The 2014 Hattie Awards!!! Or the Best Book of 2014 (That I've Read)

2014 was a busy year for me with lots of challenges at work and plenty of travel. Even though this blog was dormant nearly all of the year it was probably still one of my highest word count years when counting all of the reread posts done for Tor.com on The Way of Kings, a project I was proud to be part of and glad to have behind me. As many others out there know: Writing on a schedule is hard work, especially when you have other work to do.

I still managed to read quite a bit this year even though my overall numbers are still down. I miss reading 100+ books a year, but appreciate all the added time I spent with friends and family this year. Looking over my reading log I've read 81 stories though many this year are novellas and graphic novels. I've not counted most short stories unless I bought them for my Nook and there were only 2 or 3 like that, but the novella and novelette length really hit me hard this year with a dozen or so of those. There was just one anthology read being the all-star Dangerous Women. Here's how the numbers breakdown:

Graphic Novels: 12 (though I read many more and only list those I thought worth remembering)
Short Fiction (novellas, novelettes, short stories, etc.): 24ish (Not counting Dangerous Women)
Novels: 45

Now on to the Hattie Awards!

Best Fantasy

 Winner - City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Runner-up - Smiler's Fair by Rebecca Levine

Honorable Hat Tips -The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley, The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman, and Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Bennett's latest stole the show as far as I am concerned though Smiler's Fair took me by surprise. Sanderson's WoR was what I hope it would be, but only time will tell if it will all payoff. My money's on yes. The Mirror Empire leveled up Hurley's game though there was some shakiness in the first quarter. I think Hurley's best is still to come in this series since some beautiful ground work has be laid.

Best Science Fiction

Winner - The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

Runner-up: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Translated by Ken Liu)

Honorable Hat Tips - Lock In by John Scalzi, Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi, and Red Rising by Pierce Brown, On A Red Station Drifting by Aliette de Bodard

Some will be surprised Andy Weir's The Martian isn't on this list somewhere. That's because I read it in 2013 with it winning in one category.  But North's story has stuck with me a long time and never wavered from being my favorite in this area though it is probably better labeled Science Fantasy it merits a top spot. The Three-Body Problem left me cold for the first half of the story to the point I almost put it down, but I'm glad I stuck with it as it is one of the most unique First Contact stories I've ever encountered. Lock-In is probably Scalzi's best novel since Android's Dream and I friggin loved AD. Koyanagi's Ascension hit me right in the Firefly spot while bringing a unique cast that I was just as quick to fall for. Red Rising is the real please-me-deal in the same way Ender's Game was only more brutal. de Bodard's novella lives up to the accolades to date and I look forward to delving into more into this universe.

Best Weird/Horror

Winner - The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey aka Mike Carey

Runner-up - Datura by Leena Krohn

Honorable Hat Tips - Truth and Fear by Peter Higgins, The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, and The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard

Datura is the stuff that eerie nightmares are made of. I know because it kept giving them to me. Truth and Fear feels very middle-bookish, but the writing has a stark beauty and strangeness that captivated me. I'm still trying to wrap my head about Murakami's odd little novella. The design by Chip Kidd was worth the price of admission all on it own. The End of the Sentence gave us a dark a slightly creepy American fairy tale well worth checking out.

Best Finish to a Series

Winner - The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman
Runner-up - Shadow Ops: Breach Zone by Myke Cole

Grossman left me amazed throughout his Magician's series and he was able to close it out quite poignantly. It will be a series well worth re-reading. Cole's finish to the first Shadow Ops arc executed all the goals I had for the series with big screen action on a small page.

Best Urban Fantasy

Winner -  California Bones by Greg van Eekhout

Runner-up - New Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko 

Honorable Hat Tips - Skin Game by Jim Butcher, and Falling Sky by Rajan Khanna

van Eekhout is back in UF after a 5 year absence with a new series that re-imagines California as if ruled by powerful magicians who eat other magicians. Not nearly as dark as it sounds since van Eekhout plays to the lighter side of things more times than not and plays up the thief angle quite well. Who knew Lukyanenko wasn't done with the Night Watch series? At first I thought this was going to stretch a series too fair as the fourth book really did close most threads off well, but the author managed to dig up a story that is as good as the rest.

Best Other

Winner - Tigerman by Nick Harkaway

I wasn't sure where to put Harkaway's latest, but I knew it needed to be mentioned. The story involves a a superhero of sorts, an island scheduled for demolition, and a bevy of most likely disreputable men. Though it meanders as Harkaway works tend to do that's the joy of the story. And that twist at the end! OMG, Harkaway is truly l33t.

Best Overall Book of the Year - You guys have got to read this!

