New Year: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Time to look back over what I've read this year, and I've read a lot more this year, exceeding any expectations I might have set (I read about 25 to 30 books each year), which is good.

I'm going to start with a metaphor that may or may not work, gentrification.

The SF genre started out as slums. No self respecting writer would write science fiction, think of those who said things like my story is about the future not just squids in space.

Yes, Verne and Wells wrote what we would call SF, but they didn't think of themselves as SF authors. The foundations of the genre were built on their work, but it was Hugo Gernsback who coined the word scientifiction, his preferred term for the genre of science fiction.

Stories that were to be built on science.

His magazine Amazing Stories being the mechanism for bringing this new genre to the market. To say he was a bit of a wheeler-dealer who played fast and loose in business is just an illustration of the human condition where everybody is struggling to make money.

So from these humble beginning the genre evolved, weighed down by aspirations of respectability.

Some writers wanting to be seen as more than purveyors of squids in space. That in a nutshell is what drove the writers in the genre, which can be seen in the New Wave and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions.

Hence my metaphor of gentrification.

Arguably, which is what I'm doing here, is that it is the gentrification of the genre that has led to the current divide in SF between the traditional published authors of the last 40 years and the independent authors that have risen out of Amazon's KDP.

Nailing my colours to the mast, I see the political shenanigans of the genre as more indicative of the divide between high and low brow culture than anything else. I hate snobbery, so colour me as ambivalent towards the intellectual rarefaction from high brow pontification (yes, that's an ironic sentence).

So, here's my opinions on what I've read this year.

SF Series

Expeditionary Force series by Craig Allanson (14 books)

With all of the above in mind, otherwise why would I write it, Allanson is the E. E. Doc Smith of the 21st Century. This will probably replace the Lensman series that young readers will find that introduce them to SF.

So, not great literature, but fabulous story telling, which some older readers of a more refined mindset may find repetitious, but remember other people have simpler tastes, and that is a good thing.

Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (2 books: Skin Game & Peace Talks)

Hopefully I don't have to extol the virtues of this series? In a fair world where snobbery wasn't rampant these would've won the Hugo, and be considered good gateway books to the SF&F genre. But we don't live in a fair world, and it's worth remembering that if it were fair then everything bad would've happened because we deserved it.

Kris Longknife series by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe (19 books)

Think Hornblower, or Honor Harrington, and you'll have a good grasp of what this series is about. Could also be a contender of the next  E. E. Doc Smith or perhaps David Webber?

I don't know. All I can say is that I consumed them as fast as I could read.

Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells (6 books)

And just to be contrary, not really contrary, just detached from all the emotional turmoil that subsume the genre since 2009 or thereabouts, here is a series by a traditional published author who has had a along career before these breakout books (breakout being the term for best sellers that used to be the hallmark of publishing, back in the day, before the event).

Again, I consumed them with a passion only tempered by the cost of them.

Centers of Gravity by Marko Kloos (Book 8 of the Frontlines series)

An ending of the story for the characters, but hopefully not an end of the stories in this universe. There is much left unresolved about the Lankies and the fate of humanity in a hostile universe.

I've just read that there is a spin-off series coming out, which is good news. I'm now looking forward to reading it.

SF&F Singletons

Clowns by Peter Cawdron

My Sweet Satan by Peter Cawdron

Peter's stick is writing first contact novels. He plays with different scenarios for each of his stories. He's written a whole bunch of these And both of these were great. Cerebral SF that make you think. I like the attention he pays to the psychology of first contact.

I shall be reading more.

The Rise of Io by Wesley Chu

The Fall of Io by Wesley Chu (sequel that's really the second half of the story)

My beloved bought these, and I read them so we could discuss what we thought. They were fine, but truth be told I could barely remember reading them.

I don't regret reading them, but they weren't memorable. Read so that I have an understanding of what is happening in the genre, and not look like a complete fool.

Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster

Read this oldie that remains a goldie. Foster is what I would consider a pedestrian writer, his prose doesn't set the world alight, but it is workmanlike, all the joints fit, the finish is smooth. Again, in a fairer world he would be talked about more, because if he'd written these in the 50s and 60s he would've been considered a successor to the greats.

And, I should add, this is a delightful story.

Re-Reads

Alien by Alan Dean Foster

Aliens by Alan Dean Foster

After describing Foster as pedestrian, you may wonder why I read and re-read his work? They answer is complicated, but can be boiled down to the fact that I'm drawn in by the unpretentious stories. The deliver what they promise, and he ends them well enough.

Workmanlike (courting controversy with gendered language) they show people as just people (even aliens are people), and that is good enough for me.

A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt

McDevitt is one of those authors I buy in hardback. He's much maligned by the glitterati of SF for his settings being the 1950s transposed into space. Not a failing in my mind, because psychologically I doubt that the evolution of humankind into some future transhumanist vision of mankind will ever be realized.

Not that it can't happen, but if it does then writing about it will be as comparable to the visions of traveling to the Moon in a chariot pulled by Swans.

A Talent for War is one of those books that blew me away, and still stands up when re-read. Arguably, he's never written anything quite as good since, but I still buy his books in hardback, and that should tell you all you need to know.

Odds & Ends

38 North Yankee by Ed Ruggero

Very much the oddity here, but I'm a wargamer, and this is one of those books that any wargamer interested in what if scenarios will likely read. It is dated (doh, you don't say, Ashley!), and the writing is in what is called omniscient 3rd point of view, which is out of fashion.

But only snobs care about fashion, all I care about is story. And the story here deals with the North Koreans invading the the Republic of Korea. Given how much Korean drama this year on Netflix I suspect this drove me to read this book now.

Non-Fiction

Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder

I read science fiction, I write science fiction, and I'm all too aware that I'm not a scientist. So this is me keeping up with what a scientist thinks about science, and Dr. Hossenfelder has a delightful wit that makes her discussions even more interesting for those of us who sit on the sidelines of the advance in science.

So, I make that 52 books I've read this year, which is a record during the time I've kept a blog recording such fripperies. It is good.

I finish this by wishing you all a Happy New Year.