The Juice Boxes - Best SFF Book of the Year (2011)

This post doesn't need an introduction.  Here are the nominees, the winner, and an honorable mention for the best SFF Book of the Year for 2011:


#5: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
Most people wrongly assume Zoo City was a 2010 release, largely (I think) because of Lauren Beukes's nomination for the John W. Campbell Award at WorldCon.  Truth is, Beukes was eligible for the Campbell under her debut novel, Moxyland.  Ok, it might also have something to do with the fact that it actually hit stores after Christmas in 2010.  Either way, I know two things.  One, Zoo City is officially a 2011 release and eligible for many 2011 awards.  Two, there's no doubt Zoo City had something to do with the Campbell nomination because it's one bad ass book.

The most impressive thing about Zoo City is it managed to make me forget I was reading a novel of speculative fiction.  Basing the story in an realistic urban environment certainly aided Beukes's cause, but the depth and rawness of her prose grabbed me with its conviction.  The city's music scene in particular was given so much dimension that Angry Robot and South African production house African Dope released a Zoo City Soundtrack to compliment the novel.  It's clear that the world of Zoo City isn't just an author's passing fancy, but rather represents a fully realized vision of what Johanassburg could be.

#4: The Crippled God by Steven Erikson

Unlike the other novels on this list that are brilliant as stand alone pieces of fiction, The Crippled God is incredibly reliant on the nine novels that precede it.  Furthermore, its greatness isn't pervasive, with long sections of boredom and seemingly inconsequential asides.  But, the good parts are so good that I didn't even consider leaving it off the list.  The metaphysical commentary and the conclusion of thousands and thousands of pages of tension building, exhibits some of the best writing I've ever been privileged to read.  I believe Malazan Book of the Fallen is the most significant work of fantasy to date, and everyone should read it... eventually.  It's not for the faint of heart, or the fantasy beginner, but to the right reader it can be truly eye opening.

I'm glad that I read Crippled God before I started this blog.  I don't believe my ability as a reviewer, or the quality of my writing, is ready to give Erikson's series the praise it deserves.  As soon as I feel confident I can do it justice, I'll be writing a review of the series in its entirety that I hope will compel all my readers to pick it up.


#3: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Lyrical, intoxicating, mesmerizing, beautiful.  That's a few adjectives to describe Erin Morgenstern's debut novel.  I could go on... and on... and on.... it's that good.  Rarely does a book completely live up to the hype (and this one had a LOT of hype), but Night Circus does just that.  At the novel's heart is a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco.  It's also a love story.

Interestingly, the plot is the weakest part of the novel, acting in many ways as window dressing for the clever narration, gorgeous prose, and awe invoking atmosphere.  It's literally a novel for everyone -- men, women, young, old, and everyone in between.  I can't recommend it enough.  I don't envy Erin Morgenstern as she writes her second novel... Night Circus is going to be a tough one to live up to.


#2: The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie

Sadly, this novel joins the aforementioned Crippled God on the list of novels I read before the blog.  Since I try to write reviews within a week of finishing a book, I never had a chance to get around to it.  That's a real shame because not only is Heroes Abercrombie's best work to date (he just keeps getting better), but it's the best novel I read this year.

The plot revolves around the battle for the Heroes, a strategic hill named for the rock formation at its top.  Taking place over a few days, Abercrombie captures the nature of war and its effect on the men who fight it.  Craw's story is particularly difficult to read as an aging veteran who can't walk away. His obligation to his commanding officers and his squad are the excuses he uses to justify continuing to do the only thing he's ever been good at.

Abercrombie's characters are always dark and fucked-up, but in Heroes he treats his readers to flawed human characters, a departure from the Logan, Monza, and Shivers characters whose inhumanity defines them.  This is a novel by a writer entering his prime -- masterful and compelling.  I'm two-year-old giddy at the thought of reading his next novel, Red Country, in 2012.


#1: The Best SFF Book of the Year (2011) is:

After the Apocalypse 

by Maureen McHugh

Did you notice I called The Heroes the best novel I read this year, and not the best book?  If so, nice reading comprehension.  Personally, I never imagined that a collection of short stories would top my list of the year's best books, but here it is.  After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh is amazing.

I'd never heard of McHugh prior to receiving an e-mail asking me if I would be interesting in reviewing an electronic ARC of the book.  It turns out she's published four novels and over twenty short stories. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula Award.  In 1996 she won a Hugo Award for her short story The Lincoln Train.  After reading this collection, none of that surprises me.  Many of the stories in this collection are "award worthy" - especially the three new ones that are published here for the first time: Honeymoon, The Effect of Centrifugal Forces, and After the Apocalypse.  The latter has been included in The Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six edited by Jonathan Strahan due out in March.

