Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

This was better than any work of fiction I read in 2017. (This is not, as such, a judgement on 2017: I have many books on my to read list published last year and not yet started.) Be warned: the discussion below contains spoilers.

Most works of fiction are only minimally about themselves. Regardless of whether they are "literary" or "genre" the prose is most often designed to provide the reader with the illusion of events "really happening". (This is true even of the impossible events in much SF/F; the illusion is local, affecting the immediate experience of the reader.) This is as true of a book like Mrs. Dalloway, which tries to persuade us that we are experiencing a convincing illusion of the inside of a woman's head, as it is of, say, Cast in Shadow.

A much more limited set of works of fiction are designed to call attention to themselves as artifacts, inhabiting the borderland fiction shares with poetry. Ulysses is up there (especially its second half), Tristram Shandy, the later Henry James, and House of Leaves; on a less elevated plane, so is Illuminatus!.

Gnomon is in that latter set. One of its foreground concerns is narrative structure. There's a framing tight third person point of view, having the initial shape of a detective story, set somewhere about a century or so from now in London. There are four inset first person narratives, broken into parts and arranged chiastically, which are narratives from inside the head of the dead person, Hunter, from the incident being investigated. (This is a future with the ability to record thoughts.) They have links: in their transitions, and in certain themes and images, but this looks like a simple reflection of the mind of their composer.

Or at least that's how they start. Around the middle of the book the status of the framing narrative starts to get a little shaky (and the mode of that narrative shifts more in the direction of certain sorts of spy fiction - the secret history plus paranoia kind). By the end of the book it's not clear who is telling the various narratives, nor what the ontological status of their principals is. It is unclear how much of the main narrative has been real, and exactly who is alive, dead, or imaginary; there is one level of reading in which reality itself is overwritten, and not just the System which records it. At the same time, the novels of Hunter, which we have come to assume are simply cover for a secret identity, rumored to exist but never turning up, turn out to exist after all: in some sense they (or at least the last of them, Quaerendo Invenientis) can be argued to stand in for the book Gnomon itself.

Partway along, the narrative presents another model for itself to the reader: The Canon per tonos of the Musikalisches Opfer, is referenced specifically about halfway through: like it, the book ends having swapped out the conditions for resolution in a feat of sleight-of hand analogous to Bach's change of key. (Harkaway's interpretation of the work's social context is not that if Hofstadter.) Seen in this light, the narrative relations are analogous to musical themes.

At yet another level, it's structured around the mythic Campbellian descent of the hero to the underworld and return.

Moving along from the structure to the themes, there's another rich sheaf of choices. It is most obviously a critique of the modern surveillance state (with occasional reminiscences of Airstrip One in the descriptions of the London of the main thread), and of the clinical model of addressing the antisocial (I have no idea whether Lewis' NICE is an influence here or not). It is explicitly a response to Brexit, particularly in one of the subnarratives (although it did not start out that way; Harkaway indicates on his blog that Brexit overtook the composition of the book). It has a steganographic thread, and a sly recurrent touch of the Law of Fives. The characters, consciously or unconsciously, tread the edges of hermeticism and of knowledge or perception of a special type, that of the seer. (There are no age-old conspiracies running things behind the scenes, though, only a recent one.)

Harkaway just may be the true heir of Wallace, Pynchon and Stephenson: not that the latter two are dead yet, but their recent work moves in different domains from their defining works:Gnomon picks up the custodianship of the Fryeian Menippean satire, in which digression is a structural element.

GRRM seems to have been responsible for (or maybe he is simply the highest profile example of) a wave of alternating multi-point of view fantasy novels.

When you think of it, it doesn't have very deep roots. LOTR eventually splits into different tracks to follow the Company after the end of the first volume, but until that point it is almost entirely from Frodo's point of view (with the exception of most of the first chapter, a couple of dreams in Bombadil's house, a Fatty Bolger vignette, and a small scene in Bree from Merry's point of view). Eddison sticks with Garion for most of his Belgariad and Malloreon, and even Jordan's sprawling narrative begins with a focus on Rand.

