Wonderful SF/Fantasy Books

I’m sometimes asked for books to recommend… in no particular order, and without much ado, here’s some of mine.

1.  Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny.  Well, actually – anything by Roger Zelazny, but Lord of Light is truly stunning.  Beautiful, huge ideas; wonderful writing, dry humour and enthralling characters, Zelazny is still, after all these years, The Bestest.  Also give Damnation Alley and the Chronicles of Amber a go – and then read everything else he’s ever written.
2. Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett.  I love all of Pratchett’s books, and arguably Night Watch is a bad place to start, being a long way into the Discworld series.  But it’s still brilliant for its craft, characters and humour.  The Discworld as a whole defined a huge part of my younger years, and is still fresh, funny and humane today.  Go read.
3. A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin.  So she wrote book and novellas for decades, and there’s dozens out there to read, but for a bit of high fantasy that arguably helped re-shape the genre, A Wizard of Earthsea and the books that followed are still right up there.
4. Sandman, by Neil Gaiman.  So yes, it’s a graphic novel – but American Gods and a great many of the rest of Gaiman’s works are also superb.  It’s just that Sandman was the first graphic novel I properly read, and it too helped re-define my reading life.
5. A Tale for a Time Being, Ruth Ozeki.  Arguably not so much fantasy as that strange nebulous thing called ‘speculative fiction’ (whatever that means), Ozeki creates stories of such emotional power and humanity hanging on such unusual hooks, that it’s one of those books you don’t even notice you’re getting sucked into, and don’t understand quite how it’s stayed with you so long, and so deeply after.
6. Assassins Apprentice, (and the books that followed) by Robin Hobb.  Ah let’s not kid ourselves, these books can be a bit hit-and-miss, but for a good place to start with a world of betrayal, magic, bad weather and wolves, the first three books that tell the tale of Fitz, the royal assassin, are absolutely worth your time.
7. Bete, by Adam Roberts.  So Adam Roberts is one of the most depressingly, infuriatingly talented and clever human beings I’ve ever met.  In between being a Professor of English Literature and turning out more novels, article, stories and brilliantly observed parodies than is really natural, he was also a judge on the Kitschies and still has time to wear silly hats.  It’s just not fair.  If he wasn’t so goddamn excellent as a human being, I think there’s be a queue of people trying to kill him.  Start with Bete, then look at the bibliography and wonder what things here have been wrought.
8. Lucifer, by Mike Carey.  Now technically Mike Carey is producing a ridiculous range of absurdly excellent books at the moment, from the exorcist-adventures of Felix Castor through to Girl With All the Gifts and recently Fellside.  But Lucifer was where I first met his works and thus holds a special place in my heart.  Yet another member of the clan of people who, if he wasn’t so goddamn nice, you’d probably want to kill for his unfair talent.
9. Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne.  Technically this could be a tricky number.  There’s a lot of stuff in there that raises some very uncomfortable questions and also makes for uncomfortable reading.  But hell – books aren’t always there to make us feel warm and fluffy inside.  If questions are raised at the same time that an incredible picture is painted of a changing world, hell yeah.  Let’s go get some discourse on that shit.
10. Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway.  I was going to put Tigerman, as the more recent adventurous romp through surreal wonder and delight, but thinking about it it doesn’t have a bit with an elephant and Angelmaker does and thus still holds a special place in my affection.  For one of those books that you read with one eyebrow raised and a sense of ‘no, really?’ even as it sucks you into its mazey delights – go forth and enjoy.
11. No Harm Can Come To A Good Man, by James Smythe.  Of all of Smythe’s works, this one seems to be the one that is liked the least.  I like it.  For sheer craft, skill, wit and grace with words, intelligence with characters and big ideas in action, you don’t get much more zippy zoomy than James Smythe.  Also it has fewer broken limbs than The Explorer, which was undoubtedly brilliant but made me cringe a lot.  Sometimes there’s cringing.  This can be good too; it’s all in service of stories that leave your mind reeling.
