Not The Year In SF

While 2024 hasn’t necessarily been a great year for humanity as a whole, it’s been a better, or at least more mixed, year for SF.

Because of the exponential rise of AI, futurism already seems here and has already begun to shape the scope of future fiction. This year, you could mostly find speculative fiction about science in the business pages while SF audiences looked more towards the body of competently-written fluffy, YA-inflected fantasies that I, mostly, find uninteresting. For example, writers could theoretically deploy fox spirits and unicorns  imaginatively to take folklore into new realms and undercut tired assumptions, but generally they service the same cliches as non-SF YA books.

There were, nonetheless, a number of fascinating and unexpected appearances in the SF world and hence in my column this year. I’ve written some short notes below about what I didn’t find.

Not an SF novel

One of America’s greatest living writers, Neal Stephenson, wrote this year’s most readable book, Polostan. Despite the slightly forbidding title and despite being best known for his SF novels Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Anathem and more, this is the start of a historical series set in the era of formative US v USSR politics. It is wonderful – it would make an ideal end of year gift for the reader in your life.

Not Reviewed

The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey came out from Orbit in the middle of August this year when there was a slew of other books to review and I didn’t get to write about it for Book and Film Globe. It’s the first book in a trilogy which, to be honest, is a line that’s getting old. And the Amazon adaptation was announced in November, ditto. Can writers not write a single, self-contained book with words anymore that does not need a cliffhanger or streaming version?

However, I read it because this is a first for a while from Corey, who is the author of The Expanse which was, actually, fantastic in written and in adaptive form. Corey is the name that Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck use when they write together (according to Wikipedia “the first and last name are taken from Abraham’s and Franck’s middle names, respectively, and S. A. are the initials of Abraham’s daughter”) and, it must be said, they write well together.

Mercy of Gods has a grandiloquent title and ambitious scope, but it addresses the cosmic Carryx empire in approachable ways while preserving the distinct alienness of aliens and keeping the reader guessing a little about who are the good guys. It’s also a good, fond skewering of scientific academia.

Not Quite Yet, but Soon

A measure of the worth of near-future dystopias is whether they stand up to the encroaching near futures they portray. Helen Philips’ Hum only seems to get better as we get closer to the uncanny AIs and humanoid robots she invents.

Not My Cup of Tea

I mentioned the existence of fantasy novels about fox spirits in my introduction. This particular type of trickster genre has long traditions in Asian folklore and Yangsze Choo’s second novel The Fox Wife is a modern version set in 20th century Manchuria, now known as northeastern China. Choo is a Malaysian writer of Chinese descent now based in the Bay Area and clearly knows how to tell a tale. I enjoyed it OK, but others have loved it and you might like it.

Not Readable, Despite Fame

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville wrote a book together, The Book of Elsewhere. Neo from the Matrix and the counterculture guru behind Perdido Street Station harnessed in an SF epic—It should have been GenX boy gold. But it was not. I read it. Be glad you didn’t.

Not Alive

I found out belatedly that Vernor Vinge sadly passed away in March of this year.

Both A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and its prequel A Deepness in the Sky (1999) won Hugo awards and showed how Vinge, a professor of math and computer science at San Diego State University, could be “rigorously true to his scientific beliefs without it limiting his ability to write galaxy-spanning space opera.” Those two novels were transformational for me and some friends in how we thought about SF.

His portrayal of a totally different type of individual to group relationship through the Tines in A Fire Upon the Deep and his description of the cosmic thought horizons in A Deepness in the Sky were ways of reinscribing a lot of the physics and society questions that whole generations of science fiction writers had just brushed past and ignored in their attempt to set neat human soap operas in space.

His writing was often clunky, but there was always a depth to the science and philosophy in his books and, while we don’t know if he got things right, he certainly originated ideas like the Singularity and Cyberspace that other writers thought were right. As Steve Holland pointed out at the Guardian “while it was Gibson who named ‘cyberspace’ Vinge was the godparent of its iconography.”

Not an SF Writer or SF Novel

Orbital by Samantha Harvey became the first book set outside the Earth’s atmosphere to win the Booker Prize. It’s not really SF in any way unless the letters stand for Space Fiction, but it is a truly beautiful, almost weightless book. I would be happy for aliens visiting the Solar System in a hundred years or two, to read this as the only remaining fragment of human civilization.