Materials in this setup are unavoidable but, apparently, coincidental, although the similarity is acknowledged and there is at least one witty reversal: familiars often reflect their host’s inner character through a mirror darkly. So Zinzi’s sloth, which appeared after the death of her brother, tells you that she’s smart, sharp, and constantly on the move.

As she has to be, to navigate the competing currents that make up the novel’s plot. There’s her desire to pay her way out of her scamming debt; her uneasy relationship with Benoit, a Zoo City hustler whose presumed-dead wife may in fact be alive; the cryptic emails that keep mysteriously appearing in her inbox; and her private enterprise, her magical talent for finding lost things. It’s the last of these that provides most of the forward motion in Zoo City, as Zinzi is recruited by two deeply shady animalled, on behalf of mysterious music mogul Odi Huron, to track down the missing half of the twins that make up his latest pop sensation. The quest takes her, naturally, out of the zoo and into the wilds of the middle and upper class enclaves of Johannesburg: and back, in some cases, into the circles in which she used to swim.

So far so noir, an impression reinforced by the cool terseness of Zinzi’s narration and, at times, of Zinzi herself — “There are two things in the interrogation room with me and Inspector Tschabalala. The one is Mrs Luditsky’s ring. The other is twelve and a half minutes of silence” (28) — and by the pervasive unfairness of the unfolding story. AAF confers something between the stigma of the ex-con and, as the pervasive presence of AIDS reminds us, the stigma of the disease sufferer. Like those, it is based as much or more on assumptions as it is on any empirical reality. Found documents scattered through Zoo City tell the story of AAF — the journal article, the documentary synopsis, the prison tales. The fantastic nature of the conceit has put some reviewers in mind of Jeff Noon’s surreal Vurt (1993), although I was reminded of the more rationalised fantastic of Kit Whitfield’s Bareback (2006). Either way, for most of the novel what’s striking is how low down in the mix it seems to be: a back-note, not a central flavour. It’s only quite late on that it becomes clear, not just from those found documents, how much the existence of AAF has shaped the society Beukes describes.

More immediately obvious, however, is the care with which Beukes sketches the jungle of Johannesburg, and the people Zinzi meets. We watch, fascinated and helpless, as they are used and use each other in turn. Like Beukes’ first novel, Moxyland (2008 South Africa, 2009 UK, 2010 US), Zoo City is distinguished by its texture. The husbandry of information is mostly superb; the glimpses of Zinzi’s world captivate, from the gated high-rise where a broken lift means the wealthy residents simply throw their rubbish out of the windows, to be cleaned up once it hits the ground, to a “Great Gatsby by way of Lady Gaga” (219) nightclub and Zinzi’s own cluttered, crappy flat; and the various characters Zinzi meets, from Huron himself, to popsters Song and S’bu, to current and ex lovers Benoit and Gio, are captured with precision and detail. Per John Clute’s review, Zoo City is indeed an energetic read; but it’s Zinzi’s binding voice that makes it a visceral one, and more transporting than the earlier novel.

Less welcome is the way in which the marketing-driven cynicism familiar from Moxyland — “it’s not just about the music anymore,” Zinzi is told, “it’s about the brand” (120) — becomes here something of a red herring. Shadowing the brisk surface narrative is the Undertow, a metaphysical darkness that threatens to consume those with AAF. It is the attrition of stigma, and the burden that the novel’s villain seeks to use power and privilege to escape. The impeccably chroegraphed ending that Beukes contrives from these ingredients however, is a betrayal, an imposition of justice that everything else Zinzi has told us, and everything Moxyland might have lead us to expect, insists is unearned. And it diminishes an otherwise fine novel, even if the clue was there from the start. The thing about a zoo, after all, is that it’s a lie: the real world is a jungle.

Heliotrope

Speaking of Justina Robson, as we were, a link to this press release just dropped into my inbox:

Heliotrope coverTiconderoga Publications is excited to announce a forthcoming collection of stories by the Arthur C Clarke Award finalist and bestselling UK writer Justina Robson.

The collection is titled Heliotrope and scheduled for publication in 2011.

Justina Robson has published eight novels, including four books in the Quantum Gravity series. The fifth book, Down to the Bone, will be published in early 2011. She has been nominated for the Arthur C Clarke Award twice, the Philip K Dick Award three times, the British SF Association Award twice and the John W Campbell Award.

Heliotrope is her first story collection.

Robson’s writing has been noted for sharply-drawn characters, and an intelligent and deeply thought-out approach to the tropes of the genre. M John Harrison has described her as “one of the very best of the new British hard SF writers”.

While Robson is noted as a novelist, she is also a Clarion West Workshop graduate and has been publishing short stories since 1994.

