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.
For once, it looks like I’m on top of new releases as this book has just been nominated for a slew of awards but final results have yet to be announced. Of course this book was always going to be a high profile release given that this is by Susanna Clarke and this is only her second novel after the incredibly successful Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell. This is however a simpler, far less ambitious work than her first book which famously took over ten years to write and is short enough that some would question if it even qualifies as being a novel.
This is another novel that I wouldn’t ordinarily have read in the course of my usual explorations. It was a recommendation on Broken Forum and though it has some fantasy, it is seen as closer to being a mainstream novel than a genre one. This one is by Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian writer who has made a name from writing alternative history with some fantastical elements. This one in particular is a fictionalized version of the An Shi Rebellion during the Tang Dynasty and it really surprised me how much I liked it.
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.
