I think Heaven's Shadow by Michael Cassutt and David S. Goyer is not only a very good book, but is important for the relationship between the genre and the mainstream.  It's a J.J. Abrams -style genre revivification, pumping energy back into the Arthur C. Clarke type of near future NASA novel, while retooling it to be relevant to today.  Thus, while we get a tense depiction of two competing teams attempting to land on a Near Earth Object that's entered the solar system, we also get a continual feeling for the reaction of the media landscape, and some real personality in the characters.  It's the 'airport novel' for SF that we as a genre have long been seeking.  (Or, actually, that we as a genre should long have been seeking.)  And it doesn't forget that Clarke was always about the sense of wonder, which arrives with a numinous kick halfway through the book.  Perhaps the ending isn't all it could be.  If there's someone in your life that hovers on the fringes of SF, and misses the sort of book they used to write, well, they do now write them like that again.  Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem to be gaining much critical traction, being perceived, I think (David Goyer being the screenwriter of The Dark Knight) as a bit of an outsider book.  (The forthcoming movie will, incredibly, increase that feeling.)  But an outsider can see the wood for the trees.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson doesn't need my recommendation.  A story that should be filmed by Guy Ritchie (were he interested in gold farming in massive multiplayer online games) with Stephenson's typical love for stopping the narrative to tell us all the interesting background detail (and it is interesting).  It's telling, I think, that an attempt at the Great American Novel, a novel of character and history and how people are formed by the underlying patterns of the world can now quite simply and obviously be set in genre territory.  It's not SF, it's about how SF has changed the world, a literary novel about how things are, now that we've won.

Look at the blockiness of those islands on the cover of (my favourite author) Christopher Priest's new one, The Islanders.  This is  also, in its way, an SFnal literary novel, being a gazetteer, a map, a series of descriptive pieces, about a completely fictional group of islands, in a fictional world, with fictional politics.  It's somewhat about Britain and its former colonies.  And it's, as always with Priest, about conflicting narratives and playful world building to an extraordinary degree.  He starts toying with us on the first page.  I mention the cover because I think it gives the game away a bit: if this isn't influenced by games like Skyrim, then it should be an influence on them.  Any book you might pick up in that game is a highly abbreviated version of this.  One day, when there's enough memory in the world, I hope to find this book down a dungeon.  Or by then I might be living in it.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi is an interesting experiment (a first in prose, I think) a re-imagining of a classic SF novel, Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper.  This is a courtroom thriller about colonisation and the rights of an indigenous intelligent species.  It's also a book about ethics, where they come from, and how they're maintained.  It's well aware of the potential pitfalls.  (Avatar's absolute lack of grey areas and it's horrifying desire for its aboriginal people to be 'noble'.  A cultural fable which I think reinforces the possibility of exploitation of those who aren't wise and noble, but are just people.)  Our hero is motivated by gain almost throughout.  There is due legal process in place.  (It's almost a direct response to the idea that what the aliens of Avatar really needed was a good lawyer.)  The book features that most cliche-bashing of creations: a good lawyer who works for an enormous mining company.  (Scalzi loves going 'wait a minute' to prejudicial assumptions about types of people, especially when the prejudices are those of his own liberal readership.) It's a book of clever tricks and reversals, satisfying and fast paced.  I listened to it via Audible, with a well-chosen Wil Wheaton doing the narration.  (One surprise, though, was that halfway through the package, I started to feel that the story was coming to an end, and wondered what insane twist Scalzi could possibly spring to keep this going for several more hours... only to find the book is bundled with the original Piper novel.  That's a nice gesture.)

This year, but not from this year, I also very much enjoyed Jon Armstrong's Grey and Walter John Williams' This is Not a Game, the sequels to both of which I'm anticipating diving into with great pleasure.

In 2012, I'm looking forward to Alastair Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth, Adam Christopher's Empire State (that's just about out already), Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour in Glass and many, many more.

In the back of my diary/notebook, I keep a list of my favourite stories from each month of my Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine subscription.  I thought I'd share that list with you.  I love how the power of the Hugo Awards shapes the contents pages of SF magazines (making sure they make a clear division between novella, novelette and short story, the second of which especially is now almost a thing known only to SF fans), so why not continue that tradition?  (Where there's an except of the story available online, I've linked to it.)  Let me begin with the...

Short Stories.

'Visitors' by Steve Rasnic Tem (January).  Parents visit their son, a criminal who's kept in suspended animation, in a vividly described near future America.  One of those 'if this goes on...' stories that are the heartland of SF, with the usual Asimov's emotional depth.

'Smoke City' by Christopher Barzak (April/May).  A furious critique of steampunk as we get to meet the begrimed, poverty-stricken workers who keep all those lovely steam dirigibles in the air.  Makes excellent use of movement between two worlds of the imagination.  Now, it says, is better, choosing the future is better.

'The Fnoor Hen' by Rudy Rucker (April/May).  A brilliantly bizarre story of gene tech let loose in a future world seen, again, not from the ivory towers but through the eyes of the couples that live in the condos.

'Walking Stick Fires' by Alan DeNiro (June).  And this out-bizarres that, even, a road trip through an America that's disintegrated to the point of surrealism.  I love SF where the definitions and origins are lost to the point where the audience doesn't care and the thing is held together just by storytelling.  Giddy stuff.

'Watch Bees' by Philip Brewer (August).  Again, what becomes of America in the near future, where genetic engineering is available for farmers, but social order not so much.  It's not about the deadly bees that guard property from anyone whose biology they don't recognise, or the desperate ways to get around that, it's about how the world got here.

