Fantastic Metropolis

2003 was an excellent science fictional year for me, and I read a lot more straight science fiction than usual. That prolific nutter Charlie Stross provided me with many, many hours of thoughtful enjoyment, and his novel Singularity Sky was even better than I’d expected for a first novel. Along with Alastair Reynolds, Stross has firmly entrenched himself as my favorite SF author.

Speaking of Reynolds, both Chasm City and Redemption Ark spilled onto the overlong scale, but offered up more pure ideas and visionary scope than the majority of offerings this year. Reynolds is certainly an author to watch, and I’m curious to see more from him.

Likewise new to American shores was ‘newcomer’ Richard K. Morgan. And I have to wonder where the vats are that are growing these phenomenal UK authors. Morgan’s grimy noir tech thriller Altered Carbon kicks more ass than a SORT team throwing down a prison riot, and Broken Angels is even better. Now if only we could get simultaneous publication for these writers so we can all enjoy them at the same time…

Other notable reads on the SF side of the spectrum include Neal Asher’s Gridlinked, Stephen Baxter’s Evolution, Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, and (of course) M. John Harrison’s groundbreaking space magnum opus, Light. Harrison has single-handedly redefined ‘space opera’ with his awesome novel, which deserves every bit of praise it has received. As usual with Harrison, I stand in awe.

And, of course, one would do well to seek out Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Justina Robson, Peter F. Hamilton and a host of other United Kingdom authors.

This was a good year for single-author collections as well, and as a lover of short fiction, I spent many months basking in sheer bliss, surrounded by excellent stories.

Samuel Delany’s collection Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories is a prized addition to my collection, as is The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith. I bought and read the excellent The Hard SF Renaissance this year… or at least parts of it; this meaty tome has more fiction-per-pound than any recent collection. I also read and appreciated both the 30th Anniversary edition of Dangerous Visions and its follow-up, Again, Dangerous Visions. Yet this year, those visions just didn’t seem as dangerous as before… perhaps due to the much more dangerous stories read elsewhere.

Cory Doctorow, the boingiest of boing boings, released A Place So Foreign and Eight More via Four Walls Eight Windows, as well as his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. If any author gets to claim the zeitgeist this year, it’s Doctorow, whose nerdcore Wired crowd tales shimmer and dance in an energetic ballet with the Now. Fittingly, Four Walls Eight Windows also released Michael Moorcock’s The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, featuring that proto-cyberpunk spiritual brother of Doctorow. I think they even look alike….

2003 was also a year to challenge myself. I immersed myself in critical theory, whether it was the work of Samuel R. Delany or a text on Critical Terms for Literary Study. Days spent pouring over Deconstructions, edited by Nicholas Royle. Honing my genre knowledge with Edward James’ Science Fiction in the 20th Century, Thomas M. Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, and the perennial favorites The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. And essays, essays and more essays, peppered through countless texts.

Or how about Alice in Quantumland, or João Magueijo’s excellent Faster Than The Speed of Light? Or A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky’s experimental magazine, collected in two hefty volumes? Or that re-read of Dickens’ Bleak House, and the hours spent on Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, edited by Marc Robinson? All read, all appreciated.

So many excellent texts, a year’s worth of reading all jammed into one head. Mickelsson’s Ghosts by John Gardner, one of my favorite authors of all time, and also October Light, both novels that deserve multiple readings. And pulp, everywhere pulp! From C. L. Moore’s stellar Jirel of Joiry to the collected Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales of Fritz Leiber, from Del Rey’s reissue of Robert E. Howard’s original Conan tales in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian to Jack Vance’s collected Dying Earth tales, HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, I read everything I could find that even hinted at a pulp sensibility (for entirely selfish reasons).

I’ve read so much this year, I couldn’t possibly scratch the tip of the iceberg. There were so many good stories published this year that I either envy the editors of the Year’s Best collections or pity them for having to choose. There were so many excellent bits of literature floating through the ether between page and brain that I’ve lost more than I’ve retained.

But the important thing to remember is always this: no matter what I read, no matter if it was fiction or non-fiction, genre or mainstream… I appreciated it all.

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Gabe Chouinard is the original founder of Fantastic Metropolis, back in October 1999. He is now editor of another webzine, s1ngularity (currently undergoing renovation) and a writer for the collaborative weblog s1ngularity::criticism.