As the title implies, all of the stories in the collection deal with what comes after the apocalypse. Notice that's a lower case apocalypse. While some of the stories delve into the aftermath of the "big-one", some are more about a personal cataclysm. All of them are told from a very tight point of view in a consistently haunting prose. McHugh's characters are all real people, with real problems, who lived before she opened the window into their story and will continue to live after it's closed. It's rare that I enjoy short fiction this much. It's even more rare when I'd put a 200 page short story collection above any novel I've read this year.

#0: The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht:
And you thought I was done...

Two weeks ago Aidan Moher over at A Dribble of Ink said about The Tiger's Wife, "There’s magic in this novel and I recommend it with every ounce of my passion for literature."  I share Aidan's sentiments... I think.  The truth is, I need to read it again.  It's so good, I want to do it right now -- three shorts weeks since I finished it for the first time.

The reason it's down here, as an honorable mention, is that I'm not sure it's fantasy.  It's definitely one of the five best novels I read this year, but this is a SFF genre blog and these "awards" are genre awards.  There's some fantasy to the novel, there's no doubt about that, and certainly to a Western reader the disconnect to the Eastern European setting could nearly be second world.  But to call it genre?  No.  It's just not.  It's a literary novel about a girl coming to grips with her grandfather's death while trying to understand his life.  The interconnected threads that Obreht weaves through his life, and into the present, are timeless and resonate in a bleeding edge emotional rawness.

I think there's a section of the genre reading community that would like to claim Obreht's debut for us -- to hold it up as an example of how great genre can be.  That seems a little intellectually dishonest to me.  While elements of fantasy populate the novel, they are more an example of the mythological and cultural beliefs of a cultural foreign to mine.  What seems magic to me, is a grounded belief in the supernatural to a culture steeped in it.

I don't want anyone out there to miss The Tiger's Wife because they read a review on this blog calling it fantasy.  This is a novel for everyone who reads books.  And like Morgentern's Night Circus, Obreht has a daunting task on her hands to live up to the greatness demonstrated in her debut.

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If you missed my Thanksgiving post, I explained that I'm doing a series of awards. I'm going to call them the Juice Boxes. See if you can keep up here... so there are the Hugos. My name is Justin. Put those two words together and you get Jugos. Jugo in Spanish means Juice. The Juice Awards sounds like something O.J. Simpson would bestow on someone, so I added the box. After all, who doesn't like Juice Boxes?

I'll be doing a separate post for each category with a goal of having them all done before Christmas (we'll see). My award categories are as follows:

Best SFF Press for eBooks
SFF Editor of the Year
SFF Cover of the Year
Most Disappointing SFF Book (2011)
Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011
SFF Debut of the Year (2011)
SFF Book of the Year (2011)

The Juice Boxes - Best SFF Debut of the Year (2011)

Debut authors.  My favorite thing to read because there's nothing better than discovering something brilliant for the first time.  This has been a very solid year for debuts, due in large part to Night Shade Books New Voices Program.  While my nomination list is only five novels, I can't stress enough how difficult it was getting down to five.  I read 26 debuts this year and 20 of them were legitimately in consideration to be nominated.  It should be noted that two debuts made my best book of 2011 list and thus are not included here in an effort to spread the love.

My nominees for Best SFF Debut of the Year (2011) are:


#5: Miserere: An Autumn Tale by Teresa Frohock
This was hard.  I had around six or seven different books in this spot at some point over the last week including Winds of Khalakovo (Beaulieu), The Emperor's Knife (Williams), Among Thieves (Hulick), Seed (Ziegler), The Whitefire Crossing (Schafer), and The Quantum Thief (Rajaniemi).  All of them are well deserving of the recognition.  They're also all flawed in some way -- Miserere included.  I strongly suggest reading all of the above novels, but for me Frohock's was the best.

Delving into Christian myth, Miserere is the logical sequel to John Milton's Paradise Lost.  It tells the story of an eternal struggle between Heaven and Hell and the role humanity plays in keeping Earth safe.  At heart, it's a redemption story that's as eternal as... well.. the Bible.  I can't stress enough though that there's almost nothing 'religious' about the book and almost all of the iconography and setting could be replaced with second world fantasy simulacrums and the novel would remain unchanged.  However, by grounding things in concepts and terms the reader is already familiar with frees Frohock to focus solely on telling a beautiful story which she does -- expertly.