'Danilo' by Carol Emshwiller (September).  Emshwiller is swiftly becoming the new Bradbury, a unique voice that Asimov's has become the obvious home for.  Danilo was this guy this woman once knew, maybe, and she sets out to find him, in a future America (?) where going over to the next town is a major task.  (Reading Asimov's over a year puts one's finger on the pulse of what SF is thinking, and right now that pulse is jittery.) The world's not so much in apocalypse as in slow, sighing decline.  Or this might be set right now, just in the other world of the very poor and lonely.  The search says something to us, something lost and romantic and sad, and the story doesn't want to be bothered about being in any particular genre.

'Free Dog' by Jake Skillingstead (October/November).  File sharing is taken to the max in a world where a man's love for his dog, and the way that love is shaken by divorce, is interfered with when the dog starts getting... pirated.  It could be played for laughs, but again, the emotions are raw.  This is heartland SF adapted in that very Asimov's way: 'if this goes on... how would it feel?'

'"Run," Bakri Says' by Ferrett Steinmetz.  (December).  Bit of a masterpiece, this.  Iraqi dissidents start using SF equipment to enable one woman to rescue her brother from US forces by being able to have multiple 'lives' and go through her actions time after time, just as in a video game.  It gets as grim as you might expect, and neatly describes the processes of alienation from the world and loss of perceived personhood in one's enemies that form all extremism.

Novelettes.

'Out of the Dream Closet' by David Ira Cleary (February).  Another surreal future, the getting to which from here is unclear, but this one, a comfortable nostalgic post-everything Earth, littered with memories (literally) and sparsely populated with interesting posthuman characters, is almost somewhere you'd like to live.  Our heroine is avoiding thinking about the approaching (deliberate on his part) death of her father, who's no longer really human at all.  It's all a bit Alice and a bit Mervyn Peake.

'Clean' by John Kessel (March).  It's medically useful for a Dad to have part of his memory erased.  And that means consquences for his family.  (Dads, real people, emotional consequences, what Asimov's does.)

'I was Nearly your Mother' by Ian Creasey (March).  And was there ever a more Asimov's title than that?  It's so dull when you're a teenager and the woman from a parallel universe who decided not to be your mother wants to hang out with you.  In a wonderfully urban British setting.

'A Response from EST 17' by Tom Purdom (April/May).  Brilliant space opera, depicting some very original socioeconomic means of conflict and contact between worlds.  Dashes along at an exciting pace.

'The Cold Step Beyond' by Ian R. MacLeod (June). In an unfair world of warriors on quests, that's set in the ruins of SF rather than the towers of fantasy, a young woman warrior does her duty.

'Day 29' by Chris Beckett (July). When you're teleported to the colony worlds, you lose your memory of a certain number of days before you left.  And the implications of that are worked through very nicely.  Until the story starts to hint (and it never does more than hint, leaving it to our intelligence) that... but that would be spoiling a very fine piece.  (In what was always going to be my favourite issue.  Ahem.)

'Corn Teeth' by Melanie Tem (August).  This is a bit of a masterpiece, a dissection of how the pressure of prejudice (in this case anti-alien prejudice) shapes the mind of a little girl, from within her point of view.  It's heartbreaking, and feels utterly real.  Getting inside the consciousness of a child takes great skill.

Novella.

And to my surprise, when I look back at my list, there's only one novella on it.

'The Man Who Bridged the Mist' by Kij Johnson (October/November) is a hymn to the pleasures of work.  It's about an engineer sent to a rural community on what could be a future (low tech) Earth or a colony world, or (honestly) an imagined past or a fantasy world without magic.  His job is to build a bridge across a dangerous river of mist, in which there are huge, liminal creatures.  This will impact on the town's ferry services.  He meets a number of intriguing characters.  There is romance.  There are setbacks.  (None of them are obvious, every reversal is surprising.)  But make no mistake, this is a story (it could be a novel, even) about building a bridge.  Life goes on afterwards.  Life is good and work is good.  (The SFnal feel of it comes more from everyone's joy in the use of skill and intelligence to solve problems than from the creatures.)  It makes one wish there was a genre of civil engineering fiction.  Perhaps this is the first.  Just tremendous.



And that's it for my survey this year.  As always on the 12 Blogs, we're joined by a creator to tell us of their festive plans, and today it's a Mr Kim Newman who writes...

'I'm going to spend the holidays in the West Country.  On the 23rd, I'll be in Bristol with my oldest friends - Eugene Byrne, Alex Dunn and Brian Smedley - and we'll perform our annual ritual of opening the envelope in which we made prophecies for what would happen this year and see how wrong we were, and how few of the celebs who've died we managed to get in the Dead Pool.  Then we'll make a whole new bunch of predictions for next year.  Disappointing Team GB medal showing in the Olympics is likely to figure.  And Margaret Thatcher has been in the Dead Pool since she was in office.  Then, I'll be in Aller, a tiny village in Somerset, for Christmas with my Dad, sister and nephew - open presents, eat meal, play with toys, etc.  The Aller Pottery Christmas sale is still on if anyone in the Sedgmoor area needs a last-minute present.  Here's my Dad and me at Christmas dinner some years ago ... it'll be in the same room, but we're older now ...'


That sounds lovely, Kim, thank you.  (Maybe you should enter our This Time Next Year quiz.)  Tomorrow I'll be summing up, looking forward to the conventions of 2012, and saying hello to a whole bunch of guests, one of whom brings Vertigo surprises.  Until then, Cheerio!