Of the six novels nominated for the Nebula Award, I’ve managed to read four.

The two I haven’t read are Jack McDevitt’s Firebird and China Miéville’s Embassytown, largely because they weren’t available inexpensively. Firebird is the sixth volume in the Alex Benedict series; the third entry, Seeker, won the 2006 award. He’s been on the ballot four times since then; this is McDevitt’s eleventh nomination in this category. This is China Miéville’s third nomination in this category; Embassytown was also nominated for the Clarke Award and is also on the Hugo ballot, as a result of which I expect to read it later this year.

Of the four I’ve read, one, Jo Walton’s Among Others, I read a year and a half ago. I had a lot to say about it back then and I expect I will have more to say about it in the future. I’m not at all neutral about Among Others: it affected me profoundly than any book has in years. This is the one I’m rooting for and the one I’d have voted for (it’s certainly getting my vote for the Hugo).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t say nice things about the other nominated works.

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Just finished Theodore Rex, the second volume in Edmund Morris’s three-book biography of Theodore Roosevelt. It covers Roosevelt’s presidency from the moment he was informed that his predecessor, William McKinley, had died to the point where his successor, William Howard Taft, was sworn in. Between those two points Roosevelt was his usual blur of activity and energy, though there are ominous signs of his impending physical burnout. Morris captures a good deal of the political intrigue, maneuvering and cajoling during Roosevelt’s tenure, along with the international statesmanship, from the Panama Canal to the Portsmouth Conference, from trustbusting to conservation. But I get the impression, throughout the bluster and bellicosity, that Roosevelt was essentially cautious, even timid, on many subjects. His position on race was problematic and constrained by public opinion — you get the impression he’d have gone farther if he thought he could get away with it — and then, inexplicably, came the Brownsville Affair. In the end, though, Roosevelt had a lot of fun being president, and it showed.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, trade paperback, Kindle • publisher’s page

Previously: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

Ian Tattersall’s Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins can be read as a primer in human paleoanthropology, and is in fact useful on that level, especially for someone like me whose reading in the subject is several decades out of date. But it’s also a book-length argument that explores the question of why Homo sapiens, and not some other or predecessor hominid species, went on to take over the planet.

What’s the dividing line between bipedal ape and human? There is evidence of tool use, meat consumption and large social groups even among australopithecines; evidence of controlled fire and cooking goes back hundreds of thousands of years. Neanderthals had larger brains than we do. But none of these species dominated the planet in as short a time as we did. None of these species wiped out all other hominid competition; we did.

Tattersall argues that the development of symbolic thinking among a small group of Homo sapiens made the difference. Other hominid species, including Neanderthals, lacked the ability for abstract thinking, art, language or long-term planning and were cognitively limited, he argues, but so were early Homo sapiens. The development of symbolic thinking was a major cognitive development that allowed that group to spread very rapidly across the globe and displace every other hominid — other Homo sapiens in Africa, Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, and the remaining Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis in Asia.

This was quite readable and persuasively argued; I never once lost the plot. Tattersall has apparently published a number of popular science books on human evolution, but this is the first one I’ve encountered. I may have to track down the others.

Review copy received through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, Kindle • publisher’s page (UK)

Christopher Priest’s screed about the Clarke Awards reminded me that I’d been meaning for some time to read his most recent novel, The Islanders, about which I’d heard the sort of good things that made me think, yeah, baby, this sort of thing is my bag (for one thing, maps play a role).

The Islanders reads as a travel guide, with entries on various islands in the Dream Archipelago, the setting of two of Priest’s previous books (though he says you don’t have to have read them). The Archipelago is a massive collection of thousands of inhabited islands on another world, positioned between two great continents, one north and one south. The mainland nations of the north pass through the Archipelago to the southern continent, the battlefield of their constant wars. The Archipelago is neutral territory, mostly, its inhabitants preoccupied by artistic pursuits.

