Review

BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2023

From the ocean bed to the stars and the multiverse, five novels to transport you

Adam Roberts
Wednesday 6 December 2023

Conquest
Nina Allan (Riverrun) 
Frank sees patterns in everything. He loves the music of Bach and is exceptionally good at his work as a coder, but he gets drawn into an elaborate conspiracy theory about a secret alien invasion, the “conquest” of the book’s title, supposedly predicted by an obscure 1950s science fiction tale by John C Sylvester. When Frank disappears, his girlfriend hires a private investigator to find him. This absorbing detective story is interspersed with concert reviews, true crime, film criticism, biographical sketches and a healthy chunk of Sylvester’s text detailing the aftermath of an interstellar war and the building of a gigantic tower from living stone. The novel touches on David Bowie and Upstream Color, The X-Files and Stephen Hawking. Are these elements merely disparate, or do they add up to something bigger? Does connecting them, as the story increasingly does, induct us into a dangerous conspiratorial mindset, or do the distinct elements cohere, as individual notes come together into the gestalt of music? Allan’s story is as mellowly complex as the Bach variations its main character adores, and her best novel yet.

Him
Geoff Ryman (Angry Robot)
Him is a powerful piece of historical fiction, recreating ordinary life in first-century Judea with vivid immediacy; but it is also a science fiction novel about the multiverse, alienness and the possibilities of reality. The story is, in one sense, familiar: the childhood and ministry of Jesus – here “Yeshu”, born a girl called Avigayil but identifying from an early age as male (Ryman uses Aramaic names rather than the more familiar biblical ones for greater historical verisimilitude). The novel’s God presides over a multiverse, and into each proliferating reality he sends a slightly different iteration of redemption. This grand science-fictional conceit is grounded by Ryman’s superbly precise and evocative writing, his immersively believable world. The relationship between Yeshu and his mother Maryam is beautifully rendered and the ending, though it can’t be unfamiliar, is intensely moving. Ryman’s gospel achieves what SF does at its best: beautifully estranging our too-familiar world, and making us think and feel anew.

Some Desperate Glory
Emily Tesh (Orbit)
This sparky debut is a blend of space opera and military SF that refreshes both modes. Desperate Glory moves briskly, page-turningly, and provides all the satisfactions of widescreen galactic worldbuilding and adventure as it goes; but it never sacrifices complexity or trades in easy answers. Humanity is one of three galactic species to have independently discovered the “shadowspace” tech that powers starships, but we are regarded by the others as uncontrollably violent, having evolved “as apex predators in a hazardous biosphere” – the Earth. Now Earth has been destroyed, and the novel’s protagonist, Kyr, a genetically enhanced supersoldier, grows up in the military space station Gaea, unthinkingly embodying Gaea’s militaristic, fascistic ethos, focused on revenge. But as the story proceeds and she learns more about the universe, questioning her own assumptions, a richer, more complex sense of the nature of things grows in her. Kyr’s coming-of-age journey does not take the path plot-cliche leads you to expect, and the telling is bracingly twisty. An instant classic.

In Ascension
Martin MacInnes (Atlantic)
Longlisted for the Booker, MacInnes’s novel is both spacious and intimate. Two sisters take different paths through life: outgoing Leigh becomes a marine biologist and travels the world; quieter, smaller Helena stays home with their mother and becomes a financial lawyer. Leigh is part of a survey-ship team that discovers an impossibly deep fissure in the ocean bed. Later, she joins a space mission to investigate an anomalous object passing through the solar system: a kilometres-long, spirally decorated traveller from deep space. This object eludes the mission as they chase after it through the solar system, but something happens to the consciousnesses of the crew. What Leigh sees in outer space are “the planets, the sun, the moons as a single curved body drifting through space like the juvenile stage of an aquatic life form”. It’s a novel about big, complex ideas – our place in the cosmos, our interconnectedness with one another and with the natural world – that is also brilliantly readable, wide-ranging and thrilling.

The Circumference of the World
Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon)
Tidhar has recently intimated that he wants to leave SF and fantasy behind him (“I want a Booker,” he announced in the author’s note to his historical epic Maror, “and they don’t give you one of those for a book about elves”). But I don’t believe it: Tidhar’s imagination is so saturated in, and attuned to, the excellences of SF/fantasy that I don’t think he could abandon it even if he tried. The Circumference of the World is a case in point, a book that is not only SF but is about SF – about the golden age of Heinlein and Van Vogt, and the fantastical output of L Ron Hubbard, here fictionalised as Eugene Charles Hartley, pulp writer and founder of “the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes”. In a complex, expertly orchestrated set of nesting storylines, various characters search for Hartley’s schlocky novel Lode Stars, which may or may not explain the nature of the universe, but which appears to vanish as it is read. Detective noir rubs shoulders with epistolary fiction, a prison story and expertly pastiched pulp SF. Inventive, thought-provoking, audacious and, as ever with Tidhar, superbly readable, this is where his genius lies.

