[Ropie]

A few years ago, member Arthur Frayn (who isn't around much now) started a similar thread to this one. It was surprisingly popular so I like to repeat it each year ;)

We're looking for long lists of SF books and authors, including ratings or other comments if you like. Some of us do keep a sort of reading diary and I'll post mine a bit later. There's no prize for the longest list, other than our undying respect of course!

[PeterWilliam]

Hmm, SF is lower on my priority list, but I did get around to it this year. I did read Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction. I also read Hogan and del Toro's The Strain, but not sure if that gets qualified as SF.

[Toma]

Looks like I didn't actually read much scifi this year.

From my goodreads list:

The Road - Cormac McCarthy - 2/5
Under the Dome - Stephen King - 3/5
Jon Shannow Trilogy - David Gemmell - 3/5
Odyssey - Jack McDevitt - 2/5
Ark - Stephen Baxter - 4/5
Old Soldiers - David Weber - 2/5
Moonstruck - Edward M Lerner - 3/5
Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - 3/5
Flood - Stephen Baxter - 3/5
The Strain - Guillermo Del Toro - 2/5
Sphere - Michael Crichton - 2/5
Fragment - Warren Fahy - 3/5
1634: The Baltic War - David Weber - 2/5
Star Risk Ltd. - Chris Bunch - 2/5
Heritage Trilogy - Ian Douglas - 3/5
Code to Zero - Ken Follett - 3/5
First Strike - Eric S. Nylund - 3/5
The Fall of Reach - Eric S. Nylund - 3/5

[Ropie]

A very respectable list, Toma. So your favourite read of the year was Ark by Baxter?

[Ropie]

Here are my SF(+F +H) reads of 2009. An average year for me in terms of books read (yes, I'm a ponderous reader).

Titles in green I did not particularly like.
Titles in black I enjoyed.
Titles in red I really loved.

A Case of Conscience - James Blish
The Saliva Tree (novella) - Brian Aldiss
The Dream Archipelago - Christopher Priest
Light - M John Harrison
Blood Music - Greg Bear
The Caves of Steel - Isaac Asimov
The Bridge - Iain Banks
Real Time World - Christopher Priest
Emphyrio - Jack Vance
Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Drowned World - JG Ballard
Lord Foul's Bane - Stephen Donaldson
Pollen - Jeff Noon
The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross
The Stand - Stephen King
Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
The Affirmation - Christopher Priest (re-read)
I am the Cheese - Robert Cormier
Moreau’s Other island - Brian Aldiss
The Dragon Under the Hill - Gordon Honeycomb
The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
Grinny - Nicholas Fisk

My favourite read of the year was Christopher Priest's subtly brilliant linked collection, The Dream Archipelago.

[chitman13]

Here are all the books I've read this year, Sci Fi first followed by other genres, although you could argue that some of the sci-fi ones should be listed with fantasy, but that depends on how you view them ;) So far I've clocked 65 reads this year, which I'm very pleased with, although I've got books sitting on the shelf that I've wanted to read but not got around to. I'm even more pleased that over half of these were released in 2009, a huge improvement over previous years.

Sci Fi
Splinter by Adam Roberts
Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell
Shadow of the Scorpion by Neal Asher
Predator South China Sea by Jeff VanderMeer
InfoQuake by David Louis Edelman
Earth Ascendant by Sean Williams
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Daemon by Daniel Suarez
Solaris New SF 3
Journey Into Space by Toby Litt
Doctor Who The Story of Martha by Dan Abnett
Eon by Greg Bear
Galactic Empires edited by Gardner Dozois
This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Twisted Metal by Tony Ballantyne
Sly Mongoose by Tobis Buckell
Torchwood The House That Jack Built by Guy Adams
The Accord by Keith Brooke
Death's Head Maximum Offense by David Gunn
The Grand Conjunction by Sean Williams
Nylon Angel by Marianne de Pierres
Heroes of the Space Marines edited by Nick Kyme
Torchwood Bay of the Dead by Mark Morris
Xenopath by Eric Brown
Wrath of the Lemming Men by Toby Frost
Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi
Orbus by Neal Asher
Judas Unchained by Peter F Hamilton
Death's Head Day of the Damned by David Gunn
Nova War by Gary Gibson
Orphan's Destiny by Robert Buttner
Retibution Falls by Chris Wooding
The Gunslinger by Stephen King
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
Emperor's Mercy by Henry Zou
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Winter Song by Colin Harvey
Fast Ships, Black Sails edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King
Makers by Cory Doctorow
Mindstar Rising by Peter F Hamilton
Cadian Blood by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Mirror Space by Marianne de Pierres
Diving Into The Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Red Claw by Philip Palmer
Sundiver by David Brin
War of the Soulites by Natasha Bennett
Star Wars Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber
Cosmopath by Eric Brown
Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

