Elder Race

Posted on by Josh Nudell

It’s always a shock, when I look on them the first time after waking. I forget how their stock and mine have diverged since the first colony ships left Earth. She is closer to baseline than I, but then the second great rise of Earth culture was one of grandiose ambitions and a refusal to accept limits, even the limits of human form. I am much altered from my ancestors, within and without, and these post-colonial natives have changed little.

Nyrgoth Elder was seven feet tall, gaunt, clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors. Lyn imagined a legion of tiny imps sewing that rich quilted fabric with precious metal, every tiny convolution fierce with occult meaning.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race belongs to a long tradition of Science Fiction that doubles as speculative anthropology, and this book would be right at home among the Hainish novels by this sub-genre’s master, Ursula Le Guin.

The book opens with a chapter told from the point of view of Lynesse Fourth Daughter, the younger daughter from the ruling house of the small kingdom of Lannesite who has taken it upon herself to seek out the sorcerer Nyrgoth Elder in his isolated tower in order to invoke an ancient compact that he would help in a moment of need. Her mother might not be moved to act, but a threat is indeed upon the world.

The second chapter introduces the central conceit of the novel.

The ancient being Lynesse calls Nyrgoth Elder is a man named Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist and the last remaining member of Earth’s Explorer Corps on Sophos 4, part of a mission to study how the first wave of human colonists had evolved in the thousands of years since their departure from earth. As a good* anthropologist, Nyr commits himself to non-intervention, but that line becomes harder and harder to hold to through the lonely centuries, even with his Dissociative Cognition System—a technological device that allows him to set his feelings aside to deal with later—activited.

Both characters undergo the same set of developments, but their experience diverges quite dramatically, since, as Arthur C. Clarke’s third law goes, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Nyr cannot explain his scientific understanding of the universe without Lynesse interpreting it as magic. Tchaikovsky’s achievement in the novel is to represent both the wonder and bafflement coming from both sides, especially in the chapter in the middle of the novel where both narrators relate the epic tale of the last time Nyr ventured from the tower, riding to war with Lynesse’s ancestor, at least in the version the Lynesse tells.

But where Lynesse is driven by her quest reminiscent of traditional fantasy stories with a young, naive protagonist, Nyr’s struggle is an interior one, against both the feelings of being an inadequate anthropologist since he is now intervening in the evolution of the subject population and the crushing loneliness of centuries isolated from every other human being.

“Forgive me, Elder. If not the monster, then there is some other foe in the world that causes you concern?” The thought was dire, and yet there was something weighing on him, and surely one did not become a great sorcerer without making great enemies.

And so she wanted to know why I looked sad, and I explained that it was basically a long-term mental state and that it was all under control, but that didn’t seem to be what she heard. And of course they don’t have a precise word for “clinical depression” or anything like that.

In contrast to these themes, the plot of Elder Race is quite simple. A quest pulls Nyr from his castle to investigate the rumors of an insidious plague that threatens life on the planet. He isn’t really supposed to intervene, but nevertheless agrees to help Lynesse. But the origin and nature of that threat, let alone any question of whether they are going to triumph, are not the focus of the book. It it is a perfectly competent plot, but one that does not go much for subtlety or misdirection. Instead, Tchaikovsky layers these two dissonant perspectives atop this simple narrative in order to explore more fundamental themes of human experience.

Elder Race is a short read (about 200 pages), and I loved every bit of it, enough so that I suspect that I will be seeking out his other work in the not-so-distant future.

ΔΔΔ

My reading remains ahead of my writing about books. Since my last review post, I finished three books other than this one: Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction, a manifesto about the importance of biological diversity, Lee Child’s Tripwire, which is a perfectly competent thriller that shows every sign of Child’s formulaic process, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, which was thoroughgoing Nobel fare: a family story that traces the consequences of colonialism in Tanzania before and after World War 1. Inspired by a run of recommendation requests (four in the past two weeks), I also just re-read Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members.

A List of my Favorite Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels (2022 Edition)

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This category is dedicated to books as standalone books that may or may not be part of a longer series. The dividing line for this list was whether I thought you could read just the one book from a series as a self-contained story. If the answer was no, then the series likely appears below. As with my list of favorite novels, this is both recommendation and not. The list is a product of personal taste and dim memory of when I read these books, which often speaks as much to who I was when I read them as to the overall quality.