THE GUARDIAN

 

Divers explore an underwater cave.

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The best science fiction and fantasy of 2021. 
Illustration: Maïté Franchi

 

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

A locked-room mystery, interstellar office politics, a masterful space opera and more

Adam Roberts
Friday 3 December 2021

Far from the Light of Heaven
by Tade Thompson (Orbit)
Space is vast but spaceships are by nature claustrophobic: Thompson plays cannily on that contrast. Passengers aboard the starship Ragtime are in suspended animation on their way to the distant planet Bloodroot, but 30 people have been murdered in their sleep. Thompson’s tale is cleverly plotted and tensely told as the investigating captain must work against her own crew, bio-contagion, violent robots and a demonic AI to uncover the murderer’s identity. The book does more than the description “locked-room mystery in space” suggests: not only wrong-footing the reader as its mystery unfolds, but creating a series of believable, compelling worlds with some genuinely alien aliens.

The Actual Star
by Monica Byrne (Voyager)
This ambitious, inviting novel ranges from the declining Mayan civilisation in the year 1012, via a storyline set in 2012 in Belize, to the year 3012, when humanity lives in “a global system of nomadic, anarchist self-organisation”. By “inviting” I mean that it offers itself to readers as a way of thinking how to move beyond what the novel calls the “four great evils: capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism”. Whether or not you agree that those are the four great evils, you will be swept into Byrne’s meticulously worked world-building by her compelling storytelling and rich prose. This is a book about the profound interrelations of past and present – the Mayan sections are marvels of vividly rendered research – and the hi-tech, mystical, sex-positive, post-climate-collapse diversitopia of its imagined future is simply extraordinary.

Cwen
by Alice Albinia (Serpent’s Tail)
Although in the last few decades there has been an almost pathological obsession with dystopia, utopian writing is a much older mode. Not that there’s any wishful thinking about Alice Albinia’s feminist community, set on an archipelago “somewhere off the east coast of England”. When the de facto leader leaves for the uninhabited island of Cwen, named for its presiding goddess, what she has achieved on the archipelago is picked apart. Albinia engages throughout with the difficulties of trying to work for something better than what we have: the inertias and frictions of our world, its resistance to emancipation. She combines this with a wonderful vision of Britain’s deep history of myth and matriarchy.

The Employees
by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (Lolli Editions)
The Six-Thousand interstellar spaceship is a workspace; this short novel’s characters are workers. “You’d probably say it was a small world,” one of the characters says, “but not if you have to clean it.” The arrival on board of a number of strange alien objects galvanises a jumble of mundane and transcendent memories and provocations: intensities of taste and touch, of smell and consciousness. The book owes something to the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (or to the film Andrei Tarkovsky made of it, Stalker), though its alien artefacts are more compelling, and the ship more recognisably a place of office politics and corporate-speak. Coolly but artfully written, The Employees is a remarkable piece of work.

Shards of Earth
by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)
Since 2015’s breakthrough Children of Time, in which humans encounter a species of sympathetically rendered, sentient spider, Tchaikovsky has consolidated his position as the finest purveyor of high-quality space opera around. His new series, The Final Architecture, kicks off with this masterly example: space battles, cosmic mystery, alien superstructures, a ragtag crew of humans and aliens piloting a battered but trusty ship. Earth has been transformed into a vast “flower” and destroyed in the process: the war with the mysterious Architects is not as over as people think. The story treads some familiar ground, but does so with an expert touch, and the whole is deft and clever, expansive and readable, all informed by Tchaikovsky’s superbly baroque imaginative fecundity.

THE GUARDIAN

 

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R

ichard Powers’s follow-up to 2018’s extraordinary arboreal fantasia The Overstory – as wide-ranging, brilliant and beautiful a novel as you could hope to read – is much more tightly focused, though equally environmentally engaged.

Also shortlisted for the Booker, Bewilderment concentrates on its two main characters, and their relationship. Narrator Theo Byrne is a university astrobiologist, programming simulations of life on extrasolar planets, though his job takes second place to caring for Robin, his behaviourally challenged son. Robin is mourning the death of his mother, Alys, an environmental activist, in a car crash. He is intensely focused on the natural world, and prone to violent rages when thwarted or challenged. Bullied at school, he narrowly avoids expulsion after breaking the cheekbone of another boy by hitting him with his Thermos.