Urban Fantasy
Black Magic Woman by Justin Gustainis
Evil Ways by Justin Gustainis
Storm Front by Jim Butcher

Fantasy
The Painted Man by Peter V Brett
The City and The City by China Mieville
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Act of Will by AJ Hartley
The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert VS Redick
The Rats and the Ruling Sea by Robert VS Redick

Horror
The Birthing House by Christopher Ransom

YA
The Everlost by Neal Shusterman
Monster Republic by Ben Horton

[AuntiePam]

I loved these:

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway
Gunpowder – Joe Hill (novella)
Muse of Fire – Dan Simmons (novella)


I'm a big Stephen King fan but I was really disappointed by Under the Dome. It's the worst book I've read in years, from anyone.

I don't read much SF, apparently. :)

[Werthead]

Let's see:

Brian W. Aldiss: Non-Stop, Hothouse, Supertoys Last All Summer Long, H.A.R.M.
Neal Asher: The Shadow of the Scorpion
Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, The State of the Art
John Birmingham: Designated Targets, Final Impact, Without Warning
Rob Grant: Incompetence
Peter F. Hamilton: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, The Naked God, A Second Chance at Eden
Mary Gentle: Ash: A Secret History
Christopher Priest: The Affirmation, A Dream of Wessex
Alastair Reynolds: Terminal World
Kim Stanley Robinson: Galileo's Dream
Robert J. Sawyer: FlashForward
Patrick Tilley: Cloud Warrior, First Family, Iron Master, Blood River, Death-Bringer, Earth-Thunder

The best one would be down between The Reality Dysfunction, THe Affirmation and Terminal World, which is already staking its claim as the best SF&F book of 2010.

[Randy M.]

Here are my SF(+F +H) reads of 2009. An average year for me in terms of books read (yes, I'm a ponderous reader).

Titles in green I did not particularly like.
Titles in black I enjoyed.
Titles in red I really loved.
[...]

I like that system so I'll copy it and I'll leave off the non-sf/f/h books I read this year.

Kim Newman, The Night Mayor
(First novel, I believe, at least under his own name. Sorta-cyberpunk with a fantasy feel. Not great, but it held my interest.)

Alan Moore (w/Dave Gibbons), Watchmen (graphic novel)
(Doesn’t replace From Hell as my favorite Moore, but quite good.)

Carl Jacobi, Revelations in Black
(Fun pulp, much from the great years of Weird Tales.)

Peter Straub, lost boy lost girl
(I read 5 novels by Straub this year and this might be my favorite. Also one of the best novels I read this year.)

Peter Straub, In the Night Room
(Straub invades Jonathan Carroll territory. If I hadn’t read this at the end of my Straub-athon, I might have thought it quite good. As is, my least favorite of the ones I read in 2009.)

Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry
(Great fun. Swords & sorcery with theatrical panache.)

Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn
(Both a great fantasy novel and a commentary on fantasy novels and fairy tales. Wonderful book.)

Michael Moorcock, The Warlord of the Air
(Fun novel. Adventure in a Wellsian vein, with just a dash of Lovecraft near the beginning. Moorcock in his more pulp-ish mode.)

Graham Joyce, Partial Eclipse and Other Stories
(Terrific collection of stories. Only a couple feel weaker than the others and the novella, “Leningrad Nights” is the strongest novella I’ve read in a long time.)