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Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking isn’t a full-throated stop-this-nonsense polemic defence of introverts, but neither is it a guide for introverts on how to play by extroverted rules. What the book does, though, is quietly and thoroughly explore the differences between the introverted and extroverted ways of doing things — not just how we respond in social and workplace situations. It argues that proceeding from extroverted assumptions, assuming that the extroverted way of thinking and doing things is normal (everything from group work in classrooms to open-concept cubicle farms) not only does considerable harm to the one-third to one-half of the population that is introverted, but also to society. What introverts can contribute to society, through our tendency to retreat and reflect (and think) and our preference for caution, is, Cain argues, being systematically repressed when introverts are forced to conform to an extrovert ideal.

All this makes Quiet an interesting, though somewhat dry, book. I have not read the many other books about introversion out there, largely because their descriptions didn’t grab me: I had no interest in finding out whether I was an introvert, because I already knew; I had no interest in learning how to pass as extroverted, because I thought that was bullshit. I would have personally liked to have seen more bite here, but Cain’s arguing that introverts and extroverts are complementary — yin and yang, Wozniak and Jobs — not that extroverts are full of shit and need to back off. Which is also true, but, you know: flies and vinegar. A former corporate lawyer, Cain has built her case in order to sell it, and sell it she does. (Here she is selling it at the TED conference.)

Previously: The Power of Introverts.

Buy at Amazon (hardcover, Kindle) • author’s website

Leah Bobet’s Above (Arthur A. Levine, 2012) is so strong that I have a hard time believing it’s a first novel. Aimed at readers 12 and up, this book is nevertheless mature and subtle in its handling of its theme. It focuses on a group of outcasts — misfits and mutants, superpowered and disabled — who survive in Safe, a community hidden beneath the streets and sewers of Toronto. When that community is invaded, its leader killed and its inhabitants scattered, the young Teller, Matthew, must find a way to survive in the dangerous Above. Bobet’s use of language is impressive. The novel’s voice is authentic, the emotions very real. The hardscrabble, marginal existence of the characters feels utterly and uncomfortably convincing. A beautiful book, but also an unsettling one.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, Kindle • author’s page • publisher’s page

Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising is a rollicking, fast-paced thriller set in a near future where the polar ice caps are all but gone, and a scramble for resources is taking place in the rapidly developing Arctic north. UN airship pilot Anika Duncan is shot down while investigating a suspicious tanker that appears to be carrying radioactive materials; the investigation sets off a chain of events that very quickly put the resourceful Anika on the run, forcing her to rely on a series of colourful characters.

This is not Kim Stanley Robinson’s global warming thriller: chapters end with guns pointed at people. Little space is given to introspective reflection: things just move too fast. Nor does the setting play as strong a role as it might. In fact, for a book that is set almost entirely within Canada, there are hardly any Canadians among the very global cast; but for the climate it could have occurred in any archipelago on the planet, which I found a little disappointing. Still: fun read.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, Kindle • author’s page • publisher’s page

Ian McDonald has been writing serious works of adult science fiction for many years; the first book of his I read was The Dervish House, and I mean to hunt down his earlier work. But now he’s gone and written a young-adult novel, Planesrunner. It’s the first in the Everness series, which may run seven books, and McDonald has gotten things off to a roaring start.

After British teenager Everett Singh’s physicist father is kidnapped in front of him, he comes into possession of a map of parallel universes, which those who did the kidnapping very much want to retrieve. There are a number of parallel Earths in contact with one another, and ours has just made contact with the rest. To evade capture and rescue his father, Everett jumps into another universe, one filled with coal and airships but not computers like Everett’s tablet. Adventures ensue.

Exciting and tautly paced, with excellent characters (Everett in particular is a wonderful protagonist) and packed with brilliant concepts, Planesrunner reads like a particularly vigorous hybrid of Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Westerfeld’s Leviathan (only it’s not derivative of either in the slightest). A fantastic book.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, Kindle • Facebook page • Publisher’s page

Robert J. Sawyer’s latest novel, Triggers, comes out next month, but I’ve been reading it in installments during its serialization in Analog. It’s familiar territory if you’ve read previous Sawyer novels, but it nevertheless provided at least one major surprise. It begins in the guise of a fast-paced near-future techno-thriller: a freak incident during a terrorist attack has left a small group of people able to read the memories of one another; since one of the people is the U.S. president, this poses some security risks. After some tension in which the Secret Service tries to figure out who has access to the president’s memories while everyone involved tries to cope with the situation, near the end the scope suddenly broadens and the book veers from spy thriller to Clarkean sense-of-wonder, and assumes the ethical and philosophical mantle that characterizes so much of Sawyer’s work. In hindsight, the book’s concern with empathy for one’s fellow human beings looms large throughout, despite the sometimes workmanlike prose and thriller pace.

