No surprise to me, but the Hugo awards seem to have a problem with facing the reality of what they are.

https://www.blackgate.com/2023/10/19/the-burnished-city-by-davinia-evans/

My ratings were my usual mix of mostly 4* with a decent number of 5 and a slightly smaller number of 3. Not a single 2 or 1* in 2022 which is good - basically these would mean I disliked the book so much that I abandoned it without finishing, and can't imagine myself going back to it to try again. Of TTRBC books, almost all were 4 or 5* - of my local book group, a fair number were 3* (the organisers tend to include a number of books which they consider one "ought to read", and often I find these disappointing )

The full lot is at https://www.goodreads.com/review/stats/8796846 - top level summary was that it was a good year for reading and by and large I enjoyed the majority of what I read.

The striking thing about the book is that he uses varying fonts as well as illustrations, like drawings both freestyle and more technical in appearance to augment the text. It's certainly not a graphic novel in the normal sense of that word, but it does have elements of that. Now, for me the visuals didn't really add much to the text - I couldn't always work out why he was choosing to put picture X at point Y in the book, and after a while I stopped trying to work it out. But it's obviously meaningful to him, and others might find it more affecting than I did.

The basic plotline [spoiler alert] is that a secret extension to the Crossrail project runs into an unexpected obstacle (for those who don't know, Crossrail, or the Elizabeth Line, is a real thing, being a new underground railway line going roughly east-west across central London linking Heathrow Airport and beyond across to the Docklands). The (probably untrue) secret extension is planned to provide emergency exits for the monarchy and parliament in case of dire need. But the tunnelling machine runs into an object which turns out to be the hull of a buried alien spaceship. This triggers a defensive EMP pulse which kind of closes London down as a living city. One of the protagonists goes into the hull and ultimately finds the control chair. The other main protagonist is locked out, so hits on the idea of getting a friend to drive him out to near Bristol where (apparently) there is a secret stash of old steam locomotives - which are of course unaffected by trivia like EMPs - he then hijacks one of them which hurtles him back to London and is used to batter open the locked opening.

Things then get weirder (?!) - we learn quite a lot about the original purpose of the ship as it integrates itself with protagonist 1 - there was a long-ago war with another species which Went Badly, causing this particular ship to crash sometime in the Neolithic, ie roughly when human settlement was starting in the London area. It then sat there dormant, but its latent energy had the effect of shaping how London subsequently grew. Now, this basic concept - that the overall large-scale structure of London above and below ground has been shaped since the very beginnings of human settlement there by the design and purpose of an alien spaceship - is certainly original, so far as I know. The geographical settings are bold and obviously drawn from actual acquaintance. So far so good, and it's worth reading for those factors alone. As the book draws to a close, protagonist 1 learns enough about the ship that he is able to make it take off again, lifting (intact) a roughly 6km radius sphere of London with it into low earth orbit. Protagonist 2 has doubts about this at first but then goes with the flow.

But as you may have guessed by now, I had reservations. The story's opening sections make it seem as though there are going to be multiple protagonists and viewpoints, but before long this closes down to just two. They're both male, both quite weird in very different ways, and both conveniently free of any relational ties. The few other people who have any narrative focus at all are not really given enough for me to feel I got to know them in any real way. I'd have liked more focus on a few more people. The end result is a sense that London is home to only very few people, and these aren't part of any real community. This is in stark contrast to other places in the book where Hughes clearly loves and celebrates London as a vibrant and diverse place to live. Having lived there myself for a few years, I'm also convinced that London does have social and community relationships, as well as a degree of isolation and loneliness, but you wouldn't really get this from the book.

There's a lot of preoccupation with the secret society of steam railway enthusiasts - The Smokeboxers - who manage to turn up at the crucial point of the plot and facilitate the way in which the two main characters are reunited. This was, to be sure, fun, and one assumes is built on personal wishes and hobbies. But it provided an exceptionally complex and unlikely way to (basically) get through a locked door, and felt very much like wish-fulfillment. On the other hand, a good bit of wish-fulfillment does no harm in a novel!

