2019: Umm, yeah.
Let’s instead talk Award Eligibility first and then get to the best of 2019.
I am eligible for BEST FAN WRITER, for my work at BN Sci Fi (now sadly closed) Tor.com, Skiffy and Fanty and Nerds of a Feather. I write and publish in a number of places, I do wonder sometimes that no one realizes my prolific output because it is all over the place. And of course, quantity does NOT have a quality all of its own. And there are people who do more, and are more. Me, I just plod along here.
Anyway, besides blog posts, reviews and the like, I also do podcast like things. I am of course a central member of the Skiffy and Fanty Show, a central member of SFF Audio and also participate in Juliette Wade’s Dive Into Worldbuilding. All three of those are eligible in the BEST FANCAST category.
I would be grateful if you chose to nominate me in either the Best Fancast or Best Fan Writer categories.
So now that I’ve discussed my 2019 and my award eligibility, let’s talk about books.I read a record number of books in 2019, because as Elizabeth Fitz points out, the word IS garbage and escapism IS a thing. I managed this even with a couple of weeks in Nepal where my reading rate plummeted because I was doing other things, like, say trekking and photography.
Even though there were some high profile disappointments (of whom I will not speak further), there was plenty to love this year. All of these books except where noted were published in 2019 and are thus nominatable for various awards.
Favorite SF of the year
Science Fiction has been my core since the beginning of my reading career. Sure, fantastic lands are a thing and I can wander those with a group of characters endlessly, but it’s the future, on earth or in space, and more, that really gets my juices flowing.
Charlie Jane Anders writes novels with heart and nuance. The City in the Middle of the Night, set on a tidally locked world, combines strong characters with passion and depth, in a fascinating world on the edge of survival. I read another book this year that had scenes on a tidally locked world and was dissatisfied with the author’s depiction of it. Anders, by comparison, really did her research to make a believable and stunningly depicted world. You can listen to our podcast talking to Charlie Jane.
Favorite Near-Future book of the year:
This was a tough category, because the contenders were just that good. As it so happens in my mind, the top two were from not only Canadian authors, but authors from the same city in Canada. Strange coincidence, that. But because the characterization is just somewhat better, even as the ideas are as mind blowing as its competition, I am going to give this award to L.X. Beckett’s fantastic and hopeful novel of the near, Gamechanger. It builds a world that we could get there from here–a world with problems and issues of its own as it tries to solve the problems of our present, trying to rebuild the world. I found that hope compelling, and wonderful, and it marries strong characters and excellent prose to that hope.
Favorite Space Opera of the year:
The sheer variety of Space Opera types, and voices, and writers this year was breathtaking. Big Canvases, sure, but also stories of alien invasions, found families, interstellar conflicts, personal stories, and so much more. I am going to, narrowly, give this to Megan O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon. Switching over from the dark side of fantasy to the light side of space opera, this book carries forward O’Keefe’s excellent writing in a story of two siblings in a distant solar system, in a future, in an interplanetary conflict, with plenty of surprises, including a twist that knocked me out of my chair. Check out our Interview with Megan O”Keefe on the Podcast. You can also read Daniel’s review.
Favorite Science Fantasy of the Year
There were a number of novels this year that put strong elements of fantasy into science fiction, blending both on high, delightfully. The best of that peanut butter and chocolate combination this year goes to a debut author, Tamsyn Muir, for her Gideon the Ninth. It’s a novel that really grooves on its aesthetic and grand idea of an empire run by Necromancers. It’s a novel that shouldn’t work, it should fall down, but somehow, like the strange citadel that the novel is mostly set in, stands tall and baroquely excellent. I am really looking forward to the sequel, Harrow the Ninth.
