50 Books Challenge Part Three

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2024, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

If possible, please can you embolden your titles and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track, especially when the threads move quickly at this time of the year.

The first thread is here and the second one here.

I think it can be viewed as both and the boundaries between different genres are pretty leaky, particularly when we're talking about 200 year old books. And a book as great as Frankenstein is always going to be difficult to put into a single genre. She was clearly inspired by Galvani's work on the nature of electricity, the romantics were all aware of and inspired by the beginnings of formal science, there wasn't the same cultural divide between science and art that there is now. There's a good book about this period, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes.

@CoteDAzur I liked Ancillisry Justice.

N K Jesimin is the first writer to win 3 consecutive Hugo awards for each book of her Broken Earth trilogy so I'm surprised you haven't heard of her. It may not be your thing but they're certainly very well regarded SF books.

38 The Weekend Trip by Joanna Bolouri

A group of women who haven’t seen each other for ages get together for a weekend, fall out and make up again. I’ve really enjoyed some of her previous books but this was boring and unoriginal.

39 The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey

I really enjoyed this. It’s set in West Yorkshire in 1979, and 12 year old Miv decides to try and track down the Yorkshire Ripper herself so her family doesn’t have to move away. I really liked the characters of Miv and her friends, and the stories felt realistic.

(I'm not a SciFi reader, but) I agree with Janina that The Age of Wonder is a terrific book and very good at exploring the overlap of science and artistic interests through key figures in the 18th/19th centuries.

@CoteDAzur Puzzled what novels might be for if not feelings.

If you want facts and scientific explanations, you can read a non-fiction book; and I like my non-fiction to be straightforward and fact-filled, and can’t be arsed with learning about the author’s personal journey and all the details about the people they interviewed who told them those facts. So I understand the idea of wanting facts and ideas separate from human interest.

But novels for me are all about entering into the experiential worlds of others and getting a sense of what it’s like to be them. My favourite novels give me a real sense of the physical and emotional lived realities of the characters.

Also not convinced we need to use ableist language about people with cognitive impairments in our reviews - perhaps that’s just me, but I hope not.

I would consider Frankenstein as sci-fi, though agree genre is flexible!

would people think of John Wyndham as sci-fi? I certainly would.

Hilary Mantel studied law, not history, and she certainly writes the hell out of histfic

I would say John Wyndham was Sci Fi, yes. Also Iain M Banks. I do like Feelings in my novels, no matter what world they are set in. I don’t believe human nature changes that much, or will change in the next few millenia, no matter how much our environment alters our biology or surroundings. We’ll be putting people on distant planets before we eradicate the urge to fight each other or destroy nature, for instance. We are similar to a particularly adaptive virus in the way we operate collectively (depressing thought, must now go and find a basket of kittens to stroke ).

PD James was very of her time and she fancied turning her hand to dystopian fiction. Some people read it and liked it, some people found it a bit lightweight and rubbish. Meh, that’s books for you, sparking (mostly civil) debate since the first time someone made marks with a stick to impart information or tell a story.

Thirding the love for The Age of Wonder. Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men is also wonderful, more tech/eng boffins.

Can I have some recommendations of SF that's engages more with bio/chem, or sciences other than physics? e.g. Jemisin's eco-geological trilogy that @Stowickthevast mentioned, which I thoroughly enjoyed though wouldn't recommend to everyone, since women's feelings are pretty central.

ETA the science in Atwood's Oryx&Crake didn't annoy me, but everything else did....

Interrupting this discussion slightly with a quick review.

15. The Rector's Daughter - F. M. Mayor

I won’t say a lot, as this is a Rather Dated Book Club read so I’ll save my full comments for that, but this 1920s novel about Mary Jocelyn, the titular rector’s daughter, and her cruelly lonely life, was a quietly heartbreaking read. Nothing very spectacular happens, and yet it’s full of feelings - and most beautifully told.

@HenryTilneyBestBoy

I'm not sure if it's quite what you want but have a look at The End Specialist

PS Fourthing the recs for The Age of Wonder, an enthralling book.

It's heavy on engineering but Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars descriptions of the geology of Mars and the terraforming of the planet are fantastic. Its the first in a trilogy and the second two descend too heavily into politics for my liking but Red Mars is one of my favourite books ever. I'm due a reread I think!

@ChessieFL I'm seeing Suspicious Things all over book social media and wondered if it was any good or just very aggressively marketed so thank you for the review! Adding it to my list.

I have zero opinions on sci fi but it's an interesting discussion to follow.

Janina - Overemphasis on the "feeeeliinngggggssss" is only part of the problem. True enough, I find women author's tendency to go on and on about characters' childhood homes and lovey dovey thoughts about each other often boring and irrelevant, as was the case in The Children of Men with its pages of descriptions of the dictator's childhood home and the inexplicable romantic feelings of one of only two women in the book with nearly all the male characters. All this was at the expense of the nearly nonexistent plot, which the author could have spent some time and effort developing into something worthwhile if she were not so preoccupied with all this irrelevant fluff. At the very least, she could have come up with a more credible ending than "He put on a ring and everyone decided to respect him" which I wouldn't have found satisfying even as a 10-year-old.