The alien ship, together with its whole back story, is fun, and introduced at a sensible point. But the culmination of the story, with a big circle of central London and the ground below it - the aforementioned sphere about 6 km in radius - taking off into space, didn't fit well for me with the build-up. We had no prior clues that the ship could achieve that sort of thing at all, nor why it or its new captain might want to do it. The end result is broadly the same as James Blish's 1950s series Cities in Flight, except Blish's cities went through a whole lot more preparation before taking off. Again, the overall effect was to separate London from its environment rather than maintain the integration that seemed to be a lot of Hughes's theme. It was also, IMHO, very rushed - there had been a lot of long build-up but then a very sudden resolution, and I would have preferred a more measured pace.

Finally, the last pages rather suddenly introduce the idea that this may simply be book 1 of a longer series. I know that publishers love a series and push authors towards this, but I hadn't seen any prior clues that this was on the cards here. So all of a sudden the long long ago enemies of the ship reappear, with only the two weird protagonists and an unknown number of their Smokeboxer allies to prepare a defence. And the whole plot theme which makes use of steam trains to unite the two protagonists seems a bit pointless as it stands, since the train-driving engineer's presence serves very little purpose at the end of this book. One assumes that it might become important in book 2?

All in all my feelings were mixed. I'm very glad to have read it, if only for its bold zaniness, but felt it could have done more with the ideas and setting. It hasn't particularly enticed me to read other books by Hughes - I see he has done one other novel, plus a few highly geeky works on fonts and such like - and if he does publish a sequel I'm not altogether sure I'd rush to get it. If anyone else has come across this book or other ones by Hughes, it would be interesting to hear what you thought...

Sinopticon 2021 is a collection of short science fiction stories by Chinese authors (in translation) with some interesting and unobtrusive notes by the translator. These notes include, for example, a short biography of each author, some brief explanations of culturally important concepts that would be missed by the average western reader, and occasional comments on how Chinese names, words and orthography are used to reinforce the storyline.

As a rule I don't really click with short stories, as I always want to know more about the situation than there is time for. But these have an interest value because of their origin. Apparently science fiction writing in China has grown massively in recent years, no doubt spurred on by the international acclaim of Cixin Lou (The Three Body Problem, The Wandering Earth, etc).

Now, a lot of the writing here feels to me like work-in-progress. For example, there are odd failures to get distances and other physical facts right. Some of the story settings also come across as derivative from well-known and successful western science fiction books. However, the foci of the stories, and the preoccupations of the writers, are often quite different.

My second favourite story, The Tide of Moon City, by Regina Kanyu Wang, illustrates both of these. The story straddles a binary planet with a history of antagonism and rivalry, and it is impossible to get far into it without thinking "this is Anarres and Urras from The Dispossessed". But in contrast to that novel, the story deliberately avoids exploring in any detail the political differences between the planets, and delves not at all into maths and physics. Instead it has as its subject the loneliness of two individuals who, having once met, can never do so again. So, if you like, it is Urras and Anarres after all, but where Shevek and Takver are from opposing planets, and never reunite.

Other preoccupations include personal dislocation, time travel, tension between social obligation and personal wish, artificial intelligence - all themes which are tackled by western authors as well, but the emphasis differs. Many science fiction authors in the west want, somewhere in their stories, to touch base with Big Issues, and to describe phenomena on the scale of a solar system or larger unit. The Chinese authors in this collection prefer to deal with the impact on individuals, or at most very small groups. The background may be vast in space or time, or it may involve colossal numbers of people, but the story is actually about two or three people.

Indeed, loneliness, especially in a crowd of others, together with thwarted goals and disappointments, are such prevalent themes that it is difficult not to project them onto contemporary Chinese life. As Xuetin Christine Ni says in her introduction, these stories "tend to end with a melancholic tone, because Chinese stories tend not to have happy endings".

My favourite of all of them is Meisje met de Parel by Anna Wu (The Girl with the Pearl Earring, provocatively left as a foreign phrase to English readers), which blends time travel and AI aspects into a rather haunting tale of a young artist trying to find an outlet for her creativity.