A few stats:

  • Oldest: 1937 (Starmaker)
  • Newest: 2021 (A Master of Djinn)

Tier 3
34. The Redemption of Althalus, David and Leigh Eddings (2000)
33. Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (2013)
32. The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wexler (2013)
31. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (2005)
30. Inverted World, Christopher Priest (1974)
29. Foundation, Isaac Asimov (1951)
28. Kalpa Imperial, Angélica Gorodischer (1983)
27. The Bone Shard Daughter, Andrea Stewart (2020)
26. Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (2012)
25. The Postmortal, Drew Magary (2011)
24. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
23. The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin (1972)
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985)

Tier 2
21. A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E. Schwab (2015)
20. Ilium, Dan Simmons (2003)
19. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu (2008)
18. A Master of Djinn, P. Djeli Clark (2021)
17. A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (2019)
16. The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (2007)
15. The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (2015)
14. Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
13. Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
12. Dune, Frank Herbert (1965)
11. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke (2004)
10. Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (2020)
9. Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaimon (2013)
8. Starmaker, Olaf Stapledon (1937)

Tier 1
7. Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993)
6. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (2015)
5. Hyperion, Dan Simmons (1989)
4. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
2. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimon (1990)
1. American Gods, Neil Gaimon (2001)

Series

The following section is dedicated to fantasy books that I think of as series rather than as individual books. These series range from three to fourteen books. Not all of the series are complete and in fact my top two and four of my top ten are as-yet incomplete. Several caveats apply to this list. First, I have to have read all of the books in the series that are out, which eliminates series of books that I quite enjoyed, including some of the books on the above list. Second: where an ongoing series ranks depends in part on my estimation of the most recent books. Most notably for this iteration, Ken Liu’s series skipped past several series based largely on how much I loved last year’s release, and Arkady Martine’s books made a stunning debut in this category in large part because of A Desolation Called Peace. There is at least one first-book-in-a-series on the list above that I loved as a standalone, but was less impressed with how the series developed. The Expanse books would likely fall in Tier 3 between Tao and Shades, but I have only read half the books at the time this post went up.

Tier 3
19. Star Wars: X-Wing, various authors
18. The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu
17. Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
16. Kushiel’s Legacy, Jacqueline Carey
15. Machineries of Empire, Yoon Ha Lee
14. Tao Trilogy, Wesley Chu
13. Shades of Magic, V.E. Schwab

Tier 2
12. Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson
11. Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb
10.The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson
9. The Daevabad Trilogy, Shannon Chakraborty
8. Liveship Traders, Robin Hobb
7. Stormlight Archive, Brandon Sanderson
6. Teixcalaan Series, Arkady Martine

Tier 1
5. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Dandelion Dynasty, Ken Liu
3. Broken Earth, N.K. Jemisin
2. A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin
1. Kingkiller Chronicles, Patrick Rothfuss

A Desolation Called Peace

Posted on by Josh Nudell

What follows is the review of a sequel. I avoid spoilers for this novel, but can’t talk about it without mentioning plot points from A Memory Called Empire.

The cover of Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace.

Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire won last year’s Hugo Award for best novel, kicking off a vast new space opera centered on the conflict between the Lsel Station and the Teixcalaanli Empire. I only read one of the other finalists for the award but found A Memory Called Empire the vastly superior of the two and a worthy Hugo winner. The sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, is significantly better than the debut.

A Desolation Called Peace picks up several months after the events of A Memory Called Empire. Nineteen Adze’s accession to the throne has stabilized Teixcalaan even as the war against the unknown aliens has begun with the dispatch of six legions under the leadership of newly promoted Yaotlek Nine Hibiscus — a woman dangerous enough that observers wondered if the new emperor hopes she will die. Eight Antidote, the young clone of the deceased emperor and imperial heir, has begun training with the military establishment. Meanwhile, Three Seagrass, a functionary with the imperial intelligence has dispatched herself to the front lines, albeit with an unscheduled pit stop on Lsel to pick up the ambassador Mahit Dzmare — who is herself in political hot water and suspected of selling out Lsel secrets to Teixcalaan.

Martine deftly weaves numerous threads of political scheming throughout A Desolation Called Peace: Mahit against several different Lsel councillors; Eight Antidote who Nineteen Adze has begun calling little spy, Nine Hibiscus and her second, Twenty Cicada who she called Swarm, against potentially seditious subordinates. These plots give the novel pacing something like that of a political thriller. The reader sees each of these schemes unfold in roughly real-time as each chapter skips from one point of view to another.

However, the political machinations are not the core of A Desolation Called Peace.

