The Road

by Cormac McCarthy
If I had to describe The Road in one word, it would be "bleak." This relatively short novel follows a man in his young son as they try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by nuclear holocaust. Human civilization has disintegrated, the landscape is covered with ash, and no plants can grow. The few survivors of the fall-out either scavenge for food or join together in violent, cannibalistic gangs.

This would be an excruciating book to read if it weren't so sublimely written. Cormac McCarthy's prose is as gray and spare as the landscape he describes. The story is so grim that I wanted to detach myself emotionally from the characters, but I was still wracked as the father internally debated whether it would be better to keep going or to accept death on their own terms.

The Road is undoubtedly the best book I read in 2009. I cannot recommend it highly enough. But I'm not interested in seeing the recent film adaptation, even though it stars the excellent Viggo Mortensen. I felt on edge the whole time I was reading the book, and some of the imagery was disturbing. To see it all on film would be too horrific.

The Hunger Games

by Suzanne Collins
Not since Ender's Game have I been so utterly incapable of putting a book down. I read The Hunger Games in the space of an afternoon, and I would have gone without meals if possible. Suzanne Collins creates a partially dystopian vision of the future in which a central power dominates other city states across North America. Each year a young boy and girl are selected from each outlying district to participate in the Hunger Games, a survival competition in which the young people fight to the death on live television.

Nothing about The Hunger Games is completely original, but the book is so good that I still couldn't get enough. This is a serious contender as the best book I have read this year, and I highly recommend it. Even though it involves fighting and killing, the book isn't particularly graphic, and I would recommend it to young and old alike.

Cyteen

by C.J. Cherryh

Cyteen follows the history of Ariane Emory, a brilliant scientist, businesswoman, and politician who has herself cloned after she dies. Her clone is then part of a life-long experiment in which her childhood and development is closely controlled to mirror that of her predecessor, in homes of producing another multifaceted genius. This experiment happens with the backdrop of interstellar political intrigue and competing factions within Emory's enormous corporation.

This book was very hard for me to get into. For the first 200 pages the major character, Ari Emory, does some really repulsive and twisted thing. I wanted to stop reading, but I kept on because I had heard that it got better.

I'm so glad I stuck it out, because it did get better. It got so good that I could scarcely put it down. It really made me think at times, about what makes us human and ideas of social engineering and the ethics of forming a person's mind. Cyteen won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and after reading it I can say that it is well deserved.

The Vintage Anthology of Science Fantasy

edited by Christopher Cerf


I have a deep fondness for short stories. I think they are the perfect length to present an idea, develop it, and draw a conclusion. They are also very readable. Even during law school, when I was up to my eyeballs in cases to read, I could always find time to read a good short story or two. So when I saw a dog-eared copy of The Vintage Anthology of Science Fantasy in a give-away book bin, I snatched it up to see if it was any good. I wasn't disappointed.

This was an amusing collection of short stories by some really great authors. Some of them, like Roald Dahl or Arthur C. Clarke, are very well-known. Other I had never heard of, but they were great nonetheless. Most of these stories were written 40-50 years ago, so they have a fun campy feel when they talk about what the future will be like. 

I think science fantasy is an interesting genre. It's not fantasy because of its futuristic or technological elements, nor is it sci-fi because it doesn't really care about technical or scientific details. The fantastical devices are merely vehicles to explore interesting concepts. Science fantasy is arguably just a part of science fiction, but its definitely different from hard sci-fi. It's also very accessible, even to people who wouldn't imagine reading most science fiction.

Accelerando

by Charles Stross

I have a hard time describing Accelerando. It is sort of a cyberpunk extension of Web 2.0 principles to a vision of the future, and it is mostly confusing. That isn't to say that the book is bad, but it sprawls across four generations of characters and gets too drawn out for my taste. Charles Stross imagines that humanity is on the verge of "singularity," where computers and technology take on a life of their own and render humanity largely obsolete. Stross isn't the first one to imagine this concept, but he takes it one step further by juxtaposing the singularity concept with the Fermi Paradox. Enrico Fermi famously asked his colleagues that if there were multiple intelligent species in the galaxy, why couldn't we see any sign of them. In Stross's Accelerando world, the vast network of intelligences mostly stay at home because they are all intelligent programs living in vast computers powered by Dyson spheres, communicating through wormhole networks. The story haltingly follows several brilliant people who figure out how to contact alien species and escape irrelevance within our own solar system.

