So the challenge passed to me by Deborah Whitehead was to
name "ten books that have stayed with me for one reason or another
throughout my life." It's an interesting challenge, but I'm going to play
fast and loose with the counting.
Pride of Chanur and Foreigner, C J Cherryh
C J Cherryh has been a favourite for as long as I've been
reading her books, and one of the reasons is her detailed worldbuilding, or
perhaps I should call that species building, as that's what she does best. Pride
of Chanur and Foreigner share similar structures, both the starts of
series, both featuring male humans dropped into an alien species which they
aren't fully able to understand. Pride takes the story from the alien
side, Foreigner from the human. And in both affection successfully
crosses the species barrier, raising deeper questions of mores and sexuality.
Cyteen and Regenesis, C J Cherryh
Having picked a pair of Cherryh books for what she does with
aliens, a further pair for what she can do with humans. Cyteen and Regenesis
deal with the death of scientific genius and political icon Arianne Emory, and
the childhood of Arianne Emory 2, as her project to recreate herself in not
just body, but mind as well takes form. But who killed AE1, and are they still
out there, targetting AE2... All the major players are psychological
manipulators, but they're about to be outwitted by their own creation.
Little Fuzzy, H Beam Piper
The only book I'm listing from the Golden Age, Little Fuzzy
has all the strengths of pacing and concise storytelling that the best of the
pulps offer, but with the addition of a sense of the environment that seems
more post-80s than pre-60s. A prospector out in the wilds of a backwater planet
realises there is actually an intelligent native species, a fact which will
destroy the planet's economic value if it becomes known, but the entire planet
is a company town, and they don't want to lose their economic prize.
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
A book I try to reread at least once a year, and the start
of a loose trilogy (with Spook Country and Zero History) tied together by the
character of Belgian billionaire and marketing genius Hubertus Bigend. This is
undoubtedly a Gibson book, with all his strengths, but unlike his previous
SFnal work it's a contemporary, post-911 book, with the protagonist, Cayce,
having lost her father during the attack (emphasis on the 'lost', he's not
confirmed dead). Cayce's thing is fashion and trends, something she is
uncannily sensitive to and employed to advise on, and her passion is a series
of odd, haunting, noirish film clips, the Footage, that are being released onto
the net with no idea of where they came from, or who created them. Then Bigend
hires Cayce to track down the origin of the Footage, but does he just want to
monetize it, and does the Footage want to be found?
The Winter Market, William Gibson
So why am I listing a short story (technically a novelette)
in a list of novels? Because if you want the works that have affected me most,
then this is undoubtedly one. Published in Gibson's Burning Chrome
anthology, one of the most important anthologies in SF history for what it and
Bruce Sterling's contemporary collection Wired did to shape the field,
this is a stunning exploration of disability, death and identity, but mostly
listed because 28 years on I still can't escape being haunted by Lise's
'Sometimes I like to watch'.
At the Mountains of Mourning, Lois McMaster Bujold
Like 'The Winter Market', a list of the works that have
affected me most wouldn't be complete without this short story (technically
it's a novella, and published in the collection of the same name). The Miles
Vorkosigan books have always had a focus on disability, Miles being disabled in
a society that doesn't tolerate the Other, but in this story LMB foregrounds
that even more than usual and a very young Miles takes it on himself to
investigate the death of a disfigured infant, a death that exposes more of the
ugly underside of Barrayaran society than Miles may have expected to find.
Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold
Having listed a Miles Vorkosigan short story, I think I have
to have a novel length one, because it takes that amount of space to see the
glory that is Miles, that hyperactive runt (as Cousin Ivan designates
him), at full throttle. I could as easily have picked any of the later Miles
novels, but Memory is where Miles is finally forced to grow up and assume his
position in Barrayaran society. Originally I loved Miles for being a disabled
action hero, but Memory is where he demonstrates he can be just as compelling a
hero when the action takes place in the Imperial court, or in an interrogation
cell.
Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle
Ash has apparently just been republished in the Masterworks
of Fantasy series, but it's actually very well disguised SF hidden behind the
tale of the exploration of the background of an alternative Joan of Arc (the
eponymous Ash) and the discovery that the fantastical elements of the story may
not be as fantastical or allegorical as modern researchers have believed. Mary
Gentle has been one of my favourite fantasy authors for as long as I can
remember, and one of the most ambitious, which may perhaps explain why she
isn't as well known as many less ambitious authors.
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
Cryptonomicon (and it's prequel trilogy The Baroque Cycle create a secret history of connections amongst the lesser
known movers and shakers of the world, in Cryptonomicon's case deeply
linked into Enigma, Bletchley Park, and Nazi gold. And that's only half the
book, because the intertwined rest revolves around their grandchildren, trying
to create an artificial currency and offshore data haven, and what happens when
they run into the story of that Nazi gold. Neal Stephenson's books manage the
weird combination of being both incredibly dense, and dragging you in with
often breakneck pacing.
Look to Windward and The Use of Weapons, Iain
M Banks
Iain Banks was guest of honour at LonCon3 a couple of weeks
ago, even though he died last year, and he's been one of the strongest voices
in British SF (and mainstream) since I first read him in my early 20s. It's
difficult to pick one Banks book, I could as easily have picked, say, The
Business from his mainstream works, that's another favourite, but the
Culture was at the core of his work, so one late Culture novel, Look to
Windward, which I think is Banks at the peak of his work, and one early, The
Use of Weapons, for Banks at his early, stylistic, best, and for the image
of that chair, which has stayed with me for 25 years.
Locked In and Unlocked, John Scalzi
Putting a novel that only released a couple of days ago in
the list may seem excessive, but I've been waiting for Locked In with
bated breath since reading the companion novella Unlocked a couple of
months ago. It's an SF novel about disability, with a disabled protagonist, and
it gets it right; that's so rare. But even if you don't recognise the sharp
observation, it's a damned good murder mystery with a logic to the crime that's
deeply embedded within the milieu in which it occurs. I'll be astounded if this
isn't short-listed for next year's Hugo. Unlocked, by contrast with the
novel, sheds the tight focus on the crime in favour of a wide and deep
investigation of the post-Haden's Syndrome World, that lets it look even more
closely at the disability parallels, and it gets them even more right than in
the novel (and it's free).
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