Torque Control

Twenty Epics

For anyone who didn’t click through, yesterday’s post about essential sf books of the last twenty years provoked quite a lot of discussion, plus the suggestion that we repeat the experiment with fantasy books. For me at least, this is a somewhat more daunting prospect, not just because I’ve read less fantasy than sf, but because fantasy seems more a much more diffuse category. Terry points to this discussion about “essential reads in literary fantasy”, which may provoke some thoughts, although it’s not limited to the last two decades. Possibly also useful for reference are the winners of the World Fantasy Awards for best novel, best anthology and best collection.

Graham Sleight’s already offered his first-draft list:

  • Aegypt sequence (1987-2006), John Crowley [I know it falls slightly outside the period, but just considering the three in-period novels would be silly.]
  • Rats and Gargoyles (1990), Mary Gentle
  • Moonwise (1991), Greer Gilman
  • The Ends of the Earth (1991), Lucius Shepard
  • Was (1992), Geoff Ryman
  • The Course of the Heart (1992), M John Harrison
  • Wise Children (1992), Angela Carter
  • Glimpses (1993), Lewis Shiner
  • The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993), Michael Swanwick
  • His Dark Materials sequence (1995-2000), Philip Pullman
  • Waking the Moon (1995), Elizabeth Hand
  • The Physiognomy (1997), Jeffrey Ford
  • Declare (2000), Tim Powers
  • Perdido Street Station (2000), China Mieville
  • The Other Wind (2001), Ursula Le Guin
  • Stranger Things Happen (2001), Kelly Link
  • Coraline (2002), Neil Gaiman
  • The Salt Roads (2003), Nalo Hopkinson
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), Susanna Clarke
  • Map of Dreams (2006), M Rickert

Lal also mentioned some fantasy novels:

  • The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Michael Swanwick (1993)
  • A Game Of Thrones, George R. R. Martin (1997)
  • Perdido Street Station, China Mieville (2000)
  • Declare, Tim Powers (2000)
  • Galveston, Sean Stewart (2000)
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susannah Clarke (2004)
  • Worldstorm, James Lovegrove (2005)

Taking these into account, and engaging in some further consultation, here’s my suggestion:

  • Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay (1990)
  • Tehanu, Ursula Le Guin (1990)
  • The Course of the Heart, M John Harrison (1992)
  • The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Michael Swanwick (1993)
  • Was, Geoff Ryman (1992)
  • Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb (1995)
  • His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
  • A Game Of Thrones, George R. R. Martin (1997)
  • The Physiognomy, Jeffrey Ford (1997)
  • Last Summer at Mars Hill, Elizabeth Hand (1998)
  • Perdido Street Station, China Mieville (2000)
  • Ash, Mary Gentle (2000)
  • Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link (2001)
  • City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer (2001)
  • Coraline, Neil Gaiman (2002)
  • The Light Ages, Ian R MacLeod (2003)
  • Trujillo, Lucius Shepard (2004)
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke (2004)
  • Map of Dreams, M. Rickert (2006)
  • Discworld, Terry Pratchett (ongoing)

Now: over to you.

The Canons That Came In From the Cold

Cheryl Morgan has posted the results of the “20 essential science fiction books of the past 20 years” panel from Denvention, in which she, Graham Sleight, Gary Wolfe, Karen Burnham and Charles Brown each drew up a list, and then they discussed. Some observations.

