The 10 Best SFF Series? 1) SF
Sep. 29th, 2018 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidgillonSo Yoon pointed out The 10 Best Completed Sf and Fantasy Series According to Me by Drew McCaffrey at Tor.com and I decided the whole 'completed' thing is problematical, given widespread retconning and that some series tell a closed narrative arc, while others have an open setting allowing the author to pursue different stories with a linked set of characters, or a linked setting. And I've been thinking about this and struggling to limit myself to 10, so I'm doing two lists, 1 SF series, 1 Fantasy series, whether complete or not, and starting with the SF.
Iain M Banks: The CultureThis would be essential reading if for no other reason than to balance all the libertarian SF out there, but it's Banks, and he's one of the best writers we've had in recent years. The Culture is a post-scarcity communist society, where you can live a life of as much hedonistic luxury as you want. But for those who want to do something with their lives, and aren't satisfied with extreme sports, there's Contact, the Culture's busybody, do-gooding version of a diplomatic service, and for those who really want to push it, there's Special Circumstances, the Culture's version of a foreign intelligence service. Imagine Medecins Sans Frontieres crossed with the CIA.... And half the time Banks writes from the perspective of the other guys, because the entirety of Contact, and especially Special Circumstances, exists in a morally grey zone where the rightness of their cause varies with who you happen to be. When you employ a monster to do good, by whatever means necessary, do you still get to claim to be on the side of the angels?
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Vorkosigan Saga
This is why I decided to do two lists, because I couldn't decide which Bujold to limit myself to. Cordelia Naismith comes from the technologically advanced and aggressively egalitarian Beta Colony, but circumstances give her a life on the backward, aggressively expansionist, and thoroughly imperial Barrayar, which isn't quite ready for her. Then her son, Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, is born disabled, on a planet with a pathological fear of deformity, and grows up not knowing how to stop. If there's a wall, Miles will throw himself at it full throttle, which for someone with brittle bones isn't ideal. He spends a bunch of books as an intergalactic secret agent, but then screws that up good and proper, but comes out of it (thanks to imperial familial nepotism and an eye for the man for the job) with a role that suits him even better as his mother's son - fixing whatever needs fixing in Barrayaran society. There are some issues, I'm not entirely a fan of the way Bujold has been treating Miles' disabilities of late, but the individual stories are generally really good.
C J Cherryh: Foreigner series
So many Cherryh series to choose from! Most of which slot somehow into her Union-Alliance timeline. The Chronicles of Morgaine made a strong bid for my vote, but I like the depth of Foreigner. The series is one of the more distantly connected to the timeline because even if apparently largely contemporaneous with the main works, the human starship that begins the story is so lost it can't even work out where the Alliance is (and if you know astronomy, that's really, really lost). The ship, Phoenix, was carrying an entire colony, but the colonists come to be considered expendable labour by the elitist crew, so jump ship at the first opportunity, for the planet of the apparently friendly Atevi. But 'friend' turns out to be a word that doesn't translate into Atevi, and a couple of hundred years later, the humans are quarantined on the island of Mospheira, their one interface with the Atevi being the Paidhi, the human translator resident in the court of the Atevi leader. But there are anti-human radicals among the Atevi, and anti-Atevi radicals among the humans, and Bren the Paidhi is going to need every 'friend' he can get, in a culture that thinks 'friend' is something to do with lettuce. And then the ship comes back, with problems of its own.
Peter F Hamilton: Greg Mandel series
I could have gone for Hamilton's blockbuster Night's Dawn or Confederation series, but overall I think my preference is for his first, far more compact series, featuring the psychic former soldier and resistance assassin turned private eye Greg Mandel, whose friendship with Musk/Bezos/Gates-level entrepreneur Julia Evans keeps getting him into trouble. I like these because there's something very British in the world-building, even in the post-Global Warming, post one-party dictatorship Britain that Greg inhabits. You could think of them as cyberpunk, but it's a very rural, very British Cyberpunk. (And blast, my signed copy of Mindstar Rising is literally falling apart).
Ann Leckie: Ancillary Justice
An intergalactic series about a warship on a trail of revenge, where most of the conflict happens over a nice cup of tea. Breq is a compelling character who once upon a time was a starship, but equally compelling is the setting of Imperial Radch, where people aren't just not gendered, they have a problem actually understanding the concept of gender. Part of the reason the trilogy is so strong is that it never goes where it seems to be headed. Breq is on a suicide mission, but they survive; Breq wants to destroy Anaander Mianaai, the immortal ruler of Imperial Radch, a hopelessly futile gesture given they exist as multiple individuals across multiple systems, but ends up working for them. All that ambition, funnelled down to a single planet that's so much of a backwater it doesn't even get its own shard of Anaander Mianaai and has to settle for Breq instead. And yet for all this apparent failure and falling short, Breq ultimately attains their impossible goal.