Amazon • Author’s page

A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski is an important work of SF that won the 1987 Campbell award. It’s an impressive work of biological science fiction and a feminist, pacifist novel of interplanetary conflict in which the all-female inhabitants of the water world, Shora, who call themselves the Sharers, engage in acts of nonviolent resistance that would be very familiar to those who’ve read their Gene Sharp, as Slonczewski herself has. It’s also explicitly a response, the author says, to works like Herbert’s Dune and Le Guin’s Word for World Is Forest: a water world instead of a desert, non-violence instead of violence, pacifists remaining pacifists, and prevailing.

The Sharers are “lifeshapers” — masters of bioscience and genetic engineering. This draws the attention of the rulers of the nearby planet, Valedon, who move to exploit their planet and resources. Meanwhile, Sharers from the water world, Shora, visit the nearby world Valedon and take a young male, Spinel, back to learn their ways. Spinel becomes our window into the Sharers’ world, but he is by no means the only viewpoint character. If anything, A Door into Ocean, while vast in scope, is at the same time too limited; the story is a bit too pregnant for all its possibilities. There are multivolume series with less ambition.

See Jo Walton’s post on Tor.com and the author’s study guide.

AbeBooks • Amazon (Kindle) • Publisher

Paul Schenk’s Atlas of the Galilean Satellites (Cambridge University Press, 2010) collects all the imagery gathered by the Voyager and Galileo missions of the four major moons of Jupiter (Callisto, Ganymede, Europa and Io, all discovered by Galileo in 1610) and assembles them into global, quadrangle and area maps. But this heavy, 400-page tome begins with a confession. “This Atlas is not what it should be.” The failure of the high-gain antenna on the Galileo spacecraft meant that far less data could be transmitted back to Earth during its nearly eight-year mission than had been planned. Large tracts of the moons are mapped in low resolution; the fuzzy images yield little detail. But until another mission is sent — the Juno probe now en route to Jupiter will not be studying the moons — this is all there will be for the foreseeable future. For decades, in fact.

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Ever since he ripped my still-beating heart out of my chest more than 20 years ago, I’ve had this … thing for Beethoven. It’s only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, and lately I’ve been reading an awful lot of books about the man and his music. I’ve read a bunch about the Ninth Symphony that I may post about later; in the meantime, here are a couple of e-books for the Kindle.

Journeys with Beethoven: Following the Ninth, and Beyond is a self-published collaboration between the documentary filmmaker Kerry Candaele (whose Following the Ninth is still not out) and rock-and-roll writer Greg Mitchell. Candaele’s half is essentially the accompanying text to his unreleased film; if you’ve seen the trailer it’ll be familiar territory. Mitchell, on the other hand, deals with his own, late-in-life conversion to all things Beethoven, and lives up to the adage that there’s no zealot like a convert. He’s hyperbolic in his reverence — but, you know, not wrong. (Mitchell also writes the Roll Over, Beethoven blog.)

Also see Beethoven’s Shadow, a short essay by pianist Jonathan Biss in which he shares his thoughts about learning, playing and performing Beethoven, written as he began undertaking a recording of all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas (which is apparently something that professional classical pianists do). He posts updates on the recording process on his website.

From the Earth to the Moon (De la Terre à la Lune) is one of Verne’s most immediately recognizable novels, the first part of a duology in which a typical trio of Vernean adventurers ride a bullet fired from Florida around the Moon. First published in 1865, From the Earth to the Moon ends rather abruptly, right after the successful launch of the projectile; for what happens to our adventurers, readers had to wait until 1870, when the sequel, Around the Moon (Autour de la Lune), was published. In this post I will only deal with the first book.