There are pre-fantasy examples: the obvious example is Tom Clancy, who moves rapidly away from focussing on Jack Ryan to multiple plot tracks following the development of every side of a plot. One of the reasons this works is because the typical reader has already developed enough identification with Ryan, from the first few novels which had a narrower focus, to stick with the narrative through switches in viewpoint. (What Clancy gains from it is the illusion of realism, as he shows all the steps building towards a titanic event - the nuclear bombing of an American city, or the elimination of the American government almost in toto.) And Ulysses is notoriously multi viewpoint, but as it is an advertisement for how a master can break every rule in the book successfully, we may not want to consider it.

A really good author, of course, can generate interest in a few paragraphs, and encourage us to trust him or her on a switch to a new viewpoint in a new place; and a true omniscient narratorial technique relies little, if at all, on the reader's identification with a character. On the other hand, there's also a special kind of novelistic discipline in limiting what the reader knows to what a single character knows, and only displaying it gradually as the viewpoint character learns more. The classic détective story is built on thus foundation.

However, it comes with a heightened potential for the Eight Deadly Words. I confess that it is only the testimony of others who say that there's a payoff waiting that keeps me slowly plugging through John Gwynne's Malice, especially as he also insists on combining the technique with beginning at the beginning and showing the hero's bildungsroman in excruciating detail. Brian Staveley is better - he has only three viewpoints, his characters are more interesting, and he begins with a crisis, even if not quite in medias res.

There is one area where shifting viewpoints can be a significant narrative plus. In cases where there's already tension, abandoning one viewpoint for another can set up a terrific coup de théâtre on reintegrating the former thread. Tolkien does this twice in telling of the battle in front of Minas Tirith, once with "Rohan had come at last", and once with the black ships, and repeats the trick, again, with the battle before the Black Gate being suspended for several chapters as Frodo and Sam make their way through Mordor.

Another very recent example is Miles (Christian) Cameron's The Fall of Dragons, the fifth (and last) book in the Red Knight series, which is an effectively crafted payoff to an already very good four-volume setup.

As always in this series, the military aspects have the ring of realism, the characters are three-dimensional and clearly distinguished, and the world-building is effective.

By setting this volume up so that every thread is critical in a finely arranged set of dominoes -- failure in any one battle, delay in any one march, would be a serious problem, and there is a strict timeline to boot -- and by having already established a grounding in the core viewpoint characters, the effect Cameron achieves is one of heightening tension whenever he shifts from viewpoint to viewpoint. And this works, in turn, because it's believable that such a tightly-connected plan would be in place, because (in turn) it's a desperate roll of the dice against an overwhelmingly superior foe, so that the usual caveat against creating frangible plans in military (or, for that matter, any other) matters cedes place to sheer desperate necessity.

It's also helped by Cameron's willingness to sacrifice viewpoint characters, so even the degree of "happiness" of the ending can't be clearly anticipated. You can't assume that anyone will necessarily get through the narrative alive. It's not grimdark - there's too much virtue in the best of his protagonists for that - but it's gritty and the costs of war are realistic.

Thematically, a venerable thesis about good and evil plays out, one which works its way through Tolkien as well. The Red Knight's side, with independently cooperating leaders and motivated soldiers, can respond effectively and with initiative when small things go wrong, whereas Ash's side's overwhelming of wills and individuality (displayed also in a somewhat different ways for the Odine) sets up conditions where setbacks can happen more easily and unravel more when they happen. Evil fails in part because of its lack of imagination, an inability to understand the motivations of its foes and therefore is unable to anticipate what they will do; it also favours a highly centralized command and control model (with entities like Ash who have near-godlike powers, literal mind control from a distance) which is rigid and inflexible. This thesis is more clearly expressed because we can actually see the process by which Ash works, as his viewpoint occasionally is given its place in the sun; by contrast, Sauron is always a shadow in the background.