Accelerando is full of tech jargon -- Stross is a computer programmer -- and it is broken up into roughly nine different stories with the background of the technology singularity. It is fascinating at times, but I ultimately didn't enjoy it much. I actually started reading it back in 2005 and when I picked it up again last year I had to slog through the middle sections through sheer force of will.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

by Cory Doctorow

I had previously read some of Cory Doctorow's short stories and blog posts (he runs BoingBoing.net), but I had never read any of his novels until now. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom first caught my attention when I read in an article that Doctorow released it online under a Creative Commons license. Since it was free to read and came in virtually every format imaginable, I thought I'd give it a read.

This was Doctorow's first novel, and to some extent it shows. It has that eager and imaginative feel I've seen in other out-of-the-gate sci-fi writers. My favorite thing about science fiction writing is the presentation of an Idea. A good sci-fi story or novel usually has one or two ideas or concepts about what the future or another existence could be like, and then it tells a story in that imagined environment. Doctorow's contribution to the sci-fi corpus is The Bitchun Society, his vision of a future in which technological innovations have conquered sickness, death, and information barriers. This would be fairly ho-hum techno-Marxism if it weren't for Doctorow's vision of what he calls "Whuffie," a constantly updated score of popularity/accomplishment/influence/power that each person carries. You gather Whuffie by creating things or working or helping people out, and you deplete your Whuffie when you use things or need people to help you. Also part of this vision of the future is what Doctorow calls the "ad-hocracy," the individual groups of people who informally get together to run a community or a university or a city. With the different ad-hocracies running the show, there isn't a need for a traditional government.

This hypothetical world view sets the stage for the exploits and struggles of the main character, Julius, who lives and works in the ad-hocracy that runs part of the Magic Kingdom at Disney World. Julius and his companions fight to preserve the traditional format of the Haunted Mansion as popular new-comers with lots of "Whuffie" try to change it to something like a virtual reality experience. If it sounds odd to create a sweeping vision of the future and then set a novel in Disney World, well, it is odd. The novel is entertaining for the most part, but not particularly strong. Several of the flashbacks seem intended just to develop Doctorow's idea of "The Bitchun Society" rather than to move along the story. By the end of the book, I didn't care much about the main character, which is always a problem. Still, it a was fairly entertaining read, even if the world view was more interesting than the plot.

Howl's Moving Castle

by Diana Wynne Jones
I didn't even know about this book until Hayao Miyazaki made a movie version. The film was quite good in its own right, but now that I have read the book, I realize that he made quite a few changes that I can't exactly explain. And as is almost always the case in books adapted to movies, the book is better.

Howl's Moving Castle follows the story of Sophie, a young woman who works in a hat shop. Her sisters have left and were leading exciting lives, but as the dutiful oldest daughter, Sophie felt trapped in her tedious world. All that changes when the Witch of the Waste comes to the shop and becomes angry with Sophie. The Witch curses Sophie, turning her into an old woman, and Sophie flees before her family can discover what happened to her. In desperation, she eventually takes up residence in the strange moving castle that roams around the town, said to be owned by the evil Wizard Howl. In the castle, Sophie meets Wizard Howl and many other colorful figures, and has plenty of adventures of her own.

A lot of the characters and subplots in Howl's Moving Castle are fairly confusing, but it all comes together in the end. I thought the book was extremely imaginative, and it has a very humorous tone; the characters are genuinely funny and vivid. I'd recommend this book to anyone, both young and old.

Midshipman's Hope

by David Feintuch
Midshipman's Hope is a military/sci-fi novel that does a good job creating a universe in which humans travel to and colonize other planets using spaceships the same way our ancestors used sailing vessels. Those ships carry cargo and passengers through the depths of space for months on end, and are manned by a crew of sailors and officers similar to the naval tradition. Feintuch tells the story of Nicholas Seafort, a young midshipman who becomes the senior officer on the ship after disasters and illness kill the captain and his lieutenants. He is forced to continue the voyage to the planet Hope as his duty as an officer, even though he feels he is unqualified to command.

Midshipman's Hope succeeds mainly through its frank portrayal of the self-doubts of its main character and narrator, as well as the interpersonal dynamics of a small ship alone in space. Even though the setting is in the future, the book gave me a hint as to what sailing the seas would have been like five hundred years ago. Like most science fiction books, the author engages in some amateur sociological predictions when he describes the government and the hierarchy of the military, but it generally contributes to the story rather than distract from it. By the end of the book it is clear that there is more to come (it is the first in a series), but there is still a fairly satisfying ending in which Seafort comes to grips with his own decisions and vanquishes a few personal demons. Midshipman's Hope is a very good science-fiction/military novel in the tradition, and an enjoyable read.