Geoff Ryman isn’t an author who I’d read previously but this novel is so good that I feel like I’ve been missing out this whole time. The thing is his work doesn’t seem to get nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards and I’ve long contended that there is a frustrating sense of sameyness in the works that do get nominated. This novel feels refreshing different and wears it more fantastical elements lightly enough that it could pass for a mainstream novel. But it is a solid science-fiction novel, not just in its use of novel technologies as a plot element but in its attitude towards change and progress.
Ever since I made a more concerted effort to keep up with the winners of recent awards, I’d had mixed success. It’s probably because I prefer hard science-fiction above all and this preference doesn’t track very closely with the type of work that usually wins in awards ceremonies. This book won a lot of awards and was Ann Leckie’s debut novel to boot. It’s more space opera than science-fiction and I have some issues with how casually it treats the existence of AI. But it is a very strong novel that does make me want to read more about the universe it is set in.
Martha Wells is another one of the a relatively recent crop of writers whose work gets nominated for awards over and over again. This year, her latest Murderbot Diary book Network Effect was nominated so I thought I’d check the series out beginning with the first book. Unfortunately it looks like this was only a novella and while this first one is priced cheaply on Amazon, the other three ones which complete arguably the first volume are each sold as full-price books. That explains why the reviews are full of complaints about this exploitative marketing practice.
After writing about The Wandering Inn earlier, I realized that I’ve never written anything about With This Ring either and I’ve been reading this for a far longer period of time. This is of course not an original work but a piece of fan-fiction based on the Young Justice television series that is set in a version of the DC universe. I’ve massively cut down on my reading of fan-fiction these days and most of them aren’t worth talking about. I make an exception for this not because it is particularly well written but because of its sheer massiveness and the consistency with which the author has been able to churn out updates every day almost without fail.
I haven’t been so diligent as to buy anything close to every edition of this annual anthology of the year’s best science-fiction stories but this has indeed been a semi-regular fixture of my life ever since I started reading fiction from way back during my school days. This particular edition however is the very last one as editor Gardner Dozois died in 2018. This truly marks the passing of an era for although he is not well known for his own writing, his editing work has been influential in the field for decades and as this volume illustrates, he does invaluable work in documenting what happens in the field of science-fiction every year.
Since this book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for 2020, I’ll take that to mean that I’m finally current on new science-fiction releases. Another problem I’ve been having recently is that even as I continue to read at least one traditionally published science-fiction or fantasy novel a month, I’ve been liking them a lot less than the web serials or even the random fanfiction which I read a ton of. Here at last is a novel that I solidly liked and would recommend, even though I think it is closer to being space opera than science-fiction. Admirable work by new writer Arkady Martine.
So this is the last book of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy about Athena and Apollo’s project to found Plato’s Just City. It’s pretty clear that this was written only to close out the trilogy as there is very little plot. Much of it consists of a series of philosophical essays by Crocus, the first of the Workers, the robots Athena brought to build the city, to gain sentience. The much promised renewed contact between the Platonic cities and the rest of humanity also turns out to be a bit of a damp squib. But it does have time-travel, aliens and even a dinosaur!