Overall, this is a satisfying conclusion to a well-written series, and a nice demonstration of how a multi-pov technique can be effectively used.

In 1976 I spent a year in France when my father was on sabbatical. The first paper I had to write in my Lycée French class was on "La Littérature Engagée". I argued at the time (I recall) for the primacy of pure art over any mandate for political engagement; I would take a somewhat more nuanced view now, beginning with the recognition (which makes the whole debate somewhat pointless) that no literature can avoid being somewhat engaged, regardless of the intent of the author, even if that intent is as purely literary and abstract as, say, Mallarmé's.

Through nothing more than coincidence, I have just been reading both Gordon's Teskey's The Poetry of John Milton[1] and Brust's / White's The Skill of our Hands.

Teskey's book is a summation of decades if teaching Milton, and covers his entire poetic career. It is thoroughly grounded in both the history of Milton's lifetime and in the sources Milton absorbed and transmuted. (Teskey knows Italian, Latin, and Greek, has familiarity with the literary works central to the traditions Milton drew on, and also enough of a grasp of Christian theology to discuss Milton's theological positions intelligently.) It is well worth reading.

One thing that comes through is the degree to which Milton's work (from about Comus on) is always "engaged", even if only with what Teskey calls transcendental engagement.

(Comus has a nice slipped-in bit: in the middle if a masque, that most aristocratic of entertainments, performed in front of one of the great officers of the realm, the Lady's statement that

If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper'd Luxury
Now heaps upon som few with vast excess,
Natures full blessings would be well dispenc't
In unsuperfluous eeven proportion,
And she no whit encomber'd with her store,
And then the giver would be better thank't,
His praise due paid, for swinish gluttony
Ne're looks to Heav'n amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Cramms, and blasphemes his feeder.

-- an appeal for radical egalitarianism.)

Adam and Eve's society in Eden is, for Milton, the only valid polity in human history, and it is, formally, outside history. Milton's writing aims to push the reader into a mindset, and a course of action, aimed at bringing an ideal order into being here and in this dispensation. (The classic study of the reader in Paradise Lost is Fish's Surprised by Sin.)

We have become used to a discourse in which, because it is asserted that everything is political, and because many works elicit strong personal reactions because of traits which align them with one side or another in the culture wars, we tend to forget what fully engaged political works are actually like.

Regardless of whether troglodytes get worked up about them, works which are "political" mainly in the sense that they have diverse leading characters and display more polities than simply feudal ones in their fantasy/future worlds are not political, or at least engagedly political, in the same sense that, say Uncle Tom's Cabin was, or indeed Paradise Lost.

By contrast, The Skill of our Hands is very much an engaged book - oddly, even more on its publication than when it was being written.

At the time of its composition, its authors could not have known that it would be published amid a flurry of executive orders on immigration and deportation. They did know that the Obama Administration has increased markedly the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants, and that the general militarization of the police - a continuing trend not only in the US but more generally - was at its apex in the south.

It is explicitly an engaged work: it is about resistance; it layers the undocumented immigrant issue over that if slavery in Buchanan's day; it ends with a direct call to action. (It also slips in an aside about HFCS as a public-health concern.)

It also works as a novel, although it helps if the reader has first read The Incrementalists as a preparation.

[1]Disclosure: Teskey was an undergraduate student of my father's and a graduate student of a friend (and through the latter I see him from time to time when he returns to Canada for a visit).

Actually, two bones. One small one with the author and a much larger one with the current publisher's marketing department.

The smaller bone first: I was a faculty child for my undergraduate years, and an English major (along with a block of Classics). Janet's relative lack of knowledge of the university (specifically, the faculty) where her father teaches Romantics (mine taught Hegel) keeps breaking my WSOD.

