Best Reads of 2010

I read 134 books in 2010. The following are my twelve favorites. For variety's sake, each author is limited to a single work, and books that made the previous Best Released list will not be considered here.  I’ll post my complete reading list for the year in a few days, so you know what I’m drawing from here.

In alphabetical order, we’ve got:

Review here.

Andreyev’s characters try and often fail to find meaning, their lives so well portrayed that the century’s gap between the tales’ writing and reading does not dim their impact in the slightest. This collection is often startlingly dark, with stories like The Red Laugh painting our whole world with their hellish brush, and other tales like The Abyss showing compassion and innocence defiled, destroyed, and left by the roadside. Andreyev is a master of pace, capable of making a man’s final night seem like years and of making the longest waits and isolations heavy with their inevitable ending. Though the exclusion of one of Andreyev’s best stories, Lazarus, is disappointing, Visions is still an incredible work.

Bakker’s debut is a work of powerful, vivid prose and thought provoking ideas, offering genuine insight while also succeeding at the standards by which mainline Epic Fantasy is judged. Though there are pacing issues, their detrimental effect was diminished on reread (this was my second time through), and those problems are ultimately inconsequential in the face of what’s presented. Bakker's characterization is deep, if miserable, and sympathetic, if deplorable. The various societies of Bakker’s world walk a fine line between recreating history and pure imagination, falling to one side or the other as their prominence dictates, and the magic here is innovative and excellently depicted. Highly recommended for any fans of fantasy.

The Master and Margarita crackles with vitriolic wit. Bulgakov’s writing is impassioned, outlandish, and brilliant. He can make you care for his characters. He can make you laugh at his characters. He can make you hate his characters. The Master and Margarita uses excellently realized fantasy to criticize and examine the oppressive world around it. This is a classic of genre and literature.

Malazan is a bizarre mix of larger than life fantasy and Erikson’s philosophical and social musings. The series is far from flawless, but Erikson’s large cast and powerful prose make each of the volumes satisfying and often exemplary. When it comes to balancing visceral entertainment and more cerebral pleasures, the early volumes often fell too far to the shallow-but-fun side of the spectrum, while Toll the Hounds almost wholly sacrificed plot for the sake of writing and theme. House of Chains is one of the few volumes in the series that manages to flawlessly blend the two elements. The volume features the introduction of Karsa Orlong, beginning with his extended viewpoint, and then takes us through the height of the Seven Cities rebellion. The new ground level perspectives introduced with the Malazan army that comes into play here are well done, and the battles are mixed with the atmosphere of other, imaginative scenes that take place in the farthest reaches of Erikson’s creation.

Up until last night, American Gods was on this list. Then I read Sandman. This is a graphic novel of startling scope and imagination, with a grace of writing and presence of atmosphere that make it remarkable in any category. The sheer depravity of 24 Hours and the power of The Sound of Her Wings together managed to make Preludes & Nocturnes one of my favorite reads of 2010, and I’ll even say that Gaiman edged out Moore for my favorite Graphic Novel writer. And I hear that the first volume is the weakest of the series. Is that even possible?

Review here.

Gilman’s prose in Gears of the City is among the finest that I’ve read this year. His characters are theatrical masterpieces, cackling and monolithic in their flaws and triumphs, and his world is oppressive and immersive. I could try and rationally argue for its spot here, but I think I’d rather let Gilman do that for me and just give you another excerpt of the novel’s writing:

Later, as Arjun and Brace-Bel hid in the darkness of their bolt-hole, Brace-Bel would breathlessly recount his adventures in the Museum. He explained that he had always, in his strange life, been the villain, or worse, the laughingstock; but he’d ventured into the enemy’s lair in search of his true beloved like a hero of the highest and most chivalrous romance. His purpose had been pure as the purest knight’s, because he expected nothing from [her], nothing at all. He became what he was always meant to be. It was laughable, humiliating, but also superb… (p. 233)

Review here.

Joe Hill’s debut collection is a brilliant piece of horror, which also happens to examine just what horror is and how it works. Hill is capable of visceral darkness, as he proves again and again in tales like Abraham’s Boys and In the Rundown, but he’s also adept at moments of heartwarming melancholy that leave your world feeling drained of color in comparison afterwards, as he shows in Pop Art and the title story. There’s the occasional weaker story, but they don’t succeed in bringing down the power of the collection. Hill proves himself right out of the gate and doesn’t let up; 20^th Century Ghosts is masterful and self conscious horror.