This is a novel about first contact and what defines civilization. The latter themes were present in A Memory Called Empire where the two civilizations had vastly different attitudes toward memory, with Lsel relying on imago technology to implant the expertise from one generation to another and Teixcalaan nominally prizing “natural” memory preserved through poetic allusions. The tension between Lsel and Teixcalaan remains extant in A Desolation Called Peace, but now Martine introduces aspects of Teixcalaanli hypocrisy and both cultures are facing an alien enemy that is distinctly not human and clearly does not have the same values. They have potent technology, but it is unclear to the humans whether the nauseating screeching that they intercepted even constitutes language.

It is this mystery that Three Seagrass and Mahit must unravel even as the political conflicts rage behind and around them. At the same time, the war continues. Small vessels appear out of the darkness of space to inflict casualties on the Teixcalaanli legions and Teixcalaanli scouts probe into the unknown seeking a target that they can strike. It is a race to determine which approach will win out even though no one is certain that either one will work.

The overriding tension between the two approaches builds on and supersedes the other political dramas and makes for a compelling story. Even better, though, are Martine’s answers. As the novel raced toward its end, I couldn’t help but see it as an answer to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. In that classic novel, Ender is a brilliant child raised and reared for the purpose of guiding humanity’s war against an alien race, the Formics, that had once attacked earth. After the crucible of the Battle School, the expectation is that Ender will have the capacity to do the unthinkable in order to win and thus save humanity. Faced with a similar existential threat against an unknown enemy in A Desolation Called Peace, the outcome is much different. Most of the humans remain narrowly focused on their own desires such that engaging warfare that could result in xenocide seems like a nearly inevitable outcome.

ΔΔΔ

My reading has been all over the map of late and I am not going to write about everything. Since my last book post I finished two non-fiction books Kim Ghattas’ Black Wave, which was an incisive look at sectional conflict in the Middle East and Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet about William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. I also have finished three other novels, Eric Ambler’s early spy thriller Epitaph for a Spy, Toni Morrison’s brilliant The Bluest Eye about a young black woman who dreams of being white, and H.G. Parry’s A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians. This last one was alternate history featuring magic that received some buzz for being like Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, but I found it more than a little disappointing in that it sacrificed Clarke’s gift for inserting magic into the shadowy corners of our world in favor of giving real characters and events a veneer of magic.

A Memory Called Empire

Posted on by Josh Nudell

“So much of who we are is what we remember and retell,” said Three Seagrass. “Who we model ourselves on, which epic, which poem. Neurological enhancements are cheating.”

On some level space operas resemble one another: a galaxy-spanning empire, an exterior threat, an internal revolution, palace intrigue. A Memory Called Empire checks each box.

The sudden, unexplained death of Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn has created a crisis for Lsel Station, a small satellite of the massive Teixcalaanli Empire. For twenty years, Yskandr used his influence at the court to stave off annexation, and factions at court may see this death as an opportunity for expansion. In a desperate bid to retain independence, the Stationer Council has dispatched a new ambassador, Mahit Dzmare, to court armed only with years of training and an out of date imago of her predecessor—a piece of technology that gives her access to his experience and memories.

The out of date imago might be enough, but for its sabotage that causes the connection to her predecessor to burn out at the first moment of extreme emotion. Thus, Mahit is left to navigate the potential fatal rapids of Teixcalaanli using only her training, her wits, and her instincts as to whom among Teixcalaanli functionaries she can trust, all while trying to learn who killed Yskandr and redirect the military ambitions of an empire.

What Mahit finds is that a brewing civil war at court is the greatest threat to the independence of Lsel Station. The reigning emperor, Six Direction, is nearing the end of his life and scavengers are beginning to gather. Six Direction does have a young ninety-percent clone of himself, Eight Antidote, who he is grooming to succeed him (perhaps with a technological boost) alongside two co-regents Thirty Larkspur and Eight Loop. But this likely outcome has not stopped other members of the ezuazuacatlim, the emperor’s closest confidants, from intervening. As far as Mahit can tell, any of these people might decide it expedient to simply kill her — one, Nineteen Adze, she is pretty sure, has both saved her life, tried to have her killed, and held her in a gilded prison. To make matters worse, one of the empire’s most prominent generals, One Lightning, seems posed to stage a coup.

Against these forces Mahit trusts two functionaries: Three Seagrass, who is appointed as her liaison, and a friend of Three Seagrass’, Twelve Azalea. Every advantage Mahit hopes to rely on turns into a double edged sword. That is, except for a crucial piece of information about an unknown alien civilization hovering just outside explored space that could prove the difference not only for the survival of Lsel Station but also for the stability of the entire Teixcalaanli Empire, if only she can figure out who to tell.