#4 God's War/Infidel by Kameron Hurley
Ok, I'm cheating a little by using both of Hurley's 2011 novels.  I call it the Connie Willis rule.  Regardless, Hurley's first two installment in her Bel Dame Apocrypha series are some of the gutsiest novels I read this year.  To quote myself:

There’s a fine line between dark and compelling and horrifying and off-putting. When a story comes right up to the line without crossing it a certain dichotomy comes into existence whereby I want to look away and forget about it, but can’t. No author in recent memory walks this line better than Joe Abercrombie. After finishing Infidel, Kameron Hurley’s sequel to God’s War, I am convinced that Abercrombie now has company at the top of Mount Gritty.

In addition, Hurley tackles larger issues like gender roles and the impacts of war at home.  She does it all with incredibly authenticity.  Despite all that, there's no question Hurley needs to improve as a storyteller.  She sets up dynamic set pieces, but often lacks when it comes to sewing them all together.  The fact she's fourth on this list with that criticism shows that once she figures it out the sky's the limit... seriously.


#3: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Hi, my name is Justin and I was born in 1981. To anyone who's read the novel that last sentence is enough of an explanation as to why I loved it. The only way I could have loved it more would be to change the 81 to 75.  Even at 30 years old, I'm a little young to grasp all the references and homages sprinkled throughout Ready Player One.  Regardless, the adventure aspect of the story will be equally appealing to anyone as the whole thing reads like a concoction of The Wizard, Tron, and Stand By Me.

To be fair, I have a sneaking suspicion that Ernest Cline's novel had a larger impact on me as an individual than it may have on the general reading populace (especially the high school bullies, like any of them read anyway).  Still, to video gamers and the Science Fiction community at large there are more than a few who had similar paths to adulthood. To those I say - read it.  Ernest Cline wrote this novel for you.


#2: Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
I think I undersold Prince of Thorns in my review a few months back, largely because it's not a book I finished feeling good about.  The protagonist is hard to identify with and he does a lot of horrible things.  Lawrence didn't even try to make me feel sorry for him.  Sure, I understand why he did what he did (as much I can understand a sociopath), but there's no redemptive story line, at all.

Looking back now, I neglected to appreciate the craftsmanship that went into the novel.  Lawrence is a tremendous writer and his prose hasn't been mentioned enough.  The fact that I enjoyed the novel as much as I did, in spite of disliking everybody in it, is a testament to his skill.  Based on the reviews at large, I feel confident in calling Prince of Thorns a love it or hate it novel... I loved it.  I maintain though, that its long term place in the world will be largely determined by the next two novels in the trilogy.  I'm not sure the same level of despicable can continue ad infinitum.


#1: Winner of the Juice Box Award for Best SFF Debut of the Year (2011) is...

Germline

by T.C. McCarthy

Follow me on Twitter or read my posts on some of the popular genre forums, and this selection should come as no surprise.  McCarthy's interpretation of the war novel floored me when I read it way back in June.  Some are calling it military science fiction.  Maybe, although it is not a military science fiction novel in the tradition of Honor Harrington (Weber) or even the more recent Old Man's War (Scalzi).  Instead, it's the incredibly dark coming of age story of Oscar Wendell, a broken man who can only justify his existence by going to war.

Told entirely in first person, Germline reads almost like stream of conscience at times replete with run on sentences and incomplete thoughts. What at first feels a bit like self indulgent writing quickly starts to feel more like an authentic look inside the mind of a drug addled narcissist.  Having never done any serious narcotics, I'm not sure how close McCarthy hits the mark on the paranoia and dependence; but he describes it as I've always imagined it to be - super shitty.

It wouldn't surprise me if some readers find it all a bit overwhelming.  Oscar is a dark figure without many redeeming qualities (especially in his own mind).  He starts off annoyingly naive full of unwarranted confidence and willing to put his life on the line because he has no idea what that life is worth.  He's unemotional at times when he loses friends, and cripplingly emotional at other times.

This novel isn't for everybody.  It'll remind some readers of Hunter S. Thompson and others of Michael Herr's Dispatches.  For me, it's immediately went into my personal pantheon of war novels next to Gates of Fire and All Quiet on the Western Front.  Germline is the best debut of 2011, period.

###

If you missed my Thanksgiving post, I explained that I'm doing a series of awards. I'm going to call them the Juice Boxes. See if you can keep up here... so there are the Hugos. My name is Justin. Put those two words together and you get Jugos. Jugo in Spanish means Juice. The Juice Awards sounds like something O.J. Simpson would bestow on someone, so I added the box. After all, who doesn't like Juice Boxes?

