SF Novels of the Decade

A TOR books poll lists them

I have to admit to really liking Scalzi's Old Man's War, to not yet having penetrated the length of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and to being relatively ignorant of the rest.  So, I must make headway in the list and see if my tastes still coincide with those of the insiders.

Comments

  1. FredMarch 3, 2011 at 11:19 AM

    I've read four of them so far.

    John Scalzi: _Old Man's War_, which I enjoyed and may read others by him down the road.

    Neil Gaiman: _American Gods_, which wasn't bad at all. Several members of the SF book group I belong to like him so I will be reading more by him in the future.

    Susanna Clarke: _Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell_. I thought the structure resembled that of the classical concerto. It begins with a fast movement; the second movement is a slow one; the third and final movement is a fast one again--allegro, andante, allegro.

    China Mieville: _Perdido Street Station_--the one the impressed me the most. The SF group has read two of his, with PSS being the first, _The City and The City_ the second, and _Kraken_ coming up in a few months. I'm reading his works on my own and not waiting for the group.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Art DurkeeMarch 4, 2011 at 1:44 AM

    Strictly speaking, those are almost all fantasy novels, not SF. Swords and medieval-level cultural settings? Sorry, that's almost never SF.

    A list of best SF novels of the last decade would have to have included something by Peter F. Hamilton, among others.

    ReplyDelete
  3. StevenMarch 4, 2011 at 7:18 AM

    Dear Mr. Durkee,

    I had noted much the same--but if we use SF to mean speculative fiction, that often includes fantasy.

    That point aside (and I'm not certain anyone voting on this was using such academic distinctions) I'm intrigued by your note. Do you have particular recommendation of a place to start with Peter Hamilton? I've had no success in getting into it--but if you have an example that stands out, I'd like to try to start there. Much of what he writes seems to come under the heading of Space Opera, which is a genre, along with "Lost Race" novels, which I like best of all, but I just haven't had entree to Mr. Hamilton's work.

    More--do you have other suggestions--things you particularly liked. I fall in and out of SF based on the recommendations of others and I would love to see a similar list compiled by you and interested readers.

    Thank you for commenting.

    shalom,

    Steven

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take...
Read more