by Damien Walter)
Science fiction has, arguably, been the mainstream of pop culture since the internet displaced TV at the centre of our lives. The younger, geekier internet audience is living in a weird, complicated world, and sci-fi provides the metaphors that let us talk about it. Young audiences aren't stupid, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire isn't killing the box office just because it's the latest teen sensation. It's how a generation growing up in the ruins of late-stage capitalism are articulating the experience. And SF today is articulating an ever wider range of experiences.
SF is changing, and radically. When the old school fans of the British Science Fiction Association and the judges of the Arthur C Clarke awards put forward their 2013 awards shortlists it wasn't just that they were 100% old, white and male. They were backward looking, intent on defining what science fiction was and blind to what it was becoming. Adam Roberts – one of the white males in question – hit the nail on the head at New Genre Army, an academic conference dedicated to his work. When asked how he saw his work evolving in the future he answered frankly: towards increasing irrelevance, eclipsed by new voices from other countries and other experiences than the white male's.
Monica Byrne's The Girl in the Road is a work harvested from the author's experience of our radically changing world. Two young women travel across damaged worlds towards Ethiopia. Meena awakes with a mysterious snakebite that sends her on a journey across a futuristic India. Mariama is on a similar flight from danger, but in very different times and with a caravan crossing Saharan Africa. Byrne is a science writer and graduate of MIT, but her insight into our near future is as much informed by her extensive travels as her grasp of science. Kim Stanley Robinson calls The Girl in the Road a "brilliant novel – vivid, intense, and fearless with a kind of savage joy" and it's a book you will certainly be hearing a lot about in 2014.
Lavie Tidhar has built a startling reputation as a writer who does not flinch from representing the truth of modern experience. His breakthrough novel Osama won the World Fantasy award in 2012 for its controversial analysis of the ways in which we mythologise terrorism for political purposes. The Violent Century brings Tidhar's often acerbic, satirical style of science fiction to bear on British history. If John Le Carré had ever written for Marvel Comics, the outcome might read a little like Tidhar's alternative history of Britain with superheroes. Like all of Tidhar's work, it's a book split between the author's fascination with geek culture, and its more serious thematic concerns. But that's appropriate for a generation of readers who are just as split in their interests.
Helen Wecker's The Golem and the Djinni was by far my favourite book of 2013, and is one of those slow-burning books that will go off like a bomb this year. Wecker is a simply beautiful prose writer. There isn't a wasted word, poorly considered paragraph or a single chapter in this high-concept fairytale that doesn't deliver some new enchantment. Two fantastic creatures, a Golem woman liberated from her husband creator, and a quixotic Djinni trapped by magic, are cast adrift in late 19th-century New York. As a story about the immigrant experience, The Golem and the Djinni is a parable for our times, when populations are again churning between nations.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is a book about which I am profoundly divided. It is a homage to the many great space opera novels that inspired it, and comes complete with the clunking prose style that scars so many of those books. But it is also a smart reworking of the genre tropes those books made commonplace. Leckie doesn't hold back from exploring the very alien consciousness of the novel's central character, Breq – once the mind of an entire starship, now reduced to a somewhat more human body. If you enjoy the logic puzzles that this kind of speculative fiction raises, and Leckie layers one upon the next with considerable skill, then Ancillary Justice is a must-read.
Jeff VanderMeer has been one of the best known indie stars of weird fiction for over a decade. He has made stylistic experimentation part of the handbook of contemporary fantastic fiction in novels such as Veniss Underground and Shriek: An Afterword. Two years ago, VanderMeer hinted to followers on social media at a new project he had been writing at near-fever pitch that seemed to have bubbled up from the farthest reaches of his imagination. February sees the publication of the project as Annihilation, the first of the Southern Reach trilogy, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. To say there's a palpable excitement among VanderMeer's fans would be underestimating the buzz around Annihilation. And if early previews are any indication, there's a lot to be excited about.
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