I'll be doing a separate post for each category with a goal of having them all done before Christmas (we'll see). My award categories are as follows:

Best SFF Press for eBooks
SFF Editor of the Year
SFF Cover of the Year
Most Disappointing SFF Book (2011)
Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011
SFF Debut of the Year (2011)
SFF Book of the Year (2011)

The Juice Boxes - Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not From 2011

I read something like 90 books this year (as of writing this) and somewhere around a third of those weren't published this year.  When it comes to end of the year awards I prefer to talk about what came out this year.  To expand it would mean pitting classics against modern stuff and I find that doesn't work that well.  So every year I'll be doing this -- talking about the best book(s) I read published in prior years.

Here are my nominees for Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011:


#5: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Classic, right?  Haldeman's seminal novel about a futuristic war is, like all great science fiction, as much about the time it was written in as the time it's written about.  In this case, Haldeman's future war was a commentary on Vietnam and what is was like for soldiers coming home.  The message is still relevant today, although some of the novel's idiosyncrasies , especially those related to homosexuality, don't really conform to a modern perspective.  It's also a dynamic novel on the surface, dealing with the actual scientific hiccups of faster than light travel and what warfare might look like a thousand years from now.


#4: Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover
These days there's a lot said about gritty fantasy.  Names like Abercrombie and Martin are defined as the trend setters.  I think we forget Matthew Stover because he hasn't done much (except Star Wars) outside the The Acts of Caine series.  Not to mention his sequels to Heroes Die haven't been near as good.  Published in 1999 (8 years before The Blade Itself), Stover's novel is a commentary on consumerism, imperialism, and BestWaysToKillSomebody-ism.  In other words, its a gruesome, dirty, sword and sorcery inspired, Sci-fantasy with some similarities to the Mojoworld story line from X-Men.  If you haven't read it, what are you waiting for?


#3: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Ok, this is a good novel and a great piece of social commentary.  I'm not sure how to separate the two when rating it and that's why it's here at #3 instead of #1.  As a novel, I'm not convinced it's the best thing I've ever read.  In using science fiction as a mirror into the real world?  It's about as good as it gets.

I criticize it as a novel for two reasons.  One, I didn't really click with any of the characters which is a personal problem and may not be an issue with Bacigalupi's work.  Two, there's something about the way the novel reads that's a little disjointed.  Not the prose so much as the way it all comes together... I never could put my finger on what it was.  Sometimes a style just doesn't totally work for me, and I guess that was the case here.  Still, it's a very good novel and a must read from a cultural perspective.

#2: The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Grossman's protagonist, Quentin, is morbidly unhappy with his life and looking for an escape.  Go to any fantasy message board right now and ask, "Why do you read fantasy?"  The common answer is - escapism.  That's what fantasy is all about (or at least, was about).  Quentin wants to turn the page and go away.  He keeps chasing a carrot for what will make him happy.  When magic isn't enough, he tries love and then ultimately he pins all his hopes on Fillory - a magical land imagined in his youth.  Want to guess how that works out?  I guess I'm saying Quentin is a metaphor for fantasy readers and that's just scratching the surface of all the things Grossman is doing in The Magicians.  Go check out my full review because a paragraph isn't enough to describe the awesome.

#1: Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011 is...

The Folding Knife

by K.J. Parker

The Folding Knife is a second world setting that approximates Athens or Rome at some point in ancient times.  In this case, Athens is Vesani and I have no idea where it is in relation to the so-called Eastern Empire that exists as the elephant in the room. I don't care and seemingly neither does K.J. Parker who cuts away all the extraneous items that make up a standard epic fantasy.

In the prologue Parker hits the reader with the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN as her protagonist Basso leaves Vesani in poverty on the top of a wagon. What it holds back is the why. Parker relishes filling in that blank with a brilliant tragedy in the tradition of Shakespeare and Euripides.

Finance is the device that Parker uses to move the plot from Basso's role as head of the Charity and Social Justice Bank.  I couldn't help observing a parallel between the Vesani (read: Basso) economy and America's. Leveraged, always betting on future profits, never cutting back.  On a more personal side, namely the human story of Basso beginning with the murder of his wife and brother-in-law, Parker sets up scenes of loss and heartbreak that resonate time after time.

For all that Folding Knife is an epic fantasy - just not traditionally so. It follows a man through thirty years of his life describing his rise and fall from power through war and peace in 400 some odd pages.  Why is there any list of the best fantasy novels out there without The Folding Knife right near the top? I can't explain it.  It's one of the five best books I read this year and cemented K.J. Parker as one of my buy on sight authors.

