Ten Awesome Books on my Spring Reading List

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly book meme hosted by The Broke & The Bookish.

Gotta say I'm really excited about this week's topic. Why? Because a fortnight ago, I didn't really have a Spring TBR list. And then I decided that I would start reading/ reviewing/ blogging more, and spent the week discovering awesome new sites full of awesome new (and old!) books that somehow I had never heard of, and now my bulging TBR list is making my wife talk about hiding our credit card. Muhahahah.

ANYWAYS. Here's a list of books I intend to read in the next month or so.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
I first picked up this book when I was on holiday in New Zealand and killing time in a bookstore. A few chapters in, I was entranced by the rich prose and the promise of misadventures in an decadent city across the sea. It's been nominated for a Nebula too... I can't wait to read the entire thing.

Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay
I am a raging fangirl when it comes to Guy Gavriel Kay. His work is just that magnificent. This is the second book in his Sarantine Mosaic duology; one I would have read months ago, were I not trying to pace myself on his backlist.

Who fears death by Nnedi Okorafor
I came across a review of this book last week and was surprised it slipped under my radar. Post-apocalyptic fantasy set in Africa, good enough to have won the World Fantasy Award in 2011 – I’m looking forward to it.

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
I suspect this is on a lot of people’s to read lists! I love most of Sanderson's work (I always want to translate his magic systems into RPGs) and thought The Way of Kings was great. I'm sure this one will be too.

Pathlight: New Chinese Writing (Spring 2013)
Pathlight is a quarterly magazine featuring Chinese stories & poetry. The Spring 2013 edition focused on "The Future" aka Chinese sci-fi. I've been meaning to pick up a copy for ages. Listening to Ling Chen talk at the BLF Global Science Fiction panel only cemented this urge, as apparently this is the only place where her work has been translated in English.

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch
I’ve been following this series for a while. I first started reading them because of the British covers (which are awesome. Come on. Look at those maps.) but I’ve continued with them because they’re a lot of fun. It’s police bureaucracy meets magic, set in a London that actually feels diverse. 

The Silvered by Tanya Huff
Tanya Huff is a pretty prolific novelist, although I don't recall reading any of her other books. This one looks interesting though: high fantasy with werewolves and a magic school drop-out.

Somewhere In France: A Novel of the Great War  by Jennifer Robson
This book has been getting lots of good reviews, and I've been aiming to read more straight historical fiction. Hopefully this one will live up to the hype. 

Hild by Nicola Griffith
Another historical novel I can't wait to get my hands on. Mostly because I've seen a lot of comments on the quality & thoughtfulness of the writing, but also because it's been nominated for a Nebula and the cover is pretty.


China's Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History by Tom Miller.

Yes, there is non-fiction on this list. Is that cheating? (Guess I'm a cheat.) This book is here because I went to a fascinating talk on urban China at the Beijing Literary Festival last week: a 90 minute discussion on city verses population growth, hukou reform, eco-design, water & air pollution, and how China's changing government structures have impacted all of the above. Tom Miller was one of the speakers. I'm sure it'll be interesting to a geo-nerd like myself.



Have you read any books on this list? What are you most looking forward to?

Global Science Fiction at the Beijing Literary Festival

I’ve been living in Beijing for almost 3 years now, but have shamefully missed the past two Bookworm Literary Festivals. (In my defence, I was broke and they had no real geek offerings anyway.) So I was really excited when they started advertising a panel on Global Science Fiction, saying: 

Science fiction is a genre of cult appeal. And yet, from its emergence in the 19th century, it has remained largely a Western genre. American, Soviet and western European authors dominate the SF cannon. But this is changing fast and Sci-Fi is now on the cusp of becoming something it has always wanted to be, a unifying, global genre. Join us as Mexican SF author and graphic artist BEF, Swedish-Indian novelist Zac O'Yeah, and Chinese SF champion Ling Chen talk about this reforming of an established genre.

So, what did I think?

Basically, I enjoyed it – with reservations. It’s never a good sign when the first author starts introducing themselves by saying that they’re not really a science-fiction author, you know, because most of their work is actually crime, and their only speculative novel was a serious and intellectual oeuvre, and they don’t write about spaceships and space lasers.

Note to Zac O’Yeah: Space Opera is a marvellous genre. It can also be ‘serious and intellectual’. Just look at Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.


The other two authors on the panel were Bernardo Fernández/BEF (who also said he wasn’t ‘really’ a science fiction writer, but seemed to have respect for the genre as a whole) and Ling Chen, who redeemed the entire event for me. Unfortunately it seems like most of her work hasn’t been translated into English, although one of her short stories was featured in Pathlight’s 2013 Spring edition. She kept going off on tangents, talking about the status of science-fiction in China 20 years ago (largely viewed as a damaging pseudo-science, stories were only published in unregistered ‘black’ magazines) and how all of that is changing now.


There was very little discussion of science fiction as a ‘global genre,’ which I think was largely the moderators fault. She was clearly unfamiliar with the genre as a whole, and asked boring questions like “what first got you interested in the field?” At one stage, she asked Fernández to pigeon-hole his work, despite him just mentioning that he wrote cyberpunk. Later, she asked Ling Chen if any of her predictions about the future had come true. Ling answered that the value of science fiction wasn’t in predicting the future, but in creating stories that explore humanity & technology.

The moderator also made sweeping generalizations about sci-fi geeks and how we love wearing costumes (note: this is called cosplay. Or larping. The internet is your friend). At least she didn’t assume we’re all male...


The audience questions were much more interesting. One man used the film Gravity to lead into a very interesting question on China’s place in sci-fi narratives and space in general, inspiring a nice discussion about Chang’e and the TianGong space station, and other Chinese authors tackling similar subjects. Another queried the recent popularity of sci-fi action films – Star Trek, Marvel, etc. – and asked whether the panel thought this was positive for the genre as a whole. The debate that followed was interesting, although I found myself disagreeing a fair bit. Seriously, people. Space opera does not preclude thoughtful sci-fi, and spaceships are awesome.