Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

  Ender’s Game (1985)

  Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

  Always Coming Home (1985)

  This Is the Way the World Ends (1985)

  Galápagos (1985)

  The Falling Woman (1986)

  The Shore of Women (1986)

  A Door Into Ocean (1986)

  Soldiers of Paradise (1987)

  Life During Wartime (1987)

  The Sea and Summer (1987)

  Cyteen (1988)

  Neverness (1988)

  The Steerswoman (1989)

  Grass (1989)

  Use of Weapons (1990)

  Queen of Angels (1990)

  Barrayar (1991)

  Synners (1991)

  Sarah Canary (1991)

  White Queen (1991)

  Eternal Light (1991)

  Stations of the Tide (1991)

  Timelike Infinity (1992)

  Dead Girls (1992)

  Jumper (1992)

  China Mountain Zhang (1992)

  Red Mars (1992)

  A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)

  Aristoi (1992)

  Doomsday Book (1992)

  Parable of the Sower (1993)

  Ammonite (1993)

  Chimera (1993)

  Nightside the Long Sun (1993)

  Brittle Innings (1994)

  Permutation City (1994)

  Blood (1994)

  Mother of Storms (1995)

  Sailing Bright Eternity (1995)

  Galatea 2.2 (1995)

  The Diamond Age (1995)

  The Transmigration of Souls (1996)

  The Fortunate Fall (1996)

  The Sparrow/Children of God (1996/1998)

  Holy Fire (1996)

  Night Lamp (1996)

  In the Garden of Iden (1997)

  Forever Peace (1997)

  Glimmering (1997)

  As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)

  The Cassini Division (1998)

  Bloom (1998)

  Vast (1998)

  The Golden Globe (1998)

  Headlong (1999)

  Cave of Stars (1999)

  Genesis (2000)

  Super-Cannes (2000)

  Under the Skin (2000)

  Perdido Street Station (2000)

  Distance Haze (2000)

  Revelation Space trilogy (2000)

  Salt (2000)

  Ventus (2001)

  The Cassandra Complex (2001)

  Light (2002)

  Altered Carbon (2002)

  The Separation (2002)

  The Golden Age (2002)

  The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)

  Natural History (2003)

  The Labyrinth Key / Spears of God

  River of Gods (2004)

  The Plot Against America (2004)

  Never Let Me Go (2005)

  The House of Storms (2005)

  Counting Heads (2005)

  Air (Or, Have Not Have) (2005)

  Accelerando (2005)

  Spin (2005)

  My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (2006)

  The Road (2006)

  Temeraire /His Majesty’s Dragon (2006)

  Blindsight (2006)

  HARM (2007)

  The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)

  The Secret City (2007)

  In War Times (2007)

  Postsingular (2007)

  Shadow of the Scorpion (2008)

  The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010)

  Little Brother (2008)

  The Alchemy of Stone (2008)

  The Windup Girl (2009)

  Steal Across the Sky(2009)

  Boneshaker (2009)

  Zoo City (2010)

  Zero History (2010)

  The Quantum Thief (2010)

  SCIENCE

  FICTION

  THE

  101

  BEST NOVELS

  1985 – 2010

  Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo

  With a foreword by David Pringle

  Nonstop Press • New York

  SCIENCE FICTION: THE 101 BEST NOVELS 1985 – 2010

  © Copyright 2012 Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo

  Foreword © Copyright 2012 David Pringle

  First Edition: 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

  Nonstop Press books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: [email protected] or POB 981, Peck Slip, New York, NY, USA 10272-0981

  Cover and book design by Luis Ortiz • Production by Nonstop Ink

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  Nonstop Press

  Foreword

  TIME MOVES on.

  Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels: 1949-1984, a book I wrote in 1984 and which was published in 1985, needed a sequel by now—and here it is. More than 25 years have gone by, and many hundreds of science-fiction novels and collections have continued to pour from the English-language presses (as well as those of other languages), so some guidance as to “the best” of the last quarter-century is surely required. Having been unable to keep up with all those new sf works myself, I am delighted that Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo have taken it upon themselves to do the job, and I am very happy to endorse their excellent book.

  I have read fewer than half of the novels they describe here (after 1984, as editor of the magazine Interzone until 2004, my main sf reading consisted of short stories—thousands of them); but, judging from the works I do know, I feel confident that all the less-familiar choices in this book are sound. Damien Broderick’s and Paul Di Filippo’s qualifications for making those choices are second to none: both are creative science-fiction writers of many years’ standing, among the best of their time, and both have in addition written a good deal of stimulating criticism, including numerous sf book reviews. I actually included a novel by Damien in my hundred best of 27 years ago—The Dreaming Dragons (1980), which I described as “the best Australian science-fiction novel I know” (that sounds belittling in retrospect—the book was much more than that). It has since been revised and reissued as The Dreaming. Since then, Damien has written several more fine sf novels, of which perhaps The White Abacus (1997), a knottily speculative work, is the most successful.