Joss Wheden, et al, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Time of Your Life
(Fun graphic novel. If you enjoyed the series, this run of comics covers the 8th season, had there been one.)

China Mieville, The City and the City
(Fantasy? S.f.? Don’t know, but a solid piece of work. Quite good. It interests me that Mieville chose to use a police procedural story to help focus and ground the more fantastic elements of the book.)

Peter Beagle, The Innkeeper’s Song
(Excellent fantasy novel. Maybe not as magical as The Last Unicorn, but a more mature work about more mature characters.)

Richard Layman, The Cellar
(Easily the least of the novels I read this year, gory in spots and violent, there is still some craftsmanship to what Layman does, and the final scene is unsettling.)

Douglas Clegg, Isis
(Much the mood and atmosphere of an old-time ghost story, though not really a ghost-story itself. Quite good.)

Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done
(Dark, dark short title novel combined with two dark shorter stories. Well-written, well-imagined, intense, violent, somewhat gory. Did I mention, dark?)

Caitlin Kiernan, The Red Tree
(Melds Arthur Machen-ish and Lovecraftian material with greater insight into character, generating narrative suspense even though you know from the beginning what will happen.)

Stephen Gregory, The Perils and Dangers of This Night
(Gregory builds suspense on the interaction of recognizable characters. Near the end he pushes the action a bit farther than I was willing to suspend disbelief, but I suspect that's an individual call and others wouldn't have a problem with it. If it matters to anyone, while this has a touch of the supernatural, it is probably better described as psychological horror. And there is some gore, though generally it fits the story being told.)


Randy M.

[JunkMonkey]

Didn't get to read much this year. A new baby will do that to you every time. But the SF/Fantasy this year:


Consider Phlebas - Iain M Banks

Lightning World - Trebor Thorpe (aka Lionel Fanthorpe). An early typo-ridden work from the master of crap SF. Fanthorpe hadn't fully yet developed his style of combining maximum verbiage with minimal content but the signs are all here. No discernible characters, a clichéd story that only gets going about two chapters from the end and then suddenly stops, and Fanthorpe's uniquely wonderful air of vagueness.
When they had all descended Tony did a couple of experimental steps. That was another factor in their favour. the gravity was about two thirds earth normal - maybe not much over fifty per cent. He felt light and strong

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon - Spider Robinson

Perry Rhodan 10 'The Ghosts of Gol' - I read one book in February. ONE! (I console myself with the fact that it is the shortest month of the year, but even so -ONE?!) And what a piece of **** it was too.

Riverworld and Other Stories - By Philip Jose Farmer. Prompted by his death (not an obvious marketing move) and the fact that the book was at eye level in my To Be Read pile (I was lying down). I had been wondering for a while why I hadn't read more of his books. I remember now. I don't like them. Even after this short collection of stories I was irritated by his obsession with early morning erections and anal sex. Farmer's first published SF story in 1953 'shocked' the SF world, won him the Hugo Award for "most promising new writer" and is critically recognized as the story that broke the taboo on sex in science fiction. (Slathering BEM perverts drooling over pert-nosed, full-breasted, daughters of venerable professors aside.) Farmer seems to have spent a lot of the rest of his life upping the sexual ante.

The Carpet People - Terry Pratchett. I've been carrying this one round in an inside pocket for weeks now. Finally finished it. Time to find a new thin, easily losable book for the jacket.

The Shadow of Heaven - Bob Shaw. Meh thin SF novel.

Four for the Future - collection.

Enterprise Stardust - Sheer & Mahr, the first two Perry Rhodan 'novels' in one easily indigestible volume.

Fever Crumb - Philip Reeve. He don't half write a rattling good yarn does Mr Reeve when he puts his mind to it. Mercifully free of the religiosity that has seems to have been creeping into his books, this is a prequel (of sorts) to his Mortal Engines books. And jolly fun it was too.

An Antarctic Mystery - Jules Verne, being the somewhat disappointing 'sequel' to Edgar Allan Poe's gloriously odd 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivers; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.'