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If you’re interested in maps as art, you probably already have copies of books like You Are Here and The Map as Art, excellent collections of map art curated by Katharine Harmon (if you don’t have these books and you’re interested, now you know; off you go). If, on the other hand, you’re a crafty sort and are interested in making art with maps — whether as raw material or as theme — then a new book by Jill K. Berry, Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed-Media Mapmaking, may be worth your attention.

Personal Geographies is a short guide to making maps about personal subjects using the techniques of mixed-media artwork. Let me unpack that a bit. Mixed media involves combining several different art forms: paint, pen and ink, photography, collage; different materials and textures. Berry, lists as supplies a number of different kinds of paper and cardstock; pencils, crayons and paints; adhesives; tools; and embellishments like ribbons.

These are the raw materials. Berry chooses as her theme so-called personal geographies, broken up into three chapters: maps of the self, in which the personal is mapped to pictures of the head, the hand, the heart or the body; maps of personal experiences, such as trips; and art pieces made from real and fictional maps. Each lavishly illustrated chapter gives sample projects with step-by-step instructions; each chapter also collects map projects from a number of different artists to show you what else might be possible.

I received an electronic review copy of this book.

Buy at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Last week I received in the mail a review copy of Derek Hayes’s latest book, the Historical Atlas of Washington and Oregon. Now, except for a day trip to Mount Baker in 1993, I haven’t so much as visited either state, so my review is not as informed as a local’s could be. What I can say is that this is the latest in a series of historical atlases by Hayes, whose previous works include historical atlases of North American railroads, California and the U.S. in general, among others. It’s an attractive and reasonably priced hardcover, densely packed with contemporary maps.

On that point: Hayes uses actual, contemporary maps to describe the period. This differs from what I usually expect from historical atlases, which use modern cartography to display historical information. I’m not entirely convinced of Hayes’s method: contemporary maps may not necessarily be accurate; and they’re frequently reproduced at a scale too small to be of any informative use; and the map needed to tell a story may not always be available. But when considered as a thematically and chronologically organized collection of antique maps, it works very well indeed, though I think several subjects, such as the period before European (or as Hayes puts it, “EuroAmerican”) contact, get short shrift.

Still, I cannot emphasize enough the wealth of cartography on display here (Seattle, Tacoma, Portland and the Pacific Northwest rail lines get particularly lavish treatment); this is the sort of thing that would do well as an iPad app or enhanced ebook, where you could zoom in to a full-scale reproduction of all these maps.

Buy at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Word first came in early 2009 that Jeopardy whiz Ken Jennings was writing a book “exploring the world of map nuts and geography obsessives.” That book, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, came out in September, and now I’ve had a chance to read it.

Maphead isn’t really (or just) a book about maps; rather, it’s a book about the people who obsess about matters geographical, including maps. The subject is pretty broadly defined. He begins straightforwardly enough. After a chapter on spatial awareness, Jennings looks at the scandal that erupted when a University of Miami professor discovered his students couldn’t locate anything on a map, and at map literacy in general. There’s a chapter on borders and placenames. But things really get cooking when Jennings turns to things people do. A chapter on map collecting. On maps of imaginary places. The National Geographic Bee. Roadgeeking. Geocaching. Even the Degree Confluence Project.

In its cheerful enthusiasm for all things map, Maphead reads a lot like Mike Parker’s Map Addict (which I reviewed in 2009). This is a good thing. Like Map Addict, Maphead covers a lot of what for me is very familiar ground: I sometimes felt like I was reading my own blog archives, which is something I felt while reading Map Addict. But then Jennings goes and finds something I didn’t know, like the fact that Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” was not the only work to play with the idea of a 1:1 scale map: Lewis Carroll and Umberto Eco did it too. Ken Jennings has managed to pull off a minor miracle: a profoundly erudite, well-researched book, written in a breezy, accessible and downright witty manner that is invariably entertaining. A pleasant book that you should look at, if you have any interest in maps.

Buy at Amazon.com (Canada, UK, Kindle)

Previously: Map Books for Fall 2011.

Steve Jobs was no Santa Claus.

I didn’t need Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the late Apple CEO, simply titled Steve Jobs, to tell me that. I was already well aware of Jobs’s many character flaws: his abandonment of his first daughter, Lisa; his lack of empathy; his unpleasant behaviour to virtually everyone around him; his odd dietary habits and other quirks. All of these traits were already catalogued in excruciating detail in Alan Deutschman’s 2001 biography, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, which catalogued, in vivid detail, the period between Jobs’s ouster from Apple in 1985 and the first few years of his return.

