The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 5

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 5
edited by Neil Clarke

After enjoying volume 4 of this series so much, I decided to collect past and future volumes as well. I get a lot of exposure to contemporary short sf&f by voting in the Hugos, but those have a fantasy tilt of late, and I find Clarke's selections more to my taste; of the 28 stories collected here, there is just ones that overlaps with the 18 short fiction Hugo finalists for the same period! I decided to read a story over lunch every day that I worked on campus, but I was less than diligent about this, and then also took a break to catch up on my Doctor Who Magazine back issues, so this volume ended up being stretched out in my reading from October 2020 to January 2022! As a result, my memory of some of the volume's early stories is a little murky.

Collection published: 2020
Contents published: 2019
Acquired: October 2020
Read: January 2022

"Best of"s are always a mixed bag, and I found many of the volume's earlier stories not to my taste, especially Cixin Liu's "Moonlight," which treats as novel the kind of time-travel shenanigans any 21st-century sf reader/viewer is well used to at this point. But I soon got into it, and there was definitely enough to like here to justify the volume. Highlights included:

• Marie Vibbert's "Knit Three, Save Four" (from F&SF) is a cute story where knitting saves a spaceship from disintegrating.
• Tobias S. Buckell's "By the Warmth of Their Calculus" (from Mission Critical) is a bit vague in my memory now... but I do remember trying to figure out if he had written more stories in this milieu, so I must have liked it.
  
• Alastair Reynolds's "Permafrost" (from Tor.com) is a great, clever, involving time travel story about people who are projecting their minds back in time to head off a disaster. It's a Tor.com novella, which I like to complain about a lot, but it doesn't fit their usual style/ethos at all, thankfully. I guess they do publish unique stuff, it just doesn't make the Hugo ballot when they do.
• Tegan Moore's "The Work of Wolves" (from Asimov's) was my absolute favorite story from the volume, a cool story of an augmented search-and-rescue dog that really captures the canine perspective, and has a great, clever ending. I don't think I'd ever read anything from Moore before, but I hope to read more.
• A Que's "Song Xiuyun" (from Clarkesworld) was a neat story. (Again, I don't remember it much anymore, but I do remember recommending it to someone!)

There were lots of other decent ones, and even things I disliked were most just not to my taste I think; only one other than Cixin Liu's flat-out annoyed me, and that was "On the Shores of Ligeia" by Carolyn Ives Gilman, which had a sort of leap/turn in it that I found utterly implausible, and sunk what had been up until that point a decent tale. I look forward to the pandemic-delayed volume 6, and I hope I can get through it more quickly!

Hugos 2017: Death's End by Cixin Liu

Trade paperback, 724 pages
Published 2017 (originally 2010)
Acquired May 2017
Read July 2017

Death's End by Cixin Liu

Each successive Remembrance of Earth's Past novel has gotten longer than the previous, duller than the previous, and worse than the previous. I struggled with Death's End a lot, though maybe that was exacerbated by my need to read all 700+ pages quickly because I was coming up tight on the Hugo voting deadline. As in The Dark Forest, the bland characters here are less than interesting, but unlike in The Dark Forest, the cool concepts don't seem to come very quick or fast to make up for it. Every now and then something really arresting happens (the Post-Deterrence Era was traumatizing, and the journey into the four-dimensional realm was great), but then it goes back to slow banalities.

That is, until the end. The last couple hundred pages suddenly get weird and wacky and completely fascinating, with low-entropy entities and fantastic weaponry and beautiful imagery and a mind-boggling scale beyond anything seen in this series up to now by several orders of magnitude. If the whole book had been like that, or if we'd just gotten to that stuff sooner, this would have been a much better book, but it was just so boring to get there that I got intensely frustrated.

This Friday: My reaction to the actual Hugo results!

Next Week: At last, my Hugo journey comes to a belated end, in Saga, Book Two!

Hugos 2017 [Prelude]: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Trade paperback, 512 pages
Published 2015 (originally 2008)
Acquired May 2017
Read June 2017

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

It took me longer to get into this book than it did the first Remembrance of Earth's Past novel-- no character here was ever as arresting as Ye Wenjie in The Three-Body Problem. What really carries you through the first two-thirds or so are the ideas: how would Earth react to an inevitable alien invasion centuries in the future, especially if Earth has entered a period of technological stagnation thanks to alien intervention, and if the aliens can monitor almost all electronic communications? The book answers these questions in a variety of ways, most of them interesting: I liked, for example, the Wallfacer Project, where certain men are granted the power to do anything necessary for Earth's defense, without explanation.

As one of them (Luo Ji, an astronomer and sociologist who seems to know very little about either astronomy or sociology) finds out, this can be a curse and a blessing. You can't not be a Wallfacer (because people will assume everything you do is part of the plan, including saying you have no plan) but you can also do whatever you want (because people will assume everything you do is part of the plan, though eventually they will get suspicious if you just buy a lot of fine wine). The social implications about how to plan a mass evacuation and such are also pretty interesting, and the various Wallfacer plans for Earth defense pretty epic. Unfortunately, Luo Ji isn't a great character, and outside of him, there are so many other characters that I struggled to keep track of them all. There's especially this weird, long subplot about a really weird romance Luo Ji has that had some pretty questionable aspects.

The last third of the novel, which jumps ahead two centuries (several main characters use suspended animation) really picks up, especially once the first alien probe arrives, and I found myself engrossed once more. There are multiple events that made perfect sense that I did not see coming, and the idea of the "dark forest" and the way it is used by Luo Ji is pretty interesting and clever. Not as good as The Three-Body Problem, but it contains the scientific and social inventiveness of the best epic hard sf.

Excitingly, this is the last Hugo "prelude" book I have to read: everything from here on out will be a finalist! Finally, my rankings will come together. (This is being posted on July 11, four days before the Hugo deadline, but I actually wrote it on June 10.) Five books to go!

Next Week: Now that the Wayfarer has arrived, it's time to settle into A Closed and Common Orbit!

Hugos 2017 [Prelude]: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Trade paperback, 434 pages
Published 2016 (originally 2006)
Acquired and read May 2017

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

It took me a little bit to get into this book, which I'm reading because the third volume in the series it began is a 2017 finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. There are a lot of characters, and Liu sort of jerks you from character to character, especially at first, and the one the narrative ends up settling on doesn't really have a personality beyond "baffled but well-meaning scientist." This is definitely a sort of throwback science fiction, like The Martian, more the sf of ideas and technology than of character and society. Which turns out to be fine, because once I came to grips with that, I actually really got into the book.

The explorations of the simulated alien world of Trisolaris are really neat, especially the grappling with how would you devise scientific reasoning in a world that seemingly defied rational prediction. As things started to come together in the final third of the novel, I liked it even more-- as the narrative comes back to Ye Wenjie, she turns out to be a fascinating character. This isn't just a book about cool scientific concepts, it's also about the processes of history, and who gets left behind by history, and who feels betrayed by progress. Liu provides a mirrored vision for these issues, as we see them play out on both Trisolaris and in China. Those who struggle against history are of course themselves part of it, and even though this book just spans from 1967 to 2007, I can already see how this series will (quite appropriately) project hundreds of years into the future by the time it's done.

Next Week: A return to the world of The Broken Earth in The Obelisk Gate!