5 Best Sci-Fi Books of 2009

This year was a strange one for science fiction and fantasy (particularly dark fantasy), as horror books got a lot of the fleeting media attention normally given to the robots-and-lasers crowd. But there was some amazing speculation in 2009, and here’s the best of the best.

5. THE QUIET WAR by Paul McAuley — Released in the UK in 2008, but brought to the U.S. by the amazing geniuses at Pyr this year, McAuley’s solar-system-spanning political thriller farms the space-opera fields normally tended to by the likes of Iain M. Banks. From high-level diplomats to rank-and-file “caught in the political whirlwind” normal people, the disparate actions of the characters in THE QUIET WAR slowly, but inexorably sow the seeds for war.

And while the plotting and scheming starts out slowly, the character development in the early pages really pays off as the war between a conservative Earthbound population and the far-more liberal residents of the outer solar system eventually clash, showing that no matter how far humanity goes, human nature is never far behind. This is a thinking man’s space opera, and fans of flashy firefights and robotic armies will have to partake in some excellent cloak-and-dagger future diplomacy to get an extremely satisfying climax. 

4. TRANSITION by Iain M. Banks — TRANSITION is not set in Banks’ popular, if daunting “Culture” universe, so firstly, if you’re interested in one of today’s best sci-fi writers, this is an excellent introduction. But that isn’t to say it’s easily accessible. TRANSITION is a “multiverse” book, with characters flitting between alternate dimensions at their leisure, and the novel overwhelms at the outset with time-jumps, dimensional shifts into alternate Earths, mysterious narrators (one of whom you only learn the identity of in the final pages), and dimension-spanning conspiracies that are deep, thrilling, and mind-bending.

But just deal with that, OK? It’s absolutely worth the work, even if good multiverse-type novels induce the sort of mental knots that well-written time-travel titles are wont to produce. Banks doesn’t care about explaining every single little thing; he just wants to tell a cool story about a secret cabal that controls the fate of multiple dimensions through a network of secret agents and what happens when one of the agents starts to wonder whether this secret cabal is really as well-intentioned as it claims to be. TRANSITION is a book that demands to be read slowly, carefully, if you want to understand both the plot and the message about power that he so eloquently describes.

3. THE CARYATIDS by Bruce Sterling — Sterling is revered among today’s techno-elite, and deservedly so. He’s become somewhat of a resident genius to the world now, and science-fiction fans should praise the deity or absence of a diety of their choice when he deigns to write fiction, because it’s glorious. This particular masterpiece shows his talents of prognostication perfectly: Not only does he imagine a future rocked by climate change, but he tosses in amazing extrapolations about science, geopolitical politics, weaponry, the entertainment industry, peak oil and just about everything you can imagine to create a future that is not only believable, but seems utterly real.

Sterling might have a time machine in his basement, but as long as he keeps using it for good and doesn’t, say, go back in time to St. Nazienz, Wis., to keep my grandparents from getting married, he’s welcome to travel wherever he wants, as long as works like this keep coming. THE CARYATIDS’ main characters are cloned sisters who hate each other, and this keeps them from realizing that if they could only get past their hatred, they might just be able to save the world from itself. That might be a metaphor for something. (Hint: It’s us, right now.)

2. JULIAN COMSTOCK: A STORY OF 22ND-CENTURY AMERICA by Robert Charles Wilson — THE CARYATIDS hit the shelves very early in the year, and to tell the truth, I had pretty much made up my mind by then that it was the best SF book I was going to read in 2009. But as summer hit, JULIAN COMSTOCK arrived at my door, and wow, it made an impression. This homage to 19th-century boys’ adventure stories throws readers right in the thick of a post-petroleum world that’s reverted to a nearly 19th-century level of technology and morality, with an overbearing church and a despotic president keeping the status as quo as it possibly can with wars and edicts forbidding any exploration of pre-oil-disaster science. At its heart, Wilson’s work is about friendship, narrated by the title character’s boyhood friend as he gets pulled into a world of action and adventure that existed previously in only his imagination.

From the outset, it’s obvious that the novel is meant to end up a tragedy, but Wilson’s totally unreliable and often-clueless narrator adds the perfect amount of humor and humanity to JULIAN COMSTOCK, elevating it to near the pinnacle of the postapocalyptic science fiction subgenre. It’s a boys’ adventure, a mean piece of futuristic speculation, and a showpiece for what must have been a ridiculous amount of research into pre-oil, 19th-century science, religion and society. 

1. THE WINDUP GIRL by Paolo Bacigalupi — All the cool science-fiction literary fads seem to get a “-punk” suffix of one form or another, and THE WINDUP GIRL — set in the universe of Bacigalupi’s amazing short stories “Calorie Man” and “Yellow-Card Man” — earns a couple of these designations. It’s very much “culturepunk,” like Ian McDonald’s RIVER OF GODS and BRASYL — it really gets under the skin of the novel’s setting (in this case, future Bangkok), and it’s also what could be termed “springpunk,” because with fossil fuels at the most scarce, the bulk of machinery is driven by laborers or elephants driving energy into huge springs.

Energy is measured in calories in THE WINDUP GIRL, and waves of virulent, crop-destroying blights have eliminated so many food crops that it’s up to huge, Monsanto-variant seed companies to provide the world with the genetically engineered and trademarked food that it needs, which, of course, creates an immense amount of cash and power for the corporations.

These ideas, as Bacigalupi presents them, would make a great book alone, but the author takes the additional step of immersing the plot in Southeast Asia, home to cultures that can seem as alien to Westerners as any civilization on Mars. Bacigalupi triumphs in his interpretation of the cultural attitudes and biases of his diverse cast of characters, including a scheming refugee from genocide; a scheming U.S. agricultural QUIET AMERICAN type; a scheming, but heroic Thai patriot policeman; a scheming genetically constructed woman engineered only to serve and is designed to be the ultimate human, save for her telltale, jerky, “clockwork” movement — you get the idea. Having lived in Southeast Asia for four years, I can attest that the cultural side rings true.

But even with all of this to digest, THE WINDUP GIRL is a thrill ride — a tempest of ideas and spectacle that should not be missed by anyone with half an appreciation for good science fiction. No book of 2009 has hit the nail on the head like THE WINDUP GIRL, and it surely sits on my hypothetical “Books of the Decade” list with RIVER OF GODS and BRASYL.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Both Ian McDonald’s CYBERABAD DAYS and Charles Stross’ WIRELESS are incredible collections of mostly reprinted short fiction. McDonald’s collected the assorted shorts he’s written in the same universe as RIVER OF GODS and added a new story that provides a fitting and final postscript to that world. WIRELESS is more lighthearted, and you can never say enough about Stross’ stories set in “The Laundry,” a secret British intelligence agency bent on protecting the world from ancient evil in a melange of HELLBOY, OFFICE SPACE and 007. Both of these books are highly recommended, but pick up their predecessors: McDonald’s RIVER OF GODS and Stross’ THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES and THE JENNIFER MORGUE first.

UP NEXT:
So, 2010: What’s anticipated? I’ve already started David Louis Edelman’s GEOSYNCHRON, which is very promising; there’s a new book from Ian McDonald that has already been penciled in on my calendar; and I’m intrigued by George Mann’s GHOSTS OF MANHATTAN, but that best-of list is thankfully a year away. —Ryun Patterson

Buy them at Amazon.