  • Picking entire series of books seems like cheating to me. I can see a case for something like Science in the Capitol, or Book of the Long Sun, which really are long stories split into multiple volumes; but having all the Culture books, or the entire Fall Revolution sequence, is just greedy.
  • I am baffled by the fact that Charles Brown apparently can’t think of enough essential sf books from the last 20 years to fill out a list of 20; that said, given the cheating noting above, and the fact that Karen’s list has 22 items on it anyway, I guess it balances out.
  • Books that I am surprised did not get more mentions: A Fire Upon the Deep; Stories of Your Life and Others; China Mountain Zhang; The Sparrow; Light; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (particularly given the tendency to pick “emblematic” books rather than strictly “essential” ones; would it be on anyone’s list now that it’s won the Hugo, I wonder?)
  • Books that I am surprised were mentioned as many times as they were: The Course of the Heart (even allowing for a generous definition of “science fiction”); Magic for Beginners (ditto); Diaspora (that’s the most essential Egan from this period? Really?); Against the Day (wishful thinking there, I feel); Antarctica (I love it, and I suppose it is a half-way house between the landscape of the Mars books and the focus of the Capitol books, but it still seems a perverse choice for a representative KSR book).
  • Books mentioned by all five panellists: as Cheryl Morgan notes, only one: River of Gods.
  • Authors mentioned by all five panellists: Ian McDonald; Dan Simmons; Kim Stanley Robinson.
  • Years with the most books mentioned (counting series from the publication of the first volume): 1989; 1992; 1996; 2004 (six each).
  • Years with the fewest books mentioned: 1988; 2001; 2003; 2007; 2008 (one each).
  • A consensus list (being those books that got more than one mention, with authors’ most often-mentioned books chosen in cases where authors have more than one book mentioned, or conflated into series choices where necessary):
    • The Culture Novels, Iain M Banks (starting 1987)
    • The Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons (starting 1989)
    • Grass, Sherri S Tepper (1989)
    • The Aleutian Trilogy, Gwyneth Jones (starting 1991)
    • The Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson (starting 1992)
    • Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
    • The Flower Cities sequence, Kathleen Ann Goonan (starting 1994)
    • Fairyland, Paul McAuley (1996)
    • Diaspora, Greg Egan (1997)
    • Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds (2000)
    • The Arabesks, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (starting 2000)
    • Light, M John Harrison (2002)
    • Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
    • Evolution, Stephen Baxter (2003)
    • Pattern Recognition, William Gibson (2003)
    • Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
    • Air, Geoff Ryman (2004)
    • River of Gods, Ian McDonald (2004)
    • Accelerando, Charles Stross (2005)
    • Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (2005)
  • If I could do some kind of fancy sequence analysis, I could work out whose list most agrees or disagrees with this consensus; it’s also my sense, eyeballing the aggregate data, that there is more consensus about the past decade than there is about the nineties, but I’m not sure how to analyze that, either. The larger questions, though, are: which list do you most agree with? And what do you think is missing?

Who wins Nebulas?

In the Tor.com thread referenced in the previous Hugo post, Charlie Stross asks:

Leading off at a tangent: in light of the age profile of Hugo nominees/winners, has anyone done anything similar about SFWA and the Nebulas? What’s the average age of SFWA members, and what’s the average age of Hugo voters? Could the perceived loss of relevance of the Nebulas over the past decade possibly be a harbinger of the same trend — age-related conservativism — hitting the Hugos?

I don’t know of any available demographic data about the age of SFWA members or Hugo voters, but we do have the list of Nebula winners, courtesy once again of Nicholas Whyte. Here’s the graph for the Nebulas, done in the same way as for the Hugo graph in the previous post:

Doesn’t look much different, does it? The average age of a Nebula winner has risen from 37 in the 1960s, to 53 in the most recent decade, but the most telling data is the number of winners who were in their twenties and thirties per decade. In the 1980s, there were 27 winners in their twenties and thirties; in the past seven years, there have been four. And three of them were Kelly Link.

This age trend doesn’t hold for the Clarke or Tiptree award, both juried awards, but neither of them have been around for very long compared to the Hugos and Nebulas. Jeff suggests that we look at the Hugo nominees, to see if the nominees are younger and the older, familiar name always wins, and it might be interesting to look at the Locus award to see if the wider voting population makes a difference, but I think I am turning into crazy stats lady already and I will leave those for another day.

There’s more interesting discussion over at James Nicoll’s journal. If you want to do your own number-crunching, you can get the spreadsheet Niall and I used here.

Who Wins Hugos?