Justina Robson writes stories that are both emotionally moving and full of ideas,” Ticonderoga Editor Russell B Farr said.

“Her stories have the rare quality of simultaneously appealing to the head and to the heart,” he said.

Heliotrope collects sixteen stories, including the first print publication of “Dream of Mars”, and the never before published title novella “Heliotrope”.

“The collection has something for everyone, there is real variety in this book,” Russell added.

Heliotrope was sold via John Berlyne of the Zeno Agency.

Heliotrope will be published in April 2011 to coincide with Justina Robson’s Guest of Honour appearance at Australia’s 50th National Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Perth. The collection will be available in limited edition hardcover and trade editions.

I’ve been hoping someone would do this book for a few years now, so this goes straight on my to-buy list.

The 2010 Contenders

No books published in 2010 received enough nominations in the poll to make it into the overall top ten. This is probably not a surprise; the books haven’t been out for very long, so fewer people have read them. And some 2010 books received enough support to suggest that, were this poll to be run again in a couple of years, they might have matured into strong contenders. I thought it would be worth breaking those books out into a separate post, since their poll ranking is probably not reflective of the strength of feeling about them — and because they may be awards contenders next year. And so here they are:

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Zoo City cover

Lauren Beukes’ second novel has been picking up rave reviews all over the place. John Clute reviewed the book in his Scores column at Strange Horizons:

Zoo City may dive a little too glamorously into terrible high-rises and worse tunnels, and its protagonist (who survives the tale she tells) may wear her deformations and her scars and her cabaret presentation of self like war ribbons, and the present tense of the tale’s telling may try a little officiously to shove our faces in the fleuve of the overwhelming nows of an alternate-2011 urban South Africa (Johannesburg is hardly exited), but throughout the horrors and the almost synaesthesical complexities of the scenes unfolded we get a sense of vigour, some of it irrepressible. The main joy of Zoo City is the energy of the thing, that it doesn’t stop for breath until it stops for good.

Also worth noting is a strong showing for Beukes’ first novel, Moxyland; thanks to Moxyland‘s first US edition this year, both books are Hugo-eligible.

Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold

Cryoburn cover

I think of Bujold, rightly or wrongly, as occupying the sort of position in US sf that Iain M Banks occupies in UK sf: absolutely central in her home country, somewhat marginal beyond its borders. I’m not sure any of her books has ever been published over here, and as a result I’ve not read any of them (although the recent free ebooks of her entire back catalogue may change this). On the other hand, Cryoburn may also be a suitable jumping-on point, for all that it’s the latest entry in a long series. Tansy Rayner Roberts:

Cryoburn, while not actually hitting the heights of my very very very favourite Vorkosigans (honestly it’s hard to top Memory which is one of the best books I’ve ever read) has all the ingredients of a very successful Miles Vorkosigan outing. It also shows that yet again, Bujold is not afraid to take risks, to change up any patterns her series has developed, and even the world itself. I’m not going to address in the least the most important change she brings down upon Miles’ world, because it’s the massivest spoiler of all spoilers, but suffice to say – this is, like Civil Campaign and to some extent Diplomatic Immunity, a book which could stand very successfully as the last of the series, and yet unlike both those volumes it could as easily be the new beginning that refreshes the books so entirely that we see another five out in the next decade.

Feed by Mira Grant

Feed cover

Winner of this year’s John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer (Not A Hugo), this is the first of Seanan McGuire aka Mira Grant’s books to be published in the UK, and was one of Publishers Weekly’s top five sf/f of 2010. It’s a zombie novel, but don’t let that put you off. Roz Kaveney:

Mira Grant’s Feed is less well-written [than The Passage] but has a can-do brio that Cronin would regard as whistling showtunes in the dark. Grant’s zombies are the result of experiments gone wrong – everyone is infected and everyone might turn in a moment. Yet civilisation does not collapse, and there are even elections; business as usual. Grant isn’t writing a horror novel at all – just an SF novel with zombies in it. And with bloggers – her heroine would die, or become undead, for a scoop.

Scoops follow her around. Hardly has she and her brother and team been embedded in a Presidential campaign than a saboteur tries to get the Candidate eaten or turned. Georgia and Shaun are supremely irritating young smart-arses, but Feed is a perfect antidote to Cronin’s gloomier excesses; sometimes after a well-cooked heavy meal, you really need a tub of ice-cream, with sprinkles.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Who Fears Death cover

Okorafor’s first published adult sf novel is another one that’s been appearing on end-of-year lists, not just Publishers Weekly but also Amazon US. Matt Cheney loved it:

So much reverberates between the lines of Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death that the greatest marvel among the many here is that the novel succeeds in creating music and not cacophony. Archetypes and clichés jangle against each other to evoke enchanting new sounds, old narratives fall into a harmony that reveals unseen realms, and the fact of the book as artifact becomes itself a shadow story to that on the pages within. Okorafor is up to all sorts of serious, necessary mischief, setting up one expectation after another and dashing them all like dominoes made of dust. When the dust settles, rich realities emerge.