When I reread The Shining in March, I said that it was the best novel by the greatest modern horror author. Now, having discovered Ligotti, the latter part of that statement is almost painfully off (especially when one considers King’s lamentable later work), but that does nothing to dilute the power of The Shining. This is pretty much a textbook example of how modern horror should be written. The characters are complex and sympathetic, their relationships organic in their development, and the horror comes from the characters and their relationship to the world. It’s true that the ending is a disappointment, but what precedes those last pages is so powerful that the ending’s weakness fails to damage the work. This is a must read for horror fans.

Thomas Ligotti’s work is hypnotically powerful and devastatingly depressing. The man’s prose is crystalline, flawless and ornate. His grasp of atmosphere is equal to Lovecraft’s, and those are not words I say lightly. Choosing whether to include Songs of a Dead Dreamer or Teatro Grottesco here was very difficult. I ended up going with the latter. It’s less outright horror, operating even more on a cerebral level than Songs… did. The stories here are crushing, but they’re so well written that they are, somehow, beautiful at the same time. Review coming.

McCarthy’s work is brutally, horrifically violent. Most action stories, whether prose or film, manage to make violence glorious and exciting. Blood Meridian does the opposite. This is a story devoid of sympathetic characters and understandable motivations. It is a story with no goal in sight. It is, simply, violence, brutal and uncompromising, unending and representing the entirety of the world. And the reader, mesmerized by McCarthy’s masterful prose, has no choice but to keep reading.

Moore’s work is dark, powerful, and multifaceted; his inclusion in this year’s Best Of was assured. But that still leaves the question of which of his works to show. V for Vendetta (review forthcoming) was very powerful and generally devoid of some of the flaws of Watchmen (the ending-from-nowhere, for instance). Still, I had to go for the later work. Watchmen was generally deeper, and the character of Rorschach and his ultimate decision is still present in my mind despite having been read months earlier. If what you think when you hear super heroes isn't a nuanced examination of the nature of power, you need to read this.

After Dark is the story of a few almost unconnected characters in the early morning hours of Tokyo. There’s little to no overarching plot. Going in, I didn’t think that I would love this book, but Murakami’s prose made me an easy convert. This novel is beautiful, and I mean that in the fullest sense of the word. Tokyo is vibrant, alive, and bizarre, and the different characters came to feel as real as anyone I’ve ever met. Review’s on the way.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

This was no contest. Sheepfarmer’s Daughter was boring, and that's just about the worst thing that can be said of entertainment. The characters are uninteresting, the plot is uninvolving, the themes are occasionally offensive but generally unremarkable, and prose is wholly devoid of style. When reading is a chore best handled in fifteen minute increments, you know that something’s gone wrong.

THE WORKS UNCONSIDERED

When compiling this list, I left Shakespeare and Dostoevsky out of consideration for a variety of reasons. First, both are classic authors. You don’t need me to tell you that. More importantly, with Shakespeare, there’s the fact that I find it difficult to view his work in the same way that I do another author’s, and I’m not talking about quality here. Shakespeare is on such a pedestal, and his work has so seeped into popular culture, that one’s expectations going in are monolithic, and rare is (at least from what I’ve seen) the reader who, going into Hamlet (to pick a play at random) does not know the majority of the plot. If I had included Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, they would have both made the list (King Lear beating out Hamlet, for me), but that’s not to say that they would have been my favorite books on it.

Best Releases of 2010

I've read eighteen books released this year. Of those, four stood out as head and shoulders above the rest.  Each of these books is something I would recommend to any genre fan.

So let's get to some books, shall we?

Review here.

The Halfmade World excelled in just about every category I can think of to judge fiction. The world is immersive, well thought out, and interesting, and the characters that populate it are both larger than life and crippled by flaws. Liv is ineffective and, for much of the novel, incapable of surviving on her own. Creedmore is narcissistic and self pitying. Lowry is an automaton, unwilling to acknowledge that he’s walking right off a cliff. Gilman's created a focused work that feels epic, a fascinating cast of characters, and a gripping plot. I’d compare The Halfmade World to the other releases of the year, but there’s really no need. 2010 has a clear winner, and it’s standing right here.

Review here.

Like The Halfmade World, Terminal World uses a personal struggle to illuminate vast, world changing events. Admittedly, none of Reynolds’ characters here have the sheer power of Gilman’s in the above book. But Reynolds has never been a character writer, even if his characters have grown immeasurably. I read Reynolds books to be wowed by concepts and shifts in scale, to be awed by creations I could never have conceived of. The ideas in Terminal World will blow your mind. The Spire’s varying levels of technology allow clear demarcations within the text, and Reynolds gets to play in a half dozen different playgrounds. Every level is exquisitely rendered, from the opening to the steampunk to the endless wastes. Reynolds’ tone is no less variable, ranging from pure fun to awe to terror, and all in the same ten pages. If he’d wanted to end the book with the characters’ view of the Swarm below them and call it a day, I think I would have still walked away trying to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Review here.