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Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre) is the third installment in my read-through of Jules Verne’s novels, but the first that most people are likely to have read, if they’ve read a Verne novel at all. First published in 1864 while The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was still being serialized, Journey is considerably shorter (Hatteras was 130,000 words long) and, I’d argue, less successful as a story, though of course it’s far better known.

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Master of the House of Darts is the third and final book in Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec mystery fantasy novels. We rejoin Acatl, High Priest of the Dead and sometime investigator of magical murder and intrigue, some four months after the events of Harbinger of the Storm. The Mexica emperor, Tizoc, has returned from his coronation war with too few prisoners to offer up as sacrifice, and Acatl is again worried that the balance between the heavens, the earth and the underworld is at risk. (The world of Obsidian and Blood seems to be on the constant edge of a Mesoamerican Ragnarök.) When a plague strikes the Sacred Precinct and threatens to spread across Tenochtitlan, Acatl is once again called upon to save the day.

Selfless, utterly sincere and a bit colourless, Acatl is in stark (and necessary) contrast to a cast of self-interested and scheming priests, warriors and politicians, and a vividly painted society in which blood sacrifices are necessary to keep the sun in the sky and ensure the survival of life on earth, and the gods are neither imaginary nor distant. As enjoyable as the first two books — which is to say, yes, read them.

Previously: Aliette de Bodard’s Aztec Mystery Novels.

Buy at Amazon.com (Canada, UK, Kindle).

Columbus triggered the Little Ice Age. Malaria invented African slavery in the Americas, set the position of the Mason-Dixon line and helped the colonies win the American War of Independence. Silver from the New World wreaked havoc on the Chinese monetary system. Potatoes allowed Europe to take over the world.

These are some of the provocative gems found in Charles C. Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It’s a sequel of sorts to 1491, a book on the Americas before their discovery by Europeans that impressed the hell out of me. It’s essentially a popular history of the Columbian Exchange — where peoples, species, and goods previously separated by geography came together in a new period some have dubbed the Homogocene — where, for example, Africans outnumbered Europeans in the Caribbean and a substantial population of Asians lived in 16th-century Mexico, and crops like tobacco, sugar, rubber, potatoes and maize expanded across the world. Globalization, Mann argues, is not a new thing: the global economy can be traced to post-conquest Mexico, where Andean silver not only crossed the Atlantic to Spain, but also the Pacific to the Philippines, where Spain traded it for Chinese silk and porcelain. The world knit itself together on the bounty of the Americas.

It’s by necessity an incomplete look. The Atlantic triangle gets short shrift, and cod is not once mentioned. A comprehensive survey of the Exchange would have to be textbook-superficial, or come in twenty volumes. Mann takes one thing at a time — rubber or sugar or malaria, or racial mixing, or escaped slave colonies like the black Seminoles — and goes into considerable depth. Neither is this a history of the period immediately after contact: the Conquistadors share time with modern-day rubber plantations in Indochina. What 1493 is, like 1491 before it, is an immensely stimulating and accessible read, hard to put down, provocative of much thought. Go read it.

Buy at Amazon.com (Canada, UK, Kindle).

On Friday we’re off to Montreal for Farthing Party, Jo Walton’s mini-convention. In preparation for which I’ve been madly reading books by other participants and by Jo herself, so as to feel properly up to speed.

One I recently finished is Walton’s Lifelode, which won the Mythopoeic Award in 2010. It’s an odd and interesting book. It’s what might be called domestic fantasy, says Sharyn November in the introduction, and at least it starts that way, but Story inevitably manifests itself. “What I was trying to do was write a small scale story about everyday life in a high magic medieval village,” Jo wrote on her LiveJournal in 2008. “What actually happened was that Hanethe came back from the East and took over the plot, because she had the plot nature, and nobody else did.”

