Ann Leckie is probably the hottest name in science fiction and fantasy at the moment with her debut novel in 2013 achieving the unprecedented feat of winning both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards. I haven’t actually read her Ancillary trilogy though I really should. This is a newer fantasy novel which I thought might be easier to get into as a standalone work. This one did get nominated for a Hugo as well but she refused it as she had been a finalist too many times already.
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!
It’s been a while since I last wrote one of these broad overviews of the various pieces of online fiction I’ve been reading. The truth is that I spend far more time reading so-called amateur online fiction than published books nowadays and recently I find that I’ve been enjoying them more as well. And of course many of the most successful pieces of online fiction eventually make their way to become published as traditional books. By far, my current favorite of the lot is The Wandering Inn web serial by pirateaba. I’ve been following this for a few years now so I thought I’d already written something about this but it turns out that I hadn’t. So I’m writing this to convince more people to try it out.
Back when I wrote about the final book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy I said I’ll probably pick up this semi-official companion book and now I have. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered. This started out as a piece of fanfiction by a devoted fan Baoshu and became popular enough that it was acknowledged by Liu Cixin and his publisher. But it remains firmly in fanfiction territory as it is nowhere as creative or as well written as the original trilogy. It is also largely a companion piece to Death’s End instead of the trilogy as a whole as it features the characters from the last book.