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If you missed my Thanksgiving post, I explained that I'm doing a series of awards. I'm going to call them the Juice Boxes. See if you can keep up here... so there are the Hugos. My name is Justin. Put those two words together and you get Jugos. Jugo in Spanish means Juice. The Juice Awards sounds like something O.J. Simpson would bestow on someone, so I added the box. After all, who doesn't like Juice Boxes?

I'll be doing a separate post for each category with a goal of having them all done before Christmas (we'll see). My award categories are as follows:

Best SFF Press for eBooks
SFF Editor of the Year
SFF Cover of the Year
Most Disappointing SFF Book (2011)
Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011
SFF Debut of the Year (2011)
SFF Book of the Year (2011)

The Juice Boxes - Most Disappointing Book of the Year (2011)

Well, this is the one and only Juice Box Award you don't want to win.  Although I suppose it speaks to an author's or publisher's cache that I'm putting them on the list, meaning the selection bias is going to be toward novels that have high expectations.  There either has to be a copious amount of buzz around a novel, and/or the author has produced high caliber work in the past.  My nominations include five novels -- three of which are decidedly the latter given that they were written by the three best selling authors in fantasy today.  The other two were pushed heavily by their respective publishers, but failed to deliver on the promise in any meaningful way.  Without further ado, here are my five most disappointing novels of 2011, with the winner (loser?) at the bottom.

#5: Den of Thieves by David Chandler
There's two primary reasons why this novel made the list.  First, it's not very good.  The characters are shallow, the plot is boring, and the writing, if effective, doesn't carry it.  Second, it's one of the primary 2011 fantasy titles from Harper Voyager.  There have been literally dozens of novels about the thief/assassin archetype since Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora.  I've read nearly all of them and this is among the poorest of the bunch.

And God, that's a bad cover.  Just a poorly packaged novel from front to back.  I expect a lot more from a big-6 house whether they're committed to genre or not.


#4: Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
Unlike the previous one on this list, Alloy of Law isn't a bad novel.  I had a bit of fun reading it.  Unfortunately, what makes Sanderson such a compelling, and best selling, author, is his inventiveness.  Magic systems, world building, and twisty plots are his strengths, compensating for his characters and prose usually come off archetypal and efficient.

Alloy of Law doesn't do any of what he's good at.  The magic system is no longer new, the world wasn't nearly as interesting without Ruin, and the plot is tremendously straightforward.  What's left is a fun little steampunk adventure romp.  The end result  is me bummed out and wanting more.  Bad? No. Disappointing? Absolutely.


#3: Robopocalyse by Daniel H. Wilson
Hype machine!  This was a big push novel from the first half of 2011 by Doubleday.  Again, not a bad novel, but after about 30 pages in I was pretty sure I'd read it before.  And I pretty much had, three years ago, when I read World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.  Wilson's debut novel is a near copy of Brooks's in terms of structure and theme.  Replace robot with zombie and we'd be looking at some odd form of fan fiction.

Of the two novels I read this year that had announced film deals prior to publication, I could not be more struck by the difference between them -- Night Circus, one of my best novels of 2011 (see list later this week) and Robopocalypse, one of my most disappointing.  It goes to show that Hollywood isn't exactly looking for the same things we are as readers.


#2: Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
Rothfuss's debut, The Name of the Wind was a tremendous novel that cemented him as one of the most prominent authors in the genre.  I suspect that given the massive success of the first installment there was added pressure to get this one right.  No doubt that contributed to the extended timetable of its release schedule.  I fear it also contributed to an apparent paralysis in the novel's progression.

Kvothe, the novel's protagonist, wanders all over the world doing this and that, getting no closer to his ultimate goal.  He has sex, kills some baddies, and ends up back at school still pitted against his rival student Ambrose and confused about his relationship to a host of women.  Rothfuss continues to be an exceptional story teller and prose stylist, but without a direction, I just don't know how this all going to come together.  I barely made it through Wise Man's Fear and I'm concerned I won't want to start the third novel at all.


#1: The Most Disappoint Novel of 2011...

A Dance With Dragons

George R.R. Martin

It is no coincidence that the last two novels on this list both spent some time at the top of the NY Times Bestseller List.  That only goes to show how much people wanted to read them.  The excitement around A Dance With Dragons was especially high on the heels of the HBO TV series.  My personal excitement was so high that I reread the first four installments in the weeks leading up to its release.  I was even refreshing my Kindle at 12:01 AM on release day hoping to squeeze in the prologue before bed (I did).  Obviously, this anticipation was only magnified by the continual delays in Martin's release schedule for the past half dozen years.