Of my five professors in first year, I was acquainted with three, not because I chose courses based in whether I knew who taught them (though I did choose sections in two courses by what I knew of them: of the two professors, one I had known for eight years, and one I knew of only by name) but just because one becomes familiar with one's father's SCR and departmental colleagues, not to mention the number of faculty members whose children had gone to high school with one. And all my teachers, all the dons, my head of college, knew who I was.

Janet, by comparison, knows the campus, but not the people. I have a very hard time seeing her as a faculty child.

As for the bigger bone: this book was originally published as an adult fantasy book as part of Tor's Fairy Tale series. It has been republished, and marketed, as a YA/teen book.

This is a book whose full enjoyment depends on things like knowing who Robert Armin was, or what the actual sound of Shakespeare's English was like. It helps if one knows Le Roman de la Rose, The Lady's Not For Burning, Tourneur, Summer's Last Will and Testament, classical tragedy, and Stoppard, or at least about them. These are not things which any plausible typical teen is going to know. (I did, in fact, know these things by 19, by which time I was in second year university, but I'm pretty sure that's not the slot envisaged by "teen literature".) There is no reasonable sense in which this book can be considered as aimed at anything other than an adult audience, and a fairly well-educated adult audience at that.

Overall, though, it's a delightful book, and better (I think) than Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, although Jones has a better structure, starting in medias res. The disparity in ages in Jones' version works against the story, whereas the undergraduate atmosphere of Dean's story actively helps the flow of the story.

I was in Law School at the University of Toronto when The Summer Tree came out; I remember being amused by one of the central characters who is persuaded to come along by a promise of notes for his Evidence class (with Schiff, though Kay leaves the teacher's name out; but Kay went to U of T and would have deliberately chosen that course because of that teacher).

It made a big splash, and over the next couple of years the series was completed. It was a big piece of heroic fantasy which pulled out every stop it could - dark lord, elves, dwarves, Arthur, demigods; it showcased Kay's strength for pivotal scenes and introduced his tendency to deploy them for a somewhat manipulative effect.

Of all of the neo-Tolkienian authors of the 1980s and 90s Kay seems to me the only one who really picks up on Tolkien's theme of gradual loss over deep time and of reconciliation after a long fall: perhaps not surprisingly, given his involvement in the publication of The Silmarillion. The Fionavar Tapestry put at the centre of the story the possibilities of reconciliation and forgiveness over a very long time.

It also got classic High Fantasy out of Kay's system. Tigana was an entirely new departure, as non-Tolkienian as, say, Mirrlees or Eddison: a calque on Renaissance Italy, and with themes of group identity, revenge, freedom, and the trade offs that may need to be made in asserting "freedom".

As with A Song For Arbonne, however, the calque on history is not close. The Peninsula of the Palm has the air of Renaissance Italy, but its history is nothing like Italy's; and the equivalent of the Cathar crusade in Arbonne fails, as a result of the personal arc of the central characters. (Nor did the male/female god/goddess warlike/peaceful split parallel our history: if any historical figure from medieval France resembles the northerners, it's Bertran de Born.)

With the exception of Ysabel, which is a pendant to the Fionavar story with some additional European deep background, his subsequent books have been about individual interactions in the shadow of great events. Sometimes the core characters are central (Alfred the Great, El Cid) and sometimes they are peripheral.

The Lions of Al-Rassan is Kay's first book in the Jaddite / Sarantine parallel world. (Although the calqued-onto-history method is similar to that of his prior two books, they take place in different worlds. References to Fionavar, which is the base of all parallel worlds including our own do get into every book. And it's interesting to note that, given the latter point, it's certain that none of the Jaddites, Asharites, or Kindath are correct, as the gods are known in Fionavar and match none of their beliefs.) And it is the first to hew closely to our history.

It parallels the story of El Cid and the Reconquista in Iberia, but uses the freedom of alternative history to provide minor divergences, and, as in all of his works along these lines, his real focus is on the personal lives of his central characters, and with the ways in which minor chance occurrences or decisions can shape later great events.