12. Grasshopper Jungle, by Andrew A. Smith.  A winner of the Kitschies, it’s a YA apocalypse story that actually makes sense, mostly because the teenage protagonists telling it are far more interested in their burgeoning and confused sexualities and the complexity of finding identity than they are with the approaching apocalyptic hoards.
13. Born Weird, by Andrew Kaufman.  A delightful family drama made complicated by blessings gone wrong; it’s not heavy going but somehow has stuck with me for many years as a read that was just plain fun.
14. Memory of Water, by Emmi Itaranta.  Arguably this is a flawed book in many ways; but as an interesting and entirely unexpected look at a future in which the ice has melted and the desert has stretched across the land, it both has memorable characters and a way of seeing culture and history that sticks with you, through all the tea-drinking.
15. Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie.  Again, another potentially flawed book in the sense that the more you think about it, the less you realise has happened.  However!  As a worthy successor the Culture novels, Leckie has created a teaming, vast, exciting universe full of culture and ritual that you just want to dive into and explore, and promises to reward you the more you look, with more adventure yet to come.
16. Player of Games, Iain M. Banks.  As we mentioned the Culture, this list wouldn’t really be complete without Iain M. Banks being on it.  The Culture novels were many and various; some better than others.  The Culture universe as a whole, however, still stands out as a glowing bastion of what truly awesome space opera can be, and helped again to change the genre.
17. A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers.  Again, technically this is a book where nothing very much happens until right at the end, when it happens without much warning.  Nothing much arguably continues to happen in its sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit.  But while there may not be a great deal of action, what there is is played out across both one of the most exciting and interesting universes out there, but also across one of the most humane characterscapes I’ve ever read.  The sheer compassion, joy and potential of the future that Chambers creates; the depth of feeling imbued in the characters as they try to find their place and their way in a space teaming with life – you don’t need much to happen because so much is going on inside, that you’d have to have the soul of a lump of moonrock not to laugh, cry, care, or be moved.
18. Equations of Life, Simon Morden.  Arguably this isn’t actually the strongest of his Metrozone books, but it is a good place to start for the rest of the very fun, very smart cyberpunk series.  If you enjoy your lands of hackers and conspiracies, corporations and betrayals, Morden delivers in spades.
19. Europe in Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson.  Much is to be said about these books, including an end that left many a bit befuddled.  But what I’m going to say is that the picture that Hutchinson painted of a Europe falling apart is clever, interesting, beautifully constructed, frightening, thrilling and very timely to explore.  Part spy-thriller, part-SF, the whole series is worth throwing yourself into and letting yourself get carried along by.
20. Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan.  I read this a long time ago, so it’s testimony to how good it is that it’s still stuck in my brain.  It’s dark, violent, often brutal cyber-punk, and it does it brilliantly, sweeping you along in a violent thriller/detective noir while casually tossing out ideas of identity, memory and physicality between shoot-outs.
21. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K.Jemsin.  For grown-up fantasy full of rich characters struggling to find their place in a world of gods and kings, N.K.Jemsin nails a story of tense danger like nobody else.
22. Dune, by Frank Herbert.  Arguably this is not a very good book.  Arguably there’s much about it which is actively… hum.  But it is a granddaddy of the genre that helped re-define a great deal of what SF does, and in that way it gets a polite nod on this list.  It has also spawned 5000 sequels.  Most of these are actively very bad, and do not get a polite nod.
23. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner.  An oldie, but it still feels fresh today.  A tale of a world in which over-crowding has run wild, of perpetual strange resource wars, of intellect and corporations and identity.  A surreal, often downright weird trawl through an unfamiliar/familiar land, which, if you stick with it, returns your dedication with an emotional payoff that you didn’t realise was coming.
24. Poison City, by Paul Crilley.  A recent edition to my shelves, it’s urban fantasy, set in Durban, that gets the beauty of the city, the thrill of the chase, the mystery of the detective and the magic of it’s adopted South African culture in spades.
25. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller.  Another old’un, it manages to make the rise and fall and rise and fall of civilization a deeply human, personal affair, capturing within its massive sweep of history something human, enthralling, dangerous and powerful.  The sequel… less so… but the original is well worth a read.