I liked A Memory Called Empire quite a lot. Arkady Martine’s academic and civil-servant background were readily apparent, but this didn’t bother me as much as some reviewers whose opinions I respect and the setting of “space” offset a lot of my issues with R.F. Kuang’s Poppy War. Where I found the plot of A Memory Called Empire to be somewhat cookie-cutter space-opera, I thought she did a wonderful job building the setting, both with a planet-city run by an AI and in building out the galactic empire and its satellites. The Teixcalaanli empire is, functionally, a cross-section of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire (her specialty), and the Aztec Empire, all of which were surrounded by small satellite states that were perennially at risk of annexation. Establishing the naming conventions of Lsel closer to those an American audience are familiar with did that much more to allow Mahit to be a reader surrogate lost in the machinations and poetry (literally) of the Teixcalaanli court. I likewise didn’t buy the critique that we are meant to care about the stakes of the Teixcalaanli succession; we’re meant to care about Mahit surviving the crisis however it resolves.

However, what I appreciated most about A Memory Called Empire was one of those words in the title: memory. The imago machines, technology that allowed the wisdom and experience of generations to literally pass down through the generations was a clever wrinkle to the genre that had multiple different iterations throughout the novel. It is introduced to us as a potential crutch at the outset, something that will give Mahit a fighting chance at court, but when hers goes out early on in the story it becomes something else — something she is desperately trying to recover but also something that is sought by others with an almost McGuffin-level of devotion, and an object of debate between Mahit and Three Seagrass. For Mahit, this is the best way to preserve knowledge among a small community, while Three Seagrass sees it as a way of short-circuiting the allusive poetic culture of Teixcalaanli because it allows for replication rather than remembrance.

ΔΔΔ

I have been meaning to write this post for some time now, so it is pretty far out of order relative to what I’ve been reading recently. Since my last books post I have finished both Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, a gripping memoir about looking for his family members killed in the Holocaust, and Ben Cohen’s The Hot Hand, a journalistic look at the science of streaks that had some interesting stories, but that I found frustrating overall.

Death’s End

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Cixin Liu burst on the the American science fiction radar with his remarkable Three-Body Problem, which imagined an intergalactic conflict between humanity and a a race of people called the Trisolarans, named such for their planet and its three suns. News of this contact kicked off a crisis era in humanity. The Dark Forest continued the conflict between these two systems, establishing the Wallfacer project which aimed to coordinate humanity’s resources to confront the threat, eventually establishing a Dark Forest Hypothesis of intergalactic civilization—that secrecy is the best defense because there is always a more powerful civilization that may well decide to eliminate any potential rival. This hypothesis led to Dark Forest Deterrence, best compared to mutually-assured destruction of the Cold War, and a Swordbearer with the sole authority to send out the intergalactic signal. Such is the circumstance at the start of Death’s End, the brilliant conclusion to this trilogy.

Much like its two predecessors, Death’s End is a self-contained story that spans both space and time. This time, the primary protagonist is Cheng Xin, an aeronautical engineer involved in the Staircase project, a program meant to get a person to Trisolaris. (Because of weight restrictions, they only launch the brain of a terminally-ill classmate of Cheng Xin’s, Yun Tianming). Cheng Xin then goes into hibernation and awakens at the very end of the Deterrence Era, the period during which Luo Ji ensured mutually-assured destruction on the basis of the Dark Forest Hypothesis—that is, that there is a force even more powerful than Trisolaris—in part so that she can be elevated as the new Swordholder.

However, Cheng Xin is not Luo Ji and she is not capable of deterrence, leading to a period of Earth’s subjugation by Trisolaris, except that the Trisolaran ships sent to destroy Gravity and Blue Space, two ships that also possess the capacity to broadcast the location of both systems, are unable to fulfill their missions. An advanced civilization ignites on the of the Trisolaran suns, which prompts humanity to create artificial habitats in the shadow of Jupiter (the so-called Bunker Era). But even this facsimile of life on earth will not last and the solar system is collapsed into the micro-universes where the speed of light is reduced where the seemingly-last humans live out an eternity waiting for the rebirth of the universe.

If all of this seems like a big haul, well, it is.

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy is a throwback to an old style of science fiction along the lines of an Asimov or Stapledon. It is a story that takes place on an enormous scale and explores the rise of fall of civilizations. I cannot speak to the “accuracy” of the mathematics or science but thought that the future history of humanity became progressively more compelling as the series developed.

