![]() I think I have been waiting my whole life for this book - for someone to write adolescence like the body horror it is, with all of the cultural specificity of being a Chinese American girl, simply bursting at the seams with sapphic longing. Image: William Morrow & Company Chlorine by Jade Song But even if you aren’t an Inception fan, it’ll be easy to become immersed in The Ferryman’s distinct dystopian world. Throughout reading, I couldn’t help but fan-cast who would star in a Christopher Nolan adaptation of it. It’s a sharply complex mystery with a cinematic quality to it. This tightly-wound, atmospheric thriller weaves together layers of knotted mystery with Proctor’s haunting POV as he grapples with his relationship to grief, happiness, family, and identity. Though this premise may feel familiar, The Ferryman is anything but. He begins questioning prescribed truths and confronting the darker side of Prospera, which runs off the work of a disenfranchised support staff whose discontent is building towards a revolution that pulls Proctor into its orbit. But when Proctor is assigned to retire his own father, the troubling encounter sends him careening off the path of conformity. Proctor Bennett is a ferryman, whose duty is to guide unhappy citizens from the utopian Propersa to the Nursery, where they retire their old selves before returning in younger bodies with no memories of their former lives. Image: Ballantine Books The Ferryman by Justin Cronin But what I’ll remember most is how he crafted the perfect emotional resolution to this intellectually intricate tale that left me in tears and has stayed with me since. This is not to say that Tchaikovsky does not deliver an incredibly satisfying conclusion to the mysteries of unspace (he does!). But the characters Adrian Tchaikovsky has populated this world with are so grounded, so emotionally rich, and so vibrant that the details of the brain-bending threats lurking within unspace become secondary to their impact on the lives of and relationships between the Vulture God’s crew. Like looking directly into the sun, confronting the blurred space between the real and unreal (as well as the eldritch terrors that lurk within) poses a grave threat to those doing so head-on – at least to anyone other than weary intermediary Idris Tellemier, whose risk is merely reduced rather than eliminated. This acceptance set me up well for Lords of Uncreation, which revolves around concepts that even the characters find impossible to understand, and whose minds may literally break if they try to. Reading the Final Architecture series, I had to accept long ago that I would never fully grasp the nuances of some of its central concepts, even if I understood them on an instinctual level. Image: Orbit Lords of Uncreation (The Final Architecture #3) by Adrian Tchaikovsky We’ll keep this updated throughout the year, in reverse chronological order, so the newest releases will always be listed first. Whichever direction you head in, it will be sure to grip you - and make you think. It has also been a standout year, so far, for supernatural horrors and thrillers. There’s a preponderance of post-post apocalyptic science fiction unpacking lofty ideas like sentience and humanity, often set on different planets or among the stars. Though we seem to have crested the wave of pandemic novels, that sense of dread and discoloration has lingered, written into novels of new forms. Many of our favorites once again blur the line between sci-fi and fantasy - but this year was a particular standout for books blurring the line between SFF and other genres, from historical fiction Westerns to fable retellings to intergenerational sagas in translation. Though we’re only halfway through the year, it’s been packed with excellent science fiction and fantasy books.
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