That delay, to hear Martin tell it, was all about the  "Mereenese Knot." This knot was tied when Dany decided to stay in Mereen and rule instead of continuing her march to the Seven Kingdoms. As the rest of Westeros became aware of Dany and her dragons, many different factions began to coalesce around her. How, why, and most importantly when all these factions arrive in Mereen is the knot Martin struggled to untie. Instead of choosing to cut the knot like Gordian and thus impeaching Dany's character, he actually untied it. Well, tried to untie it.

This untying is why, as a novel, Dance is a failure. The book's pace is abysmal with over half the chapters existing as travel logs. Tyrion on the ocean, Tyrion on a river barge, Tyrion on a horse! Several POVs are far longer than necessary and some exist for seemingly no reason. The timeline is convoluted with the first half of novel coinciding chronologically with the events in Feast. This leads to scenes being rewritten, word for word in some cases, in an alternate POV. All that aside, the most unfortunate part of the novel is that 1100 pages later Martin still has yet to bring all the disparate pieces together that compose his "Mereenese Knot." For all the talk about the second half of Dance advancing the story beyond Feast, the plot only advances a few days with none of the promised conflicts among the King's Landing crew coming to fruition.

Does my disappointment reek of reader entitlement? Maybe, except the fact remains this just isn't a very fun book to read.  A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons are the functional equivalent of the The Wheel of Time post Crown of Swords and pre-Sanderson takeover. Martin has thrown so many balls into the air that to keep any from dropping he's got to painstakingly orchestrate all his chess pieces before he can go on the attack.  If I were a new reader, I'd want to make sure the pieces start moving before I invest in 5,000 pages of reading.

While I call Dance a failure as a novel, as a fifth installment I remain hopeful that it'll be viewed as necessary component to a greater story.  A Song of Ice and Fire remains my favorite series of novels, and I'm very much looking forward to The Winds of Winter.

                              

Ok, fair readers.  Tell me what I screwed up.  Cast me down from my high horse of criticism!

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If you missed my Thanksgiving post, I explained that I'm doing a series of awards. I'm going to call them the Juice Boxes. See if you can keep up here... so there are the Hugos. My name is Justin. Put those two words together and you get Jugos. Jugo in Spanish means Juice. The Juice Awards sounds like something O.J. Simpson would bestow on someone, so I added the box. After all, who doesn't like Juice Boxes?

I'll be doing a separate post for each category with a goal of having them all done before Christmas (we'll see). My award categories are as follows:

Best SFF Press for eBooks

SFF Editor of the Year

SFF Cover of the Year

Most Disappointing SFF Book (2011)

Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011

SFF Debut of the Year (2011)

SFF Book of the Year (2011)

The Juice Boxes - SFF Cover of the Year (2011)

The Winner: The Magician King

Illustration by Kai and Sunny

 

Some people (cough A Dribble of Ink cough) do frequent posts about cover art. It's not really my bag, largely because I never get the news first. However, I too love covers. My short list for Cover of the Year is six books long (see below). There's not really a connective thread between them except that none are photo realism -- a trend I loathe. Additionally, you'll see no hooded men because hooded men are lame and tired. For authors with hooded men on your cover, I apologize. If it's any consolation, hooded men sell books.  There's no accounting for taste.

So what is my criteria? I'm so glad I asked. I have four basic tenets in evaluating cover art. First is relevancy. A cover must relate to the book. Second it has to evoke something -- wonder, mystery, fear, awe, movement, whatever. Third, I like things that are different. I'm sick of the same old covers going for the same old audience. Give me art, not RPG manual doodles. Fourth, turn me on. Physically. This is only partly a joke.

No cover met those four criteria (especially the fourth) better than Kai and Sunny's work on Lev Grossman's UK edition of The Magician King.  Beautiful use of color and imagery, with just enough relevancy to the novel without being literal.  It isn't just the best cover of 2011.  It's one of the best covers I've ever seen.

#

Short List:

The Unremembered by Peter Orullian

Illustration by Kekai Kotaki

The Magician King by Lev Grossman 

Illustration by Kai and Sunny

Towers of Midnight (eBook) by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

Illustration by Raymond Swanland

Seed by Rob Ziegler 

Illustration by Cody Tilson

Le Prisme Noir (The Black Prism) by Brent Weeks

Illustration by Miguel Coimbra

The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones

Illustration by Charles Keegan

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Comments and Honorable Mentions:

I was surprised that no title from Pyr made my list.  They consistently turn out quality covers.  If I'd gone to ten books, I think a few of their titles would have made it -- especially some of the covers done by Stephan Martiniere and Jon Sullivan.  Blackdog by K.V. Johansen gets an honorable mention as well, although I felt Raymond Swanland's work on Tor's Towers of Midnight was better.  

