Fantastic Metropolis

Compiling this list has been a chastening experience. It’s forced me to acknowledge how little I’ve read outside the genre this past year, and how little of what I’ve read within the genre has been for my own pleasure rather than as a paying gig. I didn’t read more than a handful of nonfiction books, and none of them were noteworthy. All in all, a pathetic performance. Here’s what stood out, in no particular order.

The Skinner, by Neal Asher. Give Charles Darwin the sensibilities of the Marquis de Sade and the powers of an omnipotent deity and you might come up with a planet as gleefully violent as Spatterjay, where the dominant life forms are gigantic variations of the phylum Mollusca. Throw in some all-but-immortal sea captains, intelligent hornets, a dead detective, creepy aliens with a taste for human flesh, and a flying head, and you’ve got a science fiction novel that’s as smart as it is pulpy. You can read my review at Science Fiction Weekly.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. A post-modern visionary who is also a master of styles and genres, Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Philip K. Dick. I was also reminded of the The Sea of Fertility quartet, Yukio Mishima’s masterpiece tracing the twisted paths of reincarnated souls through time. But Mitchell while may recall these writers, he very much goes his own way.

The Wizard Knight, by Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is a writer who can make me gasp with admiration and shiver with pleasure; he is also a writer who can make me seethe with frustration. His hyperconscious, hyper-intelligent fictions are intricate puzzles of meaning, memory, identity and faith set up with an almost preternatural degree of control. Like Tolkien’s masterpiece, which is its model, The Wizard Knight was written as a single work, and though it was published as two volumes (The Knight and The Wizard), those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will read The Wizard Knight as Wolfe intended it. I could go on ad nauseum about the novel’s purposefully fractured structure and intricate world building (which features seven spheres of existence, hierarchically arranged from smallest to grandest, foulest evil to purest good, least to most real, and so on, with the smaller encapsulated within the larger and time running at different rates in each), but I’ll restrict myself to stating that, although marred by Wolfe’s utter inability to write convincingly in the voice of a contemporary teenage boy, and by a style that paradoxically grows more opaque even as it approaches a surface simplicity and directness that Hemingway might envy, and despite my conviction that Wolfe is no longer writing fantasy or science fiction in any meaningful sense but instead crafting sophisticated religious fables, The Wizard Knight is nevertheless essential reading. A fascinating gloss on the novel, on Wolfe’s debt to Tolkien, and on his own reactionary political beliefs, which stem from his Catholic faith, is available here.