2011 books

33) Tew Bunnag, Fragile Days, 2001
Nine stories that work well together as a cross-section of lives lived in Bangkok, from the poorest to the richest. These are less tales of status and stasis than stories of the different social strata intermixing and encountering each other, such as in 'The Flower Girl' in which a street orphan is adopted by a rich widow, or 'Jeed Finds Her Brother' in which a country girl finds out the truth about her missing brother's life in Bangkok. These encounters inevitably leave the characters changed, yet somehow everyone at some point is a victim of the city itself, the Big Mango, for the better as often as for the worse. It's hard to pick any story that stands out above the rest, although for characterisation the final story 'Love Heals Tammy' is the one that puts across best how Thais are prepared to look to the positive and be transformed by it. Bunnag also caps off the stories with a non-fiction epilogue titled 'An Ode to the City' in which he spells out his feelings on the ugliness of Bangkok itself, while declaring an undying admiration for the people who would dare to live in such a place. This is a lovely collection.

2011 books

34) Colin Harvey, Winter Song, 2009
A spaceman involved in an interstellar war of post-human factions crash-lands on a colony planet that has fallen off the map. Somehow he has to get back home, but must overcome the dark-age tribal customs of the planet's Icelandic descendants. I confess I started Winter Song while Colin was still very much alive and finished it a few weeks after his death some months later. Such is the level of distraction I've encountered in 2011: I picked up this book when I was more focussed on short fiction, hence it was the wrong time to pick up a novel whose variety of plot is one I'm generally very familiar with. With this kind of story, which you kind-of know will get resolved in a particular way, it's the 'how it's done' that keeps the reader engaged, so in my year of distraction I'm aware there are aspects to this book I should have paid more attention to: his frequent use of second-person narration to put across the point of view of an AI is tight and fluid, plus the world-building which permeates the entire story is properly non-intrusive and, in retrospect, very capable indeed. On the other hand, I'd like to have seen more editorial input in places: I can't help but think 20th Century Britishisms like 'pissed off', 'tup', 'bloody hell', 'frigging' and 'shagging' are out of place when spoken among Icelandic colonists on a light years-distant planet sometime in the deep future (as with, even, more commonplace and international Americanisms like 'okay'). I also admit that I'd like to have experienced a few more more twists and turns in a 400-page novel, but otherwise this is a solid SF adventure that's not a bad read at all.

2011 books

35) Eric Brown, The Kings of Eternity, 2011
A group of men in 1930s England come across a portal that leads to outer space and an interstellar war, while in a separate narrative in 1999 a solitary English writer in Greece thinks he has found love, while someone else is researching his own mysterious past. It can't be that frequent that a published short story takes more than a decade to mature into a fully-fledged novel, but what began as a piece of short fiction of the same name in Science Fiction Age in 2000 was then followed by the serialised novella 'The Blue Portal' in Interzone in 2002. So I use the word 'mature' deliberately because this novel has the resonance of years behind it, being as much a tip of the hat to the scientific romances of the early 20th Century as it is an ode to the loneliness of a writer's life. The themes Eric Brown engages with are handled with a sensitivity to the genre's past and he wisely makes no attempt to unnecessarily update anything for 21st Century sensibilities, least of all the naive scientific presumptions that much early 20th Century SF was built upon which here he lets the reader just enjoy for what they are. This is an elegant novel that doesn't aim to dazzle; instead it fits like a comfortable old armchair, with scene-setting and characterisation that ring true with a sense of old-fashioned English familiarity. I'd like to think this is one of the most notable British SF novels of 2011 but I'm behind on what else has appeared in the past year, nevertheless I'll certainly be nominating The Kings of Eternity for a BSFA Award.