2006 books

23) Philip K. Dick, Dr. Futurity, 1960
An awkward time travel tale that also shows PKD really didn't do adventure tales very well, and the characterisation is minimal at best. A doctor gets flung forwards then backwards in time, caught up in a plan to prevent the European incursion into North America in the sixteenth century. Unmemorable and far too convoluted for my personal liking.

2006 books

24) Philip K. Dick, Vulcan's Hammer, 1960
Dueling supercomputers at dawn, with the worldwide human dystopia known as Unity caught in between. Unity is clearly the UN gone bad, the all-knowing Vulcan 3 computer is its Fuhrer and we have a protagonist who must decide if he will switch sides. An older-than-her-years young girl provides easily the best dialogue, but Dick unfortunately keeps her hidden away for most of the story. Of its era, far from sparkling and, again, unmemorable, but there are passages midway through that I have a sneaking suspicion provided a germ for the idea behind Martin Sketchley's current 'Structure' series.

2006 books

25) Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 2005
A 'Clarke Award' shortlist novel, and if you intend reading it then don't read much further here because for full effect this is one best approached with as little foreknowledge as possible. Ishiguro's narrator, Kathy, first brings you deep into her everyday life as a modern day schoolgirl, though it's only after a couple of chapters that you begin to notice the absence of... certain essentials. The subtle hint of unease that pervades the book is captured well in one early scene, and from there the reader's perception is given small seismic shifts by the revelations held in small incidents. Kathy's ordinaryness contrasts with the extraordinarily cruelty of her existence; she and her friends Ruth and Tommy twine around each other and interconnect like strands of a triple helix, always looking back because they have no future, a situation that a more traditional science fictional rendition would probably have had them rebelling against. This is a linear book that rarely reveals the turns up ahead, and is all the more observant and unusual in its restraint because of Ishiguro's controlled avoidance of dramatic distractions. Excellent.

2006 books

26) Michael Swanwick, The Periodic Table of Science Fiction, 2005
For review in Foundation.

2006 books

27) Geoff Ryman, Air, 2004
I hope Ryman's Mundane SF 'manifesto' won't turn out to be a rod for his back, thought that will obviously depend on his ability to work creatively within the limiting imaginative boundaries he has set for his science fiction. But if Air is any indication of the strength of his most recent book The King's Last Song, we shouldn't worry too much: Air is a thoroughly engaging, mostly believable and humane work of extrapolative fiction. The fear and attraction engendered by 'Air', a future development of the internet as the means for complete human interconnectivity as experienced by a small Asian village, is what drives the novel relentlessly on, where one step forward is followed by two steps back as the protagonist Chung Mae is driven (and often forced by circumstances) to take her village three steps forward again in the name of surviving the disaster only she knows will come, if anyone will believe her. This may be a classic story of 'the old meeting the new' but the battle ground is sometimes found in the virtual spaces between people, and it's the real-world interdependence of friends, family, rivals and strangers depicted in Mae's life, in the face of this sweeping change, that gives Air a memorable but bittersweet aftertaste. A fabulous book.

2006 books

28) Gao Xingjian, One Man's Bible, 1999
A long and completely detached autobiographical retrospective on Gao's time as a revolutionary Party cadré under China's catastrophic Cultural Revolution, and a navel-gazing analysis of how women and sex have shaped him throughout his life. In this fictionalised account of his life Gao has deliberately divorced himself from his past: he refers to his younger self in the third person and to his present 1990s self in the second person throughout, which at times makes it something of a challenge to follow the dual threads but is still a neat literary device. Far too often heavy going and ponderous (as one might expect from a Nobel winner), it nevertheless does offer a unique first-hand insight into the paranoid nightmare that was everyday life under Mao.