In summary, a fascinating and unusual insight into recent Chinese science fiction. It would be nice to think that longer works by these same authors might become available before too long.

I might have even achieved higher numbers that these, but took time out from reading a various points in the year to catch up on podcasts and the reading of published papers, neither of which count in the books total.

Here's what I read this year. Thirty three books are marked with a #. These are books I purchased and read this year. All others were things I already had on my shelves.
The 28 marked with @ are audio books. Those eleven which appear in italics were book club picks.

SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS:

Day of the Oprichnik, by Vladimir Sorokin
A disturbing near future, or perhaps alternate history, novel about a Russian Oprichnik, basically a government mobster in the service of the new Tsar, who goes about his day intimidating, beating, and murdering in the name of good order. Not for the faint of heart!

@ The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi
A story of power politics in near future water-scarce southwest USA. Decent but maybe not really my thing.

Fahreneheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury is a US national treasure. This is not my favourite Bradbury, but still very good.

Podkayne of Mars, by Robert A. Heinlein
Juvenile fiction from the master, bit dated and too young for me, but quality stuff. I much prefer his more sophisticated works like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger in a Strange Land. This books features a young woman of science as a protagonist.

#@ The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
Second book of the Culture series, of which the only other one I've read was The Algebraist. I enjoyed both of those and should explore the series more.

# The Urth of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
The final volume in the Book of the New Sun, a coda to the series. I decided to read this after enjoying the first four books as out 2019 Slow Read at the book club. This is a fine conclusion to the series. It finds Severian on a space-ship to the stars, and later he returns to Urth. We meet many of the old characters again. Some questions answered, new ones raised. I definitely recommend reading this is series with the other four, so they are all fresh in the memory.

#@ The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson
An alternate history that re-imagines the world if the Bubonic Plague had been even more devastating in Europe and erased it as a power. The book is broken down into historical vignettes in different time periods, each one set in a different place and time, and featuring different characters, but the three main characters are all archetypes, who sometimes remember their past lives. I thought it was a masterpiece - probably my favourite book of the year.

#@ The Invincible, by Stanislaw Lem
#@ Fiasco, by Stanislaw Lem
#@ Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, by Stanislaw Lem
A trio of books by Lem, as I work my way through his catalogue. Invincible was my favourite, and probably my favourite Lem book to date. Lem seems to write either straight-up SF on the theme of First Contact (The Invincible, Fiasco, Solaris) or poignant, absurd, satirical futurist novels (Memoirs, Cyberiad, Futurological Congress). I much prefer the former. One main thrust of the First Contact group of novels (most blatant in Fiasco) is that any attempt to relate to aliens will be doomed to fail, because they're, well, really alien, and not just humans with knobs and scales on their skin.

#Always Coming Home (Expanded Edition), by Ursula K. Leguin
Another book club pick, this one by Barner Cobblewood. A fascinating read for me, and certainly one of our longest club books. Perhaps not the most engaging novel, as these things go, but really thought provoking in the final analysis, and it provoked one of the better discussions we had this year I think.

#@ Helliconia Spring, by Brian Aldiss
The first in a trilogy. I picked this one up because I quite enjoyed other Aldiss books I've read (Hot House, Non-Stop) and this series seems highly regarded. I thought it was OK. Will probably read the next book, but obviously wasn't compelled to rush into it.

Monday Starts on Saturday, by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
I continue to work my way through their body of work. This one is a curious make-up novel (made up of connected short stories) about a man's entry and work in a government 'institute of magic' located in the woods up near Finland. One of their more comedic and satirical works.

#@ Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente
Another book club book, it had some plusses and minuses for me. Ultimately, though, I'm just not that big a fan of 'humerous' SF.

@ The H.G. Wells Collection (The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon)
This is a wonderful collection with 5 of his most famous novels. These are Victorian SF, but for the most part you wouldn't know it. The Time Machine, Moreau, and The War of the Worlds are all knockout SF novels - well written, poignant, and timeless.

# The Languages of Pao, by Jack Vance
Book club selection. Not one of Vance's best works, and marred by the unexamined and needless inclusion of sexual violence, which means it doesn't stand up well to a modern reading.

