Every year, I write about the books I’ve read which impressed me — first for the first six months of the year, and then for the whole twelve months at the end of the year. 2023 has been a good year, so far, in terms of quantity, if not quality. To date, I’ve read 60 books, of which a quarter were rereads, just over half were science fiction, 20% mainstream, 15% crime and 10% fantasy. Around 40% were by women writers, 55% by men, and 5% other (ie, more than one writer, graphic novels, etc). So, little change there from earlier years.
I have not this year, I admit, been focusing on good or worthy books. I have several such on my bookshelves, but their size is a little daunting (I’m looking at you, 2666, Downriver and The Kindly Ones). Instead, I’ve been revisiting some of the sf novels I last read in the 1970s and 1980s, not always with happy results. But I have read books new to me which stood out. The second half of Ali Smith’s season quartet, Spring (2019, UK) and Summer (2020, UK), is a case in point. A state-of-the-nation inspired series— and it’s not a pretty state — the four books tell a sort of interlinked story that pulls in all kinds of other stuff, from female artists to the internment of Germans during WWII. Summer is the most readable of the four, but seems to lack a little of the others’ bite. Nonetheless, excellent novels, all four of them.
I’ve been a fan of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s fiction since reading the first of his Nocilla trilogy several years ago. The Things We’ve Seen (2021, Spain) follows a similar format to those earlier books, in as much as it’s a mixture of fiction, fact and metafiction. The novel is almost impossible to summarise — one of the things I like about it — but it’s the way fact, actual history, including photographs, is woven into the story that probably appeals the most. This is a book likely to send you down no end of rabbit-holes. I especially liked the line from the back-cover blurb which describes the book as “the novel David Lynch and WG Sebald might have written had they joined forces”. Probably this year’s absolute favourite so far.
I was initially unsure about Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019, USA), which won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020, perhaps because its genre credentials were so slight they were easy to miss. Add to that the fact US commentators were quick to label it an attempt at “the Great Zambian Novel”, not recognising the presumptuousness, and racism, of a) assuming they would know what a Great Zambian Novel looked like, b) Zambian literature even includes the concept of a Great Zambian Novel, c) the Great Zambian novel would be initially published in the US, in English, and d) it would be written by a diaspora writer rather than a native one. True, The Old Drift is indeed set almost entirely in Zambia, and is by a writer with ties to the country, and who has set other fiction there… But, commentary aside, halfway into the novel, after the more nonsensical conceits had been put aside, The Old Drift settled into a very amusing generational novel, and by the time I finished it I liked it a great deal more than I’d expected.
The Old Drift was not sold as a comic novel, although it has plenty of comic moments. Detransition, Baby (2021, USA) by Torrey Peters was promoted as— Well, at least half of the puffs on the cover use the word “funny”. Personally, I’d say it was witty and clever, rather than LOL or ROFL. But then, as Confucius allegedly said, the funniest sight in the whole world is watching an old friend fall off a high roof, which was no doubt scant comfort to Emu… And I suppose, now I think about it, there are plenty of metaphorical falls from roofs in Detransition, Baby, as well as a cutting but affectionate depiction of transgender culture in New York City. I’m looking forward to more from Peters.
Two recent genre titles didn’t quite make the cut this year, but just bubbled under. The first, Babel (2022, USA) by RF Kuang, is pretty much Harry Potter Goes Oxbridge, with linguistics-derived magic, and set during the early decades of the Victorian Empire. Colonialism, etymology, privilege, and the sort of depiction of UK class that only exists in the heads of Tories. Nonetheless, it’s very readable, and made for an excellent antidote to, well, to pretty much all of steampunk. Kuang has said she was surprised Babel has proven so successful — “so much of that book is just etymology lectures” — but she’s being disingenuous: the book was heavily marketed. Not every fantasy novel is launched in a nicely-designed hardback edition with black-sprayed edges.
But if Babel proved all too classifiable despite looking otherwise, Celestial (2022, UK) by MD Lachlan is the exact opposite. It opens as an alternate Apollo mission, after Soviet cosmonauts discovers a hatch on the lunar surface. And alternate Space Race takes are in right now — three seasons of Apple TV’s For All Mankind, Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murder (2021, Canada), and now apparently the first book in a series… not to mention a whole stack of alternate Mercury, Gemini and Apollo self-published novels available from a very large online retailer (one or two by a name you might even recognise). Celestial takes its secret Apollo flight as only a, er, launching pad, for a mind-bending exploration of an alien artefact, which likely owes more to magic mushrooms, transcendental meditation, and the same sort of approach to Buddhism and Tibetan mythology Lachlan’s Claw quintet took to Norse mythology (which are recommended, incidentally).
Then there were the rereads…
There are a large number of sf books I read in my teens and early twenties, long before I began recording my reading. I know I’ve read them, I can even remember a fair bit of their stories, but I didn’t document it. Some of these I’ve been picking up every now and again, and rereading. Most have been… okay, a few actively bad, but one or two survived their rereads pretty much unscathed. Such as The Faded Sun Trilogy (1987, USA) by CJ Cherryh. It’s an early work by an author who deserves the stature of genre giants such as Asimov, Clarke and Herbert, and is still going strong today, but mostly seems to be treated as an afterthought to discussions of successful sf and fantasy authors of the, um, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s… The Faded Sun Trilogy is more space operatic than is usual for Cherryh, but still displays her muscular prose and her skill at depicting alien races.
A writer better known these days for his fantasy rather than his science fiction is John Crowley, probably one of the genre’s best prose stylist. I reread two of his early sf novels this year, but only Engine Summer (1979, USA) makes this list. It’s a far future post-apocalypse novel, but it’s very much a novel about stories, and while it takes pains to disguise it, it’s also very inventive. And the prose is lovely. Read it.
Finally, a favourite writer, as are pretty much at least half of those mentioned in this post, whose self-published back-catalogue I’ve been exploring for a couple of years now. William Barton’s When We Were Real (1999, USA) was his last book from a traditional publisher. He has since self-published an “author’s preferred edition” but, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you how it differed from the Warner Aspect paperback. It’s a sort of after-the-war bildungsroman set in Barton’s Galactic Comity, a universe which shows a remarkable level of invention, and charts the downward spiral of its narrator after the loss of his lover, a purple-furred fox-human hybrid. Barton once again manages to be both grim and uplifting. It’s a neat trick; and he’s good at it.
So that’s 2023 so far. The above were easy picks. I usually find it much harder to choose which books to mention. But not this year. It was probably because of all those rereads of bad sf novels I last read in the 1970s. Which does not mean, of course, I’ll stop rereading them. In fact, I bought a couple more only today…
