Best Novels 2013
Jun. 13th, 2013 08:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesSo, once again I'm voting for the Hugo Awards, Science Fiction and Fantasy's major awards. Sure, it costs money, but I get all kinds of free ebooks and magazines and comic PDFs (sadly not free movies and TV shows).
So I figure I'd blog about what I read. Especially since this year I'd actually read four of five novels up for best novel before they were nominated.
In order of my (probable) voting preference (voting is done by ranking the nominees, then run-off style counting, a la the Australian election system).
1. Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi Redshirts starts as a parody of Star Trek -- four crewmen get assigned to the fleet flagship, where they discover that things are weird. People (but not any of the senior officers) keep dying on away missions, there's a magic box in one of the science labs that will give you a solution to any problem with an impossible deadline slightly before the deadline, and the poor Russian lieutenant keeps getting the shit knocked out of him. And the only one who claims to know what's going on is a hermit who lives in the maintenance tunnels. Where it goes is a meditation on the nature of free will and what makes good and bad fiction, as well as explaining why the Intrepid is so damn weird. Plus, Scalzi is a funny guy.
2. Blackout, Mira Grant My only problem with this one is that it's the last book of a trilogy. Thankfully, both other books in the trilogy have been up for Hugos. And, you know, I'm a fan of Mira Grant's writing. The Newsflesh trilogy is a thriller/near-SF series set several decades after some idiots break into a lab and release an experimental virus that is the final piece needed to create a zombie plague. The book is and isn't about zombies: there are plenty of action sequences and it's obvious that 'the dead rise if you don't take steps' shapes the world, but the plot is about information control and secrecy (and government conspiracies). I like the characters, the dialogue is witty, and -- for a series where science did an 'oops' -- scientists are portrayed as human beings, with the range of moralities that entails. (The same goes for journalists, which the protagonists are, and politicians.)
3. Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed This is the type of solid book that I definitely want more of. It's nice to see different places and times being used as inspiration for fantasy -- Throne obviously takes its inspiration from the Islamic Golden Age -- and to let older characters take the protagonist horns. While two of three narrators are young people, the third is a grizzled old ghul hunter wondering if he should just retire before his job kills him, and we also see his friends, a married couple. It's a pretty solid adventure story and I hope Ahmed writes more in this world.
4. Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold Another series book, this one in the ongoing Vorkosigan Saga, and one of the few books in that series where Miles Vorkosigan is reduced to a cameo role, probably because the only way to keep Miles from taking over is to make sure he's not on the same planet as the plot (even then, that's no guarantee). Instead, Miles's cousin, Ivan -- a fan favorite -- gets protagonist duty as he gets pulled into an offworld power struggle and discovers his step-father really needs a (less dangerous) hobby. Ivan gets dragged into rescuing a charming young lady who happens to be part of a Major Family on Jackson's Whole (the designated Scary Cutthroat Corporation Planet), so gets to deal with her relatives, the people who want her and her relatives dead, and Ivan's family (some of whom are Important People who pay attention to Interplanetary Politics). There's also a lot of standard romantic comedy tropes, though thankfully none/not many of the stupid ones. It's a solid Vorkosigan Saga book, but I don't know how well it reads to non-fans.
5. 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson. So, first off, one thing I like about a lot of Robinson's books is that he does worldbuilding quite well. Half of this book was an excuse to send the protagonists all over the early 24th century's solar system, where giant cities travel across Mercury on rails, always keeping just ahead of the dawn, and people body surf in spacesuits in Saturn's F Ring. The problem was the plot was a bit all over the place: the first half of the book focused on the divide between the spacers and those left on Earth, and we're expected to believe that one grand gesture (done without Earth's permission) fixed that. That and one of the protagonists was (intentionally) grating: a woman a century old who could live to twice that who still acted like she was a rich and bit spoiled 20 year old.
So I figure I'd blog about what I read. Especially since this year I'd actually read four of five novels up for best novel before they were nominated.
In order of my (probable) voting preference (voting is done by ranking the nominees, then run-off style counting, a la the Australian election system).
1. Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi Redshirts starts as a parody of Star Trek -- four crewmen get assigned to the fleet flagship, where they discover that things are weird. People (but not any of the senior officers) keep dying on away missions, there's a magic box in one of the science labs that will give you a solution to any problem with an impossible deadline slightly before the deadline, and the poor Russian lieutenant keeps getting the shit knocked out of him. And the only one who claims to know what's going on is a hermit who lives in the maintenance tunnels. Where it goes is a meditation on the nature of free will and what makes good and bad fiction, as well as explaining why the Intrepid is so damn weird. Plus, Scalzi is a funny guy.
2. Blackout, Mira Grant My only problem with this one is that it's the last book of a trilogy. Thankfully, both other books in the trilogy have been up for Hugos. And, you know, I'm a fan of Mira Grant's writing. The Newsflesh trilogy is a thriller/near-SF series set several decades after some idiots break into a lab and release an experimental virus that is the final piece needed to create a zombie plague. The book is and isn't about zombies: there are plenty of action sequences and it's obvious that 'the dead rise if you don't take steps' shapes the world, but the plot is about information control and secrecy (and government conspiracies). I like the characters, the dialogue is witty, and -- for a series where science did an 'oops' -- scientists are portrayed as human beings, with the range of moralities that entails. (The same goes for journalists, which the protagonists are, and politicians.)
3. Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed This is the type of solid book that I definitely want more of. It's nice to see different places and times being used as inspiration for fantasy -- Throne obviously takes its inspiration from the Islamic Golden Age -- and to let older characters take the protagonist horns. While two of three narrators are young people, the third is a grizzled old ghul hunter wondering if he should just retire before his job kills him, and we also see his friends, a married couple. It's a pretty solid adventure story and I hope Ahmed writes more in this world.
4. Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold Another series book, this one in the ongoing Vorkosigan Saga, and one of the few books in that series where Miles Vorkosigan is reduced to a cameo role, probably because the only way to keep Miles from taking over is to make sure he's not on the same planet as the plot (even then, that's no guarantee). Instead, Miles's cousin, Ivan -- a fan favorite -- gets protagonist duty as he gets pulled into an offworld power struggle and discovers his step-father really needs a (less dangerous) hobby. Ivan gets dragged into rescuing a charming young lady who happens to be part of a Major Family on Jackson's Whole (the designated Scary Cutthroat Corporation Planet), so gets to deal with her relatives, the people who want her and her relatives dead, and Ivan's family (some of whom are Important People who pay attention to Interplanetary Politics). There's also a lot of standard romantic comedy tropes, though thankfully none/not many of the stupid ones. It's a solid Vorkosigan Saga book, but I don't know how well it reads to non-fans.
5. 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson. So, first off, one thing I like about a lot of Robinson's books is that he does worldbuilding quite well. Half of this book was an excuse to send the protagonists all over the early 24th century's solar system, where giant cities travel across Mercury on rails, always keeping just ahead of the dawn, and people body surf in spacesuits in Saturn's F Ring. The problem was the plot was a bit all over the place: the first half of the book focused on the divide between the spacers and those left on Earth, and we're expected to believe that one grand gesture (done without Earth's permission) fixed that. That and one of the protagonists was (intentionally) grating: a woman a century old who could live to twice that who still acted like she was a rich and bit spoiled 20 year old.