Liu’s fascination with the science and big ideas also has a tendency to simplify humanity into a single society as defined against the alien races. As plausible as this vision of humanity is over the long haul, it also has a way of erasing the complexities of the contemporary society in which these books were written. Human on human violence, for instance, is largely limited to personal political power or how humans ought to interact with alien races. But Liu is the crown jewel of a Chinese-government program to promote science fiction that coincides with a rapidly-developing science sector. At the same time, the Chinese government has been interning Uyghur ethnic minorities in the Northwest, allegedly for reeducation, but by all accounts for the purposes of indoctrination—not to mention reports of torture, imprisonment, family separation, forced birth-control, and abuse.

In the New Yorker profile linked above, Cixin Liu downplayed the influence of the contemporary context on his fiction, but he also trots out familiar apologetics for the camps: a benevolent government saving them from poverty and giving them economic opportunity. Liu is in a difficult position given the nature of the news in China and his relationship to the Chinese establishment, admittedly, but he is also wrong to suggest that he is able to escape this baggage. The result is a dark cloud that looms over this deeply engaging series even as David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the show-runners behind Game of Thrones, are reportedly beginning production on a Netflix adaptation.

ΔΔΔ

I am well into the crush of the fall semester at this point, which is cutting into both my reading and writing time. I have nevertheless finished I.J. Singer’s The Brother’s Ashkenazi, a yiddish family drama set in Poland, and Dreyer’s English, a romp through the English language as told by Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief at Random House. I am now reading Drago Jančar’s The Galley Slave.

Binti

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka is of the Himba, the African people who apply otjize to their skin and hair. In a world where the people of Earth are connected to other planets, the Himba people stand apart. The Khoush, as they are called, expanded outward and send their brightest children to the center of higher learning in the galaxy, Oomza Uni, while the Himba stay put, free of the conflicts created by Khoush expansion, while exploring the universe by traveling inward. That is, until Binti tests into Oomza Uni and runs away from home in order to study mathematics.

The bulk of Nnedi Okorafor’s slim novella takes place on Binti’s flight from Earth to Oomza Uni aboard “Third Fish…a Miri 12, a type of ship closely related to a shrimp.” Other than Binti’s sense of wonder at everything new, the voyage is uneventful until, abruptly, Meduse raiders attack the ship because this extra-terrestrial race is at war with the Khoush. They sweep through the ship with “the Great Wave,” slaughtering everyone except Binti who is protected by her edan, a strange metallic device that damages the Meduse and allows her to talk to them.

Binti barricades herself in her room, only to learn that the Meduse haven’t come for blood, but to infiltrate Oomza Uni and recover their leader’s stinger that has been lodged there for years.

I entirely understand why this book won awards for best novella. It is a delightful read with a purity of purpose as it tackles issues of isolationism, war, fear, revenge, and colonialism. Binti’s special power is to be a “harmonizer,” and her survival gives an opportunity for cross-cultural exchange. The Meduse hate the edan, but are intrigued her “okuoko,” the Meduse word for their tentacles, as they interpret the thick strands formed by her hair covered in otjize, which, it turns out, can also heal the burns formed by the edan. In turn, Binti learns of the root of their conflict with the Khoush and promises to help if it will stop further bloodshed.

In short, this is a book with a gleaming heart that pulses with optimism, projecting the evils of colonialism into space in order to demonstrate the possibilities of diversity and empathy.

But to my eye, this optimism was also its glaring weakness. In a desperate gambit to create peace, Binti declares “Let me be…let me speak for the Meduse. The people in Oomza Uni are academics, so they’ll understand honor and history and symbolism and matters of the body.” Subsequently she admits that this is a hope, rather than something she knows, but she is confident in her ability to harmonize anywhere––and the academics only took the stinger out of ignorance.

This is a great sentiment, of course, and perhaps it works in this sort of fiction where people are endowed with unique gifts, but inasmuch as Binti serves as a parable about colonialism, it very much did not. Institutions of higher education embedded with the legacies of colonial and racial exploitation and, too often, when both they and the institutions are challenged on these grounds, the response is to become defensive. Rarely do they turn over the artifacts, as the resistance to returning the Parthenon Marbles should suggest, leave alone when the artifacts come from Africa.

My favorite example, and one that I use in my World History class, is the so-called Benin Bronzes, which are these beautiful brass plaques that a British punitive expedition looted in the 19th century. Despite the unambiguous record of ownership—they were looted in a war, not bought (from a legitimate seller or not) like the Parthenon Marbles—western museums have repeatedly ignored requests from Nigeria for their return and have only begun to change their stance in the last decade.