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Mars Trilogy
Mankind goes to Mars, and the crew of the first mission become pivotal, even mythological, figures in the development of the colony as governments and resistance movement rise and fall and they each follow their own political pathways that lead them down the road to either exploitation or conservation, And within that tension of development lies the metaphor of the colour wheel in which red, blue and green Mars are poles apart, but intimately connected.John Scalzi: The Chris Shane novels
This one is personal indulgence, given the second novel only appeared a few months ago, because it's one of the few SF series to take an in-depth look at disability. The world has been decimated by Hadens, a two-stage plague that killed many, and left 1% of the population with Locked In syndrome. Given that included the First Lady, and the President of the US went a bit berserk on the matter, the US launched a Manhattan Project to treat Hadens, which they ended-up end-running the symptoms of by infiltrating the brain with a neural net that allows victims to access the world via a remote-operated drone body called a threep - because they tend to look like C3PO. So society has a new minority, disabled, yet able to access the world in almost a non-disabled fashion. And there's anti-Haden prejudice, and crime either by or against Hadens and that all needs policing and enter our protagonist. Child of a basketball legend, Chris Shane, who is never, ever gendered, was the poster child of Hadens, but now they're all grown up, a shiny new FBI agent, and assigned to the Hadens beat alongside cynical and self-destructive veteran agent Vann. Lock In is a very Hadens specific crime, someone has used an integrator - someone who got Hadens without locked-in syndrome and can use the neural net to host a Haden in much the same way as a threep - to apparently commit murder. But was it murder, or was it much, much worse? The new Head On is very different, with Shane and Vann investigating the Hadens-specific sport of Hilketa, where the object is to rip your opponent's head off, but when they're a threp they're supposed to just pick it up, stick it back on again and come at you for the next round, not actually drop dead in their bed at home. And there's the novella Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome, which tells the story of the plague, and how the threeps were born in a perfectly toned documentary format.
Incidentally, an analysis shows that but for the Puppies, Lock In would have been on the 2015 Hugo Ballot. The Puppies cost us recognition of the best SF book about disability to date.
K B Spangler: The Rachel Peng stories
Self-published, these are never going to appear on most people's lists, but it's self-publishing done right. In some respects the link to Spangler's A Girl and Her Fed webcomic is a millstone around the series neck, because these are technothrillers and AGAHF is about ghosts as much as technology, but it crops up very infrequently in the series to date and is never explained, so that you can read the Rachel Peng books without knowing anything about AGAHF. In fact Rachel herself isn't privy to that side of her background, what she is is the cyborg product of a black project gone deliberately bad, that took 500 of America's brightest and tried to brainwash them into mindlessly obedient, perfect intelligence machines, capable of infiltrating any security through the chip implanted in their head. But that failed and now the 300 survivors are the newest Federal agency, with ex-Military Police officer Rachel as liaison to the Washington DC police. Rachel's the poster-girl for diversity, she's Chinese-American, lesbian, a veteran, and, secretly, blind, using the chip to mitigate her blindness. With new technologies come new crimes, and Rachel's the woman to hunt them down. And she just won't stop, no matter what you throw in her path, especially when her ultimate target is the corrupt politician behind the black project.Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon/The System of the World
The System of the World is so large I'm not sure I've ever finished it, but the world it spins, about secret histories and secret cabals and hidden technologies, around which winds the tale of Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe and his merry band of outlaws, who over the course of the books wander from one side of the planet to the other and back again, is a compelling one. And then there's Cryptonomicon, written first, weaving two complex histories of the 20th Century, one set in the 1940s, one in the 1990s, as Private Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, and Commander Lawrence Waterhouse, USN (who can give Alan Turing a run for his money), find themselves caught up in greater things, protecting Enigma, cracking Axis codes, and in hidden things, such as a society dedicated to protecting the heritage of Athena. Woven around their tale is that of their grandchildren, Randy Waterhouse and Amy Shaftoe, as Randy's part in the creation of the first extra-territorial cryptocurrency (Bitcoin without all the skeevy dubiousness) leads them back into the story their grandparents started, and the treasure buried at its end. And wandering through it all, the enigmatic, potentially immortal Enoch Root.
David Weber: Safehold series
I debated whether to include this, because if I was Weber's editor I'd be tempted to take an axe to his prose and occasionally his characterisation, but he is very good at what he does, and in SF that's tremendously detailed, generally naval-influenced SF. And Safehold is Weber with his strengths (and flaws), honed to their highest edge. Safehold is humanity's last stand, a hidden colony meant to evolve and develop away from the aliens who destroyed Earth and all its other colonies. But it was perverted into an anti-technological theocracy by a group of fanatics among its original leadership, defenceless if it should ever be found. Centuries later Terran Navy Lt Commander Nimue Alban is reborn into the hidden body of her android PICA, her mission to restore freedom and technology to a world that no longer even remembers there was a world called Earth, a world whose people know that their founding fathers were literal archangels, and that technology is the devil's work. Nimue's PICA has superhuman abilities within it's human appearing shell, and she has a cache of military hardware, but can one woman change history? Well, maybe not a woman, as the Church has reverted Safehold to male dominance (also obedience to the church, roman numerals, and forget such deviltry as germ theory or the steam engine). So Nimue is reborn again as Merlin Athrawes, arriving just in time to save dangerously entreprenurial, but plucky Charis (i.e. England) from the forces of the Princes of the Temple Lands (i.e the Pope/Spain). It's the Wars of Religion Mk II, with Good Queen Bess/Prince Caleb guided by an unstoppable warrior from the future. (And from another perspective it's Weber redoes Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin).Fantasy follows tomorrow, probably.
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Date: 2018-09-30 02:02 pm (UTC)I'll second the rec with great enthusiasm. The books (and the related webcomic, which is fantastic but very, very different) are my favorite media discovery from last year.
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Date: 2018-10-03 10:19 pm (UTC)Since you mention "Britishness" of Hamilton, I think I'd add Ken MacLoed's Star Fraction series here. Didn't love all of them, but each has something compelling in them, and the fist novel was especially interesting.
And I'd have loved to add Al Reynolds' Revelation Space but the last volume especially didn't live up to the promise, IMO...
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Date: 2018-10-03 10:32 pm (UTC)