The Folding Knife shares a limited cast with the prior two books, but it differentiates itself by not really being about the imagined world at all. Oh, Basso is in charge of the country, but we really only care about the Vesani as far as Basso feels like being compassionate that day. Parker’s newest novel is cynical, witty, and incredibly deep. It would be easy to make a novel about a single, narcissistic antihero who gets his way and have it be off putting and tensionless, and it’s true that the secondary characters here show a disappointing lack of depth, but Basso himself is humanized by his flaws and fascinating for his peculiar morality. If I were to pick an Epic Fantasy read of the year, it’s undoubtedly this.

Review here.

Apartment 16’s cast is uneven, and the climax is ultimately disappointing. On the other hand, the book’s atmosphere is oppressive enough to smother you on a sunny beach in Florida. Nevill invites the reader along as he splits his characters’ world in two and sends Seth down the dark path. Watching the main character gradually recede from humanity is a painful experience, and it’s only made more so by his occasional intersections with the world that we recognize. This is a dark and uncompromising read that will stay with you long after you’re done with it.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Review here.

Abraham's short fiction proved as multifaceted as his novels. Leviathan Wept is a varied and powerful work, capable of terrifying you with one story and warming your heart with the next. The collection was brought down slightly be a few slightly weaker stories as it went on, but this is still an essential read.

Review here.

Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction work is as insidious as his short fiction. The ideas presented in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race are interesting and well argued, if not always persuasive. I didn't put this in the upper list because I've no idea how one can conclusively state that a book of philosophy is "better" than a book of fiction, but this is a work that had to be mentioned in any proper summation of the year.

Habitations of the Blessed is a stunningly original novel that's atypical down to its very structure and framing. This is very much the first book of a longer work, and it's difficult to draw conclusions about Valente's world and its ramifications from just what's here. Still, the barrage of exquisitely bizarre imagery that Valente unleashes makes this a must read for any fans of fantasy fiction or gorgeous prose.

DISCLAIMER

Some people seem to have a rather skewed impression of what Best Of lists actually are. I know that it says Essential Reads on top of this post, but you know what? I’m aware that those are not necessarily the ultimate, objective books of 2010. They are simply my favorite released books of 2010. That does not mean that I have read every book released in 2010 (or even every book I want to read in 2010), or that I have used some sort of unbiased criteria to determine these. The complete list of 2010 releases I've read is as follows, provided to give my picks context and to explain the absence, of, say, That Book You Love That I Haven't Read on my list.

Shine

Daniel Abraham – Leviathan Wept

Iain M. Banks – Surface Detail

Justin Cronin – The Passage

Ian C. Esslemont – Stonewielder

Felix Gilman – The Halfmade World

N.K. Jesmin – The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Thomas Ligotti – The Conspiracy against the Human Race

China Mieville – Kraken

Adam LG Nevill – Apartment 16

K.J. Parker – The Folding Knife

Alastair Reynolds – Terminal World

Patrick Rothfuss – The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle

Brandon Sanderson – The Way of Kings

Brandon Sanderson/Robert Jordan – Towers of Midnight

Sam Sykes – Tome of the Undergates

Cathrynne M. Valente – Habitations of the Blessed

Jeff VanderMeer – The Third Bear

Felix Gilman - Gears of the City

This is how a city is built. Bit by bit it all locks tight together. When the lights come back the visual world will force itself on him; in the dark he can build the city himself, from these familiar fragments. He closes his eyes tight.

Listen: this is how a city is built from music.

There is something missing in it. (p. 14)

Gears of the City is the sequel to Felix Gilman’s debut, Thunderer. Thunderer was a book of distinctive prose and a vividly rendered (though somewhat incomprehensible) city, but it was let down by a looseness of pace and plot. Gears of the City exacerbates both of those flaws…and yet it is an absolutely excellent read. This is a book made by the prose. I'm not sure that it's possible to ever understand Gears of the City without reading it, so I will, when I can, try and let the characters and the world speak for themselves.