Elizabeth Bear:

Anyway, I had an epiphany while reading the ToC of the 2007 Year’s Best Science Fiction. Which basically amounted to– “oh.”

We don’t read them. And they don’t read us.

Well, really. I wonder when the last time was that Bob Silverberg read a story by Benjamin Rosenbaum, David Moles, or Yoon Ha Lee?

See, I’m thinking I’m on to something here. There’s a generation gap in SFF; we’re having different conversations, the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and Generation X. And as the Millennials (really, guys, this Gen Y thing has to stop: grant the kids their own identity) enter the genre, they too will be having their own argument.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Reporting on this year’s Hugos, Nicholas Whyte observed that Elizabeth Bear is only the second person born in the 1970s to win a Hugo Award for fiction. (Tim Pratt was the first, winning the short-story award last year.) I found this stunning. This means that of the 94 people who have ever won fiction Hugo Awards, only two are under 38 years old. When I was a young SF reader, Hugos were regularly won by people in their twenties and early thirties. It’s one thing to murmur about the aging of SF; it’s another to look at the numbers.

Anna Lawrence (in the comments to PNH’s post):

Are we allowing for birth date: date of Hugo ceremony? Maybe authors born in the 50s are ‘old’ now (I would dispute this), but if they had won awards in the 70s and 80s they would have been Young Turks (and, if in the 60s, child prodigies).

Hence, a graph, based on Nicholas Whyte‘s data, plus this year’s winners.

image119

(For some reason, I couldn’t get Excel to export in colour. Don’t ask me why. UPDATE: New graph, courtesy Liz. Praise Liz!)

  • In the first three cohorts, between 7% and 17% of Hugos for fiction go to people in their twenties; after that, none do.
  • In the first four cohorts, between a third and half of Hugos for fiction go to people in their thirties; once you get to the nineties, that drops to less than 15%.
  • The proportion of Hugos for fiction going to writers in their sixties is twice as high in the present decade as it’s ever been previously.

P.S. New site layout — good? Bad?

Hugo Award Winners

Here they are, then:

NOVEL: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins; Fourth Estate)

I called it! I totally called it. Is this the end of the squandered promise of sf? Well, no; but probably not insignificant, either.

NOVELLA: “All Seated on the Ground”, Connie Willis (Asimov’s Dec 2007; Subterranean Press)

NOVELETTE: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, Ted Chiang (F&SF Sep 2007)

SHORT STORY: “Tideline”, Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Jun 2007)

Novella and novelette are as expected, and I’m pleased about the Chiang and less pleased about the Willis. Bear beating Michael Swanwick and Mike Resnick is a bit of a surprise, but not an unwelcome one.

RELATED BOOK: Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Jeff Prucher (Oxford University Press)

Well, I thought this was a two-horse race between Barry Malzberg and Shaun Tan. Apparently not! I thought Brave New Words was an admirable project, though, so this is ok with me.

DRAMATIC PRESENTATION: LONG FORM: Stardust (Written by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Paramount Pictures)

Interesting that it managed to beat out Heroes S1; I look forward to the voting stats on this one.

DRAMATIC PRESENTATION: SHORT FORM: Doctor Who: “Blink” (Written by Stephen Moffat. Directed by Hettie Macdonald. BBC)

Hardly an undeserving winner, although I was rooting for “Human Nature”.

EDITOR, SHORT FORM: Gordon Van Gelder

EDITOR, LONG FORM: David G. Hartwell

I hope Long Form isn’t just going to oscillate between Hartwell and PNH.

PROFESSIONAL ARTIST: Stephan Martiniere

SEMIPROZINE: Locus, Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong & Liza Groen Trombi

FANZINE: File 770, Mike Glyer

FAN WRITER: John Scalzi

I called this, too, and am not unhappy about it. Although hopefully he’s not going to go on to win for the next twenty years straight …

FAN ARTIST: Brad Foster

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (Not a Hugo): Mary Robinette Kowal

Wow. Another surprise — not just that Scott Lynch didn’t win, but that the only short fiction writer on the ballot did — and, again, not an unwelcome one.