If Tigana is about identity and liberty, and the costs they incur, Lions is about the tensions between tolerance and allegiance, and how personal loves and friendships cut across them.

Lions' characters are central agents. By contrast, the Sarantine Mosaic gives us a picture of a slightly modified Justinian and Theodora through the eyes of a peripheral figure, the mosaicist Crispin (and a history which diverges more from our own). By the time of Children of Earth and Sky Crispin's name has been forgotten and his mosaics - those which survive at all - vary between having been destroyed (Sarantium), being in the process of falling apart (the chapel in Trakesia) and being still significant (that world's equivalent to Ravenna). It helps to have read the duology before the latter book.

With a significant degree of variation, Kay explores the interaction between individual lives and personal intent (at one pole) and large-scale events with an impact on society (at the other) and the elements of chance and unexpected consequences which connect the two together.

Kay has been criticized for the use of "manipulative" narrative tricks to engage the reader emotionally. I see the tricks, but I don't think of them as major flaws so much as shorthand, the activity of an occasionally intrusive narrator in a literary world where intrusive narration is less popular than it used to be. (Another aspect of this is the way in which the perspective of the narrator can briefly shift to an historical one, referring to the state of a place, or a person's reputation, centuries after the end of the story.)

Children of Earth and Sky is classically Kay: four characters (a spy, an artist, a pirate and a Janissary) pass through and in various ways influence events following the fall of Sarantium to the Asharites (that world's analogue of the fall of Constantinople). Like Crispin in The Sarantine Mosaic, they are peripheral: their various actions just miss having an immediate major impact until the one whom one would think least likely - the artist - changes the course of events for the next couple of generations decisively.

One obvious parallel is Dunnet's The Year of the Ram, set mainly in Trebizond in a similar time frame. Kay is not in a position to provide as close-grained an image of the life of the time and place as Dunnet is: he has to deal with the limitations as well as the advantages of a made-up world. But Dunnet can't alter the succession of events, and Niccolo remains a onlooker to a course of events he (by definition) can't really affect.

The Nightmare Stacks is, I think, best approached as a generalization of the previous Laundry Files novels. Although the novel is about Alex, it's not about his reactions in the same way that the early novels were about Bob's reactions (usually for humorous effects). This is about the role of the Laundry as a whole in a world shifting towards Nightmare.

( Cut for Spoilers... )

For a while, I've been keeping my eye out for Janet Kagan's Mirabile, out of print for some time.

I was surprised when, as a result of a pro-forma check of my wish list, I found that it was available and had just been reissued in e-book form only by Baen. It's not visible anywhere on the Baen upcoming releases page, but they have reissued Mirabile, Hellspark, and a collection of short stories as e-book only. I presume that they acquired the rights or were chosen by the estate to reissue them.

Safely You Deliver is Graydon Saunders' third book about the Commonweal. Unlike his previous two books, this is very much not an entry point: it follows, and has largely the same characters as A Succession of Bad Days. Comments below also assume familiarity with the prior book, although they contain no real spoilers.

Although we do encounter Reems again, briefly, this is no more a military book, or one about warfare, than its immediate predecessor. Formally, it has two main structural threads: the continuing education and, um, graduation, of the main characters in the sorcery school (which Halt continues to insist is not a school, thereby irritating at least one bureaucrat); and the adoption (on both sides) of a unicorn into their social group (Although not their working link). The unicorn, aside from being very much his own person (human-level sentient) stands in as well as a representative of life from outside the Commonweal which can nevertheless be, with work, accommodated within the Commonweal. As such, the thread of his growth intertwines with that of the students' growth.