This story is both grander and smaller than Thunderer, more focused on the central mysteries of the world and yet filled with fascinating characters and their problems small and large. The city shapes whatever is within its boundaries and makes telling any normal story in its setting impossible. These characters are not ordinary people. Even the most mundane of them is larger than life, monolithic in their eccentricities, more brilliantly overblown actors on stage than anyone you would ever meet in your street, like a cast entirely populated by the electrifying and enigmatic stars of other stories:

My name is Brace-Bel, and a byword for evil. Here, now, in these last days, my reputation is still young; a poisoned seed yet to grow. My time, like yours, was many centuries ago, and far away, and I am forgotten. Like you I am a man out of time. Once I was before my time; now I am behind it. But if all time in the city is one time – as I believe that it is – and down some strange turn of hidden streets we may wander into years thought lost to us and find the long-dead still living and breathing and fucking into existence generations paradoxically unborn in one place and gone to dust in another – well then there still exist places where mothers warn their children to behave or Brace-Bel will take them; where preachers bellow against Brace-Bellism; where gutter-witches invoke those potent syllables Brace and Bel against their enemies to make maidens sterile and young men mad. (p. 114)

In the same way that the day to day struggles of Ruth and Marta, sisters in a ruined district who are struggling to survive, is elevated to the level of heroics, the central mysteries of Gilman’s world are equal parts unapproachable and human. The Mountain itself, the central aspect of Gilman’s world, the loadstone that bears the entire weight of the city, is never understood, and the reader can never do more than gape at it. At the same time, those who search for it are flawed beyond belief, twisted by their desires and, in turn, twisting the world around them:

There were theories – in the laboratories in Zubiri they spoke of the Mountain as a singularity, a weight around which the possibilities of the city revolved. In the bloody war shrines of the Red Moon city, they said that the Mountain was the home of the cruel Gods of the city, the one unconquerable place in the world, the ultimate challenge. In Huiringa, and Slew, and on Crabbe’s Lake, they said that the city was built by the Gods, that it blazed and sparked with their energies, and the Mountain was the black cold slag-heap of the wastes the great work left behind – but Crabbe’s Lake and Slew and Huiringa were Ages of heavy industry, and that was just how they saw the world. In Pyx they thought the Mountain was the graveyard were Gods went to die.


In the bars where the madmen and seers who’d Broken Through gathered, the rumor was that it was a kind of machine – the maker and unmake of the city. The engine of time and possibility. The prison, the fountain of Gods. The most coveted weapon in the world. St. Loup sometimes said it was a palace, and smiled his handsome smile over the prospect of its harems and it’s women. Abra-Melin and Ashmole believed it was a kind of vast alchemical crucial. One by one those madmen got greedy, went looking for the way up, and never came back… (p. 207-208)

The intersection between the bizarre realistic, or at least semi realistic, is where the majority of Gears of the City lies. There is one revelation near the end that’s a tad hard to swallow at first, but Gilman succeeds overall in grounding the fantastic in the mundane and the other way around. His characters generally fall on one side or the other of the divide, frequently either trying to disregard the city around them or ignore its details, but both approaches often lead to problems for their practitioners.

In my review of Thunderer, I talked about how the city of Ararat felt elusive and impossible to ever really grasp. The city of Ararat is, here, covered in grime and darkness, and it looms above and below us as it surrounds us. Everything here is strange, even grotesque. This city is unknowable, but it is beautifully unknowable, immense and incalculable to such an extent that its streets are oppressive with the surrounding buildings’ weight. Every once in a while, there is a moment where the city or the characters seem to be about to classify themselves, but they never quite do. 

So there’s atmosphere and setting and characters and all that, but where’s the plot? Well, the plot of Gears of the City is wholly a result of the characters and setting. There are plot driven and character driven books, and this falls so far to the latter end of the spectrum that (short of a uselessly broad summary: characters try and reach the mountain, say) it’s incredibly difficult to actually say what the plot of the book is. The progression of events is so organic that it generates all the messiness that a half dozen characters all striving in different directions would be apt to make.

This can occasionally lead to moments where our expectations turn out to be horribly, sometimes even annoyingly, off. After the prologue, which deals with Arjun at the height of his powers and in the middle of his search, the second chapter at Ruth and Marta’s shop feels like a brief detour, and that impression is confirmed when Arjun wanders off again to continue his quest (though he’s no longer so sure what his quest actually is). But then what’s this, he’s turning around? Yup, turns out Ruth and Marta are actually the center of the plot, or close to it. Similar moments occur at several points, leaving us with a narrative where it’s hard, sometimes, to tell if you’re in the climax, the buildup, or just drifting on a tangent.

Which isn’t to imply that Gears of the City is a confusing work. Every aspect of the tale makes perfect sense, if you simply follow Gilman through each of the steps in order. This is very much a work that must be allowed to wash over you. You have to let the prose and characters take you where they want to take you and show you what they want to show you; any attempt to wrest control away from them will just end up with bewilderment.

Between Gears of the City and The Halfmade World, it is no longer an adequate description to say that Felix Gilman is one of the most promising new authors in fantasy. Felix Gilman is not only the best new author of the last several years, but also one of the most unique and engrossing authors within genre, regardless of timeframe. If your tastes tend toward the weird and bizarre, there is no reason to not be reading Felix Gilman.