Favorite Fantasy of the year
Okay, sometimes you want to put away the time travel machines for the road to Amber, or walking to Mordor, or ducking into an alley and finding a magical alley of shops. In this year of 2019, fantasy is pretty damned good for escapism. And the variety of fantasy was wide and amazing. It’s hard to choose between, to give a food example, a slice of NY Style Cheesecake, and a bowl of premium vanilla ice cream with cranberry sauce on top. In the end I am going to go with RJ Barker’s The Bone Ships. I have been a longtime fan of Barker’s work, and in this new series, he levels up into a world with sea serpent dragon bones being used for ships in a very hostile world of archipelagos, pirates, clashing ships, the roar of cannon, and the thrill of the salty sea. Strong character beats, pulse pounding action, and deep thoughts all make it a voyage every fantasy reader should set sail on.
Favorite Epic Fantasy of the year:
I was extremely happy to see Howard Andrew Jones burst back into fantasy novels, having really enjoyed his Desert of Souls novels. Those novels were great, but when he decided to tell a heroic fantasy with notes of Dumas, Zelazny and more, I really stood up and paid attention. I was nervous, he is playing with tropes, ideas and walking in some mighty footsteps. And he succeeds, magnificently, in For the Killing of Kings. A heroic adventure with strong character, excellent world building and action sequences that are just magnificent, this is a rolling and rollicking novel that just thinking about chases away the blues. And the sequel, Upon the Flight of the Queen, is just as good and came out this year as well.
Favorite Portal Fantasy of the Year
Step through a door into another world, another universe. From Narnia to Amber, there is an undeniable appeal to the idea of stepping through a door into another world. In recent years, Portal fantasy fell hard out of fashion, because there are some strongly embedded issues with portal fantasies and how they can sit uncomfortably close to ideas of colonization, imperialism, chosen ones, and cultural appropriation. In recent years, works have been coming out again, exploring Portal fantasy novels with a more nuanced perspective. Alix Harrow’s debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, is a nuanced and passionate story that uses metafiction, footnotes, a book within a book, secrets, lies, revelations and much more to reclaim the form and tell a complete and whole story whose power blew me away.
Favorite Novella read this year:
This year, we ran into a tie. The Fire Opal Mechanism by Fran Wilde and This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone The former is a fantastic novella about time travel, love, and the power of literacy and thoughts, with the world’s most dangerous “copier” that I have ever read in any medium.And its set in Wilde’s fascinating Gemworlds verse.
This is How You Lose the Time War is an epistolary book about the letters about time agents on opposite sides of a time war, each seeking jonbar points to change history so that their side will win, and in opposiing and countering each other, Red and Blue find they have more in common with each other than with the sides they are a part of. Love story, time travel, and much more, on a line by line level, its some of the most beautiful and touching writing I’ve ever encountered in an SFF story.
Favorite Book heard in Audio of the year:
Ted Chiang is one of the best short story writers out there, period. He works and polishes his stories to gem like quality and it is difficult for me to find a bad Ted Chiang story. He is a short storyist I am not interested in jumping to a larger form (novels), his stories are all gems. This newest collection of his, Exhalation, includes such powerful stories as the titular story about an alien scientist’s discovery about his world, the fantasy The Merchant and the Aclhemist’s Gate, the poignant The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and more.
Favorite Sequel of the year:
Back a few years ago, I managed to get a copy across the pond from the author himself, Children of Time by Adrian Adrian Tchaikovsky. It was idiotically not available for years in the US easily, until this year when it was finally released, as well as its sequel (published both in the UK and US simultaneously). That sequel, Children of Ruin, was and is a worthy successor to one of my favorite books of the decade, heck one of my favorite books, period. Children of Ruin is also a first contact story, with multiple time periods, alien characters, amazing worldbuilding and ideas and meditative thoughts on the nature of thought and cognition. And you will never hear the phrase “we’re going on an adventure” quite the same way again after reading it. Children of Ruin stands alone from Children of Time, but I think you should read both for some of the best SF out there.
Favorite Debut of the year
Since I get a lot of review copies, and read said copies, I have as always plenty to choose from in this category. A book that nearly wins its own category is definitely one that is going to take this category, easily. And that book is Arkady Martine’s galactic empire book, A Memory Called Empire. It does amazing things with language, poetry, character, subtlety and worldbuilding of a high order. I’ve followed Arkady and her work for a long while, and this jump into novels was, I felt, entirely successful and I would LOVE to see more in this world.