The Instrumentality of Mankind - Cordwainer Smith. I gave this to my partner as part of a bookswap. She gave me An Antarctic Mystery (see above) and I gave her a couple of Cordwainer Smith books on the general principle that he's one of my favourite SF writers and one of those authors who wrote the kind of SF that is pretty accessible to those who might normally run a mile from "That Buck Rogers stuff". It's about people. Only afterwards I realised I hadn't actually read anything he had written for ages (and he, sadly, wrote pitifully little) and I had the terrors that he wasn't very good and I had made a complete fool of myself. I needn't have worried. He is good. I still like his work. Haven't heard from my partner yet whether she did though...

Flying Saucers Have Landed - Leslie & Adamski - it's fiction.

The King of America - Rod Glenn

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon - Frederik Pohl

The Tales of Beedle the Bard - J K Rowling. 20 minutes of my life
spent wishing I still had my Andrew Lang fairy story books. Why did I get rid of them? They were nice copies too.

Warm Worlds and Otherwise - James Triptree Jr.

The Barbie Murders - John Varley

The Other Glass Teat - Harlan Ellison. A collection of forty year old TV reviews and political rants. More entertaining than it sounds. I really want the first volume, The Glass Teat, which I used to have but sold years ago. (I should never sell books.)

Of All Possible Worlds - William Tenn. One of those great SF authors I have forgotten about. I was prompted to pick this up after reading a Tenn story in...

More Penguin Science Fiction - ed. Brian Aldiss, which was better than...

New Writings in SF 23 -ed. Kenneth Bulmer

Interzone the 4th Anthology - which contains a story by an old flatmate of mine, and possibly the only short story ever to have a favourite awful movie director Al Adamson (Director of Blood of Ghastly Horror and other incoherences) as a character.

Omni's Screen Flights Screen Fantasies - Ed. Danny Peary. An old favourite.

The Dragon Masters - Jack Vance. I still don't thrill to Jack Vance's writing. Loads of people tell me he's wonderful and a 'grand master' of SF but I just don't get it.

Time and Again - Jack Finney. Jack Finney on the other hand has a lovely fluid style which just swept me along. The first of his books I have read. I will come back for more though I will admit I struggled a bit in the middle of this. I don't like those moments where the novelist lets his research takes over (in the footnote at the end of the book Finney admits, 'my efforts at accuracy became compulsive'). A simple tale of time travel and finding finding love when our hero gets there (I was reminded more than once of Richard Matheson's Somewhere in Time / Bid Time Return) is allowed to run longer than it should because of the long travelogue sections where our hero spends page after page describing the scenery and street scenes of 1882. This would probably be fascinating to a New Yorker but went on a bit too long for me.

Of Demons and Darkness - John Collier

Gateway - Frederick Pohl. A Hugo and Nebula Award winner (means both SF readers and writers liked it) I first read Gateway many years ago in a SF Magazine (Galaxy? Worlds of If?). When I started reading it I though it was a short story, by the time I got to the end of the first section and found out it was To Be Continued... I was hooked - luckily I did have the next two editions of the magazine (whatever it was called) lying around. Unluckily the story was in four parts. I waited weeks before the local library delivered the copy they had managed to find for me from somewhere exotic like Aberdeen (this was in the days when I used the mobile library van that visits the village and before t'internet). Some 17 years later the book isn't as terrificly terrific as I remember it - there is one piece of cringingly awful Psychological insight but still pretty darn good. Nice to read a old school 'hard' SF book in which the hero suffers from near terminal indecisiveness instead of the usual heroic crash! pow! wallopery.

The Status Civilisation - Robert Sheckley

The Sleeping Sorceress - Michael Moorcock

Atom - Steve Aylett :turd:

The Man Who Was Thursday - G K Chesterton

A Strange Discovery - How we found Dirk Peters by Charles Romyn Dake - being a different sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery... etc. etc..

The Skylark of Space - EE 'Doc' Smith

L'atlantide by Pierre Benoit

and

Various and sundry ancient copies of Astounding Stories and other free to download SF crap from Gutenberg.org