Felix Gilman - The Halfmade World

The world blurred, and a sudden and surprising mood of exhilaration seized her. Koenigswald and the Academy and her old life were ten thousand miles behind her, and the world was a blur, the world was a dream, the world was unamde. Anything was possible. Wasn’t this what she’d come here for? She could hardly wait to step out into the world again and begin to remake it.

She noticed a shanty town out on the salt-flats. Little black dots of shacks – were those laborers bent double in salt-traps? – rushed up close and vanished at once behind. Perhaps the Engine had obliterated it with the boom of its passing, Liv thought. She let the blind fall again; the flare hurt her eyes. She blinked in the dark oc the cabin, but the bright crude shapes of the world outside were burned into her vision.

Within the hour they’d left the salt-flats far behind. (p. 129)

The Halfmade World is a conflict between the Gun and the Line, between the past and the future. John Creedmore, Agent of the Gun, is driven by bloodlust and haunted by conscience. He stalks across the west and battles for independence with every step, and he seeks a brief escape from his life in the romance novels that he devours. Lowry, Subaltern of the Line, is a cog in the machine, going over his reports again and again until he has eliminated every trace of pride. Indoctrinated by motion pictures and pushed to fanaticism by the roar of the engines, his life begins and ends with the inexorable advance of the Line.

The conflict takes place in the west, a world where the age of the soil under your feet is measurable in decades and where, over just a few horizons, you get to where things aren’t yet finalized, not quite stabilized. Through it all, the Line pushes relentlessly west, and the Gun falls back again and again amidst the havoc and destruction that it’s caused.

There’s a single glimmer of hope in this barren land: the Red Valley Republic, trying to fight for a mankind governed by other men. The Republic’s a tenuous ally of a select few Hillfolk, and one of those strange creatures has given the Republic’s General Enver the key to winning the war. There’s just one problem – that hope is annihilated in the prologue, the Republic’s armies shattered, the General driven insane, the secret trapped in his shattered mind, his mad body lost on the battlefield.

Or, as it turns out, not lost. General Enver’s in a bizarre hospital, guarded by a powerful spirit, on the edge of the west. It is to there that our main character, Liv, is called, and it is there that the Gun and the Line both race, determined to get the old, broken man’s knowledge at all costs.

The Halfmade World is a novel of different perspectives, with one man’s heroics looking downright ludicrous in another, one nation’s way of life a bizarre abomination in the eyes of their fellow viewpoint characters. The Republic’s last stand is heroic to those in it, but foolish and suicidal to those watching. Creedmore’s protests of redemption are convincing to those following him, but are rejected as nothing but talk, as they well might be, to those later listening.

Gilman does not just create one setting. When the novel proper begins, we are not in the West, but rather in the civilized East, with Liv as she contemplates her trip. The East is an almost dreamlike place of muted emotions, by far the closest thing to ourselves in Gilman’s world, yet alien due to their almost quaint apprehensions and foibles in a world that the reader knows contains so much more. Those easterners, Liv amongst them, dull their feelings with a nerve tonic, refusing to face the world on its own terms.

Later, we journey to the still in construction far west, and everything shifts again as the two titanic powers – Gun and Line – are pushed increasingly out of their element, the affiliations of the various characters gradually coming to mean less and less as they leave their world behind.

Gilman uses the variety of his settings to circle back on events and characters and change their meaning. In the civilized East, Liv’s simple minded but towering assistant, Maggfrid, is considered almost normal, is banished to the sidelines where he acts as a janitor, out of sight and mind. In the west, Maggfrid is an often remarked upon curiosity and a disturbingly effective fighter, saving the entire caravan on occasion and earning the respect of all those around him. At the end, though, we’re shown that lasting changes can’t come from within, because, when he returns to the east, he is back to his unspectacular role of janitor, more noticeable now due to his temporary absence but still ultimately ill-fitting and unremarkable.

The same kind of environmentally triggered change can be seen in Creedmore. Creedmore is always uncooperative with the demonic presence in his mind, but his muttered dissent has never translated into action. Now, running further and further into unmade lands, Creedmore’s given the chance he’s always implied that he wanted, to break free from his masters and their perpetual atrocities. As he tells this to Liv while escorting her through the west, he being her only chance of survival, the reader is shown a prior episode in Creedmore’s life, where he thought much the same thoughts of salvation, of saving others, of finally going his own way – and failed to save anyone but himself. His circumstances are different, now, but the man is still the same.

