Joachim Boaz's latest blog post is a run down of the ten SF novels and ten SF short stories he most enjoyed reading this year, and it is a good mix: fiction from a range of postwar decades written by some authors most well known for writing adventure capers, some best known for innovative new wave visions, and maybe a few authors who aren't so terribly well known. You should check it out--you are almost bound to learn something new.
Three of Joachim's favorite pieces are things I myself have written about and recommend: Tanith Lee's 1979 novel Electric Forest, which I read in 2015, 1954's "Death of a Spaceman" by Walter M. Miller Jr., which like Joachim I also read this year, and Edmond Hamilton's 1952 "What's It Like Out There?" which I reread in 2017 when I was blogging about The Best of Edmond Hamilton, a volume edited by Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett (who also makes an appearance on Joachim's list!)
I missed your post about my site. I'm sorry!
ReplyDeleteI'd love to know your favorite reads of 2020 and of course, in a few months, 2021.
Thinking back and looking over my notes it seems like, in the fiction realm, I was most enthusiastic in 2020 about weird/horror stories, like Lovecraft and Eddy's "The Loved Dead," Clark Ashton Smith's "Dweller in the Gulf," Tanith Lee's "Venus Rising on Water," Thomas Ligotti's "Sect of the Idiot" and David Drake's "Something Had to Be Done," as well as Fritz Leiber's sword and sorcery Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales, with "Lean Times in Lankhmar," "The Seven Black Priests" and "Stardock" my faves.
DeleteStories closer to the traditional definition of science fiction (stories that speculate about future life and the changes that might be wrought by new technologies and sciences) that I was impressed with included Brian Aldiss's "Manuscript Found in a Police State" and the three stories by A. E. van Vogt which were the basis for the fix-up novel The Beast AKA The Moonbeast: "The Great Engine," "The Beast" and "The Changeling."
Those three van Vogt stories are about super technology and monsters and aliens, but also about politics, psychology, and sexual relationships, which brings us to Barry N. Malzberg's Confessions of Westchester County, a fun mainstream comic novel about, as I put it, "how horribly men treat women, how horribly women treat men, how working hard and/or having lots of money won't make you happy, how religion is a scam and the government is incompetent" and a highlight of my 2020 reading.
Maybe I'll make an effort in January to put up an actual blog post about my favorite 2021 reads with links and everything. Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days" and Aldiss's "Confluence" and Damon Knight's "I See You" would have to be in the running, and of course a bunch more blood and guts stuff from Weird Tales.