As it turns out, MacMillian imprints (Tor, St. Martin's) had a pretty great year with three of the titles on my list.  I should make mention of two other Tor books that were my favorite science fiction covers this year: John C. Wright's Count to a Trillion (cover by John Harris) and Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief (cover by Kekai Kotaki).

It should also be noted that artists aren't the only one's who make covers.  For all the type setters, layout specialists, and art directions, cheers -- you're equally important to making these kick ass covers.  I apologize for not adding all of your names beside your work, but my GoogleFu and PublicityPester +14 skill aren't omniscient.

Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright

Illustration by John Harris

 The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

Illustration by Kekai Kotaki

Blackdog by K.V. Johansen

Illustration by Raymond Swanland

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Illustration by John Picacio

The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod

Illustration by Stephan Martiniere

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man by Mark Hodder

Illustration by Jon Sullivan

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Am I wrong? What did I miss?  Set me straight Internets!

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If you missed my Thanksgiving post, I explained that I'm doing a series of awards. I'm going to call them the Juice Boxes. See if you can keep up here... so there are the Hugos. My name is Justin. Put those two words together and you get Jugos. Jugo in Spanish means Juice. The Juice Awards sounds like something O.J. Simpson would bestow on someone, so I added the box. After all, who doesn't like Juice Boxes?

I'll be doing a separate post for each category with a goal of having them all done before Christmas (we'll see). My award categories are as follows:

Best SFF Press for eBooks

SFF Editor of the Year

SFF Cover of the Year

Most Disappointing SFF Book (2011)

Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011

SFF Debut of the Year (2011)

SFF Book of the Year (2011)

The Juice Boxes - Best SFF Editor (2011)

Winner: Jeremy Lassen

Editor-in-Chief

Last week, I gave the Best SFF Press for Ebooks (2011) Juice Box Award to Pyr.  At the time, I said something like -- I can't award the best imprint because it's too big.  How could I possibly pick and what criteria would I use?  This is also true when it comes to picking the best editor.  In a typical year, I doubt I would be doing this award.  I only read a tiny scope of what the genre has to offer each year, and it should be impossible, and unfair, to judge based on only one or two pieces of work.

This year though, I thought someone stood out.  Not necessarily because of his physical editing, although I'm sure it's quite good, but for his editorial decisions that brought about a program Night Shade Books calls, "New Voices".  That person is Night Shade Books Editor-in-Chief, Jeremy Lassen (and his editorial team).  In his own words:

"Brad Beaulieu's The Winds of Khalakovo IS related to Mazarkis Williams' The Emperor's Knife, which is related to Courtney Schafer's White Fire Crossing, which is related to Teresa Frohock's Miserere... These are all examples of what we think Fantasy Fiction can and should aspire to in the 21st century.  

Likewise, Paolo's The Windup Girl is related to Will Macintosh's Soft Apocolpyse, which is related Revolution World by Katy Stauber, which is related to Rob Ziegler's Seed. These are Night Shade's vision of what Science fiction can be in the 21st century -- painful, and painfully relevant.  

New Voices exists to draw a circle around, and bring attention to this exciting new generation of writers."

I read eight "New Voices" novels this year and loved (or really liked) every one of them.  Later this month, when my best books lists come out, several Night Shade titles will make that list.  While other editors put out equally dynamic debuts (Anne Sowards coming to mind), no one committed more than Lassen to bringing new blood into the field.  These aren't just new writers.  They're writers bringing new traditions to fantasy and science fiction.  Night Shade takes a risk every time they publish something no one has seen.  I'm overjoyed they continue to do it.

It should be noted that in addition to the "New Voices", Lassen continues to publish titles like JM McDermott's Never Knew Another and reams of outstanding anthologies like Marty Halpern's Alien Contact and collections by Fritz Lieber and Clark Ashton Smith.  These books aren't best sellers, and never will be, but it demonstrates a commitment to publishing the best speculative fiction possible.  Throw out sales and hype and on-line presence, looking at just the value brought to market by Lassen's team this year, I can't think of another editor more worthy of this recognition.