The only character that proves immune to circumstance is Lowry. The members of the Line that pursue Creedmore into the wilderness refuse to change or adapt to their environment in any way, and, as a result, they die like flies for most of the book. Still, when they eventually reach their destination, the reader realizes that it’s not the individual Linesemen that matters, not even the squads that managed to survive. The Line is unmalleable and always spreading, and it might be that very refusal to shift that’s allowed it to spread so universally.

Gilman’s prose forces the West down the reader’s throat, making it impossible to ignore and coloring every scene of the novel with its atmosphere. Though there is the occasional anachronistic phrase (This land was broken badly, like a china plate hurled by a very angry woman.[p. 140]), Gilman’s writing is usually highly evocative and descriptive. Some of his prevalent rhythms from Thunderer and City of Gears can still be found in the way that he breaks up descriptions with punctuation and bursts of emotion, but The Halfmade World is very much its own beast. Gilman infuses Creedmore’s chapters with a frantic urgency and even managing to breathe an oppressive magic into the mechanical Line:

The noise! Inside the station there a constant din of machinery. The roar of vast furnaces, the clatter of intricate clockwork. No wonder the Linesmen looked so pale and haunted! No wonder their eyes were so dull!
…
Everything smelled of coal and oil and smoke. There was nothing natural in the Station, except the occasional rat. It was an ecology of machines. Somewhere at the heart of the structure, the Gloriana Engine lived, and its mechanical dreams shaped the world around it. (p. 108-109)

The Halfmade World is Gilman striking off into new territory and bringing all the experience he’s gotten from his two prior books with him, the beautiful writing of City of Gears welded to a gripping plot. Comparing it and any Thunderer is like comparing night and day -- and that’s coming from someone who really liked Thunderer.

Reading in October

Generally a good month, starting some interesting series and wrapping up some others, as well as quite a few collections and stand alones. No Breaking New Ground books this time around, but I haven't abandoned those and will fit in some more next month.


Daniel Abraham is fast becoming, in my opinion, the ultimate unsung hero of epic fantasy. Tor never published a paperback version of The Price of Spring, and yet The Long Price was a series almost unmatched for its decisive pacing and marvelous, evolving characterization. Leviathan Wept, a collection of Abraham’s short fiction, lives up to the lofty expectations any reader of his previous work no doubt has. Review coming.


Close this tab. I’ve heard that Barker – close this tab – is a master of horror for years, and this (closethistab) is the first work of his that I’ve read. I’m closethistab more confused than awed, though. As far as I can tell shutoffyourbrowser this is a fairly standard, meandering and unexciting novel, albeit occasionally an amusing one, that’s rendered almost unbearable by the book’s nonstop begging (don’t read the rest) for you to put it down, putting you in the mood to do nothing so much as throw the book at the wall and yell (one last chance, close this tab): Alright, Mr. Barker, I think I will!


Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell is a beautifully written novel. It’s more than a little meander happy, but excellent nonetheless. This is one of the very rare books that I can seriously call delightful every time I open it up. Not perfect, no, but dazzling enough to make up for that.


The Passage, at least in terms of marketing, seems like this year’s big novel. I did enjoy it, but I didn’t love it. Review coming.


My first Sherlock Holmes story is a success. Despite some pacing problems, I’m already looking forward to reading more of Doyle’s stories. Review coming.


The Halfmade World ran roughshod over my expectations. I was expecting good, very good even, and it delivered great. Comparing The Halfmade World to Thunderer is like comparing night and day. And that’s coming from someone who really liked Thunderer. Review coming.


I really, really love some aspects of Hamilton’s writing. And I really, really hate some other aspects. Judas Unchained seems to have magnified just about every good and bad tendency of its creators, and my opinion is mixed, though I did enjoy the read. Review of it and Pandora’s Star coming.


I always find M.R. James’s writing to be engrossing, but the reason isn’t the scare factor. There is something about James’s style, part formal antique and part colloquial, that makes me feel like the man is sitting across from me, telling me his experiences first hand. That isn’t, by the way, to suggest that these stories are tame. There are a few that the reader desensitized by the loudness and often excessiveness of modern horror will, sadly, find a bit hard to feel the horror of (I think the modern standard is for the doll’s to brutally murder at least three people; wood replaying old tragedies in the night simply isn’t bloody enough), but there are no weak stories here…

Except for the first tale in the collection, The Residence at Whitminister, which, for some reason, I found almost impenetrable. I’m not sure if this is a result of James’s writing or simply me being unused to his style after a long hiatus, but a reread did not solve the problem, and I’m left with a collection of out of order facts and occurrences without the slightest emotional thread to tie them together.


Newton’s debut is ambitious, well written, and not without the occasional flaw. Review here.