  Of course, it would not have been seemly for the authors to include any works of their own in this new hundred best, but perhaps I can compensate for that by mentioning not only Damien’s later novel, above, but also Paul’s humorous Fuzzy Dice (2003) and his manically inventive short-story and novella collections such as The Steampunk Trilogy (1995) and Ribofunk (1996), some of the contents of which I had the pleasure of first publishing in Interzone. At the time I wrote my book in the 1980s, Paul Di Filippo had published no novels or collections, but if I had been writing this follow-up volume now a number of Paul’s books, as well as several of Damien’s, would certainly have been strong contenders for inclusion.

  As for the authors whose novels are described in the following hundred or so mini-essays, I am particularly pleased to see a large contingent of those whose early stories were first published in Interzone—among them,
Stephen Baxter, Richard Calder, Greg Egan, Nicola Griffith, Simon Ings, Paul J. McAuley, Ian R. MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, Geoff Ryman, and Charles Stross. I can vouch for all these writers as capable of first-rate work. And of course, many others with books discussed here are well-known names, some of them from the literary “mainstream”—Brian Aldiss, Margaret Atwood, the late J. G. Ballard, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon, Karen Joy Fowler, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, Cormac McCarthy, China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, Richard Powers, Christopher Priest, Philip Roth, the late Kurt Vonnegut, and more. It is a first-rate line-up, and those readers who follow all the recommendations will have months and years of good reading before them.

  A century, and a millennium, have turned since I wrote my book. The world is different, but science fiction carries on vigorously, reflecting our times back to us in imaginative form—and Damien’s and Paul’s book celebrates that endeavor splendidly.

  David Pringle

  Selkirk, Scotland

  Introduction

  SCIENCE FICTION, according to David Pringle’s excellent guide to the 100 best English-language sf novels in the period 1949-84, to which this volume is a kind of sequel, is “a form of fantastic fiction which exploits the imaginative perspectives of modern science.”

  That’s true. But here’s a necessary caution: most science fiction, our favorite kind of story-telling and reading, has about as much to do with real science as chick lit has to do with poultry.

  (For brevity, we’ll refer to science fiction as sf, rather than sci-fi, which is now standard journalistic parlance but, as Ursula K. Le Guin recently remarked, “as a term for the whole field it seems kind of cheap.”[1])

  Numerous other definitions have been suggested: sf as the literature of change, indeed of radical, disruptive, wondrous change; of cognitive estrangement or conceptual breakthrough; of drastic difference from the known, safe, everyday world; of suspended disbelief and dizzying spectacle. For most of us, sf is what we see on TV or in monstrously expensive and profitable movies: warring starships roaring in the vacuum of space, warriors and explorers plunging through wormholes to far stars, robots helpful or malign, parallel worlds, psychic clones, time machines carrying the unwary into the gulfs of the future or dangers of the past, or a hundred and one other locales beyond the known realities of our sometimes humdrum lives. All this is valid enough, but it is not the whole or deepest truth, especially of sf literature.

  For sf, as Le Guin added, is not about the future, or space travel, not really. For all the legitimate or sham apparatus of science and technology deployed in these tales, they are not about science, by and large. Rather, for Le Guin, a very distinguished practitioner of the art, sf is a “metaphorical way of dealing with our current reality.”

  The shorthand idiom sf is “basically a commercial term describing a certain genre of fiction.” That is, it’s more a marketing tool than a literary category like drama or pastoral verse. It is a label designed to guide purchasers or library readers to a stack of books (or movies, comics or TV shows) that share a certain common appeal.

  But what is it about a genre that makes its appeal so reliable, so rewarding to merchants? Many readers with literary credentials disapprove of writing they dismiss as “genre”: romance, say, or thrillers, westerns, horror, science fiction. These kinds of storytelling they suppose to be intrinsically inferior and limited compared to their prized literature, otherwise known to scholars as “bourgeois realism,” or “psychological realism,” which is itself just another genre that can be sharp, brilliantly incisive, emotionally involving, or soggy, comfortable, and routine.

  But wait—that’s an oversimplification, too, because a glance at The New York Review of Books or the Guardian’s book review pages reveals a “literary” appetite for many varieties of fiction or styling, some of them blurring into the kinds of writing marketed since the 1960s as science fiction. Franz Kafka’s phantasmagorical fables remain evergreen, Latin American “magical realism” was fashionable a decade or two back, John Barth’s rich and zany metafictions had their day, while nobody doubts that Dante’s allegorical adventures in Purgatory and Hell in The Divine Comedy and Don De Lillo’s absurdist Airborne Toxic Event in White Noise are as heavy-duty literary as it gets.