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

@ Hag: Forgotten Folk Lore Retold As Feminist Fables
This is quite a good collection of short stories commissioned by Audible.co.uk collecting stories by British female authors, retellings of local folk tales with a female perspective.

@ Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian SF (edited and introduced by Michael Sims)
This is a surprisingly good anthology of Victorian SF, which one might be tempted to think of as dated (all about mustachioed gentlemen in pith-shaped space helmets saying 'Oh, I say...' as they traipse around Mars) but it's really so much more diverse than this and most of it truly qualifies as top-notch speculative fiction. This collection features both very famous authors (Poe, Conan Doyle, Kipling, Thomas Hardy) and others less well known. There's a mix of short stories and excerpts from novels. All entries are very elegantly introduced by the author, who provides a lot of context to the stories and really adds to the work. I'm tempted to look for his other anthologies.

Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
A collection of 17 stories by a variety of authors (including Neil Gaiman, Laird Barron, Elizabeth Bear, Gemma Files, Karl Edward Wagner, and Thomas Ligotti) all featuring a creature of H.P. Lovecraft's invention (or inspiration). A solid collection, but not a 'wow'.

#@ The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One 1929-1964 (edited by Robert Silverberg)
Another very fine collection, selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America based on votes from their SF author members. This collection has 26 of the very best SF short stories ever written, including Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny, The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke, and more. Introduction by Silverberg describes how the stories were selected, but the stories themselves are left to stand on their own merit.

Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang
Our final book club pick of the year, the first Ted Chiang collection (of which I think there are just two). This is a well-written and though provoking collection, as SF should be. It reminds me of several collections by Soviet SF authors I've read, for some reason.

However, I am so familiar with the plot that the considerable liberties made started to grate rapidly, and I decided that I would just find myself getting annoyed with it rather than taking it as it came.

Anyone else tried it?

In our slow read of The Lord of the Rings I remember arguing at times with @clash_bowley and others (who I'll admit know more about Tolkien's works than I) that Tolkien was less clear on some of the facts of Middle Earth (and specifically on the nature of Gandalf) in his early works than in the later ones. Reading the 1937 edition of The Hobbit reinforces that opinion for me, though I admit it is just an opinion based on my interpretation of the text. IOW, I am seeing evidence for a theory I already had. If you read the text with a different theory, you might not see the same evidence or give it the same weight as I have. Even so, it's a fascinating discussion regardless of who is "right."

Anyway, I am going to drop my notes here on the textual differences for those who are interested and want to comment. I assume that certainly Clash, @Apocryphal and @Michael_S_Miller will want to see this.

Are there any good fantasy novels that really feature a dungron crawl?

I Read 50-Plus Books Every Year: Here’s How I Do It

I'm needing a 'sense of wonder' fix and I was wondering if anybody knows about... I'm not even sure what to call them... art books that describe a setting? I've tried googling but am not getting the right hits, so I'm probably missing a key piece of nomenclature.

I'm looking for something along the lines of The Guide to Glorantha or the recent Artesia world book that came out - only I'm not looking for RPG franchises, but rather simply a creative person's individual endeavour. Something like the Terran Trade Authority books that came out when I was a kid. I seem to remember other such books, but can't think of any titles. They basically had text describing aspects of a setting - history, culture, etc. - and lots of art. I think the Tales From the Loop franchise also started out this way, and the author has a new book being kickstarted for a different setting.

Suggestions?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin

Sooo...what are you working on at the moment that you can share with the club? Either things which will be for sale, or things for your own enjoyment?

For me, there's more material for Liminal, my contemporary fantasy RPG, both by me and by other people. Soon there will be crowdfunding for my take on world hopping fantasy, Beyond Dread Portals, with a D&Dish rules influence but heavily drifted by both my tastes and to fit the setting (it's about exploration and politics rather than dungeons). And most excitingly of all, the epic @Apocryphal and I wrote, Mythic Babylon (for Mythras) is with the publishers.

Anyway...what's yours?

