It's about the end of the year, and I know there will all sorts of lists of the best books published this year, so this is a different question: regardless of when published, which SF books that you personally read this year did you enjoy the most. I'm also asking which you enjoyed instead of which you thought were the best, so feel free to include fluff without shame.
I'll go first. Of the 60+ books I read this year, here are the ones I liked most. No significant spoilers, not in any order.
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
- A project to uplift monkeys on a terraformed world, at the peak of human civilization, is sabotaged by people who don't think humans should play god. There follows a human civil war that nearly destroys civilization. A couple thousand years later, an ark ship of human remnants leaving an uninhabitable earth is heading towards that terraformed planet. This is a great book, with lots to say on intelligence, the nature of people, and both the fragility and heartiness of life.
Kiln People, David Brin
- Set a couple hundred years in the future, technology is ubiquitous that lets people make a living clay duplicate of themselves that has their memory and thoughts to the point they were created, lasts about a day, and whose memories can be reintegrated with the real person if desired. The duplicates are property, have no rights, and are used to do almost all work and to take any risks without risking the humans. A private detective and some of his duplicates gets pulled into an increasingly complex plot that could reshape society. This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, with lots of twists, and an interesting narrative as we follow copies who may or may not reintegrate with our detective.
Sleeping Giants, Sylvain Neuvel
- A little girl falls down a deep hole in the woods and lands on a gigantic, glowing, metal hand that's thousands of years old. This is a wonderful alien artifact story with some interesting twists. I really enjoyed this book. Not exactly hard SF, but checks a lot of the boxes for me, including the wonder of discovery.
The Peripheral, William Gibson
- A computer server links the late 2020s to a time 70 years later, allowing communication and telepresence between the two times. A young woman in the earlier time witnesses a murder in the later time and gets sucked into a battle between powerful people in both times. This is a great book; I think I could have recognized it as Gibson's writing even if I hadn't known it in advance. Very interesting premise, engaging characters, and fun without feeling like fluff.
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
- A coalition of human planets has sent the first envoy to an icy world where the people are gender neutral and sterile most of the time, but once a month become male or female (essentially randomly) and fertile. This is a classic, written in 1969, and my second reading - the first being in the late 80s. Le Guin creates an amazingly rich world, even with its harsh, frozen landscape. The characters grow to understand how gender impacts their cultures, and the biases they didn't know they had. It's also aged remarkably well for an SF book written 55 years ago. There's nothing about it that feels outdated.
A couple notes:
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If I hadn't stuck to my own "enjoyed" constraint, the list might have looked different. For instance, Perdido Street Station, by Meiville, is a really great book, but there's so much misery and sadness that it's hard to say I "enjoyed" it.
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I hesitated to put The Left Hand Of Darkness on the list, simply because Le Guin is so widely recognized as a great master, and the book one of her greatest, that it seemed unfair. In the end, it seemed unfair to exclude it for such an artificial reason.
While Cixian Liu coined the words "dark forest" to describe this particular solution to the fermi paradox, he did not invent it.
Having also read the series, I find myself always having to mention that while the books do some of the best exploration of more complex sci-fi concepts, they are WEIRD about gender.
The whole thing with men becoming "feminized" by an age of peace, reeks. The author goes out of his way to equate competence, decisiveness and conviction with the male gender, and tries to very akwardly make the point that without strife, these things become unnecessary, and even abhorred. To the point that "masculinity" as a social construct disappears from society. Then replaced entirely by "femininity" which the author VERY explicitly equates with "beauty", naivete, indecision and weakness.
As if women choose to be with men only out of necessity, and if given a easy life and therefore the choice, they would pair off with other women. Which is effectively what happens because according to the author such a society would pressure men into becoming indistinguishable from women in order to remain appealing.
If I had to boil the trilogy down to a message about gender, it would be "men are ugly but useful, women are beautiful but useless". That's not exactly progressive...
A major female characters entire character is that she is the "perfect" woman, and she is literally given as payment to the main-character, by the government. And no-one in the story bats an eye at this! Including the woman herself!
I kept expecting her to be disingenuous. You know, because she was literally treated like an object, given as a prize. But then it time-skips to her having the dudes kid! So apparently shes's fine with it?
Execept then when the government says so, she's perfectly down with up and leaving the guy, this time to force him into action by withholding her. Again she's a mere plot device, treated like a thing that can not only be given, by also taken. She barely exists as anything more than the concept "perfect woman". But you can't just have a human character without there being a person in there. Yet Liu goes ahead anyway.
The subtext about gender in the writing isn't subtle, and it really fucking bothered me when reading the series. I tuned out a lot when listening to the audiobooks.
The sci-fi concepts are some of the best! Only one example is the way the books explained FTL travel, and it is some of the most compelling I've seen!
But I really can't imagine recommending the series without a disclaimer about it containing some of the most sexist writing I've ever come across.
Interesting take. I read her part as more of a discourse on power disparity. The man had all the power in the world and used it to find his idea of the perfect woman. I don't remember it digging too deeply into her character or even at all into her motivations, but from the power dynamic it wouldn't have mattered to him anyway. I read it more as uncomfortable subservience to male domineering. The plot in this arc was driven by his fantasy, and his fantasy alone.
Also, Haldeman did the same gender changes with The Forever War as an exaggeration of his return from Vietnam. I saw the gender arc as more of a "hard times make soft men, soft men make hard times" thing and an exploration of complacency and opulence. But I see your point, there could be other ways to make a similar point
Her appearance and then disappearance was engineered by the government. Because they wanted him to save a world he didn't feel like fighting for. Both times.
Ok fine. The government can find a perfect woman, who also loves him for real.
It cannot then just take her back. You can't tell me she's fine with just up and leaving the love of HER life, cuz some government dude said so.
She is treated like a non-person, by the author. Not just the people in the story. The personality that would have to exist in her head for her to be the way she was in the story, is not possible.
Maybe it works for people who are less intuitive about people, but psychologically she's a gaping plot hole. The same way physics or math errors can be.
I fundamentally disagree here. Her choices are to stay where she is in whatever kind of life that is and know her species is doomed, or sleep until he secures her child's future. Those are heavy stakes and the world in the story could support either decision. I'm certainly not in the position to guess what a parent would do with that choice.
However, I do agree that the author did not give her enough agency for us to know how this decision happened. It definitely could have been explored more. The greater tragedy is that her husband treats her like a non-person, like she's his imagination incarnate, and that is never explored in any detail.
Why would she not stick around for that? Why is her first way to drive her partner to fulfill a wish of hers what should be a last resort in any sane relationship?
And by hibernating into the future, she is taking the child towards the danger, not away from it.
Why is saving the world his (and hers) responsibility at all? There is no guarantee he'll succeed. In fact the earth IS destroyed in the end.
If the decision was hers, it's pretty objectively the wrong one. Even moreso within the framework of what is known about her. She doesn't make sense.
I was never comfortable with that relationship. She was essentially coerced into it because the global government gave him the power to do anything he wanted as long as he said it would help protect humanity. I'm honestly surprised she stayed that long at all. We also only see her through her husband's perspective, which leaves an awful lot about the relationship unsaid and likely misinterpreted.
I think we're just going to disagree on this point, but I do see your point with the other examples earlier