One way to read this novel, the most obvious one, is the end of a bildungsroman, the passage from late youth to full adulthood, where the issues being dealt with are those of social incorporation into the broader adult society and the achievement of a degree of mastery sufficient to be self-supporting within society. Of course, "adulthood" and "self-supporting" have different shades of meaning when they involve making a metaphysical transition and becoming full Independents: this is a fantasy novel, not purely a novel of manners. "Social incorporation" also has a certain edge when the normal effects of becoming an Independent are to become less social -- and the progress of the central characters not only requires that they transform that model for themselves, but assist in providing a more general emerging social web for other Independents, a kind of extended family.

From another angle, thematically, it's about the maintenance of civilisation generally -- partly maintenance against threats but still more ensuring that sufficient resources are available to maintain it, and that those resources are used appropriately. What the students choose to do and what the emerging (to us) needs of the Second Commonweal are dance in counterpoint through the novels, with the risks associated with both recognized and skirted. The knife-edge on which the Second Commonweal stands becomes more apparent: it lacks the population base of the First Commonweal and is in a race against time to catch up to the productive capabilities required to maintain civilisation, while having to balance off the need to commit heavily in resources to basic survival at the agriculture and transport level. There are concrete external threats -- Reems -- as well as indicators that there may be more at work, not known or understood yet.

Conflict of the sort you would expect in a military fantasy is not only avoided but subverted: not only is such conflict as occurs more readily assimilable to weeding, but the in-work analysis after the event makes it clear that although it fixes an immediate threat it not only is unable to address the more general problems but may actually make them worse. (Oddly, Graydon is one of two Toronto authors whom I know who have recently expressed a concern to emphasize a "fighting-isn't-decisive in general" model in fantastic works: the other has made this a central theme in an under-contract-but-yet-to-be-published series which will not start coming out for a while.)

According to his progress reports, Graydon is moving more slowly on the next one (tentatively "Under One Banner") than he did on this, so it may be a while until the next installment.

These are SFF books from 2015 which I read in the past year (i.e. those which could be nominated for Hugos), unranked, but with a few comments on each.

Foxglove Summer (Ben Aaronovitch)- I wrote about this when it came out. It's a good installment in a solid urban fantasy series.

The Dread Wyrm (Christian Cameron) - I posted about the whole cycle of books earlier this year. This installment opens up the scope of the work considerably, while maintaining the high standards and the specific strengths of the first two volumes.

The Vorrh (Brian Catling) - Certainly the most beautifully written of the Hugo-eligible books I have read, and a fantasy which strikes out in a direction which is very much its own. (This was published in 2012 in the UK by Honest Publishing, but is eligible because its first US publication, by Vintage, was in 2015.)

The Clockwork Crown (Beth Cato) - The second volume of a well-received duology, right on the boundary between YA and adult in tone and content. A nice light read in a steampunk world which has limited depth but enough charm to carry the narrative.

Crooked (Austin Grossman) - A clever and enjoyable crossing of a Lovecraftian universe with a Secret History version of Richard Nixon's life (bits of it are reminiscent of Stross's "A Colder War", although it is not nearly so dark).

Veiled (Benedict Jacka) - Like, seemingly, all the other UF series I read this is developing a strong overarching plot arc as opposed to a model of full episodic closure in each volume. Verus is getting more squeezed and less able to back away and stand free of things. I found this enjoyable and will happily pick up Burned when it comes out (currently scheduled for April).

Ancillary Mercy (Ann Leckie) - This wraps up the series quite nicely, and includes space battles plus really alien aliens. If you read the first two novels, it's probably enough to say that it maintains the level of quality and brings off a satisfying conclusion; if you haven't, this is certainly not the place to start.

If we go by popularity for all three of the parts of this trilogy on sites like LibraryThing (not to mention all those awards for Ancillary Justice), Leckie shows signs of being one of the really major new talents of the 2010s in terms of reception as well as quality.

A Red-Rose Chain (Seanan McGuire) - Another solid entry in this series. I enjoy reading them; they hover right on the edge of mind-candy. Characterization is good, plot twists are effective; though (as with several other writers in this general field) the plot device of solving the crime / problem by getting beaten up, venerable as it is, begins to get a bit old.