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Considering Bennett nabbed this spot in 2012 for The Troupe this shouldn't come as too much of a shock. Now who do I have to talk to about the sequel City of Blades getting in my hands ASAP? Don't make me send Sigrud... The Girl With All the Gifts and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August have also stuck with me. These three books are also the ones I keep giving or recommending to friends depending on how their tastes bend.

Best Books Published before 2014 (That I read this year)

This year a third of the novels I read were not necessarily published this year. It is hard to rank them so here are a few of my favorites: Foundation by Isaac Asimov (re-read and deservedly in print for more than sixty years), American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett (Bennett has to be the love child of Bradbury. Has to be!), Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire (Toby just stole my heart from Dresden), The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu (Action/Adventure with Aliens FTW), and The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig (Badass/drugs are bad/also blue apparently).

So what were some of your favorites this year?

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The 2013 Hattie Awards!!! Or the Best of 2013 (That I've Read)
The 2012 Hattie Awards!!! Or the Best of 2012 (That I've Read)
The 2011 Hattie Awards!!! Or the Best of 2011 (That I've Read)
Best Books of 2010 (That I've read)
Best Books of 2009 (That I've read)

NEWS | Hugo Winners Announced (Big Tie for Novel!)

The Hugo Awards have been announced and a bit of surprise has happened in the novel category. I didn't relish the voters this year with such a great selection of novels to choose from. I myself read 4 out of the 6 and found each to have its own merits for inclusion and possibly winning.  I certainly don't disagree with the end result. The Windup Girl and The City & The City have tied for Best Novel. There have been two ties previous for Best Novel. In 1966 for Dune by Frank Herbert and Roger Zelazny's And Call Me Conrad and in 1993 for Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book. Without further adieu here are all the results.

Best Novel

• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade) (tie winner)
• The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK) (tie winner)
• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
• Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)

Best Novella

• “Palimpsest,” Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit) (winner)
• “Act One,” Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09)
• The God Engines, John Scalzi (Subterranean)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon)
• “Vishnu at the Cat Circus,” Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days; Pyr, Gollancz)
• The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

Best Novelette

• “The Island,” Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2; Eos) (winner)
• “Eros, Philia, Agape,” Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/09)
• “It Takes Two,” Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three; Night Shade Books)
• “One of Our Bastards is Missing,” Paul Cornell (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three; Solaris)
• “Overtime,” Charles Stross (Tor.com 12/09)
• “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” Eugie Foster (Interzone 2/09)

Best Short Story

• “Bridesicle,” Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09) (winner)
• “The Bride of Frankenstein,” Mike Resnick (Asimov’s 12/09)
• “The Moment,” Lawrence M. Schoen (Footprints; Hadley Rille Books)
• “Non-Zero Probabilities,” N.K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld 9/09)
• “Spar,” Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09)

Winners of the other categories.

Best Related Book: This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance (Subterranean)

Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; Art by Phil Foglio; Colours by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Moon Screenplay by Nathan Parker; Story by Duncan Jones; Directed by Duncan Jones (Liberty Films)

Best Editor Short Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Best Editor Long Form: Ellen Datlow

Best Professional Artist: Shaun Tan

Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, & Cheryl Morgan

And the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (presented by Dell Magazines): Seanan McGuire


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REVIEW | The City & The City by China Mieville
REVIEW | The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
REVIEW | Kraken by China Mieville
REVIEW | Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
REVIEW | Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson

NEWS | Arthur C. Clarke Shortlist Announced

The Arthur C. Clarke shortlist has been unveiled and it is quite a good list even though I've only read three out of the six and haven't even heard of one of the picks. Those I have partaken of are definitely deserving of being there for one reason or another. The clear winner for me is The City & The City by China Mieville.   There is a glaring error of a book missing from this list, which is The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is no small travesty that Paolo didn't get the nomination as he is doing some amazing work different from nearly everyone else in Sci-Fi right now. Below is the full list with a snippet from my review or commentary followed by the description. UPDATE: Looking through the longlist again I noticed The Windup Girl didn't even make it.  This is most likely because the award focus on work published in the UK and while Nightshade titles such as The Windup Girl are distributed there they aren't officially published and therefore ineligible.  Still it is a shame.

The City & The City by China Miéville (Macmillan/Del Rey)  - China is also a past winner for Iron Council and Perdido Street Station.  The City & The City is a detective murder mystery a la Raymond Chandler with a little fantasy mixed in narrated by Inspector Tyador Borlu of Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. The City & The City twists and turns into something I was never expecting, but is all the more satisfying for doing so. 9.5 out of 10 Hats.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.  Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts (Gollancz) - I've yet to read any of Roberts books, but have heard generally good things about his work.  People seem very divided over Yellow Blue Tibia with an either love it or hate it attitude.

Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth ... I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes in it--the population of the whole world!' The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it. But then new orders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin's rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen. The story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true ... A typically mind-blowing SF novel from one of the genre's literary stars.

