What new SF stories published in 2009 took you to new places? Transformed you? Exceeded your ability to contain them?
I'll probably be writing a piece about 2009 stories that caught my eye some time next month, and will soon be going back to stuff I put aside or missed entirely. I have a list of the stories I've read so far, with comments on some, and several ideas as to candidates. The final selection will probably be no more than six stories.
I've got a few resources in mind as prepping tools:
- The short fiction reviews published regularly in Locus for various critical responses, as well as several blogs.
- There's been interesting short fiction discussion at Torque Control's Short Story Club.
- There's a plethora of recommendations over at the Asimov's forums in the thread "The best new stories of 2009."
- There's a small stack of original fiction anthologies from 2009 around here somewhere; and
- Your thoughts.
2 comments:
It's a bit sad, but I basically can't read SF anymore. I was in a bookstore yesterday and they had an anthology called The New Space Opera, and they had a 2 for 1 detail with The New Space Opera 2 or something. Did I even pick the book up? Nope.
I've got a list of 25 writers of interest at the moment, and only a handful of them are associated with SF. See if you've read any of these writers:
Pat Barker (Regeneration trilogy)
Andrea Barrett
William Burroughs Jr (died young)
Larry Brown
Raymond Chandler
Harry Crews
John Crowley (still to read Aegypt cycle)
J M Coetzee
Thomas Disch (his later work - Wall of America was excellent)
Alasdair Gray (Lanark)
Brion Gysin
Ha Jin
Ma Jian
Ken Kalfus
Maureen McHugh (a SF writer I like very much - want to read Nekropolis and her short stories)
Andrew McGahan
David Mitchell
Cormac McCarthy (what to read next after The Road?)
Flannery O'Connor
Christoper Priest (got all but The Seperation)
Carter Scholz
Jeff Vandermeer (Finch is out)
Alan Warner
Xinran
Thank you for sharing that list!
I have read some of these authors. [William Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Disch, Maureeen McHugh, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor].
Others are on my list of authors to read. [John Crowley, Coetzee, Priest, Scholz, Vandermeer].
Still others I hadn't heard of and I will do a little research on them :-)
Within SF, of course, there are writers to tend more toward the "literary" end of the spectrum; some of them are on your list. There are many others that aren't...
I've read some of the stories in The New Space Opera and plan on doing the same with volume 2. Again, these anthologies contain very diverse authors, some of which I think you'd like (e.g. John Kessel, Ian McDonald, Robert Reed, Kage Baker, Ken Macleod, Mary Rosenblum, Jay Lake and more.)
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