These examples on scratch the surface of these sorts of problems. Too frequently, institutions of higher education have a way of creating and replicating privilege around race, class, and gender, and the systems designed to protect academic freedom imbue them with the attitude of “I’ve got mine” made worse by perpetual austerity and provide a platform that lend legitimacy to prejudices that reflect society as a whole.

Perhaps the point of Binti is to show a world as it should exist, not free of prejudices but where enlightenment is possible. And yet, as someone laboring within the system as it is now, this point seemed as implausible as a shrimp-like vessel capable of interstellar travel.

ΔΔΔ

This is the second post catching up on a backlog that, includes Day of the Oprichnik, Sugar Street, Sudden Death, and A Gathering of Shadows, and I am now reading David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

A list of my favorite Fantasy and Sci-Fi Novels (2020 edition)

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Individual Novels

This category is dedicated to books as standalone books that may or may not be part of a longer series of books. The dividing line for this list was whether I thought you could read just the one book from a series as a self-contained story. If the answer was no, then the series likely appears below. As with my list of favorite novels, this is both recommendation and not. The list is a product of personal taste and dim memory of when I read these books, which often speaks as much to who I was when I read them as to the overall quality.

Tier 3
27. The Redemption of Althalus, David and Leigh Eddings (2000)
26. The Armored Saint, Myke Cole (2018)
25. Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (2013)
24. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (2005)
23. Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (2012)
22. Inverted World, Christopher Priest (1974)
21. Foundation, Isaac Asimov (1951)
20. The Postmortal, Drew Magary (2011)
19. Neuromancer, William Gibson
18. The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
17. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985)

Tier 2
16. A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E. Schwab (2015)
15. Ilium, Dan Simmons (2003)
14. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu (2008)
13. The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (2007)
12. The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (2015)
11. Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
10. Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
9. Dune, Frank Herbert (1965)
8. Starmaker, Olaf Stapledon (1937)
7. Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaimon (2013)

Tier 1
6. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemison (2015)
5. Hyperion, Dan Simmons (1989)
4. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
2. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimon (1990)
1. American Gods, Neil Gaimon (2001)

Series

This category is dedicated to fantasy books that I think of as series rather than as individual books. These series range from three to fourteen books. Not all of the series are complete and in fact my top two and four of my top ten are as-yet incomplete. The only caveat to this list is that I have to have read all of the books in the series that are out, which eliminates series of books that I quite enjoyed, including some of the books on the above list.

Tier 3
14. Star Wars: X-Wing, various authors
13. Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
12. Kushiel’s Legacy, Jacqueline Carey
11. Tao Trilogy, Wesley Chu

Tier 2
10. Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson
9. Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb
8. Dandelion Dynasty, Ken Liu
7. The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson
6. Liveship Traders, Robin Hobb
5. Stormlight Archive, Brandon Sanderson

Tier 1
4. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Broken Earth, N.K. Jemisin
2. A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin
1. Kingkiller Chronicles, Patrick Rothfuss

A List of my Favorite Novels (2020 edition)

Posted on by Josh Nudell

A few years ago I published a list of my favorite novels. At the time I had intended to update this list annually, but never did, in part because there wasn’t much movement on the list and because the initial series included capsules that took a lot of work to write.

I have read a lot of really good books since publishing that list, with the result that not only is the list more than twice as long, but also that there has been substantial movement within it. For instance, the original list was entirely male and overwhelmingly white; it still leans heavily that direction, but also contains more than a dozen books by non-white authors and about a quarter of the new books were written by women, all of which entered the list in the last two years. These demographics are entirely based on the demographics in the books I read, so I fully expect that the list will continue to diversify as I read more widely.

Before getting to the list, a few preliminaries:

  • This list is a reflection of my own personal taste. I have become a more discerning reader since publishing the initial list, but I am not primarily making an aesthetic literary judgement.
  • This list combines the experience I had when I read the book with the foggy recollection of memory. I cannot promise that were I to read the book again it would land in the same place.
  • I have subdivided the list into tiers because some of the distinctions amount to splitting hairs.
  • This list serves both as recommendation and not. When I recommend books to a particular reader, I tailor the list to the recipient. To wit, I am moved by Hemingway’s writing and thought that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest was brilliant; I rarely recommend anyone read either.
  • I once intended to make this list out to a round one hundred books, or one hundred +X, but while there are hundreds and hundreds of books in the world that I have enjoyed, not all of those made the list because I instead decided that it should serve as a collection of books that I consider all-time favorites.
  • I am offended by lists of great novels that include series and books that are not novels. To reflect this, I have created a second list of my favorite works of science fiction and fantasy that includes both stand-alone novels and series, which will appear in a subsequent post. Some works appear on both lists.
  • The dates in parentheses are publication date, even when the publication was posthumous.

