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ursulafiction in progress
Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant. As I'd expected, my library copy expired; I'll pick it up again once I make it back to the front of the queue.
Aliette de Bodard, The Tea Master and the Detective. I'm here for the spaceships, rather than the Sherlock Holmes references (I never really got into the latter, which is sort of odd, given the amount of nineteenth-century pulp I've read); I like the spaceships very much.
short fiction
Jonathan Strahan (ed.), The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, volume 12. I acquired this from NetGalley because the list of featured authors on the cover included Geoff Ryman. Turns out this was a lie: the NetGalley cover copied the author names from last year's volume 11, and the version that's for sale now has an entirely different list.
Strahan's introduction is awful. He's trying to sound unbiased, like someone who could choose the very best science fiction and fantasy in an absolute sense, but ends up seeming pompous and dull. The most important things that happened in science fiction last year, he says, are that the United States elected a "controversial" leader (this comes off as praise-by-insufficient-hostility, which I'm guessing he didn't intend) and lots of people bought novellas. Some of the novellas were "bestsellers" and some were "critically acclaimed", but Strahan refuses to assign both descriptions to the same story.
Strahan's choice of stories, on the other hand, is pretty good. I'm reading this the way I usually read big fat anthologies, skipping ahead whenever something doesn't grab me immediately, but I'm definitely reading more than I'm skipping. Thus far I've particularly enjoyed Tobias Buckell's "Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance", Vina Jie-Min Prasad's "A Series of Steaks" (hilarious use of 3D printing!), and Yoon Ha Lee's "The Chameleon's Gloves" (Lawful Good Kel general! who is not actually the protagonist, but that's fine, I have priorities), which due to the cover error I didn't know to look forward to.
I suppose I should figure out what last year's Geoff Ryman story was?
Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant. As I'd expected, my library copy expired; I'll pick it up again once I make it back to the front of the queue.
Aliette de Bodard, The Tea Master and the Detective. I'm here for the spaceships, rather than the Sherlock Holmes references (I never really got into the latter, which is sort of odd, given the amount of nineteenth-century pulp I've read); I like the spaceships very much.
short fiction
Jonathan Strahan (ed.), The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, volume 12. I acquired this from NetGalley because the list of featured authors on the cover included Geoff Ryman. Turns out this was a lie: the NetGalley cover copied the author names from last year's volume 11, and the version that's for sale now has an entirely different list.
Strahan's introduction is awful. He's trying to sound unbiased, like someone who could choose the very best science fiction and fantasy in an absolute sense, but ends up seeming pompous and dull. The most important things that happened in science fiction last year, he says, are that the United States elected a "controversial" leader (this comes off as praise-by-insufficient-hostility, which I'm guessing he didn't intend) and lots of people bought novellas. Some of the novellas were "bestsellers" and some were "critically acclaimed", but Strahan refuses to assign both descriptions to the same story.
Strahan's choice of stories, on the other hand, is pretty good. I'm reading this the way I usually read big fat anthologies, skipping ahead whenever something doesn't grab me immediately, but I'm definitely reading more than I'm skipping. Thus far I've particularly enjoyed Tobias Buckell's "Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance", Vina Jie-Min Prasad's "A Series of Steaks" (hilarious use of 3D printing!), and Yoon Ha Lee's "The Chameleon's Gloves" (Lawful Good Kel general! who is not actually the protagonist, but that's fine, I have priorities), which due to the cover error I didn't know to look forward to.
I suppose I should figure out what last year's Geoff Ryman story was?