So: a decent set of winners for the most part. Cheryl Morgan has a few notes about finishing positions; interesting to see that Scalzi came second in Best Novel (apparently, by nine votes).

Further reactions here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

The Link King

A few pre-Hugo links (and others)…

So long, semiprozines

No, we haven’t had the actual Hugo Awards yet , but SF Awards Watch reports on some changes to the award categories which were passed at the WSFS Business Meeting yesterday – notably, the proposal that the semiprozine category be eliminated, and that a category of Best Graphic Story be added, which I believe will cover online publications as well as paper ones.

I am wholeheartedly in favour of the Best Graphic Story category, as competing with the biographies and critical works which get nominated in Best Related Book always seemed a strange fit, although books which are art collections and not stories will still go there. A category to recognise some of the excellent SF&F graphic novels seems overdue, and hopefully the Montreal shortlist will be filled with some of these. (Sadly, there will be no eligible volumes of Scott Pilgrim for me to nominate.)

Removing the semiprozine category I am less in favour of. It’s true that in recent years (UK Worldcons excepted), it has been dominated by Locus, but there are an increasing number of online venues for short fiction, critical articles, and reviews which fit into this category and don’t fit anywhere else, and under the current proposed change they won’t be eligible as fanzines either. I don’t know the proposers of this change, so I’m not sure what it was about the category they felt was terminally broken and I’ll be interested to hear what happened in the business meeting – it seems strange to me that you remove a category entirely, and then make everything eligible for the now-defunct category specifically ineligible for the one award they might now conceivably fit.

World Fantasy Award Nominees

Over at the Inferior 4+1, Lucius Shepard posts the World Fantasy Award Nominees:

Best Novel
Territory, Emma Bull [Tor]
Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay [Viking Canada/Penguin Roc]
Fangland, John Marks [Penguin Press]
Gospel of the Knife, Will Shetterly [Tor]
The Servants, Michael Marshall Smith [Earthling Publications]

I have read, er, none of these (and in fact it looks like a slightly odd list to me, given the available options), so I will report Nic‘s reactions:

On Ysabel: yay!
On Gospel of the Knife: *flat stare*

Best Novella:
The Mermaids, Robert Edric [PS Publishing]
Illyria, Elizabeth Hand [PS Publishing]
“The Master Miller’s Tale”, Ian R. MacLeod [F&SF May 2007]
“Cold Snap”, Kim Newman [The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, MonkeyBrain Books]
“Stars Seen through Stone”, Lucius Shepard [F&SF July 2007]

Huzzah, to recognition for “The Master Miller’s Tale”. Must get around to reading Illyria, too.

Best Short Fiction
“The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics”, Daniel Abraham [Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra]
“Singing of Mount Abora”, Theodora Goss [Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra]
“The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change”, Kij Johnson [The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, Viking]
“Damned if you Don’t”, Robert Shearman” [Tiny Deaths, Comma Press]
“The Church on the Island”, Simon Kurt Unsworth [At Ease with the Dead, Ash-Tree Press]

Those two Logorrhea stories sure are popular. Not without reason, mind.

Best Anthology:
Five Strokes to Midnight, Gary A. Braunbeck & Hank Schwaeble, Eds. [Haunted Pelican Press]
Wizards: Magical Tales From The Masters of Modern Fantasy, Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois, Eds. [Berkley]
Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Ellen Datlow, Editor [Tor]
The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, Eds.[Viking]
Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories John Klima, Editor [Bantam Spectra]

I did not like Inferno (at some length, in NYRSF, if you’re interested). I did like Logorrhea (although it is by no means a pure fantasy collection), and I would like to read The Coyote Road.

Best Collection:
Plots and Misadventures, Stephen Gallagher [Subterranean Press]
Portable Childhoods, Ellen Klages [Tachyon Publications]
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club Kim Newman [MonkeyBrain Books]
Hart & Boot & Other Stories, Tim Pratt [Night Shade Books]
Tiny Deaths, Robert Shearman [Comma Press]
Dagger Key and Other Stories Lucius Shepard [PS Publishing]

The Klages is good, if a little lightweight; the Shepard is good Shepard; I haven’t read any of the others.