And a few stats:

  • Languages: 12
  • Books by women: 11
  • Oldest: 1899 (The Heart of Darkness)
  • Newest: 2017 (American War and Exit West)

Tier 5

66. Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Adric (1945)
65. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
64. Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
63. Water For Elephants, Sara Gruen (2006)
62. The Clergyman’s Daughter, George Orwell (1935)
61. Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco (1988)
60. Basti, Intizar Husein (1979)
59. The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama (1994)
58. The Time of the Hero, Mario Vargas Llosa (1963)
57. Dune, Frank Herbert (1965)
56. The Stranger, Albert Camus (1942)
55. First and Last Man, Olaf Stapledon (1930)
54. Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis (1946)
53. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh (1938)

Tier 4

52. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaimon (2016)
51. The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino (1957)
50. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse (1951)
49. White Noise, Don Delillo (1985)
48. The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth (1932)
47. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid (2017)
46. Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz (1956)
45. Burmese Days, George Orwell (1934)

Tier 3

44. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899)
43. Hyperion, Dan Simmons (1989)
42. The Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)
41. I, The Supreme, Augusto Roa Bastos (1974)
40. The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk (2008)
39. American War, Omer el-Akkad (2017)
38. The Man Who Spoke Snakish, Andrus Kivirähk (2007)
37. If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin (1974)
36. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
35. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood (2000)

Tier 2

34. The Bad Girl, Mario Vargas Llosa (2006)
33. Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon (1937)
32. Good Omens, Neil Gaimon and Terry Pratchett (1990)
31. A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (2013)
30. I Saw Her That Night, Drago Jančar (2010)
29. The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk (1990)
28. The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa (2000)
27. American Gods, Neil Gaimon (2001)
26. Catch 22, Joseph Heller (1961)
25. Creation, Gore Vidal (1981)
24. Coming Up for Air, George Orwell (1939)
23. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway (1940)
22. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)
21. Snow, Orhan Pamuk (2002)
20. Stoner, John Williams (1965)
19. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
18. The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck (2013)
17. Lolita, Vladimir Nobokov (1955)
16. Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann (1947)

Tier 1B

15. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante (2011)
14. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924)
13. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (1998)
12. The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (2008)
11. The Jokers, Albert Cossery (1964)
10. To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway (1937)
9. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
8. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell (1936)
7. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1926)
6. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (1996)

Tier 1A

5. Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
4. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
3. Magister Ludi, Hermann Hesse (1943)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949)
1. The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis (1955)

The Dark Forest

Posted on by Josh Nudell

“For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template for their dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up.”

Make time for civilization, for civilization won’t make time.

The sequel to the Hugo-winning novel The Three-Body Problem picks up where the first book left off, with the world in a crisis era. A fleet from Tri-Solaris, a technologically advanced civilization cultivating the earth for colonization, is on its way…and will arrive in a little over four hundred years. How will the human race respond to this crisis when the enemy is capable of reading and hearing everything, has put a cap on the advance of science, and no nation yet has so much as a single space ship?

The central plot of The Dark Forest is humanity’s preparation for the all-but inevitable doomsday battle.

Humanity gambles its fate on reckless plan. If the Tri-Solarians know everything said or written, then the only hope for survival is to appoint saviors empowered to come up with plans in the security of their minds. The UN appoints four men Wallfacers, named after the practice of meditation, and empowers them to appropriate resources to defend the human race––with bureaucratic oversight, of course.

Three Wallfacers are obvious choices: Frederick Tyler, a former US Defense Secretary, Manuel Rey Diaz, the president of Venezuela who defeated a US invasion, and Bill Hines, a renowned diplomat and pathbreaking neurosurgeon. For each of these the Earth-Trisolaris Organization appoints someone a “Wallbreaker,” designed to foil their efforts. But the fourth Wallspeakers is a curiosity, a failed Chinese professor named Luo Ji whose main contribution to the world outside a string of disastrously fleeting sexual liaisons is to have been an early adopter (and earlier abandoner) of “Cosmic Sociology” in a conversation with the astro-physicist Ye Wenjie.

Nobody quite understands why the UN appointed Luo Ji (least of all Luo Ji, who tries to reject the appointment), but the Tri-Solarans see him as a threat and determine to kill him before the plan he doesn’t know he is concocting foils their invasion.