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I picked up a used copy of William Butcher’s biography of Jules Verne, helpfully titled Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography, to help me in my travels through Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages. There is a lot of interest here, about Verne’s childhood, politics, struggles as a playwright, passion for sea travel and so forth. But if you’re expecting an exegesis of Verne’s novels, well, you’re not going to get that: some titles fly by with the briefest of mentions.

Which is not to say that this book ignores the literary: Butcher, who’s done several new translations of Verne’s works (and has fulminated against many existing translations), explores Verne’s writing career in considerable detail, especially his relationship with Hetzel, his publisher. We learn that Hetzel edited anything the least bit controversial from Verne’s works; one result was that none of the works published in Verne’s lifetime is actually set in France. Butcher’s anger at this and at Hetzel’s financial exploitation of Verne is palpable and unrestrained; this is not a disinterested biography. Butcher also argues provocatively that a number of Verne’s works were written by others or were outright plagiarisms, and that Verne should not be seen as a science fiction writer, but rather a writer of geographical adventure fiction.

Less appealing to me was the focus on psychosexual matters and Butcher’s tendency to emphasize that a point of research was exclusive to his book, which to this lapsed historian seems aggressive and unseemly. In the end, a useful read, if not exactly a gripping one.

Theodore Roosevelt was a fucking space alien. He had to have been. That’s the only conclusion I can draw having read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, the engaging, readable and addictive first volume of Edmund Morris’s three-book biography of America’s youngest and funnest president. It covers the period from his birth to his ascension to the presidency upon the assassination of William McKinley.

Despite a fairly sickly childhood, the man had more energy than a whole platoon and produced more intellectual output, in more diverse fields, than some small colleges. He was a walking Tesla coil: you could power a small city with him. He bounced from task to task: state assemblyman, rancher, federal civil service commissioner, New York City Police commissioner, assistant navy secretary, rough rider, governor, vice president — rarely staying for more than a few years.

With a book that is 960 pages long in hardcover (I read the Kindle edition) it’s hard to complain about the gaps in the narrative — his family fades into the background as his career takes off, for example. Roosevelt led a life so full and interesting, I can see why it’s taken Morris three volumes to chronicle it. Worth reading.

It’s taken me a while to get to the second volume in Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras). At this rate it will take me more than a decade to get through all 54 novels in this series. Clearly I am going to have to pick up the pace.

Hatteras was first serialized in the Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation from March 1864 to December 1865; the definitive version was published as a book a year later. It’s listed as the second volume in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, though the sequence is a bit confusing: A Journey to the Centre of the Earth was published, and From the Earth to the Moon was serialized in another periodical, during Hatteras’s run, and saw book publication sooner, but come after Hatteras in the VE numbering.

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In his Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Venomous Snakes, Lenny Flank, Jr. speaks truth to crazy.

Providing information on how to keep venomous snakes in captivity — by definition, an extremely dangerous and life-threatening activity — is a contentious thing. Even among those crazy few who think that keeping venomous snakes should be legal, even among those who keep such snakes themselves, there is a line of thought that says, don’t tell anyone how it’s done. Because you might encourage the wrong people to do it. They’ll read your book or website, buy a bunch of deadly snakes, and get themselves — or worse, some innocent bystander — killed.

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At Readercon (more on which anon) I discovered, to my delight, that a new collection of short stories by Gardner Dozois, one of the convention’s guests of honour, had just been published. When the Great Days Come (Prime Books, 2011) collects most of Dozois’s significant short fiction over his 40-year career.

Now, Dozois is best known as an editor. He edited Asimov’s Science Fiction between 1987 and 2004, and continues to edit the Year’s Best Science Fiction series of anthologies. He’s won 15 Hugos for his editing. But his friend (and frequent collaborator) Michael Swanwick likes to point out that Dozois is a better writer than an editor. Though not a prolific one, especially during the years he edited Asimov’s, what stories he has published — I count 56 of them in the shorter lengths¹ — are beautifully crafted and are often filled with a terrible purpose. (The world comes to an end on more than one occasion.) He’s won Nebulas for two of them — “The Peacemaker” and the heartrending “Morning Child,” both of which are reprinted in this book — but none of his stories are a waste of reading time. (An argument could be made against “A Cat Horror Story,” but that one is still fun.)