The real problem and the common denominator with all the women's SF I have ever read was their weak plots and minimal worlbuilding. Now, I fully expect several replies of "Oh but Station 11 has such a great plot and worldbuilding" and to that I can only say (in the parlance of our times): You don't know what you don't know. Try reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Three-Body Problem series by Liu Cixin, or even Hyperion by Dan Simmons where there truly is no shortage of the characters' inner worlds and feelings (as opposed to heartstring tugging feeeeeliinnnnnggssss), and then we will talk about why there are no women authors writing books of this caliber, which such fascinating plot and incredibly detailed worldbuilding.

My theory is that women authors write primarily for a women audience, and as is clear to anyone who reads readers' comments, "I didn't like the book because the characters were not likeable and so I didn't care what happened to them" is a thing for such books. So, women authors feel that they have to make the characters likeable and it seems to me that is why they go on and on about their childhoods, how they feel about each other, their kids, their husbands, their homes etc even where this stuff is irrelevant for the story.

I would be interested in hearing others' thoughts on this.

Morrigan - I quite like John Wyndham's books and find that they have aged very well.

I have read nearly all of Iain M Banks's books in my 20s. They are "space opera" - a bit lightweight but engaging enough and they do raise some interesting issues. Some of his books could have been a lot better with a more rigorous/analytical co-author, I thought, such as The Player of Games where there was very little about the actual game IIRC.

Ladybird - re "Puzzled what novels might be for if not feelings. If you want facts and scientific explanations, you can read a non-fiction book"

And I can say, "Puzzled what novels might be for if not a great plot you would want to follow to the end and the amazing ideas that you have never thought of before. If you want feelings, you can go hug your kids".

We are clearly all different, and love different genres which we read for different purposes. That is perfectly fine.

However, SF is not and cannot be just about "the author’s personal journey... the experiential worlds of others and getting a sense of what it’s like to be them... a real sense of the physical and emotional lived realities of the characters" because, by definition, the author is describing a "What if?" scenario for which they need to construct an internally consistent, realistic, and detailed world. For that, the author needs a deep understanding of the subject matter, whether it is astronomy, biology, computer science, or viral outbreaks. Otherwise, none of it makes any sense and the book fails, as was the case with Station 11 where virus kills in 24 hours (hence should be very easy to contain), survivors don't seem to have pressing concerns such as finding food and fresh water and instead make museums to broken cell phones and whine on about how much they miss air conditioning.

"Also not convinced we need to use ableist language about people with cognitive impairments in our reviews - perhaps that’s just me, but I hope not."

Huh? Is this about me saying "The few political insights are too facile and overlaboured for the cognitively impaired among us whom the author appears to believe is her reader base."? You could have a point if I had said "morons", for example, but "cognitively impaired" is a perfectly valid description - words you have used yourself in the quote above.

In any case, please stop trying to police people's words. Counter the ideas and arguments if that is your wish, but personally I am not interested in what you find offensive in a perfectly normal phrase that you then go on to use yourself.

Way behind with the thread and not very au fais with SF generally but I have just read The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley which was recommended by Manda Scott somewhere. It is described as SF and was Longlisted for an SF prize in 2021. It’s historical and a time slip one. World building is very good, I’d say. The focus is on engineering& technology rather than purely physics and I really really enjoyed it. There is a fair amount of war but feels with it. Might be worth a look.

@HenryTilneyBestBoy I'd agree that the NK Jemisin books have feelings but also have good scientific basis and world building. I think you can have both in a book!

I'd agree with @CoteDAzur that Adrian Tschaikovsky's Children of Time is great and most of his other work too. I found the Three Body Problem rather boring and DNF it.

For more futuristic Eco books, I really liked Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman recently.

Dh who reads predominantly SF likes Alistair Reynolds for hard SF.

Even though Cote disagrees, I thought the Ann Leckie books were very good.

I think the man who has it all has been reading this thread 😂

Men's Poetry

Loads of good female sci-fi authors:

Elizabeth Moon
Anne McCaffrey
Elizabeth Bear
Tamsyn Muir
Martha Wells
Diana Wynne Jones
Arkady Martine
Becky Chambers
Tanya Huff

I don't select by gender of writers for any genre, just if something looks interesting!

A few that come to mind -
Native Tongue is old but good for linguistics SF.

Adrian Tchaikovsky for evolution SF (Children of Time, but also see my review upthread for Doors of Eden for something lighter & more thrillerish in the same vein)
Stephanie Saulter's Gemsigns trilogy for genetic modification of humans

I didn't get on with either the Mary Robinette Kowal books or NK Jemisin, but I think just not to my taste.
For political SF with great world building I loved Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning series but I've yet to find anyone else who's even finished the first one so hesitate to recommend them

Thank you Southeast for your steadfast work keeping the threads going.

I never post lists but am doing so as I'm still nowhere near tunnelling through Life and Fate but am determined to finish it. I'm another who has got more bolds already than the whole of last year.

1. The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

1. Dear Fred by KM Peyton
2. Venetia by Georgette Heyer

4. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

1. Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
2. The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

7. When the Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope

1. By Your Side: My Life Loving Barbara Windsor by Scott Mitchell
2. Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

10. Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis 11. A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel 12. Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

Aaaargh! Formatting Hellscape!

Why does it do that?! Mine was the same. It looked perfect written down and then poof, weird formatting.