Below are the list Night Shade's 2011 New Voices:

The Winds of Khalakovo, Bradley P. Beaulieu (Review)
Necropolis, Michael Dempsey (Review)
Miserere: An Autumn Tale, Teresa Frohock (Review)
God's War/Infidel, Kameron Hurley (Review)
Southern Gods, John Horner Jacobs
Of Blood and Honey, Stina Leicht
Soft Apocalypse, Will McIntosh
The Panama Laugh, Thomas Roche
The Whitefire Crossing, Courtney Schafer (Review)
Revolution World, Katy Stauber
The Emperor's Knife, Mazarkis Williams (Review)
No Hero, Jonathan Wood
Seed, Rob Ziegler (Review)

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If you missed my Thanksgiving post, I explained that I'm doing a series of awards. I'm going to call them the Juice Boxes. See if you can keep up here... so there are the Hugos. My name is Justin. Put those two words together and you get Jugos. Jugo in Spanish means Juice. The Juice Awards sounds like something O.J. Simpson would bestow on someone, so I added the box. After all, who doesn't like Juice Boxes?

I'll be doing a separate post for each category with a goal of having them all done before Christmas (we'll see). My award categories are as follows:

Best SFF Press for eBooks

SFF Editor of the Year

SFF Cover of the Year

Most Disappointing SFF Book (2011)

Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011

SFF Debut of the Year (2011)

SFF Book of the Year (2011)

The Juice Boxes - Best SFF Press for eBooks (2011)

Winner: Pyr

The first question would be, 'Why not an award for the best SFF Press, period?' The short answer is because it would be impossible and capricious. How do I compare something like Night Shade who does 25 books a year to Orbit who does 75? Or how do I look at Spectra who only publish SFF in relation to Doubleday who does SFF and scads of other stuff? I can't, so I won't. What I can judge, is who's making the effort to put out the best eBooks. And that's Pyr.

It shouldn't be new to anyone who reads this blog that I'm a dedicated eReader. The vast majority of books I purchase are eBooks and the vast majority of ARCs I read are electronic. Gone are the days of error ridden eBooks from major publishers (largely), but there's still a huge gap between the quality of hard copies and their eBook counterparts. Lou Anders, and Pyr, are changing that one eBook at a time.

Sure, their eBooks are almost never available on release day. And yes, they're not as affordable as those from Angry Robot or Night Shade (who both do a great job with their eBooks also). But for me Pyr has become the go to source for beautiful, professional eBooks. I'm sure you're asking yourself, what the hell is a beautiful eBook and what's important about it?

Writing this post, I pulled up a random Pyr title from my electronic library, in this case, The Greyfriar by Clay and Susan Griffith. The first thing I noticed was the cover. Believe it or not, a lot of eBooks don't come with covers. They'll start with the copyright page, or a text title page, or something else equally lame. The second thing I notice is the type settings - plural. There's a typesetting for the chapter heads, for the drop letters, and for the primary text. They even take the time to drop in custom scene dividers - no triple asterisk or hash tag here. And check this out - they've been proofread. In fact, I'm pretty sure Pyr puts the same editorial integrity into each eBook than they put into their hard copies. It shows.

Lou Anders w/Hugo.

Know what else? They aren't overpriced. While not 'cheap', I've yet to see a Pyr title in the $12.99-15.99 dollar range now so popular among the big-6 new hardcover release. I get that an eBook is almost as expensive to produce as a bound copy, less print and distribution costs. Still, there's a mental hurdle that many consumers have right now in paying more than $10 for an electronic copy. Until that changes, and I'm not sure it ever will, price matters and Pyr seems to grasp that, coming in at just under $10 even for hardcover releases.

Admittedly, this isn't an award I'm going to repeat in future years, but I felt compelled to recognize Pyr for being an leader in the industry. So thanks to Lou Anders (a proclaimed eReader himself) and his editorial team for making it a priority. Special shout out to Rene Sears, who I'm pretty sure does a lot of the heavy lifting.

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If you missed my Thanksgiving post, I explained that I'm doing a series of awards. I'm going to call them the Juice Boxes. See if you can keep up here... so there are the Hugos. My name is Justin. Put those two words together and you get Jugos. Jugo in Spanish means Juice. The Juice Awards sounds like something O.J. Simpson would bestow on someone, so I added the box. After all, who doesn't like Juice Boxes?

I'll be doing a separate post for each category with a goal of having them all done before Christmas (we'll see). My award categories are as follows:

Best SFF Press for eBooks

SFF Editor of the Year

SFF Cover of the Year

Most Disappointing SFF Book (2011)

Best SFF Book I Read This Year Not Published in 2011

SFF Debut of the Year (2011)

SFF Book of the Year (2011)