Year: 2020

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Dear Mike,

I miss you. There are signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus, the American West is on fire, and the world in general is in a state that would have gotten us at least four of your poems, maybe more. I don’t expect you could have fixed any of it, but it’d still be better to face it with you.

But we have your stuff. We have that. So I read The Dragon Waiting for the fourth time this week, in its new edition. Scott Lynch wrote a lovely introduction for it, and I had to go off and cry and swear like four times while reading it, because Scott didn’t get to know you, he’s very clear about that in the introduction, and he’s just the very tip of the amazing ship-shattering iceberg of people who should have gotten to know you. But he has The Dragon Waiting. Not the same as getting to talk to you about EMT/firefighter geekery or caper stories or whatever it is that you’d know in common that I don’t even know yet, but it sure isn’t nothing.

In some ways your books are where I left them, Mike. There are bits that I always remember, and I’ve never found them to pale on rereads. The parts I love, the horrible moment of the doctor realizing about the young prince, or the scene where [spoiler] is deliberately horrible to [spoiler] for strategic reasons, or the way that it all unfolds by implication–they’re all still there.

But they also change on the rereads. There are always things that hit me harder later. The line about how if Dimi’s father could die, so could any god: my dad was alive the last time I read that, so it was a softer blow, more bearable. But also I think of you when I read that, though you were neither father nor god to me. If Mike could die so could any friend. If Mike could die so could any mentor. If Mike could die so could any artist. You left us so many of the things we’d need in your absence, but friend, you never intended that they should sit easy, and they don’t.

The things you did with this different world were more graceful, more compact, more allusive than–my God, you wrote this in 1983. 1983. Some of it might look a little less astonishing now that other people have come along and said, hey, yeah, I think I’ll do that too, but it’s like our friend’s kid saying Hamlet was a lot of common quotes strung together. You were there first and best. Your Byzantium, your Margaret of Anjou, your Lord Rivers, the things you think to do that other people still don’t think of…backwards, on schees.

It’s September, which makes it 14 years since we lost you. That math is very hard to understand. And now there’s this new edition, so instead of scouring used bookstores we can just…tell people to pick up a copy. Just casual-like. At their favorite bookstore, if they can go there in this plague; online if not. It’s such a relief, Mike. We’re doing the best we can, but a new copy of The Dragon Waiting sure doesn’t make anything harder. I’ve written you a whole series of Nature stories, Jo’s got Richard and Savonarola and Ficino in Lent, so many others, we haven’t stopped wanting to talk to you. It’s just that now it’s going to be easier to ask more people into the conversation.

Thanks. For all of it.
Marissa

Joan Aiken, The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories. Joan Aiken’s body of work is vast and varied, which makes it a bit of a surprise when an entire collection is fairly one-note. But that’s what these are, in tone and style, in length and so on: they are all of one thing. Which makes sense: they were written specifically for one magazine in one era, and Aiken knew her audience. They’re interesting, they’re just much narrower than I expected.

Jose Andres and Matt Goulding, Vegetables Unleashed. Spanish-influenced treatments of vegetables, most of which were fairly familiar to me but colorful and easily laid out for cooks who have not done a lot with Spanish cooking.

David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. Probably the most disappointing book I read this fortnight. I would still like a history of how we think and talk about civil wars, but this was not really it. Armitage mentioned four strands of thought on this matter and then did not discuss two of them (Arabic and Chinese) at all; he promised to discuss how the Western European strand dominated the discourse and then did not; he made small but important mistakes of fact in areas that I knew well, making me suspicious of his claims in areas I did not. Not recommended.

Sarah Caudwell, The Sibyl in Her Grave and The Sirens Sang of Murder. Rereads. These remain delightful, and they were exactly what I wanted. The voice and the reading experience: such fun. The ending of the series is very much a downer, and I had forgotten why (it’s a characterization thing, it’s a very dark characterization), but I still found them both very much worth rereading and am glad that I now have my own copies so that I can do so again at will.

Kirstin Chen, Bury What We Cannot Take. The gut-wrenching story of a family trying to escape the Cultural Revolution, mostly from the perspective of the two fairly young children. I’m not sorry I read it but will not want to read it again any time soon. Make sure you’re in a steady place for all kinds of child danger if you try to read this one.

Megan Crewe, Wounded Magic. The second volume in a YA trilogy about magic, oppression, and rebellion. I feel like the character relationships and the writing are better than genre-average here, even as Crewe is playing with tropes a lot of other people like to play with two.

Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s. This is supposedly about a Radcliffe fellowship program for outstanding women in the early ’60s, but most of it is really about Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin’s friendship. Which turns out to be a pretty interesting thing to center a book around, especially if you’re prepared for excursions into other writers, artists, etc. I was reading this in conjunction with the Aiken above, and that was interesting timing.

Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. This book is gross. Good! But gross. The “grisly” in the title is there for a reason, and as someone in my family pointed out, they have given it a horror novel cover for a reason: Fitzharris wants to make darn sure you know exactly how bad things could get before proper sterile procedure in surgeries. For many of you, ghouls that you are, this is a recommendation; I certainly found it interesting. I just don’t want it to take you by surprise, because…there are no punches pulled here.

Eleanor Fitzsimmons, The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children’s Author, and Creator of the Railway Children. I love Nesbit’s books, and I also love AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book. This is, I think, a balanced look at an interesting and complicated person. There are a few places where the timeline shuttles back and forth a little, but that happens when you’re trying to follow multiple threads; people’s lives aren’t necessarily tidy.

Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See: And Other Stories. This is very well-done short fiction about generally quite unpleasant people. Not mostly genocidal criminals, just rather nasty humans. Adjust tolerance/reading time accordingly.

Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife. Discussed elsewhere.

Molly Gloss, Unforeseen: Stories. These were beautiful and self-possessed and sometimes speculative and generally a glowing volume of just what I needed, quiet, right.

Justina Ireland, Deathless Divide. Sequel to Dread Nation. Tries to do a little more with Native characters than in its sequel but still focused on questions of passing and social priorities for Black Americans, within the framework of an alternate history zombie YA. A very quick read considering the weight of its subject matter.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints. And speaking of passing and social priorities for Black Americans, this is a really intense book about ’20s New York with a lot of cultural texture and interesting magic. I liked it a lot.

Shion Miura, The Great Passage. More books should be about the construction of dictionaries. This one happens to be a novel about the quirky individuals who are working on a Japanese dictionary, and it is lovely and the stakes are dictionaries, which are quite high stakes and at the same time very little bloodshed. Hurrah.

Abir Mukherjee, Death in the East. The fourth in its mystery series, and the protagonist is making personal progress, and his sidekick is making political progress. Along with the rest of India. Since that part is the part of this 1920s Calcutta setting that interests me most, I’m very happy with the direction of the series and will keep reading as soon as there’s more.

Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World. This book is very much pop history. It was reasonably fun, and it did a good job of covering the world rather than just “the world haha no really we mean England and France, maybe a little Spain for fun, the US after 1800.” If you know a lot about any area of maritime history, it’s not likely to go into as much detail as you know, but if you don’t actually already have a chapter on Viking shipbuilding (or equivalent) outlined in your head for if somebody asks for it, you might like this one.

Una L. Silberrad, Desire. Not nearly as racy as the title makes it sound–the protagonist’s name is Desire, and this is a 1908 novel that was criticized at the time because the male love interest supported and respected the protagonist in her work outside the home, and clearly that was a female fantasy. I’m not kidding. Anyway, Desire is forthright, practical, and delightful, and so is Desire. Content warning: the death of a Very Nice Dog, but otherwise just what I needed, a heroine who takes her fate–and that of everyone around her–by the horns and builds a life she enjoys. There’s more Silberrad out there, and I’m excited.

Jonathan Strahan, ed., The Year’s Best Science Fiction Volume 1. Discussed elsewhere.

Tade Thompson, Making Wolf. This is the most violent Ruritanian novel I’ve ever read. It’s a thriller set in contemporary “Alcacia,” which is a heck of a lot like Nigeria but, y’know, all the benefits of being fictional. You can talk about different governmental and extragovernmental entities in ways that make sense with your plot and metaphors. I really like Ruritanian novels, and I like thrillers well enough. This reads very much like the start of a series, and I’ll be glad to have the rest of the series.

Bjorn Vassnes, Kingdom of Frost: How the Cryosphere Shapes Life on Earth. This is not highly technical, so if you’re interested in cold-dwelling life at all sizes, you should be able to enjoy it no problem. That is, in fact, my jam. So.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Why would you want a volume of the year’s best short science fiction? Well, several reasons. If you don’t keep up with short fiction but like it, a one-volume summary from an editor whose taste aligns well with yours can give you a glimpse, at least, of the gigantic world beyond. If you do, you might want some of your favorite stories conveniently in one place, with some perspective that will let you say in 2029, oh yes, that’s what 2019 was like in short fiction, those stories were published at basically the same time. Or you might enjoy having someone hit a few highlights that you didn’t manage to get to yourself.

Because unless someone is directly paying you to read all the short SFF, you will miss some things. I sure do. (I suspect that even the people who are directly paid miss things too. There’s a lot.)

So how does this volume do with that? Pretty well, I think. There are several stories I enjoyed the first time around and am glad to see again collected–notably Fran Wilde’s “A Catalog of Storms” but also Ken Liu’s “Thoughts and Prayers,” Fonda Lee’s “I (28M) Created A Deepfake Girlfriend and Now My Parents Think We’re Getting Married,” and Indrapramit Das’s “Kali_Na.” I would not have made the same choice as Strahan for Best Elizabeth Bear Story of the Year, but “Soft Edges” is a good story, it’s just that there’s tough competition for that position.

Of course I definitely want a YB volume to introduce me to great stories I’ve missed, and this one delivers. There aren’t any I’d consider duds–all have solid reasons to be included (please note that this has not always been the case for me with YB volumes)–and several new stories would have made my favorites list if I’d read them in time. Stand-outs for me in this category included Suzanne Palmer’s “The Painter of Trees,” Karin Tidbeck’s “The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir,” Malka Older’s “Sturdy Ladders and Lanterns,” and Alec Nevala-Lee’s “At the Fall”–all very different and very compelling.

Strahan didn’t hit even remotely all of my favorites for 2019, but that would have been impossible and should not be expected. His taste leans toward more exposition than implication in some of these stories, but it’s quality exposition. He also limits his remit to science fiction as distinct from fantasy, which is a distinction I often find counter-productive…except when it’s a matter of fitting vast available material into a book of usable size, in which case it becomes pretty understandable. You could do a lot worse than this one if you tried to pick good stories from 2019.