Favorite Non Fiction book of the year:
A lot of the non fiction I read was not published in 2018. I went deep to learn about a swath of things, mainly revolving around History. A history non fiction book, particularly in audio is a good palate cleanser and educates me at the same time. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. It got me to think about a subject that I know fairly well, the Roman Empire, and looked at its cycle and decline in a new and interesting and deep way that I had not before. The whole “decadence vs transformation vs barbarian” arguments over the course of my reading on Rome has a new and important factor to add–the Earth itself, in terms of climate and disease. It’s excellently written, with great scholarship.by author Kyle Harper.
Favorite book not published in 2018:
It took me going to Nepal (see above) to discover the goodness that is Marina J Lostetter. I’ve followed her on Twitter forever, and picked up Noumenon while it was on a Kindle deal a year and change ago. But it was when I was in teahouses in Nepal, after every day walking for hours, that I found the time and opportunity to jump into Lostetter’s episodes space opera story about a generation ship launched to explore and study a strange alien anomaly. While it shows the challenges and perils of generation ships, I found it far more hopeful and appealing than another recent generation ship novel that I reacted to rather badly. Lostetter is a hell of a writer, and now I have to find time to read the sequel.
Favorite Re-read of the year:
I really enjoyed this year’s Hugo Award winner The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal. It was on my Hugo nomination ballot, and I gave it the top vote when it came time to vote in the Hugo Awards themselves. I found myself at one point with a desire and a need for a comfort aural re-read and had the book in my Audible library already. I decided that listening to the book, read by Mary herself, would suit that perfectly. It was a deep and immersive experience, and it brought me right back into the story where I belonged. I was so taken by it this second time around that I borrowed the “Fibonacci sequence” trick used by Elma, but for mental cognition checking, not calming myself down. It worked and every time I did it, I thought of York and her story.
Favorite Dragon of the Year
I unexpectedly, but delightedly, read a number of books involving Dragons this year, or Dragon adjacent creatures. I don’t know how or why this managed to be the case (I am more Team Griffin than Team Dragon) but Dragons are just fine and dandy, a core element in my fantasy reading. Writing Dragons can be tricky and one needs to find the theme–are Dragons animals, part of the natural cycle? Elemental entities? Intelligent beings with goals, plans and hopes of their own? No one way is best and one can write dragons effectively with any of these. That said, I really enjoyed Alpheratz, the Dragon in Duncan Hamilton’s Dragonslayer. He falls into the intelligent Dtagon camp, and his story was poignant, almost to the point of tragedy, and he is a fully formed character whose story resonated. Spoiler, sadly he does not survive into the sequel, Knight of the Silver Circle, although there are more and interestingly different dragons in Hamilton’s second novel in the series.
Favorite Book with Footnotes:
(Tie) Footnotes. Why did it have to be footnotes. Sure, footnotes are as old as Jack Vance¹ in fantasy and SF novels, but there seems to be a boomlet of books which are extending the boundaries of the text by addressing the audience directly. It’s a way to bolster, augment and even undercut the narrative of the text, and break the fourth wall at the same time. Footnotes rule.
Jenn Lyons’ debut novel THE RUIN OF KINGS and Alex Rowland’s second novel, A CHOIR OF LIES really show the power of footnotes for the narrative. Lyons’ book uses it for a lot of extra worldbuilding and commentary on the action. Rowland’s book is a real and deep annotation of the text, and helps with the subversive and apple cart upsetting that the book does especially in regards to what we learned in A CONSPIRACY OF TRUTHS.
¹Notably, in his Demon Princes novels, which richly extends the world of the Oikoumene
Favorite Cover of the year.