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperCollins/Spectra) -Galileo's Dream reads more like a biography of the legend that has become Galileo, but gives the reader a deep appreciation of the long and painful life full of triumph and devastation he went through on his way to becoming a Scientific revolutionary. Galileo's Dream is a challenging, but rewarding reading experience. Galileo comes alive as he earns his moniker of The World's First Scientist. 7.5 out of 10 Hats

At the heart of a brilliant narrative that stretches from Renaissance Italy to the moons of Jupiter is one man, the father of modern science: Galileo Galilei.

To the inhabitants of the Jovian moons, Galileo is a revered figure whose actions will influence the subsequent history of the human race. From the summit of their distant future, a charismatic renegade named Ganymede travels to the past to bring Galileo forward in an attempt to alter history and ensure the ascendancy of science over religion. And if that means Galileo must be burned at the stake, so be it.

Yet between his brief and jarring visitations to this future, Galileo must struggle against the ignorance and superstition of his own time. And it is here that Robinson is at his most brilliant, showing Galileo in all his contradictions and complexity. Robinson's Galileo is a tour de force of imaginative and historical empathy: the shining center around which the novel revolves.

From Galileo's heresy trial to the politics of far-future Jupiter, from the canals of Venice to frozen, mysterious Europa, Robinson illuminates the parallels between a distant past and an even more remote future—in the process celebrating the human spirit and calling into question the convenient truths of our own moment in time.

Far North by Marcel Theroux (Faber & Faber) - I've never even heard of Far North, but the description does sound interesting.

Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city. Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check. Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere - a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society. What Makepeace finds is a world unravelling, stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of a vanished civilization.But Makepeace's journey also leads to unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this frozen world. "Far North" leads the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity's origins to its likely end. Bleak, haunting, spare - and yet ultimately hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world's fragility and beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses.

Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding (Gollancz/Spectra) - I was a little surprised to see Retribution Falls on the list.  Don't get me wrong I absolutely love it, but it doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the picks, which for the most part have a more literary bent.  My full review will be going up next week, but here is a little to whet your appetite. Comparisons to Firefly are quite apt, but Wooding has created an amazing crew and equal amazing world for the setting.  The fast and furious Retribution Falls is staggeringly entertaining and a ridiculously good page turner. The quality of the writing is close to that of Scott Lynch and has left room for so many more immersive stories for the crew of the Ketty Jay. 9.5 out of 10 hats.

Frey is the captain of the Ketty Jay, leader of a small and highly dysfunctional band of layabouts. An inveterate womaniser and rogue, he and his gang make a living on the wrong side of the law, avoiding the heavily armed flying frigates of the Coalition Navy. With their trio of ragged fighter craft, they run contraband, rob airships and generally make a nuisance of themselves. So a hot tip on a cargo freighter loaded with valuables seems like a great prospect for an easy heist and a fast buck. Until the heist goes wrong, and the freighter explodes. Suddenly Frey isn't just a nuisance anymore - he's public enemy number one, with the Coalition Navy on his tail and contractors hired to take him down. But Frey knows something they don't. That freighter was rigged to blow, and Frey has been framed to take the fall. If he wants to prove it, he's going to have to catch the real culprit. He must face liars and lovers, dogfights and gunfights, Dukes and daemons. It's going to take all his criminal talents to prove he's not the criminal they think he is ...

Spirit by Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz) - Jones is a past winner for Bold as Love along with four total books making the shortlist. Somehow the description has never interested me. Am I missing out?

Bibi (it means princess) is the sole survivor of a massacre. Lady Nef, the General's wife, stops the General taking her as a concubine, winning Bibi's eternal and passionate devotion. Years later, a diplomatic mission to a supposedly friendly planet ends in disaster. Bibi, now a junior officer in Lady Nef's household, is incarcerated with her mistress in the notorious high-security prison on Fenmu. Lady Nef, 150 years old when arrested, dies in prison; she bequeaths to Bibi her rank, her level of access to the AI systems that permeate the Diaspora of inhabited planets, and a highly secret set of 4-space co-ordinates. Bibi uses Lady Nef's death to escape from Fenmu, finds Spirit, an instantaneous-transit space pod, and follows Lady Nef's co-ordinates to a treasure beyond price: a virgin, perfect, uninhabited planet. Soon after this, the mysterious, fantastically wealthy Princess of Bois Dormant makes her debut in the high society of Speranza, the Diaspora's capital city. Thus disguised, Bibi sets out to discover why she and her mistress were condemned to a living hell; and to punish the guilty. Twenty years have passed: Lady Nef's enemies now rule Speranza. As she uncovers a forgotten, ruthless and far-reaching conspiracy, Bibi's vengeance is transformed into a project of world-changing reparation.

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