Uprooted (Naomi Novik) - This has received a ton of positive comment, and I thought it a good read, and excellent for its first two-thirds, but I was disappointed by the resolution, which felt a little too facile , bordering on ex machina. It is what it sets out to be, an effective telling of a fairy tale, but it pays the price for it by sticking to types for the main characters (every one of them with the possible exception of the narrator can be summed up in a couple of sentences) which is appropriate for a fairy tale but weakens it as a novel. Furthermore, the relationship between the main characters, taken as a realistic rather than a fairy-tale one, borders on abusive but this is (in a fairy-tale way) pushed to one side ... which leaves one with the choice between abandoning reading this as a novel rather than a fairy-tale, or treating the first-person narrator as deeply unreliable (which brings its own problems).

The Shepherd's Crown (Terry Pratchett) - Understandably weaker than most other Discworld books, given Pratchett's death before it could be finished, but it is still an effective and attractive story, closing off two important arcs in the Discworld narrative.

A Succession of Bad Days (Graydon Saunders) - Reviewed in full here.

A Darker Shade of Magic (Victoria Schwab) - I thought that this should have captured my attention much more than it did. I didn't get anywhere near the Eight Deadly Words, but I put it down to pick up something more appealing from my TBR list and have not yet picked it back up again.

Seveneves (Neal Stephenson) - This is basically a pair of very different stories connected by an intervening timeline. I liked it well enough while recognizing the considerable problems that existed with the genetics and related biological sciences handwaving. It seems to me that the core of the work is not "what would we do if the moon blew up?", but rather, "what would a world shared between variant human species look like"? (I say species because although they seem to be interfertile Stephenson has rigged his backstory so that the closest parallel to his seven-plus-two types of human is not modern "races", whose divergences are literally only skin deep -- other distinctions cut across "race" lines and there is more diversity within any modern "race" than between any two of them -- but rather the Africa of a million years ago where there seem to have been many variant hominin species.) To get there, he needs a very elaborate setup -- requiring not only heavy (and unrealistic) use of genetic engineering but the provision of a set of environments where subgroups could grow in relative isolation -- so that he can then examine cooperation and conflict between these radiating groups with the background of a common "epic". It is more a return to SF roots than anything else I've read recently: engineer's fiction.

The Annihilation Score (Charles Stross) - This book continues the movement (beginning with "Equoid" and The Rhesus Chart) away from a spy-pastiche towards an urban fantasy alignment for the Laundry stories. From unicorns and vampires we have now moved on to superheroes. Well, that and policing, as the flip side of the same coin. This also makes explicit the overall arc regarding CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN: general thaumaturgical power is rising in the population, with the superhero phenomenon an effect of that general increase. Stross throws into the mix a change of narrators -- this episode is seen through the eyes of Mo, Bob's wife -- and that allows us both to see things from an angle we haven't seen them from before and to check Bob's reliability as a narrator. I like the direction in which Stross is taking the series, although it is becoming more and more suited to an audience which is also wild about Peter Watts (Watts considers Stross a more depressing author than he is himself).

The Just City and The Philosopher Kings (Jo Walton) - Two-thirds of a trilogy (the third, Necessity is due out next June). Very definitely among the best works from last year in my reading list. I provided an extended review of the first here.

The second is at least as good as its predecessor. It is, however, very much a distinct work, not a continuation of the same one in another volume. There is a gap of about twenty years between them; the themes are related but not identical; the shape is different. Where The Just City was about the Republic, about matters of consent and free will, and about what it means to be human, The Philosopher Kings is about the difference between excellence and honour (aristocracy and timarchy), about personal discovery and growth (both physical -- the core of the book is a sea voyage -- and mental), and Justice as well as what may go beyond justice in judgement. Some old scores are paid off; some scores are very deliberately abandoned; and if the first book ended with an abortive debate and the misuse of power, this one ends in a considered and careful scene of judgement. Determining what it means to be human, though, remains a core theme, showing up in a very different way from the previous book.