Everyone else prepares, pioneering innovations to space travel and hibernation so that people can see their plans to fruition. In the years that pass, humanity survives “The Great Rift” that threatened to destroy humanity prematurely, and makes great strides in military technology, but overconfidence breeds complacency and the greatest threats are the ones they don’t know about.

The Dark Forest is not a character-driven novel in the traditional sense. As such, Cixin Liu’s characters in this series feel somewhat impersonal, though this may also stem from cultural differences. Here, at least the story engine is the tension between individual agency, the solipsistic desire for personal pleasure, and the bureaucratic structures that mitigate both––for good and for ill. The individual is the only hope for society, but the overriding impulse for most people is to take their own pleasure. Luo Ji is one protagonist, the unlikely hero and a vehicle for exploring the best and worst of human nature, his principal antagonist is humanity, which, in turn is also a protagonist faced by a combination of Tri-Solaris and itself.

Like its predecessor, The Dark Forest blends styles to explore broad philosophical questions. This installment, however, is best described as a blend of two science fiction types: the doomsday confrontation of an Orson Scott Card and the broad, galaxy-spanning scope of an Isaac Asimov or Olaf Stapledon. The combination resulted in long periods of philosophical meditation punctuated by moments of frenetic action.

I struggled a bit with remembering the characters who carried over from the first book, but that is a function of my being a native English speaker, but this was my only complication in a novel that I burned through.

Non-linear in chronology and epic in scope and fusing Chinese worldview with a philosophy that is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about human nature, I loved The Dark Forest and am looking forward to see how the series concludes.

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I recently also finished reading Sourdough, a comic novel about a young woman who discovers bread and love, and so abandons her lucrative, soul-sucking job in tech, and will be writing about it in the next couple of days. I just started American Prometheus, a Pulitizer prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that I picked up on a recent trip to New Mexico.

Neuromancer

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.

In a world of bright, runaway urban sprawl, grungy alleys and runaway tech-implants, Case is a cowboy. That is, someone who jacks into computer mainframes and hacks into programs to steal things. Case was a cowboy. Two years ago he stole from his employers, was caught. Instead of killing him, they injected him with a toxin that fried his nervous system and burned out his ability to operate in cyberspace.

Broken and living with a bounty on his head in Chiba, Japan, Case is recruited by a mysterious man calling himself Armitage and his dangerous employee Molly, a tech-enhanced killer. Armitage pays for an experimental surgery to repair his broken nervous system, telling Case that he is on the hook for a job. If he refuses, the toxins will be released back into his blood.

What follows is a dizzyingly-psychedelic heist novel. Case comes to realize that Armitage is a front for a more powerful entity, a powerful artificial intelligence called Wintermute created by the enigmatic Tessier-Ashpool family against the Turing board regulations. But Wintermute is incomplete, and has assembled this crack team of broken individuals to unite it with its other half, Neuromancer.

Neuromancer does a few things really well. Its world is immersive and the consequences of this tech-dystopia are revealed. Anything is possible, for the right price. For instance, Molly sold her body for sex in order to pay for the enhancements. Not explicitly called prostitution, Molly became a puppet where she experienced it as a dream while her body fulfilled the desires of men.

The mandatory scenes of collecting the team were likewise effective. The individuals are all highly competent, but equally flawed. The result is that the tensions are ratcheted up because the team is simultaneously competing against the opposition and racing against the inevitability that their old flaws—drugs, trauma, physical limits—cause them to crack.

I appreciated Neuromancer, but I didn’t love it. For instance, where Molly’s sexual history was effectively horrifying, both highlighting the exploitation inherent in her objectification and coming back with narrative ramifications, she has another relationship with Case. It is clearly consensual, but it was comparatively unexplained and therefore felt gratuitous, as though one of her character’s primary purposes is as a sexual object.

More broadly, Gibson’s attention to the detail of this world was simultaneously effective and distracting, making this the rare book where I pulled up reviews to make sure that I read what I thought I had read.

Published in 1984, Neuromancer was ahead of its time and is one of the foundational texts in the genre of tech-dystopia. It is built out in the underbelly of a world dominated by corporations and wealthy families, where exploitation is rampant and there is a cult-like adherence to faith in technology as a panacea for all ills, and where our heroes are supposed to be the singularly special individuals who are out to save themselves at all costs from a world that has already torn them to shreds.

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I have had less time to read recently than I would like, but that happens sometimes. I just picked up Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, a coming of age college novel. It is too soon to pass judgement, but so far, so good.