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

Blackout cover

All Clear cover

As Willis notes on her website, and as pretty much every review of either volume has noted, this is one novel split into two volumes: a sprawling epic set in London during the Blitz. Clute again:

Indeed, the least useful pages of All Clear are spent tracing its cast’s ultimately baulked attempts not to see anything, and it does take a while to grasp the beauty of All Clear, the intense humility of its portrait of London as her cast increasingly ignores Dunworthy’s strictures, especially in two superb, hugely extended setpieces: one devoted to the terrible first bombing raid on 7 September; the second massively expanding on the events first depicted in “Fire Watch” as Saint Paul’s almost burns at the end of December. Almost certainly some bad mistakes leak into the text (how else, given the oceans of data she had to attempt to master); but I for one found nothing to complain about. The main errors I noted myself were in fact easily correctible: Willis seems to have consulted a contemporary map of the London Underground, which seems to have led her to assume that the Victoria and the Jubilee Lines, both constructed decades later, were there in 1940; nurses bewilderingly tell patients their temperature in centigrade; and the term “disinformation” seems not to have existed before 1955, the first year it was used to describe false information created, usually by a government, for purposes of deceit. But none of these slips opened any plausible gulf into the alternate realities whose potential irruption haunts her cast. All Clear is a song of London, a song of England, and she has gotten the song right.

I Declare This Focus Week Open

If I were a proper blogger, I would no doubt have a banner of some kind with which to preface this post. As it is, you’ll have to make do with text: welcome to the start of a week of discussion of sf by women.

A quick review of how this came about is in order. Back in October, Tricia Sullivan gave an interview in which, among other things, she discussed the fact that the proportion of Arthur C Clarke Awards going to women has nose-dived in the last ten years — one winner between 2001 and 2010, compared to five between 1991 and 2000. I spun this off into a discussion here, which eventually ranged far and wide over possible causes and effects.

My follow-up to the discussion has, so far, had two parts. First, I’ve been reading sf by women, most of it recent, to provide material for discussion this week. And second, of course, I’ve been running a poll to determine what people collectively think are the best science fiction novels by women published between 2001 and 2010, as a starting point to address the more rapid canonisation of works by men, via representation on award ballots and in promotions such as the Gollancz Future Classics.

So another thing I’ll be doing this week is posting the top ten, and a couple of other cuts of the data. Some notes on the limitations and quality of the dataset are in order first, however.

In total, 101 people nominated 205 novels by 133 writers: so not an enormous voting population, but a pretty healthy one, and one that looks like it’s acheived quite healthy coverage of the field. About 45% of voters were men, compared to 40% women and 15% unknown; about 40% of voters were British, compared to 15% American, 10% from the rest of the world, and 35% unknown. (I suspect the unknowns were disproportionately American, based on voting patterns and the fact that I’m more likely to already know British readers, so I don’t think the sample is quite as British-biased as it looks.) The median number of nominations was 10, and the mean was 6, and indeed a fair number of people noted that they hadn’t read as widely as they might, and wondered if this might bias the poll results. For that reason, I would continue to direct your attention to the individual lists that have been posted over the past two months, whose idiosyncracies are a necessary counterpart to the lists I’m going to post here this week. I’ll be linking to recent discussions of sf by women throughout the week, so if anyone else wants to post their own top ten in the next few days, please do, and I’ll round them all up on Friday.

And with all that said: let the discussion commence.

Recap

My ten nominations for the best sf novels by women from the last ten years, then:

  • UFO In Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo
  • The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
  • Life by Gwyneth Jones
  • Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
  • Hav by Jan Morris
  • Living Next-Door to the God of Love by Justina Robson
  • Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo
  • Maul by Tricia Sullivan
  • The Modern World by Steph Swainston
  • In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield

Looking at that list all together, I’m more than happy with the quality of the books, but it is in some ways a skewed list. It is a list of books published in the UK, because even in the age of Amazon those are the books most visible to me, most easily available to me, and at the top of my TBR as someone who’s interested in the British sf field. There are major writers I’ve never read at novel length — Elizabeth Bear, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Nalo Hopkinson — largely for this reason. (The one US-only book on my list, Life, is by a British writer whose work I already follow.) It’s also a list with many edge cases, at least half of which is published “outside the genre”, which risks creating its own stereotype about how women write sf. Now the question is: how will it compare to the results of the overall poll? All will be revealed over the coming week — and if you still haven’t sent me your ten picks, you have a couple of hours left to do so.