The Sword of the South (David Weber) - Sort of what you might expect from a new series from Weber set in the Bahzellverse if you knew that he'd been sitting on the story for decades. The good news: it avoids much of the over-padding and infodumps which many of his books have shown. The bad news: in place of the infodumps there is a lot of foreshadowing coupled with Wencit's refusing to discuss things openly. (I have my suspicions that some of the foreshadowing is in fact misdirection; if it turns out to be, I'll think better of it.) Weber is not, in general, a subtle writer, but he does have enjoyable characters, good action, and some interesting worldbuilding. He has promised, cross his heart, that this series will not get away from him and will be confined to five volumes: we'll see.

The Affinities (Robert Charles Wilson) - This felt very typical of the author -- strengths from following people's lives at the everyday level, which is a constant through big-concept and smaller-concept books of his. The book posits a jump forward and a systematizing of the study of the psychology of social interactions, from a ground-level view: the narrator becomes a member of an Affinity, and the early history around the affinity model is told through his eyes. It has windows onto two main periods: the beginning, when the Affinites are new, fairly unknown, and the narrator is just joining, and a secondary point where they are not only generating pushback from society at large but are in conflict with one another. There's a twist at the end -- the book isn't going where you (probably) think it's going. This is nicely written -- good prose, engaging characters, interesting themes -- but it's not as big or shiny as, say Axis or even Darwinia: solid, enjoyable, but not at his best.

I was browsing through some old posts of my own and, aside from noting some irritating typos I really should go back and fix, I noticed that in a post I had made earlyish last year on SF popularity I had identified a set (the intersection of the LT top five nominations and the Bakka bestsellers list) which had, later on, turned out to be a pretty good predictor (4/5 -- missing only the Cixin Liu book which, naturally turned out to be the winner) of the novels which would have been on the Hugo Awards nomination list in the absence of the Puppies' slating.

This actually makes some sense, when you come to think of it, because the process of saying "these are my top five books of 2014", although not constrained to books published in 2014 (as the Hugos were) is very similar for Hugo nominations and submissions to the LT list.

This year's list has about half the number of participants as last year's, but it's already interesting in terms of what it suggests are popular choices. The SF novels on the LT list which (a) have more than one member adding them and (b) are eligible for Hugos for MidAmericon II are:

• Uprooted (Novik) - 10 members


• Ancillary Mercy (Leckie) - 7 members


• Seveneves (Stephenson) - 3 members


• Sorceror to the Crown (Cho) - 2 members


• The Shepherd's Crown (Pratchett) - 2 members


• The Just City (Walton) - 2 members


• Aurora (Robinson) - 2 members

Unsurprisingly, the list also corresponds to the general set of books which I've seen regularly noticed positively in SFF fora.

It's also still in progress – yesterday there were two sponsors for The Library at Mount Char, but one of them has shifted their support overnight and it's down to one vote.

All three Ancillary books are in the top 100. Interestingly, The Three-Body Problem is in slot 111 (with one sponsor), but was not on last year's list at all. The other Hugo winners on the list with more than one sponsor are Among Others, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and Doomsday Book (there are many more with only one sponsor).

This could still change -- more members are likely to post their favourites to the LT list -- but it's certainly an easier way of handicapping the "core" (non-puppy) Hugo nominations than going through the extensive analysis that Chaos Horizon goes through.

ETA: The Bakka bestseller list for last year is now out, and the intersection is a bit smaller than the set given above.

It is:

• Uprooted (Novik)


• Ancillary Mercy (Leckie)


• The Shepherd's Crown (Pratchett)


• The Just City (Walton)


• Foxglove Summer (Aaronovitch) - only one sponsor, but on the Bakka list