Best Artist:
Ruan Jia
Mikko Kinnunen
Stephan Martiniere
Edward Miller
John Picacio

Special Award—Professional:
Allison Baker and Chris Roberson for MonkeyBrain Books
Alan Beatts and Jude Feldman for Borderlands Books
Peter Crowther for PS Publishing
Gordon Van Gelder for F&SF
Jeremy Lassen and Jason Williams for Night Shade Books
Shawna McCarthy for Realms of Fantasy

Special Award—Non-professional:
Midori Snyder and Terri Windling for Endicott Studios Website
G. S. Evans and Alice Whittenburg for Cafe Irreal
Stephen Jones, Editor for Travellers in Darkness: The Souvenir Book of the World Horror Convention 2007
John Klima for Electric Velocipede
Rosalie Parker and Raymond Russell for Tartarus Press

Not a lot to say about these categories, except congratulations to the nominees. And the winners of the Life Achievement Award are: Leo & Diane Dillon, and Patricia McKillip.

Predicting the Unpredictable: The 2008 Hugo Awards

It’s that Worldcon time of year again, and while I won’t be in Denver and I didn’t vote on them that isn’t going to stop me giving my opinions and speculating wildly on who might get a Hugo this Saturday night. Feel free to question my judgement and attempts to second-guess the voters in the comments; if you are equipped with Livejournal, you can vote in this Hugo poll as well.

Best Novel

  • The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
  • Brasyl by Ian McDonald
  • Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
  • The Last Colony by John Scalzi
  • Halting State by Charles Stross

I hear that Rollback may be one of the best things that Sawyer has ever done I’m not convinced it can actually be good. Based on Old Man’s War, Scalzi certainly has the potential to write great books, but I haven’t read The Last Colony. My vote would go to Brasyl, probably the finest SF book I read last year, and a worthy successor to River of Gods, with the very different but still often great Yiddish Policemen’s Union in second place.

Best Novella

  • “The Fountain of Age” by Nancy Kress
  • “Recovering Apollo 8” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
  • “Stars Seen Through Stone” by Lucius Shepard
  • “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis
  • “Memorare” by Gene Wolfe

I confess I haven’t read any of these due to lack of time, and it seems unlikely that I will manage to do so before Saturday evening. My wild stab in the dark for this category is Connie Willis, based on her previous Hugo wins.

Best Novelette

  • “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” by Daniel Abraham
  • “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang
  • “Dark Integers” by Greg Egan
  • “Glory” by Greg Egan
  • “Finisterra” by David Moles

I like Greg Egan when he manages to write stories which combine hard science with emotional resonance (see “The Cutie” and ‘Reasons to be Cheeful” for examples), but both of these stories are too filled with science I don’t fully understand and characters I don’t really care about for me to like them. “The Cambist and Lord Iron” and “Finisterra” are both good stories, and only lose out because even a Ted Chiang story which is not his best work is still a very good story. So “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” gets my vote, and I think it’s going to win.

Best Short Story

  • “Last Contact” by Stephen Baxter
  • “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear
  • “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?” by Ken MacLeod
  • “Distant Replay” by Mike Resnick
  • “A Small Room in Koboldtown” by Michael Swanwick

See previously; I would go for “Tideline”, but I think it’s going to go to Swanwick.

