2018 Year End Review

  I have decided to do a year in review post. So I will  look at some of my favourite posts, purchases and reading of 2018. Since I do not maintain a reading diary and this is the first post of this kind I may cheat a bit. I think I will try to limit myself to top 5's at most for any category, which is not to say I could not list more. To do this I may vacillate between being a lumper and a splitter. For some items I will include a link to relevant posts.

Favourite Posts:

SF and me

 "As part of creating and maintaining this blog I often find myself questioning why I like certain stories and novels more than others, or why certain periods or themes within science fiction attract me. I know that my tastes often differ from the science fiction my wife or my buddy Doug choose. Indeed part of the reading exercise that Doug and I have embarked on is aimed at exposing each other to works that we might not have chosen on our own. Also my wife reads novels and I prefer short stories, so while I may read the same authors, we both have a fondness for new space opera authors like Alastair Reynonds or Neil Asher, our reading diverges. Since Doug and I have a page limit (200 pages) for the works we suggest, we are limited to short stores or older novels and novellas, although I think Doug would gravitate more to longer novels in his own reading. My wife also reads new works whereas Doug and I read a combination of the old and the new." see the full post here

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2018/06/science-fiction-and-me-why-i-read-what.html

Golden Age Optimism and the Lords of the Starship (okay I cheated this is from 2017)

As I enter my 60's, I realize I have been reading SF for what must be approaching 50 years. I started with SF intended for children in my school library in Windsor. Titles that spring to mind, John Keir Cross's The Angry Planet or Miss Pickerell On the Moon, she also goes to Mars. I graduated to Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov's robots and Ray Bradbury, who I loved, still do, but even then he was a bit of an outlier, what after all was I to make, as a white kid who lived across from a Detroit in flames, of "The Black and White Game" (1945) from The Golden Apples of the Sun.  see the full post here

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2017/10/golden-age-optimism-and-lords-of.html

Favourite SF character:

Murderbot, the character introduced by Martha Wells in All Systems Red. I was not alone in this as noted in Wikipedia.

"All Systems Red won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novella,^[4] the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella,^[5] and the American Library Association's Alex Award,^[6] and was nominated for the 2017 Philip K. Dick Award.^[7]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Systems_Red

Favourite New Arrivals, Books:



https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2018/02/new-arrivals-including-vance-ellison.html




https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2018/04/new-arrivals-and-updated-reading.html

Favourite Novel:

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, I found this a perfect combination of horror, SF, and weird tale. So much so, that as with All Systems Red I have not yet read the other volumes in the series for fear that they are not up to the same standard. "The novel won the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel^[2] and the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for best novel.^[3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_(VanderMeer_novel)

Memorable, Short Stories:

"The Universe of Things" by Gwyneth Jones (1993)

"The Man from P.I.G." by Harry Harrison" (1967)

"Of Terrans Bearing Gifts"  by Richard Grey Sipes (1967)

"Epilog" by Poul Anderson (1962)

"The Camel's Tail" by Tom Jolly (2018)

"We See Things Differently" by Bruce Sterling (1989) 

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2017/01/bruce-sterlings-we-see-things.html

Favourite Anthologies:

We See a Different Frontier A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad

2001 An Odyssey In Words edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2018/10/peter-nicholls-perry-rhoden-and-some.html

Favourite New Arrivals, Magazines:




https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/search/label/Edgar%20Rice%20Burroughs

 

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2018/06/sleeping-planet-and-conde-nast-analog.html