Broderick Damien - Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

TIME MOVES on.

Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels: 1949-1984 , a book I wrote in 1984 and which was published in 1985, needed a sequel by nowand here it is. More than 25 years have gone by, and many hundreds of science-fiction novels and collections have continued to pour from the English-language presses (as well as those of other languages), so some guidance as to the best of the last quarter-century is surely required. Having been unable to keep up with all those new sf works myself, I am delighted that Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo have taken it upon themselves to do the job, and I am very happy to endorse their excellent book.

I have read fewer than half of the novels they describe here (after 1984, as editor of the magazine Interzone until 2004, my main sf reading consisted of short storiesthousands of them); but, judging from the works I do know, I feel confident that all the less-familiar choices in this book are sound. Damien Brodericks and Paul Di Filippos qualifications for making those choices are second to none: both are creative science-fiction writers of many years standing, among the best of their time, and both have in addition written a good deal of stimulating criticism, including numerous sf book reviews. I actually included a novel by Damien in my hundred best of 27 years ago The Dreaming Dragons (1980), which I described as the best Australian science-fiction novel I know (that sounds belittling in retrospectthe book was much more than that). It has since been revised and reissued as The Dreaming . Since then, Damien has written several more fine sf novels, of which perhaps The White Abacus (1997), a knottily speculative work, is the most successful.

Of course, it would not have been seemly for the authors to include any works of their own in this new hundred best, but perhaps I can compensate for that by mentioning not only Damiens later novel, above, but also Pauls humorous Fuzzy Dice (2003) and his manically inventive short-story and novella collections such as The Steampunk Trilogy (1995) and Ribofunk (1996), some of the contents of which I had the pleasure of first publishing in Interzone . At the time I wrote my book in the 1980s, Paul Di Filippo had published no novels or collections, but if I had been writing this follow-up volume now a number of Pauls books, as well as several of Damiens, would certainly have been strong contenders for inclusion.

As for the authors whose novels are described in the following hundred or so mini-essays, I am particularly pleased to see a large contingent of those whose early stories were first published in Interzone among them, Stephen Baxter, Richard Calder, Greg Egan, Nicola Griffith, Simon Ings, Paul J. McAuley, Ian R. MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, Geoff Ryman, and Charles Stross. I can vouch for all these writers as capable of first-rate work. And of course, many others with books discussed here are well-known names, some of them from the literary mainstreamBrian Aldiss, Margaret Atwood, the late J. G. Ballard, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon, Karen Joy Fowler, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, Cormac McCarthy, China Miville, Michael Moorcock, Richard Powers, Christopher Priest, Philip Roth, the late Kurt Vonnegut, and more. It is a first-rate line-up, and those readers who follow all the recommendations will have months and years of good reading before them.

A century, and a millennium, have turned since I wrote my book. The world is different, but science fiction carries on vigorously, reflecting our times back to us in imaginative formand Damiens and Pauls book celebrates that endeavor splendidly.

David Pringle
Selkirk, Scotland