I loved The Folding Knife, and I went into The Engineer Trilogy with very, very high expectations. Devices and Desires is very good, and has quite a few very interesting elements, but it also has a few aspects that I’m more hesitant upon. All the same, I’m looking forward to starting Evil for Evil in a few days. Review coming when I finish the trilogy.

Up and Coming (and Essential?) in October

The new semi-Western Weird work from the author of Thunderer and City of Gears seems ready to push everything Gilman’s done into hyper drive. If nothing else, the prose will undoubtedly be excellent.


I’ve only read two of Banks’s books, the excellent-but-flawed Use of Weapons and the okay-but-flawed Matter This is another book in the Culture setting that Banks is most famous for, and the blurb is enough to get me interested, though I have heard (and experienced) very mixed things about Banks’s later work. There's a preview of this on Banks's site.

The Half Made World [Cover Art]

I really enjoyed Thunderer, despite its flaws, so it's no surprise that I'm eager to be there as Gilman evolves as a writer. He gave a bit of information on this in an interview with Locus a while back:

In September, I have something coming out from Tor which is very different. I didn't want to write another city book, didn't feel like creating another gigantic setting. And I wanted to try my hand at something which had a more straightforward plot. I've been accused of overplotting and underplotting, but this one has a clearer plot. It's called A History of the Half-Made World (first of what will be either two or three books), and up to a point it's like a fantastic western. It's a purely invented world, though the fantastical elements are mostly limited to two weird and inhuman factions which sort of divide the world between them. They're archetypes of something or other, probably. The book has the frontier theme, the theme of the founding and various falls from grace, but I don't want to describe it as purely an American history thing, because that sounds like it's more closely tied to American history than it is. It plays with certain tropes, let's say.

Looking forward to it (and City of Gears, as well) quite a bit.

Felix Gilman - Thunderer

In his mind he was composing a letter to his mothers and fathers: here we begin at last. The city is a puzzle box to be cracked open. Let me describe it for you…But he wasn’t sure how, yet.

Felix Gilman’s Thunderer begins as the Bird, god of flight and freedom, returns to fly over the city of Ararat. Ships collide in the harbor as the crews stare at the sky, people across the city pick this moment to escape both prison and circumstance, and the faithful leap from the roofs on multicolored wings, eager to fly in the wake of their god. Ararat seems immeasurably vast, incomprehensibly wonderful, and impossibly strange in these opening moments, and the reader no doubt assumes that the book’s power will come from ever-increasing knowledge of the city, like a child given a marvelous, complex present and slowly figuring out how to make it work. This is not the case.

In an interview, Gilman said:

There are different kinds of world building. There's the kind that focuses on making the physical details real, and the texture of the culture the characters inhabit. That's something I want to do, and I think it's really interesting trying to create textured worlds in that sense -- which is very different from the huge architectural level of deciding, 'This goes here and this goes here; this is the continent with the elves, and this is what dragons do.

The quote goes a long way to summing up Thunderer’s world building. The world feels vibrant and alive; you can imagine the people milling around you, and you can hear the recitations of the poets and smell the dark waters of the river as you walk along behind Arjun or Jack. That being said, you never really get an idea for what Ararat is. It’s a bit like trying some new delicacy. You savor the taste while eating it, but, if asked afterwards, to describe it, all you can say are meaningless words like textured, interesting, etc.

Early on, the reader learns that the city is so vast that, after showing an appreciable portion of whatever area they live in, mapmakers just draw a question mark to show that they don’t know what lies beyond the city (or if it even ends at all). Gilman’s city is unknowable in more ways than just the geographic. Despite its immersive nature, Gilman’s city is difficult to ever really comprehend. As we follow the characters, we experience it as if we were there. Take even a step off the road, though, and everything replaced by that massive question mark. It’s the difference between admiring a work of art and understanding it; the reader is only allowed through the gate when they’re shown by the hand.

This style of world building is obviously, both in its advantages and its flaws, a conscious choice by Gilman. In an earlier quote from the interview, Gilman says:

The things that interest me in world building are the entertainment or culture of the world, or the academy, or the newspapers: what are they like? Or the politics in the sense of the day-to-day ideas and ideologies and unexamined notions and slogans people carry around in their heads. And to develop these things through contrasts, through things knocking and rubbing against each other. The denser and more knotted the more interesting.

The unknowable nature of the city is itself a major part of the novel and ties into one of its most interesting elements: Atlas, a group of mapmakers and encyclopedia-ists that seek to document all of Ararat. Their attempts, and the city as a whole, are not the plot focus of Thunderer, but the two influence almost everything that transpires.