Let’s face it. Humans are a visual species and image is important. You might think that “Paul, you know this, you do photography” but I didn’t always feel that way. I used to think it was overly shallow, but now I realize that running from the eyeballs to the brain is an effective way to draw interest. And the book itself needs to live up to that cover. It’s not just eye candy but it is the backing behind it.
Out of the 2019 books I read this year, the cover that enthused me again, and again and again and the book that lived up to it was Julie Czerneda’s The Gossamer Mage. It’s a fantastic standalone fantasy set in a secondary world where magic is rare…and extremely dangerous. Czerneda writes much more SF than fantasy, but her fantasy is as nuanced and special as her science fiction. But look again at this gorgeous cover, with an image created from a photo taken by her husband, Roger. Now there’s a husband and wife power team of creativity–words on one side, imagery on the other.
Favorite new Cinematic Universe
Once upon a time, Linda Nagata wrote a nunber of fantastic future nanotech novels, the Nanotech Succession (Tech-Heaven, The Bohr Maker, Vast, Deception Well) . Nagata dove back into that Cinematic Universe with Inverted Frontier: Edges, returning us to Deception Well and starting a sequence with characters old and new, in a world where the dread Chezeneme are still out there, but the inner solar systems around Earth have gone quiet. What happened there? A number of brave cells decide to find out, starting a new open ended series. There seemed to be an oblique reference in that novel to a different novel not in the Nanotech Succession, Memory. THAT novel was also about nanotech but a world where tides of the silver rise every night.
In Nagata’s new novel, Inverted Frontier: Silver: Nagata formally adds Memory to the Nanotech Succession verse, tying them all together on both a character and setting level. Thus, Linda Nagata has joyfully managed to create a Nagata Cinematic Universe with a lot of her Sfnal work, and it delightfully works. I want more!
Favorite Book of the Year:
And the winner of The Waterfall Award for Paul Weimer’s Favorite Book of the Year is…
Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear.
I was overjoyed that Elizabeth Bear was going to return to space, with a new space opera series. I was bit confused when I heard it tied into her Jacob Ladder’s series, since that story is a pretty tight trilogy. And when I started reading Ancestral Night, I wondered just what this had to do with that verse.
Instead, Bear has created a wide and vast space opera canvas that has everything I want not only in an Elizabeth Bear novel, not only in Space Opera, or in Science Fiction, but everything I read for in a book, period. Fascinating and well drawn characters. Check. Big Dumb Objects. Check. Interesting worldbuilding and deep time history for the world she creates. Check. Well drawn aliens who have a live of their own. Check. Line by line writing of a high caliber. Check. Ancestral Night scratches ALL the itches and is now my new “if you want to read Elizabeth Bear, try this” book, edging out the previous office holder, Carnival. The Eternal Sky books are still my favorite Bear books, but Ancestral Night is pushing on that, hard, too.
Ancestral Night will unquestionably be on my Hugo nomination ballot. Read it, and it will likely, I wager, be on yours.
Honorable Mentions:
Reading a lot means that there is plenty that almost made the cut here. Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds also scratched that SF and near future SF itches in a deep and thoughtful way. Schroeder is a thinky thinker who likes to work his ideas in a thoughtful and complex way. Valerie Valdes’ Chilling Effect belies its fluffy cover with a thoughtful story of an itinerant starship captain caught between real family, found family, and an interstellar mystery in a satisfactory and intriguing story. The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley is a time traveling story of war and soldiers, the latter a strong theme and note in Hurley’s fiction, taken in this new book to new heights. Max Gladstone’s Empress of Forever was the kind of space opera story I have been craving for a very long time, with a diverse cast and a number of amazing set piece locations in a strange and unique universe. Claire O’Dell rocked with two very different books–The Hound of Justice, sequel to her A Study in Honor, a near future alternate Sherlock Holmes novel with two POC queer female protagonists, and A Jewel Bright Sea, a pirate novel set in her River of Souls verse.
What will 2020 bring? I’ve already read a book for 2020 that is most excellent and if that is any indication of what the year has in store, 2020 is going to be a target rich environment, book wise. Bring. It. On.
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