The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014) edited by Jonathan Strahan is a collection of short fiction published in 2013. The short stories and novellas are selected by Strahan, whose taste tends to fall on the literary side of SFF, with well-crafted prose and a focus on character, though there's plenty of plot to go around. There's also slippage between genres in a bunch of these works.
There's twenty eight stories in here, and none bad. There are favorites like Neil Gaiman and Joe Abercrombie with decent short stories. Known for his
hard SF, there's Greg Egan's “Zero for Conduct”, a humanistic story about a Afghani college student studying in Iran who makes a scientific discovery. She then has to deal with logistics of manufacturing and transport between borders, as well as dealing with the locals. Yoon Ha Lee's “Effigy Nights” is a wonderful story straddling the SFF line about a military invasion on a planet whose inhabitants fight back with creepy magic.
There's way too much other good stuff in here to properly describe, like Ramez Naam's “Water”, a near future corporate hacking/AI/terrorism thriller, and Ted Chiang's look at memory and language in “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling”. K. J. Parker's “The Sun and I“ is a hilarious story of the creation of a religion, Caitlín R. Kiernan's “The Road of Needles” follows a space freighter feeling regretful of ignoring her family's pleas while terraforming technology aboard the ship goes haywire, and “The Irish Astronaut” by Val Nolan examines survivor's guilt and could well be a mainstream literary story.
The stories by M. Bennardo, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Priya Sharma, Ian R. Macleod, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Sofia Samatar, An Owomoyela, Karin Tidbeck, and Robert Reed are all fantastic as well. Strahan has put together a significant and diverse collection of stories this year.
Trying to fix my fantasy blindspots, I read
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis. Four siblings are sent off to a countryside manor during WWII, and discover a portal to a fantastical land under rule of a despot. Lewis writes a bunch of Christian allegory and themes into the novel, making it an interesting read beyond the surface of a children's epic war story. Though the religious tone is unsubtle at times, the novel provides some surprisingly moving and shocking moments.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012) by Ben Fountain is a touching and funny novel that's centered around Bravo Squad, who are considered Iraq war heroes for a taped firefight that has blitzed the media and captured the nation. Nineteen year old Billy Lynn is part of the unit and he, along with the rest of the survivors, have been pulled out of the war for a couple weeks for a tour around the U.S., to boost morale and support for an unpopular war and administration. The tour spends its last day at a Dallas Cowboys game, where our heroes deal with all manner of indignation and revelry.
The novel spends a lot of time satirizing the war, the military, politicians as well as everything American. Billy Lynn loves his existential and sarcastic ruminations about war and death, family, overeager supporters of the troops, Hollywood, football, consumerism and greed and business, as well his own many faults. Fountain's prose is well served to this task, with long meandering sentences chock full of metaphors for everything, mostly in a conversational and informal tone.
The characterization of most folks is nicely done, though surprisingly some of the remaining members of Bravo squad aren't sketched out well. Billy does seem like a kid who's grown up quick, though some of his angst is a little heady. On the whole, Fountain packs a lot into this novel and succeeds with the majority of it.
Blindsight (2006) by Peter Watts is a hard SF novel concerning first contact with an alien species and the nature of consciousness and humanity. It's a novel that asks the unlikely question, was the evolution of consciousness even a good thing for our species? It grapples with that question through an encounter with the truly alien, something nigh incomprehensible.
Watts weaves plenty of science, psychology, and plausible extrapolations into the space journey of a group of scientists and observers trying to figure out the origin of an alien communication, as well as it its meaning. Watts' mostly good prose means there's plenty of awe and horror to go around, while still creating a net of humanity to fall back onto.
Blindsight comes highly recommended online, and I'd add to those. Watts has made it available to read online in a number of formats
so check it out. A novel in the same universe was released recently as well.
---
I'm reading
White Noise by Don Delillo right now, about halfway through and enjoying it.