The reader is grounded in Ararat through the characters. Of the three leads, all are well drawn but only one manages to fully live up to his potential. Arjun, arguably the main protagonist, is obsessed with searching for the Voice, a deity that shows itself through audio perfection. A calm, melodic symphony of wind and earth heard from atop an isolated tower. Arjun goes to Ararat to try and find his god, but it’s never totally clear if his real goal is to search for the Voice or to escape its absence. Once in the city, he discovers that the Voice – if it is even there – is lost amidst literally hundreds of other gods, and his personal quest is drowned out and steered by the demands of the city and the people within it. He can be quite self centered, he’s prone to fixations and obsessions, he’s a bit naïve, maybe just a tad cowardly, and somewhere in the midst of all that Arjun comes alive on the page.

Jack is only one of many to gain their freedom on the day of the Bird’s return, but he becomes unique when the Bird’s gift and drive do not depart. He turns a group of outcasts into his own freedom fighters and plans to bring liberty to everyone in Ararat. For a time, his arc is the most fascinating part of the book. Jack’s righteous drive clashes with the practical survivor-mentality of Fiss, and Jack’s most ardent devotee, Namdi, seems headed for disaster. As Fiss and Aiden, the original leaders of the group, point out: Jack’s plan simply cannot work. Unfortunately, this arc is weakened when, at the last moment, Gilman pulls back and denies the characters the climax that their actions necessitated.

Arlandes woke from a dream of Lucia, dancing. In all of his dreams she was either dancing or falling, or sometimes both.

Arlandes steals the spotlight for the first third or so of Thunderer. Arjun’s characterization is excellent, but he is more of a cumulative experience than one defining moment, and Jack doesn’t come into his own for some time, leaving the initial promise of Arlandes’s storyline to reign unchallenged. He is the captain of the countess’s new super weapon: the floating warship, Thunderer. As the ship was raised, Lucia, Arlandes’s love, was killed. Throughout the countess’s domain, Arlandes becomes a tragic hero. He is the star of countless plays and poems, standing in black and tormented by loss. Arlandes himself scoffs at all of these cheap imitations. His life is composed of misery, and his only solace comes when firing the Thunderer’s mighty guns at some helpless, grounded target. Sounds like the start of a fascinating narrative, no? Unfortunately, a start is all it is. After the groundwork is set, Arlandes merely regresses to a state of depressed near-incompetence. Yeah, I suppose that’s a bit more realistic than, say, homicidal rage, but it’s a bit of an anticlimax to have the most intriguing character fade into a mopey absence after the first bit.

The plotting is fairly uneven. At its best, it’s character driven and surprising. At its worst, it’s meandering and a bit bewildering. Despite that, things come together very well for the ending, and Gilman finishes the book by pushing the Weird Level up to about a hundred and five, leaving the reader with a nice mixture of amazement and satisfaction.

Throughout the novel, Gilman’s prose is excellent:

Some days he felt like he was beginning again; that, after many mistakes and wrong turns, he had found himself back at the start of thing, unencumbered, full of promise. Some days he felt that he was at the end of things; past the end, that all the orchestra’s lively and noisy themes were finished, for better or worse, and the he was a mere coda, a single note repeating quietly, in measured isolation, soon to be stilled.

I expected the book’s style to be divisive, of course. It’s filled with oddities and is very much Gilman’s own. All the same, I’ll admit I was a bit shocked when I discovered that Rob (of sffworld) not only disliked the prose, but considered it a deal breaker…and then quoted a passage that I had thought excellent to prove his point:

Sometimes Arjun went down to the waterways. He never had to walk too far in any direction before coming to a canal, a reservoir, one of the ornamental lakes of Faugére, or on of the shallow marshy ponds that formed on condemned ground north of Fourth Ward — and the River itself, had he ever been brave enough to face it, would have been only a few hours’ walk to the east.

Rob goes on to say in his review: There was no real cadence to the narrative because it seemed every statement was interrupted by a comma or a hyphen, changing the flow of the sentence with varying degrees of bluntness. It’s odd, because I can’t really disagree with the statement. In fact, it’s a pretty good description of why I found Gilman’s prose interesting. Picture a river, flowing, serene. Then, imagine that it changes course, flowing down an unexpected channel, but doesn’t lose any of its natural grace. That’s something like how Gilman seems to construct his passages, sliding into and then back out of our expectations. I think that the reader’s enjoyment will really come down to whether they consider these course changes intrusive or not.

Brandon Sanderson summed up Thunderer best, I think: Recommended for any who want to sit back for a spell and just dream. Thunderer is a novel with flaws, yes, but one that I feel more than makes up for them. I can’t guarantee you’ll love Thunderer, or even tolerate it, but I think it’s something you need to try for yourself anyway.