Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man (Tor) was an enormously skilful entertainment, using a space liner as the venue for a complex murder mystery. Kessel’s work is experimental in subject matter, deeply rooted in dialogue with previous works, and morally demanding. John Kessel’s The Dark Ride (Subterranean) is a career retrospective of one of the most outstanding recent bodies of speculative short fiction. Kay’s sentence-by-sentence skill more than justifies the return. Jemisin’s The World We Make (Orbit) was a sequel to The City We Became (2020) and continued its premise of the New York boroughs as an animate gang, fighting worse things than Brooklyn-Queens rivalry.Īll the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay (Hodder & Stoughton) was another of the author’s almost-historical almost-fantasies, in this case sharing an almost-Italian setting with previous books like A Brightness Long Ago. It’d be a spoiler to say more about Elizabeth Hand’s Hokuloa Road (Mulholland) than that it should be of interest to Locus readers for the author’s brilliance at evoking place (in this case Hawaii) and her skill in the detective/mystery mode.
Night Shift by Eileen Gunn (PM Press) was a welcome collection by an author whose fiction is always eagerly awaited. Spear by Nicola Griffith (Tordotcom) was a dense, intense reimagining of Arthurian myth, reclaiming the old stories for a new audience. One wishes one could have heard much, much more about it. (And one should be grateful that no attempt was made to complete it posthumously.) What we have in the book is an extraordinarily inventive fantasy world in the throes of industrialisation. Published from the partial manuscript Ford left at his death, and with a sympathetic and informative introduction by Neil Gaiman, it makes no claim to be a complete work. Ford’s Aspects (Tor) was an unusual case. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (Scribner) was a sort-of-sequel to A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), presenting a fragmented and compelling vision of a tech-dazzled USA just a few steps into the future. Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters (Tor) was a striking debut novel, quickly staking out a distinctive tone in fantasy and horror, as well as embodying some intriguing ideas about secret subcultures. It did not have the scope of his previous book Ka (2017), but did make a welcome return to a number of old Crowley themes, not least the turning point of the Renaissance. John Crowley’s Flint and Mirror (Tor) was a brilliant and colourful portrait of a myth-touched early modern Ireland. As with so many of the most interesting authors these days, he refuses to be pinned down to any single generic location. The Adventurists by Richard Butner (Small Beer) was an overdue first collection from a writer whose fiction is always compressed, individual, and adventurous. The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz) took in space piracy, romance, and murder investigations with all the author’s accustomed vividness. Instead, I found that the most interesting works I read had a deep, and often critical, engagement with the past of their genres.Īs an example, The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz) was a venture in the long-view scientific romance territory that this author has been central to reinvogorating – this book pushed on to deeper perspectives than are usual even for Baxter. However, there’s so much lag between an event occurring, an author choosing to write a book about it, and the book making its way through the publishing process that it’d be a genuine shock if a 2022 book were to be ‘‘about’’ 2022. 2022 was an extraordinary year in global events and (I think) an exceptional one in the SF and fantasy it saw published. My usual comment on publishing and novels applies even more strongly this year.
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