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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin is the second book in my reading of the 2010 Hugo Award nominees for best novel. It’s a fantasy novel, the first book in a trilogy, but it’s not your standard fantasy — it went in directions I did not expect. Nor, though it features a female protagonist who has relationships with supernatural beings (gods, in this case), is it anything like a paranormal romance. It’s something quite different, and quite original.

The Arameri are a family who rule the world from their city of Sky, where they serve their god, Itempas. In a war between the gods thousands of years ago, Itempas banished or killed the other gods, who now serve as slaves to the Arameri. Yeine, the granddaughter of the head of the Arameri, is summoned to Sky on the death of her mother, who was estranged from her family, only to discover that she has been named one of her grandfather’s three heirs. This puts her in considerable peril, and she must navigate palace intrigues, family politics, and captured gods in order to survive.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was a pleasant surprise: a novel so fluidly written, so gripping, with world-building and mythology that are first-rate. It’s hard to believe it’s a first novel — in fact, it just won the 2011 Locus Award for best first novel. It was a Nebula nominee too, and now it’s a strong contender for the Hugo. You should probably read it.

First up in my reading of the 2010 Hugo Award nominees for best novel is The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. This is the first novel of his that I’ve read, though he’s written more than a dozen of them. That’s a shame, and something I’m going to have to rectify shortly, because The Dervish House is a masterful, beautifully written book that thoroughly deserves its Hugo nomination.

Set in a near-future Istanbul, a few years after Turkey joined the EU, the novel whirls around the inhabitants of the so-called dervish house (a square in an Istanbul neighbourhood). Over the course of a week, it shifts between six point-of-view characters and multiple storylines — a terror attack on a tram, a scheme involving a gas pipeline, the search for a man entombed in honey, among others, all within the context of a world thoroughly infused with nanotech. It’s a little hard to follow in the beginning, but the seemingly disparate threads do come together, and make for a satisfying conclusion. And the characters — a motley collection that includes a retired Greek economics professor, a nine-year-old boy with pet robots and a heart condition, and a man who thinks he sees djinni — are wonderful and lively. This is an impressive piece of science fiction on so many levels.

Note: the Kindle version (U.S./Canada, UK) uses images to render the Turkish letters “Ğ” and “Ş” — with ugly results.

Gardner Dozois called Engineering Infinity, an anthology of original science fiction stories edited by Jonathan Strahan, “the best SF anthology of the year to date” in the April 2011 issue of Locus. It’s a strong anthology with some really good stories in it. Ostensibly a hard-SF anthology, its stories range in scope from the intensely personal to the grandly Stapledonian, but in most cases retain a human perspective, if not scale. Here’s the table of contents.

It’s hard to pick a favourite. John Barnes seems to be channeling Larry Niven’s stage trees in “The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees,” and that’s not a bad thing. Two stories are sequels: Karl Schroeder’s “Laika’s Ghost,” a story about the Soviet Union and Mars, is the fifth, I think, in a series involving arms inspector Gennady Malianov (beginning with “The Dragons of Pripyat”); Charlie Stross’s “Bit Rot” is a sequel to Saturn’s Children. I also enjoyed Greg Benford’s time-travel-and-serial-killers tale, “Mercies”; Gwyneth Jones’s story about alien cannibalism, “The Ki-Anna”; Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s bittersweet “Watching the Music Dance.” And Peter Watts is in his usual fine form with “Malak,” a story about a weapon that grows a conscience.

Fuzzy Nation is John Scalzi’s reboot of H. Beam Piper’s 1962 classic novel, Little Fuzzy, published with the consent of the Piper estate. This is a reboot in the sense of Batman Begins or the J. J. Abrams Star Trek: not a sequel or a rewrite, but a different story written from the bare bones of the original. Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Nation superficially tell the same tale: sunstone prospector Jack Holloway encounters a small and unbearably cute race of creatures he calles the fuzzies (or, in Scalzi’s version, the fuzzys, which seems wrong); if the fuzzies are found to be sentient, a human corporation loses the right to exploit their planet.

It’s remarkable how different the two novels are beyond that point. Reading one does not spoil the reading of the other. (In any case you must track down Little Fuzzy, which is in the public domain and downloadable for free, so there’s no excuse.)

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