The teaser contains a few (rather disconnected) scenes and cameos, plus a bit of rather sickly commentary from David Goyer. It's going to be on Apple TV which I don't have, but with a bit of luck it will also show in other places. It sounds as though it will be presented as a series rather than single film, which is an interesting choice - as I expect we all know, the first book (not counting prequels and all) is episodic by nature, so maybe that makes sense.

The blurb says:

========

The Book of Koli begins a breathtakingly original new trilogy set in a strange and deadly world of our own making.

Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognisable landscape. A place where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly seeds that will kill you where you stand. And if they don’t get you, the Shunned men will.

Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He believes the first rule of survival is that you don’t venture too far beyond the walls.

He’s wrong.

Ward's main thesis is that Lewis constructed the entire Narnian series - seven books - based on the Medieval astrological view of the world as made up of seven concentric spheres surrounding our Earth. The seven in order ascending from Earth are Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - in astronomical terms broadly heading through the inner system first and then the outer one, but that is an entirely different way of looking at the phenomena.

If you're interested in this very compelling attempt to unravel Lewis's imaginative and metaphorical construction, the book is well worth it (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Planet-Narnia-Seven-Heavens-Imagination/dp/019973870X)  and is now available in a variety of formats (years ago when I bought it it was hardback only ). Briefly, Ward looks at key themes, recurrent words and phrases, prominence of particular objects and what they are made of, and a whole diverse mix of bits and pieces to establish connections between each book and one or other of the seven planets.

So The Horse and his Boy is characterised by a heavy pairing of twins or associations - Gemini the Twins being ruled by Mercury in medieval thinking. Indeed, the whole plot is driven by the reuniting of sundered twins, and in Archenland, apparently, twins are common. Not only that, but mythologically speaking, Castor and Pollux are respectively said to be a great horseman and a great boxer, a direct parallel to Cor and Corin. Beyond specific human pairings, the journey is constantly being forced to confront paired choices of direction etc.

Mercury is also, of course, the messenger of the gods, and Shasta's primary role is as messenger. Again more widely, messengers and messages fill the book, along with a need for haste and being fleet-of-foot. There are also frequent references to language, and in particular contrasting the dullness of (most, not all) Calormene poetry/song with the liveliness of that of Narnia and Archenland. But not only are words important - on specific occasions silence is the appropriate response... recognising the limitations of language as well as the potential. And arguably, Lewis's own use of language on multiple levels is at its best in this book (or Dawn Treader, for different reasons).

Anyway, I was convinced by Ward's arguments, and rereading the book made it seem altogether compelling that both The Horse and His Boy and the whole Narnia series had this underlying metaphor behind it. At very minimum, the book sheds some fascinating lights on Lewis's use of language and his ability to draw on Medieval and earlier imagery and metaphor - this is nowhere near so obvious in Narnia as it is in Lord of the Rings, but arguably that's because Tolkien wanted to make it much more in-your-face than Lewis did. One of my favourite examples was Lewis's use of "tingling" in a variety of places. Now, one of the Old English words for star was tingul (or tungol) from which Lewis's mind went to "twinkle twinkle little star" and hence a linguistic pun between "tingle" and stellar influences. Ward's book is full of these little, rather delightful derivations and etymologies (sometimes false etymologies used for their punning effect) that Lewis's academic studies would have suggested to him.

This link https://theportalist.com/andre-norton is a mini-celebration of her career to celebrate what would have been her 108th birthday...

The discussion is at BRP Central: https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/10571-ringworld-roleplaying-adventure-beneath-the-great-arch/?tab=comments#comment-158559

The general consensus seems to be that the setting is very large, and something is needed to ground the players and get them hopping to other locations on the ring. This is a similar problem to Space Opera type campaigns - where the setting is basically the entire galaxy, and can be huge. With space opera, though, it's easier to imagine each location as a 'point of light' - a discrete (and probably two dimensional?) location on the map, basically the backdrop for the scene, rather than a living, breathing location. Maybe this is why I've never really gravitated to space as a gaming milieu? I love settings too much!

Link: Ringworld RPG

Link: Five Classic Sword and Planet Sagas

The book seems to be somewhere between history and fiction. I'll let you know when I read more.