Best Related Book

  • The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Glyer
  • Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium by Barry Malzberg
  • Emshwiller: Infinity x Two by Luis Ortiz, introduction by Carol Emshwiller, forward by Alex Eisenstein
  • Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher
  • The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Even if I had read all these books, I have no idea how I would make a comparison between a book of critical essays, a biography, a dictionary, and a piece of sequential art – if the proposal to creat a sequential art category passes the business meeting, that would take away part of the problem. The only one I have read is Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, which is absolutely gorgeous and wonderful and should be read by everyone, and I think it would be a worthy winner. My actual prediction is the Malzberg, based on it winning the Locus Award.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

  • Enchanted
  • The Golden Compass
  • Heroes, Season 1
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  • Stardust

I’m torn between Heroes and Harry Potter on this one (Stardust was good but not that good, The Golden Compass was not very good). Order of the Phoenix is a bloated book made into a surprisingly good film, but I don’t know if I’m giving it extra points for being a much better film than I thought it was possible to make out of that book. Heroes season 1 I don’t mind being in long form, but I would have much less trouble voting for some of the specific really good episodes than trying to judge the season as a whole with all the ups and downsagainst a two hour film. In the end, I think Heroes might edge it for me. Predicting what will actually win is difficult, as I don’t know if the unexpected presence of Heroes in the category will affect the voting. I think Harry Potter might win it, and I won’t be too upset with that.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

  • Battlestar Galactica “Razor”
  • Doctor Who “Blink”
  • Doctor Who “Human Nature” / “The Family of Blood”
  • Star Trek New Voyages “World Enough and Time”
  • Torchwood “Captain Jack Harkness”

Two-horse race, I suspect for the voters as well as for me, between the two finest episodes new Doctor Who has produced. “Human Nature” / “The Family of Blood” wins for me because David Tennant does a stellar job, but in the end I think this might be a third win for Moffatt, unless the inexplicable Torchwood love is more widespread among Hugo voters than I think.

Best Semiprozine

  • Ansible, edited by David Langford
  • Helix, edited by William Sanders and Lawrence Watt-Evans
  • Interzone, edited by Andy Cox
  • Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong, and Liza Groen Trombi
  • The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by Kathryn Cramer, Kristine Dikeman, David Hartwell, and Kevin J. Maroney

Ansible remains one of the best and funniest newsletters I’ve seen in any field, but this is the Locus category and I see no reason why this will change this year. I would prefer it if Helix didn’t win, and I wouldn’t mind seeing some recognition for NYRSF.

Best Fanzine

  • Argentus, edited by Steven H Silver
  • Challenger, edited by Guy Lillian III
  • Drink Tank, edited by Chris Garcia
  • File 770, edited by Mike Glyer
  • Plokta, edited by Alison Scott, Steve Davies, and Mike Scott

I like Plokta, particularly the Facebook-parody cover of their latest issue , but this category is defined for me by the lack of several excellent fanzines, like Banana Wings, Prolapse, and Chunga, which all deserve to be on the ballot. I predict a victory for File 770, because I have a completely unfounded feeling it might be a US ‘zine winning this year and File 770 has past form.

Best Fan Writer

  • Chris Garcia
  • David Langford
  • Cheryl Morgan
  • John Scalzi
  • Steven H Silver

Sure, Dave Langford has won this award many times, but I still think there are very few fan writers to match him. I predict this is the year that John Scalzi swoops it, and I won’t be too disappointed with that even though he wouldn’t be my first choice.

Faber Finds … SF?

Faber’s new print-on-demand imprint has reached the reader suggestion stage:

For the launch list Faber has canvassed its editors and authors for their suggestions. As we continue to grow the list, we’ll be asking both writers and readers to nominate forgotten favourites. So we’d like now to hear from you, the reader – books can be fiction, memoir, poetry, autobiography, criticism, history, anthologies, science fiction, thrillers, and books for children. Let us know by emailing lostandfound@faber.co.uk.

I have two requests in mind already: The Sea and Summer, George Turner‘s 1988 Clarke Award-winning novel (if only so I can return the copy that I’ve borrowed to its rightful owner); and the out-of-print parts of James Blish’s After Such Knowledge trilogy, Doctor Mirabilis, Black Easter and The Day After Judgement (because Joanna Russ’s reviews made them sound fascinating). But what else? Note that they don’t insist you limit yourself to books originally published by Faber — although the Turner and Blish books, I believe, were.