  It’s equally true that many genre readers stick faithfully to their accustomed diversions, preferring yet another franchised episode of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, or Luke Skywalker and his mean Dad, rather as some people eat the same breakfast every day and wouldn’t dream of adding garlic to their nightly dinner steak, or replace it now and then with squids in spice. For these happy browsers, “literary” writing is snobbish and any attempt by sf writers to adapt the same techniques to broader their canvas and elaborate their palette (or palate) is pretentious or boring or uses “too many hard words.” In a genre where masters from H. G. Wells to Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick were comfortable with once-unfamiliar terms like ecology or delta-V or epistemology or with fresh coinage like ansible or kibble, this seems an odd complaint. It’s one we intend to ignore in our discussion of 101 significant, exemplary sf novels from the last quarter century, novels that in a hundred and one different ways are as wily and inventive as the best speculative writing and as well-wrought and insightful into the nature of human consciousness and society as anything by, well, Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing or Philip Roth or Margaret Atwood or Michael Chabon or Cormac McCarthy—some of whom, marvelously, are here as well, with their own distinctive contributions to the canon of recent speculative fiction.

  The year 1985 inaugurates the span under consideration in this volume, and it might profit us to consider, with memory’s Wayback Machine, exactly what some of the salient features of that far-off year were. (Of course, we are not going to rely solely on our fallible human wetware, but instead will consult Wikipedia, an omnipresent invaluable resource whose very name was nothing but a gibberish string of phonemes in 1985. But more on that in a few paragraphs.)

  Ronald Reagan assumed his second presidential term. His name then still conjured up images of black-and-white movies, and, for sf readers, a deliberately and brilliantly offensive New Wave story by J. G. Ballard, not the vaseline-lensed hagiography the man enjoys among some today. Reagan’s bête noire was the Soviet Empire, which in 1985 seemed destined to reign eternally with an iron fist across half the planet. China, on the other hand, although also a Communist bogeyman, was an amusingly backward country subject to internal purges and worthy of notice only when it reared up against Taiwan. Japan, however, was a different matter, the one country threatening to usurp the USA’s place as global economic and cultural powerhouse. (This irony of their past top dog status became particularly painful in early 2011, when a devastating earthquake and tsunami battered that island nation.) European nations still featured individual currencies, and required their citizens to present passports for internal travel in their own Union. The worst terrorist attack against the USA had happened in 1983, in Beirut—an enormous blow, some 200 soldiers dead. The world population was 4.8 billion. Climate change was something only paleontologists had to be concerned with.

  A state-of-the-art cellphone was the Motorola DynaTAC, that expensive, rarely seen, retrospectively laughable walkie-talkie-sized unit. The internet consisted of low bandwidth communications amongst some military and university computers. A state-of-the-art home computer setup could be had for $1000.00 (nearly $2000.00 dollars in today’s terms): a Commodore 64 CPU and keyboard; a green-on-black CRT monitor; an external floppy disk drive; and a dot-matrix B&W printer. (That’s what many writers sprang for back then, happily abandoning electric typewriters and carbon paper forever.) Text-only email service could be obtained through a noisy dial-up modem connection. Music was released by large corporations on the relatively new medium of compact discs. Books and magazines and newspapers had no digital electronic counterparts. Broadcast TV and the major networks remained dominant over the na
scent cable hookups. Electric cars were nonexistent.

  In the sf field, cyberpunk had burst out of the zeitgeist as the hottest new movement, while steampunk was merely a tossed-off term of derision. If science fiction did not still outsell its upstart sister fantasy, at least sales were basically even—unlike the present, when sf is the minority category. The Star Wars cinematic franchise had ceased, seemingly forever, with three films, while 1982’s Bladerunner had as yet sired no true progeny. The term “CGI” was essentially meaningless. The prime mode of sf fan activity (“media fan” was more or less a subcategory of readerdom), besides the occasional small-scale convention (that year, San Diego Comic Con hosted a mere 6000 attendees), relied on paper “fanzines” distributed through the postal service, and in fact the cyberpunk movement, preaching a future dominated by cyberspace, promulgated itself through just such paper vessels.

  Of 1985 fashions in clothing, dance, music, interior decoration, art and other mutable human pursuits, we will not speak, since such things are by their very nature transient and not assumed to be an unchangeable bedrock of existence.

  You can, of course, provide your own present-day counterpoint to this capsule description of 1985. But any portrait of today will certainly limn a world that has undergone immense, almost unforeseeable changes since that vanished baseline year. Wired, distributed, hyperkinetic, beset by heretofore-inconceivable perils and challenges, gifted with potential-filled miracle gadgets, inventing new artforms and modes of communication, moving at warp speed, the world of the second decade of the 21st century and its inhabitants must present time-traveler-magnitude cognitive dissonance to anyone who contemplates the past twenty-five years. Yet at least half the global population is old enough to have experienced both eras firsthand. Why, then, are we not on a daily basis disoriented strangers in a strange land, unable to function for all the head-whirling confusion? Well, primarily because all the massive changes snuck up on us incrementally, and were absorbed at a steady pace. But also because of sf.