Fantastic Metropolis

Here’s my list of great books I read in 2001. Not necessarily all the great books I read, nor necessarily the greatest books I read, nor necessarily the greatest books published this year. I haven’t performed any kind of exhaustive survey of the year’s literature, and I’m behind enough in my reading that I’ve included a couple of standouts that were published in 2000.

Have I weaselled and disclaimed enough? Are you seated comfortably? Then I shall begin:

Cory Doctorow’s (non-exhaustive, non-proscriptive) list of several noteworthy books that he read this year (including one book he’s in and a bunch of books by his pals and cronies):

An Ideal Boy: Charts from India, Sirish Rao, V. Geetha and Gita Golf

(Dewi Lewis, 2001)

India’s instructional charts are beautiful and strange. This is fantastically novel stuff, to my Western eye. From the palette to the lettering to the figural representations of children and adults, every page oozes culture-shear. These are posters whose purpose and content are readily identifiable, but whose form is different from anything I’ve seen before.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Steven Johnson

(Simon & Schuster, 2001)

The golden age of science fiction and technology was an era of determinism and rationality. Prognosticators fearlessly followed trends outwards and predicted an age of bubblecars, bubblecities, automated traffic systems, universal currencies, jetpacks, all clean and shiny. So what happened? Complex adaptive systems happened. The world we live in is less like a machine and more like an ecosystem, an unfathomably complex system of independent actors who maintain stasis through individual actions. The centralized, top-down approach to keeping order is giving way to distributed efforts that yield Internet-like (or city-like, or ant-colony-like), probabilistic order, unpredictable, variegated and chaotic. Johnson’s book is a mind-twisting, eye-opening look at the elegant complexity of the order that emerges from the chaos.

Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link

(Small Beer Press, 2001)

Kelly’s first short story collection is wondrous, an 11-pack of fanciful gems. Link writes these understated, surreal gems that stick in your head for weeks and months after you’ve finished ‘em. Summarizing a Link story is nearly impossible, as is figuring out how they work, so strange is their structure and style. That they are wonderful is indisputable, but it’s one of those deals where you gotta read ‘em to get ‘em. Count yourself lucky to be alive and reading in the oughts, when Kelly Link’s work is being published.

Starlight 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

(Tor Books, 2001)

Yes, I have a story in this. But so do Ted Chiang, Geoff Landis, Terry Bisson, Susanna Clarke, and many others. Patrick’s Starlight anthology series is the last great bastion of original short fiction in book form. I was raised on these things, great stacks of Orbits and Universes and such, and I naturally assumed that by the time I was ready to write for publication that I’d be selling to these things every year, too. Of course, the field has changed, the short story’s on the wane (hell, I’ve all but stopped writing shorties over the last couple years, ever since I started working on novels), and projects like Starlight are rare and precious indeed. The stories in this anthology are all so very different from one another and so delightful each in their own way, it’s like touring a dozen worlds in an afternoon.

Ventus, Karl Schroeder

(Tor Books, 2000)

What I’d prefer to do here is blurb Karl’s new book, Permanence, which Tor will be publishing in 2002. When I workshopped Permanence with Karl, it pretzelled my mind into Escher shapes whose topology I still can’t understand. But Permanence isn’t out yet, so lemme tell you about Ventus, Karl’s first solo novel, the story of a sapient, object-oriented universe that marries cutting-edge computer science to epic, medieval adventure, plunging the lucky reader into a marvellously realized world of swashbuckling armies and million-year-old planets-cum-people-cum-gods who stalk one another through a world of pervasive and invisible technology. While mere mortals can’t read Permanence yet, Ventus is a fine stand-in until Tor gets Permanence on the shelves.

Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

(Houghton Mifflin, 2001)

Read this book and never eat another hamburger for as long as you live. The story of the rise and rise of fast food in America is as revolting as it is fascinating, a slow-motion nutritional car-wreck that will have you driving past, rather than driving through. Fast food is corrupt, unsanitary, inedible, and manufactured within an inch of its life.

Secrets and Lies, Bruce Schneier

(John Wiley and Sons, 2000)

The climax of so many science fiction thrillers revolves around a quasi-mystical bit of computer hackery where some bespectacled geek clatters away at a keyboard, mutters some pseudo-tech horseshit and hey–presto, the bad guys are defeated. It’s not just crap, it’s boring crap. And it doesn’t have to be! Schneier, a righteous SF fan and a one of the world’s leading infosec gods has, in Secrets and Lies, created a layperson’s security bible, a thrilling tour through the world of computer crime, high-tech incompetence, wily hackers and ethical techlogists. This book is a must-read for anyone who plans to use a computer, period.

Cruddy, by Linda Barry

(Scribner, 2000)

Linda Barry’s latest novel inserts itself into your guts like a rusty fishhook and then Barry hauls on the line hard enough to drag you through the story, past page after page of gruesome, depressing, horribly fascinating coming-of-age narrative. This isn’t genre horror, but that’s just a marketing decision. This is every bit as nightmarish as any of the darkest fantasy you’ll find in the horror section of your local bookseller.

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Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of Boing Boing. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, will be published by Tor Books in Fall 2002, and an excerpt is available The Infinite Matrix. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. He is the co-founder of OpenCola, a software company.